On July 21, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon and Haakon I. Romnes met in the President's office in the Old Executive Office Building from 2:43 pm to 2:47 pm. The Old Executive Office Building taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 264-012 of the White House Tapes.
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Yeah.
Yeah.
Hello.
Well, I knew that you would call me when I was in California, and this is good news, but I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciated the fact that the company found a way to keep that service going.
I used a lot of telephones during that period.
You probably guessed by now.
And also, I think it's really fine the way you worked the settlement out.
Well, no, they're, yeah, right.
Well, everything is important.
But I thought one graphic way you got it across, and I liked it, was they had a fine picture of these men.
They had a picture of, you know, supervisors and others working, you know, doing the phone thing.
And it shows you can do it, you know.
And that's one thing.
We think of things that are indispensable these days, and I suppose that before the days of telephone, people, of course, they got along without it.
But now, like when we had to inform in space 15 minutes before this China announcement almost two days ago, we had to inform 24 government ambassadors and about 50 people
We couldn't give them more than 15 minutes in advance notice because of the possibility of leaking.
But we could only do it with telephone.
We couldn't use color records.
So we just bagged those phones and ran up quite a bill.
But I think we can pay the bill.
Right.
Well.
I wish you would do, I wish you would convey, if you would, I know there must be somebody in your organization, the people that you kept going and not only, I know some of them were wondering, that was a high management decision, but there must have been an awful lot of very loyal people that really broke through, you know, went around the clock and made that time and just say that there's one guy that appreciated it.
That kind of loyal people in an organization are really hard to come by.
And you appreciate them, right?
Well, good.
Yeah.
We just hope now we can get steel settled in a reasonable way.
That's our next big one.
We've had fairly constructive reports, at least on the local issues.
Of course, the money thing has come.
It's just because the steel people have had it in New York, the labor union hasn't had it.
He's right for a long time.
But when I had the men, I told them, I can't believe it.
Here they are.
In the last 10 years, they have less people working in the field than they had 10 years ago.
Over the last 20 years, we've gone from 50% of the world's production to 23% of the world's production.
And if these folks don't buckle down and find some way to increase productivity, they may have very high wages and then new jobs.
That's what American businesses have got to understand.
I mean the ones where they have this competitive problem.
Oh, well, you know exactly what it is then.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, the thing that I, that we're trying to emphasize to the, on the labor side, of course, the industry side of the world, as you know, in the 70s,
The public eye, and of course everybody's eye, is on the amount, how much.
But the important thing is to get some progress on work groups.
And their unions are just talking as they can be.
And if they just have a big settlement here without announcing that there's going to be some kind of new attitude on the part of unions working with management,
to make steel more competitive, that's going to be very bad for the law.
So if even that can come out, it will be helpful.
But anyway, we'll hope for the best.
And I do appreciate what you've done.
Thank you.