Conversation 821-001

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around each of the departments, like I did in 1969, you know, and say, oh, we're pushing west, we have every confidence in you, and it's a lot of grit.

Hell no, I'm going to go around saying, I don't have the confidence in you.

In fact, the ones we appointed are going to come here.

Don't you agree?

I do agree.

And also, they, it gets the wrong signal to them.

They are our friends.

And they know damn well they are.

You know, you know that I keep worrying about that flag.

That irritates the shit out of me.

Well, I don't know all the time.

It does, man.

Yeah, it really does.

Most of our people are afraid to do it, but I'll just figure it out there.

Well, anyway, I guess what we have is we're up against three of the best that you can do.

Mark.

day-to-day tasks that you have.

Really study it.

Study it.

It's important to detach in a more detached way.

And study the State Department.

Talk to CHIELD.

If he takes a trip, have him go along.

He's an observer, you know.

He's the guy that will sneak in and find out what the hell's going on.

When you do go on those trips, when you do go on those trips, take your flag off.

take it on, and slip in.

Go in as kind of a bureaucrat type of a guy, you know, a young guy.

How are things going?

It's not a horrible thing we've been doing in Vietnam.

I've heard a hell of a number of horrible things.

But you've got to play the game in such a way that we'd like to get chaptered first on it.

We'd like to find ways to, I guess we just ought to find ways to shake it off, you know.

Especially the career, the ambassadors and the ministers that are at our service, you know,

ministers to DCNs that are career-type people.

We can get readings on it so we know who to promote.

You'll find some that are good.

That's the other thing.

If you can't help it, you can find some young FSOs that work well.

Some of them will be smart.

The fight is that we would like to know, but we really have to get better information from them.

People that are bad ought to go.

They ought to be watched and sunk before they get up.

And also people that are good, that ought to come up.

We're going to bust enough open that we can move some young guys up fairly fast if we could only figure out which ones we want to move up.

And you ought to, if you can, from the U.S. parallel to the U.S.

a lot of the other younger guys that are doing it now.

So I don't want to pinch so much what the hell we're going to be doing.

Let's help them give some recommendations about how the bureaucracy can be changed.

Well, that's it.

Get someone else to do your legal work, and don't waste the time on that.

Waste your time.

Spend your time moving around.

Find out what you can in the woodwork, because you can help the country a hell of a lot more that way.

You can hire all the lawyers that need to do this.

You would think, though, that after we win the election by a rather handsome amount, these bastards would shake up a lot of them.

Some of them will interfere, I suppose.

But others will just try to wait it out, won't they?

It's a deep...

It's discouraging for them to have to wait four more years.

Well, I told you about them.

I mean, even a year ago, I was walking around Christmas with the top letter writers.

the ones over there with the big Kennedy picture hanging there on the wall.

What do you expect from an office like that?

A trust, huh?

What do you really expect?

That's it.

I wonder in four years if we've improved it.

Sure we've improved it, but we sure haven't made much real progress in it then.

Nope.

First four years, I think they just held out.

Thought you'd lose for sure.

Yeah, why?

I think they thought you would lose for sure.

And I think they just held out the first four years.

Yeah.

In anticipation of returning.

We can take this off.

We can keep enough heat on.

We can keep enough guts in our new appointees so that they keep heat on.

I think you can drive a bunch of them out in the second four years.

We'll get...

Only in this first year of it, though, really.

You've got to get it done now.

Yeah.

Because anybody who hangs on through this first year will decide, well, I've only got three or more years to wait, and Teddy will be here, and then everything will be fine again.

I bet you get in here.

There you go.

Thanks, and I wish you well.

You'll always be proud.

Thank you.

No little, no little crap.

Thanks for your loyalty, your guts, everything you did for us.

God, it'll be worthwhile.

It's an honor to work with you.

You're going to be chairing the USC on your own throat for all of these?

I sure will.

I must say, this is probably the one time when they should beat the hell out of Ohio State.

Ohio State probably will win for the first time.

You know what I mean?

Ohio State's never won in our paper.

I don't see how anybody's in the USC.

Yes, he has, without a question, the most explosive offense of any team in college football.

One of the most explosive offenses of any program.

At their best, they can play even with any program at their best.

Mr. President, good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

Hi, President.

How are you?

Good to see you.

Not always as angry as it should be.

Well, I don't blame you for the beating.

I don't blame you any more than I do.

I guess we'll sit over here.

Well, it's feeling good.

Frank will put you in this chair.

This is your second chair.

Okay.

That one's full of blues.

What aspect of that old man?

Managing editor of the largest circulation newspaper in the United States.

Industrial capital of the West.

And the only paper in New York that had a little different view than Post and the Times.

President of the only evening newspaper in this nation's capital.

President and editor of the largest circulation newspaper in the world.

I mean, magazine in the world.

All three of those men, if you made a list of the 10 most important communicators in the United States, they'd probably figure in the list, those three.

And not one of them had been to the Soviet Union, which for 25 years has been the essential element in the foreign policy of the United States.

And not one of them had been there.

I'm surprised at the hope.

I'm not so sure.

None of them have been to the Soviet Union.

I was appalled by that.

Oh, it was good that they made the trip.

I was glad that they had made it.

O'Neill said a very interesting thing.

I said, well, I'm going to see Frank at the wedding today, and I'm pretty sure that I'm going to miss him.

He said, well, I'll tell you, we need him in New York, or you need him here.

So I said, well, you'd be damn sure you'd get him in a good position.

Well, but at least Frank has sent those three guys who

I think all three men feel personally extended by having come.

These are fellows that just went over to see your exhibit in London, and one of them, O'Neil, did a study of USIA and how it operates in Moscow.

He wrote a nine-page paper on how he thinks our mission operation must go.

It's pretty long for you to read, sir, but I'll send it to you.

I told him we would follow him.

It's tough.

But what I wish, yeah, he wants to do a lot of things, and I don't think they're very worthwhile.

He'd be a good member, don't you think, for your advisory commission?

Oh, you?

Yes, nothing.

Yeah, O'Neill's is the strongest.

It's mine, sir.

Yeah, that's a hell of a paper company.

Whatever they want to say about it, by God, they have the best education in the country.

That's right.

It's real awful.

They say more and fewer words than any other paper in the country.

And more people read it than any other paper.

It's very tight-knit, and you just can't read them.

Yeah.

It's a damn goodness paper.

Do you think John Sheehan ventured into the afternoon newspapers and ended up in there?

He's talked about it for a long time.

He ran back into Hawaii.

John, John's problems, you know, just kidding.

They're people.

They help you finance them.

They sit down.

Costs a tremendous amount of money.

Very expensive.

I wish he'd approved the total inspection.

You know, just within this, I don't know if she's your friend very closely, but I know only in our advisory commission, I've met a lot there.

I have other plans, which are, you know, locked in, but he's been pressing me very hard to join his organization and to run that paper for him.

Is he a very sound fellow, and does he have access to the type of enormous capital that's going to be needed to keep eventually the film?

A cell phone.

Cell phone.

The fellow who knows, the fellow who would know better.

And I don't want to knock it on the shirt, but his, he goes up and down, it's Flanagan.

Flanagan, he did some deals with him on occasion.

He probably knows the backers and falters and all that bunch in New York.

I call it falter hands.

Walter said, he said, look, unless he's prepared to put in between $50,000 and $150,000 a week indefinitely, he can't make it go.

And he said, if he is prepared to do that, I think he's got a shot.

I think if he, you know, in 18 months or so with photo offset and with the financial aspect of it and all of that, he said, I think it could go.

But it's no business for Fainhart.

The thing is, he's got to have the financial backing, and I don't know that John's got it.

He's got the heart, but he's got the dough, is the real problem.

John is a real goer.

He's got guts and heart and everything.

But you know these financial people, Frank, they're a cold-blooded bunch of bastards.

At the moment, they start losing $100,000 a week.

I mean, they've got even life.

There's not a hell of a lot of ideological money around.

Well, we've talked a lot about it, but you know, we've got a limestone here and an old cave there that's not very well-designed.

Well, that's an old cave.

It's not by those standards or something.

Frank, you're pretty locked in on what you're going to do.

CBS?

No.

That's good.

I mean, I have this in front of me.

I'm going, Westinghouse has a...

Subdivision of their company, which they've taken the television, radio stations, and some resort hotels, and soft drink poppers, and things like that.

And they've put those together in what they call Broadcast Learning and Leisure Time.

And I'm going to be associated with that endeavor.

They have a television station found.

Very good.

What is it?

What kind of associate?

The Executive Vice President.

And the man who runs it?

Who's the Vice President?

Tom McGann.

He's along a little bit, and I think in due course he'll be going on that.

Right, right, right.

It's a hell of a thing.

What can you do with Westinghouse?

Well, we'll determine that after I'm there.

I'm very comfortable with him as a man.

Well, let me tell you this.

Whatever you need from this place, you get it.

You've got to do policy now.

There's some of you that are going to get in and some aren't.

Now, if you need Tom Hyatt or something, you can do anything.

Let me say, in that connection, if there's anything that, if you want to fight for a television license and bust somebody up or something like that, we have various ways.

We want to do a great job.

We just want to help our friends.

We want to help our friends.

We really mean that.

All out.

But you've got to go in there and fight for it.

I wish you could go after that channel on the floor and take it away from the post.

Unfortunately, they have their full component.

They have five televisions and seven radio stations.

That's the legal limit.

And they're in pretty good markets.

San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia.

So it's a question of operating rather than acquiring.

Well, if anybody gets after you on that,

So that you don't appear to be doing it here, you might get a hold of Chuck Colson, who would be on the outside.

Well, I've worked very privately with this gentleman, because you know, you're a guy, Chuck.

You know what I mean?

We have ways of getting at people without going through the White House, which is what you would not want to do.

They all know that our friends are going to be helped.

All right, from there, where would you go?

Do you think you will stay there a while, and then you'll look, and you'll see?

I think so, yeah.

Yeah.

That's a good option, don't they?

At least they've got it out there.

They've got it all.

I think doing something.

Yeah.

Well, it's a wide open field, too, to get into the area where the money's to be made in the next 20 years.

At least we're a party.

Well, it is.

People don't have to work anymore.

They're going to have more leisure time.

Is there anything in terms of that position that you would like any kind of appointment to hear?

You know, all the advisories that we're cutting, we're slicing them down and getting very close to them because of that.

Our arms control the crime because it's just, in a way, embarrassing the ones that you find.

The personal ones?

Yeah, that would be useful to you.

It would be nothing that would be useful to me in my business.

