♪ >> c-span, where history up folds daily -- unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. ♪ ♪ [inaudible conversations] >> good evening. i'm not sure the microphone is on. can you hear me? well, excuse me. you can? okay, great. good evening. my name is vanessa beasley, and

i'm a professor here at vanderbilt university. it's my great fortune to welcome you to this wonderful discussion that we're going to have about the presidency of richard nixon and the lessons therein. is and i'm also happy to invite you to a conversation we'll be able to have on that same, that same theme and that same question. before we get started in earnest though,s it is fitting that we take a moment to remember the space that we're in and who founded it. tonight we are gathered in the first amendment center here at vanderbilt university which was founded by john seigenthaler. for those of you who may not remember mr. seigenthaler or be aware of his legacy, he served for 43 years as an award-winning journalist for the tennessean. at his retirement, he was editor, publisher and ceo. and in 1982, seigenthaler became the founding editorial director of "usa today" and served in that position for a decade.

seigenthaler left journalism in the early '60s to serve in the u.s. justice department as administrative assistant to attorney general robert f. kennedy. his work in the field of civil rights led to a service as chief negotiator with the governor of alabama during the freedom rides. and during that crisis, while attempting to aid freedom riders in montgomery, alabama, seigenthaler was attacked by a mob of klansmen and hospitalized. in 1991, he founded the first amendment center where we gather tonight housed at vanned arer built university -- vanderbilt university with the mission of creating national discussion, dialogue and debate about first amendment rights and values. and one of the first amendment rights we enjoy is the opportunity to look critically at our own past as citizens and members of u.s. democracy. and so tonight to lead us in that discussion we're very fortunate to have john farrell,

author of the book "richard nixon: the life." it's hot off the presses, literally, and available in the back of the room. john farrell is the author of three biographies, first of the great american attorney clarence darrow which won the los angeles times book prize for the best biography of the year. second, of speaker tip o'neill which won the lyndon johnson foundation award for the best book on congress. and, third, of richard nixon, the book we'll be discussing tonight, which will be published on march 28th. somehow, we already have copies. he came to biography after a long career as a newspaperman, most notably for the boston globe and the denver post x. in the late 1970s, as youngsters, john and one of our other conversational partners, david maraniss, competed as reporter ares while covering the maryland legislature for rival newspapers. mr. farrell recalls that he did not fare especially well in that

competition. [laughter] to mr. farrell's right is david maraniss. david is an associate editor at "the washington post" where he has worked for 40 years. he is author of 11 books including biographies of bill clinton, barack obama, vince lombardi and roberto clementi. the final book in his series was once in a great city: a detroit story, winner of the robert f. kennedy book fried. maraniss also is the recipient of two pulitzer prizes and was a prettier or finalist three other times for his books in journalism. this semester for the third time we're so happy to welcome him back to vanderbilt as a visiting, as a distinguished visiting professor where he's teaching classes on political biography and america in the mccarthy era. he and his wife linda have welcomed vagabonds, spending time in washington, d.c.,

madison and wisconsin, and here in nashville. he is known here mostly for being the father of andrew maraniss, the author of strong inside, the book about vanderbilt athlete and alum knew perry wallace but has become the freshman book reading for the second straight year. our other conversational partner will be professor thomas schwartz. schwartz is professor of history and political science at vanderbilt university. educated at columbia, oxford and harvard universities, he is the author of the books america's germany, john j. mccloy and the federal republic of germany, and lyndon johnson and europe, in the shad toe of vietnam. -- shadow of vietnam. and with mathias schultz, the strained alliance. schwartz has received fellowships from the german historical institute, the norwegian noble institute, the woodrow wilson center and the

social science research center. he served on the historical advisory committee of the department of state and was the president of the society of historians of american foreign relations. he is currently finishing a biographical study of former secretary of state henry kissinger. is with all of the overlapping interests and expertise, i'm sure you'll join me in welcoming our distinguished conversational partners. there'll be a portion of the evening when you, too, will be invited to be a conversational partner. with no further ado, let's get started discussing lessons from a failed presidency. [applause] >> thank you, vanessa, and i'd also like to thank avery commons for helping sponsor this event along with the political science department and the provost. and thank you to the audience. in the front row, we have a few

interlocutors including my great colleague, bruce pop oppenheimer, political scientist, and throo -- three of our students who will be part of this. we're going to do it in sort of four parts. first, i'll talk to jack about the making of the book. then professor schwartz and i will talk to him about the substance of the book, then we'll have some questions from these four in the front row and then open it up to the audience. you know, as we used to say about richard nixon or tricky dick, he's back. [laughter] tan and rested and dead. [laughter] but who knew that he would be so relevant again. >> yeah, awful. >> so i'm going to save jack the trouble of, you know, when he was on campus today, he was sort of -- and when he was writing the book, he was realizing that he was writing it for the students of today who are, you know, nixon was like the teapot

dome scandal of our generation, that far back. and so, you know, each the students' parents -- even the students' parents were just kids when richard nixon was president, to some degree. so i'm going to save him a trouble, a couple of bare facts for anybody who doesn't know. richard nixon was born in 1913, he died in 1994 at age 81. he was a congressman from california, served on house un-american activities committee, then was elected to the senate the same year jfk was, served briefly, and then was vice president for eight years under dwight eisenhower. ran for president in 1960, was defeated. two years later, lost running for governor for california and said you won't have dick nixon to kick around anymore, and then he came back, was elected in '68, lasted five years and hen re-- and then resigned after facing articles of impeachment for the watergate scandal. i know that as an author myself

