good afternoon and welcome to the new nixon library. library. i am president of the richard nixon foundation. we are honored to have so many council members here today

shelley buchanan. [applause] shelley started working for richard nixon -- thank you for the support for the legacy that encourages civics and citizenship in the community. i hope everyone today will consider becoming a president's council member. i would like to introduce several people because this is almost a family reunion. how many alumni from the administration and the people that were close during his career are here today. first served to hr haldeman. [applause] larry the member of board of

directors from the foundation we certainly appreciate his service and focus on advancing the legacy. thank you. >> sandy quinn also a board member and foundation president. [applause] we have one individual i don't see here but i want to recognize him because he's special to the foundation. [applause] colonel brennan i brandon is a m veteran and purple heart recipient. [applause] the first marine military aid to the president of the united states he became close to president clinton and served as the chief of staff from 1975 to 1980. he was memorably if not

necessarily accurately played by kevin bacon in the movie frost nixon. a treasured friend of the family and a mainstay to the nixon foundation. [applause] jim represented the 27th district in the house of representatives under president george w. bush, jim served as the under-secretary commerce and as the director of the u.s. trademark office for many years he taught at the university law school. overnight, ben stein became one of the most famous people in america because of his ability to repeat one word in so many inflections. bueller. [applause]

while he so often noted before that, he's an author, actor, economist, attorney, tv pundit and served as a white house speechwriter for presidents nixon. among his assignments writing the groundbreaking health care e message to congress in 1974. thank you. [applause] i also like to recognize frank joins us today. a white house fellow that became a special assistant to the president. he led the design and construction of the new nixon library which has received two national awards already and hopefully a third next month in new york. he acts as a special advisor to the nixon foundation. [applause] when i make a reference to reunions there are two other

special individuals i want you to meet and honor. they both joined the staff of senator richard nixon in 1950 when working with the loyal and loving personal secretary rose mary woods. since then, they've been mainstays of every office and campaign and close friends to the family. serving as the white house assistant, with the foundation before its opening in 1992 until she retired in 2007. she remains assistant treasury of the nixon foundation board. their combined knowledge of richard and pat nixon and their combined loyalty and dedication, intelligence and integrity guided them to inspire generations of colleagues and friends and delighted they are with us today. [applause]

and now the reason we are here today to welcome pat buchanan and his new book the white house wars. "the new york times" already recommends the book that you should purchase and read and it describes pat as one of the most consequential conservatives of the past half-century. to introduce path, we called on the nixon white house colleague and longtime friend in native californian who joined the 1968 campaign in new york at columbia university law school and graduated and joined the nixon administration as a staff assistant and speechwriter as a special assistant to the president. he joined the former president to work on his memoirs and was his chief researcher with the frost nixon interviews and ronald reagan presidential campaign he traveled with the candidates to enhance the

speeches and in the white house he was the chief speechwriter. among the many memorable and historic speeches he wrote was blustering and moving farewell address at the convention in 1988. he then also worked in the successful campaign. today he's the veteran of nine presidential campaigns and has been an advisor and strategist for governors and drug arrests in manand many of california's t distinguished public servants. he served for many years in the richard nixon foundation board of directors and continues to advise and contribute in its current capacity role. thank you. [applause] he still lives and remains active in law and politics and community life. we are delighted that they are

here today and don't get me started on meredith's biography. please join me in welcoming the great american, californian and friend of the nixon family and foundation. [applause] 50 years ago as a student at columbia law school i had seen an article in "the new york times" about the staff that was surrounding then potential candidate richard nixon and the numbers of staff for calling him pat buchanan. so i wrote a letter to nixon asking if i could help on the campaign mentioning that maybe one of these fellows i could work for them.

i didn't get a letter back the first time, so i wrote it again. meredith worked at wall street about three blocks from the office so she handcarried affair and so a few weeks later i got a letter back from one of his assistants and i've got that letter here 50 years ago. [applause] so i met pat in his cubicle and told him i would like to do some research. i was a law student was raised

on a farm in california and told him i knew farm issues and i got questions about obscure agricultural concept from the harry truman years called the plan or what i knew about it and i knew nothing about it. i thought i messed up my interview and all of my chances of working on the campaign. not only that but i later found out he thought that i was a spy from the rockefeller campaign. to this day he still thinks th that. he must have taken pity on me and told me to come on in and put me to work answering correspondence and the rest is history. patty became my boss and mentor.

