Conversation 852-007

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Is he conscious?

Yes, he's strong.

Oh, really?

He shook hands recently.

Oh, he was unconscious yesterday.

He was in a hell of a shape that he couldn't live in.

Yeah?

He called the coach.

I don't think that all the serpent Christians listen to radio all the time.

It's a terrible thing.

After the second game, I saw him call the coach at midnight.

I told him to find out what the score was.

The reason I raised it, I'm not going to decide it until the night of California.

If the caution person knows the word, and I heard the doctors out there,

last night.

If there's even a 50% chance you will, I'm not going to go to California.

I'm going to Florida instead, because I would have to come back to this town.

And I don't want to fly five and a half hours when I can go to two.

So I'll decide tonight, about 6 o'clock, we'll get the latest report.

If there's a reasonable better than 50% chance of you surviving the week over in California.

But only if there is.

Well, I need you to just get out there and throw our back to him, you know?

Yes, I will.

Okay.

I worked the way through the speech and sent it back to you.

You should have done that by now.

No, I said, now they don't want you to do it, I guess.

Oh, no.

I just decided this morning that, uh, that it's John's time.

I just thought it was a good speech.

It was John's time.

of a problem, now doing it as a question of this international.

If you move to devalue, then you should have given this speech just before that.

I apologize.

Well, it won't do any harm.

The speech will be in the bag.

Now, if you laid it out this morning, then I might want to do the devaluation speech on television.

I haven't seen George talk, but John said there's no thought, as far as he can determine, no thought of doing that.

Do you agree with the strategy?

Yeah.

I don't know.

First of all, it's his understanding of George that it's your feeling that if, only if we make the hard move, would you make any announcement.

Otherwise, the announcement would be made by George.

If you make the hard move, the announcement would be made by you, but it's not John's understanding that there's any thought or suggestion that you do it on television.

We have two different things.

First, they're moving now with the Japanese, and the rest you see in the negotiations, 6.5%.

That's an evacuation of both ways, yen up, dollar down.

And I say, yeah, well, you can probably get that.

The next question, though, is the announcement of the trade deal.

That I don't have to announce.

George, there's something that he cannot handle in our situation.

I'll pop it up there.

And I don't mind, but it's three.

No, sir.

Yes.

In view of this trade and monetary thing, it would be seen in retrospect as... Well, either that or really, depending on how the negotiations come out, that you were misleading people.

Do you understand that trade doesn't affect these people?

Well, I do understand that, except that if you're going to make a State of the Union on the nation's economy...

And you don't mention something that's very hot.

It's not the whole truth, so to speak.

He's got a cable that he wants you to approve for text to Tanaka.

And then he'll send Volker this afternoon.

He's testifying this morning.

I told him yesterday, go ahead on the 6 1⁄2, 6 1⁄2, as far as the trade is concerned.

And here, that I have to read.

I mean, that's fine.

That's a very good thing to say on the plate.

It's a blood-curdling language about Georgia State.

That's what I've planned to do.

And I've got to tilt the whole trade message.

the protection of American jobs, and of America's, and of devaluation.

Matter of fact, with devaluation, he devalued .

He said, well, we're going to have to devalue .

The whole purpose of devaluation is to make America as one competitive.

I also told John to go back and read the August 15 speech in the language.

Also, what I said to the Congress, when I went to the Congress,

The whole thing, if you would go back and get it changed, it's not a hell of a lot.

Now, Mills will raise the question on the monetary problem this afternoon.

George would like to discuss only the problem without any solutions being out of discussion.

And so he will probably take this up with you when we have our tax meeting.

And I'm giving a talker on the tax meeting, which gives you a feel for the stuff that he submitted to you.

but in very sketchy form, and then suggests a way to...

I thought you were disappointed in what the Treasury had done.

Do you want another crack at it?

I do.

We've had a crack at it, which has broken Georgia's heart.

What is it?

Well, Simon and their tax man came over, and I went through it with them and criticized them.

And so that has disappointed George because he hoped it would not be criticized.

And so— Everybody gets a treasury just since he's gone.

The damn bureaucracy and the treasuries.

Yep, the bureaucracy caps it.

It's this kind of thing.

They want to change capital gain rates.

They want to make it more equitable.

Well, there's no plus in that for you, and it hurts all your friends.

And it's just going to make everybody mad.

I was up talking to Juan.

And he says, the president would be crazy to get into that kind of stuff.

He says, hey, you don't have to take any positions on anything.

He says, you don't have to have a program.

All George feels has got this.

And you've got to give him a look at it.

I don't think we've ever believed on that anyway.

When we do try to get the rich folks around, they say it isn't enough.

Well, it's a loser.

And this is Long's point.

He says there's no votes in closing these loopholes.

He says there's not one vote in it for the president.

There's not one vote in it for me.

There's not one vote in it for anybody.

He says it's a bad political issue.

The reason that there's not money, there are two reasons to be against it.

There's not any votes in it, John, or something else.

It happens to be a phony issue.

It is wrong.

There aren't any loopholes.

You know, what is one man's loopholes and what is another man's?

And so if you do something on capital gains, you well know that some people think there's got to be no capital gains.

And, of course, the one that they talked to, even those, our poor, dumb Republican leaders understood that, that Barbara Comgo, uh, I mean, not, uh, understood that, well, if you take away, and you, you talk about, uh, we're not going to have, uh, deductions for mortgage payments anymore.

That's, what do we have?

Our constituency, the 70% of the American people that do own 10-month mortgages.

That's the point.

Well, and who's going to win?

Well, I'll tell you, I'm against the loophole.

I've done this.

I've kept hammering away on these two things, if you want, parochial schools and the elderly real estate tax.

And I broached this with Walt.

He says, those are winners.

He says, those are good ones.

And he says, we can make music out of those.

But he said, and of course it was long as Katie's hell.

He said, you both work with me now.

He says, I'm a person's man.

I'm going to ask him all this stuff.

But by that, I wanted to talk to you about something we could get in.

Let's see.

As a matter of fact, I say in the talker that that's the way you can put your dog.

You can say that you want to come to both mills long before you make your mind up on this stuff.

I want to see the schedule for tomorrow, the tentative schedule for tomorrow.

You're clear at the point that we're getting to.

Those are all second, and then just a quick...

You're clear from... See, he was bringing the radio address at 12 o'clock.

He kept it clear before that.

Well, should we take a crackable on it?

Wait a minute.

And Wagner will not have been approved?

Well, we don't know.

It looks like not.

They're holding him hostage again for this damn Watergate thing.

Until they get their resolution passed.

Well, they haven't passed it today.

Could be.

They apparently can't get any amendments on it.

It doesn't sound like it.

But at least they held it up one day.

If it's worth the Weinberger price, if we can hold up the Watergate resolution through the recess so that we got them in a couple weeks here, we'd be ahead and screw Weinberger.

We'd go out and find them.

I hope that he's confirmed that he's going to go to the job.

Yeah.

And it's definitely confirmed.

But in other words, the Watergate thing, they'd have to vote on it.

I'll tell you.

And they know about it.

That's, they may.

That's one thing they're planning on.

Let's see, what's the situation on the bottom right?

That'll be over by, we'll get a cap over by 10 o'clock.

You said 8 o'clock.

It's 8 o'clock.

Yeah.

It's going to be over by 9.30.

I'm going to put it on the shoes of the other.

The radio just was scheduled for 12 o'clock, sir.

Followed by Doug Kennedy and the National System.

I don't need any of that.

What I'm trying to figure out is an hour, but I can see Russell Long tomorrow.

If you've got one in hand, I'll let you know where you got it.

We have him at 2.30, sir.

It appears that he has not been confirmed.

He will not be.

That's right, sir.

I've seen.

I've seen before he's been confirmed.

I'll have to because then he'll take off while I'm gone.

Sir, there's a possibility that one of them will be confirmed tomorrow.

In which case, we should consider swearing in before the fortune.

Yeah.

I'll go right after the cabin breakfast.

Oh, you mean confirmed in the morning?

Oh, he may be confirmed in the afternoon.

Well, he may be confirmed today, sir, then.

All right, then let's try Russell Long, just so we'll leave an hour in there, in case, let's just say, 10.30.

Fine.

Now, I think on that one, it would be good if John, you called in.

What do you think?

All right.

And I said, the way you should say it is the President just entered the State of the State Senate, whether it was a game or a thing.

You should say the President noted that Jordan Schultz, that Wilbur Mills was coming down, and we could go on and discuss the trade episode with George Holston.

When the president saw it, he just called you into his office and said that the president said, I, of course, won't talk to Mills, but I want to be sure it's understood.

I'm going to talk to Long, too.

Could you come down tomorrow with Ben Curry, the senator?

I don't know.

I don't think a lot of people have ever put on the basis that I saw him.

