 Mr. President, I think we'd probably a good place for us to start was with Mr. Mondale's proposal for a tax increase. We'd like to know where you were when he made it, how you heard it, what your reaction was to it. Oh, well now I'm trying to remember where the... Wasn't it at the convention that he... Was it at his acceptance speech? Yes. Here? In the residence? Yeah. What was your reaction? Well, it was kind of a double reaction. The first reaction was that he'd stated his position and I thought very definitely it was a wrong position, which was encouraging. But then the double reaction came then when he so flatly declared that I too would raise taxes only I would lie about it. I wouldn't say so. And I felt that was something that I was darn sure going to rebut. Were you angry about it, amused or what? No, I just... I had a feeling that he hadn't read the public right in his declaration that he would raise taxes. I was a little annoyed at his stating so positively that I would too but that I wouldn't have the courage to say it because I knew that I was going to make very sure if I could that the people understood I wasn't going to do it, but I thought he was wrong. Mr. President, right in the period right after that, there was about a week or so when it seemed as if you, generically the White House, were sort of unsettled by this proposal because you thought, some of the people on the staff have told us, you thought maybe Monday was trying to trick you, or trap you into saying something about social security that he could use against you. What was your thought about that? Well, I never really, I never thought about that and certainly there was no division. I remember reading some stories that as if there was division here that the people that thought that we should raise taxes and so forth and I had never sensed any that I'd never heard anyone in our circles recommend such a thing so I felt that we were all solidly to gather on that. The thing of social security, yes, this was so deliberately in the 82 election and frankly, based on distortions of truth completely and I thought there were evidences also that this was being used in the campaign of 84 that trying to revive the feeling and the part of the senior citizens that I did nurse some plot to do away with social security and nothing has ever been further than the truth. You know, the whole, let me get in a lick here because the whole evolution of this, when we came into office 81, we knew and were made aware that social security would be out of money and bankrupt by July of 1983 and we tried to get them to sit down with us about what we were going to do and this had nothing to do with our budget or deficits or anything else. This had to do with the program and its fiscal integrity and we were told by some of the committee chairman of the House and the other side, well, come in with a proposal. Well, we had to do it by ourselves and the next thing we knew, there was the 1982 campaign issue. Well, by the time the election was over in 82, we'd had to borrow $17 billion to pay on the checks. But in their demagoguery, they were claiming that it was not true that social security was in any financial trouble. Immediately after the election was over, they came to us and said, you know, we'd better get together. We know the program must be straightened out and that's when we formed the bipartisan commission, straightened it out and for as far as we can see into the next century, it is on a sound financial footing. But they brought it up again and tried to make it an issue in the campaign, even if it was to the extent of only reminding people that somehow I had a plot to do away with this. That bugged me, I must say. And you know, you're torn between, do you respond to this and then does that only heighten the issue and make it look debatable and as if you're being defensive or do you just ignore it? But if you ignore it, are there a lot of people out there whose memories are going to be such of the 82 campaign that they're going to say, yes, I'm somehow wanting to do away with this. I must say that with an 86 campaign facing us, we know that there have already been fundraising letters go out that are similar to what they did in 1982. They're saying the same things. Let me skip ahead, Mr. President, to the, to the, this campaign, you made such short work of it, there aren't an awful lot of high points here. But the, let me skip ahead to the Republican convention. They, it's only two or three weeks. Were you surprised or taken aback at all at the reaction to the speech you made at the prayer breakfast at the end of the convention and the whole religious reaction on the religious issue? Yes, I was surprised and I thought they deliberately were, again, demagoguing because I saw the reaction at the prayer breakfast. I couldn't have been better received or gotten a greater reception. And I think that anyone who actually looked at the speech and didn't take things out of context would see that I was, I was talking legitimately within the framework of the First Amendment and and extolling separation of church and state. What I was charging was that there were some on the other side who were advocating the opposite, who wanted, let's say, more state influence over religion. But it, yes, I thought it was unfair and unjust when they started to try and make an issue of this. Did you temper anything you said or did later in the campaign because of that, do you think? No. Mr. President, your observations about social security are particularly interesting to us because in that first debate you seemed to really come out swinging on social security. You wanted to defend your position on social security. Did that have an effect on the whole atmosphere in that debate, would you say? Was that maybe one of the reasons that you were considered not to have done so well because you wanted defensive posture? Well, let me say that there were by that time not only that but there were so many other things in which I thought there had actually been misstatements of fact about figures and so forth and what had been accomplished that I set out to cram, thought that the debate might then offer me an opportunity to rebut many of these things. And you know, it is true, you don't rebut them in the sense otherwise, in the sense of simply going out and saying, hey, I didn't say that or that, isn't it? Because then you do look defensive and you're giving the other fellow a rehash of what he said. But I thought in the debate that it might very likely come up more of that face-to-face and I wanted to be ready to make sure I had everything at my fingertips. And I left my fight in the locker room. I knew when I stood out there that I was flat. I wasn't really ready or up to it. I just crammed myself and as I say, it was what they often say about leaving the fight in the locker room. Paul Axel used that famous phrase after the first debate that you had been brutalized in the preparation for the debate. Did you think the preparation had been particularly tough? Well, maybe we overdid it in some ways, but again I think the main factor was myself. I brutalized myself with my cramming. Were you surprised at the reaction how it was translated into an age question right after the debate? Yes, yes I was, because I've never seen any time where that issue ever got off the ground with the people. What do you think about what television did those succeeding nights after the first debate dealing with the so-called age issue? Well, as I've said, you know, as of the actual night of the debate and the moment it was over, even though I knew, and I went upstairs and told some of the gentlemen sitting in this room that I didn't feel I'd done well. But no one else seemed to feel as much that way. And it took about 36 hours, if you will remember, before they began to rev up