On July 27, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon, John D. Ehrlichman, White House photographer, William M. Magruder, and Stephen B. Bull met in the Oval Office of the White House from 3:49 pm to 4:37 pm. The Oval Office taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 548-011 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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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 are you?
Nice to see you.
You recovered from your battles and everything?
Cool.
So we're here to get a gun, a little chair out, to get a gun.
That was many months ago.
But this has been a terrible disappointment to me, not because of political or partisan concerns, but because I see this niche getting out of place.
uh where something america has never done before we've always been getting into that we get in late-night spaces now here we are getting out of the race to say we won't run we drop out and the result is that uh we give up the leadership in the world forever all but you can't nobody can ever say forever
It can awful take an awful long time to get it good again.
So that's why I told John that I said, let's explore it and see if we can build it with a Japanese, see if we can build it with a Willie Brown, see if somebody else will do it.
And you know, what was fascinating to me is that he apparently explored all these things already as he built this project.
I've been surprised the list was so long.
Tell me, what do you think, what do you think will work?
What should we do?
If you were, what's your, let me think of these.
In terms of looking at the various options, there are two or three different.
But you said there, but would you advise we do
to get back into the building of an SSG.
Do you think we can do it, or should we give up?
Is it too late?
It's too late to do it and compete with the Concord One.
We've been out of it for a decade.
I think that's the tragedy that it's been here for ten years.
Good God.
What if we throw away what we've done?
Well, sir, I think that it's a tough thing to say, but even had we stayed in with the program we had, which was an excellent program, we had some gaps.
The earliest we would have been in service was 1978, so we were running five, six years behind there.
That wouldn't bother me because we were quite a bit better.
We would have captured the market.
We were a bigger and faster plane.
Yes, bigger, more even faster, much more growth potential.
We could have grown 5,000, 6,000 miles, over 2,000 miles an hour.
That kind of work cannot do that.
Now, I look at the SSG, as I think you do, as part of a bigger picture of what are we going to do to protect our exports in the high-technology field that we've dominated, in which we've gotten $2 billion a year between a favorable trade balance for more than a decade.
And what I learned is I went around Europe, and I talked to the board chairman of all the major industries in France, and the government was very quiet and did the same thing to Germany.
I didn't ask for anything.
I just asked, what are your plans?
And what are your thoughts about the international partnership?
And what's your timing?
And what I learned from the SST.
In France, they've been fantastically successful in getting eight nations to join their national credit groups with French leaders.
And they're going to have a family of airplanes.
The Concorde will be sort of the Blue Ribbon airplane.
And they'll have an A300 Airbus.
We have no competitors for that, and I see no hope in their return for financial conditions of Boeing, Lockheed, and Doc Tho's producing one, because our free enterprise system has got them all roughly borrowing and bidding dollars, and they've got to get some return on that.
They also have a Mercure, which is subsidized.
All of these are subsidized, and they don't have...
A very favorable payment term to the airlines is a 10% down.
We normally ask for 50% down.
And very low interest rates.
They've dedicated the penetrating export market, because it's $100 billion worth of business in the next 20 years.
They're going to buy in 100 billion.
The number of aircraft sales commercially in Asia's airlines throughout the world in the next little less than quarter of a century is about $100 billion worth of business.
We've had 85% of it.
We've just dominated that market.
It's been a difference in our trade balance, favorable trade balance, for the past 10, 15 years.
Without aviation, we would have been naked.
It's given us between $500,000 and $750,000.
Now, these people have been very intelligent.
They want new parts in terms of partnership with the United States.
They want us as subcontractors, building engines, building parts.
So they can claim 50% of those airplanes to build the United States and penetrate our markets.
We have a big marketplace there.
And they've done it.
They've done a fantastic job.
The Dutch, the Spanish, the Swiss, the Belgians, the Italians, the British, and the Western Germans are all involved.
And it's well-organized.
It's a big company.
Those airplanes are flying.
I saw all five of them at the air show, except for the eight that were going to be.
three other passengers, a wide-body twin engine airplane.
Now, the accident that's happened to our industry, and it is an accident, and we participated in it.
This would give you a chance to come up with an answer for it.
And as I've counted around the world trying to sell that airplane to the airline president, an unfortunate thing happened to McDonald's over in Milwaukee.
The airline industry chiefs in this country wouldn't let us build an Airbus.
An Airbus is a cheap $20,000, $1,500 airline.