I'd ask him to come in, too.

Okay.

All right.

Do you want George to sit in with Long?

He has to.

I think he has to.

Long likes to talk, you know, he likes to talk the kind of politics that George is pushing.

You know, Long is a gutter of money gentleman in his pocket.

He shouldn't have had the time to do this.

Why don't we just say that Long just, this is basically therapy, and then I think we better keep him, say, in charge for next week or something like that.

Or do you agree with me?

Yeah, I think Long will want to talk two things with you.

One's welfare.

And the other senator, he owns a lot of it.

Well, I'll just tell George that the purpose of this is welfare and energy, and I'm going to try to keep him off of the tax.

All right.

And then I'd like, therefore, I'd like to not kill George.

Well.

George is there to expect it.

You could say this to George when he's here.

You don't see long tomorrow.

Right.

About welfare.

And it's going to be basically about welfare.

About welfare.

That at the same time, you don't want to decide these tax issues.

until you get out to california over the weekend and you the same thing i suggested in the talker is that you ask george for a ballot for a laundry list check sheet that you can use in indicating your decisions and so he can have it send that out to california

I'm going to keep in those arms like a taxon because I don't want a lot of it to get out.

And then, obviously, if it's welfare, then I have to have the damn full cabin, frankly.

If we get welfare and energy, I'd have to have him.

I'd have to have Mark Rock and Mark and all the rest of them.

I certainly didn't want you there staying on.

So I told George about my talk with Long, about Long's position on the rules.

Right.

Well, what we'll do is, on this international subject, it's there, let me say, and even George, who is less than 70 today, very excited and so forth and so on, I can just emphasize on his time.

or yet no one on the international side.

Look, I've been doing it all.

Everybody around here gets terribly excited about the international thing and thinks the whole country's excited about it.

Now, just don't worry that much about it.

And I'll look at it.

And, I mean,

They're, I'm glad you agree with Bob, because I know they're, they're, they're, they have, they advise you to go on television, my mom was 15, and explain why we evaluate the yen and all that sort of thing, and also put it in the trade, and...

course uh is pretty good well of course i'm not going to do that it's silly i'll have to handle that with the radio and it'll hit the audience if you want but the point that i make is international monetary series and voter dropping around hard to remember around george will talk to a couple central bankers and sign them up and the end something works out the thing you've got to remember in a trillion dollar economy with a six billion dollar balance of payments

all that much of a problem.

Nobody is saying that.

Nobody is putting the damn thing in perspective anymore.

But it's no problem for us.

that the revaluation of the dollar does not affect the value of your dollar one dot and then, as we said on August the 15th, and the point that I made is that we're just not getting that excited about it.

We're just not getting that excited about it.

They, particularly Volcker and Burns, are, you know, alarmists on this sort of thing.

Now, if it is in effect,

We do know, on the stock market, and there will be.

But what happens to these things, for the most part, is that they eventually go away.

Now, there are fundamental causes that don't go away, and that we will work on.

We've got to work on the trade balance.

We've got to have a better trade bill.

But, you know, when I see the trade bill, I don't much give a damn about the trade balance.

I care one hell of a lot, though.

about making the American manufacturing press and the American labor review guy think that we're fighting to re-tie to the dollar and put in a tough trade bill so that we can protect jobs.

That's something we care about.

And then we, of course, are the Europeans.

We want to be responsible trading partners.

And the rest, of course, we do.

But the point is, and George is falling into the same trap as the rest, the point is that, and our term is, is that

We are always to be responsible.

And Europe is not responsible.

And the Japanese are not responsible.

That's what it really is now.

The Germans are really responsible.

So don't get that excited about it.

I have to listen to them.

They have to come in too.

Everybody's got to think this is the biggest problem in the world.

It's a problem.

It's not that big.

Did I tell you that he's going to send Volker today?

Yeah.

No, he didn't.

OK.

And he's going on around, and he'd be back in here on the weekend, and George would like to come out to California if there's anything.

No, never.

I don't want him out there.

I don't want George coming out to California because he's not on that subject.

All right.

So it could be handled from here.

He can make the announcement from here.

He should make the announcement from here.

He comes in to California.

We can make the announcement from the end.

on whatever comes out of Oaker's trip.

I suppose that's what comes out of it.

I suppose that I would have to see.

I don't want anything coming.

Why don't we leave it just up in the air?

Let me tell you the reason.

John, we cannot allow a distortion of the volume.

in terms of the relation of my time to various problems.

Because George is like Colin before.

They consume you with the creative devils.

And you notice, and Harvey, you notice that.

Oh, I sure have.

They consume me, too.

And it's just a question of how much time a person has.

Now, George is a brave guy, wonderful, and much easier to deal with than Colin.

But if he comes to California, it'll be a five-hour session.

Also, also, we can wheel this tax thing without burdening you if he does not come out.

If he comes out, there's going to be a confrontation on your decision.

Why don't you just tell him about it when I do tell him?

I think he'll have a few days.

Just for once.

I mean, we could do that once.

I've never taken any time off.

You know, every time I'm on the floor, I'm ready to speak.

I probably won't take time off.

Somebody else will come up and have to do it.

But not now.

The trouble is that we cannot live.

Yeah, yeah.

Let's think about it.

Why don't we leave it on the air?

Indicate to him that you hope to be able to get the president to take some time off.

That if there's some order and a way of working it out, he ought to give some thought to it.

And that we'll all talk about it on the phone.

And I'm not sure that I'm going to be staying out there either.

Because I've got to call him.

I've got to talk to him.

Fine.

And it's keeping loose.

Okay.

the president may be back at that time.

He just doesn't know.

It's a variety of reasons.

And because he said, depending on the district, the district may take a day later or longer, and we can't tell.

You know, blow it up a lot.

And we've got to wait until we hear from him.

I know what his plans are and so forth.

But I want to point you for your own information, for your own guidance, both of you, that I always

but he will inevitably get me involved in the nitty-gritty of stuff before it's really up, you know, and he'll give me that tracer stuff and I don't want to get, I mean, I don't want to get out committed.

Now, he must get in the position where he feels that he has to, you know, everything's got to be approved by somebody else.

I want his position presented, but he's got to present it in a somewhat

Well, George is like water on the stone.

He'll wear away at you on this stuff.

And on his taxing, for instance.

I know you haven't.

But no, no.

In fact, that's the reason for the meeting.

He's crying for an opportunity to get at you to get some guidance.

But I think unless you want to commit to about a five-hour study course,

The best thing to do is simply say, this has been a very helpful hour, George.

Thank you very much.

And you'll be hearing from me.

I'm going to spend some time on this this weekend, and I'll be back to you.

And then let us field it from out there and send it back to you.

We have only two minutes.

That's right.

And we've been hammering away on those.

We've got to get those two things done.

Now, there's a gimmick.

The Treasury boys don't like a call we made on the aid of the elderly on property taxes.

We felt, as a political proposition, that a 5% deductible, so to speak, was the best way to sell this.

They want a $200 base that you don't begin to enjoy the...

benefits of our program until after you've paid the first $200 of tax.

Well, that's a hard thing to sell politically to somebody because you're going to end up with some guy getting only $1 of benefit or $0.85 of benefit or something of that kind.

The flat percentage is more attractive as a pure political call.

So we're going to send a decision paper back to the Treasury with that marked out.

The

Now, they've reclamed that back to you, and I think you've got to slap that down if you want to go the political route.

On the other hand, there's one of those nasty little questions.

Why is it a matter of caution?

Yeah, it's a matter of administration for them.

It's a matter of difficulty handling the forums and so forth.

Well, look, we're not talking about something.

God.

That's right.

We're talking about something.

Something we're for.

And the Congress will have that thing screwed up beyond any belief.

You'll be able to say to a person, if you pay $100 rent, you're going to get relief on 95% of it.

That's a lot easier than saying you will get relief on all but the first $200 of it.

That sounds like a hell of a lot of money.

We say we have a 5%.

Five percent deductible.

They want a $200 deductible.

No, $200.

That's just silly.

It makes their computers run easier.

Okay, well, I may come up, but that's the only detail that we'd be getting into here, because we decided that detail issues are going to affect them.

You're going to read a lot of stuff about Engman at the FTC.

My deal with him was that he would go up on the Hill and say anything he had to say to get confirmed.

Yeah.

And then do?

And then do exactly what we expect of him.

He's going to command the staff.

That I'm supposed to have made in December in regard to ordering the USDA to look at the tax returns of America's markets.

That's a routine statutory provision in the Internal Revenue Code that permits every department of the government to examine returns.

Every department of the government has that right that's given specifically by statute.

This was strictly a demagogue move by some congressman who picked that up.

Can you get the monkey off my back?

I think so.

I think it gets you into position.

