Nixon & Haldeman on National Prayer Breakfast and Edward Heath visit

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Well, it's going to snow.

I guess not down here, but it is a big city.

You may have a white scene up there.

Can't bring it back this afternoon, can I?

It's fascinating to see what the television does with his arrival and whether they use that line or not.

The courage to make the difficult decisions.

He couldn't have done it better.

That was good.

Okay.

You're right.

Hold that.

Silly-ass cat field was mine.

I mean, it's... What I saw there was a precious, uh, cat.

Got a jerk.

Some silence there.

to that, although, well, your thing came off.

Well, I worked on a speech anyway, because I figured something might happen.

So I worked last night.

Oh, but Hackett was so in the first edition.

It was kind of interesting.

You start right at the beginning.

You look up, and there's everybody at that table is dressed in a dark blue suit.

He wore a green sport coat.

to start with.

And then, he goes up and instead of, and that wasn't that easy.

So, in the first place, you ask people to rise, normally, for prayer.

But if you're not asking to rise, at least you,

Instead of saying for just a few seconds, you'd say for a moment of silent prayer or something, and then let it last about a minute or at least 30 seconds.

Christy, there wasn't time to collect your thoughts.

The guy is a pony religious, and I don't understand why Billy doesn't see that.

He hasn't been for years.

Because nobody, and Billy knows that, you don't ask people.

I don't think anybody can compose in his own mind

If you're asking someone to pray for Senator Stennis, you've got to give them time enough to think through a thought of some kind for Senator Stennis.

And he did it.

He just about gave you time to get ready to start.

Well, that didn't turn it off.

Do you think that it was the best that I did that I did anyway?

It was.

It was a good little talk.

I was just thinking that they're going to see what they do with it.

We've got to get a chance to make the Vietnam pitch again.

But you also, you also made the peace of prayer a chocolate ball, too.

And the point that you can't legislate compassion, just like you can't prejudice everybody, treat you as a guarantee of peace.

That's a transition.

That's what our religion is about.

You change a man's ability to stop him.

Hatfield was ignored.

Hatfield didn't applaud during your speech.

He didn't.

Not everybody in the whole damn place during, what was it, on the end of the war.

You know, he said, we went out on a piece, whatever it was.

There was, you had the one line on the end of the war in Vietnam that everybody, there was a sustained applause for.

Hatfield just sat there.

And you said something about Senator Stennis, and they applauded.

Hatfield didn't applaud that either.

He's probably sitting there wondering how the hell it happened that he went to the war.

Well, he hasn't been all that bad in his public statements.

He's just wrong.

He really hasn't.

He's just wrong.

Well, this talk wasn't very good today.

I know it was lousy, but I think it was too...

complex for most people.

That's it.

And he did the wrong thing.

That guy's not supposed to deliver a sermon.

That guy's supposed to give a little pitch about the prayer breakfast and tell one or two testimonies of the things that they did.

Like the other guy, the congressman did exactly the right thing.

He told about the little girl crying in her hospital bed.

That's what they're supposed to do, and give a little of the history of the prayer breakfast.

Couldn't help but think, you know, that guy is the living image of Hubert Humphrey.

He looks like him.

He talks like him.

I'll do that.

He probably does.

I just sat there thinking, you know, 30 years ago or 20 years ago was Hubert Humphrey.

It's the same sort of verbose capacity.

Well, you know...

We just stopped and then went to the .

I hope that is used.

A pair of things we've known, we've done it before, they've never been used before.

One minute, one minute.

That's why we said help.

But it's a message to those people that come.

Why the hell are they coming?

I don't know.

It's one of the greatest promotions that the world has ever seen.

That's a promotion that is as cynical, as cold-blooded as the Congress invited to a peace conference.

It's really something.

It's a promotion.

But boy, they're all there.

The same.

That probably is the...

of a non-official function, accepting things like the inauguration or an address to the joint session of the State of the Union, something like that.

Other than that, it's probably the single greatest accumulation of power that there ever is in this country.

And it's hard to figure why.

Do you think I should do it every year?

I really don't.

You know, we've got to change the name to the National Prayer Breakfast instead of the National Prayer Breakfast.

Isn't the way to go to a release would be a way.

Yep.

Or something.

You can't be in town and avoid it.

That's right.

There's no way.

I'm sure it's all going to be a way.

But you've got to get to those bastards.

I'll tell you, they sent the invitation out about six months ahead of time, saying you're invited to join the President and Mrs. Nixon at the National Prayer Breakfast before we even know the date of it.

You know, I was just thinking that after the shot on the side of the dinner last night, I had to work for three hours with the British and prepare something, prepare the arrival or a remark for him this morning, prepare the remark for the day I heard about this man.

It was up at 7 o'clock.

It was up at, go to bed after midnight, get up at 7 o'clock.

be over there at that time, like this state.

You've got to run through all this track law and get back here at 9.30 to 9.30.

You have to send a statement to the governor before you go on here.

Then go through this.

Then, of course, start with the Republican governors.

Then Heath again, and then Nashville.

I may have to...

I may have to cut that meeting down quite a bit.

It's in the backlog and it's going to just cut it out.

We're going to have to, since he has passed for this time, cut it out.

I think you might just call and say, well, we have a problem here.

There's no problem at all.

Let's just wait.

We'll start that after the catalog.

Is there anything going on there?

We're negotiating.

That doesn't affect your trip to California.

No, it won't be until March.

I said spring.

I know.

So I didn't know whether maybe you had a reactor going to get a reactor to open my air.

I see.

So do you have any thought of going over to see Stennis?

I haven't thought so.

Well, the only reason is if you .

If you came up, if you decided to go, you'd have to go pretty soon, apparently, because he goes into a period of five to ten days of very severe discomfort starting tonight or tomorrow.

