Nixon, White & Sanchez on 1972 Presidential Election and Foreign Policy

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All right, bye.

I'll shoot one while we're sitting here.

That's one of the things, Mr. Sixpence, that I'm very proud of.

The yellow and the gold and the colorful.

Oh, here we go.

Now, there we are.

Is that appropriate?

Yes, sir.

Copies of each, if they turn.

Well, that's pretty good.

How do you come to know?

No.

You've got seven weeks to go.

Seven weeks to go.

When do you start the Rising Act?

No.

Three days after.

You can't write.

You don't write anything for a long time.

No.

You can do it for a long time.

You can do it with iced tea, iced coffee.

I've got all of this.

I've got all of this coffee and stuff.

Oh, this is a very good glass of coffee.

Well, you've got to interpret the conventions.

Let me approach you directly, Mr. President.

Ah, sure.

It's certain that you'll be the fourth president in this century elected for two terms, and only three others elected.

Re-elected.

Who's been re-elected?

Wilson.

Roosevelt.

It's Eisenhower, right?

Managed to make it twice.

You will certainly be elected.

The question is whether it's...

I mean, basically, I don't know.

Let's put it that way.

What did you get out of it?

I do have, you know, yes, for your very private intervention, Mr. Columbus, I received a very nice note from Mrs. Kennedy in Rose County thanking me for making the Secret Service available to Ted.

As you know, we stretched a point there, but my reason for doing it was fundamentally the fact that

He's kind of, of course, acting the most threats, certainly.

And also, he really should get it on with you.

And for the Wallace thing, you really just can't take any chances with anybody who's involved in it.

But I just think he's getting

It's mostly there in the South.

It's work.

It's patriotism.

You know, my God, I mean, the cameras, it's hot in the Midwest.

You should hear it in South Carolina.

You know, they wear the flag out there.

Alabama.

You see, whenever we made a Vietnam speech, the biggest response we always get is to the South.

That's just a big issue.

The whole business of the, you know, the things in the garden are sort of, you know, they, the garden is sort of the top, sort of the coops and the rest of it.

That doesn't bother God.

Those southerners, for the most part, it bothers them very much.

They're kind of moral, kind of religious, kind of square, kind of like, like, you know.

I guess the most important thing in my last book was the conversation we had at the Pierre.

When I asked you that, you know, the technical form, and you said my priorities are

to get some sort of deal with the Soviet Union, to defuse the situation in the Middle East, to wind down the Vietnam War, to come into contact with China.

Did I mention that?

I did.

It's right there in the book.

You said you want to put Africa in the background.

I had to.

You had to.

But for a projection of, on the record, of what a president plans to do in foreign policy,

I don't think there's anything that's like very routine.

You know, I'm saying, I'm not going out there.

Charlie Ribbons.

Yeah, Charlie Ribbons, the picture of Tubbs.

I remember that so well.

Well, there were the four things that you said you were going to do.

And they're on their way.

Well, they've been done, actually.

You said there has to be a dialogue.

A climate of dialogue with the subject.

I mean, we haven't gone to Seoul at all, a bunch of us.

Then you said we have to get into communication with China and the

Middle East, each of the four major things, all that you said was done as marvelous.

What I want to do is ask the same stupid question now about domestic affairs.

So the whole thing comes in that big.

I don't know what I'm going to do.

Well, let me do this.

Let me digress from the domestic affairs to put the foreign thing in context a bit.

Because I think you should know that I don't think that's

what we had done in foreign affairs, and we had really achieved more than I had hoped, except for the fact that I had hoped that we would have had a more rational reaction than our Vietnamese, or so that would be over, and the money would be over.

Let's just face it, it would be over.

Now, the point is that, on the other hand,

terms of the opening of China, the establishment of not only negotiation but even cooperation in some areas with the Soviet Union, the reestablishment of American, using that word, prestige in Europe, even though you hear a lot of bitching around.