now to give you a little insight i had a title when i worked for past and it emanated from our good friend here who became a noun in the white house and worked for bob haldeman so among those of us in the white house, his last name became a noun, so john ehrlichman and she happened

to be diane sawyer and even higbee. i was buchanan's higbee and that became the 50 year long-term friendship. that was part of the white house that was very unique and part of a murderer's row of speechwriters that they could have had ever since. they came from the new york herald tribune and hea and he'dn an editorial that endorsed lyndon johnson over barry goldwater and he had to speechwriters with the most remarkable staff ever. i think that we were in all of them for their talents but pat

began his remarkable career with nixon in 65 and he became the campaign aide and chronicled this remarkable period he worked with nixon from 1965 to 1968 when he worked with richard nixon during this comeback. a where richard nixon rose to become president of the united states. in the white house, pat wasn't only the conservative conscience but strategist for the preside

president. no other was able to capture the unique forces shaping america in the 60s and 70s as pat. more importantly in terms because he had spent that time in such close contact with you will find in this book is a roadmap of the great battle with the american left and the media and if you were there when we were there it is a true insight into the years we were there and it was all done in the grips of the social unrest and the vietnam war and frankly the records left behind by jack kennedy and lbj and the great

society. it was before the computer keypad by the way. this took away one of the great fun of writing speeches. it has no noise to it. we had typewriters back then. they made a loud noise. some of the speechwriters could make the typewriter thing. pat was working and could make the typewriter smoke. [laughter] i remember because i share share office with him in the last year and a half and i can remember when he was working on a speech they were always a little more on the attack side. i was always trying to emulate that to hear the typewriter you

knew that he was working on something very important. he left his mark of loyalty to the man whose name is on this build and he needs loyalty and credibility to ideas and personal conviction. when we were here pat and shelley would visit and he would be so happy the room was full of laughter and all the political gossip he would bring back from washington and they would have stories of the great battles they worked on inside and the president would ask pat what was going on and it was a lot of fun to watch the interaction but throughout the years we had fun and it wasn't all work. welcome to the west coast especially glad to have you back

in the house with the old man's name on it may be we can suit up one more time and turn this country around. [applause] ♪ thank you. i can still remember him coming down columbia university and after the interview with me he was going down the hall and i did say check this guy out i think we have a rockefeller spy and he went on to be a

strategist with the greatest political mind can't richard nixon and the speechwriter from one of the greatest communicators of all time, ronald reagan. [applause] i was just on a tour of the library now that the others have fixed it up in a was the first time i'd seen it and i will say for the folks in the c-span audience and of course everyone here, having worked with the old man for eight and a half years, you can't watch the film without having your heart torn out. it's magnificent and i barely got through it but you want to see it. let me talk now about nixon and what was in the book the battles that made and broke a president

and changed america forever. ken has listed what was going on back in the 60s so this was the year before richard nixon took office. we took off january 302001 for new hampshire in 1968 romney had been in the race a couple months not doing well. we flew up to new hampshire and i remember teddy asking me about the tet offensive that just occurred and i had a brother in vietnam at the time and that of course cost a thousand american lives. they basically came home and said the war is lost. we made a tremendous campaign intends when the president was there and we went back to florida and came back and went

after governor romney and he dropped out of the race. richard nixon was alone and it was followed of the night nelson rockefeller who got out of the race and began the crazy march. gene mccarthy won 42% of the vote against lbj. people don't remember he didn't even have his name on the ballot and i don't remember what brought that up but any how he e got 42 and lbj got 49 and then right after that happened we won a landslide and bobby kennedy in the senate went to the same room jack kennedy declared for president denomination around march the 17th a few days after new hampshire and then richard nixon at the end of march had me

