On August 12, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon, Arnold R. Weber, George P. Shultz, White House photographer, and Stephen B. Bull met in the Oval Office of the White House from 12:25 pm to 12:44 pm. The Oval Office taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 562-005 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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to go over the deal.
Yes, sir.
I'll be right down, Mr. Chairman.
pretty soon.
September 1.
September 1.
Well, I won't be here.
Get your formal picture here.
Thank you.
Got others?
Sure.
Get three.
Get the three of us, please.
They've worked together so much.
Well, I'm grateful, and we wish you well.
Thank you very much.
Nothing will ever be quite as grinding, quite as hard, quite as frustrating, shall we say, on film.
That's right.
I suppose that's one of the things.
I'll find out how I react to that.
Well, it's been a great pleasure serving you and the administration, both down in the pit in the department and up here.
Down in the pit?
Yeah, well...
I'm still in George.
I don't think my lectures will ever be the same again.
You've been here back a while, haven't you?
Yeah.
Charlie is one of our teachers at the university.
And I'm sure his class will be going well.
Oh, yes.
They have more blue books, correct?
Yeah.
Real books, did they still use that for design?
Still did, yeah.
They're a traditional variety of writing.
Real books.
Law school.
About a fortune.
They are.
Law school.
It's almost as bad reading them as I recall.
How did that one get to where it's now?
And I'm ready to speak.
Mine was a precious article.
I don't know how the hell it ever ended.
George was a very good manager at the end of the business school.
And if you're an effective teacher, he lets you teach in something we call the executive program, where they had classes of 75.
And you'd give them a three-hour exam at the end of the year, and you'd have to read 75 blue books of 75 disgruntled businessmen.
And I always thought that was a terrible job.
That's very interesting.
People are very bright.
Thank you very much.
So it was encouraging to me what they didn't know, and even the bankers didn't have any real understanding of the monetary system in the United States, but how money came into being in the role of the Federal Reserve, in the role of the commercial bank, and how it happened.
And it was like that.
It was like opening a curtain to them.
They showed them how it happened and they sort of couldn't believe it and they thought it was some kind of magic.
But it's just surprising how many bankers don't know how the bank exists.
They don't know how they act.
Well, I think another thing, you know, an area of ignorance that hopefully I can help fill is thinking
Everybody has this great deficiency in their understanding of government in terms of importance and how it works and the normal businessman thinks in terms of his interests and his contact in Washington and not in terms of the establishment of problems and priorities at the national level and just the enormous effort it takes to get things done.
And a great challenge it is to try and do it well.
And I think that's a message worth conveying, to make the processes of government, you know, meaningful and relevant to these people.
I'll try.
I'll try.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think that's right.
They certainly do.
You know, I have a great definition that I consider a definition of a conservative.
It's someone who comes in and tries to manage a program started by a liberal.
And that's...
And that's the way I felt when I was Secretary of Ed.
You know, my job here, I was a student of it.
There were all sorts of inferences in terms of impact and how it's set up.
And then you get in there, and it's a mess.
And nobody was really concerned, you know, because it was essentially viewed as a distributional device of income, not in terms of helping to equip people to function over a lifetime instead of, you know,
providing some short-term service to a mayor, or disgruntled black group, or some employment service.
In the past, the Ministry of the Land Power program was scandalous.
But Charlie and I found out almost immediately that it was scandalous.
And the strides that made to try to make the program actually work to do something for people.
And I guess our biggest initiation of this was the Job Corps thing, which Arnie really managed.
Now, Job, there was a program that, once you look into it, it just was demonstrably, clearly, unambiguously not working.
Whatever you may say about the glory of the objectives and so on, it just was not working.
There was a record, and we laid that record out.
Oh, boy, the...
The square root of that card operates on the Congress line.
After the Congress day, after the day, after the day, after the day, after the day, after the day, after the day, after the day, after the day, Well, you know, the percentage is the fact that you, as I recall, you find out the number of people that come into it.
And, well, first, the cost of training, and I'll let you know, that's just one thing.
The second percentage is the
Just compared to other programs, it was lowest tutorial.
17 out of 100.
They start with 100, and by the time you come out at the end, you've got 17 left.
And the program is really ministered to effectively.
And their performance was 2% better than a control group of the same agent characteristics that hadn't gone through the program.
And the average cost was $7,000 per hit.
So you got a price of 2%.
And it was sort of interesting, George, you often commented on that.
It was just a big political slap.
And in a way, it was sort of salutary for us because we came in and this happened to us in the first three months.
Everything else that's happened to us, you know, is relatively vile by comparison in this adversary proceeding that you have with Congress.
Well, actually, we came off well.
Well, I think we did well.
I mean, they tried.
Sure.
Right.
But the thing was, we didn't.
We started out to do it, and we got through, and we closed, and they're all closed.
59 centers that don't exist.
$100 million dollars.
hundred million dollars per year.
Well, and the interesting thing is, you know, since that time, that whole area of the Job Corps has been diffused.
You don't read stories in the paper about riots at the Job Corps.
New centers have been set up.
We've made some progress.
The country's a bit cooler.
There's still a lot of problems.
