Nixon, SerVass & White House photographer on Indiana politics

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Yes, they have.

Let's get over here.

All right.

I'll check it on the other side.

God bless you.

party loyalty in the presidency

So I'm going to give you an index of all of these to send over.

These are just a selection of those that's equal right here.

So I thought that, and we were so pleased with your thoughts on this issue.

It's a base.

We travel everywhere from there.

I have...

But Curtis is still in...

It's all back in Indiana.

Everything is edited there, published there.

We have offices in principal cities.

But that's our base in Indiana.

And even more interestingly, perhaps my basic business is the steel business.

And we have three steel plants in James County.

Every week or so.

And you're thought of so highly.

I mean, that trip you made down there, the county's never been the same.

Well, these are 14 plants.

It is, but we're the industrial base there.

And we make automobile parts.

And we're building a hospital.

We're building a hospital.

There's no hospital there, so we are building a hospital.

And what, Richmond?

North Vernon.

Yes, North Vernon.

It's just south of Columbus, as you may recall.

All right.

I have a little project here which I'm nurturing.

Hopefully this is a chance to look at it.

I want to read my speech for you.

Oh.

I would like to make a suggestion.

Well, I used to be a speechwriter.

I really did.

I used to write it.

The American Legion had its national headquarters there.

I know.

For about five years, I used to write speeches for national commanders on foreign affairs and all sorts of things, and then I became too busy.

But this speech I'm going to write for you, and I only want to write it to see whether it'll fly.

policy speech by utilizing the draft boards to classify the unemployed for entry into the labor force in the same way that the draft boards now qualify men for entry into the armed service.

It's just a different form of service.

The theory being that all unemployed are handicapped in some way, and they're not competitive with the minimum wage.

So if we could take the draft boards who have done a fine job, are not controversial,

and convert them into the classification of the unemployed, then we can assign each unemployed person a handicap.

And with that handicap, he could work for less than the minimum wage, the difference being supplemented from unemployment compensation, and could find a way of entering into the labor force.

That's so important because there is no

And once they're in, then they can be trained.

They're re-evaluated every six months by that same draft board, and hopefully they're brought up to and beyond the minimum wage, at which time they're on their own.

So I talked to Patrick Buchanan, and Patrick took a lot of notes.

And then they're going to give me the job of writing a rough draft to the speech to see if it goes that far.

And I'm hoping that maybe I can continue to be active.

Absolutely.

We will.

Unemployed are sickle cell anemia, cerebral palsy, a lot of medical problems that cause industry not to be competitive.

They hire them at minimum wage because they aren't

They could earn a dollar in it.

Money isn't for them to do, but you can't take somebody with a 12-year mentality and give them a 30-year mentality job.

That's right.

They can't compete.

But doctors could really explain the handicap to the employer, too.

Each disease, like sickle cell anemia, is becoming very common.

Yes.

And people finally discover it.

But they're so unique, they're just lethargic.

And schools think the kids are lazy, and they're really just...

Marginally.

Physiologically handicapped.

Laurie Jane is a physician, Mr. President, so she's speaking some of knowledge that I have.

I have offered a full-time volunteer to help us.

We have a pilot plan to put this plan into effect because I think that physicians need to explain to industry better the handicaps of sickle cell, cerebral palsy, ecumenics, all of this.

Many.

And the handicapped are so rough.

They're handicapped the most.

physically, mentally, all these are handicaps, preventing them from being competitive with the minimum wage.

One thing, of course, is to find out what the numbers are.

You know, I'm probably the only adequate survey in the Labor Department to be able to do that.

We're going to have a number, shouldn't we?

There must be.

Some of those may be available now.

Probably in some areas rather than others.

I remember your speech.

my mind's eye saying that for good health, every man needs to be employed.

He needs to have something to do that is useful, that gives him a sense of satisfaction.

He needs a way of entry into the labor force.

Today, we're so concerned about entry into the educational system.

But entry into the labor force is even more difficult.

You know, one of the problems we used to begin with right away is to get the unions to cooperate.

They have a lot of problems.

See, both of these are out in the field, and they wouldn't be going

medically with a lot of physicians with a lot of explanations like one of the 10 Negroes has a trait and if they marry each other they'll have children with the disease it'll help even to become aware and be more honest about the problems in medicine and cause people to not be able to work

So that the 3% that are really in transit between jobs are really identified as that, and the other 3% are identified as handicapped problems.

Then if we could salvage the draft war system, which has the respect of the American people already.

There have never been any scandals with people accepting the draft classification.

If we could, I'm just thinking of this speech as a

And it's emotional, and it's, how should I say, I see it framed as an appeal to humanitarians.

And while I realize that there might be certain welfare groups that would say, oh, you're going to take welfare people where they're handicapped and make them work, the truth is they want to work.

Sure, that's part of it.

It just makes their handicap worse for them to feel that they're useless.

Absolutely.

They just sit around, you know.

That's right.

And they become worse and worse.

And if they do something, they'll give them a reason to live.

Otherwise, they'll have some will to live.

They don't have that.

That's fine.

That's a very good point.

I know how they are.

You see them, you know, driving around Central Avenue and other places.

Well, I just wanted to know if that's a project that you would like to work on.

And it may never fly, but at least .

Incidentally, I wish you well in this project, too.

taking the post.

I just hope that you can make it go in terms of your plans are rather ambitious, aren't they?

With magazines and stuff.

Magazines folding, like, look at the restaurant.

Here you are, moving back into the field where everybody thought it was finished.

How about the, now you also have Holliday.

Yes, we do.

That's about the same.

They were all losers.

Yes.

