Conversation 788-018

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Oh, that's what happens.

as an amendment to the debt ceiling.

Mayhem, very opposed to it, on principle, went to Albert and Boggs, who were ready to object to it anyway, because they felt their prerogatives had been usurped by Mills.

So they had a meeting, and Mills withdrew the request, in effect.

But it was not a request for a rule.

But he withdrew it, and Albert told Harlow yesterday that one staff man from the Maine Office Committee staff and one from Mills were going to get together and try to figure out what to do.

That's where it is.

There are all kinds of opportunities here.

If you want to model an attack to try and get this,

And we get a whole list of alternative things we might do to dramatize.

You're, in effect, drawing the line on expenditures.

You're for lower taxes.

It dignifies all of your taxes and these things.

And it gives you something to do, something to be for, something to show activity on for the next week or ten days.

It's damn embarrassing to the House Democrats.

They are really stupid on this, in a way, because...

Right.

They don't have to go through this whole exercise.

But as long as they've got themselves in this pickle, maybe we ought to take advantage of it.

There are, I guess, negatives to this.

Well, not only that, but maybe you're getting rebuffed, possibly.

We have to be very selective about the way you personally get involved in it.

We might do it.

I was just thinking of the kinds of levels.

Sure.

We should get our leaders in.

Yes.

Bring the Republicans and Ways and Means Committee in.

I wouldn't bring the Democrats.

Well, I don't want to be quite as, shall we say, political as that.

If you do this, you could call in a couple of servants from the fields.

cancel their appointments, we can put out the word that you're making a major effort and so you can call back, call a couple of them in.

Or all of them for that matter could make a major lobbying effort on the Hill.

Call on the public interest groups, call on the business lobby and so on.

Maybe go out here to the press room and make a statement some day.

How much we want this and so on.

They're under the gun.

Because, of course, there's a time limitation on the debt ceiling extension.

So that legislation's got to move out of the House within a limited period of time.

And so this is something that they can just sit on indefinitely and have to fish or cut bait.

Yeah, yeah.

No, we need the weekend really to set our plans.

Oh, no, no, no.

We'll set our plans over the weekend if you think well of the idea.

Well, I think we ought to make an issue of it.

I... Well, there's one other aspect of this that I ought to mention.

I take this, and when you talk about mine,

I think my going out and hitting it in the press room, when every sophisticate knows that we don't expect to do it, probably is an over, over flaw in something that we're going to get rebuttal from.

On the other hand, I think we could have a meeting.

You see, I, I just have not had my face turned on the camera.

The other hand, I'd be very, I'm inclined to think

You're actually the best one, a great one.

I mean, you're better than basically anybody else.

Well, we can do a lot.

I was thinking of things that we might get leadership.

We might have a meeting of our own leadership.

You're invited.

We've got time.

But before we get that meeting,

because we invited several captain people and so forth to have a working meeting, having only on that subject, and said, I want all of you to get out and invite whatever surrogates we got and get their asses in here.

We asked him to make a list of things that he thought might be effective.

The meeting was one of them.

He said he could write a personal letter to all or part of the members.

We could recall surrogates and have them lobby.

We can seek public support from outside groups.

We can ask GOP challengers to make this an issue in the districts.

We can ask spokesmen to appear before the conference.

Do you have a reminder of Monday and the assault sign in Houston?

The assault sign, probably.

We do want to ride.

Sure.

When, Steve?

I'm not sure.

If you could ask us to meet Monday, we could roll with it.

I think you had Ford and Aarons and Connell and some of those folks.

I wouldn't have a whole gavel.

No, we'll pick out key Republican leaders.

All right.

You have what you want.

We'll do it.

Figure out a plan.

We'll work on this tomorrow.

All right.

I think so.

Mills is in an awkward spot.

He's now saying, well, this is the president's proposal.

President, Odyssey, Albert, Odyssey, Boggs, Odyssey, Mahon.

And so Bill said to him, well, would you be president?

Mills said, no, I shouldn't be president.

I shouldn't be president.

He's trying to give you the basket.

I know.

I don't think this is one we ought to play it that way.