Whether or not there are commissions in which I could be useful to you, I don't know enough about that.

And that would be something that you'd have to consider.

But if you've done it purely that way, I don't need anything.

It would be helpful.

I'd like to work with the police.

Well, the point is that I think what we do have, for example, like if we do have some mission to undertake, I wonder if you should go on the USIA thing as the former director.

Let me be very simple with you.

I'd rather not.

Well, I think I'd rather not from his point of view.

Yeah, I don't think the former director should be on the commission that overlooks the current director.

I would be uncomfortable with it, and I think he would be fine.

It's a good commission, though, with maybe one exception.

Yeah, true, true.

But I agree it's one of the better ones.

Yeah, it's the Franks, though.

They're good people.

We'll get a new chairman there.

Yeah.

In January, because Stan is trying to inspire his new friend.

But he's having a shot.

Somebody else should get a chance to do this.

Go to the new director, the new chairman of the commission, and you've got a plan.

Right.

The main point that we need from you, Brian, is...

I said, I mean, that is one of the main things we know which I understand you're doing, is you're listening.

Do you understand that when you provide to Bob or Malachi or whatever you like, you kind of understand the goal list, the state list, et cetera, not just in your department, but in other departments.

I mean, you've seen ambassadors around the world, the DCMs and so forth and so on, those that can and can't be changed.

You know, the people who are bad and the people who are good.

We need intelligence, all of us.

With Casey in state, we're going to shake the hell out of state in about three months, and then it's going to be shake the little bitches out of it.

But we've got to...

The economic thing is just a cover for Casey.

That's a cover.

That's a cover, and Ronnie knows it.

He'll send us, and he'll move on up to definitely play...

But that's his job.

But he deliberately is going to have his nose under the tap three months from now and fire those bastards over there.

Well, then once he does it, I would make so again.

He really has two choices.

One is to stay, and the other one is from Washington, and the other is to go to the field.

And they're not mutually exclusive, but you have to put an emphasis on one or the other.

I would contend very strongly on him traveling his socks off, because what he learned about these people is out in the field, and he's even doing that in the city of Washington.

Get Casey off his ass right away.

Get him out.

Absolutely.

Get him out.

Before he's confirmed.

Exactly.

Do it as a consultant.

As a consultant, if he can, immediately do it.

Frank is absolutely right.

You never learn anything about it.

You sit here in Washington.

People say, well, I remember the time I was a voter arrest.

Mrs. Meeker was so nice.

Well, Mrs. Meeker happens to be an instance.

He sure does.

Yeah.

Well, that was the point, John.

Remember how you raised this with him, right?

I'm glad that maker's going to go.

Yeah.

We've picked up a few of them, and you've picked up a lot.

We've all been much more intensive.

We've all shut some in from time to time, if you've not alone.

If you're good at all, you can.

At long last, too, we will.

The staff will have done it earlier.

And fortuitously, now that we are coming to staff back and moving into sort of a different relationship with the state, which will be very heavy this time, we're going to have to be here.

their relationship with the state and so forth and so on.

We also will carry out the, carry out the objective review of Warren Cushing Board, which we shared about before.

We've got to bring the USIA all in to the big policy initiatives and so forth.

It's got to be sitting in so they can get out and do the progress so they can grow.

And we haven't done that.

We haven't done that enough.

And I think, so we will do that.

You have a problem here, which you've got to recognize as a champion of your lives.

It's your job to get along.

Because if you have got to be in there, you've got to run in, and then you've got to get it settled out of state, there's not a mean question that they're going to do what we say.

There's no problem there.

You'll find Rush a very easy man to work with.

Ken Rush will be the man who's going to be in charge of the state.

And Casey should get out and get the hell out fast.

I'll tell you what I'd like you to do.

telling you to go ahead and talk with Frank, and you give him recommendations as to how to look.

He didn't even know how to look.

I've done all this trouble throughout the world.

As a freshman congressman, I learned that simply because somebody had nice manners invited you to dinner, and you were about to, well, they were giving too much martini or something like that, and I said, this is nice, and all that.

But it got their numbers awful fast.

And they have never liked me since, and I've never liked them since.

And that's been 25 years.

But you see, the point that I make is, Frank, most people are taken in by them.

Most people, and most of our people are taken in by them.

I send them a grub, and they come back and say, well, these are real people.

And he was one of the dumbest, totally dumbest.

He comes back against the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

That's right.

He doesn't say, for example, that this guy happens to be a tough son of a bitch, but he may not have the manners and so forth.

It's much better than somebody else who, gee, you know, bombed over him and did that.

He'll learn.

The point is whether the guy can speak the language, whether or not his wife has nice manners, whether or not

He is one who, you know, can kiss your ass.

It's not any test of whether the guy is loyal to the country and loyal to the administration.

You've got to find that out through a series of tough questions.

They won't vote Casey because Casey doesn't care for the social correctness, just as I never cared about it.

I've always done it because I had to, but I didn't care about it.

Casey's never done it, and Ann doesn't care about it either, so he'll get along well.

The main thing, and you agree, you've got to go, you've got to listen.

You've got to act as if you're just lying every minute, if you're being taken into this.

But remember, they're the enemy.

They're the enemy.

Never forget what I said.

You didn't think this when you came down and told me about the press.

And now they're telling you.

And so it is here, out there.

The bureaucrats, the bureaucracy is the enemy.

Now, does this mean they're all the enemy?

Of course not.

It means that maybe 5% are.

Maybe it's 15.

I don't know.

But you've got to assume that the overwhelming possibility is that the people that are out there are trying to do us in.

They don't like our policy.

They don't like us.

Frankly, it's one hell of a problem.

It's as much your shock, as a matter of fact.

Frank, I hope, has done some, meaning up to that.

But, it's got to happen in the State Department.

Miss Mellon, don't think that the Defense Department's all in it either.

They got a lot of bad boys out there.

Don't think the CIA is that clean.

The CIA is one of the worst.

Because of where they come from, you see.

You know, Mr. President, based on the USIA experience, if you look very carefully and if you set your own moon sails and your symbols, you can find the people.

They're oftentimes at a low level.

They haven't been promoted.

You have to jump-promote people to get them into positions.

But there are people, career officers,

in these services who think the way we do.

But most of them have been ducking.

Because, you know, the promotion boards and the family relationships and all of that have been very tough.

That's the reason that I'm enormously encouraged to hear what you say about the state, because

Whatever else is done in USIA and all of the other, the related foreign service agencies, Armed Control and Assignment and AOD and the Peace Corps, they're derivative of State.

State is the central entity.

If you do nothing with State, it's very difficult to change the sort of derivative arms of the foreign policy structure.

But it's true that the people who think the way we do are a substantial minority, but they're there.

The substantial minority, I mean the small minority, but they're there.

And you will, a lot of them, are already in a position to be a leader.

There again, the idea of finding those is stable.

You know, finding, because as they're not turning around, it's kind of open.

That's always how you find people to follow.

Well, you find them, Mr. President, by traveling a good deal, by getting to know them, by watching their work, by reading what they've done in the past, going into their files and seeing what they wrote in 67 and 66, about six of their situations, by getting to know their friends and the type of friends they have, and the way you get to know anybody.

Thanks a lot.

I'm more interested in your department, not me, but how do you find out about the statement?

Well, in State Department...

If state is the problem, how is P.C.

going to find out?

Well, I can only tell you the observations of my own.

I've been to almost 80 countries in these four years with you.

And when you go out, you see, when you travel at a very high level, say the Kissinger level, or your level, or Bill Rogers' level,

You are so surrounded by protocol that you see the very top people on motorcycles.

That's about it.

Absolutely.

The level of the SIA director is a great way to travel because you're important enough so that you can do what you want to do and see the right people, but you're not so important that you get in the cocoon of your struggle.

So when you spend three or four days in the country, it's a very useful way to observe.

And of course, USIA is mixed in very, very tightly with the foreign mission, so that you have a reason to look into everything.

Of course, once he's the economic secretary, he can move it somewhat at the same time.

Also, he can move into the business community and say, I want to ask the business community.

You can find out a hell of a lot about the State Department by asking the business community what they think of them.

Some of those business guys out there know who the jerks are and who their guys are.

They know we're an enterprise and we're a program.

There's another thing, too.

Once you spot the officers, once you spot the career officers that think your way, they know where the other ones are.

That's another source of contempt.

Another thing is tell them not to worry too much about the little people countries.

The best thing is to concentrate the supplier on the important places.

Do a few things well and don't grab you a great number poorly.

Tell them that you can learn one hell of a lot by talking to business guys.

Business guys don't know everything, but they can tell you a lot.

Although some of them become part of the establishment, too.

Sometimes the chaste mankind can be bad as hell.

I learned my law mainly because of the way that I was very fortunate, of course, to vice president, but I hadn't the law.

I was not, I had little, not nearly the time to work all day, but every day, so I never had to learn the law.

But then, as a congressman, senator, I learned a lot.

Oh, that's a beautiful way to go.

traveling out of office when I was no longer vice president for eight years, I learned the most.

Because then, yeah, I mean, they let their feelings be known.

I would take a year to get back to you without getting... Well, you're right.

There it is, there it is.

That's a good thing.

I think the best thing is to get Casey out fast, and you should get out fast too.

Go ahead.

If I may, I can go back to what you said about the importance of structuring Jim.

In my judgment, sir, that will not occur unless you personally order it, because...

for reasons that you alluded to with Henry and also with Ed State.

It's not in the natural order of things.

And yet, unless...

the man who is your information man on a worldwide basis, your international communicator, if you will.

Unless one is a WhatsApp meeting or a Security Council meeting or a meeting of the senior review group, unless he's there to listen to what's going on and what you're trying to achieve and what you've worked on, it's impossible for him to operate really effectively for you.

And to leave it that, well, when it's a communications matter, we'll invite you in.

That doesn't work.

He needs to just be there.

He doesn't have to have a vote.

He doesn't even necessarily have to speak, if you wish him to.

But he needs to be there to listen.

They are terribly important.

I take it for a little homework.

Do you think that's the most important problem?

I think it's the most important.

We thought we had it solved last night.

That's right.

Well, you do it.

It's just done now.

There's no problem now.

Just say that's the way it is.

And the best way for you to handle it is just sit there.

Just sit.

I've tried.

They'll call on you in due time.

They'll realize.

You've also got it in Wessex now.

You're going to have Elliot Richardson.

That's right.

And Ken Rush.

And Bill Clements, people I've had in there.

Instead of Mel Laird and David Fireman.

So it's a new group.

What part do you have?

The part from that.

You've got to make more use of this.

