 there, sort of a hell-raiser, and he don't know exactly what he wants, I think, but he's the most dangerous thing to the bread and the regime. I think if he were to take over, he'd have to get out, and of course, he'd have to endow out the area of standing by self-determination of people. I don't see how he'd say, we're not going to go, Charlie Bielsen and Charlie the government. The thing is, it's going to be a headache to anybody that tries to fool with it. Now you've got all the brains in the country with the president, you better get over them. I don't know what to do about this. I saw it all coming on, but that don't do any good now. That there's water over the dam, under the bridge, and we're there. Well, you've got over there, Mike DeMair. He was up here just by the Estapo committee. I didn't want to have him up here, but I was counting them. I said up here in 830, I'll start appropriating hearings. He's been kicked around on it so far. I'm not sure he's as objective as he ought to be in surveying the conditions out there. He feels like it's a sort of presentment up to him, but to see that the thing goes through. He's a can-do fellow, but I'm not too sure he understands the history and background of those people out there, as fully as he should. Even from his picture, the damn thing ain't getting any better than just getting worse. We're putting more and more in there, and they're taking more and more away from the people we're trying to help that we give them. I don't know if you better get some brains from it. I don't know what to do with it. Well, I spend all my days with Rusk and Mike DeMair, Bundy and Harrowman and the Vance and all those folks that are dealing with it. I would say that it pretty well adds up to them now that we've got to show some power and some force and that they do not to believe that kind of like MacArthur in Korea, they don't believe that the Chinese communists will come into this thing, but they don't know and nobody can really be sure, but their feeling is that they won't. In any event that we haven't got much choice, that we are treaty bound, that we're there, that this will be a domino that will kick off a whole list of others and that we just got to prepare for the worst. I have avoided that for a few days. I don't think the American people for it. I don't agree with Morse, all he says, but it doesn't look to me. I'm afraid that's right. I'm afraid that's right. I don't think the people of the country know much about Vietnam and I think they care a lot less. I know, but you go to send a whole lot of our boys out there. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. That's what I'm talking about. You get a few, we had 35 killed and we got enough hell over 35 this year. So that means more than that has been killed in Atlanta, George. You've been killed this year and all them will be elections. That's right. Maybe three went down and one crashed on the 7th most of them, but one day, but that's been making a difference there. That's what our folks understand. They don't understand this and over that now. The Republicans are going to make a political issue out of it. They want to have me and Dirksen out. It's the only issue they've got. I talked to Dirksen the other day Friday and he suggested I have three of Armed Services and three from Appropriations and three from all of them from Relations Town and I told him all right. So I invited him yesterday before the king. He gave out a big statement that we had to get us a program and go after him. And Hagen Looper said that he just had to stand and show our force and put our men in there and let come what may come and nobody disagreed with him. Now Mansfield, he just wants to pull up and get out. Morris wants to get out and Greening wants to get out and that's about where it stops. I don't know. There's others here that want to get out. They haven't said much about it, but Frank Church just told me two or three times that he didn't want to make speech on it, but he just wished to God we could get out of there. I don't know whether he's told you that or not. I haven't talked to him, but I just use that as an illustration because he's mentioned him more than once. Who are the best people we have that you know of to talk to about this? I don't want to do anything on the basis of just the information I've got now. I don't know who, Mr. President. I've talked to I's now a little bit. I think that the people that you have named have all formed a heart of opinion on it. I think it's... Oh, Rusk has tried to pull back. He's tried to hold back on everything. But he's about to come to the conclusion now that Laos is crumbling and Vietnam is wobbling. Laos, hell it ain't worth it. They've been talking about all these battles down there and I tried to get the best information I could from CIA and from the defense both on all this fierce fighting on the plane of Jars and all in the highest estimate is to the casualties is 150. That Laosian thing is absolutely impossible. It's a whole lot worse than beating on. There are some of these beating the me's after they beat them over the head, it'll go in and fight. But Laos is an impossible situation. That's just a razzle. I don't know. Before I took any of that action, I think I'd get somebody about like Omar Bradley and one or two perhaps senior people who had had some government experience, not necessarily military. If he wasn't scared to death of Mike Nomara, this fellow Adams whose head of strike would be a top-life man sent out there with him, let them go out there and fool around for a few days and smell the air and get that atmosphere and come back and tell you what they think. Because they are new in it and we would not have a great many preconceived ideas approaching it. Now one of our big problems there, Dick, the biggest between us, I don't want to repeat anybody's lies. I know it. He ain't worth a damn. He can't work with anybody. He won't let anybody out there. He won't let anybody else work. We get the best USAA man to put on all the radios and try to get them to be loyal to the government and to be fighting and quit deserts. He just called in the USAA and said, I handle the newspapers, magazines and radio myself. So to hell with you. So that knocked that guy out. Then we send out the best CIA man we got and he said, I handle the intelligence to hell with you. Then he wants a new David's chief of mission. We get him to give us some names and we pick one of those, the best one we got, send them out to run the damn war and he gets where he won't speak to the David's chief of mission. And we got General Harkins out there and we thought he's a pretty good man. He gets