Conversation 792-006

Transcript (AI-Generated)

This transcript was generated automatically by AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Do not cite this transcript as authoritative. Consult the Finding Aid above for verified information.

Hey, Mr. Bill.

Good to see you again.

I haven't seen you in a long time.

I don't do that kind of business.

I don't do that.

Self-representation.

That's fine.

I've seen you.

You also...

I don't recall when was the last time.

It would have been... 1956, right?

I don't...

I just got a picture of you on the flag.

We always, at this standard, we should have a computer, but this is just, oh yeah.

All right, all right.

All right, oh boy, did I write it?

I don't write my own plan.

Oh yeah.

Good job.

I can tell when I hit it, it didn't do it.

Come on over.

Now, let me say what I had in mind.

I had a problem from time to time with Lou Harris' accent over K County, the Gallup people, and

The purpose, which I'm sure you understand, is not for the purpose of talking about how the elections and so forth are going to come out.

I'm trying to think of an ice-cream question.

Ice-cream?

Ice-cream question.

But what I'm really interested in is scams.

Now, we're going to have to talk to

I'm interested in what really runs beneath the surface, what the trends are, why it's happening.

The thing that I would particularly like to, you know, get any feelings you have on your observations is, and I know the pieces that have been carried here, the star, but what has happened, say, since 19...

1968 and 1972 to turn around the country's attitudes on a number of things.

I was, before you came to the House, I was rather thinking, this is Bob Holt.

No, I'm sorry.

I was thinking about 1968.

Well, let me put the proposition in.

In August of 1969,

Thanks to Pat Munch and his brilliant, creative thinking on this thing, we came up with what we thought was a much needed new program to do with welfare.

It provided banking assistance.

It was at margins either for it.

It was also providing work requirements and the rest.

We thought that five days of work on welfare, two work, made sure the people that worked didn't get less than people on welfare, and so forth and so on.

At the time that that was proposed, we polled, not like we polled Harrison County, but we polled around 65-70% of the people before I worked for it at that time.

Now, that was immediately after I made the speech.

After I made the speech, you know, I made a speech about it.

I think probably they were paid more attention to the workfare part than they were the family assistance part, if you broke it down.

The point that I make is that

And then in 1969, if you had rioters in numbers of 250,000, 300,000 marching around the Capitol, you had attitudes with regard to war, regarding national defense, with the U.S. role in the world, which were basically

uh, well, yeah, grave sense of pessimism about the country, its future, and so forth.

The argument was that unless we did some things, we did a very simple thing for the cities, for the black men and the poor and so forth, we were going to get ahead of the whole country and become a part of the cities.

One of the angels would come in about every three or four days and said, Jesus is here.

I'm going to bomb you.

I'm going to burn you.

I'm going to take care of you.

I'm going to save you.

I'm going to get you out of this world.

Because he, of course, was scared of all these people.

Now, the covenant.

The country is never as bad as it seems through the eyes of investors, never as good as it seems through the eyes of the conference, as we know.

But some changes occurred.

I was just talking to a senator here today who had supported our welfare proposal, who said that at the present time, it's a loser.

It says any welfare proposal is a loser.

This is another, what we call, moderate.

the what he said was a total turn around the small men had to go against one of the the bad boys which was a total turn around on the other side of the war the war that they had won against the and losing and the imposition of the communist government by force the attitude toward the feds

And looking back at that post, he says if you were, for example, to take the SST and bring it up, he said you'd wait for a variety of reasons.

Part of the national product and all that sort of thing.

Questionnaire, of course, being one of the environmentalists and so forth.

But nevertheless, he goes on.

Then he goes on.

He says in terms of the defense, the rest of the attitudes have significantly changed.

Well, to what at least senators and congressmen, to a certain extent, are reflecting differently.

They all reflect their error, and if they are, they compete.

And unless they're smart enough to know how to appear to be something that they are, then they are.

What do you feel, apart from what you found in all your surveys, why does it happen?

To what extent does it happen?

What's your working lead?

Some would say, well, there's the problem with race.

There's the problem with taxes.

There's the problem with the work ethic.

There's the problem that people have a little bit more sense of pride.

You know, call it jingoism or whatever.

How do you see the whole shape of it?

Yeah, shape of it.

Which has to do with the work ethic and the rest of the people saying, well, shape of her, or get off, and the like.

But I find this is not what you found.

Yeah, I mean, I wish you could run away with that.

Why?

What happened?

Why does the country turn like that?

Let me conclude with this.

I very much talked about it to you the other day, which you know.

If it hadn't been for Mr. Dillaton, I mean, I would probably be president today, probably be more effective on the people.

We were talking about Britain's problems, and Britain may have had it.

the question at the present time being that they do not have any such interest in the United States.

We just don't have the discipline of our labor force.

And he made a very good observation and said, you know, it's interesting to know if you'd join me.

He came over and met with our secretary of our general order group recently.

He says, this is after me and I had some confrontation in Miami.

And he was explaining how he had done something.

So I said, why didn't you do it?

He said, because I gave my word to the president.

Because they never do that with us.

Of course they might do it with a bigger government.

The point that he makes is that this is the environment.

And as a result, they've got this runaway inflation that had due to wage cost pushing in arms proportions.

But that's not the important thing.

We've had serious inflation problem with the wage cost pushing in this construction area.

unless people were willing to adhere to them.

And they were willing to adhere to them.