I think we should play it partisan.

But I don't want to be partisan.

I want others to see the major.

Because we find that every time I can't even open my mouth, somebody's taking the card.

And we're going to need to do that experience with our little statement on the environment.

So everybody doesn't have to try to take it to Congress.

We will.

But the point is, I think this is a good one to lay the foundation for getting the hell out of the land.

Now the other ingredient

tempers the need for this somewhat is the fact that we're going to get a lot of these big spending bills in that period of time that will permit a pocket veto.

They probably won't roll over.

We'll not get water in time to avoid a pocket veto.

Well, it's a mixed blessing.

Water, yes, I'd prefer it because then they won't roll it.

on some of the others, where they would have sustained it, I'd kind of rather have the ratification from the Congress.

But... Sure.

That's right.

I was thinking on that, I'd like you to try half a page of the message.

She said, which in effect says, this presents one of the most difficult

I have also recommended funds to leave them for the Congress.

However, as you see the budget request, I so much.

If I signed the bill, it would lead inevitably to the tax increase.

Therefore, before this bill, I am going to tax increase .

By that time, the spending suit would probably be dead.

So you say that Congress having failed to enact the spending suit.

Okay.

Well, it might be interesting to have a short video.

It might be one of ours.

We can program it like we did the labor ATW thing.

There was so much acceptance by the time you beat those back that there just wasn't a murmur.

I think we can lay the foundation.

Now the other thing I wanted to do on that one, I'm certainly going to do an audio, but the question is whether I might try, we tried a video once with one camera, and the situation made a lot of sense, so I suppose what I could do is just read to all the cameras on the other cameras.

I don't know what they're saying about that.

Okay, yeah, the other question, of course, is this green deal.

Yeah, I have an hour and a half.

Oh, good.

All right.

Do you want to wait on that until he gets back?

Yeah, I can stand by.

I had a very...

It was a very good meeting and a very good point about...

wrench, you know, and I'll get back over to you.

And I'll get back to you.

And I said, that's great.

The other thing, they were able to just do it with footage.

So I, of course, played back to the American team.

And so all of a sudden, it's like, oh, they're in a run zone.

They're preparing for something like this.

Yep.

And watch or guard or whatever he calls it.

Right.

On the green thing?

No.

No, I just want to bring you up to date.

Well.

The more I think about it, too, I think that we can get our tax thing ready.

Do you think you can?

Yeah.

The preliminary work's all done.

I like it.

We had a short meeting this morning, and there's some stuff that we need from Treasury that we don't have yet.

But I think right now we've got enough so that Anders or somebody could start to write a radio speech.

Well, one of that series could be on problems in the elderly, and so on.

And I had to run this in as a proposal.

It'd be a headline story.

Four radio speeches are very good idea.

That's the way to do the .

Well, they're working on them.

And I told them there would be something that you might take one radio speech on the whole business, and the deficit wouldn't decline between bills and all that sort of thing.

That's a hard exception.

Yeah.

In other words, it's not—I suppose you want one's positing about how they would do the .

Yeah, they're doing that.

They're doing that.

So that's not—it's not bad.

Even though we said it over and over, put it in a radio speech, and then people think you made it an English speech.

But I disagree.

As you know, John, all that's a bunch of malarkey.

I mean, there's no suggestion you can ever change it.

Well, it is necessary.

Good to have it supplemented out, though.

Okay.

The facts are not all in.

But it's one of these situations where probably everybody acted in good faith, but very stupidly, and in accordance with past practice.

This grain trading business is all custom and usage.

For generations, the people in the government who handled it had been people from the industry.

And the industry, of course, is a very small number of companies.

So they handled this the way they'd been handling deals forevermore, but there were some extenuating circumstances.

This guy, Palmby, for instance, undoubtedly had a job offer at the time he was negotiating with the Russians.

This fellow, Braunhaver, instead of issuing a press release, phoned around and contacted the grain dealers by telephone.

It was a dumb way to do it.

It should have been by press release.

20-20 hindsight, you can think of four or five things they should have done that they didn't do.

On the other hand, there are a number of allegations in the thing that are not so.