C.R.
Smith, and George K., and Floyd Hall, sort of insisted that we build one through trans-U.S. Well, that forced Douglas and Lockheed to compete with Boeing on the 747.
It was a trucker there at the time.
It came with a second market.
And then when we went to Europe, the Europeans were very clever.
And they just ratcheted those lock-ins until we got to 5,000 mile an hour.
They never would let us get down to that Airbus market, which is the big market.
And when you make a sale, usually you don't have enough courage to build it.
Sometimes you do, but we didn't.
So here we are with our industry, our whole civil industry, competing for that 3,000, 5,000 market.
And the Europeans have got the supersonic market locked up.
They've got the... And they've got the short run.
Of course, you know, you stop and think of, I've got the Airbus working, even on the transcom, at one stop, right?
Like a Kansas City and so on.
Just like DeVos.
And it's the perfect plan for Europe.
Absolutely.
The perfect plan up and down the West Coast.
The perfect plan...
for where airlines like Continental are the perfect plane for the East Coast.
The Airbus is the perfect Miami, New York run, isn't it?
What the hell's the matter with our people?
What the hell's the matter?
Well, unless you ever dealt with these wonderful people, they're wonderful, they're colorful, they're romantic, they're...
They're crazy.
The C.R.
Smiths, about six months ago, designed an airplane that would fly 50,000 feet and a wing as big as Lafayette Square.
And who would buy it?
These are the people that made this industry great.
They made that mistake.
And our industry captains weren't smart enough to resist it and say, we can't afford to have it in this country.
Everybody's back in the same market.
So we stopped.
Now, what I'm saying.
You and John, in terms of the SST, we lost the SST, which was a part of our family.
So now we have a very limited family.
And the real problem we had was how did the government work as a partnership of industry?
It's always been a partnership, but it's been invisible.
The Pentagon flow of technology was always there to sustain civil aviation.
It isn't there anymore.
B-52 was built.
The B-1 and the F-14 necessarily, for wide reasons, must fly rail-able to the ground, penetrate, dash over the target, and variously wing to come home.
That technology doesn't go into it in commercial aviation.
The solution to the urban mass transit problem, that little piece of it that belongs to aviation, will only sell in aviation, requires a stove machine.
Now, you have evidence of what's going to happen in the future.
Boeing signed an agreement with the Italians immediately after the FST lost.
They had no choice, because they've got 2,000 of the brightest engineers in the world.
They've got to keep doing it.
That signature on that contract means that the Italians now have the best brains in this country teaching them how to do the technology, the management, production, tooling, and the sales.
Boeing never has a negative cash flow.
From the instant they sign that agreement, the attacking government picks up the whole negative cash flow.
And at the end of the year, Boeing makes a profit of $150 million.
They're going to sign a similar agreement with the Japanese, or McDonald's, I think, within 60 days.
And it will probably be an airbus event.
And what that means, you remember the brilliant brain drain of people who were so successful in the 50s, and all the great engineers.
This is a total system drain.
It's a total system export out of the United States into the European Economic Union and Japan.
And the SST has made the Europeans feel that the U.S. government has turned its back on this leadership.
And I think you're doing a very wise thing helping to get some of this money back to the airlines.
Because one of the customers of that money is KLM.
And they've been our best customers in this country.
And they're coming to see us all the time wanting to know what we're currently doing.
And you just keep our money after that and bail it out of the program to your own convenience.
So I hope when you get that money that everybody knows now about it to the airlines that you get some of that money.
Yeah, I hope we get a full credit for it.
Absolutely.
Don't let Boeing or anybody fix it.
We've got to keep the money down.
Now, what are we going to do with this?
It's not going to work.
It's not going to scare you to death.
It's a horrible picture.
And it is a horrible picture.
And I think what Ed David and what the NASC and what Bitcoin and Commerce were doing at the UT, we've got to get it out of the Congress and the public.
Because that whole partnership is gone.
the military, the records, the commercial, which is how we got healthy, is gone.
We've got to substitute something.
So what are we researching about?
We've got to protect our export business.
It means tax incentives.
I was telling John some of my wilder schemes, and I've done almost everything.
I think we have to join up with him.
I really do think we're going to probably have to get the Japanese in here.
That's a tough thing to say.
But the cost of getting an SST coin is probably not less than $2 billion.
The number is $478 million.
$2 billion is nothing.
That's a big amount.
Bitcoin is about a $100 billion business.
