Nixon, Haldeman & Woods on 1972 election and Vietnam War

How are we doing ?
You don't want to keep it a lie.
That's the point.
I know we all .
I don't think it is very important, actually, except that I don't want to have the appearance of hanky-panky.
I mean, that is bad, you know.
We should run away with that.
But that's something out of the earth that takes responsibility, right?
Yeah.
When he makes the war the issue, that gives Compton an opportunity to slam the hell out of it.
I mean, if the polls mean anything, they seem to indicate that people are for the bombing.
They're for the mining.
They may be worried about the POWs, but good God, you know, I agree that the press is going to have a holiday not using that zero calculation thing.
It was the lead on the radio this morning.
They will say it.
They may well say it.
First time in the history of the war, they may well say it.
After they had a day to work on the radio, the CBS News lead this morning was absolutely straight and put it in historical perspective for the first time.
And it also said there were only, I think it was six wounded or something like that.
Which they said was awesome.
The total was also as low as there were nobody healed for the first time.
But also the total killed and loaded was the lowest expense since they started or something.
They had a historical line that had totally positive with no dislike, no effort at all to cut it.
And that may not hold as the day goes on and they find something to cut it with.
But also, Goody could never have done China.
He couldn't have moved through those things with Joe and Lottie the way he did either.
Well, don't you think?
The style?
No.
The best people remember them.
The toasts.
The way you moved around that table.
The way you fit into the atmosphere there.
Oh, the guy on his coat and so forth.
Those were the things.
The manners.
That's what mattered.
And the manners were what people remembered.
It was interesting when they talked about the Chinese New York church and said, how about playing that American beautiful thing?
I trust that said that.
It did.
But that's what a real pro would remember.
He didn't remember the Shanghai TVK.
He's a White House press secretary.
He's the one who spent his time looking.
How about American and beautiful?
And that's the groundwork.
And putting on Joe's coat and the way he went around the table.
People have never seen that happen before.
I haven't.
And those movies that I have in China, boy, that's people, you can't imagine how people are fascinated with those films.
They really are.
We've had California friends come over and bring their kids, and the kids have said they're absolutely fascinated.
And they're practically overwhelmed to get to see them, hear the story of all this stuff.
It's very big stuff to just focus.
So we've got to play that back.
We need to recreate those images in people's minds, not the substance, not the fact that you signed any agreements or issues about that communique or Shanghai agreements or anything.
Don't matter a bit.
Now with regard to the war,
Of course, he could create quite a, quite a role, but I just don't know.
I don't think we're going to get that goddamn airship in the war at this point.
The whole stuff shows that the war is declining as an issue.
Christ, you know, the day, poor guy, the day he fixed to launch his warship last night, the next day he announced that nobody was killed.
I mean, that we couldn't have done anything about, but that's what happened to him.
Well, the press, of course.
However, he can score if you can see his press become better.
Yes.
And that's a huge surprise.
That's their issue.
That's right.
So he'll get his press picked up a lot.
That's right.
And they all are going to say about him.
The problem with the war is there's nothing more to say.
What he did last night, I was very emotionally curious.
He has two bombs with him.
He has two kind of fragment bombs.
One that hits the ground and fragments, and one that blows up in the air and fragments.
And he says the only purpose of these bombs is to tear the collection of human beings.
And he said, so we've changed it now.
Instead of white flesh, we're tearing it all over.
But the blood that flows out is still red.
I mean, you know, he's going into the bullet holes.
Well, that's the point.
That's the point.
So the war is terrible.
So that's why you're doing something.
And he's totally overlooking, which I think has come through, and which a lot of people talk about, is that
You know, it isn't just our bombs that are killing yellow people.
The yellow people that our bombs are killing are yellow people who will, if we don't kill them, go down and kill a lot of other yellow people.
And why doesn't he talk about the 100,000 corrupties?
How about that?
You know?
I said, what about this double standard?
I said, we worry about Jews.
I said, Israelis?
Because of the Jews.
We worry about this group because of the Catholics.
I said, here, 100,000 have been slaughtered.
And I haven't had a recommendation from the State Department to call our ambassador for consultation.
Nothing.
I said, what about this double standard?
Why doesn't anybody care about them?
What the fuck about them is wrong?
The reason is the State Department, of course, takes the view that they're petrified of ever being critical of a goddamn black.
But the black governments eat each other up, doing everything.
The Acker, they got a little excited about that only because a few Catholics got straight up and say it wasn't just, they were for the Nigerians eating up the Acker, by Ackers, which they thought not going to eat them all.
The evils.
And the evils are gone.
that's finished because some of that stuff it seems to me it's for the long-range interest of the world this idiocy of the african states out of the exporting to african countries there are 42 of those little governments
Barabi has 3 million people, 100,000 that have been killed.
Now that would be 1 30th of the population here.
Yes, that's right.
But the point is it's more than that, because you add their families, multiply by 4, these are the heads of families, all the attributed sons, some of their families are that.
That's more than 100,000 that we've got to have.
Maybe they're affected without a question.
I mean, just unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
Yeah, but that's...
Extermination of one-thirtieth of the population would be the equivalent of killing seven million people in the United States.
Of course, the Russians, we let them get away with things.
They exterminated the Hungarians.
They exterminated the Ukrainians.
They exterminated, you know, a million of them.
But as long as they were copies of them, they would kill their Chinese.
The Chinese wouldn't exterminate them for years.
Did Teddy White mention that?
That was kind of an interesting side point that he raised on China.