CBS ran a special on that.

For instance, they said, well, the Department of Agriculture knew that there had been a Russian crop failure.

They had a report.

This is the allegation.

They had a report, and they suppressed it.

Nobody suppressed it.

Turns out, when you get it, and you look at the data, they'd already had the press conference, and the grain companies had already made their buy before the agricultural attache in Russia sent it over here, so that there was no superior knowledge in the Department of Agriculture.

Well, there are half a dozen things like that that are haywire facts that we're getting back to it.

So I'm having the Department of Agriculture put together a chronology and a fact

a fact narrative.

I think Butts has enough credibility in the Midwest and understands and is able to explain this whole thing well enough that we ought to put him on the air in the Midwest if necessary by time for him, let three farm editors go on with him in a meet the press format or something of that kind.

and letting him just lay this thing out, if it takes half an hour or an hour or whatever it happens to be, he could tell a story well enough to lay a lot of these goats.

Now that's my very tentative thought right now.

Sure, he can do that.

But he's got very warm relations.

Well, he claims he can get, and I'm thinking of radio now.

Farmers all listen to the radio.

Yeah.

These guys, when they milk their cows or they're running their tractors or whatever they're doing, they all have the radios on.

And the housewives or the farmwives.

The way I see it, I don't know if I'm conversing to that, but the guys with the decision relations could talk to somebody who runs a network out there.

And there are several networks.

Yeah.

If Buzz would agree to

have our Q&A with their guy in the top background, a couple of places, answers on three people.

They'd be ecstatic.

The other thing is that his statement, however, should be a very positive one about what a great deal.

Sure.

Well, and that comes through with everything you've said.

Right.

This guy's very able, very articulate, and he understands the moves.

He's very honest.

He feels badly about Pompey.

Pompey is a horse's ass in the way he handled himself.

Just awful.

Well, is there anything the bus can say?

You don't think that he can reprimand that?

Oh, yeah, sure.

No misunderstanding.

It shouldn't be a whitewash at all.

He undoubtedly, by the time we get done with this, and we're only halfway through it, he's not ready to go on that.

But he's going to be able to say things like this, luckily.

This is a customary practice in the last ten administrations to have these guys from industry doing this job.

They shouldn't do it.

It looks wrong.

If I were a farmer, I'd resent it.

If a former grain trader were working for the USDA on this kind of a thing, I'm going to change that because I think appearances are very important.

It happens this time.

It didn't lead to any wrongdoing, but I can see where it's not a good practice.

once Clarence Pompey knew that he was going to leave the USDA, he shouldn't have been involved in these negotiations.

He knows that.

I know that.

There isn't any excuse for it.

It was just bad judgment on his part.

I wish I had known what he had

Because if I had known it naturally, I'd have taken steps to make sure that, you know, so on and so forth.

And he turns the phrase well.

I think he comes across very, very well.

Well, there are three aspects.

There is the question of whether the Russians disadvantaged the American taxpayer by getting subsidies in effect for the wheat they bought.

There's a question of a conflict of interest by Pompey and this other guy who left.

And that has to be dealt with.

And then there's a whole question of notification of the grain dealers of the change of policy.

And the combination of the three make it so difficult to understand, so technical, so

So confused that it's a real mayor's office.

Now, they're going on.

The Democrats say the name of 14 people in government who come from the green companies.

What they don't know yet.

No, unfortunately that isn't so.

Well, some were, but we've appointed some.

There's an additional element to this, though, that they don't know yet.

concerned about, and that is that your old law firm represents one of the great ones, currently, right?

Sure.

They use it every year.

Right.

I don't know if they show it.

They sure do.

So John Mitchell and so on, and all that comes roaring out.

I think the FBI— Probably John Mitchell's in it now.

Sure.

That's what I'm saying.

I understand.

He said it.

That's right.

We'll have the chronology Monday.

We'll have the FBI investigation completed by the 3rd of October.

It will probably indicate no violations of law or... How is that without ?

No, that's coming to us.

Oh, Christ, I don't want to put it on the White House.

Well, we're not going to put anything on it, as of now.