all authors, most hate the question why. why another, why this, so i'm not going to ask that. [laughter] no, no, no, i don't want to ask it. so i'm going to ask how. [laughter] really the same question, but a different way. how did you come to this book, and how did you conceive of it? >> okay. there has been a tide of new nixon material since around the turn of the century. all the tapes -- not totally all the tapes, but all the tapes that are ready for public consumption have been released. hundreds of thousands of documents, transcripts of henry kissinger's telephone calls. 450 overrule histories -- oral histories of nixon's childhood friends and family all came out in the last 10, 15 years. and the last major biographer to take a shot at this was back in the early '90s when nixon was

still alive and had no use of the tapes whatsoever. so doubleday, my publisher, thought that there was room for a new, up to the date, single-volume nixon biography and asked me if i would want to do it. and i -- it took me that long to say yes -- [laughter] because this guy had been such a fascinating political leader and such a major part of my life in my late teens and early 20s. but you ask how, and i went into it feeling that i couldn't do one more hatchet job on richard nixon. nobody would want that. what i had to do was try to write a straight down the middle biography. and i found that he was much more than the caricature. he was, in many ways, a fellow that you could have empathy for. and one of the things that i enjoyed most today was talking to some of your students, david, and finding that that came through in the writing of the book.

>> and how did you go about researching it? >> that's a sad story because -- [laughter] it was outside washington, d.c., and all of nix season's documents and tapes were seized by the federal government and put in the national archives about 15 minutes from my house until three years before i got the contract for the book when they were moved to yorba linda, california, which is about as far away from washington, d.c. as you can get. so i spent many, many hours in yorba linda staying at the extended stay motel and trudging in every morning into this basement vault and just turning page after page of old nixon records. the easy part of the research was that so much is being put on the internet these days that i could do a lot of research at home. and i predicted probably in the next 20 years you'll probably experience this as well where somebody could write a major biography of a major public

figure and never have to change out of their pajamas. >> i'm always fascinated by the process of organizing such voluminous materials. how do you cull and decide what's going to go boo this single-volume biography, and how did you organize it? >> well, the most important thing to me was to make it readable. the second most important thing was to aim it at that huge part of the american population that had not experienced nixon. and somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the american population either weren't born or were not living in the united states at the time nixon resigned in 1974. so that was a big audience of people that didn't know anything about his first congressional race or his time as vice president with eisenhower. and so i really, if anything, this book is weighted away from the presidency and towards his development as a man and as a political figure, as a husband, and the trade-offs that he made as he went through his career before he became the tricky dick

that we all know and loved. if you get down to the actual technical part of research, biography is very easy -- or maybe it's the easiest book-length craft because the plot is written for you already. it's a person's life from birth to death, and chronology is your best friend. you just start making chronologies. i started off with decades, and before too long the decade-long chronologying is too extendsive, and i have to separate it into five-year groups. and by the end in some cases i've got it down into six month blocks of computer files. and in there i try to have a mix of nixon's voice, which is very important, the voices of other people who i knew him and analyze him from us and the documentation that for historians very important to say, well, this is a good, well-thought-out and thorough book. >> was there something about

nixon that you became obsessed with and you wanted to solve, that you were most curious about? >> there were. there, i spent an inordinate amount of time dispelling conspiracy theories. there are many conspiracy theories about watergate, about why the break-in was passed, was plotted, and some of them have gotten very elaborate. and i felt that i needed to sit downing with nixon's spokesman from the nixon foundation and have them challenge me time and time again to make sure that the story that's in the history books is correct. so that was my great white whale, was to feel confident that the watergate chapters stood up, and little did i know that they would have such relevance as they have today. but if there was anything that was a subsidiary goal, that was it. >> which is the elephant in the room, appropriate since nix season was a republican -- nixon

was a republican and so is donald trump. but it's just, since january when a story broke about your book and his involvement in 968 and since then trump's election or rise to the presidency in january, there's been a constant drum beat of comparisons between richard nixon and trump. and i'd like to sort of have you go through -- >> sure. >> you see the contrasts and comparisons to be valid. >> the most interesting one is that right before richard nixon was elected in 1968, he was accused by previous president of interfering with a foreign power to hack the election. and one of the things i found turning page after page was a set of notes from bob haldeman who was nixon's chief of staff which for the first time put the words of that conspiracy in nixon's mouth.

he denied it all his life, he denied it to david frost in the famous frost-nixon interviews. and so if there's a little bit in the book that moves history a little bit forward, it's that piece of the puzzle. what happened was lyndon johnson wanted to end the war before he left office, and he had a piece pushed on in october of 1968, and the nixon campaign heard about it, and they had an intermediary go to the south vietnamese and say, hold on, don't go to the talks, you'll get a better deal once nixon is elected. and lyndon johnson heard of this, and if you listen to the johnson tapes on line, you'll hear him call nixon guilty of treason and all sores of other bad stuff -- all sorts of other bad stuff. he had the campaign tailed to some extent or the other, so there was sort of a debate over surveillance with that incident

as well. and in the end, richard nixon was elected because the south vietnamese did not go to the peace process, and it sort of made johnson look like -- who already had a credibility problem -- and it made it look like he was being clumsy and manipulating the election himself. johnson then faced a very similar choice, as president obama did when he got word that there had been contacts between the trump campaign and russia. and johnson made the same decision that obama did which was not to go public with it because of the great shock this would be and because they did not have the evidence to nail it down and directly tie it to the candidate. so that's probably of the very many comparisons, that's probably the one that jumps out with, of course, the additional sweetener that in both cases we were involved in -- we're