And labor, of course, among the best, even though they bitched about them, which is quite a credit to these fellows.

Well, I digress.

But I'd like to get your feel of what's happening in this country.

And one last thing.

Why have so many of, if I may use the term, of your colleagues in the Eastern Establishment have not seen it and don't even still recognize it?

Why is it that when you go down by, I'm just referring to the news magazines, the Times, the Newsweek, to the three networks, etc.

Needless to say, in Washington, D.C.

I'm asking, I'm asking, but not reading my stories.

And that's the truth.

There's something wrong there.

They don't see it.

They're living out their era.

You see, once the World Telegram died, I've had no New York City out there.

I get published by Long Island Press.

which is out in part of Jamaica, you know, part of Rhode Island, but all the so-called opinion makers, they don't see this copy at all.

And I'm published in all, in the suburbs and all this, but I'm not in any, in the New York Times.

You see, you only have... Sure, stop right here.

Yeah, and I only have two and a half newspapers in New York City.

And the World Television used to run my stories, and this meant that everybody in New York saw my stories and made a great deal of difference.

Now here, the star is, they have great internal properties, and they have been burying some of my stories, and cutting them, and not, and I think, I don't, Frank, I don't understand, because basically, I know what I set out to do, and nobody works any harder than I do, I think I, whether I succeed, but I'm always looking for the change from one election to the next.

And I work at it.

And there isn't a paragraph in any one of my stories that doesn't have a place there.

You can see they're all tightly written.

And many of the answers, questions you raise, will be really answered if anybody's read them carefully enough.

Now, I'm in Washington.

Post is running a series now, which to me is meaningless.

Because, uh, here's a piece of an indie tape that looks like more of a scissors and paste job rather than an analysis job, but I think you're wrong.

Well, I get the impression that, I don't know, I know that individually he's very confident in his work.

And, uh, their writing of the election is as if it, I can't say as if it started when the government got the nomination.

It's a little silly.

Because by that time, it's questionable that any Democrat could adopt such a big name.

And they also are trying to reduce this to a matter of personalities and say that this is a choice to him.

Well, I, and this is kind of,

And it's really silly in the sense that, obviously, of course, you vote on a man.

But people vote only on the man that they identify with.

And they identify with that man on the basis of reading into that person their own interests and their own concerns.

See, I use the term mentally, and not everybody, it's a selection scheme.

given selection, and everybody's tuning out all the time, and they tune in.

And the whole business is to understand the psychology of selection.

Now, there isn't anybody, if you listen to everything that was thrown at you, you'd go crazy.

It's a highly defensive, this is the secret weapon that the voters have against all the politicians, they don't listen.

And when they do, and when they do listen,

and try to translate it down to their own level.

Do they just turn out if they don't, if it doesn't relate to them?

It's just as you don't hear, you don't hear police alarm, you don't hear all kinds of sounds around you because you tuned them out and then suddenly you picked up sounds that interested you.

Now you haven't consciously decided, and also when you pass through the crowd, you pass all sorts of faces and you're picked up and stopped on the face.

Now this is the normal way that

And I'm sure that the psychologists have good explanations of it.

I've learned this over the years, the story of how people reacted.

And so when they start saying people have turned off or something, this is how they react normally.

The thing is, why have they turned off?

And how are they tuning?

What are they tuning in?

What are they tuning out?

All right, now, basically,

So every election, you can say, is a personality thing.

But this notion, I use the phrase, and I did one or two surveys here, that charisma is seeing yourself in the mirror.

You see, a politician has charisma if you see your own interests in them.

And this politician also has credibility.

If you agree with a kind of charisma,

Charisma is the voter.

To the voter, charisma is seeing himself in the candidate.

Charisma.

Now there are very few candidates, some candidates, who can tell this.

When you look at the voting returns, if it is the personality, it will override past leadages, will have all sorts of different effects there.

Now even Eisenhower,

with all his popular appeal, he had different effects.

He was the same man, and he had different effects on different people.

And this is how I judge, and this meant that his personality appeal was so flawed, and there were other things that they read into him.

And I'm sure if you remember, we talked a lot about him, when I was writing for the Golden Markets.

Everyone had the same opinion on him.

They were ready, they felt it.

on matters of war and peace, he would keep us at peace as long as he was alive.

And they didn't give two hoots about what he thought about domestic violence.

They paid no attention to him whatsoever.

And all the criticism of his domestic violence, he did not even give a damn.

They didn't care.

And one of the great mistakes he made in the 1958 procession, at that time, I was sitting in Sherman Island, and I told him,

People don't think he's alive.

Why doesn't he go out and talk to people?

They disagree with him, but he hasn't spoken to them all this whole recession, you know, through the recession of 58.

He did not make a public speech at that time.

And I said, if he fired somebody, it would be good.

And I was like, well, I don't think that he... You know, you're part of the problem.

You're part of the story.

It had a hell of an effect.

But this was the feeling in the country.

The people were wondering, who is running the White House?

And this was transmitted all through the thing.

But basically, even with his great popularity, a lot of reporters would like to write about a father image and all this other things, but basically, they always knew this distinction.

They were foreign for peace, and they didn't listen to him when he said anything about foreign policy.

And that's why, and I've had a number of people who would say, I'm going to vote for him, and I'm going to vote for Democrats to keep foreign prices up.

They did this consciously.

That's why in 1956, with a 17-point margin over Stevenson, we failed to carry the House this time.

Right?

They voted for the House.

Remember that?

