Nixon, Haldeman & Ziegler on Supreme Court appointments

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from the way it was handled, and also from the standpoint, well, it was a surprise, but these are two real good men.

He's very, he's honest.

Tries to be honest.

But God damn it, they are two good men, see?

And it was so, so good that you had old Joe Patrick in it.

Oh, he, you know, he, he walked out of the, he walked out of the door and he said, I said, where are you going?

He said, he said,

I'm going on a CBS show, and his eyes lit up, and he said, I won't have any trouble at all with Powell.

He was kind of floating around.

He said, I don't know too much about Rehnquist.

Is he all right, Ron?

Can I just say, he's a fine guy.

Great, great, great.

Just walking out here, he's a happy man.

Really pleased.

Buchanan should have seen you instead of Sweeney.

Buchanan went out of jail.

He did.

He just moved.

My Powell.

He was, he was really excited.

Very nice.

And I talked to Pat this morning.

He, by the way, he finds out about Renfrews.

Oh, Renfrews?

No, Renfrews is more conservative than Paul.

That's right.

More conservative than Buchanan.

He's a, he's a gold one.

I'm concerned.

He's not known as that.

He is, though.

We know.

I know.

We know.

We don't know if anybody knows it, but he isn't known.

He doesn't look like that.

Yeah.

Oh, he looks like a scholar, and I said, why?

He seemed to admit it.

He said, comes from on the bench.

Buchanan, I talked to him this morning, and he said he'd been talking to, he referred to them as his people.

He said they are just as floating on a cloud.

They are.

Yes, sir.

Even though he didn't get a candidate, he wanted a candidate for the election.

That's right.

You know, there was another good thing about this.

One was a Democrat, another was a Republican.

Yes.

That should have been one of those.

Paul was a Democrat.

Because I had that in mind in March.

That speech was kind of that well-balanced and everything in it.

Rick Price said this morning, he was in Stephanie this morning, he said, it's all right with you.

I'd like to recruit the guy who wrote the speech last night.

I think we found the writer.

They do a good job.

This time, I think, no, I had to do it myself because I know more about it than anybody else.

Right.

What happened?

It comes off better that way.

Well, it came off awfully well.

The packaging around the nation should build up.

Though I feel that they work a little bit of time.

I'll mention the demonstrate the way it is.

I can't just talk about the court and what I believe about judicial philosophy and what kind of in on the reality and so forth.

And then without saying, the first man is, and the second man is, and I said, and it just went right down to the next way the speech should be.

So it's always this and that.

He's a great man.

I think it went well that way.

And then getting the corp to the left is a good idea, but we ought to obey the law.

We ought to impeach the goddamn corp. We ought to, I mean, but nevertheless, I wouldn't say that.

It's going to be a hell of a question.

Will you get those to tell us as soon as you realize it?

No.

He's nervous about his career because Harlan, while he was a fine judge, was old and blind and could not participate in the base.

These guys will be in there like tigers.

Harlan voted right, but he didn't add anything constructive to the list.

Blackman is a good man, but he doesn't have near intellectual capability of either Paul or

Power rams are really electric.

I know.

They're just in the background.

They are really superb, man.

You know, the line in front that I used, which I had there, the fast track, which is very important.

This is the fastest track.

And it's very important that the men on the court be able to keep up with their able lawyers that come before them.

That's a very good one.

That's another episode that came off extremely well, not even competing with a lot of others.

That gives us now the goddamn conservatives.

I'm proud about all their other little things.

That you've got an anchor to lean towards the conservatives on those four court seats.

They're all conservatives.

They all thought, Buchanan even thought, you name one conservative and then you feel you had the balance.

Did he think that?

He thought you had sort of, not a liberal, but a, you know.

Never.

I'll never point.

That was an awfully good line, too, that you used, apparently, in the chit-chat afterwards.

It got picked up, which was, isn't Powell too old to be putting on the court?

And you said, 10 years of Powell's weren't 30 years of Lesserman.

Is that a good answer to the age?

Moore's got a good answer.

He's probably focused on the age thing, too.

which is if you pass through the towering justices were of the last century, it was Brandeis and Holmes, Curtis and Holmes, all of them in the 60s when they were appointed to the court.

60s, and also who stayed on in the 80s.

I wouldn't add that part.

No, Holmes stayed on through the 90s.

He stayed on too long, didn't he?

No.