Bob, I think it's what we're doing.

It's what we do.

I think he covered it all wrong.

And that's not...

I go to the FBI in the day, I think, and I pay the tribute at the press conference, and I pay the tribute...

This morning.

If you go too far, it's over.

Also, if you need to die or something, I think you can leave it right there.

No, I didn't.

Johnson used to already do all those things.

You could do it, but do it once or twice.

I've done it three times now, and that's enough.

Okay, well, I just want to be sure you didn't.

If you did want to go, you have to go now.

So I will come fairly soon.

She knows everybody.

It's a good God business.

No, I think Rob said it in one of the television shows.

They did.

But it just kind of seems they did.

He got a little slug in there.

But Rob's point was very interesting.

Of course, I think part of the reason it was the first one, part of the reason also there were some big stories.

in terms of, as Julie was pointing out, in terms of the amount of coverage that we're really asking for.

It's very big, five to seven minutes on every network sign.

And it carried, so it does show, I'm sure if I'd done the same thing in the office, it would have been only two to three minutes.

What it would have been is a couple minutes of,

Tom Gerald, or Dan Rather, whoever it is, up there, sent the president an impromptu news conference.

Obviously, they said that the television cameras not allowed, the television cameras not allowed, that he would not commit amnesty, that we can't forgive those people.

He expressed his anger at the press for their unwillingness to write about peace with Hunter, and showed a very petulant mood in doing so.

His hatred was ill-disguised, and that

He also indicated that Henry Kissinger was going to be this and that.

And they would have lobbed him in, and that's it.

They would not have the sense.

They would have not had the hand on the thing, which he said, oh, we did have.

And which is a good shot also to get in 24 hours.

Sorry, I'm not special.

He would have been a couple minutes at the most, and it would have been a loan.

Or this way, there was the five-minute loan that began with the president on himself, but then they also picked up in the news show on other news items.

They relayed it back because they got to the Stennis story, and that's when they cut.

They didn't carry that in the news conference.

But it was a later story, and then they cut and ran a clip of the president on Stennis.

And so you get playing through the rest of the news, as well as writing as a lead story on its own.

This is worth telling.

It's a lot of people.

It's the president and the stuff.

I was one of the people, when you're doing it yourself, they see, they hear you say it, they see the mood.

It makes it much more difficult for the press to lie about it.

Oh, it's interesting, too.

Did you see the wood cover piece?

I think it was wood cover.

Somebody did a feature piece where it said the president met the press and mastered them.

That made the point.

Clearly on top.

Wow.

Get Henry cranked up for his very good performance tonight.

He sure is some dude.

Shit in the hell out of him.

Well, he's, he's going, coming around the full cycle of that thing.

I don't, if this goes wrong, that's, well, now, you're probably subduing the doctor.

That's what I'm doing.

You're right.

I mean, he's, he must be depressed.

You can always tell when he's depressed.

But you know where he was?

He, he's, I don't think he's depressed now.

No, I know.

I couldn't tell him.

He was subdued yesterday.

Yeah.

But you know where he was yesterday was at the Washington Star.

Yeah.

She did the editorial for him.

And he called me last night at home and went through, you know, reciting for me all of the great things he had said at the start.

And they hit him, he said, hard on the bombing thing.

Because, of course, that was the one they were opposed to.

And he says he totally hit that back.

He was rehearsing, obviously, for the night.

He thinks he's going to be able to get his points across.

Calvin's kind of...

one of the right things.

He's talking about, he's talked over with Cal in the general format of the show, so he knows how he's going to approach it.

And he's looking for the ways to work in the lines that he needs to get.

And he's going over that with me.

His mind is going in the right direction.

Now the thing is to get his spirits up again.

And David Rothstein made the point that you're the one guy that can turn this around.

Get the story across.

He's saying this this morning will help a lot, I think, with Henry.

It gives him a base.

Yeah.

And he caught it.

Also, the editorial type stuff is starting to build up somehow, and that gives him a little feeling that he's got a little time just shooting into the wind.

What happens?

And he talks to his friends.

And he gets a look at the college field.

And he is totally, totally disappointed.

I bowled over by him.

That's his problem.

And he tries to, you know, compensate for it, to adjust to it, to compromise to it.

You can't compromise.

You can't adjust to it.

What you have to do about fighting, you know, fighting is skillfully, not literally.

You have to take a run for it.

Stay in the trap.

Stay in there.

I mean, he'll stay in there for a while, but he's got to go to the PR side.

But Henry is, you've got to realize, he's a very sensitive follow-up.

Basically, it comes from that community.

It comes from Michael.

He's invaluable.

It's the other side of the coin.

And we should have learned by now, too, that you just don't get disturbed by what these press people out here are thinking, and what this town is, and the way you see it.

Yep.

Sure did.

That's what happens in the Congress.

Just get bowled over by reading it.

They just can't take it any longer.

Reading it and then in circles here, everybody talks.

I can tell you there are people there.

People are kind of scared.

That's true.

That's true also.

And that is really why I'm interested.

Because I've never asked what here happened and what.

And they tell us that, which is what bothers them, because they're all pushing it.

They don't know damn well what happened.

They were all out to live about bombing.

They wouldn't worry about peace.

They're going to go, you can't get anything unless she was overgrown.

There's got to be a coalition government.

What happens?

What do you do?

That's good.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

You know, it's your point.

Even Henry and his, you know, most common ones.

Worse is a hell of a lot better than what you'd otherwise have.

Well, I don't think you'll be bad.

I think you'll be better.

I don't either.

I think we've got enough of it that you'll get some of the points across the nation.

Nixon & Haldeman on National Prayer Breakfast and Edward Heath visit

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on February 1, 1973

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