It was impossible.

In fact, that's the first time a president has ever won with that kind of a margin and not traded the House and Senate.

Right?

And we weren't starting too low.

After 54, we were barely the same.

But you didn't lose by six to Obama.

Oh, you didn't?

That helped you a ton.

Plus it has taxes.

He was losing.

I once did a count, but then he lost in 1867.

All by himself.

Well, I don't lie.

The man is important.

But you can't separate any political personality from the issues and the positions he's taken and how he seems to people and how people identify with him.

So when you come out with a series that says people are voting on personalities,

this becomes meaningless.

Because, I'll tell you, the government doesn't say anything.

People will vote for what they want him to be, to stand for, and they'll proceed to read their interests into him if he kept quiet.

And they would vote accordingly, because this is the nature of voting.

People attach, you see, the candidates are already manipulating the voters.

And the voters manipulate the candidates that they have, whatever the choice is.

And if they feel strongly about something, they're going to attach it to someone.

And if they only have a choice in the government, you know they feel strongly about, and they can't attach it to you, they'll attach it to the government.

And it doesn't make, it doesn't make any difference whether he knows they're doing it or not.

Because they will do this, you see.

And the same way if they feel strongly about something, they will attach it to you.

You see, this is the process that the voter does.

Regardless of the campaign, I think most of the campaigns, yes, I did a little funny piece which I brought along in Star-Wars, about how to solve a watergate problem.

And I said my solution was, I thought this idea of reconciliation, it wasn't going to win me a Nobel Peace Prize or even get me a State Department job, but I said I thought that all of 10 million bucks should be given over to

worthy chariots, worthy charities of Democrats choosing.

But this such bipartisan benevolence, you see, with the Republicans putting up the money and Democrats naming who's going to get it, was the best income distribution plan that anybody had proposed.

But basically, the public in itself, they feel, they have their

always their own concerns, and they feel strongly honest about anything, they will find a way of expressing it.

And they are limited, you see.

Now, the great thing, you see, that happened in 1968 was people were using Wallace as a temporary waste engine before they made up their minds about the final election because they were trying to get a message out to the politicians, pay attention to us.

And when I was interviewing him, and I interviewed, I always asked people, who do you, of the two candidates, who do you dislike most?

And if he looked like he was going to win, which way would you go?

On this basis, they could figure out that in the North, where the break came, they would go for country, in the South, they would go for you.

And the last story that I sent out, Johnson announced his, his bond clause, and I said this would be neutralized.

because the Wallace photo would break according on both sides you know and would not have any great great effect because my judgment was that this would uh that there was any breaking you see the Wallace photo was ready to break and the very fact that it looked in the south and it looked like Humphrey was going to pick up those more Wallace I could then break over and come over to your side and reverse you see and this was the way the photo was poised at the end of the 16th election

So I did not see just doing their thing, but it was always in the picture.

Now, in this election, they're making a two-party choice.

See, there are very little defenders, and this gives it a different flavor in that sense of the thought.

Now, I don't know, when you talk about

You're going to have to bring me back to the parts of the major concern, no major concern.

You mentioned this welfare plan, and they say that the surveys has Gallup, Shultz, I don't know what questions they were asking.

for Nelson Rockefeller during the 68 campaign, when he was trying to beat you.

And one of the things at that time was this, you know, the idea of a gambling economy.

And I told him, you get off that.

But this is, you can't win.

Because if you, as soon as you raise this, people then bring up Social Security, and they want their share, and you have to have a general increase of everything in order to bring it through.

And the only way they want to bring this in is just say, you want to make jobs for people so they can work their way off welfare.

And this was the position he took.

But there was never, you see, this has always been tied in to the minds of the voters that they, you see, one of the things about welfare, and this showed up in the 60-day election,

They're critical of welfare, but they're envious by what these people get.

And they want it themselves.

So if you start giving them, if you start giving them something under the welfare plan, you have to match it.

And this was the point that I made in 1960.

I just said this is, you can't put together, you can't put across and get acceptance for a,

a guaranteed annual income, unless it's part of a general, you'd have to increase social, you'd have to increase everything, because there's a competitive aspect, just as there's a competitive aspect to people's thinking about the private economy, there's a competitive aspect to people's thinking about the public economy.

And they often compare themselves.

If somebody is getting something, they want theirs.

They want theirs.

And this is the dynamics.

And it shows up steadily in that.

And it's been in this picture.

And one of the things that you can, in polling,

The main part of the question is really how it's not the wording of the question, but whether the questions that are asked make sense in terms of the dynamics of the feelings of the people.

And the worst thing, the worst kind of pull there is to get a single question put on a

problems that can't be answered with a single question, then these polls are all wrong.

And whenever you see a single question, it's a very dangerous and tricky thing because... Do you approve or disapprove of the president's plan to do this and that or the other thing and get a wrong answer?

You get, you see, unless, if it isn't a single, you see, now you can get a single answer, you can get an answer, and you say, should capital countries be protected or abolished, you get pretty good answers on it.

But if you ask them, how do you feel about what we ought to do in Vietnam or the president's policy in Vietnam, you find out very quickly there's no agreement on what the president is doing at any various time.

It means different things.

So you have to ask a whole series of questions.

Yeah, and this is really one of the great problems of the polls.

They do questions and then they proceed to assume that the answer means what they think it means, and they don't really know whether the answer means that in terms of what the voters think.

And this is a mistake I have never made because I do my own research.

