On September 10, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon and Charles W. Colson talked on the telephone from 3:53 pm to 4:17 pm. The White House Telephone taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 008-084 of the White House Tapes.
Transcript (AI-Generated)This transcript was generated automatically by AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Do not cite this transcript as authoritative. Consult the Finding Aid above for verified information.
Hello.
I have Mr. Colson, sir.
Yeah.
Good afternoon, Mr. President.
Hi, Chuck.
How goes the battle today?
Well, I think pretty well, sir.
I haven't seen the wires this afternoon, but our fellows... Did go to bat.
They went to bat.
I talked to Bob Griffin, and he said he had seven of the eight went out on the floor, and he said they did a damn good job.
Good.
Bob was headed up for the TV gallery himself to do a tape, so we'll see if we...
We're trying to get some play, and they did do well.
Sure.
We had Hatfield.
That's a good, I remember you gave me the group yesterday.
It's quite a group.
Everybody showed up except Baker, who took it off for the weekend.
Yeah.
I talked to Ed Brook this morning, and gee, Ed was just effusive over your speech yesterday.
He called me.
He didn't like the business about the menial work, but I've got to take that position.
Well, he called me to apologize.
Because, you see, he doesn't understand that, you see, my feeling on this, Chuck, is this.
you
I remember the Depression, and I remember working for the... Well, that's the point, Ed.
So each has got a... Well, Ed, the reason for Burke's call, Mr. President, he called me first thing this morning, and he said, I've seen the story in the Washington Post where I'm quoted as being critical of the President.
He said, will you please tell the President that I issued a very positive statement, and the only thing they picked up was the one comment I made about welfare.
And he said, I have to make that because...
The blacks all expect me to say those things, but he said, I'll tell you.
Tell the president I am with him and will back him to the hilt on this program.
And he said, I've been doing some head counting.
And he said, I said this to the press yesterday, but he said, print it.
He said there are a minimum of 40 Republicans who will support his program all the way, and probably 43...
And he said, I'm very bullish.
And he thought your speech was superb.
Great.
He made the call really to... Well, that's fine.
Well, I know what it is, and he's exactly right.
I know he has to say that.
I mean, he's got to say that to his constituency.
But there are oppressed people.
Well, he issued a long statement.
They took the one thing out of it that...
I'll tell you, the labor leaders are certainly contrite right now.
Boy, did you turn them around.
I've had a long conversation with Fitzsimmons, and he said, you did a fantastic job with them.
He said, I'll give you some quotes.
He said, the president really scored points.
It was a complete turnaround.
He said he won them over completely.
Fitz told me, by the way, that this morning at 9 o'clock he was asked to come to Meany's office.
He got to Meany's office, and they were all
reading over your speech yesterday and trying to figure places they could pick it apart.
And he gave them a hell of a lecture.
He said, yeah, let's go over there and figure out how we're going to work together.
And after the meeting, he was awfully good.
That's what I mean.
He was just strong as hell.
He's great.
He really is just our kind of guy.
He's our people.
He's with us.
He is.
He said that he said he rode back with me in the car and he turned to me and he said, no,
what do you think now?
And Meany said, we're all right.
The president means what he says.
And so his feeling is that Meany
is going to cooperate fully.
He said, I think you've won your fight with them.
Well, we have.
Our problem is what we do about such horrible things.
Deferred wage increases and a lot of others.
Well, there are going to be all those problems.
But I think basically, Mr. President, you have passed the point of... Yeah.
You know, the part that we have to bear in mind, though, is that Labor took us in a terribly weak position.
They're enormously... Alderman has just taken out another poll, and my God, the people are just... Their own members don't support their position.
Dave Bradshaw, who I...
brought him up last night so he could come in and say hello to you.
He's a great fellow, and he travels all over the country, and he talks to working men, and he's a Democrat, and he's kind of an earthy guy that they'll talk to.
He said that all over the country, and he gave me a list of the places he'd been.
It was an interesting cross-section.
Denver, Colorado, Florida, Tampa, Minnesota, different towns in Missouri.
He said the reaction everywhere among people is that the president has balls.