He wasn't evading it in the last...

He may have claimed it, but he was still in a lot of the margins.

He had a hell of a lot to say.

Old stuff.

Yeah, old stuff.

Totally built at half speed was working the other jugs at full speed.

Well, that's sort of the point.

You may do it on power.

But records, that's the secret.

Maybe those bashers don't realize what they've got there.

He's a target.

And they've got 30, 40 years of him to deal with.

God damn right, he's healthy.

Well, at least they've got 30 years.

He'll stay on in year 77.

That's pretty good.

That's great.

No, the conservatives should all be awfully happy.

You know, the other thing we've done, we have traced through the press and left, because they went carrying off on the ground.

They were not against these people because they didn't think they were distinguished.

They were against them because they were concerned.

That's particularly true of Frankie, the woman there.

They were against any woman.

But Frankie is distinguished, no question.

He's a member of the House of Elements.

And then they said, well, we ought to appoint a distinguished person.

And so then he came right back and appointed two distinguished conservatives and the sons of bitches that are hoisting their laws in their Congress.

Because they were saying things like, I really don't care about conservatives.

The main thing is to find the best distinguished qualified man, which is right in the back.

Now what do they say?

Are they screaming about Rehnquist this morning?

No.

The only best man is he who sustains them.

Always remember, remember the most important is not his version of his class.

That's important.

Clerk's permission, Justice Jackson.

Everybody who has any brains knows that Jackson is probably the best judge on the court in his time.

Reckless voice, I have opinions for you here.

That's pretty good.

Clerk's Jackson.

And then, of course, the lawyer's wife, of course.

Oh, she's been with the Constitutional Lawyers.

One thing, the people who work in justice, the career people, the people who slant left, were just as...

Complimentary of him this morning?

Everybody was, yeah.

All the young lawyers.

He's a great hero.

It was amazing.

Why is that?

Because it recognized brilliance.

They know the guy was just like...

It was reported in detail.

John Dean and all the guys that actually just got...

But there were some good quotes in the paper this morning from the low levels of the... Like what, did they say?

Well, just that he was a man who had a good mind and followed the law, could interpret the law well.

You know, the lawyer's a lawyer type of... Where they're going to hang on to us is he's got some blood-curdling quotes they're going to wrap around him.

And that's the one that'll get into the... Because it'll be tough.

But let me tell you this.

It's just because of...

I never submit a great question to our staff of...

I would never have submitted you last night.

Actually, I haven't picked out the quotes that you can't take this man.

We can't do it.

That's not what you mean by staff.

I've got to take down the fencing and rule.

The three most happy people in the administration of Reckless Appointment were John Irwin, David Young, and John Dean.

But I checked earlier.

I knew it was from Reckless.

Yep.

David Young is very smart, too.

Garney can't object to those, because Garney admires intellectuals.

He's liable.

He admires intellectuals.

I think he would have taken the exam.

No, I knew earlier when we checked him out.

I had more checks than him on records.

He didn't check all of them.

I didn't call him to be checked with anybody.

There was no...

Ehrlichman had always been for Powell also.

Even though he was old.

Ehrlichman called strongly about the age that Desiree had given him.

I just decided not to have Desiree.

And another thing is this.

No, but Ehrlichman had gotten the point.

See, Ehrlichman was very anti-Friday.

And he got to the point where he said, you'd be a lot better off with an old Powell than with a young Friday.

Of course, Powell does look old.

Oh, he looks wonderful.

Let me tell you one thing.

No doubt at all, but he will not stay on if he faces a chance down at the point.

He's that kind of man.

He's not, he didn't ask for this job.

He didn't want to.

He actually, earlier, as I understand it, he had asked not to be considered attorney at one point.

But the fact of the matter is,

Anyway, he told me, he said, I'm too old.

If you could be a younger man, you could do better.

I said, well, put him on for four years.

And then let him all resign.

If he doesn't resign, he's over 10 years.

But he's the kind of guy I was expecting.

You never know what happens to a guy when he gets that damn robe on.

Right closer, it won't happen to him.

Something all of a sudden.

I think Powell.

Powell's been around too long in the records.

He isn't going to dance on it.

No, it happened after Berger.

Berger.

You mean his opinions?

No, no, not his opinions.

Just his personal.

They become more personal.

Yeah.

They start to get a lot of traffic burns.

And all of a sudden they think they were born to the throne.

Created.

