Nixon White House Tapes › Tape 702 › Conversation 702-006
Nixon & Butterfield on American leadership and Traditional values
Tuesday, April 4, 1972 · 3:12 PM–3:45 PM ET · Oval Office
AI Summary
President Nixon and Alexander P. Butterfield engaged in a wide-ranging philosophical discussion regarding the perceived decline of the American "leader class" and the erosion of traditional values. They expressed mutual concern over the negative influence of television on family life and child development, while criticizing the lack of moral courage among contemporary elites, businessmen, and politicians. The conversation concluded with reflections on the need for a national return to fundamental roots, the complexities of environmental policy, and the challenges of governing in a perceived age of decadence.
- American leadership
- Traditional values
- Television culture
- Moral decline
- Environmental policy
- Urban renewal
Audio
This conversation has not yet been cut into its own clip, so the player above contains the full tape segment shared with neighbouring conversations. It begins about 00:44:05 into the tape and ends around 00:58:02.
Transcript (AI-generated)
This transcript was generated automatically by AI (WhisperX) and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Names and numbers are often wrong; speakers are not identified. Do not cite it as authoritative — verify against the audio and the finding aid.
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· Timestamps are positions within the full tape recording.
44:07I still have to answer my own question, that a majority of the people in this country
44:10across the country.
44:11It isn't a very big majority, but maybe it's about 55%.
44:1555% of the people on a critical issue of national events, national honor, law, order, justice, etc., will come out on the right side.
44:29In other words, that out through the heartland,
44:32And there's a lot of hard money in Michigan and New York and other states that we do not consider to be so-called conservative.
44:37And I'm speaking of conservatism in the same sense that you speak of it, the majority of it.
44:42But I think the great danger in America, the weakness in America, if I may say so, is in its leader class.
44:49Its leader class.
44:50It is difficult to find businessmen, educators, opinionators, liberal politicians,
45:01who will stand for it and fight for it.
45:04Take the Senate.
45:04The Senate at the present time is an interesting one.
45:09And the House of Representatives is true.
45:11But its strength is
45:17It is rapidly dying off the top, and that is the main strength of the old southern conservatives.
45:23The old chairman is dying, Russell is dead, Stennis is very old, etc.
45:27And so what is it going to be?
45:29What is it going to replace him?
45:32and you look at the Republicans in the North, well, now and then you've got a stand-up guy, but some of that is just, you know, trying to characterize what's your view about this.
45:40What about the American leader class?
45:42Do you think, do you think there's any hope for it?
45:43Well, every class has seen the decay of the continuity of the family and the class.
45:47It's something T.S.
45:48Eliot was going to demonstrate.
45:50It's not in our time.
45:52And I'm not speaking in compliment.
45:55We'll look at Eliot today, but I forgot to look at the character of him.
45:59Did you do that?
45:59I've got a long section of it.
46:01I've got a section of it.
46:02I'm happy with it.
46:04I think the reason, because I see it, the family's my own sort.
46:07My father was an instrument player.
46:09My father was a street player.
46:12And the one who had such a family was a student with a number of them.
46:19The families in such a class, the number of families in that class, had to pay a family cultural accountability going back generations and so on.
46:25And the real education is carried out in the family.
46:29Okay, the education is carried out in the family.
46:32That's right.
46:32We got a lot of them in church.
46:34We got a lot of them in church.
46:36And also, I must say, we got some in school.
46:43I don't see that my kids have any kids.
46:48In the school education itself, a good candidate is possible only because the children there were interested because they came in families that had an interest in learning.
47:05some kind of continental culture.
47:07Well, that is breaking up and saying, they've got more people than Detroit.
47:12They're breaking down because there's too much money.
47:14There's too much idols of lack of genuine culture.
47:18All breaking up at once.
47:19You can see it all around.
47:21Television, we've much of a break with technology.
47:24Everyone has a problem with television culture.
