JOHN: No, he was pretty cynical about the notion of the Kennedy's creating a Camelot. old Jo Kennedy, the father, had a heavy hand: he, Nixon felt that that Jo Kennedy had bought and paid for the President, the Presidency for his son, and was an eminence grise in that administration, and that it could never, it could never achieve idealism because of old Jo Kennedy's participation in it.

JOHN: At the time I lived in Seattle, and practiced, practiced law. it didn't affect my life at all. There was very tiny effort at, there's what we think of as a civil rights movement, at that time. When I went to Washington, and began to work in the administration, in 1960, it became a very real political force in my life - through the campaign. Richard Nixon had to figure out what to do about this highly militant organized group who appeared to be opposed to him. Once he came into office, then they were a, they were a potent political factor, that he had to reckon with; and a lot of our time was spent in reconciling the so-called Southern strategy of Nixon's, which cracked the South for the Republicans on the one hand, and the requirements of law, which Spring Clerk was laying down at the time, saying that schools had to be integrated, and that civil rights had to be accorded to everyone, regardless of race and color.

JOHN: No, I think actually his attitude was - it's the law, we've got to do it. We are politicians, we've got to do it in such a way that we don't commit political suicide with our constituencies, but we can reconcile the two: we can successfully obey the law, integrate the Southern schools, for example, without poking our finger in the eyes of our constituents. And that's what he set about to do, and he did it rather successfully. He integrated more schools than any previous President, and he did it in such a way that he retained his majorities in the South.

 JOHN: Well I remember it very, very vividly: I was in my office in Seattle, and the news came on the radio, and everybody tuned in, and we were all shocked. we all, I think, regardless of our political orientation, had some emotional connection to John Kennedy, and it was a very heavy emotional time.

JOHN: I didn't, I didn't know, and I don't know it today. One of our problems is that the whole Kennedy episode is left with so many unanswered questions. the Warren Commission didn't close all the doors - there're still remaining questions. I suppose at the time I worked in the White House, I could have gone to work to try to answer some of those questions, but I had too many other things to do, I really didn't have time. the Bay of Pigs remains; for that matter Watergate remains, with many unanswered questions. We seem to have a lot of trouble in this country tying down the four corners of our major historical episodes.

JOHN: I, my feeling during the campaign, the '59 campaign, and into 1960 - excuse me, the '71 campaign into '72 , the '69 campaign into '70 - was that these people were not taking seriously the role of the United States in the world. the idea that we could simply pull a string and unilaterally pull out of a commitment to South Vietnam, it seemed to me to ignore the realities of the world. we had alliances, we had dependents around the world, and for us to have done that, would have sent a very unfortunate signal to countries like Japan, that are, that were our clients. so it seemed to me a great luxury for people to be able to protest the war, and just disregard all the ramifications.

JOHN: No I didn't think it was treasonous, I just thought it was foolish, that they were not, their calculus was incomplete - they were not adding up everything that needed to be taken into consideration.

JOHN: Well I'm the father of a lot of children, and the middle sixties I had some kids in college, and some at high school. so I had a very, a very direct and personal interest in long hair and tie-dyed shirts, and things of that kind. one of my kids announced that he was going to go and live in the woods, and you don't simply say to a son like that, no you can't. You say, well take the family tent, and I hope you're warm and dry, and who's going to fix your dinner - and those kinds of things. we got through that episode, and a bunch of other kinds of episodes. but it was a tough time to be a parent.

JOHN: Yes, we had some drugs, we had some sexual liberation - not on a grand scale fortunately, but nevertheless something that my wife and I had to cope with; and it, we were not immune. when the demonstrations started over the war, I had anguished 'phone calls from college campuses from my kids, saying, you know, you're in the White House, and you're Henry Kissinger's friend, but my friends are all in the streets - and then what am I to do? A tough spot. I was fortunately in a position where I could take that youngster, and bring him home and sit him down with Henry Kissinger, and let Henry explain to him what the war was all about - and Henry was pretty good at that.

JOHN: He worked very hard in the out years, to become a creditor. He appeared at County Lincoln Day dinners, he appeared for congressional candidates, he did political favors for people - he ran very hard. in this country, particularly since 1960, it's it takes a candidate about twelve years for him to establish himself in his party, and to win the primaries that he needs to win, to win the convention, and so on. And Richard Nix-, Richard Nixon worked very hard at that. I was in on the 1968 convention, at Miami Beach: we organized that, every detail dominated it, controlled it, froze out Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan, and won it on the first ballot - narrowly, but we won it, by superior organization and hard work.

JOHN: We had a television consultant, who worked with us in planning the convention. he wrote, with our help, a script for that convention; and then he was in touch with all the networks - and in those days, unlike today, the networks gave you beginning to end coverage: so our man was on the 'phone to NBC saying, you'll want your cameras to be at entrance number three now, because members of the Nixon family are coming in; or you'll want your cameras to be out front because a limousine is going to pull up and a number of our supporters are going to get out and do something that'll be wonderful television. And we dominated the television coverage of that convention, by a lot of planning, and by very close liaison. it's a lost art at this point, because the networks have become disenchanted with that coverage, and they only show an hour or two. the parties don't have contested conventions, like they used to, so that's sort of by the boards; but at that time it was terribly important.

JOHN: Well, here here's a man that had been in politics for over twenty years; he had a position on the books - unfortunately every issue there was - so it was just a question of researching what he had said on a given subject, and going back and then asking him: is this still where you want to be on this? But it is true today, and it was true then, that the so-called platform of a political party in this country, is not terribly important. It's what the candidate is saying out there on the stump, and what he's saying on the television cameras for the evening news, and what's in the newspapers - that's sort of his living platform. The party platform is kind of very often a sort of dead hand of the past.

JOHN: I think he was saying, I'm tougher, I'm smarter, I understand the world better - my opponents are divided, they've been taken over by the fringe elements of the democratic party, and a bunch of loonies are in charge; we're stable, we have a sense of direction, you know where we stand on things, you can confide in us; and we won't let the Russians or the Chinese push us around.