waiting at an airport to report on him on what lyndon johnson said on the speech in vietnam because we have canceled our speech. i'm waiting in that limousine and listening to lbj and that is when he announced he wasn't going to run again and he was out of the race all of a sudden. four days later doctor king was shot to death in memphis and the riots in the city's wake-up calls from cities seventh street was burning up, federal troops and the nation's capital, marines on the steps of the capitol. this is what was going on that spring and then president nixon won six straight states no one would contest and get in there against him. there was a fellow named reagan

because as long as we have the goldwater conservatives, the nixon republicans, no one on the left could beat us, so reagan didn't get in about a month or so. he had a thelma but he only got 22% of the vote and nixon got 70%. i waited at the hotel and went down he was having dinner and celebrated. the interesting thing is the first time a kennedy had been beaten in any political race since world war ii bobby kennedy was coming up from california. we went down from the front of the bench in the hotel i went down to the room to watch him give a beautiful concession speech and say we are going on to california.

one week later i was back in new york when an aide of mine called me from the headquarters and said bobby kennedy has been shot so i called the president mr. nixon had been awakened already and i asked the president if i might because a former journalist i thought it might be interesting if i went to the democratic convention. i thought that it would be more exciting than ours so i went out and happened to have a seat on the 19th floor of what we call the conrad hilton hotel. i'd gone down in the street and i was born and raised catholic, i was in a coat and tie and everything down there at grant park and everyone would point at me and yelled fbi.

[laughter] and a lot of public things as well so i was up on the 19th floor then who walks in but norman mailer with josé torres. we heard a racket in front of us so we looked out and the police came down michigan avenue and headed into the park and wailed on these folks for 15 minutes. josé torres was cursing the police. i remained silent because i was rooting for the police after what those photos had been doing to me that there we saw the democratic party, part right in the streets of chicago as a historical event. i did feel sorry for hubert humphrey coming out of their.

they remained constant attacking him and for the first time in weeks he couldn't give any speeches done without disrupted. he started moving into this 43 for nixon beginning of octobe october 28. wallace was 217 points behind and by the end of october it was 4343 all. they lost some points. hubert humphrey had a phenomenal come back in the month of october 1868. so then we go in the white house, arrive at the white house as america was coming apart after 196,831,000 dead americans in vietnam when president nixon took office with no indoor victory in sight. the president was the first since zachary taylor in 1848 to

take office without either house of congress behind him, he had a hostile press corps. the supreme court was led by google warren, not his friend from the california days and the bureaucracy had been built up in the new deal and great societiey so it was complete with hostels there. that's the nation mr. nixon inherited but if you take a look back at the inaugural it is immensely conciliatory. in other words he held out his hand to foreign powers and others at home and said let's listen to each other and stop shouting at each other. he went on a very successful early to her, apollo 11 the

first launch of astronauts into space came in the middle of july and all i can remember is it was magnificent this gigantic rocket and i remember ray price saying the noise alone was worth the 23 billion when nothing rose o off. he gave a speech and talked about a new foreign policy where we help our friend. i think that it was far ahead of its time and frankly right on the money. then came october and all the demonstrations were forming.

it was the calm before the sto storm. and i know david was the leading liberal columnist of the day at the "washington post." he wrote on the eighth of october and said we are about to see the making of the president. it'president. it's becoming more obvious with every passing day that the man and the movement that broke lyndon johnson's authority and 68 are out to break richard nixon in 1969. the likelihood is great that they will succeed again. at that point, looking at the demonstrations, i wrote the president a significant nano, one of many in the buck and we have been asked to name the successes and i wrote the president back saying this is like asking lily to 16th about

the successes he had. we are in the eye of a hurricane and it was said that he would have been a great king that he inherited a revolution and it was a day or two later he said when do you think the president should make the speech and i said we have massive demonstrations coming up. we don't want to be spooked by these things so do it midway between the two between octobe october 15 and the one coming november 15. let me say there's a lot of people that claim credit for that but that entire speech belongs to richard milhouse nixon.

as far as i know, and i've looked up my files, to contribute to that speech, the president of the united states wrote of himself and he sat and realized his presidency was in danger of being broken and he delivered it and called on the great silent majority to stand behind him for peace and honor in vietnam and they did. the response was phenomenal and something like 70% of the american people supported the policy and even the congress and members of the house of representatives endorsed the president's speech and it was i think the real making of the president. but that night something else happened. after the speech was over, the networks crashed it came to be.

