Nixon, Mitchell & Haldeman on 1972 Campaign and Welfare Reform

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Well, I'll tell you later, man.

We'll see.

I can't tell the difference.

So, George, you had it left and gave me a note on Meany and I. I just wanted to ask you about that.

Okay.

Right.

You got your breathing off okay, huh?

Good.

I think it's, I think in your instance, we talked about cold turkey.

I know it may be messy, but I don't know.

I've created as much of a freedom as I can do.

God, these guys have just got to be able to handle it.

What a time they can show cleverness, restraint.

You know, there are various ways they can do this.

You have lost, you're all starting to lose.

And I just put it right on the line.

I put me right behind them.

I say, no, you're doing this.

You're not acting on it.

This is

Okay.

Yeah.

I just wonder too now, I want you to follow through with the agriculture lobby.

I was not in a position to argue with you when I say I think a lot of this is bacon.

It's terrible.

I don't see any reason that there's going to be a world where we meet, or try, we should go in and help our community clean the land.

What do you think?

Yeah.

I mean, this, this is for, for the mouth.

Well, would you tell Henry that I did that?

That I raised it?

Push it along?

Okay.

How are you?

Well, considering everything that just happened, I ordered two-quarter yourself a little pepper if you don't want it in front of me.

All right.

Well, that was good.

I understand.

Good morning.

Well, they sort of hung in there on Agnew and a few other things, but we've got to keep guessing a little bit longer.

Well, there are so many others.

Yeah.

Come on.

I'll get you all part of their syndrome.

Get you in here.

— 3 min 37 s with no transcribed speech —

Hello?

Yeah.

Hello?

Yeah.

You're getting it.

That's great.

That's not too bad.

Great.

That's hard work, sir.

Okay, I'm not going to share it with you this morning.

Yeah, no, it's going to get rolled.

It's going to get rolled.

No problems.

Any good reactions from last night?

Okay.

You know, it was either... Every time I'm there, I just need it all the time.

The gray, actually.

The Iranian gray.

In Iran, you notice they had it even better than the Russians.

Yeah.

Because there it comes from there.

That's Chesapeake City.

Oh, that's Chesapeake City.

Shaw has a private sock.

My tastes are very...

John, I'm wondering if you could be god damn proud of when you can't be in our court.

Those four guys done great, for sure.

I mean, two or three of them.

Well, not going as far as they did.

And, you know, sort of sticking their lips around the business when they came up on the right side of the Capitol, but it was that place.

Because that happened to be my view.

I heard, and it's not going to let us know this or that.

People really understand this.

Do you think they're getting out of court about the next court?

Very, very much so.

I think about that decision yesterday, which got the biggest play in that decision.

We can draw a line, but in this court, there's still a minority of one.

I don't know if they hung together.

They've been together three games solidly.

They've been great.

Actually, all of them.

All of the writers who played in those recordings.

That was column after column after column.

Playing in both ways.

I don't know if it's negative.

That's good, too.

I love it.

I don't know if it's that great.

Well, it's great.

A lot of that stuff.

It's good that it's in post.

It's interesting, too, it's the next recording I haven't heard of, but the other one was never the Eisenhower recording, it was the Warren recording.

Fortunately for Eisenhower's memory, it was a high office recording.

You know what?

Georgetown did it, don't you think?

The Georgetown set.

Son of a bitch, you saw him.

Ivy League, Georgetown.

Remember I told you.

Watch out for people, huh?

This kid goes to his stead.

Not bad.

Well, John, on this other matter...

Let me say this to you.

It's one of those things where...

Right arm has shown for a long time.

When we were back in the late 60s.

It was right arm.

Real, real problem you guys.

I understand what you're doing.

I just need to talk to you guys.

Real problem you guys.

Let me say this.

I've always had a theory about politics.

I've covered this crisis in some way, but I've never covered it.

I dedicated that book to a flyer called Japan She Also Ran.

And it's always seemed to me that she was the closest

is that for a woman, being a wife of a politician is infinitely more difficult than being one.

Because you see the man getting out there, slugging kids around, dressed, getting home, going to the restaurant, and so forth.

