Nixon, Ehrlichman & Sanchez on 1972 presidential campaign and George McGovern

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Well, what were you doing in New York?

St. Rocky?

Talking to your partners.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, that's it.

Yes.

Well, that did well.

I had to sort of rehabilitate our relationship there a little bit.

Well, the problem is, of course, that they won't talk to me.

And so they want to talk to me and I want to talk to them.

That was another thing.

They said that they'd talk to you at Christmas time.

I was a little bit told that it was impossible.

They said, well, we can talk to him at Christmas time.

He said that he had to sit down with us on this.

I said, well, we'll see.

I put it up in the chair with him on it.

and we went through the whole Mississippi Convention and campaign preparation and all that, the legislative session, and I said that really it's going to be awfully tough to work out of time, but the upshot of it all is that they'll have something to us in 10 days that's going to be, I think, going to be very satisfying for jobs.

And then I got the chance to excuse myself.

You want to keep coming and getting this, don't you?

Yes, but they've taken some of it out, so...

Well, on this thing, John, tomorrow, I had in mind that what I really want to do is to, frankly, first, I want to have a business group grow up just like you and me, and sort of have a little bit of an area up there.

Second, a business group cap, whatever they call it in the area.

It occurred to me that

I guess we're going to have McGregor talk a little about it.

Have you seen Timmons' paper?

The outline of the thing?

Of McGregor's, of what the president's saying?

No plan.

Yeah, let me get this to you.

And this is the, this is basically the content is this.

McGregor, Timmons, and I worked it out this morning for your approval.

You should also add that Congress is going to need the Democrats.

Okay?

That should be in this too.

I may say this, but maybe you could say it.

That's what McGovern has.

And, of course, they, therefore, will support him.

Working through the Democratic leadership are desperate.

They see the Congress, this Congressional session, as an opportunity

It is somewhat, it is somewhat as a matter of fact, an adverse twist by a trillion people.

Well, maybe I should say it before we get into what we're talking about.

Maybe I should do it.

But I was making notes on it.

It's something that you can sort of come back to and think that someone like Truman, who came out of the convention, knew how to do it.

Again, by making it easy, making it accomplished, the looking for it.

here, and when the Congress was controlled by the other party.

Ironically, here was I in the head, and the Congress was controlled by the other party.

The government is going to try to reverse that, try to gain on the president by just trying to be the president.

See what I mean?

It's a quite interesting thing.

Now, as a matter of fact, if we handle ourselves properly, we should get a wash out of this.

What we'll have to do, what we have to do, is to make the Congress look bad.

And particularly to make the governing people look bad.

The strings to add to McGovernance.

Let's start using the term McGovernance.

Never use the word public safety.

Yeah.

from the government.

Don't you like that term?

Yeah, yeah.

And don't worry about using his name.

You see, using the name Crack John is only, only important when you're running against an unknown for dog-catching, or even for Congress, or even for government.

But presidential candidates are going to have this whole problem of name recognition, particularly with the media being on the side of this crowd.

Okay.

Now,

How then do we handle this?

We've got a very difficult problem, in one sense, because the President, in the name of responsibility, would like to have to veto some big spending plans, and that would put us against the vote.

And so we have got to, we've got to know that that will be their tactic.

Their tactic would be to try to see that no, and to see that

the administration gets no bills through that the administration can claim credit for.

And second, to see that the president is forced to veto bills that they say are in the people's interest.

Now, what we can do to counteract that is, one, to try to get through some bills to with one revenue share.

where we can get some credit for something that we did.

Not because they like to shit about Revenue and Share, except here is the government, but because it's the loose side of the Kuhn scheme.

The other thing is that we must show that their irresponsibility

Let's put them on the side of big spenders and high taxes.

That's, as I see it, the way we handle the spending.

We've got to, but not a firm fiscal responsibility.

That's bullshit.

We all know it's important to determine this work today.

Well, I don't mind you using it, but you see, this Congress and the November Congress are off on a wild spending spree that will raise taxes and, of course, the inflation rate.

The inflation rate.

and that we have to make that.

We want the people thinking in terms of higher spending and higher taxes and bigger government, of course.

You know, like that line that Fitz put in his statement, which was written by Don Rogers in the bank.

He said that we want to get government out of our pockets and big government off our backs.

I don't know whether you were able to read the piece, which was very, very perceptive.

Uh, you know, the guy that wrote the book, what was his name?

Christel?

Christel, yeah.

