both liddy and magruder, and i say, gordon, you've got to be kidding. this isn't even real. and liddy, who became quite annoyed with me, snapped his heels and turned to mitchell and said, john, or, general, i can assure you these are the finest girls from baltimore. [laughter] and so he was quite confident he had the talent to handle it. and it went on like that. it was quite an amazing meeting. i knew that mitchell, when he got to the bottom line, was going to reject it. he said, this is going to cost you a million dollars. he said, gordon, this isn't quite what i had in mind: we're more interested in protecting the re-election committee, so why don't you go back to the drawing board? he realizes today he should have thrown the man out of the window. i came back to a second meeting, and i really arrived late. i now today know from looking at calendars in the archives that i actually visited with bob

haldeman after both the first and second meeting to tell them all the craziness i was learning about. i went to the second meeting late, heard them talking about electronic surveillance, and i said, listen, i apologize for being late, i don't know what you've talked about, but i do know this conversation shouldn't be occurring in the office of the attorney general. so i threw cold water on it. i never thought it would go further than that. i remember liddy and i talking about something afterwards. he said, well, you know, i understand what you're saying, john. the president needs, or the attorney general needs deniability, you need deniability. i won't talk to you ever again about it. i said, that's exactly the way i want it. so i went back and reported that to haldeman, and he said, john, you should have nothing to do with this, which i didn't. and it isn't until after many, many months later when liddy's men are arrested in the watergate that i learn -- you

know, i'm able to put together the pieces very quickly, and i learn that mitchell has approved the plan down in miami. it's down to a quarter of a million dollars, but it's very clear. and in the, in writing the addendum i added to "blind ambition" after many years and some unique situations in litigation, i've obtained a lot more information. and it's quite clear while nixon never ordered the watergate break-in, i don't believe anybody in the white house knew about the watergate break-in, it's very clear that nixon was asking for information at about the only place you could get it was inside the watergate. they learned about a kickback scheme the democrats were planning at their miami convention whereby advertisers would come into various lobbies and locations and pay for the space, and that would come back into the democratic party not as campaign money from contributions or from corporations which were

outlawed, but just a vehicle to funnel some money into the democratic party. that's what they were looking for in the dnc. they were looking for financial information. and you find it both in documents that i have come across, and you find it on the tapes both before the watergate break-in was discovered and after. and it's pretty revealing. i'm sure that actually there'll be more tapes found over time. these just happen to be tapes i've spent over the years, you know, a couple decades, and i said, my goodness, you know -- including some conversations of my own where i didn't really understand what the president was asking me. >> host: just as an aside, the story that you just outlined from the girls of baltimore and the situation in miami beach characterized by martin sheen in the movie, "blind ambition." did he capture this? >> guest: i think pretty well. i worked with the screen writer.

he based it on the book, and i think they had a pretty good sense of what was going on in there. >> host: from randy. >> >> guest: do you have a clip for it? >> host: no, but we showed a picture of you and martin sheen on the set. >> guest: we went out to visit during the filming. >> host: randy who's 60 years old says that you and mr. butterfield stole the show. two questions, first of all, please comment on whether the watergate fiasco should teach us about where the line between transparency and secrecy should be drawn in the country. >> guest: i think it taught us a lot, and it's a lesson we seem to have forgotten. we remembered it for a long time, but one of the reasons i wrote a number of books about the bush administration is because it became so conspicuous we not only had forgotten, we were trying to reverse the

impact watergate had had on the presidency and transparency and the way the three branches should operate. there's no question that accountability is indispensable in a democracy, and you can't do it behind closed doors. and that's one of the -- if there's anything -- two things helped foster watergate. one, having too much money in the campaign system and, secondly, secrecy. i'd be the first to tell you that no president can govern without privacy. the difference between privacy and secrecy, secrecy is the intent to hide. privacy is the need to make decisions in a way that doesn't interfere with your decision-making process. so i think it was one of the lessons, and it was in place for a long time. cheney came in with a very clear mission to try to reverse all of

what he thought had happened to the presidency as a result of watergate. i'm one who never thought the presidency was weakened a second. if anything, it was strengthened because of watergate, and he just didn't like the fact that congress didn't gain power of its own for oversight and things like this and has done his best, did his best to obliterate them. >> host: of course, worse than watergate. >> guest: that gave me the title, "worse than water kate. got. >> host: fantasy, i know, but in what major ways would the world look different today if nixon had not been caught or behaved dishon blly? >> guest: fascinating his to hil counterfactual. i'm not sure i could spin it all the way out. you know, i don't -- first of all, i don't think that anybody in the nixon white house with maybe one exception was particularly evil. i think they were all good men with good intentions. they were trying to do the best

to run the country -- >> host: who's the exception? >> guest: g. gordon liddy. i just think gordon has got the screws all confused in his brain and just never seemed to, you know, he's just totally misguided in trying to sell the half-baked approaches he believed should be permissible, and they're all beyond the law, you know? you just don't -- the law is irrelevant. and i just don't think you can be -- or the fact that you should remain silent after you make a mistake. i don't think the code of the mafia should be the norm for white house aides. so i just have, you know, i could go through a whole litany of activities where i just think liddy, as evidenced some signs of a very distorted, if not evil personality. >> host: and you filed a lawsuit against him. >> guest: oh, yes.

