On March 21, 1973, President Richard M. Nixon and John D. Ehrlichman met in the Oval Office of the White House at an unknown time between 9:15 am and 10:12 am. The Oval Office taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 886-007 of the White House Tapes.
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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.
Steve says you'd like to get through a different period or a different time.
We can do that.
Well, I mean, he can come home earlier.
Yes, sir.
I decided to go to Florida for the purpose of doing that.
Right, and I'm working at that speed.
I'm figuring that I will be less intrusive over there.
Right.
Well, I'm sure if you could come in two, three, four hours earlier, I could get probably a little sun.
Right.
If he'd come earlier, that'd be great.
I thought that even in the thought of the possibility of going out and seeing him at 5 o'clock here, that would be too... Yeah, well...
But if he could get in, say, arriving, we could have our meeting so that we could try to make the...
If he arrives, he could be in, say, 3 o'clock.
I've got a meeting at 3 or even at 4, so that I could take off at about 4 o'clock.
I'm sure that could be done.
to do that or time it down.
Now, the meeting I want to have would be with Jessica at this point.
Right.
And if you, I would say, if you have this number, so we can give you a general background as to where you stand, right?
You might say that I do not want at this point to get bogged down in an actual monetary or primary concerns of Phase 3 tax.
Great tactic.
We ought to, John, to get him.
I've talked to a girl about this.
And we've got to spread it to them, in my opinion.
I think he's got to be such a bearer of the word.
I've got to get him out of that Soviet craze that Henry just had to do it himself.
Or frankly, let them do it under very, very great supervision.
I want to get him out of that.
I want to get him out of that.
I want to get him out also of the thing.
Andrew's got to be in the park with that.
He's supposed to play the old song.
The other thing I think we have to get out of that is going to bring his heart and energy.
I think we got to get him out of that.
Putting Simons in that, well, the difficulty is Simons can help a valuable man, too, and I wonder if he should have used so much of his time.
Well, I know he's good.
On this, let me say this.
You know, everybody wants, what is the most important thing?
What is something that Schultz can do and Simons can do that nobody else can do?
It sure as hell is phase three.
The reason I say trade, that's my point.
Well, see, Simons has a petroleum council now, a petroleum policy, in place of Lincoln.
He's doing a hell of a job on petroleum, the import quotas and all that.
It would be a logical thing.
Simons isn't on it.
George is totally on it, though.
Okay.
Because George is concentrating on the green game.
There again, energy is escapist.
I don't know exactly what it is.
It's what people are talking about.
There is the issue of trade.
There is the issue of taxes.
There is the issue of prices.
And that story is bad.
And you've got to concentrate on that and the exclusion of everything else.
one or two things.
Very well, they would support it.
I don't think he's doing anything that's poorly necessary, but he will end up doing it.
Well, I think if we could see our way clear to let Bill Sines into the energy thing, it would save the face a little bit for George for one thing, which is a minor consideration.
But it ties nicely to what Bill is doing in the other thing.
And Bill is a guy with great capacity.
Great capacity.
Yeah, that's true.
I'm sure of it.
Yeah, we've got an undersecretary for him.
His name's Schubert.
He's a lawyer.
Who looks damn good.
Who's had Labor Department experience.
Brennan likes him.
Schultz likes him.
We've signed off on him.
Goddamn, let's get him out.
Right away we would stay.
Right away.
I get it.
I get it.
Don, I'm just working on it.
Let somebody else write it in the mail.
I suppose that's all.
He's, I know, bogged down.
I didn't know it was because he wouldn't let loose of it.
We've also got some assistant secretaries for him now.
Colbert, Stender, people that he likes that are satisfactory controls.
And so I think that bogged down is broken.
Well, I think that's, we're over the hump on that now.
We're in a bad spot with Weinberg.
I laid the whip to him on all these Democrats.
for my report.
Well, in your opinion, I would be one of you.
We think this is definitely an argument.
I would say, based on my record in the past four years, what happens if somebody like the name of Kovac apparently wrapped up during a finance thing over here?
The general media experience, not the Democrats, but with the non-loyalists and the hooters, is almost always bad.
