Conversation 649-001

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I don't want to seek that according to the protocol.

It's the risk of the same thing sitting with everybody else.

My thought is to, you see, we're going to have

I don't know how many tables there have to be, but I think there should be.

I think we're going to keep ground tables.

It's locked.

We're going to keep ground tables, and there should be a cabinet officer in each chamber to see where I have a cabinet.

My house has a new bar cabinet.

And my table, I think this is Stan, should be in my house.

But I don't want Mrs. Peterson.

So, there.

And, uh...

I think that the plan is to stand between my right machine and my left machine.

Oh, wait a minute.

Maury?

No.

If Maury asserts Pat in, Pat sits in his right.

Yeah, he sits on her.

You see, if you take somebody in, the woman, the woman, the...

I should be the head of that table, excuse me.

You should be the head of that table.

Morey should be, you know, on the right, whatever it is.

Then I think that... We should scatter the undercounty people.

Mrs. Stanton should be here because they're leaving.

Mrs. Peterson doesn't need to be here.

Mrs.

But I'd like to hire him.

Mr.

It should be nice.

They have left Mark Hardin on the other end.

Mr. Cliff Hardin and Ed Morin should be the guests on the ground floor.

Mr. Now you're talking.

Now you're talking.

The rest of these are... Mrs. Also, they're both... Mr.

I'd like all of us to have people that are around.

the rest of my people in the past.

I think you are the one who's going to do it.

Oh, I don't care.

The rest just goes, I have one in my right.

Oh, there's a mean something.

Yeah.

Because when we don't go by protocol, they don't have us to go by.

Well, we'll... We're going to talk.

We're going to try to help them to put people together.

We're going to try to drag them out of that.

We're going to put together people so that...

We did it by lot, so to speak.

But doing it by lot isn't the way to do it.

The way to do it is to do it by lot in their minds.

The Rogers, for example, and the Lagers.

I think it's about our dimension.

No.

Yes, I think so.

I think it is.

I think it's only right to have John also.

I want to have three cabinet people at your table.

Three cabinet wives close to the seat in front of your table.

That's all right.

Laura, do you think we ought to spread John and Martha around?

Well, you know, she's, frankly, I have a big complaint about her, but she's the best fun to have at a table.

Yeah, I think we should put her at another table next.

I can go to a table when he leaves, or after he leaves himself.

Even though the panel objects, we almost have to have them by themselves, or with just a few people because... Upstairs.

Well, I will be anyway because I can't hang out when I have to, and I should because what the hell, she's an interesting personality.

All right, put that at table two, if you will, please.

I think so.

Maybe we have to drop a few.

standing with most people around because we might know their personalities more than... Yeah, but you tell me, you work with Lucy on it so that it doesn't feel that we're... Oh, I work with Lucy, yeah.

But how it really does it is standing talks.

All right, we don't keep talking at all.

We like to sort of mix this up in a way that we can get in and so forth and so on.

Sir, I don't know if I can talk.

Yeah, because you mentioned before... That's right.

I will serve to thank him.

But they sort of left, you know, at a time when there wasn't time for anybody to do anything.

Only anybody really had a party for them.

Was it a time when they were all finishing Christmas?

No, it was just before Christmas.

It was a time of that Ford's Theater thing, because it was that day...

And that night, it's really funny how funny Stranger Things was.

That night I went to the fourth theater band and Pat and Bob hit really hard.

The heart that was standing there, the sort of reflection that went in, and I went right up to them, you know.

And it's just amazing how the minute you're out of the cabin,

You don't realize it, that's right.

Those are a couple of notes, one out of the jury, and another one to the down show.

There's two letters on here.

This is our animal.

You know that Herbert Hill, I knew that we had done a letter, but I got it out.

He had two articles, one in each month.

And he's the old Herbert Hill who used to come in and help us out in Indiana.

And you call him Hurt.

Now, we could do something again, but we call him Dear Hurt.

Because it's an October issue.

Because that little, third of us, all of us, all of us,

You shouldn't do it with all life's sorrows.

All right, let him just go to him and, you know, it looks like he's got to get it fixed up.

Rose, I don't need to hear anything more about it.

No, I'll work with Lucy.

You work it out, and have a little talk with Pat, so that she'll be able to play.

If we have any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any, any,

I think, frankly, you could take the Army chorus and their orchestra and have them work up the melody

They do it as well.

You know, what do you think?

You don't need a selected reel.

I think you really got them.

They do it so well.

The song's over 50 years, you know, like Johnny comes marching home, and they've got that nice announcer who comes off in a big, moving voice, and they don't have any fairies or anything.

I'll try that.

I'll see.

I'll see whether they've got it.

All right.

Now, I'm going to sound like I'm working.

Here we go.

I'm starting.

I'm going to sit down.

I'm going to sit here and feel the need.

I don't worry about things.

We know what the hell's going to be.

And he said, now, I'll put a big box on you, bring your strap out there, you wouldn't know where I am, and then you can show up the next day.

He said, Henry, I'm sorry.

We were really disturbed.

I cut it in 20 minutes, and his strap was about 38 minutes, 17, closer than the pages.

And I said, but Bill's all the time.

He's totally cooperative.

I don't think that was his value.

I didn't help him.

The problem is, Henry is not going for the television presentation.

He's going for all the stuff that will be on the records.

I saw it.

When she built it, she cut it in.

She said, I got it, I got it, I got it.

I said, now, one thing you've got to do, you've noticed I've made a subtle change in this.

I said, we could have done this and that, because all the way through, it's a doctor who disappeared, and his doctor disappeared.

I mean, it was about every third sentence, really.

Well, you know, it's just one of those these staff, you know, that drive people around the football.

Isn't that true?

It's true, too.

It's the president that does these things.

Sure.

He's an agent.

That's right.

And his...

role is going to come it's going to come through so resoundingly is to be detrimental probably in any way maybe not the way we handle this those are on the track okay at least i'll tell you this i have come to the conclusion on speech running so the first speeches are of course i'm talking speeches are but i just come to the conclusion that uh

I couldn't do it at the beginning because I didn't know how to do it.

But it's not worth my putting in more effort than I'm doing on these.

You know what I mean?

I give them a price and I keep, rather than just writing myself, I just gave them a couple more ideas on the work.

But that's, it's in time.

He's beginning to come around better.

That's the way FDR did it.

And he did.

He worked with them a lot.

But he did it.

The way you're now doing it.

He didn't write them.

The only difference.

The only thing I do, and none of our staff does for me, is this.

This is the hardest work of all.

I'm the architect.

You see, a speechwriter should be an architect.

That's right.

How many speeches...

what Henry did and what Ray did, it was fine on substance and not worth a goddamn car.

That's the argument.

So I have to dictate the outline, see.

So what I used to do, I'm doing now, I'm very rough, and I go speed lap, and I do that great, and I rewrite it this way, and I put these things in parts.

Roosevelt didn't do that at all.

No, no, no, they gave him a draft.

And also they thought up an idea.

But first of all, he would tell them, not what he wanted, not...

the words he wanted to use, or the structure, or the format, or anything else, but what he wanted to get across, and what his pitch was, that they'd do a draft, and he'd take the draft, and boy, his speeches went, like your State of the Union's going, all his fireside checks and stuff, and his campaign speeches, which is amazing, they really worked those up.

They went through draft after draft after draft,

But their guys always worked in teams, which is fascinating.

They sat in the captain's room, Stan Rosenblum and Bob Sherwood, Harry Hopkins, and they'd work all night.

Rosenblum would work them over until about 10 o'clock, and he'd go to bed.

They'd work all night, and I'd draft on his breakfast tray in the morning, and then they'd go home, go to bed, and come back at noon.

and even come up with a draft.

Well, each has to do with it.

And I have done too much in the past, like on some.

And of course, the major thing is that they particularly afford it.

We just ain't got a writer.

We just haven't got a writer there.

But it's coming along.

Well, we'll have a review, Connie.

One thing you might want to raise, Burns is asked to see you as soon as convenient, aren't they?

And Connie says Burns wants to talk about what you will do, what the administration will do when the pay board collapses, which apparently Connie's mentioned to you.

And Connie feels you should see Burns and show some courage.

I said you'd want to wait until I couldn't stay with you.

I thought you might want to raise this with Conley.

All right.

Anything else that might come up?

Whether you're not alone.

No, that makes sense.

You get into the politics, I don't know what kind of stuff you want to raise.

I would...

I would think from the beginning, if you want to kick off a point for a political strategy type discussion, it might be good to raise it.

It won't raise it unless you want to get to that.

It's this idea of looking at a different approach, raising the question of whether being presidential is really the answer.

which he's totally different from Ray.

Well, then he backs off of it some, but he builds his thesis on the great question, which is why, after a year of dramatic activity on the President's part, unrivaled success is judged by friend and foe by bold new initiatives.

Why the hell is Nixon at least a half a dozen points below where he was at the end of the year, where most observers said he was frustrated and defeated at returns?

Well, I may say there's one item, however, that you can go on and find out that you shouldn't.

His thesis is that one possibility is that the American people get bored with their presidents.

Especially in these days of intense media, there's an inexorable decline in popularity simply because they get tired of it.

But he says, maybe what the president needs to regain law strength is not drama like the China trip, not new initiatives like the American Revolution, not bold decisions like economic program, not even steady, solid performance.

Perhaps what is needed is an end to the era of common presidential leadership and success and the beginning of a new era of conflict and crisis for the president of the United States.

And he says, part of the greatest pious of the American people when he was fighting for the survival of the presidency in November of 69 against media and demonstrators alike.

Times when the American people sit up and take notice.

And also we held well.

We held well, he says, in Cambodia.

We held right up there when we were fighting.

We held well.

But we didn't in Laos where we didn't fight, which is kind of interesting.

We loathed to be Laos.

And that's what we did.

That's interesting.

He says, people sit up when a president fights under fire in full cry, taking after his adversary.

Great battle, ground-landing excitement, interesting management, political struggle.

Maybe the American people are bored and would like to see a good fight.

He says, looking back over the presidents, we remember the common man remembers them for the great battles.

Teddy Roosevelt, the trust cluster, Woodrow Wilson fighting for the league, FDR, the scourge of Wall Street, Harry Truman giving out to the Congress.

That's right.

So he's saying the avoidance of controversy and conflict with our primary adversaries may be politically wrong, not politically advantageous.

Had the high court disallowed the Amchitka blast, and had the president told them 12 hours later to go to hell and fire the bomb anyhow, that would have been the kind of dramatic institutional challenge that would have awakened the country and gotten along their feet cheerily.

So he's... Randy's point is that we tried that in 17 and failed.

His analysis of 17...

Pat starts with that.

He analyzes 70, and he says, it's absolutely clear, looking at the Gallup poll, that it was the media construction of the president's campaign, not the campaign itself, that cost his support.

Because in November, he didn't go down at all.

In December, he went down 5-1.

I wonder why we gave you the opportunity to do that with the telecast.

The telecast was our fault.

And he says that the New American Revolution and the State of the Union accomplished zero.

Or at least none of them.

yeah that's the uh

We, uh, I don't suppose on that point there's been any report yet of a European... No, uh, never really talked to Doug.

I'd like to talk to Thomas.

Are you ready?

Not today, sir.

I'm being put in by, uh, put in by Venus.

Well, that started with that six hours that you were talking about.

No, he went for it.

I'll take some coffee.

I didn't know about that.

No, everybody called and talked over it last night.

And things are just going slow.

He doesn't have a great deal to report.

He'll be back this week.

He said he talked to me this weekend.

But no real progress yet.

I'm not talking to you.

Well, there's no way that I think we're going to have one more round than probably the last week of the month.

Fair enough.

We'll get started.

Yes.

Something better than we were going to get before.

We're going to get something, and the Japanese are not going to give until they see what the Europeans are going to do.

I think the only hang-up is this green pricing thing.

I don't really think we're going to get too much.

We'll probably work more and settle it without it.

But without memory, it's better.

I think so, too.

I think the Great Depression thing, John, is a hell of an issue with a lot of people, but I don't think it's going to make that much difference.

No, I told him, I probably ought to call him on his own, but he agreed with what he said, and I say, I don't think the Great Depression thing is worth a hand.

I think it's, I mean, just so we get something, I don't think it's that big an issue.

So...

We're not going to get that much out of it.

It's not going to make that much difference.

It's a question of whether they raise the price at all, and if so, how much.

Of course, what we're trying to do is lower the price, which they're not going to do.

Our next position is to at least stay even, not go up and take advantage of the devaluation of the dollar, which they're probably not going to do.

Our next step is to go up 3%, which they might do.

And I don't think it'll go up over 5%, but somewhere in the range of 3% is the most that I think we hope to get out of it.

So I'm very impressed.

But I think we can do that for citrus and get tobacco.

Look, get another thing.

Well, all that list of Japanese sounds very impressive.

And if we get the Japanese list, we'll be in good shape.

And I think we might want to try to wrap it up fully in the month.

Before we get to the matter of Peterson and so forth, let me ask you about Perkins.

I understand he wants to come in.

Do you want me to see him?

Oh, I think you'll accept him.

Well, I think there's people who want to know.

Now, I don't want to do it.

If I see him alone, I'd be sure to come with him.

I would prefer not to see him alone.

I'd be glad to come with him.

I don't know what he wants, as far as I know.

The thing that he wants is to try to talk to you about the fallback position in the event that the paperwork comes apart at the scene, which is what we're going to do.

