Nixon, Haldeman & Kissinger on Economic Policy and Labor Relations

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All right.

What's that?

You ready to go?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

They voted, I don't understand this, voted down a previous question on the emergency employment bill.

Then they adopted an amendment, 210 to 176, to make an order, a rule, which would allow a vote on our manpower special revenue sharing bill as a substitute.

We expect the House now will vote to adopt this new amended rule.

Therefore, tomorrow or Thursday, we could get a vote on a revenue sharing measure as a substitute for the Democratic employment bill.

Good.

I wish they were all excited about it.

You wanted to see, uh, Shelton McCracken and Hodgson.

Is anybody around?

Uh, yes, Coach Colson and Earl Gooden are all sent here also, sir.

We can bring up the car and practically move material.

Yeah, that's right.

I just came into the education and the rail situation.

All right.

McCracken leaves at 2 o'clock tomorrow.

We'll be back with you next week.

So the question is whether you want to... Oh, and this was on this thing from George, you know, on the construction order.

And what do you need to say before he goes?

You had said you wanted to see George Paul and Jim Hudson.

Well, he read a memorandum on the construction order publishing.

I mean, McCracken wrote a crack.

I wrote to you the memorandum, and you were saying that you were transmitting.

So I suggested that you, he, and I would sit down and talk about the thing.

You know what a construction trade is doing this thing?

If you remember the memorandum, you wrote to me.

I cracked it up.

You said that you disagreed with it, and I said don't sit down and talk about it.

The question is whether you need to meet with Paul before he goes.

Yeah, that's the question.

Yes, I do have reservations about that as an approach.

What he wants to do is to... Well, will anything be done before June 8th?

Not unless you would have to agree to do this before anything would happen.

What it involves is this issue of rolling back...

increases that have been agreed to and mccracken's view is that we should have some government people who give their opinion about that to the board and push the board in that direction very hard the private board that issue is just a it's a very tempestuous issue with the union people the board is making some headway on it

And I think that they're doing a little bit of it, but it's the kind of thing that you have to do internally.

And I think that it's also desirable for us not to get too much mixed up in that.

The way it's been set up, it's set up as a union management thing with public representatives, non-governmental.

And the whole idea has been to keep it that way.

And if it doesn't work out, well, it wasn't Paul involved.

I'm sure Paul would present the counter-arguments, but I...

He's taken off now.

I would bother with it tomorrow.

There's no real need to have a meeting before Paul goes.

Well, I don't think so, unless he feels strongly that this has to be done.

Well, he didn't ask for it.

No, it was just that you had thought of it.

You and Larkson, I'm talking about starting to reverse the track.

That's fair enough.

See, that'll wait your time.

That'll wait your time.

Good.

This gets us, we get us further and further in this.

I'll wait for it to not be, it's not a real strike.

Well, the rail situation, I know you were anxious about that.

It looks as though we will get something tonight, from what I understand.

Congress?

From the Congress.

Yeah.

There is, at this point, a difference between what the Senate is doing and what the House is doing.

The Senate, and Javits is the person doing this, has this October 1 date with the Board's recommendations up to October 1.

The House will have the moratorium on the strike until July 20.

And interestingly enough, they don't give the full Board-recommended increases.

Now, the compromise that apparently is being worked at is to take the Senate date and the House wage package, which would be better from our point of view.

But the workers have to go back to the... Well, they'd have to go back, and I'm sure they would.

That sounds like an optimistic outcome to me, and Janus is apparently resisting it and fighting to get more money for the agency and so on.

But...

But we have the making of agreements between Mansfield and Albert that they're going to keep things going until we get something out today.

So we'll get something out before we get out of state.

That was a fantastic session.

I hope those people appreciated it.

They were a rather cold bunch at first, but you warmed them up and they went out a lot better than they came in.

But, gee, they got quite a treat.

You really gave them a lot of stuff, and I hope they appreciated it.

I don't think they were so cold as perhaps just...

They were a little odd and a little mystified.

I think they were wondering, what is this?

The usual kind of a meeting, Bob, I've heard clients say, never talk about what the hell you were here for.

I know.

It was so screwed, I didn't get the message.

I know.

So I had to work for 20 minutes to even get on.

But I think it was an interesting thing for them, don't you think?

Oh, my gosh.

They had just interesting stuff all over the place.

I thought you came down very well on the... Trade.

...several times on the business of the domestic economy as our first concern, and that got across.

The general posturing on trade and the...

the why you believe in free trade, but at the same time, we have problems, and we've got to look at these problems and work on them.

Senate accepted House wage package minutes ago.

That's good.

Sager said he would move with the Senate date of October 1 in the House shortly, so it looks like we're going to get it.

That's good.

And that's good.

October 1 date and a wage package slightly smaller than the board recommended.

So that's a lot better than the Javits proposal.

So that ought to be, we'll have that down here tonight and for your signature and we'll get the trains running.

Great.

I'll be here.

We got through, I thought it was good to get them, to give them

a little feeling of the trade, of the Peterson thing, and certainly the antitrust thing, the tax thing, they also, a little of the American spirit.

The reason you've got to be a free trader is because of these little spore problems, these spores and so forth, but also it has a hell of a lot to do with what kind of a country we're going to be.

Are we going to be the bunch of...

I thought that you gave a very good build-up for Pete's presentation, and they'll be looking at that.

Apparently, Pete is going to do that after dinner, and also to John's various views, so I thought that was interesting.

You know, the thing is that all of these falls, George, are so consumed with the idea of what are we going to do about the dollar?

The hell with it.

What are we going to do about the economy?

Are we reveling around about a dollar?

I couldn't agree more with Milton Friedman.

I mean, what did he title his column?

Well, he titled his column The Mark Crisis.

The Mark Crisis, right.

And he said that the...

The whole thing is that we worry about the dollar, and they say, what are we going to do about it?

Also, they look at the immediate thing.

Are we going to do something about this international monetary thing?

I'll come down hard on the fact that we damn well aren't going to do anything in a crisis about it.

Yet we are going to do something that we know that we want to do ourselves, that we're going to have it well planned.

And we're going to go to a meeting, and we do go to a meeting, and we'll tell them what we want.

That's the way to do it.

That's what you want for these little boys over at Treasury to come in and say, gee, we gotta go back over to Europe and sit down with the people from the Hague.

Who the hell is the Hague?

Who are the Swiss?

Who are the damn Danes?

None.

All of them are suckers.

And we don't agree with that.

Okay, that's great.

I'm glad to strike yourself.

I will be.

At some point, if I could take advantage of this particular time, we need to have a discussion about the intelligence program.

All right.

Get that off the ground.

You had a meeting scheduled with the coroner.

That is the standard thing.

I took quite a few notes, you know, trying to get that written up.

There are all sorts of...

The car is also completed.

As you can see, the car is now completed and is going home.

Nixon, Haldeman & Kissinger on Economic Policy and Labor Relations

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on May 18, 1971

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