Well, of course, that's just for SST.
But basically, what's $2 billion?
$2 billion.
Just invest in the future.
That's all it is.
And we've got to have some system to protect this short-haul solar market, too.
And that's going to mean research from NASA.
It's going to mean all kinds of ways to help the industry stay healthy.
Too late to get back in the air, most people say.
No, that could be done too easy enough.
The only problem is, where is the industry going to get the money?
They can't.
They've got to get the money.
Otherwise, they're going to take it.
What about the, uh, well, what do we do?
We put something in the bucket, do we, uh, that's the bucket in there, the problem, but, uh, we, uh, I don't even go for, I mean, I'd be wanting to go for a very big play here.
Is that, can you talk to Peterson?
Yes.
Connelly.
Only on the SST, but Connelly had him.
Right, he did.
We're going to have this, I'm very anxious for Conley to hear this commentary really up the wall, you know, about balance of payments, as all of us are.
And he's very sophisticated about airlines.
He'd love to hear this.
We remember, I told you yesterday that we had another section of that wrap-up that we didn't get to on technology and research and development.
I'd like Bill to come over and grade what we had and sit in, because this is an old safety.
It may be that what we really ought to do is to...
I don't know what you're going to come up with regarding the new NASA.
This would be a tough thing to ask you to do, but he ought to get into this.
And you've got to have somebody in this government who's thinking this way.
Somebody who's really, I am thinking this way, and John is, and the rest.
But you're an expert.
You know what the hell it's all about.
And so Peterson will sit in here and talk about the terrible problems with God and all the rest.
But where do we go?
Where do we go to get the expertise?
Where are you going to?
Go to NASA.
Well, we've got the experts right now in place in some of these companies.
That's very true.
So we're not going to have that long.
What I mean is, where do we go in government for our experts?
Ah, for the purpose of heading up this whole deal, which is going to kill them.
Yeah, this time I'm going to show you, I think, establishes the only question about the need for it.
The need for it.
We are not geared up to attack Roscoe.
And we'll invent it.
NASA will invent it and spend a lot of money.
Two questions.
I told you that space thing.
So you had trouble with that, I understand.
Oh, is that so?
Well, it had the red lights.
It had a indicator that said it was just a squids malfunction.
Got it.
Well, whether it is the existing NASA or whether it is something like it,
Somewhere in this government, we have got to pull together all the loose threads of this thing.
We are pissing away untold.
You talk about $2 million has dropped in the bucket.
We are subsidizing research and development all over this country in enormous quantities on a totally undirected basis.
And there's just no sense of strategy at all.
I hear strategically one could see how this particular airplane project bears on our foreign agonizing problems.
But some of the stuff that we're doing research on is totally unstrategic.
It's just some guy who had an edge, you know, on the end.
He talked his unity into putting it in the budget, and what got through the Bureau of Budget got to the Congress, and it was appropriated, and then we hired a lot of professors.
And we needed that, and we needed to develop a national transportation plan.
And we don't have those, so the SST kind of stuck out like a sore thumb.
It wasn't part of the overall index that you could comfortably fit it in and protect it.
And it was defeated because of that.
So it's terrible here.
No, not even hard.
It's terrible.
You have to say, Lockheed, quite a bit of ridiculous.
That's my brother's old alma mater.
Well, I worked at McDonald's over this time.
We worked at Lafayette, and I was in the Air Force at Boeing.
And they're all alike.
They all have the same problems.
And they're all North Indians.
They have a devil of a time, pulling together.
But there is a need for a national plan so these people can see how they fit in that plan, and then don't end up cannibalizing each other, which is what's going on right now.
We haven't had to have that hesitate, I think.
Well, there's a lot of them.
Yeah, true.
It's that true cannibalism there.
Oh, absolutely.
There's no doubt about it.
Sort of a feeling like, gee, if you're building Monopoly up in Seattle and I have a piece of it, I can't see my activities, so why don't I shoot the SSD down and maybe I'll get some more business for DC-10.
Well, we're in Seattle here.
I'm lucky.
There's various people chopping it up for the wrong reason.
But if you had an overall index of where we were headed,
to improve our excellence.
Maybe right there, I'm with it, is to improve our employment, which gives us taxes, which lets us afford these social programs.
That's right.
Then you've got yourself.
That's right.
You know what, for something in general of $100 billion in 25 years, that's $4 billion a year.
That's quite a business.
Yes, sir.
