Bella Abzug on Richard Nixon

“As far as I'm concerned, ending this dirty, immoral war is the most urgent thing this Congress has to do. President Nixon, with his phony "Vietnamization" schemes, is nothing but a wind-up, wind-down mechanical man who thinks he's fooling the American people. He and his pals in the Pentagon are full of lies and deceptions; they manipulate words as if they were playing parlor games instead of dealing in human suffering. They're making us live through a B-movie rerun of the Johnson script, which promised "no wider war" but brought just that. Can you imagine telling us to rejoice because only forty American kids a week are getting killed over there now? This is going to be a no-hands war, Nixon says, and so what if it goes on? No ground troops, he says. Just hundreds of bombers dropping thousands of bombs on innocent villagers. Very clean, isn't it? Well, if he thinks he's going to get away with it, he's nuts. Whether he knows it or not, the people are against him. They've had it. And so have I.”

“We got some characteristic reaction from the White House on the Women's Caucus. Secretary of State Rogers brought the subject up when he and Nixon were getting their pictures taken with Henry Kissinger, who's just back from a "fact-finding" trip to Paris. Kissinger, smiling, said he heard Gloria Steinem was at the Women's Caucus. "Who's that?" the President asked. (He doesn't read the papers, so how would he know?) "That's Henry's old girlfriend," Mr. Rogers said jokingly. Then Rogers mentioned a photograph of me, Friedan, Steinem and Chisholm, which one of the wire services had circulated. "What did it look like?" Nixon asked. "Like a burlesque," said Rogers. "What's wrong with that?" asked Nixon. Isn't that something? Obviously, these guys are accustomed to viewing women in terms of flesh shows. It's insulting, I must say, but hardly surprising.”