where he can't work with him so we send Westmoreland out. And it's just a hell of a mess and you can't do anything with Lodge and that's where Maximair so frustrated. He goes out and they get agreements and he issues orders and he sends stuff in there and then Lodge takes charge of it himself and he's not a take charge man and he just gets stocked up. He never has followed anything through to a conclusion since I've known him and I've known him for 20 odd years. He never has. I went out with him around the world and voted three. The only committee I went out during the war, we went everywhere and Lodge was on there. He's a bright fellow, intelligent fellow, but he's just not a man that persists and he thinks he's dealing with barbarian drives out there and he's the emperor and he's going to tell them what to do and it doubted my mind that he had the old deem killed out there himself. That was a tragic mistake and it's awful and we've lost everything. We want to get somebody with more plant to Lodge to do exactly what he said right quick. And he's living up on cloud nine. It's a bad mistake. I don't know. I think probably the best thing you could do would be to ask Lodge if he don't think he'll by the time he's coming home. Well, he'd be back home campaigning against us on this issue every day and God Almighty he's going to come back any time comes. I'd give him a reason for doing it. He's going to come back, you bring him back now everybody say, well, hell, he's mad, cause Johnson removed him out there. I thought he couldn't, he with all of his power couldn't hurt Truman McCleary. Everybody would say, well, hell, he's just mad, cause he's got removed. And the double million sympathize with him anyway. And you need to worry, Lodge will be in here. In my judgment, he'll be on that ticket in some way. I don't think I know I'm the president, but they may put him on there for vice president. Whether they do it, don't. He'll be back here campaigning for what campaign's over. I don't know, but I doubt they'd better take that back this thing is so hopeless for the Republicans out there. I doubt that he certainly got enough political sense to know that and not to get his head chopped off in a putty foolishness. Has Clay got any judgment on a thing like this? Yes, he has. He has, but though he's inclined to, he's out of that area of the world, almost, isn't he? I think Clay, as he knows, I'd take his judgment on almost anything if he'd separate himself from his predictions and he don't have any out in that part of the world. He's a, and I think people generally have got a good deal of respect for Clay's judgment too. And there's a great deal of affection and respect for old man Bradley. He's not, he's not in his dirty jet by a hell of a lot. I got him up here the other day getting some advice from him on some matters. I found him very lit. He's so humble, I don't know, he'd just be a dogmat for large out there. But he's an intelligent man. Now Clay wouldn't play a little, he'd stand up to anybody if he feels like he's got any support from high up places. I just don't know, it's a tragic situation. It's just one of those places where you can't win anything you do is wrong. Well, think about it, call me. I thought about it. I have worried about it and I have prayed about it. I don't believe we can do anything I have because it's something that frightens me because it's my country that's involved over there. And if we get into there on any considerable scale there's no doubt in my mind what the Chinese will be in there. And there we'll be fighting the dang conventional wars against our secondary not potential threat. And it'd be a corail on a much bigger scale and a worse scale because the peculiar physical configuration of corail made the extensive guerrilla fighting impossible. But that's not true over in there. If you go from Louson, Cambodia, and bring North Vietnam into it too, it's down to the mess over there at the point. They lost 250,000 men and spent a couple billion of their money and two billion of ours down there. They just got the hell whipped out of them and they had the best troops they had including practically a division of crack German troopers who were starving and then this didn't bother them, they just went down there. You don't have any doubt, but what if we go in there and get them up against the wall the Chinese Communist is going to come in? There's no doubt about that. That's my judgment and my people don't think so. There's no doubt in my mind about it. If you find Chinese volunteers in there as soon as you get there, we're very sure that we have active combat units engaged. Now Mike writes me a memo and all he says is that we continue support to Vietnamese and that's number one. And then to the reflex of peak and pace saving at every assay of the galls where we're not peaked we just ask the gall to give us a blueprint and he don't have it, he just says neutralization but they ain't nobody wants to breed a neutralization. We ask him who will grieve to go with old Ben Mylon, we're ready but he just says well we have to continue to maintain their strength and get into position but he's got no blueprint. Three, a realistic placing of the fact that we're in this situation without reliable military allies. Well I know that. Four, an exploration of the possibility that the United Nations is some other arrangement. Well we, this is Mike Mansfield. They won't do a damn thing even on the Cambodia border. We can't get a majority vote in the Security Council. A willingness to entertain any reasonable opposed international conferences. Well we are ready to confer with anybody any time but that the conferences ain't gonna do a damn bit of good. They ain't gonna take back and give us territory and behave, we tell them every week we tell crew chief, we send China and Hanoi and all of them word that we'll get out of there and stay out of there if they'll just quit raiding their neighbors and they just say screw you. That's right. So the conferences won't do it. Now the whole question as I said is it more dangerous for us to let things go as they're going now deteriorating every day? I don't think we can let it go Mr. President indefinitely. Then it would be for us to move in. We either get to move in or move out. That's about what it is. You can make a tremendous case for moving out. Well I take the next one for moving in but it would be more consistent with the attitude of American people and their general reactions to go in so they could understand that. But getting out even after we go in and get bogged down in there with the war with China is going to be a hell of a mess. It'd be worse than we are now.