Nixon & Ziegler on Amnesty policy and Media relations

We're sending up the impoundment thing this morning, which points out that you're impounding.
smaller percentage than has been historically the case in the past, 3.2%, I believe, versus an average of 5% in the past, which is .
My letter from you to the .
Yeah, it's consistent with legislation passed .
Then we have an extensive series of testimony today on the Hill with Schultz.
The Weinberger thing is still going.
Weinberger, how long is that going to go?
Bill Timmons thinks it will be another couple, two to three days.
He feels it's got to be wrapped up on the Weinberger thing.
So it's that type of thing.
John told me an interesting thing here in relation to animal and China.
Of course, Herb's going on that and is really up about that.
But he apparently has an offer.
that John said he was going to talk to him about today to become president of the University of Connecticut.
I said, my heavens, take it.
For, you know, for her to, to do that.
It would be a good place for him to, to observe some influence on those college presidents.
Right.
Make a lot of consultants.
Well, maybe so.
I don't know.
And we're not keen on her.
We're applying oil.
Well, it better, it better, it better, it better, it better, it better, it better, it better, it better, it better, it better, it better, it better, it better, it better, it better, it better,
Good thing about Herb, too, having been to China.
When he comes back, when he talks about the China Initiative and the peace settlement and so forth, he can have that substance behind him to make the points that should be made.
Now, on the University of Connecticut thing, the only reason I raise it is to make you aware of it,
a year or two before Herb and a job such as that could bridge him off into something, you know, from this to that could bridge him off into something perhaps better than it might be there for him at this time.
I don't know.
Well, it looks like the Congress is really having its problems these days.
You have disturbed and prepared people.
We're going to put John out on probably Wednesday.
Well, that's in the works.
Yes, sir.
John is putting together with Ken Cole and the Klosset people an attack back for what he refers to as the cases are matters.
And he said there are a number of them prepared to stand up and address this.
So that's in the works.
It should be taking place this afternoon and tomorrow.
And then John would follow up on that.
with the briefing here on Wednesday.
Sure, that's, you see there's no news, I don't think of Jordan or anything.
Right, right.
Perhaps we can put John out tomorrow.
Okay, I declined to think that the,
I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to press picture or any of that sort of thing.
That's what we're like, you see what I mean?
Yes.
I know that many people want to go right around to a funeral and all that sort of thing, but that's also what we're doing.
It's too much .
No, I agree.
I agree with you.
And when they're in here, I don't want people in to say, you know, emotional thoughts or anything.
I suppose if you want to, you can have a .
Well, I think we should have that done, yeah.
I think Ollie should take a picture and then let's see how the meeting goes.
There may be something that we .
I wouldn't like to have a low key basis move on it.
I don't want a whole herd of press people looking at these .
No, I agree.
It's not a good idea.
I can only picture and then we can release it to the wire.
You know, I have to tell you that the
I think most of that has been a lot of that, at least as far as I know, a handful of decades, pretty much all the way to the end.
Well, there continues to be a certain unsettledness amongst the media.
The Trib, of course, was concerned about the Whitehead thing and got a little exercise on that.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
They had a very, I think they had a front page
And I think because of the television stations that they have, as you know, and the whole thrust of that, they have actually— Their monitoring stations are going to be called the way that thing goes.
Well, the five-year thing.
But there's still that element that bothers— The way that thing really goes to the local control.
It doesn't go to—it goes on the network, not the local control.
That is understood if you look at the legislation, but there still is an impression that the trip got sucked into it.
I think that probably- What I'm feeling here is that .
Well, we haven't done much with the trip on an individual basis.
Yes.
Time magazine referred to that this week, the fact that you had known for a period and now have come out fighting and, you know, come out clearly standing by your position.
I think the trip, and I quite frankly have not read the full trip section carefully enough to make a judgment.
Let me ask you about, I don't think that, I know that it's also, there are several things, and I didn't do the summary of the show, objective to both the assault judge and the person they interviewed.
So do you think those things are at stake?
No.
Maybe they are.
Maybe we're wrong.
And I didn't see that much of them.
So they had to show the assault judge.
Basically, it's really good to have that sort of thing.
And I don't think it's better to have more of this general and not do the individual .
which again, you could never leave a higher labor in a general press conference if you would have a follow-up question to see.
But I'm referring to leaving the harder type out, which I might, which I think is incredible at times.
As far as this stuff about basically personal things that surround, I wonder if that, if that really is worth the candle.
I mean, it isn't.
People aren't, I don't think that,
i think i think i think that's the kind of thing that would be useful if you had basically a more a more friendly price but i think in our case i don't i just think that they tend to just pick and pick it out and say oh well we're trying to humanize
I don't agree with it.
No, they don't.
I think it's my sense of reading them and talking with them.
I don't think that they...
