On June 8, 1972, President Richard M. Nixon and Charles W. Colson talked on the telephone at Camp David from 10:56 am to 11:25 am. The Camp David Study Table taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 133-011 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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.
Good morning, Mr. President.
Well, I just had a long talk with John Mitchell.
He sees the thing pretty much the same way we do.
He's really got his fingers in a lot of those pies, isn't he?
He's about people to what he's doing.
He's an amazing fellow.
He knows everybody.
He knows what they're doing.
Yeah, he really is.
He's very good that way.
There's any way to keep this thing alive.
I mean, keep the convention alive.
He'll think of it, but it's going to be quite a problem.
He told me that Muskie was going to do the press club tomorrow.
Well, we're afraid Muskie's going to drop out, Mr. President.
I just had a call from... John felt that, too.
Yeah.
It looks... Well, it's not even 50-50 right now.
He's inclined to get out or get on the McGovern bandwagon.
He's afraid if he doesn't now that
McGovern will be vengeful, which is true.
Vengeful, really?
He's that kind of guy?
He is that kind of guy.
And that Muskie, if he has any interest in the future of the Democratic Party, had better get on.
Most of Muskie's advisers are telling him now to join forces with McGovern.
Dwayne Andrews called McGregor this morning and said a few fellows have any ties into
uh muskie for christ's sake tell him to stay in there because hubert is very very elated over his showing in california he thinks he can cut mcgovern he thinks that he he has now some plans to to really take him on very very hard uh on the issues and wants to continue to do it and fight him right there on the wire but if muskie folds there isn't anything there's nothing nothing more to be fought all over it's all over so i'm going to call
I've got some friends who can get to Felix Oreden, who was a big Muskie fundraiser at one point, and just see if we can't keep Muskie shored up.
Hell of a state to be in.
It was only four months ago we were trying to destroy the guy.
Now we'd like to see him stay in there.
But that's quite important, I think, tactically and strategically, because if we can keep Muskie in the ballgame, what that does, of course, is
keep Hubert alive, and Hubert now feels, Hubert is convinced that his debates cut into McGowan.
If he'd had another week to go, he would have beaten him.
And that if he keeps up the debate between now and Miami, he may deny him the nomination.
And that apparently is his aim.
And he's being fed on that by Andreas, who sent him $100,000 yesterday to keep it up.
So from our standpoint, it's in our interest to see these fellas keep going.
Of course, of course.
And not let it run away.
Whether we can or not, whether we can do anything about it remains to be seen.
Yeah, it's tough.
Many of the same types of people that support McGovern supported Muskie, so they would tend to sort of, you know what I mean?
That's the difficulty.
Muskie went the left approach.
Muskie had chosen that way, and that's why it's going to be damn hard.
Yes, it is.
going to be hard for, it's really hard for Muskie to resist.
You know, he's got no future at this point in time at his age and as bad as he did this year.
And he may hope for cabinet posts someday or the vice presidency.
I still think he'd like that.
But we'll do our best on that one if we can.
Well, I figured that the, I mean, certainly Hubert ought to take some comfort out of the California thing.
I must say that
I don't know.
The press plays it in a mixed way, from what I would say.
I mean, they want to have McGovern with a sweep, and on the other hand, they say, well, he didn't do quite as well as was thought.
That's right.
Sort of a mix.
Is that your analysis?
Yes, sir.
My analysis is that at this point in time, thus far, it has been mixed.
Some of them have given credit for Humphrey making a last-minute surge.
Others are saying, well, McGovern...
made a tactical decision to slow down spending because he knew he had California I, which is a jackass analysis.
NBC had that last night.
Some are saying, like Evans and Novak today, that maybe they found the Achilles' heel of McGovern.
There hasn't been enough yet that his extremism is showing.
Croson tells me an interesting thing.
He talks to all the working-level reporters, and they all say this.
But then when you see it in print, it's kind of purified.
The media really want to protect this guy.
Sure they do.
But we can bust through it.
Mitchell is having a press conference, as he probably told you today, and he's going to use some of those lines that you and I went through last evening, and Buchanan has drafted them for him.
He's a dedicated man who means exactly what he says.
He says he's going to build the biggest welfare program the nation's ever heard of and make the middle class pay for it, give $1,000 to everybody, take them at his word.
That's just what he means.
And his views are very extreme, but that's the way he's gotten this far, by espousing a very extreme position.
So in a nice way, I think he can be...
I think we can do it.
From our side, we can do it in a nice way.
