so it's clear that libby takes his group back in the second time. he claims that he told hans and the others that mitchell insisted on it. well i don't think mitchell insisted on it at all. i think he told on the stuff he had gotten was junk. and libby is a highly manipulative person. when he put together his book will i think he tried to do an honest account. but he does it bother eight years after-the-fact and he tries to look at other people and remember what he remembers. i'm the first to tell you that memory is not the best source. i think something like these tapes, i remember so many thin things. this is a contemporaneous record that we make these mistakes. ..

on the wrong side of the law and noted so. but i think that everybody who worked at the nixon white house knew the difference between right and wrong, and they -- you have a great meter in our gut tests of things. everything i thought was wrong when i pulled out the law books, was wrong. so to me the lesson is, when it feels wrong, it probably is wrong. double-check, we have an also

rather interesting situation jive in your 30s only and you're a lawyer in the white house, bang the door downed, raise your hand and say -- maybe you're going to go out and take an extraordinary amount of courage for somebody to actually do that. >> guest: i blew up one break-in, which was the brookings. they never thanked mr. for saving their build that i go were going to fire-bomb. >> host: i doubt if they will. >> guest: i think you're right. anyway, that's one lesson. we all have good sense -- >> host: your gut, is this right or wrong? >> guest: exactly. and, for lawyers, that what -- as a result of watergate there came out a set of rules that never existed before largely because of my testimony. that's why it's been interesting to do these continuing legal education programs, because they develop real world ethics rules, and they have a -- if you-in my

situation, you have a reporting up requirement, and you have to report to the top person, if necessary, and you have -- >> host: who is your client. >> guest: really not. they cleared that up. nixon -- there's fascinating conversations about that in the white house counsel, the president is not his client. the office of the president is his client. big difference, bob. it's the entity, and he has to protect the entity and not the occupant of the entity, and this is true with other entities, corporations, what have you. the general counsel represents the organization. >> host: but common sense should prevail and as a human being you can't distinguish that. >> guest: but you have to go in and say, mr. president, for the office of the president, i have to tell you, my march 21st 21st talk would have been different. i would have said, if you don't hear my warning and don't believe this is a problem, i have, depending on how the rules were written at that time -- if they were anything like they are

now, have a duty to report out. i have to go to the prosecutor. i have to go to the congress and tell them this. that's a lot of leverage. >> host: who was nixon? >> guest: who was nixon? one very fascinating character, very complex individual. he is a different person with different people. he is something of a chameleon. he is intelligent, but at the same time he is remarkably stupid. i mean, to make some of the mistakes he makes, shows a level of incompetence i didn't think existed. >> host: don't you think he thought he had immunity? >> guest: he does. >> host: i don't mean legally. he was living in a bubble. he is the president. no one is going to challenge him. and so it starts in a sense with the tapes, the arrogance of the tapes, that you think you can do this. this wasn't just done to, you, john dean, and hasteds. it was done to all the foreign leaders, done to anyone who went

into the oval office, and he just was coin of saying -- kind of saying the confidence that people should expect when they come see the president, we're not going to care about that. it is in my interest to do this taping. then when it was disclosed, the idea that no one is ever going to get the tapes. >> guest: what is interesting he is troubled by that very fact himself, he tells haldeman, i don't feel comfortable doing this. so he knows it's wrong. but he doesn't pull the plug. >> host: and what is amazing about this book, in a sense, it kind of seals the conclusion about nixon, and what you have done is you brought the microscope as close to this presidency as anyone could, and for that it's a public service.

at the same time it is a really long book, and all of the detail and all of the -- for somebody who wants to relive and relive in technicolor and for many, many hours, this will tell the story, and -- >> guest: i found bob doll county reside review interesting. he said it's not an easy read because it's a painful read because it reminds us of those periods. i didn't -- you were not my audience and my mind -- i don't now if when you write a book you have an audience. itself was people who really don't know watergate well, who have a smattering of knowledge north like a woodward so those are the people -- the reason i didn't do transcripts is because i find transcripts are tedious

to read. i know frank gannon said, why didn't he publish his transcripts? i have 23 volumes of three-inch notebooks, almost four billion words. it would fill all these shelves. >> host: 39 years after we first saw you on the national stage on television can you have returned, and i'm sure in the mines of many people, with applause and in the minds of some others, the ghost of john dean. thank you so much. >> guest: thank you, bob. >> that was after words, booktv's signature program in which authors are interviewed by journalist us, public poll so imakers, legislators and other familiar with their material. after words airs every weekend,

