On June 10, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon, Rose Mary Woods, H. R. ("Bob") Haldeman, White House operator, Peter M. Flanigan, Stephen B. Bull, Manolo Sanchez, and Alexander P. Butterfield met in the Oval Office of the White House from 5:20 pm to 6:01 pm. The Oval Office taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 516-012 of the White House Tapes.
Transcript (AI-Generated)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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.
Well, how's that?
How are you?
Perfect.
I'm talking to you again.
I'm afraid I don't get to have you.
I asked out on the road, did you think we should have told Harrison to call back?
I don't know if he's too old to take out a photo.
No, he's too old.
He's a very nice old man.
He's a great, wonderful friend of all times, isn't he?
You know, Dora will be 95.
I was right.
It was 1965.
She called me.
She'll be 95 on October 21st.
So I have asked, I've sent a mail to Dwight to put a temporary hold on that date.
And the letter he wrote me the other day, I'll just send it to Liberty for you.
Let's put something together.
T-H. T-H. T-H. To Galway.
T-H. That's my middle name.
Galway.
I've never been back up there.
You've been to the office since we left.
When we left, just before we left New York, I went down and cleaned up for files.
But I haven't been back since.
I'd like to go in there some day, if it makes sense.
I'm sure I'll carry all those seatbelts you wear every day.
Oh, I have to reach over to say you got it?
Uh-huh.
That's why I put my head on top of the seat.
I want you to copy this letter.
That was about a doctor, what's his name, Fedoff, who does all of your research, brought me a new book today that he's done.
And he said, you know, it was marvelous when you look at the, when you get the background and all these people, you know,
He's just a dear old man.
He said that.
I think we ought to.
We ought to bring him down to a church service or something.
Bringing him down to a church service, by all means.
You must do that.
He does.
And it's just beautifully done.
But how nice he said it.
The character is way, you know, he said...
No one could be surprised at how the great character of our president, if they really look at the back.
So it was just beautiful.
You're all set, James.
Go grab Hulk.
I did talk to B.B.
He'll explain it.
So, you know, if that's what you want to do, it's not me.
I didn't howl when I told him to watch the movie.
So he got me a drink after the thing, and then I said in the end, I want you to watch that movie.
The present will have to dance with it.
You see how important it is.
Yes.
You do, Father Jackson, first.
But you know, I have no regrets about that rose that I don't do.
It's not really why.
You can't tell.
And second, it is not a proper use of it.
It wouldn't be a proper use of it.
He said it's not in the mail.
You know?
Not at all.
But, he just howled like, the other, the other time, the president had talked about, he would have said, what's the question?
And what happened?
And maybe it was Tuesday, and maybe he would have said something like this.
Excuse me.
A lady starts to move one of them step-offs with her trigger or something.
And not anybody else.
That's the end of the line.
But we hear that.
He, you know, he talks.
He laughs so hard.
There's no action.
We've got all work out here.
I just need to check that out before last night.
I went out and extinguished the flames on the flag that was burning down in San Francisco.
It was a girl.
You can see in the picture.
She was a security guard in the Bank of America.
And she really, personally, interested in the injury.
She wanted to come out and put out the flag that was burning.
She couldn't thank God.
She never thought of doing something like that in the world.
Well, I was saying, you're still up.
And I was all over the dance floor.
So the way it works is that I pass the panel.
I first cut in, and then I dance with Pat.
And after that, I dance with Mrs. Cruz's son.
And after that, his mother meets him at the store.
And then I dance with Julie.
And I'm checking out.
I'm getting the hell out.
Oh, yes.
Oh, my words couldn't twinkle, but they did.
No, wait.
I would get off.
I mean, I'm even thinking about it.
I mean, I'd get Mark Mitchell, and that would be the picture.
Well, of course you'd get Mark Mitchell, but he's got a lot of trouble.
Well, gee, look, and then it'd be all over, and that would be the bottom of the other pictures.
Or I would get...
God, Blaine.
All of them.
All of them.
Well, that's right.
Did you tell Blaine you agreed to go with us?
Yeah.
You can give her my best tonight.
She's coming with us.
