Conversation 559-023

TapeTape 559StartTuesday, August 10, 1971 at 3:21 PMEndTuesday, August 10, 1971 at 4:14 PMTape start time03:26:42Tape end time04:19:36ParticipantsNixon, Richard M. (President);  Shepard, Thomas R., Jr.;  Haldeman, H. R. ("Bob");  White House photographerRecording deviceOval Office

On August 10, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon, Thomas R. Shepard, Jr., H. R. ("Bob") Haldeman, and White House photographer met in the Oval Office of the White House from 3:21 pm to 4:14 pm. The Oval Office taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 559-023 of the White House Tapes.

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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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.

All right, all right, stay, stay.
Is there a picture?
Is there?
Good, well, let me just lie down on the mat, or, uh, or your official, uh, right here.
No, just that guy right there.
Sit down, sit down right here.
We were just going over some of his environmental points.
I told him you were very obsessed, that you were a great crusader for the environment.
He didn't like people.
He didn't like people.
That thing that goes off and you don't have your seatbelts on.
God.
I had a marvelous time.
I went up to Columbia School of Journalism, Mr. President.
They let you in?
They let me in.
They let me in.
They let me in.
They let me in.
Ooh.
Seminar deal.
Not all students.
Not all students.
This was a birthday pay for the privilege of a two-day seminar.
And they had this panel.
And I decided that, knowing the guilt of this group, that what I would do is make a few points, allow my facts and abuse my thoughts, and then suggest another credibility gap.
which would someday land on these reporters for not having been balanced in their reporting and given to their side.
So I took a housewife to, a day in 1975, when all these laws had been passed.
And among other things, as I had her pick up 80 bottles to put into her car to drive to the supermarket, she went over a bump.
And that airbag went all in her face with the sound of a .45 Colt in her ear.
And she narrowly missed the job on a bicycle.
But I took those 140 people from the day of the house flight.
Some of these extreme things are put into law.
And that would be a hell of an effective way to calm some of our doubts to make a film.
Get a good filmmaker to make a film of a life, a day in the life of the 1975 housewife.
This is a very short one, Bob, and if you'd like to have a copy of this.
The rest of it took an hour of challenge.
How could you say this?
How could you say that?
When did you quit reading your wife?
Why is it that you believe me here?
It's just because they're good.
Right?
And that's the one that shakes them.
Well, anyway, they, uh, they, uh, the pieces of Jupiter, well, mainly their species, are the same.
I think there are many points that very much need to be made.
Let me get out of here.
I'm not, uh,
I'm concerned about the each individual point about, I would argue, about DDT or this or that.
That is all, to me, to cite a point that's irrelevant.
I know it's relevant, but it isn't really the major issue.
The major issue is that
that whether it is consumerism or whether it is environmentalism or any broader aspect, whether it is the U.S. role in the world, the intellectual elite in this country have now reached the conclusion that they have got to find
something to beat the country in the head about.
Racism, of course, I should have mentioned this the other day.
So, we mean that we're a racist society to begin with.
We provide no opportunity for the poor blacks.
We are, our system, of course, is polluting the air and the water and poisoning us all and so forth.
We are
building shoddy goods, the worst goods in the world.
There's a hell of a lot of shoddy goods.
There's no question about that.
And as a world power, we are in utter failure to be realistic as citizens and not to rule or to lead rather than to rule.
That would be the word.
Well now,
There is, of course, some truth in everything.
I mean, you can find something to back up the premise of what you can do with anything out of the Bible.
But the motive of those, that's what I get at, the motive of those who attack on these fronts is very, it seems to me, susceptible to questioning.
And because their motive is really not to clean up the air and the water and make everything safe and so forth and so on.
Their motive is to have the United States receive basically a secondary position.
In the world, they hate the system, really.
And possibly, and probably it goes much deeper than that, is because, and this is one of the reasons so many of them take a permissive attitude toward crime, not necessarily individually, but toward drugs, which many of them are on.
The reason is that they themselves have lost their words.
They don't know what they believe in.
And so deep down, if you were to put them on a psychiatrist's couch, you'd get a psychiatrist who wasn't on the stuff itself to examine them.
He would find that they're carrying the country down and carrying the system down.
for reasons that have nothing to do with what's wrong with the country, what's wrong with the system.