So he is the type to break for something.

Yeah, excellent.

Interesting.

I ended up in a sad spot in Cato this morning.

Very interesting.

The poor son of a bitch.

You mentioned in Cato Clarkson, how at 80 in the day, somebody took 23 hours.

Yeah.

Well, it was something that was totally wrong.

That's right.

And that didn't raise that, that read that.

And the point that I made,

And this is what really concerns me about our property tax bill.

The point that I make is it would relieve property taxes, but it would raise other taxes.

There, however, he had an income tax.

There's worth of value added.

Well, we've got a sample going on in Michigan, you know.

Melvin's trying to get value added, value added statewide.

And it's really property taxes.

And it's going to be a referendum.

And whoever went along and comes up at the primary time, they're going to move by company.

He's had enough flooding, he tells me, right now.

Maybe because of the school plan.

Are you sure they don't want money to go to the school?

Now, among issues, what issues in this Congress can help us?

One is busing.

Correct?

Any way we can put them to the sword and bus them to it.

And make them vote up or down.

We've got to get the government to get even.

I've got all of you can't get the government to get even.

But I'm busing.

And the other is big spending, which will raise tax.

And another issue, though, is there's going to be one hell of a fight.

Now, the question really gets down to a challenge to whether the decisions are in our best interest to let the bill be as bad as possible, rather than as good as possible.

Now, I don't know whether you can say that in a mood that long without running us abreast.

I don't think you can say, no.

But, no, I'm just talking from the top of my head.

My view is, I don't want, I don't want this, you know, the barrier will not be, you know, crime, theater, and so forth and so forth.

But that's not the lesson, to get too big this idea that, well, a government can't win if we can lose it.

That's a put-down of our campaign, even though it's a put-down of what we've been saying for years, and it's not accurate, it's not fair.

Also, what we have got to say here is that what is at stake here is winning this election.

We consider, we don't care what the polls show, they show us way ahead.

We're not going to assume that we're neck and neck race, that we're going to fight like hell for everything we can get.

One, to assure victory, and two,

with the hope that we could win.

No, we couldn't accomplish it.

You know, I was thinking about this coming down the airplane just now.

There's a tendency, when the press come at you and say, you're not taking the government's defeat for granted, to say, oh, no, we're taking this very seriously, and we're going to run a hard race, and we think he's a worthy opponent, all that.

I wonder, maybe we shouldn't be saying, we've got an opportunity to rack up the biggest landslide in favor of a Republican president,

that has ever been racked in the history of this country.

To the Republican.

The word Republican.

Well, all right.

In other words, to be aiming so high up here.

I think we should aim to win by one vote.

Aim to win by $10 million.

All right.

That's the point.

We've got to, and also this country,

And I think the idea of a term, a government, would be a very dangerous term.

Dangerous is the word.

Dangerous is foreign policy, defense policy.

Dangerous is the word.

I thought incidentally that at the end of this, I'm inviting Henry.

I would have him spend just a little time on the end of the war.

And I wouldn't survive if you would get into it too much.

technical thing about our proposals for coming up that long.

Well, I'd like to do this with him, if you think it's appropriate.

And I know that Jeff Weicker or whatever wants to go out and make the statement.

I'm sure he should.

I'll probably make the statement.

I've got to make it at a certain time.

Well, we've agreed that thing, that the only press tomorrow would be Scott and Ford,

That's the wrong form.

That says the budget's all the president's responsibility.

It's done in a message for the Congress.

It's the monkey on the Congress map.

And we do that next week.

I have a copy of this, too.

I'm going to revise it.

No, no, no.

I don't need it.

Well, I have it in my mind.

Okay.

You don't need to worry about it.

Don't be bothered.

You can have it.

No problem.

But you're all set.

Okay.

One point that you have to have in mind.

Because of the people we can have around us.

Because there's no self-righteousness.

Yeah.

Howard would be a very dangerous man in his office.

That's the problem.

Yeah.

That's the problem.

Very dangerous man.

And it would change this country in a way that it just must not happen.

That's the problem.

And I think a hell of a lot of people are going to be thinking that.

despite his enormous attempts to change the position of his back, I think the second one is as bad as the first one.

The second one raises middle income people.

Working at 30% of the time.

You can't cost the damn thing out because it doesn't exist.

You can't find it.

They're still working on it.

Nixon, Ehrlichman & Sanchez on 1972 presidential campaign and George McGovern

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on July 20, 1972

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