On January 31, 1972, President Richard M. Nixon, Stewart B. McKinney, John D. Ehrlichman, and Ronald L. Ziegler met in the Oval Office of the White House from 4:04 pm to 5:05 pm. The Oval Office taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 661-009 of the White House Tapes.
Transcript (AI-Generated)This transcript was generated automatically by AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Do not cite this transcript as authoritative. Consult the Finding Aid above for verified information.
telling me that you had a birthday yesterday, and I just wanted you to know that.
And I saw how young you were.
I thought, gee, he's got 30 years left to get into Congress.
Yeah.
You saw Congress at 39?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, well, I hope it went over well.
I'm sure.
Thank you.
One thing that you want to remember is this, sir.
And tell all your friends, I mention this to these people as much as I can say, don't be concerned about the Chinese turning it down.
Well, they haven't actually rejected it yet.
They're just knocking it around.
Because basically, that's the way these things go.
There'll be a period in a few months where they...
The negotiation is very, very hard for anybody to resist.
I mean, you can't go much further than what we have done.
And so I would say that we've made a good offer, and this is one that the American people ought to back.
This is one that we can potentially lead to a successful resolution of the conflict, particularly if we return to our deal in August.
Oh, yeah.
I was thinking that it might be helpful in terms of the fact that they have to, he's going to have to work on it.
It might be helpful to let Henry tell that son of a bitch craft.
And there are two that he has had enormous influence with.
I have to say that
And the way he should do it, he said, Ron, I just wanted you to know that your old Ron Ziegler is sitting here, and she just told me that he sent your name over.
And she said that later.
And then he calls Buckley and calls him the same name that he sent him.
How does that sound?
That's good.
Just let him build a little equity there.
And then they'll get it done to him.
Huh.
And then they'll appeal it to him.
Then he should go on to say, look here, we're taking only one, two communists.
We're taking you then.
You better protect us from other conservatives who couldn't get to go.
Don't tell them the ones who turned it down.
And then at the same token, stick it in the craft.
The only communists we're taking, so you protect us from the other communists who are beginning to take it.
All right?
But when we hear back, then we'll have everything in place.
Good, that's all right.
That's all right.
Yeah, go ahead.
President, I'm going to say, I'm going to ask the President to talk about the .
He said the members of staff, Richardson and Curryman, will be talking to him and Bennett along.
to work out a strategy that will lead to getting this bill out.
And the purpose of President Call was to simply note that Reverend Call had questioned some of the President's support for it, the President reiterated his support, and the need to jointly discuss how we can develop a strategy to move it out of the committee.
Is that all right?
Yeah.
Sounds good, I think.
That sounds good.
Senator Long saying that the President has talked with Senator Long and Senator Bennett previously.
And he has, and has noted that their views are, I mean, as you know, there is great division in that debate.
The President has now talked with Senator Long earlier than he has talked with Senator Bennett.
Not, I mean, over, I mean, I don't mean in the last week of our conversation, not since the, but I know Long's views, and I've talked to him, and that I,
The President feels that it's important to try to feel that we can't claim the common ground among the Senators in the Finance Committee.
And he's asking members, Mr. Berman and his staff, and of course, Senator Richardson, to explore the situation with the Senators involved, to see if we can find the common ground.
If we take out the version board and just put it in, he said, I think that's just a good idea.
He said, then I think we have the whole balance of each other, which would, of course, make it some of my liberalized commitments.
And apparently, the balance does cover some of the old books and other things.
It has some good things that we want.
So he said, the important thing though is that you should place a call to him and set up your class.
So he had a good, friendly talk with him on campus.
He's under pressure, so let him think that we were going to work with him.
I, you see, I ran the thing by him first, and he said, well, it's just a committee work, so I don't know what he's going to do.
And I came back to him again later.
He said, well, he got this thing out.
And maybe, he said, we got it to the floor.
He said, then I think you would get a house version of H.R.
1, which is the other one that the Senate committee now presently has it.
And probably the one that I wrote that.
He said, that's what I think you could get.
You could get it.
That's interesting.
My, his sights are certainly down for what they were.
He said, I have a problem with him.
He says that every time I mention a huge program, I mention the fact that we would have had a better Medicare program, a better Medicaid program, if we hadn't touched it.
Ah, yeah, yeah.
He's got hangs of conscience on that one.
There you go.
There he's right.
Yeah.
You know, John, without any, without reference to where he's going,
We can't put 11 million people on a public tip.
Don't you agree?
Without being sure, I think it may be basic, but it may not.
It's interesting, though, that he's got the Medicare and Medicaid.
What I need from you is guidance as to how you want this to be set up.
And the checks.
This is the collecting pool.
And this is the site.
There are big trees down at this end already.
The buildings were in this part primarily.
What you would have here is, and these banks, you can't tell from this photo, but these banks slope up to the top of these structures, so you really can't see the structures from the street at all.
