Conversation 659-006

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This is the presidential seat.

Well, we wish you well.

Arrest someone.

Tomorrow night we turn to death, pal.

This is not too bad.

Wow.

I must say that I know that we've come out there to give the bowels to bureaucracy that we have.

It's a much fine work of staff that we appreciate.

We appreciate your kind attention.

These are the top three.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

I'm sorry.

I have to bring this encyclopedia in.

If I can have Max come in right now and convince him to take a picture, then we'll bring Pastor Robbie in and they can do their presentation.

No, that's not going to happen.

If we bring Max in first, then that just crowds me.

That's supposed to be the plan.

No, sir, but it will preclude the plan of execution.

I got your school memo, or your, you know, the long piece this morning.

And I've got a meeting with Mitchell and Richardson and Schultz this afternoon.

They'll give me a chance to get the thing on track in the proper direction.

You've got a tight end of the line.

No, I don't.

What time do you have to leave?

3.30.

Yeah, yeah.

Have you seen this before?

Are you in there?

I'm in there.

I thought you were.

I looked at the index and said, where are you?

By our spaces.

The work that goes into this are unbelievable.

Oh, it's got to go in the end.

The way I like your speech, Mr. President, I like your speech.

Oh, all right.

When you made that first speech, you had all the tough names over here.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it takes some time for the work to end, so we hope.

At least we can't go any further.

If you're going any further, the only other step is to take a surrender.

We can't do that.

You can't oppose the economy.

It's got a problem, but you can say that if they agree to resign, that's fair, honestly.

Oh, that's where we were.

Okay.

Come on in.

Mr. President.

I'd say, you know, Mr. President, my old friend, Carson.

And I meet my young friend.

Yeah.

Mr. Chairman, so can you say a few words about Mr. Elliott, the chairman of the board of the competition out there?

Very good.

Yes.

Oh, that's a good one.

That's a different one.

That's a great one.

For me, I'll take it back.

Thank you, but you get right in here if you will.

Here we are.

No.

That's the first dog.

This is the first one.

This is the president.

This was written in tradition.

It was published and accomplished here.

It was written yesterday.

Oh, all right.

done at universities or... No, you know, in your house, you know, that's... Yeah, yeah.

Of course, you have pieces done by...

If I may add, this is the unique and one of the greatest philosophy of Jewish work that has been on the table in this century.

And...

2,500 scholars from all over the world, many of them from the United States, have participated.

I don't want to sound US people, but there's a lot of reasons for this kind of work.

What people say that we choose are the people of the book.

In this sense, this book is about the people of the book.

We try here to show our heritage,

and tradition, our history, and our culture.

And we believe that we are contributed to the civilization that lives by the doctrine of humane liberty, by the ethic of man's equality, by the ideal of peace, and by the principles of democratic government.

We also think, Mr. President,

that our two countries share the same common heritage.

You, the most powerful nation of this world, that under your leadership has strived so relentlessly to strengthen those countries that their freedom is threatened.

We, a small country embattled for the last 23 years,

But our roots are 2,000 to 4,000 years deep.

And I want, Mr. President, to thank you especially for your support for the cause of the Greenpeace in the area, for making it possible for this to defend itself, by itself, as long as peace has not been achieved.

And I would like to convey to you the gratitude of the people

Thank you very much.

I'm grateful for your silence.

If they want to... Oh, they've got this covered.

They would like to have a picture of me passing through this petition.

It's on.

All right.

This is a little side question.

I apologize for that.

President of the United States of America.

That's where we came from, and we came from all the nations of the world and the congregations that were made by the people of the Jewish States of this nation, our region.

As a consequence, I would consider this to be part of the American history, not just Jewish history.

That's what I feel about it.

As far as our, what you said about our general policy to a different country,

What we've done in Europe is also our own.

I mean, there's peace in that part of the world, and survival, and strong, and independent states.

And part of the interest of the United States is also in the United States.

So we're going to be sure to come back soon.

You've got to get it together.

You've got to get something together.

You see, we had bookmarks today.

These were made of steel here and there.

Would you like a short summary?

That's fantastic.

How many years?

Five years.

Thirty percent of the documents are done in the United States.

If I had a dollar in the U.S., 60 percent is read and 10 percent is read.