And for one who doesn't have to be a politician, in other words, who doesn't want to give one damn about it, but is simply doing it for public service, it's a sure case.

I'm supposed to be a political politician, but I'm not.

I'm going to have to push this thing for a long time.

And the market has been a great asset to us.

It's got a star quality.

But I can see that what happens here is that I've just got two championships in three years.

My own view is that probably

because I I think too when you're dealing with situations involving men but even more so women who are

emotionally upset at all about matters of this sort.

You cannot run.

You cannot press too far.

You never can be sure what's going to happen to you.

Pressures are never going to get less.

They're going to get a hell of a lot worse.

And under those circumstances, when we go on, we want to put all that pressure on.

particularly afterward, have already been proved.

Well, that's sort of a, I just want to give you a little bit of my own thinking that I totally understand.

I actually, you know, I feel about it.

I think we should put a way out there.

You're the best judge for that.

Whatever your judgment is, I have to keep working on it.

Well, for my view, but I do, the only thing I would say, the only thing I think is that

Well, see, you can't put amateurs in.

There are California, or New Jersey, you know the ones where, and also some of the southern stuff.

It's just too, but you agree about, I guess that, I mean, we can say, well, we'll let Brenda do this, or buddy, well, it's too big a play.

They don't talk to you.

As a matter of fact, if you put in a new man, you have to do, they're going to just be talking to me.

And that I can't do.

Mr. President, Martha is around in Whiteford.

She has a stand.

I appreciate that.

And she brought up the fact herself.

I'm going to keep you lit.

I'm going to keep things quiet.

I could be insulting just so often.

I wasn't the object of all the shepherding.

So I was most of the stuff that would work out for me.

I can't even think of anything else.

You can't let that happen.

You can't do anything, like for example,

You know, if you want to restrain a situation and maybe match some friends or have a big trip or something like that, you could have easily done it in 68.

You would no longer do that on the block.

She's a public eye.

I see that.

That's right.

And I see your friends again.

They're going to be afraid of that.

They can't do that.

But if you've got them, of course, you've got to decide to do it.

You don't have to fight them back.

You have to do what they did.

So that's what brought me to this...

That's Martha.

Martha loves Sparta.

But Martha doesn't like Sparta.

Martha doesn't like Sparta.

She's a fighter.

She's a bunch of other things.

She didn't take this down.

That's why Martha's not a fighter.

Okay.

Which I like.

I find it difficult to be restrained sometimes.

Let me say, we really don't need to go in, but I understand totally.

I think it's not much more of a wonder when we cut some of the water to be cut here.

You know, it was really amazing when I was taking that ball off of the other side.

It was just a country club progression.

And then the other day, when I was going to kill my mom.

Did you drive down to Washington?

Didn't get to play at all?

Fight on?

I couldn't.

I didn't like the crowd.

Yeah, you didn't put her on that front.

Well, she was with me.

See, when John went up and brought her... Oh, I'm sorry.

I didn't even understand how much you were by yourself.

He went up by himself.

Well, we were lucky to get out of that.

I said to Connor, I said to the reporters and photographers all over the place.

I'm very well known.

Well, a man who cares, an old man of ours, he just went out the way.

I don't want to question you.

I don't want to...

Otherwise, we'd have fog, and that's the only way down.

We've got a few of them, you know, in some of these boats.

Like, for example, he knows I want to send him to the welfare department.

He's part of it, and I want to send him to the city.

You're not supposed to know that, Keith.

But I guess you get some access to the one time go with some of the activities that are going on.

Well, that'd be a good thing.

The reason we're pushing HR wouldn't be so hard is because it never holds very well as long as Richardson and Hudson, as long as no program can recover.

That's why I called them in.

I called them in and said, we're going to turn it down.

We will not move our herbicide.

Yes, but the next day in the Los Angeles Times, which drove Ryan Reagan off the wall, was the statement that some other put out that Richardson and Hudson encouraged you to do.

They did.

That's right.

And I rejected it.

I'm running out of here.

We're in the same pair of lights.