This is a courtyard with a big cafeteria here and some little shops.
And I may see the shop in here.
This pool can be used for waiting.
I may see it in here.
And then underneath it is a parking area, primarily for excursion buses, for tourist buses.
And this ribbon here goes down to the Lincoln, back up this side.
It's clear to the capital, and that's for the trans.
Then as you go into the park, here's a boat rental place.
And all through there are little canals and little lakes all the way back, so you could take these old, kind of like swan boats on the commons.
Back up in here is an amphitheater.
There's a restaurant on the water over in this area.
There's a children's park in this area with all kinds of rides and swings and diversions of all kinds in there.
And then all this is like clear down as far as that back up here.
Looks pretty good.
It's about a third of the cost of the first one.
And it can be done by the time of the licensing.
And there it is.
It has restrooms and all that kind of thing that aren't down in that end now.
This cafeteria is an indoor-outdoor, so in the summertime you can get your food and go out and sit in the garden.
And it's got a lot of pluses to it.
Certainly better than having it empty.
Well, that's better, too.
I think, John, trying to just put up a museum of modern art or something, there's enough of that kind of stuff around.
I kind of, I sort of did, I have a feeling that we need in Washington a place where kids can go to the bathroom, eat a hot dog.
You know what I mean?
You see tourists around here, and they haven't a damn thing to do with it.
You know, because there isn't any place to get any meat.
It would be the most popular place in Washington.
Well, and it could operate at night.
It could pull people down in here.
And it could be a place to come and hear a band concert in that amphitheater, sitting up, looking out over the lake.
I wonder if somebody could take the time and show the path.
Sure.
You've got to say it, sir.
Well, that's what I wanted to find out for you, is the steps that you'd like to take.
I'd like to.
You can, uh, all right.
Who showed it to you?
Uh, Rox Morton.
It's over in his office, uh, in a room off his office.
Right.
So she could, she could go over there if that's convenient, or if need be, they could bring it over here, but it's pretty hard to move.
The model?
Yeah.
Oh, no.
It's, uh, it's twice the length of this desk.
I'll ask her to, uh, go over and take a look.
Oh, yeah.
Her own damn idea, but that's all right.
Well, they might be good.
That's it.
And this is the time to get it.
You know, if she's got any ideas or changes or anything of that kind, this is the time to catch it.
Now, nobody has seen this except a few people in the Department of Interior and, of course, the architect.
How do they know about it?
Well, Rod was very high on it, of course.
He thinks that he's doing himself in the Congress.
He said there'd be no problem with the Congress.
He's a little worried about the Capital Planning Commission because they have some highway problems down in there, and they don't want anything to happen until everybody agrees to their highway planning.
But we talked a little bit about what to do about that, and that probably can be managed.
The money he doesn't think will be a problem.
He thinks that 30 million... Oh, no, no, no, my God.
Right, right.
Cheapest people.
You see those touristy kind of, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but I do think they have places for restaurants or a little, I mean, not expensive.
One will be just flat cafeteria, cheap.
Right.
The other one will be a sit-down place with terraces outside.
Right, right.
where they can get hot dogs, and sit hamburgers, and stick up pies, and all that stuff, and kind of stuff that families can do and eat, and the Marriott has had a concession.
They won't do it by the government.
It must be a concession deal.
That's the idea.
If you had two of them, you see, one a higher class thing, it could be run by one of the better restaurants in town, and the other one by a guy like the hot shops like Marriott.
And people can come from the capital and get on one of these trams right all the way down the mall, get off down here, have their dinner, and then go to Lincoln or go anyplace they want and go back to their cars.
It's a real step forward from what it has been.
And the other thing that's kind of interesting is that the lake is only four feet deep.
Exhibits.
Japanese want to come here and have an exhibit of Japanese art.
You could plant stilts.
They'll build this so that they can put stilts in the bottom of the pool.
And literally hang the exhibit up over the water.
And people can come up into there and see an exhibit.
And then when it's done, you can take it down.
You know, there are wonderful things people can do.
And, you know, I know you think, oh, it's just crazy.
Crazy people have great ideas.
He's a good architect.
I think he's crazy on some things.
I think it's this national thing that's going a little bit up.
The national growth thing that he had in mind with the transportation corridors and all this stuff.
It's fine to be thinking ahead like that.
I don't think it'll happen this week.
This one will happen.
Let me see.
I mentioned to Lauren Rockefeller the other day an idea that is, you know, to try to gin up some hype.
Your thought of trying to gin up some interest in the environment.
Apparently, he let me say that he thinks Julie is the greatest salesman for the environment he's ever seen.
She may have done something in New York.
She's been to Houston, Florida, all these places.
Apparently, she turns on a lot of the radio.
But she has the enthusiasm for it, which you need.
But anyway, I said, you know what?
Probably all I had was to have a, I don't know whether a meeting does it or not, but you could have a meeting.