It has to do with what's wrong with them.
That's my analysis of it.
The other thing that I think is terribly important, and I don't know that you have touched upon this as thoroughly as I have on the case of the small groups I have been involved with yet,
That is the failure in America, interestingly enough, as we look at the construction of this radio guy, Paul Harvey, you know, the great gentleman.
I said, you know, it's big.
Not among its so-called lower classes.
In fact, back when I was in this office, I was standing there and hoping that if it hadn't been for the hard ends, if it hadn't been for the farmers, if it hadn't been for the soldiers, if it hadn't been for basically the, let's face it, the police and the firemen,
and the serviceman, and the VFW guy, and the rest.
We would be down to two today.
We'd be down to two.
The system would be down to two.
We wouldn't even be negotiating the install of the facility because we wouldn't have an ABM.
They wouldn't be willing to negotiate.
We'd be the second strongest nation right now in ABM, look at the damn sign.
At the same time, we wouldn't be in a position to negotiate, either by negotiation or by a continual hiring program, ending the war with some honor and thereby maintaining credibility or else the world power.
We wouldn't have any chance if it weren't for the lower classes.
So what does that say to you?
Well, it tells you something about the people you don't know.
It's very interesting.
They know I know them.
You see, they don't feel that the hatred, and it is really that, and frankly fear, that the so-called opinion maker types have of me is much deeper with regard to me than Coldwater or McCarthy and all the rest.
And the reason is that they know I know them.
And they know that I am not setting any sense of pride or anything.
They know that I am at their own level, and I don't give a damn what they think.
And as a result, you see, and they're absolutely right, as a result, what you find is, in this class, it starts with arrogance.
The most deadly of the deadly sins, pride, a belief in none but themselves.
And then when they find they have to turn to themselves,
They're frustrated and they tear down the hoop.
But look at the later class in America.
Look at the college, not the professors.
The old guy is pretty good.
But the generation of sub-professors and associate professors and instructors that have been created, draft evaders, some of them, and others, all right, perhaps in that respect.
I don't want to down them for the wrong reasons.
But it's a bad class of people.
It's the average teacher, bad.
and I'm referring to in most of these areas, in most of these places, look at your, you start with the, with that leader class, you start with the so-called opinion makers, sit with a group of reporters or editors, except for the old-time editors and so forth, look at your own staff and look, you have a hell of a time finding one out of ten that believes in anything except the destruction of the country.
Oh, he wouldn't like to admit it.
He's not a communist, see that?
See, this is the reason these guys, put it in personal terms, I mean, because I've often talked to these men, probably, but the reason these guys have such a, well, and they should have, why they hate Mike, that's a fair piece of it, because you see,
See, the mistake of the radicals on the right, basically, whether it's Barry or Harvey or the rest, is that they look at these comments and say, oh, he's a communist.
He's a hell of a lot worse because he believes in nothing.
He doesn't believe in himself.
He doesn't like to make happen.
He's on the line and says, you've got no questions.
The opinion maker's not only there.
The news media...
most devastating television media, and then you go to the churches.
And I happen to be a Quaker, so I can speak pretty good English, because we're on the works, mainly because of sanity.
I'm a Quaker, so in order to get on the track, and also because a lot of Quakers are
It's rather than being a pathology test, which I trust I have.
But so we can, so they're there in the vanguard of this piece of Christ, the hell of America, sort of thing.
But the Protestant church, except for the Graham, Norman, Peale fundamentalists, has gone to hell.
It has nothing to say anymore.
That's what they're asking.
That's a pretty Catholic church.
Catholic, I don't know many Catholics who used to think it was true when Eisenhower was
The spirit of the Catholic Church in America and the world has gone on board against permissiveness, communism, or whatever you call it.
No more.
No more.
Because it also, its authority has eroded.
And you find that the new, this new isn't infected by this virus of destroying, of destruction.
Well, in the field of psychiatry, you've got creative distinction and self-destructive distinction.
And it's now the self-destructive distinction that has really grabbed this whole class of Americans.
So now we've gone down.
But I left out one group of students.
And that's the business community.
The average American businessman today except for a few of those who, some way or other,
uh, you know, we're grew up in the great old tradition and I've got a lot of guts or we're able to, but the businessman is just as bad as just as a follower.
It's just like a
that goes along with the facts he will name in the media.
