thread of the story and then just one more thing will pop up loose and in fact the three biggest stories of that time actually are all done by reporters who are not woodward and bernstein and they're one-offs woodward and bernstein, you know deserve all of the credit that they get for keeping the watergate story alive during certain portions of it. good afternoon, or good morning. good morning. it feels like afternoon already summer. welcome back to the gaithersburg book festival. my name's mike sesma. i'm a former member the gaithersburg city council and a proud supporter the gaithersburg book festival since it's inception if you joined us for

the first 10 book festivals, well, welcome back and if this it's it is really great to be here in person this year after two years of virtual book festival, as you know, gaithersburg is a city that values and supports the arts and humanities and we're pleased to bring you this fabulous festival. thanks and part to the generous support of our sponsors and volunteers. our volunteers are wearing these bright orange shirts. so if you see them, make sure you say thank you and if you see our sponsors, they're the ones walking around with money falling out of their pockets say thank you to them, too. before i introduce our author michael dobbs, let me make a few announcements. please silence all of your electronic mobile devices for the latest updates about the book festival. make sure you're following the gaithersburg book festival on facebook and twitter and if you post about the festival if you're one of those people that social media savvy, please use the gbf hashtag. your feedback's really important to us surveys are available on

our website, which you can access at gaithersburg book festival.org or by using the qr code that you'll see displayed prominently around the grounds by submitting a survey you'll be entered in a drawing for a $100 visa gift card, which we hope you'll spend in our bookstore. michael dolls will be signing books immediately after this presentation in the air condition comfort of the activity center. so please meet him there. copies of his books books are on sale in the politics and pros store, which is also in the activity center a quick plug for buying books. remember, this is a free event, but it does help our festival if you buy books lots of books the more books. we sell out our events the more publishers want to send their authors here to speak with us purchasing books forum our partner politics and pros health support one of the great independent bookstores

booksellers in the world and it benefits our local economies supports local jobs. and by the way books make great gifts. so if you enjoy the program, please stop by the bookstore in the activity center and purchase the books. so our presenter today our author today, michael dobbs has been a foreign correspondent for reuters and the washington post in eastern europe paris and moscow. he's covered the collapse of the soviet union written about the history of the cold war and a recent biography of madeline albright. during the 2008 presidential campaign. he returned to the post to launch its online fact checker column. so we have michael to thank for that. king richard nixon and watergate in american tragedy is michael's most recent work. we're counting the days following the landslide re-election of victory of nixon and how the investigation of watergate blew it all up. reading king richard for me brought me back to college days when all of this was happening when we crowded into tv lounges

because that's how we watch tv. it was a shared experience. we watched the select committee hearings instead of going to class. it was it was educational it was riveting and for many people it was traumatic like the title suggests. the story is the shakespearean tragedy. no heroes and one notorious figure in the character in the center of it all watergate for me. it's like the car crash that you can't turn away from. and with this book michael shows it to us all he helps us relive it again, but this time in slow motion. so i'm looking forward to hearing what michael has to say about his book and the process of writing it so please join me in welcoming michael dobbs to the gaithersburg book festival. well, thank you very much. so as was explained i'm can you all hear me? i'm a former journalist. i used to work for the washington post.

and after 30 years of being mainly a foreign correspondent, i turned myself into a historian. and actually to distinguish myself from all those presidential historians out there. i call myself a presidential crisis historian. because i try to focus on not just the entire life of somebody biograph writing biographies like biography of nixon, but i try to focus on the most dramatic moments of that person's life when they faced an existential crisis of one kind or another. i wrote a book about the cuban missile crisis called. called one minute to midnight. which is about the time in 1962 when the world came closer than ever before or since perhaps with the exception of the current time to some kind of nuclear exchange.

um, i'll just obviously that was the ultimate crisis that a president could face. but nixon also faced crisis. he faced a personal crisis. he faced a national crisis. and that's the crisis that i've tried to describe in this book. so why did i call it king richard? actually, i don't think i'm very good at titles, but i think king richard is a pretty good title because it summed up. you know the spirit of what i was trying to do. obviously that phrase evokes the kind of shakespearean tragedy. shakespeare wrote, you know king lear he wrote two books two plays richard the second and richard the third. um, but also there's a connection to nixon's life because his mother out in california. she came as you probably know from a poor quaker family out in calif who had migrated california from, pennsylvania.