And I said, maybe Camp David, maybe San Clemente,
I think many probably is the first choice because it's so beautiful.
And, uh, uh, uh, uh, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and,
Would this be an occasion then for...
It might be an occasion.
I mean, you've been saying that you needed something to show an interest in the environment.
There's one way you should go out and see whether or not the garbage is being burned properly.
Another way, of course, is to have a meeting.
And maybe what you do
The possibility is to have a... Can you get that?
No, I don't want to get the general public into Camp David.
That new facility, if you looked at it, that they're building.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
The new... No moral?
Yeah.
Because God, we could have a bigger white house.
That's a beauty.
But it's going to be quite a place.
That's all I'm saying.
You could have a... You could have a Camp David...
It's like a weekend at Camp David kind of thing.
The problem there is, listen, that's it.
The press agreed that we should never let that bar down.
Absolutely.
Otherwise, how much would it cost?
That's it.
Whatever it was.
I agree.
I totally agree.
It's very good.
Well, you've done some good things in Florida, but San Clemente, you're right there on that beach that's identified with you.
Sometimes,
And I don't know if this would present the occasion or not, but sometime when you're going to be near San Francisco, I'd love to get you onto the Point Reyes Park that you cracked open.
Because that is the best, that's the best piece of business we've done in parks since we've been here.
And it's up north of San Francisco there.
It's a first rate.
It's a triumph, really.
it yeah well that's the problem uh some people know it but not enough and it's far and away the best national park that we've added to the system uh in a decade or more it's it's just a personal layout now maybe uh something could be done that would you could do them both you see in a span of two
You could have a meeting of the environmentalists in California.
And then, you have to use it now.
You're going to get this new television guy into your home.
It's actually a pretty good idea.
The Daniel Stewart channel.
Yeah.
Anyway.
We could have a meeting.
It really sounded like we created a job that sounded good.
We thought we needed to name it.
But you'd have a meeting out there and get basically the leaders of the environmental field, the movers and the shakers, you get maybe a hundred.
Then what we could do, if our NB, of course you never know, the spring is a little chilly, but no, it's not too bad.
April's not bad.
Before Moscow.
It's not March.
March is too cold.
But in the middle of April, probably too bad.
You could have a beautiful lunch around the swimming pool.
Maybe that's too luxurious.
But maybe you have a meeting there.
Or maybe we sit outside for the meeting.
I'm thinking of that.
Maybe we have a meeting at my home in the patio.
What I do is I bring in a chair, and I say,
If this is clean air and it's a beautiful day and you want to see more of it, maybe we put it out in the front lawn and put the chairs out there and have the people talk and they look down and see it.
I'm just trying to think of a way to do it differently.
Get it to play.
And then after that, we take the whole bunch in the Air Force One.
Or...
and load him aboard, or maybe we can't take him off, take two planes, fly him off the plane ready, look at that damn thing.
Maybe that's what the kind of thing, maybe, maybe out of it, they want a television show or something.
I don't know.
I wonder if maybe a television documentary may not be better than my sitting and blabbing about the environment where I had 25 minutes and I was trying to write a speech
I don't know.
But I think you've got to get your best thinking to work on it.
You've got Russell Train and his two colleagues.
You've got Michael Salish and you've got Lawrence Rockefeller and Hayden to do something.
Let's just use Pat and Trish and Julie to upmost in this because this environment is a good place for them.
I like it, too.
I mean, if we get people out there, and particularly young people, they ought to really care about it.
Figure out the best way to use your time on this.
Well, if I'm in California, I see no better way to use, say, over a weekend.
Yeah, yeah.
You're telling me, a weekend on the environment?
Now, you could still do Camp David.
Real mystery.
You have a meeting at Camp David.
Try to go back to the audience that's there and not try to talk to them again.
Yeah.
Require a third building like that.
Have them all there in a big cloud.
They sit and talk.
You know, we might use Luber for that.
Let the press in there.
Yeah.
That's very rustic.
Very rustic cabins and all that kind of stuff.
and keep them away from David.
Well, if you want to keep the press out, you could invite this great crowd up there.
God, it would be such a... Well, then we'd just be hitting all that.
Two people made all feel that we've got to do more than that.
We've really got to find a way so that the whole nation looks in on it, don't we?
They've got to look in on it.
Right.
Now, you're going to do a national park, presumably.
This is the centennial of yours.
Well, I'm not particularly for that.
Is that so?
Well, I'm going to say he's not against it, but he says do something other than a park.
He's got ideas, but I think he's, you know, he's already dealt with that.
I'm going to talk to him tomorrow.
He's coming over for dinner.
But I told him to think about this, but I want to be sure Lawrence Archibald brought in, after all, he's our big environmentalist.
Right.
Right.
It's really illicit, it seems to me, the environment.
If we get the reasonable people on the environment, frankly, our guys, not nuts that are going to be musky eyes that are going to come around and tear the hell out of us.