He went into a lot of stores, shops, and he said in Shanghai, he was there before, there were 100,000 English-speaking people in Shanghai.
All shopkeepers spoke English, and there are none now.
There aren't any now.
He said, what happened to all those people?
They weren't all old enough to have died of old age.
What did he say?
He said they've exterminated them.
Eliminated that class, that class.
And now they're on a crash program of teaching English to their people, but not.
First they make them communists, then they teach them English.
Instead of trying to take someone who speaks English and make him a communist.
The Chinese are good at English, you know, and the Japanese are a hell of a time on the subject of this pronunciation.
Now Chinese speaking people are flawless.
The government law in those places makes people do the language.
But he said it was really fascinating to him that all through Shanghai he couldn't find a soul
spoke English, and they gave him a terrible interpreter while he was in China.
He said partly because he was insignificant, partly because they thought he spoke some Chinese himself and didn't need an interpreter.
He found that his Chinese was no good because it's changed.
Well, on board, I suppose he goes bouncing over to Hanoi.
One thing we, maybe Harry told you, we understand that Kennedy picked up the prisoners.
Don't we have to get anything like that?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Well, what we're going to, Otto Passman is very upset about this whole thing.
And what we thought we'd do is before Teddy announces it, is let Otto Passman get up and say this is a despicable thing that this man is going to go over and politicize the
freedom of prisoners, and that he's going to call on a speaker to insist that he and the leader of the Senate appoint a bipartisan delegation of Republican and Democrat, one senator of each party and one congressman of each party.
If anybody's to go, that would not be right for him.
He may not quit.
That would pass as mad as hell.
And they're just going to give him a lot of time.
I have a feeling that perhaps the new secretary will overstate it.
I think it already has to a degree.
I don't think it's going to be interesting.
You know, that one look at it, it's, in the first place, it's been made pretty clear.
They've been selected.
They've been carefully selected.
And they have handled it.
Either they aren't that brainwashed or they're handling it subtly until they get them out.
into the United States, but they haven't attacked the U.S.
They have, like the Korean people did.
They have said the war should stop.
And they have praised the Navy and the Navy for serving two and three.
You know what these guys are doing?
They're committing moral suicide.
They will be finished.
These folks do this.
and then come back.
In other words, a columnist who takes a position before pre-Japan, like for a serviceman, to be a prisoner, and then to break, and then come back.
They'll be pariahs, like protectors.
They're worse than those bastards who do.
And these are officers.
Which makes it even worse.
All of you members are officers, right?
Liars.
Henry's point though, it seems to me, has some validity.
If you can brainwash a guy, you can re-brainwash him.
And that if we can get at those guys, one of them may not be as solid as the communist party was before they got him out.
If one of those guys came back and ratted on him, it would have an enormous impact.
You could have got like this old guy we have here, you know, as a pay-by-lose.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Did he?
Yes, he did.
I got the name of the black, Mr. Charlie James.
Yeah.
And I talked to him all about it.
And I said, he's an assistant to the secretary.
Or a man of honor.
Because then I could show you how stupid this service is.
And I was going to say that his name was not on the list to go from brigadier to major general.
And Nelson went back to the Air Force and said he put his name on.
And it wasn't.
I should have watched it myself, if that's Henry Shopland, but he was a leader.
And goddammit, you've got to go to the black.
The Army's going to be, it's going to be half black anyway.
And goddammit, Jackie James should have been on that list.
But it shows you why you've got to tear that Pentagon from limb to limb.
And the Air Force has got to be torn up.
It really does not.
It's bad.
And that's why, as one reporter said, boy, it's true, it's true.
You've got to get a guy in there who is not out of the brass of the military.
Because that's your biggest problem.
Their self-defense mechanism is, is damn tight.
Chaddy Jenks, I don't know, I think we ought to think of pulling him out and using him in some respect.
You know, you've got to, you've got to live with the blacks.
You've got to have a, they say he makes the best Nixon speech, or Mel said that, he explains the Nixon doctrine, the president's programs with Reese and all that sort of thing.
There's an opportunity maybe to get a copy of him on a change of speech.
Not for me, but because I think it's a disservice.
It may not have anything to do with God, but somebody has told me that he is the best man that we've done for the youth.
I told you, Billy Graham told me he had seen it.
Oh, that was it, right.
Well, I know James, and incidentally, it was not the drugs he was hijacking, but field guns.
He's a fine-looking man, tall, strong.
Davis is the hijacking gun.
Davis is hijacking.
And he's also a hijacker.
Right.
But this guy is more effective.
This guy is, well, this guy is a great speaker.
He also sings.
Does all sorts of things.
He's just enormous in the fact they follow him.
And I think we ought to see if we can get James out more.
We can be sure that we can get him out.
If the war becomes an issue, I think having James out talking, not to black audiences.
I don't want to talk to black audiences.
I only want the white audiences.
You see how it goes here?
And of course all senators are.
But they're racist and they know it, but they don't, they know they shouldn't be.
So they look for ways to sort of counterbalance it.
Getting back to this proposition, do you have any, well, we may be wrong in our assumption.
He may not be able to make up his mind.
But on the other hand, I think that what he's likely to do is to go, if he found this reaction of, my God, if he, if he, if he faces this reaction of what 500 people are fundraising to dinner to, he's obviously going to be admonished.
I mean, those people are going to join us.
I mean, any more of that group is going to be national leader of San Francisco or Los Angeles.
There's going to be a variety of people in there.
There are all kinds of things you could send to get them up.
That's right.
And I'm trying to get themselves to blow their heads up.
