Conversation 559-021

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All right, so, let's say that, uh, I'd like to say that all of you, Mr. President, see if you've got anything to add about Harry?

Yes, I'm very pleased to be here.

Well, you've got a report to our accomplishment, but I just want to thank you for signing down here with us.

I'm proud to have you see you as Vice President of the United States.

Well, may I come to town to get one of your papers?

Yes, please.

All right.

Thank you.

President Nixon and Paul Harvey were close as if they could just find their views unmistakable.

He had a very successful meeting, I don't know, I don't suppose you'd wonder.

Yes, I got a story, darn it.

That place is where it all started, you know.

That's where 63, before they ever had any problems with a ruler or anything else, they didn't have any of the black problem.

They just stood for work, you know.

They ran it.

That's where this Mark Rudd and all those... Now that I'm not even on the student council now, Mary O'Sabio was a speaking respectability, two children looking for a job, full-time student.

I didn't know that.

I heard it.

Yes.

So he's turned around?

Who knows?

He's turned around.

Probably, who knows?

It might be, too, that one of the reasons the student movement is so much cooler this year, and also in the summer, might have been the fact that this is the other side of the economic problems that they just decided to get a new job.

All of these kids have been out banging around.

Things were so easy for them when it was on the flyer.

And so they just, when they don't have to do anything, when they have nothing to drive so long to either for survival or success or whatever they have to do, they just turn to destructive activities.

It could be that they're flying in the air.

But Chicago has been as bad as some places I've been.

The mayor is a pretty tough guy.

Yes, he's not easy to hold on to.

It doesn't matter what you see in the localities.

Sure, he's got a local mayor that I've been out there on a couple of occasions that talks like he is.

He runs the city, of course, like cities usually run.

He's got a lot of poverty and nonsense.

the police, the firemen, the law enforcement officials.

And it was a very curious thing.

I remember after the Democratic convention, we all, everybody was just giving tickets.

I was in China.

First, I didn't deserve it, but because I saw the people who were going after him.

But I would imagine that many of the Democratic candidates would rather wish they hadn't jumped on him at that time.

What do you think?

I expect that he'll remember if that's what you mean.

I think he will.

Now that you do a good job now on over 400 and some odd radio stations each day, six days a week, right?

Six days a week, yeah.

But also on television and when he speaks on college campuses and in high school.

Good for you.

He does a tremendous job.

You are right in the camp of the, shall we say, the, not the, not the, the, the, the, the,

It seems to me that if we're careful not to

with a position that's been established over a period of many years, if they see that you're going to be consistent in your persuasion, they'll finally sit up and start listening and respect you even if they don't agree with you.

And hasn't this been your strength?

You're my secretary.

Yes.

And that, of course, that is one of the reasons why we have such a really vulnerable opposition.

the fashionable left.

They didn't know what it's called.

Well, it's not called the liberal establishment and so forth, or the eastern establishment.

It isn't that.

There's an establishment in every place, you know.

And by that, I mean there is that kind of thing.

Maybe you've got some of them.

You've got a little area in San Francisco, Boston, and you have a city.

to sort of the intellectual snobs, the elite, and so forth.

And the people who really thought they had the world at the tail in the early 60s and who were permissive, who ran down the United States, and then, as time went on,

who turn on all the old values.

They believe in nothing, actually, except themselves.

They believe in nothing outside themselves, as well as it's an attitude, for example, which so many of us showed.

Well, really, really, their attitude in this rather unfortunate business of the Pentagon on paper is where they didn't even read it.

In my view, as far as we were concerned, there's no skin off our elbows.

And it's all about the previous administration's decisions that were made with regard to war.

Why do we let it out?

The point is, can an individual, be he in government or be he in editor, make a decision as to what is best for the country?

Can those decisions be made there, or must they be made in another area?

It's impairments.

The most deadly of the seven sins is pride, of course.

And that's what they have in the development degree.

And I think that the thing that we find around the country is that it's a rather curious thing that in this whole period in which we have passed, the period since we've been here two and a half years or so, that our strength has not come in our support from the so-called better classes.

and those who call themselves the better class, if it hasn't come from the university professors, from the great,

For the most part, from the so-called intellectual leaders, opinion makers, etc., etc.

