 Well, thank you all very much. I'm sorry on this 20th anniversary that we haven't been able to have our usual White House reception, but the schedule did get a little cluttered up there with China, and now coming up Europe for the summit conference, but I did want to come by and at least drop in here and greet you and welcome you, and to say that I hope that as White House fellows that you will, whenever it occurs to you, ask questions, and if you get some very interesting answers, I'd like to hear them. As I remember, a young fellow in a situation, something like Eurone, when I was Governor of California, and it was assigned to a department where they were, really they had storage files of official documents of a certain kind, and not a file case where it was used in the daily work and you looked in for this file or that file. These were storage files, and he was struck by the fact that there's the employees as you saw them putting these files in the filing cabinets that they had double, fold them over double, and it didn't take a genius to figure out that if you've got to double them to get them in, you've cut the file cabinet's capacity in half. So he said, why? Well, they said these forms don't fit the filing cabinet. Well, he said, why are the forms that, well, they said they've always been this way, and that was the accepted answer. Except that he got on the phone and called the state printer and got a number of the phone and just ordered that henceforth the forms be of a different size. And that year we bought 4,200 fewer file cabinets. So if you come to some questions like that, as I say, I'd like to hear them. I know that I've only got a minute or two and that I'm interrupting your regular session here, but if I could just take this one or two minutes here and not say welcome to you again, but have you ever thought sometime that said to yourself, boy, if I had a chance, would I ask him? Well, go ahead. Yes. President, what are the implications of the Soviet cancellation of the Olympics? Well, the Soviet relations, I don't go along with the thing that they are at the worst stage they've ever been. I was just reading the other day a kind of a scholarly document that was written in April of 1980. And in there you should have heard the assault that was being made on the previous administration that relations with the Soviets were the lowest point they had ever been, and that was in April of 1984 years ago. I do think that part of this is election year. You're not going to do anything that's going to help in this year. They are the ones, however, who have walked away from the tables with regard to the negotiations. We have actually tried to meet some of their demands to prove that we could be flexible in those disarmament negotiations and did no good. Well, one thing we're not going to do, we're not going to roll over and give in to some demand, which we're not in agreement, simply to buy them back to the table because from then on I know all they had to do was take the toys and go home and we'd give in to bring them back. So when they're ready to come back to those tables, that's fine. I think very possibly there's a part that this is revenge for 1980. And again, as I say in an election year, it's helpful. I think it is disgraceful. You know, we hear so much about old men in government sending young men out to die in wars. Well, those old men in the Politburo are not only sending their young men out to die in Afghanistan and have been for four years or longer, but now they won't even let the young men and women engage in athletic contests in a contest that for 2,000 years or more has been known as born in an effort to bring peace. The Greek city states, which were always at war, the Olympics were created to try and bring peace between them. And they took it so seriously that in those days, if a war was going on in Olympic year, they postponed the war in order to go to the games. And as I said the other day, I wish we could be that civilized. Throughout your career, you've been a super leader, and I would just like you to take a second, if you could, and share with me and the other fellows some of the nuances that you've learned over the years through California, through Screen Actors Guild, and in office now, maybe go inside on your success. Well, I don't know just where. Well, you mentioned the Screen Actors Guild. I was president of the Screen Actors Guild at a time that literally a strike was forced upon us. We had never struck before in the motion picture industry and a very prominent head of a studio at that particular time told me that while he had been one that resisted the organizing of actors, thought it was a terrible thing for the industry. He had come to realize that the Screen Actors Guild was the most constructive force for good in the picture business. So I really mean it when I say a strike was forced on us. Well, I found out, leading that strike, that I could get up in front of the mass membership meetings of the Screen Actors Guild and I realized that they would more or less take my direction. And I found myself losing sleep because I said, how do I know that I'm saying the right things? Who am I to be responsible for 14,000 actors' lives and careers? And I finally figured out the only way I could sleep was that I would make every decision as nearly as I could on the basis of what I thought was morally right or wrong. And live with it. So when I became governor, after that experience with a lot more responsibilities, I told my cabinet that in discussing any issue, I never wanted to hear the political ramifications. I only wanted to hear the discussion as to whether it was right