talking about a break-in at the democratic national committee. in watergate, it was actual burglars and, of course, in russiagate it was hackers. >> what about in a larger sense of their morality, their veracity and all of those sorts of things? >> they both had trouble with the truth. they both were very accomplished liars. in fact, nixon was famous for telling one of his aides, length, you'll never be good in politics because you're not a good liar. so we have that going for us. they both have press secretaries that have been scorned by the press as being untruthful or manipulative and have become sort of very quickly jokes on prime time television. but most of all, they both had what i call the politics of grievance. they reached out to people, and they touched their fears in times of economic or national

stress and made them feel that the elites in the two coasts did not pay any anticipation to them, that they -- attention to them, that they gave minorities jobs and money and advanced ahead of them, and nobody cared about them. and so that same sort of way that you saw donald trump tap the midland last year in the election, nixon was very deft at that as well. nix season was a little bit, i think, more subtle because he had george wallace running as an up dependent candidate for president -- independent candidate for president who was saying everything bay about thely. so nixon could come across as sort of the candidate who believed in a lot of things that wallace did but didn't have to say et because he could seem -- say it because he could seem like the moderate voice of reason. his campaign was very different from trump's, but both were aimed at this sense of resentment in the voters. >> there's a wonderful quote in

your book describing richard nixon as going up the -- [inaudible] >> yeah. >> and that evokes so many different images, but i wanted to take you back to where that started. what his sense of insecurity, where that began and why, how it played out through his political life. >> yeah. i had a very hazy concept of nixon's childhood and his upbringing before i went into this. i sort of knew that he came from something of an impoverished home and that he had shown remarkable resilience and audacity in winning his race for congress and the race for senate in california. and they were clouded by allegations of red baiting, both the house and the senate race. and then, of course, there was the famous checker speech when he was picked by eisenhower as his vice presidential candidate and accused of padding his own

pockets with money from wealthy donors and went on television in what may be the most bravura television performance ever and talked about his income, his wife's -- [inaudible] and the family's little dog, checkers, which he actually reached out to the american people on television and said and no matter what they do to me, we're not going to give up the dog because the girls love it. and so it was a very maudlin performance. so this was all part of the nixon caricature, and what i -- as i began to look boo -- look into his childhood, i find out it was awful. his father was a very unpleasant, brutal man. his million was a very sort of cold and -- mom was a very sort of cold and reserved religious figure. she would retreat into her closet to pray when she wasn't working the long hours that her husband required at the family store.

and as nixon once confessed, never in my life did my mother ever say that she loved me. and then he would immediately follow that up and say that was just not the quaker way. but that was a pretty damning, i think, admission where his, what his home life, emotional home life was like. he had two brothers die in his childhood, a beloved younger brother was stricken down instantly. another brother caught tuberculosis and died over a six-year period. and that death, the cost of caring for that brother ruined the family finances and ruined dick's dream of going to an ivy league college. so he always had this chip on his shoulder that an inferiority complex, but also an anger at those like, say, jack kennedy who had everything given to him whereas nixon had to scrap for everything that he got. but the whole experience left him very insecure, and that insecurity was his great, tragic flaw.

he was never satisfied with even his greatest accomplishments. you can go to the white house tapes, and you can hear him belittle his china initiative or belittle the strategic arms treaty that he struck with the soviet union. and kissinger once, henry kissinger once said, you know, imagining how great this man would be if anybody had ever loved him. and elliott richardson, another cabinet member, said, no, if anybody had ever loved him, he never would have been the success that he had, because it was that drive and insecurity that made him such a formidable politician. >> i think you find that to be true with most politicians, that their weaknesses are their strengths and their strengths are their weaknesses, and it's really they're inextricably linked. i know the same thing is true with bill clinton -- >> absolutely. >> people would say if only -- >> yep. >> -- if only he didn't have these flaws, but it was that same draw that led him to his successes as well. >> that's certainly the case

with leadership to be johnson as well -- lyndon johnson who suffered the resentiment of the elites and northerners who looked down on him, so i see that. we set the title of this as lessons from the failed presidency, but there are many people who would argue that richard nixon actually was extraordinarily successful in foreign policy, that he had a record in changing american foreign policy that really few presidents have matched. and i'm wondering as you approached it or came boo it, did you find -- came into it, did you find yourself being struck by his successes? what were the revelations or the insights that you gained in looking at that? >> the one insight that i gained immediately was that for all his brilliance, he did not recognize the u.s. failures in vietnam. and vietnam will always be for he and lyndon johnson a black mark, although as time passes,

the effect of vietnam recedes in our society, and it seems to be moving towards being put up on the shelf next to the korean war without the same passions that it engenders in my generation. the greatness, i think, of nixon was that he had the ability to look out -- first of all, he had the drive from his mother's side of the family, the quaker side of the family to try to bring peace. and he's constantly talking on the tapes about, you know, we can get 10, we can get maybe 20 years of peace. and in the middle of the cold war, in the middle of the nuclear arms race, 20 years of peace was a great deal. in the end, he sort of brought us 50 years of peace if you're talking about great power confrontations. and he had the ability in 1969 to look across the ocean and see that russia, that soviet union and red china were at each other's thoses -- throats and that this was a time where the

united states could do a triangular diplomacy if only the chinese would let him make the approach. and he and kissinger, who was his lieutenant, made this very dramatic, secret approach to the can chinese, carried it out with a lot of clandestine, you know, turned-up trench coats and secret airplane flights and sunglasses, and kissinger went to beijing, he talked to -- [inaudible] and came back and said, yeah, they'll see you. and then you had this amazing trip of an american president, a right-wing american president as mr. spock says, you know, it's an old vulcan proverb that only nixon can go to china. but that word actually came from america ao. mao is the originator of that phrase. he said only nixon can do from the right what the man on the left cannot.