We're in a good position now to do it.

I mean, after the election and so forth, looking at the low review of most other foreign leaders, we're in a pretty good position once we get the war finished, which, of course, most people think it will be finished one day.

Probably.

It will one day.

So now it's time to build something.

I mean, the thing that Frank has done with great courage, as it is, and been afraid to say some niceness about the administration, he's caught a share of hell for it.

God, it's something, you know, when you think of that awful bunch of crap that came out about Kennedy, you know, while he was president in front of the US, now he just gobs and dobs and dobs, nobody ever complied.

We didn't say anything about that.

There was one of them, but they counted it Bobby's favorite agencies, really, were Attorney General and, of course, and the SIA, because he is the SIA, he really was involved in it on a worldwide basis.

Did he?

Absolutely.

Right.

Expanded it enormously, and it was his personal.

They didn't know what he did.

The people that were there were his people.

And all of the people right out of your heart were chosen by Papa.

And he was at the agency frequently.

And it was a Kennedy.

It's a way we want to choose.

We want to rule the school.

How about your second man?

It's open.

It's open because you see Henry Loomis, who was the second one on to have the broadcasting, and I deliberately left it open knowing what my own plans were, so the general counsel was involved in that.

You've got the director and the deputy director and the chairman of the advisory commission all open so that you've got a perfect opportunity to put your team... One of the toughest, one of the most courageous, unspecified, really tough people.

We'll fight with this.

That's what I said.

It's got to be people that are, that understand that we're fighting.

No doubt about it.

Yeah, I know, I know.

Not naive people.

Yeah, I know, I know.

I mean, it's, it's a, it's top of the, top of the fix we didn't do in the first four years.

We did a few good things.

We must have done something.

Anyway, the way that we stopped to think of what we didn't do,

But we were simply too terrified.

Every time anybody came in and said, what about the blacks in the West?

We only got 43% of the vote.

There's that good country, Democrats.

God damn it, we were always doing that.

And the only blacks we were watching were those who were against us.

Not quite the only one, but so on down the line.

No more.

I've said, if out of the 61% of the people that voted for us, they're our answer department, and we can't find enough people to run this government, then the hell with them.

That's what it's going to be.

Nobody needs to be appointed to any of these positions who did not support us.

And I mean openly.

Openly.

Not these businessmen that laid in the woods or in the bushes.

You know, I don't worry about my stock.

There's a hell of them.

Nobody needs to get one.

I don't care how capable they are.

Mr. President, just to agree with that role, I agree with it entirely.

It's the only chance we've got, because they're so unbalanced against us.

You've got to remember this.

We're only doing what they've always done to us.

When Bobby and Jack came in in 1961, they fired every goddamn person who ever was with Isaac.

Everybody.

Except for a little longer.

They let him pad around here because he was running on his own.

He wouldn't do any harm.

He was their symbol, I guess.

He was their carryover.

He was trying to say something else.

I was going to say that in this traveling in the last year

I think that in addition to all of the highly beneficial effects of your new arrangements with the Chinese and the Soviet Union, there is one effect which is occurring.

It's a very dangerous effect.

And that is that everywhere you go, you find a much lessened perception of possible power from those .

A euphoria, in other words.

Yes, sir.

Oh, I know it.

And the same is going to happen as when the damn war is over.

I think there's an erosion of a feeling in the West, using the term West as a very loose umbrella, as it is, whether it has solved the Soviet Union.

Now we're in good terms and everything is locked up.

And of course it isn't that way.

I agree.

And I think that...

But the news magazines are contributing.

They're very separatized, all the assholes like that.

You're absolutely right.

I totally agree with what you said.

And how we get it turned around is going to be a problem.

Basically, the world has not changed.

The Russians are doing what they're doing only because of certain interests they have.

And the Chinese are doing it for the interests they have.

And we're doing it for the interests we have.

And so people think, well, now the world is all changing.

And we say the winds of peace are sweeping the world and all that sort of thing.

What is happening is that this is a battle of love for a great storm.

It will continue to go on.

I mean, people was raising hell at me because I wouldn't go up to New York to give my auntie a dinner.

And Richard said he wanted to go up to give her a dinner.

Richardson, for Christ's sakes.

And I said, the hell no, he's not going to go there.

I said, the lowest level bureaucrat we can find will see the son of a bitch when he's in New York.

He's not our friend.

Again, he's our enemy.

You were detecting us.

Well, you know that you beat us.

But who?

What?

They even called over here.

That's his favorite part, sir.

Hell, yeah.

But then I said, no, again, he's not going to be received in this country.

He's our enemy.

I think there are ways in which we can make clear that while we go forward in an attempt to rationalize relationships on a state to state basis,

their fundamental philosophical underpinnings in arms are diametrically opposed.

And that as long as that continues, there is a very grave down to our way of life.

I think that's a very important consideration which is being lost sight of in the formal structures which quite probably would

You know, it's a real problem here in France.

The American people are totally psychos.

They've always been this way.

I'm sure they do cruel things.

They just cluster their brains up in a piece of rock and fight.

This is not the end of it.

But basically the American people are, they do want peace.

And they think, they think, they think we used to shake hands and a lot of things, and it's just fine, just ducking, looking.

And the person is nice, the party head, he's not giving a briefing, they give a beautiful toast, and they say, oh, I had such a good relationship with your agreement, or a good relationship with your agreement, less than I had a relationship with your agreement, and we were brash, and I'm conceiving, and regarding, and so on, in a personal way, just couldn't have been better, because I know a lot of people, but there are enemies.

I don't know what they're trying to do to us, what we're trying to do to them.

But we have to play it in a way that we can use that at a time that they have another hand.

And we play the Chinese, we use that at a time that they have another.

And how long that time remains, I don't know.

How much time we've got, I'm not sure.

But we can't let the whole rest of the world let down its guard.

We did the assumption, well, communism, I think it stands for, has now changed its attitude and said, who feels that?

They talk and so forth.

The European Security Conference, there used to be a terribly difficult thing for us.

Terribly difficult.

Because it's something the Russians have wanted for years.

When you look at the recent elections in Japan, in Australia, in New Zealand,

in Germany, and what the public polls show, and what would happen if elections were held currently in England and France.

In every case, there's a pretty difficult move to the left.

Now, that's eroding the opportunity for reasons that had to do, however, with nationalism, not with international considerations at all.

But you're right, Tony.

Japan, their socialist and communist game.

Australia.

Australia to the left.

Australia was the left.

And the present polls show that in England and in France, if there were an election today, Papa would lose.

Papa would lose, and he would lose.

And of course, you had the situation in France.

And so you're eroding.

There's an erosion of the underpinning of much of what we believe in.

It's a real problem because the kids

Don't proceed with this.

Your college generation and below is growing up in this feeling.

Exactly.

With a total unholiness to accept the possibility that there's going to be .

And they were in that thing.

They had war groups and all that.

And if we just stopped killing them, then the war would be over.

They never looked at the they're killing us side, or that they're moving into .

It was always that we're dealing with our table piece.

And it's a, that's very Italian for you now.

I don't know what the answer is at the moment, except that we are the only ambassador against them.

We still have to play the Russians in the Chinese game.

Just like we're playing in Juneau.

Without that game.

Very, very bad position.

Would you live in New York?

Yes, we could.

We could.

Oh, hey.

I'm hungry.

A good guy and a real mean bastard that we were going to have in charge of the federal curriculum change.

I didn't think of that.

But anyway, we really need that these commissions are more important

It's something I have a little bit of detail on.

They are doing business on a frightening basis at the moment.

They're a power commission.

They're a trade commission.

All right.

That's it.

So, of course, hand in hand with what you brought in.

This is the systematic demolition of the free enterprise here.

It's just .

I've so steeped myself in the farm policy.

and I really get domestic.

You'll find out.

Well, I very much appreciate the honor of being associated with you for the last four years.

Well, you've done a terrific job.

The thing I admire is that you stood up.

You know, I didn't have the chance to talk as much as I would have liked.

You didn't participate as much as you should have.

But the main point is that, my God, you have

You're one of the few people in the agencies that start doing that kind of thing.

As a matter of fact, we've tried to stand up for you, as you know, and it was easy.

But it takes a hell of a lot of courage to be a member of an administration like ours.

If you look back at it, I say,

I never thought adults did, personally.

I read that one area, but for the most part, I think Brown and O'Rourke should have been involved.

But you agree with the guys in our years?

Not in our years.

There's a lot of good things, but on the other hand, in terms of attempting to clean up the bureaucracy and bring something new in the way of conduct and so forth, that just never occurred.

I was so far removed from it, and I wouldn't know.

As an outsider, if you're that way, you would, of course, know whether or not it was the case.

It was all very quiet.

It wasn't much.

It was, in a way, what the country seemed to need right now.

What I meant is, let's face it, Jim.

I'm looking at it in a social way.

We haven't done it in a social way, but a lot more than most.

But in a social way, I remember the same goddamned people came to the White House, bidders and so forth and so on.

They didn't come.

The Truman was there.

And all the rest, the same clack.

Well, I finally got a feeling, ouch.

but they have been back.

That's a big thing, but it has an effect.

Believe me, believe me, the social virus has an effect on more people.

That's the only thing.

White House staff is superior, but they can't get the men, but they get up through the lines.

Same with the cap, through the lines.

Also, you recognize values.

You get it.

That's right.

You know, another thing that happens, too, is if you live in that certain environment like that, you can't help but be influenced by the club you belong to or you play yard.

You can't help but be influenced by the parties you go to.

You can't help but be influenced by the people who sit around and play bridge or whatever the hell people do.

or that you go on a cruise with them to take a vacation.

And so the net result is that what we're going to try to do this time is to set up our own establishment so that our people and lives and so forth and so on, they all think they can get around

eat each other, and a few others, and there must be, there must be a group of literally Republican Congressmen, Senators, I mean, a lot of them before you graduate on that level.

Why do you always have to go out with a goddamn Fulbright?

It's a joke.

I mean, it was the only letter that came through first in the class.

Where's the Fulbright?

No, but I think that these things have an effect.

It is my whole view about the social elite.

I mean, yeah, sure, I never want to say it publicly, but Frank, when you get back to New York, you remember, because you were an exception in that community there.

I was studying the results of this last launch in areas like the state of New York area before New York was born.

Did you know that among the upper middle class WASP areas, we did the eventing slightly less good this time than we did in 1960?

Where we made a huge gain, clearly.

basically out there in that great big country, there's just a hell of a lot of people that, I don't mean for that, he's Catholic, non-Catholic, Catholic, they were working people, they were white-collar people, but they were not the elitist.