10:00 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9:00 p.m. on sunday, and 12:00 a.m. on monday. up next, booktv's college series. this month we're at pepperdine university. wade graham sat down with booktv to talk about his book "american eden" where he look at our gardens and the people who design them. this is half an hour. >> now on booktv we want to introduce you to wade graham, the author of this book, among other books, "american eden." first of all, what do you do for a living? >> guest: i do a series of things. i design gardens. i'm a professor of public policy and a journalist. >> host: how did you get interested or active in the designing of gardens. >> guest: like many things in

life i fell sideways into it. always been interested in housing, designs, landscape, and got a chance to train at the feet of a master. >> host: who what that. >> guest: a woman named nancy power, in santa monica. so what ended up happening to me, in these various strands of my life, designing gardens, writing and teaching about environmental history, i realized i was ignorant about what i was doing designing garden. i could put an english garden with a english house and a modern garden with a modern house but i struck me i didn't know why people do these things, and it came to me strongly it as an interesting question. ahad a woman client who said i need your help. my husband has commissioned a frank greery house. very angular. would you please design me an

english rose garden. i thought, well, how can i do this? poses challenges. and what does it tell me abouture marriage? so i set out to figure these things out. >> host: what was the importance of the marriage? >> guest: the tensions between the two of them, trying to mary these two opt styles, certainly -- opposite styles were indications of who they were, how they were trying to make things, and it strikes me anywhere you good in the american landscape and the american culture you see unreconcilable tensions, because we don't from a unitarian cultural tradition. we bring bits of different things just as we are bits of different things. we try to reconcile them, and the mismatches are interesting. >> host: give us an example of a public space that is a tense place. >> guest: think to me the most magical and productive and curious and frustrating public space is probably monticello, thomas jefferson's house and

garden in virginia. and it's a place i think everyone should go. it's absolutely stunning, a beautiful place, white move, impressive. he really made an incredible sort of real estate demonstration there, and it's a place that -- first of all can the founding american garden, really. we have to understand that. thomas jefferson was born an english in an english world and it was up 0 him to fashion something new, an american character, taking english institutions and thoughts and ideas and turn them into something different, something that is american. so he did this at monticello. and the first thing one notices is this sort of nowhere there is a straight line in monticello. there are no clipped hedges, no taupe area, because that to me, the gardens he grew up with were gardens about royal power, before the oppression, the king of france and so forth.

so he made monticello with wonderful curving lines and flower beds and woodlands that came up in views off into the distance, the mountains, and the river below. and this was a free democratic garden for free and democratic people. so, it's a demonstration in a sense of his ethics, his ideology, his aspirations and believes for all of us but is unreconcilable in with the way me made a live, namely his garden was built by slaves. >> host: have public spaces always been important in american history? >> guest: of course they have been enormously important, although america as a culture is far more turned inwards. more interested in our private spaces so we don't wildfire about public spaces and probably have fewer meaningful public spaces than other countries. we have the mall in washington.

we don't have the equivalent of trafalgar square or red square or tianimen square. the stink is not meaningful or useful. so i make no distinction between a private garden and hidden courtyard and a fair ground or public space. they still are expressions of who we are, what we believe. they're windows into both the mind of the maker and the clicktive mind. so, i look at gardens in a promiscuous sense. look at a private garden that thinks of itself as a guarden and look at a golf course, the way jack nicklaus designed the fairways to look like the distance of the place where he was. so the key is to try to learn how to read the language of gardens in the way we reading thises that are more obvious and

expressive. so the landscape -- the language of gardens is water and it's grass and it's hedges and trees and woodlands and flower beds, and fountains and so forth, but the sin tax is similar to the way we express ourselves. we do it to our address, our speech, our politics, if we're wealthy, by spending money on things to show people to form a demonstration. so i try to read these things and get a window into the mind that made them, and in a sense the garden, if i show it to you, is me putting my mind on the ground, putting it out there as a diagram, other diagram of who i think i should be, want to be, what i think you-topia utopia. >> host: who is frederick olmstead and his importance in america's public spaces. >> guest: homestead created with the help of an englishing architect named calvert fox, who

we forget to mention -- the greatest piece of art of the american 19th century in the central park, and keep in mine he was not trained to do this. he was trained as a gentleman farmer and failed it. then put in charge of the relief operations for wounded soldiers in the civil war, american sanitary commission, which became the red cross. he was someone skilled in organizing thousands of people and resources and so forth. and what -- they created there at central park is a kind of an incredible demonstration of what was going on in america at that time. so, central park is indeed looks like nature but it's a recreation of nature, a landscaped scale replica of a natured that was being destroyed at the time they built it. so manhattan island and new york city are these incredible raging conflagration of industrial and financial power, which quite scared americans. americans had been trained to think of ourselves as an egrayan

