On September 22, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon, White House operator, and Charles W. Colson met in the President's office in the Old Executive Office Building from 6:31 pm to 6:48 pm. The Old Executive Office Building taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 279-041 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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, no.
Something closer than that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, I don't think the star headlines are bad.
It says, prices did jump despite a freeze.
What the hell?
It's sort of negative in a sense, but the story is not that bad.
The main thing is that we've got to get all the hard people and...
The only chair that we got from campus was Connelly.
But Romney, he deleted the chairs.
Romney and Volpe are both optimistic types and fighter types.
I think that they need to sort of buck up and tell us that we're less, well, you know, egressive.
Everybody ought to just be like, actually, this is working.
It's working.
The country feels better, but our people have done it.
They have it written all over their faces when they go out.
I just hope they are.
I know you're not, but I meant our day.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, the thing is that on that man, I wonder if we can't find...
This is one of them.
Why not take a fellow like Herb Stein?
I mean, as you know, there are 19 out of those 21 are Jewish.
Take a Stein and put him over there and throw more out.
I don't know.
I just don't know.
But I really think you need a tough fellow that can handle those goddamn people.
Yeah.
Basically, a weak, spiraling son of a bitch who's left the right over in his name.
Do you agree or not?
Yeah.
That's right.
Well, can't you talk to Arthur about it?
Maybe he'd say, no, Arthur, we're getting screwed.
But no, Arthur, he doesn't want the figures to be good.
Well, he would now.
Yeah.
He's the one that advocated all this stuff.
They're competing.
They're running ads.
They're
having sales, I don't think these people are reflective.
Look, they've got a lot of gun and hip-sweep bureaucrats all around, and boy, we've got to find these people right to the death.
Let me tell you, I want to be sure that Schultz knows that I expect a real son of a bitch to be in that job.
I don't want some weak one, but you know how George is, he's always here, he's the best man, the hell with the best man.
I want the toughest man.
I'll tell you the good man, Weinberger, that kind of a guy,
Yeah.
I know.
Well, you can't put him over there, of course.
Right.
Well, the thing that I was thinking is on the employment figures, I'd like to go over those figures.
Where there are states, where our state figures are, I'd like to break out the federal figures, and let's get 10 or 15 columns on that.
Now, we had a few speeches made
You know, that people say, by what?
Business is better than, what the hell's the matter with the BLS?
And attack us.
See, let them attack us more.
See?
Why don't we do that?
Well, right?
I really can take New York.
New York comes down to 5.6.
Now, if New York is 5.6, the national average has got to be 5.5, because New York's a little worse than the national average.
Because New York, California will be above New York, but not much.
It'll be maybe 5.9.
But the South is all less than 4.
Yeah.
And Texas, Texas.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Midwest is, Illinois is not bad, Ohio is not bad.
Yeah, yeah.
And yet you go to Illinois and they say, gee, things are bad.
The reason is that you're this goddamn idiot.
And our figures.
I've got to get close on that.
Is he unhappy?
Yeah.
It's a promotion.
Promote him a little.
Give him a little more money.
You mean he thinks he was doing this in and expecting it?
I think there are many.
He's damn smart.
Of course.
But now, God damn it.
put him up, give him a good job, but for God's sakes, what is more, just an old, I imagine an old, old maid account, right?
Yeah, I know.
God damn it, why we took him to the marker, I don't know, well, I don't know.
Marked up the Jews.
You know, I didn't, of course, naturally don't check the religion unless you gave me the politics, but I found that 19 out of the 21 are Jews.
The whole goddamn thing, Goldstein brought them in.
So what the hell do you think they're going to do to us with Kempis?
That's right.
Now, that doesn't mean they're all disloyal and they're all dishonest, but Jesus, it does mean that somebody that leads can just kill us.
And this is the most important thing we can do.
I mean,
They talk about the appointment of Secretary of Agriculture and Congressman.
It doesn't mean anything.
Nothing compared to these monthly figures.
And poor old George doesn't understand this, or does he?
Does he understand these figures kill us every month if they're bad?
Shaken?