Well, I thought that maybe we could use it.

Yeah, but I'm not so sure yet what it's going to say.

If it's clean, that's another matter.

Now, the investigation may very well show that nobody made any money, that there was no unusual trading, that there were no profits taken.

As a matter of fact, cargo is losing their ass.

Because they got caught short.

That's right.

And the market's going from $1.60 to $2.20 and it's still going.

Well, except we're down in the Midwest.

In that Harris mode.

We're down dramatically.

And I can't figure out anything but this that could account

If I'm concerned, yeah.

Okay.

Well, anyway, that's the way this thing is going.

It'll be toward the end of next week before we're really in a position that maybe we ought to try for four months, maybe a week from Monday or something of that kind.

Yeah.

Because there's an enormous amount of material to be gone through in these trading transactions and so forth.

We're right where we were today.

We went up, we went up, and then went down, just like we did in the pension.

Well, the numbers I got from Chuck were 53-34.

That's right.

Down from 64-29.

That's right.

But three weeks earlier, it was 53-36.

That was earlier than where we were.

Well, but the... Oh, you mean three weeks earlier than September 1st.

up and then we came back down.

We did the same in the Midwest as we did nationally.

The drop in the Midwest is no greater than the national drop.

The rise in the Midwest was greater than the national rise, so it was more of a drop.

The other thing that I wanted to check with you.

The interesting thing is there was no drought in the south of the west.

The drought was in the west.

I'm not sure.

Honestly, I do know everything.

Well, if you want to take the state, take Michigan, take Minnesota, LA, I mean, not our polls, but the Detroit News and the Minnesota Polls, you're exactly the same kind of thing.

So here I am with a poll.

We were talking about leadership meeting Monday morning, Bob, of Republicans.

House Republicans.

I don't think we want them all.

No, so the selective list.

Yeah.

You've got to select.

Monday's fine with me.

You wouldn't want to wait until Wednesday?

No.

I think time is going to be important to get the president to launch this thing that he won't have to do anymore.

Monday's fine with me.

It's good to have a domestic thing going on.

Well, let's just be a foundation anyway.

Yeah, anyway.

We can point back to this.

Then the other question on our revenue sharing, there's now such a thing as mayors for McGovern featuring such thrilling characters as John Lindsay and Allie Lowe and others.

Right.

Are you quite able to have them?

Yeah.

Well, I wouldn't at all.

But do you want any of them?

That would be the question.

Sure.

Why?

Like Elliot?

No objection.

I'd have Elliot.

Okay.

I wouldn't have anything to do with it.

He's from California.

Oh, in Wisconsin.

Mayor.

I'd have him.

Elliot.

I wouldn't have anything.

I watched the...

I don't want to be too obvious.

I think we should.

I don't think you can go out in the Midwest and you'd find that people would, the Midwest basically, what really counts there, frankly, is Chicago, Detroit, Columbus, and Indianapolis, if you could show it on the green.

Well, and Bud says, you have to look pretty hard to find an unhappy farmer.

He says you have to go to a certain section where they made early sales.

But even there, they're looking forward to

He said, they're out about $5,000.

But he said, that's just the difference between having the new Cadillac this year and having it next year.

And he said, they're selling off all the storage now, saving only enough out for Japan.

And he said, it just stands to reason there's going to be a hell of a food market for a long time in this country.

And he said, they all run.

So I said, well, you know, there's this Harris hole.

He said, that really surprises me.

I mean, he said, I don't know where Harris found those folks.

He said, I don't find them.

Well, you've got to find them.

I wouldn't get that.

I wouldn't do that.

I wouldn't do it for that reason.

Okay.

All right.

We're going forward here.

All right.

Sure.

I think at 8.30.

Oh, what did you get at the cost of it?

Did you buy it on your own?

No.

Exactly.

I don't know.

I mean, they got it from Republican sources, to get my point.

That's the real killer.

And of course, the worst of the people is the White House, I think.

So, no, yeah, why borrow them?

It isn't.

We haven't.

We totally haven't.

Well, yeah.

And it isn't...

I don't think it's likely that that's what happened.

