On May 25, 1973, President Richard M. Nixon, Stephen B. Bull, Henry A. Kissinger, White House operator, and unknown person(s) met in the Oval Office of the White House at an unknown time between 10:10 am and 10:44 am. The Oval Office taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 928-006 of the White House Tapes.
Transcript (AI-Generated)This transcript was generated automatically by AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Do not cite this transcript as authoritative. Consult the Finding Aid above for verified information.
My initial reading, Mr. President, I said to the Senator in the day, he said, Mr. President, he's struggling.
I know, he's not a president.
I don't have any questions.
What we would like to do is, we're going to send someone out there.
Good.
Send one more.
I mean, it's funny.
They're going down.
Last year, they had 1,000 people.
in the Army.
We think it would be a good event if we can get people there to provide a proper forum and a large enough crowd.
It's a joint PSWR coalition with World War I veterans event.
And we really, really insist.
We've got to do that in our library, too.
They were going to go to the library, but there was no new wing.
The new wing was put up in 1968.
Oh, I see.
It's just a memorial day.
It's a memorial day event, sir.
But it might be a good one since you were initially invited to deliver the dress.
We just would like to make a reading together.
OK.
That's a secret little town.
Half an hour from Salinas.
Salinas, that's where I live.
And there, you sit there anyway.
So, hi, how are you, Mr. President?
We didn't look at it.
We read it.
All right, fine.
This is George Barton.
I'm in the airport.
Give me a minute.
I'll get closer.
Good morning, Mr. President.
Hopefully it's in 15 minutes.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
You know, to check his, he had, he had cold.
I said, together, they may have a few little things of cold.
Okay.
All right.
Fine.
Well, how are you coming along?
Well, we are coming along, uh, fine.
As I told you yesterday, on the, uh, I know it was a pitch of the negotiation with these new freaks, seeing what they are.
Goddamn Federal Tribune over there, every day printed every critical article they could find on the editorial page.
Every day, one or two, sometimes the whole editorial page full of attacks.
The lack of patriotism of these, I sent some pictures out of it, I made it work for me.
I tell you, Peter, I know that we have nothing left to lose.
Thank you.
Well, I think we've either got the liver or the spine, didn't you?
That was really moving.
Those guys are great.
I wish you'd have been there in the afternoon tonight.
And we'll talk to them in there.
Well, Hayes told me you were magnificent.
And that you did a great job.
Yeah.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I'll call you back tomorrow.
I understand it was tough.
It was strong.
And, of course, these people are magnificent.
It was really moving last night.
It made me realize that, you know, in a sense, it's all worthwhile.
I mean, whatever happens in the future.
That one night, you know, you heard, I mean, old crows come up there with deers in their eyes, like Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne and Dick DeMone.
And, you know, they've done the greatest shows in the world and say this is their great experience.
For one minute.
Good God almighty, you know.
Mr. President.
They were, they, and then you realize that but for what we did, a terrible decision we sent, they'd still be in that state of hell.
And for four years.
Did you hear that?
Yeah.
Oh, God.
Well, if they all came out then.
Yeah, yeah.
I know they were all in it.
I told them to be sure to point you out, you know, because they're saying, well, this doctor is here.
I'd like to see his ass.
You've got to go out on my phone.
I sent the one way to Mrs. Stockdale.
You know, she's a real raving bitch.
Her husband is an animal.
And she says, I really gave those kids a hard time.
And he used to.
And then I gave Agar a hard time.
And she said, but she was nice.
She was nice.
She said, I just love that man.
He's so, you know, honest, funny.
And
Because the company meetings we had with those people, those were huge.
It was something that enhanced me to the felt, and we got it back.
And you notice how they all said with honor, and they have those flags in there.
God damn it, it meant something to them.
And that marvelous flint, when he got up there and said, I got them here, and those said, the Jews come over, we were coming home.
And we also, we started to pack our bags, because we were coming home, and we were coming home with honor.
Jesus Christ, that's what it was.
It's all about it.
That's what the American people someday will remember.
This is a sickness now that we are going through.
A sickness is basically, though, we have to realize, it is an obligation.
I should apologize to Paul next time.
In our case, it would be a slap in the wrist.