Well, that's nice.
I'm going to let Rose arrange everything.
She's going to pop out of the cage.
I was going to say, if you want her to, if you were hanging with Dan's parents, your big son, where's that bachelor dinner?
Well, we're almost at the end of our time.
But I'm surprised that it doesn't come to your dinner, that you're in there shooting it.
I'm sure they thought they did because the other one is back there.
Well, what the hell do they think they were going to do?
I don't have an idea, but whatever they thought they were going to do.
Well, there are other things to do.
This is one.
Sure, they've got their boys.
Why don't they participate in setting everybody else up to watch this?
Yeah.
I'd like to be a man so she could have her job allocated on the boat.
Maybe she'd go with her boy.
She's probably a good swimmer.
Sure, I'll catch her.
Ben, Ben.
I have a question.
He's still in composition with the Kennedy.
Oh, it's a big guy that wrote that, I remember.
He's, uh...
He's a very interesting guy, obviously a little... Not really, but a little.
He's a zealot.
He's 32 years old.
The Catholic University.
I don't know where he taught.
Princeton Theological Seminary.
Oh my God, how does that affect you?
Let me tell you why, though.
He's very interesting.
His father has a real estate business.
He worked there for a while.
Then he did some freelance writing.
Then he went up to Prentice Hall as an editor in New York.
He was alone in New York.
I was hopeful and unhappy.
He was a Catholic, raised as a Catholic.
It became an agnostic for eight years, or an atheism for eight years.
He left the church.
became an atheist, was alone in New York and was wandered into Dr. Peale's church one Sunday because he had nothing else to do.
And he was very much taken by Peale.
Met his wife there, became very active in their young adults program.
Married a girl that he met at the church and was married in the church by Peale.
Decided
to try and find himself as a Christian, and so went to Princeton Theological Seminary last year, just last year.
Spent a year there.
He says, I'll tell you, I know more about radicals than anybody in this country does.
He said, I was at the headquarters.
And he has now become a Catholic again.
Came out of there and returned to the church.
His wife's Presbyterian.
And he's back in the Catholic Church, and he's back in his father's real estate business.
He wrote a piece he's sending to me that ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer and got a great deal of attention, something on a similar line, I think.
And he, because of the interest in it, he sent it to the Bulletin and said, maybe you'd like to open it too.
And the Bulletin wrote back, so we wouldn't print anything the Inquirer had already printed.
But if you ever write anything else, let us know.
So he wrote this other piece and sent it to the Bulletin.
It's cut.
The reason it doesn't end right is because they didn't run the whole thing.
They cut.
He said he's sending the whole piece.
He was, he said he got a lot of phone calls and other things as a result of the piece.
He said that he kept sending it.
This, you know, your call just completely tops them all.
I said the president asked me to call.
You know, it's interesting to think about his toll on the call that we have here.
I really think that people like Rodney Johnson and others can make even more out of the fact that they're calling for the president.
Do you agree?
I think you're right.
As seems, I did.
This guy couldn't believe it.
The White House board put the call through, of course, and so she said, the White House is calling Mr. Hawking.
And he's got a great voice, very articulate, and a very good voice.
And I said, have you ever said you're interested in politics?
And he said, only in politics.
studying, reading, and all that.
I've never been involved in any political campaign.
And he said, after the other articles, people came and told me I ought to run for Congress, tried to get me to run for Congress.
But I didn't really think I should.
He said, my real interest is in writing.
And then at a couple of points, he said, of course, I'm a strong supporter of the presidents, and my father is.
He's obviously quite close to his father.
He works in his business.
And he said, did you ever get down to Washington?
He said, I've only been to Washington once in my life.
That was for an hour and a half going through to someplace.
And he said, but I could certainly get down there any time.
And I think I'll get him down here next week.
I'll tell you, he is...
Very much, in a lot of ways, the kind of guy that that Catholic priest that Ray Price wants to hire is, except that this guy is exactly down the line of a zealot in what we believe in, where the Catholic priest is a lay winner.
He could work with Buchanan.
Ah.
That's the beauty of it.
And apparently he's got a good mind.
But he's a much better writer in the popular sense than Buchanan is.