He said the general feeling is
totally different than it was six months ago.
The feeling is he's strong, he's got guts.
He said what had to be said, and he'll stand up to labor.
And he said that comes from rank-and-file working men, that they will say, thank God that the president has the guts to talk to these guys.
We don't.
We've been paying our damn dues all these years to get nothing for it.
He said he didn't find one single labor rank-and-file member, rank-and-file,
who was critical of you, they all were cheering you.
We have a situation, interesting enough, Bob, in the poll that he took on some other issues, showed that we, you know, Gallup shows the same approval in his next poll, 49-38, that he had before.
But Gallup makes a very interesting finding.
that he's going to make an interesting finding.
That is, whereas in March, those who, it's sort of on the same line as Harris.
Those who mildly approve were three to one over those who strongly approve.
Now it was half and 50-50.
That's what Harris said.
And he says that's what bodes well for the future.
And as a matter of fact, Chuck, I doubt if we're going to go up much in approval.
My feeling is that we're going to stick around 50 and there are going to be about 30
five percent that are not you know that are basically hardcore on the other side well until the war and the economy move in other words the fact only will change any of those people well i i think probably that's right mr president that it's going to take us time to do it but i think if the trend is right and it just uh i'll settle for
It's just like the stock market.
I'll settle for a little bit of gain here, just steady.
Harris is totally convinced that you don't even need 50 to be re-elected.
He said the advantage of incumbency works.
The one thing about this, it's really too bad in a way that we couldn't have had that talk on the night television.
Of course, we couldn't do it because we'd had the one two weeks before about the same thing.
But the applause factor apparently was carried somewhat in the news.
Oh, my golly, the news last night.
We had three and four minutes of it on each of the networks.
NBC gave us a little less, but no, the three minutes and 15 seconds on ABC, 210 on NBC, four and a half minutes, four and three quarter minutes on CBS.
And they picked out the best portions, I must say.
Did they?
They edited it beautifully, yes, sir.
They...
It was just like watching it again on the live.
It was perfect.
I wish it had been at night because I think personally it was, I hate to keep saying this because you keep outdoing yourself, but it was the best performance, the best delivery I've seen, the strongest delivery, the most confident.
Wish 80 million people had seen it, but... Well, I don't think we could have done it, do you?
No, you definitely could have.
Having taken prime time to...
I couldn't take prime time again to say relatively the same thing.
No.
No, you could.
They would have raised hell.
But it was... You see, the Democrats would have asked for equal time, too.
Well, they probably will anyway, but as far as I'm concerned, let them... Oh.
They do let them have it, because they haven't got an answer to that.
What's Jackson... Jackson, I understand, is now traction around about Vietnam, huh?
Oh, was he?
I hadn't heard that.
I heard that in the news summary it indicated that he was going to take on about the Vietnam elections and our handling of them.
Of course, if he's doing that, he's going to lose even his labor support.
Oh, hell yes.
And that would be a terrible mistake.
I watched him on television yesterday while you were speaking.
They came down on Teddy once, who was not applauding.
Oh, of course not.
Made him look very bad.
And they came down on Jackson once when he was really scowling.
He was sort of sitting back in his chair looking...
Trying to put on a little act.
Okay.
Well, anyway, we'll keep up the good work.
We'll keep the idea.
I know you discussed it this morning that Mills took on the idea that we should announce the end of the freeze.
Of course, we had to in order to be sure that business decisions did not come up to the last minute.
But on the other hand,
I think we need to get out quite soon the fact that as of a certain date, we will announce the second page.
Well, my feeling is that, and it's a judgment call, but my feeling is that
First, we are going to do it by that date, and I don't see any disadvantage in setting it to us.
Let me tell you the advantage, Mr. President.
Market went off again today, as you perhaps know.
How far?
4.8.
That's all right.
Well, it was down at one point this noon.
It was down almost eight points at noon.
Now, the reason it did, I talked to Al Gordon, and he spent a couple of hours checking around for me.
I was concerned, frankly, that...
following, and Al yesterday had said the market would go up after your speech.