people who live on farms farms d small towns, virtue in simple missty and we think of ourselves and yet in the set century we're confronted we ever a very different reality which was visible in places like new york city, enormousr)

ed. nervous irritation and loss of spirit and that by walking in this landscape they would be renewed, literal lay form of national therapy is what that represents. so, if you walk in central park, think about the tension between our view of nature as a repository of virtue and then the fact our economy is baseed

on exploitation, if not destruction of nature, and those things are difficult to reconcile, as different to reconcile as jefferson's ideals -- he wrote the declaration of independence, all men are created equal -- and the fact he owned 666 people in his lifetime. many of us are unable to reconcile our ethics with what we do during the day. so olmstead also done think of him as this landscape architect but also invented or if not invented, then really perfected the suburb. the suburb. the suburb is a place where people with enough money could take a railroad out of that horrible city and buy themself a piece of this sort of romantic nature, often behind gates, guarded, gated communities. olmstead key signed 16 suburbs, beautiful winding streets and lawns and a sort of invocation

of nature but it's a rejection of the city but you have to pay for it with city money. so olmstead, as he faded away in his older life -- retired to one of the suburbs in brockline, massachusetts. beautiful place. he said he couldn't get enough of the suburban country and that where he died happily. the olmstead model of what kind of creating a form of bucolic, romantic nature, as the medicine that allows to us live our annual urban lives. we're an urban and industrial people. it's a way in a sense of reconciling these things that can't be reconciled. >> host: was there public policy fights about creating central park? >> guest: um, central park being in new york city, had really more to do with finance than with policy. central park was not in -- inhabited by several thousand black and irish people with pigs

and farms, and the new york state legislature made a decision to commit some six or seven million dollars to buying and constructing the park because they recognized it would raise land values in the peripheral area. so parks have always been built as real estate amenity. actually sell the real estate around them since thesel century? england, this has been the financial model. so the new york legislature said we will fund this for the betterment of the finances of the city. that's what happened. when they built this thing, suddenly everybody had to live on upper fifth avenue and moved from the 30s up to the 50s and rebuilt their mansions and that how that worked. so, real estate is typically at the heart of these things, although you will find public policy not too far from any garden you look at. we can look at michelle obama's lovely garden at the white house, which is in direct terms really just a -- it's an assertion of egrayan virtue in a difficult time. she built it in 2009, right in

the midst of the meltdown, which was caused by a lack of virtue in financial markets, which was actually caused by the overleveraging of houses, right? have to remember that jefferson died in enormous debt because he kept rebilling monticello to make it more perfect, and he was so mortgaged to british bankers that whole place had to be sold when he died and all of his slaves and families broken up. so mortgage debt is an old thing. real estate overreach is an old american habit. so, michelle obama, her response to, i think, that crisis, which was a moral crisis in a sense, was to go back to agrean roots. so it was bit with $200 of seeds and supplies and some school children's donated labor, and it wases about 1100 square feet, which pales in compare son to mr. jefferson's, which was 8,000 square feet of vegetable gardens

in which he grew 350 kinds of vegetables 50, kinds of cabbages and 150 kinds of fruit trees. the garden at the white house is a little built less ambitious but no less forceful as a moral statement. but at the same time the interesting thing about that garden is that it is an assertion of a program, of a set of beliefs. she went on sesame street and said, we grow our own food and we're using this to educate children about childhood obesity and sickness and the importance of put these parts together to live in a virtues sense, and yet the same year a farm bill came across her husband are desk that was $300 billion, which fundamentally supports the overproduction of soybeans and corn, which we use to mike high fructose corn sir chip which is what makes our children obese to begin with. so so the obamas can't reconcile

their notion of a garden with their notion of public policy, and these intersections are what is interesting. >> host: in your work as a garden designer have you seen any impact from misch own -- michelle obama's efforts. >> guest: i absolutely have. one thing that is hopeful about our own era, itch i can back up, one thing that one seize is a sort of pendulum swinging back anding for between the good times and the bad times, and when it's good times we splash out. we sort of do things bigger because more about -- when we're in leaner times, we sort of are close door our roots. one of thing we're seeing is people's desire to have a connection to how food is made, produced, where it comes from. even in the middle of cities, people are moving back into cities for the first time in generations in this country. we have been a people who have been running away from tower cities as fast as possible, running air from the city and

