Nixon, Haldeman & Colson on Supreme Court appointments and Common Cause

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Oh, I see.

Fine.

I want to tell you one thing, but are you ready to talk?

Fine.

Uh, I just had a letter, and it's just working, sir.

Tom, you'll hear it.

You know who he is.

And he's, uh, a big wheel.

He's an American.

He's such a good boy.

He was a bad rapper then.

I don't know how you'd understand that.

He said, uh, hit it.

Hit it.

Yeah, but Los Angeles Bar, and he was close to Earl Adams, of course he is.

So I think we, I just want to throw those things in.

There's apparently a quarterback player living on the other side.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, if it happens, it would be a hard one.

He just, I guess, just might be a little, I guess, confident.

Yeah.

That's right.

Well, we'll see what, if the army is off the hook on that, then.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, right, yeah.

How's this one?

Did you get your old gun from the end?

Right, right.

Okay.

I want to clarify one other thing that both you and I thought on the court thing, you know, about the press quite a lot.

You were right in what it said.

It said, press advisors said, I went back and had them run the tape, and what it talks about is the press is giving the president a great deal of advice on what he should do on the court, and these advisors say what the other people in the press who are advising say is not that they're press advisors.

So it's...

You know getting back to that William and Marnie flares or anything that we can do with another field or any other field.

I feel very strongly that we just shouldn't take that line down.

He was one of the experts, first to cut me up and then fire me twice when I was trying to control him.

The only way to do it is for either the board to fire him, which we can't.

Sometimes, even with the Johnson people, see, all there is, all you've got on the board is church and name.

Thank you.

Oh, 25 minutes.

Right.

There's a team of ex-officials members, and some of those we can wheel, but... Yeah, okay.

Fine.

The other one is for Roger Stevens, who actually will add on everything there without the board's consent anyway.

to see the light and decided to better do it.

And that's... Well, you know, they're losing the manhunt.

They're not.

They're the big part of it.

And last Saturday, you know, they're just so... And frankly, should we use it more?

Yeah.

Or should we want it?

Like if we have, you know, some kind of a gathering where we want to have a big thing over there?

Yes.

Yeah, but they pay for it.

They charge for it.

I raised hell about that.

I also raised hell.

I hit him on this.

There was an executive committee meeting yesterday, and I do it kind of innocently at the board meeting because the Kennedy sisters are sitting there at home.

I just asked for a copy of the policy governing the use of the Senate by outside organizations.

And Blair said, we don't have one.

And I said, well, I'd like to have one drawn up by Monday and nailed to all trustees so that we can discuss that at the next board meeting.

And I said, well, we've got to have one, because what if the Black Panthers decide they want to have a fundraiser?

And he said, no, I don't think so, but maybe we would, maybe we should.

And I said, well, what if that...

I quit arguing.

All I wanted to do was just...

It's worth our making some effort because we're putting, the government's putting money into it and it's being perverted.

And they won't abide.

I don't know whether we want this or not.

Bob Anderson.

Which one?

All right, it's a great deal.

Lampage has gone in with a proposal that the other two theaters be named, the Nixon Theater and the Johnson Theater.

Because he says there were four presidents that had been associated with bringing this center to completion.

Eisenhower started it, Kennedy carried it on, Johnson renamed it for Kennedy, and President Nixon got it finished and dedicated it.

So he's arguing that the three inside theaters should be named for Johnson, Kennedy, and Nixon.

I mean Johnson, Eisenhower, and Nixon.

And what was that project that appeared?

No, they're just the Opera House and the Concert Hall now.

They don't have names.

I don't know whether you want a name or not.

If you do, you ought to take the Concert Hall, which is the one you can dedicate to it more time.

It won't have the musicals and stuff in it, which will be the ones where you're making some lousy shows.

I don't think beyond the 30-mile radius of Washington that a lot of people are going to show up.

Oh.

Yeah, they do.

Right.

I fight him and I make his letters.

Because he's a bad man.

That's the key.

He had to use his ass to perpetuate the whole county business.

Well, he's bad on everything.