That's just about what we're out of balance.
If we lose, if we don't do anything more than lose the business in Europe and in Asia, it'll cost us a half million direct jobs.
And that could all happen within five to six years.
Because when the airlines see we're not going to come up with our buses and we're going to build Ford and STL, we're not going to have an FST, they're going to go where they can make a deal that'll last for 25 years.
Because when you buy an airline and you get married,
And that's why the TWA Eastern people were so adamant about Cranston's thought to change the management.
They didn't want to do business with a management that was a receiver.
They should answer to Dan Huff.
They trusted him.
Actually, it's a business or anything.
And they're not about to do any other work.
That's why Cato has bought every airplane at McDonald's.
They just can't quite twist themselves away from things.
relationship.
And today, all over the world, you can just see the rolling cans and the McDonald's cans.
You can penetrate one of those cans almost at once.
And the United States has had it all.
And we're just on the verge of letting go.
This group in Congress is led by a part of the United States.
Unbelievable.
What the hell does he want the United States to be?
I wonder if he's a Republican.
I don't know.
What is he like?
Do you have a chance to talk to him about this?
Oh, I'd really like to.
They can't do it.
Partisan or non-partisan, we can just sit down and find a ground for communication.
And there is one.
Maybe we'll simplify it.
He's a Democrat.
Well, there's no question about it.
He's a shadow pastor, too.
He's on the best bandwagon in the world.
wasteful spending, you know.
How do you do this?
Well, I'm the son of a bitch who always votes for it.
Oh.
We talk about spending.
He's got one of the worst spending records in Congress.
I mean, he talks against this.
But, you know, have you ever seen how he voted on social programs?
But try to get the press to press.
Do you try?
Yeah.
We've got so many cute stories.
I'll try to find it.
If you have a little head of media, they go wild.
They won't press it.
Let's make another effort on that, John.
I'd like to ask Mark Colson Group to just get the whole deal on.
I'll tell you what, he's a great center on spending.
That's the way to do it.
You buy him in the top ten, and there'll be a way to put him in the top ten.
All spending.
Well, back to what we do.
It's going to take a mixed bag.
And I think that we have to find tax incentives.
We have to find things like the Arthur Burns plan.
We have to work on antitrust laws because we're at a disadvantage in the United States with a 70-year-old antitrust free enterprise, free trade system that's up against the guy.
It's kind of like the Southerners' plan.
They could have beaten the Yankees if they fought with corn stalks, but they fought with mini-malls.
What does he argue first?
Well, a broad type of loan system.
In his case, it's like a junior RIC to help people out of trouble.
I'm not so sure we don't need a system somewhat like that that recognizes exports to encourage the industry to enter export markets.
All you can do now is if you're in trouble, you can get up to $250 million out of $2 billion.
But it seems to me there's got to be a recognition of the damage to the nation, to every citizen, if we continue to have deficit spending internationally.
What happens to the dollar?
What happens to our ability to have peaceful,
Asia-Broad and pollution control all these problems, as well as elementary-type things, which aren't popular at all.
And we haven't sold that to the public very well, or to the communists.
Every time we try, we seem to lose.
And I think you have to, I think you do have to probably get to the National Department.
If you get a big enough mixed bag,
it doesn't become vulnerable to the proxies.
There are enough people with interests in different areas that it is just wasteful spending, jet-set spending, all these things he says, which he himself does more than anybody else does, but no one understands him in the line.
What about keeping your units alive over transportation?
We talked about that just now.
Bill, could you keep a little bit of the SSC activity in the government?
I mean, relatively low expense, maybe, what, 30 people or something of that kind?
Yeah.
You want to keep the spark alive.
Well, how do we do that?
You mean putting another request?
No, the mechanics of the prison, I think, are like this.
direct the DOT to keep this nucleus alive.
I'd be very careful how I did that and write, not just be John talking to the Secretary of Defense about what to do.
That office would both terminate and serve as a focal point for information.
We would then work with NASA to generate the additional R&D to make it even better than the one that Boeing and GE had.
I don't think the possible reason why is to push an SST program through the collective elections.
You said the two elections?
I think it would be hurtful to you, and it would just raise the environment, raise the welfare of God.
In other words, you wouldn't throw it in Senate 3-1, would you?
I would.
Maybe there's a supplemental later, after the election bill, or something.
But that isn't too late.
Not at all.
Just go and then go gung-ho.