Now he's got another idea today, which is not a bad one.

But he talked to Volcker about it.

I haven't talked to him.

He's also talked to George Shultz about it.

He thinks that now, either in the State of the Union or in the budget, there's a huge deficit that you probably ought to come up asking Congress to put an absolute limit on the seasonal spending.

It's not a bad ploy, the seasonal spending.

The seasonal amount or the exact amount?

On both, on both.

Yeah.

See, the President's on record.

saying that he's part of a CBO standing if it will apply to the Congress as well.

And so you're not, all you're doing is the fact that you're restating your position.

I'm just going to take it.

What about, which do you want to, I think it will be lost to the State of the Union.

My inclination is that, let's see, it will be lost to the budget.

The budget has to be big just to be in deficit.

I think that's the place for it.

All right.

We'll, uh...

Do you want me to follow through and talk to the bill or want me to probably mention it to George?

I'll certainly follow through with George.

All right, you hand it to George and I'll have a few of them just say that we've approved it and thought that there should be and put in a strong statement that there has to be a ceiling on spending.

It's a very good idea.

This is the time to have it.

It ought to be.

You know, John, hell, we don't need a dance.

We cut all the time.

The Congress is just all over us.

I think you make some sense.

on the Burns thing, I think we might as well have the meeting.

How are you?

I'll be at the end of the Thursday.

Our Thursday's coming up tomorrow.

Good day.

Good morning.

It's the best time for me and my wife.

What do we have?

We've got those guys to do.

Yeah, I know that's what I'm going to have at 3 o'clock.

I could spend an hour on it and be back at it.

So what's the time?

Can you tell me your schedule?

I can do it in the morning if you'd like.

Morning start of the week or afternoon?

You don't believe that to be expanded to include Stein and Schultz, the quadriad thing, not this one?

Well, I don't know what he wants, and I would have thought it depended on just guessing what he wants.

Then what I think we should do is after we have this meeting, John, I think you should call if you would have been in the lottery after a week later.

How about that?

All right.

So then I would have thought it depended on just guessing what he wants.

And then the Quadrat, because in the Quadrat, he shows off.

But with you again, I don't think he will.

Well, he will, but not as much.

No, he doesn't as much.

The Quadrat is, but the Target is without him, sir.

The Quadrat would be the meeting the next week, and I would set it for next Wednesday, so I'm not sure if he'll be involved next year.

Work that out.

Yeah, it'll be a good thing.

After the budget, before they come.

Work that out with John's office.

It's him first, and then tell the others.

I think the water can meeting should be, well, that should also be in the morning.

He's got that detriment of 11.

All right, well, then have the water at 10.

If I ever had to take an hour and a half, if I could give you an hour and a half of a discussion at 9.30 or anything like that, well, let me say that I think it's true that the other guy schedules more in the morning, so I don't know.

I might agree with your time.

9.30 is fine for me.

It's all right with you.

I'm sure it's all right with me.

I'll let you look at it.

All right, well, we'll check it out.

30 or 30 in the afternoon, or 40 in the afternoon, we'll see.

Okay.

We'll let them get a picture of the quadrillion.

That'll be the big one.

It has to be a picture to ride anyway, because at that point, we're meeting on that.

And we'll publicize that meeting.

I mean, we'll publicize it that day.

And that night, we don't say anything about it.

But we'll discuss it with everybody.

Okay?

We'll tell Arthur that.

So tomorrow, we'll...

How is he doing, John, on the money supply?

Yes, sir.

Did you notice the private trade went down?

Yes, sir.

Does that affect your interest?

Oh, yeah, sure.

Short-term trade?

Oh, I don't think you're a good person.

Oh, no, yeah, I can't think of that.

How do things like that work?

I'm just curious.

Well, I know a lot of things, too.

I've made around 7 or 8 percent, I guess.

You've made 7 and a half percent, 3 quarters.

And I'm most of my own 7 percent.

We take primary.

This is the time to reason in.

Sure.

No, I'm serious about that.

Sure.

Of course, I was trying to reason that.

Except a lot of mine's on, it's an insurance company, long-term.

And they're asking.

And I can't reason that.

Yeah.

And I can't reason that.

So, they're not too bad.

The short-term rates are what they need me of.

And I owe about a half a million dollars on the short-term rates.

I mean, that's a lot of short-term rates.

But that is not the prime rate.

That's a different thing.

Well, it ought to be.

But I see.

I'm deliberately above the prime rate.

so that nobody can accuse you of it.

But you shouldn't.

But you shouldn't think that much of it.

No, I'm trying to think.

The prime rate is lower now than it's been for years.

Isn't that good?

Oh, sure, it's good.

We should kind of watch Huber a little bit, because one of his big fixes is that you stop heavily by watching the interest rates soar up.

It didn't do anything until one week or four, before it paused in on the economic policy.

And another bank, Bankers Trust went down today, joined the first national table.

And they're lower than they've been since 64.

That's the third biggest bank, Bankers Trust.

So the interest rates are just great.

Now on the money supply, the money supply the last month was up.

I talked to Arthur in April yesterday, I guess Saturday.

He had a meeting last week with his open market committee.

He kept them all day long.

And he had a split vote.

But he says, I got what I wanted.

And he tosses and rolls.

He cannot tell me what it was.

But the clear implication was that he got a strong agreement

to increase the money supply.

Well, Marker wants us to succeed, deep down.

Don't you think?

If his ego gets in the way, no.

How about the new man on the board?

Honestly, if you've got a chance to talk to him.

I've not talked to him since the beginning of what he had.

As far as I know, he hasn't shown up yet.

Or, indeed.

It's going to be a good idea to get the young guy ahead and prepare for those other guys.

Oh, yeah.

That's good.

I will send you a hundred points.

He's young, he's tough, he's aggressive.

I could see that.

Oh, and he's, uh, he had a very speedy look.

I liked his looks.

I had, I did, I did talk to him all before.

I'd never met him before.

He's ambitious, uh, so he, he'd be hard for us to handle on any of that.

That's what you wanted to tell me.

It may be hard for us to handle, too.

That's all right, too.

But we don't want to handle, I have too much to argue about.

Now, speaking in Hanlon, I want to talk about what I want to get clear today before we get further down the track is the relations we're going to have with Peterson and his position.

And if we work the thing out, we want to have Peterson's stance announced and then Peterson's replacement announced at the same time.

But I want to be sure that on Peterson's replacement, there's a pretty clear understanding.

Now, let me get some thunder brush out of the way at the outset.

Bob told me this morning, and I had not heard of him before, that he usually wanted to set up or announce the setting up of a new council or competition or something of that sort.

And I vetoed the idea.

I think we've got enough councils at this point.

running around, and I think that for him to say that prior to the time he's confirmed or anything, to just start rushing right out and setting up a council, would be probably a little jump.

You know, so I think that might reflect on Stan.

You have another view on that.

Did he raise this with you?

I've never heard of it.

What does this man think?

I said, if Bob was here, so he hasn't discussed with anybody, just his own idea.

He was going to run out by you and get it okay, and then discuss it with the people.

I said, well, sure.

No, it isn't.

Well, I mean, he at least should ask, but that's what it is.

That's what it is.

As a matter of fact, I thought he had something.

Yeah, all right.

Well, anyway, it's dead.

There's going to be one.

The second point is that I think a good use for Peterson is the one which I think somebody has suggested, that Peterson and Hodgson could be...

very active in terms of showing concern about unemployment and going around the country and making talks and looking into the situation and so forth and so on, much as we have done with that operation on the West Coast with that fall from Pennsylvania.

Now, I think also getting Peterson and Hudson to work together is a good idea.

for a reason that I hope people can do, I'm sure, it fits in the reorganization scheme.

You see, those two are going to be in one department.

Fortunately, you see, with regard to Stans and Hodgson, you've got to understand what the problem is.

Stans and Hodgson aren't Stans and Shoals or anybody.

It was like oil and water, because Stamps is basically, you know, a very rural business, and frankly, he didn't want to go around the Secretary of the League.

Peterson, on the other hand, is the kind of a fellow, you know, who will work in the Senate deal.

And is that the problem?

But Hudson is very much intrigued with that as an opportunity, and he's delighted to get Peterson in to do that.

Do you mean just...

One of our political problems, as well, is that we don't appear to give a damn about unemployment.

We give a terrible damn about inflation.

And we've done a beautiful job of ruling inflation.

And there's hardly anybody around who will say Nixon has let inflation run loose.

They have to admit whether they like it or not.

He's done something about inflation.

But there's a hell of a lot of people around who say, effectively, that Nixon doesn't give a damn about unemployment.

That's Hubert's line.

He just doesn't understand that guy in the unemployment line.

He doesn't care.

We haven't looked like we're fighting unemployment.

Why do we look like we're fighting inflation?

During the years, for example, the Kennedy years, when unemployment was approximately what it is now,

At least they were having studies in age, structural unemployment, and so forth and so on.

They were always fighting.

Well, it's a different way of saying, too, don't you, that we ought to indicate a concern about it, recognizing that we may not get it down, Russia.

Well, Russia really has a different tactic than we meant pursuing, which would be, we meant saying, unemployment's going to go down, and it's really not so bad.

And this would be to almost turn the other way in the rhetorical approach and say, we're terribly distressed that unemployment is still at 5.9% or 5.1% or whatever it is, and we, by God, are doing something about it.

And then have, like Arthur Goldberg, he had ran around to the unemployment offices and talked to the people in the lines and all that.

He was a lot of Secretary of Labor, but he looked like he was worried about unemployment.

We don't have anybody who looks like that.

How does this strike you?

I'm just going to ask you.

The idea of getting the Congress secretary to worry about unemployment, as well as the labor guy, who is traditionally supposed to worry about it, adds a little bit to our system of jobs.

I'm still working on it, and I'll have the draft over to you tomorrow.

That's an old section on that.

I am showing great concern about it, and I'm trying to show concern about doing some things about it.

This is a device to go on and do some more about it.

I think, although I just think all of us ought to, and the way to get both labor and business in it, Peterson, is to analyze these statistics and, you know, make a big deal about the breakdown, looking at the outlook column on the front page of the Wall Street Journal this morning.

I don't know if you saw that or not.

But it's what I've been saying for six months now here.

And we can't get anybody to do it, or have anybody do it.

But somebody ought to analyze what the unemployment figures are, who's unemployed, who's unemployed, and why are they unemployed?

You see, what I'm trying to say, and what Peterson did say, in addition to expressing the term about the unemployed,

Basically, we look at a thing, 6.1.

Then we either take monetary or fiscal action to cure unemployment.

Well, it doesn't cure unemployment.

Because the 6.1 reflects more of a social problem than it does an economic problem.

Exactly.

You're absolutely right.

And that's why they aren't married men.

That's right.

And they're married men.

That's right.

So no matter what you do to the economy, you spend yourself buying.

You still don't have 6% unemployed unless you isolate and put into pockets and analyze what the unemployed are and what they mean.

Now, 17% are young people.

This means that maybe this spring we can have a whole new program for employment of young people.

Like, for example, a universal non-governmental service.

For a year.

But this is because Congress gets these statistics.

You see, Pete can just be talking about this all the time.

And he's good at that.

Oh, he's good at it.

He can analyze the breakdown, the number of women, the number of people that have gone into labor force, the number of young people involved.

And this needs to be done.

Frankly, we need to get away from this unemployment figure.

We're now using it.

That's right.

We ought to try to completely get away from it.

I'm not talking about the married men unemployed, which is 3%.

Married men and married women.

The heads of the household.

The heads of the household, I see.

The heads of the household, real breadwinners.

And the real breadwinners is about 15.3% among the men today.

And it will never go much lower than it never was.

It just can't.

That's right.

Under our system.

But he can do a way more terrible than this, and it desperately needs to be done.

How can we, uh, what can we do?

Could we, uh, is this something where we could say, uh, you could, uh, as you say, you've got two people here, but it has to be, et cetera.

If you bring Matt Peterson and, uh,

and Hodgson together, and I guess they're, who the hell else would be exposed?

I guess science, science people should work on this too, shouldn't they?

They studied her.

They'll have to, no, I wouldn't have a chance to take it, and I think you, I think the first thing we need to do is get Tom Commerce, the basis, then have Labor, the Department of Labor, analyze those statistics.

And then correlate the unemployment statistics with the employment offices around the nation, and see how many people are asking for work.

How is the procedure?

Should we have a meeting in order to where we

Sheldon had a lot of throwback.

Yes, because of his partner players were throwing at that time, too.

I think the thing to do, the thing I want John to do, is to give the order, in other words, to these folks.

We know that this is something that is to be a major thrust of our economic policy in this coming year.

So what would you suggest we do?

What would you like to do as a means?

i think it probably will start with hudson and the news called three of us and he had to say it if you want me to say anything about it they talked to you about it right we'll start with them and we probably bring in the director of the census uh

We want it very well.

We want that on a crash basis to get us to study.

But we also want a hell of a lot of publicity about it and we're looking into it.

We want people to know that we're studying it.

So they should develop a plan.

The point is to avoid going off in different directions.

I think you could, I think it should be under your hegis as the chief economic column.

And so you could get, I think, it's basically Stavros and Schmanz, I mean, and Peterson, of course.

It really comes down to, I think that Peterson will have no problem because he's the goer who gave him the, gave him the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

The employment officers and laborers throughout the nation come in here for a meeting to make them bring whatever figures and get all the statements and statistics on unemployment.

