>> from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: the former chief economist and head of asset management at goldman sachs, he has not rode down from retiring in wall street. at prime and esther david cameron asked him to combat a combat resistant superbug. that role he was tasked with advising economic performance. i am pleased to have him back at this table. first of all, goldman sachs and

leaving goldman sachs, why was that the right time? jim: i don't know if it was. but for many years, there was always a time where you have to leave. a place as competitive as goldman, i had seen a number of senior people leave and stay too long. did not know how to cope with life. i kind of told myself that i would certainly rather leave before the best time rather than after the best time. i will take the best and learn to explore elsewhere. when i am comfortable with pursuing the same path. by the time it feels --

[indiscernible] i don't really think about it. it did wonders for my career. a great meritocracy. it did. 40 years nearly since i first -- it was a great enabler from anything -- for mayny things. charlie: take goldman at their best whatever it might be. jim: it is pretty genuinely meritocratic. in terms of bringing me on

board, remember that i joined as a partner. a be the fifth person -- may be the fifth person and quite a step for them to do. no one was interested in my background, how i spoke, where i came from. and people were really focused on if you could contribute to the success of the firm and its clients. that part is the absolute best. charlie: what are you doing in government? jim: five weeks ago, i had no idea what was going to happen. i deliberately left having no idea what i was going to do. i also thought on the advice of some people and in all walks of life. it's best to give yourself some time to breathe.

i kind of developed this mantra that i would do whatever it was. if it couldn't be better, it had to be different. it was a screening device to allow me to say no to a lot of conventional things. how can it be better than anything else? i don't want to do that. i didn't want to go on boards and some wonderful people asked me to do that. the first thing i did was actually a bbc radio documentary. the next division. i travel to mexico, nigeria and other places. when i came to an end, i was asked if i would review the challenge of getting more economic growth in urban britain outside of london.

the u.k. has become an economy that is dominated by london. and it is quite rare to the degree of a developed world. i coming from the north of england myself, it is something that i have a lot of historical passion about. and that certainly qualified the different. and i thoroughly enjoyed it. because it was just one year and it was something i didn't know a pretty dramatic idea. the theory came to the corner and in manchester, within 40 miles, there are three others by british standards. and so i dreamt and i focused on acronyms.

which does not roll off the tongue. that became the basis of what the chancellor embraced in the northern powerhouses. a number of our ideas it was economic policy. fast-forward 18 months later after the commission finished. the government is reelected and i got a call from the chancellor. i am kind of like, wow. beyond wow. i can't really do that because i'm leading this review into global resistance. an incredible amount of weird symmetry about it. when i first was asked to lead the review by the british prime minister, i was halfway through with the commission. i'm not going to not do the city commission stuff because there's a lot of momentum with it and a lot of excitement.

i will do it if you wait in till the end -- until the end. fast-forward and the same thing happens in reverse. it was something i would never dream. it is the part of manchester -- it should say [indiscernible] charlie: i am really interested in science for that reason. when you look at the global economy today every time i pick up something, i get a concrete point of view. there seems to be no consensus to where we are. we do not know how much china is slowing down. we know that the best economy in europe in terms of gdp growth is britain?

we know the u.s. is recovering but we see issues. jim: i am still in the optimistic camp. not quite as optimistic to everybody else as i often have in. obviously brazil and washington. i think it is two steps forward and 1.5 back. i think what a lot of people tend to underestimate if you think of it in terms of six years plus on from the crisis -- the u.s. and china had to come out of that mess in different places than they were before the mass. and you can't do that overnight. both the u.s. and china, two of the most important economies in the world, they are structurally adjusting more than people realize. i was raised on the notion that the u.s. [indiscernible]

but here we are, less than 3% of gdp. and there's a pretty reasonable domestic demand growth. the flipside of that, in china china has slowed down. gone from 10% of gdp to less than 3%. charlie: and trying to create domestic amand. jim: which i think is having reasonable success. i think the birth of those places having to adapt to that way of driving himself. there are lots of challenges in some parts of the emerging world. particularly those as the fed starts to raise rates. in the number of challenges in some european places. they seem to never get out of the way.