Yeah.

I think that's the line I ought to get out.

I hope now that all these son-of-a-bitch editors that have been criticizing these columns for as hard in fairness writing.

I want Bob for once to get letters from the editor that every son-of-a-bitch in the room allows a column.

Say, to deal with that in fairness, why don't you write one saying, well, we've contacted all of them.

We made the list last night of each paper we're going to edit further on that.

hit each one of them, and now you've got what you asked for.

We said, well, let it draw us.

And, well, hell, even the Times Post did.

And they're backhanded with screwing.

And Nixon Court, those four men against what's left of the court,

Douglass, you have to figure, is a towering Indian man, I guess.

A what?

A towering Indian man.

Douglass is John Ascension.

Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Oh, I know it all.

I don't quite know Douglass as Ascension.

His character I knew.

Douglass is a brave man.

But Potter Stewart's not brave.

Potter Stewart's not.

Peter Switzer, why?

And, of course, Thurgood Marshall is an ass.

And Brennan's a lightweight.

Brennan is... Everybody knows Brennan's a lightweight.

And Marshall is lightweight.

And they consider Potter Stewart sort of in the middle.

And Douglas on the top.

You'd have to say Douglas is good.

But Reckless is equal to Douglas.

Douglas is good in the brilliant sense.

He's not good in that he's not a good influence.

And I think a lot of people very strongly feel that Reckless is crappy because he doesn't really lead in the country.

He's terrible.

Our kind of people are like those women out there.

They like to hear about the little old lady who can set 8,000 stitches in her mind.

You know the stuff, they love her.

Oh yeah, Mrs. Voss, sorry.

Mrs. Voss.

That's right.

She's a little woman from Cincinnati with big kids working with teenagers in a halfway house for girls.

It's good stuff.

What's good is that you, by telling those stories, tell them that you care.

And then you see people like that.

And they all relate it into what they do.

That's because they're all volunteer women.

Every one of those women is doing something.

We're going to announce the pay board.

What in the hell happened?

Those labor guys this morning, they didn't come because they were out.

The secretary just talked.

I talked to him last night.

They're not coming at all today.

Well, the chairman may call a meeting this afternoon of the pay board, and we don't know if they'll come or not.

But we had a secretary call from my office just five minutes ago and send a meeting.

We're going to amend the president that intends to announce the membership this morning of the pay and the price board, and we wanted you to know that.

And he said, no problem.

I just want to get together with my people over here first this morning.

So then they show up.

And George Hiltz was saying, you know, these people should be treated just like anyone else.

Everyone else received the same invitation that they did.

And they're here this morning.

Maybe overplaying their hand.

Bill doesn't.

But it's not good to have that be out there.

I don't know.

Maybe they're opting, trying to get a separate meeting with me.

It didn't appear that way.

But we're going to Hokia.

I'm just saying.

The notice just went out that a number of people did not.

I put out that a number were not able to attend.

No.

You want to say that the other Washington first is going to meet later, or Boycott's first meeting?

Well, it's almost that anyway.

It's the press know they're not here.

They're all right here in Washington, almost all of them.

Well, what the hell can we do?

We had Schultz to work on it instead of Hudson.

I think that's smart.

Well, Schultz worked on it with Hudson this morning.

From that last phone call, and Schultz was in my office when the Secretary of Labor made it,

There didn't seem to be belligerence on the part of me, just a little testiness here at first.

Well, it is a bad story.

That's right.

Labor boycotts opening a traffic station.

Well, it may not be that heavy.

If we walk out there and announce the names, we don't have any pictures of this meeting, the question may not come up.

Announce it, gentlemen.

If it does...

I'm not saying that everybody isn't here.

I just say I put it so that it doesn't appear.

Well, some of the business people couldn't get here either.

But here's the list.

This is an organization meeting and other meetings will be held.

Chairman may call a meeting this afternoon.

I think that's what I'm going to call it.

Not about this.

Mr. President, what's that?

What's that?

It's not clean.

The hay isn't fully green.

Now, I have to go.

Yes, sir.

You're all ready.

There's no rest for you guys to do.

It's just a thing that should be happening very fast in this game.

Nixon, Haldeman & Ziegler on Supreme Court appointments

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on October 22, 1971

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Nixon, Haldeman & Ziegler on Supreme Court appointments

AI Summary

Audio

NARA Description

Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on October 22, 1971

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Cite this conversation