Nixon White House Tapes — Conversation 007-124
Date: Sunday, August 15, 1971 at 9:50 PM
Participants: Nixon, Richard M. (President); Rogers, William P.
Recording device: White House Telephone
Source: https://www.easynixon.org/tapes/007-124

This transcript was generated automatically by AI (WhisperX) and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Do not cite it as authoritative.

[0:01] Hello.
[0:04] Hello.
[0:05] Secretary Rogers, Mr. President.
[0:06] Thank you.
[0:06] Mr. President.
[0:07] Hi, Bill.
[0:07] That was excellent.
[0:08] You survived.
[0:09] That was great.
[0:10] I think you'll have a... We may not have any friends left in the world, but I was quite conciliatory.
[0:16] I thought so.
[0:18] No, I think the world has got to understand that I talked to Sato, and I just finished talking to Mitchell Sharp for two hours away on vacation.
[0:25] Mitchell Sharp is acting prime minister.
[0:28] Did you call Heath?
[0:29] I haven't.
[0:29] It's the middle of the night.
[0:31] I hate to wake him up at 4 o'clock in the morning.
[0:33] Oh, hell no.
[0:34] So I thought I'd better call the ambassador and tell him that you asked me to speak to the prime minister, but I didn't want to wake him up.
[0:40] Right.
[0:40] Good.
[0:42] And I didn't... Bob thought I shouldn't...
[0:44] It doesn't affect him too much anyway.
[0:46] No.
[0:46] The British aren't too badly affected by this, you see.
[0:48] It's mainly the Germans and the Japanese, I think.
[0:52] I think...
[0:53] I didn't mention on Canada about the business about terminating the auto agreement.
[0:58] I think we ought to be a little careful about how we phrase that.
[1:00] I think we could renegotiate it, but I don't think we ought to arbitrarily.
[1:04] Look, on all these things, now that we're in a position of strength, we can negotiate a lot of things, and they'll be more reasonable.
[1:13] That's right.
[1:14] You know, as you probably noted, as you can imagine,
[1:18] They prepared a draft for me.
[1:20] It was really a monstrosity.
[1:21] They wanted to start talking about the International Monetary Fund.
[1:24] I said, now look, that's the thing nobody's going to sign.
[1:27] I'm going to put that last.
[1:28] So I started with peace, Vietnam, jobs, inflation, and then stuck the other end.
[1:34] But I'll be there.
[1:34] Don't you agree?
[1:35] That would have been murder.
[1:36] Oh, you can't do that.
[1:37] I thought the end of it was very good, too.
[1:39] I thought it ended on a high note.
[1:43] But the, well, first I think that you, you know, as I said the other night when we talked, something had to be done.
[1:48] And I think doing it in a sort of a dramatic, you know, across-the-board way is...
[1:53] It affects everybody.
[1:54] That's right.
[1:55] It's really, as you note on the foreign economic aid, that covers everything.
[2:00] That leaves out anything for refugees.
[2:02] It leaves out anything for military.
[2:03] Well, that's what we need.
[2:04] This is manageable.
[2:05] If you had to put it in, you couldn't... Well, I couldn't cut other things without that.
[2:09] No, absolutely not.
[2:10] So there's no problem on that.
[2:12] We can...
[2:13] And people love it.
[2:15] That's right.
[2:15] They shouldn't, but they do.
[2:16] That's right.
[2:18] So I think it's going to have a hell of an effect.
[2:26] You know, you stop at every Democratic candidate in the papers this morning.
[2:30] You're out calling for these 12 Republicans.
[2:32] All of a sudden.
[2:34] We go far beyond, but they've got a piece of it because we cover the waterfront.
[2:39] One of the commentators I heard just said right afterwards, he said that this covers really everything that your opponents have been demanding you do.
[2:51] In a way, it touches everything.
[2:56] Well, the only one I talked to George Shultz about, the only one that is going to be, I think,
[3:03] interesting to watch is the reaction on the gold convertibility, because we've never really done it.
[3:10] No, I know, I know.
[3:11] Well, we just labored over that, and nobody knows, so let's see what happens.
[3:16] But on the other hand, what I think this may do is that we'll trigger what we really have needed.
[3:24] We need a new system.
[3:28] Bretton Woods was 25 years ago.
[3:28] We went horsing around, SDRs, none of it's ever worked.
[3:31] And so let's just ask for the United States
[3:33] It is 25% of the world to be pulled around by the goddamn Swiss, Belgian, Dutch.
[3:40] It's ridiculous.
[3:41] That's right.
[3:42] And, of course, the Japanese, too, are the worst offenders.
[3:48] I mean, they're terrible.
[3:48] And so I think the thing to do is to work with the convertibility and all the rest.
[3:51] Fine.
[3:52] They want to talk, but we're not going to be at the...
[3:54] I said, of course, the American dollar is not going to be the hostage of international speculators.
[3:58] They're a little demagogic.
[3:59] Oh, that's true.
[4:00] And, of course...
[4:01] Now, what we're really saying to them is let's get the monetary system in order.
[4:08] Stabilize the dollar.
[4:09] Stabilize all currencies.
[4:10] Let's get the currencies in relative positions so that they relate sensibly to each other.
[4:18] And that's really the situation in Japan.
[4:22] Sato was a little perplexed.
[4:24] I wasn't able to tell him what the hell was in it.
[4:28] It's too broad, so I told them we'd be pulling with them.
[4:34] You know, I told them it wasn't discriminatory.
[4:38] I said it wasn't against the nation, but if you want to freak, force them to do the Japanese tour, the Japanese cars, the Germans would do the Japanese tour.
[5:00] Okay.
[5:01] Thanks, Mr. Bennett.
[5:02] Congratulations.
[5:03] Good night.