Because he doesn't hate as much.
He hates.
You can see that.
Well, he hates the goddamn radicals.
It just shows in his article.
You see, we need one writer like that.
You see, Pat is so busy with other things, but this guy, I really feel we ought to get him.
I think he's that good.
I mean, Bob, that's a hell of a brick of a piece.
Dean Manning picked up his earlier piece and this piece, put them together, and under the title American Manifesto, and has reprinted them and is mailing them out to the Manning Forum.
He did them on the Sunday evening broadcast, and he's mailing it out, isn't it?
and there are other people who've seen his town.
And I get it, I wouldn't like time wasted because I...
But he's got this religious quirk in him.
It shows that he's a zealot.
He's a guy with a... Yeah.
A burn that wants to believe something.
That's right.
But that's all right, too.
And God, he believes in you.
Boy, he's...
I wondered about that, you know.
Yeah.
He kind of laughed and he said,
I said I was certain that you had instructed me to circulate the piece to the senior White House staff, and I was very mad.
He said, I guess you'll have to take out the part about family assistance.
I said, no, sir, we don't believe in that either.
That's just part of a package to try and reform the welfare system, which we've got to do.
The fact that he knew what the family system was was very interesting.
He's a smart guy.
He's obviously done a lot of reading.
He said he'd written some fiction, but he said I could never get any of the public to give up on that.
and uh you got a guy like that he could come down and uh you know he could be part of your he could write letters to the editor for other people he could do uh uh he might get turned on speeches that thing might even stand near a speaker it's taking our president trust he did he damn near could do it he uh could do some presidential uh speech writing where we could just get something that's really that would have a sharper focus basically the most great stuff you know what i mean
Yeah, but the phraseology he uses is that people go to their disgusting movies and, you know... That's right.
The neutral is the guy who wants to be sure his television set's in repair, and there's cold beer in the refrigerator.
I mean, he paints pictures that are very, very clear pictures.
You know exactly what he's talking about.
He may have this one for me now.
It's just one of those accidents that...
In America, it seems very unfair.
He believes we're being had.
He believes we're losing the war.
Yeah, the internal war between the Americans, the Anaheim, the Christians, the theological services.
Theologians convinced him.
He said, we're really full of radicals.
Not awful.
He said, calm it down.
Bring them up there.
Bring them up to these ministries and make them atheists.
I'm going to step out.
You'll get it done.
He'd have to feel he had a call, you know, I mean, a spiritual call or something.
But he has some mystic sense.
That's a real project, isn't it?
I don't know.
Look at all the stuff on the lawn, oh my God.
It's all over the place.
Those TV people stand to put on a banner.
Yeah.
Look at, you know, billions of dollars.
This is the first event that's not sponsored, too, is it?
Uh, I don't know.
I think the specials will be sponsored.
Or they'll run the, you know, run somebody's aisle.
They can't be sponsored.
In other words, they can't say, uh, uh,
You know, Gulf Oil Company brings you the Tricia Nixon wedding.
What they can say is NBC News presents an NBC News special, the wedding of Tricia Nixon.
And then the commercial comes in for Gulf Oil Company.
We haven't allowed them to put it as a...
The other thing is I understand that they can't use commercial times for it, but it has to be an NBC News presentation.
Now, as any, their specials are, most of them, I'd like for you to get, I'm going to get down, because I feel the need for one more man, Bob, one more man who can write as sharply and that feels as I do on the issue.
Well, Ray is still pushing very hard to get that Catholic priest who is one more man who writes very sharply and Ray thinks is absolutely brilliant and all that, but...
I just, I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't like to be on the left.
I'm going to say no, I think, because we're going to do it.
I'm going to say no.
I don't think that's the best story.
And the guy says he's recanted, but those people can't recant.
The guy obviously doesn't believe.
No, he's bad.
Get this guy.
This is a great person.
I'll be good at judging.
My name's not a story man.
Ray has gotten good people.
Cook is good.
If we got this guy, maybe it's...
The thing I argue with Ray is that this priest is going to be an issue himself.
He's going to be a big-cost celebrity if we bring him in here.
