1971 | Washington, DC

Blow the Safe

Nixon needs the files.

Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman: You could blackmail [Lyndon] Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing.

President Richard Nixon: How?

Haldeman: The bombing halt stuff is all in the same file. Or in some of the same hands.

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: We have nothing here.

Nixon: Damn it, I asked for that, because I need it.

Kissinger: Yeah, but Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together for three years.

Haldeman: We have a basic history of it—constructed on our own—but there is a file on it.

Nixon: Where?

Haldeman: [Tom] Huston swears to God there’s a file on it at Brookings.

Kissinger: I wouldn’t be surprised.

Nixon: Bob? Bob? Now, you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it.

Kissinger: Couldn’t we go over? Now, Brookings has no right to have classified documents.

Nixon: I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.

Haldeman: They may very well have cleaned them by now, with this thing getting to—

Kissinger: No, I wouldn’t be surprised if Brookings had the file on the bombing halt.

Haldeman: My point is, Johnson knows that those files are around. He doesn’t know for sure that we don’t have them.

Contributor

Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon

From a conversation recorded in the Oval Office. Convinced the Brookings Institution had a classified report on the 1968 Vietnam bombing halt, President Nixon ordered implementation of the Huston Plan, a burglary and surveillance operation directed at antiwar activists. The original plan—which also called for detention camps for domestic radicals— was never implemented, but did lead to the creation of the Special Investigations Unit (known as the Plumbers), whose members planned the Watergate break-in. This conversation was part of 3,700 hours of tapes released starting in 1996, after a lawsuit by a history professor against the National Archives.