she called her sons. she named her sons or three of her sons after the kings of england. and she named richard after the first king richard the lionheart. two others were named after other english kings. in fact, they died. when richard was very young during his childhood from tuberculosis, so he had a tough upbringing. and he climbed all the way from this dirt poor. background family in california to become president of the united states. and then the same qualities of persistence and drive and hatred of his enemies and determination to get even the qualities that had carried him to the presidency then ended up bringing him down. which is to me very shakespearean story. a tragedy you have a tragic hero

has a fatal flaw. i'm used to be capable of greatness, but then fatal flaw brings him down. and i think that's the case with with nixon. um, so explains why i chose the title king richard because it's personal to nixon's life and it's also evokes this the subtitle of the book is actually an american tragedy. we can talk in the questions and answers about whether you see agree with me that nixon is a real tragic figure or not. but okay, so i want to talk a little bit about my approach to writing because i'm a former journalist. i'm not a professionally trained historian. and therefore i try to tell history as a story. using the techniques of fiction

to apply to nonfiction. actually, there are a lot of journalists have become, you know, outstanding popular historians. david mcculloch is an obvious example, eric larson is another example and at the washington post i one of my mentors was rick atkinson who wrote a wonderful trilogy of the second world war and then wrote is now writing a trilogy of the american revolution. but these authors most of them form a journalists, they sort of pioneered these techniques of writing nonfiction or history but using fictional techniques of developing characters using plenty of dialogue. creating scenes and moving from one scene to another now, of course if you're writing nonfiction, it has to be every bit of it has to be accurate. you can't just invent things. and you know one of the reasons actually i chose this subject of

nixon and watergate. is that that you don't have to invent anything? because the historical record is so rich. and it's much more. interesting and much more colorful than a i mean, i haven't got a great imagination. but if i was a novelist, i didn't think i could invent many of the lines that you know crop up in watergate. and of course we have the tapes, which is an amazing source for real life authentic dialogue. okay, so how do i write this book i focus on nixon's re-election in 1972. this is after six months after the watergate. he was inaugurated for the second time as president. he had one, you know one of the outstanding election victories in american history. he won by the largest popular

vote margin up until that date. so you have the country behind him particularly the second time he ran. he thought that he'd largely put watergate behind him. this is it watergate is june 72. he's re-elected in november 1972 and my book begins with a scene just before his inauguration in january of 1973 actually 20th of january 1973. and nixon has you know, he's feeling pretty good about watergate. he's about to conclude a peace treaty with north vietnam. he's had his big opening to china. he's being acclaimed as a great foreign policy president. and this little matter of watergate doesn't seem to be all that important and even the washington post have run out of leads to to to investigate and then suddenly in the space of just three months or actually a

hundred days it all falls apart. this very disciplined presidency unravels completely and nixon is facing. the greatest personal crisis of his life and the country is facing one of the greatest political crises in american life. so it's interested in how this happened. you know, it's an incredible story of just the unraveling of a presidency which you are able to. witness from the inside thanks to these tapes. okay, so i begin the story. it's one am on january the 20th. at noon nixon is going to take the oath of office for the second time. he's in his he had a favorite room in the white house, which is the lincoln sitting room. he's on the corner of the mansion on the second floor overlooking the washington monument. this is actually the smallest most intimate room in the white house. and nixon loved to go there he would.