by and large, it's doing ok. charlie: greece. and what that scenario is. jim: when i see greece i think, thank god i'm not my old life. it is a game of chicken, it seems to me. i have said all along it will be some kind of deal. obviously, it seems pretty outrageous a thing to say. the second thing i would say is most importantly, the peripheral economies have changed quite a bit is the greece crisis. and a lot of the dirt is not owned by the private sector. the whole contagion issue seems to be much less of a risk than before. even if greece chooses to play

hardball -- i don't watch this closely but china creates another greece every four months. they probably create a greece every three months. if i were managing my staff in mild life, i would say don't spend so much time thinking about it. charlie: you are to russia next week to talk to the president of russia and others. where do you think their economy stands with this energy dependence? jim: i think it's the summit -- i will never forget back in 2008, they asked me about if it would be a brick by 2020. charlie: they said what would it be like in 2020? jim: i had not been fully

briefed on what they expected me to say and i pointed out that it was pretty unlikely oil prices would spend the next 12 years doing what they did the previous eight. and inevitably, the oil prices start to reverse. and the aging demographic. it was pretty inevitable that russia would see much slower growth. there were not overly pleased with what i said. they were particularly un-pleased about the kind of media coverage i had. i kind of have suspected that the same part of the russian camp wanted me to say that to try to engineer some kind of change. but i think ignoring the political issues the core problem is that they are just so dependent on commodities.

they need to do much more substantial things. charlie: so we all have these things inside of us that evolved and allow us to have natural healing processes. as we go through time, some of them become resistant and some of them don't. charlie: resistant to what? disease? jim: disease and infections. and importantly, resistant to antibiotics that we get prescribed or, in many cases, where we just demand that we are given them. because we think they are this magical solution. and the problem we have is the economics are such that there

has not been any new ones for 30 years. charlie: explain that economics. jim: they want to sell as much as possible for something that is as higher prices they can get. with antibiotics, and this is what they need to help solve the problem is the opposite. that causes the resistance problem. we wanted to be as affordable as possible for the emerging world. if that is the condition for the former world, i am not interested in producing that. but that calls -- culls the supply problem and there is a huge demand problem where, in our generation, we kind of learned to think that it's a solution to the slightest thing.

whether it is an ear infection or -- and of course, in hospitals with the growth of superbugs. and importantly, in the emerging world, there is a very crucial interplay with infectious diseases like tv aids -- tb aids, where the great strides that a been found in the last couple of decades require antibiotics to help ease the treatment. and we may not be a look keep up with the progress. we showed that if you carry off the path, 10 million are dying.

you think as scary and as horrible as ebola has been -- today, the data is very difficult to get to grips with. 25,000 in the u.s. alone. and in addition, that's beside the point. together with those numbers of deaths, i deliberately chose 2050 because it would go with the whole brick story. $100 trillion of global gdp.

the world economy today is $75 trillion. the world could more than double by 2015 -- 2050. maybe quite a bit more. but as this problem grows, we will use -- lose those months of gdp. and in some parts of the emerging world, it's already in india. one of the african and bassett are's to the u.n.. and because of resistance and antibiotics all very high. the number of these people that enter the workforce they would be the ones that would be the case. that tendency would be greatly impaired. in the developed world, it's

what we all take for granted. hip replacements, knee replacements we will not be able to do in 20 odd years. charlie: why you? jim: that is a very good question. that's what i asked them. i didn't even know what it was. antimicrobial. one lady deserves an enormous amount of credit. she persuaded the prime minister that a lot of scientists know all this stuff. they can't see the big picture. she said we need an economist to basically turn this into an economic problem so it will get solved. as i joke about it, it eventually stopped with me as they found other people. charlie: is there something

related to your core competence and your core capacity. you know the details but you can see that you don't lose sight of the forest because of the trees? jim: i like to think that is the case. i think the brick story creates some evidence for that. one of the big issues that really matter and what i've learned not just in that instance, but many other things in life it is the simple big issues that really matter. you have to keep your mind focused on where the trend of all these things is going. i wrote a piece for the english times. charlie: let's review the 10. embark on a massive global pr exercise. speaks for itself. tell people what the problem is and what has to be done. jim: with the power of some of

these technical apps and the generation below us i got interviewed the very first thing by cctv. a young woman said, our generation is really eager to help. i chatted off line. charlie: i know, right. jim: the domestic chinese version. you need a whatsapp campaign in china, a ball he would campaign -- bollywood campaign in india to influence the things that really capture the imagination of the next generation of people. we don't want to be infected by all these things. help us control ourselves.

we will write an important paper about this. charlie: something like $19 billion -- [laughter] wash our hands more? jim: it's one of the basic things. if we just washed our hands more as human beings we go to the bathroom, it reduces the likelihood we will pick up infection. charlie: an animal group and others? jim: this is a really big area in the united states when you look at this topic. the u.s. is normally, on so many things, way ahead of europe. particularly in some of the scandinavian countries we basically made it really difficult to use antibiotics as growth stimulants for animals and food.