Well, that's what I'm going to do again.
But basically, it's an assault.
The Democratic Liberals should be held obedient, however.
They got their candidates lost.
Having lost, they didn't know what the crisis was going to happen to them.
They see this as an opportunity, not to just destroy the Republican Party, but to get back into power.
And they don't care if they destroy the country in the process.
See, they didn't mind losing the war.
We know that the men of the war were those Americans.
They didn't mind because their only interest is power, Henry.
They thought that who we have against us at the present time?
A group of people.
A group of people.
Some politicians and some members of the press, unfortunately.
I don't mean all of them, but some.
Who?
And, unfortunately, three-fourths of the faculty of the school.
who have a financial desire to get power at any cost from America, but on the two, they hate this country deep down because they hate themselves.
And now... Do you have a response?
You're 100% correct, Mr. President.
They wouldn't have minded losing the war in Vietnam.
They betray this country in its deepest sense.
For that, they're getting away scot-free.
George Bundy called me yesterday
and said, I should disavow you not on the legality of the who, for why, and how, but on the morality.
If I did that, he said, then my friends would see to it that I had survived.
I said, George, the man who testified at the Ellsberg trial when 10,000 government documents were stolen, and who I do not remember said one word about the morality of that situation, had no right to tell me anything.
And I will say not one word.
That's what I agreed with the decision.
Secondly, I will say not one word about the president.
Does he know that they can't?
He can't say that.
Oh, shit.
They can't all over the place.
But he swears.
Bobby Kennedy did.
He's a goddamn liar.
He swears they didn't, but I think we should get them signed up.
And we can't get them to come out and burn.
Hoover does all that.
That's what they're going to do about it.
because we should have proven those.
I don't know why we were so nuts as to put them into the sand.
Forget that.
Forget the George funding.
No, no, but it just shows the moral collapse.
I think, Mr. President, you ought to go on the counterattack.
You've got nothing to lose on this.
The country has a lot to give.
We will.
But we have a number of things.
The Canadians are announcing today that they're withdrawing from the International Control Committee.
I talked to them.
I got them to extend it to 60 days.
Now, on the negotiations in Paris, basically... How are you going to talk to the captain?
Nothing, because the North Vietnamese promise us they wouldn't say anything.
You're just going to talk to the captain about what, then?
Well, I told her she would talk to Ombidou, what she was planning to do with the year of Europe.
and give them five minutes on this.
Basically what we did is we traded starting the things, resuming the things we had started in April for observance of the agreement, which is what we want to begin with.
We're going to...
I'm going over there on the 6th.
We're going to conclude the agreement on the 8th.
And we'll...
In Paris.
In Paris.
And we're going to sign it there.
Because it's a communique, it's not a formal agreement.
Right, good.
But there's going to be, both, all sides will issue new ceasefire orders.
They will stop infiltration and then put that into the agreement.
We've killed the National Council of National Reconciliation.
That's now practically dead.
The agreement now only says the two parties should be encouraged to form it as soon as possible, which means never.
Do you remember how they were using other coalition governments?
Uh, we got, uh, we, we got them to... One point is that you must very strongly get wherever you are, is that leaks of sensitive national security documents have seriously imperiled your negotiating position.
Oh yeah.
And we know that's true.
That is true.
That is true.
And as I said that yesterday, I said we had our sole position to put off advance while we had all the other positions in Vietnam.
That was the reason.
And I went on to say that without secrecy, we couldn't have done China, because it's not Russia.
And we couldn't have had the war in Vietnam.
And we had to have security.
We had to have more of you than all of us in there.
I had no question about that.
Go ahead.
That's Dan .
On the two-party military commission, where they have their people scattered all over South-Vietnam, we've got them to agree to bump them back to the zone of borders.
So now there are no Viet Cong running around South-Vietnam anymore.
And, in effect, I've written you a memo.
I'll, uh, send it as a letter.
It's in my office.
I've got to bring it.
Why don't you send, uh, Sir Whitby to Florida?
I've sent it to the chairman.
He's getting Elliot this morning.
Good.
I'll send it with you to Florida.
And, uh, the entry of the people of Vietnam is in effect to, to, to remark the existing situation.