Maybe you're kidding, I suppose, but the rest of you will believe me.

First of all, you know, I honor and forget I had a very interesting experience in 1966 or 7.

I was blind on the morning.

I was upset.

I was going down there, and I felt there were Asians and African-Americans.

And I was dragging a person in the stories, and he said, Taurus, would you come back?

And I said, I'm just going to share about that.

And he says, there's a group of people here.

He says, there are people in the Jewish state, and there's a Martian unit.

And I went back and I think there were 40 of them, the Martian units I remember.

And one of them was here.

So I just realized that there is a movement of the White Sackers.

There was a donation there of the American people.

And I found that going down the aisle, they were very important people, and all they couldn't afford to tour was in some port to the east.

So you find this there.

Well, we appreciate it very much.

I don't know.

I don't know what it is.

That's another thing.

Well, Mr. President, good to see you again.

Good to see you all, Mr.

Ambassador.

Thank you.

Well, we're honored to be here, and I'm honored to be in the company of OSHA, and I understand you're going to present one to the whole of Minnesota.

Well, I'm honored to be on behalf of our country.

Thank you.

Well, thank you.

We'd be glad to see you again.

Yes, yes, sir.

He's your man.

How do you treat him?

Perfect.

I do have to get it out fast.

You know, I have some nice people out there.

Very, very much so.

I can put it on the line for you.

Do you have another copy for the...

Bye, John.

Bye, Max.

Good to see you.

No, no.

No.

I just had an accumulation of things here.

I'd better sit before I left.

I'll be back tomorrow night, but some of these are...

The member, just before he went out of office, Johnson appointed Kappel and a small commission to look at executive salaries and judicial salaries and congressional salaries.

The question is up now as to whether you should do this or not, and my feeling is that you ought not until after the election even appoint a commission.

No, absolutely not.

You're running a deficit, and we're talking about salary increases.

We're in this whole business of the 5 to 5.5 percent.

Right.

All right.

There's plenty of time actually after the election.

So, okay.

Anybody have a question over there?

All right.

Now, Bob tells me that if you want to do the EEOC thing, it could come through with cease and desist.

And I think we better start passing the word.

46 to 48 is the total time.

Well, you'd be sustained.

There isn't a question about it.

The one danger in passing the word at this time is that if the Southerners end, we'll not filibuster.

They'll lay back and say, let the President take the heat.

I thought you said it was past the time.

Well, now, let's see.

No, no, no, it's come out of committee.

It's come out of committee, and it's... Now, remember, that was the Dominick Amendment to go strictly the court route, and it was defeated.

But they have not yet adopted the cease and desist.

See, it's still before them.

And Irvin and others are threatening to unfilm us around here.

Let them unfilm us.

All right.

Well then, we'll pass the word that... Dominic event is the right thing, that's what I mean.

All right.

Okay.

This just feels as strongly about it.

All right.

Well, it's hard times.

Then, then if... Look, you get the shit you've got to be held anyway by Hensburg.

Yep.

Okay.

But you know, of course, let the Southerners take the heat.

All right.

Let them unfilm us from here on out.

I don't want to have any idea that we supported it on this.

Absolutely.

Not balls out.

There was no question.

In fact, there hasn't been any question where you've been on this for two years.

In the last Congress, same thing.

Okay.

And I mentioned to you that I have your memo on constitutional amendment.

And...

I'm going to talk to Morgan about it.

I am flexible to this point.

Either that or legislation.

Yeah, we can have it.

But we can know we cannot sit here in our mom's shelter hoping and praying that nothing happens.

It won't go away.

Well, it is not going to go away, but the real problem that I see with garments and the other targets, and Christ is the same theory, well, let's wait until he gets to the Supreme Court.

John, we're stuck with that court.

That's the next

until the next court does it and then put in an amendment.

We are screwed and tattooed.

We've got to do it before it gets to that damn court.

Because I don't trust the court on this.

I've been learning more about this.

It's a very, very broad subject.

And you're right, it involves housing as well as schools.

If you have a constitutional amendment that only affects busing,

It's like trimming, you know, 2% off the end of the road.

It's got to be fundamental.

And I think the presidential thing to do, once you start down this road, is to offer a constitutional amendment that goes through the whole problem.

And that...