or wrong for the people. And I have told a cabinet here at this level in Washington the same thing. And I think that has to be. I think the day that you begin counting the votes in an election, I had to say, well, should I do this or shouldn't I do that because of the votes? And I know some people justify decisions on a basis by saying, well, I can only continue to do good for the people if I'm still here. I don't buy that. I think the day that you start basing a decision on counting the votes, that is the day that you begin counting the votes. That is the day that you begin compromising and are no longer making decisions on the right basis. So I've stuck with it all this time because I found I sleep better. Mr. President, are you happy with the Federal Reserve and its conduct of monetary policy? Well, I know that the press seems to want to create feuds whenever they can. I've criticized them right now because last month they have a bracket of two lines that are supposed to roughly parallel, as they see it, the increase in productivity and therefore the need for the increase in money. And they try to keep the money supply within those two, the upper line and the lower line. Well, last month, and maybe this is what's happened to the interest rates, although I suspect a little selfishness in the part of the banks, too, there is no excuse. For the interest rates being at the level they are. The interest rates went up because of inflation. Obviously, if you're lending money and your money, while it is lent out, is going to lose value through inflation, then you've got to get enough interest to not only get a return on your money, but to also make sure that you get back the same amount of purchasing power you loaned. Well, now with interest rates down to where they are, where they've been below 4% for the last two years, and they're still holding that figure, there's no reason for this increase. But I do have to say, fairly in March, they got the money supply below their bottom line, not within their bracket, which, of course, lost supply and demand, restricted the amount. I do have to say on their behalf, however, their tools are very clumsy. This can happen sometimes not by a decision of theirs to lower the money to that level. It is an inaccurate system that they have, and I sometimes wonder how and why we created a totally independent, literally private organization to regulate this. I grew up in an era where the money supply was regulated with the fact that it was based on the value of gold and silver, and how much of it you had. And somehow we didn't seem to have. Would you believe it that interest rates were just sort of taken for granted at about 3% in those days? And so it is possible that this was an inadvertent dip, but I think it is also part of what has caused this recent flow of increases, and I hope they'll get back up there in the framework. Mr. President, I grew up in Latin America. I want to compliment you on your speech last week. I'm curious about something. You're going to have to speak up a little bit. I'm curious about something on your Latin American policy. To what do you attribute the difficulty in convincing the American people that there is a difference between Vietnam and what we are facing in Central America? What other factors do you think you're going to have to do to prove the American people there is a big difference? Well, of course, there is no relationship between the two at all. One was 10,000 miles away. And I think our connection in that one was because we were participants in the Geneva Pact where when France gave up, French Indochina as a colony, which was Vietnam, that we felt a responsibility when they divided and created two countries out of it. If you will recall, South Vietnam and the United States did not sign the accords in Geneva when that decision was made. But today, we're talking about here in our own hemisphere, we're talking about some countries that for the last 400 years have known what we scathingly referred to as banana republic revolutions. And those revolutions pretty generally just changed one set of rulers for another set of rulers. But several years ago, before we got here, El Salvador overthrew a military dictatorship. And for the first time in 400 years set out to create a government within the democratic bounds that we recognize as proper. And they have made great progress down there. And we have been helpful. But what happened was suddenly guerrilla forces trained in Cuba, many of them trained in Nicaragua nearby later, but aided and supported by the Cubans and by the Soviet Union, by the communist bloc. In fact, the first weapons provided to those guerrillas, when we captured some we identified, they were American weapons. They were the weapons that we had left in Vietnam. And the communists in Vietnam delivered them to the guerrillas in El Salvador. Well, the Monroe Doctrine is not popular because under that Monroe Doctrine, many of our Latin American friends saw us as unnecessarily interfered. And to this day, even the best of our friends do not want us to go back to a day where we land the Marines to settle an issue of this kind. But they do want us to help them. El Salvador has said repeatedly to us, we do not want your manpower, but we do have to have your help in training in weapons and now in the economy so that they can implement the social reforms and the economic reforms to create democracy at more than a government level in the actual economic and social structure. What has happened with us is that we've been so held down in the amount of aid that the Congress has given us to provide them with that help, that it's almost as