The next time he went over to the band concert, he ran up to the press and said, this is...

terrible thing we were assured that we would have 24 hours notice before the president ever came to the hall let's go and raise hell with him he didn't have a telephone that night you know we couldn't get them on the phone and i raised hell with him and he his answer to me was well we've been assured that we would always have noticed and always has advanced before the president

Roger Stevens is basically a burden.

He's a nice guy.

And he's being pleased.

He's politically pleased.

Good on him, too.

But if you think he's a good player, well, I don't know.

Thank you.

Roger Stevens.

What is the situation on the, uh...

I had a piece of paper of, uh... No, I'm fine.

It's one of those.

It's just, uh, like that.

I thought it was a couple of those.

I'm just going to, like, finish with... What is this?

Yeah, I think it's pretty good.

You can check to see where I walked out there.

I didn't know I had it in my pocket.

I was looking for it.

The attacks of Kennedy and Bayh and the meteor on the possible Supreme Court nominees, Scott has told me he would take them on this afternoon.

And Grenny did an excellent job yesterday.

Scott has agreed to start rallying the forces and give us a little counterattack on the onslaught of garbage that's been dumped by Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Kennedy, Bayh, and company.

We've got some people working on it.

The thing that they really needed

The thing that really demonstrates, Mr. President, is how hard it is for them right now to find something to attack you on.

And they're going to go all out on this one to try to find it.

Anyway, the thing is that we ought to really have a memorial for you this fall.

Wait, wait, wait.

If somebody can speak up and just let them talk right the hell out of us.

First we call them.

We're going to call them back fast.

Granny responded quickly.

We gave study.

We sent up some material yesterday.

Started by six guys.

That's it.

What was it?

Right.

If Scott gives the speech we've written for him, he will remind Ted Kennedy that Ted's first nominee when he was a senator was Francis Morrissey in Boston.

His brother had to withdraw the nomination.

It was so bad.

One of them raised common cause.

They said they were really affected.

They were getting them heavy, heavy, they were concentrating on .

They were getting heavy, heavy mail.

And the governor was saying there was an all-government , corrupt and so forth and so on.

Query, why didn't they have anything to do with common cause?

Did they have a tax attempt to save us?

No, sir.

They did not?

No.

Why are we doing that with regard to trying to cut off contributions and so forth?

Well, we had a...

These guys really, they all ran that board with Scott.

I don't know.

In fact, when it was effective, we had an all-out program.

Then it sort of faded until we quit working on it.

Yeah, they...

The gardeners sort of withdrew from the publicity campaign and started working instead on

organizing and getting people out there.

Well, I think that's true.

What it is, Mr. President, is the

is the rallying point for all, everybody who feels disaffected with society.

And, well, far from that, though, they may disagree with us, John, that it was basically the Republican institutions that conquer middle-class types that are heavily supporting, you know, suburbanites and don't work them at all.

The Ducalism.

Yeah.

Well, God, that was interesting.

I remember you had one, somebody resigning on it once, was there?

Well, Chuck, the other day, uh,

It was a Democrat who resigned from it.

It was John McCone who resigned from it, but wouldn't let us publicize his resignation.

It's hard to find out who quits, because they won't make their membership lists available.

Well, I really am not sure.

We had some stuff stacked up.

We had some stuff stacked up, and we kind of backed away when they went flying.

Well, they went by it, and the effect of really the Republican National Committee attacks, the effect was really to help them build up their membership a little bit.

So we stayed away from it, and for a while after the SSP, they really went too active.

I haven't heard of them.

Yes, that's right.

That's right.

Is that what they're getting mail on?

That's what they're talking about today, you know.

25 more letters in Congress than those that are in the party in Congress.

Sounds pretty good.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Quite a load, isn't it?

Yeah, it's, that's, uh, if we get the legion on the BSW after an individual congressman, we're lucky to get 500 or 600 letters in a week.

Or the chamber.

They did well on the paid feature.

They did very good.

They really did.

I'd like to see, can we check Gardner's tax returns?

Sure.

They're not that well-checked.

I don't know if it's organization.