He doesn't want to stand up.
He has no guts.
So where is the guts of a country?
Well, unfortunately, I say unfortunately because it should not be that way.
A country should be led by its so-called, what I would call, its best people, by its leader class, the opinion makers, the leaders, the people with the best education, the people that have judged them and so forth.
But what do you find today?
Where is the guts of the country?
Where do you have to go from here?
You've got to go with a hard hat.
You've got to go with decent nose guides.
You've got to go with labor guides.
You've got to go with farmers.
You've got to go with people of concern.
That's the only strength.
Now, on the other side of the coin, that gets some hold.
This country, there's a hell of a lot of bigger coins out there.
We used to call them the silent majority.
Maybe they're not a majority.
Maybe they're not a silent majority.
because I have a lot bigger audience than most of your colleagues in New York realize.
It's a much bigger audience, because what we have today is the media are pandering to.
They've been doing it.
Some are hitting it, but they're pandering to the worst incest in America, because they can tell
in New York or Beverly Hills where I live or San Francisco or out on the lakeside drinking too much, talking too much, thinking too little.
And that is the problem.
Now, what you have put your finger on here, and you've been one of the few in this country that has, you've certainly said it.
What you have said is that it isn't the environment that they're concerned about, isn't it?
To dig deeper, the flies are a part of this education.
And by education, that means first destroying all of our religious beliefs.
I don't think of Dan as a religious person.
He could be a Catholic, or he could be a Buddhist, he could be anything else.
But an individual doesn't believe in something other than himself.
He doesn't know how to be much of a leader.
That's the real problem.
And so what we find here is they take out other people's beliefs, and then they leave nothing else there.
So you have the most selfish, the most decadent, the most, in my respect, in my opinion, the most unaggregable group of leaders in America that I've ever seen.
I'll just finish by saying that I say all this, but it's not an ad.
to go through these goddamn dinners and sit and talk to their wives or their husbands or the rest, and hear the spatulous talk from people you know that have no guts, that talk with scorn about that uneducated thought,
involved here is much more serious than even the things you point out.
What really is involved is moral crisis.
Moral crisis.
And I don't mean, I don't mean, I can really say what's on the same planet.
Everybody's going to get saved.
In other words, you're going to walk down the aisle and get converted and all that sort of thing.
That helps some, but not this class.
His class became sophisticated with that.
What happened to this class is that they got to look in the mirror one day and say, maybe it isn't the solution, maybe it's me.
That's what they thought.
And then they got to look in the mirror one day and they say, well, maybe it's me.
And then they look around them and they say, well, by God, this is a hell of a country.
And they travel around the world and they look at every other country and every other period in this nation's history and everything.
I don't mean because, simply because it has such great material things.
They perhaps do go too much in material things, if you can think.
But on the other hand, because we look at America today, whether it's in the race field or whether it's in the opportunity field or whether it's in the wealth field, I mean, we've gone too damn far.
That's my speech.
We stayed with all these new thingies and never really came over to get found on these things.
Okay.
I have very little people, very few who support me.
I mean, you take it.
You take it.
You take it around.
You'd be surprised.
You can't.
No, I don't.
Certainly.
in the Congress and so forth, there are damn few strong people.
There are very few, well let me, there are not many who will find a John Connolly, but most of them are nice people, but fashionably gutless wonders.
No, I'll tell you, I'm not a search, you understand.
Basically, the, uh, the, you see, I, uh, I walk this street all my life.
almost by accident, and not because of any crusading, I forget, but because I had the head in, I don't want to put too much in the pro numbers, the first person isn't bad, but because the calls they were engaged in were often ones in which I just had to be on the other side.
And once they've taken you on, once they've drawn the sword,
This gentleman here is a little bit responsible, in a sense, for what I've been doing.
Believe me, two years ago, and these are not the best constructive talks in the world.
They're just simply saying our nation is not going to hell.
Not that good.
My mail.
I'm averaging now maybe 350 letters a week.
And back two years ago, the mail was 85% of them.
really hitting me on the head in the most vicious way.
But I noticed everybody who attacked me was going to have motion, and they never really had it in my points, which is what I was thinking of you about.
Now the male has changed, and I have to watch myself because I'm still in good luck and I have a job to do.
So I try to pinpoint where I get these hooks, where I can make them.
