On November 8, 1972, President Richard M. Nixon and Harry S. Dent met in the Oval Office of the White House from 9:16 am to 9:29 am. The Oval Office taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 813-012 of the White House Tapes.
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Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm so surprised.
All right.
Yeah.
Let me ask you something else.
I wonder, Harry, if...
I mean, they should have run better candidates and stuff.
Now, they did damn well, you know, quickly, and they saw the governor about to get it.
That good God, with the kind of sweeps we had in 65, 70, 75, you could have carried states all over the damn South.
What was the trouble?
What happened?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Candidate negative.
I see.
So there, it's all right.
What about the rest of the country?
It didn't seem to me that, frankly, that Harriet's people, I saw they were running in some of the northern and western states, and God, they seemed like a bunch of sad sacks, old and for the most part.
I don't think that one of them are much a candidate.
Tell me this, when you think of the ones we lost, coattailings, or you think, for example, I had gone to Yellowstone High School to save Miller, I don't think so.
Miller is so, yeah, Miller, well, Miller, too, has been, he's so, he's a manly fellow, yeah.
Now, maybe, I don't know, I don't know.
How bad did he lose?
That's what I'm going to say again.
Oh, well, isn't it possible that some of them didn't hang closely enough or didn't have an eye?
Remember I kept saying, huh?
You get me?
Yeah.
That's right.
Yeah, and too late.
They were saying they were all going to do it.
Marker, that's 78, wasn't it?
74.
Baja, if it's too bad, apparently.
I suppose by going over there, maybe we'll always have an angle in there right at the last.
You know, that's as much as we've ever done, you know, in the eyes of an R.E.D.C.
Do a good bellwether.
Yeah.
17, Tumkey.
How many figures in Tumkey?
What the hell was the trouble there?
And they just stuck with it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Now in Rhode Island, I just have a feeling there the problem was, was Chase just, he was a devil too long, that's what I think.
Yeah, that's true.
But it turns out,
Uh, apparently we, we finally won Minnesota, didn't we?
Is that the final count you got on that?
I thought we would, I mean, uh, even the Gibberts left, and the Lassos came through.
In fact, the only one they got then was Massachusetts.
Yeah, thank God.
Cal, Mark, you haven't got the final record, but I've hit squad 55, 56, and 12, Mark.
17, I suppose.
Yeah.
Well, on the percentage, I think it's going to be 62, I'm sure.
What is it now?
I don't know.
What the hell did Johnson have?
He had 61 in it.
61.1.
Of course, if we had a gun that Schmitz in there, we'd be 63, you know.
A minute of guns may never kill.
Nor were you cold for Schmitz.
Yeah.
Well, in fact, we've got a little old-houser, you know.
He's not much to look at, but he's a good man.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I just can't understand it, Harry.
Isn't it really necessary to build a new party?
I'm getting hit by a candle with you.
The word Republican is banal, isn't it?
And don't you think we can stop them?
I think we can stop them.
They've got a lot of these assholes.
And I heard you told a couple of press guys yesterday, one of them being Thursday, I said, you guys are interpreting this.
They're all, this is really not a very helpful part of the liberal press.
I said,
You are not blaming the governor's tactics for losing this."
I said, his tactics didn't lose him.
His issues lost him.
I said, he lost election.
The day of the nomination, sure, people have heard his son and the thousand-dollar thing.
But I said, you want to remember, he stood for busing.
He stood for amnesty.
He stood for exit.
He stood for bigger welfare.
And all of you stood for that.
And I said, now, because you see that going down the tube, he says, oh, it isn't that we were wrong.
It was that he was wrong.
Now, come out of your back, and I said, now you take this up.
Everybody said, you've got to try to write this as if this is a question of race.
And I said, hell, it's not a question of race, John.
It's a question of patriotism.
It's a question of moral values.
They just thought this all had the wrong kind of people.
Don't you agree?
I mean...
All right, it's off, mind up.
And they said we have those real enthusiasm in the South, right?
They've been there in North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Georgia.
Yeah, of course, they say the boat was low.
Of course, as a matter of fact, have you ever seen the boat be very high when they're in Manila?
But it's a landslide.
Yeah, all right.
The triple buzz, yeah.
That's what I wanted.
And so that's what we think you should be glad to know.
We're going to have Vietnam done and on the right way over the next couple of months.
I deliberately didn't say it.
I didn't want to play politics with this son of a bitch.
Didn't you think he was about the worst candidate here in history?
What he said, I didn't.
We're not going to let them get away with that.
He said last night, he started out nicely last night, but then proceeded to shut his jaw out and said he wasn't going to support, you know, this or that.
Do you know what I'm saying?
What do you mean by that?
As far as Grayson, no, I came on.
I thought Frank Grayson was a son of a bitch.
very important it seems to me for us to try to keep that southern base uh very mean for me to have it but by doing it we're going to have to do it by inviting our democratic friends in our period you can't do it by just going with those small well except in the border states north atlantis but even in virginia christ heart it's a coalition of democrats
But Georgia, for example, South Carolina, hell, you can't do Trump.
It's a straight-up Republican, huh?
You agree?
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
The National Republican Party is a damn disaster here, isn't it?
Spent $11 million in the fall of year 71, but then only got the shield for it.
And all they do is monitor, because they say, I don't come in .
And yet, you know, if I had gone to more states, I could mobilize more of our Democratic friends, too.
Well, I did six states.
And the ones they wanted, you can't expect nobody left.
Nobody asked me to go to Maine.
Well, uh, let's see.
Allen didn't go to Colorado, but got the money.
I couldn't believe it.
I knew we were carrying Colorado 65 percent.
How in the hell did Allen lose?
I, part of his problem was he just ain't much of a candidate anymore, you know.
But even, you know, Allen's always whining.
I think you're right.
Yeah, yeah.
Harry, I'm going to be the center of the press conference.
Do you have in front of you where you could offer home?
Yeah.
Do you have in front of you the latest California return?
I'll tell you, I had to go over to the dentist for an hour.
I'll be back about 10, 15.
And if you could get me...
the latest in california i'd like to have the latest return there and uh and the latest popular vote and uh uh what is the latest the latest i've got five o'clock in the morning yeah but uh a total of 43 johnson got about 43
Of course, it's a hell of a lot lower in registration.
The low of the, what do you think is the low of the lower vote this year in 64?
Opposed?
Not bad.
That could be.
Also, also another possibility is that some of our people just don't know what the hell we're in.
But after the last vote, with about a year's time, I made one thought of that, except for the commentators about the low vote.
There wasn't a happening on our people.
Did you think so?
No.
Yeah, that was Tom Lee's point.
Tom Lee said there's no happening.
Well, not only that, let me say, we gave a letter of endorsement to everyone.
I had a picture taken with everyone.
To all the Senate candidates, we had television clips made for all of them.
I did radio tapes for all the Senate candidates.
And I made telephone calls to them.
Now, what in the hell more do you do?
But it's like, you do your best to get that out.
You get a hold of all of them.
I go and pass it around.
You do that, you connect to them.