Nixon, Haldeman & Bull on Productivity Commission and White House Management

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Probably another 10, 15 minutes, he's going to check.

They expect it to be 11.30.

See, I... Schultz does not understand the ground behind the jury.

He always says, oh, you sit down.

We talk for a while.

Talk a little while.

What I will do is to go in and thank them all.

I'm not even going to sit down.

Don't go down to your place.

Stand at the end of the table.

I'm not even going to sit down.

I'm going to go around shaking hands with all of them and thank them all for serving with me.

Yeah.

Fifteen minutes.

Fifteen?

Yes.

Well, Steve, listen, about five minutes before they break, I'll come in and just shake hands with all of them.

I don't want any picture.

Right, sir.

No picture.

I'll just shake hands.

And, uh, and, and, uh, and walk out and sit and sit and sit.

I'm gonna hear it in a row.

You're about to, uh, just a second.

Anything to do is wait until they break.

You know, as soon as they're ready to break, they'll show up slowly enough.

And this is a time to let us know before they adjourn.

Before they adjourn, if you can.

But I'm not coming to talk to them.

You know what I mean?

I'm not coming to sit down and meet them.

I don't know anybody like Shelton or anybody like that.

If you'll say the president will want to speak to us.

We're not there to speak to him.

This is the right thing to do.

Yes.

Yeah.

Oh, let's see.

Don't bring him in here.

No.

Now, then I can get a call, and I'll have to set it up.

All the people in the room, you hear, should hear.

This is a recession without a curtain.

It's interchanged.

It's an AESH recession.

My name is Dennis Pomo Abel Fitzsimmons.

We have a great recession in Indiana.

I'm with you.

Who?

Andy, Pat Grayhouse, Woodcock is not here.

Grayhouse is the Vice President.

And, uh, Roosevelt was there a little while ago.

Well, I'll, I'll drop in.

Tell him, tell him, tell him, and I'll be in for, I can only drop in for five minutes.

All right.

So shake hands, but not just sit down and speak.

Yeah.

But I will not be able to say anything, but I'm meeting here, and I'll say it.

They need to know that I'm here.

They're all labor leaders.

We have a same situation.

I'm gonna work out with John Harding, too.

where, you know, Schultz likes to have a meeting where he could hold it next to John.

And we had a little while when John decided that they weren't serving that useful purpose.

And bringing up a lot of odds and ends that could otherwise be handled.

On the other hand, having a meeting say, you know, it makes a lot of sense having a first one at any time you need it.

What I'm getting at is we've got to work our thing out.

We've got Henry working around, too.

You know, it used to be they had the deal.

They had to come in every morning.

He gave me a full report on every goddamn fight he was having with everybody in the government.

You know, what do we do about this or that in this crisis?

He handles some things.

We talk about the important things.

I think what it shows...

A daily meeting is not a good idea.

What we're going to do is Shultz, Hurlickman, Neidertalk, Ash and I, and Henry Winslow-Cunn are going to get together every morning.

And the real purpose of that meeting is going to be to review the agenda as far as you're concerned.

In other words,

You cover there the ground of what anybody who feels he has to see you that day wants to cover with you, because we can solve most of that when I'm seeing you.

If we go over it, yeah.

And so we go through it, most of that will get settled within that groove.

Out of that meeting in the morning will come a request on some days for one or another or several of those people to see you on some specific thing that they don't need to see.

Or listen.

That's what I was thinking.

And then the thought was to wait until afternoon to meet with you rather than you meeting with many of them in the morning.

Do it at 3 o'clock.

Keep the time.

I think the idea of all of your having strategies, as John says, is very, very good.

Thank you.

I think people in the White House need to have the feeling that part of the team, part of the goddamn staff, I don't know, must be a big cast.

What do you do?

You have that big staff meeting every morning.

We're not going to have that anymore.

We're going to have that on a less frequent than daily basis because you don't really get it.