They will stop political subversion head on, uh, and military attacks.
On the other hand, they're getting the territory they're already holding more or less recognized.
So it's a sort of division of the country, but they only have 5% of the population.
Yeah.
What's Q getting up about?
Well, Q is going through the same crap that he did in November and December.
I mean, I'm going to just cut his head off.
A hundred mistakes with no consequence.
I've gone over this with Haig.
I've gone over this with Sullivan.
No one who's seen this agreement.
Haig's probably a character.
God damn it, Q is working out with Sullivan.
God damn it, Q. I mean, I have a fight for his aid.
They don't want to use him as aid anyway.
Well, he's going to come along now.
To lose the war.
We know that the men of the war were those Americans.
They didn't mind because their only interest is power, Henry.
They might have been doing that against us at the present time, a group of people.
A group of people.
Some politicians and some members of the press, unfortunately.
I don't mean all, but some.
Who, and unfortunately, three-fourths of the faculty in this country, who have a fanatical desire to get power again.
On Laos, we've got a fixed date for the beginning of withdrawal.
The area where we're doing badly is Cambodia.
Well, the trouble is, Marshall Green and Swagg killed us in Phnom Penh.
Their trust isn't enough.
Their trust isn't enough there to hold it together, and the bombing restriction killed us.
Now, I have told them I won't sign this.
unless they give us something on Cambodia, so I'm playing chicken with them.
My recommendation to you, though, is that after I've played chicken, I'd better eat it.
Because in Vietnam, in Laos, this is better than where we are.
I'll play chicken until five minutes before the end of this session.
But...
And how are the dealings with the Russians going on?
On the Russians, Mr. President, what we have to do is by early next week, we have to make a decision on how we're going to handle the summit information.
This nuclear treaty, which would have been a temp strike in a position of great strength, now can easily be twisted as a desperate act because of watering.
And it's essential that we get the bureaucracy lined up and that we get a procedure worked out on this, because if we spring this up... You're not spreading the bureaucracy?
No, no.
I'm waiting for your decision.
But the bureaucracy can kill us.
It's a very subtle thing.
We can easily sell it, but we've got to have everyone pulling for it.
No worries.
I'll be ready.
But we've got to get it ready weeks before.
to a lot of, not by us, to a lot of news agencies.
We don't know who did it.
State Department officials.
It's not true.
And the State Department doesn't know a damn thing about it.
They didn't do it, but it's not so significant because people are deliberately causing it.
And... You don't think Russians did that?
No.
I have too much of a sense of it.
The British might have done it, but they know about it.
The French might have done it, they know about it.
But that's something that's a bit... Well, that's true.
That's whoever did that should be fired.
Well, it may be an ally.
I don't think it was.
It couldn't be the State Department, but they didn't know about it.
On my side, only two people know about it.
Oh, well.
We've got your staff.
We know virtually no one so far.
So...
But that's the decision, Mr. President, you should make by the time you come back from Iceland.
That's how to handle the control of the bureaucracy.
One of you is hay.
Sit down and give me a thing.
See, I'll use hay as the hammer.
I don't want you to be the means on the pitch.
But hay, give me.
Absolutely.
And with these kind of people, I'm scared of them.
They should have gotten them launched.
Now, on the phone video meeting, Mr. President, this is very important.
He's the key to the year of Europe.
And I will write out talking points very carefully.
I've had a long talk with him.
But he's going to be a tough sell.
I don't know how much detail you want to get into now.
I'll do a little before the capture.
You can pick up some there.
But we ought to spend some time.
Because that you have to get.
It's got to be more precise, because he's more precise than the meetings with... Sure, sure.
...with Brandt, which wasn't your fault, God, the conditions you had there.
Well, you couldn't be more precise then, but we can be now.
We've got the British lined up.
We've got the Germans lined up.
If we can get to France, then we can have a very major achievement.
Well, that's my understanding.
There you go.
At the end of this year.
And...
I'm going to talk.
I'm going to talk.
I had an excellent talk with him, but the French are wary.
They're stupid.
They don't understand.
Another thing we have to do is to get the French agreement, or at least toleration of that nuclear treaty, with the Russians, and not let him slide off so that we don't know whether he's going to hit us after we publish it with the Russians.
