Nixon & Price on State of the Union and Speechwriting

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Well, we're sort of coming down a home stretch.

I, uh, I feel that, uh, I feel a fidelity on that matter.

That's fine.

I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure.

If he doesn't, then why let me know?

On page 7, you don't need to mind the accomplishment of the investment.

Rather, the troops are leading the economy in combination with the Amazon and so forth.

I think I'm just going to say the number of Americans in Vietnam has been reduced by 20% from 541 to 69,000 in New Jersey, more than the ocean, and the numbers are growing up.

And in America, well, you see what I mean?

I'm getting off of a hook and saying, just before a Vietnam offensive.

They are going to be able to do, in my opinion, the right thing about that.

Well, if you want to say, in support of the Phoenix Delta rules,

No, I don't say that.

Ending America's fall in the war, Vietnam is first.

Oh sure, that's fine.

Vietnamization has that as its goal.

I agree with you.

I want to give it away now.

I see your point.

The war in Vietnam comes to an end.

How does that sound to you?

We must now go on to build a generation of peace that's under our feet as the war in Vietnam comes to an end.

Now, it's our fault in the Vietnam when the war in Vietnam comes to an end.

I was wondering if you thought that the business about competition that you put in, I don't know, whether it's .

I think the way you word it's out of time, but I didn't think it was worth putting in.

I mean, here's a good point.

I would like to say to a lot of people, even in our creative technologies, whether it be about their marriages, work, you know, well, it's the fact that we're the highest paid in the world and that our goods can still compete with world markets.

That American goods produced by the

that American workers would be the highest paid workers in the world and compete in the American world.

I know that I like that.

American workers.

What you just said is possible.

American workers would be the most highly paid in the world.

And our goods would still compete in the world market.

Get off the second paragraph of page 17.

I want to ask you about one fight.

I made one strike.

I...

I thought we'd take out the power and resources for one.

I've made it so often that I think we'll come about it.

If you don't mind taking that out.

Even though I did suggest it, we ought to take out the thing on page 21 and crack it in Congress about how long we're going to go on with the services.

I don't know.

You kind of like picking up these straight goals, don't you?

Or do you?

How do you feel?

Um, I didn't, uh, I thought part of this, uh, was very effective in finding out the ways in which that could work.

And this, it just seems to be a framework within which to measure these, uh, and, uh, and prove that we're still active.

I think, go ahead, you start to say what I'm saying.

But you have doubts now?

Not really.

You like this?

All right.

Let's leave it at that.

Despite the last paragraph, it's pretty well sensed.

It's not bad.

It's for high stations.

I have to look back and say that it's pretty good.

If you reverse the order of it so that you end in a great Congress, it's a whole better report.

The back and sides, despite the great pressures of a political year.

So...

Because it achieved, despite the great pressures of the political year, and in spite, that in spite of the great pressures of the political year, because it achieved such great good for the United States, I would engage with it.

That's all I have right now.

I think it's about late on it.

decision on a neighborhood school, then what we have there is enough, you know, that will control the school.

But then, that's all I've got, if you want to ask me something more.

I'll just give you my thoughts.

They're very small things.

Is it possible, because there's other ways about it,

Oh, well, you're good to be back.

But whatever you can, I don't, we can go on.

$3,900.

$4,000.

Well, I cut $26,000 already, so we've got $4,000.

It's still a little shorter than either of the other ones.

All right, go ahead.

One possibility would be on page six.

All right.

We've been having a one-paragraph thing.

We want the same paragraph.

We continue to do this part.

I agree.

Cut it.

Let me show you what I did at page eight.

That's the way.

It builds up this sense to put this one in front of it, rather than .

I cut this out.

I think that the first generation, I moved the first generation to be scared of the scourges of war to here, the next generation.

Rather than a four horse, slow convoluted .

Actually, it can't be the first generation .

Well, I .

I don't think we need to.

I don't think we're that long.