He's on that list that we put down.

Can we have him?

He knows somebody else, too.

There's a couple of cops he can remand.

Unfortunately, he'll come out clean, I'm afraid.

Oh, sure.

He's basically just a fanatic.

I don't think he's got that much.

I mean, he lines up in the doze, and I...

He's still decent.

At least he finally got his invitation to go out the window.

It's a darn good idea to have any more of this since the timeline.

Remember the time we had a little bit of something?

Three different.

I had four different dinners.

He ate one before I...

Remember?

Yeah, he made some nasty crack about that.

Well, we tried to buy it.

Well, no, no, not directly to you, but the thing at White House dinners.

I mean, you didn't like them, did you?

I forgot that I could.

They get to the White House dinners and everybody gets saddled or something and overlooks it.

But that doesn't mean anything to me, because I've been under too much damage or something.

Who's a scientist?

Well, we're here.

I just hope our, I mean, those of us who got down, I want them, and also, I want Vicar to be real tough in regard to those, those pressing velocities.

Very tightly.

We should take another look at that because if he's getting active again, we did have some things that we hit up our sleeve.

And we might feel a few more people off this board right now.

He must be a son of a bitch who just got out.

They have a very extensive fundraising operation.

They go through direct mail and go through voter lists and just pick indiscriminately.

Probably a very effective industry.

Well, why don't we do that?

Maybe we can learn something from them as to how they operate.

I've looked at their direct mail.

Their costs must be enormous.

They keep coming back with... Somebody is giving them a hell of a subsidy in life.

Big money in that.

We know what this stuff costs.

Big, big money.

But what else is there with Efren?

Is there anything else your audience is worried about?

We're hoping to get a little counterattack started today on the hill.

Bill Springer, Dean Birch, some of our friends are testifying and they've all been geared up to discuss Efren's book.

Springer was just loaded for bear, right?

If he

If he does it, and if the...

I think the networks have got to cover him.

They've covered him.

Yes, sir.

No.

No bookstores.

Yes, I just signed up and bought a Cappy Birdie, which I needed to be enriched.

According to Neil Freeman, the sales are not particularly exciting.

It's not the kind of a book that...

The average fellow working on the side is very kind, of course, but nothing is reduced.

Well, Frank, you've got to move the bridge of confidence again.

No, we could start buying.

Why don't we start sending them around?

We are still having that in mind.

That's being done, Mr. President.

We have the... We've got it in the hands of the congressmen, the senators, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Yes, sir.

What we're doing is putting a...

The only thing that's holding that right now is that a summary is...

We're rewriting a summary of the book, plus Edith Ephron's speech, which was printed in Human Events, which was excellent.

Putting that in a package, because people are more likely to read that than they are to read the book.

And actually, we may get some very good publicity this week out of the Urban Hearings, because we've got two shots at it.

And Thurman, who's on that committee, is loaded to ask the right questions.

And he will.

And Springer is well briefed.

I think the networks, they played themselves so hard on this bleeding hearts tune that they're being repressed by government, that they almost, they're almost honor-bound, duty-bound rather than, no honor, but duty to carry the, if the FM thing gets into the hearings this week, they're almost down to carry that.

Bob, as we get back to our earlier subject, it occurs to me, I don't know if Chuck agrees with this or not, but

And I know you, and this is one of the few areas where you're trying to sort of go from the soft end.

But I really feel the, I really feel this art style is almost a bluebird in pain in the ass most of the time.

I know the art is that we get to some people that we don't otherwise reach and so forth.

But believe me, it's like the tennis set.

The art set is a loser, it's a lost cause.

You could spend more goddamn time with those people.

Unless they're basically, they're basically gardener types and all the rest, except for now and then a Bobax, and so he was anyway.

But I wonder if all of our efforts here,

I don't think it's worth it.

I don't think going last night was worth anything.

We did that from the arts.

I'm worried I won't go again.

Never.

I think you having some interest in the art, you look at that cross-section of the people that you trotted over to one day here in town.

Look at who was there.

Were you there?

Almost.

Pretty solidly on it.