This is just a pain in the crotch, eventually.
This is the great crossroads moment for Weinberger, as I see it.
He is either going to be brought to capturing that department, or they're thinking of going the easy way.
And if we don't hang up this week, we've lost it. .
Yeah, I'm going to see him again today.
Maybe I'll let you know.
I'll let you know.
I have no questions about it.
Well, it's a typical situation.
You know, you say to him, there's this big problem, and he says, I see the big problem, and let's talk about the individual guys.
And, you know, you take one by one, you can make an argument.
It's like a budget argument.
Well, okay, let me go call George and get him to come earlier.
And I'm sure that's not a problem.
I'm just positive of this.
And then I'll have a short meeting with him first, and then figure that you'll be able to get out of here by 4 o'clock.
Well, see, and what I'd do, if I could suggest, I'd have a helicopter come in here and land, regardless.
And that'll put a finite, you know, sort of bulky type of
Because George is going to come with so much on his mind that that would be the best way to do it.
I think it's probably really good.
I think, uh, I would say, like, two of them are really good.
That's really good.
In fact, in other ways, uh, you can stick around here.
I'm just wondering if this is very, you know, not necessarily the outdoor area.
The outdoor area.
In fact, you know, I haven't traveled a lot myself.
I know that one thing is that you're really out of touch.
That's right.
I don't understand what the hell are people worried about here, don't you?
That's for sure.
And, uh...
I was, uh... What was the book by?
You know, to show you how staying fairly tough on something doesn't work out all that bad, but he was trying to do the hysterics because we had...
His book is very loyal to you.
I understand that.
It rather consciously omits the short strokes at the end.
And in effect, it cops out on that.
So it isn't required to draw any conclusions about .
Yeah.
We all know what happened.
A fellow who works for the LA Times, named Burke, is writing definitive work on that whole thing.
I don't know.
I've asked you several times.
I actually don't have any other views.
Not yet.
Have you ever seen anything better?
Not yet.
Have you ever seen anything more risky?
No.
Isn't that really the problem?
That's the problem.
It just doesn't happen.
I don't have a job.
Do we?
No, we'll be all right.
No, no, no, no.
I don't.
I mean, we don't know what's going to happen if we put in an assistant assistant.
Well, I think we do, though.
I think we do, though.
Do you think it works?
Not as we originally had it, but I think we can draw up a little work.
It ain't good by just sending the work requirements.
We've already done that, and we're seeing welfare coming down.
Yeah, I don't know.
Tell me if that's accurate.
We're staying at this time.
As a matter of fact, John, you know, next year, he said provide an aid, and he's doing an aid, but provide an aid.
I think we've come to a time when a lot of people have discovered what they think about welfare that they didn't know before, that had never been called on to.
And we've been had.
And?
We've been had, and they're stiffening up all across the board.
Congress, I think, is in a fairly receptive mood now to take a fairly tough piece of legislation.
And it comes down to presidential leadership paying off.
I think when the history of this administration is written,
it'll be written that you led the turnarounds on welfare.
And having put that bill in and having all the debate, even though it didn't pass, is a part of that turnaround.
Everybody had to run on it.
There's got to be something.
There's got to be something.
We're working for the rest of it.
I don't know.
I don't know what.
Well, I'm feathering.
I think it's, I'm still there.
I still think you can do it on a federated basis.
But the working poor guy, and maybe you don't do it as flat-out welfare.
That's the point.
Maybe you do it as credits for parochial aid, maybe you do it in other forms.
That's what I think.
Maybe the contact younger are not for having kids, because they forget that they don't have children.
No.
That's that.
But I would say in terms of maybe around loans.
Yes.
I mean, what the hell.
Why didn't you get exactly the same thing, but call it something else?
Well, housing, not rent.
You see, it was a premium on the guy who bought his own house.
And they put together a package that consisted of a number of houses.
It might have been a housing, medical, two or three others.
We're going to do that, and the total allowance is that.
But don't have something other than food or a social worker's going to buy a house.
We give you that, and we cover these items.
And then you're on your own.
And then you're on that bill.