they inherited instant analysis and failed miserably and trashed the president had done as well so we got messages the next day saying call them and write letters and i tried again writing a memo to the president and said in effect it is now time to go public and deal with the hostility and the power of the networks. two thirds of the american people were getting their primary source of information about the nation and about the world from three networks where you had about 12 men in new york and washington deciding what people saw and heard about their country and what they should think basically about their president so i told the president i would be delighted

to write a speech for vice president agnew and we have a plan and we sent it over to bob haldeman and there's a photograph of the memo back that has bob haldeman's writing but it's a he has seen, go ahead. that means the president has seen, go ahead and get the vice president, write the speech and we will deliver it in a couple of days, which is what he did and the vice president went out to des moines iowa and delivered his speech on the 13th and it was one of the greatest successes in the career of the vice president who depend ridiculed for a great part of that time and i can still remember after i finished the speech i was called over by the president of the united states to the oval office and he was doing some editing on my work and i was a little concerned

about this because i thought that it was a poetic masterpie masterpiece. he had his coat and tie and glasses on and he had a pen out and would write down the words. they were licensed by government i was jolted by that and then as he went on he said quietly in sort of a murmur this will tear the scabs off of these expletives and i broke out laughing and he did also because we knew that this was going to set the country on fire at the president being the first to to take on the national press and networks and i tell you when we sent the final draft of the vice president with two changes and the only two changes came from the president. and i remember i got the word

because we put something in the speech to see if it depends on them not us, abc decided to go live with the speech and i went up to the university club a little nervous swimming in the pool, sally called me and said that cbs and nbc are going live with the speech. it's either going to be great towards the end of my political career. [laughter] it was almost as much of a sensation as was the president of the united states. there was another speech i helped him with and so what had happened, the president of the united states the first year try to reach out and work with the democrats and people will tell you he did and i'm telling you the truth, it was conciliatory that what happened is the organ

to break nixon as they had broken lyndon johnson but at the end of that year richard nixon if you can believe it was at 68% approval in the gallup poll and 19% disapproval, astonishing. here was nixon seven years before independence offers the biggest loser in american politics, astonishing. move forward now [inaudible] [laughter] thank you. but the advance now to another event and it was april 281970 i

got a call in my executive office building looking out at 17th street and i got a call from the president of the united states said, on down to my office. so i came down to his office and he said we are going into cambodia we are sending american forces if we are going to clean out fish hook and peer its beak one of them as a constant headquarters and the other was the closest area to saigon where the north vietnamese remain and would strike into south vietnam and retreats to sanctuaries and nixon says we are going into every one of them if we've already started bombing. i was taken aback because i said if you started bombing they know we are coming and that's when i learned the secret of the administration.

we've been bombing those guys for a long time and this was the bombing of cambodia which later they would try to impeach richard nixon but they did not do so. so nixon gave me a draft from the national security council that he didn't like. he said there is some good progress in here but it's dry and we need something else so he dictatedictated paragraph after paragraph and i wrote them down on those famous yellow pads and he said get this back to me in three hours and don't tell anyone or give the speech to anyone. i said i have to tell my secretary because they will type the draft. tell her but no one else. i knew this would make a problem for the individual i has the national security advisor doctor kissinger. so what i did this worke is wore draft, took it down to the

president in about three hours after i was done with it and headed up to the university club where we swam without bathing suits and i'm swimming up and down the pool and somebody comes in and says you have a phone call from the white house. i go to the phone and pick it up and it's a dramatic voice of our foreign policy adviser henry kissinger. henry and i were going back and forth fighting over this. the president did the final draft himself and the speech was explosive for any of the reasons the country assumed he just continued to move out and he would continue to clear out the sanctuaries so the american troops in vietnam with the secure while we withdraw that the countries would've exploded into the president went over to the pentagon to get to report the next day on how well the

troops were doing and when he came out there was a woman whose son and husband were in vietnam and she said thank you so president nixon said those kids over there, those men over there are outstanding and terrific. he came back to the white house and his comments started to rise than two days later, the national guard shot four students at kent state and wounded nine and the full story was the crowds in the city burned down much of the main street. at the governor came in and they called out the national guard. they burned down the rotc building on the campus and then on monday the crowds got out there and the national guard

were backing up the hill and pieces of concrete and rocks and things were thrown at them. campuses exploded and nixon was blamed. it was awful for the president and then he had a press conference that friday night and then saturday morning had a famous visit to the lincoln memorial where he got up in the middle of the night, to the capital and to make ou -- mayflr for breakfast and two days later students at jackson state were shot and african-american students who had nothing to do with the riots that had gone on in the streets. i saw him in those days.