There are going to be some that are going to suggest that we are doing this as a whole public relations game plan, but they're going to suggest that anyway.
Is it even good that they have that?
Why not just lay the straight, very, very, very instance over the line of .
I think occasionally it's good to let one or two in on this basis because it keeps them on their toes.
So I think it is.
So what do you think about it a little?
I'm not sure that it's going to be .
What I mean is I'm referring to the broader aspects of it that I'm not .
I don't think, I mean, we did solve it .
I'm not sure that that's a personal kind of thing.
We have never had any success in getting that sort of thing out, you know, all the things we do.
Anyway, I just wondered, maybe you just take that as a fact in life, and if the press wants to cover it, or how public they have issued it, you personally cover it.
Don't try to sell it to a broker.
That's what it's all about.
They think all about it, you see.
Well, I don't think my view is that the salt pen and the birthday thing was not a hard sell.
I think if there's anywhere that we may have failed in the last four years in moving the personal side is that we have tried to oversell on some occasions.
I don't think we have approached it with enough subtlety.
And this goes with the whole thing that we've talked about before in terms of making sure that when we proceed with common plans and when we proceed with press contacts that we do it in a coordinated way.
Time and time again, Mr. President, the first term, we were going to move the line.
And the word went out to move the line.
Well, hell, I've talked to a columnist about moving the line.
He said, I've had four calls on that already.
Well, of course, this is going to destroy the virus.
Bill Sapphire used to call people.
No, but that's good.
Bill Sapphire was all right doing that.
But we didn't do it.
Excuse me?
Others were trying to do it.
There's nothing wrong with a lot of people doing it, but it is how it is coordinated and how it is accomplished.
And this goes back to my earlier point.
If there's anything on the personal side, in moving the personal line, that we have failed in doing, I think it was not from your standpoint, but from the staff standpoint, an overkill of that, not using the appropriate subtlety that could be used.
The Saul Pitt interview and the birthday interview, it got by play and then pressure.
was set in about that.
Now, there's always going to be carving, and I think that's what you see here.
It was pretty hard to get much of a positive on the heat in it, wasn't it?
I guess we didn't have enough controls.
I was like all sicknesses.
But, of course, there's very few.
Well, it's a phenomenon.
I mean, face it.
When you go to Great Britain, the papers in this country carry massive headlines and so forth.
And when they come here, there's not that much interest.
Don Maitland did a great job of moving color.
For example, that line you said about the walking.
I said, now, Don, you moved that from the prime minister's side.
He called in the wires and so forth, the American wires.
to move it that way.
And then I reminded you that they used it.
Sure, they used it.
It didn't run in any of the Washington papers, but it ran.
The walk, both between the meeting and the meal, and the walk back over the helicopter.
The part about walking around checkers with one security man in your continent, you'd walk more.
You could do it with fewer security people.
That all moved on the wires, on the domestic wires, not the international wires.
But from the standpoint of
hard news, there were really no decisions made.
Yeah, there wasn't much to explain.
And the script is getting pretty good plays.
Not massive plays.
Yeah, but it's nothing negative yet.
Nothing that I've seen except the security story out of Laos.
He had a lot of, he had a lot of security.
Yeah, but the guy who wrote the story, it was a, we did papers, it was a jam-type story.
You could tell from the way it was written, but the only negative story I've seen was the security story.
On his arrival in, in, in India.
He gets back from the party.
My personal thinking is that rather than go to the California State, it's probably the state of Washington that would be better.
Having reported the champion right here, I'm getting a little bit of support there.
If he can back her in, I'm trying to have him show up for this today, so yeah.
It's just damn hard to...
It's probably Ross, kind of the enemy.
is he has too much security.
The law doesn't require him to be protected.
It's all, it's his choice.
He can tell the Secret Service to get the hell out of the way.
He really can.
What are the other things?
At least you get them out of the way and go over and talk to people.
When Nash, Christ, when I got to the 53 trip, they had a fire one night.
I got in the car and left without a damn fire.
You know, that's the kind of thing he should do.
You know, these are things that will work.
You know, the Vice President has got a marvelous opportunity to get good publicity with his abroad.
And he'll never miss it, because he doesn't play the human side.
That's what he said.
It's good going around.
He can't be substitute.
I mean, he should go out there.
He should, uh, knock his ass off in Vietnam, too.
Maybe a Vietnam hospital, or what I would have done, where some of the civilian kids in the middle were in our village.
Why don't we do something like that?
Well, trip after trip that he goes on, the basic story that comes back is what I was worried about.
What I was worried about with the communications gap was not that White had that sort of thing.
I really feel that we are going
all out.
I mean, I think that we are doing as much as we possibly can.
I don't want, I don't want to be, to appear that we're reacting to the idea that we have not done that much.
Right.
And, uh, we had enough of us, right?
