Nixon White House Tapes — Conversation 749-005
Date: Friday, July 21, 1972 at 11:43 AM
Participants: Nixon, Richard M. (President); Shultz, George P.; Haldeman, H. R. ("Bob"); [Unknown person(s)]; White House operator; Bull, Stephen B.
Recording device: Oval Office
Source: https://www.easynixon.org/tapes/749-005

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 Do not cite it as authoritative.

[0:12] I think that's been released.
[0:14] It was today, right?
[0:16] Yes.
[0:20] This economic news today is just sensational.
[0:22] Unbelievable.
[0:23] I can't believe it.
[1:04] really sensational.
[1:05] As I say, it's going to be hard for our critics about that.
[1:11] I want to really stress just a little business.
[1:18] Because we all
[1:37] It is possible.
[1:38] Why the hell would it?
[1:39] I don't know.
[1:40] Who the hell cares about business?
[1:44] They also, they get a lot of reviews.
[1:48] Well, they've gotten themselves mesmerized by the business.
[1:51] The economics is bad for the administration.
[1:55] Foreign policy is good for the administration.
[1:57] That's the line.
[1:58] And so, they haven't seen it that way.
[2:01] They all write the economics.
[2:02] Well, I think
[2:04] But we are going to be, the facts are, we are going to be very comfortable with the economic issues.
[2:11] That's going to be, that's coming up roses.
[2:13] And can't help but be perceived as such.
[2:18] We are.
[2:19] I can't believe it's true.
[2:20] I can't believe it's true.
[2:21] But if that were true,
[2:30] If that were the money increase, that would be so sensational.
[2:33] But a real increase of that magnitude is... How did Scott Sturges know if the power of prayer had been answered or something?
[2:44] He said, Scott, if you don't need confidence in the Lord, what does that mean?
[2:51] The power of prayer.
[2:52] It's like the assistant by season, Justin.
[2:55] Yeah.
[2:57] That's a great one.
[3:07] I'll tell you, it'll be on the back page.
[3:15] That works.
[3:17] It's interesting to see two of the great classics of newspaper headlines of all time were the one in the Washington Post that said... On the truckers?
[3:35] Yeah.
[3:36] The lead wasn't the Teamsters, but the lead was something else.
[3:42] It was somebody endorses the government.
[3:46] Somebody backs government.
[3:46] And the subhead was Teamsters back.
[3:49] I mean truck drivers, truck drivers.
[3:53] And then the LA Times story on the AFL action.
[3:56] The big headline was, most AFL-CIO unions will back the government.
[4:03] And then the story said the AFO was actually about to vote it not to, but most of the AFOs pulled back.
[4:11] Well, they printed that one, sir.
[4:26] On this economic news, there was a great function for Atlanta.
[4:32] No, I don't think so.
[4:33] I'm going to have a press conference Monday.
[4:36] I think Stein is briefing on it.
[4:39] That's fine.
[4:41] It's a hell of a good boy.
[4:43] You can get my eyes out of this.
[5:02] and grow this weekend.
[5:03] I've never been out there before.
[5:04] So I'm looking forward to it.
[5:08] Who's going to tell us what's going to happen?
[5:10] Mandalay, I think is the name of it.
[5:12] Mandalay Hospital.
[5:14] They have a wonderful, Mandalay, Mandalay, I think that's the place they have the, it's first of all, the rain goes on there.
[5:29] And all over the
[5:33] Emily usually has something around 10 or 11 o'clock, and I recall they used to have a, they agreed to, she eats bread, which people would eat stuff themselves on with their booze after the program.
[5:56] It's a very rich camp.
[5:57] Very salty.
[5:57] They're all rich.
[5:59] Be sure to walk over to the cave, which is where the food is.
[6:04] There you'll see the old hands like Will Thomas, Alan Hoover, and Jack Howard.
[6:12] They're all members of K-Man.
[6:16] It's a good old band.