Human events will go out of their minds.
And, uh... Ray will not like this guy's style.
Nope.
The reason he won't like his style is he won't like his views.
You see, he won't really believe it.
This guy is hard on his health.
And he just is a square.
He really is.
But God damn it, so am I.
That's what we've got to understand, and we've got to get a little bit more of that across.
I mean, I just don't, I'm not comfortable with up there, you know, Black Alarm or some of this crap, you know.
You know, he's, you know, he's gripped in this stuff a bunch, you know.
Well, this guy tells it like it is, and he says, he says, why do you exactly, after you get to every environment, you start talking about sending your kids off to school,
with teachers that drive them away from me, and they do have to try and get it back.
You might get some reactions to it, I'm certain.
You're going to write the comedy in Rogers and Irwin.
And I'm not planning to go.
He'd be very good if you don't want him.
Well, it would be good to have him because he might get an exposure with a rodent.
I'm not sure I want to let the rodents have him because we need them for political purposes.
It would be good to have somebody in the state that's a tough son of a bitch.
Yes, he is free.
Keep my hand, please, for all of them.
Well, that sounds great.
If we just made a bomb deflector, I think we may have.
The minute I read it, I thought he was a gunslinger.
I'll tell you, the guy, from the sound of his voice and his looks in the picture at least, the guy, I think, would make one hell of a candidate.
They may not have a good stomach for him.
I guess guys that like to write aren't really going to be good candidates because they don't want to go out and get kicked around.
Very good candidates, you're right.
Writers are very good candidates, because a writer's used to hiding behind his pen.
It's like Pat Buchanan was lousy on me.
Lousy on me, and he had other poets.
Yeah, right, you read each other's poems.
Jesus, it must be interesting.
Pete, would you be able to join the president of Sequoia for dinner tonight?
We'll be leaving in just a few minutes, 6 o'clock.
And John Connolly and Bill Rogers and John Erdman and I are going.
Okay.
Come on down at 6 to swing over there.
That's a pretty good movie.
Very good.
Steve Redding, he planted them on the boat.
He knows it.
I thought he could tell them on the boat.
Now there's a guy that did the right job.
Couldn't be better.
It's fascinating trying to put people in the right kind of places.
Some people fit in one place.
You'd never think a fellow like that would have been a Marine.
You know, he's so nice.
He believes he's a very, very, he talked about Buchanan.
This guy is about 300.
Is he to the right?
Good.
I'm right as well.
Getting more right every day, I tell you.
Gee, I'm not going out in bold, and I don't want to go out in presence of certain people.
And I wondered if you would bring me a sport coat.
Oh, that sort of plaid blue sport coat.
Do you like one?
It's blue, whether two or three of them are ready to arrive, but any one of them.
And the plaid blue sport coat.
Good.
I mean, and I leave it down in the end.
I'll get up at the diplomatic reception at 6 o'clock.
Yes, sir.
Fair enough.
Okay, fine.
We won't be needing more here now, so we're all set.
You're not a good people person, are you?
He just says, I'm being scruable already, I don't have a boy, he just slips in and he struggles on and on and so forth.
He gets everything done and is willing, you know, no phony business.
If any one of us have any problem on a trip or something, on a crisis, you lose a button and he runs up and sews it on for you and doesn't strut enough.
You know, if the president's in L.A., you would expect him to just say, screw you, to the staff, you know, I'm taking care of a big man.
There's not, none of that, none of our people have that kind of that audience.
There's never a very lot of people who haven't.
The reason we, that's why we really want to do our best to bring people together to get this focus to go better.
And everybody works damn hard.
And I sent this quick analysis of the, both his, of both our image book and their issues book.
And he ends up saying, it sounds like you write him.
in the issues book to the domestic counsel people and says, you've got to focus on two or three issues that matter.
Forget about everything else.
You know that I said that before?
No.
What did he say?
Benham said that.
It sounded as if it were you writing it.
Benham wrote it in his analysis.
He said, all we've got to do is focus.
This is his analysis of the whole.
What it tells him is that...
We've got too many things.
We've got to take a couple of matters and zero them and stay on them.