Then I would go gung-ho, and in the meantime, I would advise John that we must find somebody to do for you what Eugene Black did for Harrison Kennedy.
And Eugene Black did a special report that kicked off the assistive program.
In fact, it's commonly called the Black Audit Board, or the Stanley Audit Board.
And they did an uncanny job.
If you were to read it today, the recommendation is almost like they were looking at the future.
And we should follow some of those recommendations in some of the difficult
Bill says tracks helps us with a lot of junk because we haven't used it for anything.
For God's sake, sir.
I guess he could have asked, or should he have asked him?
Well, he was offensive because he supported Rockefeller.
Well, I don't give a damn about that.
I can also tell that he was kind of a Rockefeller.
He was a Rockefeller himself.
Well, I guess it's your challenge.
We're working for Rockefeller.
We might just resurrect Black on this.
Yes, but I don't know if he's still got his mark on us.
He's mad with us.
And I think he said hello again.
I hadn't heard that we were using him.
I didn't know he wanted to be used.
Well, let's get to work on him right away.
He's a superb operator.
Also, he's got an immense presence in prestige and all that.
And on this subject, he's getting there very quickly.
It's about time.
It's very timely to raise this, but also to put it in the larger context of all exports.
Frankly, not just all exports.
It's all of them.
all kinds of development that produce jobs and progress, et cetera.
We talked about wanting to clean up the lakes and rivers and harbors and so forth and making the country beautiful.
But where the hell are we going to get the money to do all this?
That's what we haven't told anybody.
And we just failed Denver.
We had a great story on Tennessee.
We couldn't get the newspapers to print it.
And what they did is they acted like they didn't understand it.
And even without our administration,
We don't have the sales for that kind of, I think it's a necessary argument.
You get on Dick Cavett's show, I don't understand how tax money gets back into social programs.
You know, that's a rudimentary, you can't believe it.
Where does he think the money comes from?
From what?
Somebody's got to earn it before anybody can spend it.
Somebody's got to produce something.
He mentioned that the only hallway he knew was what he read in the New York Times, and I told him that explained the whole problem.
But that story, which is so clear to you, and so clear to the rest of us, is really not being controlled, and it's not clear to me.
On the other hand, related to jobs, I'll tell you what, you don't have any problem explaining this to George Meany.
No, sir.
You have no problem explaining it to Peter Brown in the building trades.
You don't have any problem explaining it to Fitzsimmons and Teamsters.
Unfortunately, you don't.
You should end up trying to explain it to that son of a bitch, Woodcock.
I know the other reason for it is that he's basically a socialist.
He came out for the wrong reasons.
A lot of his members are UEX players.
You've got to have jobs.
This environment stuff.
You can never go anywhere to save the fruits of the environment versus jobs.
Jobs are going to come first.
Right now.
I don't see where the money is going to come from.
We have to do jobs first.
What are you going to build?
You've got to do, this is one area.
But there's so many that are related to all high technology areas.
And then they have to be subsidized.
You've got to have government subsidies in many ways.
You've got to direct subsidies.
tax incentive, which would be easier.
But I think we have to have programs of participating with foreign governments to make it more efficient.
This isn't always the case, but this isn't actually a management problem.
It is that we have a lot of resources around here, and we have this problem.
And we can, we can pill away these resources, or we can, we can rifle shot onto the things that are going to bring us the biggest payout in some sort of an order driver, you know, we can go down that list of all the resources that are on the line.
And this country isn't doing that.
The Japanese are.
The Japanese have the same kinds of opportunities all over the world as we do.
And they're in the way.
And the EEC is going to do it.
Surely.
And the EEC, when it comes to aerospace, they've managed to organize and get all the nations together.
This is what I think we can begin to do around here.
And it's long past overdue.
Long past.
But we have been thinking about some of these things, I suppose.
Part of it is because, I don't know, the S.H.T.
triggers some, the enormous balance of pain of the problem, you know, triggers others.
And then, of course, you just sit down and think about the United States and where it's going to be in the world, and you think about how you've got the New York, you've got the Soviet Union, this miserable system, you've got Russians handing things.
You look at the Chinese, there are 800 of them.
And they don't produce as much as the Japanese do with 100 megawatts.
In fact, they produce half as much.
The Chinese are Chinese in one way or another.
They're going to be a hell of a competitor in the world in the next 25 years.
And the Japanese, needless to say, are already here.
And so here says the United States, this is our world anymore.