We're not going to have a hell of a lot of applause.

Yeah, because we don't really spell it out.

Also, we've got the want more later on.

That's good.

We've got your 26 words.

Great.

See, I cut this out.

You saw that.

That's almost 26 more days.

Well, I'm sure there was a lot of work on the dam.

How do you feel about it?

I feel good about it.

Are you ready?

Did Len leave?

How does he feel about it?

He feels good about it.

All right.

How does he feel about it?

He feels good about it.

All right.

Yeah, you said he was.

How do you feel about him?

Oh, I feel good.

Have you had a chance to sleep on him and think about him?

Correct.

I feel better about him now than I did yesterday.

Why?

I don't know.

It's reading over the draft.

It's sure going to be pretty tame stuff after the way our Democratic principle is up on candidates' parents.

Pretty rough.

Good.

Clark?

Oh, yeah.

Of course, he's such an idealist.

He liked it.

He thought it was strong.

Does he object to the fact that he's kicking the bucket?

No, he doesn't.

Well, uh...

So did we.

So are we.

Let's face it.

No, what I mean is they could do it, right?

And they should because they've had it so long.

Most of his, there's a lot of new stuff in here, but we're not submitting any new ones.

For example, that technology thing, that duck suit, there's no controversy.

And the other one, we don't expect them to act on this stuff.

So they ought to get off their ass and pass on this stuff, shouldn't they?

Education and welfare reform, revenue sharing,

and something on health have got to be passed, and some of the environment stuff.

I thought that's the truth, and I thought that was the goal as well.

I had to work my way through it.

It's a state of feeling that it's going to matter in some way.

I thought we should get back to this.

In the early days of the Republic, there was no reason to do it the way we did.

But now there is.

But we should do like we're going to make a state of the world.

And that's the way it should be done.

And we're going to have 45,000 well-chosen, unintelligible words.

But it will still tell us a hell of a lot.

Those documents are read all over the world.

If I tried to put that in a 45-minute speech, it wouldn't be worth a damn.

It would be too simplistic.

Right?

And so it is in this field.

How many words can you find against another count?

Don't worry about your count.

Just say yes if you find it.

Don't say over 5,000.

Use an exact number, even though you don't know the number.

I'd say 15,216.

Nobody's going to count.

Don't worry about it.

I say, well, I mean, the number's a little different.

You say, well, I'm trying to cut some people out.

Why?

Because you're within the ballpark.

You were going to say that.

It's something you've done.

It's something you've done today.

It's good to be an outback to the city.

In the D.C. area, we've done this stuff today.

The first plan is that we'll be an outback.

That's what we need.

We need to do something here.

How Washington is safe and ready.

What's your feeling?

I think it is.

There's been a lot of good business and better.

There's been a lot of coverage over the last few years going back and forth.

I know.

I think we're live.

But apparently on the face of these new figures, which look better, I think, than some of the adults, there's now good things going on here.

And crimes against the person are also going to be some part of the news.

You mean necrocrats now?

Well, uh, things like, uh, uh, murder, murder, uh, rape, assault.

Oh.

Why don't you put us on murder zone?

Murder zone.

Murder zone?

Murder zone.

Somebody going out and killing somebody, you know.

Just to me, I can't comprehend.

No, I couldn't.

I can't kill a bird.

I have never shot a thing in my life.

Nothing, believe me.

I shot my 45th ward when I was learning that I never killed a bird.

I just can't understand people going out with a huge arsenal of weapons to kill these poor goddamn dumb animals.

Can you?

You cannot do it.

And you know what?

I don't hunt fish.

I, uh, I, uh, because, you know, you up come those beautiful fish, you know, and they're flopping around and roving and eating around.

I can eat them, though.

You can't put them on a catcher.

When I come in for your start of the night, I don't want to have to leave the boat up.

I don't want to go up in the water after the sun comes up.

BB gun?

I did it.

Good guy.

One's gonna shoot a rat.