They've got all these things and they, my God, they can play this thing like a fiddle if they want to.

I'll tell you, at this point, maybe the best thing to do is for you to call

to get them and to indicate that we've talked about it, we want this done.

And then once they come in and I participate, or if they want me in at the outset, I do it either way.

Just you tell me what you think is the most effective.

Well, I think, without opposing on your time, certainly in the next few days, I can...

I don't want Peterson.

I mean, actually, I will not cut off any camp unless you have to come see me.

But I don't want Peterson running in.

you know, some speed every couple, three days on something, unless he's, you know, checked it out.

So if you could bring him in in the first instance, it would be better.

and to say that we've discussed it and that you will be reporting, as a matter of fact, we'll take it about a month.

I've got a certain parcel I time out now, anyway between now and the 15th of February, because I've even had to end a trip, you see, and I've got to, so I would rather not, I'll participate in any of these if we need to, but this one, if you would just take it out.

And it puts the authority where it belongs.

Now, the other point is,

The other point is that this now gives us an opportunity, which I want to be sure we clearly understand, and I want to be sure that everybody around here has an opportunity to clean up this financial, economic thing.

so that there was no question of lying to authority or any of that sort.

As you know, you had the problem with the Peterson operation.

He thought he was doing it, but he didn't think so.

He felt that he should be.

In fact, he wasn't.

And he couldn't.

And it had to be handled as it was.

Remember, they can't take that operation and all the rest.

Now, flying basically is an inside man.

Now, the thing that I want to be sure we understand, and I have not talked to Lannigan myself about it, but I understand Bob has in my direction,

Bob is planning to totally understand, as far as the international monetary, economic things are concerned, that he is basically here not as a self-starter, as the Peterson operation thought it was, but he's here to carry out the policies that are developed on the other side.

Yeah, I'm not sure he would rule out self-starting, but he would rule out direction.

from there.

His view, as I understand it, is that that council and that responsibility there has got to encompass both monetary policy and trade policy.

That it isn't just a trade council.

It's an economic policy council, which means trade and monetary policy.

But he completely recognizes the Secretary of Trade recently

pre-dominant position and the Volcker Committee, or whatever it is, has responsibility as setting policy and sees his counsel as being one for implementation and execution.

He sees himself, as I understand it, as being, as meeting the need that you and Detective Shelton Kissinger came up with the need for being an agent in the White House.

It cuts across agency lines so that you have some point of control vis-a-vis state, particularly in Congress, to the degree also in the area of international economic policy.

Now, he recognizes totally the need for you to be the spokesman and for you to have control on the decision-making side, and sees himself as being a valuable tool in your hands in carrying that out.

It's eternally important, if that fits the way you want to do it, that both you and he see together the thing that way.

I know he's talked with you, and I'm not sure that he feels that he got it.

that you and he came away with exactly that point in mind?

No, I don't think we did.

And probably the reason is the basic misunderstanding that I think obtained with respect to the reason for the council in the first place.

Now, everybody

when they talk about international economic policy, includes monetary policy.

Now, there's never been any question in anybody's mind, that I don't know, that says any other department's got anything to do with it, outside, obviously, the president.

If I don't talk about state or commerce, it ain't got nothing to do with monetary policy.

But everybody wants to include monetary policy as a part of economic policy.

Now, my statement to him was, well, if you're talking about economic policy encompassing monetary policy, I said, then it's even more logical that economic policy encompasses military and political policy.

Because that's where your money's spent.

Monetary policy don't spend money.

We make money.

Now, why do you, when you use the word economics,

Now, this was Peterson's problem.

He wanted to get into monetary things because this was what was happening.

He wanted to constantly get into the monetary field.

Well, why?

These are two separate, distinct things.

Trade is one thing.

Monetary policy is something entirely different.

Now, if you want to include it under monetary, under economic policy,

trade, monetary policy, than I think Treasury has ever right to have as much say about political and diplomatic policy as the state does about monetary policy.

And this is where we come to a basic misunderstanding about what that council is going to do.

What was it organized for?

Well, at least to the actual council, Roy asked, and I understand there were some studies going on within the administration, totally separate from us.

But we got ahead of it because we solved the problems that were developing with respect to trade, hours of payments.

We didn't think anybody was coordinating what was going on in the economic deal.

Now, obviously, all of these things impinge on each other.

But to say that defense can go off and make any kind of deal they want to,

as Laird did on the offset agreements, and that has no bearing on monetary policy.

Of course it does.

That's why we're not part of our balance of payment problems.

So you get the question, what are you talking about?

Who's going to be involved?

Now, this gets to a much broader subject that we're going to need to deal with here today, but this is why we got on the CIA island, because I said, why don't you assume that when you use the word international economic policy,

that you include monetary.

I said, that's because everybody wants to fool with the monetary policy.

And I said, we didn't have eight people fooling.

I said, that was Treasury, and the Council of Economic Advisers, and Kissinger, and Schultz, and the, uh, and State, uh, and the Council of San Peterson, and the Federal Reserve, and one other.

We had eight people.

And everybody wanted to run monetary policy.

Well, we don't do things that way on diplomatic policy.

But what they do on diplomacy, what they do in military decisions and defense, have an enormous impact both on the trade policies, on the balance of payments, and monetary policy.

So all I'm saying is that we've already decided how the thing ought to be operated.

And just because you speak of economic terms,

uh there's no reason why you just started with a broad sweep sweep in the monitor obviously you're running in the way you want to sure well let me say this that the first uh we can we can talk we can talk uh what we want about this organization things and the rest but uh as i saw very clearly when they had this monetary realignment uh you can't have that there was frankly

no good purpose served by having other people involved in it.

It has to be done.

It has to be done, basically, under what we call the one-man responsibility rule.

And it has to be done by treasuring, obviously.

They'll do whatever checking they have to do in other fields.

But in this instance, you had to do the deal with the final announcements.

Yes, I did.

You've worked up with them, Mr. President.

When I sent over a kid to the State Department, because they were teed off, because I didn't want to take Samuel with me, they refused to send out my kid with me.

I spent, Volker and I spent the next two days calling people on the phone because they refused to send out a cable.

The Secretary of Trade asked me to send it.

I never did send it.

Refused to send the cable.

On what kind of matters?

On advice that we were given to ask the people to come to Rome to bring some of their trade people.

In fact, just wouldn't send the cable.

We wanted to lead in Russia.

And Rome, we wanted them to, we were trying to wire, I was trying to wire the finance ministers of France, Germany, Britain, and so forth, saying, why don't you trade people with you?

We want to talk trade.

And that was part of the tactics of saying, and then the State Department, because I said, we don't need Samuels to go with us.

They refused to send a camel out.

Now, you know, this kind of Mickey Mouse operation is not going to happen.

Well, now, the thing that I think we have to understand, though, is that there's another kind of thing where Pete could be a note to you, it seems to me.

Oh, yeah.

Well, you don't want to get into a nose-to-nose thing like that.

He had plenty of money.

He could get a bus of boots here.

On the basis of the kind that you can trust, of course, I understand you have a problem with Peterson, not even that you can get into things with him.

Well, I don't really have a problem with Peterson, except we just talked too damn many people.

Well, he talked too many people.

He talked too many.

That's right.

He talked all over the place, and he also was so full of ideas that it just took too damn long to get through without the other people.

The thing that I think we have to understand is this, that in this decision law, that whatever it is, the monetary policy is to be on the Secretary of the Treasury.

And Pete is to understand that he is to, in that view, is to undertake no initiatives

unless requested to undertake such an issue by the Secretary of the Treasury.

Now, that's just the way it's going to be.

Now, we've just got to have that as a clear line in this field, because obviously at this point you have the O'Reilly line, but there may be something in the future.

You may want to be setting up some meeting, right?

Yes, but not to me.

But now, if that is clearly understood, does that sound all right to you, John?

Sure.

People will do whatever he's asked to do.

He just needs his orders.

In fact, he follows orders too closely.

But nevertheless, he does not want to do anything in derogation

of the Treasury's dominant role in control of this very complex matter.

There's another reason for this thought, which you've got to understand.

This is an area where you can't have a bunch of managers and blabbermouths talking

Now, when you've got people rushing around, we had people, you know, like everybody, you can't silence harder, but various people were saying, we will raise the price of gold, we won't raise the price of gold.

We'll grade on 3% or we'll grade on 8%.

by the time it all came around, all the goddamn speculation, it very much erodes the negotiating position of the Treasurer.

The United States can speak with only one voice, one voice, in the field of monetary policy.

The other thing is, and if Pollard saw this very carefully, remember, he wouldn't let us put out, he was right, our private agreement, because he said it would cause enormous speculation in the French exchanges.

He used to say it would hear.

Now, we on our side, however, you take out the morning paper and Peterson will say it's something, or Burns will say it's something, or Schultz will say it's something.

All of it messes with the tensions.

But none of them should have said anything.

You see my point?

Now, Heather, it's a question, it's a point.

One other thing I think you and John, you should know, that I think is important,

flag, and that's to say which tribe.

Peterson is not one who is interested in making speeches and all that sort of thing.

He's basically, would you not agree, an inside man who's not interested in a lot of public events.

So I think you've got that well nailed down.

But I want to be very, very sure we understand that in this scene or two, there is absolutely no, there is to be no

no fiddling around for the security.

And John has, you know, if he sees that a monetary decision is going to affect some, you know, negotiation that we may be involved in with some foreign country, you know, that's the way it has to be.

But I think it has to be closely held.

I think the point that you have, John, is that you've got to have one voice

And that we cannot have other people messing in it.

Is that what it is?

That's exactly right.

And it's largely the Treasurer's function.

Which anybody would want to do it, but you have to have one person doing it.

That's right.

All right.

Well, that's it.

That's the way it's going to be.

And the Treasurer will do it.

And Pete is involved with all of that.

Now, if that is, if that is cleared away, do you think he's all right with John Locke?

He's clear with John Locke.

I told him when I talked to you that I wanted to talk to you about it.

I wanted to have you clear with us.

Frankly, Mr. President, I don't want to go through another year like we went through this year.

I'm not certain of the sort of thing that we have to do to get back to the bill and try to cover it.

Again, on trade matters, I'm willing to admit at the outset

And on bird's eye, I'm willing to admit to you, I said that I'm sure that I transgressed from the Defense Department, the home state department, to, and I said that to Bill.

I hadn't said it to McMillan or anything.

But you did so with my fellow officers.

You were totally aware of it all the time.

I knew exactly why we were doing it.

I wasn't trying to assert any jurisdiction over it in terms of empire building and treasury.

Now, Trey, nobody has to do it.

Cordell Hull of Billion.

over its state, but it's kind of, it's been, all economic matters have been downplayed.

Commerce has no portfolio for it.

It's just a bloat.

But I must say that I'm not concerned with the jurisdictional trade or exclusive jurisdiction at all, because I don't think we have it.

I don't think we have that portfolio.

Other than the next administration, frankly, it all will be cleared up.

I think for the trade thing, though,

And that, if I may address myself to that point for a moment too, I think we've got to be a lot more clear on that.

We have a situation here where, what basically,

What is Ehrlich's role, you see?

Who is Ehrlich under?

Basically, under you.

He was always saying that he's under that.

No.

Well, they'd like to think that, but he was too shy because I don't know what the hell.

He's a special trade representative.

He was created by Session.

Yeah, the Congress.

for the express purpose, really, of pulling out of state and having some other mechanism within this government to deal with special trade matters where the president wanted to go to without going through state.

Now, it was created because of the lack of confidence in the Congress, in the State Department, to conduct trade negotiations.

So, in one instance, he's got more of a portfolio than the special trade representative, as any of the others.

Because the Congress specifically delegates that position to him, that responsibility to him.

Part of that responsibility.

Well, let me say this.

I want to delegate that responsibility to you.

And the reason is that I have been able to see that, for better or for worse,

The trade thing is so intimately tied up with the monetary thing that we, in other words, that you've got to stay on top of it.

And also, philosophically, your view is closer to mine than some others.

Now, by that, you use anybody you want.

In other words, use everybody.

Bring Congress in.

I don't know what we can do.

One bullet we've got to light sometime.

I don't know when it can be done.

We've simply got to strengthen the State Department's

commercial representatives.

Now, you've never talked to Bill about this, have you?

No, sir, I don't know him.

Mr. Palamari's man has been in with him and has struck out 18 times.

I'm sure that within a month you're going to hear my friend Kutcher come in and strike out again.

But we've got to do something about it.

They are piss poor.

Now, our point is, though, I want you to take the job, you take the trade, okay?

I want you to take the trade, and by that, let me put it this way.

The monetary crisis and its ways are of useful purpose because it shows how this is all so closely interlocked.

It cannot be handled by the Secretary of State.

It cannot be handled, basically, frankly, by the President.

I mean, he's going to be there to back up where it's at.

But I think that, to be true, it depends on the man.

It couldn't have been handled by Kennedy.

It can be handled by you.

So I want you to take the monetary thing.

Can you trade things?

Yes, sir.

And then, also, on the burden sharing and that sort of thing.

That's something we'll have to kick around, of course.

And that's something we kick around.

But the trade, and now I want to ask you about Aero.

Do you feel pretty good about him so far?

No, I feel good.

I think he's articulate.

I think he's smart.

I think he's aggressive.

I think he fights for ourselves.

I have not been actually negotiating with him.

He's been in the room when I've been there, but I care to go and negotiate with him when he's there.