so you had nixon, the anti-communist, go to china and back and tell the american people, all right, this is in your interest, and they believed him because nobody would ever accuse dick nixon of being soft on communism. he also had what i found was fascinating, he wrote this article in foreign affairs magazine before he ever took office in which he talks about this revolution that is coming. you know, it's coming in the countries in the pacific rim like singapore and the philippines and japan. and it's going to be all about computers and independent creativity. and so he had this ability in 19, this was 1967 to look far in the future and see what was going on. and the only way i can forgive him for keeping the vietnam conflict going on as long as it could is i think that part of him believed that he needed to buy time for these fledgling

democracies to take root, for democracy to take hold in places like malaysia, thailand and the philippines. and, but, yeah, i would -- >> well, you actually make an argument that i had first heard from walt rossdale, that in effect the united states bought time for southeast asian cups, and i do -- i'll press you a little bit. what was, what would have been a politically viable route op vietnam when he came into office? >> well -- >> as you yourself point out, in cambridge, massachusetts, or in boston people voted against unilateral withdrawal as late as 1970. so what was a policy that could have worked? >> yeah. i think that he could have -- the technical answer is he could have followed the french-algerian model which is to negotiate a peace that called for a long withdrawal of the french forces from algeria, left algeria independent and also took care of the algerians who had sided with the french.

and by doing it over a long period of time, he could have gotten those algerians -- could have gotten the vietnamese who supported the united states out. but the short answer to the question, the flip answer is that this genius who saw and made this trip to china who, only nixon could go to china. well, maybe only nixon could have gotten up there on january 20, 1969, and said we're going home, and the american people, trust me, because you know i'm dick nixon, and nobody hates the commies more than i do. but this is in our interests. so that vision that he showed in other areas he didn't show in vietnam, and then as you go through the war when he can't get a quick successful ending to it, you see awful cynicism where he actually stretches it out, causing, you know, more and more deaths, expands the war boo cambodia. -- into cambodia. many of these things can be argued were the right decision

at the time, but the division that he sparks at home helps lead to the pentagon papers, helps lead to the watergate, and the whole thing collapses, and we lose everything. we lose press teeming, we lose the south vietnamese, we lose a million, or two million cambodians and a million vietnamese boat people, and the united states goes boo this funk for another six years where our foreign policy is moribund and our defense policy is, suffers fallout as well. so, i mean, i don't think you can divide vietnam from watergate. nixon himself called himself the last casualty of vietnam. and i think that that's true. so historians looking back, i think, are going to -- as i did, lump the two together and say, you know, he bungled it. how much better would it have been if he had just, you know, said at the beginning let's go home. >> i get one more -- >> of course.

>> and it's not my war anyway. it's a democratic war. >> well, yes and no in the sense that he had alwaysported it. one of the other things, the uglier aspects of nixon, of course, is the tapes reveal the man who often said anti-semitic things and often talked of jews in very negative ways. on the other hand, anyone who looks at the middle east would argue richard nixon, perhaps, was the most devoted defender of the state of israel. i'm wonder or what you see is his legacy there. >> yeah. the phrase, and yet, is used a lot in my book. [laughter] because nixon does have these two sides, and he has this incredibly dark, ugly side, and in few places is it as ugh -- ugly as his anti-semitism. and yet henry kissinger, alan greenspan were jewish.

nixon, if you were on his side, nixon was not as ugly. he reserved the real ugliness for the openers and the editors -- the owners and the editors of "the new york times" or the federal judges in new york who were jewish who ruled against him in the pentagon papers. but that, definitely, that ugliness was in there, and to his great dismay as somebody said the other day, he's looking up at us -- [laughter] the tapes are going to forever cloud history's verdict. what was the second part of the question? >> well, in the middle east -- >> yeah, the middle east. part of that was that this was great power politics. the russians were trying to use the israeli-egyptian war to increase their influence in the middle east. and is so he was alerted to this because he was a cold warrior, and this was all about the soviet union throughout his entire presidency.

but on the other hand, he thought the israelis -- he liked them. he thought they were spupg key. the -- spupg key. the israelis sort of fit his image of upside dogs, you know? and -- underdogs, militant underdogs who fought. and, in fact, the state department came to him and said we can get these arms in there, but we have to, like, be careful and fly only at night because if the rest of the world sees we're arming the israelis, it's going to affect our calculations. and nixon said, wait a minute, what are you talking about? they're saying, well, maybe three flights a night. he said, i want you to fly everything you have. all we have -- have one plane land for israelis, it's the same as having 50. and is the american arms lift to israel was astonishishing, astonishingly quick. and golda my year said he probably had saved the state of

israel at that time. so if he was truly anti-semetic, like a hitler, he never would have tone that. but i think his anti-semitism was very ugly, but it was also a part of the parochial, southern california outback where he grew up and also probably a product of his father's ignorance. >> yeah. you can ask one more question, and then we'll go to the -- [inaudible] i'm fascinated by the nixon-kennedy relationship. they came into the senate at the same time, they were sort of buddies in a sense. and yet by 1960 you write this powerful sense about losing that election to jfk gave him the resolve never to be outdone by a rival's dirty tricks again, sort of setting up all the tsa to come. >> yeah. >> talk about that.