a good 60% of antibiotic consumption is probably high maybe close to 80%. it's for stimulating animal growth and it's a big issue in china and india and other parts of the world. charlie: there is no agreement on the facts. i'm trying to say this right. no agreement -- jim: put it like this. there seem to be a lot of powerful voices that try to create doubts about the facts. towards the end of this week we will be learning about the views and the mindset. this is a key issue.

in this particular sphere of life, it's better. it may well be the younger generation. a powerful anecdote they made an announcement that they will stop using chickens that have been given antibiotics. it seems to be the main influence. they are planning on environmental issues and better quality food. those kind of things, it's

probably really powerful. indirectly, a lot of the pressure is coming, of course. charlie: number four, explore the scope for using vaccines. dramatically improve the surveillance of resistance. how do we improve surveillance? jim: this is one of the five no-brainers. one of the things that we found so alarming when we showed the global impasse, it pretty hard including an advanced countries to have good, national wide data. we need to build it or surveillance systems. it should be reasonably straightforward. very proud to say in this regard that the u.k. authorities, when they saw this report, the

international aid program, to kick off an incentive for 695 million pounds, financing countries around the world to benefit from a different program. charlie: state-of-the-art diagnostics. it should be samsung forgot. these guys influence so much of our lives, we go in to visit a doctor. say i have a sore throat. jim: an educated guess. i know that the boots, they are experimenting with something

where within two minutes, they are taking a swab. the very small sample it's reduced by 70%. charlie: the problem is too many antibiotics. improving the numbers and the pay. a global innovation fund. jim: we believe the pharmaceutical industry can collectively finance that. charlie: you mentioned a priority at the g-20 leadership. and big new drugs that are overcoming -- the business model. jim: on the supply side, you've either got to bite the bullet or it is very complex.

we will happily produce more. if you try to solve the problem in the u.s., maybe you can do that. how can you do that in the emerging world? where people cannot get access to antibiotics today. if we were in a world where the demand was much lower, perhaps. charlie: jim o'neil. back in a moment. stay with us. ♪

charlie: 42 years after the watergate scandal, the fascination with richard nixon continues. he was a self-made man and rose to occupy the most powerful position in the world. he remains the only one president to resign. this biography explores his complex character. one man against the world, the tragedy of richard nixon. and being that some, a man divided. i am pleased to have both of them at this table. the same question for both of you. wine and other than what i just said. a fascinating character -- why nixon? other than what i just said, a fascinating character. >> i was at the nixon

presidential library 2.5 years ago, talking about his relationship with j edgar hoover. the archivists came up to me and said, listen. we know how you work. you like declassified documents. by the end of 2014, all of the tapes and hundreds of hours of tapes never released, he was nixon's chief of staff. by the end of 2014, everything will be out. i thought, i will write that book. they said at the end of the conversation, everyone will have to rewrite history. i think of nixon's five years in office as a five-act

shakespearean tragedy. the fourth act, the king goes mad. charlie: and having written about so many historical figures -- evan: i worked for the washington post company and i was the enemy to richard nixon. he was saying, get rid of those harvard guys. get rid of them. i saw him as a cartoon figure. i knew it had to be more complicated than that. having been the enemy, i wanted to switch sides and see what it was like to actually be richard nixon. as tim says, there is a mother lode of documents and tapes. 3000 hours of richard nixon talking extemporaneously amongst his friends. they are his chief of staff.

not only famous diaries, but a fantastic tale that allows you to get into the head of richard nixon. charlie: between good and bad, dark and light? evan: we think of nixon being dark and bad. he had some dark sides. but what really intrigued me is that late at night he would take his yellow pad, his best friend and would write notes to himself about how he wanted to be joyful inspiring, confident. these are not words you normally associate with richard nixon. charlie: he was constantly self introspective. evan: i think he was fighting the dark side and it was ultimately a losing battle. he was haunted by his demons. he tried much more than we

realized, he tried to be a confident person. when richard nixon came home at night, he would whistle as he came to the door. he would turn on the lights, put a show tune on the record player, and when they had dinner, it was upbeat and positive talk. he was fighting against the dark all the time. late at night, if he had a drink , maybe the darkness would come back. charlie: is this amateur psychology? evan: all biographers are amateur psychologist. what do you think we do for a living? unlike a lot of biography this is based on what the guy was saying and thinking and doing. presidents leave an incredible paper tray or -- paper trail. i have never gotten as close to my subject as i did with nixon. charlie: you have read his book? tim: i have.