And then you don't get it after a certain amount.
Of course, for better or for worse.
And then that reduces.
Okay, got a couple of other items.
Did you have to run off?
No, sir.
Finished your morning meeting?
No, we're all done.
A couple of points with regard to the food price and so forth.
I had a very rough day yesterday.
Actually, the coverage wasn't bad.
That's what I'm good at.
Of course I'm good at it.
I always have this problem with this interview, because I have a little bit more hates the last year, so it's just a rough night for me.
Well, the commentators gave you quite a lot, though.
It's interesting.
They picked up Jamie McClain.
We were going to put that white paper out, kind of low key, and they played the hell out of the thing on camera.
And Jamie got a chance to stand up and say our piece, and he followed our line.
And I thought, this is good.
The hell it is.
It's less of these fish that bothers me so much.
And somewhere along the line, we've got to start saying, it's good to eat beefsteak.
It's good to have a balanced diet.
We want everybody to have everything they want to have at a fair price.
And where I think, I'll tell you one of the best things that came out over the weekend was the fact that you all are eating chicken and other things in the White House.
Just the fact of your example.
You know, some of the left-wing Christian, you know, part of that I contributed to myself without ever attending to it.
When I was in Florida, I went to a... We went to HASA.
I went to the hospital, and I always ordered fish.
I said, I like it.
But you were very indirect about it.
Some of our consumer police and others, they didn't say, no, they didn't say that.
I don't know.
I said, I always get fish.
I don't like them.
No, what you said to somebody going out was, order the fish, you're very good, or something like that.
some of the Virginia Now type of comment that says, shock oil, don't buy beef, buy chicken, don't buy beef.
But we're working on this.
We're going to keep hammering away at it.
But I think the fact that you are moving on food prices has to be seen by everybody.
There was five minutes on every network.
And then Scott went out.
He was very good.
He was excellent.
And Ziegler was very good yesterday.
So all in all... Did they get covered?
Oh yes, yesterday Scott got covered.
Ziegler got quoted, he didn't get covered.
Scott said the prices are concerned, the prices are moving, food prices are going to moderate, and those are the kinds of things that we're going to have to close soon.
What about the late stop effect, maybe food prices?
I don't know what.
I think he's captured by the goddamn agriculture department.
And I keep getting signals back that he is subverting our effort to move the stockpiles.
And I'm checking this now, but I got a very clear signal yesterday from down inside the agriculture department that the problem is not with the guys that I've been leaning on.
You know, I just batted this one guy, something terrible.
Well, he is exercising his discretion, which he has under the law.
Put a line, put a memorandum out with me that all departments, that is,
I understand that you have various discretions under the law.
That discretion is no longer to be exerted by any of you.
I am hereby directing that I have, which is my responsibility, that I have preordained every provision of that sort within the law.
And with that out there, I think that will do it.
That I am then concerned that some department heads, that any that follow up my clear directives and meetings
must be reported and accounted for within 24 hours.
And that there is no discretion.
There is to be no discretion exercised by the department secretary.
He has that discretion.
By and large, I am clear on equivocal direction.
All right.
That would be very tough in a memo.
Let me suggest this.
We have a team calling on each one of these dollars this week.
Can I have them just tell them that?
That's right.
Malik and one of Curtis' fellows is crowing on each of the caverns, and this would be a very good thing to tell them at that time.
Yeah, I think it will.
Now, I'm going to see Bud's.
You get to that, and I'll get the roof.
All right.
The bishop was saying these things about the price of crows.
We want to let the pastors in.
They can't get a price for crows.
We may already be on high or low, but what knows?
Well, I haven't talked to him about this lately.
We were together yesterday.
Yeah, and he told me that.
But he's getting an argument, in my opinion.
I wouldn't buy a sign on that yet because I think he's getting enormous pressure from those Wall Street guys who thought everything was a flop.
I don't think they can judge him quite that way.
I'll tell you something about him.
He's got those Wall Street guys sized up.
It's very interesting.
I've had a long talk with him about that because, see, we met with him.
And he takes them with a grain of salt.
Good.