[6:19] We've got some good numbers.
[6:32] You don't consider these late numbers, as you were talking about the other day, as being that significant that it's a sort of a turn down.
[6:47] I'll say I'll be just like those housing numbers.
[6:50] A little bit of a change like that.
[6:53] But you can't go up and up and up forever.
[6:56] I think it's amazing.
[6:57] It stays as high as it has.
[6:58] Depth of reduction sort of sliding.
[7:03] Well, remember that the month before they buy it up, and then they put the next month on top of it.
[7:09] It always looks a little worse.
[7:11] I went over and spoke to the National Alliance Business Jobs Program lunch the other day.
[7:19] And Gordon Metcalf is the head of Cedar Cereal.
[7:21] I was asking about retail sales.
[7:24] Oh, they're having lunch.
[7:26] And he said they had a bad show.
[7:30] And he said it was because of the weather.
[7:32] So he said they never had a July like they're having.
[7:40] And they practically made up all the sales they lost in June.
[7:43] So July 9th is when I had Anthony introduce this to him by way of saying, what do you think the retail sales picture looks like?
[7:49] And he came back with that answer.
[7:52] The weather had to have something to do with it.
[7:55] The weather was so powerful.
[7:57] That's what he said, you know.
[8:00] And he gave figures about how much air conditioning they just sell, and they have solar and so on.
[8:07] So he was quite positive about it.
[8:09] Good.
[8:10] Okay, Thursday or Friday for a month.
[8:15] Thank you.
[8:18] Or Tuesday, I can do it.
[8:20] Tuesday, Thursday, Friday.
[8:21] Thursday or Friday, I think Thursday or Friday are the best days.
[8:33] for me.
[8:33] He's gone on off to the golf course now himself.
[8:36] He left off just as I was going.
[8:40] So I'll try to confirm some money.
[8:55] Good.
[8:55] Thank you.
[9:46] I think we won't take any more credentials now.
[9:51] Don't you think we've done enough?
[10:15] We'll see if we can't just pull them off.
[10:18] Yeah.
[10:19] Well, two months.
[10:20] Three months.
[10:21] At the same time, so this, this, this patch, that, that, that, that, it's like we, I mean, it's, it's all, it's an hour and a half a day.
[10:28] If you go back on it, it'll be less than that.
[10:30] And I'm not sure that there's a lot of therapy in the ass.
[10:35] That whole, that whole thing is, is ridiculous.
[10:38] It's totally ridiculous business.
[10:55] about this uh what was the uh let's understand what happens we screwed our friends to help our enemies and our friends don't like it especially that way that we let down the primrose path and pull the rug out
[11:25] Fist off.
[11:28] We've been fighting.
[11:30] They think we have the votes.
[11:36] The can't get through just isn't true, apparently.
[11:41] That was the line we used, but I don't think the PAC would tell.
[11:44] And I don't, as I understand, I may be wrong, because I know this.
[11:48] I understand that our congressional guys thought we would get it.
[11:56] Well, I know that.
[12:00] We've given up a bill, apparently.
[12:09] Whatever it is you have up there.
[12:28] And we buzzed about some unacceptable segments of it or something too.
[12:34] But it hit Packwood hard because it was a fast change on a... How was it changed?
[12:44] How was it announced?
[12:46] By...
[12:46] I don't think we announced it.
[12:49] I think we simply sent word up there that we were going to back anyone and Packwood got mad and went out and said it.
[12:55] The White House pulled off of it.
[13:06] There's some detail on it in there that you're just reading the highlight page that is similar on what happened in there.
[13:17] Oh, there's nothing you can do about it?
[13:18] No, there is.
[13:19] It's just one of those things that you get one guy mad, understandably, but you accomplish a lot of other things.
[13:28] And as they point out there, if I could have gotten that and run out and said it, ironically, we could have hung it the other way on them.
[13:35] Packwood is the guy who goofed, but he goofed.