So I have not first-hand seen him.

But every indication I have is, if I know anything about him, he's good.

But the thing we ought to probably agree about, I want you to make a note of this, is you've got to see this.

It's all about him.

You're not going to make a crap.

When we were at Senate, oh, man, we had a soulless thing happen with the Japanese.

I thought it was so bad.

where John said that if Ehrlich had gotten off with Tanaka, that they might have made better business, but that Stans of Jackson and would not allow

in the goal because he said he had to be there but now is this correct or was the science correct he said it's a little worse than that and i didn't tell you but well it sounds like it sounds like it's self-serving but before we got there the ambassador told or no tanaka told everything

He said, I'm not going to take you for what I'm going to do in any kind of negotiation.

We're not letting you take me.

But he said, I will tell whatever.

And he said, who do you want to tell?

Do you want to tell me who?

Do you want to tell Secretary Connolly?

He said, I will tell Secretary Connolly.

Tanaka said it.

He said, I like things.

Tanaka told him everything he had.

But we got in a big meeting with all of us in Mazzucca and the whole damn works.

I sat there and I stayed with Mazzucca and his fans and everyone else in Tanaka.

I don't think he would have got any names for the man, Mr. President.

I don't think that, because they're going to wait and see what we can do.

But I think just like they told me on the monetary things, I think he would have told us.

He said he would have told us privately what they were prepared to do, which he never did.

And we don't know yet.

He may have been, maybe he wouldn't have been.

I understand, but we just, we just have to at least find out, alright, this is why the trade that you see Bob is going to be in that area.

And what I want you to do, John, is that I want you to, and I will back up totally with Aaron, I want you to point out to him,

that what that is my feeling that this is all so closely intertwined that you're gonna i'll uh

uh we'll talk to her early when he's uh whenever you think it's a perfect thing to do but i think what we have to do here is again to remember that you cannot have this is the problem you cannot have it'll not be you cannot have peterson talking to one person you cannot have uh uh

or whoever it is at the State Department talking with another line.

And you can't ever be talking with another line and can't be talking with another.

It's got to be one man in charge.

And the Secretary of the Treasury will be in charge of the Treasury.

In other words, by that, I don't mean you have to negotiate.

You understand what I'm saying?

You'll lose these guys.

As a matter of fact, you may want to use Peter sometimes.

He may be all right.

I don't know.

I'm sure he will.

But the point is that I, we need somebody in charge because we can.

I don't want the fellows running to me.

I want Peterson and Arrowley and whoever's at State, Sandler, or a successor, coming in and saying, well, we got this and that, or we got a kind of a deal that this is what we ought to do on the trade.

We've got to pull this into one.

Now here's where, now where Pete Flanagan, where Pete Flanagan comes into this is that actually this is in the area of international economic policy.

What he has got to know is who sits at the head of the table and who sits at the head of the table by my interaction on this issue as on the monetary issues of the Secretary of the Treasury.

That's the way it has to be at this point.

See?

Does that, though not,

preclude the need for planning at all.

I mean, really what you're doing is solving the problem that that council was set up to try and solve by a different means.

To a large extent, yeah.

All right.

Let me, with one exception, Mr. President, let me raise this for you to think about.

Trading the Treasury is not a necessarily logical move

It has no home at the moment, admit me.

It's normally in-state.

In the long run, I suspect it ought to be in-state.

But, more than that, this is a radically changed city.

Yeah, but you have to land it in Chinese state.

We're not ready for that.

You can't do that, Mr. Chairman.

Now, with that reservation,

I see nothing to take along with this.

But you're going to offend state, and I want to make that point.

And you remember when you created this council, independent state, on international economic policy, they were offended.

And you recall, you had to take the chairmanship of it.

to keep from giving it to Rogers.

And then Rogers was made vice-chairman of it.

And because of the structure of it, the council rarely meets.

That's right.

And then Peterson ran it just without council meeting, in fact.

So this is where we are.

Now, the trade matters really ought not now go to Congress, even if you want to put them there.

Because hopefully, we'll reorganize the Commerce Department in this state.

No, we have a chance.

I think we have a chance.

And in any event, that's what we ought to be trying to do.

If we could, maybe three or four years, trying to get a new apartment straightened up, much less taking on trade laws.

So, but all I'm saying is that on a temporary basis, this is all right.

In the long run, I think it ought to be stated.

But before it goes there, you're going to have to...

What you have to do is you have to redo the State Department.

What has to happen is that they have to have an Undersecretary of the Role at the State Department, an Undersecretary for Economic Affairs, who is tough, pro-American, and reorganize it up and down the line.

That's what Bronner should not have.

He doesn't have any money.

That was the thing.

to stand up with a flag, to begin with, and never got our flag in Monaco.

But he wanted to do it, and it was going to be done now, but it wasn't going to be an undersecretary.

Well, it was going to be an undersecretary, but he was assistant secretary.

He was going to be an deputy assistant secretary.

There's no running errands, and it won't work.

No, it has to be.

It has to be a, it could be a hell of a job.

Sure.

And that's where it belongs.

It could be a hell of a job, because all the embassies abroad are there.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And he could cooperate and work with the conference department on it.

So the real question at the moment then is whether, is there any point in continuing the facade of the council and putting Pete into that?

Or is it better to make it, make it give you the protection?

In other words, it is the facade through which you can do this.

I mean, you're not putting this in Treasury.

You're putting it in John Conroy.

That's right, John Conroy.

rather than the other way.

And that while ostensibly the president presides and here is the chair of the council, de facto, you don't do this by, when you say delegate this trade responsibility to me, you're not delegating it to Treasury.

But as chairman of this Council on International Economic Policy, you're just dedicating me to sell that job.

I'm not saying you ought to even handle it.

That's not the Secretary of the Treasury.

Now, let's not have any paper on it.

No paper.

No, let's not write a paper on it.

So don't further offend Saeed, because all it does is create problems, guys.

And I think that Peterson will be very good at working on this thing.

Oh, he will.

If he understands it.

If he knows it.

And if that's worthwhile, you know, planning is not, as you know, it's not looking for this job.

You don't want it.

And we will.

It creates a problem.

We will get into it.

So I would put valor in this job.

If this doesn't solve the problem for you,

I didn't work with Pete.

Pete and I have worked all year.

We've never had our care.

I don't think we've had any problems at all.

All of us have done it.

And all of a sudden, really what you're doing now is, in effect, what you're telling Pete is that he's a snap man to John Connery.

And it's a unique one.

Because what I'm really doing, John, is to set up for you in the White House, basically, a snap.

That's what I'm really trying to do, and that's what I want you to understand.

Because you're asking John Connolly, the Secretary of Treasury, to act for the President, so to speak, and how he should then, and so that way, do his best to, I mean, there isn't a staff over there to speak about this, you know what I mean?

But what Stafford is, isn't very good.

But my point is, he should work.

He just knows that he is to, is to, is to, is to basically establish, to pull this thing together.

And then at a later point, when we get further down the road, that we can then fight with the State Department.

We can't do it now.

That's frankly what I'd like to see do, Mr. President.

If he would, he would.

to look at this whole, right now, look at this whole international field, in terms of restructuring, state, commerce, particularly, with respect to trade and economic matters, during the next term.

You can't wait until November.

We need some very quiet work going on right now to see how to, because the State Department is jammed at the moment.

And at some point, you have to reconstitute it.

You have to rebuild it for your own interest.

But it needs a nice turnaround, if you will.

That work needs to be going on and need to be formed.

And it needs some ideas very broadly right now.

Okay.

Let me see if I can formulate some ideas with regard solely to the economic field you're talking about.

I'm talking about where trade matters are.

How should international trade, how should international economic matters be done?

not necessarily monetary, but you know, plenty of monetary as well.

You know, some monetary life, if you would stay with prayer,

for economic matters, trade matters, had to go to Congress or state or somewhere.

If he was in state, he'd be liable.

He's got an embassy now, except for that.

That's right.

That's why he fought this, because he said, well, state has got the most to do with economics.

Well, that's what happened.

But they got to be reconstituted before they handle it.

Yeah.

That's all I'm saying.

You can't do it with MSMS.

You can't do it with what you've got in existence now with their philosophy.

But people are doing a valuable job on structuring this kind of thing.

I'm looking forward to January of next year.

Would you talk to him?

Sure, I'll talk to him.

I think that John's point of no paper is a very good one.

We have this, on the monetary thing, we have said it, and that's the way it should be done.

On this other thing, on the trade thing, you just do it.

Use the money.

Planting is extremely effective in one respect.

If you're going to hunt him to Washington, John Washington, you point him and believe he goes right to the target.

And don't ever tell him anything you don't want to have done, because he'll do it.

But if you ever tell him, he'll follow through with ruthless sufficiency.

So if you would just remember that, and use him.

And I thought I was .

No, he's the kind of man .

What I mean is, with Peterson, you've got to be subtle.

Not the plan.

No, there's no subtlety with mine.

He doesn't understand subtlety.

He doesn't whack and say, no, you do this, this, this, and this.

He's totally loyal.

Absolutely, totally loyal.

Totally selfless.

He's not trying to make a name for himself.

He doesn't get one day.

We are.

I think that he doesn't want you to think.

And that, he just wants to do a job.

What I'd like for you to do, if you would, is to use him.

and to use him as your agent within the White House.

Now, the way I will get around this, the way I will handle it with Congress and the state when the two impinge upon each other,

Uh, rather than having you have to take them on, on the planning.

See what I mean?

Yes sir.

Yes sir, I understand that.

I understand that.

Exactly.

That's why you can do it.

Now doesn't that sound like a word because of the proposition?

Yes, it does.

And I think it makes more sense then.

Most of our trades over except long range, there's no point bringing up having any papers delegating any trade responsibilities to me because that just lies in everybody's face.

Now there you go.

But what we will do then, we'll announce, we'll go ahead and announce Peterson's fanship tomorrow.

Flanagan's position as a substitute for Peterson.

Now, I better talk to Flanagan about all this, to be sure.

All right, well, that's clear.

All right, I'm sure we won't have any potential misunderstanding, but there won't be, I don't think, even this one.

I think he's, I think you ought to, you ought to listen to what we, how it's to work.

It's really a hell of a, it's a fine opportunity for Pete because it's a chance for him to work in a new field where he can make a contribution.

I mean, this is, there's been a desperate need for this kind of, for an attack on this property for a long time.

We tried to get at it through the Peterson Council.

It hasn't worked for a variety of reasons, we just had too many crises.

But now,

Uh, we can't, we can't travel with it right now because, uh, it's the wrong year.

But, uh, well, actually, the Supreme Council had a real problem because you, Secretary O'Connor, and Henry Kissinger, and ultimately George Shultz, all were reluctant to work for Pete Peterson for...

for a lot of reasons.

You just have problems with working with the guy.

All the council is, is the guy.

That's right.

If I can overcome that problem, then you can use the council for a whole time.

You want Pete Peterson to be the mine cabin officer, but he's not a staff man.

That's right.

Oh, that's correct.

He's not a staff man.

He is a staff man.

That's right.

And that's the difference.

That's the difference.

So now, Pete is going to have a chance to go out and send his own, which is great.

But I haven't been willing to play the accompaniment.

It's a much more difficult thing to do.

And not get too loud.

I think if you explain about it in terms of the fact that this is what we, this is a real team, we want to be sure that it's understood that we're working in this way, that we're trying to pull this thing together, and that his major contribution is going to be to

grapple with this problem of how the trade thing is to be organized in the future.

And then he can say, and then immediately after November, we'll implement it.

It'll be a blood of the forest.

He might be a guy you want to go over to see as an undersecretary.

Well, that's the point.

What I'd like to do is to test him now and see whether he might develop those capabilities.

And if he does, he'd be a damn good panel there.

He develops, for example, the...

Well, what I mean is, at least he develops the credibility for the job.

Sure does.

Which is very important.

You see, a guy will be deeply immersed in it.

He'll become an expert in it.

And then you can put him over it.

And if you don't constantly come up with some statement or recommendation to and for that position, some NSO guy who's been counseled or in Paris or London or some other place, but who isn't going to be worth a damn in terms of any new approach.

That's right.

Well, Pete, and this is going to be no place to change the way the council has been operating.

Pete Peterson tried to gain more and more of monetary policy, but I never would have had it.

I collected the time.

I just hard-nosed it.

I said to my people, you know, I'm going to have to head it off.

But I did.

I did it three times.

And it worked.

No one's really done those serious enrollments on the monetary policy standpoint.

On the trade thing, that's the way we've worked it.

It's been kind of a loose understanding, so it's not even radical change.

Well, everything works.

Everything works, I must say.

He thinks he's operating under my control now, under my direction now.

That's quite hard to do.

And now he defeats everybody else, and that's fine.

That's a great job, too.

But when you come right down and say what the hell we'd accept and what we won't, he calls you what he calls us.

So there's no basic difference, but it's just to make it clear.

The one thing that I would like, and I don't know whether it would fit into your scheme or not, but to the extent you can, and I know your time is, I mean, it's a little longer than most, but if you could bring pain...

into your market, in other words, and have them over.

It just happens.

So that he gets to say them.

Because he's a, if you spend a little time with him, he's no time waster.

I don't know what he's having for you.

But I think that on the other hand, like if you're discussing some things with Volker and Bob Trey or something, you can find the game.

And then he's got the orders and you know exactly what he's told.