I'm going to brief tomorrow, and I'll read together.

This is a law passed by a Democratic congressman.

Sure.

You go through the Internal Revenue Code, and there are just hundreds of agencies and departments and state governments.

Why don't you go to the agency and why not get the non-tabulation?

Well, see what they use it for.

They use it for tabulations.

They don't look at individuals' returns, but they get tabulations of the average income of a partner and that kind of stuff.

Yeah, but they have to have that right of access to do that.

Well, it's...

Well, it's important because it's...

I just want to be sure.

When I just said that the president had ordered it.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't like that.

I never ordered such a thing.

I'll reach for it.

I never let anything like that go by me.

I signed it down squarely.

Well, I'm sure you didn't sign it.

I'm sure we are not going to if we didn't avoid it and investigate our crime.

Of course.

We've got to start investigating it.

That's right.

We have an IRS commissioner candidate.

who's over at the Interior Department right now, who's a 38-year-old lawyer.

Very highly recommended all the way around.

I'm going to have him in and talk with him.

And we'll see what we've got.

We're not inspecting it now.

We offered it down to the legal counsel, but he turned it down.

Well, now, this is always a politician's

I just want to be sure that...

Well, I would expect to do with this guy as I did with England, and just calling in and saying, now, this is what we expect of you, and we're at a point where we're no good.

And either you commit or you don't go out.

Yeah.

Well, I've got a list of names for you to take a look at.

As far as I'm concerned, Rumpelstiltskin is still at the top of the list.

I've not discussed with anybody but Mitchell.

He's favorably inclined to it.

But you're not discussing with Mitchell?

No.

That's right.

He keeps asking.

Is it true that we have that Connecticut card seat that Mitchell has to be in?

I don't know.

There's a district court in Connecticut that's supposed to be open, and then she says that's the way to sign for the president, which is even good, and that's good for him.

I'll find out.

That gets us to your friend Jack Miller, which when he lobbed one in, what's his name?

And then I went up there after he raised it.

No.

What he wanted was a district court here, which we won't do.

But there is a patent court she opened, and that's what he is going to lower his price to.

We offered him a postal rate commission.

He said he doesn't want that, but he'll settle for the patent court and get him off everybody's tax forever, which may be worth it.

You had said don't give him a court job.

That's the bottom of the patent court.

Basically, all you do anyway.

We've got to just gently go to the patent court.

It depends on that guy.

You can get him to the patent court, is what I mean.

Another thing is that military court of appeals thing.

It's that damn thing.

We don't have one there.

You're willing to give him that, though?

Come on.

You're looking into that for him.

Because the son of a bitch will be in there.

He wants to come in.

That's what we've done.

We've given him out.

All right.

We'll tell him how to track.

We've got the patent court to work on.

Yeah, he jumps out at you as you go through.

Well, sure.

Say, all right, we've got a scheme.

Okay, that's exactly what they're playing.

They've got him in a parlor, and I'm just going to wait until we have work to ask him.

That's okay with you.

We'll go ahead and do that in the parlor.

Okay.

I'd like to wait until after the Pentagon trial, the Pentagon Papers trial, before we move on any of this stuff.

We have a five-year statute of limitations on all that kind of stuff.

We have the other one hanging on, which is Neil Sheehan at the Times, and I've got both of them on a tickler system.

They come up regularly.

What I was thinking of was I'm writing a basically watered-in, and I'm just going to see what they think about it.

Well, the Pentagon Papers trial will be over, I would guess, in another ten days, two weeks, something of that kind.

It may go longer than that, but I don't think much longer.

I'm not going to convince you of anything.

I doubt it.

I never heard of it.

I'd be very surprised.

I never thought we would, no.

But the happy turn of events is that Ellsberg is not able to use that as a platform to get you.

It's turned into a very sort of a Delaproze kind of a proceeding.

Yeah, pretty much.

No, that turn of events in the Supreme Court was a happy result.

But on Neil Sheehan, on Jack Anderson, and the NSC... Yeah, he's turned down about his guy being arrested.

About that case?

No, see, they arrested Les Whitten.

for having stolen documents.

And so Anderson takes off on Bob here in the morning paper.

I didn't think I did, but he said that I did.

He says, I've issued an order to nail Jack Anderson and the Washington Post.

The sources are .

I don't know whether you had the same impression I did, but I saw a picture in the Post and the Times today of what were supposed to be Indians, you know, charged in the courthouse in Dakota.

All the way to Monaheim, those people were just radicals.

They were not goddamn Indians.

Oh, well, you're an urban Indian.

It doesn't look anything like the Indians we knew in Southern California at first.

The downtown Indian these days is flat-out radical.

There's no question about that.

I'm thinking of something else.

I think what's happening is that the movement, so-called, they see various causes, and I think some of the movement we're in, you know, look at that, are now joining the Indian cause.

I would not

in that, so to speak, the radical Indian movement.

But you look at this crowd, for instance, or the BIA, or you go down and look at that crowd that's on the Alcatraz, and a lot of them do not have Indian features, racial features.

But they're specific.

Oh, yeah.

They're 16.

They're there.

Yeah.

But boy, they're sure radicalized, some of them.

They really are some of them.

And there's no relationship between them and the tribal responsible Indian leaders.

They're just alienated.

We're still keeping BIA very loose.

We're not going to put anybody back in.

Well, yeah, but see, he's going to the office.

He's going to run the Indian bank right out of there, rather than the .

Basically, it's their recession, primarily, before they go off.

Some of them are .

But is there anything particular you want ?

They're all getting beat up in the Congress over this issue.

They're all being called up there.

There'll be four or five committees going at a given time with our guys up there on the line.

There'll be four or five different committees holding hearings with different secretaries or undersecretaries.

I think you could just give them a pat on the back.

You're proud of them.

It's a good fight.

They're fighting for the country.

No, you don't want to have an ammunition briefing or anything like that.

We're going to give them a little bit of what we gave the leaders, Roy Will and I Will, on the facts.

We'll hand out a lot of ammunition, a lot of the same kind of stuff we gave the leaders.

And that's the subject matter of the meeting.

The briefing itself will take about five minutes for each of us.

I can't see anything.

And they've been at it day after day after day.

It's just sort of pounding and pounding and pounding by people.

And to no productive end.

Yeah, well, he's had a particularly heavy stint this last two weeks.

doing, you know, their usual erasing their problems and all that.

But I would hope they could be a little bit positive.

Oh, they were super positive.

Those are good guys.

Super positive.

They are good guys.

And they're, you know, it's interesting.

They're problems.

And I think maybe we ought to pay the price to do something about it.

But I think they raised more than anything else.

is the social question.

Why can't we come to the White House to see the President?

Like Eisenhower used to have us down in groups.

I don't get it.

When I said that, I turned to somebody and said, God, how many times have we met them?

And they said, well, we've met every year.

But they, anyway, forget that.

The point is, they were saying that...

There's going to be some toughness.

The clear feeling in that group is that you're absolutely right on the budget.

We're going in the right direction, and they want to hang with it.

They know this is what the people want, and they want to be with it.

Their point is, though, you've got to have clear signals.

They've got to know what the veto prospects are.

And when we tell them, we've got to stay with it.

Even if we've decided wrong, don't change our mind.

In other words, make a careful decision first.

Send us a question.

We already did that yesterday.

Right.

And every veto we were going to have.

Right.

And Jerry was there.

And Jerry did a good job.

Yeah.

But the interesting thing to me was that they weren't saying.

You know, you're giving us a terrible time on this budget cutting.

We're going to have another tough time on all these programs.

Now, what they were saying is we want to do this, and we're hanging with you on that.

Just give us a signal so we don't come in back with a social thing.

Are they referring to themselves or their wives?

Their wives.

I can't start on that note, but we can have a...

What they were after was that divide the Congress into courts and have the members with their wives for a reception over here where the president doesn't have a receiving line.

He just comes in and says hi to us and mingles around and goes away.

Let our wives plod around the White House and say, you know, I had a good time with the White House last week.

This thing is mysterious, but it's there.

No, but my point is the Rumsfeld, there you go, John.

There must have been more for them and more for the Democrats.

We will again.

Well, a couple I'm hitting on, you know, is the President going to change his approach and campaign for Republicans in the 76 elections, 74 elections?

You bang that?

Oh, yeah.

When they talk about 70.

Yes, sir.

I did 70, and I said, you know, that's sort of, I acted then.

I said, that's a ridiculous question in a sense.

There is no man in the history of the Republican Party whose credentials are more clearly established than those of Richard Nixon.

And

To their great credit, a couple of the older guys said, here, here.

You know, they backed him immediately.

And then I said to the president, his campaign, his campaign, he's completely aware of that.