So he did some trick here, Al, and he doesn't agree with this himself, but he said this is the consensus.
There's a general letdown feeling today that we may not know where we're going in November, that by announcing the end of the freeze, people are again uncertain what's going to happen.
And the general, the Dow Jones wire and the
General talk in New York is nothing will happen now until the new plan's announced.
This will put everything sort of into a hiatus.
So I just sent a memo over to John Connolly with a whole list of talking points.
If he announces the date, he can make all the points that you never keep a freeze on.
It's only temporary.
It's only for the purpose of working on the permanent system.
And by X date, we will announce phase two.
And we've put extensive work into this over the past month.
We know what we're doing.
It isn't as if we're just jumping from one thing to the next.
And he can put that uncertainty to rest completely if he announces a date and says all that's gone on.
So I think that...
Yeah.
Well, my guess is, and I anticipate this could happen, you see, the question is, does it happen now or does it happen later?
And my guess is that the way to stifle it, however, is to create, is to give the impression that there is going to be as of a certain time.
So I think if he does that, I think you're absolutely right.
Deadlines are tricky and dangerous, but I think it's
In this instance, the thing we have got to do is keep people convinced that you are deliberately right on target.
And also keep people convinced that we are still fighting inflation.
Exactly.
And we're going to keep a wage price freeze on, so to speak, or something.
There will be no let up in the fight against inflation.
The only thing about a freeze is that it's a temporary period in which you...
work out the permanent solution.
That's right.
Now, as a matter of fact, that's where your speakers next week ought to really hit that very hard, and I trust they have today.
Because I covered that, if I covered that very directly in the speech, where I said we are going to have a, you know, we're making a commitment to the American people in the Congress that we were going to set up a system which would avoid another runaway inflation.
Well, Ziegler hit it today well, and hit that point, and reinforced it.
And our speakers...
up in the Senate did.
So we'll get it.
But I think you've got the right track with Conley saying something very specific and making the point that we've done a hell of a lot of work in the last three weeks.
It is as if this thing is coming out of the air.
I'm just looking at the wires on Meany.
It's running very, very well.
He said that he, AFL-CIO President Meany, one of the bitterest
critics of the administration's economic program told President Nixon today labor would cooperate with any equitable and fair wage and price stabilization program.
I am convinced the administration and the president are sincere.
It's pretty good.
Good.
It's good.
Good stuff.
Well, we'll try to keep this thing.
Let's get this commenting.
It's a it's a little tricky time right now, but we don't want to lose the initiative of being for
the program, that's all.
Oh, I thought, well, you've, of course, by going to the Congress yesterday, you did that.
Yeah, well, I mean, but I don't want, but I don't want the reaction to that, the fact that we said we were going to, to discontinue the freeze, to leave the impression among people that it's, you see what I mean?
It's created a little bit of uncertainty.
Uncertainty about the freeze, in other words.
Uncertainty about the future that it has, unfortunately, that, that, uh,
As somebody, one of the Wall Street fellows said to Al Gordon, we were just, we were used to it.
We figured it was all being programmed, and all of a sudden now we're in doubt as to what's going to happen a month from now.
Even though we announced the 90-day thing, they didn't ever face up to it.
Well, they get used to it.
That's right.
They get accustomed to it, and they feel things are... Of course, what would happen, you see, the problem we have is that if we...
This would build up, if we hadn't covered it, this would have built up gradually.
Oh, yeah.
And over the next month, until hell wouldn't have it, they'd say, now what are you going to do next?
And then the trouble is that you might be forced into going on and freezing some more, and it wouldn't work.
It would never work.
That's the problem.
We cannot continue to freeze, because these labor guys are just about to jump out of their skins anyway.
Well, whatever uncertainty there is can be quickly cleared up.
I think it can be.
I think the points can be made very effectively, and Conley is just the guy to make them and take away that...
Just that little element.
You can read all that.
Well, of course, he's with the Japanese today.
I'm going to see him tomorrow at noon.
I've sent a memo over so he'd have it before he saw you tomorrow.
Just the points that I've just made.
I think he can do very well.
Okay.
Thank you, sir.