The elitist, and this is the great problem in our society, the elitist in our society have gone soft.

Now, the elitism of society in Kosovo is a very grave, dangerous signal for that country, absolutely.

It's ruined Britain.

It ruined France long ago.

The Germans had all theirs killed off, so that's why they're still strong.

And so you get the Japan.

But at the present time, the elitists in the American society, they're the kind of people that you know and that I know.

And let's face it, I know that American society in the back of my hand.

I know the Beverly Hills and California society.

There is a mix.

You've either got nuts on the right or softheads on the left in the American society.

But they're better than most places in Los Angeles, for some reason.

San Francisco has all gone to hell except the day back in the 90s and 90s.

But looking at the New York area, the East,

New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Texas, the most influential people in this world, in terms.

And this is true not just of people in the media.

It's true of the great media people.

It's true by the great media people.

I'm not speaking of .

But I'm speaking of those who are .

It's true of the media.

It's true of the teachers and professors.

And it's true of the business people, too.

You see, the business people, everybody says, if I have a businessman, the businessman, of course, those businessmen are excellent because the government wants to take away all their money.

I don't think we're not very enthusiastic, as Don Kemp is not about to.

It is utter horror when you try to set up a business

We have done a lot more success setting up a ministry business than we did, shall we say, the business council type.

What I'm really trying to say is as funny as this happened, education and prayer

and what they read, and to whom they talk, and what they listen to.

You look at the, let me take you for an answer, because I made a little study before we met, and I said, because we're loaded around here, I'm making these graduates, and I said, all right, look at the ambassadors, and where are they all going to school?

I found 55% of all of our ambassadors were on our graduates of Ivy League schools.

So I said, what's the percentage of Ivy League graduates in the nation?

It's one and a half percent.

I said, now look, I'm not for quotas.

But I said, goddammit, that's wrong.

We're not representing the rest of the nation.

There must be somebody from Ohio State or Kansas or Nebraska or Texas who can read, write, and perhaps learn how to speak German.

Now where the hell are they?

Not really why.

Because out here in Georgetown, this elitist thing has got a stranglehold on it.

And it isn't fashionable to have somebody that wasn't.

See, one of the reasons that I drive it up, and I'm quite aware of the fact, they think I should be one of them.

After all, I was recently well-educated.

I recently went to law school, and I recently did the trainings and all that crap.

as well in society because I was an exciting personality because of his case and why they agree with it.

But you see, when you do not join them, when they know that you can handle them, but will not become one of them, then they hate you with a passion.

And every hate will go farther than they do me.

I understand that.

Or McCartney.

But the hatred is so deep.

as Alice Walker and Pat O'Rourke and other old actors.

Oh, my God, it was a wonderful time.

He says, everybody in Georgetown is just choking on his purity.

This change in our intellects and our elites, I think you put your finger on it.

The seminal reason was a change in educational emphasis.

maybe 20 years, 30 years ago, and everything that's coming now came out of that.

You know, in... Yeah, that's it.

It started 20, 30 years ago, right.

In the universities, I'm a little hooked on this, but I think the beauty is that

much as far as education, because they took notice, as you said, it's what people, what they've been reading and hearing day after day.

That's right.

But the media is also the problem.

The people that run the media are the problem.

In early 70s, right after we were all here, I went to the

first meeting that was held in Africa in this administration on all of the ambassadors to an African country.

And as you know, there's been a proliferation in many states in Africa.

So I think there are 39 chiefs of mission, either ambassadors or chief of mission, credited to the continent of Africa.

And we all met in Kinshasa.

And 150 people there because of a reason.

So I went over.

I was the only representative of this administration that was there.

And I went because I thought, I'll learn something.

So I sat there for this four-day meeting, and I noted that every single person who talked reinforced the same viewpoint about foreign policy and African society and that sort of thing.

You mean the Black Act?

Yes, but more than that.

Practically, the whole feeling was, if we'd only send the Marines into South Africa, we'd sell all of them.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The whole syndrome.

Yeah, we've dealt with that one 18 times.

And then I started, by sheer coincidence, to check into something.

And I found, and these figures are very close, if I'm not correct, but of course they're three years old, that of the 39 chiefs of mission,

We had in Africa, in 1969, 26 went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, and 16 went to Harvard.

Isn't that incredible?

It was a problem.

It's what killed life.

They had to do this.

What I think killed life is they lost touch with their own, they lost touch with the middle class.

They had to.

I was thinking, if I may interrupt you for a moment.

Before the election, I would only say this to you folks.

I would never say it publicly.

I knew from the day that the Barons nominated that we would win the election, that we would win it by around 20 points.

I never said it.

But I did it because I know that from a crass political standpoint that he has, in the famous California pattern, could win a majority of the Democratic Party and thereby be nominated.

But the cost would inevitably be to lose the nation in April of 6040.

So all of the people who talked about the ups and downs, he's going to close the gap for us.

And sometimes that gentleman wants to do it again.

He's just going to stay along with people and say the same thing.

So it came out in 1938.

Now, the point is that the reason why, and Bob Novak wrote another piece I understand on this, where he said that the press has got to watch out for this credibility, because in the last month before the election, they were writing stories

Tom Brady and others, and my brother and his team, and this priest, and that priest, and so forth.

It's changing.

Their son's losing.

He hasn't left the rise on his head.

He better go out.

He's not getting back through this and that, and so forth.

There's a sharp shift, and so forth.

And he said, it was not a thing.

It was totally untrue.

Untrue.

We knew this guy from other times.

Of course, we were told in private all the time, opposed to the change on the continent.

We said, just burn up our support.

It's against their now.

Why did this happen?

The reason the colonists were predicting that was not because they were finding it as they went from place to place, and I'm sure they walked from place to place out there, but because they wanted to find it.

The reason they were writing and saying it was not because they believed it, but because they wanted to believe it.

The reason that they thought that the government was the new populism

as Harriet Manhorn says, a man that's really too good to be president.

Basically, the reason is that they honestly believe that the movement, everything from, you name it, from pot to abortion to all other things, busing, welfare, bug out of Vietnam, et cetera, don't wear a flag in your lapel,

The reason that all that, the welfare ethic, the work ethic, and so forth, because they honestly believed that that was the way for the future and that that was the way the country believed.

And what happened is that they allowed their passion and emotion to believe in those things which they thought the country really didn't believe in and ought to believe in.

was going to prevail.

And that, in my opinion, is exactly what happened to life.

And it happened to Luke before.

And it happened to Saturday before.

Because all of them, out of editors, sat there.

As you know, life, he said, in long last, they were going to endorse.

I don't know why the hell they did it.

It didn't give a goddamn of a difference whether they did it or didn't, because they cut us all off in the picture sessions.

And I said, what happened to you?

I said, I was a little rough.

But anyway, the guy, the reason, the point that they did it,

When Life decided to endorse it, they found that by a percentage of 80 to 20, 80% of their top repertorial staff were against it, and 10% were for it.

Signed the letter.

They had to force the editor out.

They had to force the editor out in order to endorse Nixon.

Because the publisher wanted to endorse Nixon.

Why?

Now the other point is, having done that so, my point is, Jeff, I feel very strongly

But the reason they went down, I feel very confident they went down, because they misjudged them.

They said, I was one of two.

That when I welcomed Pete Brennan, he's at the Harvey.

That was the new secretary of labor.

I welcomed him in here.

He said he wanted to come down and tell us at the time in Cambodia, a few people are for you.

And I added in, they hired Harvey.

With the exception of Hall, Colson wasn't here.

He wasn't there.

With the exception of Hall,

There was nobody on the White House deck, including Kissinger, who thought that wasn't a horrible mistake.

Good God, Senator Darman thought it was a great price tagger who resigned, et cetera, et cetera.

Why?

You know what?

It was great.

Remember you thought it was great?

Yes, sir.

And I said, well, I said, for Christ's sake, why don't I see it?

Of course, I'm going to sit there for a meeting, and all the other assholes are marching around here in Kansas, but they didn't have a man.

But they would meet, they would meet to those students who passed on the American flag.

That's right.

Who had part of the American flag on the upside down.

Huh?

And here it made it like a grass stream.

So here's the point that I make.

The point that I make is they were out of touch with the country.

A lot of our own people were out of touch.

A lot of our own, believe me.

They can't tell you here.

It's Dan Murray who doesn't hear it, and the Washington Post, the reason they get out of touch, I can tell you, they read the Washington Post.

The Star, except for some of its editors, isn't much better.

I mean, because now that it's got on the news, it's having to pander to the, you know, the other times.

So, and they are transferred.

So what happens is, they said, they have to treat them.

They've got the Times, the Post, and they have the networks who piss on us every night.

and then what do they find in addition to that where do they go out to dinner they go out to the parties and so forth and so on and they hear a constant constant dripping it's not going to live up in jesus so how else do you turn out that takes a rather strong person not to turn out the other way i digress from what i'm simply saying is this

If life had read the mood of the country a little bit better, it might have said, oh, yes, making picture magazines, you're never going to go.

But some magazines are making money now.

But what did life do?

Life first went through the erotic stuff, which was stupid, and gave up its great editorial writers that Jessup used to write.

And great editorials were gone.

They were finished.

They never sat in any space anymore.

And then life went to sensationalism.

And after that, it went down.

and out, and it deserves to be out, because the goddamn thing was not a good magazine anymore.

Even though they said they had the best editorial staff in America, but I may be wrong.

No, I agree, I think that's right.

They lost touch with their audience, and their audience was a big mass of people in the country.

And the reason that they just got this elitist treatment, right, on that sort of staff, what's an elitist staff, they should have hired more people from the Daily News and fewer people from Harvard.

Let me tell you another thing that's happened to the movies, and I had a hell of a talk with Jack Warner about this,

who's great for producing, you know, great American shows, and I had seen the most obscene, horrible goddamn movie ever, and I said, I don't like, I like a nice, lusty movie, you know, with a little, you know, a little action in it, and I said, I said, do you really think that that's what people are, this is some 12-year-old kid grounded as a cat, and

and electrocuted his stepmother, and then she was trying to poison his second stepmother and a lot of others.

And he finally died, and his second stepmother threw a rock ball in front of the car.

So the guy's pet dog ran in front of the car.

He ran in front of the car, and then the car hung over and mangled his head, and that's the way the movie ended.

That's supposed to be .

I said, what about all this?

And Jack said,

Because, you know, he's made all the great patriotic movies.

I said, Jack, I'll tell you something.

Your younger guys won't agree.