but that's another story. let me, relate me -- where were we on the other one? >> host: had nixon served two full terms, how would the world look differently? >> guest: how different would it have been. well, there's no question that the biggest thing that got set aside that nixon was working on for his second term was a rather major reorganization of the executive branch. he realized he could never get the legislation through the congress because when you reorganize the executive branch, you effect the congressional committees that have oversight over those particular administrative agencies or departments and what have you. so he had, he had divined a system that my office worked on, i had people from the department of justice working on it, ehrlichman worked on it, it had been this the works many months and would have radically redesigned and modernized, if you will, more into a functional area all the departments and agencies that have grown up over

the years. in other words, national security is all over the lot. the national security community which is one of the largest in the executive branch ranges from the intelligence agency spread out to the department of defense, the department of state. now some of it's in homeland security, an agency that didn't even exist before, and it was just a mess. so you would have put a counselor to the president in charge of the policy of all of this. you'd had, you had a serious of cowns counselors that were being graded as white house aides who would then be able to control in a way that had had never been controlled the executive branch. this terrified the congress. aye long thought that one -- i've long thought that one of the reasons that the congress was so anxious to hold the hearings it held in watergate is it needed to block this rather dramatic policy that they knew was in the wings that nixon was

developing. and that's probably the most dramatic change. i don't think we would have been in, you know, we'd have seen some terribly abusive use of government. nixon, that was not in his disposition. i think that he was trying to make the government work better, and in a way that really is a little bit frightening. for example, things developed during the reagan years like the so-called unitary executive theory that brings all the regulatory agencies under the white house. not so sure that's healthy. we hadn't gone that far in this reorganization. it was really to make the principle agencies, not all the independent regulatories subject to the president's control and his policies. >> host: we'll go to victor who's joining us from allentown, pennsylvania, with john dean. go ahead, please. >> caller: thank you for taking

my call. you spoke at lehigh university in 2007 on the subject of worse than watergate and broken government. i had the honor of asking you a question about authoritarianism. several years earlier you had been recorded as saying that this country was about 25% fascist. >> guest: no, not fascist, i just said authoritarian. >> caller: well, i understand. well, i have it on tape that you did answer questions in which that word was used. >> guest: yes, i'll explain that. >> caller: and when you answered the question, you explained that you were talking about authoritarianism. by the way, i gave you a silver dollar with the constitution on it, so you may remember me. but i thought your book was just excellent on that subject of authoritarianism. so could you distinguish between fascism, authoritarianism, naziism and militarism?

>> guest: sure. >> caller: maybe in the context of having known alexander haig with lieutenant colonel to chief of staff at the white house to head of nato to secretary of state. that's my question. >> host: thanks for the call, victor. >> guest: okay. let me see if i can handle that for you. first of all, about -- my whole study of authoritarianism is based on social science. in the aftermath of world worldr ii, a group of social scientists tried to get together to find out what had happened in italy and germany, if it could ever happen in the united states. could we follow mussolini or a hitler? would we toll late things -- tolerate things like a holocaust in this country? and the sad answer was, yes, there's some segment of the population that has an authoritarian personality. the book and the study was well

and probably rightly criticized when it first came out because it was based largely on freudian psychology which has its own problems. another group of social scientists and particularly one who landed up in canada, a fellow by the name of robert at meyer, decided to look at this question again. and doing it by rather solid, empirical studies. by that i mean he would question people about the nature of their personality, their dispositions and what have you and would over time collect one of the largest databases that we would ever assemble on this and find, and found, excuse me, clearly there is an authoritarian personality type. they actually break down into several categories. there are authoritarian followers, authoritarian leaders, they call them dominators, and then there are people that have uniquely traits of both. it's because they score so high

on these tests they call them double highs. these became, and some of the dominators became my conservatives without conscious. and when you understand this class of person and this type of personality, you understand why this is true, they have no conscious. whatsoever. and i asked altmeyer over the years who had studied this, i said, how many people fall in this category, the overall? not just the double highs or the dominators or the, or the followers, but just the whole -- alone, but the whole collective? he said as best he can figure, about 25% of the united states would follow in this category. this isn't a good or bad, this isn't a pathology. this is just a nature of a certain element of the american population. and it's a very real element. i think we're seeing it today very much in the tea party

