Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XIV, Soviet Union

192. Telephone Conversation Between President Johnson and Attorney General Clark¹

Washington, January 20, 1967, 7 p.m.

President: Is there anything you can do with Hoover to try to get him to say that he’s not against the Consular Treaty if he’s given enough money to adequately cover any espionage activities?

Clark: I can try.

President: He wrote Rusk a letter² but it doesn’t do the job. It just says that-he was just saying that if they had new consular offices open why it would create a good many problems. It’s very negative. And what we’re trying to do now-we’ve got about five big decisions. One of them, just between us, is just as hot as a firecracker right now, on Vietnam. It could mean the difference. Another one is the Non-Proliferation Treaty. We’re within an inch of getting it. Another one is the anti-missile missile. They’re going to spend $30/40 billion and we’re going to spend $30/40. We don’t want to get in that arms race, so I sent Tommy Thompson back over there. I tried to talk them out of it. Now we’ve made a good deal of progress in the Civil Air Agreement. We don’t trust them. We don’t think you can trust them. We think you got to watch them every minute. We think you ought to watch them more than we are watching them. But the problem is not their knowing what we got. Hell, they’ve got blueprints of everything, as Judy Coplon shows.³ The problem is we don’t know what the hell they got, and the consulate thing gives us a chance to protect our people and get around and to have some little something besides right just in Moscow. And all of our people like Thompson and the experts say it’s just so important. If they want to put x consulars here, well we don’t mind how many million he gets, and he can just by God sleep with them. We expect them to be sleeping with people over there too, but we want to know more than we do know, and we think it’s to our interest, not to theirs, that we think the advantages are so much stronger for us, at least Thompson does and Kohler does and Rusk does, so that is it. And if in talking to him [Hoover] we could say that let’s be affirmative and say to Fulbright, “I am not running the State Department. I’m not passing on these treaties. I am not against a consular office provided-you know what I’ve said, it takes additional personnel.” That’s what I think he said to Rooney.⁴ I think that’s all he intended to say. I don’t think he intended to start passing on diplomatic matters, but I don’t know and I don’t know whether I’m the one to get him to do it or whether you are. He wrote a letter that kind of halfway did it but it didn’t do it enough to satisfy the Dirksens.

Clark: I saw it on the ticker. It looked pretty good to me, but I’ll—

President: Well I talked to Fulbright this evening and I talked to Dirksen last night. It doesn’t quite do the job. What we need for him to say is-if I could get him over here and get Fulbright over here and just sit down with them and say, “Here’s what the advantage is to us,” and let both of them listen to it, maybe Dirksen. “Now what do you need to do to see that our security is protected?” And he could say, “well I need so and so and so.” “OK, we’ll give you that.”

Clark: Let me discuss it with him and see what—

President: Don’t say I initiated it and don’t say I started it but-think about it.⁵

[Here follows discussion of other subjects.]

1. Source: Johnson Library, Recordings and Transcripts, Recording of a Telephone Conversation between the President and Clark, Tape 67.03, Side A, PNO 3. No classification marking. This transcript was prepared by the Office of the Historian specifically for this volume.
2. Hoover’s letter, dated September 16, 1966, and Rusk’s September 14 letter to which it responded were both released by the State Department on January 20. For text, see The New York Times, January 21, or American Foreign Policy: Current Documents, 1966, pp. 485–486. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the Consular Convention began January 23.
3. On March 7, 1950, Judith Coplon and Valentin Gubitchev, a Soviet consular official, were found guilty of conspiracy and attempted espionage against the United States.
4. See footnote 3, Document 163.
5. Clark met with Hoover on January 21 to discuss the Consular Convention. Johnson summarized Hoover’s position, as expressed in the meeting, in a telephone conversation with Senator Mike Mansfield on January 25, during which the President and Mansfield discussed strategy for securing approval of the convention by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (Johnson Library, Recordings and Transcripts, Recording of a Telephone Conversation between the President and Mansfield, 10:55 a.m., January 25, Tape F67.03, Side B, PNO 5)