charlie: you knew something about the man. tim: i think what evan sees as the light side let's say it is a double helix of character in his dna, i see it as political genius. the man achieved the greatest comeback since lazarus when he won the election in. charlie: not a natural politician. tim: not a backslapping. basically, awkward. i found a key, i think. in a letter that martin luther king wrote to a friend in 1958 after he met nixon. martin luther king said, nixon is a genius at convincing you that he is sincere. if he is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in america.

this is where we divide in our books. i see a genius that had a grand strategy for world peace. and i also see a man that is fighting two wars. he fought the vietnam war on two fronts. in southeast asia and at home. over there, he used b-52 bombers and over here, he used bugs, break-ins black bag jobs and political espionage to destroy his enemies. the domestic enemies, the press. among them, nixon said to kissinger the press is the enemy. the establishment is the enemy. the professors are the enemy. write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it. evan: nixon could be a blowhard and blow off steam like that. he hated the press, that is

halfway true. but a certain amount of next and on these tapes is nixon just showing off eating this macho guy. nixon was bad at swearing. he was faking it. lbj was good at swearing. nick's and was trying to be something he wasn't. and about watergate, something that grabbed me. i have this dark view of watergate. it was left a machiavelli in plot to disrupt american civil rights, but it was a screwup. charlie: that the democrats had something? tim: nixon created an atmosphere where people did bad things but he did not know about the break-in. he could not confront his own subordinates. he was too shy. he wasn't a master schemer, he was too shy to go to john mitchell and say ok what

happened? why did you go in the building? he couldn't bring himself to do it because he didn't want to hear the answer. he should have brought in a tough lawyer to do it. he didn't get everybody in one room until it was way too late. it wasn't a plot, it was a screwup. tim: what we call watergate was not an event that took place 42 years ago tomorrow. it wasn't just the break-in at the democratic national committee headquarters. it was a series of what john mitchell called "the white house orders." breaking into the office of daniel ellsberg, spying on teddy kennedy. putting spies in the enemy cap. -- camp. stealing papers. when j edgar hoover said i'm not

going to do this anymore, which he did in 1970. he said no more black bag jobs. dixon set up the crew that he called the plumbers. but crowe, gordon leddy hunt ex-cie and ex-a and ex-fbi guys. the plumbers were there to stop the leaks. they tormented every president but none more than nick. charlie: it seemed that he was a man that felt grievance and he felt like those people had an advantage. the kennedys had something. they did it to me, i will do it to them. he felt almost justification to do what he wanted to do.

evan: bobby kennedy audited nixon three times. nixon abused the irs, but he wasn't the first. he had this view of the kennedys that they were better at dirty tricks than he was. he kept saying, why can't we do it as well as they do it? he exaggerated, but the candidates were not bad at dirty tricks. bobby kennedy did a lot more wiretapping than richard nixon did. including martin luther king. they were almost a model for richard nixon. he thought he was catching up to the challenges. we talked about nixon being paranoid and all that.

i don't think he was. charlie: go ahead. tim: evan is exactly right. richard nixon loses to jfk and 1960 by this much. it could've gone either way. evan: it was stolen. tim: we could have had bush v gore if nixon challenged the results of the presidential election. he is determined that he's going to win in 1968, and he went to extraordinary lengths including sabotaging the paris peace talks that would have prevented war in vietnam. but he was determined to win in 1972 by the greatest landslide in american political history and there and lie the roots. to win at any cost.

charlie: you would think that all of this is unnecessary. he had a weak opponent running against him. he was coming off of some positive things in his administration. that is not the time to be paranoid. evan: he had this idea of the new american majority. a southern conservative democrat. he wanted to create a new party. kind of a new majority. nixon was a genius as a politician and long before ronald reagan created the moderate -- modern republican party by appealing to the disaffected. charlie: the so-called silent majority. evan: but he knew where the courts were going.

saying that we will be segregate. he did it cleverly. the deep south was deeply resistant. there would be riots, fights trouble. he created these commissions in every state. had john mitchell come in and say that we will enforce the law. he will bring these people to the oval office and here is where the tough decisions get made. every one of those commissions agreed oto go along. only 9% of black kids went to integrated schools. two years later, 70%. he did that without a big fuss riots, or trouble. this was nixon being practical and clever. george schultz ran the operation. he was a very clever guy about this. next in said racist things but

put in affirmative action. he understood the economics of this. he said that these black kids will never get to the middle-class high school or to a middle-class college unless we help them. this is an important point about nixon to me. he was an outsider. he understood what it was like to be an outsider. he said terrible things about blacks. he did. but on so many levels, he understands that they needed help and he did help them. charlie: what about sheer brainpower? do we look at him and say this is a very bright guy? tim: a political genius and a man who committed political suicide. he made so many disastrous and self-destructive decisions that he brought himself down like the shakespearean king in the fifth act. charlie: a personality flaw?