And I worked at it.

See, I'm always trying to see what's causing people to change.

And I'm sure I've made my mistakes.

But I know more.

I have the advantage that I apply my psychology to the voter while I'm listening to them.

See, in other words, I know a good deal about how voters think.

And they tell me things also by the figures that they

See, if people have information, I don't regard this as my intelligence.

I think this shows their interest.

People throw away information unless they're interested.

If they have information, it's evidence of interest.

Now, in the 1960 primaries, you see, between Kennedy and Humphrey in Wisconsin, a lot of people told me they were undecided, and I asked them, well, have you read up about Kennedy?

And then they told me, and they would read about it.

And I would check.

And in very little chapters, we were reading up about Kennedy and Frost and reading up about Humphrey.

And they were predisposed to us not caring that they got here.

So there are a lot of them.

But anyway.

What do you want to know about this work ethic?

At present, it is the carrier of the welfare feeling, it is the carrier of, and I wrote a piece on this, and there's a lot in there.

It's the carrier of racial feelings, it's the carrier of economic feelings, and it's the carrier also of the general frustration

that and so to be implicit that this is the most vulnerable that that people when they talk about it think entirely of the preferred black people they're very unhappy because they start talking about it and immediately the next thing they talk about the blacks the people who support welfare always have bring up their own family experience and there's a good deal of this now i've got letters i've got more letters

from people writing, writing in on a well-fed bank.

And some of them are very moving, and they just tell their own stories.

And it had four hard pages, and it ended up in a Jewish library.

And they told me, they're very thoughtful, and they explain what welfare means to them.

They have this sickness, and they're putting through that.

And this side, this part of it is sort of lost completely

in the pressure of the situation now, the guaranteed annual income idea is a very tricky concept.

And what you brought it to, at one point, the government brought it, and I remember what

Well, you bought it, so, at one point.

McDonough bought it, and I remember what...

He paid a bigger price.

That's right.

And it's really, it's really a statistical concept, which I very little, which you can't translate into your opinions.

And it comes out of, I suppose the Keynesian approach is to just move statistics around.

The economy is doing well, and that's what I was learning.

I think this is a basic mistake in how our whole society is being run today.

There are too many people running it by computers and statistics.

And not enough sense of trying to break down in terms of the impact on people.

And I'm trying to take a part of the problem and do something about that, and a part of the problem and do something about that.

You see, I think it's a great mistake to think that welfare is one problem.

It is actually a number of different problems, and you can't deal with it just by, you know, trying to build freedom.

It's only going to give people money, and this will solve everything.

Well, money is a very dangerous tool.

You see, money fights government.

This is what I learned during World War II.

The whole problem was the more money you pumped out, the harder it got to mobilize your resources for the purposes that you had.

You had to control it.

Money gives people choices, more choices than they had.

Alright, this is fine, but how much choice do you want people to have?

And still have a manageable government.

So this notion that all you do is just give people money and then they're going to do it they please with it.

They always want more.

You've got to satisfy them.

And there's a question whether you do it and you get it.

Then inflation becomes the way of achieving everybody's.

And then everybody has a good business.

And there it is.

Now, the other thing about the welfare thing is

uh i don't think it's a single problem and i don't buy this notion but you put a label on it and that makes it a problem you put welfare and say this is a problem that's accurate i don't have any different problems that are underneath it and uh and i think uh it would make more realistic and more effective and to deal with it as

Not as a single problem to be disposed of with a single monetary grant.

I understand the administrator's simplicity of the advantage of that.

But on the other hand, you'd be amazed at how many people tell you that they know all sorts of people who are not on the welfare loans.

Who should not be on the welfare loans.

Withdrawing doubles, you know, have two names and so on and so forth.

And on that note,

What is the situation, in terms of the defense foreign policy?

I noticed that one of the people who quitted depends on jobs.

Beyond that, what is the analysis of the defense by the SEC?

Well, the Defense Board of Policy Antitrust at the present time, that's a big question in terms of why, for example, have the public assignment with regard to, say, a harder law in Vietnam.

Let's put it this way.

Before May 8th, when I made the decision to mine and bomb military targets in North Carolina at the time of the invasion, when that decision was made, it was, I'd say, 95% of all the experts in our government, particularly the media, said it was a good day.

One, it was a mistake.

Two, I mean, that's, so we see it's debatable.

But second, they said, didn't put me over the sun.

They were touching on the camera, and I, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my.

But third, that the, uh, people would not support it.

Exactly the other thing turned around.

You had a strange advice.

Well, these are not advisers.

I was referring to people.

Oh, I remember you listening.

These are not advisers.

He does it this way.

That's why he thinks they're right.

We were pretty long on that day, I must say.

And frankly, the captain, I suppose, the captain, the captain, they had to be done for reasons I decided myself.

But my point is, I'm referring now to the, again, the...

Why would the country react as they did after having been in this, what is a terribly miserable, difficult war, which nobody wanted, where so many people were blaming us and that and the other thing, and so forth.

What's your reason for that?

The country right at the present time, for example, and here, and I'm not referring to

approval of policy in Vietnam.

That, of course, is a question that is too general, because they may approve of getting out or getting in, bombing or not bombing, wherever they can get in.

But I'm referring now to such specific questions as to who favored the, what is basically, you have a choice between the hard-line and the soft-line situations about how to keep it different now than it was six months ago.

And they, it's a great point.

Well, I don't quite follow your online social organization.

