Nixon White House Tapes — Conversation 739-006
Date: Wednesday, June 21, 1972 at 10:40 AM
Participants: Nixon, Richard M. (President); Shultz, George P.; Burns, Arthur F.; Weinberger, Caspar W. ("Cap"); Stein, Herbert; Rooney, John J.; [Unknown person(s)]; White House operator; Walters, Vernon A.
Recording device: Oval Office
Source: https://www.easynixon.org/tapes/739-006

This transcript was generated automatically by AI (WhisperX) and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Do not cite it as authoritative.

[0:04] Now, this will go over here.
[0:06] Get the new quadriad.
[0:07] Let's get in here.
[0:08] Let's see, George, you're here.
[0:10] Let's see, Arndt is here.
[0:12] That's Arndt.
[0:13] You're just sitting here.
[0:17] Yeah.
[0:17] Fair enough.
[0:25] Well, you'll need to find it.
[0:30] Yeah.
[2:42] Tell him, hey, I want him to give the summary, you know, give him some of that, that sort of thing.
[2:44] The summary of Conway's conversations, well, the summary of Conway's conversations in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Venezuela, and get it to him in confidence.
[2:52] This is very confidential.
[3:00] I prefer to go a little bit political as well, you know.
[3:06] My friend, Joe, for his, in other words, basically, eyes only had not to be conveyed to the massacres.
[3:09] You see, we have a little sensitive situation here.
[3:12] These are conversations he had, which I asked him to talk to people like Ben and Jude, and how they unburdened their souls, and what the hell they want, and so forth and so on.
[3:33] Well, there you go.
[3:36] So we have our first meeting in our quadrant.
[3:57] Oh, it's always bad.
[3:59] It's a little bit of a minus side or a little bit of a plus side.
[4:03] Let's say it could be a hell of a lot worse.
[4:07] You see how he's having a terrible time in the house.
[4:08] He's having a terrible time in the house.
[4:16] He's having a terrible time in the house.
[4:24] I'm going to tell you something.
[4:25] He asked for it.
[4:26] Did he?
[4:26] Sure, he did.
[4:27] What did he say?
[4:27] His chancellor, the checker, stated, Tony Tucker, Tony Walker, stated that they're going to have to do this to get the bomb.
[4:34] And they're not going to worry about it.
[4:42] So anyway, the bomb has to be taken back.
[4:50] or a denaturation is suspected in that sort of thing.
[4:56] Hello?
[5:01] Hello?
[5:02] John, I just wanted you to know, as an old friend from way back 25 years, I was delighted to see that the earlier terms were wrong.
[5:08] One of our boys called me about 12 o'clock in the evening.
[5:11] I said, oh, God, no.
[5:15] But
[5:19] Listen, don't, don't worry about how much.
[5:23] Yeah.
[5:24] Yeah.
[5:24] Yeah, but I, yeah.
[5:29] Well, I told them they, yeah.
[5:34] Yeah, who's that?
[5:37] Oh, come on.
[5:42] Oh, a pretty good call.
[5:43] You were hurting with that shirt?
[5:47] Oh, well, I'll tell you who it is.
[5:49] That's not all I'm going to do.
[5:52] I'm going to carry it forward for you.
[5:55] Yeah, but in the meantime, good luck.
[5:58] Yeah, good to talk to you.
[6:00] Good luck.
[6:02] Bye.
[6:02] I have to get really supportive for a patient.
[6:06] I'm just going to be kind of serious about it.
[6:15] That's what I'm going to do.
[6:18] I'm pretty good at it.
[6:19] It won't be that much bigger than that.
[6:24] But go ahead, go ahead.
[6:25] No more than that.
[6:27] More than ten.
[6:29] Ten times five.
[6:34] Five times a day.
[6:35] One day.
[6:35] One day.
[6:35] As they lost well over a billion last week, today, I recognize that the market is a little more quiet, but the loss of reserves is coming up.
[6:50] Why say that?
[6:51] It's what he said.
[6:52] Why say it?
[6:52] Let this be your policy.
[6:53] When the time comes, you do it, yeah?
[6:54] Who wants this trouble?
[6:59] I'm sorry to see that.
[7:07] He's been very slow.
[7:07] He's been very slow.
[7:09] Well, go ahead.
[7:10] I'm sorry that I don't think we're in a situation like this.
[7:13] I wonder if the program you want, if the program you want, a narrow American, helped us.
[7:19] Well, we're not the only ones.
[7:25] George Meany, who just came back from a week or so of prison, he spent some time with them.
[7:39] He told me that he spent an hour and a half or so in the shadows.
[7:44] Sure.
[7:44] He did.
[7:45] He just wanted to ask me what happened.
[7:46] Thank you.
[7:48] And I can't tell them I haven't had anything to do with it.
[7:50] And on the British paper, I think that George was pleased to have an opportunity and was struck by the interest in the place prices.
[7:57] If they're all looking to offer the model, I hope they're right.
[8:12] Anyway, go ahead.
[8:14] As I said in my memo, I think everybody now agrees we have strong economic expansion underway, and this was confirmed, surprisingly, by yesterday's
[8:26] preliminary estimates of the second quarter GNP, which showed an annual rate of increase of 8%, which was much more, I think, than anybody had expected.
[8:40] And it may very well turn out not to be true in the end, which meant that... Usually it's low.
[8:43] But even if it is, even if there's an average discount, if it were 7, it would still be a very big increase.
[8:51] And I shouldn't say more.
[8:54] And we've been saying that we thought the rate of expansion would accelerate during the year.
[9:11] We've now had some signs that it's actually happening.
[9:19] My thought, my memo has been said, despite the fact that it was not going on at a rate, it was not likely to be going on at a rate, it was going to make a very radical reduction in the unemployment rate during the remainder of this year.
[9:37] You said it could be down there.
[9:38] At best, maybe by 5, or it's just likely to be by 9.
[9:41] I guess it's likely, but it's been a little out of the box.
[9:50] It could still be up there.
[9:51] And even if it's 8% rate...
[9:53] by kind of standard rule of thumb of the relation of unemployment to the rate of expansion of the economy would mean it continues with something like a decline of one tenth of a percent of the unemployment rate and that brings us in October down to, if we got that, it would bring us down to five, four, I think.
[10:15] Yeah, so it would be, which comes down to November 3rd.
[10:18] And the whole, so what I'm saying,
[10:21] One can't make a very big bet on the expectation of a very substantial reduction showing up in the unemployment rate during the remainder of this year, although I think everyone expects some reduction to occur here during the end of the year.
[10:37] On the price side, we now have, for at least today, the May Consumer Price Index.
[10:41] Which will be up, which is about 3 tenths of a percent.
[10:43] It doesn't compare with the zero in March, 2 tenths of a percent.
[10:48] In April, was it 2 tenths?
[10:52] Yes.
[10:52] And they have...
[10:55] And this one, we still have food down, the food is down one tenth of a percent in the May figure.
[10:58] The big change is that the non-food commodity grew up about five tenths.
[11:02] And some of that is used cars, but there are always some special things.
[11:09] But still, we can't attempt to look at that number.
[11:13] And this is funny, especially when we have ahead of us now the food price increase, the meat price increase.
[11:20] Apparently, we've already had it since then.