i'd never seei've never seen hid i've got my book and then knows how the staff into the country was divided. i've never seen the president have it so tough and how he got through it alone is a remarkable tribute because there were a lot of people even who were inside the white house and let the president know that they thought he hadn't done the right thing to do. let me move to the politics of the political grand strategy of the nixon administration and he'd bring us up there as they success with fdr in creating the

new deal majority that caught five straight presidential elections and nixon ranks up there let's go back to 1962 after he lost and got beaten by pat brown during the time of the missile crisis. howard k. smith of abc ran a documentary next weekend on the political obituary of nixon ended by the culture just to testify on tv to a failure mr. nixon was, what a loser mr. nixon was and how he was at the bottom of his career. by 1972, richard nixon is back and have wo one the greatest landslide in political history. how did he do that in terms of political strategy? basically, when i went to work for nixon in 65, i argued that

they would have been strong enough together. rockefeller of course behaved badly and i told him the center of gravity has shifted. at the same time you have to center of the republican party walked up and if you can marry these conservatives forget about the rockefeller when to get these two together and you've got to get the nomination.

he did put together a coalition to keep them from coming together successfully in that end of the nomination but when we got into the white house, the question was it was 43 all, we were tied at the end of the race with humphrey coming back so we needed a strategy to build a majority. you've heard about the southern strategy and there's no doubt there was a southern strategy but there was also a northern catholic strategy and i grew up catholic in northwest dc and you could call it a ghetto but it was basically a community and they loved. truman that they liked nixon he was an anti-communist, middle america, he had a lot of things going for him but they didn't have the hostility to nixon you

found by those that despised. so there is two blocks of the democrats we can get on a variety of issues one has to roman catholics like i grew up with and the others. now mr. nixon had a solid position all along. he supported every civil rights bill. we didn't change our position on civil rights. we got new issues. it was a tie in a prius and anarchy so we're going to be the law and order party to back up the cops. we did that and there was the counterculture, sex, drugs, rock 'n roll, post rock 'n roll. so, nixon was the traditional culture and he stood up for it. there is gillespie an in the whe house. it wasn't woodstock. so needed that traditional

versus countercultural than the troops supporting vietnam. most of the working class middle-class folks have their sons over there. so, nixon stood behind the troops in the non- against the demonstrators and against the radicals and those in their moratorium in 69 who had spun off and tried to assault the department of justice to raise the vietcong flag repair on constitution avenue and i remember on the fifth floor looking out it looked like the russian revolution solis t did with those folks unabashedly on the issues of elitism. he stood with populism that he was with the middle americans,

the forgotten americans are the silent majority. all these folks do within the broad majority in the silent majority was quite pleased with them and all these folks started moving out of the democratic party or the way from the elite like teddy kennedy and the rest of them and a number of democrats wrote a book in 1970 said democrats better wake up because these folks liked agnew and nixon and the views they got thought and they don't like all this radicalism. so the country was basically we were redefining the country differently with richard nixon in the republican party amazingly we are winding up with a larger half which was astonishing when you consider 64 bit goldwater lost they had less than one third of the house and

senate, less than one third of the governors. the republican party was flat on its back. richard nixon had rebuilt it in 66 and was proceeding to make it the center core of the majority that would do what? when the four or five presidential elections in the coming years, and all four of those would be about 40 state minorities into one of south 49 state majority. that is a strategy nixon had. i must say we had digital opposition work. after 1970 was open it was january 20, 1971 nixon sent a memo to me wanting to know why we were not hammering this harder which is what we agreed on the most dangerous adversary

