Conversation 702-003

TapeTape 702StartTuesday, April 4, 1972 at 3:11 PMEndTuesday, April 4, 1972 at 3:12 PMTape start time00:33:37Tape end time00:39:26ParticipantsNixon, Richard M. (President);  Butterfield, Alexander P.Recording deviceOval Office

On April 4, 1972, President Richard M. Nixon and Alexander P. Butterfield met in the Oval Office of the White House from 3:11 pm to 3:12 pm. The Oval Office taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 702-003 of the White House Tapes.

Conversation No. 702-3

Date: April 4, 1972
Time: 3:11 pm - 3:12 pm
Location: Oval Office

The President met with Alexander P. Butterfield.

     Lyndon B. Johnson
         -Trip to Washington, DC
               -Accommodations
                    -Madison Hotel
                    -Blair House

Butterfield left at 3:12 pm.

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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.

And came out of a certain generation, from the 50s and so forth.
And more often than not, they're leading the charge.
And I don't mean that you shouldn't lead some charges.
But he's leading the charge of no nice.
Basically, the modern so-called radical, the one that charges and yells the four-letter words and all that sort of thing, one, two, three, four, we don't want to talk about it, and so forth and so on, the modern radical is not a thinking person.
It's not.
It's not based on thinking.
It's not based on philosophy.
But it's an emotional, animal-like attitude.
I don't know.
And an awful lot, and a lot of it is led by, as I said, the people that aren't my children, the students.
And why that would be, I'm sorry to figure out, too.
But do you see some improvement there, too?
Not much yet.
It will come, I suppose, as the present generation of undergraduates is more sensible already for the past two years.
Those who are looking to graduate school will tend to be less ideological and more sensible.
It comes slowly, which I suppose we don't have to expect too much, you know.
change the original other reforms that were in place once it appeared.
There are several reasons for this ideological advances.
One is that these people who are the infrastructures, these professors, have never been anywhere except in school.
They are studying in society.
Yeah, that's right.
Full intellectual presumption.
They assume that they know how to govern society, only they will recover.
I don't know about any kind of rational experience.
Well, that's always the answer.
You pointed out that the most dangerous person
intellectual position of power, because it's sheer, dedicated evil.
Particularly if that's all they have, that's it.
That's right.
That's right.
The other thing, of course, that leads and brings one to its present attitude is the fact that the average B campus was simply a very unpleasant place to be.
Everybody had been included.
There's math education.
Among the other instructors, the same spirit we found among the undergraduates and graduate students at Berkeley.
Why is it an unpleasant place?
Well, we don't want to be IBM members, is the idea.
But masturbation, too big, too impersonal.
You face a class, so the young people who face the class, as you know, anywhere from 3,500 students or, of course, some New York City college students, about 1,500, about your own.
And you don't know them.
They don't know you.
It's an impersonal relationship.
You were right.
Even the members of your own department is too big, but it's a place like Ohio State nowadays, there isn't even a coffee house you can go to to sit and talk to everybody.
It's all humanized and personalized.
So it's lost.
Just to say an undergrad who's lost is a great big mass.
So the young instructor is lost.
Now, the senior professor is done so badly off.
He's been there longer.
He knows people.
He's got a nice house and so on.
He can take it all.
It's a little different.
But the young instructor, especially, is not lost.
I see, I see.
The biggest place is Gaffer, the more personal the Gaffer is, the greater the acceptance of the script, and the more personal the Gaffer is, and the greater the society becomes, right?
Yeah.
Here's Michigan State, where I was going to graduate, which is now 44,000.
I was going to be personalized.
Now, the first idea, of course, was always conservative until recent years, through most of the farm boys in my day.
And people still come from suburban backgrounds and the farms and so on.
But, so they come there with more or less conservative prejudices.
Then they're transformed by being part of a mob.
By the mob, the young instructors were radicalized.
by the collective dormitory life, big television screens, .
It's an .
What is your feeling?
Do you think this country can survive?
I mean, I'm speaking now in terms of not how we handle such things as Vietnam and China and Russia.
I mean, maybe we can handle those things.
But do you think it can survive from the standpoint of this, of, can it?
When you see, like, the demands more and more for less and less, I don't refer to it very much now,
As a matter of fact, I must say, some of the more impressive people that I have seen, if I am talking about men as men, I go with Frank Fitzsimmons, or Giorgiamini, for that matter, or Peter Brennan of the Billiard Tree.
These decent-nosed guys who came up the highway and so forth, but they're about guys that wear American flags and their repels,
When it comes to the great national defense issues, they're with you all the way.
True, there's naturally a softness in all the rest, but they're highly moral and highly decent.
They believe in the law and so forth and so on, and must be starting to steal electric help out of them.
Now, you take your average businessman that I see.
There are a few of the old-timers, the guys that made it and so forth and so on, but for the most part, they're a new managerial class that have come up through the numbers, and they are playing both sides, putting a little on one horse and the other when it comes to strength and courage and guts and so forth.