The other side, particularly the Humphrey operation, if it stays alive, we'll do it in a very strong way.
One thing that we did get out last night very successfully was the fact that this is the McGovern stock market.
I don't know whether you saw that, but one of the networks picked it up, and the papers this morning have got it.
Analysts, brokers and analysts are saying that
The market is going down the last few days because of the fear of McGovern being nominated.
That's good stuff because a hell of a lot of middle America owns stock, or at least if they don't own stock, they're worried about the, they want the stock market to be healthy.
That's right.
So this is one where I think we can, our friends on the street may give us a little break if they keep talking about it.
There's no other reason for it to go down, is there?
No, there isn't.
And my God, the economic indicators are just tremendous.
They really are.
That's all right.
Let it go down.
Well, it's following a good, healthy pattern, and it'll be at $1,000 in another six or eight weeks, and that's great.
But if there's a little temporary scare, if people think that the market will collapse if McGowan's nominated, that can't do anything but help us.
I don't really think there would be anybody that could get to a Muskie, though.
The fellow you mentioned, just a financial contributor, you've got to get to a fellow like Muskie.
You've got to get to him to a political man.
Well, what I was hoping was that Roy Houghton, who was the chairman of his finance committee, could get to Hughes of Iowa, who apparently has more influence on Muskie than anybody, and just talk Harold Hughes into holding firm.
The trouble is that Hughes, of course, was kind of pro-McGovern at one point.
Yeah.
The other point would be to do this, would be to get, if you could get the fellow-like Hollings of the Senate Campaign Committee, that's the kind who could say, good God, don't let this fellow get the nomination.
They're going to hold senators and carners from the government.
Oh, yeah, that's a good point.
I think the Senate Campaign Committee and House Campaign Committees could say, look, we just can't run with him on the ticket.
Stay in there.
Stay in there.
Yeah, that's very good.
And that could be that, and how to arrange that.
Yeah.
I'll tell you though, he's really something.
I mean, would you think of ideas?
You know, he says he's going to go to Hanoi now.
Isn't that the damnedest thing?
God Almighty, I mean, you can, you know what I mean?
It's like Eisenhower going to Korea.
Well, that was a different matter at this.
He'd go to Hanoi.
That's it.
To me, I just can't.
I believe, Mr. President, that he's going to be able to sell less stuff.
You know, as Mitchell and I talked this morning, the guy has never gotten more than, say, 40 percent of the Democrats who turn out to vote in the primary.
And Massachusetts, where he got his biggest percentage, he's still only got 10 percent of the voters in the state voted for him.
He does not have a big constituency.
And I just can't help but believe, I watched that last night on television.
It's just horrible.
Some of the press know what's happening.
Bob Novak, who's been very helpful to us.
They know it, but they won't say it.
Well, Novak saying it.
Oh, God.
He did that little Metro Media commentary last night.
Right our line.
He said, if the governor's nominated, this is an historic opportunity for the Republicans.
It probably gives them their first opportunity
The first opportunity at the Congress, Nixon will sweep the Senate and the House in with him.
Most Democratic politicians fear, and he gave that very good pitch for us, and his column today was good.
That'll get out into the media.
We may not have gotten it as much on the first blush of California as we would like, but... Well, we can't.
It's not our...
It's the Democrats' job to do it.
I mean, they don't pay attention to what we say.
relationship oh sure if we can plant it here and there it begins to if it gets into their consciousness if they start thinking in these terms the press they all follow one line right bob pinch this morning is that he was going to take on field and we'll see he does well
Putnam just tore hell out of my... Did he?
Yeah.
What did he say?
Well, he said he was shoddy, inaccurate, liberal, biased.
He also called McGovern all sorts of names.
He'll probably end up getting called into the FCC again, but our people called him, and he was...
Boy, he had some marvelous tough lines to start pounding out, and we...
We are compiling all of Field's mistakes over the last several years.
He's probably way off.
He had Rockefeller beating Goldwater by 12 points, which I wasn't aware of.
I know he had him headed, but you see, Chuck, he always loads it on the liberal side.
He never makes a mistake on the conservative side.
That's my point.
That's right.
I mean, if he made a mistake on the conservative side just once, then you'd think that maybe it was just an honest mistake, but it's deliberate.
Mm-hmm.
But on this one where he was dead wrong on the Proposition 9 and then dead wrong on the other one.
Yeah, he covered himself on Proposition 9.
On his second poll, he called that one correctly.