What we may see, we'll see what comes on of the emotional, spiritual things about, that he must get it too bloody.
There's a funny thing about war.
Yeah.
I found it in all my talks with him.
I'm very, very careful.
I hold down the kind of stuff sometimes.
If you make it too bloody, it just, people just cringe.
They can't stand it.
You know?
You agree?
Except these people that revel in it.
There's a group of people that just love that stuff.
But they're McGoverns now.
I mean, it's this mock theater group and these nutty, you know, these guerrilla kid things who stage bombings and these demonstrations and all that stuff.
The thing that worries me most is the thing you raised the other day.
It's the only thing, and I don't think it has any effect on the election, but it could have an element of effect on the country, is...
I honestly believe that there are a lot of people there that are capable of doing damage or anything.
Pushed to the point of desperation, which they have to be about pushed to.
Well, you mean the McEverett thing.
They're basically not McEverett.
They're not at all.
That's right.
The McEverett's cause.
There were the same people, I emphasize, who were marching around the White House and burning the flags, who did throw bombs, who did bust weapons, who did incidentally, most recently in Miami, British fires and all that sort of thing.
I know there were very creative people, John Richards and Leonard.
I think the damage done by these, there was a hell of a lot more that got reported.
Richard told about his bus that they,
selection of tires, no chasler, broke all windows.
Very thoroughly reported that night.
They wrecked the bus, the whole thing.
South Carolina bus and the Ohio bus, actually a couple others.
And it was very rough and it was well reported on television to our chagrin because it cut into some good positive stuff we had on that it was really better for us to get sent.
That's right.
We had enough positive stuff that we could last for a while anyway.
I was thinking of you about that.
It wasn't me.
It wasn't me.
Is that a lie?
It's a lie.
Including you.
I didn't know what it was, but it's the slightest idea what it was.
It hit out of my car, just like Schreiber cut it out, but it, you know, he beat him on a knife.
It just... Could be pretty bad stuff for the folks, I think.
Well, particularly since we are more clever in the use of television than what we're going to have on television.
Well, what I say will be on their television, I'm covering that there.
Definitely.
But I think what we have in the daytime... Oh, yeah, the radio, it is.
I think it's been our conversion course.
The radio in the high school, our conversion subject was going to be before kids actually talked too long and so forth.
They'll probably try to stir up, we don't have too much, we don't have any real evidence of any Chicano problems.
I can't imagine that they won't do something.
They can hire people from... Oh, yeah.
He goes, I'm going to ask him.
Yeah, I'm going to ask him.
I'm going to ask you to go to college tonight.
He said, well, no.
He said, you're doing well, I'm already...
I think he's right.
deal with this Mexican thing.
Well, if it's the President of the United States, particularly, I don't think it would make sense, because he's not acting, actually.
But if we go in and just do it, we would get a line.
I'd expect to have a person.
Everything's got a view.
It's getting a view.
But they don't know too much.
And there's such an old story now.
So there's this bunch shouting, you know, let there be a confines.
I mean, that's certainly become a standard part of the scene.
You just have to have them then.
Well, another thing you've got to respect is that it's always fair in politics.
You've got to remember that the questionnaires are being planted by us, the hecklers.
He's got them.
I'm not going to tell these people, but it's like we did.
I should get some members on office business.
Do you remember?
That's the way it's done.
We'll have ours, we'll have ours out there.
But I think we will have enough, you know, over the bottom of basically us.
Yep.
There's just other things to try to build you into losing your cool sometimes doing something that, you know, you're not going to be able to do.
It's not, it's not happening.
What is the situation with regard to the, do we have anything, do they have anything that I can look at?
Sorry, I'm going to stop you now.
It's a remark in regard to the little ice cream.
Or is that coming down or a little coming down?
Ray said he had it by hand, so.
I don't think you see it.
Here you go.
Now, Ray, do we have any remarks for Texas men?
Well, we got it done by three.
He's the president.
We can start working on that.
Whatever they have, we can send it over to three.
Yeah.
But I'm talking about for the high school.
The name of the high school is what we need now.
The border station is...
I don't know if you know about it.
I don't think I haven't seen it there yet.
You're going to have to inform us that you guys are doing a great job.
I appreciate it.
That's great.
So you don't have to say anything.
I'll need a little talking paper so I know what to say to the man and the workers and so forth.
The purpose of this is to thank all of you.
They're just going to show you quickly how they do it.
You know, you take a look at the worker's station, how they check the cars and tell you about some of their, you know, all the tables and shit about some of their cars.
And we said that you did a great job.
We're going to protect our kids tonight.
All of America appreciates it.
That's about it.
Keep up the good work.
What do you feel about the high school minutes?
I don't think we ought to take a lot of time on that.
It should not be a major address.
It should be a courtesy call.
It should be played that way.
You come in.
The student funding person is going to introduce you.
It's a student assembly that they're having.
The personal assembly will introduce you and you just say how much you
We're impressed by the group that came up here and that you were delighted to get a chance to have the invitation to come back and see them.
I think throwing a little Mexican touch, they're all Mexican, but the great heritage that they've given to America and your friendship with them as a Southern Californian or something like that, I mean, just a little tie to that.
and also the personal, friendly, and the authenticity of this country for all people.
And that you showed you don't have to take advantage of that opportunity.
I mean, your last year senior class year did.
Yeah.
That's good.
And how impressed you were.
I've told the story.
It's inspired people over the country.
Your example has inspired me.
The guy who beat you there is Judge Ramirez or somebody like that.
It's the big wheel apparently.
His daughter was in the class that came up here, so there's something to play with that.
