Conversation 452-017

TapeTape 452StartFriday, February 19, 1971 at 1:39 PMEndFriday, February 19, 1971 at 2:25 PMTape start time03:30:00Tape end time03:50:12ParticipantsNixon, Richard M. (President);  Haldeman, H. R. ("Bob");  White House operator;  King, GerturdeRecording deviceOval Office

On February 19, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon, H. R. ("Bob") Haldeman, White House operator, and Gerturde King met in the Oval Office of the White House at an unknown time between 1:39 pm and 2:25 pm. The Oval Office taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 452-017 of the White House Tapes.

Conversation No. 452-017

                                                                              Conversation No. 452-001

Date: February 19, 1971
Time: Unknown between 9:03 am and 9:05 am
Location: Oval Office

The President met with Alexander P. Butterfield

     The President’s schedule
          -George P. Shultz
          -Paul W. McCracken
          -Peter G. Peterson

Butterfield left at an unknown time before 9:05 am

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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.

The President got the right to leave before 2003, and then rotted in 2003.
He came out and then Ron gave him a quick follow-up before he got so south of the first lease that the government announced that the cost of living rose only 0.1% in January, the smallest monthly increase recorded in four years.
It's more than three.
The White House quickly decided to report seven starting out if policies are working.
The grocery store, who has been stable since February 1970 and services a good line from the extremely high rates of last year, does not agree with that.
That's the UCI and the APB.
The cost of building is measured by the government.
It is done with 110 to 1% in January.
This is the smallest monthly increase in nearly four years, popularly indicated by the next administration in its fighting against pollution.
That's the point of victory.
Good job.
Good job.
Good job.
Good job.
Good job.
Good job.
Good job.
Take a couple minutes, Scott, with this one from London, New Zealand, Mississippi, from a call.
They want to, she's asked for, you know, five minutes of you to give a couple quotes to enhance the article.
Like you did with Paul Gavion.
Oh, Christ, it'll take a half hour, you know, five hour hour.
It doesn't have to.
Play the play.
I didn't want to lose the victim.
See, that way I can cover my time.
You know what I mean?
I mean, Bob, if you would.
I guess Henry had burned it up, but it's a funny thing.
Everyone that you can think of has turned out to be a critter.
You know, just call her and tell her.
Oh.
And she was being in the territory of the library.
Of course, it's hard to get all the right people.
I know this is hard.
But he must extend his staff so closely.
And he must not talk to his staff.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I've been called because I've been heard that the congressman or something went under the weather.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, usually if I'm on the call, my father is on his way to the speaking gate, but I had that with me, that he's got an awful lot of readers, and he needs the power of streaming on that fourth policy force, and tell him to spend more time with his subordinates when he's at his stations.
I don't know.
I hate it.
He's burning up that he's, you know, he's worried.
Well, I mean, don't worry about it.
The problem is really his heart refining that bothers him.
You know, in the foreign policy area, who is...
How the hell do we run that?
I don't know.
But we do eventually, if I think I can find a guy on our side that is bright.
Bright enough.
They're not called.
They don't have to be left-wingers to be bright.
Also, you can't denounce very dark people.
I don't care if he's a hard-ass footballer or not.
You don't say he was fired.
You know what that does to a man, Bob?
It rots his skin.
It doesn't mean he said he was fired.
It didn't.
Most of the rounds we had to get in the corner of that.
Then somebody said to me, Mark, you had to pull up and see who was fired.
Then I said, Mark, I'm not going to be fired because, see, that's the thought that I made.
Well, it will be on our mind.
Would it not be possible to just do these without them?
We talked about that before, okay, since you've got the recording.
Oh, wait a minute.
This is recording.
All right.
But we can do it on the basis of your notes, and we can put the thing out afterwards.
If I do, there's something else.
No, see, I can go back, we can go back and use, we can use the recording, but we can't do it on, I don't want to do it on the transcript of those lessons.
Let me just run it back and take the notes out there.
It's just a little bit awkward for a call to be sent, you know, without anything to do.
It's probably more awkward for you than it is for anybody else.
It's rather, once you do it, it's harder to handle it.
You know, or help me be part of the SOA.
But the real idea of it really is that I have an advantage to be able to make the notes when it gets me to let them work.
But having time to each time and then go out, and then I don't have the feeling that it's a process.
It could be less awkward for me.
I think it's awkward because I think it's awkward for the crowd.
You know, me and everybody in the panel discussion.
Well, in regard to our fitness thing, the, uh, the, uh, the people who call us friends, baseball, that sort of thing, which is not really true, is the feeling that what is needed is to take our advancement in practice,
And whenever we're going to participate in that, to give that responsibility directly, we're seeing that, you know, the people are invited and the leaders can see that.
It encouraged me to even take a look at what was a very, very tall house.
And the product they've got, half the people there were staff people.
Five, you know, 30 people.
They really don't know anything.
They write a letter and they think, well, they've done
And, uh, I think we could do a little turnaround.
Absolutely.
Especially on something like that.
There's no reason at all why we can't just send it in and say, well, what is the situation?
If it will be derived, how many telephone calls have you made?
What do you have?
And so forth and so on.
I know you are part of this, and the leaders are in this, and that's all right with me, but I just think don't ever rely on government staff.
There's a lot of people who can get them there.