The first one, he was off, and then he came back and did a second one and showed it's losing.
So we don't have him on that one as we hoped to have him.
We're not referring to that.
We're just referring to his first poll.
Forget about the second one.
You don't play clean with a fellow like that.
No, sir.
Because he doesn't play that way.
Did you see, by any chance, Mr. President, the Reston column yesterday?
No.
Of course, the Times and the Star ran.
No.
Well, this really probably does us more good.
He's got some anti-Nixon jabs in here than anything else because it's a liberal writing about a liberal.
He talks about how George McGovern is convinced that the nation wants radical change, uses the phrase, that the nation wants to revolutionize the tax structure and redistribute the wealth of the nation, McGovern believes.
Then it says President Nixon and his aides are eager to fight the issue on that ground.
and says what is interesting and puzzling about this is that McGovern keeps getting the support of workers and suburbanites who are normally supposed to be against his radical foreign policy, defense, and welfare programs.
That goes on, and many people are telling McGovern that by keeping on arguing his radical programs, he may win the nomination but lose both the election in November and democratic control of the state capitals and the Congress.
And he says, still, McGovern keeps betting on his radical programs and his young army of radical organizers.
His argument is very simple.
People want this kind of a change.
And then he goes on to conclude.
It's a fascinating column coming from Reston.
McGovern probably cannot win on his policies.
Even his own party is badly divided on them.
And he may even lose control of the Congress if he continues to insist on them.
But he is a plain, simple character, and it may be that that is his only hope.
And he goes on, after five years of political expedience, Andrew Johnson, Nixon, the city is, at least this city is sick of the hucksters who argue for more of the same, more war, bigger defense budget.
McGovern, at least, is arguing an honest line.
And he said, we are faced with radical problems, and we need radical solutions.
And it says he will probably win New York, but the Stop McGovern movement won't succeed.
And he will still be, however, in trouble and still be counting on bad news in Vietnam and the economy to help him in the election.
It's a devastating piece.
That's the kind of thing that... Of course, all these things, Rex can really believe in himself.
Well, that's the point.
And what he's saying, and he always has, he just not then covers it up, but he's a total radical himself.
He's written this in a, oh, he's a complete radical, Jesus.
He's written this in the sort of wistful tones of a radical columnist saying, here's this honest, simple guy, and he is a radical, and he's proposing radical things that he's probably going to lose.
That's one of the things, of course, that's a terribly effective thing to get out.
In other words, to quote the liberal New York Times columnist, quote, quote, quote, quote.
Exactly right.
I thought we would take this thing and put the whole thing out.
The difficulty with our people, we're always putting out too much, but just put out two or three lines.
The Frank Leonard approach, basically.
That's right.
frank leonard is the one only one that does really effective things or that stuff he does for monday after trips and so forth did you see the latest that he put out yesterday no i didn't i didn't see that oh he's got a marvelous one that's it on this time on the russian trip oh yeah he's done a beautiful job i guess he did such a fine job on the china trip yes he did i got very angry at frank because he didn't put enough of the tanya speech in which i told him was probably more important than the
Yeah, speech when you came home, but he has the page of headlines in there.
President proved pundits wrong.
Richard Nixon seized initiative, took the risk, took the journey.
Isn't that good?
Prudent, painstaking, state's graft.
And he's got some of the best pictures out of the trip.
He's got a 16-page job, a lot of them on Mrs. Nixon.
i hope they get it around a little well this is being mailed now to where our list on first monday now is up to about 500 000 so this will get out to 400 000 this will get out to all of our good our workers and it's uh i should think they'd like it and that they'd like extra copies of it do they ever put in a little tab if you want to buy extra copies you can get it for so much or anything there might be an idea of it i don't know i don't know what to do with readers digest reprints of this to be obtained by
sending it to so-and-so.
He's a genius at this, but that's the way to do political stuff, is not to give him too much.
Pick three or four little simple things and just hang him with that.
Yeah, what we could do is just take out of this Reston piece a couple of phrases here where he says, if he keeps on arguing, his radical program.
Radical program.
Reston calls the governor's program radical.
That's
That's better than anybody else calling it.
But I think some of this kind of thing we can start building on, Mr. President.
Well, look, here's the whole point.
This time, let's look at what we could have had.
We could have had Muskie.
He could have been a tough kitty in any event, you know, because of the fact he didn't have many enemies.
That's right.