We have found around here that he is as good a man as straight arrows you can find.

He's no empire fighter.

And, uh, that, I don't think we've done enough of it.

I'll be delighted to, because we're going to have to, we're going to have to make some radical changes in our own operational regulation.

And they're probably good.

In the first place, we have a lot of people leaving.

Yeah.

And in the second place, I've got to rebuild three assistance centers, you see.

We've lost every public relations system.

We've lost the administrative system.

We've lost the international system.

And we're going to lose some more, Sheriff.

And all of them left for good reasons.

But we've got to, we have done the job that we should have done, particularly in supervising these World Bank, IMF, and American Golf.

That's the other committee that I'm scheduling.

There's one other.

When McNamara gets back from his trip, which I understand will be this week or this week, he leaves this week.

What does he get back?

He's going to be gone two weeks from now.

Before I leave, when he's back in two weeks, I want to sit down and have a talk with John and McNamara.

And in this case, I think we should bring him in because this is it now.

And get a report from him.

So now there's one thing on that.

I mentioned that to Henry yesterday or the day before and said that you had suggested such a talk and I said maybe we should have it now.

And Henry said, well, he thought we'd all let it go out, go out first, and of course we tried to do that.

But I said, well now, the problem I see with letting McNamara go out now is that he might give the Indians and the bank a lot of dash and all the rest to make commitments.

Henry said, and apparently he said this based on either a conversation with you or with McNamara's hold or something,

He said that he was confident McNamara was not going to go off and make a lot of commitments at this point.

This is correct, and I'm sure that's right, because he had dinner with McNamara Thursday night or Friday night, I think, or last week.

Yeah, Henry did.

If you feel McNamara, then go play ball with him.

Now, when he comes back,

uh henry feels based on the conversation that he had with him like your sons upon them he feels that mcnamara has been really not only well on him but would just be all over every heels to have the opportunity once a month uh again maybe that's too often maybe it's sponsored a couple months of of of coming in

and coordinate to the extent that he can his role with our international policy.

No question about it.

All right, let's do it.

Well, it's extremely important.

You've already got exit, and that's under your right.

You've got returns.

And the World Bank, too.

And the World Bank.

All right.

And then I have that back, back, back.

Well, what I've had is, and I don't mean it, but what I've had is that

You don't control.

No, no, we're a bank.

No, but then you control.

Yes.

Now, all right, you got that money, you got the world back.

Now, what about these other banks?

How are they?

We just have boats in the other bank.

Yes.

But you have a boat.

Yes.

All right.

What I was trying to think of is that are these other, are they heads of these other banks, any of them Americans?

For the old Asian bank, the Latin bank.

No, they're not old Asian banks.

It's Japanese.

But we already have these fellows in.

For instance, the nearby Republican bank, has been extremely helpful to us through the president.

I'm going to send you a memorandum on it now because he's going down there next week.

What we've done now, we can do this.

It'll show you what can be done.

The great problem with Peru is the ex-corporation, the IPC, which was the South Central Area Standard of Currency.

And you sent Jack Irwin down there three years ago to negotiate this thing, and everybody in the world jacked it, basically.

But what's happened, and I'll go into all the details, it now appears

We, the Treasury, has been doing this through Archie's man, the Inter-American Development Bank, plus our direct contacts in Peru with the last Mexican ambassador.

We think we've got the Peruvians to agree to pay $8 million to Stanford for IPC.

But they're going to do it through the back door.

They're giving a copper concession to a company.

It's very interesting.

But what we did, we got the copper company and the Perugian government to agree to let the copper company have such a hell of a deal that they would agree to pay Standard & Jersey $80 million for the IPC for the deal.

So they're paying it through the back door over a period of years so the Perugians don't have to face up to the political problem of the IPC, but it doesn't cost the copper company anything.

But we got the copper company the concession.

Now they got it.

And we think we're going to put that thing together in about the next two weeks.

And this has been working on it now for about every month.

And Artie's saying that he is out there talking about health tips.

And we sure won't give up.

What would you say with regard to the McNamara meeting then?

Should it be just you, the three of us?

You wouldn't want Kearns in that?

No.

Kearns basically, that's a different matter.

It's just financing ours.

And there are longer hits frequently.

World Bank, and you always have to deal with each other separately.

Really, the two that you need to deal with, the Asian Bank is out in the Philippines, so we don't see much of them in here.

There's nothing here anyway.

But McNamara and the Northeast Bank are the Inter-American Development Bank.

These are the two critical ones.

And through those, plus, to some extent, the IMF,

to a lesser extent, they can have a profound influence on foreign policy.

Believe me.

Because they've got the money.

Yeah, I bet they can too.

To a much lesser extent.

Because they don't make loans in the same sense that the World Bank does.

They can accommodate governments, but through credit ratings and

Things of that sort.

And the KGB won't, but nothing like the World Bank and UNRWA.

You said at the McNamara meeting that the artist's balance should take place.

We should do that too.

You know, the... Let me ask you one other thing.

The one other point that I...

Remember, you have your plan, or the scheme that you talked about, about the necessity to get the...

to develop policies whereby we develop looking to the future for raw materials, which in Latin America, Asia, et cetera, et cetera, like the Japanese, who, John, can we give that to?

Who can we ?

Senator, would you tell him, would you give him that as the council will be working with him?

Good.

And plan to do that as to how we should.

Because you know, around the world, there are more of these.

I was just in Rupert.

It's a different side that you mentioned, Peru.

Did you notice that there was somebody that's starting to empty?

And they also set back this election.

Those two parliamentary elections.

What do you think of that?

That's great.

Now, if you're willing, that is very significant.

He was fighting like hell.

We must not save him.

Well, this brings up a point, and I've got to remind them again.

We've got a meeting in Paris, the so-called Paris Club, where we deal with the Chilean credit, whether or not we let them renegotiate their debts.

They've been up here talking.

Now, here again, normally you'd think this clearly would come within the territory's province, but the state's asserting jurisdiction over it.

As a matter of fact, Weintraub has already told the Chilean ambassador that we're not only going to Paris, but we're going to renegotiate it before we ever get there.

Well, the son of a bitch is not supposed to do that, because I issued an order through Dissinger.

You know about the order.

When I say order through Dissinger, I told Henry, at the time I interviewed him, we were not to do a damn thing about them.

Absolutely nothing.

Now, uh, is this, uh, I don't want to get Henry in the office.

He does not fight you, sir.

No, Henry's the president.

I've got to say, I'm totally opposed to him.

And we're not going to kill him.

I've got to, I've got to memorandum, sir.

What, what is required?

Well, I'm not going to say that you'd have to memorandum if you agree with me.

I just said that, uh, I think we ought to have the delegation to the various, uh, meetings.

Well, if I can't hear you, sir, carry on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Can you imagine one truck going there and apologizing for the fact that the reason we should have been there earlier when we were busy with the Christmas holidays and wanted to set up a pitch?

He knows very well that we haven't turned any more on this thing.

Well, I'll be working on that.

Anyway, that's just it.

But that's one of the... Well, the matter is, we're out of the problems that you're running into.

That's why you've got to have a reconstitution in this damn place, sir.

Because you have to have it.

Yeah.

And you're out there.

You can't just have it behind your back now.

Yeah.

It's our major stroke in international affairs.

It's our economics.

Let's face it.

Sure, we can't send men now anymore.

I mean, as we all know, we fight with these damn whores and things.

So our major thing that we can do is squeeze them economically.

And believe me, that can have one hell of an effect.

One hell of an effect.

It sure can.

That's why we're going to drag our feet on the engine and continue to.

Well, the World Bank, I talked to Mike Romero Friday at noon, and he is firmly committed to no renegotiating with Chilean-led.

No, sir.

We're not about that.

And then for us then, for the Paris group to do this.

The Paris block is ridiculous.

No.

Well, their answer is, well, they keep on.

If we don't renegotiate, we've got to set a new maturity.

I said, well, what the hell are the goods of new maturity then?

You're kidding yourself.

I said, well, they've defaulted.

They've defaulted.

Let's try to impose some kind of sanction.

Let's try to make them pay us.

And I asked them to do this off.

As I said, we've got Henry in too many fudges to skip at the moment.

Anyway, this is an awfully good one for planning to follow up on in every instance.

Now, if I'm planning an error in the future, if you would have such cash, I don't want him to hide it from Henry, you understand.

I just don't want Henry to get his balance in an uproar and raise hell with projects.

But planning...

uh, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll just toe the line.

Don't you agree?

I agree.

That's the way to end it.

Yeah.

Let's do it right and we can do it the other way.

See, Pete's quite aware.

If you talk to Pete, he'll, he'll love this too.

He'll love getting into this kind of thing.

Good.

It happens.

This is so, such direct violation of what I, what I've said.

You know, I mean, basically, John, I may be wrong.

I'm not joking.

I mean, any of you will think I am.

And about Cuba,

But after all, it's why somebody's got to make the policy.

Not now, I admit it.

You can't, for example, the state is always trying to make air runs on the Cuban thing.

And I say, no, we're not going to do it.

I'm not going to do it.

They're different from China.

It's not going to do anything with Cuba at the present time.

And we've just got to, it's either got to be one way or the other.

I mean, they were elected.

That's the point.

I don't think those guys should have been elected.

And I get to eat naked all the time.

If you're a Protestant, you get to have it naked.

If it's wrong, you get to have it in place.

I'll get it right.

I'm going to tell those creditors that's right, too.

Now, one other thing that I want to hear, if you don't mind me mentioning it to you.

Sure.

I have sent a letter to you, which you're not aware that's what I'm answering today at all, but I'll tell you at the outset that it's not going to please everybody.

I've sent a letter to you recommending the real owner, Bill Camp, as the comptroller of the currency.

Now, this is not, I don't know if it's going to create any great problems, but it's not going to please anybody.

You're particularly cross-predator than me.

You can't see the legal sense.

And we probably won't put in a good Republican.

But I've written a page-and-a-half letter too long.

What do you feel about it?

Well, I already reported him, obviously, for the following reasons.

One, he's been in that department for 30-odd years.

He's the other comptroller now.

He's comptroller now.

Fred, he's gotten an enormous amount of support from the banks.

Now, Fred said, well, he generates a lot of that.

Well, to some extent, that's true.

But I also have a lot of personal knowledge.

I kill a lot of it.

Because I've had innumerable banks say to me that we'd like support if we were the right way.

And I said, no, don't start with the other way.

And I said, it's all right if a few of you do it.

So I said, but don't you know that?

Do you want to have a job?

Yes, sir.

I said, okay, it's done.

I didn't know.

Fred has to look.

No, he doesn't know that.

Fred, that's very important for Greg.

He's not a good question.

No, I'm not.

Yes, but they can't go to me.

You see, Bob, in these various fields, you've got to have somebody who tells you what to do.

Now, like the ambassador to Japan, we've got Ingersoll.

I said, I'd like to take that job with Ingersoll, the one Japan.

Which Ingersoll?

What was the one?

You know, I had mentioned him to you.

He's the, that's one of the finest Midwestern gods you ever saw.

No, I didn't mean to say that.

Incidentally, would you do this when Ingersoll comes back?

to do for his country, you know, to hear the Senate.

And I couldn't drop him a seat.

He is, you'd probably think, I don't care, he's a big, tall guy, prematurely bald.

He's about 45.

I used to know his father, who was a fantastic, terrible man, and a great man.

This guy will be our man in Japan.

But wait, if you don't mind, Mr. President, I'll remember, I'm going to wait to get my remark and then get to Fred's.

Fred's not opposed to this guy.

He just says that he's there, and I think he's no Democrat.

He says, furthermore, I'm sure Fred's right, that he's gotten some feel from the Southern Republican Party that the camp is partisan, has been partisan to the Democrats on bank charges and so forth.

Now, my answer to that is that

I said, if you all want a bank chart, just let me know.

He told me anyway.

And that's right.

Whatever you need over there, he'll do it.

We just got through the Crocker Western.

I mean, the Wells Fargo Western with Dick Cooley.

He approved it.

Look, the damage report took only the FDIC,

In writing, what does he look like?

He's a nice looking fellow.

What's your size?

Bill Kemp.

Bill, there's a Bill Kemp.

He's from California.

You know Bill Kemp, South Carolina, the head of the Agricultural League of Equinox.

Yeah.

Wow.

He's now a comptroller.

He'll cause you no trouble.

I don't know of a single banker in the United States.

When you talk about friends, all these bankers are your friends.

Where is he from?

He's from Texas.

Greenville, Texas.

Now Johnson first appointed him.

That's the problem with him.

And he's related to this other camp.

He's probably the same kind of guy.

He's probably from the other camp.

The other camp is also a Democrat.

He was from South Carolina, I think, during the first year or so.

And a hell of a, very close to the time he was in the cotton business.

He said, he's one of the big cotton men up in the San Joaquin Valley.

Probably dead now.

I don't think he is.

I guess, I was thinking, I talked to him at 68.

He was still alive then.

Well, I understand this.

And, uh, and sometime I should be there to stay a little human.

But I mean, you should say, you know, I had him over here.

I thought, when you reappoint him, I mean, you should bring him over and take a stand and have a picture taken.

I was just thinking about it.

He is loyal as a dog.

That's correct.

And he agreed.

No problems.

And this, this frame, let me tell you what he has to do.

Uh...

Our U.S. Attorney in San Diego, he played hell by indicting the Frost National Bank down there for making a political loan.

Oh, yeah.