So I think you'll find that his judgment on that kind of thing is pretty balanced.
He's got a funny last name figured onto a T. Very interesting.
What do we do about that?
I think what we ought to do... You know, my problem frankly is this.
I honestly feel...
Why don't we do this?
Why don't we let Simon work on Schultz over the weekend?
And then I'll talk to George after I get back from the coast on Monday.
right and then let's see what happens in the in the vectoring let's see what george comes up with let's let george uh prime right kicked up and and you've got these various objective signs and then you've got simon and simon's going to clamp onto george let's
Just let that gel over there.
Well, you have them all down, you've got a job on them.
Why do you keep them?
I don't know.
I gather from this meeting I had with the Wall Street guys that this is symptomatic of their lack of confidence in phase three.
It's also a desire to make more money.
I guess the feds tighten up a little bit on money.
I have a feeling, based on Dunlop's analysis of the Railroad Resettlement and what he tells me about the rubber fluctuation, maybe there's a way that could come through this.
If we did, my God,
You were talking about George's big plays.
The other thing to put on that list is meaning.
The care and feeding of meaning.
That's right.
What else do you have?
The other thing is he's got a lot of ability.
The first quarter, he's laying under a lot of pressure.
That's right.
Yep.
Yep, that is the problem.
Phase two to phase three, we had one, you remember, in phase two.
I just think we've got to keep our heads here in the sense that I realize that this kind, our kind of economy never goes sideways.
They always go up or down.
And we just can't get that damn excited about it.
Well, we tend to look at the short swings.
I don't know.
One good thing about the campaign is it made us look at the four-year curve rather than the short swing.
We've been through some upswings in food prices before.
We've been in downswings in unemployment.
We've been diligent about attacking the problem when it turned up, and we've managed to moderate it.
I think we'll do it again.
No question about that.
These fellows, Schultz and Stein, I crack into a lesser degree, have managed the economy better than that first term.
than, I think, anybody in the 20th century, really, in terms of the... Because the 70, the 70, call it a recession, down here, was a milestone.
Under terribly aggravated conditions of change.
Terribly aggravated conditions of change, that's right.
But it was a modest turn.
And it was just, the point is, it was modest in terms of its amount of time.
The magnified in our city of Charleston is being a terrible problem more and more I see in this country.
I, we must admit, we're too far behind the age of being a problem.
You just read somehow.
You go on and on.
I was wondering, for example, where would we be at the moment?
The first 60 days of the district being 60 days of the church.
had we not had political peace, had we had not had a regenerative deal with them.
That's the only positive story we have.
That positive story has tended, in the public mind, to sort of bounce off others, which are basically, not that maybe, but they may know something, you know.
What did they, as a crisis, I mean, crisis, the last week began, so that is bound to be the number one subject nobody asks about.
They were making them.
It was a horrible crisis.
Now the crisis, of course, is a crisis.
Of course, the water needle, which is a crisis.
Well, and then, of course, our problem is a crisis.
And the constitutional crisis with the Congress.
But my point is, a lot of it is due to, first of all,
Crisis makes news.
We've got to understand that.
The busy monster makes news.
But also, another thing is there's almost, I can sense this in the news magazines particularly, there's a panic.
There's a panic in the eastern establishment.
They are facing the horrifying fact, and it is a horrifying fact, that we're going to be here for the next four years.
And then there's going to be activists, and then there's going to be activists, and then just panic projects.
classic is oh yeah you're dismantling oh yeah and they're standing there and they're saying he can't do that i'm glad that phillips is doing this i think i didn't want to give any credit that probably was unfair to him that i was criticized when he was doing it was not at all exactly the right thing
And I think he got a bug rap on the K.O.
business and so forth that they picked up some kind of bad thing.
I don't know if you can keep saying this, I heard some kid about communism being struck.
My point was that that's an agonist.
It's not worthy of a government person.
Did you make a comment on that?
I did.
Somebody got a back to him.
began and the others thought that the President was trying to pull in their arms and thought this was terrible, we ought to fight.
Well, I didn't know that.
Now, independent of that, see, I moved in on it and set up a procedure for clearance of his speeches and stuff.