She was here.
I don't care what kind of perception you get.
It's a damn nice thing to do.
It's a very human thing to do.
You don't need to go and respond to the group.
You don't need to be down at a great game school and try to...
And rather than going after a big band and all that sort of thing.
There'll be a band.
Oh, they'll have a band.
Yes, sir.
They do have a band.
I think it would be a very good...
I think it's good to do that too.
I don't think just high school, well, it looks like you were just trying to balance off the economy thing or something.
But really, it gives you a real solid story.
And it gives you, well, really gives you the chance to take prevention and the Democratic Congress in any way you want.
That's not a falsehood to Jesus.
The governor goes into Texas and he can't get anybody to come out and see him.
You go into Texas and you bring in two Democratic accomplishments and a Democratic senator with you.
That's significant too.
And none of the Democrats are Texas.
are not identified.
But they're there on the platform.
They go to the border station with you.
They're there at the school with you.
Then you go off to your national democratic election.
It's a rough story to deal with.
You're still, you know, you haven't changed your position on the warden.
He will support you on it.
Now, what's he going to do to change your position or change the people that deal with your position?
So the warden doesn't check it.
It's been rather volatile.
It goes up and down.
Not much.
Not lately.
It's been up and down on events.
Not lately, I agree.
It's been going on a pretty steady trend this year.
Ever since May 10th.
May 10th, right.
Yeah, that was the trend.
Right.
Now the question is, you impress Teddy with that and he can't figure it out.
What's gotten him terribly worried?
Maybe, yeah, the Bible says he was brought up on a grave site each year.
He said, I can't, he said, the President, that's the turning point.
I don't understand why.
I've got to analyze that.
But more than anything else, there's not as much approval about him.
I don't even want to go in that direction.
It was action.
It was guts.
I think that's probably what it was.
And then going to Moscow on top of it.
I hit him hard.
I said, one thing that you ought to do in your book, because all of you people write elections without ever giving any consideration to the effect of the media on the election.
And now is the time for you to do it.
I said, the way you can do it is look at the effect of the media on Vietnam.
And just look at, you could do a whole chapter
You can do a whole chapter on analyzing what the media said they were going to have done in Africa at the time of Cambodia.
They said we brought China into the war and we were invading a third country.
And that would lead to another vision, that obviously, once starting in Cambodia, we'd have to go all the way through and take it over.
And then we were assuming the defense of Cambodia along with Vietnam, extending the war to another country, and bringing China in.
And then what happened?
And of course, they said this bullshit about that we were only going to stay in with Jim Perry.
It was a lie that Nixon was working on to close the thing up.
What happened?
Then we went into Laos a year later.
And what did they say then?
Well, they said we had it in another country beyond Cambodia.
Then we went in May to mine the harbor and mine the harbors to step up the bombing.
He overlooks the step up the bombing.
He always only talks about mining the harbor.
And I kept, every time he said it, I said, mining the harbor and the bombing.
Intensifying the bombing.
And he keeps going back to that harbor with such a beautiful flood because it was passive.
It wasn't, you weren't killing anybody.
I said, Ted, mining the harbor and increasing the bombing, don't ever take that as a passive.
I said, but what did the analysts say then?
What did all your air and sub-rides and the people you sit and analyze on in the air?
They said, oh, that's the end of the Russian side.
Here, the great tragedy, you tried to play it straight on that, but you said it isn't a tragedy.
But Nixon, on the eve of the climax of his career as president, with a great peace initiative and everything, has blown up.
Now he can't go to Russia.
Now all of the painstaking work of putting that together is down the drain.
And that might happen.
But to Russia, everything worked out pretty well.
And then he said the other thing we had done by that was we had totally blown the chance of any negotiated peace, because the North Vietnamese wouldn't sit at the peace target table with us if we were bombing the North.
And here they are sitting down every Thursday, plus calling Henry into Paris, and he would lead out code every few weeks on the secret side.
It would just be fascinating to do a chapter in your book on that, wouldn't it?
He wrote it all down, but I'll guarantee you there won't be one more.
They never get each other wrong.
This is kind of interesting.
I was about to say, Bert, is that...
He didn't appreciate it because I kept saying hello to him.
Well, I mean, hello to them.
He's, uh...
I think we're all set for what is to be a very, very scarring situation.
30 days after the election.
I think we're going to organize the government then.
and make the hard decisions right then and get it going and not let time waste and let things, you know, and all that sort of thing.
All right, that's one.
Some arguments to the contrary.
One of the arguments is that we are completely after the President's one.
Now let him be generous in victory.
Generous to the President.
For us to oppose him.
Generous to the bureaucrats who honestly get support.
Generous is the other thing.
If you do that, it's going to happen to me in a century.
I'm not going to build it.
It's just, I'm not going to build it.
It would be a hell of a lot easier.
And nicer.
I could have saved a lot of agony.
A lot of hard work.
But I would not give this company the resources.
There's such a chance they'd bust out.
I broke the territory.
I said, we're not going to keep on.
He said, well, he doesn't seem that spoiled.
which is that they're wrong.
before you could bring it off.
There's no reason why we can't.
But you've got to bring a guy who's interested in Kaplan and John.
Everybody's thinking it's conventional.
Everybody thinks you've got to, whatever's there has to stay there.
And Kaplan moves faster into that.
And you don't.