I doubt .

The thing is, something like that, if somebody knows it, other people don't.

You just, there aren't secrets.

You don't get exclusive.

The fact that John Mitchell comes up with it, you know, the other thought we had, you know, .

John is working on radio talks, too.

He said, yes, you had in mind about four.

I think so.

See what they can do.

I think if we can do four, it would be, if we got four, I wouldn't do four just for the sake of doing four speeches.

If they're three, and that's it, then do three.

That's right.

There's six that are worthwhile, there's six that are private.

It's somewhere, there ought to be more than one or two, I think.

Yeah, it should be three.

Three to five.

Yeah.

And I wouldn't do a pattern.

I wouldn't say I'm going to address an age.

You've got something to say.

You've got an evening to say it.

And we buy the radio time.

You go on and say it.

And it's Monday night one week and Friday night the next.

That's right.

And fit it into the balance of the other things.

I feel a very...

I do too.

I haven't.

I think you put your, as I said earlier, you put your finger on the whole goddamn problem.

You said, we've got to decide now what we're going to go with.

He had to talk about them.

It's going to be a great session, I can see.

Well, if you remain to count, you'll have backup.

I think we don't want to have a breach.

I mean, no one can make it credible.

that you are betraying a man for whom you risked December, Cambodia, Laos, and Bombay.

We've got to realize that.

The other thing is that we've got to realize that this war has got to stop.

We cannot go off this very business and hang on for another four years.

It's been too long.

and get the prisoners back and so forth, we wouldn't be quite as concerned about trying to do something now.

But I'm not sure.

We've got to do it.

If we can't end it this way, we've got to do a lot after the election.

And what I meant is, if I do that option, it would work.

I would say to hell with this.

I would try.

But I'm not sure it would work.

That's why we've got to try this.

I think we have to make an honest effort to do this.

Yes.

All we can without dishonoring ourselves.

and you see if we have made this effort and then you have to go all out the strength of your position up to now has been that we've always been able to present to the American public both strength and moderation we've always alternated a peace proposal with a tough line we've never been in the position you've never been in the position of chance who was farming mindlessly day after day without ever making a peace proposal so if this doesn't work

It gives us three, four, six months of quiet.

I don't think anything less in this room.

How do you look over these places now?

What do you think?

I think it would be awfully difficult to reject what they had given to us in this last session.

Because anybody could exist.

And therefore the argument of saying we don't want to come into government there just no longer holds.

That's the thing.

We cannot say that they are just going to come into government because they are given the chance for a non-communist government to survive.

Of course what they think is that if they can get you to resign, plus all these changes made, plus keeping their army in the country,

that they can create so much chaos that the remnant is going to collapse.

And therefore, our scheme requires that if the Jew agrees to this constituent assembly rule, that then we will require that they have to pull some of their army out of Vietnam and all of their army out of Cambodia and Laos.

And if they don't do that, we wouldn't settle.

And on that, I think we can stand.

They can demand both that the Constitution be abrogated and that they can keep the whole army in the country.

We've got to live with this problem.

We've got to have a solution to it.

We cannot just continue to sit there and this POW thing is a pretty good indication of the enormous buildup that's got to happen.

And we've got to have a solution, and we're going to find it.

And it isn't going to work that other way.

Therefore, we believe that this is the best that we can do.

We'll start out talking about the past four years and represent them in terms of our interest for a non-communist South Vietnam.

And this is what we'll take.

don't need this but did you want to use your strength domestically here to put pressure on their lives for concessions and that they are moving and we do have an interesting possibility it's not yet acceptable but that's what i want to discuss with them and i want to go through the realities of the

So the last time the vote should not be reassuring because it was still a marginal one vote.

Given that, at a time when you're 30 points ahead of the poll, we win a vote for cutoff of funds by two votes.

So this is very funny.

And I'm going to recall this discussion with me last October.

He said if he felt there was a true peace,

And he repeated it on my head.

He repeated it on my head.

Then I would go through.

Fig leaf, or an advisory group that's without power, and if the South Indian government is going to control the Army, the police, and the territories, they can't control it.