Just do it beautifully.
You don't have to bother running.
You must make him do blind.
Oh, I understand.
Am I correct now?
He's disappeared.
Why?
I don't know why.
I don't know.
But isn't it because he's playing it safe?
Isn't it because he's playing it safe?
He's going to be in there fighting for great.
I was concerned that Phillips was going to draw so much fire on himself that he wouldn't be able to do his job.
And so I just made an arrangement.
We talk about.
The bombing in the center, terribly difficult.
So any of our friends who seriously question, I am interested in anything here and why I was there, I am interested in that because I can tell them why we're doing it.
We talk about whether there are any survivors from all over the world or whether they help in the event.
Now on all those, we do, I think it's something I'll prove to these folks because I did very well with the right soundtrack.
I don't think that anybody could have said this with your 18 folks by all the work that we've done.
But what you do have here is a group of these people that are just coming back, and it's simple.
Almost, well, it's a crux of the speech, which is, but they are so well stated that they don't sound like
Did you see the guy last night on the CBS morning news?
You ought to get him to replay that for you.
I understand.
Well, replay this guy.
He was on yesterday.
I didn't see him, but I heard he's in the news summary this morning.
Well, well, he was on the CBS news and they replayed him on the news station.
I heard him on the radio last night.
And it's these and thems and those.
This is an Army Air Force captain.
This is a guy off the street.
He is beautiful.
He is just beautiful.
Do you have to do some right here?
I'll find it in there for you.
He goes through all these points.
He goes through the necessity for the bombing.
He goes into...
Mulligan.
I'm happy about the CBS coverage, and he picked out CBS particularly.
Mulligan, who's his name?
Mulligan, the attorney in Mulligan.
Mulligan, he's another Mulligan.
And, well, he may be a Navy captain, so as I said, but anyway, CBS White News.
The visit to Hanoi of prominent U.S. citizens, and he went into all of that.
He said, there are no questions prolonging the war.
And he said the effect on our morale was just devastating, just terrible.
And he said the North Vietnamese got a lot of propaganda out of it, and then told about what the North Vietnamese said to him about their being there, and that they were going to win this war in Washington, not Vietnam.
Then he got very patriotic.
His neighbors had put a flagpole in his front yard as a gift.
And he talked about that.
And it was just beautiful.
He said, that's really great.
And he says he gets a lump in his throat when they play the Star Spangled Banner.
And he does apologize for that.
He thinks that's pretty good.
But he just, by the way, he got into the bombing.
And I don't see anything in here about the bombing.
But he got into that.
He said, there isn't a question but that the decision to bomb brought this thing to an honorable conclusion.
And he was just made him.
Thank God the President brought us back on our feet rather than on our knees.
That is so successful.
Yeah, very helpful.
And they said when the bombing started, I mean, we all cheered.
Our guys jumped on the shoulders.
They didn't spit away from that moment.
They do.
We do that.
We were lucky.
Yep.
That will happen now.
Let me say that that is going to happen.
A clever editor, I don't think I ever called him on this.
He's got so much that he can't fault me on all sorts of things.
But he probably is a clever editor if you have one around here.
He would go through all of their statements.
And he could say, and put out a brief pamphlet, and say, I mean, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh,
The experts speak.
In fact, they're the experts sometimes.
Yeah, well, they can say what they, uh, they can put a verbatim kind of way.
They can say, uh, uh,
Well, you know, this stuff gets through.
It does, but I think if you get it assimilated and you put it under speakers, they hear it.
Thank God we came back on our feet and on our knees.
that strikes the government.
It says something for us, doesn't it?
It says something for the country.
I'll tell you, I think the coverage is so penetrating that maybe it does impact, that it does get through.
I think we have to be a little cautious about a period of co-op.
No, no, we must explore.
But then, what I'm speaking about is not something done under the White House, but I'm thinking of something like that.
He said, I think we'd get it passed without you.
If you just don't fight us too hard, if you don't respond to money, if it's passed, why is it where I am?
I think we should in this case give it to him.
Well, if we don't come after him, it has to do with the priest teaching on it, and a couple of other things briefly.