[13:40] In his own mind, he goofed because he was double-crossed that night.
[13:43] I mean, that's what you read in the news.
[13:48] Had he just kept quiet, which was what the plan was, they would have landed on the Democrats saying he couldn't get the thing through and that they had to put some unacceptable stuff in it.
[13:57] They could have said the Democrats had the rule of the group and started the legislation, but Packwood went out and said the White House pulled that.
[14:07] I'm not so sure that it wasn't handled.
[14:11] It wasn't handled properly by Packwood.
[14:15] No, but I bet that he should have been informed.
[14:21] Well, he wasn't.
[14:23] I don't know.
[14:26] But by the city of Silverman.
[14:28] Oh, I mean, probably.
[14:29] He could have been better than that.
[14:32] I mean, you can't.
[14:34] He felt, well, he was a man of the day.
[14:36] I'm not so damn sure.
[14:37] I'm not so sure.
[14:38] In the election year, you could probably get a labor bill through that Congress.
[14:44] Not through the House.
[14:45] No, probably not through the House.
[14:46] That's what I'm talking about.
[14:47] Okay, but we pulled it out of the Senate.
[14:51] He means they could have got that thing up and voted for it.
[14:53] That's what he thinks, as I understand it.
[14:55] I don't know.
[14:56] I may be wrong.
[15:02] You know, that's an amazing cut, Daniel.
[15:08] I can't really believe that.
[15:09] That's much worse than Washington Post.
[15:12] Y'all know the story, it's good.
[15:14] It's just a terrible headline.
[15:17] This airline rider sits there and just sweeps, sweeps it up.
[15:21] Yeah, it's typical.
[15:23] Typical, yeah.
[15:25] Don't you think the Times, Los Angeles Times over the years is about the same as the New York Times, Washington Post?
[15:33] I don't think so.
[15:33] Well, you can't be worse than Washington Post.
[15:35] It's worse than the New York Times.
[15:36] You think it is?
[15:37] Yeah.
[15:41] You'd say that it is, but you're not sure what you're saying.
[15:44] Especially when you consider that their editorial policy, it's worse than the news in the New York Times, when you consider that their editorial policy is fairly substantially for us.
[15:57] It shows you it's a just terribly badly run paper.
[16:04] They let the news, the headline writers, the picture people, the city desk people, go away with the scrutiny.
[16:11] positions that they're in the Toronto Plains believe.
[16:46] He's trying to call.
[16:54] Oh, the other guy is disagreeing.
[20:48] On Mitchell, did you say that he could not be here today?
[20:52] He wasn't here this morning, but he apparently is.
[20:54] Wait, wait, don't call me because I may have another idea.
[21:03] I think it's a mistake for us not to know this video.
[21:10] I'm sure I'm right tonight.
[21:25] go out tomorrow and meet with you today.
[21:26] No.
[21:27] No, we could meet tomorrow morning.
[21:33] I mean, we, I, I cast, I would go to Camp David.
[21:59] And we have a lot of them.
[22:01] There could be none of those.
[22:03] But I think it's a better story tomorrow than it is today.
[22:06] So let's just put it on that basis.
[22:09] I don't want to miss on those two stories.
[22:10] They're too important.
[22:12] I don't know whether they get much right anyway, but this will just tell.
[22:16] This will be the lead story, the end of the story.
[22:33] You could not have agonists who are active in the press.
[22:46] Just let's say the president, like let him wait a little bit more longer.
[22:49] Say the president made yesterday a request for an agonist.
[23:05] He goes up to the fund or something and he can say, go ahead and meet me today and say, we will announce it tomorrow.
[23:09] Yeah.
[23:13] Okay.
[23:14] Secretary would say, we will announce it tomorrow.
[23:16] And then you've got to get the meeting over with before you get it in common.
[23:22] Yeah.
[23:22] All right.
[23:22] We can do that, but we will not announce it today.