Well, I've been able to check those and cut their heads off.

Yeah, yeah, I've done that.

I work at the store.

I want to check this.

Not rackets.

Dress rackets.

I want to check this.

I am.

Yeah.

And if you miss, I'll cut the heads off.

Wipes.

It's okay.

He's a great person.

He's a man.

He's optimistic.

He's a fighter.

He's idealistic.

He's got real quality.

That's all.

That's your damn life.

All of it.

He would have beaten anybody but not me.

Anybody but not me.

Because you know, the Democratic candidate, despite all of the acting around him, is regardless of what he's going to do.

I mean, he's quick.

That's a lot of hard work to do, isn't it?

I'd like to do it if you would.

But I can still get along without him.

I think you look a little better without him.

What do you think?

I don't have to.

I don't know.

I'm sure we can.

I don't think this is a speech we ought to give at night.

Or a secret.

I don't know.

It's a...

It's a

Never be duly noticed.

It's always beyond that.

Well, anyway, you'll get it.

Why haven't you said the truth for 35 minutes of that kind of nonsense?

I think that the one thing that this narrative is true for, for you, and that's essentially the war is constant.

judgment of speeches on the basis of how many times they were interrupted by applause.

That's a tracking tool.

They said he was only interrupted three times by applause.

So that would be bad speech.

And he was interrupted 25 times by applause by Jesus Christ.

What does that prove?

What in the name of God does it prove?

I watched one of the best speeches I made in the campaign the other day.

We used to, everybody would.

Once, not once, they just listened.

They were spelled out.

In the end, they chipped for five minutes.

And that was just a hell of a successful speech.

Well, I think there's another couple in the United States.

You know, they had a speech in 1967.

I don't remember all of it, but it was a very popular speech.

Very popular speech.

How the hell is he talking about that?

Did I do the hand-to-hand?

I'm surprised it didn't happen.

I thought I could do it in the morning.

I'm not going to, I'm not going to work my tail off trying to, you know, get real up for this.

I don't, I mean, basically, I don't think I should be doing this.

I'm going to be relaxed.

Of course, I'll breathe as well as I can, but I'm not going to try to go for any histrionic effort or...

This is a band.

One thing I will say about the band, honestly, there is a period of dishonor.

We have got to take every bit of can and hypocrisy out of it, right?

I'm sure there is.

We took out the war.

You know, we took out the records.

We took out the stuff about the neighborhood school.

I suppose we had bills to grid up.

I don't know if we had, but it was good to have a number in there.

It was like suggesting that we really need to go in for quite a bit of this.

Yes.

It's not really.

Well, why is it?

They might.

Just might.

Just do them.

Some of them will feel that way.

Do you agree or not?

Totally will.

And this product is coming to open the air.

Well, that's the right thing for us to do.

We call it a good, good.

Thank you.

When you're going, our people, the PR side, come out, follow up and say, now, when they say we do not talk about domestic programs, I talk about domestic programs just the way I blow in the face.

And I make speech after speech after speech about them.

They are to follow up and say, well, here it is.

He's had this here for two years.

He's done this for a year and a half.

He's got all these things.

We're fighting for these programs.

Now, what the hell?

You know, the reason we get that rap for me is not that, well, it was like Ravel the other night in his questions.

When he came after he had asked me about foreign policy for the first eight minutes, he said, if I don't answer this question, it's a great question.

I said, well, where's the great question?

Neither do you.

If you're asking the questions, they don't ask the domestic questions.

They don't ask them.

because basically they ask about subject matter.

But then they get the impression you don't care about the environment, you don't care about this.

So it's war, it's war politics.

But here we are, we got it all out there.

How about doing trees?

And so I think there should be a very handy nailing of the 15,000 word line.

The idea that this is an historic thing and it's the record of a, it's the president's record, you know, it's everything he stands for is here.

This is the Nixon that we plan to return to work with.