We could have had Humphreys.
uh well probably not as tough except that he would have still kept the establishment in the labor crowd yeah the adrenaline and the party would have moved yeah no he we could have teddy with all the problems i had so with all the problems you know i know there are those that are constantly stuck telling us how strong the governor is and the argument of how well he did in south dakota and so forth and so on first we've got to understand that uh
that winning in South Dakota or Maine doesn't prove you can win nationally.
More importantly, though, the point is that if we're going to have, when you've got here, a fellow that deliberately takes the ultra-radical extremist view, that's what we ought to have.
That's the kind of candidate we want.
And so, therefore, you go after it.
And it's well, of course, to get everybody
get everybody steamed up and scared as possible about this and say that the media are supporting him and so forth and so on, and that we will do.
It's well, however, for us to bear in mind that we must not allow the fact that he has this media support move us from the right to the center.
I told John Mitchell that today, and John totally agreed.
I said, John, it will blur the image.
I mean, it will blur the debate.
If we start, that's the trouble with it.
Hubert's attack on McGovern would have been infinitely stronger if Hubert had moved a little bit right, so you had a little valley between them.
But you're not going to have any valley between me and them if I were to go out with me and take Elliott Richardson's program for accepting river cost welfare.
Why the hell should I do that?
Awful.
Awful.
I'm not going to do it.
See, that's a wrong tactic.
I don't draw the issue that way.
That's right.
Dead wrong tactic, Mr. President.
Our whole game in this campaign, and I know Mitchell understands this, and our people have got to understand it, is that, A, we run a very positive campaign on your world leadership.
We're one of the great statesmen of this century, and it's true.
And even our critics in the media are acknowledging it.
I mean, nobody is knocking you on this.
This we have all to ourselves.
And then on the domestic side, you run a negative campaign.
McGovern wants to do this, but we're against that.
The Democratic platform would cost $400 billion.
By God, we're against that.
He wants to legalize marijuana.
We're not going to do that.
Just hitting him on his weak issues domestically.
And don't try to outdo him.
There was a conversation at the 815 meeting this morning where a number of people said, let's get the president more active on his domestic programs, revenue sharing.
oh and i said my god just keep not revenue sharing please no i said just keep the president on the pedestal he's on right now when he has a press conference let him talk about the changing uh conditions in the world that are leading us to peace and the hope for peace and we're we're moving a step closer to peace and a step further away from the dangers of nuclear war this
You know, this is our long suit.
Well, the point is, why talk about the other fellow's issue?
Now, the other fellow's issue is they all want to talk about, let's clean up the ghettos and all that sort of thing.
Now, damn it, that's not our issue.
No, and that's not where I vote, sir.
That is really not where I vote, sir.
And getting me out there, I mean, go to the county, I mean, meeting a county commissioner, hell, let Agne do that.
That's his job.
Yep, exactly.
You did one yesterday that is marvelous because it took
none of your time, and yet it got extensive media coverage, television as well as radio, as well as in print.
We sent a telegram to the Governor's Conference in which we urged the states to pass no-fold automobile insurance.
That's a very popular consumer issue.
I think that's the kind of thing
where it puts you in a good posture.
The only people who oppose it are the tort lawyers, and hell with them.
There aren't that many of them.
It's a big consumer issue.
I know the impact it's had in Massachusetts.
And Connecticut, it's been enormously popular.
They just cut the rates again in Massachusetts, and everybody thinks Frank Sargent's a hero.
He's a jackass, but they all think he's a hero.
And now you're on that issue personally, and a very good telegram yesterday.
It didn't take a nickel's worth of your time.
Isn't that great?
That sort of thing I'm all for.
Yep.
And going home on the car radio last night, they were quoting from your statement on it, and it was on TV, and it's in the press.
That's great.
Incidentally, another good break we got was another good Supreme Court decision yesterday, too.
Oh, we've got a series of those.
This wasn't that great, you know, about Potter Stewart and our four judges.
And I think...
If you could tell the PR people, I haven't seen much, Chuck, of them using it, but do you think they ought to use how Nixon's changed the... Are we doing that or not?
We are doing it, Mr. President.
There's been, actually, there's been a pretty good amount of that.
I think I've been at the amount of coverage we've gotten on that.
It's been quite a bit since...
I was thinking of giving it to our speakers, too.
You know, when they talk about things, oh, we've changed the court, I mean, peace at home as well as peace abroad, a little of that.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And make it damn clear that we have nothing to do with Angela Davis' case here.
Oh, Jesus, yes.