But then I also said that the key point here is that the responsibility starts with you and your campaign committee.

in developing candidates, first of all, that are, have a chance to win, and secondly, if you target the districts, so that, and of course, Bud Brown and Bob Wilson were both there, Bill Brock and Bob Wilson, so if you target the districts, and then the White House stands ready to help in any way we possibly can.

George Bush was there, and he said, that's the only thing the president keeps hitting me on, over and over and over.

He says, you've got to get candidates, and we've got to move, you know, all of his interests is,

We're in good shape.

Well, let me ask, though, regarding the candidates.

You can't get us in a position where I spend so much time with the minority that certainly don't get the votes that we sometimes need.

The others, they've got to understand that.

Now, they need that phone.

A couple of them said that, you know, you've got to talk to the other Democrats.

That's why they don't want to be spending an hour with Long.

Why do we spend it with Mills?

Because they're indispensable.

Absolutely.

And they think I should spend an hour with Schoenigle?

No.

Well, on that sort of thing, what the hell can you do?

That's how we eat in the White House.

Well, we might do more of those.

That's more than I don't know.

Well, for that moment, I don't know.

Well, you've got the shirt on their hands, and they come down.

They all have to be aware.

I never mind that.

It's just a question of what we want to do.

Well, I mean, one of the first things you did was have a reception for the new members, and, you know, you wanted to welcome them and their wives.

Well, what do you think?

Well, I don't know.

I think we ought to...

I don't think that they, it's their wives that they really want to get it.

It is their wives.

As soon as we can get a couple of evenings on, rather than going through stances less.

And certainly, we've got to go through stances less.

You've got to go through stances less.

But rather, we can sure move mouth.

We already have a mouth.

I don't know whether you want to waste it.

They've all been here.

Their wives have all been to receptions and so forth.

Not much.

That's a funny thing.

They want to come more often.

And, well, you get some, like, fairly senior guys, like Brock, for instance.

Brock sure can't complain.

Well, I don't know that he's complaining, but, I mean, guys are that vintage, so to speak.

Yeah, he was here a couple of weeks ago.

He was here a half a dozen times during the transition period.

Yeah, he was also asking.

young senators, for instance, of that person's second term.

Right, right, right.

You get in a dinner party situation with those people, and by golly, I've had wives hit me over and over and over again in kind of a smitty, pathetic sort of way about how they never get invited to the White House.

Well, now let's come to a couple of other things, you know.

We have the Senate wives, all of them,

But they want more than once a year.

I don't think so.

No matter what you do, it has to be once a year.

I think we've got to probably figure that once at Congress, we've got to do it.

We ought to do it early rather than late, because it's too late.

We ought to have some way of getting all of them in.

For example, I have found that

they're getting away with this idea that because it stands in a four million dollar surplus and that they were crowning because i hope you did answer that because they didn't have did you see that in the news

That's the point that was written.

Yeah, but there's no complaint about that.

Well, the point is they had, each of the committees had a surplus of over $100,000, $200,000, $300,000, which we can't have.

There we want it.

Stan showed it to me.

He said, I don't know if it's entirely because he said the House Campaign Committee had a $300,000 surplus, the Senate Campaign Committee, because I asked them all along, and they never said they wanted anything.

So you see, it's a bummer.

Why didn't you get that?

It wasn't enough.

That area didn't even arise.

But tell Bush.

I put it in the news summary.

I marked it.

You remember one day.

Somebody bubbles up on that.

Yes, sir.

We'll see.

The committee, our committee, where they're bigger, they say, well, they didn't get money.

Now, wait a minute, what about your service?

And that knocks out of the ballpark.

Or they say the president didn't do enough.

Now, wait a minute, you all had television clips and all the senators, you all had this and that and the other thing, right?

The number of states you were in, you know.

Well, even that's not, compared to what Eisenhower ever did.

He never did.

Presidents can't do it.

Well, and it's interesting.

You say to a reporter, how many states does the president go to this time for candidates?

Oh, two or three.

Would you believe 14 or 15?

Oh, it couldn't have been that many.

I said, well, let's get the record out.

That's right.

You go back to it, but you shouldn't.

Well, I just take it from the convention time, you know, from the active campaign times.

And they did.

They forget.

Well, all of a sudden, we did more and more.

Yeah.

No, we all know it's a human trait.

Well, during the first term, the president visited every city.

Even the vice president visited every city.

Nobody's even thought of doing that before.

And nobody, I mean, none of the press would be crazy for that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

I hear the vice president's got to be making them available every month.

Every month.

Nothing cares.

Every damn month.

And I've got my 30 sales, 20 sales, so forth.

They go to every, you know, little chicken shed thing.

And these guys don't appreciate it.

They don't appreciate it.

Oh, yeah, they do.

They do.

Well, I don't know where the family is when they lose.

The guys that the family didn't go to don't.

Well, you know, it was a real impression made.

Eddie Cox was up in the state of Washington.

He did a hell of a job, apparently.

When I go up there, or when somebody comes in, they talk about how he handled himself, and how great she was, and such and such a thing.

The impression they make, especially with the White House, is a tough one.

As I said, Jerry Ford wanted me to have my 15 to crack, and I said, that's going to be about eight months.

You know, these guys have a terrible sense of inadequacy, these congressmen.

You know, and their wives chip away at them.

It is.

There's no doubt.

Tremendous currency.

Yes, Majority.

You know how many you can take care of now?

Why?

So I take care of six each dinner.

That's why it's so important.

So it's a scarce good life.

It is.

If you had to dinner every week and had a hundred of them, it wouldn't be anything to be proud of.

Yeah.

And they don't want to come in that large a group, you know, like when I tell them I can eat meat.

Yeah.

Yeah, they do.

Yeah, they're really, I don't even think you have to have to eat.

I think you can just do it as a reception.

What the hell would you have a reception for?

To honor the conference.

Honor somebody.

Well, you can do that, honor Jerry Ford, but you can have it just as a reception for the Republicans.

I wouldn't have it just for Republicans.

I'd have it – I think that really we've got a real chance at a lot of these Democrats.

Or if they're going to charge too easy, that's a foul.

I don't think they'd do it all at once.

They couldn't do it all at once.

You'd have to break them up.

You'd have to have four of them or something like that.

You'd have to be four of them.

See, the only problem – That's what you did.

You did it exceptionally well.

But we've also had various other things.

There's just reading English at home, except the new members.

Every wife now has had a chance to be in the White House.

And not only the first floor, the second floor.

That's right.

They never did that.

They never did it with Kennedy.

They never did it with Johnson.

That's right.

Now, what the hell if we got that threshold in the third floor?

You bring them by here.

You let them walk past us.

That's what I'm saying.

I don't know what the hell this is going to come to.

You don't have to top it.

Just the fact that they were there.

So they go out, write a letter to their constituents, tell the other ladies.

What the president said to them, what he said to the president, and all that below me.

But you think it's important to have a law, isn't it?

Above and beyond everything else.

That's where the pressure is.

Okay.

But where is it?

I think that's a pretty good idea, though, if you could, you know, and so let them have a little entertainment, so that they feel.

Well, if you're going to do that, then the thing you do is have a series of meetings and fix it.

Don't just have a bunch of stuff, but have a good batch of congressmen, which actually enhances the financial status and all that.

It's kind of fun for them to have a bunch of congressmen.

Well, basically, you can have 200 in the evening.

300.

I wonder if you can, Bob, with the time you put in the stage and all that sort of thing.

Well, if you have 300, you can have 150 from the Congress.

I think what we must do is this.

Let's stop the administration.

uh... uh... uh... uh...

If you do the Congress on a mixed basis with other people and gradually, you can avoid inviting the people you don't want to invite.

Well, and it's less blatant.

That's right.

I know.

You get more credit.

And you treat it like people instead of Congress.

No.

And they can wear a long dress and fiddle around and drink champagne.

I think the evening, though, is the must.

An evening you can do for 300.

Now, you had the captain, but one or two of those personalities...

or henry or somebody like that is a is not a bad example what i had is that i noticed for example and this is only a small thing i noticed for example that after dinner

Two-thirds of the list basically were administrative.

I think it's wonderful.

I'd love to see the secretaries of this about the other thing.

There are some people there that haven't heard about it.

And Bob, I'm not complaining about it.

But what Iowa has done, Iowa had two-thirds of that list of administrative assistants.

They had two.

They had George Mann's administrative assistant, Bob Burns.

That's great.

Administrative assistants of congressmen and senators should come ahead of anybody here except the assistant secretary.

And then the others come.

They're around here all the time.

They're at the White House.

I really think, you know, that's money in the bank.

There's some parents, especially in the late West, where you don't get the orders of the Senate yet.

It's overdone because I know what happened.

Malik pushes the list because he's a strong, vigorous guy.

And nobody's waiting for those other people.

Tenants send in the list, but he's not over it.