This company, which was one of the great American corporations, just smashed up since 1965.

Lost $100 million.

$100 million?

Right now, even this five years later, we have almost a $40 million tax loss gap.

I don't know whether I can utilize it, but now, because we're a small company.

But this company, just two years ago, lost $10 million.

But now, the status quo is in the black.

The company is in the black.

And I think we're going to have an interesting story for this presidency.

Benjamin Franklin founded that magazine in 1728.

And people say, why don't you suspend that publication for 20 months?

And I say, yes, but you know, it's not the first one.

In 1775,

that the Franklin suspended publication of the Post to protest the stand-back.

And in 1812, it was suspended when the British occupied Philadelphia.

So it's only the third time.

But I think in each century, it went back to the Renaissance.

And now I think we're good to the year 2050.

Right.

How do you do your ?

Of course, I guess the

If you notice, it says it costs a dollar on the newsstand.

But if you take a subscription, it's a dollar and a half because the postage is going up so fast that it's putting a lot of magazines out of business.

So we charge more for the subscription than for the newsstand because of the cost.

And we simply sell the magazine to the reader.

And we try to print wonderful stories in the sense of interest, good fiction, good articles, good volume.

Your subscriptions will pay for it.

That's what they're paying for now, the subscriptions.

Is that right?

Yes.

And the readers love it.

They write how their mothers cry.

Why, sure.

But they ought to.

The advertisers ought to support this.

I mean, these businesses in this company, in this country, instead of supporting the smut stuff that they get in some of this other thing, why don't they support a decent magazine?

Imagine having an advertising agency.

These are pretty liberal, by and large.

Liberal?

And they support their liberal friends.

That's a very good point.

And the businessmen of the country, Kevin Swilson, I don't know if you know him, Holiday Inn.

He has Jay Walter Thompson and the Eli Lilly Company.

And I talked to Gene Beasley last week, and he's going to insist that Deer DeBois, their advertising agency, support the Post.

He's going to insist on, I guess, their recommendation.

They want to be in liberal publications with people who may cause them trouble on the Hill.

They want Lilly to advertise in liberal magazines.

Why?

Because they say that sooner or later, these liberals are going to cook up some ideas about what to do bad to the pharmaceutical companies, and generic medicine, and what have you, and then they're going to cause trouble.

This is what the advertising agency tells the Eli Lilly company.

No, that's years ago.

I don't know.

They insist that they want to be an activist liberal publication for Lilly.

keep Lily out of trouble.

Oh, that's...

Isn't that the darn thing?

They won't have time in magazines like ours because those people are poor than any of them.

I want you to just have them tell the story of a homeowner when you do that.

It used to be with J. Walter Thompson.

It's been 10 minutes or something about this magazine.

I'd love to.

You tell them.

It's a very good thing.

I was thinking of Ted Wilson of Holiday Inn.

He's a great... Billy Graham.

They ought to be in there all the time.

But he has Jay Walter Thompson for his agency, and they recommend against some post every time down the line.

They have yet, Kodak won't even come with us, because Jay Walter doesn't think, I mean, either they're liberal or I don't know what, but they think.

They should be liberal.

Well, I don't know.

I don't understand that.

I do not know why, but the big agencies.

The big agencies.

Most agencies in New York are not.

and they're all liberal.

And so the conservative press is a businessman.

By the way, in today's editorial in The Star, Mr. Powell was attacked by Anderson for this memorandum that he wrote two months before his appointment, urging business to go to the courts as a prosecutor.

It causes

why don't you go to court and help defend the defendants there?

And Anderson was taking him to the cash, yes, because he said this was marked confidential so that it didn't come to the attention of senators who would have voted against it.

Now, I think that's another reason to vote for it.

That's right.

But it showed you the bias.

You see, these agencies also determine what's on the networks, and they support these horrible television programs, including news shows and the rest of it.

I mean, it's one player's agency.

It's all a group that works in it.

And these agency people will squeal around, and they'll say, I don't know if we can do that.

This is a proposition.

That's not true.

They do it because they

And our people there, we insist that they want to be in the activist, liberal thing.

Well, they're just sustaining those people and cutting our live blood off.

They prevent conservative publications from existing by cutting off their advertising.

That's what it is.

You don't see any advertising to speak of the nation from here.

No, no.

No, what you want to have here is a fine magazine.

It's one of our surprise and so forth.

My God, when you see some of that junk,

That horrible, really horrible thing.

Actually, you're doing pretty well on advertising.

I know it's not going to be done well.

We have general orders.

We are doing general orders.

We're really working hard for it.

We're really going to make it by selling it to the reader.

And we think that that's the big question.

So great that you're doing that.

may develop in Washington in the next four years.

And I like reading things and to think about it and to construct it and then maybe to try to write it down and to give it an editorial forum.

In the post, we have, unlike the Reader's Digest or news magazines, we can go at a long length, 10,000 words to explain how something will work and the ramifications with great pictorial ability.

So I'm hoping that as time goes along,

great projects that are aborning here and in a creative form, that I can work with some of those.

And when the time comes to try to convey that in the graphic form, in great detail, so that it has a good airing.

Well, you had a talk with .

Both of you had it on this matter.

Uh, and then John Erdman shot on the, uh, on the, uh, employment scheme, so.

We've got a lot of people around here.

I mean, I mean, there are all these, uh, presidential complexes that kind of knew that, you know, just the, right off the fly, that this was the same thing for you, and that's off the floor, you see.

Here it is.

Thank you.

Hang it up.

I can see that.

Nixon, SerVass & White House photographer on Indiana politics

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on September 29, 1972

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