Just don't have to have somebody double check in on every line.
You can double check and see what you've done here.
I can't be charging you for approaching the whole thing.
I suggest that you listen to them.
Talk to them.
Talk to other people about this.
So that we can have good health.
That is something that is terribly important.
I don't think it's stable.
Other than that, I don't know.
I don't know.
What is really stable is you've got to bring decades of this.
But, I mean, you've got to do it where you can.
It's got to be stipulated.
shows problems in their minds.
Yeah, apparently, and then he reports to you on it and says, you know, well, we had moderately good news this summer.
Just exactly what you said he had said.
Moderately good news this summer, simply because...
I'm sorry.
Then he throws away the line and says, well, it's increased since 1966.
She didn't understand how to be presented.
Economically, it is, you know, $1 is more economical.
And also, what she wanted to do was just to walk out and get on the plane.
Just go take care of her.
How old is Rose?
Is she back yet?
I think she is.
I haven't seen her today.
But things are, you know, so we're going to try to figure it out.
And you know, so I talked to Walter yesterday about his trying to sell her off.
My guess is that I probably should plan to go, or at least have in mind that I might go.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But that had a pretty good audience.
It wasn't a huge audience.
It was kind of a group.
And if you went on any place a little bit of a back-to-the-eating thing, too, probably, it would do the whole thing for you.
That's the, you know, the coverage Joe's got on it.
I haven't interviewed that one.
I had Chuck Young from UCLA this year.
He was taking dinner, and I took him around, introduced him to people, and set the world brand.
And more people.
I sat there and said, oh yes, we saw you on the Today Show, or I saw you on the Today Show this morning.
And, you know, he was amazed that people in this town could still see it.
I thought, Henry Mancini is so good, you know, creating the threads.
You know, there last night, you ought to have him back for an evening at the White House sometime with a
with his architecture now basically let's face it he can answer for our benefit i mean it is pretty good build up i don't i don't know lizards they're not afraid of that i think that's what it's all right
He came and raised me up for you.
But he despised you.
And he, he produced, he probably produced a hell of an evening.
He had used his sickness for you.
He had frustrated you.
You can use it with the orchestra as a part of the show.
It would, you know, if you want to just jump in his ride, you just can't do that.
But if you had a couple other, you know, a couple of singers actually for evening at the White House, you can't do a ride.
As we talked about, it's really hard to serve in that room with an orchestra.
There's a lot of so good in that room, you know, that it's awful loud.
Remember how bad Les Turner was?
Les, you know, gets here with Bob Soap.
Because he, uh, or anybody who makes up a huge fanzine.
If you look for Thomas and Richard Rogers tonight, you can see the fanzine is the orchestra for Richard Rogers.
That wouldn't be the conclusion itself, I guess you would point it out.
You're on the progress.
What he said is to press on her and we get out there.
Oh, great.
Press on her.
We're going in.
The leaders are coming in here.
We want to get a press photo in here.
There's a rope.
The leaders have no press.
Oh, that's... Let's see if we can set that up.
Hey, we're just doing the photographs in here, right?
Yeah, there's not even photographs in here.
No handshakes, no photographs.
It's a lot of people battling.
When you do that, it's kind of like arrogance.
They were right in the shopping mall, 3 1⁄2 of the mall.
And that wasn't just the bad guys.
He had taken on some good guys.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Did they tell you about this show yesterday?
I heard about yesterday, breaking it down.
They said, why?
Because he makes it look like that Billy's not this.
Whatever.
I guess it was his parents were both dead.
He just wished they would know that a poor boy like him in this country had come to the point where he was going to not have been a friend of the United States of the White House.
So I think the real tear-jerker, however, was the way that he put it.
Yes, you could take the camera away.
And yes, but who rose?
News from three days ago.
I see that on top of the station.
He said he'd send over a camera to drive him to another car.
That's what we found.
That, I think, might be the van.
If Garfield does it, though, he's got to get some background.
Do we have anybody that knows anything about the sports background here?
Don't give that as a price.
You've got none of that knowing about sports, you know.
I'm just saying that it would be something.
Get more money from the sports.
Get some of that sports money, if you know what I mean.
Not intellectual.
Otherwise, you know, you're going to go football on the beach almost.
You know, I think of another story we talked about, and I think very well of that.
I mean, I think of all the ideas of getting out that little prayer practice, and absolutely, that's the kind of stuff that this thing, I think, is sent to us.
But I don't think it's sent to the ones we were talking about, others.
I don't think it's the people.
It's always the prayer.
It's always the people on our church's list.
Every religious list, I'm sure you've seen this.
I'm just going to read a thing.
The other thing is, Mr. Mayor, I'll let Joseph take it.
I have to go to all sorts of people.
Who do you think is going to stay or don't remember the committee?
What?
No.
I can't just sit here and not do it.
And if he did, then he would be... Do I?
If he said something in the letter about it, I thought he'd be interested in the remarks of the President of the State because, to me, they both most triumvantly describe what we've been doing.
We've had several requests that we'd like to...
We'd be glad to send a letter, and be glad to send it to the Libyan region, sending them, sending copies around the country to leaders, you know, so as to emphasize, you know, that maybe they'll get another business level, but the whole program on that issue, that won't do, correct?
You know, I don't agree with you, correct?
Sorry, I have to have a fire to repeat, which is something that's scary to me.
The other thing I want to do