Conversation 796-004

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I don't want any big story about how much money we spent, spent sending it out.

You see what I mean?

I know the boys over there, they'll be proud that they've done this.

But I noted, for example, that the issue of Georgia, some silly issue on Thompson, as we franked out a lot of stuff.

Now, the fight is this thing that says, telegram from the President of the United States, the assumption of the average person is going to be, I just don't know what the assumption is, but it's going to be that I sent the goddamn thing at government expense.

Clark and the boys don't think enough that they're thinking of running for the House and the Senate.

She's a hell of a lot different thing.

But if you put to her, the President of the United States, I'd like to have credit on the bottom of it, or on the back even.

It should say, this message, credit, the cost of credit, and this message has been paid to the committee to re-elect the President.

You see my point?

Did anybody thought of that?

Do they think it's a problem or not?

They don't take me on just to see gobbles under the bed, but you have to see what I mean.

No, it's a valid point.

You know, people just don't like to use those things.

You just don't need to make that certain.

If you give any issues of that sort, which makes it appear you're using, it'll be, it won't be Frank's mail, obviously, you know.

Frank, Christ, no.

So there's no question that it was paid, that's the question.

And being paid the thought that you paid for it, well, I see what you mean.

That's why I shouldn't say the White House or anything like that.

But just put that, put a line, put a line.

Can you put it on the back of it?

I doubt it, but I'll see.

I don't think they can print the other, I mean, should we be quite, uh, there's no reason, I'm not going to ask at the bottom.

In fact, this message, the cost, the cost is crazy.

This is a message from the president, as we paid for it with the committee to reelect the president.

So just like we used it on television, we said- Yeah, he said it.

That's not a good idea.

I just don't want to raise any hell.

Good.

so i asked about this question he said well i'm not sure yet you better be careful because he said it's that's the only thing the reporters are talking about i read press conference i have all that all they want to talk about is espionage and sabotage and all that stuff they said and he said i've answered it by getting hard that that i say that regretfully this has turned into the dirtiest campaign in american history is being

And these people have been driven to the point of desperation.

They said, they're talking about, it is a dirty campaign, but you certainly, you can't have it both ways.

He said, you're charging the president for not being on campaign.

So you certainly can't charge him for conducting a dirty campaign, because if he is not campaigning, he isn't conducting a dirty campaign.

So where's the dirty campaign coming from?

Only from the other side.

And then he said, I'm not sure that you want to go very far and take it on.

He said, I think some of us have to when we get the questions.

And we need to do it by counterattack.

He said he thought the vice president's thing was very good in hitting on the counterattack side.

He said, don't defend.

Don't defend.

Then I said, well, what about raising the question of the double standard of those reps?

That's a good idea.

He said, if Croson or somebody like that would write a letter, which is fine, we could have to do it.

What I had in mind was this.

I think what ought to happen here is an attack on the price in the sense of a double standard.

The MacGyver people, the MacGyver people had, they were violent demonstrators, supporters of MacGyver, who pierced tires, et cetera, et cetera, to protect their public and national community, what we say.

In other words, some of the portal boys over there got a list, you know, they guessed, I mean, that's fair, because I told them to.

That's fair.

The second point is, that is, they put out flyers, they put out the Berkeley thing, $15,000 worth of damage was done.

The president visited that.

By the way, there were local demonstrators shouting consanguines to the president when he was in Statue of Liberty.

They shot consanguines to the president's daughter when she was at the Italian parade.

Telephone calls were made from that.

Now, one of the next included in that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah

I went through exactly this kind of a process.

I said, is this a good thing for us to do?

He said, yeah, I think it probably is.

He said, don't elevate it too high.

Don't get it out of the way.

I agree.

Then he said, well, you've got to recognize my view.

is that, as of now, McGovern has decided, and I think he's right, that he has only two issues that are of any hope to him.

One is the war.

He said, unfortunately, bombing the French embassy or whatever it was, you know, just played right into his hands because it gives him something to talk about on every day.

That's right.

And he said, I think he's going to stay on the war.

I think he's made the decision that he's got to ride with that.

I think that's all he has.

I agree.

It's all he's got to hold on to his own people, apparently.

That's the problem.

It's the only place where he's got a clear position.

And he said, plus, he's got to ride on this whole idea of graft, corruption, intrigue, sabotage, and all that sort of stuff.

And he said it would be very good to counterattack that with proof of what they're doing.

In other words, counterattack on specifics.