turning real pastures into fake ones and then destroying them. people are moving back into the center of cities now and that is incredibly hopeful and they're bringing the same aspirations into the center of cities. so, i want grow vegetables for mids. i have chickens in the shadow of the skyscrapers of downtown los angeles, about three blocks from dodger stadium, and my kid goes out in the morning and get the eggs and it's quite wonderful. so in a sense we are making a refewed effort to reconcile and to bring these opposites together, and it can be done, just like the rose gadsen for the frank geary house. it can be done but it's a baseball. >> host: in your own experience, what's kind of permits from the city do you need to raise chickens -- >> guest: depends on the city you live in. lucky for me the city of los

angeles, just a couple of years ago, decided to allow backyard chickens, up to three and no roosters. so -- but many places are a little behind, and many cities, including the city of los angeles, will come and cite you if you have a vegetable garden in your frondyard. so we're sit wrestling with that. >> host: have americans always been environmental lists. >> guest: americans have not always been environmentalists. we have a rare perverse veneration of nature. we also venerate it in so far it's is makes us difference wind chill thought our wilder is in continent gives us an opportunity to remake the world from the corruption of europe. we came from corruption and destroyed countries. but at the same time, we brought with us a cultural attitude towards wild nature, that it was somehow terrifying, dangerous and needed to be subdued. so we both think that the american wilderness is something

that confers an enormous difference and beauty and sub himmity to us but we'll kill the world as fast as we can and cut down the forests as fast as we can and turn nature itself into agriculture. so, i think environmentalism, as it appeared in the 19th century, was not aspect of this anxiety about the changes that were destroying it so fast. in a sense it was know stall gentleman for the lost nature. you look at in the mid-century, the great american writers all wrote about nature. emerson's beautiful essay on nature, and walden pond and all of these other books, and john muir. americans became concerned that we ourselves were taking -- destroying nature too quickly. we clearcut it, mine it, burn, it, drain it, plow it, and kill it. think about the extinct crisis, the pasteur pitchon and the

buffalo and the american indian. so in a sense environmentalism was an awakening to the fact that our veneration of nature was not enough to save and it we had to put in place policy and intention. this is why americans have a slightly uneasy relationship with what we call environmentalism, because it goes to the core of who we think we are. >> host: we're here at pepperdine university in malibu, california. what's the role of california in american gardens and american environmentalism? >> guest: california has always had an outside influence on not just californians bit rest of the country and the rest of the world because in a sense it's so visual. everything is bigger here, yosemite valley and the secretary a river and sierra nevada and the mojave desert. a landscape that is just powerfulfully iconic. and it's also a climate which is really, really seductive. it's drawn people here and when you draw people here to live in

this splen for of nature, you -- splen discover nature, you ruin it and you can only run so far because you keep mucking up paradise, and eventually you'll muck up paradise so california is a kind of -- it's our national trauma and dilemma. it's also the case that environmental politics, environmental formation, environmental rhetoric, really matured in california, from john muir to david bro brower and the sierra club in northern california. modern environmentalism took its shape probably here, and then second part of your question -- or the first -- was about gardens. i think the modern garden did emanate from california. came out of post war suburbia and kind of a wonderful form of garden that mixes simplicity and quite a bit of jefferson's sort of paradise on the hill where there are no other people around

and a veneration of nature, and a lot of whispy, a lot of tiki style and palm trees and exotic could that people brought back from the war in the pacific and having fun after that difficult times of depression and two wars and rationing. it's california. ask that nothings that it there could be pleasure and privatelandscapes, the nuclear family was this new paradise that reconstructed the garden on eden. that spread all over the world you. can go anywhere in the world and see california style garden, in nigeria, new zealand, in china they're building subdivisions for tens of millions of people that are modeled on orange county and mod eled on santa barbara, spanish colonial architecture and swimming pools and the pleasure principle at large. so that's the only american style that is really probably indigenous to america and it

certainly the only american style i think has become globally influential shall. >> host: in the suburbs, the lawns got big, and now they've gotten smaller again, haven't they? >> guest: simple forces, one is just escalation of real estate value. now expensive to have the big lawn. and in this part of the country the price of water is going through the recover so people are reassessing that notion. property values drive these decisions, and property values are quite high in most parts of the united states. >> host: what do you do here at perrer dine. >> guest: teach urban and environmental policy at the school of public policy, and i teach quite a bit about resource politics and about water, for example, which is a big issue for us, and it's an urban issue as well as agricultural one. where there are no real distinctions. so, what is happening in the state is fascinating on many levels, not just because of the stresses, like the drought that is putting us into a crisis and