Why don't you, on this case, what I'd like for you to do is just say that the President, if you could say that, Mr. President, he's actually, he's pretty sure you know all that now.

follow his intention.

He can't select a man.

Well, I won't get into that until we see the whole proposition.

He doesn't have problems with that, because it calls for a constituent assembly and a new constitution.

Yeah, but he's going to, in effect, dominate the election, because the electoral law

The election can never take place because its electoral law will be written by a commission, which requires unanimity.

I don't see how you can ever review unanimity.

Therefore, I think that he should be very, very generous as far as what happens after that to the unanimity proposition.

He'll say, well, that might even get it.

We just can't assume that, because I win the election, that we're going to stick with him through hell and I'm like, well, there's more time to go on.

God damn it, we can't do it.

We're not going to do it.

We're not going to have our guys getting killed in our prison or something.

But it's just that.

We're not going to have them get killed.

And we're not going to have our relationships with the Russians and the Chinese as bad.

And also, we're not going to have to keep us from doing some other things we need to do.

We've got to get into war.

Oh, I feel that, too.

I tell them, I know those casualties show 300 a week being killed.

I said, I take no comfort out of the fact that we are casualties.

We were one last week.

What is your 300?

I said, to me, that concerns me.

And that, uh, I got an idea.

I think you've got it.

I want you to know you can do very well.

I think once he is the subject, he should take plenty of time.

It's too much in his interest.

I don't think we should get him all stirred up before that.

That's it.

even the second necessarily, because that's just the kind of thing that you don't want to think out in the greatest detail.

You ought to know that we're very strong for it.

You may not decide it in the second session, but if you get away, you'll sit down and talk with some people.

We'll table the proposal anyway the following weekend.

It doesn't make any difference what he agrees to.

I suppose, yeah.

It is desirable to have a public break.

That would be bad.

A public break would hurt his election.

But it would also be abused by the government then, that you strung along with you and that it hurt your interests, just because he killed 20,000 people.

So we should avoid a public break.

Mr. President, nobody would have believed that they would make a proposal which would keep the Saigon government in power with its own army and police.

But without you, we'd never have taken on that fight.

for all their previous proposals were that Saigon has to disappear and the other government, the provincial government of National Conqueror replaces it.

And that would have led to a sure-coming mistake.

And that was easy to reject.

We were never tempted for one minute.

You could have settled it in July or now.

It's those two.

We were never tempted for 30 seconds for any of those calls.

And here we are in front of the proposal of a

government of national concord that has no power, no police, no army.

And, moreover, we won't even accept the word government for it.

We'll call it Committee or Commission for National Reconciliation.

It's basically the Air Force 2.

It's the other third one.

It's the third one.

Yeah.

I get it.

I'm not used to that, but it's good.

Who did you take with you?

He's got a good friend.

He's got Necroponte who was with me.

What do you mean?

Necroponte.

He's my Vietnam expert.

He's been with me on all the negotiations.

So he can't tell any of the fine boys.

Because there's a lot of the truth crap that Al could possibly absorb in a day and a half.

As a weapons expert, to look at the military situation.

He's a big guy.

He won't be a big guy.

Yes, that's the debate.

He's still making discussions.

But it wasn't done until he had success.

I wish he would have.

Well, that's why I think we have to push it, push it as hard as we can.

If it's afterwards, I think we ought to find a way to get Jesus out of the North for two or three months, and then do it.

Yeah, I would agree.

And then in February, January, we can go to Congress.

And get out.

And then in January, February, go and do the effective sentence, I suppose.

Sure.

Well, I don't know if we're getting out.

No, he's going out tonight.

But can you wait a minute out before you go out?

The pressure speculated that the deal for that lease would be $500 million.

It will in fact be $725 million.

I can travel with him.

Let me talk to Peterson about it.

Maybe you want him to have such an intersection with Peterson.

Maybe you don't want him to do that.

Yeah, I think he could do a good job with it.

Yeah.

Well, would you rather hold up the trade agreement until after the election, or could you try it after that one?

Well, the trouble is, President wanted to refer to it in a speech earlier in the lesson.

