On October 31, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon and Charles W. Colson talked on the telephone from 7:57 pm to 8:13 pm. The White House Telephone taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 013-051 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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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?
Yes, sir, Mr. President.
I got your note on George Bush, and I wrote him a note.
I didn't see the program, but I wrote him a note.
He was just approved.
Well, that's what I said in the note that all my reports indicated that.
It's really good to have a guy like that, isn't it, that'll go out and hit the hard, the fast ones and
And he's apparently very skillful, too.
Well, he was very upbeat, and he was very positive, and it didn't matter what they asked him.
He answered what we'd asked him to answer.
First question out of the box, he led right into Kennedy, and he said it was cheap cut politics.
Really?
Yeah, and he said that he was just appalled by it.
He really hit him very, very hard.
And then the second question, which had nothing to do with Kennedy, he did it again.
Yeah.
That's the stuff.
Good to have a pile of fishing.
Right.
Then the thing to do is to give Bob a call and tell him I noted Ray Ray, you know.
It's sort of
That's what he needs to hear.
He does.
Buck him up.
If he feels that he's doing a great job, I'm going to call him in the morning and tell him it's been great.
It's been played beautifully.
In fact, our fellows were kind of congratulating him.
The guys did a beautiful job on television.
When was that?
He went on the, he did a network tape last night, and it was shown on the 6th of low evening.
He reported to me about it.
What did he do?
Well, they said he was more like Agnew than Agnew.
He claimed to have defeated the born-eight-fellow in the New Left and the Radical Liberals.
All right.
He really was.
The New Left and the Radical Liberals.
Yes, sir.
He apparently used both of those phrases.
He had a quarrel with Moriarty, and he said they were the same thing, and he really didn't agree with it.
Well, just keep him also bucked up.
Well, they should get some fighting.
They know that they could see how the Democrats just, with a flagrant display of partisanship, are going to do this on everything.
They don't care about the country.
The poor damn Republicans always have to be concerned about the country.
But our Democratic friends, they'll vote even though they know it hurts the country.
They ought to be hitting them on the partisanship and lack of patriotism
I'd really hit them hard on that.
I think Agnew ought to ride to that attack right now.
It'd be a good thing for him to hit.
Agnew has a speech on Wednesday, Mr. President, to the Mutual Insurance Agency of Florida, and it's their national convention.
That's a pretty conservative group.
And I've been working, as I said, one of my fellows is working this weekend on the speech, which I just heard you know by now.
It's very good.
It just takes each of these things one by one.
Now, George Bush...
Bush today, he just would have been so proud of.
The second question he asked, he said, this is the same color with Senator Kennedy who accused President Nixon of wanting to continue the war in 1972.
He said, that just shows you how low he's getting television.
He went on, he said, no, I'm only involved in the U.S.
He just
He took the first 10 minutes of the program with Kennedy, and the question was, you could see they were perplexed because they couldn't shut him up.
Yeah, that's great.
Then he defended you.
He talked about your role and the tremendous leadership you've given in the world.
And then he talked about the ugly conduct of the United Nations.
Did he get that across again?
Yes, he did.
I think that's beginning to sink in.
Oh, there's a question in there.
Yeah, you see that all, that refrain is all too representative.
But I love the phrase...
They said that the president overreacted with his statement on the U.N.
He said, well, if anything, he understated it.
He said it was worse than the president's statement.
The president's statement was mild and compared to what really happened when he was there.
Ah, good.
And then his last answer, which was just delightful, had nothing to do with the question, was that the Arab delegates had been coming to him to talk about expelling Israel.
So he scored all the points he had.
You love to see somebody who really looks at it and does it well.
And in a sense, let's understand that all this controversy about the UN and foreign aid and so forth isn't all that bad.
It's going to build up Bush, which is good.
It's just personality.
We need a little on our side that way.
Well, you know, it's been one of the weaknesses.
We haven't had fellows that could go out and make the news for us.
And it's been, when you do something, it's a big... And they all wait for that.
They sit back and say, well, the president's got to say something, and they don't want to say anything.
But I think that, frankly, if a fellow like George Bush, he could build up to be a good counterattack fellow on national security and foreign policy issues.
and a few others that can be articulated.
Right.
Well, Scott, I'm glad that he's doing it.
Scott's a great phrase maker.
I didn't just say that we consider that he should fill the leadership vacuum.
He's the man to do it.
Also, Scott has a feeling we're going to win, which I think is part of his...
He'll go all out.
See, that's what he's reflecting on, isn't he?
He's the willow tree.
He knows that we're riding very high.
I just was reading this afternoon all of the newspapers around the country on the Gallup poll and the Harris poll.
It's a marvelous headline around the country.
Those headlines are more important than I noticed that.
The star says Nixon suffers twin defeats.
You know, that Sherman piece.
Tell me, what is, do you know Sherman?
What is about Sherman?
I don't know him, Mr. President.
Why don't you check his background?
What I mean is that Ziegler ought to be smart enough to find somebody on the star like Horner, somebody to play off against him.
Because he's written twice.
He wrote last week that Kissinger developed all the foreign policy.