No, he knows it already.
We've already given it to him, Mr. President, because we thought it was too dangerous to have it.
How are you feeling?
I'm having fun.
How are you feeling?
I feel fine.
We've got to bargain.
I was...
I was moved, really.
I was practically in tears myself.
I was so moved.
God damn it.
You've got to keep it all in perspective.
Keep your fight all the way.
I repeat my side.
You can count on it.
You've been the grand president.
They've torn around.
They're carrying some presidencies.
They're carrying a truth because they also want to.
They know that this is for me personally, not because of the crowd.
Because it's a man.
Because God.
Mr. President, I tell you the Europeans are appalled by what allegedly happened.
But I should get it to the newspapers.
The Europeans are terrified that we're losing our authority in this country.
Not because of what... Well, I think we had that problem.
We have it more than we had it before.
This is the legal...
This is the legal version of the riots.
They've been able to destroy you.
It is the legal version of the riots.
Of the riots in this country.
I understand that.
They, at first, they tried to subvert your government.
They tried how to do it by YouTube.
Now they've been seen.
So when you look at this stuff that was done, basically it was boycott stuff.
It was just breaking into a psychiatrist's office.
There isn't one big thing that was done.
Well, there's a lot of people.
There's a lot of people.
And they are now trying to do what they tried in 69 and 70.
I think, Mr. President, you might consider...
and say, this is my program.
Now, the guilty will be punished, but the country is eternal and continues.
You said that.
You said that.
Yeah, but you have never said it toughly where the people could rally to you and said, now I ask the American people to get back to the business of government.
Now, you'll get a lot of treatment, but no matter what you do, you'll get screaming, so you might as well fight this.
I think it would be very helpful, just from a positive standpoint, if you could do a news thing on Wednesday, Tuesday.
Absolutely.
Because now you'll have to realize that they'll, the competitive thing and so forth, you're talking about Europe, they'll realize your speech in Europe, they'll get even more so, they'll get you on.
I don't think I could answer one of your questions.
Well, except when they ask me one of my questions.
I don't think there's a paper that has been put out and that you supported.
I'm sure you did.
Don't say anything more.
But I do think you ought to make the point that I made in my speech, in order to get around anywhere.
It is necessary for, I mean, we would not have made the progress we've made in the year 1972 without having security in our communications.
We cannot make progress in the next four years without security in our communications.
And, gentlemen, we just have got to get away from this totally unrealistic view that you may be a hero out of an individual who steals a document and condemns somebody who tries to condemn them.
I don't get very help from that.
I need your help on that.
Okay.
Please, ask me.
Now, you're 100% correct, Mr. President.
They wouldn't have minded losing the war in Vietnam.
They betrayed this country in its deepest sense.
For that, they're getting away with God's grace.
George Bundy called me yesterday and said I should disavow you, not on the legality of the Hooper-Weill attacks,
But on the morality, if I did that, he said, then my friends would see to it that I survived.
I said, George, the man who testified at the Ellsberg trial when 10,000 government documents were stolen, and who I do not remember said one word about the morality of that situation, had no right to tell me anything.
And I will say not one word.
First of all, I agreed with the decision.
Secondly, I will say not one word about the predecessor.
Does he know that they tank?
He claims they didn't.
Oh, shit!
They tanked all over the place.
But he swears they didn't.
Bobby Kennedy did.
He's a goddamn liar.
He swears they didn't, but I don't think we should get those signs out.
We can't get them.
We took them out and burned them.
Hoover does all that.
That's what they're going to do with ours.
No, Sullivan says they tanked.
Sullivan.
Because we could have proven those.
I don't know why we were so nuts as to put them into the sand.
Forget that.
Forget the George funding.
George funding.
No, no, but it just shows that Morrow collapsed.
I think, Mr. President, you ought to go on the counterattack.
You've got nothing to lose on this.
The country has a lot to give.
We will.
But we have a number of things.
The Canadians are announcing today that they're withdrawing from the International Control Committee.
I talked to them.
I got them to accept it in 60 days.
Now, on the negotiations in Paris, basically... How are you going to talk to the captain?
Nothing, because the North Vietnamese promise us they wouldn't say anything.