47:26How's it possible you're running a school nowadays and the children spend a lot more time watching television than they do?
47:31I think television is a matter of fact in terms of education.
47:36People say it could be a great educational tool, I hope so.
47:40But I can certainly say that television at the present time is a destroyer of family life.
47:46And I'm going to sound extremely reactionary here.
47:57Because basically,
47:59Unless it's something you really want to see, like things anybody wants to see, like the China war, or the moon, or a sports event, or something like that.
48:07My God, if television knew you better off reading this paper, you'd get a lot faster.
48:13That, in terms of television fare, it is unbelievably bad.
48:18But you agree?
48:19Oh, yes.
48:20Terrible?
48:22Terrible.
48:23Terrible.
48:25But if you change the whole psychology of the child, he becomes very brave.
48:29He wants constant change.
48:31Right, right.
48:31Sensation.
48:32Yeah, sensation.
48:33That's right.
48:33That's right.
48:34That's right.
48:36No things against any habits of reflection.
48:40And you changed all of it.
48:42Well, exercise pressure, that works, but that's a little bit slow.
48:48I think if you can say it would be .
48:55Yeah.
48:55Yeah.
48:55Yeah.
48:56Yeah.
48:56Yeah.
49:00But, oh, I see the same thing on the cost of work.
49:03Now, we'll have to fully interact with our own school, our own house, in order to get a really decent school.
49:11It's still a drop-in school, which is still good.
49:13It's still overrun.
49:14It's still a well-planned, small, very clean drop-in school.
49:18It's still going.
49:18How long?
49:19We'll know those questions.
49:20Forbidden in the aid of constitutional members of Michigan now.
49:23Aren't you part of that?
49:24Oh, yes, all of it.
49:25So am I. I've got to make a speech as a matter of fact.
49:27There's people that don't get to it.
49:29I've got school administrators and I'm going to reiterate myself with my support generally.
49:35That's a little bit of tax.
49:37This is a small aid, but it will help some.
49:41It's not a tax credit.
49:42But I think in the provincial schools, if I can get two million dollars for children,
49:48They aren't long for this world unless we start helping them.
49:51So I'm going to pass it down.
49:52I'm going to send that faster than they have to because they're now obsessed with the idea of their own death.
49:58We're doomed.
49:59And they talk about it.
49:59They talk about it all the time.
50:01So they're giving up their passion.
50:02They have to.
50:03They say, well, it's just a question.
50:04We'd be out in five years anyway, so let's do it today.
50:06And that's a great recommendation.
50:10Well, that's interesting.
50:11But you said you're here.
50:12Well, I don't know about that.
50:13I don't know.
50:15But even there, even though it's a good school, still television culture comes in from the other children.
50:20The other children, most of them are very, very not very interested in what's going on.
50:27They're constantly full of television slogans and so on.
50:29So even that has been worked too well.
50:31Nobody has to take them out and see how it works.
50:32They have to take them back home and carry on with school at home, where they're the only place in the county where it's just not submerged in television culture.
50:40So the library club only got one household in the county.
50:44which is still carrying on in anything like the litigation.
50:48Do you think anything can be done at the governmental level?
50:51You know, everybody talks about the moral leadership of the president and all that sort of stuff.
50:56But, uh, it's terribly difficult to, uh, what's done is, uh, it's very, very difficult.
51:01They don't want presidents to preach to them.
51:04I do.
51:04I mean, these days, uh, I mean, there was a time when D.R.
51:08talked about the presidency being bulletproof and all that.
51:12And to a certain extent, you can get up in a rank of people about drugs or some other subject, but when you finally come down to it,
51:25with the pounding they get, the media, night after night after night on the television, you know, a little reading they do, I mean, occasionally here.
51:36You do, you try, you try.
51:37You gotta stand for the right things as much as you possibly can and fight against the wrong things.
51:50But you're, let me ask you, you're not pessimistic about the future.
51:53Well, you are.