Economically, it was 20 years ago and 10 years ago.
And you see it.
The brain drain.
It was drained for over a year.
Now they're draining the systems.
That's a hell of a thing.
It is.
Just, out and out.
Japanese are the inventors of this.
Instead of their developing this big R&D capacity, they bought licenses.
And they paid for their licenses.
And they bought all of them out.
And pretty soon, what you've got in this country is a license for the market.
And like today, we have one company in the United States making commercial radios.
All of that's been made in Japan.
One?
Which one is it?
I don't know.
They're one of those.
Yeah, some of them.
and we're just out of control.
It's just ridiculous.
Lost and we're in total, it's ridiculous.
I remember when we all would just have our own hill coves.
The hill cove, I remember the first one we ever had.
Well, they're all Sonys and they're all Japanese.
Well, they're coves, but they're made in Japan.
Oh, yeah.
And we've done that in movies.
We've done it in maritime shipping.
Automobiles, California now imports 45% of our automobiles are abroad.
We import a billion and a half more automobiles than we export now.
Who would have ever dreamed that would happen to Detroit?
And this year, we're going to import more avionics, electronics, and computers than we've ever exported in the first time.
That business only existed for 10 years.
And I predict that in five, six years, the same thing will happen to civil aviation.
Because the lead time is so great, it takes 10 years.
If you aren't doing it now, you aren't going to see it for 10 years.
piece of the overall bigger picture of exports and employment that's needed for these plans, transportation, aerospace, R&D, technology?
Well, I want you to hear this, Mr. President, because I could imagine, I want you to understand the relationship here as we go into this other subject.
I mean, you say computers.
Yes, sir.
When George and I were at Hong Kong, we went through a computer factory where they'd take the little girls, little rose girls, little Chinese girls, white jackets, putting together computers to be sent back to the United States, and they paid them 26 cents a day.
And they're doing all this intricate wiring, close to the wire circuitry and all that kind of stuff.
Little Chinese boys in it coming around, picking them up, putting them together.
And they're rats.
And then the whole innards of the computer go in the box and coming back to the United States.
Can you take a few minutes to tell me how this happens?
I think you would be interested in it.
The way it happens in an airplane is we dominate it because it's great.
There's no problem with it.
And the next thing you know, when I was in Douglas, in order to sell the DC-9, that was a case of sort of knew we were going out of business.
And in order to make the second sale, they're always down the flight list, and only had one sale, the Delta Air Lines.
We agreed to build a wing and a tail in Canada.
And not many people know that the DC-9 wing and tail are built out of the United States.
To make the third system, we had to agree to build fuselage panels in Italy.
So the DC-9, which we all think is a great American private-financing aircraft, and most of it's built outside the United States, shipped back to Lockheed and assembled in Lockheed.
You never get better with a guy who's been there.
That's part of why the Lockheed brought the Rolls-Royce engine.
In order to get 50 sales out of that air holding,
It was necessary to provide the Rolls-Royce engine.
Now, in the case of Douglas, Douglas will be building parts of the DC-10 all over the world.
They won't be talking about it.
To get the Air Canada L-1011 sale, we had to put something like $100 million worth of business into Canada.
So these offset agreements go all over the place.
How much of that do we need?
We do as much as we can.
We're the big marketplace.
We have the touch.
We're trying to get sales all over the world when those people want technology and recognize the balance of managing jobs.
Where I ran into trouble in the administration is where we're talking about security.
What I just said got me great enthusiasm in comms, got me great enthusiasm with C&D, great enthusiasm with John Whitehouse Day, but when you start talking to the pure comms, the Hank Rutanters, Paul McCracken, the people who work for John Collins, you run into a whole different mentality.
You run into people who think all the way from Milton Friedman, I started a life of 10 days, he's a great man, he worked with Mr. Friedman up on the hill,
Vermont.
Just two camp stools.
Yeah, sitting there arguing about exports.
And he just kept saying, well, you should never export.
When you export, you should dig up your resources and turn them into computers and airplanes.
Put your sweat into it.
What are you going to return?
Papers with money.
And he said, well, it's a pretty good documentary.
Pretty soon, he had his kids and his wife.
And we were all down there arguing about this thing.
You get yen, you get marks, and you hold them.
And then when it's a fair trade, you spend them over there, and you get Israel resources.
Friedman said that 30 years of debating, that's the first time anybody ever gave me the right answer.
He's not even in that argument.