[23:25] I'll say that we'd love to.
[23:26] And then we will announce it today.
[23:28] And then it's a little bit better when it's going out and announcing it here in front of the White House.
[23:33] And then you can say to the president,
[23:35] Where would he be over that time?
[23:38] Well, he leaves here at the end of the month, so he can do it from here.
[23:40] At the airport when he leaves.
[23:43] Well, where is his office?
[23:45] Where does he do things when he does things in Washington?
[23:48] He doesn't very often.
[23:50] He'd call the president once in a while.
[23:52] They'll call him, and he should just arrange to be at any place he likes.
[23:58] I think that's the best thing.
[23:59] I think we'll be considerable enough.
[24:13] Sit here, please.
[24:15] Sit here, please.
[24:47] Right?
[24:48] When do you read tomorrow, Saturday?
[24:49] He's done.
[24:52] What if we had an announcement we wanted to make today?
[25:29] It'd be pretty great.
[25:35] But I don't think we'd, you wouldn't want to say anything because I'd just tips it off.
[25:40] Point is we don't want to undo anything on the economic story today.
[25:51] Right.
[25:53] He won't make me ask me who would.
[25:55] This wouldn't involve a president.
[26:13] All right.
[26:13] He says he doesn't have a normal briefing, but he can post it or do a call-in deal for a briefing in the morning at 10 to 1.
[26:20] What he said is we're totally flexible in anything we want to do.
[26:23] We can work out the original process.
[26:45] by the president.
[26:46] That's right.
[26:49] Or housed by the press secretary that the president is.
[26:52] So it's like, let that move on the wires before the West person moves out tomorrow and then let him talk about his line.
[27:10] That would also give us a time to notify if you
[27:33] Wow, he's big, you know, that historical association, you know, he's very hot on history, which they're not tying into.
[28:09] We are not who we are.
[30:06] All I have is questions.
[30:08] I didn't know they were going to move.
[30:10] I heard about it.
[30:10] I don't know that we didn't.
[30:12] We may have.
[30:13] Because the decision was made on Monday.
[30:20] I asked Gerard Schultz about it.
[30:22] He said, no.
[30:24] He said, we really got to get off of that.
[30:26] And then he said, I'm just going to watch.
[30:31] And I said, all right.
[30:32] You know what I mean?
[30:33] We just, we didn't.
[30:34] It wasn't any case of sell-off.
[30:35] Later.
[30:36] But the timing made it look like it.
[30:38] It sure did.
[30:38] And I'm sure it made sense.
[30:47] Well, we will do today.
[31:26] And so it's moved by the time that he gets out.
[31:28] And then he can say, well, I'll be glad to see you, Peter.
[31:36] That's not bad, anyway.
[31:38] Well, it shows him moving right out of the couch, too.
[31:39] That's just good, huh?
[31:40] That's good.
[31:40] And we get the story of someone who...
[31:45] There's a better story tomorrow.
[31:48] I can write this on your paper, anyway.
[31:58] He doesn't know anything about what we're talking about.
[32:02] He just doesn't want to have a meeting.
[32:07] So he doesn't think about changing any plan.
[32:11] Just say this is the plan because it works best this way.
[32:31] Yeah, yeah, there's a trick.
[32:32] Put those down on the floor.
[32:34] Yep.
[32:39] See if it closes.
[32:44] Yes, sir.
[32:44] Yes, sir.
[32:44] I'd like to see you at some time.
[34:00] to the Senators and Congressmen in the next good few months.
[34:04] And then I would say, you ought to break up with the Secret Service.
[34:07] I'm going to tell them that.
[34:09] And I've talked to them.
[34:11] I'll say to both the Secret Service and the Library to do some contacts at airports and so forth.
[34:18] They said they're always security conscious.
[34:38] It was interesting.
[34:43] They did a poll of the Newsman, the Washington Newsman, as to which papers they believe.