And that's easy to do, as they tell us in Christmas.

just give a quarter quote is that right but i'd be glad to do it to have just fat cats and congressmen without mixing a few of yours for therapy purposes

Have no more administration people for therapy.

Let them wait.

Have the administration people for purposes of basically when they need it.

Life for me is no therapy.

I have to go.

That's what I have in mind.

Jesus, I deal with these administrations.

They're all nice, wonderful people working their butts off.

But they've got to go in the back.

Because that's another irritation I find.

You know, the administrative system particularly has no part in that.

You know what I'm saying?

Now, why can't all those people that work in the finance get to come?

Why can't we get to come?

That's a legitimate reason.

That's quite a legitimate reason.

For that, I think I'm complaining about the top people.

They know, you know, that why Kissinger or you or Ag has to come.

But then when you get down to the secretarial, you know, their office of numbers, they say, no, not them.

Why don't we get to come?

Why do those people that are there all the time get to come?

They like having the top people there, I think.

The top people I know, they get to talk to them, and they get to introduce their wives to them, you know, all that sort of stuff.

But if the people would start on you, I think it's worth doing.

Right.

But Bob, would you be sure that the list now shop off the people within the White House, the executive office, the chair of the White House?

Then, let's have star value people from the administration and fill in the balance with Congress.

Senators, Democrats and Republicans.

Could we try not to do it by seniority?

Yes, we did it by seniority.

We had a brand new senator in Georgia, Nunn, for example, the first senator.

He probably drove half the Senate up the hill.

That's why this wild card thing in leadership meetings and that sort of thing, where you get some people that have to be met, I think wild card in the last, pushing cameras a little harder than that.

That's why Carl was just thinking of leaders.

Wild card is great.

Those guys are loads.

Well, I made that point today.

Somebody said, you know, that Craig Gossett said, why don't you expand the leadership meetings and have more people?

And I said, well,

Part of that, of course, is that your leadership seem to likely guard their position in Fort Lauderdale sickly.

And so the other part is that we have the president's requested, and Bill Timmons had a strong agreement with this, that we ought to bring in a few non-leaders to each of these briefings and leadership meetings to give other people who have a particular interest in the subject a chance to sit in and participate.

And we've been doing that.

And understood that was a, had been well received.

A couple guys said, yeah.

A couple guys said, no, I didn't get to come.

See, they're selfish.

They don't give a shit.

No.

Guy A doesn't care if you have Guy B in it, right?

That is not a team.

That's right.

A lot of people think that they're exactly right.

And that doesn't help you one damn bit with any other.

It hurts you.

It hurts you because they also don't like you.

one friend in the 1,000, one in the 1,000.

That's the way it is.

And that's John's point exactly.

They are not a team.

And having one of them is not symbolic of having them all.

It's only symbolic of not having the others.

The one thing, though, that I'm not going to do, I mean, I'm willing to work for these people in the rest, but we cannot get in the position, the horrible position, whether it's with the Congress or the governors or the rest, that somehow the president's got to go win the Congress.

when they're, I mean, we've done something wrong and so forth.

It's got to be the other way around.

Our strategy is exactly the opposite.

We play it that way.

I think we take for example, they're very few districts where the president can run as well or better than all of them can.

They ought to give off their ass and appreciate that.

Well, the whole strategy on this budget and all that is not the president coming and asking the Congress for anything.

But I think that attitude has – that was what I was trying to say earlier.

I think at least this group, the individuals that were there this morning, generally had that feeling that they want to tie to you.

They're not asking you to tie to them.

They're saying give us our marching orders.

We won't march.

Well, I don't know why, if you, Jerry had told me that individual sessions where they can sit and ask questions and so forth and so on.

The great danger of that is that the jackass is fleeting, and some of them are.

They think that that is loss.

Of course, some of the questions aren't as sensitive, but you, I mentioned this to Bob, but you probably didn't realize how

desperately bad that lead from that leadership was.

And it was something that was unconscionable for him to do.

And he probably would have done it deliberately anyway, but it's unconscionable.

delayed the negotiations by perhaps at least a day because we had to, the point was that we had to, I made the point, I mean, there are options, there are questions.

I just did it deliberately so that there would be nothing that I was not very aware of.

And he said, we will go there.

And he went off and said, the president is not optimistic about it.

And Gray fell inside.

Yeah.

And Gray fell out.

Totally.

Okay, on the

Is there anything particularly you want me to say in addition to what you said on Stennis?

I think you covered it pretty well in the hospital where you were taking it out.

I was covered very well in there.

I don't think we had anybody there to take it out.

I know there was a tolerant thing, so you get a tape of it if you have to get it.

It's moving on the bars already, so that's all right.

One other thing, on the urban subcommittee,

It seems amazing, we should say, that the intent of the Urban Committee is to examine this whole area, probably in 1972, going back to 60, 1964, and 68.

And as Senator Urban says, it's not going to be a partisan in nature.

Then, of course, we need support.

It's the presidential election of this last time, particularly as for the Republicans.

Yes, sir, in the resolution.

Oh, all the way through it.

Yeah, there are about ten specifications in that thing.

It says Republicans.

And it says the bugging of the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic Party.

I don't know about the violence, but they had a whole bunch of proposed amendments.

The Tower was pushing to get three and three.

And I think they'll propose this on the floor, three Republicans, three Democrats.

All right.

There's an aspect to this that you may want to allude to, Ron, I don't know.

The Watergate defendants are going to claim that Sirica should not sentence them because he exhibited such malice, prejudice.

If he does sentence them, they will appeal, even those that plead guilty.

Can they do that?

Yes, sir.

Now, there will be, therefore, an appeal pending for the better part of the year.

There's a serious question whether the Senate ought to go forward during the pendency of those appeals, because if the two convicted fellows, their convictions are reversed on appeal, they would be up for a new trial.

That's right.

The White House should take that notice.

Well, all right.

But you ought to have that in mind by way of background.

And, of course, you should have in mind that, obviously, the investigation must be independent.

The scope of the investigation must, of course, be dependent upon the status of any proceedings that are in the courts and must not, under any circumstances,

uh, impede or, well, or interfere with the rights of defendants, uh, to get a fair trial and a fair appeal.

Do regard to the rights of defendants.

Do regard to the rights of defendants to get a trial.

Now that's being advanced to urban, private.

And, uh, uh, I don't know what effect it might have, but...

No.

But what may happen is that one of the defendants will seek an injunction to prevent the hearings from going forward.

Then you've got a nice constitutional question of whether a court can enjoin the proceedings of the Congress, and it'll get all snarled up.

So that's all ahead somewhere.

Well, with regard to this, the key part is that the administration, I said this a while ago, will cooperate with the courts or any investigation that is fair.

Right.

I think that's good.

I don't see anything wrong with saying that.

In other words, we have never, we've never been opposed to thorough and fair investigation.

The elections of 68 and 64 and 60, Senator Goldwater, you could say, has raised some very serious questions about what happened in 1964 on both sides.

And it might be useful that the Senate is really attempting to...

that wants to render a public service for it to go back and pick up those charges as well.

64, uh, 60, 1960, 64, 60.

I don't see why, well, we've stayed out of all this stuff before.

It seems to me we still understand.

Well, I mean, the White House.

When Ziegler says it, it's the President who's saying, getting into the water game.

It seems to me all he ought to get into is that we will, of course, cooperate with any nonpartisan, properly conducted investigation, as we consistently have.

Of course, then you move into the questioning.

What does this mean that the President would permit news?

Exactly.

I'm not going to get into that.

You're dealing with hypothetical questions.

Why don't you say that each case will be determined on its merits, and so you can say they're not.

Or you can put it off.

No, you can put it off by saying, look, we're going to have a complete statement for you very shortly on executive privilege.

Let me take your questions on that subject after you have the statement in hand.

Wait a minute now.

Is that something to borrow?

No, I don't think so.

The statement deals with both the testimonial privilege and also... What is our position going to be with regard to... We say...

It says three things.

Do we go all the way or do we cooperate part way?

Part way.

Well, here's what you say.

It says this.

We've been on record since 69.

We've been very liberal in making people available.

Executive privilege covers two kinds of situations.

One is a situation where a witness is before a tribunal and is asked an improper question and exerts the privilege.

The other is where someone is requested to appear, and because of the nature of his position, the constitutional relationship and custom dictate that he not even appear.

And then it defines, basically, the kinds of people who are protected by the latter privilege.

They are.

In general, it requires the deal and the personal policies related to the person.

And then it draws the analogy then to the clerk of the Supreme Court Justice.

He's privileged against even a period to discuss what the Justice deliberated on before he made it.

How do we justify that?

How do we make a perception there?

Well,

And we made an exception there to avoid the, I mean, you know why we made it.