But we have done a hell of a lot on the environment, Jim, haven't we?
The parts of the people thing is pretty good, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
It really is.
And it's going to be much better by the time we go for an
But what I meant is, this is a program which, if you get your new environmental follow, you could put this TV guy, put him on it.
And it's a PR type.
You've got a sapphire, one of those guys.
I just love this idea of this activity.
it is expandable into tiboli when you see the model this this is all empty up at this end and there's quite a lot of fairly empty space throughout someday somebody is going to get the idea well here it is here's the water just like tiboli and his the arrangement's kind of like tiboli why don't we put in some of the same kinds of attractions and they'll do it
There's a lands there, and it's laid out right, and so it can grow into that sometime.
I think this is good for a first step.
But you know, John, it's much better to do this than just leave it all at bay.
Oh, yeah, no question about it.
Do you think the environment will fight this because of taking up the grass?
No, the controversy is going to be whether this whole thing should be underlaying with a huge parking garage.
And the reason that it shouldn't be, they've concluded, is that the water table is so high,
that you'd have to build a concrete boat under there to keep the water out, and it would cost an enormous amount of money.
They're going instead to propose a scheme of peripheral parking served by these trams and tear down some of these crappy buildings and make parking lots and then serve those parking lots with trams.
trying to work with this water tank you could do this pat i would simply have uh maybe you could call her or have martin call her and ask her to go over all right this thing but i want her soul in the idea okay now she is she'll buy it she looked at the original and turned it down and finally came around to something else
Okay, very good.
If you decide you want to go over and look at it, it'll be over there.
No, no.
I'm not expert enough on the name like this.
I'm just a leader to the judgment.
You guys know what to do.
The other thing is, the name didn't lead very far into some creature conference.
Make it beautiful.
Yeah.
But be sure there are plenty of restrooms and plenty of drinking fountains.
Yeah.
And plenty of places for the little hungry kids who get a hamburger down at Glass Mountain.
Yeah.
white liberalism.
Don't you agree?
That's what it is.
It really is.
Part of the problem of the old world is, you know, these beautiful castles and palaces and other places.
There's no place to go to castles.
And we think that those things don't matter.
No, they do.
And in the old world, they say, ah, that's materialism.
Believe me, they'd love to have some of this materialism.
I mean, look at Disneyland.
That's the secret of Disneyland.
There's always, every place you look, there's a men's room.
There's always a guy right behind picking up papers in the fall line.
Everything's clean.
There's a drinking fountain in every corner.
The thing is just replete.
No.
That's what I hear.
But you know, it must have something, the whole Disneyland concept, because they tell me
that what has really made the season from Hamming Beach this year is Disneyland.
See, Hamming Beach is gradually being ruined because of the Jews.
And it's a, it's a, just a Jewish, very close label.
It's a horrible place.
Horrible.
You know, because there's just too many of one kind.
I mean, you know, it'd be horrible if there were too many attendees.
Right.
Anyway, you know, it comes up, it comes there.
The Jews are, have to voice it.
But they come there, and now,
As a result of Disneyland, they're getting $40,000, $50,000 a day.
People come to Disneyland and drive on and on this evening.
They spent a couple days at Disneyland.
Isn't that a wonderful thing?
Yeah.
You don't hear much stuff.
You don't hear much stuff.
What's going on there?
Well, we're both so close.
I said, you can't mean it.
The damn thing was fantastic.
Right.
It costs quite a bit to get into.
But what the kids, you know, and you live in an age when really the kids are really, we spoil them all.
And maybe that's not bad, but you know, entertainment, everything.
Gosh, you know, you can remember the time of God seeing the movie or
Almost anything.
You really thought it was wonderful.
Now, every night I'm told, that was a lousy shot.
Hey, you remember being permitted to stay up and listen to Amos and Andy?
I remember that used to be a great circle.
I remember that.
They were grateful.
They were fine.
Some of those radio shows were superb.
But that was the entertainment.
That was it.
Fred Allen, that was a big deal.
We actually used to talk about what was on Fred Allen for a week afterward.
And now they're so jaded with all this rerun of movies and all kinds of television.
You know, John, a lot of it is awfully terrible.
Oh, it's awful.
I know.
Awful.
People don't believe me, you know what I'm saying.
When I say I don't look at television, I actually do not see the goddamn thing at all.
I never do it at night at all.
Of course, I go further than some of you.
The rest of you have to look at the news.
I don't look at the news because it's a waste of my time.
I read it.
I don't look at any television at all.
And I believe in no specials, no movies, no nothing.
If I see a movie, I only see it when I go to Camp David or when I go down to Hillary.
And then I take the damn thing and look at it.
But the reason I find that if I've got that time, instead of looking at the television, what I do is to read a book.
And I find it so much more useful.
You're not missing anything.
I'm sure.
I'm reading a book right now that's very interesting called The Zimmerman Telegram about Woodrow Wilson.