Everywhere I go.
Now, John had a gallery.
There's a scowl, you know, they come.
It's just a pure, poetical effort.
And he says, balance the trades of that.
Is there red hair?
You don't have to export anything.
You don't get that same awareness of what a job means and what a discipline means and why a healthy high technology industry is important.
What you get is a theoretical standpoint, we're going to have full employment.
We don't care if all aerospace engineers have to run over here and build pollution machines.
But that's not important.
The important thing is if we can't build airplanes to compete with the Japs, then we shouldn't be in the market.
We'll buy theirs.
It's cheaper.
And that horrible conflict happened.
Why?
That's the other thing.
Where are we going to get the money to buy theirs?
What the hell are we going to produce?
I never would have thought that coming.
Thanks to John, we all got together.
We all said it right next.
We don't all believe that we should have a lot of blood.
I don't believe it.
It was interesting.
We ran into this the other night.
We had this group in here with Janine and some of these theoretical accounts and some other people.
And Janine got really strong up on this because he was getting this talk about, you know, if we can't compete in a free economy, then we don't deserve to have the business and so on.
He said, he said, this is our country.
And he says, you guys aren't winners.
He said, you've got to fight in there to win.
He says, it's a big amount of money.
He got really excited and stood up and waved his arms around.
The reason those guys are winning is they are exporting with export taxes back.
Sure.
with all kinds of things.
So we have dedicated national funds to penetrate that market.
Great.
You should put that last part you just talked about there on a couple of pages for me.
I want to get my mind controlled on it when I go to the Curl on Saturday.
Would you mind just, not a long presentation, because I've just ended this argument that it started with the proposition, well, it doesn't make any difference what we do.
We can't compete.
And we just simply ought to recognize that and buy it from abroad.
And then buy it is to, we have to do it.
We have to be winners and so forth and so on.
And I don't buy this kind of, in other words, put all the demagoguery in, who will I put it on?
It's just my own.
But it'd be very helpful to have that.
You could get it to me in a day or two.
And don't get them to be just fancy, just so the main thoughts are, so that I can assimilate it.
You did a great job with the Midwestern newspaper people recently, and I used a part of your speech last week when I went back.
Oh, I was just talking in there.
General Sharks about, just frankly, all the stuff about the .
But you made the point that 25 years ago, it was not even a second foot.
And that today, we've built such a strong alliance with our allies that we haven't protected ourselves against the fact that they don't use the same training practices we do.
And we really don't have .
Yeah, that point in particular I want to make.
They subsidize, they do this, and we go to .
We go to Japan.
We go to New York.
But in a different way, because they saw the strategic importance of value-added tax with export advantages to them.
And they subsidized their exports.
They penetrated markets on a very deliberate, calculated, strategic basis.
John, what is your view on value-added?
I think that we should go.
for our Mississippi.
I just think how good are these squares?
These squares.
If I had a little more, I'd get it.
I think, in other words, you aren't concerned about cap wine burgers, the raising taxes.
Well, I think we've got to balance it.
I think we've got to do two things at the same time.
We've got to link to reduction of real estate taxes and to export subsidies.
And if we could make it do those two things, I think we would sell it.
for subsidies, but my point is, would be lending over some of them.
You see, something in the way of new taxes.
In other words, what I'm getting at is this.
What we really need in all this time, you finally add it up, you know.
You finally find, well, you've got two, you can't do it for $200,000.
So my point is, you need to say, as a result of that, you would have the government take more out, and we're presently taking
and say we're going to take $10 billion more out through value-added for the purpose of exploration.
That would be more for the purpose of jobs, two things, jobs and real estate taxes.
Now, a little sick to the plate as it goes by to help with our problems here.
We'll get a little great again, but I wouldn't be embarrassed about that.
In other words, you would add a federal tax on how you relieve the property tax.
That's right.
And just be blunt about it and say, add the 20 million dollars.
And you would add the federal tax on how you relieve the property tax.
That's right.
And frankly, this is to finance for the NASA, basically.
Well, we can do that too.
That's right.
We can do that.
I think you've got to put it all together.
I think we can finance it being conservative about it.
I think we can finance it in advance.
by marshaling our assets, you know.
And by, as you can see, a lot of this worship propagated, the propagation of the new and all that stuff that we're in.
And folks, that's what you could call it.
There is more crap that we are doing.
It is unbelievable how things are growing.
It's unbelievable these programs that we've got.