My feeling is to go ahead.

My feeling is that they're going to screw around about this grand deal and so forth, but I think most of the American people favor a good deal with Russia.

It's a great deal.

It's easy to talk when you suddenly get a billion-dollar win for it, which you didn't expect.

After this, it's easy to talk.

At that time, everyone thought it was a tremendous bargain, a tremendous deal, and no one, none of the critics at that time, at the comment, now that we know there's a worse food situation in the Soviet Union than we realize, all they're talking about is $100 million and something that we could have avoided maybe.

We didn't know about their situation.

How would we know?

We didn't.

Both deducted it, and the deal had not come through.

My view is that on things like this, there's never really a trail by or deflected by, you know, the crap around.

It's like everything else we do.

I mean, Christ saves all.

I just sailed into it.

We've done pretty well, though, at work, haven't we?

The goddamn liberals, I'm not to be deceived.

Now Joe Crabb and Milton Beals are accusing us of not being tough enough on the Russian.

I, uh...

I'll tell you about it.

What was that?

No, on the V deal that we could have done a lot more political concessions.

Hadley Donovan raised it with me, I tell you now.

For three years, the president took a beating.

on the theory of linkage.

For three years, we were told that linking things together was bad.

We linked them together.

We got aid agreements going simultaneously with the Soviets.

Then, now, the liberals are telling us that we should have used salvation in Russia to get one.

In the Middle East, we got the Russian troops out because the Russians, because of an arrangement with us, did not supply offensive arms to Egypt.

What more could we bear from them?

In Vietnam, they stood still for the

poor defining of the North, they have not given any diplomatic support to them, and they've grown pressure on them to help settle it.

What more could they have done?

If anyone could tell me, if you had been in the presidency, what would you have done?

Well, Donovan, you know, it's been a week since I've been in the presidency.

There it is.

It's basically a phony.

The suspects are just in power.

But they think we're messed off because we're in, and they think we're going to win.

And so they're going to find anything wrong.

We're doing the right thing.

No, I want to do the right thing.

Right.

I think that's the reason it's unfortunate.

They said that Gromyko and I hadn't given the signals properly.

So Gromyko already gave them today.

Now I'm terrified that this goddamn thing is going to leak out of the stage.

Gromyko didn't say at all.

Yeah.

I had told the Prince that it's awfully hard for these foreigners to keep in mind that they cannot tell certain things to the Secretary of State.

But I'll read from it.

In any event, I can just, if you want.

We'll just wait there.

Then make the announcement.

Make the announcement.

Even the place that we all have found, but it's not really there.

That's right.

And I'll just not answer a few questions.

It's very little of what we already accomplished.

It's much more than we already accomplished.

I can't explain the fear of it.

It gives them a chance to answer me some questions.

I can certainly make one hell of a lot of news on October 15th.

I don't know if we can do this again.

Shut up.

That's been unannounced.

I do have a mind to do this.

I have a mind to do this.

You know, when you've got two good stories, you can put them all in one.

I would like to go out.

He would.

If I'd like to remember the last time he came back to me.

It's so true.

He got buried.

Two questions.

That's what I was thinking.

I just want to come back.

And frankly, you step out and do the Russian announcement.

And then walk out and say,

I need to say, which I'm not going to say, because that's all I can tell you.

Fair enough.

Because I tell you what, otherwise, what you're going to say is that I'm going to kill a hell of a good story, so don't ask a good story.

You have to believe that.

That's what I'm going to do.

It was a pretty thing.

It was a damn good thing.

It was a pretty thing.

I heard all of it.

And I did.

They picked out two.

And I did.

Well, it wasn't your fault.

Well, I could have said that, you know, after the Soviet trip, I asked that question of the Soviet trip.

Okay.

And I won't talk about it now, and that's what I said.

Listen, I'm going to do this.

Maybe it's not so, but I'm going to talk about it now.

Sure.

That's the way I did it.

Of course, by October 15th, I'll know where I'm going.

Thank you very much.

Yeah.

Your next meeting, are you going to start today or not?

Yeah, we will wait until it's getting about five minutes.