Have you read that?
Oh, I know about the Zimmerman Telegram.
Well, this, uh, this Barbara Tuckman, uh, is a complete, complete book on the circumstances of the Zimmerman Telegram.
And I'm only about a hundred pages into it, but... Don't say that or I won't kiss you.
Yeah, I realize it.
Sorry.
It'll, it'll work out one day, too.
I hope.
And when it does, this will be the basis.
It's a fascinating tale of how Woodrow Wilson came to the White House all shiny and determined to do good in domestic affairs.
And immediately got caught up in the Mexican struggle.
Got on the wrong side of that.
That's right.
Chasing after him.
He should have been supported.
Well, and he had some other Mexican that was continually coming here in exile and raising hell and running for the Mexican border.
They didn't know whether to capture him or not or let him go across.
The foreign policy was not very Wilson's foreign policy.
And he was totally unable to, Churchill describes him as devastating, almost cruelly, in the First World War.
Not cruelly, but he said, he said, when you look at Wilson, he was a man as distinguished from his British and French and other counterparts in Versailles who
had not been hardened and tongued in a school of politics, whose only experience had been for two years as a governor of New York, I mean of New Jersey, which was before, not before the war, but before his term, and who had been a political scientist for President,
and who, you know, just went on and on.
And, of course, Churchill puts great stock in the fact that, of course, the British underclass for years got down to a person who's got to be trained or he's got to get the job.
You can't imagine anybody in Britain being prime minister unless he'd been through the chairs, can you?
Wilson, one of the first things he said when he came into the White House and was confronted with the situation, he said, wouldn't it be bitter irony if I should be compelled to spend my term in foreign affairs?
And then, of course, one thing after that, it crowded in on us.
And his record of foreign affairs was lousy.
I would not have said it until I had studied it more lately.
Lousy because it moved soon enough and strong enough against the Germans, which might have stopped the whole bad thing.
Not stopped the war, but maybe in 1915 or 1916 it could have.
And the horrible deaths of 17 and 18 had been avoided.
You know that on March 21st, 1918, the British lost 400,000 in one day.
My word.
Now, in terms of, that was a great turning point.
The British lost the battle.
Oh, 100,000.
Oh, the loss, now that didn't happen at any time.
But the casualties were, you know, that killed it.
Yeah, yeah.
Isn't that fantastic?
It's a horrible place.
But the Germans, by failure to break through, lost the war that day.
Well, so far as I've read in this book, I have the impression that Wilson was clamping down hard on the British and negotiating with the Germans, trying to mediate the war, and almost starved the British to death.
He just came within an eyelash of clamping down too hard on them to try to force them to a settlement.
And he was so focused and idealistic that he lost the support of Lodge.
He failed to gain the support of T.R.
It's so easy to get.
And his League of Nations just went right down the tube.
And also he made the great mistake during the war of fighting the battle, the congressional battle of 1918 on a partisan basis.
during the war, when his best supporter for the Republic was down for war and down for peace.
And that, of course, killed his chances too.
And yet, his gift was the gift of words.
But he had a greater gift than some of the speeches in his first inaugural of the Song of the Classics.
Yeah, and his essays before he came in the office.
Oh, his essays and also his 14 points.
His speeches when he was fighting for the Venetians.
His speeches in Europe when he was over there in his crib.
He had this little passage.
But it shows you that the damn speeches...
I guess it's our weakness, you know, making these speeches everywhere you can.
But we do think, well...
The speeches are built up according to whether or not the press is for you.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
I think that inaugural of yours will always be seen as one of the great ones.
It's kind of a lost art these days.
People don't have the time to do it.
So art is just a miserable art.
Now, this speech from the standpoint of getting the job done, the one on the 20th of January was a damn good speech.
It was getting the job done.
Now, I had to do a hell of a lot of work on it.
If you've seen the first draft, it was under-registered.
And they ran back to November 3rd for its time.
It was a good speech, but it just kept getting the job done.
But that's a different, it's a different medium and a different style.
And it's sort of the modern oratory, I guess, but we don't think of it in those terms, with that medium.
There were parts of this last State of the Union and 1971 that had comments about what's happening.
There were parts.
You just pretty much have to fire for effect.
these days.
They don't have the luxury of using a tool.
Yep.
They spoke for the written word.
That's right.
It was reprinted and spoke for the written word.
Yep.
I'm not sure that Gettysburg addressed them in all that good of a way.
Certainly.
The second agra, which was, you know, the house.
Yep, yep.
Got to read through.
It sure does.
It's one of the great things about going down to that memorial.
Look out there.
And read that, yeah.
Well, Hal says that we just don't have any good speed trackers.
I don't think that's the case.
I mean, Price, you know, he's got a good radio.
I do, too.
I think you've got an interesting mix.
I was confused.
But I don't think there are.
I frankly think the point is there just aren't any good speeches to be read by the, to just suit the modern needs.