So the law says that you have to have an agency, but you can take it three years to get around to finding the right guy to head it.
well what do we do to countries we don't like if we don't get around to appointing an ambassador well as a matter of fact I mean I'm going to take some of these agencies and act under us I'm not going to cut the hell out of that budget on the other hand I'm just never going to meet with the arms control advisory I'm just not I'm not going to try to strengthen it I ain't going to meet with it you know what I mean and I'm not going to let anybody around here meet with it I'm going to let those assholes get out and fart around on their own in other words you just put them out
Well, let's try to achieve it.
Well, I don't see that service.
We have the Congress there.
All the things that we've set up, never we had any.
That's the thing.
We've got to get right.
We've got to throw them out.
They're going to have it all the time, even with our people around the White House.
And that's why it's almost necessary to get somebody on the outside.
I mean, they'll see their own little lead.
It's like anyone wants to keep all these things.
And everybody wants to be on it.
Everybody says, well, this is such a good little group.
That's where we need to go.
Let us do the axling.
The problem that you're going to have is that we won't be able to stop all the appeals.
Oh, I understand.
Maybe we can.
That's the key.
The key is to keep you away from them.
You know, I think the thing to do is that you probably need to send a number in to the various legal concerns.
I ordered reorganization.
It will be carried out by these people, and I expect you all to comply.
And that's that.
And let them whine.
Let them wish.
Let them wish on a whim.
I don't intend to take anything from Agnes, though.
I don't think we're going to, if he doesn't, Agnew's position is that he's got an ammo alert, that if he's thinking about his future, that he's got to get along, maybe kind of get along with him.
His first problem is he's got to get along with you.
That's right.
That's his problem, not mine.
And this idea that we're going to give him additional responsibility, bullshit.
He can't do the responsibilities he's got.
It's not going to be done.
We're going to take away that space and it's going to be cashiered.
You can go with a lot of other things, it's okay too.
We've really got to put all our own corporation down at the same time.
God, you know, I think of what we do for Congressman and Senator, you know, if you do something to the service team right here.
That guy, I don't know.
Of course, I didn't agree with the one.
You know, I had these pictures of them for any congressman.
Now, really, that's what John D. Decker does.
He does it beautifully.
He just holds the hands of people and laughs at them.
I don't think the other two did that.
I just think it's a, it ought to be a little tougher.
It ought to be harder to get.
I don't think you should call everyone up and tell them.
There's a lot of damn folks that are trying to do something right.
You can't call them to thank people for doing what is their duty, what is right.
I mean, also, that currency, Bob, our first year, our price was terribly cheap.
One of those guys had got to talk about, I've got 18 letters in front of me.
Oh, shit.
That's just a mistake, you know.
That's a joke.
Dennis has done better.
He's got it down.
We've got those.
We're really good at this kind of stuff.
Anyways.
That's where we've got to change the way I think.
We've got to go this route of building an establishment.
We've got to really go it.
And the only way you can is not either to use or hate your enemies, but you've got to go in and kill them.
Kill them by the... Goddamn person.
I guarantee you'll be all over this place.
Everybody in the kitchen here will have breakfast with it.
Gregor will have dinner with it.
John Harley will have a program for Illinois to carry out with it.
No.
He's one.
We don't purge it.
This is what we did to that asshole in the yard.
Yeah.
Because it's not right.
It's a two-way street.
That's the point.
When Percy helps us, he hasn't been done.
That won't help.
And he played the same game with Alfred Vernon and some of these other people there.
Yeah.
Who knows?
Because we really go all the way to Christ.
And I realize, you know, there are these damn watches and all these people.
That was a nice thing to do.
Where, you know, this is the fight.
It's the wrong relationship with the president to be supportive of this.
I just, we appear to love being all, gee, what you just can't do this weekend.
The shows you're all about are going all out.
Close down.
You've got an antivirus campaign.
If you want to be furthest from people like you're talking about in November...
I don't think I'm going to look at it.
I look for retreats, don't you?
Yes, sir.
It should be my meeting, or my place to have a chat about meetings if I want to, and so forth.
But I think that we just got to look at it.
Or something to sell it through a direction.
You may decide that you would be hungry, and you start picking up.
Secretary of State, you want them to do something, you know, get some group in for some kind of thing.
You tell them, you scan data to do this.
But you don't go to them and say, call up my aide any time and use my office.
Well, where are you dealing?
So that they decide, well, you know, I'm going to take my staff out and I'm going to go to God.
And then they get mad at us because they don't have enough.
Well, I told you, I said, listen, I've only been there once.
It's much more than you think it is.
a boat the same way.
Now we're going to jump that boat.
We have a decent boat.
Are we?
Yeah.
How are we going to do that incidentally?
Why don't you give that boat?
I think we keep the boats.
Not I.
But why don't we give that back for the Navy?
Dear God, I'm right.
And let all the Secretary of the Navy's be used for, by him, and they all have, and they all have, not Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of Defense.
Okay.
I give it to Secretary of Defense.
And then he uses that for all the services, you know.
Like they did before with Sequoia.
Now the new vote, though, it's up to the president personally.
And that, I think, should be one that we have somebody give to us.
We've got to be candidates.
Well, there's no problem with it.
The problem is picking what one they want.
There are people who give us the idea.
There are votes all the time.
Because, see, they make money by it.
It's a tax-deductible gift.
They give it to the government.
You could get one basically to see going both of them.
That's what you really need.
One to wear for example instead of just going down to Potomac.
One or two.
Well either that or another thing you could do is have it taken to an ambulance or some kind of thing.
And you could go down and get on a helicopter and get off of there and cruise around on there.
But also, in the wintertime, instead of putting it in a bond post, you run it down to Key Biscayne.
That's right.