I saw Jerry Ford's statement on the county, indicating that it was...
that it is, that we have to, that we have to account for, like a deficit with them, on $11 billion higher than $73 billion or $75 billion, whatever the case might be.
Could I get, could I, could we get, let me say this, could I get an overall effect of an impounding?
In other words, when I discuss it, I don't want to discuss the terms of an impounding.
In other words, by impounding this money,
we avoided a 5% increase in taxes.
We know it's 15% and everything, but could I get that?
I'm not sure.
I don't want to know what the, I don't even know chapter and verse, but the accounting is $300,000 in addition.
So the second point is I do really want to know what the victory is with regard to
We've got it for every previous year.
Well, you could say that this is less than the average, or you could take a Johnson year.
In the year, this amount is half of what it was.
I just want these figures.
On grade.
Shouldn't say we're getting a strong backing up state today.
Yeah.
Are you talking about that?
Yes.
Something funny happened yesterday, we're still trying to track down.
He went up there and said, I can't talk about this and I can't talk about that.
We did not get any of those instructions.
And I'm trying to find out who did.
and couldn't reach anybody this morning before it came and hit her, so I'll track that down.
Well, as a Panther fan, let me say, there are two different problems here, though, and if you did not, well, whether you would live somewhere, you couldn't fight this nation.
I have said that the practice of trying total brawl files over the whole committee had never been the practice of the ruler.
It would not be the practice under this administration.
the grade was an exception for understandable purposes but it would not be the policy in the future all right the next came to me and like say we're supposed to work it out that he would follow the procedure which is the old procedure but turning it over but not the whole commitment because it contains
because it would injure innocent people.
Now we're on the right side of this, not buying the name of Christ.
And then go back and repeat that.
That's not the problem.
I don't know the problem here.
According to the new summary that I read this morning, they said, they can't give up on only two.
That isn't enough.
We've got to have it all seven.
That's another subject.
What happened yesterday was that they put some questions to Gray.
And Gray said, I'm sorry, I have to decline to answer that.
The Attorney General always instructed me.
that I should not answer that and it's garbled in the paper.
I gather that what his instructions probably were was don't get into the substance of Watergate.
Let's force a dual vote on your qualifications without letting the bleed Watergate into this anymore.
But he also refused to answer some other questions which don't add up to that.
And I either confused his instructions
where he was given very broad instructions by Kleindienst to just sit tight now and let's force him to a vote.
Sounds to me like Eastland and Kleindienst may have hooked up a deal.
That sounds like a change in their advice.
Their advice is never new.
And we're getting tagged with it by the news.
The White House is toying with it.
That's right.
And I've got to get Ziegler positioned on that also.
This is not going to happen.
I don't know what you're saying.
The only thing that we can do is that because of the group meeting.
Well, be sure that we make, we take the offensive on the idea that we're all part of this and the FBI will not be turned over to the committee.
Is that clear?
They will not be turned over to the individual congressmen.
They will only be turned over to the senators and congressmen who are in charge, who have a responsibility in a certain area.
And then on a highly privileged basis.
Okay.
We have a difficulty .
Yep.
Pardon?
In the main.
I mean, first, if clients would step out and have a press conference once a week and bang some of these things, it would help a lot.
It's very hard to do.
Yep.
Okay, fine.
We're glad to do that.
All right, my point is that I think you meet every morning.
You've got to sit down.
Now, what is our, what point would we like to get across this morning?
A bank, you get across maybe two mornings out of five.
That's better than none out of five.
I think that's a really good question.
Now that we've finally gotten that, we can finally talk to that.
That's a management problem.
Hold on.
Just a fact that we're working on.
Yeah.
But you say that I agree.
I went with my niece, for example.
I can feel very strongly that we've got to make more out of our investment on the crime.
That's right.
That's right.
Do you agree or not?
I believe I promise you.
A strong long-issue, and it's great to have the lab, the ground scene, and the rest lying around about it.
He had capital punishment.
He had the dope people get him right and square in the ass.
You're getting state after state now, readopting the death penalty.
And there's lots to talk about.