But the reason that movies in the present time and so forth, the reason they may be not going over, he said, God damn it, they're out of step with the country.

I mean, I even talk to my own kids, and they don't know the impression I'm trying to give schools.

But they said, you know, they talk about this nostalgia for the 50s and all that sort of thing.

There's a change in the attitude towards music, a change in the attitude towards the more older sexual business.

That's what everybody's for, you know, in the living room.

And the other thing is that they're about, here's what you have.

You have a situation at the present time.

where here at this goddamn Kennedy Center, I don't know why they built that son of a bitch, they had horrible, horrible modern art, and I guess that's a little wrong, most people around here got modern art around, but anyway, what I simply say is they are catering to, they're pandering to an audience that is not a majority audience.

Take the New York Theater.

I went up there and saw that it was supposed to be the best in history to come into character here, as much as you do about nothing.

It isn't worth a goddamn.

It was better than the one or two gentlemen in Verona, which was made in some way, and they'd followed them two weeks before.

But for Christ's sakes, if I couldn't take many of them, Shakespeare would have wrote.

It did a little better than that.

I mean, I would think that.

I mean, it was mediocre.

I mean, but it wasn't worth 12 bucks.

I mean, where in the hell did it come from?

Where is this stuff, you know, that used to, where is the good music?

You know what, they're not, because basically, they are writing for themselves.

And they're writing for their own writing.

And I think they're out of touch.

I say this, being one who has the closest relationship and the greatest admiration for people like, well, Len, Len likes this kind of stuff, but Len himself admits it.

They're what he likes.

They may not like out in the highest state.

I think that's right.

That's the point.

There is, frankly, a New York, an Eastern liberal establishment elite that is corrupt, decadent, and wrong.

All right, we'll probably just put them all up there and let them look at their goddamn filthy pornography, and let the rest of us see something decent.

I think that's all I want.

The New York here is even a little far out from Atlanta.

Atlanta is one of the great properties that he's owned.

Teddy Wright, Teddy White, Columbia Review for the Columbia School of Journalism wrote a very interesting piece a couple of years ago, and he talked about Berlin in the 20s, and apparently Berlin in the 20s was the most fashionable city in Europe, because it was very avant-garde in art and theater.

Was it?

Yes, very much so.

And it was where all of the way out stuff occurred, including all of the way out sexual stuff and that sort of thing.

And it got to be very inbred, highly fashionable, very chic, and very much involved in its own media and its own cultural manifestations, until they thought that they were just the living end.

And they totally lost touch with Germany.

And then when Germany spit out Hitler,

No one was more surprised than all the people in Berlin who thought they knew their Germany so well.

They lost touch.

You see Cabaret?

Cabaret, yes.

roughly the same, but it was a very perceptive piece by White, and it was relating a little bit to our time, that you can get so avant-garde in your cultural manifestations of communication and media that you lose touch with the very society that you represent, and then that society may do something in which the communications media can no longer portray it or relate to it because they don't understand it.

You see, what happens, too, is that by the time they do that,

They have there so poisoned and so weakened the leader class that there can come from the masses an individual who has all the capabilities of leadership, although not the birth and all the rest, but some way or other through uttering almost obscene slogans and the rest.

He mobilizes the masses.

He speaks to the masses.

He's strong.

And that's the stuff of the dictatorships coming.

That's the wrong kind of dictator.

It's not healthy.

It's not a healthy thing.

In this country, it hasn't come that far.

All that I have said is this, that we are probably the last of the old gallery, whether we can really hold the line for 40 years.

We're having a hell of a time, and there's everyone making these changes.

Christ knows what he wants to leave, and why, and whether we keep the Cadillac for another month, and all that kind of thing.

That's alright, that's alright.

They're a nice bunch of folks.

But my point is, in trying to get competent people in government who will come in

be determined to do everything that is necessary, unpopularly or, you know, to be dragged into the goddamn country, turned around.

It is hard.

It really is.

Because most people we want and we love.

Frankly, and I say this as one who is a great defender, frankly, the department, Bill's department, Bill Rogers' department, he has been a state department.

He would not know this.

And it's tragic.

Bill's problem is that he passionately wants the people of the press and the people who work for him to like him.

Which is Jones' problem, too.

By wanting them to like him, he thereby loses their respect.

Because when you play down

rather than making them play it up.

That's the inevitable result.

Now, it doesn't mean that you treat cruelly everybody below you, that you're just a crass son of a bitch who doesn't care.

But I must say, the real problem that we have with every appointee we make

If you've got any value adjustment, is he or she, when he gets to that job, going to be thinking, now look, how am I going to be bought out of the department?

Are they going to have my pictures on the wall?

Are they going to be glad I was here?

Am I going to get a nice little profile on the New York Times man of the day or all that?

The moment they worry about that, they're going to be a lousy Catholic officer or a lousy administration personnel.

You agree?

Wouldn't you say that in addition to coverage,

They also take conviction.

You've got to know.

And I think that's sort of the blessing.

What did you stand for?

What did you have to achieve?

Well, conviction required brains, too.

Because courage, we have lots of people with it.

Well, we have plenty of people, say, here with courage and loyalty.

And they would do anything.

I mean, I read anything.

I can show it.

And go on into the camp.

That's right.

And I admire that.

And you need a few people that are willing to do that.

But on the other hand, in government, you need courage, and you need also, you use the word conviction.

But conviction is something I would describe as being not a prejudice, but it means believing in something and knowing why you believe in something.

And that's the point, and there's the weakness of so many people.

We have people who are loyal, and the people who are courage,

But when it comes to conviction, making that extra step of having the ability and the depth to believe in something very deeply and know why, they won't sit in their ass to find out.

Or they may never be able to develop.

And then once you get that, then you can stand up like a rock against, let me give you an example on the court.

Take rent.

We appointed Renquist to the court.

He's never been a judge, and he's young.

He's just been in the Office of the Legal Counsel.

He's an Arizona lawyer.

All he has to do is disperse his class at Stanford, but he'll have his card and so forth and so on.

So Renquist went down, and because of the times and so forth, the times that we appointed, they had to approve him.

On the court, as of the present time, Berger tells us,

that Rehnquist is by far the most valuable man.

First, because of his youth, he could do double work with anybody else.

Second, all of our appointees are conservative, but Rehnquist is younger than Powell.

Powell's a little old black man.

He's smarter than black.

Of course, and Berger wouldn't say he's probably smarter than Berger.

He's not even a politician, but he's smarter.

So when they have their Friday conferences, the British man on the other side is still a little asshole, but he loves us.

What do you want to say about that?

He's smart as hell.

But Rehnquist sits there and cuts into pieces every frame, just like that.

So there you've got the combination of loyalty, courage, conviction.

And it's a rare thing to find on our side.

On our side.

Because you see, on their side, on their side, they have what?

They have courage and they have conviction, because basically, the left

is the bashful thing for intelligent people to be for, and only the dummies are basically people that wear flags and their lapels, although I can tell you what George Mayne can give cards and spades to every goddamn businessman I've ever had in this office, and I'm all ashamed of any kind of debate.

Because he's smarter than they are.

If he had the education, he'd probably be president.

Or pope.

How do you see a narrative of philosophic values relating in our foreign aspects?

How do they relate?

Well, they... Getting that, the main place, the main part there is the individual who makes the decision has to understand it.

As far as getting other people to understand it, it's damn near impossible.

Impossible because

in a free society, in a free philosophy, so-called, with all this division and a lot of diversity and so on, everybody's supposed to be able to disagree and so forth and so on.

And what you've got in this whole foreign policy view is war.

And there you're going to believe, you must have courage, you're going to follow the orders, you're going to kick the other people in the nuts.

And don't ask the reason why.

It would help if they understood it.

And it would help if they had some deep beliefs about it.

And many do.

There ain't enough if you're giving it to you.

We probably have more than we think, too.

And I don't want to sound so scary.

The problem with our side is that the bright guys that we knew in college, the ones that were oriented toward conservatism and toward particular conservatism,

go into business, therefore the private sector.

The bright guys on their side go into government for the purpose of destroying business, or into the media for the purpose of destroying business.

Now, the other thing is what we have to do is to get bright guys on our side with the right convictions, the right moral rights, the right religious rights, the right philosophical rights, but with brains and loyalty

to come into government and say, God damn it, I'm going to come in and I'm going to fight those bastards and beat them.

That's what we need.

And there's one weakness in society, one weakness in the lifetimes.

And that weakness is very, very, despite all the talk out there, sacrifice and so forth, when it comes to

what I would call character, deepest sense.

And that means seeing what they... First, the left is totally obsessed with power, for the sake of power.

To them, people are not individuals.

They are masses to be manipulated.

And the government will tell them how they are to do it, whereas we love our people as individuals.

But being power-mad, power-obsessed, they respect it and they fear it.

And their weakness is that they lack character.

And when the chips are really down, they'll lack guts.

I'm never afraid of the leftists.

I'm afraid of the unexplained kind of leftists, the American leftists, the liberal leftists.

The communist left is a different thing.

God damn it, he's a true believer.

He's a true believer, and he'll fight and die and sacrifice and all that.

But the American leftist is basically

The worst of both worlds.

The communists, like a, like a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a,

It's a strange thing, this sentimental, mushy idealism of the left, which is purely a facade, brings nothing but contempt from both the right and the far left, the real left.

And the real right didn't have contempt for them.

Now, the real right's no asset to us.

They're just too goddamn dumb to ever be flexible enough to get anything done.

The far left is our enemy.

And here, however, at the instruments of power, you've got this flatty left, liberal left.

I mean, basically what it is, the limousine lips, they are the greatest danger in America today.

Far right or the far left, far right or the far right,

And the reason is that they've got no goddamn character.

And that includes the businessmen.

It includes the media people.

It includes the professors.

Not a bit of character in a whole damn bunch.

I haven't seen one that ain't useful.

I've seen an Ivy League president sit here, and I thought I flatly saw a bunch of bastards they were.

If we're, if we in the United States, the Americans, or the only nation left,

that has at this point in time the philosophical strength to hold up against communism, against the Chinese leadership, against the Soviet leadership.

It's terribly important that people in foreign countries sense that about us because what they see is transmitted to them in large part by our media.

They see our firmness and uncertainty and that sort of thing.

They worry about whether we're stable.

And that goes to this question that I talked about a moment ago.

When you link the constant portrayal of our media and their media showing us as uncertain and fermenting and ruthless, and our values as insecure, and at the same time we structure a much higher formal relationship with communism, they say, well, everything is going in that direction.

If we could come up with some way to show what our root philosophical values are and how determined we are that they survive, I think it would perform a very useful function.