My God, every bank in the country does that.

Sure.

And under the law, under the law already, there's a contract.

But when they pick it up, the examiner's supposed to report it to the Department of Justice.

And I said, I can't.

I said, you just don't report anymore.

I write him.

I said, you just don't want to play anymore.

If he was angry, pick him up.

You settle.

And he still said, he has not made one single report since that time.

And he'll take the heat.

And he said, I agree.

We ought not to do that.

Tell me, thanks.

It wasn't kind of the do-lots being violent.

No, that's right.

The do-lots, not the pick-ups.

That's right.

But anyway, whatever plays, he'll do it.

I got the word.

This only has to do with .

You know, we talked about what the hell position the president ought to take in the election year.

Let me outline it in broad terms.

and see if I read you right as to what position you think we ought to be in.

Now, in the year 1971, I, as you know, did nothing political.

I did one dinner, one big finance dinner, and I personally went.

That was the only political appearances I made, but it absolutely was.

We did the China thing with the economic policy and so forth and so on.

We now have the year 1972.

There are two ways that this can be played, as I indicated already in my conversation.

Rather, my present decision, which I feel is a good one, that I've always spoken to change, is that until after the Republican convention, that I should continue to play the role, the 71-member role,

the president of all the people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, an argument on the other side is vigorously made by some, not partisan, it's not, this is not a partisan opinion.

Somebody looks at the yard and says, look here,

After that year, 1971, which was, in many ways, the international economic settlement of economic policy, the China and Soviet announcements and so forth, the wind-down of Vietnam, from the standpoint of what we did, that was a year of very high statesmanship.

Nevertheless, at the end of the year, we're no better off, approximately the same as we were a year ago in public.

the polls, even though the magazines, the bar charts, everybody else now, I would say that, as a matter of fact, I would say that that in itself is probably a major accomplishment, because as presidents finish their term, they begin to go down.

But the other point, and also a major accomplishment due to the fact that we have so many of our Democratic friends in the ring, Biden, Madison, and all the rest.

On the other hand, it can be argued that, and the thesis of this call is that

who's quite an expert in this field, who's sent me along on the ride prior to the stadium change.

Not so much for the change in the stadium, the activity that maybe, that despite the fact that the Chinese trip, the Soviet trip, and so on and so forth, that what the country wants,

that maybe the country basically is bored, frankly, with just, you know, doing a good job as president and so forth.

And all of us know that what they want, frankly, is maybe this controversy, et cetera.

And then they go back and say, look, it's a successful presidency.

And I said, well, but PR is a fighting trust with Wilson.

Well, that was good.

And I agree with you.

Well, I think, actually, he got his ass beat, too.

I mean, he's really good.

When you remember Wilson, when you remember that great career spot in Malaysia, a neighbor of mine, they're probably going to remember the China trip, too.

But maybe that's what we remember about his father, you know.

In terms of FDR, FDR played the role of president of all the people very well in 1936.

And in 1940, he stayed above the battle.

But he had some good lips.

I.N.R., of course, was the epitome of the above the bat, wasn't it?

I mean, he never got into any of it.

But D.R.

Lee, too long, because he set up a class war.

He called it that.

He fought it instead of Wall Street.

That's right, that's right.

Economic joys.

Now, the question really raised, John, is whether...

whether this, if my State of the Union speech is going to be, you know, we talked about it on the phone, it's going to be, frankly, it's going to be conciliatory toward the Congress.

I'm going to lay it all out as to what we expect, but I'm not going to do it in a mean, you know, like Harry Truman kicked the idiot Congress around saying, by God, you ought to do this, but it's not going to be that.

Nevertheless, the question is whether at this point

That is the best strategy now.

I am confident that any partisan strategy should get wrong, because by partisan I mean Republican versus Democrat.

I've never run as a Republican all the time.

In other words, I always run basically to try to get Democratic votes.

But isn't that my problem?

I'm really talking not about partisanship.

I'm talking about style.

Now, I know that you felt, after the 70 campaign, remember we had a talk, and you talked very openly, and also you said that you hoped that I would maintain dignity, and all that sort of thing, and not get out there and start sweating, and so forth and so on.

Now, we've done that.

The question is whether in this political year, in this context, we ride above the battle.

Frankly, don't take them on.

I mean, when they fight and so forth and so on,

Let me say, when I say write about the battle, of course, we'll ask the Congress to have some revenue sharing, government reorganization, and all the rest.

We're going to do all that.

We'll make our trips, and we'll report on them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But what we're really talking about is whether we get it arranged somehow.

There's one paragraph that makes the point that's kind of fascinating.

He's saying not that the president should move off the presidential pedestal and get into partisan combat or look around the program, sir.

but rather that we should consider whether the avoidance of controversy and conflict may be politically wrong."

And he says, in short, while the President as President is the best posture for the coming year, we may very well need to consider great issues, contested questions, where the President can, as President, throw down the gauntlet to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, or to Congress, or to the Court, or to some massive, powerful institution.

so that Nixon will go into the 72 as a fighting president, not as the professional managerial president.

We might need to cast a resonant role that not only earns respect and quiet applause, but one that excites people to stand up and cheer and excites the partisans to go out and fight, leave, and die, on the basis that the American people love a good fight.

And he sums it up by saying, better a howling press and high polls than a quiescent somnolent press and low polls.

Well, his point, his point would be, and Bob and I say that we can consider this, you remember the confrontation with me?

Now that was a good, god damn good, good confrontation.

It had no effect on the folks.

It was pre-existing.

That's right, thank you.

Now Eric, there we are.

So I, uh, now you have your theory of divinity, I know that.

But when I put it on the other hand, you also have a strong view of the dignity of the Presidency, right?

Yes, sir.

And, uh, and, uh...

But Daniel Rosen, that boy, the Assumption of Daniel Rosen, he maintained the dignity of the Presidency, but he attacked it with Jesus.

Out of the Republican Congress?

Out of the people of the Republican Strange Bedfellows?

Martin Luther King, that's right.

And then when it was all over, he gave a great wrap-up speech on his vision of America, then wrapped himself around with his presidential mantle again, and boy, he was just cynical as hell.

I have mixed feelings about it.

I think you're right and I think he's right.

If I explain it this way,

at least until after your China trip, and I think I'll be a little later, until after your Moscow trip, you ought not to do anything.

You ought not to take on any of them.

You ought to be completely preserved.

That would be for the first time.

All right.

Just not too long, I think.

At least until after.

In other words, play they grow, I play them.

Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Notice why I say that.

It's an entire question of time.

And now, I would hope that you would go maintain a strong position as you are now.

And I doubt you still need all of these guys.

At a time when they're not mad at each other.

Always, when you've got eight or ten people running an issue, even though they carry you with just a muskie or a humphrey or a tin, those guys initially will run stronger than they will after the connection.

Do you think so?

Sure.

We're in separation the other way around too, I don't know.

of the party, but after the fight, after they get in a real good fight, there's going to be some Humphrey people that are going to say, I'm going to vote for him.

There's going to be some Kennedy people that are going to say, I'm going to vote for him.

But now, because they're Democrats, they'll vote for him.

Because they're not really voting for him.

They just voted against him.

Well, that did happen.

I must say, that did happen.

That was 1968 convention.

Now, Humphrey was much weaker.

after the convention.

That's correct.

I ran better at the tribal leagues than he did at the election.

All I'm saying is, down the road, it gives you time.

I think you have to come out of strife.

I think you stated there that you have to be a fighting president.

Why?

And you have to have it in.

It doesn't have to be any bigger.

It doesn't have to be a party.

You know, I started to be a party.

You're not going to realize what I think we're going to do.

I think you should know.

John, both of the parties have had it.

Republican Party has had it, Democratic Party has had it.

It's a curious thing, this historical reference

I remember after Eisenhower was re-elected in 1956, I was sitting here in his office, but I always had a desk over there.

You know, Eisenhower said many things, which we would never, I would never put in a book, like that, because he used to say out loud these things, and I'd see what your reaction was, and he says, God damn the Republican Party, because at that time, he had won 60%, 30%, to 40% of his, beat the hell out of Stevenson, and still lost the Congress, because they were such jackasses, and were running, and they had a hell of a bunch of bastards.

And he goes, God damn, he says, I, but he says, I, put him in a Republican, and he's independent.

New car, new car.

The life car is right.

I don't know whether it can be done, but it may be that of all the things that we might accomplish, that we survive the election.

It may be the fourth, frankly, to do under the new car.

It may just be a union party.

That's a bad term.

But this country, at least.

But you know, I was reading last night

I was reading the Lord Cecil's Biography of Melbourne, which is a fascinating study of the first half of the 19th century in England, and basically how the coalitions and parties, you know, we had involved in all that sort of thing.

But in this country,

The significant thing is the Republicans, there are about 27% of the people who say they're Republicans.

There are about 43% who say they're Democrats if they're asked.

Of course, that bulge mostly comes because the most southerners are Democrats.

So in the northern states, they're relatively even.

But the important thing is that

the second strongest party in this country by far with the swing of the independents.

And there is more and more and more, particularly, particularly, I'll put it this way, in the Midwestern and Northern and Western states like California, the independents hold the balance of power in the South.

People call themselves Democrats, but of those Democrats, I would get help showing them what that, for what it's worth, that poor fool, you know what I mean?

This is a fascinating thing.

General election.

In the country, it's very close.

Go ahead.

It was, what, 75-25.

No, no, no.

I remember what it was.

I was going to say, there needs to be a place, frankly, where the people, where the decent people of this country can get together.

We've got the demagogues, as you know.

I don't know what you're going to call it.

The answer is not very good.

We're a conservative alliance.

We're used to scare off a lot of people.

I don't know.

But that's further down the road.

What I say is this, that I have people very strongly that what I need to get from you, accountants, is some frankly good advice as to what the devil is the right posture.

Because you've got, as distinguished from that, you've got one for the right price.

who's a liberal side, very decent guy.

But he totally rejects that.

Totally rejects that.

He believes that I should just sit along and be a nice, pleasant, hard-working, his idea of a professional president.

Well, and Reagan doesn't know as far as a lot of others to go to a further point of not just being a professional president, but that.

You actually have done yourself harm in spite of the great acceptance of your China initiative or even the economic policy that you hurt yourself by.

or the fact that you didn't go up at all in the polls as a result of it, was that the Glee, if I'm not wrong, was counterbalanced by the fact in that people are so rattled, so fed up with politics, government, and no future, and shocked, and scared, and concerned, that they don't want to be surprised, and they don't want anybody doing anything, taking any big steps.

They just want, and therefore you shouldn't do any more.

No, that's why he's not on the scene.

He's not on the scene.

That's on the other side, on the other side of the Eisenhardt thing.

Yet we want to remember that Eisenhardt didn't go down as the most successful president either.

Well, the point that I'm making here is this, though.

There is one factor that is not measured in this job.

whatever the polls may presently show, and this is the thing, Mary, you talked about, you talked to your marvelous friends, and people on the telephone, and the rest, and I had, you know, Colston has this network of people all around the country, and I may be even crazy, but I do believe that at the present time, among

People think that we're a lot stronger today than we were a year ago.

No question.

Now, do you agree with that or not?

I don't know whether that, in other words, the intensity of the impeachment is there.

There's a danger there that wasn't there a year ago.

I don't know.

Now, the reason it isn't great, if I'm even frank with you,

Because of your very nature, because of your temperament, very few people think they know you.

So they don't have the feeling of warmth, they don't have the feeling of identity.

They don't have the basic feeling of, I don't give a damn how I'm born and got, you know.

which they had for Eisenhower, for many years actually.

Eisenhower had a father, my guy was a great war hero, he was a lousy president, he didn't really do his job, he wished he had done it, a lot of people think that, but it was a major difference, he could have been elected a third time, just because they fell safe with him and so on.

Now, they don't know quite how to judge you, they don't have that in their mind,

any real fixed idea about what you are.

Kennedy, they got mesmerized.

They said, oh, Kennedy was in trouble.

He got assassinated.

So they started down.

No, he started down.

He was way down east in our part of the country.

Now, I think that at the end of your third year, the fact that...

With all the turmoil, with the unemployment, with all the hell you call it, that's just rather incredible that you're as high and bold as you are.

Now, I do think that until after the Moscow Triad, and I want to put in a reservation, some natural candidate shows himself.

Now, whether it's the ecology, whether it's the bureaucracy, whether it's an individual, I may want to change my mind.

But I would say basically until after the convention,

You ought to get in a fight.

If you get in a fight, get in a fight with Ashbrook or McCluskey.

Get in a fight with them in your own party.

Don't get in a fight with the Democrats.

Take over the right wing if they want to denounce you.

If Buckley didn't want to denounce you, just give them the back of the hand a little bit.

Just say, I'll follow their advice and we'd all go down the drain or some such.

And if you get to fight within your own party to the extent that you do, I would recommend you do it until after your conventions.

When the conventions are over, and we ought to be laying a predicate for it, maybe unemployment insurance, maybe balance of payments is your cause, maybe the ecology is, but somehow we have to pick out a one bill for you to tilt at.

You've got to pick out something.

Because you are going to have to deal with images of fire.

Everybody likes a fire.

They just do.

But also, the thesis is that they've got to realize that I probably got where I am because I was a firefighter.

That's right.

I mean, I wouldn't survive without being one.

No question about it.

You could turn, you're a firefighter, and this is that point.

And nobody's going to want you to do it.