51:54My thoughts are yours.
51:55Probably, we are in a decadent age, but in all worlds, all great states are decadent in some degree and fashion.
52:11And one of them looks at the perception of history, after all, there are ages and segments, and then there's recovery.
52:19If you look at the history of the Byzantine Empire, you'll find this.
52:23You should take something out of shop to do it.
52:26Add to the appearance, perhaps, of a new religion, but a revival of religious understanding.
52:33I agree.
52:34You need that, don't you?
52:36The politics can help in a sense to refrain from doing bad things.
52:41But mostly from correcting policies that have been ruined.
52:47So what about your new old highway building?
52:49You've done so much terrible mischief.
52:51You can do it on the slope.
52:51Well, we're getting after a few things.
52:52Some of them, perhaps, are doubtful.
52:53And so, particularly in that existence area, people would say that it may be going in the wrong direction.
53:03But any of that new work requirement is right.
53:08But you come down to it.
53:09A forestry integration, for example, housing.
53:11It's ridiculous.
53:12If you can't force people to live together, you don't want to live together.
53:15My argument is that no government aid should be provided to any community that should be community choice that doesn't want it.
53:25And no government aid, of course, should be provided to any housing project that, which discriminates.
53:34So that, that is for the community.
53:36And the community should decide it.
53:38But the whole urban renewal thing, I mean, it's been such a disaster.
53:45Martin Anderson, of course, did a classical piano, and he still is.
53:48I mean, he's helping us this year, but that was a beautiful boat, I think, and tore it to pieces.
53:59But we've had to fight it because you see the Congress, and they see these things.
54:03They see all these wonderful abilities.
54:05Let me ask you one other thing.
54:07I know you're of great interest in talking about the
54:12farms, you see, and all the other things.
54:15What about the environment?
54:18Is that, is the kit going too far?
54:23No, probably not far enough.
54:25How do you feel about the environmental issues?
54:28How do you just deal with that?
54:30It's immensely important.
54:31We haven't done this as a means or a method.
54:34And if we went to demand magical results at once, I would not at all be willing to bear the sacrifice.
54:44It costs a lot, yes.
54:45And playing the physical sacrifice and saying that.
54:48In my house, we didn't have any electrolytes at all 20 years ago.
54:51We didn't have any except downstairs.
54:5412 years ago.
54:55Well, now everybody in the county has big freezers and all kinds of other things, air conditioners and so on.
55:01Well, if you're going to save the environment in the county, you're going to have to go back to kerosene land, which is not the wrong way, but most of the way you're going to have to get rid of these freezers.
55:09It might not be too bad.
55:11It'd be a very good thing, I'm sure.
55:12It'd be good for the people, for their character, the kind of work they do in those offices.
55:16If you front them with it, they'd say, fine, we're going to, in the ecology, we're going to take away your freezer.
55:22Or you're going to start, stop selling so many automobiles.
55:24Yes, yes.
55:24So we won't have to build more superhighways and all of that stuff.
55:27We're going to have to have some more urban.
55:31Yeah.
55:32And some of Junefield struck it a bit, but do you think the environmental case is one of them?
55:37That's a good outlook for people, you could say.
55:40As I said, the real questions before us are the restoration of moral understanding and the recovery of roots.
55:47And the ecology, if you have any questions, those are the big things we can come to.
55:52I think the roots are more important than the environment.
55:54I think that it will come.
55:56But when we talk about the recovery of roots,
55:59See, I get back, what do you feel about those in your class?
56:01Do you share my concern about them?
56:03Do you know?
56:04Yes.
56:04Yes.
56:05Yes.
56:05And I've just seen the .
56:08And so you agree with me about the business community as well as others?
56:11Yes, as most of us.
56:11Or is that a surprise?
56:12When you say it's the Main Street people, you still have some of them.
56:15Main Street, oh, obviously the Main Street, the Rotarians, and the Gaitwanians, and the rest, you know.