go up there. there was a roaring far going actually his daughters liked to joke that you know, even in the height of summer on a day like this nixon would go to his cubby hole the lincoln sitting room and he'd have the this fire going set by his faithful retainer manolo sanchez, and then he'd have the air conditioning up full blast to counter the effects of the fire. and he would settle in there and write on his yellow legal pads. so basically this is what he's doing in the early morning hours of january the 20th. and he can't get to sleep is to excited. he's thinking about what he will. tell the american people the next day and at 104 am he calls his crony chuck colson. and they start talking about everything he wants to do in the second term. and among the things they want

to do in the second term is to screw all nixon's enemies, you know, all the anti-war crowd. they're going to get even with them. they've got this tremendous. tremendous triumph in securing a piece with north vietnam as they see it. and they're also so they're going to screw the enemies and really as coulson says we're going to slash the bejesus out of them. then they start talking about how they're going to screw the washington post because they of course he hates the washington post. and so colson has a plan. to drive down the washington post share price. i think it was 38 dollars and colson has succeeded in driving it down to as he says 25 dollars. actually 28 dollars and so he's

boasting about this to nixon. he's delighted to inform nixon that the economy was doing great. everybody's fortunes are up except those of the post. oddly enough their stock has dropped three more points since i told you last it's now $28. that's too -- bad. nixon replied sarcastically. isn't that a shame says colson? it was 38 dollars in december and had record earnings and has dropped 10 points. keep them busy nixon instructed. it was nearly 2 am finally time to go to bed. the president had to be up early the next morning for the inauguration day ceremonies. he said goodnight to his special counsel and hung up the phone. two floors below in a locked cabinet in the west wing basement. you are 4,000 real to real tape recorder. stop worrying. now if any of you did ap literature in school, you know, that's an example of for shout i think it's called foreshadowing which means you put in a little detail.

to suggest what is going to happen later in the story? and in this i'm introducing the tape recorders and the tapes as a kind of as a character in the book. and there are very important character. there are witness to everything that happens. but they're also they're an inanimate character of course, but they're also the agent of the tragedy. because i'm convinced that had nixon not taped himself. then he would have survived his president. it was only the existence of that smoking gun his own tape recordings that eventually brought him lead to his resignation. so the tapes have incredible historical importance. but they also have an importance for history because you know, we are never again going to get as intimate a look at what it's really like to be president.

as we do during this very crucial period of the nixon presidency. you know no president because of the precedent of nixon is ever going to tape himself the way nixon did i mean, that's absolutely we can just we can say that for sure. so this historical record is never going to exist again. i mean some people say well trump tweeted a lot. i mean, i'm sorry, but the tweets have got nothing their tweets were intended to be public in the first place. the tapes were not intended to be public. the tapes were private documents the nixon never intended to become public and when they did become public he was horrified by it. so now nixon was not the first president to tape himself. actually taping in the white house began with franklin roosevelt. who taped a few of his press conferences during the second

world war because he was angry with the press about misquoting him and he thought he had a he had a device in his desk that he could turn the tape machine on. but he got fed up with it after a few sessions and and stopped the practice, but then after the war kennedy taped himself or he taped meetings in the oval of not in the overall office in the cabinet room down the corner from the oval office. um and i drew on those tapes actually to write my book about cuban missile crisis. they're very it's very valuable source. but again kennedy. was able to turn the tape recording on and off. and then johnson taped himself. he taped his telephone conversations. but the difference between all these former presidents and nixon. was that some genius in the white house actually was probably holderman. thought well nixon is a

technological cluts to say the least, you know, he's very ham-fisted with technology. and as holderman put it no one's ever going to trust you and you're not going to trust yourself to turn on the tape recorder when you want it. so let's have a tape recording system without an on-off switch. imagine it will tape everything will start recording when you go into the room. i mean think of that in your private houses if you had tape recorders that recorded absolutely everything you said whenever you walked into a room or whenever you picked up a telephone. and they thought this was a great thing because nixon wouldn't have to worry about it. but in the end it proved his undoing because the tape system recorded the good the bad the ugly the illegal. and they're very sort of it's not just all terrible things on the table on these tapes. there's some intimate moments with his family his daughters that show nixon in a different

light, but there's also of course the illegal stuff. so you know with retrospect this was the biggest act of self-harm that a president could ever do to himself. but for a historian or i hopefully for a reader it's an incredible gift. it's the gift that keeps on giving as people have said is it enables us to see this presidency unraveling before our eyes and the president, you know facing all these incredible strains. i mean you think of stress in your daily life think of it dealing as a president trying to deal not only with the crises of the country, but also that crisis in your personal life and that's what we have here. i'm nice. sometimes say that my ambition was to make the reader a fly on the wall to all these events that normally people like you and me would never get to see but to witness. and we can imagine ourselves as a fly on the wall on in the