You didn't talk to the captain.
Why wasn't that?
I thought that you had talked to Ombidou, what you're planning to do with the Eurobureau.
And Ed gives them about five minutes on this.
Basically what we did is we traded starting the things, resuming the things we had started in April for observance of the agreement, which is what we want to begin with.
I'm going over there on the 6th.
We're going to conclude the agreement on the 8th.
And we'll...
In Paris.
In Paris.
And we're going to sign it there.
Because it's a communique, it's not a formal agreement.
But there's going to be, all sides will issue new ceasefire orders.
They will stop infiltration and then put that into the agreement.
We've killed the National Council of National Reconciliation.
That's not practically dead.
The Indian people now only say the two parties should be encouraged to form it as soon as possible, which means never.
Do you remember how they were accusing us of coalition government?
Uh, we got, uh, we, we got them to... One point is that we must very strongly get wherever you are, is that leaks of sensitive national security documents have seriously and terribly renegotiated the position.
Oh yeah.
And we know that's true.
That is true.
That is true.
Because I said that yesterday, and I said we had our sole position to put off advance while we had all the other positions, and we had not been able to attend.
That was the reason.
And I went on to say that without secrecy, we couldn't have done China, because it's not Russia, and we couldn't have had the war getting on.
We had to have security.
We had had more of it, and then all of a sudden, we lost all of it.
I had no question about that.
Go ahead.
That's a damn great part of what you're saying.
On the two-party military commission, where they have their people scattered all over South Vietnam, we've cut them to a degree to pull them back to the zone of borders.
So now there are no Viet Congs running around South Vietnam anymore.
And in effect, I've written you a memo.
I'll send it to you later.
Why don't you send it to me to Florida?
I'll send it to you to Florida.
And the end result of the decision of Vietnam is, in effect, to rectify the existing situation.
They will start political subversion head on, and military attacks.
On the other hand, they're getting the territory they're already holding more or less recognized.
So it's a sort of division of the country, but they only have 5% of the population.
What's Q getting up about?
Well, Q is going through the same crap that he did in November and December.
A hundred lip-takes with no consequence.
I've gone over this with Haig.
I've gone over this with Sullivan.
No one who's seen this agreement.
Well, he's going to come along now.
On Laos, we've got a fixed date for the beginning of withdrawal.
There's a withdrawal in July.
There's the area where we're doing badly.
It's Cambodia.
It's Cambodia.
There's a lot of things in the news, sorry, about the Chinese today, saying they're still spending.
Well, the trouble is, Marshall Green and Swang killed us in Phnom Penh.
Their trust isn't enough.
Their trust isn't enough there to hold it together, and the bombing restriction killed us.
Now, I have told them I won't sign this.
unless they give us something on Cambodia, so I'm playing chicken with them.
My recommendation to you, though, is that after I play chicken, I better yield.
Because at least in Vietnam and Laos, this is better than where we are.
I'll play chicken until five minutes before the end of this session.
But...
And how are the dealings with the Russians going on?
On the Russians, Mr. President, what we have to do is by early next week, we have to make a decision on how we're going to handle the summit information.
This nuclear treaty, which would have been a temp strike in a position of great strength, now can easily be twisted as a desperate act because of watering.
And it's essential that we get the bureaucracy lined up and that we get a procedure worked out on this, because if we spring this up... You're not spreading the bureaucracy.
No, no.
I'm waiting for your decision.
But the bureaucracy can kill us.
It's a very subtle thing.
We can easily sell it, but we've got to have everyone pulling for it.
Don't worry.
I'll be ready.
But we've got to get it ready weeks before.
For example, yesterday,
Not by us.
To a lot of those news agencies, we don't know who did it.
State Department officials.
It's not true.
And the State Department doesn't know a damn thing about it.
They didn't do it, but it's not so significant because people are deliberately causing it.
And... Yeah.
You don't think Russians did that?
No.
I have too much of a sense in it.
The British might have done it, but they didn't know about it.
The French might have done it, they didn't know about it.
But that's something that's... Well, that's true.
That's whoever did that should be fired.
Well, it may be now.
I don't think it was...
It couldn't be the State Department, because they didn't know about it.