>> definitely. they both came in in 1946, and because they were freshmen, they were put on the same committee, and they were -- the chamber of commerce on mckeysport, pennsylvania, had them come up and debate a labor bill. and then they took the train back to washington together. and they'd both been in the navy in the south pacific at the same time. they later talked it over and figured out they may have even met. a friendship i -- grew, and jfk respected nixon for beating jerry voorhees who was a new deal stalwart, and nixon basked in the fact that the rich ambassador's son was his friend. and the two of them, the nixons were invited to jack and jackie's wedding. so they were close friends, in fact, i think it was 1958 one of nixon's former staffers went to massachusetts to run for secretary of tate or some lower -- of state or some lower

office and asked nixon to come campaign, and nixon said, no, i can't go into matts because jack's running for re-election, and people will ask me whether i support his rival, the republican. and i'll have to answer candidly on behalf of the republicans, and i can't do that. so he stayed out of the race to his aide's great dismay. so when the kennedys then turned their money and their charm and their ruthlessness on nixon in 1960 and, indeed, right up to election night where he believed they stole the election in illinois and texas, it seared him not just as a bad loss, but also as a betrayal. this was somebody that he really -- i mean, loved is maybe too strong a word, but maybe it's not. he really admired and had great affection for jfk, and to be treated like this, to nixon, was a betrayal. and from that point of on, nixon was determined he was never

going to be outtricked again. and there's a great scene from the '68 campaign where a secret serviceman is walking down the aisle of the plane, and he looks and there's nixon in his seat in the aircraft going gotta be tougher, gotta be tougher, gotta be tougher. and it was that kind of feeling that comes out in the tapes and you see watergate eventually happen and the tragedy arise. >> joey, suburban chicago? >> what professor thwart was saying, we're talking about lessons from a failed presidency, and one of the hallmarks you can see today is the relationship with the press. nixon had a directly adversarial relationship with the press, that might be understating it -- [laughter] and i'm wondering looking from then to today if this is anything nixon could have done using his political gamesmanship

to change his relationship with the press and if that could have changed the outcome. and speaking more broadly, if this is any long-lasting implications of that between the press and the executive branch that we could carry on to today. >> nixon had several problems with press and, in fact, i stopped the narrative for only two things in the book, i stop it to talk about nixon and the press, and i stop it two times to talk about nixon and civil rights because these are really good indications of his character. he grew up or entered politics as the favorite of the los angeles times which was then a very conservative newspaper in southern california. and came to believe that the game was rigged, that newspapers declared favorites, and there wasn't any tradition of objectivity in the reporting. and when he got to washington, he expected the same thing. so when there were critical articles written about him, he saw them as enemies from the other side. he had never actually run boo

them in california -- run into them in california, but now here they were, and they were against him. and believe it or not, large segments of the american media are left-leaning and liberal. [laughter] and they didn't like nixon from the get go. they didn't like him because he had defeated liberal heroes to get to washington, and they didn't like him because as soon as he got to washington, he exposed a former assistant secretary of state as being a soviet spy who was a darling of the left. and so right from the beginning, there was this confrontation. another man like jfk, more secure in his shell may have been able to endure this, but not nixon. it gnawed at him. he was always insecure. and that insecurity, no matter what his accomplishment, it was never enough for him because he felt bad about himself as a person and felt that it would never last, he would never be happy. and so the press was this

constant irritant to him. the files are filled with advice from well-meaning aides, reporters, friendly reporters saying, stop, go to the press bar, have a drink with these guys, you know? make connections. this is awfully self-destruct i have behavior. but it's true. in the middle of the -- at the end, at the end of his first term when the peace negotiations with north vietnam hit a bump, he ordered a massive bombing of north vietnam called the christmas bombing. and so on the tapes there's this amazing transcript where kissinger comes in, and they're talking about military and strategic and diplomatic maneuvers, and then all of a sudden nixon starts screaming at henry kissinger, the press is the enemy, the press is the enemy, the press is the enemy. the professors are the enemy. the media's the enemy. write thatten on your back bloard a-up times -- blackboard a-up times, henry. >> but he didn't tweet it. >> he didn't tweet it.

[laughter] >> and kissinger ignored it. >> and he didn't say the press was the enemy of the american people, which is a step higher. finish and in nixon's case of lying, nixon had a basic respect for the intelligence of the people that his were clever lies. trump's are such bay about the lies like paul manafort was not a major player in the trump campaign, or i've been wiretapped by barack obama. it's almost, it's almost surrealistic. it's almost an insult that nixon never would have done like that. he was, i'll give you an example. when they came back from china, they had lost the chopsticks, and somebody said, well, we really want to preserve a set of the chopsticks for the nixon library, and nixon said -- grab any pair of chopsticks. people will never know. [laughter] he did not have a basic reverence for truth either. >> frank?

>> so i attended a talk a few years ago, and it was a guy from nixon's administration, and he was saying there was a kind of loyalty within the administration that when he was being sworn in, he felt like he was swearing to nixon and not, you know, to pledge allegiance to the country. >> uh-huh. >> how do you think nixon was able to establish that kind of loyalty? >> nixon's favorite football coach was a guy named george allen, the coach for the washington redskins. george allen was famous for, it's a common tactic in kevins, but george allen was famous for carrying it to the extreme, of making the other team the enemy, the bad guy. and that was one thing, i think, nixon tried to do with his people. he had a very nice long -- much, much longer honeymoon with the press and the public than trump is having. his honey moon lasted almost six or seven months where he was

given a lot of leeway, people were patient. they wanted to see what he could do about vietnam. so he didn't really turn paranoid until the fall of '69 when the students got back on the campuses and they began to protest the war again. and then the following spring and the spring of 1970 you have the shootings at kent state, and the paranoia really ratchets up, and the hatred really ratchets up. but all of that created sort of a siege mentality in the white house. and so not only was nixon demanding personal loyalty, but you began to feel -- i mean, at one point they took city buseses and encircled the white house with city buses so the protesters could not get in and burn and raze the white house. that's how paranoid they were about it. and that in 1971, they begin the tapes, and you hear that paranoia over and over and over again. so, you know, he had a shot. he had six or seven months. and i don't mean to make it sound like finish.