The rationalization.

You're going to get caught in this.

How do we say that we made this exception for planning?

Why do we say that?

Well, let's take the example of when they want to change their response.

Why do we say no?

Well, the statement makes the point that there are some people who have a dual role, who have a personal staff member to the president role.

And that they can testify in the one area, but have to limit themselves to others.

But there are other people whose existence is solely for the convenience of the president.

Well, that's right.

Well, you mean Kissinger doesn't have a dual role?

No.

He doesn't?

He doesn't.

Flanagan did, in that area.

Flanagan has a dual role.

He's assistant to the president.

He's also director of the staff of the Council on International Economic Policy.

No, sir.

He's not.

Who is?

Some little guy over in the EOB.

Okay.

Well, how do you support the statement that the administration has always said that we will cooperate with the investigation and accept the facts in a partisan nature?

How do we cooperate?

We'll cooperate informally the way we cooperate in letting Henry go up and talk informally to Senate Foreign Relations.

I've been interviewed twice by the FBI on the Watergate case.

I invited him in.

We did the same thing possibly with the Senate committee.

They could submit questions.

But we will not go up and go through a service on the hill under television.

But I don't want to say that today.

But the question will still come.

The question will still come about whether or not the president will permit members of the staff to testify.

That will come bridged off of cooperation.

Now, if I say, gentlemen, I'll take that question.

We have a whole thing about the executive order, the executive privilege coming out.

When that executive privilege statement comes out, the whole focus is going to be on urban value of the water.

Yeah, well, now, just a minute, though.

Ron's got a point.

You may be building that too much.

Maybe it's better for the finesse of now.

I see Ron's point.

I think Ron's saying that it'll be handled on the basis of the policy of each individual case.

That's the answer.

Oh, that sounds fine.

Then you're going to make the point.

Maybe you don't want to get into it now.

See, when I talked to Irvin, the point I made with him was that, in effect, there's an easy way to do things and a hard way to do things.

And that I had the impression that he had not really made an effort

to do things the easy way with the White House, and that there wasn't any reason why we couldn't talk on the telephone about future problems and this kind of thing and see if there wasn't some way to work them out.

And he was quite responsive to that.

The question is whether they want the information

prefer the hard way at times.

We will cooperate, of course subject to the constitutional separation rules, etc.

The constitutional separation of the rules of the Constitution.

And there's strong public policy apart from the Constitution.

You ought to start introducing some of that.

Those, we will cooperate to the extent to, we'll have to debate on it.

It'll depend on the investigation, the scope of the investigation, and the manner in which it's conducted.

See, that leaves open, well, a story to be written.

The executive order is negative.

This approach, we have to recognize, leaves open the possibility for the story that White House officials may testify in an argument.

But you say that no decision has been made, no decisions are before us?

Why don't you say that?

always have these matters of executive privilege on the basis of specific cases and so the question is whether i'll make a statement

The other question is, in swearing him in today, he wasn't able to say a confirmation.

Yeah, but it's brought down in the House.

The House has indicated very clearly that they are not going to move that piece of legislation.

He swore it away, actually, in the last party.

No, he's not.

Who the hell is he?

What do you think that bill says?

He said yesterday that we should beat him.

In other words, are we going to get the two things in our lap?

No.

There was a piece of legislation which we had no objection to.

The edge.

The Dunlop.

The Dunlop, right.

And that's now fired out of the House.

Well, that legislation, we have no objection to it.

But now it's bogged down in the House, and the President feels that the issue of keeping down the cost of living for millions of American families cannot wait for this Congress to

So we're swearing him in today.

Just put it that way.

We cannot wait.

And then the issue of keeping down the cost of living for every man in America is more important, far more important than waiting for the Congress to act.

The Congress may take weeks to act on such matters, and certainly we're not going to wait.

And the President made it a statement.

I'm swearing in to get us to not walk the job.

Stick it right to us.

Okay, the state of the movement situation, I'll ask about that daily.

I'm totally flexible.

Stay loose.

What we're trying to do is get a substitute subject ready.

And there's a speech due up there at 11 o'clock this morning.

It's up there now.

And we'll see if it's any good.

I'm naturally certain.

Oh, of course not.

Of course not.

We could say this, but...

We are several in the process and so forth at the present time.

And they'll be announced when they're ready.

The president's going to be working on this during the Easter recess.

I mean, they need to be, just say that.

They're going to be working on this draft during recess.

Okay, now, Vice, I'm going to mention Henry.

I'm not going to comment on that.

Right, right.

The vice president's

No, I'm not going to do you up.

I just, the 9th of February, he's getting up very late.

The 9th, it's a Saturday night.

He's getting up at 9.

It's a Friday night.

Friday, he gets in 3.30 Friday afternoon.

10 o'clock.

Christ, that's all season.

No, no, I, what they want to do is get you up at 10 o'clock Saturday morning.

Fine, fine, fine, okay.

10 o'clock Saturday morning.

But I may, just between you and me, I may, I don't want you to tell him I'm going to California for sure.

I'll go to Florida.

So you see, my point is, just say the president will be

We say while the Congress is on, put it this way, while the Congress is on its length of day vacation,

tomorrow let me see what the situation is

Thank you very much.

I guess I'm saying to you that John was invited.

The reason the press is jumping, the Congress is jumping, is because sons of bitches are dying.

You know, Christ, they're dying.

They wanted war and they got peace.

Kill them.

Absolutely kill them.

Let them die.

That's why they're capturing them unnecessarily.

Just a bunch of goddamn asses.

That's the trouble with the Congress.

Peacemakers up there.

They're dead.

They just died.

Because now they wanted war, and they got peace.

War was their issue.

They got peace, and that's your best word.

You might use that to them after you leave.

What about the situation in Sedona County?

Rather remarkable to me that the New York Times, that left-hand side of it, called Libby about Chagrin.

I thought that was out about eight months ago, or three or four months ago.

Am I right or wrong?

Yes.

I think it's a revelation.

Of course, that's one of the areas of all the revelation.

Everything they're lobbying out now is stuff that's already been out.

They're just retooling and lobbying out again.

If we could just get our people to say, now, well, didn't that come out before?

Is this anything new on that hearing?

Oh, well.

And start attacking the hearing at a very early time.

Probably .

How big an issue is it in the country?

I don't think it is.

I think it's less and less all the time.

I think that as time goes on and washes away further and further, then when they get into it, they'll make the payday out of it for a while.

You're in Washington.

Yeah.

Well, they have open areas that will get on TV, so...

Ron should then take the position that he's not going to comment on the hearings while they're in process.

And that keeps the White House in awe of him.

And that's going to be my position.

There will be no comment on these hearings while they're in process.

So we don't want to interfere with the hearings.

Maybe just say that in the court and I'll say the same on the hearings.

I don't have questions in person, so I don't have anything to talk about.

We'll have to handle that and see.

Mitchell, I mean, Burgers, you know what?

Mitchell and the rest of them.

They got a dry hole on the Johnson Buckingham.

Well, we just have to get them started with the storage.

We've had a relatively early time since we got the mail.

But they've got to drive it over.

They're still playing that around.

And they have to wait and see what the Senate does today.

And they stall them today, too.

I just wish, as Grady called in the boat, we found out about the boat, right?

He directed them to find out from the moat who was the guy in charge of the buggy.

The Loach is thinking on that, apparently, because Mitchell doesn't have...

The Loach now says that they only got the tall pitch.

Yeah, that his records show that they only did bug, but they were told to, and did not, and refused to vote candidates.

But why the hell did then Mitchell says that Hoover told him?

That's me.

He says Hoover told you and him together at the Pierre Hotel.

That's right.

The threat of that really is worth more than the fact that .

I had an idea on this entertainment thing, talking to that Negro singer last night.

She's going to be at the Plaza Hotel in New York, and is also at the showroom.

The one who is the manager for all that is Vernon, you know?

Vernon?

Oh, Bill Vernon?

Yeah.

He got it from way back.

Must be.

It occurred to me that on a case-by-case basis, we might get Burnham.

Burnham might be the guy to get our, you know, produce our key mix.

Is he?

Or is he?

Well, he's a celebrity finder, at least.

Yeah, this is not the time.

You see, he's coming up now with, as I said, he was coming up with, you know, that old Negro band leader, you know, in New York, and he just isn't up to it right now, you know what I mean?

You know the one with Larry Goddamn Brown?

Oh, yeah.

He's a vinyl manager.

Vinyl manager.

Well, that's because he's trying to play to the people that work for us.

I agree.

I see your point.

But his arms are good enough.

For what?

For eating in the winery.

No.

Well, that's what we're asking.

No, sir.

If he'd be eating in the winery, that would be a disaster.

Well, maybe he's made up.

Maybe we're having dinner in his arm.

Well, no.