a value flaw? tim: he said it himself the day he resigned. he said that others may hate you , but don't let yourself hate them. because you destroy yourself and that is what richard nixon did. through hate, through fear a disastrous series of decisions about the vietnam war that ended not with ending the vietnam war as we all shook hands and walked away, but with a disgraceful retreat and a disastrous american defeat. nixon was the first american president to lose a war like that. saigon fell shortly after that. charlie: nick's and lost -- nixon lost the vietnam war.

tim: he didn't start it. he inherited a horrible horrible war with 500,000 american soldiers in conflict. he promised the american people that he would and it and give us peace with honor. he did not. peace with honor was a deception. the war went on and on. ♪

charlie: we need to talk about two relationships, nixon and kissinger. evan: tortured. shakespearean. fun to write about. his closest advisor. kissinger pretty good at playing tenex in and giving him valuable advice. -- two no nixon and giving him valuable advice. my old boss, misses graham he's having fun with the president and making jokes about his drinking habits. kissinger is charming and self-deprecating. but nixon knew his principal foreign-policy advisor was selling him out on a regular

weekly basis. charlie: he thought he would be an agent of mine to change history? evan: she tolerated him for a number of reasons. he said henry needs this. he needs to be this way. he was hurt by it. next and would say, there goes henry to talk to the georgetown crowd again. i think it did hurt his feelings. he had to sort of bear it. he got a lot out of kissinger. nixon was the idea guy. kissinger will tell you this. the idea to go to china was richard nixon's idea. when kissinger heard that in was gone ago to china -- nixon was going to go to china, he said, fat chance. next in was -- nixon was lucky

to have someone like him. but he was the one calling the shots. tim: kissinger was the tactician that carried out the strategy. but what was the strategy? why did nixon go to china? why did he become the first president to set foot in the kremlin. it was part of the grand strategy to bring the vietnam war to an end. that he could convince chairman mao and the communist leader of the soviet union to be nice and be our friends. he was thinking glasses and making toasts with the men arming our enemies and killing american soldiers in an absolutely futile attempt to bring the war to an end.

he came away with communiques. the shanghai communique is a completely meaningless document. the arms control agreements. the year that they were signed. 1972. jim/injure -- schlesinger was head of the atomic energy commission. 1972, we produced the united states, more nuclear warheads than any year in our history. it did not end the arms race and it did not bring the war to an end. china and russia today are not our friends. it did not bring us together. evan: there were linkages in china.

he wrote that china cannot be left outside the community of nations. he wanted to bring china in and make him a partner. he knew that only he could pull it off. that arms control treaty was flawed. for an american president to go to moscow and start dealing with russians and trying to create them, no matter how flawed that he'll was, it was a good thing for the united states. it slowed down the cold war. tim: what i've understood after reading these tapes and reading through the declassified diaries that came out just six months ago, nixon knew before he was sworn in for his second term that he was going down. he knew before he was sworn in for his second term -- he knew

that the cover-up of the watergate break-in went all the way to bob altman all the way to john mitchell. he knew that his closest aide had been a primary instigator. he knew a few months later that he should probably resign. in may of 1973, 15 months before he resigns in the midnight rambling, exhausted, drunk telephone call. wouldn't it be better to check out now? i can't fight the dam battle alone. i've had it. but he had to fight the damn battle alone and he fought the damn battle for 15 more months before he stepped down. charlie: [indiscernible]

tim: only nixon could have gotten away with it. [laughter] [talking over each other] tim: only nixon might have been able to get away with it without causing a complete cataclysm in the american political system. but his aides began to debate if we will have a bonfire on the white house lawn. who will strike the match? evan: he gave the order to destroy the tapes much earlier thinking about watergate. kissinger onto to have a record so that he could rebut his version. tim: the tapes were in valuable to an end. he knew that he could write a postpresidential memoir worth

millions if he could hold onto the tape. he was a smart guy and knew that history is made by the people who write history. he was determined to write it. i intend to write it. charlie: paraphrasing churchill. and the books again "being nixon" by evan thomas and "one man against the world" i tim weiner. thank you for watching. see you next time. ♪

angie: still on track. the 17th said improving labor market means gradual tightening remains likely to hear. bracing for a breakdown. the greek prime minister says he's ready to embarrass possibility for rejecting an unfair deal. -- and bracing responsibility for rejecting an unfair deal. plans to fly nonstop to new york. welcome to "first up