in 1972 was ed muskie in 1968, 1970. he'd given a nationwide speech. the press liked him and his positions were ideally suited, threats to the catholic strategy. i wrote a memo to the president in very strong terms of saying we are going to have to go after him and take him down he is the main one. i said we ought to go down to the kennels and turn all the dogs loose. three years later i was explaining that memorandum before the watergate committee. [laughter]

but president clinton was saying you know he is strong in the south. what are you doing i thought you were supposed to handle this. so i have to tell you a story it was the pentagon papers in the rose garden the next sunday. they were not from the nixon administration to the kennedy johnson and they were designed to damage and point out that we were lied into the war. henry kissinger was outraged so

they pushed ehrlichman and haldeman to get an investigation going because his father-in-law were former father-in-law was close to hoover. they kept pushing me to get together a team. so they got together in various departments.

it's not only to tie him to everything that was done but to dig anything up on his background so one of them gets up and says i am not sure if this but we have reports that many are engaged in orgies. i said ellsberg is at about 5% of the polls. let that out and you come to be to jump up to 15%. they all started laughing. [laughter] i went back to the white house and i said i'm not doing this job. my good friend took it over otherwise i would have been in charge of this.

anyhow i will say as an adversary strategy research we were in on this working together it was as effective as anything that i'd seen. he was doing extremely well and then up in new hampshire somebody sent a ticket and to this day we did not write the letter but she laughed at him insult to conducts with her french canadians many of whom are living up in new hampshire and were not amused by this. my friend published this and found they showed up in front of the union leader and breaks down in tears in front of the union leader and this is all filmed so what happened after that is got

new hampshire by about ten points but it was a small amount considering he came from next-door so then he goes down to florida and is wiped out by george wallace who swept every county in the state on anti-bussing yeshivas wiped the floor with six liberal democrats so he was pretty much out of the race. we had written a memo after i did and n. .... long analysis, took thousands of words, researched the press clippings and everything we had. i had it done and then i said pesky, kennedy, jackson and humphrey are the only credible

ones we see as democratic candidates. no president is so virtuous as to be granted george mcgovern to run against. we've got ten in june of 1972 we had gotten george mcgovern. then he moved out to the watergate thing and by june 17 the whole thing lasted 22 months until the presidents resignati resignation. i got the call on june 17 after they'd broken in saying people broke into the watergate headquarters and i knew instantly it was probably our folks almost assuredly from the committee to reelect so that proceeded and it wasn't huge until the spring of 1973 and

then it was the time that we decapitated the entire white house staff then we went through and the tapes were revealed in the hearings and i testified for five hours before the ervin committee because we have done some dirty trick strategy which we had not. it came october and one reason i want to mention this is because it was brought up in the firing of james comey. i told folks i didn't arrange to have the firing of james comey. had the president announced it on the saturday night massacre. let me tell you again to put this into some perspective of where the president was, it's october and i just testified. the president said, on down and take a couple of days off.

we were down there and on october 6, the egyptian army crossed the canal, surprise attack and moved aircraft guns and shot the american air force out of the sky and killed a thousand of troops and for pushing through the sinai peninsula and they were breaking through caught by surprise because of the jewish high holy days. said to be preparing to fix nuclear weapons on the aircraft he said this may be the end of the third temple so this war in the middle east going than the vice president resigned on the tenth and then you have a great argumenthegreat argument in thee house about who should replace him. then we worked out a deal with the special prosecutor, or we thought we worked out a deal to turn over the tapes to the special prosecutor and here's what the deal was.

we would provide all of the watergate materials but not the tapes themselves. the democrat from mississippi would validate the complete and accurate regarding watergate and then they would be provided to the watergate committee and the prosecutor, elliot richardson and i was told was aboard with video, senator durbin was aboa aboard. we were not sure archibald cox the special prosecutor was aboard but my understanding is richardson said if he refuses to accept the deal he will not be allowed to subpoena any more tapes. if he refuses and goes after more tapes i will exercise my duty tha that he's gone beyond e bounds and i will remove them myself so we were all set.

