Bush Campaign Irked Over Nixon Tapes
W A S H I N G T O N, Oct. 26 -- The George W. Bush campaign expressed concernabout the government’s release of 420 hours of former PresidentNixon’s secret White House tapes that include the voice of thepresidential candidate’s father.
But the National Archives made thetapes public today, as scheduled.
The elder Bush is heard talking on only three of the 4,140conversations that were released. The tapes carry conversationsthat occurred in late 1971.
One conversation is a two-minute phone chat between Nixon andBush in New York, where Bush was U.S. ambassador to the UnitedNations. They talked about the Dallas Cowboys and Nixon praisedBush’s U.N. work and asked if he liked “fighting that New Yorksociety crowd.”
“I don’t like that part of it, and I don’t like the familyliving here in New York … but the job has been fascinating,”Bush replied. Nixon asked Bush to give his best regards to Bush’sfather, Prescott.
The India-Pakistani Conflict
In the other two conversations, Nixon and Bush discussed theIndia-Pakistan conflict. Publicly, the Nixon administration was nottaking sides but on the phone Nixon made it clear that hesympathized with the Pakistanis. “India’s hands are not clean,they’re caught in a bloody bit of aggression,” Nixon said.
“India, in spite of its sanctimony was really the aggressor,”Bush told Nixon.
The timing of the tapes’ release made the George W. Bushcampaign wary.
“We did call to express concern, you bet,” Bush campaignspokesman Ari Fleischer said Wednesday night. “We do have anongoing concern about whether this administration is going tocreate external events to influence the outcome of this election.”
“We expressed a concern about the timing. We were told thatthese are predetermined dates [for Nixon tape releases], and weaccept that.”
The Bush campaign has harshly criticized members of PresidentClinton’s Cabinet for going to bat for Democrat Al Gore’spresidential campaign.
Trending Reader Picks
ABC News Live