That's why you have it down there.
Correct.
There's no point in just sitting there.
It sits there six months a year.
You can go to Key Biscayne and run around on a houseboat.
That's right.
You shouldn't have to do it.
And you may want to some of the time.
Just in case.
If this is a boat that you take down, you can use it to go over the bonds if you want to go on a long cruise.
You want to just get out for a while.
But we can run it over to the island.
So you can go over, fly over, and then do a little island cruise over there.
Incidentally, I don't want to raise this subject matter.
I mean, I'm not going to raise it.
It's sort of right back at the election.
I don't think we have time.
We're ready to do it.
But I'd like to get on a very quiet basis and plan for that attention.
And I guess that's the whole evidence filter.
I don't know if we can plan now, though.
What do you think about that?
We've got reasons to do it, too.
I looked at it just last night.
And it looks like a hospital kitchen.
It's 10 years old.
10 years old.
Well, it was never made as a Catholic kitchen.
It was made as an institutional kitchen.
But we don't use it.
We don't serve it.
We don't use it.
That main kitchen can serve 12 people, and that's all we ever have.
It can serve 20, whatever.
12 is all we ever have at that time.
It's all special.
You've got to come later down to the main kitchen so you can serve down below that.
But I think putting in a beautiful kitchen and a beautiful
pantry thing there and so forth.
And as I said, the top of it is a regular thing, you know, I guess it might have been just the front.
That we can put it in right now.
Why don't I just have to put one in there.
We've got these executive refrigerators.
They look like a, look like a, you know, a thing in your office or a cabinet.
What they ought to do is put a cabinet in there.
It opens this kind of refrigerator, a little bar storage area to keep some glasses and a couple bottles, whatever you want there.
And then a bar top that you can... Well, actually, let's not do it now.
Let's do it when we're gone.
We'll have to rip out the back side of that closet.
That closet is too big for a lot of people anyway.
And we fix the area and fix it up properly.
You want a sink in there too then?
That would be the thing to do.
Make a little bar.
It's really what you want.
It's a little wet bar or a little sink with running water where you can dump stuff out.
And a refrigerator underneath.
And a little storage together.
And that way you don't have to go to the kitchen.
The right help is every time you want to get a drink or serve a friend or something.
And it's right off the old road to the green road.
very useful.
Do you want a hot thing in there too, so you can keep hot coffee on it?
No.
No.
I've never done that.
No.
I wouldn't put that in there.
It's coffee so easy to get whacked or somebody around.
Open a good bar.
I haven't thought of that.
You're right.
Instead of having to walk into the bathroom and wash your glasses off, which you could do, you could, uh, you could just have a slow sign, a little hard sign.
I mean, you've got to find a way to get the pipes and that sort of thing out.
You can tear a hell of a lot of things.
By the way, if you just put cold water in front of the hot water, you just don't want to have hot water.
Because all you want to do is pull up and rinse a glass under your head and drink some water.
I'm not sure that you need that.
I'm not sure that it really helps though.
It makes your hands up to you.
But you see, that bathroom is right there.
I really don't know you to keep that.
You want to throw it out and make a fresh one.
The other point that I didn't go over with John, but I did mention to him, and it's something that's going to be there if you didn't call me along, is the jobs.
John is not sensitive enough to the need, and you may not be either, but I am terribly sensitive to appoint Catholics, Italians, Poles, etc.
to top jobs, and, if I may add, Democrats.
Now, I'll have to listen to Bill, unless we do this.
Now later, for example, I've told Colson that I want people, I want quite a couple of labor guys and ambassadors
I'm going to put in a labor guy, secretary of labor, too.
I'm going to have a businessman this time.
We've got to find somebody.
Maybe Rogers can do it.
I don't know.
I'd like to take a young guy, a real young guy, and put him in there.
He's our friend.
So we really have to build that labor strength and play to it all the way.
You understand that?
Yes, sir.
And not play the businessman's captain again.
The second point is that
On the top Democrats for jobs, that's Conley.
Conley's the man we're going to turn to.
But he's got to give us names.
And I really want them in.
I want to bring in their cabinet.
We can get a George Christian to come in on our staff.
I'd be delighted.
And our staff has got to be open up to that.
You see, we've got to realize that we have some that aren't really strong enough here to stay.
And unfortunately, a lot of them want to leave anyway.
But that's one thing that we've got to do.
I decided, I think we should know now that we should not keep Blank.
And I think we just better, you know what I mean, I missed him.
Except for, I would do this.
Oh, I think he'd have a hell of a time on confirmation.
I would make him chairman of the commission.
I don't think he would want that.
But beyond, I don't think Bobby should be in the White House.
I don't think he should be in the policy position because I think, I don't think that he has the
Now, this brings me to a very critical point.
Here again,
you've got a weakness in her with the fact that he's only interested in, as any good lawyer should be, and who else is going to be a good judge, right?
I have found it doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference.
The main thing is just to think right.
The next appointment has got to be a Catholic.
And they must all be in service.
The second must be, the first must be Catholic.
And I would hope an empathy.
If not, there's the possibility of that former dean of our board of law school who's a great friend of all, Caves Mulligan.
But I don't give one damn whether he's got a classy background and all that sort of thing.
We have gotten to a point in the Supreme Court of the United States, a Catalan ambassador, an Italian from Massachusetts, a young one,
He's just a district guard.
It's all right.
Just look for him.
I say reward the attack as fast as you can.
That's the point.
My point is that the question is whether he's qualified yet.
But we've got to look at the attack.
We've got to look at the back.
