 considering Tommy Thompson for Moscow, but that Tommy was probably reluctant to go. I just wanted to tell you that last night at the dinner party, I had a long conversation with Jane Thompson, who I know very well. And she said without qualification that if you wanted Tommy to go and you personally made it clear to him, you wanted him to go, they'd go with pleasure. Now, this isn't something Dean Russ can do and I haven't talked to him about it. I just want you to know that for whatever you chose to do with it. All right. I'm a little worried about him leaving here, Bob. Well, so am I, but I think that with Kohler back here and with the other Russian experts they have over there, Mr. President, you'd be well served by him in Moscow and I haven't heard anyone suggest anyone else who is qualified for the post. It's likely to be an extremely important post during the remaining years of your presence in the next four or five years. It's extremely important over there. And he is admirably qualified to carry it out far better than anyone else in the country. We just, wait a minute, Bob. They've given me, yeah, these things have a way of appearing. Yeah, evidently there was some article in this last night I didn't see it that somebody mentioned it to me. They say there's a fellow named Davis who is young and very able and very fluent, probably the most fluent one we have in Russian and Romania. They say there's a fellow named Packard or something that he's from some of the embassy that's very good in this field. They say, and I don't know whether this is just an image or not, but they say Reinhardt in Italy is very good. Now, the three or four separate reports I've had on Reinhardt is he's not heavy above the shoulders, that he's dull, that he looks like Brooks Brothers, attractive looking fellow, but that he's not too sharp and keen and so forth. That may be just some of the boys giving him the works. Colerque says he's one of the most brilliant fellows he's ever dealt with. Have you ever dealt with him? Not extensively. I stayed there for one night last week. He was in Naples, sick in the hospital. I talked to his wife at some length. I've known him before. He's well thought of in Italy, but I don't think he's had any really important substantive effect on them or on us as a result of his tour there. I would think he wasn't heavy enough for Moscow. The problem is getting in with the Russians and we haven't had many ambassadors that can do that. Thompson was one of them. Another one they suggest is Mosley, who is head of Columbia Institute. I don't know. He's been extensively in the field, who is well regarded by the Russians and who speaks the language fluently and about one of the few. They keep sending us feelers that they'd like to have a businessman. You're not going to find one who speaks the language now. That certainly is. I got convinced yesterday that we had to have the language after I listened to Colerque. He said that you wake up in the morning, you can't read the paper. You go down, you can't talk to the fellow that serves you your breakfast. You go reach your cables and then you start having to make calls. You can't talk to anybody. You have to get an interpreter. Then you go to reception and you just stand out by yourself. Nobody can communicate with you. Then you get invited out on the weekend. You can't carry your interpreter with you. I'd strongly urge you not to send anyone who can't speak at this present. Just in my own contacts with foreigners, I know how difficult it is to deal through an interpreter. I think it'd be particularly troublesome there. As far as Thompson's value here is concerned, I think you're going to lose him. He's got some serious financial problems. He spoke to me a year and a half ago about leaving the government. So you can take account of that as well. Some of those other names on there may be very competent. Mostly I've read writings of, but I don't know him. I don't know how he's negotiating how sensitive he is to what could be done. He's an international institute. You might ask some of your friends without telling them the purpose of it. Do you think that we have enough strength here with the second graders to evaluate for us carefully what effect a bombing of hyphongs could have? Yes, I do, Mr. President. I think I feel that with Kohler coming back and being in the position he's in and with some of these others that you spoke of available to fit into the staff of the State Department. Although I have the highest regard for what Thompson has done in the past several years in rising you and the Secretary of State on Russian attitudes. Yes, I do too. I feel very, very comfortable. Absolutely invaluable at times. But I do think you'll get it now from these others. I've got a rather desperate and pathetic appeal from San Francisco Mayor at 2 o'clock in the morning. He says about to declare martial law that the withdrawal of MDTA funds, that's manpower training funds, I guess, manpower training development funds. Please do something about that and please get some action in there of some kind to take these youths off the streets and get them busy. I told California I'll try to get one of your best men to see if there's anything that they might explore in the way of your industrial people up there, your Navy yards or any of the other things where they might be cleaning the streets or something. I told them to get driver and told them to get to words and have a meeting the next hour so we can answer that thing. These people, these old dogs won't hunt anymore. They just tried themselves out of the ballpark connected with these things. You see the Maddox election and the Johnson election in Arkansas. My first thought this morning was this was a real blow at Brown. Oh, yes, it's real blow at Brown, but what we're doing, Bob, with the Maryland and with Maddox in Georgia and with McKeith in Louisiana and with Wallace in Alabama and Johnson has been reasonable and friendly to me in Mississippi, but he can't hold anymore. He and the others can't. And with Mansfield going the way he went yesterday, he just turned his tail every time something comes up on the amendment too that we're going too fast for the guidelines. There's a great revulsion taking place and it's going to be a pretty solid front against us in the South and put where the Republicans give them control. And I'm not sure that the North is not going to be