He isn't even for that because he...

Of just a band, any band.

That would be true of any band.

You can't just have a band with Les Brown or Lionel Hanson or Guy Lombardo or anybody else.

That isn't enough of a show.

You can have Les Brown if you have Bob Hope.

You can have Lionel Hanson.

If you don't have any of those folks, it's nice enough to work.

It just works.

I don't have a band.

There has to be somebody who's independent and knows all that stuff, doesn't he?

Well, this Mike Kerr thing was an excellent idea.

They were just dancing.

But even they, you know, see they, well, Mike Kerr and the guy, Mike Viner, that works with them, he's the promoter, the producer guy, did a lot of our stuff in the campaign, the convention, and the inaugural thing.

They're crosswise with people because, again, he's MGM.

So he works his staple of people in and annoys the other people around him.

He brought other people in.

that didn't end, there's some argument that he didn't handle it right.

And that, you've got to get a guy who, as I understand it, who doesn't have any acts of crime.

And there is a certain point, that kind of person who is an affiliate.

You found a good job for Pat Powell.

Several possibilities.

Well, one thing we were talking about is putting her in with Ann Armstrong, but the problem is you've got two stars there, and that's... She's not a big star.

She's not a big star.

She'd be with young people.

That's one of the possibilities.

What Andrea wants to do is get out and sell around the country.

She likes conservative type of operation.

That's why she'd be great with Ann.

She'd work with Ann in that area.

She'd be just great.

and give a hand to somebody.

I just think she'd be great.

So we have other people.

Needless to have her around here.

Use her as a hostess for people.

Right.

Work with Julie on the East Wing stuff.

Anything on the idea of a breakthrough?

Mark Hurdman's on that one.

I understand that there's a problem.

Colson was telling me about it.

I had people reach across to go to Brown yesterday or something briefly, and he, between Ehrlichman and Brennan, Ehrlichman is pissed off because Brennan won't take the one-to-one.

That's the other secretary.

Brennan agrees.

Bad choice calling.

Colson says Schultz does not agree with that, but Schultz is getting along very well, so.

But I wanted to tell you that this is one area where you have got to overrule the Ehrlich and Malloy payoff.

Brennan's indispensable to us.

We've got to play his game.

And there's one that, and Malloy in particular, but Ehrlich and also to an extent the domestic people, tilt too much to the managerial, basically barren boy types.

And God knows, I know why, after going through the Romneys, and the Stars, and the Volkeys, and the Hickles, it's much better to have a granite hitter.

On the other hand, we need granite bomb.

We need it badly, and we've got to pay a price for it.

So if the thing comes up, you're to play the ghost role on that.

You understand?

Yeah.

I didn't bring that.

You've got to put it over there.

I have two guys who went to the same university and have this agency for government.

What difference does it make?

The last one I logged in, and I still don't know.

Rogers is a graduate of Cornell School of Business Administration.

He's a button down.

He has a good line in the White House, and he knows Brandon.

He knows the city of Secrecy, and his Irish temper, and the rest of the control.

I just like a guy like Rogers over there better.

He'll be Brandon's man, and it's all right, but he'd be our man to an extent.

He's got to be Brandon's man.

That's right.

And he bought it for his own future.

He was just interested in the branch.

That's right.

So I wish you would, if you wouldn't mind, get into that one.

And it's constantly tilted.

That's what you do with a ballot operation.

It's political.

Yes, sir.

Well, we've seen, now it's out of that now.

Jerry Jones is running.

Jerry Jones is totally political.

Yes, sir.

He's infinitely more cooperative than you.

Well, I think Mal was great.

Mal felt he had to fight the other side because, just as you said, you know, Colson and Mal get their people in, and that's their both, their adversary type people, and that's the way they came to play, and that's good.

Jones is more cooperative in the sense of not being an astragalus.

I think now that it would be good to get the very best polls

questions loaded as much as we can.

And I've got a Gallup done on Boris privately.

Let me tell you, we don't owe Peter anything that we didn't say enough in the campaign.

When I'm getting into the tree, I want you to use Gallup or something, and I want you to use Harris or something.

And of course, then I, you know what I mean?

On the spending issue, when the questions loaded don't bother the ORC, we don't need to do anything for that.

What I'm getting at is,

You get bulls, and then you see Gallop holds for me for time, and they release it.

We can have him take a bull, and then he releases it as a private.

Oh, yeah.

The only, you see, the reason we use the ORC is not because we owe them anything, but because they are much better whores.

They're more magical.

Yeah, sure.

My problem is with a Gallop, and Harris is this way, and I'm sure Semmel, but with Gallop particularly.

Independence.

If they use a bull, they insist on it.

First of all, the questions, and secondly, they release all the questions.

They won't release part of it all.

The beauty of the ORC was they would, after we got the results, agree which ones we put out.

Well, I could use Gallup for other reasons.

I can't align this.

I'd have him do something on an issue like this.

And I think about the spending issue that they want done, which you'll never get done by John and his crowd, is that we need a PR operation.

Now, by a PR operation, I'm thinking of not just doing individual coverage.

First of all, you've got to get pools for individual coverage.

Second, I want you to get Harlow in and get in.

I think I've mentioned this before.

I'll tell you how they work that deal on the application of services.

And Bob, around this country, there must be, get close to working this right away before he takes off.

There are at least maybe a thousand organizations, but let's settle for one.

I see the head of the NAM for example.

They have 20,000 members.

I see the head of the JC's.

They have, you might have the General Federation of Women's Funding.

But in any event, even the business-oriented organizations that made up this, up into the millions,

What I'm getting at is that we have got to get to those people and pick a time and then ask them to circulate their members and get their members to write in the Congress.

Otherwise, Bob, I'm going to walk into a leader's meeting within two weeks.

You, Scott, and others are going to say you'll lead the charge.

But they're able to run it 10 to 1 against what we're doing as well.

That's part of why the attitude was going to was to make three or four of them talk to me and John was to make the chair of this.

The mail is pouring.

The President's request that people write their congressmen on this subject has paid off.

They're getting tremendous mail now.

And he said, keep it up.

He said, any time the president or any of you make statements on this, repeat the thing.

Don't think you've done it.

I do give that in order to shows, to everybody that goes to talk shows.

And that, listen, the Congress hears from a special audience.

let them hear from the General Electric.

And this is exactly, he said, you're exactly right.

It's your position of the General Interest for Special Electric.

Throw the Congress out of the wall.

But he, the Congress was the one that said it was right.

But you see, it is right.

You see, and then the Special Electric, and then that gets us fighting the Special Electric.

So anyway, maybe they're getting mail, but don't assume it's going to continue.

That's exactly what I'll say.

It continues.

And I'm on a program over a period of time where the mail pours into it.

Right in their Congress from the Senators.

Don't write to the President.

Write to the Congress from the Senators.

Mail here is a good thing to do.

Write to your Congress and say, if you want to keep taxes down, write to your Senator.

If you want to keep prices down, write to your Senate.

If you want to get rid of programs you don't like, write to the Congress from the Senators.

on the spending.

And when we get the first veto message, we're done.

We're done.

Or write to them on that.

And let's find out where we stand.

The other thing is that this might be one of those occasions where I might write to a select group that we might educate in a similar way that they

They share these views, and they might express their views with their senators and congressmen.

I hear, especially when there's a generalist, have maybe Ducan and Wright start writing in the morning or evening.

But you see what I mean?

I'm talking on a scattered basis.

Don't leave it to the domestic counsel.

Don't ever leave it to the domestic counsel.

Don't leave it to the domestic counsel.

I've said it three times.

I'll never do it again.

How about it?

Don't leave it any more than you should leave the pieces of things to the security counsel.

Because John will not do it.

He will not do it.

He's got a blind spot on him.

He has.

I don't think he's got a blind spot on him.

I think he has.

He's a great individual, which Henry is not.

But John does not see that it is his responsibility to turn up the PR program.

Does he?

Yeah.

He does my work.

But don't you think you can help?

Sure.

You've got Rudy over there panning to go at things.

He's a real guy.

He will be better, of course, due to the fact that he will not have any enemies to begin with.

And he'll be just as tough as the rest.

And he won't be as much.

And let's get down to it.

Now, of course, it has probably occurred to you that Sanchez's theory with regard to the peace thing is right, that we should not let the issue drop, that the Democrats, the Doves, are desperately trying to forget it and not talk about it at the moment.

Now, of course, we tell those leaders and others to talk about it in a positive way.

We broke the Eisenhower and the war agreement.

i don't know about how it's programmed except to say that uh i noticed for example the south carolina legislature passed a resolution i noticed several little towns passed resolutions it's too late now i guess but you uh have your people or somebody whatever pr that you've got sit down and think what they can do to

express thanks, maybe, to the president for his leadership or peace or something, and get resolution.