movement which is the next step beyond the material i had in my book. i've got to tell you that in writing that book, which i had originally planned to write with the late senator goldwater but his health became bad so we could not do it together, it was one of the most informative books i'd ever written. i've learned more from it, i've returned to it to understand things on any book more than all those i have done because it was so eye-opening to understand. i looked at fascism to see if these were fascists. they clearly are not. this isn't even incipient fascism. but it's the stuff from which far itch -- fascism, obviously, can arise. it is -- we have never in this country had authoritarians take charge. they are not large enough in their numbers, and even some of them who test high or would test

high as soon as they realize their personality nature, they back away from it. they're not even comfortable with it themselves because it isn't our norm for our political activity. there is a chart in one of these books or in a table that sets forth i think it's page 68 and 69 of the book that gives you a catalog of these personality traits, and it's not very pleasant. and, but it's very real, and i think just understanding these people helps us to deal with them. >> host: alexander haig, who recently passed away, and so did gerald ford's press secretary for about a month. randy reid from illinois saying, what does his resignation mean in terms of the protest to the nixon pardon? >> guest: the, it was, you know, i think a lot of people were stunned when gerry ford did this. it was no surprise.

he had hibted he was doing it -- hinted he was going to do it. i was one who was about to go off to be incarcerated. i never did go to prison, but i was in a witness protection program for a long time, and i was about to go off and make a safe house my regular residence where i would be brought into the city almost every day, which i was. so i wasn't real happy about it. my wife was quite upset with it. and most of those who were involved in watergate were really quite shocked that it wasn't even broader. but it was something i'd never asked for, nor wanted. but i think that in the long run it was the right decision, and i think while ford, obviously, suffered his, his ability to win the presidency on his own as a result of the pardon, there's just enough people who really felt strongly about it that would have made a difference in that election had that not have been the key issue. but it's pretty, pretty ugly to

contemplate any former president of the united states on trial for what happened during nixon's presidency. it's, there's a real question as to whether richard nixon could have ever received a fair trial. if the well had not been so poisoned from which you draw jurors, you'd never find a juror that could give him an honest reading. he had some defenses. a lot of this material, a lot of this activity was, in his mind, national security activity. he wasn't, his motive -- informs, bud -- in fact, bud croag went to visit him after he'd been pardoned and said, mr. president, do you feel you're guilty of a crime? and nixon said, no, i don't. i really don't. and that kind of attitude, obviously, made it very

difficult for him to, indeed, understand why he needed a pardon. but his lawyers advised him to take one. >> host: but you never met with richard nixon after you left the white house. >> guest: never did. i think it would have been very difficult for nixon. my last conversation with him was on easter in 1973, easter of 1973. and he said, john, i'm calling to tell you you're still my counsel, that i'm still one, i still know what you've told me, and i will not forget it. of course, it was what we call a stroking call to try to keep me from doing what i ultimately knew i had to do which was testify about what had happened. >> host: a twitter question from gary in pennsylvania saying as a young person should i be looking up to glenn beck or barry goldwater to learn what it means to be a conservative?

>> guest: i don't understand glenn beck's conservativism at all, and it has nothing to do with the conservativism that has been in such a long tradition in this country. and if you look in "conservatives without conscious," i think you'd immediately understand why. i didn't even include glenn beck in the book. >> host: next is a call from lee in new orleans. welcome to the program, lee. >> caller: hi. wondered if you could say, mr. dean could say a little about why white supremacy, white racism is such an important component in this american conservativism? i mean, you've mentioned barry goldwater's 1964 campaign and his trips to the south. clearly, with white spremmists and his interactions down there. so i'm wondering why this is, why they have, why the american conservative movement has allowed white supremacy to be such an important component in

their development and rise in america? >> guest: well, i think it's a rather new phenomenon. as a matter of fact, if there is anybody who was not a supremacist or a race cyst, it's barry goldwater. he's the man who integrated the arizona national guard long before truman had even done so with the, with the armed services. he's somebody who, for example, there were black and white theaters in the phoenix that he as a member of the city council eliminated. he's somebody who voted against the '64 civil rights bill much to his later chagrin on the advice of two lawyers who he was very impressed with. he said there was a young -- i asked him this question one day, i said, why in the world -- because i happened to have been in the gallery for that vote. i was in law school at the time, went up to see the vote. it was such a historic vote, and i was very curious as to how he was going to vote on it.

