260. Editorial Note
In his diary entry for May 23, 1972, White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman writes: “( Rogers heard that Henry [Kissinger] would be working on the communiqué and) [at] this point, of course, went up the wall. After the [plenary] meeting broke, Rogers went up to Henry and said: ‘You obviously cooked up this deal,’ and was furious. He then went to the P and said he might as well go home. He later talked to Ziegler and said, ‘if I’m not going to be in on writing the communiqué and doing these things, then I’m not going to go to NATO.’ In other words, he’s stomping around with all kinds of threats.” Haldeman writes that Nixon met with him at 1:30. “He wanted me to talk with Rogers, make the point that the P just delegated K to develop a work schedule and to make some announcements of agreements, and that anything that happens this afternoon will be on this kind of thing.” Haldeman records that Kissinger suggested that he “should get Rogers to assign Herrinbran [ Hillenbrand?] to work with [him] on the communiqué, then have it come to Rogers after they’ve developed it. Then we agreed that the only way I could get off this was to hit Rogers on a personal basis, and tell him you just can’t do this, and throw the China communiqué back at him, that he tried to botch that up, all for no reason, because the things he raised were not of any importance. I’m not sure I’ll be able to work anything out with Rogers. I didn’t do anything following that meeting.” Haldeman recalls that he sat with Nixon and Kissinger at dinner that night following the evening session “while we reviewed the whole thing, dwelling primarily on the problem with Rogers, and the P’s great concern on how to handle it. We didn’t come up with any answers, still, and I’m not sure there are any that we can come up with.” (The Haldeman Diaries: Multimedia Edition. The words in italics at the beginning of this paragraph are printed in The Haldeman Diaries, page 462, but not in the Multimedia Edition)