And here's the guy that came back, not wanting to exist, and he's President of the United States.

Well, this doesn't mean that you have to be a mean bitch.

You have to be a dog.

How do you get people to, you say, to know the President?

How do you do it?

I mean, isn't it very difficult with the media problems?

Isn't that really what we're up against?

Yeah.

It may be insolvent, but you know it isn't completely insolvent.

You can cure that, but you know it isn't.

You're going to have to change your way of doing it a little bit, once a week, or maybe every once in two weeks.

You're going to have to selectively pick people.

Nothing flatters people like attention.

And I understand that.

I'm not being critical.

You don't like to fall over people.

You don't like giving them that much attention.

You like to do your work.

But you're not that precarious.

and serve more time himself, and I think that's great.

But I think you have to, once every two weeks, you have a black child in there here, stagging you every night.

Don't bring your wives.

Your wife will get mad at you after you do it all the time.

You can't always do it.

But invite these people from around the country.

Invite a hundred of them.

Take a Jay Cameron, he comes to mind, from Dallas, Texas.

probably the most important and most respected man in the oil service.

He's a Republican.

He has tradition from Oklahoma.

He's given an enormous amount of money over many years.

But he got his feelings hurt after he came in.

He wasn't called in.

Well, he not only wasn't called in, he couldn't get anybody on the phone.

He couldn't talk to anybody.

And he really felt he was embarrassing humanity.

But he's the one that I told him, why don't you invite JT?

And he's a decent guy, just a decent guy.

And you invite another from California.

I'm not trying to make guesses, but you might have heard of him.

And just have a hair down and spend enough time with him, associate with him.

Maybe it's vintage.

Maybe it's foreign.

And just say, I want you to tell us.

And I will tell you what I've been doing.

And I want you to.

No, I need your help.

I want you to help.

I don't know what I've done wrong.

Let's be here for somebody.

I just cover New York, Chicago.

I do it every couple of weeks.

We are planning to do that in April, March, April.

It's still in the power centers.

It's in the eight major states.

the New York crowd, the California crowd, the Texas crowd.

All, all, all separate.

Each separate.

So, because they're all people that are together, don't you think?

Yes.

Some are getting a group in from Texas, spending some time with them, and then a group from Illinois, rather than a guy from Texas and a guy from Illinois.

Well, there are these types of thought.

Well, talk...

There's a lot of merit on the other side, too, though.

Yes, sir.

They like to see people from the other side.

They like to meet these people.

That night, 40 people from Texas, they figured, well, I don't want to fight.

But if you just have one or two from there, I've never really been selected that way.

Good point.

And they get to see other people from other states.

I would say we're going to have 10 dinners.

Maybe it's better to make each dinner have four people from each of the 20 states rather than 100 people all from one state.

Right.

Yes, sir.

For the simple reason that they make some people... You know, the best thing to do with them is a Q&A.

Just to get out and ask questions and to answer any questions.

A Q&A?

You must ask them very much.

Say, don't eat those down on your mind.

Say, they tell me I'm not very popular with you all.

You know something else about me.

What else do you need?

Now, John, that'll help with that kind of... That's for the leader class, though.

How do you do this, though?

How do you break through to the maps?

That's the other problem we're talking about.

You become a fighter.

Some way, you see, you have to have some mass appeal.

I don't get it.

We ought to do, for example, all our press conferences and that sort of thing.

Not necessarily.

I'm asking for that as my advice.

You see, one of the reasons we've had to limit those to an extent is that there's the equal target problem, and I don't want to give these other guys a shot.

On the other hand, it is something, what I just mentioned, it is something that I can do reasonably well.

Now, and of course it's an adversary machine.

I've never had a press conference that's like that.

Would you have some?

Would you have more than that?

Oh, I'd have some, yes, I'd have some.

Yes, any more than that, that's enough.

I wouldn't have any more than that.

Now here again, it's an adversary position for the press.

But that's a little bit different from what I'm talking about.

They expect that.

That's something that the people expect to have.

But what you need is to have an adversary of some other proportions.

You need to be either strongly for something or strongly against something.

Or maybe strongly for something and strongly against something.

And frankly, that has to be distilled very soon.

You don't use it now.

Well, you may not use it now, but you can start preparing for it, actually.

And it's going to have to be something that touches the lives of people.

The ecology may not be the answer.

You don't want to go overboard with that issue.

Well, maybe there ought to be jobs.

Maybe there ought to be jobs.

Maybe there ought to be, but to do that you have to have a program.

You have to have a book before.

And this does violence to you and I.

Because he said you've got to be competitive with us all.

Well, so you could turn the jobs thing the other way, which is your point that all that ain't gonna make any difference.

The job problem really is the social problem.

You could go out on the social side instead of the board of directors.

Now, the bureaucracy is a great enemy.

Taxes are a great enemy.

I would be a wonder to recommend to you.

We haven't got taxes at the moment.

We can't cut them.

But if we finally come, if we finally do, I don't know, we may not, but if we finally do come around to anything on the property taxes, value add, and so forth, we've got to really pull that goddamn parachute.

But we may use that to... We can't be for taxes, honey.

That's not good.

You might have to be against some of the taxes.

You may be against the parking taxes.

We've got to find some substitute for it.

But, uh...

But you, in other words to say, after the Moscow trip, you believe that it would be well then, you've got to be out fighting for something.

That's your...

Now, I don't think anybody's in question for what you're doing.

You're doing a very excellent job.

But I'm not sure that either people love you or hate you or fear you.

And they ought to be doing both.

They ought to be doing all three.

Yeah, love, love, love, fear, hate.

You ought to have a lot of them that love you, a lot of them that fear you, and a few that hate you.

and they love you for some reason, and they fear you for another reason, and they hate you for another reason.

But to be a good, professional presence does not generate, nor does it appeal to the instinctive emotions that motivate people to a high degree.

Now, it may be that this is a year when you don't have to, but I don't think so.

I think you play it.

As a professional president, you do a good job through the Moscow trip, but it's too dangerous to carry me on that because if you don't have a degree of support, if you don't have the love and the fear and the hate and the respect,

That is to motivate the people.

If you have no reservoir of good will on which to fall back, then something's going to happen to you.

The economy doesn't do good.

You've got to ask the people that are with you about what you're right and what you're wrong.

That's right.

And you've got to have them to fight for you come hell or high water.

And they've got to think that you've got the courage to do it, that you stood up and you did something.

And it's great.

They think you do, that you do have that.

Because of the actions you took in August the 15th, I think you changed a great many people's ideas and minds about you.

But here again, you were dealing with an abstract problem which they didn't understand.

And they couldn't relate to it.

They don't relate to the international monetary field.

They do their wage and price controls, and they understood that.

And they thought, sure.

And you have a high degree of acceptance.

And they thought you showed great courage in doing it.

But this spring, this summer, you're going to need something else.

That's right.

And you're going to need, maybe there's a Supreme Court.

And you say this year, you can't take on the State Department.

I'm not saying you can't.

A major shake-up in the State Department.

This kind of means that the average person, it may not sell to you, but the average business man would.

By tens of thousands.

Everybody has this.

Everybody has ever been to Mississippi.

And maybe this summer would be the time to get Bill to agree.

Without any doubt.

I don't mean to take it off Bill.

Just say you have Bill's recommendations stated or he recommends it to you.

You just say, I've got major reorganizations to take apart.

We're going to get equipped to compete in this world.

We're going to have a, we're going back to a discipline of hard work.

Maybe your enemy is permission issue.

All right, I hit that hard at 7 o'clock.

All right, maybe you're not permissive.

Not just on drugs, not just on films, but in the whole field of permissiveness.

Say we've gotten too soft.

We have to discipline ourselves.

And on the other hand, you're not only against permissiveness, you're for discipline.

Now, maybe this isn't sexy enough.

Maybe this doesn't capture the people enough.

And I'm rambling here, because I'm sorry, I don't know exactly what to say, because I haven't crystallized it in my own mind.

But what I'm trying to say to you is that what I said a moment ago, you have to be for something, and you have to be against something.

Now, it had to be earth-shaking, provided people know that.

Something will trigger.

Something will come up.

that will give you a chance to do that.

Now, you've got to seize it.

Then you have to seize it.

You have to seize it.

It may come before Moscow.

I hope it doesn't.

I hope it can come later.

And you have to try to seize it in a non-political environment.

This is where I hope you won't be partisan or political until as late as you possibly can.

I'm not telling you to be partisan at all.

I'm telling you that if some opportunity presents itself, then you can seize it.

And you do it in a non-political way.

made his tonography, although that's probably too narrow, too limited.

I don't know how you do about dope, but boy, that's the one that dope just bothers the hell out of me.

The dope issue is...

the second strongest issue concerning people after whatever their first one is.

But you can make it the strongest issue.

You say it's got to be one that really gets to them.

And that gets to them because there isn't a single mother in this country who isn't scared shitless that her kids are smoking marijuana this afternoon.

Not one.

And if you can move on now, and the thing is there, it's something we believe in.

We're against it.

It's not the answer to this thing.

The person can do it in all good conditions, not in an environment where it would be the only issue.

If he goes on the ecology, he wouldn't mean what he's saying.

I'll let my kids do that.

But you go the other way, and you do mean what you're saying to a degree.

You don't get far enough to satisfy the people who are going to help you.

You'd be perfectly happy to go for capital punishment for a peddler.

And they did.

And on the public square, the guillotine.

So, castration every hour on campus.

So, dare you believe it so you can get out and be real.

It's an issue of vital personal concern.

It's the domestic issue on which the Nixon administration gets one of the lowest marks that it gets on anything.

We are seen as not doing a goddamn thing.

We've done what anybody ever dreamed of.

Nobody knows about it, just you.

Now we go out and do some of this stuff.

We'll go out and arrest all these peddlers at the high schools and hurt them all in the concentration camps like we hurt all the demonstrators in Washington in the concentration camps.

And the Japanese will walk out too.

People that jump up and cheer.

And so we can't defect them.

I would say the other one.

I take on the courts.

I take on the federal courts.

Now, you gotta get something that's emotional about it.

We can tie that into dope, because the whole dope problem, the reason cops don't arrest dope peddlers is because they can't get back to them.

Now, the school thing is testing.

And you don't want it to just be a demagogue or a vicar.

But my God, most of them, these judges are terrible.

This Richard judge ought to be... Now, let me give you an issue with that.

Oh, he was appointed by Johnson.

Oh, I'm sure.

Johnson performed a lot of bad things.

But let me give you an answer to that.

Why don't you just take this issue to the country, that everybody ought to be answerable to somebody, short of God Almighty.

The federal judges are not answerable to anybody at their point in their life, and the only judgment day they meet is the judgment day that none of us can report on.

But what we ought to do is change the system in this country where these federal judges are not beyond the reach of humanity itself.

And I'm going to fight for reconfirmation, not reappointment, but reconfirmation by the Senate every eight years.

Or every ten years.

You don't have to reappoint them.

Just make them come up for reconfirmation.

Now, this may sell like hotcakes.

Or, I wouldn't limit them in terms.

They'll, you'll be accused, or whatever, you're trying to destroy the repentance of the judiciary.

Well, to the extent that I think they ought to be responsible, yes.

I think they ought to be responsible.

They all say they want to be, uh, they want to be, uh, uh,

living in their own county, and they think the Constitution is a living document with a letter of action.

There's nothing to be confirmed in the Senate.

I don't care that the President has to reappoint them.

They don't have to be reappointed.

But every one of them has to come up for reconfirmation by the Senate and say, I have my problem with the Senate, but they're representing some people.

And I'm just tired of these judges running around here with these lies.

Lies that form this answerable rule.

That's a hell of an issue.

That's a demagogic issue to play with.

But in another way, it's true.

Now, I'm not so sure they're in a very sound position today.

Now, if you want to, if you don't want to do that, to insist that all retire at age 65, or a second, take a year.

A lot of congressmen and senators

Well, just say that's all.

Just say we're supposed to count half of our own Congress.

Scott's 70.

I'll tell you, that's not a deal.

Just say, now, those people are insured.

People in the constituency of Washington, an 80-year-old man, that's their business.

I'm not trying to invade the province of the elected.

But the elected didn't put Bill Benson on that court.

And he ought to retire.

But this is the only way I know you can get this racial thing.

Got a question?

which you had to unfortunately, fortunately not have enough.

This is one place where when you get money out of the nut cutting after a convention, we've got many, really many issues due to the fact that whoever the Democrat is, if it's Muskie, or if Hubert should come back, or if Teddy should slip in, they have got to be for

integrated housing, integrated schools, and busing, and I am asking.

And I'm going to fight this.

I'm going to have that.

I'm going to read your legislation right down the line.

I was early.

It's supposed to be working on that goddamn thing, and I don't know where it is.

I've got to hear you.

If you do that, that's a great issue.

But I'm not sure that you ought to wait until after you've been mentioned.

I agree.

What I have to say is, did you notice an interesting thing that even Huberton,

down in Florida now, here's you, the great governor, has come up for the space shuttle, and Musk is against it.

And he has come up against the Richmond decision.

You were helping him, didn't you?

Yes, sir.

He had to win the Florida primary, and that's all he could do.

He will say what he can.

Most of us, he's pretty, you know, he takes it quite a bit.

But last but not the same, look at Hubert Humphrey in Florida.

The election thing in Florida with his pollsters, if you allocate the undecided votes, you get Nixon 62, Muskie 38.