I'm rather accused by other than Usani this morning.
Usani had a new economic policy.
We thought we needed to do that so that we could get back the prosperity we'd had in the two previous administrations.
Well, I would sit there at one point and say it's time to say which one he wants.
Does he want to pick the three Kennedy years on an average 6%?
Or does he want to pick the five Johnson years when we have lower on the planet, but at the cost of water?
Which kind of prosperity do you talk about?
Well, we need to move it down.
Hyde Park, Hyde Park in Chicago.
Oh, they're super, super liberal.
Well, the thing that, you know, I particularly enjoy is the quietness.
You don't have a house or park?
No, I have a house.
It's the same house.
It's just a residential area.
The house is out in the lake.
It's a little of both.
It's right around the university and it's all around the corner of the lake and the Museum of Science and Industry.
Yeah, I visited the university once.
I heard you then.
No, Alan Wallace invited you once.
Oh, no, no, no, no, when I spoke to the faculty.
Yes, the faculty.
Oh, that was there.
No, I had forgotten that, but I also, I went there and spoke to the faculty and asked you some questions.
Yes.
The other time I went there to take you out to school.
For what?
dedicated one of their units, one of their units, I remember, I don't remember much about it, except it was, you know, so they had a lot of glass in it.
Yeah, so they lost the building, yeah.
Yeah, so it's a Saturday night, very lovely.
Well, that's a great institution, I must say, right?
Well, who knows what is the most important thing to you?
Many of the most important things to me.
I would say the most important thing is to run a city, or something else, something.
Of course, the real message for everybody is that they're all important.
I tend to kind of buy this arrogance of some that only what he does really matters.
And it's really the sense of pride in doing any job well, any damn job, teaching at a primary school.
Who knows if that primary school teacher may have a whole lot more effect than you may have on that
the person who is the potential leader.
We never know.
We never know.
Maybe the minister is.
Maybe the local town justice of the beach or somebody who really makes the congregation.
And of course, does something about the business tax and all of this.
The tax that they offer.
It's a good market test.
Nobody.
But nobody.
must have run boys in drafts or something like that, and of course we have that, so they're voting.
If they have a free choice, whether they're coming from free countries, and of course almost always from communist countries, the choice is to get the hell out and come here.
They're running all over the world.
It's such a sad sight.
I remember going to Poland.
One guy walked 200 miles to come out to try to get into the United States, and he said that, asking what he did, he said, well, he was a, you know,
He was an editor of a small paper, one of our papers.
He said, he said, I would rather, he was able to talk to each other in German, they would have been caught.
And he said, I would rather, if I had reality, I'd rather be in the United States and sleep in Florence and edit a paper here.
And that was right.
That's a pretty eloquent statement.
Except for the elite.
And there is no elite class in all countries.
If you're in the elite class someplace, you'd probably rather be there running a show than being here, not running.
Although there are those who said in the early days of the Republic that they'd rather be a worker in the United States than be a king in another country.
It's not true, of course, now.
But be that as it may, except for the elite class speaking to totalitarian countries who
Our, our, our, our rulers, we, uh, we, we, we just can't estimate how, how much, uh, met drawing power in the United States as a, as a fellow country.
And, uh, people, people realize.
I'll let you go.
Well, I'll let you go through the psychological.
I was just reading last night, it was on all over the world, it was right in 1875, almost a hundred years ago.
The United States has probably seen its best days.
Our attribute has always been, I think, the capacity to generate and regenerate hope.
I remember in reading a book on the development of the American labor force, and they were talking about the colonial labor force and people they attracted.
And this was back in 1789, and they talked about a Frenchman who came and went down by
Ohio River near Kentucky and opened a French restaurant on the frontier.
You know, and that just sort of summed up this capacity of hope for somebody to come from, you know, highly civilized environments into the wilderness that must have been to open a French restaurant, and I dare say with the linen.
Any other questions?
Yeah.
Well, Americans don't care.
It's all right.
You look at a Western movie, and they did pretty good.
They dressed pretty good on stage, assuming that they are somewhat true to life.
They're all getting vests, and all the other friends, and they're dying to stick friends, and their ladies, of course, with their clubs and their clothes, and they can pick them up.
Well, this is for the children, huh?
There you go.
You got three, four, three.
This will be yours for all three.
All boys?
Yes.
Fifteen, fourteen, sixteen.
Okay.
Well, you can do it again.
There you go.
You can do it again.
Always the same thing.
There's a six-year-old right there, the Apollo viewer.
He's the last thing you can see.
Is that something that's nice for your wife?
That's the presidential seal and the compact.
Now that's silver, so we're taking care of it.
And this is, of all things, a money club.
I think that's also one of our better items for a profession.
Yeah, you know, there's no people that you want to stand on.
Like, if you had money, you would enjoy it.
It's a natural life.
I've heard of it.
You know, I haven't since I was in the student service.
I've never heard of it.
Feel that weight there.
That's something.
That's something.
Well, thank you so much.
You're welcome.
We've got a standard version of the car.
All right.
You're welcome.
You got any brave ideas?
Out of the way.
Save us three or four million dollars for us, huh?
Yes.
Well, I think we're well in the least comment then.