Nixon, Ehrlichman & Haldeman on 1972 election and Economic policy

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I'm in good shape now.

Are you watching your weight?

Well, I'm trying.

It's not going to help show much results, but...

Well, one thing I was going to suggest to the Cherokee Indian people, I think it would be a nice thing if I, at some time, maybe this might be a good time, I'm awake all of a sudden when I'm trying to do it, that I ought to spend a half hour with our young teachers over there.

And also, I think I ought to spend a half hour with the women to see do they have any women or are they all lesbians.

Well, you know what I mean, a lot of normal drugs.

Okay.

I mean, you know, so that we know that they're here.

Because you see, I've had with ethics and shoes and everything else.

I just think that we don't want to know that we're scared about that.

On the client group, I don't know if she's going to be there tonight.

I don't know if that's necessary.

I'd like to get these out of the way.

Get these out of the way now.

Because I think I see most of them anyway, don't I?

or you are bringing the bill up.

We can't do it.

We're out of here.

Yeah, and come up and say we want to implement it and take the team up.

John Irvin, you're up.

John's talking about, okay, good.

Well, these things I think that, do you think of any other group like that where you're like, I spent a half hour, and he spent an hour, and I have to do it one more time?

So that they sort of have that feeling, okay, well, I won't.

Okay, here we go.

I wouldn't, I wouldn't get in.

I don't want to see that effort.

They're useless.

They're useless for me.

No, I mean, well, I meant, I'm sorry, I don't even know the effort.

The one that's committed is, I've met those a dozen times.

We have a different group.

Yeah.

Oh, you see what you want to do there?

Okay.

Well, don't put it on any calendars or anything else.

So let's, let me pick this up.

Pat is a great, she's a, she will go talk to her about the law.

She also will be over at the store.

I'll let Pat tell the secretary that I would like to talk to Pat.

I kind of like the idea of going up there.

I will do that, but we will after the bed.

What do you think it would be?

You take the team and you go in and you'll meet with people in Wilkes-Barre and with the federal and state officials.

The exterior damage in Wilkes-Barre is very bad.

houses off their foundations, whole street jobs, and so on.

And you can go to a place like that, and you can talk to people right there in front of those things.

I want to be able to say, this building is a business.

And I can turn to somebody and say, no, I don't take care of this.

Yeah, you say, let's go, how are you doing here?

He says, dude, I'm doing hell of a time.

And what's the problem?

Well, I can't seem to get these guys to get my house approved.

That we'll have a shot along.

You'll have a shot.

That's right.

Yeah.

We put it on my return.

Well, that makes a pretty big day for you.

And I don't think you'll get that much more out of it.

It's just a repeat.

And not a severe damage.

Well, that's not the problem.

Let's do a well start.

We can do another.

We can do another dark one.

I really think probably .

I think in one year,

It's not a bad thing to point out, right?

It comes with all the names that we do, right?

And that we have not gone after it.

We have others.

That will fit nicely in the line that I've been trying to make, the fact that you have done a number of politically unpopular things, because they were right to do, and yet you're supposed to be the politician.

And this has not plagued, I've not peddled with anybody,

Now we're looking to the future.

I think we have to revert to the past.

I think what happens

and actually what we did.

I must say, I think one hand, Mr. Kressler, you would have passed away like that.

So if I had done the other thing that you just explained later, I think we would have done better.

Maybe, maybe.

So I'm told that the right spirit, the people's right spirit, on the other hand, for example,

For example, let's just face it.

They were honest.

They were honest and healthy.

That's something.

the wires are nice and all that sort of thing.

We could make a lot of credit for that.

I think that the, I think certainly that the, we didn't, we haven't had enough control over, we didn't spend enough attention on the subcab for the questions.

It was a great mistake to let the cabin officer point to the subcab.

I think Kathy was correct in that.

I don't think he would do that, but I don't, I think the other part of the whole thing, subcab,

Why the hell would you bring that?

Here is the point.

The reason is we asked people to join the cabinet.

I asked for our secretary.

I asked for their opinion.

This time, by God, they're going to be lining up.

And if they don't want it, I'm not going to do it.

I'm not going to do it.

You agree with that?

This time, if we ever take them, we can appoint a cabinet of baseless people.

Baseless people that are good people.

They can be very young people.