I mean it is, you know, usually Pat Monahan's old-blown rhetoric is the most, let's face it, the most

and the revolutionaries in return is the most comprehensive, exciting, far-reaching, dramatic domestic program ever presented by any president.

That's what it is.

Comprehensive, dramatic, exciting, total.

Another thing I think is this, you know the radio project for the city.

decided at the moment.

How about trying about, trying to cut it down to maybe do three over the Easter period?

I mean, sort of a semi, I don't know, religious or, you know, sort of a...

I know you've done a lot of work on the rest of it.

And out of your supplemental notes, there's a hell of a lot of stuff.

that ought to be said sometimes in that kind of form.

First, I really feel I did them well.

You know, I like an easy format for it.

I don't know as deep as it gets for as big a newspaper play as the idea of a man-to-man.

Particularly if you take it on the side of your sentence.

But I wouldn't do six.

Maybe we have too many.

Or maybe we don't.

I don't know.

But maybe there's four.

Maybe there's rather than a trilogy, maybe four.

But there are probably four good, solid reasons to talk to them, you know?

And, uh... ...work out fairly carefully a list of foreign policies that we need.

This is our policy, but, uh, hopefully it'll work out.

If we're the same, this would probably end up in the... ...policy bill, the secondary bill, the bill...

My lab would rather have it appear like that so that it's easy.

I think it helps the

Writing in press, you see it broken down.

It's the paragraph one that I used on the initial episode.

And I like to break it.

Incidentally, I think it's, I like very much what you're able to do.

The idea we believe, don't you think it strengthens it?

It does.

Better than sort of straining it all out.

We believe this.

We believe that.

It's sort of a credo, so to speak.

First, if our interests are involved, we have to intervene.

Now, they'll say, what do interests mean?

Well, they'll say, if American citizens, for example, are endangered, and, you know, in Lebanon or Daka, you've got to go get them.

or if interest, of course, is the common, you know, basically what it means, that if there's a civil war in Vietnam or another war in South Asia, we do not agree.

But our interest, you see, Ray, is that, as you probably know, the main reason we have a treaty is Israel.

We have a treaty with Israel.

But our interests are very definitely involved

because the Mideast is oil, it's the Mediterranean, it's NATO.

And while many of our Jewish friends said we should intervene in order to save the Jews, they all know I'm not going to do that, but they will do to save American Indians.

Now, we probably wouldn't.

I mean, right at the present time, Americans aren't about to intervene anyplace.

But you can't, you could never let the Russians think that only where we have a treaty with the United States of America,

See, that's the other thing.

If they knew, or the Chinese, we'd have it.

But we don't have treaties with some very critical parts of the world.

We have treaties with all of Latin America.

We have hardly any with Africa.

I mean, in terms of defense treaties.

We have none in the Mideast.

None with Israel.

There is absolutely no treaty with the Mideast.

Words of America are the most important.

Thank God it's not with India or Pakistan.

Well, it's not with India or Pakistan, but it's Baghdad and Pakistan.

So it allows you to stay out of the brush fire and peripheral traffic.

Latin America, it allows you to stay out of a Latin war between two Latin states, but it would not allow you to stay out in the event that a Latin American nation were threatened by a European nation.

There you have the .

So it's careful to wear the gown.

That was too demagogic.

I knew it at the time.

I felt it.

I didn't want to leave the impression of, say, Vietnam.

You just can't say, well, goddammit, we shouldn't have done it.

Actually, maybe we shouldn't have.

I don't know.

I mean, we had Senator Hendricks were involved there for a ride in Thailand and Venezuela and a lot of other things.

But be that as it may, you can't tell the American people that 50,000 people a night wasn't asleep.

So, you know, we don't know.

There should be no problem with 35 minutes.

I don't know how the hell I did it.

Last year, though, I had 4,500 words and got through in 35 minutes.

I must have read very fast.

Well, I had, of course, .

For 4,000, it would be less than 40 minutes.

That's the critical thing.