Now, it's, uh, it's very, uh,
Just so that you're, I want you to be sure you're properly briefed, because I want to be sure we keep the amnesty thing going.
I don't want that debate.
I'm trying to get a boat up there, but I can't.
I have a meeting sitting here in 20 minutes on the whole amnesty thing.
The Haynes-Johnson article that appeared over the weekend.
I know, I've talked about that.
The Haynes-Johnson thing, as you know, was incorrect.
Yes, sir.
I've made that point at least 100 times around here, so people have got to get that.
Amnesty for the enemy is one thing.
I mean, amnesty for, not quite amnesty, but amnesty for the South is one thing.
But Lincoln was hard to find in terms of amnesty for those, like, you know, the conservative, conservative conceded one.
Yes, that's what we're talking about.
And the best piece that has been written on it, the start of it, or the end of the point, very, very nice of Lincoln to give amnesty in terms of, on the basis that they want, they're not asking for forgiveness, they're asking for forgiveness.
to say that they are, that we let them off because they were morally right and they intersect with two and a half million Americans, including 45,000, and now they were morally wrong.
That's what's involved here.
And also, there's a total misconception when they, when I talked about the idea of being liberal after the war, they left off what I also said, but whoever
Going back, Mr. President, to the point on...
With Radin, you made a comment with Radin on amnesty in the discussion.
You see, Ron, it's your job when you see them say, you, Mr. Chairman, the President said he would be liberal.
You've got to nail him, right?
Right.
You forget it, gentlemen.
Did you read the rest of it?
on an individual basis, on an individual basis, some kid had written me.
So if his wife is going to have a baby or something, I think maybe we'll be looking at it on an individual basis.
But every, the point is, there isn't going to be a blanket amnesty on an individual basis.
Not, no blanket amnesty.
I mean, can you get that across, Your Honor?
I don't see why that hasn't been answered before.
Well, we've hit it and we'll hit it again.
Are you sure other people are correct?
Oh, you've got to have a question.
What's that?
I was going back for a moment.
I had a note from the vice president reporting.
Really, from the news standpoint, he does not get particularly much more focused in doing that with the cabinet.
He gets more- Well, my fight is I don't want to get any focus.
Okay.
My fight is I want an excuse to have a cabinet together with the US government.
And if I can, I may not do it.
I may not.
I may decide to leave before he doesn't get back his excuse.
And it builds his ego.
Right.
Because he doesn't want to get it.
I realize that there's not that bit of attention publicly around the Olympics because he doesn't pay attention to it.
It's his own fault because he wants attention.
He played a little closer to the vest, a little more mystery.
He did some.
This has been very such a very important trip.
What other questions are coming up that you need any guidance on?
Well, I'm in good shape on the foreign policy side of things.
I think it's certainly true.
Oh, don't let the press get off the hook on it, but in regard to, you know, where they're in Sweden, that's a kind of statement.
But they've had a bad rap in terms of showing very little, you know, that they seem to be at least relieved or so forth when the war was over.
You're quite aware of what the record is, are you?
Yeah.
Well, let me suggest an alarm.
Would you go re-voice your song?
Sorry?
Re-voice your song.
I'll go back and read it in a second.
This is new album.
those who have been most vocal were the least
It's a very good needle, as I think it drew blood.
It did, it drew blood from a lot of people, including the Pope, who tried to justify themselves and had a collision.
Well, they pointed out that they disagreed that those who had... What drew blood?
They tied it into two, you see, and the fact that he had opposed the settlement.
I mean, it drew blood because they reacted in a way.
I'm sure we can share our own voice and say the offense is defensive.
That's right.
Let's take it right home again.
Because this tends to raise the credibility of the media, which it must do.
They know it's true.
And the rights are common.
I think this is by far the best.
Did you read that?
Yes, sir.
And it's right on the nose.
A number of big authorities and I saw it.
the real fight is they
that have to come this way.
We haven't tried to keep them alive.
But you can't have that team calling him about the thing.
The bastard could die this week because he's fired for emergency.
He's dying.
He's dying.
Huh?
It is, too.
Of course it is.
But if you notice, though, they're...
Anyway.
How is their general attitude?
I think the working press out here at the end
I just wanted to ask you to check on two people.
You know Paul Greenberg?
Paul Greenberg?
Yeah.
He's been doing some of the best writing.
Adrian Lee.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One person who has been extremely good is Betty Beal, almost.
Right.
Without exception, you see that that gets a bigger play.
One who has been invariably bad, strong, so could you do a, is there any, I don't mean out, I'm not referring to anything specific.
If you do or don't do what I mean, I've got, you can find ways of pools and so forth.
We took a different trick in our,
any special article or anything where you give her interviews?

Nixon & Ziegler on Amnesty policy and Media relations

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on February 6, 1973

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