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April 22, 1972

Introduction

This almanac page for Saturday, April 22, 1972, pulls together various records created by the federal government and links to additional resources which can provide context about the events of the day.

Previous Date: Friday, April 21, 1972

Next Date: Sunday, April 23, 1972

Schedule and Public Documents

  • The Daily Diary files represent a consolidated record of the President's activities. Visit the finding aid to learn more.

    The President's day began at Camp David, Maryland

  • The Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents made available transcripts of the President's news conferences; messages to Congress; public speeches, remarks, and statements; and other Presidential materials released by the White House.

    Digitized versions can be found at HathiTrust.

  • Each Public Papers of the Presidents volume contains the papers and speeches of the President of the United States that were issued by the White House Office of the Press Secretary during the time period specified by the volume. The material is presented in chronological order, and the dates shown in the headings are the dates of the documents or events. In instances when the release date differs from the date of the document itself, that fact is shown in the text note.

    To ensure accuracy, remarks have been checked against audio recordings (when available) and signed documents have been checked against the original, unless otherwise noted. Editors have provided text notes and cross references for purposes of identification or clarity.

  • The Federal Register is the official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other Presidential documents.

Archival Holdings

Any selection of archival documents will necessarily be partial. You should use the documents and folders identified below as a starting place, but consult the linked collection finding aids and folder title lists and the collections themselves for context. Many documents to be found this way do not lend themselves to association with specific dates, but are essential to a complete understanding of the material.

  • Selective document listing

    President's Office Files

    The President's Office Files consists of materials drawn together by the Special Files Unit from several administrative subdivisions within the White House Office. It is the handwriting and sensitive papers sent to the Staff Secretary that now comprise much of the President's Office Files. Visit the finding aid to learn more.

  • The H. R. Haldeman Diaries consists of seven handwritten diaries, 36 dictated diaries recorded as sound recordings, and two handwritten audio cassette tape subject logs. The diaries and logs reflect H. R. Haldeman’s candid personal record and reflections on events, issues, and people encountered during his service in the Nixon White House. As administrative assistant to the President and Chief of Staff, Haldeman attended and participated in public events and private meetings covering the entire scope of issues in which the Nixon White House engaged in during the years 1969-1973. Visit the finding aid to learn more.

    • Transcript of diary entry (PDF)
      Saturday, April 22nd. Still at Camp David; cold, rainy, heavy cloud-layer day.

      The President called me over to Aspen about 11:30 for about three hours. He had a fire going in his study, and he got into the question on details of the Russian trip. He gave me a lot of instructions for Chapin on taking some very firm positions on the things that we want to do, such as using our car, using our plane, going to Leningrad on Saturday, not on Sunday. The President's convinced that the Soviets are pushing for Sunday in order to avoid the President getting a good crowd there, etcetera, and so on. I covered that by cable with Chapin.

      The main area of concern was Kissinger's trip and the general Vietnam situation and plans for the TV follow-up next week. He's concerned about the effect of Kissinger's trip, whether the people in this country will think he's there because the Russians are pressing us and that this is a sign of weakness or not. He feels that we can't show any overt weakness on our part, and he called Haig several times during our meeting, each time emphasizing the importance of maintaining our bombing and other attack levels. He's especially concerned about the effect on our people, the hawks, who are now enthusiastic, but could be turned off pretty rapidly if, as a result of Henry's trip, we backed off. He says that Henry has to make clear that if the May 2nd meeting is not conclusive...

      -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      DECLASSIFIED - E.O. 13526, Sect. 3.4: by MS, NARA, June 12, 2013
      Audio Cassette 20, Side B, Withdrawn Item Number 27 [AC-20(B) Sel ]
      Duration: 21 seconds

      …we'll hit Hanoi and Haiphong for 3 days running. He also told Haig to have Henry hit Gromyko on the downgrading of the trip from a state visit to a summit meeting and to demand that he change that.
      -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

      Part of our plan here is Kissinger's unbelievable ego, in that he's really pushing to have the President announce his Moscow trip and make a big thing out of it. Also, apparently he hasn't followed instructions from the President as to what he's to be negotiating. He's spending his time on the Soviet Summit agenda rather than on getting Vietnam settled, and the President was clearly disturbed by the information he had received from Henry last night. He waited all day and into the evening for a message today, and the last I'd heard, it still hadn't come. It now appears that Henry won't come back until Monday, which is again the ego thing, because he was determined to have a three day meeting and he's managed to do it.