I'm just trying to give you a straight answer.

And those words are not quite accurate.

There is an atmosphere in it.

But, see, the feeling about Vietnam has come to me for some time.

And I did some pieces on this, and I suppose I charted this feeling more accurately than anybody else, because the great surge to get out of the war came in the summer of 71.

Right.

Even people who were so-called hawks who talked about Donovan Day.

And this was tied in.

It largely went with the fact that the economy was going sour and nothing was going to be done about it.

You can't, no issue stands alone.

You have to see the relationship.

And then after the wage price freeze,

And the main effect of that was that they felt that you were alive.

Just like they felt that I was now.

What's this man doing in white?

I was going to do a damn thing.

I found people, I found, well, maybe it's right or wrong, but at least he's doing something.

And it wasn't the act, you know, the quite specific action so much as the fact that action was taken.

And, uh...

I had already started asking.

I've been interviewing through that summer.

I never wrote these things because at that point I came down with a hernia operation.

And then my doctor was supposed to take two hernias out of it.

Took one and I had to go back to the second one.

But at that time I did talk to

I guess with Bob Fischer and so on.

I said, everything's fine.

Peace is the present.

But then, along with Vietnam, people's attitudes started to change as the economy started moving up.

And about January or February, I forget now when it was, I ran a piece of the Star.

It was my first piece that I ran.

saying that the American people were getting ready to stay in Vietnam.

Somebody from the office called me and said, we don't get this, how do you explain it?

I said, I don't explain to anybody what I get.

This is what I said, this is what I'm saying, and this is what I think is happening.

And that's all I got to do.

And the movement had started then on that basis.

over some time.

You see, I don't know.

And I make this point, definitely, that they were getting ready.

See, there's a way, at the end of the year, of reminding what people are getting ready to do before they do it.

And my reading has indicated that they were getting ready, more of them, you see, but they were getting it.

And they were still, you know, not a dominant factor.

And, of course, when

When the South Vietnamese started their offensive, and this I wrote in my first series, you know, from this camp, there was this reaction of great humiliation and a feeling that we ought to get back.

But for years now, people have been saying, why don't we go in there and finish them down?

So, and this is kind of, you see, there's always been this hawk and dove division.

It's never been quite accurate because there have been a great many people who have felt the way to get out of the water is to blast the hell out of it and get out.

And then other people have felt the way to get out of the water is to pull out.

And these people, I remember when the coffee ran up in New Hampshire, somebody

and I analyzed the results and said the people, they didn't know what they were doing because they were hawks in love with the coffee.

Well, I interviewed them and they were people that just, all they wanted to do was get out.

They didn't care whether you got out by blasting the place or whether you got out by coming, by pulling out.

To them, Vietnam wasn't important either way.

So there's always been this feeling in the country that strong action might get us out.

all pulling now, you see, and the thing, and if you remember back in the Korean picture, this is actually what happened in the Korean tradition, the people, when Eisenhower was running in 52, people just said, well, let's go all out and get out, one or the other, and they didn't almost, when they voted for Eisenhower, they didn't almost care which one you did, but in their minds, they wanted to end it, so this isn't,

And this feeling has always been there.

I use the phrase when I look up, I always get a quote from, you know, David McCrae from the American Five saying, the poor birdwatcher, you see, it wasn't a dove or a hawk, this thing was an albatross.

Everybody just wanted to get rid of it.

And the thing.

Now, I am interviewing to see what the reaction is now.

to a possible ceasefire.

I don't know about that reaction.

And it could cause you trouble.

It could cause you trouble.

Well, when I wrote, you see, in one of my series of pieces, in one of the series of pieces that I did, I think it was the third, where I wrote, and at that time it sounded, I know the star looked down at me and said,

What did you say?

And I said that I thought you had, the voters had given you, were ready to give you a free hand and envy at that for the election.

And I didn't qualify it, and I gave them reasons why.

And it reflected the reaction to the bombing, you know, step up and bombing.

But more than that, it was really the key thing was the fact that after mining the harbors, the Russians did not react.

We went to Russia.

Yeah.

And this made, now what this did though at the time was it also left a feeling that there was going to be a quick end.

And this hasn't come yet.

And this hasn't come.

Although it says it, it's a critical line.

Well, and at that point when I raised this, you know, and then speculated at the end of the piece, I don't know how, but it seemed to me, I said, what could change this?

And I said that

One was a possible ceasefire after a change, and the other was that it would just drag along on a nutrition basis.

I would not say automatically what the effect would be at this point, because I know what the effects have been.

I know enough about the attitudes.

to not, I would not make a judgment on it.

I could see where it could have effects, and since I'm not writing tomorrow, I don't care about it.

The idea is, you just put it as a ceasefire.

Doesn't it make an awful lot of difference what conditions the ceasefire is under?

Well, what'd you get for it?

Well, it all depends.

And this is one of the problems of interviewing on the subject of this.

You can't give people a laundry list of alternatives because they don't think of those alternatives that you've got to.

work it out and kind of sort of see how they would feel and then you face this on that background I would say certainly the same to me that they're having been through around the ceasefire you know we've had it in the minutes you know and we were supposed to have one in Korea you know a lot that burned so often

It's forgotten.

Because it went on and on and on.

But what I had is a ceasefire not accompanied by a return of POWs and some understanding as to, and not accompanied by a disintegration of South Vietnam.