white house or the camp david. or the lincoln sitting room um, but actually i think it better analogy is a bug in desk because the they actually drilled holes in the desk in the oval office to plant their bugs. so the perspective we get is, you know exactly that of being a bug in nixon's desk. actually then manolo comes in with a cup of tea and they start moving coffee cups around on the table and you get a sort of screech or nixon puts up there on his his his feet on the desk and it sounds like a, you know, a thunder roll or something. so that's how we're listening to this. okay. so what interested me was how this very disciplined presidency

fell apart. and how one thing leads to another with all these unintended consequences. now when after watergate happened, of course, this is in june 72. there's an election in november. so they figure and there's no i mean nixon ordered a lot of things. there's no evidence the nixon actually ordered watergate. he certainly caused it to happen and he created the culture in which it happened. but he didn't actually order the break-in. so had he been honest with the country in the summer of 1972. he could have blamed it on a few of his aids and probably got away with it. but his instinct because there

was an election immediately, you know in just two or three months time. was to cover it up. and that was what brought him down it wasn't watergate that brought him down. it was the cover-up. i mean actually in he understood that himself. he said as the cover up that always could destroys people and happened in his case. so there's a guy called gemma gouda, who was i mean as far as we can tell he was the person who authorized the break-in he was at the committee to re-elect the president known as creep. to their enemies um and magruda lied before the grand jury, and before the fbi. and his rationale was well, we weren't covering up a burglary. we were safeguarding world peace. we had and in order to safeguard world peace. it was absolutely essential that nixon be re-elected as president. this is the way he thought and probably a lot of presidential aids think so that was his rationale his justification then one thing leads to another. okay. so in january of 1973 nixon is reelected. he thinks he's got watergate behind him, but something happens that is the trigger for this unraveling. and the trigger is those guy called james mccord who was one of the supervisors of the burglars. he had former fbi guys cia guy. and he'd been arrested because

he had connections to the burglars that could be proven and he was sitting in the dc jail, which i describe in. my book is the most unpleasant place. you can imagine particularly back in the in the early 70s and he's sinking to himself. why am i going to he's an upstander you considers himself and i'm standing member of the community actually lived in not very far from here. he could have been one of your neighbors. he thinks to himself. why should i go to jail when this schmuck magruder? is getting off scott free and what's more the washington post is writing flattering profiles about him. he was running the inaugural festivities at that time. so magruder mccord is not willing to put up with us. so he writes to the judge judge sirika and says perjury was committed in this trial. in fact the orders for the break-in went much higher up. it wasn't just these burglars who decided of their own accord to break in. there were orders came from higher up. particularly magruder so that

triggers a whole. long episode of one of nixon's aids running for cover, you know one x nixon aid accusing the other and nixon himself had a very colorful expression for this he said you know, the my aids are going to start -- on each other and then they're going to start -- on the president. excuse my language, but it's actually nixon's language. um, so this book describes what's happened how this happens how in a magruders? the fingering of magruder leads to john dean becoming very worried about his future and john dean turning traitor on nixon and cooperating with the prosecutors. you know, i've called it's like a sort of. in shakespeare you have or in greek tragedy you have hubris. and then you have crisis and

then you have catastrophe and then you have at the end some kind of catharsis or resolution. um, and so this is what happens. you've got the hubris the opening scene of them thinking that everything is wonderful that resulted this watergate problem. then you get the crisis of mccord's letter to the judge then you get the catastrophe of all the aids turning on each other and finally nixon being forced to part with his closest to closest aids holderman and erlichmann. and nixon coming very close at that point to thinking he had to resign himself. actually he manages to hang on for another year, but that it takes the he hangs on while there's a a big fight you probably all remember it over whether or not the tapes will be will be published. okay, so we see.