If they take a guy like Jackie Kemp, I was thinking about this the other day, take a guy who's almost a nobody, first parent congressman, young guy, and say to him, all right, now this is what you're going to do.

You're going to get over there and you're going to do this and this and this and this.

And if you aren't going to do that, you don't get the job.

And a guy like that's got to jump like a truck.

He's just got to.

He's ambitious.

And then put him in the cabinet.

You're credited with youth and all that.

You've got a guy that's totally controllable.

I don't know.

Well, anyway, let me say that what concerns me is that the mother and the mother and the mother and the mother and the mother and the mother and the mother and the mother and the mother and the mother

Now, I think, too, that actually, not in terms of persecution, but there's a crime that

I think it's the same in the Justice Department.

Or would you agree?

I hope you do it.

I really do.

But don't you think you're up to it?

Absolutely.

I think so.

You have a guy like Kimmelman walking around.

And we haven't let him go alive.

We've done a hell of a job on the New Jersey Democratic political issue.

We've destroyed it.

You know, just literally destroyed it.

But that's because Mitchell knew that situation.

He had some zeal for that was concerned, and he went after it.

But inside the departments, and over on the national democratic side, he was never really going on.

He used to talk to us about this.

Well, he didn't get any of the national guys at all.

He got a lot of little patients, a lot of colleagues.

And he stayed on one other thing.

There is a possibility that he's a law shot, but at least it's a possibility.

He wouldn't have said it's possible.

He wouldn't have won.

He probably would have.

How the hell did I?

I would never be here if I hadn't done the investigation.

the lawyers, the counselors, the committees, you know, those counselors and committees, they are a power of the people, they prepare the questions, they do the closing down, right?

Let's understand that a little bit.

What made Bobby happy?

He was an investigator around the corner.

That was his only qualification for me.

What made Bill rush?

He was an investigator around the corner.

So he still talks about it, you know.

That's where his roots are.

So that's how that part of it, you know.

What I need to do, I have a time with, one of the reasons is Heather Hayes and Ron Hill.

I did that with Michael on a round in Europe.

He just puts it back on, he puts it in place.

He said what he put forth, he said, it's a hell of a time to jump ship.

Goes out and says, you're not quite listening.

I think you're going to be able to not get any money and be able to march and so forth and do what's funny around the world.

He thought it was better to find out how to resist it.

Why the hell do we deal with it?

We lost Michigan.

The same with Bolton.

We lost.

They both can't.

They can't pay that off.

But really, those are mistakes.

We shouldn't have appointed Bolton.

We shouldn't have appointed Rotten.

We shouldn't have appointed Hitler.

Why are we doing this?

We're trying to get people to do well.

We understand that we'll have none of those compulsions this time.

That's the record.

Let's start with the long range.

Thinking about Kevin and the personnel that you want to do, do you want us to feed you names for the next few months?

Or do you want to wait?

I don't want to do anything until I've ever said it.

OK.

I think that everybody should concentrate solely on either budget or anything else.

Let's just concentrate on the election.

And after that, we'll go like gangbusters.

OK.

But people can be thinking names are a little valid.

It's just staying in the knowledge.

I mean, it's better than, there must be a sub-camp.

That's one thing.

And there's a residue here.

We've got a reservoir.

We have staff people who pour out into that sub-camp.

Well, we can put them in the sub-camp.

Sure.

And you never know.

Well, two blue guys that we can count on.

Right.

We'll leave them there.

So I just think, though, that we ought to,

Now, what we can do between now and the election, I think all of them are going to see each other's lives.

First, they're all going to have to give up their lives.

Second, so that's hard.

Second, I do feel that we should not just not try.

I just think if God

I think we're going to break this a little, Brian.

Well, I wouldn't wait.

I'd kind of like to throw it over there.

I'm going to get Schultz tomorrow, and I'm going to take him to that.

And I'm going to ask him to have the IRS go behind that entry and that reporting.

Right.

And call for those returns.

Every little gentle thing, we don't need to appear in them at all.

No.

It doesn't even look good.

Not an investigation.

Why are we investigating Don?

No, we're investigating John Meyer.

Investigating a guy named Cleveland.

Because when Hughes bought all those mining plants out of Nevada, there was a big kickback.

There was about a $9 million kickback.

Where Hughes actually paid about $9 million more for them than they were worth.