It's a difficult problem for public relations, but it's very important.

And a good mission to be able to do that.

Yeah, it's a good mission, however, for a philosopher, too.

But eventually, it has to be in practice.

It just can't be that nice, flabby, you know, sculptural, cluttered, elegant.

Well, at least we survived, that's all we can say.

We survived pretty well.

We'll count on you.

I'll tell you though, Bob, and Jim, you watch for this too.

I think that...

I don't want to be on the Senate committee unless that's a bad thing.

The presentation of the bicentennial is a major focal point for the program.

I'm speaking about Frank.

Oh, Frank.

I'm speaking about Frank.

Thank you.

I've got a couple of my little things here.

You see what, you've got to, I give you an extra, and then you have one extra.

You must give me an extra.

All right.

Probably a couple of them.

Oh, yeah.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I don't know about you, it was a joke.

Glad to have you back.

All right, thank you.

I mean, you know, Frank is a guy that should do better.

A lot of it's our own fault.

He probably isn't so intense.

He's such a difficult guy to deal with.

Henry knows that there's some fault on his side in not getting him in, but he had a good excuse, which is the guy isn't taking the ass down.

So be it.

Yeah.

And he's wrong.

It's the same reason you didn't have him in, the same reason that, you know, you just stepped up.

Yeah, I did.

And she...

She comes in, she talked to Ron also.

Oh, I have a sheet around the corner that kind of helped build a job.

And I had to practically beat others in the head because of those two things that Julie got to say.

She just thought of a way to go ahead.

What Julie said was, we talked about what I think she could do here, and I think she could.

But what she said was that she felt the place she could make the real contribution is in running the East Wing.

And I thought I would agree.

I told her, I agree.

She said, that's what she really thought she ought to do.

And then, you know, we talked over and she said, is there anything else?

And I said, yes, there is.

This area, the whole area of planning,

looking for the little things and the big things that fit in so that we make our, what we do look right to the people outside.

Not the substance, not determining what position you take on an issue, but determining what the president does, what the rest of the family does, what all the White House people do, and what they're perceived as doing.

And we have some people working on that.

We have Dick Moore, we had Chapin, we have

from on the fringes, the garments, and the sapphires, and the people who kind of look at it from that way.

We have Tex McCrary that we bring in from outside, to look at it from outside.

The problem is, you need somebody who understands what's doable, rather than just what's desirable, that has a sense to see both, and work with those people in developing plans, ideas, reviewing the schedule, reviewing the question of, you know,

what the president ought to do, but more importantly, maybe what other people ought to do, and how you work those in, what's being done, what our objectives are, what impression we're trying to create, and that we're going to have a real goal in that with Dwight leaving, and that that's a hole that she uniquely, in my view, could fill, and fill on a day-to-day basis.

Working with those people, working with Parker on the schedule planning,

would like to work with.

She said, well, how would I do that?

And I said, you'd have to have an office.

You'd have to come in.

You'd have to go to work in the morning.

You'd have to meet with these people as the day goes on.

You'd have to spend time with me.

You'd have to spend some time with your father from time to time.

You could look at the overall, how the East Wing ties in, what your mother's schedule is, and how that all works.

the idea of where we can better use cabin officers, how we can look a little more human, which is more important now, because we haven't done well enough in that, mainly because most of us really don't see the things there that you would see.

And I went through all that, and she said, yeah, that's very interesting.

That's something I think I could do and I would like to do.

But then she came back and said, but I think where I can do more,

And uniquely so, maybe, is over in the East Wing.

And I said, well, if you do that, you can do this to a degree also.

One doesn't rule out the other by any means.

In fact, they should be tied together.

Because this whole place should be working in one.

And she said, well, the point that Ron said she shouldn't be hurting the press around all that.

I said, absolutely not.

You shouldn't be.

But the role you should be in over there is assistant to the First Lady in the same way that I'm assistant to the President.

I don't hear the press around.

I never even see the press.

But I have a very direct responsibility for what we do with the press and how we handle it.

And on the other hand, you can be a front personality, too.

And Ziegler talked to us a little about this.

He said, for instance, you shouldn't have heard the press around.

You shouldn't have briefings.

You shouldn't have to handle our daily requests.

But let's say there's going to be a dinner at the White House tonight.

might be a hell of a thing for you to have a little thing with the television cameras there, where you stand in the Grand Hall this afternoon and say, after dinner tonight, after the President and Mrs. Nixon come down the stairs, then our entertainment, we're going to have Fred Waring, who's going to be seeing some numbers.

You tell them, you take the people a little bit through the party.

They make a hell of a thing that you can do that no press secretary could ever do.

No Ron Ziegler could do it, and no Connie Stewart could do it.

But Julie Eisenhower, the daughter of a house who is in charge of the thing, can't do it.

And Ron's very excited about the thing.

See, when he talked to Pat, what he said to her was, he thought you probably had to keep Connie now, because we don't have anybody else on the scene, and you need somebody.

He said, I think you ought to keep her, but we ought to be looking for a replacement.

Well, nobody, none of us in our wild audience ever thought of Julie.

It's a fascinating letter.

Ah, that's a fascinating letter.

I'm very happy with it.

I will continue to fight and support his humble station in life and mortality.

Joe Weiss, if he's responsible, is not the person to employ the new government.

He also has a middleman.

Not because he cares for me.

Well, I don't know if she could get around her mother again.

It's a very good thing.

I just haven't got time to figure out who the hell all these people are.

Somebody, I suppose, would be there, other than the military, to tell me who they are.

Yeah.

Or is it like the L.A. police?

I'm saying it's the British.

I know a lot of them.

He's almost every one of them.

About half of them, I think, you know.

How many of these do we have?

Three.

Yeah, there's only one of this kind of people.

The other two are in the majority .

Yeah.

I have a .

You've got to get people like Shakespeare.

And others.

And also, it's good to talk to some of these people.

I think what we got into in the first turn, I'm trying to get a hold of her rather than this guy that I said, I really felt that I didn't want to put it in the way of me because I just know that's the kind of thing that I'm going to snap up like that.

And we, there's some little things that you always do and some little things you don't always do.

And I'm not going to do it.

No question, that was one you should have done.

It never got in as a schedule for placing at all.

Rose just, she got a phone call.

She called again and said, what do I do with this?

Are we scheduling any of those?

What we're doing on those is we're bringing over to the family for their, you know, something that's a high-level thing like that to see if one of them can receive them.

I didn't ask her about it.

I mean, I guess.

They take a letter, and I saw what it was, and I said, oh, they're correct.

Same time she was seen, and I was available to come over.

The problem is, so I came back, they gave a letter, and I said, you know, I've been driving two weeks to get that in here, and I couldn't break through.

That was bullshit.

So, you know what I mean?

She made one check two weeks ago, and then didn't tell anybody they were coming.

They've got a schedule over there.

Dave didn't know that the people were here.

And he said, by no name or intent, he said, he takes the blank.

He said it was my fault.

I should have went to the schedule.

I should have realized that.

But I didn't.

But that's, you know, we shouldn't be playing that kind of game.

That's why, god damn it, we didn't get Julie in.

Yeah, but she does.

And that, you know, we can't do anything about that.

She...

kind of like a parrot taking a joy out of a stick, kind of rather make the point that she couldn't get through than to have gotten through.

She can get through hell.

She's never mentioned it to me.

And she does mention to me all kinds of things like that when she thinks they're important.

And she's usually right.

She has been good judgment on that stuff.

She knows that you ought to see someone like that.

Or, you know, that old man from your law firm or something like that.

There are certain things like that that you ought to do.

Anybody else?

or he likes it or not.

It's just trying to know that you should get the job done.

If you do do it, you have to do it.

I like to.

I never mind.

Anything I have to do, I like to do.

I never worry about it.

But anyway, you've got to get a hold of it so that I can have the time to do a little of anything.

Give some leadership.

And that's why I'm not going to get involved in rushing around with various agencies, kissing people on the ass.

So I will have people in if I can give them some leadership and talk to them a bit.

If you've got control of your schedule, we're at a point where you've also got control of the administration so that I can talk to people with confidence and get them charged up and so forth and so on.

I've got control of Bush.

To the extent that you're willing to, the more time you'll spend talking to people in the administration for a while,

more mileage you'll gain because every one of them if you get into this stuff not into their problems that's the thing we've got to get it so that they do their their operating problems without whether they don't come in so they don't come in the way it won't be hard yeah with the goddamn manager with the whole damn list a little bit just come in and talk about it like vote you should come in and talk about all things in massachusetts well in the general

Generally speaking, the philosophy even of his own department is just, you know, Mr. President, I'm pushing very hard now to loosen these trust funds up.

I don't want to get into the specifics, but am I on the right track on this?

Should we, do we want to bust this?

And then you can go back and charge up this whole team of what I've said.

I don't know if I'm sure to see those appointments we're going to make.

I've done enough of the nationalism stuff now.

I've done, you know, the Quaker one and the other.

That's really come down now to

I just got to get some good patients, Bob.

Young, some women.

Goddamn, I don't know whether I can make a woman an undersecretary or anybody.

Incidentally, does Danny want that damn job over there or not?

If he doesn't, can we give it to him?

We're supposed to be here today.

Huh?

No, it's fine.

I will give it to the woman if he doesn't want it.

That's what I was thinking.

She'd be all right for it.

The other thing is, could you make a slight check for Schlesinger on information?

He's asking back now whether you had said you wanted to meet with him about that memo that he was writing after he had written about what he wanted to do with the CIA.

Now, you had to go over that memo, take a look at it.

That's, you probably should do that.

I mean, you're sending a guy in there, he does, he better, I have a picture of what you want done.

I do want, I've got to tell him, because he's a straight line guy, like, right?

Exactly.

Or like Colson, you know, you tell him to cut it by 75%, you'll find, you'll find it cut 75%, but I'm going to do it.

I'll find pitfalls and all the rest, and you've got to get along with the Congress, and listen to them, and go to school.

It's not for many petting in his case.

I know it's a question of his getting it right, but I don't mean before it goes up.

But the way we all have handled Stennis and others is that we said we've got the big tree, you can follow him if you want.

And again, I get back to that party and the cabin thing.

The more I think about it, I think if you, since you've gone down the road for the tree, you may as well add the other two.

But from now on, like I suggested, let's just understand that when we do have to have somebody, let's not say even that Erland has to run every time.

You don't give a damn.

I sure don't.

It gives or it doesn't.

But he comes to it often.

Well, this one, if you put the new cabinet in it, Erland should be at this one.

And he's important.

It's a real problem.