He's obviously playing the whole New York Times line, just 100%.
I agree, and I've only read it, I think this is only the third piece I've read, but each one has been a hatchet on a site.
I'm planning to see Smith Hempstone.
Now, who is, what about him?
He writes great stuff.
Oh, he's marvelous.
But is he with the star, or is he a columnist, or what?
Well, he's a columnist, but he's also married into the star family.
I don't know the connection.
Well, I think he writes some of the very best stuff of all, and I really ought to get to meet him sometime, will I?
Is he a young man, old man, or what?
Well, I've never met him, but I am told that we were in the same outfit in the Marine Corps together at the same time.
I guess he was 40-ish.
His stuff.
He wrote that beautiful column on the whole Marines.
Jesse Fuller.
Yep.
And I think I wrote him a note about it.
Yeah, I did write him a note about it.
When he comes in, just bring him in and say hello to me.
And then, but also, ask him, what's the crisis of matter with Sherman?
Why don't you do that?
I'm going to do that.
He has a lot to say about the editorial policies.
For example, he took the, I'm told, he took the editorial syndicated columnist.
I gather he is more than just a columnist.
A good friend of ours, who was the executive director of lawyers in 1968, I think, George Weston.
Yeah.
That was a good one.
get get get him in early this week get him in tomorrow like tomorrow understand it doesn't make any damn difference for the star readers but it does for the washington types you know they figure the stars sort of really be with us
That's right.
That was a tough article and a tough headline.
But I...
But let me say, I don't think that headline hurts us.
No.
You know, Brian, my feeling is that the Deeds and so forth, what about?
Well, the sophisticates around the island, of course, know what the men did.
And it's sort of a... As one of the columnists pointed out today, they never should have voted.
They were in an ugly mood.
They had a bad week.
They acted in a very...
That's right.
They'll recognize that.
What?
We won't do what we want, but we'll fight the whole program.
Bill Timmons was meeting with Scott today.
And apparently Scott suggested that maybe the bipartisan leadership should meet with you on this issue.
I told Bill that we should meet.
Not until we have the conditions, that's right.
We should first see what the, not for the, only for the purpose of telling them, not for the purpose of finding out what they're going to do.
They'll say, get out of Vietnam and cut off Asia-Greece.
Hell, we're not going to do that.
Well, I told Bill to first see how the lines were developing, and I did tell him that he would talk with or speak to Mayhem, if that makes sense, to get a longer continuing resolution than Mayhem, if that makes sense.
But until we do just
who we're going to do what.
Exactly.
But we would do what we're going to do, and we're going to go get our own strategy.
It would be a very great mistake to bring in the bipartisan leaders and have them go out and knock on the door.
We want to remember that they are a man's field.
Well, that's right, and what we need to do first is to get to, I think we need to get the housing appropriations guys on board, make that, cut that deal, and then when we know where that's going, and we can get it over to the town of the appropriations, with all the damn heat out we can to get that continuing resolution on board, then maybe it's the time that you call in and jack the leaders and say, no, let's go, we need that much more than that.
I think at that point it would be the end of Brexit.
Well, that's right, and it's a signal to the whole world that we're really prepared to push to that beautiful future.
We're telling the world what our leadership role is going to be, and then he went on to have beautiful views, describing how beautiful he felt when he was signified by you, and how well he felt when he saw you.
But that's the mental issue at the time, that we know exactly where we're going to be in the future.
Yeah.
But as I say, going through these newspapers this weekend, we will have just a series of marvelous headlines.
There's a big article in the Post on Gallup.
It's been rated higher in January.
It's in popularity and up in the charts.
It's been a good, from a political standpoint, a damn good upbeat week.
Damn good upbeat week.
Yeah, yeah, well, the other thing, the DM, well, there's had its negative effects, but there's more of a negative among the participants.
It's just kind of, it's a big one.
It's not a big one.
In other words, in the case of the foreign aid, they blame the Senate.
In the case of the U.N., blame the U.N. You see my point?
That's the way to play the game.
And make the Senate the issue, make the U.N. the issue, rather than ours.
It has gone, I think it's gone damn well in our respect so far as a person.
I think the U.N. issue clearly is on the U.N. And this one, we just have to turn it as got to the U.N.
I didn't see it, but the way it was described, it was marvelous.
Laying it right on the Fulbright, Kennedy, the new, we'll keep the drum beat up.
I think that I'm very anxious to see if the wire service coverage gets picked up tomorrow, because if the, not all the people, if we can't protect Kennedy, but the four prominent fellows we took him on, I think that it would be,
If our fellows begin to think that that's a good thing to do, it may be too bad some of that didn't get in before there was a weekly magazine.
But I wouldn't worry about that kind of thing.
But they'll have their time.
This is just like they had another time.
Like my report.
That's right.
Let them be out next week or something else.
We'll keep our fellows hitting the plate, I guess.
And I think the Vice President, like that speech on Wednesday, could be a damn good chronicling of the partisan obstructionism of the Democrats on foreign policy issues.
And the new isolation.
That's right.
They have a partisan obstructionism on foreign policy.
Breath.