In fact, have you noticed, Mr. President, I think there is a hunger in this country for a positive viewpoint.
Do you think so?
Yes, I do.
I honestly do.
I think a lot of people now are getting sick and tired of this masochistic tearing and racking up of this great society of ours.
I really do.
You know, it just occurred to me now as you were talking...
My wife and one of my daughters are both Smith graduates, and I think you have one too.
And there is a history professor up there called Max Salvadori.
Do you know him?
Well, in the movie, he was Smith 119 Bolton.
I've been obviously there.
A man, a man, Max Salvadori.
He's a current graduate of Smith 119 Bolton.
He's a farm-born, by the way, and that has a little bit to do with a feeling about our nation.
You're right.
Oh, like Kissinger, for example.
Kissinger's an extraordinary person.
He's Jewish, of course.
But total, uh, total, uh, because he's a refugee from Germany, he is all out the other way, of course.
Well, this is a particular story in the current issue that says
The intellectuals of our nation are to be blamed a great part for some of our problems because all they know how to do is criticize, criticize, criticize, part, part.
They don't know how to be constructive.
They are filled with an inner guilt.
He goes on to say that one of the crime needs of our nation is a sense, a renewed sense of self-discipline and self-control.
And he even touches in on the work ethic, which we've lost a little bit in the sense of our nation.
And for your information, Mr. President, uh, I'm telling the reporters now, uh, Mr. Ward Keener of Goodrich is head of the, uh, United Front Red Cross state attack.
And he said, would you please come out and at our annual luncheon this fall, lift up these people and tell them a little bit about what you're saying.
And I know what I'm going to say.
I'm going to put it together with my great-grandson.
we have to find again and the role of citizen action to solve our own problems in this nation.
And find a way for citizens to respond and lift this nation up again and not to turn to, you know, Big Brother or something in 1864 for insisting over it.
Well, I'm on the same wavelength, Mr. President.
I am way down.
Oh, that's great.
I'm alarmed by what was happening, but I'm going to see it first.
I do want to see it, basically.
I'm going to see it.
You know, the people in the people in the class you run with, there's some of them, are some of them going to begin to get their list.
They are.
They are.
They are.
They are.
They are.
They are.
They are.
They are.
They are.
They are.
They are.
They are.
They are.
They are.
They are.
They are.
The uneducated would just have a right gut reaction.
But in the final analysis, if you look at the history of great civilizations, when their leader classes disintegrated, they had inevitably gone down.
Because, you see, the others can't lead.
The trouble is that what concerns me at this point is that very thing.
We simply got to get our leader class
It's gotta be revitalized.
You just can't have the guts of this country solely represented by
You know what I mean?
Like a Catholic war veterans came in and gave them a word that a couple of real guys, guys with a tag, one was an Italian name, another one was a Pole, and so forth.
And they spoke about the countries that they liked.
And, but they're the guys that, but the people that you know in New York would think they were a couple of them.
You know?
Well, you've done your study on the hardhats and all that.
You wouldn't believe what we went through here after the hardhats marched in New York and had demonstrated in other parts of the country in favor of the president's policies and what he was trying to do.
The president, someone wanted to come in and see him.
The present president said fine.
He'd be delighted to see him.
Well, God, we had people around here absolutely horrified.
that the president would bring the hardhats in here.
And they came in in their hardhats, and they all came in wearing, I don't have my hardhats, came in wearing American flags in their lapels.
And they were also, they came in, and yet those very same people were, who understand, who were horrified about that, pounding me on the desk.
I've got to see some student blowing up a library, or some black building.
I'll tell you why I think this is good, but if you're interested, you may be.
I sent it.
Well, I'm just one sample, but Mr. President, I do think, I don't understand why a whole lot of businessmen kept, I've had businessmen say to me, Tom, keep it up.
Yeah, good for you.
I can't do it in my disease.
Right.
But Mr. Roche gave that talk in Chicago.
I wrote him a congratulatory note.
He had written me about one of my talks.
Mm-hmm.
And I wrote him and I said, Mr. Roach, that was just great.
I'm so delighted you spoke up, but be prepared.
Pretty tough mail.
That was just an aside.
He wrote me back and he said, you should know that after a week, the mail's been pretty good.
And then two weeks later, he wrote and said, you were right.