the other quality or characteristic of a tragic story is that you have to see the hero suffering. and i think we do see nixon suffer. we see this sort of human side to him when he gets rid of holdeman. he says i love you and then there's a pause like my brother. so i think there he's referring to his two brothers who died of tuberculosis as a young man and it was as painful for him to get rid of holdemann as it was. to lose his two brothers as a young man. he wasn't like trump who's such as fired people by tweet for nixon. it was extremely painful. as he says to kissinger at one point nobody will ever know. what they put a president through in a time like this. um, so i think we can talk about whether or not nixon is a true

tragic hero we can talk about, you know, some of the of watergate. um, you know, i loved the line from that holdeman says to dean dean will do once the toothpaste is out of the tube. it's going to be very hard to put it back in. which described their problem they faced because once the aid started, you know talking and dean started talking in particular was very hard to put that toothpaste back in the tube. then there's nixon to david frost. actually, this is after the after his resignation. he says i gave them a sword meaning his enemies. which they twisted with relish into my wounds. if i had been in their place, i would probably have done the same thing. there's nixon on his own. downfall where he says he tells his staff always remember?

others may hate you but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. and then you destroy yourself. and i think that pretty much sums up the tragedy of richard nixon so, thank you very much. let's have a nice conversation. broadcast how you handled the the erasure in the tape? did you do it novelistically or

just skip over or how do you do? well, you're probably referring to the famous 17 and a half minutes. i think it is of erase tape. that's actually from one of the first tape recordings of one of the first sessions after watergate in july of 1972. and my story actually begins in january of 1973 in the way. i tell this story so i'm not trying to include every single detail from the beginning of watergate. i'm focused on the downfall of the president the unraveling of the presidency, but since you asked about that incident, i think it's pretty obvious that you know, that was a deliberate erasure. i mean the national archives, did big investigation into that it's not just one sort of accidental. a sort of pressing of the recording button they're about 30 pressings of the recording button. and it was probably either nixon or it could have been rosemary woods his secretary. i wasn't done very efficiently. and suddenly they were trying to you know, there was embarrassing stuff on that 17 minutes, but i don't think it was any really more embarrassing than a lot of other stuff on the tapes. the reason is that in a nixon repeated himself a lot so you

wouldn't have found just one little bit of very damaging stuff on one tape with no reference to it somewhere else and those 17 that that meeting holderman we have another source, which is holderman kept private diary every night. he would go and record his private diary. so and then that was typed up. and that was meant to be a private diary so he had no reason to hold things back and he writes what happened in that in that session and certainly they were, you know, discussion of cover-up blah blah, but it wasn't any wouldn't my point is it wasn't any worse than a lot of other tapes, so i'm inclined not to pay so much attention to the it of course we were everybody was interested. in what happened? you know how this had been arised. it's one of the big mysteries of watergate, but i think it's been sort of exaggerated actually. yeah, hi. i really hope you'll give it a

nice long answer on this with some historical perspective. so i studied this in undergraduate and i i think a couple of comments just to see to get you. to shed more information for us. so it's really is nixon's self-implosion. right? and he had thugs he did lots of dirty tricks for years and he was pious and he said everybody does it. i feel like we've learned nothing as a culture. i think that there's been revisionism and rehabilitation pat buchanan diane sawyer all these people excusing the thugs so as you look back now did we i mean to be honest the republican party ended up being vengeance full they felt like they were decapitated their leader and the washington post did it and in fact, it was itself implosion by thugs so there's a cultural discord from this moment and if you could just talk to us from your perspective now your comments did we learn anything? yeah. thank you. actually, we're 50 years from

the watergate breaking june 1972. and next month will be the 50th anniversary of the watergate break-in which gives you a certain detachment and historical perspective. um, you know, everything is relative. and of course nixon was i mean he committed criminal acts while in office for which he was forced to resign. and and as i say the well, the cover-up is technically it's called obstruction of justice and his aids went to prison for that. but you know since i've i mean some people say that my book is more sympathetic to nixon than some other books. i'm actually i don't think sympathy is the right word, but i do think it's important for a writer to tell the story through