Don't counterattack on the generality that they shouldn't be doing it.

Then he said, make the point, which I do all the time, that this has been going on for years.

He said every political headquarters in American history has been sacked, rifled,

the people pride that has always been done.

And to get excited about it today all of a sudden is an indication of a double standard.

Double standard.

And I think you can align that we start to crank up a little.

The same people who glorified Dick Tucker as one of the great leaders of American politics are now the one we go back to.

Why don't we go back chapter and verse it?

In other words, they put it out.

They put it out.

But that was the editorial record.

across the country now.

What about what he did there?

That's what we're working on.

So that came up.

I think that's not, I think that's the...

But otherwise he doesn't know what to do.

He said, first of all, I don't think it's taking...

I don't think it's taking the people somewhere.

Due to the fact that that's not assault that I...

Well, the reason they're getting a press play out of it is because there's nothing else for the press to play on their side.

And so that gives them at least a battle of press thrives.

The only thing they can exist on is a battle, and that's the only battle there is.

But now, it faded awful fast.

The networks gave it that eyes all the way back before last, and then it just went, whoop, and it's gone.

It'll be back, I'm sure.

Yep, he's leaving right now.

He'll be back at 6.

He wasn't able, he apparently had work to do.

He's just leaving.

I'm sure he was.

But, I don't know.

The cable product says, I've just completed an extremely long session here.

It is essential that I have ample time with President tomorrow for thorough review of situations, since careful game plan is now required.

As I told Kennedy, it would be very bad to see Rogers until I have had a chance for detailed discussion with President.

All right.

Now, that poses a problem.

He, he, Hayden mentioned this to, on the phone to Kennedy.

Kennedy called me last night and said, we, they, Hayden, he said, Hayden.

I'm Hayden.

That was the problem.

And Hicks had told Kennedy to tell me to please try to work out an opportunity for them to have a long session with you before they have to do Rogers.

And he said, the thing to do, if you can, is announce now that you'll have a breakfast meeting with Rogers and Henry tomorrow morning or something like that.

And then let Henry do his kind report to Bill tonight.

I'll get one for you tonight.

Order that.

Order that up and tell him that it'll be for breakfast at 8 o'clock.

He's going to be in.

He's going to be very, very tired.

Okay.

Now, let me see.

So that it isn't.

Yes.

Yes, it has.

I just had a secret to put it out.

I'll have a secret to say we're not sure what time Kisney will be returning.

That he will be back sometime this evening.

We'll return this evening and we'll report to the President and Secretary Rogers tomorrow morning in the breakfast meeting.

Breakfast meeting at 8 o'clock.

Fair enough.

8 o'clock.

Good.

Obviously, he's going to come back with a pitch to

back down.

He doesn't have a legal degree with him for a long discussion.

I don't know.

There must be some new boy here that he thinks, that he knows is going to be a problem, but thinks it's a possibility.

Okay.

Well, what do you think?

I think.

Yeah.

He will be able to see it for a little more clearly.

He won't choose my view.

So I'm trying to keep Henry being true to his own passion and desire to be very decent all the time.

That's hard to do, I'm sure, though, with Henry.

Especially, you know, he can't do much better than that.

Well, I agree with you.

You know what I mean?

Well, Bobby, I'll tell you that there have been any phrases that he could have been on his way.

He said, I've got a little headline.

So that's the reason he's coming back here.

He didn't write that at all.

I don't know.

Well, Bobby, what he said on Saturday morning told 14 hours to you guys yesterday.

Sunday.

But the main thing is when he comes in, there's going to be no doubt in publicity about the guy.

You know what I mean?

Let's just say that I'm working on a congressional case.

I'm going to have breath at any point.

How about some of you?

I think that one's fine.

And I didn't want to do it anyway.

I don't know how to handle this bad thing.

They do great, but you've got to whack them.

Or is he?

Yeah.

He can hit it harder.

He can go out on some water.

He and Dole both can.

If we want him to.

We held him off on it, basically, yesterday to see what happened.

See, that whole Zagetti story and all that doesn't seem to have caught much fire except with

You know, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York Times, you know, they were fine students, or the New York Times that are writing, but they had a great big lead editorial on whatever the piece was, and then you would expect a second one.

I mean, it's a trail of disaster, but the Post does the same thing.

Of course, the Post editorial, I was on it every day.

Now, Post has a standard technique.

They write something on their front page one day.

As an allegation, it's denied.

They ignore the denial.