But whether it's in Western Europe with the great powers there, whether it's in Japan where we've got our problems, but we still are highly respected, or whether it's in Southeast Asia,

any place in the world, with the one exception is South Asia, where we have the problem, and then you get Pakistan, which will always be with us, as long as they're having their terrible, stupid fight about protection.

Whether it is that, we have, I suppose, I was properly accused of overstating in China when I said we had changed the world.

a lot better world now than it was.

It's a lot safer world than it was.

And it's going to be safer in the future.

It's in the title of my last chapter, which is because at the end of the post-war world, the settlement of 1945-47 liquidated in the next administration.

Well, now look, what I see now, and the reasons I want to mandate, is that

And it hurt, and Kissinger pointed this out in his last, and he came back after his impression.

And he was sort of, you know, he said, you know, he said, except for Joe and I, he said, you're not a senior spaceman of a major country in the world.

And, of course, I wouldn't say that in terms of any grandeur or anything like that, but it is true.

was gone, Churchill was gone, even Macmillan was gone, Carson Eisenhower was gone, and all the rest.

So here we are, here sits the United States, with new leadership in the Soviet Union, Russia, now it's the man, no question.

Joe and I, of course, and Mao Zedong, and China.

So, what we need, as I said, there's the leadership of Japan, which you point out, the Kishi, Saiko, Yoshihiro, gone.

Tanaka was new, if the American president can come in with a solid majority, he will speak with enormous authority.

Now, we have done extremely well from a base of 43% with the country that was divided, with the press just coming to live with Jesus.

Those who work in the election community, in fact, the opposition, the establishment, believe me, I mean, you have to

I don't blame anybody for this.

But the establishment has given us not nothing but a clear button all the time we've been here.

And, oh, sure, they went along with the China thing when they saw it succeeded, the Russian thing when they saw it succeeded.

But you know our problems.

But be that as it may, we have come this far.

But now comes the need for very, very careful

continued progress handling this China initiative from now on without scaring the Japanese to death or our other three Asian friends.

Very difficult problem.

We must do so.

Balancing the China thing with the Russia thing is a very difficult exercise.

We've got to keep the friendship bold and we must never be playing one against the other.

It's much more difficult, because it involves the whole heart of our defenses.

And then they become the MPFR.

And you're not balanced fortunately enough.

That requires all of our therapy.

And you keep all this in your mind.

That's my job.

But MPFR, you see, all of this is going on.

There will be announcements between now and the election.

It's all two.

This is all of this that we know.

It's not to be read, but MPFR will be announced.

in the negotiation at the F.R., the European Security Conference.

And so, too, we'll all take place in the next six months.

Now, I've seen the reasons.

So what I really need, I've got to, if we are in, we should win the election.

I don't want to be in the position of George Churchill, you know, going to Potsdam and, you know, and, I mean, on the other hand, that isn't going to happen, I don't think.

But that is, if we could win, win well, then,

to talk to the Soviet, the Great Authority, you can talk to the Chinese Authority, you can talk to the Japanese.

And you've got to talk to the Europeans the same way.

The European, here's Europe, economic giant.

And like it had, virtually militarily, in terms of world power.

I don't mean France is strong, and Britain is strong, and all of them together.

that the United States is the key to it.

And therefore, the negotiations of the United States must take the lead in the negotiations reducing the tensions in Europe, reducing the burdens of arms in Europe, reducing the forces in Europe, but without discouraging their allies and without Finlandizing Europe.

That is the next great problem that we need to confront with.

The Mideast is still terribly difficult.

I would like to say that while we've got Bill Rogers and all of our people great credit for cooling it there and having the courage to try a lot better for the monarchy to lead each other every day, nevertheless, it is terribly difficult that we are going to keep our commitment to Israel.

But we at the same time must develop a policy that is something more than an arm's use there.

And that's the question.

So what I'm saying is that the work is not finished there.

I would just mention it.

I don't want to indicate that there's no interest in Africa.

There is.

But that's basically more European.

And the more their problem and ours, the more they have to go through.

But Latin America, Latin America is our problem.

And when I say our problem, I don't mean that.