It's now coming in and it's terrible.
But I do think that before our system is going to be shredded, it never will be.
We'll come through the trials of the day.
Well, I do see more and more businessmen starting to speak up.
I think they may feel right, but I do think that their problem is that they don't know about the time.
That's the problem with the businessmen.
I mean, what's he going to do?
He's got a problem with what he's going to do.
I know you do it, and you're in a much more vulnerable position than most businessmen are.
Of course, that's to be involved, but our editors wanted to have a confrontation with me.
Of course, that would be just the lack that I talk to them all the time.
Hell, they wanted to make it official.
They wanted to have Mr. Coldsteady here on that show, and the board, editorial board, taking on each other.
Well, we can't afford, at this juncture, to do anything like that, but Mr. Coles, for his credit, has never once asked me to clear a talk with him.
He has never once put a leash on me.
The editors of Look are no different, in my opinion, than the editors and writers of all other media.
They haven't.
They're problem-oriented.
And if the problem isn't clear, then they'll look under the bed for the problem.
And their stories, therefore, are cast with a problem orientation.
And I tell these five people over and over again,
Let's put a balance into Look Magazine.
Let's put the positive side as well.
Make Look really a true national platform where all issues are debated fairly across the state, where people can turn to Look as a great national platform.
I have a little ways to go before I win all these battles with our editors and others, but I think we're making progress.
I really do.
And you should know that in my own little sphere, when I finish talking the way I do, I don't know whether to duck or run or what.
And I do know that people come up here and they're saying over and over again, I got your saying.
It's about time somebody said these things.
I think there is that hunger, Mr. President.
And I can't really go wrong in my own little way by standing up for this great nation.
Not just, you know, we're not perfect.
We've got a lot of problems to solve.
But we're not going to hell in a hand-basket mess.
Oh, we've got to take on Ralph Nadek, too, man.
Derek Severide, the broadcaster, he said one thing that I'll never forget.
He said it on the pages of the book.
He said, you know, if you dropped all the immigration and immigration barriers of every nation on Earth,
and send to the people to go where you will.
It all takes a quick form to come to this area.
The president says that all the time in speeches.
If you look at where people are going and where they're coming, you don't see anybody lined up.
It's just that the traffic's all one way.
It's true.
They're lined up to resolve.
always wanted to come to America.
And I don't, I don't, I just see a damn few people that are lining up to get out unless they're trying to avoid the draft, do you?
Who's trying to leave?
Why don't you look at their faces when an American person drives down the street with the drafts?
The journey is there, they're just so...
I'm excited to see an American and the symbolism of this country.
You know, the first time I met you, Mr. President, I went out.
What, a Mike Sanders meeting?
No, I met you there.
I met you in my own money.
I decided I wanted to go see that American exposition in Moscow.
Oh, my gosh.
And at the embassy that night... 59.
Yeah, at the embassy that night, one of the spirits, of course, was here, and the John Burns over there, you know, and all that.
You got up and you talked about tradition today.
Yeah.
Yeah.
flattering thing for us because you found yourself for a moment free after the dinner and I beckoned to you and you came over and you talked to the shepherds and the mangers who were there under false pretenses.
But, uh, that was, uh, that was a pretty time.
Mr. President, I had a feeling for you and you hadn't let me down one single damn bit.
Well, let me say, having said what I did, uh, I, I am not, I'm not innocent.
I think we have a, I think we have a, we have, we have two weird children, people who stand up and, and, and strongly gotta fight every bit of the way, uh, and, uh, and of course we gotta be intelligent.
So many of our people, I say on our side, I say on our side, those that still believe in the country don't know why.
And that's all right.
That's all right.
I mean, thank God for a lot of those because they ought to feel that way.
And intuition is a very, very good mode of development in our practice.
But on the other hand, in order for you to know why, and you also have to know why the other side
those that are told why they're doing what they do.
And there it is.
It's really, I really feel that a lot of them are lost souls.
Yes.
They're lost souls.
the best schools, you know, they come from the best families, or at least have claimed to, and then here they are at loose ends.
It's not a deal.
Frankly, they feel a hell of a lot better if they have a little pride in the country, if they believe in something, you know what I mean?
It just doesn't, well, there, of course, there are some species that,
that really feed on being naked.
There are some people and personalities like that.