And that really, you see, you're talking about the counter-reformation.
I mean, you reckon counter-reformations are one.
And one area that nobody gives about that, but what you support, the concentration of power in Washington.
This is a divestiture of power, right?
And that wasn't any one of your folks.
That's right.
The divestiture copper has overestimated.
And it's a bit of a story turner.
And I said the real problem here is not how much money the city's in the space.
And that's not the issue.
The real problem is that there's a hell of a lot of people that don't believe in the divestiture copper.
They believe that Washington does know this.
And they may be right.
But now is the time to find out.
And again, it's the wrong way to run an industry.
You can write it down to the left, write it down to the left.
Look John, you know it very well.
You know it very well.
It's like Walter Judge, that marvelous story he told in his 1960s, he had a speech about helping his daughter with the arithmetic.
He says, I love my daughter.
And he says, when she comes to ask me to help her do the arithmetic, he says, I intend to do it for her because I love her so much.
But he said, I can do it better than she can.
And I can do it quicker than the teacher how to do it.
But because I do love her so much, I don't look for her.
I think very little.
Now that is the story.
That is the story, and that's what we're really saying here.
So you've got to get these clots out there.
I mean, sure, who knows better what the people are going to know?
Maybe.
Maybe.
Maybe.
But why is it?
Because we're smarter, better at it.
But we ain't there yet.
That's why.
So the second point is, we're turning around.
There's a counter-reformation in the whole area of law enforcement.
So we haven't gotten that credit for that.
We've turned from permissiveness to toughness, let's face it.
Somebody had put out something without .
They used that .
Was that something that somebody else was ?
I don't think it's without pity yet.
They know that we're going after the pushers.
Without pity.
Without, no, another word.
Let me say this.
As far as the police are concerned, we don't want to shoot them.
Second point, though.
Third point is that...
We are, we are, we're having, and this is very relevant, related to the second point, we're having counter-revolution in terms of the whole, shall we say, ethical tone of our society.
Why are we in the country not standing on two crosses?
I'm only really talking about here because during the 60s we were leading the thing for people in high places to encourage the hell with it, bomb, the laws of the enemy, join the radicals, carry the
What is coming around?
We're coming around.
Religion.
Pornography.
Pornography is all tied into that.
In other words, the respect for the basic values, the math, etc.
So there's a counter-reformation going on there.
We could mention other things.
But it has to do with the role of the government.
individual, it has to do with the law enforcement and so forth.
And it has to do, of course, with the, not only how government does something in the university, and who does it and where, but more than that, the borderline is what government does.
In other words, we don't even believe that government at the city level or the local level ought to put everybody on the level
We don't believe in pre-action programs, period.
We're not saying that, look, this is a program that you ought to consider.
They can't.
We don't think it's worth a goddamn.
We don't believe in the trickle-down theory of helping the poor.
We don't believe in that theory of helping everybody that can't help themselves.
It was pretty tough rhetoric, what I said in the inaugural.
That was the real test.
The comparison of what I said in the inaugural to what Kennedy said in the inaugural.
many convinced that, and he said that I was saying exactly the same thing, that I was saying something totally different.
We will, before you ask what your government's going to do, you need to be able to do it yourself.
You're also going to have to work for the word.
Now that, of course, this is very different to, John, what they're going to do in colleges.
It's much different from being told by teachers and the rest.
It's different from being told by the preachers.
And I understand now that the preacher shouldn't see your passion.
He shouldn't say, you are your brother's keeper and all that.
But if we turn to the location of dead weight, all these days we've served God.
We've had horrors on our lives and what not.
Just that, we've been raped somebody, we've been killed and so forth and so on.
Jesus' mother didn't beat me correctly when she was a kid, but my dad can do it.
It's the line.
You don't want to go totally over to the originals.
We do have, for example, a program on corrections, on persons, on dope, hags, and all the rags that runs out of our goddamn haters.
And we want to help the retarded, etc., etc., etc.
But what you're getting down to here is, and I quote all these names, when I talk about our problem of getting through, the smart guys, the collegiate jobs, know that that's what we're after, and that's what we're seeking.
