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Nixon
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COLLECTIONS
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EXHIBITS
NOTE ON DRAFT TRANSCRIPTS
These Nixon tapes transcripts are posted as draft transcripts. They may contain errors. We post them not as authoritative references but in the hope they might serve as useful guides. Users are strongly encouraged to listen to the original audio in tandem with reading the transcripts. Each transcript includes a link to the corresponding audio file. Please send any suggestions and/or corrections to whitehousetapes@virginia.edu.
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Richard Milhous Nixon spent many of the “after hours” of his presidency in the Lincoln Sitting Room of the White House residence with his feet up before a roaring fireplace (even in summer, when he had the staff crank up the air conditioning), a yellow legal pad in hand and a phone at his side. The pad allowed him to organize his thoughts into strategies; the phone, to implement them. The White House switchboard operators permitted the President to reach anyone, anywhere, anytime. Nixon started recording his phone calls in April 1971, a month and a half after he began recording meetings in the Oval Office. The recording system captured calls from the phones in the Oval Office, the Lincoln Sitting Room, and Nixon’s private office in the Executive Office Building. [More . . .]
Below are several methods for accessing the Nixon Telephone Transcripts. New transcripts will be posted regularly.
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President Nixon: . . . if you read the polls and everything else, there is a credibility [issue] about us. They don’t believe us. There’s a lack of confidence in the conduct of the war and so forth. That is no reason to cave. If we just state it out there the best we can and hope for the best.
001-004
……………….
[on explaining overtures to China]
President Nixon: And that then you go on to say, “Look, this has nothing to do with it. The President has always—this has nothing to do with trying to make the Soviet mad or the Chinese mad. The purpose is to get along with both. We want to be”—the line that I took in Yugoslavia and Romania: that you can be our friend without being anybody else’s enemy. That’s the line.
001-076
……………….
[On federal assistance for farmers during the drought]
John Connally: 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, 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.”
042-033
……………….
President Nixon: . . . well you know actually, the country usually turns around a little before the folks do, you know? I mean usually before the congressmen and particularly. They sit here in Washington and they read these, you know, Washington papers and the rest and you really think everything’s going to hell in a hat.
[042-061
……………….
President Nixon: But you know, Freeman, the thing we’ve got to remember is that that’s what this is all about. That, it’s what the president, President [Dwight D.] Eisenhower used to always think of, what I think of. Goddamn it, we just want to end this son-of-a-bitching war in a way that our kids can have a chance to grow up in a world at peace.
001-043
……………….
[About Donald Rumsfeld, amongst others]
President Nixon: Goddamn it, if they don’t stand up now, you know, I ain’t going to talk to them. Screw them. I am not going to do it. They aren’t going to come sucking around after they read the polls.
001-039
……………….
President Nixon: And particularly [Donald] Rumsfeld, [Counselor Robert] Finch—well, not Finch, the hell, he’s got to do, you know—he’s just got to go whatever we do, you know that. But Rumsfeld’s a different cup of tea, you know. We’re not going to send him abroad and give him a goddamn trip unless he’s going to be with us.
001-045
……………….
President Nixon: Yeah. And if it doesn’t work, I don’t care. I mean, right now if it doesn’t work, then let me say, though, I’m going to find out soon, and then I’m going to turn right so goddamn hard it’ll make your head spin. We’ll bomb those bastards right off the earth. I really mean it.
001-010
……………….
[On federal assistance for farmers during the drought]
John Connally: 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, 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.”
042-033
……………….
President Nixon: . . . well you know actually, the country usually turns around a little before the folks do, you know? I mean usually before the congressmen and particularly. They sit here in Washington and they read these, you know, Washington papers and the rest and you really think everything’s going to hell in a hat.
[042-061