If you move those five people together, then if each of them will meet with the people that are concerned with him, which is the important thing,

I mean, I wonder how you're going to get people out of the crisis.

That kind of thing we're talking about there doesn't affect them.

We've got to get them in on another basis.

And I've been going over some of the approaches and all of that.

There is a need to get them in more.

Yeah, and in two more.

Frankly, I position times on ice when I'm around two.

Now, they will go ahead with the daily, the basic, the margins happening every morning, which covers the price.

Yeah.

Rosewoods that she won't cut, so people like that.

Well, her editor says this is...

I think that it's not good for her to have the little special bits.

you know, coming over and so forth and so on because basically she is, she becomes a little bitter and I don't want Julie to be exposed to that, you see my point?

Julie will be around there and it isn't right, I don't want Rose bitching.

You know, just don't frankly put my voice in it.

Now, Julie's pretty good.

She'll try to be fair about it, but it's not good.

It's just not a good idea.

I think the thing you want me to do, therefore, is to include Rosie in one of them.

Maybe so she'll have a nice pricey rider that got the damn manners.

I don't know what she was going to do then.

You know what I mean?

Well, when you put her on those, she crosses herself out.

Well, at the Inaugural, can't we?

Maybe you're talking about the Inaugural.

No, at the Inaugural.

I'm sure that the Inaugural has understood that, you know, she should be on every list or at any salon.

Because I did read it's true, we should be at every one of these damn things.

I don't know which one.

Well, Kevin and Henry, when he extended it, are the servants.

The servants, there were quite a few White House people there.

And so when we put the, well, they were the people who had worked with the servants, which she didn't, but we could have brought her in anyway, wouldn't we?

But the only White House effort was that.

It wasn't having a servant.

I wonder why she didn't get on the list.

She wasn't, I guess.

She was doing a lot of speaking.

I'm not sure whether she didn't.

I wonder if she was on one of the lists.

I've got to go in and see if she was on one.

You see, we covered most of our other people's lives, the close-in people's lives.

I mean, Groucho, the Finch, and that one.

They are all covered in various things, weren't they?

Yeah.

I did, I did, so I wanted you to answer.

And we just, I thought, I was certain she'd be at the serving thing.

I don't know what they actually, you know, we could have met her at the serving thing.

She would have, she's, she had, I was right to say, she would have been here at Lugard and, of course, the whole county.

They were part of that Sturgis operation.

That's who they had.

Did that happen?

I don't know whether it was or not.

What line do you want to use on BB's house, Chris?

is to some degree known and is going to become, is sure to become known at some point.

I'll discuss that with him, see what he thinks.

Strange thing, but my son came home from school the other day, so he brought her out to the hotel.

He said, what's B.E.

Uboza doing with the house out on River Road?

I said, we're here, anything like that.

He said, well, it's...

It's just funny.

One of his friends in his class is a girl named Camacho.

And Camacho was trying to find out.

So D.P.

bought it out from under him.

And Camacho told D.P.

they don't know how to do this game.

So they just said it.

But the point is, that kind of word gets around through that kind of thing.

Some press person, that's what happened in our house, I thought we were quietly out in our house, and all of a sudden, an accident.

The secretary writes it.

Yeah, our terrible piece on that.

I don't know how big it is and all that.

Well, that's what she did on ours.

They try to do that on these, too.

It's a hard one to figure out.

Well, I think you can just say that he bought it because he felt he'd like to have a house.

I would play any games about it.

Leave it at him at the moment.

What would I say?

He moved back to town.

Just say he bought it as an investment.

He bought it as an investment.

He'll be using it for the time being probably.

Is that the plan they can move into it?

Yeah, because that's the deal.

Might as well say that.

But if we don't back the recess, they'll be marched before that happens.

That's not a right.

He ran into that.

That's the way it'll be.

It'll be a random proposition.

he long thought about getting a place up here so our investment had to have a place up here yeah okay

Nixon, Haldeman & Bull on Productivity Commission and White House Management

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on December 20, 1972

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