If you had either, if you had failure to get the POWs and failure of South Vietnam to survive, certainly in a reasonable time, a chance to survive, a ceasefire might make a big dynamic.

Now, I say that I'm probably right in the same front of the national security wrong, too.

We can't do it on either basis.

That's one of the reasons why, you know, when Schillman was here the other day, the French government's drug, they're always, of course, the country for the sun.

They don't give them any money.

They say, is there some chance?

The French agency called me up and I wrote that piece and said, how do you do your surveys?

Good.

They need a...

They have a...

He said, Paul, why would you consider a bombing halt sometime before the election?

I said, but you are a minister.

I said, we've cut it with you.

I said, under no circumstances.

I said, there's going to be no bombing halt.

I said, the situation has drastically changed since the 68th, that the bombing halt played a significant part in the election.

Most people would think it was not decisive, but it was significant.

But then the bombing halt was, action was taken, and something was acquired for it that we thought we didn't want to screw, but because what we acquired, the understandings and so forth, were not kept.

Nevertheless, the people said we've got a bombing halt and negotiations were to begin.

So everybody said peace, peace, just around the corner.

But the bombing halt now,

at this point are lifting the mining as a gesture or good bait so that it would be a better disaster.

That's what's wrong with the state of the country.

It's always very convenient with what is right.

Also, it's politically right.

In my view, the loss of the time to what is right is the best part.

What happened?

In my view, for example, I just had to sign a Veterans Benefit Bill that goes higher than it should.

But it has to be signed before the standpoint.

And we can live with it.

And this is going to cause various attacks and so forth.

That isn't going to pay any respect to the country.

But in this foreign field, the country cannot afford air to its capital.

kind of afforded the air, kind of afforded the meetings like we were talking about, you know, the Russians and the Chinese and the rest, can't you get a little air, get a little air, so forth and so on.

Not everybody could live with it.

And so that's the one area where there's no compromise in terms of what we can do.

Let me ask one other question in terms of what is the, what,

the attitude of the country toward the whole, shall we say, violence syndrome.

You know, in the late 60s and frankly in the 60s, 90s, 70s, there was a certain toleration of, oh, we will eventually be a margin of the, you know, demonstrations and so forth and so on.

We can note the difference in our own travels now.

We have a few efforts in that area, but it's not, the student has gone out of the, what's the reason for this?

Is it the fact that young people just get tired of swallowing goldfish or something else, or is it issues of change?

I can remember my dad had some doleful predictions on that.

He said the whole generation is going to end up as a bunch of gone-throwers.

It doesn't seem quite as stressful to me that way.

First of all, the people have been the so-called center around the city.

They've never been.

typical of the bulk of young people.

They had cause, which young people would read with.

That didn't mean they bought the language, and that sort of thing.

One big factor, or the biggest single factor, I suppose, has been simple production and practice.

And this was always a picture of the draft that we had.

It was the worst possible draft that you could have for a thing.

And yet, I have very small troops, keeping millions and millions of families upset, you know, versus Hershey, who lived in with psychology, the worst psychology, just keeping all this uncertainty.

And, you know, you couldn't have done a poorer job from a military, just from your own policies.

So this has been a major factor.

But in the end, I would guess you also, it's very tricky to talk about the young generation.

They represent several levels of feeling.

I have to believe that the main concerns

and, uh, the physics of the governments of Britain and Latin America.

They're making certain things up.

See, they're out.

I've used the phrase, uh, they're the entry generation.

They're the entry generation.

They're out.

The problem they have, is really, is how they get into society.

And the jobs are just not there for them.

They have some of them, but they're not there for enough of them.

And the war is a factor in that.

It keeps them in because it also holds resources, which a lot of it should be applied to making jobs here at home.

And I think that

So this is really the, I don't think the question is, as far as the black violence, I think that passed off relatively quickly.

And as a matter of fact, I think there's a sense in the country, 68 people still worry that might be the repetition of violence.

Now, I think people feel that they can push the blacks down.

You see, the blacks will fight back.

This is my sense of how people feel.

They're not afraid.

And this is a change.

One of the curious things about this country, the one thing we don't know how to do is to practice restraint on a sustained basis.

We always feel that we each of us should have a free run for ourselves until somebody stops us.

We don't want to stop ourselves.

And this is a great, it's been a source of strength in the American Territory, but it's also a great weakness because we don't have to learn self-restraint.

And yet the general feeling has always been that you never,

You push, you push, and the other fellow can push, and at some point you push each other in the corner, and then you say, all right, let's get out of the corner.

But, and this is, it's also that people would prefer to have a crap game in which you divide who gets what, than to do it reasonably.

And there's some, this is that gambling streak in the American people.

And it shows up.

And so if you push back, as in the blacks, if they push for their right, then the whites get mad.

If the blacks stop pushing, then the whites forget about it.

And there isn't any real balance.

And this is, as I sense it, one of the great problems that we're feeling up for ourselves

We're losing the sense that we never had much self-restraint, and we're losing institutional restraints.

And the question is, where is the restraint going to come from?

Who's going to restrain us?

You have institutional restraints.

church, school, whatever.

But you take out, this I'm not being personal, but you take out campaigns around.

Anything goes.

Everybody thinks that the other folks are going to do the same thing.

And nobody feels that there's certain things they shouldn't do.

If they don't do something, they haven't thought about it.

They just go ahead and do it.

And much of this

It's unnecessary, and it doesn't even make any difference, and yet they do it.