You realize a damn few presidents have gotten speeches over in less than 40 minutes, and we've got to keep going.

She did it the first year, in 37, I think, huh?

Did that go 41?

Depends on how, whether they, if they don't, they should never count the applause at the beginning or the end.

You've got to take the time to start speaking.

You can't take the time to start speaking.

The time you start speaking, I think she had it less than 40.

That may be it.

The longer speech is the shorter time.

We use the times from the press releases as we recover the Starbucks.

That may have .

The introduction.

Calling upon the President of the United States to make sure .

That is a pretty sweet shot.

Basically, keeping him down to that is something, you know, you remember that, you know, Gertie Johnson's pictures in the Eisenhower speech, the poor Eisenhower, he hated him because he was physically tired.

And it's still 58 to 62.

He's got one of the last, I think, that he should go down.

Less than 30.

All right.

.

You know what I mean?

No, sir.

I mean, I... Do you remember?

I said, Johnson worked hard.

And I said, I... Hard work and presence.

I wasn't very excited to hear of it.

It had been abysmally conducted.

There was so much power in each city.

Here it is, you know, three-four-three.

I think everybody thinks it's good.

Three months ago, everybody told me it was going to be Kennedy.

Now everybody tells me it's definitely not going to go on.

It must be a shooter.

I have a feeling.

Right.

He's struggling.

Of course, he doesn't have anybody against him.

He'll come out with 65% of the vote there.

He's got a victory.

He doesn't get much money.

All of that goes to Florida.

Now, Florida could be quite a blow to him.

I think Rawls will come in first in Florida, and I think Hunter may come in second.

Huber is a hell of a campaigner.

He can do it without too much money.

He can get around, he makes news, he'll chop Muskie up pretty good for his crew.

I mean, what if Huber on the space shuttle, on the goddamn space shuttle, and he knows that Florida wants him?

Well, if he did, Muskie would have got away with it very well.

That sort of thing affects people like me and Florida.

And you would also, though you may do that, you would also use all of the micros.

Very well.

Because you do better with labor, whatever they do, or you might do the same.

When I come to Wisconsin, there must be some winter hands down because of the cold.

You never can underestimate your .

And if Wallace should win in Florida, he'd get a hell of a vote in Wisconsin.

Because that is a state that has great gates.

I didn't see Wallace drawing a hell of a vote in the water.

So I would say that Muskie should have to be the favorite

But if he stumbles in Florida, and then should be messed up in Wisconsin, he's then for a hell of a race.

Because it's a long way then.

Then the next Pennsylvania.

I think in terms of this kind of battle, he doesn't really have the heart for it, the guts

And I just say you can't underestimate Hubert.

Hubert's a juggler fighter.

And he'll get rough on you.

So is Wallace.

Wallace will get rough on you every time.

And a sleeper in all this is Lindsey.

Now, Lindsey, you've got to remember, whatever people think of him otherwise, the charismatic figure, he'll be around there for you.

He was going to be rousing on us, which, of course, is exactly the way that you can.

And if you remember, I didn't say a word of one against Romney or Rockefeller or anybody else.

And he wouldn't even answer any questions on all of that.

And he says, when I was there, fish took off after the other.

And Johnson, of course, as well.

So you can keep your own party together.

I'm not sure they can enjoy that kind of luxury, though.

I'm not sure.

It's a big prize out there.

They may not start having any more.

I don't know.

And I think Muskie has a fine hair.

But I think he is

They were nice people, though.

Good for them to know.

They loved us.

They gave us a hell of a load of food.

You know, we weren't sure that we'd make it by the end.

That's why if people said we wasn't supposed to eat, I'd rather you wanted a lot of ramen, which was wrong, and you didn't want salad.

You thought I had a right.

Nixon & Price on State of the Union and Speechwriting

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Also recorded on January 13, 1972

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Nixon & Price on State of the Union and Speechwriting

AI Summary

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NARA Description

Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on January 13, 1972

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