he said here's the deal so that we finthenwe find out he is notd and i sent a memo over to the president and he says come on over to the oval office. around 3:30 on saturday she went into the office and calmly explained i have henry kissinger reportedly putting nuclear weapons on ships. the airborne divisions are moving towards airfields. we have american forces on heightened alert. i cannot have my attorney general defined me when we've got the impression it over there watching my reaction to what's going on. i have no choice but to do it and to this day i think the

president had no choice. [applause] i think he did the right thing. [applause] so the circumstances of this are all lost. what you see is the president went over to throw everybody out of the special prosecutor's office when they were doing such a nice job. we want to get to some questions. let me talk about the achievements of richard nixon, and again this library has it magnificently. the editorial editor at the post said i think we belong to the

nixon generation. we never know if a time growing up when he was not an issue in the election and i think that is right. i don't know if you had him out here he's a democratic strategist, a very bright fellow that worked in the campaign and said he was the most consequential political figure of the second half of the 20th century. bob dole and his famous eulogy said ours is the age of nixon and considered only two men in american history have been on five national tickets. richard nixon and fdr. richard nixon set the all-time record of being on the cover of the magazine 55 times from the alger hiss case in the senate races, vice presidency to his

own presidency and beyond. what did he achieve comey promised to bring the troops home, and he did. he negotiated the greatest strategic arms limitations agreement sends the washington naval agreement. he opened up communist china which had been sealed for 25 years from the horrors of the korean war and then he saved israel, golda meier herself. richard nixon is the best friend we ever had. egypt even at the end of his presidency he brought egypt back around into the western camp. the domestic policy he ended the

draft and enacted the 18-year-old vote. he created epa and i wasn't involved in that but i remember birthday and all these issues and i remember we were sitting in a meeting, howard baker was there and 1966 we helped elect him. senator baker was there and they were working on the clean air act and i remember a comment the senators made. if we get finished on this thing the only thing that is going to be able to move in america is a small pony. [laughter] it created osha and to protect against inflation, elevated the national cancer institute and declared a war on cancer and have four justices elevated to the supreme court including one president and one future chief justice, the segregated southern

schools, even a little democrat and anti-nixon columnist for the times wrote a book called one of us where he believes it was his greatest achievement. he moved the nation off the gold standard. i think that he was rivaled by fdr. one time he pulled me aside and said i think mr. nixon had a pretty good for foreign policy. so who was richard nixon? politically speaking with me tell you a story he was a famous

british correspondent who'd been writing things about nixon and he wanted an interview and i told mr. nixon he should do it so i was in the room at the oval office and they don't take notes they just sit and listen. but she asked if he would have been a new deal rather than the postwar era and he wrote a long memo that is in my book about yorba linda and he wasn't against government action and he didn't believe folks like him should rely on it and people should only use the government needed it. so nixon came to power in the postwar gop in 1946,

anti-communism and the cold war these were the issues initially that made and define him with the alger hiss case, the battles against adlai stevenson. 1968 he moved on from the conservative to the broader vision of the world. there was a touch of woodrow wilson and this idea he could create a generation of peace. we haven't had one of those so it might be a utopia. in domestic policy i think the term is progressive or pragmatic republican when it comes to issues like epa or if he felt it

could do good for the people he was not adverse to that and a lot of the programs you will see indicate that. nixon was also an internationalist but not a globalist. he's going off to europe and he and jack kennedy both supported the marshall plan and nato and containment of the soviet union. on politics richard nixon it's fair to say in his political strategies and tactics it was anti-elitist, partly populist that got those represented in his own way and at the combination of those three things were the things that gave

him that landslide in 1972. socially and culturally as a traditionalist. one story that's in my book i did the briefing books after when he was vice president and when i went to work for him in 65 and 66. nixon pretty soon had me doing the books for him to. and he would go over to his office and say i want my briefing book by such and such they. i would go through all the papers and get the questions, go through the briefings and get the questions asked, caller onto the major departments. give me a call if you are after something and after a while it

got so i could predict almost every question that was asked in a press conference and sometimes i actually predicted every single one of. i had gotten every question and it was obvious so he called and said you did your usual excellent job. i noticed that you predicted every question the president asked and i said yes, sir. he said there's other questions in the book that were not asked. i paused and then he said next time, leave those out. [laughter] one other time in my runs for the presidency