COLLECTIONS
ABOUT
EXHIBITS
COLLECTIONS
ABOUT
EXHIBITS
Date: April 13, 1971
Time: Unknown between 4:40pm and 4:47pm
Location: White House Telephone
Participants: President Nixon, White House Operator, General George Lincoln, John Connally
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Listen:
President Nixon: Yeah?
Operator: [Office of Emergency Preparedness Director] General [George A.] Lincoln, Mr. President.
General George Lincoln: Hello, Mr. President.
President Nixon: Abe, I’m sitting here talking to [Treasury Secretary] John Connally about that Texas situation. He’s just back. I wondered if he could talk to you a bit and you fill him in on what you’re doing, and he can sort of give you a feeling about what we can do.
Lincoln: OK.
President Nixon: Particularly with regard to an item of paying the freight on the ra—on, on, on—
John Connally: Hay.
President Nixon: On hay. But here we go.
Lincoln: Mm-hmm.
John Connally: General?
Lincoln: Yes. Yes to you.
Connally: How are you?
Lincoln: Well, I’m very well. As a matter of fact, I was just on the phone with [Agriculture Secretary] Cliff Hardin on this problem, and he was outlining to me how he’s proceeding.
Connally: Well—All right. I don’t know a thing about it. I don’t pose as an expert. I merely want to give you this much information.
Number one: it is damn bad. That much I know, over a very, very wide range of Texas. It is just as bad as they say it is. Secondly, don’t let Cliff go with just a grain program.
Lincoln: Mm-hmm.
Connally: Because all you do is run up the price of grain.
Lincoln: Well, now, he can go with a grain program from his parity price. They call it loan price.
Connally: All right, but go with some hay.
Lincoln: Mm-hmm. Yes, well, we were starting to talk about hay.
Connally: Well, now, the most effective thing, at least—now this is what the farmers said, I’m just telling you what they look at. During the Truman days, they had a drought in a certain part of Texas and what the administration did then was to pay the freight. The farmers bought the hay—
President Nixon: [In the background.] [Unclear] Congress then.
Connally: The President said he was in Congress and he remembers it.
President Nixon: [In the background.] [Unclear] popular [unclear].
Lincoln: Yes, yes.
Connally: And it was a very popular program where the farmers bought the hay but the government transported it for them for free. So if they were paying $42 for alfalfa a ton or 48 in Arizona, well that’s all it cost them. It didn’t cost them $90 a ton. And what they are trying to do is save the cow herds. There’s 8[,000] to 10,000 head a week now in the San Antonio market, 8[,000] to 9,000. They think that’ll jump in another, if it doesn’t rain in the next 10 days, they think that will jump to 10[,000] to 12,000 a week, and the normal is about 4[,000].
Lincoln: Yes, I have already checked that they doubled there. I got that figure just now.
Connally: And of course, I’m right in the middle of it. I got two ranches, 125 miles apart, and hell, I’ve been selling [unclear] for six weeks. I saw this damn thing coming, or I thought I did.
Lincoln: How are you off for hay by the way, because we’re . . . yourself?
Connally: How am I off for hay?
Lincoln: Yes.
Connally: I have no hay. I put up 20,000 bails, and I bought hay. I bought 2,000 bails of hay to get me past the last 30 days, and fortunately I’ve got 400 acres that I’m irrigating around the clock now trying to keep my cow herd together. But most people don’t have that. And hell, there’s no grass there, I mean, they just . . .
Lincoln: I have the department of agriculture making a survey across most of the United States to find out where hay is, right now.
Connally: That’s good.
Lincoln: So that’s been under way for a couple of days.
Connally: You’ll have to ship it in, General. There’s no hay in Texas.
Lincoln: Yes. And I’ve ascertained that there apparently is no hay in Texas.
Connally: That’s right.
Lincoln: And we have a problem, according to the department of agriculture, that every hay deal that they ever were involved in, they say they got in a mess.
Connally: Yep.
Lincoln: That there were allegations [that] things were not quite right.
Connally: Yep.
Lincoln: Allegations, I suppose, that the first hay went to the king ranch.
Connally: Yep.
Lincoln: Allegations that people were using government hay when they had feed of their own.
Connally: Yep.
Lincoln: And so, we face up to those dangers. Now, I’ll say frankly that I was talking to [Agriculture Secretary] Cliff Hardin about on the hay business was that, for the time—as a first cut, to try and see if we couldn’t get private enterprise operating with the department of agriculture telling these people where the hay was, and have the ranchers or the dealers make the deals themselves—
Connally: Yep.
Lincoln: —to get the hay.
Connally: Right.
Lincoln: To keep the government—
Connally: Right.
Lincoln: —out of the middle of that.
Connally: Right.
Lincoln: And on price, well, I sympathize with this. I pointed out to him that the price of hay here in the east—and I happen to know something about this because I have a daughter teaching riding at the Rock Creek Stables—the price of hay in Middleburg is $55 to $65 a ton.
Connally: Yep.
Lincoln: Right now. That’s what people pay out there in Virginia for their horses and cattle.
Connally: Right.
Lincoln: So one comes down to have to think a little bit about whether at least at the beginning of a drought one starts to pay transportation.
Connally: Well, General, just—
Lincoln: Now a month from now, or two months from now, one might be thinking about it.
Connally: Well, don’t wait too damn long to where everybody else gets the credit for it. I just have a few observations to make.
Lincoln: Yeah.
Connally: Secondly, don’t be too niggardly. Remember, that the average person—and this is what I heard at the corner cafe down there. They all sit around and so they don’t have a damn thing to do, they can’t work their field, so they’re all in town talking. And they just say, “By God, if there is a famine over in India, they goddamn sure get the food over there—”
Lincoln: Yeah.
Connally: “--and they don’t mind giving it away. They’ll haul the wheat to Russia, to the Communists, they’ll give them food or anything else they want. But when it comes to us, we got to go through all the goddamn rigamaroles with this and that, and we can’t ever get any help.”
Lincoln: Yeah.
Connally: You know, I mean, this is an unfair thing, but nevertheless that’s their attitude.
Lincoln: Well, I’m answering a lot of letters from California in the same vein right now.
Connally: So all I’m saying that if you going to do something, hell, don’t be niggardly about it. Go on and do it, even if it costs you a little bit more money, because you’re going to get credit, and only to the extent that you do it voluntarily. Don’t wait so long where they think they made you do it.
Lincoln: Yep. Yes, I follow you. Let me make a comment, by the way, on other things. We’ve declared agricultural emergency loan areas for, what, 62 counties in Texas and the same for emergency feed and have opened up grazing land—are going to open up grazing land down there. But it’s going to be necessary, I find, to get some more money for the department of agriculture to deal with these loans.
Connally: Yeah, and you don’t have enough grazing land in Texas to make any difference.
Lincoln: No, it’s—
Connolly: That’s nothing
Lincoln: This is a gesture to—
Connally: Right.
Lincoln: —use everything that’s available.
Connally: Right. Well, then I think that’s fine, nothing wrong with it. But I’d just follow it up as quick as I could. Now, I don’t want to be running your business, but I just . . . and that’s all I know.
Lincoln: Yes. Well, thank you very much. [Unclear.]
Connally: OK, General. Thank you. Bye.
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