Like for example, this legal service.

Son of a bitch.

Public broadcasting by God Almighty.

I like that.

I got to be the highest bidder.

Hired any member of the cadets to record.

Right, right, am I right?

He did H-5, that's H-5.

But he didn't work for H-5.

He said, he's a pain in the ass, he said.

That's the other point.

He is the, he is the, you could argue that Walter Crockett is more than that or something on the market.

Sure.

The senator is the half of the candidate.

The senator is solely a candidate.

Yes, yes, sir.

Well, there's another factor.

The longer you wait, the more risk each hour you run the risk of more stuff.

Valid and invalid servicing on the wiring cable, that type of thing.

You couldn't possibly do it if you got on and it was positive in your side.

Yeah, that's the other thing.

The trucking doesn't come on when we don't.

We hope nothing will.

It may not.

But there's always risk.

As of now, there's no problems, man.

As of any moment in the future, there is at least a potential down there.

Oh, I've cut the laws fast.

I've cut it fast.

If we're going to do it, I've cut it fast.

That's my answer.

And I don't think, oh, as a matter of fact, I don't think the story, you can put it in human terms, I think the story is positive rather than negative.

Because, as I said, as I was referring answers at press conferences, I just wrote it out and I thought, you know, the ones that I think are terribly sensitive, I don't know, I don't know.

I know a lot of people will like that answer.

They will.

If it made anybody else ask any other questions, I'd look like a savage son of a bitch.

I thoroughly had to look like that.

Well, let me just tell you a confident something that happened to me three days ago.

Billy Graham called me.

And he said, you know, he's a great admirer of ours.

He said, I don't want to get into something that's not my thing.

He said, if I can do anything in regard to this situation between John and Martha, I will be glad to do it.

I said, there's no problem.

I said, no, there's no problem.

I said, Martha's

and I appreciate it very much.

You see, my point is, you've got a guy that's on our team, and so whether it shows you that the reaction will be exactly what it goes down to, well, of course, that's why you have to do it.

And one of the other things I did riding back and forth, I don't know if you've ever read Martin Fenway.

Fantastic guy.

He kind of develops it, so.

So this was after she had died.

I don't know if that explains all the rest of the kind of talk.

It's always something within the world.

That's great.

Don't let you take this move.

People won't expect it.

It'll be a surprise.

No, it isn't a surprise.

Otherwise, your writing will be tied right together with one of these.

You won't like it.

If you wait too long, it simmers down.

And if other stuff develops on water, the problem is it's always potential or something.

I'll look at that around the car.

That's right.

It'll be hard on our line.

This will departure under the capillary.

Well, I guess why don't you be happy with the... ...marking number?

Yeah, we have...

Sorry about the problems.

This is a ship I don't want to launch.

Yeah.

Sorry about the problems.

And I won't add to what you've done.

Cracks don't count on you.

I owe people with that.

No, I'm not... No, but I think it's a good solution.

All right, sir.

Mute.

Let me just say this.

I won't say any further.

Mute.

If you think Martha's tough...

You should get through two of the things I got through in my life.

Well, I'm the only one who hasn't.

Sometimes it's more difficult than others.

As a matter of fact, I really think that Sam Rayburn and Joe Martin were right.

No politician should ever be married.

I agree with you.

Really?

I mean, I think, frankly, the Catholic Church was right, actually.

The folks, the priests, and the rest of them, none of them are just better for them.

None of them are as hard as they are.

I mean, this, this, this, the family, you know, and all the other things, God, man, you've got to fill the end.

Terrible problem.

Total conflict of interest.

And that's, so there you are.

And it's just people in public life have one hell of a time in terms of their lives.

Well, anyway.

We'll try and work it out.

Right.

We sure will.

See you.

See you back.

Yes, sir.

Nixon, Mitchell & Haldeman on 1972 Campaign and Welfare Reform

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NARA Description

Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on June 30, 1972

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Nixon, Mitchell & Haldeman on 1972 Campaign and Welfare Reform

AI Summary

Audio

NARA Description

Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on June 30, 1972

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Cite this conversation