Maybe, let's see, we've got to get going on certain things.

I mean, the bench idea is, well, wrong, in one respect is right,

Yeah, although all of this, the key thing is to keep the fact of it up there.

Yeah.

We keep this going, but none, no one of these things, the drumbeat, how it's sung.

Sure.

No one of them does much good.

I get it.

Yeah.

What does, they can't avoid it now.

Last night on TV, the lead stars are 20 minutes close to Vietnam.

Wow.

On every episode.

It will be for a while.

And they ate it, but most of it's positive.

They try to find all the negatives.

They can't.

But unfortunately, even the negatives are so mild that they don't take good time.

They will for a while.

And we've got to keep it going.

No question.

I want you to help the people in the examining things to look at these various things.

Like I said, it's out there on the legislature floor.

That one thing you could do is just stop in and speak with us.

And it was valuable to do those people out there.

And I was supposedly surprised, of course.

Pretty good group.

Well, what I told tenants after doing this one is that I think we've made a mistake, and he's made a mistake, in pushing us to go to things like the Capitol Hill Club party for Bob Dole, or the

House Republican gymnasium.

Yeah, picnics or whatever happens, and all that stuff.

Because that's a waste of our time.

Also, it's common.

But it's very hard for any of us to go into that, because what happens is two or three guys corner you and just grind you away.

Why can't you get so-and-so into the margins of things like that?

Right, right, right.

Where if you go, and the other thing that's wrong that they've done a couple of times is to have a group of us go up and have lunch with the Senate Wednesday group or something.

We all sit around and talk and get to know each other.

Oh, shit.

Which is...

Because it wastes the time of, there's no point in my going to the same place that Jordan goes.

And there's absolutely no point in six of us going.

Everything is one man.

And I completely agree with that.

That's all right.

And also, that's also what Timmons, Timmons is in disagree with the point that I should not go manly up to the hill.

Yep.

But he argues, and he's right, that more of us do it more often.

But what I said is, get us into this kind of thing, where it's a formal situation, where when someone asks me a question, he has to ask it so the other people hear it.

That forces him to be a little bit responsible in his question.

And where my answer is heard by all of them, so that I don't have to say the same thing over and over to everybody.

Instead of putting me in a social situation where I can't win,

in this kind of thing i can come up pretty well and all of us each of us can now running us through these clubs through the bull elephants through the uh and i told them i keep and i'm going to do the bull elements that would were maybe more important than these guys now the full office of the administrative system and uh they have a luncheon meeting it's the same kind of thing it's formal with a head table and they ask you questions and that i think

I've got to get this.

Is anybody seriously suggesting that I should go up and do such things?

They are, but nobody here is.

And they said, you know, the president ought to come up with some fancy questions and challenge the president.

You can't do that.

I don't think so.

And I'm sure they'd like to, but I think we can, by some of us going up,

We can turn off some of that, especially because we haven't done what you could do with this.

You've got to know Jared.

You've got to know Jared and Scott.

You've just got to say that, well, you know, we trust the leaders, but we can't trust them.

We just cannot speak frankly with that president comes up and it's a huge thing.

Yeah, that sort of thing.

Well, you can't approach them.

That's the other thing they want you to be frank and it's all off the record.

Well, that's a lot of money.

You know damn well if you said anything that was... You know, we had paper.

I had paper.

Well, that was that San Devine series.

We had the San Devine series, and I had a group, and they heard the Southern Times once.

It was a dead loser.

All of them were losers.

We've got to work socially.

Socially, I think I can handle them.

There's the key.

You can handle them socially.

We can handle them socially.

It's useless for us to do it socially, and it's not wise for you to do it socially.

We can handle them socially, yeah.

A lot of it is just ego.

So the guy, you know, it's much more soft.

The guy can go back and say, well, I was talking to all of them.

But he doesn't want to say it on his side.

He's got his constitution.

He worked his ass off to get elected.

That's all that's worth.

The poor son of a bitch just wants to be paid attention to it.

You see, the number of self-confident cars up there, you can probably, there may be 50 in the house, there may be 10 inside, and that is all.

You know?

But all the others need attention, attention, attention, attention.

I never needed it.

I never gave a goddamn about the White House or the rest.

Of course, I was only in there six years, but I was doing an important thing.

That's the other thing.

Those aren't the real things that matter.

Almost none.

There aren't any that are.

The only reason I think it's important is I was on the investigating committee.

Of course, we don't have the ones as far as the public is concerned.

They're going to have the power and the will of the Senate and the committee on our side.

But what they were talking about yesterday was

Tower and Griffin.

Right, so Griffin for the lawyer, Tower for the down county.

And Griffin has a good image of sort of the economics.

Oh, God.

That's it.

He's got a sort of discipline type thing, you know.

And the best girl on television looks like a serious... What are we on, probably the 10th time or so?

That may work.

That's the other side of it.

The problem there is that both of them are up for election next time.

I'm afraid they won't track the problem.

That's right.

Don't do it.

The problem with all this is it is going to be a television story.

But on the other side of the coin, it may, it may.

wear out for a certain length of time.

You hear the same old crap over and over, and I just can't imagine that people really get very interested.

Well, there'll be more stuff coming out of the museum every time.

Not much.

Now this damn trial judge in a civil suit, he's got a little excited seeing what Judge Sirica did, so now Judge Ritchie did an old fart apparently.

has released all the, all the, uh, secret.

That's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a,

That's how the Colson stuff started.

Yeah.

I forget which game from where.

Where he said that John heard when I asked him about where to reach on Colson.

I didn't play that.

The most amused thing I thought about was where, the only person where, now, she is.

That's very, very cleverly arranged.

You make stories, you break them, and talk about it.

It's incredible.

I suppose Ron, that's the kind of shirt that sort of, you know, what he does in it.

I really hate him on that one.

He said we could have controlled Johnson's death, or the inaugural, or the decent.

Got it.

So we held it just because of wire gates.

That's all the three of them talking about, isn't it?

Yeah.

Well, we have, of course, the Orchard Excribes and the Crush Conference, so it would be a good time to...

That's why I've got to get a position where it's sound regarding administration people.

And one where I can say whether a question can be answered or that I will not comment on hearing a lot of questions.

Which I think probably is the best thing to say.

to get it back into my cursing or so.

The thing that was good about them, that I much prefer, is that they have, they bring a beautiful, successful, upbeat feeling to the evening.

And that's what people need to hear.

Instead of being very cultured, they need music.

They need to be cheered.

They need to be... You've got to realize that there are, you know, the congressional types that they don't have a... You know, I...

I can't tell you.

I use that a lot, that idea that only 10% of the people really care that much about Senate.

That's very high.

I think you're right.

I don't think maybe 10% go.

But I would say I'd watch those crowd.

Half of these other people don't care.

Half of them.

Half of the 10% know anything about it.

So I just know that's the case.

with our average people, the average that should have care about them.

On the other hand, as I told you, if we could get quieter for the Jewish woman, I'd much prefer to, I don't want a Jew for the Jewish woman.

You remember, we made that horrible mistake, we had Bernstein and that other one.

I was extremely, extremely sorry to mention, but no Jew for the Jewish woman, because Len Brown was talking about a Jewish woman.

That's wrong.

I don't think Len probably consciously thought it was Jewish, but you know, you can think of those terms.

I told Pat, listen, I don't want them to, I, I, I think, you know, Tim Clyburn, he's been here before, but not while we've been here, has he?

No, no, you haven't been with us, but I'm sure John's been here before the concert.

But he's probably been here, see, they didn't have evenings.

Well, no, no, this is not an evening, but you could have Clyburn in here.

I'm wondering if something was a problem after dinner because he didn't do any shortening.

It doesn't matter.

You had a car that didn't rush, rush it down.

It doesn't make it down that way.

It didn't do any shortening.

Sure.

And it was long there.

But it doesn't bring any damage to it.

So it has 15 minutes.

It has 15 minutes for us.

At least with the library, you can put it in the center there, and you wouldn't have a wall.

It would be great.

But you are totally right.

The dinners are losers, because it's too much fabric for too few people.

The evenings are winners.

And by God, we can handle them.

Incidentally, I asked this with the church service, how many of you did these covers for senators?

I don't think the church, why don't you ask them?

true you know i don't know if it would that is one place where i can run in droves you know disagree now you know about 300 church service they all come through the liner but nobody is i decided to knock off the kids from the church services that we get in more and more adults you know you agree

I think that's, we haven't thought of that as a church service.

That's an excellent way to recommend it.

We have some, but we could do a bunch more.

I guess for church service, have a hundred.

That's a very easy way to get congressional attention because they're in town.

Church service is hard to get people from out of town for, although we can do that too, but it's for both of us, obviously.

You know, I think, uh...