But Latin America, we need some limitations in that area.

So much for the foreign policy.

What I mean to say is that we have made a very good beginning.

Many would say a spectacular beginning.

Because for 25 years, we were frozen in ice.

Now we've fought the ice.

find a way to swim through, you know, and get to the shore.

And this, therefore, it's when the ice thaws is the period of the greatest danger, as well as the greatest hope.

So that's the way I look at it at the present time.

That's foreign policy.

And the mandate is essential.

in order to be able to feel stronger.

In fact, Kissinger and I were saying, we just marveled that we've been able to do what we've done from a position of weakness.

This fellow, I mean, a position of weakness in many ways.

Well, in the sense that we didn't have public support at all.

You know what I mean?

The Europeans, they read Time, they read Newsweek, they read the New York Times, they read the Washington Post.

This fellow hasn't done any support, right?

And the only way we've been able to do this is, we haven't done it with the mayors, but as the personal diplomacy at the highest level, we've had to convince them that we were strong and that we had the will to use our strength.

That's why the May speech was so important.

That was probably the most important decision that was made, the May planning speech.

I wasn't sure about it, but I knew we had to do it.

So much for that.

Now on the domestic side.

The way I would put that is this.

In the view of foreign policy, a president can lead in a congress festival.

We know that.

Even if we've got a number.

Look at Truman.

You see where I've learned that.

And the reason I knew it could be done is what Truman did with the Indian Congress.

Remember?

Yes, we just beat the hell out of Truman.

We passed the Taft-Hart numbers.

We told him.

We made it rational and all that.

But in the field of foreign policy, we had the Greek-Turkish aid program.

We had the Marshall Plan.

Truman led, and we followed him.

I voted for all those things.

And I'm very proud of my partners.

Now, here we are in the field.

even though in Vietnam we've had a terribly difficult time when those votes were harassed virtually every month.

Nevertheless, the Congress has gone along, because if the President steps up strong and hard in foreign policy, a Congress will follow him.

And one of the Governor's major problems is that he's out of step with the bipartisan tradition.

That's the major mistake he's made.

I mean, I think he'd get away with $1,000 a person, with $4,000 a man, with $6,500 a man, and all the rest, provided he had not departed from what was considered the bipartisan vision of a strong defense and a strong foreign policy.

That, I find, is the real cruncher when it comes to all that space about the meaning.

The meaning is that sort of stuff.

And comedy.

Oh, yeah, they work on the economics, too.

The redistribution of wealth disturbs them.

The welfare disturbs them, all these.

But what really forces a man, the main thing that makes an individual, a man or a woman, lead his party is usually when they think in terms of the country and the people of the board and defense policy.

That'll take them over.

The domestic thing, they figure they can handle.

Now, let me come back to the domestic thing, to where you were.

While in the field of foreign policy, using my 80th Congress exam, a president with a Congress against him can leave.

In the field of domestic policy, he cannot.

And there again, in 1980, the Congress went directly against Truman's will on taxes, on a number of items.

Do you remember?

On the trolls.

The trolls.

Now, they lost, but nevertheless, they did.

I have had somewhat similar problems.

In fact, we've got the Coast Office, and we've fiddled around with a few things.

You've got the Amur idea, too.

We're going to get revenue sharing.

That's what I'm going through.

Oh, it's sure.

It's sure.

Revenue sharing is the only major issue we're going to get.

Now, that's because we put a hell of a lot of heat on the mayors and governors.

And Governor Rockefeller probably deserves a round of applause on that.

He is just bringing up a great issue.

And anyway, we're the mayors and county mayors.

But anyway, now my point is, we were just talking to Elliot today about welfare reform, and they were talking about what do we do with the fuel and the taxes, and what about our health program, and what about our government reorganization, and the other things.

And I said to him, Elliot, let's face it, this Congress is not going to do anything responsible for this ocean.

I said, so let's quit fooling around.

I said, let's do everything that we can.

Because if you do make concessions, you're just going to get ourselves in the same box the other fellows in.

We leave our positions.