And then on the editorial page the next day, they write back what they put on their front page.

Is the word gotten around that ?

I think Rogers is .

I think that's false.

because of the assault on his colleagues.

Not me.

I'm not sensitive about the fucking Post.

He should not leave out what John mentioned.

Mitchell's out of the picture.

But he knows Maury Stanton's been technically honest, straight at least, if anything, to that much of a sundowner.

And the Post is libeling, libeling.

It would be libel if there were any political libel anymore.

I don't know why they don't leave it.

Well, he practically raised the question over here.

Well, we heard about it.

I don't know whether it was maybe through the scheduling office or what, but anyway, it came to me a long time ago.

Did we have any feeling on whether Roushers should or shouldn't do the Washington Post dedication?

And the word went back, we have very, very strong feeling that under no circumstances should he do it.

That he would be out of his mind to do it.

That word went back, and the next thing we saw was an engraved invitation.

Featuring Walter Washington and Bill Roushers.

I went through that whole grievance thing, and the judge rushed out, gave him everything he wanted on that, and now I'm rushing lawyers and psychiatrists in to see if everything's alright.

As far as I can see, we're completely out of there.

The blacks, there's no way to shoot out.

It's also not that big a story.

It's a very big Washington story, of course.

It just wiped out.

The interesting thing, really, you probably read this, is that

The really bad bounce the government's getting on is Vietnam's speech.

Now, it may not get to some level, but... Well, you know, let me say about this before I play about the French consulate.

I think that the sophisticates may worry about the French consulate.

I don't think the American people give one thing or stand about the French consulate.

Now, that's my view.

That's right.

So, and also, what happened, one guy's wounded.

Well, how do we send it out?

That man had capital.

The only story they're trying to make out is we don't know what we're hitting.

We never did bomb it there.

It's probably the same.

But the other unfortunate thing is that it overwrote the overriding of the counterattack.

Well, it overwrote Laird's counterattack.

The counterattack.

Although he got through on his counterattack on all the networks.

What I understand is that the best perimeter, the best inventory was the Star.

Reston pissed on it.

Joe Kraft pissed on it.

Fulbright and some of those others are backing off of it.

They're saying he made a mistake in going too far in the specifics of his plan and he shouldn't have said he was going to bring back all the material.

And that's what's going on now.

He's backing off on the residual waste.

They just want to get out and leave the P.O.W.s with nothing then.

What did they say?

See, you know I had a procedure before us that you don't have an answer to cover us up with the P.O.W.s now.

But he implied that he would use that to bomb the P.O.W.s.

Well, of course.

I don't know why he needed it there.

But his chef was right.

I said, oh, no, he wouldn't do that.

So now it occurs to me that one very good line would be that the guys ought to say, we will not attack the P.O.W.s.

in Thailand if they let Vietnam go.

Why are they going to be used for the purpose of that?

If they could say that before...

You know, these vans and so forth, and the tires, you know, that gives one heck of a good point for a little animal to make us eat and make us talk.

I think so.

What you're going to hear in white is that

But we would try to press the thing next week.

Not a problem to press the thing next week.

You'll see.

But you'll want to watch very, very carefully whether or not it's going to be simply on this jackass on the 7 o'clock.

That's right.

And if it is, maybe you better have it anyway.

I'm not so sure, but maybe you should.

Yeah.

All right.

So we'll go right to something maybe.

Well, for the same reason that you hit him on the corruption thing.

Yeah.

That worked beautifully.

It really did.

You played it in exactly the right tone.

It's still reverberating in backup reports and all that kind of stuff.

And it pretty much chopped the water out of them under the corruption law.

And you may be able to do the same thing on this.

Same course you go through.

The beauty of the in-office press conference is you don't need to decide.

You've got to start doing the work on it, but you don't need to decide to do it until five minutes before.

Well, I need a little chat or a verse about the top operations, what has happened compared to previous campaigns and this kind of shenanigans.

Frank, I don't approve of it.

I'll say, what about the White House?

Well, the White House, he hasn't been mentioned.

And he says, well, Cross is the only one.

Cross is the only one.

And that's been refuted totally by Flo.

And the only thing he's been mentioned on is that he dropped the letter to Lowe.

Apparently Colson did.

But he juggled well enough that Lowe has shot down the fact that it was Jobs that he verified the source and, you know, shot down the whole story.

Well, Colson apparently made some remark to this.

Oh, yeah.

Who hasn't said that?