>> part of that honeymoon was because there was someone even more famous than him coming to washington at the same time, vince lombardi. [laughter] >> i thought you were going to say elvis. >> david broder wrote a column. >> is that right? >> yes. about nixon being overshadowed by another new presence in town. jude. >> so thank you so far, this has been great. i am wondering, and speaking of lessons of a failed presidency, in the hopes that now we will have a successful presidency, what lessons would you wish to impart from your knowledge of nixon to our current president in terms of isolating and going after groups in the way that nixon did in his involvement in the house un-american activities committee. >> i think at this point donald trump still has a chance to have

a very successful presidency. we are so early in a four-year term. but the question with trump not that he's not getting good advice, because you can see it like in the state of the union speech two weeks ago that he can do the reagan-esque performance if he has to. but he has this, his own character flaw which is he has, trump has to be trump, and that means that i have to tweet outrageous things which means, you know, my inauguration crowd has to be the biggest inauguration crowd. if had the self-discipline and control of somebody like reagan, i think he could turn it around very quickly, and you would have a democratic nightmare in that an effective republican president right now with both the senate and the house in republican hands and now the supreme court going back to where it was, you know, you really could have great, great changes.

>> you do a nice job of discussing nixon and civil rights. if there's a news nixonin' 1968 there's also a new nixon in civil rights transform from the nixon who in the eisenhower administration, along with the attorney general are really pushing as hard as they can on eisenhower to take a stronger pro civil rights stand and helpful in passage of the civil rights act, to nixon who to get

the republican nomination in '68 and then to win the election, first gets in bed withstrom thurmond and then aloud what we call southern strategy to prevail. does that change something you can see coming? where does that fit in the analysis that you do of nixon? >> like i said i stopped the become twice, the narrative the flow of the book twice to zero in on where we are in civil rights right now. think it illustrates his character. all i think politicians are expedient to some degree. nixon was almost totally expedient, and yet in the '50s, in part, again, because -- and yet in part because he wanted to get the black vote in the cities against whoever he ran against in 1960. he reached out to martin luther king, jr. and made flippedded with martin luther king, a good

friend of jackie robinson, he attended black social events in washington, dc when -- the first american vice president to visit a black family in their home. a wonderful letter he -- in whittier, she barber shop had a shoe shine mon -- man and he had a daughters' passed through washington, and dix nixon took her to lunch in the senate dining room, and that must have been a shock just by itself in the 1950s, and then he writes this wonderful letter to a friend of his back in whittier, saying it really just is so a's affirm mist faith is in country that the daughter of a shoe-shine boy in whittier is now graduating from columbia law school, a person of such grace

and intelligence, and now has a positive future ahead of her. so the feelings were genuine. he really did take the quicker -- the quaker abolitionism from his mother. is father died at get gettysburg and and there was word the quakers were helping the underground railroad them joined club that admitted black members in 1920s so he was color blind as far as martin luther king could see, and in 1957, when the first civil rights bill hit the under of the senate, he was its -- one of its mightiest champions as you said. and then in the 1960 election, he loses the black vote because he falters at a key moment.

king king king is arrested and on a trumped up charge and sent to a prison in rural georgia, and jack kennedy and bobby kennedy get in contact with the governor o georgia, examiner interseed with the judge, call king king's wife to comfort her and make a big impact on the black population in america, and the nixon campaign says, no comment. and martin luther king, who had once said if richard nixon is not totally color blind he is the most dangerous man in america because he was convinced that nixon is big-hearted and now considers him the most dangerous man in america because he put on a show of sympathy and support but the first time it cost him votes, he wasn't there when it countered. so then you move on to 1968, and reagan is running for the presidency and trying to get the

consecutive votes from the -- conservative vote little from the south, and nixon makes a deal with strom thurmond in which he promise the nixon administration will lay off the pro negro stuff, and hesitate on the integration of schools, in order to security the southern delegation at that convention. and then in his presidency, he does things like appoint southern racist judges to the supreme court and drags his heel on some civil rights measures, and yet, when the supreme court says you have to integrate the schools he puts together an amazing effective plan with people like george schultz and integrates the southern schools and more kid black kid go into

integrated schools because of richard nixon more than any other president. and the one guiding light is expediency. he said this is what i have to do the moment. the great tragedy of his be trail -- not betrayal of the civil right movement but his switch was that kennedy and johnson put the dignity of the white house behind the civil rights movement. they had aligned the presidency with civil rights, which was something that eisenhower had never done. truman and fdr had never done. they'd come out and said this an american cause that the presidency is all about, and nixon backed off from that. and so all of a sudden he moral authority of the white house would no long ever with the civil rights movement and he started talking about civil rights extremists and who want instant integration and forced busing are just as bad as the klan, which is a horrible comparison, but again it was

because he saw votes in south, the first -- not the first but a major step of the way towards the total republican control of the south that you have now. >> nixon's life through the 20th century and you can write a book about -- the mccarthy era to vietnam and watergate, watergate is the defining issue of his political career, and how does he change -- what did you pick to write about to write about that and how much did you draw on my colleagues, bob woodward and carl bernstein. >> their files the university of texas. to all the watergate interviews of the -- from the sources who