There are people, but people that know a lot better, they saw some of the good things about a country woman, wouldn't they?
And some of the good things, like who I am, and what it's all about.
Isn't there a guilt feeling somehow, this guilt picture, this atmosphere you've had in this country?
Yeah, well, they get them in this company as well.
We should be guilty about what we've done to the blacks.
We should be guilty because there are poor people.
We should be guilty because there are poor people abroad.
And we should be guilty also because in our foreign policy, we at times have killed people, even though we have killed people that we're trying to murder and enslave people.
So do it.
That proves that we should be guilty and
We must purge ourselves.
And so we purge ourselves by tearing down this evil system that did all these terrible things.
Soviet, we've done things that are wrong.
I doubt if you were black in America, I suppose an intelligent black bound to be a bonjour.
And Mexican, he had to keep his glasses, the pool, et cetera.
And yet, of course, the other thing we have to have in mind is that there is no perfect moment.
And that's a theory that I accept, that you can create heaven on earth.
It's never going to be that way.
It never was, never will be.
Some religions teach it that wrong.
It's, indeed, there are always going to be poor people.
There are always going to be criminals.
There are always going to be some that are going to be ahead of others.
And nothing can change it.
And those systems in which, like the totalitarian systems where they say, well, we have no poor people and we have no classes, there's the greatest class gratification there is in the world.
I mean, the elite class in the communist countries, as you know, has less contact with
the non-class than we have in this country.
I mean, the American politician, he can walk into a factory, he can wash down his hands, and he talks to the guy in the open shirt, the kid in the home, or the black kid, or the yellow kid, or the poor kid, or the rich kid, and so forth, it's all the same.
Not the communists.
It's a very different thing.
They're frightened of their people.
They live apart from them.
And that's the only way that they can keep the system turned around.
Well, of course, we've all heard this before.
But again, that's another thing which some of these people ought to be proud of, shouldn't they?
That we have such a system in which our political leaders
can't leave, and they shouldn't be, of course, just part of the mob, or otherwise they cannot leave, but they must be able to maintain, to be available to them so far.
I think, though, that your own brain
If we can get people in our audience, which is watching us, that a majority of the people are going to respond positively to an update, a statement about
Some of the members of the press in order to prove that this is a problem or any society would literally destroy their meeting in order to .
I will contain...
We are out of time.
Are you seeing the copies of the presidents?
I'm trapped in the grease
because the Vietnam War is no longer complicated, and it's coming to an end, and there ain't no damn well wars going on.
It's in the papers.
I'm sure there is.
But nevertheless, they see all that.
And they see also that we're going to cool the campus down, and we're going to do a little better in law and order issues for France.
None of the networks, we haven't been paying any attention to it.
None of the politicians.
Depends on who's in.
So now it's 5.8.
That's too high.
It's got to get .
But the thing about the economy here is that the feeling of the country has great effect, as you know, on the plus side of the economy.
What is good about it at the present time, the main industry, is the whole area of what consumers are doing, not what they're saying.
They talk bearishly, but they're acting rather bullish.
in terms of retail sales, in terms of housing, in terms of those things.
And once the business then begins to get a little of that feeling, it will be reflected.
And we, of course, will be doing it in economy, too.
We deliberately must do them at a time when it will have the greatest effect and not so early that if it's done,
And it might prove to be a successful thing.
And people could find it out.
But what I'm getting at is that on that story, whatever we do, when you look at the American economy, you look at, let's suppose, I don't care who is sitting here,
I often say it would take a genius to ruin the American economy.
It is strong.
Sure, we've got great problems of competition from the nations abroad now that we didn't have before.
We've got problems of productivity that we didn't have before.
We've got problems of...
perhaps labor demanding too much or too little, but we haven't had as much before.
Overall, when you look at this economy and all the positive factors in it, debt is going to give up.
We had, at first, the hard problems and the complications, and of course everybody in Hollywood, too, has said it all.
But the fact that we're having a terribly difficult period of accommodation, trying to cool off inflation,
and transition from war to peace.
The press was understruck last week when I just mentioned all the men in the press conference here in the office.
I said, you know, somebody has to run an employment against 5.8.
I said, if the two million people that were in the armed services and Vietnam and other places and in defense plans were still there, that's what we came into office in January on the 4.3.
But I said the casualties were 350 weak men and now they're 15.