Well, where are we?

When are we going to get to that?

Not one of the goddamn press has done anything about the total calls from the Los Angeles office and the flyers in the Berkeley office and the damage that was done.

Have they?

No.

Well, yeah.

Have any editorials on that?

Yeah.

There was some editorials on the phone call.

Okay.

But nothing, you know, not from the White House.

How about what was their phone editorials in the Chicago Tribune or the Orlando Sentinel or the Globe Democrat?

I'm tired.

Okay.

Good.

Well, it's part of the course.

You know what?

No, no, no.

I'm just trying to get...

I have a question.

What I'm trying to do is to scream my heart out and just attack right back on it, but I didn't get attacked on the first one we made.

The devil's never depressed.

I met a pretty good attack on the Washington Post, incidentally, the day that their building was dedicated.

But what they're talking about, he won't do it, but it's maybe worth a try.

Right.

Is having Roger do it in his speech there?

Oh, sure.

Not as a frontal attack, but as a talk on the double standard of the press kind of a thing.

Where, if it's all by implication, it's the folks he doesn't do the posting around him.

But the press holds an obligation.

He has to maintain his own credibility.

And if you raise credibility about an administration that's been its own, it needs to be fair.

Roberts just might do it.

If he would, it could be effective as hell.

If he wouldn't, it's gonna make him a national celebrity.

Thank God you don't have to focus your time so much.

Thank God.

Thanks God they're on the other side.

We need that, you see.

We need to have some who are basically enemies.

And we've got to get all of our people to recognize it around here.

They are the establishment bomb.

They are.

And they've got to realize it.

And so it's true, Cronkite, all those assholes, too.

Usually in time, they are being established.

And they are wrong.

And they've got to be defeated.

And it's got to be written.

Yes, sir.

The guy that agreed to write that would be Christ.

He doesn't believe him.

He can't believe him about his copies.

He knows he's doing pretty good on that, I think he has.

Yeah, and Crossett may be the guy to get it right.

Because, boy, he believes it so deeply and bitterly that he's, in a way, could turn out to be your left wing Buchanan.

Right.

Because he's Jewish, which is good.

He's opposed.

He's Jewish.

And he's not a conservative in the, you know, the knee-jerk type Buchanan type conservative.

you've got to do that.

Now, on the other hand, getting back to the Kevin Bowles thing, this has a new kind of reaction, which is different.

I have a feeling.

That we should not step up the...

I know the argument.

You've got to start up your own troops.

People have got to get angry.

People have got to get out and vote and all that stuff.

I obviously have a view.

Just a gut reaction.

than people who do not want to hear bitterness, hatred, and meanness.

I think part of the reason that crap comes along, even the logic kind of thing, that it's just too mean and bitter and vicious.

I have to do it as far as .

Ron, uh, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh, I told Bob, you can, uh

Well, yeah.

We ought to get it as yellow TV.

I can't see none of that 300 panels.

I can't have every local station.

Can you have a pool?

We'll set up a Atlanta pool right away.

Yeah, Atlanta pool and a pool for television.

I want the pool.

It already is.

Well, we have Bill Tice and then we have the Atlanta Journal.

That's all.

No, we'll plan this.

We just want the little conversations that we have with the people.

It is okay to leave the pool and just to watch the proceeds.

We haven't walked all the pool and stayed there and didn't see the proceeds for sure.

I think this is our one now.

If they catch some of those people, we can't lose by that.

The other thing, excuse me, is that they bring things up there on the rocks or something.

I mean, I don't know.

Don't put that out.

Don't put out what they say.

They say they catch it back.

We'll see.

I've got it.

We have two problems.

First of all, I won't give the time.

They spot the plane if it's taken off now, so they'll be able to count it like that.

In other words, they know he just got out.

All right, all right.

Thank you.

So I want to see if he will report to the president tonight.

That's on you.

Yeah, I'll say yes.

Say yes.

Don't say anything about it.

All right.

Don't say anything.

I'll wear away a thousand pieces.

He's going to report to the president tonight.

The president already has it.

He, of course, has stepped up and has mandated or is currently this.

He will report to the president when he comes in early tonight.

And in the morning, he will meet with the president and secretary of state.

I think that's it.

I've got a photo of him.

All right.

All we want is to hear that.

I don't think that

If there's something in there you don't know about, it's a list of the first family visits to the South.

I saw it.

Call me at your house.

Oh, good.

OK.

Thank you.

See you later.

Bye.