I don't know how long it's going to be written.

Well, that's the trick.

I think what I want to do is get a couple of very bright people, take them off to Camp David,

Right.

Sit there and .

Well, I'm not sure we can, I'm not sure we can usefully spend a whole week on this, but if we get up there in the middle of the week and just spend a few days talking, working it out, working on the language,

It may be that we can come up with something that will do this.

It's going to involve reading the things that we've already said on housing and schools to make sure that we know what's behind this.

What is Ron May up to at the moment?

Well, he is up to taking a five-city tour to talk to city and county and suburban government people.

and saying to them, the central cities have gone to hell, everybody's abandoning the housing in the central areas, so in effect you've got to think of the total city, and you've got to assimilate this housing in the suburbs.

And I spent two and a half hours with him yesterday afternoon, and I'll see him again, and we'll get him positioned.

But he's not terribly bright on this.

He's not thinking politically.

And he's got a great call with him.

And they're all cranking him up.

And he doesn't have any more idea of where he's ultimately headed down this road than the man in the moon.

He's got a whole sack full of problems.

And he's running out to talk to people about it, which is a hell of a thing to do in a political year.

Well, I'm not so sure.

I don't know what the hell he's going to say as to what other calling is.

But my guess is he probably wants to run for vice president.

What do you think?

You know, you never, I never want to under judge her.

I don't want to investigate what Romney thinks he's going to do.

That's right.

I just don't have any, I've thought about this.

I can't imagine what it would be unless he's going to go home and run for mayor of Detroit and fix Detroit after some.

I agree.

I just can't imagine what it would be.

Well, my feeling is that maybe, maybe we just have to take it.

I mean, I just, I mean, I just feel in the house, I'm so strong in here.

Hell, even the Jews are against you.

Even the Jews!

You know, I've just received a surprise.

Even the Jews.

Well, Rizzo has that pretty well in mind.

And, of course, we've got that.

You've got to stop my understanding.

Well, in this Long Island thing, of course, you've got the Jews just really up in arms about public health issues.

Yeah.

But, with Romney,

I kept saying to him, he's talking about abandonment and foreclosures and mobility and all this.

I said, you're talking about race.

You're talking about race prejudice.

And he wouldn't admit it.

And then he went off on another big excursion.

I said, Mr. Secretary, look what you're talking about here.

You're talking about people not wanting to live side by side.

I said, it doesn't have anything to do with economics.

He said, well, over half the people in low and moderate income housing are white.

And I said, well, why doesn't that half that bothers people?

It's the other half.

And I said, you're really talking about race.

And you're going to find cities.

And you're going to talk about integration of the suburbs in five cities in an election year.

I can't believe it.

And he said, no, I don't know what I'm going to talk about at all.

He said, I'm going to talk about the stranglehold on the core cities because of the balkanization of the municipalities around.

And I said, no, you're not.

What it all comes down to, really, when you say the words or not, is race.

Well, he began seeing that, and I said, do me one favor.

Don't talk to anybody else about this record until we get a chance to talk further.

And he said, well, all right, that's what he said.

So we're going to talk first of the week some more.

We'll keep working on it.

Well, he's a wild man.

There's just no way of knowing on him.

Well, he's got so much energy and drive and ambition.

He needs a product.

And he needs to be pulling something.

He needs to be in charge of something.

There's a goddamn thing to put him in charge of that I know of.

Well, not without having a keeper.

How the hell was he governor?

I think Van Dusen probably was governor, if the truth were known.

And of course the governor isn't pretty all that great of a coach.

No, no.

You have a budget and that's about it.

And Van Dusen engineered the new Constitution up there, if there's any questions about that.

And I think he's programming Romney.

So, and I'm sure Romney left... Well, the thing is, John, is that I, the reason I wrote that program,

is so that you will really be under no illusions as to my own philosophy.

That's very helpful, right?

And why I reached a conclusion, and it has nothing to do with race.

Right.

God damn it, if, as I, and you should keep that, and pass it around.

No, sir.

That's all I need to say.

I understand.

I want you to show that you can, on either end of the spectrum.

Yeah, with red, it would just blow the poplar off.

Now, the point that I make is that

that we, that with full, with absolutely, John, full recognition of the problem, total compassion, total understanding, and no prejudice, whatever.