the eyes of your protagonist. and so a lot of it is true nixon's eyes or things that happened in nixon's presence. and i would like since you obviously are not a nixon fan. i'd like to just mentioned a couple of redeeming qualities first of all nixon never questioned an election i mean well, i mean, you well, i mean, you know now he the presidential election of 1962 was a much more close run election than the last election and nixon certainly had some bases for challenging it in, illinois and texas. but he didn't but he bore a grudge from it. he thought okay. the demarest kratz have screwed me. and i'm not going to allow myself to be screwed again. but he he resigned he allowed. i think the system did actually work in 1972. and i think the system came close to breaking point in recent years and particularly the question of the stealing of

the election which nixon never or the question of challenging the result of the election which nixon never tried to do. um reader wrote to me and he said thank you for your book. it was well researched and interesting. however, richard nixon was not a tragic figure in any way. he was a spiteful hating hating and conniving sleazeball no moral compass in any way i'm 74 years old and i wish i could -- on his grave before i die okay so that obviously reflects a certain strand of opinion out there about nixon okay so i'll read my reply to him i said thanks for your note ah glad you liked the book even if you hate nixon as i hope you noticed i wrote it on the principle of show don't tell.

i tried to capture a particularly dramatic period in nixon's life and the country's life as vividly as possible the way a novelist or a playwright play right might was sticking strictly to historical fact. it's up to readers like you to decide for themselves. what lessons should be drawn from history. from the story as for the subtitle an american tragedy that can be interpreted in different ways a personal tragedy a political tragedy or a national tragedy. perhaps all three take your pick so that pretty much describes my approach i think. you know. hi, thank you. i haven't read your book yet, but i was wondering did you bring spiro agnew into the story and did his? action sort of add to the

corrupt aura around the nixon administration and kind of make it all worse for nixon the former governor of maryland you're talking about that next agnew makes a sort of bit part entrance actually, you know at the same time this is all going on with the president. the vice president is facing his own investigation and crisis and nixon all often used to joke. actually nixon's quite can be quite humorous and he says, you know one thing i've got really got going for me is that if they get rid of me, they'll get nixon and they'll get agnew and do they want agnew? of course, the answer was no,

but then eventually as we know agni was forced to resign and so that kind of cleared the decks for getting rid of nixon. so i mentioned agnew in passing in response to your now thank you, michael couple of comments on technology in about tape recorders in our homes. they are in our homes and her name is alexa. so right and curious about when you're developing this project. how are you able to work with or collaborate with with carl bernstein and bob woodward on that project and at all if you did well, i knew both of them from the washington post particularly bob woodward. and you know as interested in i i didn't. actually, i asked woodward for a blub and he agreed and then he said he had his own book to write and focus on so he didn't even give me a blur. but anyway, no hard feelings, but i wasn't really didn't. feel the need to do a lot of interviews. i mean, i've talked to woodward particularly woodward often about watergate and i investigated this whole question mark phil mark felt, you know, the question of who was deep throat. i mean that all comes out in this book, you know, but i

didn't really need to talk to people 40 years 50 years after the event because the you know, i had enough problem listening to all these tapes and dealing with i mean the contemporaneous material is so rich. that it's and it's much more valuable and much more authentic than people's memories 50 years later. so if you want to read a would get woodward's perspective on something he's written lots of books and you can go and buy his books. i didn't feel the need to you know, it's not nick's woodward's story plus. you know this unraveling of the presidency. i'm i think you know all the president's men has created kind of distorted version of the journalists bringing down the president and the journalist certainly played a role and the washington post played a role and woodward and bernstein played role, but it was only one role that were other people. there were the investigators.

there was the you know, george chirico who i mentioned and all these people, you know, there was an internal dynamic. inside the white house, which we didn't know about the time, but you know all these people turning on each other magruda turning on dean and dean turning on magruder. and that was all hidden from view at the time. so, you know, i like to think that well all the president's men was the first rough draft of history told from the perspective of the reporters, but i've you know 50 years later you get many more interesting perspectives, so i didn't want to rehash all that stuff. so i think your book is very even-handed for. a criminal like richard nixon, but i would say if there were heroes in this story in a way. we look at it as a story. it's john surica. some people think john dean is a