i had another friend in law school whose father was in the senate and got us some nice prime seats in the galleries and waited for that historic vote. and when goldwater -- years later i asked him, why did you vote against him? he said, well, i had the advice of this young lawyer from phoenix who i greatly respected by the name of bill rehnquist and another was a professor from yale who sent me a dynamite memo by the name of bork. i -- he said, do you know robert bork? i said, i sure do. so on those two constitutional analysis, the '64 bill, he believed sincerely that it was an unconstitutional action and it, indeed, would be thrown out by the courts as such. and that was the basis of his vote. >> host: let me go back to something that you wrote about in your book on warren harding. you both grew up in marion, ohio, and you write about a speech given october 26, 1921,

birmingham, alabama. >> guest: in woodrow wilson national park. >> host: and in the speech he said i was say if a black man is fit to vote, he should vote. i would say to a white man voting when he is unfit, he should be prohibited from voting. and he said unless our democracy is alive, you must stand for equality. this is 1921. >> guest: i had such fun doing the harding book because the harding has been so maligned as a president. he is typically considered up with of our worst presidents, and i had grown up in marion, ohio, his town, and my next door neighbor was the editor who would follow warren harding some years later as the editor of the marion star which was harding's creation. and had been the first editor of the paper. he introduced me and gave me my first harding book with harding becoming, if you will, my first

president. my library has everything that's ever been written about harding -- good, bad and indifferent -- and i realized a long time ago particularly picking up this information as a kid that harding hadn't been given a very fair shake as a president. so when arthur schlesinger jr. started the series on which i wrote one of the series of 42 past presidents, i called arthur. known him for years. arthur had written some rather ugly things about harding himself, and i said, art, i bet you don't know what to do with harding. he said, john, i don't have a clue what to do with harding. and he said, are you interested? i said, i am very interested. when i turned in my manuscript, arthur called and said you have begin me an entirely different perspective on warren harding. he said, i didn't realize some of the information you had. you're one of the few people i know who ever actually looked at the papers that did survive his

presidency. i think it's a mistake that we have done with harding, he asked me to cut just a very few -- i was a little hard on some of his friends who were historians, on some of the false material they'd put out on harding. so it was -- i turned arthur 180 degrees it was just a wonderful undertaking because he had had these fixed views of harding. the speech you're referring to was a really brave act at the time harding did it. he went into the south. the audience was segregated, there was a wire fence between the whites and the blacks. and harding spent most of that speech looking right at the whites and telling them that you just can't go forward in a democracy and call it a democracy and treat people on the ore side of the fins the way -- fence the way you're doing so. it was a speech that was -- it was hated by the south, but he

still thought that there was, there were inroads even then for the republicans in the south. and the blacks were by and large thrilled with it. he had not done as much as they wanted, but he did a lot as president. woodrow wilson, his predecessor, had been, sadly, a serious racist. he had removed blacks from positions they'd long been in in the district of columbia in the federal government, and then as soon as he got them out of those positions put a civil service in so they couldn't get back in. harding did what he could about hiring more blacks and getting them in but was a true progressive on this. in fact, so much of harding's material while he is still in many regards a classic conservative president, it's also a highly progressive president particularly on social issues. >> host: one of the stories from

the book, you describe december of 1920 the transition is in place. florence harding meets with edith wilson, describes her as haughty and condescending and in the tour of the white house conducted -- >> guest: the word haughty was a rather nice description of her, i think. [laughter] >> host: but in the tour of the white house conducted by the housekeeper, florence harding views this white house as the home of a very sick man. can you elaborate? >> guest: yes. wilson, of course, had had a stroke many, many months earlier when he had come back from europe and negotiating the league of nations, had gone out on a tour to try to sell it to the american people. while on tour had had a very severe stroke, had come back, pretended he was all right when he was bedfast for all practical purposes. they had pulled the shade, and the place had become a rather grim, semihospital for a very

ill, incapacitated president who was surviving unbeknownst to what he was capable of and was capable of actually very little. harding made an interesting call during the campaign when his aides tried to get him to attack wilson and his health, and he said, there's no way i will win the presidency over this sick man's problem. he just refused -- he attacked the wilson policies, not harding -- not wilson himself and his condition. so you're right. when florence came in and looked around and everything from the odors to the atmosphere just decided she was going to have the place painted and open the windows and invite people back into the white house where they hadn't had a function in the last time anyone could remember and did so. and changed the whole atmosphere of the, of white house with people coming and going. >> host: our next call from

florida. david is on the phone, welcome to "in depth" with john dean. >> caller: thank you very much. and steve, as always, thank you and your whole staff at c-span. you do a great service for america, and i want to pick up on what mr. dean said before i ask my question. >> host: sure. >> caller: about woodrow wilson. if it were not for glenn beck, many americans who did not know before would not know what a miserable man woodrow wilson was, how he brought segregation into the federal government both in washington, d.c., specifically, and throughout the civil service and the armed forces. he was a horrible man. now, what i originally called to ask and to find a comment on is the fact that gordon liddy seems