A few, like yourself, stood up on these things, but most did not.

And it hasn't come from the elite among the business community.

A few stand up, but most sort of go with, well, they read certain newspapers, listen to certain network commentators, and...

They go that way.

But our strength, you know, has gone with those who are looked down upon by so many people.

Hardhats.

Who is a hardhat?

He's a guy who works.

So a hardhat, a policeman, a farmer, an individual who may not use good grammar, an individual who is basically a southerner.

The southerners are the only place really where the elite

the only part of the country where the elite, the majority of the elite, probably, were with us was in the South.

Because the South has traditionally been, despite all of this, the agonies of

the war and all that, the Civil War and so forth.

The South, traditionally, has been very strongly patriotic, very strongly law-abiding, you know, and so forth.

The Midwest, next, in terms of that.

But the East, and many parts of the Far West, still looks the same.

Rather, there are rather striking exceptions, like Orange County, San Diego, et cetera, in the far west, where you still have great strength.

But you'll find what we have found in this period

is that as far as where we stand here, that on the great issues of national defense, on the great issues of trying to end a difficult war in an honorable way, on the great issues of standing up against demonstrators, which we have had to do, on the issues that we have found that, or shall we say, what is the right of any law and order, we have had to go for our support

to those that are looked upon with scorn by the university graduates, the teachers, the professors, the opinion makers, the business leaders, etc.

I know this crowd so well because I lived among them.

You have them in Washington.

I know them in New York very well.

I know them in California, and of course I've seen them around the country.

And steadily, I have no rancor against any of them.

I respect everybody for his point of view.

But at this particular point, what is really being tested in this country is America's leader class.

Not its middle class, not its working class.

There's still a lot of character there.

There's still a lot of those people who go to church, believe in things, wear a flag, not just in election time, but other times as well.

There are still some old fadding patriots, old fadding churchgoers, etc., etc., people who believe in basically the old values.

But that is

And that, frankly, is the hope of the country as well as its present strength.

That's why I always refer to the heartland.

The heartland is not a place geographically, although it's mainly in the south and the middle west.

Because you find a heartland in upper New York, you can find it in the heart of New York City a long, long, long, long time.

You can find it in California, particularly in the state of California.

You can find it up in northern California, as a matter of fact, up through that great central valley.

But the key point now is that

It's whether or not those who should be the leaders of this country, who should make opinion, and now whether they have learned or are beginning to learn, I don't know.

But the real question is whether they will now step up and speak out against permissiveness or speak out for strength for the country.

speak out, of course, for recent foreign policy, you know, like in the areas that I am moving in.

We're not doing things because we're naive.

We're doing things because we're intelligent.

That's the difference in terms of our approaches to the problems of the world, at least I think it is.

And I think at this particular point, if your audience, for example, is basically a hard-land audience,

people listen to you and they support you because you stand for, basically, certain fundamental values that they here deride in virtually every motion picture, in virtually every television program, on the television news night after night, in the newspapers, except for maybe The Trip.

I don't know, they've been there for half a dozen.

And, of course, among the comms.

Well, it's pretty hard for that kind of medicine to be

pushed into the body of politics over and over and over again.

And it's very hard for a younger generation to come off being exposed to that kind of teacher, that kind of influence.

Because what they learned in school

It's what they're exposed to, what they see on television, what they read in the newspapers.

It's hard for a young generation to come up and have any sanity at all.

Would you agree?

Mr. President, I would not only agree, but I'm going to attempt to apologize for my media and the manner in which it has made your job sometimes almost impossible.

totally right away, that could be tied up a little well.

The whole thing would be the complexion of every other landscape whose writers could be turned around in a period of 10 years, and I hope that 10 years you'll address yourself to, well, yeah, I think so.

But it has to be turned around by finding some system of reward and punishments, perhaps.

I was thinking more of the fact that these came out of a certain era

Now that we have some journalism training for the new breed, they'll work to... Where are you going to get that?

You know the schools of journalism.

Columbia.

We can create one.

Could you?

Yes, sir.

You see, I have talked to many editors, and I've talked to some station owners.

They say, my God, we just hate the stuff that's on our program.

We can't control our people.

Even the editor of the...