hero. it was interesting to hear. the rendition of how he came up with his testimony and how he used the tapes to create his own testimony. but the central one here the most perhaps most important one was alexander butterfield. it doesn't get a lot of credit even though we have all of these tapes that basically once he explained that these tapes were there. it confirmed everything that dean said and all of the others actions, so maybe you want to comment on that. i think there are heroes in the story, but it's it's certainly not the protagonist here. yeah. well, you mentioned butterfield. i mean butterfield was not your sort of average political hack. he had been a colonel in the us air force i think and he hold him and recruited him to the white house. but he was not a sort of party guy. he was you know a he was in charge of the paperwork, but he also happened to be in charge of the taping system. so he was not going to blow the

whistle on nixon, but if he was called to congress and he was asked a direct question about the taping system. he was going to answer honestly. so you know that. i think that's a great perspective for a civil servant. that you know, you don't go out and put a knife in your president's back, even if but if you're called to testify and by another branch of the government or by investigations, then you answer honestly and that's what butterfield did so i agree with you but field is a hero and without his actions and without those tapes nixon wouldn't be have been forced to resign. yeah. thank you so much that it's interesting dean comes up as a quote hero. and and has been rehabilitated and is now a commentator everywhere you go. it's there's a series on right now called.

gaslit. yeah about martha mitchell. yeah, which is really kind of funny because it is as much about dean as it is about north at the metrics, and i wonder if if what we're seeing in gaslit, which is dean as this. not comfortable in his own skin, very low level thinker but not a very high level player is is actually the dean that was in the white house. well dean i think is an he's neither to me. he's neither a hero nor a villain or perhaps he's a mixture of the two, you know, sometimes there are shades of gray and i think that dean mark felt also illustrates this the people have different motives for corporating, you know was whistleblowing and then not always honorable motives. i mean in dean's case he came to detest the nixon but you know his first motive was he didn't want to he and actually he's pretty smart dean dean was smarter than of the other guys because saw the threat to him

the legal threat. which was of him going to prison and so he was not prepared to go along with that, but he had personal reasons for the for that. so you know somebody like dean is a good example of in life that many people with mixed motives, they're not just you're not either black or white. you're somewhere in between and i think dean is a good example for that. i haven't seen gaslit but i mean martha mitchell too, you know, she's an interesting character, but and she's sort of blew the whistle early on. but she was also to be honest a pretty impossible woman to. to be married to i imagine. i mean i have some sympathy for for john mitchell, but i am say i should see the have you all seen who seen gasoline here. okay, great. i'd had enough of mixing and

mortar gate then. so then anyway so thank you. so you talk about the nixon story as a shakespearean or a greek tragedy. but i mean, it's really the elements of human nature. it's the elements of human nature and that just kind of repeat themselves over and over. i was wondering if you care to talk about any similarities with the situation with trump and january 6th. yeah. you know, well tell us what you think is gonna happen with the various players. yeah in their mixed motives to right cooperate or not. i mean as was said i tried to be even handed to nixon personally in terms of rating presidents. i consider trump to be you know

far worse than nixon. i mean because nixon of course he hated this he hated being forced to resign. he hated his enemies. he hated everybody else. but in the end he respected the system he respected it in 1962 and he respected again in 1972. of course, there are many elements in nixon's politics. you can draw a straight line between the silent majority the race car that he played the southern card. you can draw a straight line between nixon and trump in many

ways, but in terms of the you know, i mentioned one of them nixon is tamia more human character nixon you see nixon suffering you see nixon in these tapes having conversations with his daughter. you know, he had a of course he had family i go into some of the family crises they faced. um, but you know, he was a loving family person. ultimately. i mean, i see perhaps in 50 years time. we'll get a different. view of trump, but i'm not sure we'll have the you know, i can't see the human qualities in trump that i can see in nixon. i can't see the suffering. i can't see the basic respect for the system.

i certainly can't see the i mean nixon whatever else you think of him was a brilliant mind. it wasn't kissinger who opened up to china, of course, you know, that might not have been such a great idea now that we have problems with china, but that was nixon was a very, you know, creative foreign policy thinker he read deeply about american history. i i'm in perhaps my too close to trump, but i i put them in

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