if they're just giving them enough to stay alive and stave off defeat, but not enough to end the situation and go forward with the democracy they're trying to create. In other words, as one Democratic congressman said to me the other day, he said that we're giving the patient blood transfusions a half a pint at a time and this is what we're doing, slowly letting them bleed to death. Now, we do have a stake there as my speech last night, I won't ask you if you heard it or not. We had some visuals about the importance of that area, that the capital of El Salvador is closer to Houston, Texas than Houston, Texas is to Washington, D.C. But more than that, we now have great colonies of refugees from those Central American countries that are coming up here and many of them illegally crossing our borders because technically they cannot claim refugee status, but we can understand their situation. Now, Nicaragua had had for more than a score of years a dictator named Somoza and finally all the Democratic elements of Nicaragua got together and staged a revolution and one of the elements in that revolution were the Sandinistas who have been aligned with the Communists for years and years and as I pointed out last night had actually joined the PLO in declaring war on Israel several years ago. When the revolution was successful and we did nothing to prop up Somoza, the revolution combination asked the Organization of American States for a declaration of help and support and the Organization of American States went to Somoza and asked him to step down to avoid further bloodshed in the revolution. And he said, if it will end the fighting and avoid that, yes, and he, the dictator, stepped down. And then the Sandinistas did what Castro did in his own revolution. Suddenly those other Democratic elements that were his partners in fighting the revolution were some of them imprisoned, some were exiled, some had to leave as fugitives. The Sandinistas took over. They had given the Organization of American States written promises as to free elections, free labor unions, freedom of press, all the things we recognize in our Constitution that this was what they were rebelling for. They had never kept one of the promises they made to the Organization of American States. I referred last night in this speech to their humiliation of Catholic priests and their attack on the Catholic Church as they had attacked the Jews. Today there are very few Jews left in Nicaragua. They have had to flee the country because of persecution. But I didn't say in the year, I didn't say insanely, I'll see to you, they went so far in their humiliation of Catholic priests that one bishop was forced to parade through the capital of Managua, down the middle of the street, heard down the street. The Mosquito Indians who even under Samosa had been allowed to live with their own culture, their own religion, lived their own lives the way they wanted to. They moved in on them instantly. They burned their villages. I have a letter from an American medical missionary. He and his wife have been in Central America for 30 years. She's a registered nurse. He's a doctor. And they told me that in one camp in Nicaragua, they're treating mosquito refugees that have crossed into Honduras right now. In one camp, one concentration camp, they have 12,000 Mosquito Indians herded in to a facility that was built to house 800. And they have no medical care for them in Nicaragua at all. So I think every moral consideration insists that we should do what we're doing in providing them help to win freedom for themselves. And maybe this is a long-winded answer and I know I'm going to have to leave now. But let me just say that to many, the great immorality in Vietnam, once we made a decision, the First Division of Forces, we were involved only with military men and civilian clothes carrying no arms who were sent over to help this newly created country have a military for its own protection. The country that had been named North Vietnam did have a military. They were the forces that had been fighting against the Japanese occupation in World War II. Must say this for them, but under Ho Chi Minh, they were purely communist. And the agreement had been that people from North or South Vietnam, once this single country was made two countries, could for a period of time migrate to whichever country they wanted to live in, these newly created countries. Over a million North Vietnamese had left to come to the South and then in violation of the agreement, Ho Chi Minh closed the border and said no and they weren't allowed out. And there were slaughters of some 50,000 landowners in North Vietnam also. But then, President Kennedy, because of the terrorist attacks and on our own civilian clothes, military, he sent in a division that began the actual conflict with us involved. And as you know, it multiplied up to 500,000 of our forces there. But the immorality was that our government asked young men to fight and die for their country, but was unwilling to let them win the cause they were fighting for. For some reason we had a terrible feeling that if we were victorious that this would somehow create a wider conflict involving then communist China. And we knew the Soviet Union was better than North Vietnam. And that was the immorality of Vietnam. But that Vietnam syndrome, there's no question, has had a very bad effect today with regard to legitimate areas where the United States should protect its own interests and that of our allies. Mr. President, Fred Jimmel is over there. He's over there giving me a big mess. I thought there was somebody right back here. I have stayed longer than I'm supposed to.