I don't know whether Billy told you this story, but a few years ago, he pulled a dozen of us together into New York, and said they wanted to create a university of substance.

He didn't want to have any Christians figure out where they were coming from, and they had to apologize to the Lord.

The land was available to everybody.

They had the money to share it with, but there were no questions.

But this is what I'm down on.

I was there because I wanted to take care of establishing a journalist's circle.

Taking this part of the university, yes.

And hopefully a law school.

I wanted to have Harvard Harvard.

This is bogged down, unfortunately, because we couldn't get 12 men to agree on the Code for Campus Conduct.

And I ask that they, if they ever do this again, don't ask 12 men to do it.

Tell them and let those who want to go along with you.

You never ask anybody anything unless you decide in advance what you want to come out.

I don't need you to dictate.

You've got to persuade.

You've got to maybe mold your views.

Why don't you go ahead and give your name?

The whole essence of leadership is, of course, to decide what's going to happen, what you think should happen.

bring people around to it, let some of them be with the other.

You can't collide more than one with your enemies who are already entrenched anyway, why don't we?

It will come, and as a matter of fact, we may be, we may be witness.

You never know, these things change you without your knowing it.

But there has been a general cooling of America, as you know.

There has been somewhat of an improvement, you know, that actually blew in law enforcement.

As we finish the Vietnam War, we hope that there will be perhaps maybe some restoration of patriotism and the rest.

But there must be something in Vietnam.

People like Marina, Norman Beale, people like that, their religious appeal seems to be quite something.

On the other side of the coin, I have a message to churches.

The other side of mine, I happen to be a Quaker.

And I must say, we have got some good respect for the number of people that have joined us, Arch and Janet, and some of their positions or something.

But if you look at the Protestant Church today, except for Graham's fundamentalists, you see what Carson Blake usually talks about?

Look at the Catholics.

You talk to the fundamentalist Catholics, and they've got real problems too, you see.

Now that doesn't mean, that doesn't mean that there is a certain rigid view in the church that has to be taken.

I don't go that distance that some do, the literal.

But I do know that once institutions

just cut away from all values and all principles, they're gonna die.

Nobody's gonna believe them.

And that's why if you find these,

great so-called progressive churches empty over, you know, the congregations and so forth, the Presbyterians, et cetera.

But the Mormons grow faster than the Adventists grow faster.

The Mormons is a fundamentalist group of those people.

And the Southern Baptists are still growing.

And as I say, some Presbyterians are there to fight.

But we, no, I don't give up because I think that, as I say,

If what is called the lower classes of America, basically, I don't say that, but that's what others call them, if they had gone to the way of the other people, then we should be very frightened.

But fundamentally, the heart of the country is not.

It's a close call, but fundamentally it is.

The point is that as the younger generation moves on, exposed to this new leader class, which is not sound.

Then, over a period of time, that arose to the heart.

And that's the thing we've got to do.

It's a question of the education.

You're estimating your effect on your influence on the country in your selection of Supreme Court justices, and I hope you don't underestimate your possibilities in this particular position as President.

I hold it because I think that's a matter of fact, because I'm in a service group.

The difficulty is, well, I wouldn't agree more.

Because, actually, you can't win, I'm sure, if you have smart people.

The difficulty is, you see, also, we've got to get at these networks.

There are evil people around.

I mean, like, I mean, like, natural television people.

And those clowns are on the network.

Uh, and, uh, one for the Marshal and one for me.

They're going to get a little reported.

Uh, if you take out, I have a big printout in Los Angeles that you may know, George Buckley.

He has a huge audience.

And, uh, you have a big audience and so forth.

Do you want to get on that work?

If you don't have it, send me a call.

I'm going to get it done.

That's the truth.

Right, right.

You'll get it done.

Thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

Uh, what is your son's name?

He's 23 now, but this was when he was in third grade.

Oh, I know.

He's pretty big.

That's all I got, ma'am.

Well, thank you.

Goodbye.

I'm going to see you guys later tonight.

As a matter of fact, he's coming out for dinner.

Oh, okay.

I'll see you then.

And the jury's used 200 of us.

I think we're having a meeting with, uh... Oh, you're with that group?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I haven't seen you in a while.

It'll be good.

I'm glad you came in.

My pleasure.

Thank you.