And I looked at it, and I watched this process, and I watched and I re-wrote it.

Most of what has been done doesn't change in those.

And you can't really, there's no change, do you?

No.

And in some, it has an effect, holding your thoughts, and it has an effect, but I think that... Oh, sorry.

Look, if you just said that everybody, whatever they raised, give half of it back,

But it would be fine.

It wouldn't make any difference in the .

And I think that in this little funny piece I said, by this time, the public is going to be having headaches trying to figure out how to spend this money without losing votes.

How to get it done.

68%, for example, we have a lousy commercials program that's spent too much on television.

You can't spend that money that much efficiently.

Nobody knows how to spend that money.

We don't do it when you buy weapons.

We don't do this part of it.

We don't do this.

So this is, if you ask my concern about this, is looking ahead.

Where do these restraints come in?

And because I see, you see that, and this is, again,

The New Deal coalition had a curative built into it, had certain restraints, and relied heavily on the use of government.

And in that, that common bonding use of government held down racial tangents and held down, in many cases,

And it also held down religious prejudice because this was the nature of the elements that Roosevelt brought together.

And it was a great unifying force at that time.

And it carried us through World War II.

And it was.

Now the question comes up, at least as I see it,

That there's a lot of, you know, creating, I use the phrase, and I often talk about selfish individuals and self-centered individuals, and I change it around, but basically it's every man for himself.

And there's more of it now than there was some years ago.

A lot of it has resulted in continued inflation, which forces everybody to try to pass off something on to someone else.

But it's there and it's getting stronger.

That's what I can tell.

And this is a...

I don't know whether you can build a sustained society without

government.

So you can't just be anti-government and have society.

I'm not, or you know enough about my rights and all, I'm not a social, that government should do everything.

I've always, I've never talked about you, even on a racial thing, I've always

I've written and said that the integration efforts would not succeed.

I've talked to them about settlement.

I'm ready to accept any voluntary program, any settlement I want to do.

If you want to take five years to do it, I can take it.

You know, I've proposed this in my book on white and black some years ago.

When it was at, when the civil rights thing was at a peak, I said that I would take a voluntary...

I would take a voluntary program because if they will do anything voluntarily, let them do it.

I'm satisfied as long as it just gets done and the world doesn't come to an end when I sit next to a black person and that sort of thing.

Well, you're now getting another push and in another direction, but it's kind of on the racial side, it's very difficult to see

There are certain things that people want to push out and try to push it out of politics and push it out of reaching blacks.

And at the present point, there is no countervailing force.

See, we have a society which is largely an arena where people come and fight for their own interests.

We believe in freedom.

This can get pushed too fast or too far.

And then you get other big problems, which will come up.

I don't buy these surveys.

They intimidate them.

They're more racial in a sense of tolerance because they ask the question, would you be willing to have a black family move next door to you?

So they say yes, because they have rigged it, so there isn't a chance of one moving at all.

So they can't give you the answer.

Who's going to say it?

Some of you people are going to have a black president, and they'll say yes, or a white president.

Well, actually, you know, you see this... Do you know that?

A lot of them do a lot.

Well, this year it kind of...

But the thing is that they have now set up the suburban migration through support, you see, where...

the only kind of black migration that's possible is on a small basis and then and many of them say and announce this as evidence that they have converted themselves you see they're now very profitable because they know there aren't going to be two with one in one i think at this time so people in war in michigan got one black family and a whole suburb

And it's hilarious.

So it's like somebody in the Middle East, like being a heart of the next to you, and you say yes.

You know, that's the only one in favor, and it's quite pleasant.

And so I don't, this is again, this may have been an index of some kind of active abrasion theory some years ago, but it no longer has the same context.

And

So I'm kind of concerned about how far one of these things may be pushed.

And my interviewing does not indicate that.

I think my interview, you see, but this is the nature of FEMA.

They think they can get, they don't really know what they're gonna, there's still a lot of question in people's mind whether you really need to stop busing them out.

They say, well, he's talking about it.

I mean, if they had a choice, they might not stick with it.

But at this point, they don't have a choice.

But they are trying to use their power before the vote to commit the politicians as much as they can.

People aren't, you know, the picture that your media represents and so on, that's why they think people are stupid.

And they think that all they do is manipulate, has been manipulated.

And they don't understand that people are alert to their own interests.

They don't follow everything.

There are a lot of things they don't care about.

And by the time their own interests are affected, they are very alive.

And on the other hand, there are many issues now at this point which affect their lives very intimately.

And this is why you get here very excited.

Electric has views on many issues, not on one, back in 19...

And I was running a simple collection.

Yeah, the choice was depression.

I didn't go to any law.

And it was very simple.

That's right.

Now that our great, the whole economic issue has never been one economic issue.

It's now become a bundle of issues.

It's the most different things and different people.

And they're trying to, and they still are giving the choice to candidates.

And they've got to deposit their votes from one or the other.

And yet, so naturally they have misgivings about both candidates.

But they have to make a choice, and this is a problem.

The point of it is to understand that they feel they have to make a choice, and now they make it.

But they don't make it on the basis of what they read and that sort of thing.

They make it on the basis of the impact of their lives and other things.

I would guess the actions that you

that the president or anybody in office takes that has a direct impact on people's lives and more effect on all the species of things.

Well, I appreciate your time.

I don't know if you can see what's going on.

I don't know what the hell that is.

I don't know something horrible you did.

What do you do?

Do you pull right up in time?