about as better. The dailies are awfully better and you can see the New York situation. So we're in trouble on the civil rights thing. I don't know how to write an amendment now and the report saying that we're going too fast. I don't see that as a damn thing. I'm unthinkable to me that in 11 or 12 years, you can't carry out the law of the land. I noticed that the polls showed 52 percent, the highest percentage for a long time of people who thought we were going too fast. It's a damn shame because you're going to get both forces, as you just said, working against you. You're going to get the blacks on one side and the whites on the other. Both of them are going to erupt. I don't know what you are as a politician, but somebody would have got to think about it. I came past the demonstration city's bill and I thought to you, the only one I know has got any contact with Bobby. I talked to Weaver yesterday and I don't think he respects Weaver very much. I don't think he likes anybody in the White House very much. Words might have some influence with him. He and Revikoff are opening up their hearings again on the city. They've killed it, just dead as hell up to now. Now we've got a rule and we bring it up to try to get our nose under the 10th Republican reclaimment and we want to bust children and stuff under the demonstration city's bill. They're going to start the hearings and that's what just scared them to death. That's why we haven't such a hell of a thing on poverty. We've had them there and we've bought them and we've sent airplanes for them and everything else. We've been winning the votes for 43 to 118, stuff like that for the last two days now. But if they have these hearings and get these fellas talking about trillion dollars again, I just won't get 50 votes for it. If they told Joe Califano, they promised him that they would not hold hearings till January. But they get on that television and they get in these mayors and they say we've got to have 60 million. That's the minimum we get by with nothing. We have 100 million. And when you get them added up, it adds to three-quarters of a trillion. And then you imagine yourself coming from a little district in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and you're voting for a program like it. I can't get a taxi to vote for it. Not even the city is like Houston, San Antonio, they won't vote for it because they get themselves into a trillion-dollar program. So we got to think some way in your social contacts you can't say let's get demonstration cities under the wire and then build on it like we've built on poverty and like we're building on the others. But let's get the power. And that's what we need to do. I'll call Joe Califano and learn something about it. Do that. I'll think about the status of the bill, but I'll learn something. Well, I'll tell you the state on intelligently the problem. The status is past the Senate. It's past the House committee. Patman got it out for Marvin. He went up there and got him to work on it. He couldn't get a rule on this hearing. We finally got a rule. That's going to be taken up in the next week or so when we get through the tax bill and everything. If we could just get it up and then really we've got to fight for our lives. We don't know what to pass it on. But we know that if we have a bunch of hearings, they think it helps. The hearings that it concerns them. But you know what a trillion-dollar figure does, Bob, for Congressmen. Okay. Now, what shape are you in on your defense appropriation? Russell is just continuing to drag his speed and he hasn't decided what to do. I was going to see him the other afternoon when we went down to Cape Kennedy and when I couldn't, Si went over and talked to him. And he just says that he's not going to move until he figures out how to kill that river's reserve bill, which is past the House and which is a lousy bill. There's no question about it. They only got five votes against it in the House, though. Mayon has said to us, we just have to kill a bill in the Senate. We said to him, well, why didn't you do something in the House about it? Well, he said that we can handle it in the Senate, which I think we can with Russell. He was very much opposed to it, but who, as part of his tactics in opposing it, pulls up this defense appropriation bill. I'm not too concerned about the defense bill in this president. I think it'll come through all right, but I'll be damned if I know how to handle Russell on this matter. If you have any trouble with your Navy planes, I'll notice where you have to have a large report, and you have to get authority. You report to the committee on your transfer. They have to give you the authority. They have to give us what we call a reprogramming action, which the committees have the authority to do, which we requested the day I made that announcement. I had to make that announcement that day because we had to send the action up to Congress for the reprogramming authority, and we've been told by Mayon and Russell and the others we'll have no problem at all. As a matter of fact, I've already gone to the companies and worked out the schedules with them so that I think we're in good shape on that. What do you see in the appropriation now? Well, 66 billion of expenditures is still the best estimate I can give you at the moment it looks about 11 to 12 billion of new obligation authority. And Dan Blair, that's what he said yesterday. Yeah, but when this comes out, Mr. President, even when it does, we ought to put it on the expenditure basis, because that's what affects the budget and that's what's thought of, and that's only 7.5 billion. So I propose whenever you get to that point to turn all of the public statements to that figure. Is there any way that you can put any years in economics? No. Are you doing that? No, they're doing the reverse, Mr. President. We're carrying a lot of their costs. I don't know how much it's up to now. I keep a record of it here. It's well over 100 million, I think, and we don't have the money. So we're paying for many things on a military front that normally would be paid for out of the economy. It's a rather dangerous practice that Congress has asked us to supply information to them on how much we're doing, and so on when these days we're going to get covered with it. But we definitely can't do the reverse. They just don't have the money. Okay, I'll expect that. Thank you.