Erland is not going to be at the dinners, as a matter of fact.

family thing that night right what he's going to come over before dinner and mingle around and people think he's there and he's going to disappear when we go into dinner nobody will ever know he's not there could we invite the others to do the same thing remember don't get me in any trouble with like other people like it was the same with attendance

And there's some reason for both of them, operationally, that you can make a case for those.

I think we're going to have to, frankly, handle the planning problem at some point.

Ziegler, incidentally, was not asking to come to that.

Timmons was, because Timmons is concerned about his perceived position in the White House.

And he's got a reason to be concerned.

I didn't think Ziegler came to that conversation.

He doesn't.

He doesn't need to come to anything, you know, but...

We'll work it all out.

The staff members are treated just like the CAG members.

And I think everybody will be happy.

That way you can bring in lower people, you know, all of them down the line.

Bring in new members.

It'll mean something to them.

Well, that's my view.

And then everybody needs an area.

I don't know how otherwise, you know.

Patrick got out of here four years ago.

We were delighted not to come to the White House.

We could possibly have gotten out of here all the time to come.

But, you know, we've been to a lot.

We didn't even get clothes and everything.

It's a big thing.

It's the dinners with you.

We do need to do more.

We do need to develop a little social and cultural life.

It's partly my fault because I hate all that crap.

But I should take some leadership in that.

That's right.

And .

I think we've got to use the facilities.

We've got all kinds of places, for Christ's sake.

We've got Blair House.

We've got that place across the street there.

We've got that.

And there's a portrait gallery.

There are all kinds of nooks and crannies around this town that nobody knows about that you can have unusual kinds of parties and you can do interesting kinds of things.

And we can have these lectures and see

This cultural stuff is damn interesting.

We're making a mistake now for all of our wives.

It's a monumental problem for all of us, and I know it's a pain in the ass to hear about it, but it really is.

I haven't realized until just recently how rough it really has been.

I've sneered at the other people, and I've had the worst problem of my own and not known it.

This is a terrible time to raise kids in.

And it's a terrible town to live in for people like us who don't like this kind of stuff.

It's a marvelous town for people like Bill Sapphire and his wife, who are beautiful people and just love this shit.

But for the Eardlemans and the Hollomans and the Archival people, Weinbergers and the Schultzes, I mean, O.B.

Schultz hates all this crap.

Hates it as much as I do.

But O.B.

Schultz, they all have a starving for companionship and belonging and uplift and all that.

And the way to do that is to get these luck chickens.

Now there's another thing.

My wife raised with Lucy and got nowhere with, but it's a hell of an idea that Julie could put into motion, and that is to take the staff wives, and maybe the cabinet wives, but I don't think so, I think the staff wives, and make them

service at White House functions, when Pat Nixon has 500 people in for tea in an afternoon, and they go through the receiving line, you ought to have a bunch of bar wives

Not in the formal sense, but in a weekly sense.

And that's what they want.

They don't want, yes, they don't want to go through the line.

Have one of them, or four of them, stand in the red room and give little lectures about the red room.

And have four more in the green room.

That's what they want to do.

That makes people, they want to help.

We don't want to just sit there.

Yes, they want to help.

They want to work.

Absolutely.

Another thing we can do is this.

We can't do path listening to every one of these things.

You know, we get big receptions over there where she may not even be there.

Let the White House, let them come on a tour, but let the White House wives be over there to explain it.

White House wives can be over there to explain it.

To the Republican Women's Committee of Ames, Iowa, to meet Jean Ehrlichman, it's almost as big a thrill as meeting Pat Nixon.

That's right.

It's huge.

It really is.

It's huge.

They don't have to bring the Catholic wives in on that.

And let them run for it.

Use them on tours over here when you're out of the place.

Let them run, like, my wife ran an art museum thing in Los Angeles where they, you know, tours for children's groups and stuff.

Right.

They can run that stuff through here and tell the history of the cabinet room and this room and all.

It's much nicer than having a White House guard with a pistol on his butt.

Do it.

He's illiterate.

No, they're good.

They aren't illiterate.

Those guys do a damn good job on their tours.

Yeah, they really do.

I'm going to shoot it down here.

But the point is,

They're just a White House guard doing it.

If you get Gene Ehrlichman doing it, or O.B.

Schultz doing it, that's a hell of a big thrill to the folks who get the tour.

Now these people, I'll tell you, these tour officers, we run, you know, we have to, when you get friends in from home and stuff, you have to run them through a tour.

And, John, the letters we get back on those, they obviously, you're, and that's why I'm glad we're keeping them white.

At least Pat does a hell of a job.

So at least the Whittier people should sit there and give the White House a tour or something.

They don't agree.

I'll tell you, we treat people very, very well here.

And we have a field through here of all of the White Housers we have.

Should we start voting the congressmen and senators on a very selective basis between our Republican congressmen and senators for tours and our Democrats and supporters and screw the rest of them?

I think so.

I think we should run out of tickets.

Huh?

I think we should run out of tickets when we get the people that work with us.

I hate to have to take the groups that are discriminated against, but we can take the groups.

But my point is that the Congress was always scared to get the groups that were advised.

Getting back to Julie, how Julie would...

Well, she had to go over and meet Congressman Steiger to receive a, she laughed.

I said, you know, it's a problem with that Whittier thing.

I said, that's the kind of thing you would have caught.

We would have, if you had been around, we would have not blown something like that.

And she laughed and she said, well, unfortunately, it's my turn today.

I've got to go over to Congressman Steiger's presenting something, you know, a goose or something.

I don't know what it is.

Something, she had to go over and receive that.

And that's fine.

She's great at doing that.

She should do that.

And he's just as happy.

All he has to do is get credit for presenting the damn thing to the White House.

And you don't have to sit through all that.

I should have.

Never.

And the wittier people, I know you feel badly about it, and it was a mistake, but the wittier people got a hell of a thrill.

I'm sure.

I'm coming to the White House, seeing Pat Nixon, going through the tour and presenting that thing.

And don't

We cannot denigrate what the other people do, what happens in medicine.

And we do a lot.

And you do a hell of a lot.

But the less you do of that kind of stuff, the better.

You just don't need to do very much of that.

It's much better for you to sit and talk to Bob Nisbet for an hour than it is for you to receive a half a dozen mayors with their Christmas hoops.

Right, right, right, right, right.

I do.

I know.

It's better to give some leadership feedback.

And that's right, he talked to Jim Schlesinger for an hour so that when he goes out, you'll aim him for four years.

And it'll remake the CIA.

You get Keogh aimed in the right direction on the US side, and he said he doesn't, and he wouldn't anyway, but he said he was a good choice.

When I talk about the re-credits, I don't mean to downgrade Whitaker's name.

I just know what you mean.

I just had a sort of a feeling that, where is the saying in that department?

Why don't you get a little Zane in the Park Service with Ron Walker and tell him that's going to shake things up.

Did we do it?

Yeah.

Did we?

Yeah.

What did they say?

He's not qualified?

I don't know.

Raj and Whitaker went over with him.

They got upset.

So he's, you know, qualified.

It doesn't...

So they don't think he's qualified.

Who the hell... Was Bobby Kennedy qualified to be Attorney General?

Sure.

Well, I'm glad we put that other guy on there.

I'm glad that you noticed something on Meagher, though.

I had told Henry Meagher to go there.

And I got an order on him here from, it's not really Neil, David, who said that you don't have a strong professor in college.

Well, I raised that with him when we were in Romania, because I wondered about him then.

Because he's the guy in Romania.

Yeah.

Because he wasn't, you know, we had some problems in working with the government there, you know.

He was, he shafted us.

His interest was in putting himself out front, not in getting our work done.

I don't like that.

Jacob Bean is a disaster.

Jacob Bean's wife, I'll tell you, is another one.

Jacob Bean's wife is another one that's a real mess.

But he is really retired.

I know.

a lot of them will be ready to go at 60 years of age, and just don't make any, just, God damn it, man, I just can't be shit, that's ridiculous for him to try to hang all this on that.

I'm not going to take Henry's advice on the Russian thing, I don't understand it.

Yes, you know, but Henry's the judge of them.

But we pushed him.

The thing Henry raised was solid.

You approved it, so I started that one.

I don't want to try that anymore.

I mean, I... We don't take it.

We don't take it.

Well, you can leave him as ambassador of ours and let him go runnin' around the senators or somethin', you know?

I don't mind him being ambassador of ours.

He can't...

He won't do any harm.

He's trustworthy.

He'll do what he's told.

Well, at least I can kind of tell him that.

You can have him do that.

Special events, co-meetings, represent things.

Do you want to put Shakespeare on active?

Screw things up a little bit?

Yes, we have an invite.

What do you want?

Well, we're trying to shake that thing up, you know, and then just send it in and out.

be a pretty good signal as he goes out, that he goes out not in disgrace, but... What do you want?

I need to see those bastards win anything, you know, and if Shakespeare goes, they'll think they've won something.

That's right.

Acta.

And Acta is this place that would signal that he's, you're keeping him in, you know, a key area of foreign policy, and he understands the Soviet threat, he'll be hard-line, he'll cause a lot of trouble there, which is what you want, I think.

You mean, you put him on the advisory?

Yeah.

If we're stuck with it.

Very good idea.

We have to have it.

You don't want him on fire because he got a little dreary with that.

Huh?

Well, he's a little dreary for that.

He just, he's too...

But he could screw it back up pretty nicely and keep things kind of high up.

And he'll be opposed to all the disarmament stuff.

It's not bad to have a guy like that.

I love that.

I think he was right in not going on the USIA if I'm not mistaken.

I don't think he should have put the phone on the restaurant.

That's very good.

I mean, I, I promise you.

Oh, it was nice to offer that.

I had a, I had a skeptic, I don't know, I may be, what was it, a problem or anything, I don't know.

I am really very discouraged as to what ability at all we're going to have to deal with anything.

Except mainly because we don't seem to have many offers from anybody that wants to really come in.

I think we do, but I think we have a lot more.

I just don't know.

I just don't know whether we've got it or not.

Whether we're going to grab hold of this thing or anything.

But I think what really disturbed me the most was the Bill Rodgers attitude.

Couldn't have the old Bill Rodgers attitude.

But those are the people you're getting rid of, not the people you're bringing in.

Bill will be here a while.

Well, that's too bad.

But you know, he's not one hell of a problem.

I'll tell you that.

While Bill's here, he sure tracks.

I mean, when I sit down with Scali and then...

So he said, that's fine.

I just want to be sure about you.

So he made this decision.

He made this decision.

A personal gift of $1,000 to Jane Arden.