We've also got to look at the woman.
The Jews, I'm not concerned about, due to the fact that I have Jews in the White House most of the time.
They teach style and will, and certainly will keep history, at least for a while.
And if you've got Jews at that level, well, that's fine.
So I'm not thinking about Jews here in the cabinet, or in the, or any other, or in China, or in the judiciary.
I'm not going to put them in a Jewish state court.
Only exception there, Brittany Weinberger, who is not Jewish, but they think the link is.
At least the only one I think of in the court.
But we have a key one now.
Our next appointment, I'd like to put a couple of battalions on that damn court.
I mean, or, well, a couple of Catholics, maybe an Irish and an Italian.
The courts should have two counts.
It's up here on 209.
That's how much popular it is.
We're going to have a quota.
Let's have our quota for our side and not for the other side.
So, you see, now the pressures will be in other directions.
The pressures will be to put the good old Bill Smith on in California.
And, because he went to Harvard and all that sort of thing, he's a brilliant guy.
But that doesn't make you understand.
The courts have gotten to be primarily a mixed court, but it also has to be one that we use to the service of the Army.
Now, the same on the cabinet.
Fortunately, Carlucci's attendance
Whatever position we put in it, we get some ground points for that.
But we remember, Catholic, labor, ethnic.
Not Negro, not Jew.
That basically is the name of our game.
And we don't give a damn if they're Democrats or Republicans.
But there's going to be some that are going to say the name.
My feeling is that it would be very likely to find a Democrat to be Secretary of Labor, which would be a Labor leader who was a Democrat.
That would be illegal.
He could be a second-level guy like Rodgers.
Rodgers is a Democrat.
I assume so.
And he is.
And he's a Catholic.
It may be that he just isn't in the league, but he's that impressive to me, and I don't think he has to be all that impressive if you put another secretary in for the rest, you know, you can run all those things.
The less impressive guys may be the better guys for our group, what you're after anyway.
When you talk about building a new establishment, you get some of those kinds of people in the prestige of having been a member of the captain and then out into the country afterwards.
You've got quite a bit going on.
Well, the embarrassment in terms of OOP has been a good thing.
I mean, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but you can go share it.
He understands that part of the game and works hard at it.
He is a hard-working guy.
And he's a nice guy.
Oh, boy.
Now, it's like I've got to make him, if he wants it, we're going to give him that ambassador shit.
If he wants it.
Just make him give us a little ambassador shit.
Bullshit.
We've never had any bullshit.
Well, I got to take over the whole forum.
I definitely got to take over the forum on this myself because I'm really the only one that understands what the establishment is and it's an area that's got a feel of it because of that advanced reputation.
So that'll be helpful.
But you see, the forum policy is one where your forum policy man is usually a disaster because he always knows these assholes.
And they are charmers.
They are.
That's what they do.
They will stock the trailers.
They will stock the trailers, the brown ones.
They really do.
They always do blackmail, not blackmail, but bribe, you know, in subtle ways with all this stuff.
It's incredible.
The way they pour stuff on.
They're very, very clever in taking care of their own.
And so it pays off for them, especially on the hill.
Those in the guard room fighting, sir, they're going to get it.
And I'm going to be hard-nosed as hell with the Republicans.
The Republicans are coming for their goddamn appointments and arrests and all up and down the line.
I want this done, not just at the top level.
I want them to be U.S. attorneys.
I want them to be U.S. judges.
I want them to be Customs officials and so forth.
We are going to reward, and settle on their rights.
Any Democrat.
Any Democrat.
Unless he supported us.
You understand?
Right.
Not to bullshit to the effect that we don't want a Nixon Democrat.
You remember?
That was a hell of a mistake.
You know, we've got to get somebody that's a Democrat that didn't support us.
No, sir.
Well, I was part of that running the country.
I know.
We started with you.
Why not?
This time.
This time.
We're going to have a majority, aren't we?
And so what are we going to reach over?
We're going to reach over to the 40% that voted against this?
I hope not.
It's not happening.
It's not happening.
What you want to bring together is whatever the percent is that votes for you.
That's right.
Because I think we ought to ask them.
Even down at the low levels.
What would you vote for?
What would you vote for?
That's right.
You're making a political test.
No, sir.
You're making a philosophical test.
That's right.
If you voted for President Nixon, then you obviously believe in what he's doing.
And that's who we have to have here to run the government.
We can't do it with people who are opposed to us.
But there are other ways.
You can check, too.
You can check on their rights and their efforts.
Yeah.
You can see whether the wives have a better and proper sticker on them.
I think we ought to look at wives, too.
I think there's stuff in the United States that these wives are adamantly against.
It's like Peterson's wife.
That can't help but affect a guy.
If your wife...
and she's also a little nuts and i know that but while i saw it though you know so he's a brilliant guy but his wife hates you and that can't help but you know that's who he sleeps with every night that has to rub off somewhere although i think he's
I don't know, I think he is an absolute shit, but I think he is a pretty brilliant guy.
He's the most obnoxious guy I've ever dealt with.
You've met, except the Relief Department, many who weren't named by Jews, and you've met that were not really personally obnoxious in their ways.
Actually, yeah, they is.
Henry is obnoxious.
Oh, obnoxious as hell, that's what he really is.
Henry and Sapphire and Stein is obnoxious, you know, in his own way.
I thought it was less so than some.
Not so.
Stein really is less so, less so, but I think he is in terms of the way he, I mean, the point is, he doesn't know how to, you know, gracefully.
He's a saint.
He really is.
He's a great, sweet guy.