And we come develop the cutting edge.
Did he comment on it?
He didn't comment.
He didn't.
Of course, there was nothing to comment on in our last talk.
He gave you his analysis as to why we're trying to make a change.
They're going into that some more.
They're just looking at that, too, because I don't buy that.
And he doesn't really either.
That's his quick analysis.
He said that's the only thing to see.
on the surface, he's gonna try and figure it out.
He's gonna try and get something to egalitate it.
There's something wrong with that, I think.
It doesn't, you know, that kind of thing doesn't go like that.
Well, the interesting thing is that even comparing Gallup with Harris, it was a hell of a difference.
Harris showed a landslide, and Gallup showed a relative close.
Now, there's something about them, Tony, that maybe the people didn't like.
You see, I don't have the confidence, Bob, that they feel that, these bulls.
There are a bunch of left-wingers, too.
You know?
I mean, the actual bull takers, Scott, on the on-rides, mostly women, are they?
And they're, well, of course,
If I did that, I spent six months when I was in college taking polls, and I know how easy it is to disturb.
You get bored at the end of the day, and you screw up a questionnaire, and you don't worry much about it.
If you've got one more to do when the day's over, you rush through it just to get it done.
He feels aware of it.
What do you think?
Like his last poll was pretty good.
You're doing extremely well.
Makes the point that on the personality stuff, we're in very good shape on the basic characteristics and traits and all that kind of stuff.
And, of course, he's kind of a fighter, too.
He says he's a fighter in his press.
Yeah.
He says we've got to get better.
Of course, he doesn't know that we've got some very great events, possibly in the wind.
That's right.
God damn it.
Something's got to crack.
Something's got to crack.
Something's got to crack.
Well, then you notice that as well.
Yeah.
It's going to have a hell of a effect.
Damn right.
Of course, I really think that even if we don't get the Russian back, we might not.
It'd be much better.
I think, Bob, if we just come right down the back and don't get the Russian back, then we have to make the trip to China.
And that's going to have one hell of a effect.
Don't you?
Absolutely.
And the last one back, too.
Because nobody really, you know, they talk about it a little bit, but everybody just kind of laughs it off.
Nobody really believes that that's a possibility.
I think the shock value of that and then the sort of the wonderment of it actually happening would be tremendous.
We'd have some things out of it.
If you go, I hope you can stay a few days.
Yeah, I always would dream of going without you.
They'd check out for my work.
Oh, you may be ordered to, but they'd check out.
I imagine they'd turn the whole place out of them, and Haile would be the one who'd be camping.
The legendary thing that you don't mean with Mao Tse Tung is just kind of a...
I figured we're doing it well mainly because we have so much drag against him at that point.
The war being the main one.
That's right.
He makes the wars.
receiving as an issue will have a very great effect.
He's right.
Yeah, but he makes the point that you need some specific things to replace it.
There'll be actors for some household thing.
It's nothing like the war, though, possibly.
It's nothing like it.
I thought you were thanking for his speech.
I'm surprised everyone is.
Coming out with you.
Oh, they're here?
Mr. Secretary of the United Nations.
Just bring your cards up here, Mr. President.
So he's going to do his jacket over here.
Do you want to have the chief bring it over here?
Do you have it?
Have the chief bring it back over here?
One signature, I'm sure, which doesn't have a cover.
I don't think it does either.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
He has since been informed of your comments, but my comments are almost exactly like his, aren't they?
That's right.
He knows that now.
Yeah.
Did he understand?
As you please consult him, crack him, burn him, show us some of your expertise.
Fire a warrant.
Fire.
Give me a recommendation for action.
That's right.
I...
I think I'm going to move on this problem.
You're not going to pretend that you've all seen the two men I go on to say?
No.
See, too large a reach.
I mean, you talk a lot about the subjects they know little about.
I'm not one man responsible for your problems.
Yes, he doesn't have to say that.
He should be the late man.
Peterson, of course.
It's actually your man who's crossed paths.
It's the very end.
It's the very end.
He said he'd still like you to be the late man.
I agree with that.
Yes, sir.
All right, Jim.
That's it guys, that's the heart of your life.