[35:09] I don't know if somebody was reported on these things.
[35:15] Eighty-one percent believed the New York Times.
[35:19] And like 14 percent believed the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Star.
[35:27] And 11 percent believed the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal.
[35:33] And like 7 percent believed the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune.
[35:38] I mean, it was something like that.
[35:39] My numbers may be wrong, but my point was about it.
[35:42] Because the Times is the only paper that the press corps believes.
[35:47] They see the Washington Post as a totally distorted work, and they don't see the Times as such.
[35:54] But they see the Post way below the Wall Street Journal and the Substar and the Baltimore Sun and the Christian Science Monitor.
[36:04] They rank it with the Chicago Tribune, one on one side and the other on the other.
[36:14] Chicago Junior isn't as bad as it used to be.
[36:17] All our LSAs are as good as they used to be.
[36:25] We don't turn around.
[36:26] We don't turn around.
[36:27] We don't turn around.
[36:33] We don't turn around.
[36:36] We don't turn around.
[36:48] about Chandler and Otis Chandler to go to Montgomery Chandler.
[36:52] Those things followed.
[37:49] First, they're gonna present a problem, and I don't have a hell of a lot of confidence about our own strategy for meeting, and I don't have any better ideas, but I think that we just seem to get rolled every time we get into a whack with the Congress.
[38:03] Don't you have that feeling to an extent?
[38:06] Oh, but not every time.
[38:07] I don't think they win every vote.
[38:08] We want more than the flaws.
[38:08] I'm not speaking about the votes.
[38:10] I'm speaking about the PR votes.
[38:12] Not even on that.
[38:15] Well, if you get the PR vote of Detroit,
[38:19] water we hold now.
[38:19] There's no light.
[38:24] While those, we're going to have a tough time.
[38:26] And help let that rich man in the lighthouse sits there, heartless, heartless and cruel, cutting off funds to starving children, letting the water stay dirty, taking breakfast away from the black children.
[38:55] He doesn't care, he wants to protect the IT&T.
[38:59] The strategy should really be delayed, the way I think about it.
[39:15] Spend more time on the political side of this.
[39:19] The PR side, that's all he should really worry about.
[39:23] He's gotta watch things like this.
[39:25] I didn't know about that Pennsylvania thing.
[39:36] I don't know what you think.
[39:39] It's a hell of a lot more important than private insurance.
[39:45] We work our butts off on private insurance and I need to find a government and so forth and it gets two-six.
[39:53] You know what I mean?
[39:55] two sticks in the public mind, and it is not that much of an issue.
[39:59] It really isn't.
[40:00] It is the, we do our job and have us to make it work, which I don't think, do you think it is?
[40:06] No, there's no question it's not.
[40:11] But if we could play the role, nobody ever really decided to do it, it would just get appropriate, but I think for the most part, the more we can delay and screw things up, the better.
[41:46] Chester.
[41:48] They get, you know, they say, does he play at the first fair?
[41:54] Yeah, fair.
[41:55] And he's not playing for us.
[41:58] Why is he not fair?
[42:01] Severide's playing it our way.
[42:03] Brinkley's playing it our way.
[42:04] Brinkley, when we're really out, he craps on his snide remarks.
[42:17] But while they've been front and center, they've not done well with the analytical guys on the two big networks.
[42:26] They've not done well with Howard Smith, but they generally don't.
[42:31] How about the other reporters?
[42:35] Ferries?
[42:35] Mudd?
[42:37] He has given them a bad time.
[42:39] I guess that Mudd knows he's got a problem with these men, because he coached at L4.
[42:45] Shore has been pimping for them.
[42:48] All the way.
[42:51] Rather is the standard Democrat, so he hasn't been very good with the governor.
[42:59] Pierpoint, kind of lost in the middle, hasn't covered much one way or the other.
[43:08] Larry Hines, Larry Hines has been pretty much straight.
[43:27] I'm not sure.