I wish we could find something for him to do that is very important, because God damn it, he deserves it.
Yes, he does.
There should be something.
A loyal man who has done everything.
He's broken and done everything.
I mean, he's been loyal, and he's been kicked around, pushed, shoved, been on the wrong side, you know what I mean?
Goddamn, I don't know what to do.
I don't know what you can do.
You can find something.
There ought to be something.
You really should.
Howdy.
Hi.
I didn't even have to say it to you.
Figure it out.
Right, but maybe I just discovered it from out there.
Oh, I'm afraid it's winter.
Oh, not yet.
We've got all of October.
We ought to have a great and sunny day.
Guess I must go read.
The story of this... Lundgren's office was broken at 2 last night.
There was $100 in cash and a lot of valuable medicine there, and nothing was touched.
The only thing that was touched was the envelope in which he keeps the president's medical record and that of the family.
The record is not with his other records, but in a walk-in vault where they keep old records.
And the president's record is in a safe within that vault, and they broke into it.
Well, how would they know how?
A safe record.
How would they know it was there?
Well, his office was broken into once before, but they didn't find this at that time, so apparently they... Did they take the record?
No.
The material from the president's envelope was on the floor of the wall when they went in today.
The one letter, which was a letter run down from the president's medical history that he had prepared to send to Dr. Takashi, they said it had been copied.
How the hell did he come back?
That's my intention.
I think we ought to put that out.
Just let the L.A. police put it out.
The police know about it.
The police are coming to take the prints home.
You know what?
I think there's a lot of this medical history.
It's a pretty good thing to get out anyways.
Sure.
As people know about it, they know about it.
Sure.
Rose is concerned about a January 5th.
Isn't it broken too, too?
No, but if they went into Lundgren's and they know about that, they'd figure it'd be a good chance of that.
Hm.
Well, I'm not concerned about it.
No, let's roast it.
If there's nothing in there, it would hurt.
It's not a place to do it.
You know, this is interesting that this comes.
We were at a time when we were just saying we would do desperate things.
How could you put this?
How would you use it?
Well, the only thing is that I don't want to leave any impression that there's something there that we were afraid of.
You see what I mean?
Well, I think the next step is for Dr. Lundgren to say, I wish someone had called me and asked me, you know, because they could have saved all the trouble breaking the safe.
Here it is.
Hand it to the reporter and say, print the goddamn thing.
If he can, I would think he can.
There's no problem.
It's old stuff anyway.
Lundgren doesn't have any current stuff.
He has an examination recently.
Since you've been president, he had once.
Was that after you were president or was that after the election?
Or before inauguration?
What this can be, you know, is somebody that has something to do with anybody who is doing it to try and get it to sell.
Maybe it's somebody within Leverett's shop.
Because my point is, it sounds to me very candidly, it's an inner-sided job.
Because my point is, if he wasn't in the usual place than somebody else, why didn't they work right in there and get that file?
Well, it's at the bottom where they keep the old records, because it's just an old record.
He wants to know what we wanted to say about that.
Let me call him and find out.
Our information would be to say
Dump it out, unless you feel there's something there that could be blown out.
I'm going to have to carefully look at that.
This certainly bombs the water again and again, though.
You mean it helps us?
Sure.
Yeah.
This kills it, putting it out.
I wonder why it wasn't that they didn't get out and block everything up again and take their pictures and stuff like that.
Well, I would suggest you call them and say, what the hell?
Is there anything?
And I don't give a damn about it.
I don't care whether it's a piece of paper or a total or anything like that.
I have the money.
I'd call it my way.
I think it's important to get at her right away.
If she thinks about it, it's a pretty goddamn good story.
It might be a good story in terms of the break-in.
They just want to get out of anything.
Let's face it.
Don't tell them to have them all around.
Say, look, they've got it.
It's best for us to put it out.
That's the way I'd say it.
They want to kind of look at it.
Listen to the comments.
Search what they're up to.
I don't think there's any place else that they can break into that
Well, there's nothing we have that can break in here, and why else is it secure?
The update was secure.
The floor is secure.
I'm not even there anyway.
Sack on me.
I'm not even there.
Nothing did break into your places anyway.
It's just this guy here.
Well, after all, too, if they want to go to the families, we'll go to the governor.
That's right.
We'll just go to him and say, we'll go to the governor himself.
And you still get that five.
What do you mean?
Fort Wayne.
Not us.
Someone else.
I don't think it says Jesus.
That's why we keep them.
I don't think they will.
I hope that your family's been worked over so much.
It's pretty hard to try and do that again.
We're being pretty responsible.
I think he does.
No reason to do it.
Going stupid politically, anyway.
You ought to remember this story.
That was the hardest, worst, and heaviest story.
He was an idol in every bar I'm drunk.
All the more reason it can't be used.
The reason, from a personal standpoint, that you couldn't use it.
It's just a vicious damn thing to do.
On that note, how should you write deals around the economy?
Is that it?
That's one I could worry him about.
The value of that one is if things get rough enough, you might want to let it become known to him that that's enough.
That would give him some things to worry about, and I wouldn't use it, I think.
If you kind of let him wonder whether you're going to use it, and he gives it to you.
He'll spend his time figuring out how to answer it instead of figuring out how to attack you.
Anyway, okay.
Ooh, I hear the ball, didn't I?
I don't know.
He's called up the police.
He said they didn't get any money.
I didn't hear anything else.
I don't know.
Was there anything?

Nixon, Haldeman & Woods on 1972 election and Vietnam War

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on September 21, 1972

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