I mean, I'm telling you about them and the Black Swords.

They are in my neighborhood.

They don't bother me a bit.

I never care.

All of that, I know that

You've got to deal with the country as it is, and you cannot pull it faster than it's ready to be pulled.

And I constantly get back to one of our little boys around here who was at the party when he didn't cry, and he said,

Lincoln was probably the most pragmatic president we've ever had.

The Emancipation Proclamation was war-making.

Exactly.

He didn't have anything to do with slavery.

He was a war-maker.

And incidentally, everything he did was that.

You know, did you know that his amnesty thing was a war-making issue?

Yep.

I read a lot about him.

Now, of course he is held up.

He wasn't that who went through hell and a horrible captain.

And he marvels in compassion and magnificence and his humor.

And he believed in all these things.

But he put the human first.

Now, I don't put the country first.

The country, I don't think, John, I don't think at this point, going in terms of education, going in the cold,

there's only one ingredient i'd add to what you said there and that is that this court now cannot be you can't view that court without adding the ingredient of professionalism that these guys are our lawyers and that they follow the law and they take it very seriously and that the the

track that you can trace of where the cases are taking us.

If you follow that right down, you're exactly right.

This court is going to do the thing that we fear it's going to do.

And it's going to do it for some of the reasons you assigned, but also because if they're just lawyers and if they justify the law in a judicial way, that's where they're going to end up.

Due to the fact that they cannot reverse

They've always got to go with, and the president is there, but frankly, they are walking into the court with their decisions already written for them.

That's right.

You take this business about whether there's a better education than a biracial mix.

Well, that's in the warp and woof of the cases now.

It's inescapable.

And unless the people announce a contrary doctrine, some way, we're going to have to live by that.

And it's probably wrong.

It's probably a mistake of fact.

That's right.

Well, it's the passion of all of us.

I mean, we've got to realize that they developed that job.

You know, all the do-gooders went down, and Browners, if we were here, and all that.

Brown and all those other right spots came along here, and they had a story for each spot.

And it became the law of the land under Warren.

And not with Warren.

It was the right of the boys who were in Clinton.

And God damn it, it just probably isn't true.

It probably isn't true.

Even Coleman isn't sure anymore.

He really isn't.

That's right.

Coleman's an honest man.

Yeah.

You know, when you come down to it, the scandal, of course, he was basically a Democrat.

He has this fascinating theory.

He says that

When you say that separate education is inferior education, that's white racism.

And he's so damn right.

Because we don't say that white education is inferior.

So it's separate only if it's black education.

So that's white racism.

They deny that even separate housing is inferior housing.

That's white racism.

It means that the Negroes basically cannot run their cities.

They've got to make sure the whites can help run them.

That's white racism again.

Frankly, it has to do, if you apply it worldwide, let's face it,

separate black states are not a good thing, John.

We should have the white colonials in there.

That's right.

That's a lot.

And frankly, I agree with you.

It is part of the law.

the court will come down, they'll come down also for, don't underestimate the reasons I mentioned.

Oh, I don't, at all.

I don't.

I'm sure you're right.

You cannot read Washington here without becoming just a little bit liberal.

But you take a guy like Powell, who has 50 years at the bar or whatever it is, and he'll be impelled that way as a matter of instinct.

because of the present.

Well, anyway.

Let me see what we can do this afternoon in wheeling this Mitchell and Richardson and Schultz toward a work program to develop a constitutional amendment.

And my inclination is to keep Morgan on this because he's so damn knowledgeable of the nuts and bolts.

And then to try and find two top-notch lawyers to sit with us and develop this.

I think from a political standpoint, there's a time-bombing, but also, the standpoint of the country, where we stand, it's...

you have to do some things that are totally honest.

And God, I don't know if I won't believe in this stuff, but I just do it.

You know?

I just, I just, well...

I mean, like, for example, as I tell you, I, every time I speak in those speeches they prepare for me, we get increased food stamps by, uh, a factor of five.

I practically puke.

Three, but it's bad enough.

Yeah.

Or the last time.

Whatever it is.

That proved that we're great.

I'm not really...

Proves we're flexible.

Proves that we're prepared and hungry, and so we're going to get a morsel of this in.