Now, the only problem about the growing of Hughes stuff up, if you wonder what the Hughes people didn't say about Don,

Anyway, it's an old story.

That's it.

They'd have a hell of a time.

This, we're not going to publish necessarily.

We just want O'Brien to put Stephen Knights.

How will he get the word?

He's going to get an audit.

They're going to pull his return.

They're going to say, hello, here's a payment to Napolitan.

They call him in for an audit.

They say, what is this?

Do you have anything to do with that?

And he's got to get an attorney or an accountant.

Well, John, the funny thing is, as I told you, in 1961, the first year I ever made it, I wrote the damn book.

Those sons of bitches came up that day and went after him and said, how about you save your house?

It's horrible.

And I scared the little munchies out of them because I got the guy home one day and I said, now look,

Well, let me say, it worried me.

That's a very disappointing episode.

They went after Pat, I remember, on whether or not he would pay Social Security or no one.

Actually, a goddamn thing like that.

But they were harassing all the time.

Well, Pat Harris, a rival called Cal Fowler, said, bastards are harassing me on my taxes.

And he said, it's probably a countermeasure against the Watergate deal.

Cal Fowler said, well, you're clean, aren't you?

Well, I have a $190,000 paper from Howard Hughes in there.

So I called him up and said, what the hell was that for?

And he said, they're after me on the Apollo.

And further, I shared his piece.

Joel said, geez, wait a minute.

Let's take a look here and see what they've got.

Better come over.

And I had to go back and forth a lot of it.

The way it came up, it didn't come up in this setting at all.

It came up, he told me, because this young fellow, Roger Barton, is over there, and we've been wanting him to be Deputy General Counsel of IRS, because he's in a position to do a lot more.

George called up and said, geez, I am really having trouble with this.

My bureaucracy is really wild about this.

This guy is known to be a wild list and a hard ass, and so on.

And, uh,

So I've had a lot of flack.

And Mr. George, that's the only guy we've got in the whole aisle.

All right, his bureaucracy.

I want to know how many of those people are at our government.

Aren't there several?

I'm sure there's a ton.

Six or eight guys.

Every one of those bastards is out.

I think the whole bunch goes out just because of this.

You agree.

It's truly a great move.

It would be a marvelous move.

You know, really, I want you to come down and look.

So they say, well, you haven't got any experience.

You'll kick their ass out of there.

Four years to learn.

That's right.

And they can learn.

It isn't all that difficult.

But out their asses go.

And investigate the matter.

They probably don't understand.

This guy who's over there knows the names and numbers of all those players.

I want to keep him in position for just that reason.

Jordan's great, but actually, as you well know, he's one of the two that I think is worth keeping down.

Because he's an honest, decent man.

Bright as an owl.

The budget is that he needs probably 100% of his total loyalists.

Well, he's a nutcracker.

Yeah.

That's what we need, and he's got to take one.

I mean, not a trouble walker.

Charlie should go back to banking.

He's not like that.

Now the other thing is that it occurred to me that on this food, I saw it, of course, we went up 9% over the last year.

That's uncomfortable.

Now, of course, you could say that's, you could say, well, the farmers are getting

The hell of it.

The cattlemen can't be fetching their riches, hell.

But the point that I make is this.

It's a 9% increase.

And so this is a wholesale market.

They only get a lot.

And next year, it'll be reflected in the next two months more.

Part of the, there's less correlation.

It used to be because of the controls.

And actually, it will not show up that strong, they tell me, in the consumer price.

All right.

What I'm getting at is this.

I know what you're discussing.

But why?

Well, I think you wouldn't be the person to know what that is.

And I would put it strictly in the context of the basis of the job.

If you're the author of the law of the city, if you do this, you've got to be a defender.

You've got a hell of a problem.

We thought we had a hell of a record in the place.

We've gathered our records, and we're some police.

And, frankly, it's all of us now.

The more I think about it, the more I think about it.

We've got to find a way to do this.

No, there's some of them give some encouragement, and they're the politicians in the family.

Butz goes just right up the wall, of course.

And yet, when he gets up there, he says, well, now if you're going to do this, I want to talk to you because there's some things we've got to do first.

So he's real listening about it.

He's not irrational.

He's not going to resign.

He's going to help.