either released them from the off the record guarantee or passed away. so i went to uta, i spent what was supposed to be a 40-minute interview, turned out to be a three-hour discussion with bob woodward which was invaluable. previously i ired into ben bradley before the passed away. so a very good feel for their work and a great admiration for it. but there were also -- what they did, what was so important, they kept the story alive until the -- like the judge said late are -- i have to slow down. the break-in happens in '72. nixon gets reelected despite the post's reporting and then the burglars go on trial before the judge, and the judge later tells everybody that he decided he had to tease -- a republican jump

but had to take a tough stand and read the post's reporting and he wanted questions answered even though the u.s. attorney just wanted a quick conviction of the burglars. and so judge threatens the burglars with long prison sentences to force them to talk and they crack, and that's how the coverup finally cracks. the tapes show -- famous conversation nixon has withjohn dean in march of 1973 when dean says theirs a cancer on the presidency. we have been committing perjury, raising hush money, prom -- promising clemency. your top aide have to go to jail and john decencies that because he thinks the president doesn't know, but in the white house tapes show that from the second day after the burglary nixon was

in on agency. constantly calling calling calll des moines and ehrlichman saying is -- we have to keep the attorney general john mitchell safe because we can't afford to lose mitchell. how are we doing on raising money? money has to be raised. let's hope they washed that money correctly and go on and on so by the time john dean comes in, nixn knows everything except one little nugget of information, the exact amount of hush money they needed to raise that week. that's the only news in that entire speech i can determine. so the was in the coverup, up to his neck, and his loyalists have attempted of the years to try to say it was -- that dean ran the coverup or that dean and hall theman and and ehrlichman betrayed him.

the tapes show right from the extort he would play it rough, the with a they play it of he was going to be tough, tough, tough, and it was a terrible downfall. >> want to take some more questions now? >> can you stand the microphone, please? >> was nixon a wealthy man any time of his life or after his presidency? was he a man of some wealth? >> he was certainly not wealthy as a child. had to go to whittier instead of a better school. he got to go to duke law school on a full scholarship. and by the time he did the checkers speech, his holdings as revealed them were to meager as

to be -- his wife pat was humiliated he was announcing how poor they were on national television. he made a little money after he lost in 1960. became a corporate lawyer, and lived comfortably for the rest of his life, but nixon was never motivated by great wads of money. he didn't want to worry about it because that was a distraction from what he really liked to dream about which was mitt cal -- political power and how he wore shape the globe and become a great hero. but many, many rumors spread about hidden nixn wealth after watergate, and not true. the only thing that bailed him out was he god i think $600,000 from david pros to do the interviews and then wrote books the rest of his life to keep the wolf from the door. so money was never a great motivating factor, which is interesting considering he came from such a poor household.

>> can you talk about mixon and title ix? >> if you go out in the nixn library now you'll see there's a play which lists all of the considerable domestic accomplishments of his administration, including a volunteer arm y, help me out here -- the establishment of the epa, the clean air act, and one of the things that came up to his desk was this title ix amendment which said that colleges had to treat female sports programs equally with the men, and the -- and nixon was a big college football fan and he had lots of friends who were coaches at notre dame and oklahoma and elsewhere, and they all called him up and said this is outrageous. it's going to damage all of supports.

they don't want to -- some of them can run track or play tennis but your talking about we have soccer teams for them, equal facilities? you can hear this on the tapes, nickon saying this is crazy. why are we doing this? but it was slipped into another bill that was more important that he felt he had to sign and so he signed and it now if you go out few the nixon library they've have a display saying one of his great accomplishments was president was the signing of title ix which is technically true but something he had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do. >> given the conservative liberal dichotomy today you mentioned he started the epa. can you tell me what the motivation was for that back then? >> yeah. he was inaugurated on january 20th in '69 and i think a week later there was massive oil spill off of san

santa barbara, california, and is it was heavily covered by the media. he was from southern california and he talked to the people of santa barbara and had a photo opportunity. this inning nighted the environmental movement in the united states, and the republicans and democrats got in a race or competition who could do more for the environment, and nixon won. of if you poll environmental organizations today they will say that in the number one president was -- for the environment was ted are roosevelt and the none would was richard nixon. it wasn't jas epa it was clean if a and coastal zone management and engrangerred speed act and almost all of the major environmental legislation was signed by richmond nix -- richard mixon at that time. >> signed by -- >> certainly driven and put on his desk by democratic congress

but he had aides like ehrlichman and whitaker who were very devoted to the cause and nixon had a basic -- he admired teddy roosevelt, was from california, watching what was happening in california with smog in los angeles and this oil spill and other cases but he could never -- never good as far as the democrats and that began to frustrate him, and abuse he was a republican, he had a business constituency which wants things thick the super sonic transport and the alaska pipeline which he wanted to go along with, and so he never -- he got frustrated and there's a great tape filled with profanity so i can't recite it as i'd like to right now -- >> we're on c-span. >> it's from '73 where he starts spouting, i'm not a liberal. i'm a conservative, and all i

get on my desk is this liberal crap over and over again. all we're doing is re-organizing the chaos a little better. all this environmental stuff is bull, and i don't know why i'm doing this, and so there was that side of him, too. so when the issue was hot, he was there. in part it wassed expediency ate point that put on a his desk a measure which said of that we have all this federal surplus lan land. we had military bases that were being closed and he had it would be nice to have park's are for families and nixon remembered as a child parks were something the family could afford and he put his heart hip it. an example, a very complex character with complex motivations with an underslight streak of sentimentality and