That's right.
What do you think?
When do you use them?
And also, we may be a little overly critical.
There may be some better speeches in our books than we think.
A little better radio.
I think some of the radio speeches, for instance, in the campaign,
The one on the presidency.
It's a great piece of work.
I'm trying to get him to do some more now, but he's a talented man.
Boy, he takes time.
They all take time.
And I would like to, I've often thought I'd like to take the time myself to
to sit down and write a speech, but I had made a very tough command to sit down and write, except like, on these pragmatic things like I had to do with Cambridge, and I had to do with all of the amount that I had done myself.
And they don't have a lot of work, and of course, working in the stadium, I just cannot sit down, I cannot afford, and I had a lot of money in our collection, that I can't justify.
The use of that much of my time in a week to write a speech.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Things just move too fast.
You just can't do it.
I don't think the fact that it was a good speech or a great speech made that much difference these days.
I think the inaugural did.
I think that sort of lifted you, put you in place in a way that had to be done at that time.
Yeah, because the country was so far out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it served a very important purpose.
But the ordinary speech to a result doesn't justify it.
So that they can do it, not to me.
Well, or to make them for what they are.
Get out of there.
That's it.
Do it.
Do the best job you can.
Give them the amount of time you have to do it in and move on to the next thing.
It's too bad it has to be that way, but...
Some of the best that I've done are basically the...
They don't disperse so much in reading, but in terms of hearing, in effect, they prompt you to toast.
Yeah, yeah, right.
That's an art which is almost lost in the art today.
We've got a very human talk, actually.
That's right, that's right.
I like your... Like you talked to the cabinet the other night.
One of those kind of...
just meaningful occasions.
Do you stop and think of a fellow like, well, who would be present with a good oratorical, say, well, like Lincoln, take, he only had the Congress around here how many months a year, four or five months a year?
And, yeah, and then... Also, you want to remember, too,
before the days of television, he made the same speech over and over again.
He made the House-provided speech 112 times.
He did.
He did that right, literally.
And across the whole speech.
Yeah.
Brian, Brian practiced that goddamn speech all over the country before he made the big invention.
Yeah.
You can't do that now.
You can if you're Congressman or Senator.
But you can't as the President of the United States now.
You make a speech, and then they say, ah, he said that before, and our pencils drop.
Yeah.
You notice that?
That's the stump speech, then.
Yeah, very quick.
Are we going to quit listening to you some again?
It's going to be interesting to see what we do.
We come on our dope, you know.
Narcotics?
You think he's going to be all right?
Ambulance?
Oh, he'll, he'll...
I think he'll do all right.
He's going to have to be in prison.
He's going to have trouble in the local police department.
So he knows that.
A lot of them are crooked.
They're jealous.
They're not interested in having the feds come in.
And they're afraid of what might be found.
You know, police corruption, that kind of thing.
So he's got an uphill deal.
But...
It will be better off for having done it than not.
It will go partway.
This whole law enforcement thing is a tough one.
Well, the point is, much as we've bitched about it, it's a long-range process.
We've changed the course.
The damage to the war corp, it won't be undone for another 10 years.
The decisions will slowly come back, and the balance will be restored up and down the line.
The same thing is in terms of law enforcement, respect for law.
That's a process, and it's beginning to change.
It's a little better.
The change is tangible.
I'm sure it is.
And the average citizen agrees with that.
The average guy agrees with that, I think.
Well, they even feel it out in the cities.
They do.
They do.
They know it.
I want to mention to you, we are going ahead on this constitutional amendment thing.
I'm going to take a few lawyers up to Camp David Wednesday, and we'll work Wednesday and part Thursday on it.
It's a hell of a complicated thing.
I've been doing it recently.
I'm not sure.
I don't know what you're going to come up with, but I do know that we're on now a very dangerous weekend.
I think you agree.
I can see us marching right down the road to our court.
The timing is not really...
It's to me, it's open to question.
I think if you look at the march of decisions, and that's what you've got to do, is see when the courts have found likely to get to it, and then be ready to move at a certain time.
Well, we're going to have hearings, you know, starting the first of March.
Oh, that's right.
So Mitchell will have to go up and Richardson and testify.
So we've got to be ready for them to know the direction we're going in, at least.
Well, we can get a reasonable box.
I think so, a little bit.
i talked to bernard jordan this morning about a little bit early yeah he was in we just talked pretty good yeah he is no he calls me up and he says can you help me out on this i said bern i can't help you he said thanks or he'll i'll call him and he'll talk to me straight he's a he's a very cool customer
He came down this morning and said, listen, I've got to go up and testify on welfare reform.
He said, I'm going to be against you.
I just thought you'd better know it because you didn't read the papers.
And I said, work requirements?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I said, well, that's fine.
But I'm pressing.
He said, well, I know we're on the wrong end of this.
He said that?
Yeah.
He said, well, how his own people are.