that a winner-lose situation on the debate. I just thought maybe they were inventing some excitement out of it, because I thought the real truth of the matter was that the debate didn't get caused any excitement on either side. Did you think that that whole thing was serious enough that your campaign might have been in jeopardy if you hadn't done well in the second debate? No, not really. I think, and I think what we know now is that the debates aren't the campaign. They're a kind of a minor thing, and they just, first of all, they're not, like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, they're not in a debate formula. And I just think that so-so, he came in there having debated his way with his primary opponents all the way through the Democratic primary. Let me just be sure I'm clear on this. You felt that the general themes that you were using in your speeches and the advertising, the whole themes of the campaign, outweighed whatever happened in the debate? Yes. Did you do anything different from getting ready for the second debate? I know you cut back on the number. Well, and I didn't cram. I realized what I'd done, that I had myself so filled up with trying to remember facts and figures for whatever might be raised, that I wasn't really thinking and responding to what he was saying there when we were face to face. So no, I just didn't do that. One of the things we were interested in, we've said this to Ed Rollins when we talked to him before, but your campaign thought of every possible turn of the political process in every way, all through the year. But we were also told that in preparing for the second debate, no one sat down with you specifically to talk about answers you might give if the age question were raised. That's right. Where did this thing come from? Jim Baker told us that he thought you had said something like that once in the car to him two or three months before. Where did it come from, the answer? The answer when you said you weren't going to, when you turned all the way around and said you weren't going to make an issue of the age question. No, that just came. That was the thing that I was incapable of doing in the first one because I had crammed myself dry. It just seemed like a fine answer to the way the question was presented. Did that come to you on the stage? Yes. Mr. President, to just go back for a second again about television, what was your reaction when the networks paraded out all those psychiatrists who talked about the effect of senility and so on and so forth for two or three nights in a row? Well, it might have bothered me at once at one time. It didn't because by this time I have to tell you I'd become convinced in my own mind that no one had been able to make that issue sell. Did you come out of that first debate for yourself in a combative mood? Did you really want to get into that second debate because of how the first one had gone? Oh, there was a matter of personal pride, yes, when you know you've done badly. It's like I suppose if you're doing a show and you know you weren't hot one night while you decided to make up for it the next night. Did Mondale surprise you at all in either of the debates in terms of his debate style? No, not particularly. I mean he came at you fairly softly in that first debate. Was that at all a surprise to you? Maybe to the extent that you know a lot of the analysis of him had been that he was easily aroused and that he might come storming back and so I think I'd been prepared if he had done that and he didn't. After the second debate, did you think it was all over? The campaign? No, that's impossible for me to do. Maybe it's a little masochism or something, but maybe I played on too many losing teams in a small school and football, but no, it's just impossible for me to get overconfident. I go right down to the wire refusing to listen to anyone. In fact, if you recall speaking to Republican constituents and groups toward the end of the campaign, I think the gist of my message was don't get overconfident. Don't look at the polls. Please keep on fighting. Was there any point all year, going back even to the before the general election campaign proper? Was there any point that you thought you might have a serious trouble or might have a serious challenge? Well, only in the sense, as I say, that it's just my nature to think I'm running one vote behind. There was never a point when there was any issue was raised or anything that came up that gave you pause because you saw all the polls, I suppose. No, there was never anything like that. I never have anything to base my pessimism on. I just do it by nature. What about the constant allegations of the Democrats that you were running what they called a feel-good campaign with the commercials that were thematic rather than specific and so on? Well, because that was the reading of the people out there. There was a different atmosphere. People were telling it to me, people who came back from trips abroad, the out there in the campaign on the campuses. For someone who had known the youth of America as I knew them when I was governor back there in the 60s when they were burning the flag and burning me in effigy and a few things like that, you couldn't help but see that something had happened out there when those young people made up so much of the crowd at our rallies and the enthusiasm and the patriotism they showed. It wasn't just enthusiasm for me, it was that thing about America that how many times I'd have to stop speaking to listen to the chant of USA like they did at the Olympics. What do you attribute all that to anyway? Why did that happen? Well, all I know is that there was a, maybe it was just a natural reaction to the fact that for so long in the previous administration they'd been hearing such downbeat things of, you know, quit anticipating the future. We've got to, what were some of the terms they used, we've got to face the fact that it's an era of limits no longer the America that we've always thought about and maybe it was just a natural reaction that the people of our country are known to be optimistic. Did you ever think that you might, let me put it this way, did you ever look back and think you might have done something differently in terms of spelling out proposals or particular programmatic intentions of yours after you got elected or not? Oh, I can't remember specifically any, you know, doing any dwelling on that. Well, what do you think you won by landslide by such an immense margin? Well, I think maybe the people were telling us something that it didn't have to have to do so much with me is it had to do with what had happened in the country. You look at the succession of things, the economy for one thing, all the things that have been up for most in the people's minds and the polls as the unemployment, the inflation for a long time was the biggest thing in people's minds and the economic turnaround was a large part of it. Maybe something like Grenada was a part of it. We have used our time. Let me just ask you one question that we want to pose further. Going way back, was there ever any question in your mind about running this time? Was that ever a serious question in your mind? Not really. I deliberately tried to keep from even sitting down and thinking about it and saying, what am I going to do? Because I've always been so conscious of the fact that there is a tendency then to interpret everything that's done as being political and I just put it out of my mind for a while until I finally knew that I would have to face it and the first one I sat down with was Nancy and we both agreed that we didn't see that there was any way that I could not run. Mr. President, we appreciate your time. Well, pleased to do it. Thank you. You haven't given us a very good book to write this to this time. It was all one side we're having on.