On my staff, only two people know about it.
Oh, well.
We've got your staff.
We know where she is.
Oh, well, not so far.
So...
But that's the decision, Mr. President, you should make by the time you come back from Iceland.
That's how to handle the control of the bureaucracy.
One of you is hay.
Sit down and give me a thing.
See, I'll use hay as the hammer.
I don't want you to be the means on the pitch.
But hay, give me.
Absolutely.
And with these kind of people, I'm scared of them.
They should have gotten them launched.
Now, on the phone video meeting, Mr. President, this is very important.
He's the key to the year of Europe.
And I will write out talking points very carefully.
I've had a long talk with him.
But he's going to be a tough sell.
I don't know how much detail you want to get into now.
I'll do a little before the capture.
You can pick up Sunday.
But we ought to spend some time.
Because that you have to get really, if we can get the branch,
It's got to be more precise, because he's more precise than the meetings with... Sure, sure.
...with France, which wasn't your fault, the conditions you had there.
Well, you couldn't be more precise then, but we can be now.
We've got the British lined up.
We've got the Germans lined up.
If we can get to France, then we can have a very major achievement.
Well, I understand.
There you are.
At the end... at the end of this year.
And...
I'm going to talk.
I'm going to talk.
I had an excellent talk with him, but the French are very... they're stupid, they don't understand.
Another thing we have to do is to get the French agreement, or at least toleration of that nuclear treaty with the Russians, and not let him slide off so that we don't know whether he's going to hit us after we publish it with the Russians.
No, he knows it already.
We've already given it to him, Mr. President, because we thought it was too dangerous to have it.
And how are you feeling?
I'm having fun.
How are you feeling?
I feel fine.
We've come to bar you in the community to try meeting those wives.
Oh, I was moved, really.
You know, about two-thirds of the politicians are just all pride.
I was practically in tears myself.
I was so moved.
God damn it.
necessary.
All get up there.
You gotta keep all perspective in here.
That's the plan.
Keep your fight on, boy.
I repeat my side.
You can count on it.
You've been a grand president.
They've torn around.
They're tearing some Presidency in here.
They're tearing it through because...
They also want to...
They know that they're searching me personally, not because I'm a friend.
Because it's a man.
They're getting their divestments, Mr. President.
I take it the Europeans are opposed, not by what allegedly happened.
But I should get it to the newspapers.
The Europeans are terrified that we're losing our authority in this country.
Not because of what we're doing.
We have it more than we had it before.
This is the legal version of their eyes.
They've been out of it, showing you.
It is the legal version of their eyes.
I mean, explain that.
They, at first, they tried to subvert your government.
They tried to do it by you.
Now they try to do it by me.
So when you look at this stuff that was done, basically it was boycott stuff.
It was breaking into a psychiatrist's office.
There isn't one big thing that was done.
But it is getting bigger.
You know, it is getting bigger.
And they are now trying to do what they tried in 69 and 70.
I think, Mr. President, you might consider...
and say, this is my program.
Now, the guilty will be punished, but the country is eternal and continues.
You said that.
You said that.
Yeah, but you have never said it toughly, where the people could rally to you and said, now I ask the American people to get back to the business of government.
Now, you'll get a lot of screaming, but no matter what you do, you'll get screaming, so you might as well fight this.
I think it would be very helpful, just from a positive standpoint, if you could do a news thing on Wednesday, Tuesday.
Absolutely.
Because now you'll have to realize that they'll, the positive thing and so forth, you're talking about Europe will, it'll be like the speech in Europe, they'll get even more so, they'll get you on.
I don't think I should answer Watergate's questions.
Well, except when they ask me what I should answer.
I don't think they need this paper.
It's a paper that has been put out and that you supported.
Period.
Don't say anything more.
But I do think you ought to make the point that I made in my speech in order to get around anywhere.
It is necessary for, I mean, we would not have made the progress we have made in the year 1972 without having security in our communications.
We cannot make progress in the next four years without security in our communications.
And, gentlemen, we just have got to get away from this totally unrealistic view that you may be a hero out of an individual who steals a document and condemns somebody who tries to condemn them.
I will get very tough on that.
I will get very tough on that.
Okay.
Please, if you ask me.