He's not going to have a lot of blacks.
He's not going to have blacks.
They're against him.
He said, I can count.
But he said, I just can't see my way through it.
He says, I don't see where all this ends up.
And that's the thing that scares me.
He says, I'm just afraid that if the passions begin running too deep on this thing, that we're going to end up behind the back of where we are now.
So I said, well, look, it's political year, and what do you think we ought to do politically?
He said, well, there's no question what you ought to do.
You ought to do exactly what you've been doing.
He said, well, it would be against us.
He said, yeah.
He said, you don't have any choice.
I don't know.
We've got a bus dependent on four of us.
Not yet, but you do in his mind.
George says, you know, it's very interesting to see my Democratic friends on this.
He says, I've only got one over there, and that's McGovern.
He says, all the rest of them are over with you guys.
You think Musk is with us?
Yeah.
You've got to get back to him.
Well, he thinks he's over with us.
And he doesn't like it.
He thinks
You know, it's a very interesting thing, though, these Democratic caucuses in Iowa and Arizona.
First, it's an interesting device, which we were on our wheel and done.
I mean, we used it with Chris Gray.
But the other thing about it is that
Muskie has shown some surprising weakness, and I didn't think he would.
He has the establishment in each state, and he comes up with less than 50% of developments in each state.
Now, I have a feeling that what it is, is that for the party out of power, its cutting edge is too not sharp enough.
I mean, we can talk about being presidential and all that crap.
That's fine if you're president.
I thought when you're trying to be president, you've got it now and then.
You have a reason to kick the bastards out.
Yeah.
I hadn't thought of that.
I hadn't thought of that.
But the people he's losing are the young people and the minority.
And the blacks.
Yeah.
Well, look, he's lost them.
He lost the young people over there in Arizona.
He lost the Chicanos.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They went solid for Lindsey.
And Lindsey did it with Polish.
Yeah.
He's got, he says anything.
He's a demagogue.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
No, it isn't over yet.
I think it's a pretty good bet that Musk is going to be nominated because, you know, usually the establishment controls.
But look at New York.
You know, it's very, very safe.
It's all... Goddard says he's going to get the delegates nominated.
He won the caucus.
Yeah, whatever.
Well, that was a rump caucus, I think.
Yeah.
That's going to be an awful fight.
That was the Democratic Organization in New York.
The O-10 was shot to hell.
The government may get a lot of it.
It's too bad that the government is showing strength in that area.
And that... Because basically the follow-up would be much...
greater help to us to show it would be McCarthy, because we think there's a very good chance he'd be a fourth party candidate, but never be fourth party.
He'd stay in the Democratic Party and swallow them all.
I think he might not.
What do you think?
I would assume he'd stay in the party.
Then he'll stay in the party.
i suppose i think it's going to do this though one thing about the left we talked about the strategy of muskie that what he will do would be to balance his ticket with a moderate southerner i mean he can't i think he's a liberal how can he how can he not vote who the hell is getting the votes against him first of all he's gonna win the south with wallace on the ticket right
Wallace is not a candidate.
He hasn't got a chance in all seven states.
Now, what do you hear about Wallace?
He's the President of the United States of America.
I run the floor for him.
Is that right?
That's the present conjecture of his people.
Why in the world would he do that?
He can't do it without the Democratic Party and so forth.
Probably, you know, I don't know.
There are reasons.
I don't mean to be odd.
I don't know.
He doesn't have anything to say to me about it.
But is that the present indication?
And even when Paul said, we haven't got a chance to take this out of Jackson anyway, he said, yeah, it's changed considerably.
But now you come to Muskie's problem.
If he's going to lose the South anyway, then he's got to go to the North.
He's got to go to the North.
He's got to trim.
He's got to have a liberal on the ticket with him to pull in the North liberal votes rather than a conservative candidate.
And of course, he'll talk maybe a little bit to, well, that's a long way down.
You mean Lindsey or somebody like Lindsey?
Well, Muskie and Lindsey, but that's a little hard.
They have two from the East, isn't it?
They'd be done.
He could well have that.
Or it could be Muskie and McGovern.
That's another thing.
McGovern shows any strength at all as he goes along.
I think it's going to be very difficult, John, for the Democrats ever, the first time around, to put a Lindsey on their team.
I think so.
I think, you know, after all, he is, he's new.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They would draw the line if Lindsey was on it.
He would be, they would pedigree, I said, and he might be in certain instances.
But on the other hand, they would draw the line for a lot of work.
Yeah.
Got a rock for him at that.
He's hard to hold him back.
Bam.
Well, I was there.
I was there.
Better today.
Much better.
I had a very conciliatory phone call after the meeting on classification, saying that he knew the governors were coming in town tomorrow, and he would like a briefing on them, be sure he had the lines so that he handled the real property tax thing right, and so on and so forth.
Getting briefed up.
It's like awful, awful loose.
Right.