I have said very well, I want you to do some Benjamin Franklin hours over here with two columns, the for's and the against's.

And let me have your very best thinking of all the reasons for and against and how to do this if you decide to do it.

So he said, all right, I'll have that over there in 24 hours.

And I got it.

Second point.

All right.

When are we going to leave?

We're out.

We can discuss it, I would say, Monday.

We will be talking about it.

No, I haven't.

I've got a request and a requirement that I haven't seen.

That's one thing.

Well, if you put your request, I, if you go to the president's office, no, I haven't done that.

I'd like you to put it right away.

We don't mean it.

I've got a special request.

You need your advice on something, but he doesn't want to get it directed at the region.

But then try so hard, I'm in awe to say, so you ought to bust the unit.

Well, we don't like it, but this is number one priority.

You see, if we could hit this one, we'd never be using it again.

And there isn't anything else that could go out of it.

Unacquainted, still hanging, about five and a half meters.

Oh, the heat's off almost everywhere.

Even in Seattle.

Well, this is the reason we're doing the demand.

I mean, we've given them food stamps.

And also, as the economy gets better, people buy more of it.

All right.

Taxes.

Yeah.

Because right now, the economy is really, it's a demand, it's a demand for election.

Not a cost, not the other way around.

And that's why it's food and not some other thing.

Because it's down that end of the economic spectrum.

You shouldn't see what the housewives are looking for.

She goes, you know, 9%.

Oh, God, I have a little poll last night at dinner.

And I said, why is it not on the table?

And they began telling me how the price had gone up on a particular cut of meat.

Six months ago it was this, two months ago it was this, last week it was this, and now it's the other way around.

How about just meat?

Well, that's one of the things we're looking at.

So one thing that would appeal to me would just take meat.

Now that is the one that gouges the muck down.

Frankly, you can't do vegetables.

Forget it.

In my view, you can't do it.

Because I think they're just too damn borrowed.

But meat, for Christ's sake, I think people would have made a lot of money.

The meat wholesale price, as you were saying, was starting to come down.

You just slap the neck and go on meat and say $5,000 or more.

It's over for 90 days.

The cattle have a squeal, but they just got to be good and say, look, we're going to do this, and your quarters will change and a lot of other things.

I asked one thing.

Several of the farmers who came through the line raised a high thing.

A lot of people told me that.

get accepted by Shirley Schultz on that now, but not by Schultz.

Peterson was the trollier on this thing, as far as I know.

I wouldn't admit it, but I know he was running that operation in Congress.

But the merits of it are, I don't know.

Because in terms of pluses and minuses.

I mean, it's a hell of a lot of times for heights to be able to shoot.

This is just something I don't know a damn thing about.

You can knock off the high one.

You know what I mean?

There's a trade-off.

I think that was a boo-boo.

Bugs next to the boo-boo, knock off the highway, and then throw the briefs on it.

But they should be briefs of the retail level.

Oh, that's the other one.

We can't fire around wholesale.

That's right.

Well, I wouldn't go to the other.

I think they're very difficult because they're in governmental class.

Getting back to my heart,

He doesn't want to come back.

He doesn't want to come back to government.

He's sequestered himself off of, I don't know where it is, someplace on the spot, I guess.

I'd like to see a businessman innovator who's not an innovator, who doesn't think in those terms.

Yes, some guy like that fellow with the right to read for a while.

Yes, yeah, get a guy like that.

Or a young businessman type who's got it made like, say, Sam Wiley or somebody of that kind.

Don't need the money.

I do not want it.

I won't.

I think we're on the right track with this first guy that we had if his leaning was a good track, but he was just haywire on something.

We need a double one.

Yeah, I got your note on that today.

That's pretty interesting.

Well, you saw what happened, didn't you?

Yeah.

Because all those damn corporations are making money out of it.

It's not going to help the stock market for a while.

I don't know what that does.

What I did, I got that a little while ago when I dictated a question to Rumsfeld.

I don't quite understand why that happens.

Our controls are supposed to be on the profit market.

That's the theory of our price controls.

I know the problem.

So as the economy grows, sales grow, even though your margins may be down, you might want to know about that in the most bad future, making money.

Now that's something that labor has a legitimate, we keep labor down to five and a half.

Parts of the market's not up there.

What do you think?

Well, it's a intriguing idea as a couple to this other breeze.