Okay.

Well, you're not doing all that much.

We're getting a lot of credit for, well, we are doing that much.

All right.

We got 40 days of publishing.

That's a lot of money.

That's right.

It means something to the women, actually.

It means a lot to a lot of men.

It's amazing.

The men, it's the businessmen types, the Bob Anderson types, and...

There's lots of things, there's something about it that gives them some kind of aura of respectability to be tied in with that side of things.

It satisfies their requirement to feel that they are doing something culturally worthwhile.

With women, there's a certain amount of glamour attached to it.

They identify.

I don't think these should reach very far.

I don't know what the thing is that requires it.

acceleration of time.

I think you've done enough.

And because you've got Nancy is damn good.

She pressured you, but she's also good at making sure she's like, what's her name?

She milks everything for all of us.

She does.

If you think of the Bill Boyer's efforts of building up the JFK Camelot image as being effective, what

Lyndon Johnson has done for us this week.

He's warned 10 times that on the other side of the fence, nailing the Vietnam War.

I'm wondering, is any of that getting through?

Oh, yes, sir.

I don't know.

We think it did.

We thought kind of enough papers were getting through.

I think they got through to a degree.

I think they got through in a very negative way on Kennedy.

His stature has not...

I mean, the memory of his presidency is different today than it was six months ago.

You think the Johnson thing is going to be the same?

Same way.

It's a cumulative effect.

And then you read a column like Shannon's in today's New York Times trying to revive the memory of Kennedy, and it falls flat.

I mean, it doesn't.

Well, Lenny was furious.

I saw him yesterday at this meeting.

You know, they would consider you as a decent reviewer.

They had three reviewers for the three principal publications.

They're all crap all over the book.

A few people ought to have an interest in that book.

It's doing you a lot of good.

Yeah.

Don't get it.

It'll sell.

Don't worry.

It's got a good name.

Well, that's getting big.

Newspaper front-page type coverage.

Yeah, because they all want it.

That's the second serial rights.

Yeah, people can't miss the newspapers.

And even if they only skim it, or even if they only catch it, headline it.

There's a big front-page headline in the L.A. Times.

Jesus, he just today, he zapped Bobby Kennedy today.

I'm the vice president.

How he got to be nominated as vice president, he didn't really want it.

Jack came to his room to talk him into it, and then Bobby planted stories saying he, Johnson, had been seeking it.

Maybe those were the politics we employed in the program.

That's part of it.

The most important thing is the end thing of that.

So we'll follow up on that at a proper time.

We're putting that summary together for you, Mr. President.

I hope to have it by the end of the week.

We may decide to drop that sheet off.

Well, we're in complete control of what we put together there.

It's got a lot of wallop to it.

Picked up an interesting...

report from secondhand, but directly from the fellow who talked to Mayor Daley before Daley met with Kennedy last week, Dave Bradshaw, who's very close to Daley, who said that Daley is coming hard.

It was interesting because I didn't tell him any of the conversations I had with Lovestan last week, and he gave me a report from Daley that was almost identical to Lovestan's report from Meany.

— 4 min 6 s with no transcribed speech —

Incidentally, what about the housing start thing?

I noticed that they made a big drop.

Well, I gave you a bad information last night.

It was... Well, it's outstanding, but there are two ways you can look at it.

You can look at it as year over year, in which case it's up 47% year over year.

But it dropped a lot.

well they call it season but right now it is just below 2 million in august it took a flip up to 2.2 on the other hand if you look at it the normal way that they've been looking at it every month until this month it's a year-over-year basis it's good 47 above a year there's never been in the history of the country a 2 million

housing start year this year will clearly be two million on a on an annual basis and that's a hell of a strong housing right good market's floundering again today and i i called up the market let's see at noon it was down eight points i called two of my friends both of them said well they're now wild rumors about tight money which i

Nixon, Haldeman & Colson on Supreme Court appointments and Common Cause

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on October 19, 1971

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Nixon, Haldeman & Colson on Supreme Court appointments and Common Cause

AI Summary

Audio

NARA Description

Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on October 19, 1971

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