Word: laird
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...Laird acted on the assumption that he had a constitutional right to seek to outsmart and outmaneuver anyone with whom his office brought him into contact. I eventually learned that it was safest to begin a battle with Laird by closing off all his bureaucratic or congressional escape routes, provided I could figure them out. Only then would I broach substance. But even with such tactics, I lost as often as I won. John Ehrlichman considered mine a cowardly procedure and decided he would teach me how to deal with Laird. Following the best administrative theory of White House predominance...
Toward Connally there was none of that ambivalent sense of competition and insecurity that marked Nixon's relations with the other Cabinet members. Unlike Rogers and Laird, Connally had not had any contact with Nixon during previous crises in Nixon's life. Nixon therefore did not have with Connally the same fear of not being taken sufficiently seriously. Connally's swaggering self-assurance was Nixon's Walter Mitty image of himself. He was one person whom Nixon never denigrated behind his back...
...Sunday evening, April 26, the President met with his principal NSC advisers-Rogers, Laird, Wheeler, CIA Director Richard Helms and me-in his working office in the Executive Office Building. Nixon tried to avoid a confrontation with his Secretaries of State and Defense by pretending that we were merely listening to a briefing. To my astonishment, both Rogers and Laird fell in with the charade that it was all a planning exercise, and did not take a position. They avoided the question of why Nixon would call his senior advisers together on a Sunday night to hear a contingency briefing...
...even this "double-barreled presidential imprimatur," as Kissinger calls it, settled things. Both Rogers and Laird were having second thoughts. Nixon agreed to think it over for 24 hours...
...Tuesday, April 28, in a 20-minute meeting with Rogers, Laird and Mitchell, the President reaffirmed his decision to proceed with a combined U.S.-South Vietnamese operation against the Fishhook. He noted that the Secretaries of State and Defense had opposed the use of American forces and that Dr. Kissinger was "leaning against" it. (This was no longer true; I had changed my view at least a week earlier. In my opinion Nixon lumped me with his two Cabinet members because he genuinely and generously wanted to shield me against departmental retaliation.) Nixon assured them he would assume full responsibility...