Well, yes.

These are the kinds of questions I was asking this morning, this morning, this trade-off.

Are we so solid in physics?

Are we so solid in the climate that we can afford the trade-off using up some of our equity in that area in order to make a jump at the popular states where the consumer votes are?

And we're going to talk some more about a funding they want to chew on out of line.

Well, I guess I'm starving on that.

I'll be back in a minute.

He's doing a fair amount.

He's on vacation right now.

He's been out quite a lot.

The problem is, the groups he speaks to, he's preached to the fire.

He's done bar associations and criminologists and phenologists and judges and that kind of stuff.

And that's a sort of advice in that job.

He's done an awful lot of that stuff.

from a professional association.

He ran out talking to labor unions and to groups of active labor unions, women's clubs and stuff.

You know what I mean?

That sort of thing.

If you're going to talk to a group and then of course getting this bad out there on television.

He's still terribly gun-shy about that.

Of course.

Yeah.

Why?

Because of the anti-team.

He's

This guy is scarring.

It's very interesting.

He's pretty elastic.

He's tender, you know?

He's just tender as hell.

He thinks he's a pariah.

And I grant you, I'm working on him, and it's coming.

But he's wanting to keep his head way, way down.

There's some of his second term syndrome in there, too.

I think he figures he's going to ride out these few months.

And then he's going to retire.

He's going to find a bad ball practice.

And he's going to play for the United States.

We came up.

He actually didn't go to the convention.

I was over there the other day.

I was down for one day.

He didn't want to go to the convention.

Well, we just didn't figure that it would.

Yeah, and he didn't want to be down there in case there were riots and that kind of thing where he'd have to assume direct local command and so on and so forth.

And so I talked to him about being in a box and being visible and getting on television and some of that stuff.

And he's going to go.

But he really, really, really, really, he leans in and he's got a heartache.

That's right, that's right.

It hurt his wife, it hurt his kids, and that's got to end.

And it doesn't look to end again.

That's yesterday's story.

I went to the Bridal Rigmarole, and the President watched you down there.

That's the problem.

You've got to say this for Rock.

After all, he's out speeding.

But the way that I handled him,

He's driving everybody up the wall.

He's not going to be a problem about .

Richardson is a hell of an asset.

He's got a lot of strokes in a way.

He can do a lot of different things.

I thought you should look at it tonight.

It's the introduction to a mid-year economic review by CEA.

It has to be approved tonight.

You may want to take it to Carl.

I think you can put in, I'll approve it, except for the fact that you should put in the top of this for, you should put in, except to say, I, I, I, one of our, one of our subjects of major concern is the, is that while we have cut the rate of inflation in half, is that the, is that the increase in the price of food,

Major concern.

I want to acknowledge that fact.

All right.

He's been passing the hat among these flags.

He's come out strongly for it and so on and so forth.

The son has a primary.

The son is still in his primary.

He can't come out until that's over.

And there will be a proper security, which I guess will be around the same time.

Well, he said, no, actually, he says, we've disposed of the railroad, and it's about to come out right then.

And so I think the property probably doesn't mean as much to him as the, even his corporation, the standards.

He's got everybody working in RSM.

Well, did we tell them to be there at six?

Yes.

On the boat?

On the boat.

Well, God damn him, he ought to come out.

Well, that's just the only thing offered, to handle that one.

So I'll be back at him.

He didn't do much for us on the substance of the bail.

And so we're going to have to catch up and see if we can put a squeeze on it or not.

Well, let me say that I really think that on this whole thing, I kind of hate to see Herb and George have to take the wraps.

But they are because they're all terribly proud of what has happened.

finally sold.

We all know, they all know that in a free economy, there's always spots that don't work very well.

And it's always going to be that way.

The difficulty is that we have one right now, and it's about the food price.

I can assure you, next year, you probably aren't going to have a problem.

Farmers will grow more pigs this year.

Well, they already have grown more chickens.

It's already happening in the town.

They'll be able to move more.

That's right.

Sure.

I'll take that.

And would you mind putting that briefcase over the ..

Yes.

The briefcase should go on the ..

Yes.

Thank you.

But I think you can do both.

You can have both.

I think that what I'm getting at is,

Nixon, Ehrlichman & Haldeman on 1972 election and Economic policy

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Also recorded on August 3, 1972

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