So wouldn't it be better if tripling is good?

Then wouldn't it have it a hundred times as much good?

Meaning everybody would have gotten guaranteed annual lunch.

Well, how would you feel about shooting for completion of this before you leave?

Well, if you could, it would be great.

I wouldn't anticipate you to do it that fast.

Well, I see if we don't, we're liable to get overtaken by events.

Okay.

And Richardson and Mitchell are going to have to testify before the Seller Committee on constitutional amendments.

Basically, I think that they may have to testify before the Lincoln recess.

That's right.

But if you would shoot for the 15th, which is the middle of the Lincoln, by the Lincoln's birthday, right at the time of the meeting,

Well, I know you're going to have other things pressing you, but if we could shoot for that Florida weekend that you're down there to clean this up as a matter of your attention, we can develop it, I think, before you go.

And let me ask you about the...

It may be that I'm totally wrong, but the...

Do you have any other view?

Do you think we can just weather it?

No, I'm coming.

See, I've been doing almost nothing else.

I've been doing almost nothing else but this and housing for the last week or so.

And I've had a chance to try and think this through.

And I've come to the conclusion that there is no way to do it in the courts.

It would probably be very dangerous to go to the Congress for a law because they'd run away.

There's no telling where they'd end up.

the only way to really contain this is with a very well-drawn tight constitutional amendment and then say that's where we are and we aren't going to take any other form or version that's our form and we're for that and it would announce

People think, well, Rubik said there's a bunch of goddamn racists in here and we do it all the time.

So do you.

No, I tell you what I would do is to put out simultaneously a kind of a white paper on that.

Like ours?

Exactly.

And being totally honest about it.

And saying this proposal finds its place in this context and we'll lay it all out and say the courts have run away, they're headed down this line.

There are tough questions of fact in here.

There are things that we don't know.

There are passions running.

There's only one way we know to get to the right result.

You see, we regret that the illusion, as far as I'm interested, maybe on the education side, and the rest of it, our new value added and all that sort of thing, that solves it.

Well, it's one aspect.

But this thing is like a diamond.

It's got so many facets that one of the things you have to talk about is equality.

You have to get the same amount of money to the black schools as you get to the white schools.

And that's where this fits.

But it doesn't answer the problem.

It answers one aspect of the problem.

But then you turn that thing over and there's another one.

And you've got to go with that.

And in order to get a totality of this thing, you've got to have a finance plan.

There's no question about it.

You know, we had an interesting reaction from the leaders of the union.

George Shultz was probably pointing out that how we, in the super-greatness of this administration, with a 53% increase in business, we've seen 43% of this and 35% of this.

Gordon Allen, who's supposed to be great, liberal and racial, he said, he said, he said, my God, there's a hell of a lot of people objecting to that, too.

People who just serve.

He said, why do you object?

Because they aren't getting those promotions.

You're giving them to the blacks who observe enough, which, of course, is true, John.

That's not a need.

We have to do it anyway, but you don't take television.

They're television producers.

They've got television.

Every one of these groups has got a black and so forth.

Some of them are up to it, some are not.

Yep.

garden is talking about the department of interior that's where he would hear and they're going over there sure that's interesting it's funny how these guys cringe when you say that ronnie acted like i touched him with a poker when he said when i said that yesterday yeah he'd love to talk all around it without

without facing that.

Well, okay, that helps with the timing.

Now, on value added, I'm operating on the assumption that we want to be in a position to talk about real estate taxes during the campaign.

Now, there are two ways we can be.

We can have this stuff sort of in the oven with this ACIR study, and with nothing concrete out,

and run clear through the campaign saying we had this idea and we've sent it over there and as soon as we hear back from these fellows then we're going to be ready to go.

Or we can press ACIR and have it come out of there after the convention and before the election and have it under advisement through the campaign.

The Vice President's strong feeling is we'd be better off to have it bottled up than ACIR.

And he's pressing very hard to sort of keep it under wraps.

I would ordinarily have had the opposite judgment, that it would be some advantage in having a bipartisan report on your table

And then you could play it both ways.

You could either campaign against it, if it were to your advantage, or you could pick it up and wave it around and say, this is mine.

But all the time, talking about lower property taxes.

It's a judgment call, and I need a little guidance as to how you see it.