The Richmond decision helps us because that was handed down by Justice, by Hainsworth, who tried to put on the Supreme Court, where they reversed the Jackass decision.
is great in terms of Richmond then helps us there.
It hurts us in the busing thing in the Congress.
We're probably this week going to get the damn provision that they have on the higher education delay because now apparently the Richmond case has taken a lot of the steam out of trying to get our moratorium substituted, our busing plan substituted for the one that got freeze put on.
The one that got freeze put on doesn't do a damn thing.
McGregor said this morning that he was afraid that, in view of the Richmond case, that we probably now, we're not going to be able to get that one changed.
And Congress will figure that they have settled the busing issue once they pass the conference report on higher education law.
You mean I'll have to sign it?
Yep.
You mean because they're going to... Why would it change?
What do you mean?
Well, what happens, Mr. President, they have on there the compromise amendments that they added to the higher education bill on busing, which the Congress says, many of the Congress say, well, it's a good solution to the busing problem.
It stays certain appeals, but it's
but it's a halfway solution.
And it does damn little, but it may defuse the issue, you see, and make it tougher for us to force the Congress to act.
Why do I have to sign the bill?
I'm not for the higher education bill anyway.
No, I made that argument to the 815 meeting that maybe we ought to veto it, and everybody said, well, you'll get accused, I know, of being anti-education and rejecting the busing thing in order to keep the issue alive.
Well, it's
point of view it's one you may want to think about because it is a half-assed solution to the busing problem but it gets them all off well it isn't going to take the it can remove the busing issue though no it doesn't remove the issue because it only it doesn't uh it doesn't remove it because the moratorium didn't even remove it you know that's right there's a hell of a lot of people that aren't going to be affected by this isn't that true that's right yes sir uh that's the problem with it and uh
It may be that, well, we've got to figure some technique between now and September to sharpen that issue because we are still not getting the credit, even up in Michigan.
We're not.
I mean, the busing issue is, hell, everybody in the state that I've talked to, half a dozen people, busing is just the issue.
It's ours, and yet they're not really associating us with it.
They associate all of us with it.
But not us.
We have to figure a way to sharpen that.
We just haven't done it.
That's one that, on the domestic side, where it is worth some effort on our part.
Absolutely.
It is decisive in some states, and there are states where electoral votes can be very important to us.
But that's one area, and that is one area on the domestic side where I want to do a little more.
I've got Scammon coming in here for lunch with me tomorrow to get more ideas from him of
uh things we can do in areas of the country where we can where we can work at and opening that one up the war issue i think we've i just think we're in marvelous shape right now i i just am so pleased with the floor breath on that the latest terrorist poll was marvelous which he's got out for this coming monday where he
It makes the point that the American people do not believe that the Vietnam conflict will be resolved any time in the near future, which is, I think, helpful without expecting a solution.
And 79 percent want an end, but a majority oppose a coalition government to 75 to 13.
They say the U.S. should stay involved until all American prisoners of war have been released.
They favor a ceasefire, two to one.
Every finding in the Therese Bowl is exactly opposite from the McGovern position and really does the best one Harris has had on the Vietnam War.
But he firmly believes that issue has turned and that you now have a very, very good support on that.
It's not a question of neutralizing the issue.
It's a question of it being a positive, really.
Getting back to this busing thing, you mean that these...
So the amendments that Congress puts in, Congress is going to claim it has handled the busing issue?
That's what they'll say, yep.
That's the difficulty with it.
You see, they'll now take the position, well, we went through an elaborate conference.
We came up with a very good compromise solution, and this is it.
And we're going to say, well, you haven't solved the problem.
And they're going to say, yeah, we solved the problem.
Yeah, well, the message, if we sign it, has got to say it's not solved.
Good God, I mean, this is a horrible bill.
I mean, and the whole higher education thing is a mess anyway.
It's a monstrosity.
It is.
The money in there is just absurd.
No, I may still lead to it.
Well, it's...
Pass it around on there.
It'll scare the hell out of some of the left-wingers.
Oh, my God, I...
that I just against the bill for other reasons.
If I passed that around today, they'd start jumping out windows here.
That's right.
I said it at the 815 meeting, and everybody jumped in.
But I think the message is the key, and I've told Ken Cole and domestic counsel people that they'd better get a very, very stiff, hard-line message that just says to the Congress, you haven't done a damn thing about busing, and this is a cosmetic and only a cosmetic,
will not solve any problems.
I want Buchanan to write the message on that part of it.
I'll get Pat to do it so we don't have it written in too soft language.