Or do you interview?

And then interview afterwards.

It's important things to know what the election meant.

But I don't know if you know.

I know what it means.

I don't necessarily feel that I have to do a hundred jobs to predict the election.

No, I have predictions of you.

I'm trying actually to see what lies beyond the election.

Exactly.

And I'm questioning people more in terms of what lies ahead for the future.

And at the same time, I get that kind of reaction.

Well...

I certainly agree with this.

kind of the type of polling that you sort of like to ask these questions.

Name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name, name,

What's that in the picture?

You get that for a drink?

He doesn't articulate it verbally.

He's like me.

But I was glad to talk to him.

He's an interesting man.

Interesting man.

Strange little fellow.

I think he's sure right.

I think a lot of his interviewing is often close to the mark.

In other words, he saw the unknown coming.

He saw what was related to the economy.

So he had all these questions.

The economy, health, Vietnam.

He didn't mention China and Russia.

The federal government, too.

Oh, he did mention Russia and China.

Absolutely.

But he made that point in his article.

Of course, one of the things he was terrible at, as of this point, which you mentioned, was the connection between the idea that if this thing doesn't end the war, you're not going to hurry.

This important work goes down.

It hasn't gone down yet.

He didn't say in a hurry.

He said there's going to come a point in time.

Well, and he has to be right about that.

The only point about that, however, is that we, is that actually, is that the war hasn't really, the U.S. Army has gone down and down and down and there's nothing else.

No more bomb, no more draftees, casualties, three now this week, one last week.

But you're going to reach a point where you're going to be able to serve people up on simply the dollar cost, you know, just the dollar cost of all those tons of bombs every night.

And they get on, you know, and they start dramatizing.

I was watching last night, there was a chancellor or somebody report, you know, we dropped 560,000 tons of bombs on Vietnam yesterday.

Well, they start peddling that line, you know, that's one hell of a lot of stuff to fly over and drop on somebody and not do anything.

That's right.

If it doesn't work, you can do it for a while and get some results.

He is totally right about the ceasefire.

Totally right.

He seems to say, Wayne Robinson, it's the nature.

It's a real lab line for this election.

He oversimplifies it because you can't respond to it.

You can't just say ceasefire.

What is a ceasefire?

I think he meant, he meant the ceasefire as a gimmick.

Okay.

The unilateral ceasefire should be wrong.

But if you go the other way, if you actually have out and make the case that you've got the exchange, you've got the ceasefire, there'd be a hell of a lot of excitement in this country.

There'd be a big...

A big black cloud lifted into the room.

This is not going to be enough.

It's not going to happen.

One day it's going to happen.

We're going to help make it happen.

It's going to be a blast forever.

Pressing them to do what we just did today was fine.

Yeah, I'd wait and see before you make any.

Shall they have one?

Well, see where we are.

Oh yeah, but we want to answer your question.

We may not want to do it.

And I don't think you need to.

I think this did, you've done all you need to do.

And you probably did need to do one before the election.

I think so.

So it was probably once a month.

It probably had to be done.

But it was at least certainly valuable to do.

I don't think you need any more.

Now the question is, do we gain enough from doing that?

It wouldn't make it worth the effort.

You ask me, do we do?

How do you do any better?

One thing I was thinking of, what might you do?

I might just have something, John, if you'd like me to wrap up the security conference or something else.

I've called you in here every day to talk to you about what?

To my point, do it the day after you announce it so you get a better response.

I don't know.

Then there isn't much to say about it, right?

I'm almost inclined to think that you are trying to scratch the surface.

It doesn't matter whether there's anything to say about it.

Huh?

It doesn't matter whether there's anything to say about it.

Nobody reads what's said and you're like, I don't know.

This is what I was going to do today.

I haven't feeling the right feeling about it.

It's going to be because of the son's riches.

I think that's right about it.

And the editors and all the rest, they wanted to see the price.

A lot of the big headline now is Nixon to address Nation Saturday on taxes.

I hope they don't think we're going to make a tax default now that it is Saturday.

All right.

I'll let you hear it then and see.

He's not registering to vote, Mr. President.

Mr. President.

You know, I agree with you.

There's another reason why I'd agree with you.

I would be happy to depress him again.

What the hell?

You know what it really is, Bob?

You should accept it.

But you're doing that exercise and trying to prove something to the assholes in the press.

But you didn't do it.

Goddamn, how often do you have to prove it?

You know, a lot of people come in and say, Dave, that was fine.

That's fine or something.

That's fine.

One may be one, may not be one.

And there's different degrees of bests.

You can't say one's the best and one's not.

This one was good in one sense.

Others have been good in other senses.

Sure.

The point is we never have to say we want to be wrong.

That's the point.

They're all different.

You've got to hit the mood for a period of time.

Sometimes you want to be too soft.

That's the point.

You want to get across.

Right.

And if you want to get a little passionate about something, they don't necessarily have to be alone.

Now you have to go over here.

Well, .

But when I say that, I'm like, well, not the great people that are.

You know what I mean?

This is more of a question.

So it's dry when everything comes out of it.

You take the rather remarkable

Oh, but it's worth it.

You don't mind that if the guy delivers.

in the back sometimes.

You can justify the pain.

Interesting that this fall saw Vietnam turning around in January and February, didn't it?

Yeah.

It was the beginning.

And that's just because the national balloon is turning around.

That's why he didn't agree to get into Iowa, to give us a polluted account.

He never got that contract.