      The President then made the point that he's basically decided not to have a press conference next week, but rather to go on television for a Vietnam announcement, where he would cover the troop withdrawal question, some follow-up on Kissinger's trip to Moscow, explain why we're doing the bombing, a…

      [End of tape reel AC-20(B)]

      [Begin tape reel AC-21(A)]

      Continuing Saturday, April 22nd; talking about the point of the President's announcement plans re: Vietnam. His feeling being that he's got to explain the background of what's been going on, and all, in an uncluttered atmosphere of a speech rather than of a press conference. He had first told me to have Safire try a draft of the speech, but then later decided not to. That he'd write it himself, but he wants Buchanan to prepare a 500 word opening statement, purportedly for the press conference. In that, he wants to review what happened: that they massively invaded with Russian tanks, what, that our reaction was to respond, especially why we couldn't bug out, building up Agnew's line but cool down some, say that the South Vietnamese are fighting hard, and well that we'll stop the bombing when they stop the invasion of the South. And any other good points that the President could mention. In other words, this would be a progress report on Vietnam: why we bombed, snap back at the critics, thank the American people for their support, but without the antagonism of the press conference. He told me to tell Haig what his plan was, which would be first to announce Kissinger's trip on Tuesday, and then the President go on TV Wednesday night, make the troop announcement, and the plenary session announcement. He told me, as I said, to have Haig hold that up, but Haig says he can't. He then wanted Haig to come up this afternoon and talk with him, but Haig had other plans, so he's coming up tomorrow.

      He expressed some concern about the general foreign policy PR, making the point that Haig had told him about some very interesting intelligence data that would be good propaganda, but that nobody's taking any initiative to put out. He obviously pondered this, because he called me later in the evening to say that he'd been thinking about that, and had decided that I would have to take over that foreign policy PR responsibility, and that he wanted to talk to Ehrlichman and me about it at 9:00 tomorrow morning.

      I asked him at the meeting about the Connally situation. He said Connally had agreed to do his withdrawal in sort of two steps. First, he would say that he has no plans, when he resigns, he would say that he has no plans for any political activity that the President has his personal support and that of his wife. Second, he would wait till after the Democratic Convention and then come out, blast the Democrats, and announce that he was heading up the Democrats for Nixon. The President said he went through again his line with Connally, that he thought he was the only man who could be President, and that led us back to discussion we had started with Ehrlichman yesterday on the restructuring of the two-party system. The feeling being that the President and Connally, after the election, could move to build a new party, the Independent Conservative Party, or something of that sort, that would bring in a coalition of Southern Democrats and other conservative Democrats, along with the middle road to conservative Republicans. The problem here would be to work it out so that we included Rockefeller and Reagan on the Republican spectrum, and picked up as many of the Democrats as we could. By structuring it right, we could develop a new majority party under a new name, get control of the Congress without an election, simply by the realignment, and make a truly historic change in the entire American political structure. This intrigues the President and Connally, and it's obviously the only way Connally has any future, since he's never going to be nominated by the Democratic Party, and by leaving now he loses much chance of ever being nominated by the Republican Party. If we formed the coalition, with the two of them being the strong men in doing it, he clearly would emerge as the candidate for the new party in '76, and the President would strongly back him in that.

      End of April 22nd.
    • Original audio recording (MP3)

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Audiovisual Holdings

  • The White House Communications Agency Videotape Collection contains “off-the-air” recordings of televised programs produced between 1968 and 1974. Visit the finding aid to learn more.

    • WHCA-5297B
      "Agronsky & Company".
      CBS
      Runtime: 00:29:19

Context (External Sources)