And that is also the fact that in the world, they are truly now isolations and muddleheads.
and do not want the United States to be strong, because they need a strong America.
This is a threat to the eastern world.
So that's another reason why this is a watershed period.
And it's not a big job for me, because if you take a candidate in here, Teddy Kennedy or, I don't know, I've got to tell you, if that candidate is here, the country will be managed.
I will promise you, it will be managed.
It's a world power.
And it'll tear itself apart.
It'll just tear itself apart.
They'll like it.
They'll have a hell of a holiday for 90 days.
You're gonna have their house sealed and scraped and arrested.
And then you watch.
You watch.
Because despite what your British scientists may do, my quavers may tell me a man is not inherently good.
Unfortunate.
And he is not perfect.
Unfortunate.
Well, he's not perfectible, he's perfect, but we don't see him that way a lot of the time.
So that is basically the whole conflict is with legislature.
There are those who believe in the perfect and the light movement, and man as well.
It's Rousseau, isn't it?
We're all as far.
But man is important.
The light movement.
I read a paper so many years ago about the light movement.
You know, you get that theme in the Bible.
You have two versions of creation, you know, and fall from grace and all that kind of thing.
Man, man, we could back to the ages for that.
Well, it's humanistic.
It's very good.
That's right.
There's a mystery in it.
But if you notice, there are a hundred and ninety-one spirits out there, and they aren't going to the churches yet.
That's right.
The kids are referring to the fundamental, to the true religious, to even the Jesus freaks is a way out version of that, but they're looking for the mystic.
They're looking for the spiritual rather than the humanistic.
On whom Christ is sent, we will be taken by the continuity of people all over the world.
It's just hard and hard to tell us about these major speeches.
Be sure, let's be sure that our friends, uh, that our backs, our backs are brave and strong.
And, uh... Incidentally, we're going with summer youth today.
We're gonna have the mayors, with some existing money, come out and make a reaction.
Now, again, positive reaction.
I think it'll be seen as a transition move.
Yeah, that business that was planned all along.
Yes.
As a result of our meetings, we have now been able to find out what the needs are.
And this amount is now going to transition.
Exactly.
Cole is going to lean on it.
And he should do very well .
It'll be .
Oh, yes.
That's all been done.
Yep.
Yep, good clearance process that's been going on yesterday and will go this morning until the briefing time.
And it's a nice little move and it also gets us off the hook on summer violence.
It's a very satisfying sport.
It's 400 million, it's about 7 million more than we put in the program last year.
I do feel that on the violence case, that it's turned some of our jobs.
It's not respectable.
That's what I mean.
That's what I mean.
And it now has very many racial overtones.
The blacks are the only ones who are talking about street violence.
Jesse Jackson and that crowd.
Not if we were smart.
I tell you, our friend Vernon Jordan stuck his toe the other day at the press corps, and I'm going to pistol with him a little bit.
He took us on, and he took us on in a way that he didn't have to do.
He called me ahead of time, like he always does, and I said, Vernon, don't do it this time.
You've got a cabinet meeting coming up if you play your cards right.
But you can spoil it.
Well, he spoiled it.
What did he say?
Well, he went out and he hit us in a gratuitous kind of way on revenue sharing and all this kind of stuff and said that it's the new reconstruction.
So, wait a minute.
And, uh, so, um... Well, I'm having Stan Scott take a look to see if there's a good guy that we can... Well, our question about this is our question.
The Negro College.
Have a meeting with Art.
Have him come in and tell us about the plight of the Negro College.
Now, I want to make this very poignant with Jordan.
I have a kind of a relationship with him that I can say,
Burt, this is number one.
You made a mistake.
It's going to cost you $5 million.
And there's two ways to get along with us.
That's a third of what he's getting.
We can give him a lot more if we can get any of his truck.
And I think we can make it.
Let's test and see if we can make a good idea out of it.
It's worth the trouble.
Well, that's an old Western expression.
That's an old Western expression.
You don't have to do that.
Mr. Bartlett, are you all right?
Yeah, he is working.
Apparently.
Apparently.
The primal dose is very good.