Remember that the next Congress will do a better job on a tax bill.

It'll do a better job on a welfare bill.

It'll do a better job on needed health reform proposals.

A thorough prioritization in this Congress.

And he said, well, suppose we don't win the Congress.

I said, I don't care if we win.

I said, I want us to win.

I said, I think we may win one house or the other.

But even if we don't, if a president wins by anything like 10 million votes or more, which we might.

We could win by 10 million votes or more.

Or we could win by 2 million votes.

I said, when the president comes in with that, the Congress for the next year is going to follow that president.

That's my view.

If the mandate is big enough.

Truman, you understand, the reason it's falling is this.

Truman, you understand, in 46 had not been elected.

He had no mandate, remember?

He had succeeded Roosevelt before five Republicans got ahead.

a field of domestic policy, then we can say now the country has spoken.

Because I'm going to present my domestic views in the campaign at a very high level, not taking the NFL on.

Others will do that.

I'm going to present my views so that the people will be determined whether they want an enormous increase in the welfare rules or whether they want the kind of order we've got, whether they want our kind of program and fiscal responsibility.

I'm going to leave the present a little bit further out.

Maybe you'd like to see a little history, maybe.

Stay right there.

The night Rockefeller nominated me, I called him from home, and I said, thank you very much.

And I told him, you know, I'm super sorry about the video, but I didn't tell him a lot of things.

about all these problems.

He came in a couple of days ago, and he said, I guess it's time to have a conversation with you.

I made some notes about some things that we learned.

He brought me this piece of paper.

And it didn't really matter.

I'm not suggesting that I have been studying.

I said, all right, let's keep going.

I said, you're busy.

You go down and get your bright boys to get busy and all this.

do, because you see, what we can do, I want to make the kind of change we're going to have, this is very important, it's not the kind of change that we had in the well-intentioned, but not well-thought-out poverty program era.

The 60s was not good for America.

It was a mess.

The 60s, I think it would be a good one of that name.

Yeah, very good.

One thing we have learned, and this is the thing about some of our guys, but the early ones, his crowd over there, needless to say, the Kissinger crowd, we know how to do the job.

We know what will work and what won't work.

We're very pragmatic.

Lewis Harris uses the term, and I used it when he said this, change that works.

radical upheaval.

The American people are a little suspicious of too violent change.

In fact, rightly so.

They had a lot of it and wasted a lot of money.

Now they say, my God, we want change.

We want to improve.

You see, that's my concern.

So when it comes, when you talk about the Constitution, the government reorganizations,

constitutional uh something that's radical as far reaching as the constitutional convention uh reorganization decisions and so forth and so on but you say you will find a very open mind in our shop but we're going to be darn sure that it's something that's going to prove the situation rather than just stir people up get them all excited and knock them off their worries the american people today i think you're finding this if you remember the sand sandbells found in

and boat errors and yelping their coals.

People are, this is their reactionary.

It's just that they're fed up with being used in experiments and so forth.

That's my view.

I don't know what you meant.

But what Nelson's point is, after all, he's a city man, he's a state man.

He just thinks we've got to get rid of the problem of transportation.

You know what I mean?

He's got his head screwed up tight.

Because Nelson also knows what will work and what won't work.

At least that's my view.

So what you can see here, what you will see, is a very pragmatic administration.

Pragmatic in the sense that we know all the plays.

We know all of them.

be in a position to present to the country and to the Congress those changes in our system that are really needed and that will really work and that will really improve the administration that will make it more efficient, that will make it closer to people, more responsive to the needs of people.

These are just generalities, of course.

But these are goals that we are going to work towards.

of their goals that will be achieved only by the most intensive study and revenue presenting the country.

But let me say this.

I do not look upon, let me put it this way.

Let me start over again.

The first four years has not been a easy period, because we started when the country was in a hell of a shit.

You've probably forgotten those days when we had $200,000 or $300,000 margin

I saw you at the beginning.

Nixon, White & Sanchez on 1972 Presidential Election and Foreign Policy

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on September 18, 1972

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