56:20They're more of a push to the wall.
56:22They're fewer every year.
56:23That's right.
56:24The big chain stores, they go there.
56:25They're close to folks.
56:26Yes.
56:28I don't know, even though you're a mainstream lawyer or doctor or whatever he is, he's a lot better than the Park Avenue one.
56:35You know, in terms of believing in something.
56:38That's the difference.
56:39You think, one of the things, I'll say a little bit, I've had people, far more experiences than I have,
56:44If one looks at, say, the men of great wealth who have, say, political imagination and moral concern and so on, they're very few.
56:51I've known some, some of those I've known to death.
56:54If one were to look around today, that's obviously what that means.
56:58We won't have any friends.
56:58We won't actually have a bloody body and so on.
57:01Still, we're starting to come to those who have real imagination at the same time.
57:05Well, you have someone like Anthony Salazar, right?
57:07People like that who will read books about money and interest and so on.
57:10But they're very few, very, very few.
57:15What would you really come down to it?
57:16Most of them are men who set up foundations and then they hire bright young guys who work in foundations and gals.
57:26And those people completely corrupt and distort everything and all that they rebuilt.
57:31That's what's happened to the Ford Foundation.
57:35Pretty good examples.
57:37I knew Henry Ford when I was a young man.
57:40And what he was really interested in, so far as I've seen, was the historic preservation.
57:46And that's when, of course, I was told that they'd like to use it for the Greenville Village.
57:51Well, only when he boarded the project, which he would have boarded.
57:57Yeah.
57:58And what happened was he would agree and he wouldn't have killed him because of that.
NARA Description
On April 4, 1972, President Richard M. Nixon and Alexander P. Butterfield met in the Oval Office of the White House at an unknown time between 3:12 pm and 3:45 pm. The Oval Office taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 702-006 of the White House Tapes.
Nixon Library Finding Aid
Conversation No. 702-6
Date: April 4, 1972
Time: Unknown between 3:12 pm and 3:45 pm
Location: Oval Office
The President met with Alexander P. Butterfield.
Henry A. Kissinger
-Location
Butterfield left at 3:26 pm.Also recorded on April 4, 1972
- 701-017 1:17 PM · 14 min — President Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger met in the Oval Office of the White House from 1:17 pm to 1:32 pm.
- 702-001 2:47 PM · 3 min — President Richard M. Nixon and Stephen B. Bull met in the Oval Office of the White House at an unknown time between 2:47 pm and 2:55 pm.
- 702-002 2:47 PM · 28 min — President Richard M. Nixon, H. R. ("Bob") Haldeman, Ronald L. Ziegler, and unknown person(s) met in the Oval Office of the White House at an unknown time between 2:47 pm and 3:11 pm.
- 702-003 3:11 PM · 6 min — 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.
- 702-004 3:12 PM · 4 min — President Richard M. Nixon and John K. Andrews, Jr. met in the Oval Office of the White House at an unknown time between 3:12 pm and 3:45 pm.
- 702-005 3:12 PM · 1 min — President Richard M. Nixon and Stephen B. Bull met in the Oval Office of the White House at an unknown time between 3:12 pm and 3:45 pm.
- 702-007 3:45 PM · 1 hr 22 min — President Richard M. Nixon, Henry A. Kissinger, Alexander P. Butterfield, John N. Mitchell, H. R. ("Bob") Haldeman, Manolo Sanchez, Charles Lucet, and White House photographer met in the Oval Office of the White House from 3:45 pm to 5:06 pm.
- 702-008 5:06 PM · 1 min — President Richard M. Nixon and Stephen B. Bull met in the Oval Office of the White House at an unknown time between 5:06 pm and 5:08 pm.
Cite this conversation
Conversation 702-006, April 4, 1972. White House Tapes, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, National Archives. Audio and AI transcript via Easy Nixon, https://www.easynixon.org/tapes/702-006 (accessed October 12, 2026).