Now look, George Shultz, I understand, in the vote last night, objects to my vetoing
because he says it will cost 300,000 jobs.
What does that mean?
I'm trying to find out.
I can't believe that.
I don't believe it.
Well, I don't know.
The way they say it, I think it's spread all through the government.
Yeah, it's not federal government.
It's personal.
That's the first question I have.
What jobs are you talking about?
What it is, it's community action agencies down in the localities.
It's social workers.
It's a lot of so-called political programs, plus George Madden, by the way.
Now, I think the way you get around that is that you say, I'm going to get rid of this, and you do manpower special revenue sharing, and that'll take care of all those jobs.
We don't have to eliminate them.
And we'll do community development revenue sharing, and then they won't have to eliminate those jobs unless they're no good.
And the city councils can decide that and put the monkey on their backs.
But say the money's there in special revenue sharing.
So we don't have to eliminate any of us, except by local option.
What are the real options?
What are the real chances that we can get that?
Well, we're going to do it on our own.
It's community development, very good.
Manpower, we're going to have hearings, and we'll know better than to say, please, we're on the road.
Well, let me say this, that we must not find, let's not do this, John, for the purpose...
of contingent OEO.
And that's, I feel very strong about that.
And I know, I think what we're getting to are the usual arguments of people who want to do that.
And I'll be damned if we're going to do it.
It might not have been the same as true, incidentally, of that action agency that this young fellow heads.
Yeah.
I feel exactly the same way.
That damn Peace Corps auto-passing was just in here.
And he told me what is the truth.
He says, we've been kicked out of 12 countries and aren't wanted in 30 others.
And we spend 71 billion bucks a year on them.
All right, let's put them someplace else.
You understand?
And I just don't like this business of people on our own staff running around saying, well, they're too dead because basically they're taking a life.
I do not believe in these programs.
That's the thing we've got to understand.
I mean, when we've got things like this to do, I don't believe in them.
But you ask me questions that I can't actually answer.
But I'll find out.
I'll let you know.
We've signed more things, you know, more things.
Well, we can't do anything about it.
Here we are.
We've got, you see, these huge expenditures of money.
And you wonder, what names have gone?
Are we spending them?
What are we getting out of it?
Don't you wake up.
I'm trying to proposition this guy to come over here and get into this.
The Marshall that he's had a sense of the technology and the whole business.
And he's got a lot of fancy offices all around.
I know.
And he's never made any money in his life.
And I don't know why he should start now.
He'd be a damn fool to do it, frankly.
Well, I know.
But on the other hand, I think if he could do it, frankly, if you could do it for a year, it's always...
But I think the exciting possibilities are such that you really can't turn away from it.
I mean, you've just got to do it.
I mean, we've just got so much to do here.
I mean, these jobs I can list, and I've been in the private sector myself, and I've never kept any of them.
I also know that it's easy to laugh it off and say, well, what is money?
It's a hell of a lot.
Buy shoes and clothes and college education and all those things.
You can't get without it.
These jobs are miserable around here, considering, I mean, in terms of the financial side.
But on the other hand, if you could do it, we really need the talent you've got in this thing.
But what I want, John,
It's obvious that he has an understanding of it in a practical way that some of our other guys don't have.
They talk real big about all this.
You know, you've got to get right down to it.
But if you could put him in charge of the units, you know what I mean?
And so we know it's being done here, and we come up with a plan, and we sell it to everybody.
We sell it to Conley, and we sell it to...
He's had a pretty good...
Oh, I know that.
Another thing, too, is that I'd like to have, tell you what, if we have that small group, I'd like to have him give us a little visitation.
I'd like to see what happens to John Collins.
I see his hair going.
He hears this thing.
I didn't realize it was that bad.
You know what I mean?
What he says about computers and all the rest, no.
And also, I have a body hearing at the very conference.
I know, I know pretty well how tremendous my art is.
And George Holtz is the first part of that same school.
And I'm great at my art.
I do this.
But you see, in the conference, they all say, well, everything should be made worse than Jesus.
But then what can the hell do the people of the United States do?
What do we do?
What do we create?
We're a service society.
That's right.
We make toilet paper.
We're good at that.
We're good at that.
We're good at that.
We're good at that.
Thank you.
I appreciate what you've done.
I appreciate your time.
Talk to us.
I would appreciate it.
Tell us what you did and what you want to do.
We'll do our best.
Thank you.
No problem.