I said it wouldn't be worth it.
Well now that's what we're really, what we're really aiming at.
What we trust we will have to point to by next year at this time.
We'll be able to rough sled it before we get there.
If the economy does move as we think it may, and we'll hold a job here and there.
And by us, if it does move on an upward trend,
If the inventories that are low now begin to be rebuilt and the companies don't have to go out and buy the new plant equipment if necessary, it will mean that the United States will be looking towards something that we really haven't had since World War II, and that is a period of high employment, or rather a full capacity,
Now, right now, you'll find your friends, if you go around the country, and they'll say, well, administration's done all right on foreign policy, but why in the hell don't they do something about the unions?
Why don't we do something about the economy and so forth and so on?
And my answer is that don't assume that we won't do something.
But also, I would say to some of our rather timid business friends,
And of course, part of this is again,
5.7, uh, 5.5 to 2, 5.7 to 2, average 6%.
But you did hear NBC, ABC, CBS, the papers and so forth banging all the time.
You see, so then why am I scared of that?
I'll tell you what I did hear.
It was the most reluctant.
Uh, CBS, it's just too bad, it's sad.
When the, uh,
5.8% of the input down.
It was almost a sense of disappointment for part of the reporters that hadn't zoomed up to six.
Because they said it was going to now.
It was almost a disbelieving report.
Well, we're not actually, like you say, if we're taking a new program on the economy, we're going to do some things better.
You know, it really goes back to the country again.
You just go out across this country and there's an enormous amount of buying power and a lot of stuff moving along.
And really, the lack of confidence is in the leader class.
And I think the people you speak to, I mean, not through the pages of what they're doing, you've got the power to have it.
You're reaching this so-called ignorant thought, so-called election.
But in the leader class, that's an audience you speak to.
But I think that if you were to give me one suggestion, I would challenge them.
I would say, by God, the leader class in America.
Let me say, let me tell you that when I had to take a strong position, I did on November 3rd, 69, against these rioters.
When I had to make a decision, when I had to make every tough decision, I didn't get any mail at all, or any leader class, or maybe a couple.
You know, I can't do my business friends, but hell, I didn't know professors.
The one where they all wrote in is China.
They all wrote in for China, but there they wrote in because they're so goddamn naive.
They did it for the wrong reason.
They think, ah, finally we realize that everything's going to be hunky-dory, you know, as a result of going to China, that really the Chinese are really very nice people and all the rest.
uh, but the reason, according to China, has, doesn't have anything to do, just to go in my house.
He's not meeting me because he likes our system, and I'm meeting him because I like his.
We're meeting because we both have bigger fish to fry.
It's just cool trivia.
Now, the statistics say that, but you should see that some of the,
They're the ones that should be talking about principle.
They're the ones that should be attacking permissiveness.
They're the ones that should be saying America can't settle down
so much so many people out of the college universities and so forth say but what does it matter it's technicalistic to talk about number one what does it matter whether the russian is first first in everything first independence first in space what does it matter whether or not we uh for example uh no longer the major school of steel producing that the japanese are going to pass the
But if you could tell your audiences, believe me, are the most important audiences.
I often told people, they say, well, there are important things to speak to.
That's my job.
I have to do that because we've got a majority of information.
But the most important audience to be hit now is the audience of your rifle shot.
the professional people that join with them.
The others, they need to get a sense of direction, a sense of character, and a sense of backbone that a hell of a lot of them have lost.
They really need to do it.
I tell you, I sat in here and talked to college presidents
I will try and do this.
I think it's legal.
Well, if it's behind the President, it's one other part of the problem.
If it's not legal, I've got to keep my mouth shut.
I've heard you now say that.
Yeah.
Listen, you go ahead and say it.
Is that you, Goffard?
Is that me?
No, I'm the taxpayer.
You're going to become a Goffard.
You're the President of Goffard.
I don't.
I always give up.
We get crickets.
This is the... Now, that's a paper, right?
The paper on our desk gets so marvelous.
It gets so thick that that one will kill the damn paper.
And then... That's the one we signed bills in.
There's your title.
All right, Mr. President.
It's a seal.
That's for the girls.
Well, I'm dressed.
I guess we'll be fine.
I hear you have to go over here now.
You can send it down to us.
I need some outreach materials.
All right.
All right.