Hodgson is a weak man.
He's a nice man, but rather weak.
But George is a strong man.
Now, George ought to understand this and say, God damn it, we're not going to be screwed.
You know?
Right.
You know?
But whether it's when you've got to make a judgment call as to whether it's
whether the point is up or down.
Sometimes you're six-tenths of a percent.
You round it out to one above or one below.
Well, it's kind of that.
They round it below.
But the other thing is, though, that I am convinced that the state figures are probably much more accurate than ours.
That's right.
And ours are, you know, they go around here.
And, of course, it's good to have the state figures come out.
Like the New York figure, that New York headline was damn good that night.
michigan michigan and basically it's michigan los angeles well seattle doesn't matter because it doesn't have that many people but it's michigan los angeles san diego and uh and well connecticut is a matter of your connecticut small it's only new york california and basically in the south that matter and the midwest well the midwest is rather solid it's a little below five percent right so what the hell the south is below four percent
So then you look at California.
Well, California's high.
It's as high as 6%, right?
Six and a half.
Yeah, maybe seven.
Well, but it'll come down.
It'll come down.
When it comes, it'll go with a real gallop, because that's a very volatile state.
Right?
And also, California will have...
enormous retail sales.
It's basically a space where people buy cars, refrigerators, houses.
That's a mistake.
Why don't you start?
What did you say?
Fitch said he felt that things were better out there today.
Good.
Now let's get the figures, and let's go after them, and that'll make the BLS stand up and take notice that we're a bunch of men, and get some senators and congressmen.
I consider this more important than any other thing.
I really do.
Yeah, because basically,
People are going to read these figures and say, are we succeeding or aren't we succeeding?
You know, these Democrats can then whine around, wring their hands on unemployment for us.
Well, the bastards, Christ, they had more unemployment than Kennedy's three years we had.
Six percent.
I know.
And also, it was, it averaged six percent.
Six percent for three years.
Next month is going to be more than 6.1.
It's got to be.
And it isn't.
We're not in trouble, but we know somebody's lying.
It will be.
And it's not like when it does, we are screaming from the house.
All of this
You know, some of our people are getting so goddamn naive, they say, oh, we can't talk about the good figures because next month might be bad.
Get the hell out with it.
Talk about every good month and ignore every bad month.
That's what they do.
That's right.
But when it's good, you just can't thank a lot of them.
Romney's a good man.
He's a decent fellow.
And his wife is.
Oh, sure.
I'm glad I had him at the bottle thing yesterday.
We stood in line and chatted together.
Well, he's hurting.
He's fighting for us.
I think things are going well.
Oh, sure, the staff.
When my doc brought up, he had 2,200,000 stars.
It's unbelievable.
Give it to him.
Give it to him.
Tell him.
I think he did, Karen.
But Stans, of course, he doesn't
I don't have any charisma, but he's really a loyal boss.
All the way, it's all the way.
Kettle just kicked the hell out of him.
Is he bored or not?
How's he feeling?
We're going to get through there.
You see, a wave means they're going to not give us what we want.
They're going to give us 7% across the board, which is fine.
They're going to give us more of one thing that we want.
We're going to get it through.
That's right.
What do you think of these figures, if you're talking about these?
Right, right.
Because he's a good fighter.
Well, you don't have to keep him up because he's different from so many of our others.
He never gets down.
He always says, well, what the hell?
And they, when they're, they cave in on the right and they cave in the left, we attack in the center.
Now you just keep everybody charged up.
Oh, don't let them.
No reason to be down.
And the main reason is it's working.
I have a real confidence that this economy has moved up.
For Christ's sake, it's moved up in the first quarter.
It's moved up in the second quarter.
It's moved up in the third quarter.
I mean, if the Democrats were in, they would be, you know...
That's right.
And it's moving up without war.
If you take two and a half million people out of the armed service and put that to them every time you can, it's better to have people working for peace than to have our prosperity build on killing men in Vietnam.
I hate the hell out of them.
They hate to hear it, but put it out there.
Where was that?
Right.
Good.
Yeah.
Right.
Okay.