that's why he is going down in excite -- in history and always be honored by environmentalists. and also a fantastically admired president by native americans. he had a football coach in whittier college who was a native american, and nixn had this great sympathy for native americans and there was a horrible policy of assimilation which his administration reversed sort go on trouble councils at the west there's still pictures of richard nix' on the wall. we talked to a student from china and asked her where nixon's place was and she said that, well, he is number two in your list of presidents, and i said, after who? after george washington in china, there's richard nixn as the second best president. he is slowingly climben -- c-span has a survey of where american presidents and nixon is

jumped up from the bottom. somewhere in the low 20s and probably stay there because of watergate but it's -- i think he's going to be endlessly fascinating because of the character that he was. >> before we get carried away with this, there was a columnist for the -- >> you told me today it's impossible for other biographer to not develop an empathy. >> we just read the same column by an economist who said in the end the presidency is the wrong job for amoral men. >> you could make a very good argument that nixon was no worse than franklin roosevelt. but franklin roosevelt pulled it off. this job that result had -- that roosevelt had to do all the agencied with the three letters

he knew might not work, maybe would work, and then to prepare the american people to battle the totalitarian governments in world war ii, took great cunning, greated anden si, great powers of analysis and powers of leadership arrange little demagoguery. >> but those don't add up to amorality. >> i'm not sure that -- probably an old plato or something like that argued this point or maybe just mac. >> i think sometimes morality has to come from the people and the leader has to pay attention to that, but that i think that vision and effectiveness are

truly important, total amorality, no. obviously can't go in that direction. >> where does nixon fall. >> he was pretty -- it's hard to find much that nixon really, really truly believed in or wouldn't do. and in that regard he had the capacity to have been a great president. to pull off things like the opening to china but there was that same lack of morality that got him in trouble. >> also in your work this idea that he was not ideological. >> no. >> that was actually something i was thinking about when you talked about trump. there is this option of someone who is elected who doesn't have the ideologies of the time, and nixon was somewhat like that and gives him wonderful opportunities but also incredible dangers, i suppose. >> didn't have a firm rudder.

an angry enemy hoe wrote we're neither fish nor foul. now -- fowl and the conservatives are getting upset and nixn is a president who is man without a party but reagan came in and the conservatived took over the republican party and nixon is seep as a squish, who created the epa. so he lingers in the -- >> hope was to create a new political movement because of watergate. he was never able to consolidate what we later call the reagan conservatives and build the southern majority. >> that do you know donald trump thinks of richard nixon. >> i've heard and i'm not sure

it's reliable but i heard on his wall in the oval office he has a letter from richard nixon. nixon met aim when he was still the donald, running around new york and being on the front page of the tabloids, and wrote him some sort of note which said, don, you're going to go a long way, and whether or not it's in the oval office or somewhere else the white house i think he has kept that and certainly show it and talk about it a lot. he could do worse. but -- and i think he is doing worse. >> he practiced. >> okay. well, we'll take one more question. i'm sorry. >> wait for the microphone, please. >> just curious, did you interview nixon's daughters or have a perspective on how being a father affected his outlook or if it affected his outlook.

>> he was very clumsy human being when it came to interactions with fellow human beings, even his family. they would communicate with notes slipped under doctors at night or left on pillows. i asked jewly and trisha if they would sit down and a great tragedy is they have not sat down for a long oral history about their dad and insights that could give, with the exception of julie's biographyy of her mother, will be lost if they don't. julie would if i was as a crisis point and there was a question i had that only she could answer, we would have an exchange of e-mails and she sent me a picture of -- a wonderful picture of nixon playing the bepiano for his grandchildren that could i use. i wasn't totally forced out but still an awful lot of bitterness and resentment there about the

way they'd been treated by the press and by buy biographers and the intelligentsia. so, no, itself was a lost opportunity. i went in thinking that was my special brand of branny i would be able to happen this happen and it didn't. blarney. >> in my opinion a great gift of biographyy in particular is taking a subject we tech we know hell and making him or here more complex, perhaps creating some empathy or understanding. so thank you, because even from tonight's discussion it's clear that the work you did in this book and we all look forward to digging into the book and getting to learn more about nixon. so thank you so much and thank you to the panelists who was here to join the conversation. if you're interested the book, i invite you to step and the lobby where our local book store has a sales table. thank you for being here and

thank you for your provocative work. [applause] >> here's a look at authors featured on "after words"

>> what i think hat to indian cower i -- not just divided congress. read in the "new york times" a woman moved to italy because the was afraid there would be a riot, fighting with one another about politics. one hoff my boyhood friends told me he cannot talk to his father about politics. his father is 90 and dave said all we do is shout at each other. she said i don't even go there knee.

we know that families are fighting, you unfriend somebody on facebook. if they saying something you don't like. i think that there are things that pull us together. i'll give you what i think a couple of them are. one is this drug problem. the dea, the drug enforcement agency, told me the only way to win this i education are starting very young and all the way through witch ought to have groups in neighborhoods that work to spread the message to young people. believe in mentoring programs. they're the most powerful thing, to give kids confidence. that's not republican or democrat. the drug issues not republican or democrat. that's human. it's a human issue. or somebody that lives in your neighborhood who has lost their spouse of 60 years. we all have to pitch in and help a person like that. as we begin to work together to solve these things in 0 neighborhoods we'll learn to

communicate with one another and then send a message up a to the leaders they have to knock this tough off. >> you can watch off previous "after words" programs on the web site, book tv doering -- booktv.org. >> joining us here on the city is author david horowitz. his newest book its called "big agenda: president trump's plan to save america." does it feel like the '60s so to you right now in america. >> feels much worse than the '60s -- first of all the big movement from the '60s were the hippies and they were benign. they were not really political. but even the left was not as violent and -- as this left is. i don't