There's no use in borrowed trouble.
The issue is not worth it.
I think it's better on the capital, on the aid to private schools is concerned.
I think we ought to use a little bit of a straight-up amendment on that.
We're going to go for tax credit.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's separate and apart from the rest of it.
See, we'll have the McElroy Commission minority report or special subcommittee report to go on there.
And our thinking is we'll wait till that comes in and then we'll move on that right quick.
And we can hang it
then we'll stay very loose.
We'll be briefing a lot over the next two months.
And the thing that we're saying is that this proposal of ours is a hypothetical.
That it's one of a number of possibilities.
And that, uh, we just think it's worth people looking at it.
Changing the tax system, that it does not add new taxes, it simply changes the burden on our property to, and it's not regressing for our people every day, because it would be popular to do this and that.
Yeah.
It's exactly right.
But, have in mind the fact that, when you're fighting it down to the nut gun, we may not be able to propose it.
Yeah.
Due to the fact that it might give the opponents a clear-cut issue of the system.
We're going to raise that.
Well, it'll have flopped around for six months by then, with all of us briefing governors and going on panel shows and going around the country and all that sort of stuff.
It'll have had a lot of exposure.
And we can take a reading then, just see where we are.
We'll see them all the folks riding.
Yep.
Let us know if they're going to shoot us or why.
Well, it just may be that Muskie's advisory commission will kill it.
They'll recommend strongly against it, which is then an excuse to either do nothing or to be courageous and go off on your own, depending on what your desires are.
You've got the option of going both ways.
We get it enough.
Play it.
Out of our 15,000 word magnus opus, is that getting around?
I don't mean play.
I mean, I hope our Republican congressmen, senators, and governors, and all the rest take the goddamn thing and say, well, now do we have a program?
Yes.
And they certainly haven't.
Well, won't they get a name for the goddamn thing?
I know a blue guy wrote me a note on that.
You need something to describe it.
I suggested this to him.
We've got 90 proposals, 93 proposals for the 93rd Congress.
What are the sons of bitches done?
Start saying that in about one week, and then every day say it again.
It's not bad.
People shut it off at 93.
What do you think?
It's not bad.
Oh no, what do you think about?
Are we getting... Well, here's what we've done.
We have a hell of a program.
Here's what we've done.
There's something like this in...
They talk about Wilson's domestic program.
I remember what it was.
You remember?
We had the Federal Reserve.
We had an infected amount of dam.
It was important at that time.
Very, very efficient.
But this time, Jesus Christ, for heaven's sake, any one of these times, it's an enormous change for the banner, right?
We've been up with a good old Republican conference, all House members.
And George is going up this week.
I was up last week.
Laid it all out for them.
And then answered questions for a couple hours.
Did the same thing with the Senate Republicans in about a week.
And laid it all out for them.
Then what we've asked to do is meet with their staffs.
And so I'm going to see them, I forget, in the next two weeks.
That's all a good move from another standpoint.
It shows that the White House is willing to talk to staff people.
We respect them.
They should be willing to talk to staff people.
Well, they're going to pull together all the AAs on the House side to start with.
And we'll go into this with them.
And we've got a bunch of
of kits and material.
Then we've got a briefing the end of this week, I think, for all of the sub-cabinet, their wives, wives of all the congressmen, Republican congressmen.
And we're going to teach them the line so that when they go home for the Lincoln recess, they'll be able to write them in terms of sixth-grade goals.
Yeah, sixth-grade goals.
And that won through presidential initiative, and that was the economy, and that the other five remain to be acted on.
But we'll just keep plugging away groups of this kind on a face-to-face basis.
We'll put these materials in their hands every time we meet with one of these groups.
So by the time—well, by Easter time, I hope, because our $15,000 were—
Well, it's in process.
It will be by Friday.
Because that's what we give these ladies.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, no illustration, but major headings.
So it's readable.
And then we have those kinds of things for each of the six goals.
I remember that you did something, and you might put this down as a possibility or put it in the back of your head.
In 1960, he developed slip paper presentations of Senator Kennedy's stand on immigration, Senator Kennedy's stand on equality of opportunity, and so forth, with slip paper, picture, et cetera.
And it was a very effective thing.
I don't know if the written word means anything, but I was wondering if in two or three, you could certainly do that in the environment.
Well, we have done that.
We've got a book on each of the six goals, plus environment.
Yes.
Pictures on the cover, illustrations inside as you go through.
In some cases, photographs.
In some cases, line drawings.
And they describe the problem, and they describe your solutions to the problem, and have quotes from your messages and your speeches.
And so I'd be sure, in addition to making your call
to call my name.
Yeah, I will.
I'll talk to Rivercoft.
Good.
I got everything we can.
All right.
Rivercoft says that he can't.
We've got to go through this, and we're going to have to buy it, probably, but we want you to know that we're not back on this.
All right.
Right.
I'd better go.
Okay.