Well, I think that you ought to have a talk with Conway.

All right.

Tell him that we have these two judgments that he's ruling.

Okay.

Whatever you want.

My own guess is, John, having the issue of reducing property taxes may not be as important.

The risk...

of the negative issue of a specific program of another kind of tax.

Maybe it is correct in the sense that we've got to ask for a new tax reform.

to get property taxes down and just talk all around them.

In other words, I don't know whether we could live with that.

But, you know, this is against my usual bent.

I mean, I sort of prefer fighting the thing to the end of the program.

Let's stick it out there and go on.

It's so hard to get people to understand when you've got a media that is trying to destroy it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, we're talking about this some to the media, and we're talking about it to congressmen now in the course of briefing on the CDA.

And we get a pretty interesting reaction from the congressmen, who, of course, focus right in on the real estate tax and on the question of, is it regressive?

What do we say to the blue-collar worker?

And about the time you say to them, well, we know how to do this, and the blue-collar workers' taxes are going to go down, then they're really turned up.

At the same time, they're all very concerned about the deficit.

And they think that this is a very, it's Republicans.

And they think this is a very tough issue.

And the new taxes are not very popular.

One after the other.

Well, I'll talk to Connolly and...

then we'll try and set it up.

I'm concerned about it, too.

We all are.

I don't like that.

But on the other hand, our political opponents are in a hell of a struggle.

What the hell are they doing?

Mostly they want to increase domestic spending.

Some of them say they want to increase defense spending.

But that's a tough question.

And they're feeling great pain on this.

Great pain.

Particularly with those inflation numbers coming down, like on Georgia's chart.

You get the conservative Republicans saying, well, geez, everybody knows a deficit is inflation.

And then you put that chart up there, and you say, well, look what's happening.

It's inflation.

You've just got to say that a deficit under local custody is not a temporary one, which is when you're at local custody.

We talk jobs, and that seems to settle the thing down.

This deficit is for jobs, not for inflation.

Well, okay.

Bicentennial.

Philadelphia aside, Dave Mahoney, I think we're getting Dave some staff and some help in getting him geared in.

He's got an interesting idea, and they've got a model of it over here across the street in their, on the square in their headquarters.

It is to have... Oh, we're putting $4 million in these early years, $4 million a year, and it's...

So we've got an appropriation, yeah, yeah.

But they have a proposal for creating a bicentennial park in each of the 50 states and then booking shows, in effect, to go around to these things.

There'd be auditoriums and there'd be displays and the heritage of America and of the state and that kind of thing.

And then this would become a permanent facility forever with a hall and all that kind of thing, right?

in some population center, not necessarily downtown, but accessible to a lot of people in the state, as a kind of a heritage of the Bicentennial.

Big enough, with water and lakes and so on, so that it'd be a meaningful thing.

Besides which, it'd be a hell of a public works program.

It'd cost about a billion and a half, probably, to do it, plus the land.

And we might be able to use some federal land for this if we get the law written right and move some of this land in other ways.

All new.

They would very much like to have you approve this.

They'd like to have you come and see their model and all that.

I'm not so sure that you should do either one at this point because I've asked for OMB to tell me what's wrong with this and they'll give us a list of

negatives and we can we can shake it out but uh uh you'll be seeing dave i would guess here and there at the dinner or something and i said i would tell you about this proposal so you know what they're very interested in it and i'll be interested to see the evaluation so yeah that's in the works uh

Wyoming?

No, no, no.

You'd have a five-state park there with Montana and Wyoming and Idaho maybe.

Maybe at the junction of the boundaries or something of that kind.

These things don't have to be right down.

No, you wouldn't have 50 altogether, but you'd have every state participating in one or another.

And it'd be totally federal money.

to begin with, and then you'd turn it over.

You'd have a focus for the show.

You'd have a focus for the Bicentennial.

People would take the kids.

They'd go there for the day.

It would not be overnight, as they envisioned.

You'd have all kinds of things going on every day during the year.

And, you see, you could cook a show

that would hit 40 on one, you know, one week, depending on climate and so on.

So there are some problems with it, obviously, but it's the best idea.

I wonder if we're really thinking in modern terms with TV and everything.

Well, they're going to do that, too.

They're going to do a lot of that.