With the undecideds, 55, 34, 12.

So as far as the other software, we're okay.

But then you put Muskie in the race, make it a three-way race.

Muskie, you mean?

I mean Wallace in the race.

Make it a three-way race.

Then Nixon drops from 62 to 48.

Muskie from 38 to 30.

And Wallace gets 22.

We lose 14 points and Muskie loses eight.

But we still lead by 18 points.

So Wallace doesn't hurt us enough to matter in there.

But look at the 22.

He gets 22 in there.

of the total literature.

This is all he's going to do in the Democratic primary.

Then, if you put Monarchy and General on as a lit ticket and a black ticket, you know, there's two other independent parties, so you have three sub-parties.

Then, Exit goes down a little more at 43, but Muskie goes down at 22.

Wallace, they killed him.

Poe said, Tony, McCarthy, if we don't find a way, if we don't find a way to get McCarthy in the race, I would like him to be assigned.

He kills him in New York.

He gets 10-12% McCarthy, but he gets an 8 out of 10 from the liberal Democrat.

But my point is,

There's no problem with me on dope.

There's no problem with me on the courts.

There's no problem with me on this.

As you know, I am, you know, the interesting thing is, John, I did this, but who the hell's making these appointments?

I fought for, hell, I fought for Haynes, for Carswell.

I appointed the two most conservative, four dead conservative judges in the country.

And so we changed the court.

We've got a good issue there.

I don't know what the trouble is, Bob.

I think your PR guys haven't been a goddamn hit back across the country.

All right, you've got that across.

You've got to let the people who care.

Yeah, I think it's a very important thing.

Yeah, we've got to keep driving.

But not trucks, though.

That's the same issue.

No, it's not the same issue.

No, no, it's not.

Okay.

No, but not the way people want to live.

Permissions, basically.

Okay, but what's wrong with drugs is you aren't doing a damn thing about the guy that's standing outside my daughter's schoolyard trying to sell her marijuana this afternoon.

You're letting him stand there and do it.

That's how they see it.

They don't give a damn about the Supreme Court or anything else.

And when the friendly local policeman arrests that guy, then they take him to the local court, the local judge lets him off, or gives him 10 days.

Suspense.

Data.

John's point, though, is a very, very, you would, I think it was Eisenstein, you would say first,

We're better off today than we were a year ago, despite already no question, because of dealing with the credulity thing.

Yes, you're confident.

I mean, yes, you're strong and all that kind of shit.

Second point is that there is, however, a need for a, a need, if you get into an election, to establish an identity.

An identity can only come not from being a professional president.

It has to be by

the love and hate and fear syndrome.

And so it's always, you've got to find issues that will get that goddamn thing going.

Now I've had that going before, you know, I had it when I ran for the House, when I ran for the Senate, when I ran for President, to a certain extent, right?

But you just can't keep it alive.

See, the difficulty with the price theory is that it just, you swim along and

and just do a good job.

It's not being such a resident.

I don't know what the hell it is.

You make a big thing out of doing a good job.

He goes to the honest point.

That doesn't help.

That won't do the trick.

He goes to the argument of incumbency, that as a president, for people to vote against you, you have to have a reason to be against you.

And if you are the purely professional president, then...

I will differ with that a little bit, Bob, to this extent.

The tendency today on the part of people is to be against people who are eating.

That's right.

Now, this is against, not necessarily legislators, because they always cover themselves, but against executives.

That's right.

Basically, that's right.

By God, they kicked the goddamn governors out of Denver.

The Republicans had never pressed laws.

They took them back.

But the Republicans took the worst path, but we had most of them out.

That's correct.

Remember that.

That's exactly right.

So what you have to do is overcome it.

You have to be.

And that's only done reasonably well this past year just to survive.

Amazingly well.

That's the point.

Amazingly well.

Considering the fact that we've got 6% unemployment and still have a goddamn war.

Oh, it's practically over.

You know, they may see you well, I think, but now all you need to do is be sure that you don't run the risk.

You have to crystallize some of that support.

You have to get people who are willing to get out there and fight for you.

John, the thing that I'm concerned about is the methods of doing things.

Now, you are too keen on the press conference deal as a method for getting across the personality.

Well, it's good, but it doesn't do what I'm talking about.

It doesn't put you in a position to fight, doesn't it?

You have the antagonism of the press that people expected at that time.

You get 26 issues for however many questions I've asked you.

Now, you convince people that you're knowledgeable, that you're scholarly, that you're a good professional, that you know what you're doing.

You do all that.

But those kind of confrontations don't evoke the slam-bang enthusiasm, nor the disgust or even the hate.

What I'm saying is that you have to find so many issues.

that you can tie people to the emotional wisdom.

And you can't do it at the press conference.

It does everything else for you.

I'm not saying you ought not to do it.

It's through the professional president.

That's correct.

No question.

You've done that.

I've done it enough.

Oh yeah, you've done it enough.

You have to keep doing that.

I've done it enough that people are presently, fairly well, convinced on the professional president point.

No doubt.

That's undoubted.

Not to be sure.

I think it's enough.

I don't know if you realize that.

I would say so today.

But the point is, John, the point is that really it's not for the country.

The country needs somebody that they have, you know, they've got to have basically stronger feelings, emotional feelings about.

Now, one of the reasons, of course, is I'm sure you realize that probably we couldn't do it in the last three years.

The country is so goddamn torn up that hate, bitter, etc.

could have just tore it down.

You know, when you figure, you realize how many times there have been 200,000 people out on these goddamn streets.

So, but on the other hand, now that we've had a year of cooling, maybe we can now have a year of heating up.

But you have calmed people down, no question too much.

Well, no, I think you've done exactly right, because they were brought up for the wrong reasons.

And they were brought up for the wrong causes.

And what you need to do is serve, in an emotional way, to time you.

You don't want 100,000 people in the back streets of Washington, or 10,000 in the back.

That doesn't help you.

But you want some issue, whether it's a foreign issue or whether it's a domestic issue, that somehow ties into you and that you crusade about, one that you feel very strongly about.

And if it's the school system, I tell you, of course, what I think,

That's right.

That's why this housing, this federal sponsorship of the integrated housing in the suburbs, the forest hills, for example, which you've been saying so much.

the school system that you've been against, this Muslim thing, these are things that touch people and you never take them away from them if you did this over.

Not for four or five years or ten years.

One other thing, however it has to be said,

And this goes to the timing point.

Because you say if an issue comes, you've got to seize it.

Like if you go to the, you have a bell scale, and you've got a big meeting on, how should I tell this?

Well, I say it didn't affect the polls.

It may well have.

You never know what, you know, you never know what polls is.

The main thing is we didn't go down.

We stayed up at what we were under attack.

Like part of what I mean is something else.

We now are at a point where we,

If we can, in terms of timing, that there's so much news that flows, and it's so fast, and the public memory's so short, that if you strike too early on an issue, you'll forget.

There's no question about it.

So that's one of the reasons why we've got to hit this wherever we want.

at a time where we can, now we're going to write this one and we're going to write it during the election, see what happens.

Otherwise they'll say, oh, it's the same old speech, I heard that speech, but he got new.

Because you need a little background so it doesn't look like he just done something and had it up there when they tried it.

And also, you want to remember to have something like the last month.

Having in mind the fact that maybe things are worn up, you've got to keep snapping them up.

Oh, this is a...

This is a very volatile populace we have today.

The whole thing has changed, John, since you've run and since I have run when we ran earlier.

I mean, it's changed since the year, certainly, 52, when I made the first use of television.

But that audience there is relatively small considering everything.

Although it had a massive impact.

But you realize that today, that goddamn television hits at the news to 40 to 50 million people every night.

So this is life in the studio, you know what I mean?

The newspapers, all these other things.

You know, we could rely on that.

And it changes.

And it's in a different way than it's been created.

I said, you read up, you explore books, you watch TV, you sit down.

It's an important thing.

The war happens right before your eyes.

And that was good.

Because my point is that the television, because it hammers the people night and night, it means that the media and the commentators, I haven't talked about what you're trying to do yet, that they...

They also will be inserting other news in between the time of your own, you see.

That's why we have to constantly keep attacking, you know.

That's true.

And it's no question what it's a powerful meeting.

Of course, there's other potential enemies.

See, they'll rate high now.

Strangely enough, they're all there in practice.

They'll rate high in the minds of most people.

Most people think they're biased and prejudiced.

And they're ready to believe you when you take them on.

But you can make anybody an issue.

The president can make anybody an issue.

I'm not sure that you can.

Did you know I tapped two or three?

I still think a great target, if I could be Washington Post and New York Times, not the newspapers as such or the media as such, just two newspapers.

I saw President Roosevelt, and you did too, take on Colonel McCormick in the Chicago Tribune.

He never came back as a member of the military.

Never.

Never did.

But he took them on.

That's right.

And also, you remember when he killed one reporter, John O'Donnell?

Yes, sir.

He got that right.

Iron Cross on him.

John O'Donnell, who was a great man, a fine man, a decent guy, got down and killed him.

Killed him as an ambulance down at Iron Cross.

He sure did.

And so these things can be done.

And I don't want to bug you on this court thing.

And I know that this lawyer instinctively shy away from it.

But I believe that the people of this country have a real concern about these courts.

And they think most of the trouble comes from these courts.

And they are right.

And it's quick.

Whether it's immigration, whether it's school, whether it's taxes, the whole kind of thing is tied to the courts.

No, I want to ask you one thing.

This is not something that I imagine.

But did you say that you did or did not like deep sea fishing?

Or I love it, but I'm okay.

You don't have to be worried.

I'll tell you this, but I told you to be sure to be okay.

Did you have, do you ever look at that, that television program called the American Sportsman on ABC, and it's in the, you know, you have this, what, Josh O'Neill?

Never.

Last week, they had, or I guess a week ago, they had the caption of a mark on the ground.

You had to see it.

Well, the caption of that mark, John, was done off of Bob Appelbaum's place, the place that I go on Airmate Key.

The boat is the sea lion.

The captain that you saw, saw there, is our captain.

Is that right?

And they've got a hundred and four hundred and fifty miles.

Now, hardly.

I had to go down before, you know, Thursday night.

And I'm a fisherman, but I was planning to go over for a day.

If you would like to consider it, I think, have you ever seen that place in hours?

Well, I think it is one of the, it is one of the most, you know, I hate to exaggerate, but in its way, it's like anniversary.

What it is, this guy's got this island out there, uh, and, uh, with the, with the, uh, with the, uh, I don't know where you're doing my damn boat, but this beautiful house on the island, uh, and, uh, uh,

A few years ago, Pete would be in Appelhoff, and you and I would be there, maybe, in a mic by George Sanders.

You can't.

Listen, it's this weekend, the 21st of April.

All right.

Now, I have a last speech.

What's the other New York tonight's speech for you?

So the National Industrial Conference will be at Lincoln Park.

Why does that have to be at Lincoln Park in Florida?

Because they have a pop cap on once in a while.

See, what we do, John, the helicopter orders will be the same.

And the weekend is Lincoln's birthday.

How about people's birthday?

Because I'll spend one day there, too.

All we do is go over, and I'll show them.

They go all the way up and have dinner that night.

What are you doing at the NFC?

Sir?

What are you doing at the New York thing?

Friday.

The National Industrial Commerce Board?

Friday the 21st.

Come down Friday.

Oh, I have the alphabet.

Well, I don't have it.

Well, that's right.

The alphabet.

I don't have it.

Well, I don't have it.

No, I'm sorry about that.

So why do you have it?

You borrow it.

We don't build hands here in Columbia.

And we get to do it.

Because this is, if you don't trade fish, you don't buy them.

This is a disbelief.

You say to it, I've heard it.

They call it, you know, I don't fish or anything like that.

But you can't go on this damn boat without catching anything.

We were down there about a month ago, and we got there, we arrived at 3 in the afternoon, and Athlon says, what do you want for dinner?

He said, fish.

He says, what kind?

And I said, yellowtail.

And Raposo went on and said, snapper or grouper.

He said, fine.

So this color guy gets up in a little boat and goes out.

Within an hour, he brings back the old tale.

Rupert Smith.

That's weird.

I can't believe it.

I believe it.

The water is, you see, it's part of the island.

And it's the most beautiful beach and everything.

It's terrific.

It must be something.

That was what that damn thing was like.

They don't know the whole thing there.

That was after all.

I'm sorry about that.

His name was Walker's Keith.

Yeah, I know it.

What's that boy's name?

I know all of those folks.

Tom Ward was president.

Tom was the director.

I know.

And the head of ABC Sports is... Rune Armitage.

Rune Armitage.

All right.

Rune Armitage.

And David Jackson was there shooting the lines, Matt Walker was shooting out of them.

I mean, Jake Buffalo was not showing up.

Well, when it gets to the 12, it might not do.

We only take, they only need four of us on the end.

I'm not going to go around telling everybody that the House has four bedrooms.

I appreciate that.

Yes, you can.

But it's sad.

That's great.

Yes, sir.

You know, I have no... No, no, no.

I'm going to send her a text anyway and get ready to go visit down there.

Yeah.

Sometime later.

May 1st.

You haven't heard of that, have you?

Oh, yes, sir.

Now, all of a sudden, it's here to happen.

She's barbecue.

That's what that whole thing is.

She's barbecue.

We beat you up.

That's what it is.

That's right.

Sorry, did you follow up with Pete?

Yes, sir.

That's right.

Okay.

That was a great thing.