That's the name of the sign.

Oh, I see.

Yes.

Which is it?

It says the members of Congress get reminded of the curve.

No.

Why don't you give one to each of the celebrities that worked for you in the campaign?

And all the performers.

Well, yeah, yeah.

Well, look, and I have work to do.

I don't want to hear it.

Well, we, the members of the Congress, had a good idea, though.

You shouldn't be against it.

It came anyway from, uh... from, uh... from Tennessee.

through humans and so forth but uh be sure rose knows that he's a celebrity and then some friends or something you know what i mean uh what what will a tire be for the starting answer that shall we say shall i say what is it

Well, you won't participate on the first anniversary of the initial event, not by Jim, but easily by Dave Harris.

Oh, Jesus Christ, man.

Hello, Jim.

How's it going, man?

6.30, back.

I called about it.

It's very long, very long.

Things that we should be doing and how we should proceed from here.

Henry's thoughts on the military action, Henry's thoughts on how we should handle publicly what we'll have to cope with.

and to keep the dialogue going with them, keep them breaking.

A lot of the press reporting is encouraging in a way, because obviously nobody's telling anybody anything, and these guys are wrong as hell.

They're all saying that we're close to the sun.

They're all wrong.

But they make me right.

They make me right.

You know, they make me right in the broadest sense.

I think that, sir.

I've been through all the intelligence that we've had since the 6th of October, the raw reports, and it's just inconceivable to me that Illinois is going to be able to pick up and go on the way they're going if they do want to.

because they've instructed all of their cadres.

They've reorganized our forces in the south, broken down into small units.

Everyone's been briefed and oriented.

Yeah.

So... Well, I think they're going to play on what they anticipate to be pre-Christmas anxiety on our part.

And...

What I mean is this, like you said, and I talked to you about Henry's long message and so forth.

There is nothing to be gained by virtue, examination, what's wrong, this and that, and the other thing, you know what I mean?

Just forget it.

I'm not interested in all that.

There's nothing to be gained in going over, well, they gave on this and we gave on that, and their sons and bitches and so forth.

Let's forget all that.

All we have to do, sir, now is to go from here.

And why is it that...

He's got to go to the meeting tomorrow.

You sort of got out of my thoughts, did you?

Yes, sir.

I sent that message to him and told him to use it, as he said.

Yes, as he said it was wise.

You can't tell what it was.

I'm sure he was there, of course.

No, that's right.

He's got a sense of it.

He'll know.

He was quite explicit in saying that the thing would be done amicably, which lessens the chance that they'll go public with an attack.

Although they reacted quite sharply to that.

What did they say?

They said that...

This was an unreasonable demand.

The United States was responsible for it.

Madame Bin did the same thing, except she said that, she sort of implied that we shouldn't allow him to do this, trying to keep a split between us.

But Hanoi was a little more direct in its attack on both Chu and ourselves, as being a puppet of ours and an extension of our view.

claiming that we really didn't want to settle, and that they were filling up with military supplies and civilians acting as military, tens of thousands.

And we don't really want peace, and we just want to continue to be a demologist, which is fairly consistent with their approach to the table.

You're making these same kinds of

Now once you're, when you really come down to the fundamental thing, first of all, then he's got to get the product over on tomorrow and have a boy at Boston.

That's right.

Then he will come back.

After he comes back, then suddenly he will be, there'll be, there'll be a letdown here.

Everybody will think it was going to go.

But that isn't working.

You see, you mustn't think it's the end of the world because the talks don't succeed right now.

And I hope that you left Henry in that frame of mind when he left, or is he—his hopes are pretty high on Saturday.

They were high Saturday.

Because when you came back, you obviously were out there.

And I must say, based on the session Saturday, it was a good question.

whether we fought a compromise or folded or they did.

But that was it.

And nothing happened.

They reopened the same issues we had hammered out Friday and Saturday, so laborious.

What in the hell do you think happened?

There was nothing in between, either.

Well, you know, we've done a hell of a lot of things.

There must be driving them up the wall.

in an objective sense and of course we have put in a billion dollars worth of equipment come on now then though then so we were disappointed there and we obviously got a hell of a letdown like you see i can tell more about his reactions from this by reading 30 pages of why you know i mean

reason he's down and discouraged, he raised his hopes high.

So now I say, well, you're dead.

Now they're dead.

Well, they should have never been high.

They never should have been dead, in my opinion.

I think it's always about where it was.

Am I wrong or not?

If I am, I'll start reading all this stuff.

No, I think you're exactly right, sir.

I think this thing we just got to... All the indications are that they want to settle, and I think they will settle.

But they're communists, and every goddamn nickel they can make from us, they're going to try to get.

And they don't mind if it takes two months, a month, a week.

They're going to get the best deal they can get.

So how are we going to position Sigler tomorrow?

Did Henry give any guidance on that?

Well, he claims that he has guidance in here.

I think we should really say, and I'm sure his guidance will say this, that he's returned for consultation.

So when I'll be in in the morning, early enough in the next sentence, I get enough call, you can come in a little bit later and talk about it.

Yes, sir.

You and I'll get a secret position.

It's a consultation, but there's just not an issue to be made.

I think, frankly, we ought to say, I don't know, we can't say we've made priorities that they're going to deny.

I mean, I don't know.

It is true that there has been.

There has been progress, and I think we can .

We have made progress, but there are still some other issues to be resolved, and we're trying to resolve them.

That's right.

If you just come up for consultation, when will they be resumed?

Because as soon as we both sides agree, they would serve a useful purpose.

That's what I would say, just one time, get on with it.

Exactly.

And then when there's just .

Now, let me tell you a key point.

You really don't feel you should bomb again, don't you?

You see, the real problem we've got there is that if we do, the bastards could use that as an excuse for not talking.

And if they might, I don't know.

No, sir, I'm afraid, depending on what is really the cause of the hang-up, if it's this whole array of things, I think we should start racking them.

And recognizing it, it's going to be tough.

You know, we've taken it a lot tougher than this.

It's not going to be that tough.

No, no, no.

The election is over.

Forget the election and that sort of thing, sure.

It's the Christmas season.

People out there are going to be taxed.

But we'll just say we're doing this because we want to get these negotiations going.

What do we say?

Why do we say we're buying now?

What's our... Well, I think we have to... We're not going to say a damn thing.

We're just going to start doing it.

We'll say we usually go back and say, well, there was a buildup.

There was a buildup.

The talks had gone on for an extended period beyond what we thought would be necessary.

We can't risk dawdling tactics.

We're prepared to stop it just as soon as...

We get it settled, and of course it's going to settle.

But then we must not stop bombing in Oregon until we get it settled.

Until we have it on the line.

That's right.

We must not do it.

Now, that's the point of the mistake we made, to stop this standing before we had it settled enough.

And we're going to get pressure from Bill Breeden.

I am confident Henry's going to come back with some theories as to why we shouldn't do it.

We have to consider that.

He may know something we don't know, or he may get some assurances from late October that we don't know that.

But my own instincts are that they only understand one thing.

And if they're going to try to play us right up to the congressional return, that would be even tougher to start again then, when these men are back in town.

And we get into a weather problem.

The B-52s are great around the clocks, but they need escorts.

And the escorts are weather sensitive.

So while it's technically feasible, it's not the kind of thing you can do without some kind of reasonable weather.

Now, we've got another complication.

As I sat down and thought of the war game this Tuesday, he was calling for a ceasefire.

There have officially been holiday ceasefires, and we're going to have to wrestle with that one, how to manage that problem.

And I think that's, quite frankly, what I know he's very conscious of.

They don't want us to start bombing.

They realize now that they've got a gap that can

Well, he offered, ordinarily they run at Christmas, midnight the day before Christmas, and midnight the day following Christmas.

And they have another one at New Year's.

There have been occasions when they've had them longer.

They've run right through the period.

He offered that, but that was in conjunction with this POW

That was a red herring to take the heat off of him and show his magnanimous spirit.

Now we may have to send the Vice President out still to brutalize this guy.

About what?

Before we have a settlement?

and say, by God, we want you to know we're going.

And are you going to persist in this?

It's going to be your destruction.

We've got to take military action.

We've got to concert on that to get maximum pressure on Hanoi.

Well, I think we have to think about this.

Maybe I should do that.

I don't know.

But I think, too, right now, so far off the reservation, it's going to take some more tendings.

I agree.

Maybe you have to do that.

Maybe using the vice-president for that is... Keeping crazy terror.

But he was got to be told in the coldest possible terms.

What in the hell has he paid any attention to this stuff?

Well, it's hard.

We always knew it was going to be hard.

It's just a little harder than we expected.

What happened was that Henry got his hopes up a little higher than he should have before the election.

That's right.

I never thought, I didn't, and you know it.

You never have, and I never have.

Huh?

I never have.

Really?

I never did.

I remember when he came in, he said, well, we've got three, three over there.

I waited the next morning.

He pulled off a little, he was a little bit sober.

What the hell?

You got that slap in the face of a few out there, right?

But you know there comes a time when it must end.

That was really the theme of Bucky's call, wasn't it?

That's right.

We've backed this guy, and we've given him everything, and it's time for him to stand up and face it.

That's right.

What we really have now, even Abrams with it, it's just sort of like a sudden rock.

I don't know if it says anything, but even he said it on one occasion, and I actually recall he said,

Well, you've got to cut him loose and see what he can do when the time has come.

It'll depend on us too long.

No, I agree.

Isn't that where it is?

Yes, sir.

And I agree with that completely.

We're just going to have to manage that one through.

But I think we're in a hell of a lot stronger position than they are, sir.

I really do.

And they are?

I think we're in great shape.

Why?

We're going to stay confident.

Why are we in great shape?

Because they're hurting very badly in the South.

Goddamn, we just got the bombing going.

That's right.

They can't face that.

That's why they're being, if they're being amicable, the reason they're being amicable is because they're a very divine.

I don't think there's any other damn reason at all.

I want you to get that across to, just tell Henry that I do not want him to do anything that will limit my option, very clear option, to resume intensive bombing in America.

You know, in a sense, that's really better than having a better option open than to have, than to pay a price to have him say something pleasant as he leaves.

Because something pleasant as he leaves is sort of, it's always impressive when you say, well, the talks haven't succeeded so far.

Although the press is going to be very clear here.

The press sees this as moving toward a settlement down there.

Or would you agree?

No, I think they do.

I think they sense this.

They sense it from Moscow, Peking.

It's a situation.

I'll see you in the morning.

Yes, sir.

Don't let me.

I was worried.

Oh, thank you.

Ah.