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tv   Michael Dobbs King Richard  CSPAN  August 12, 2021 12:49pm-1:52pm EDT

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that moment i simply shouted out at the top of my lungs this is because of you here i screened it. >> okay. >> it's because of you. [shouting] >> and i think i was representing four years of angst and anxiety and anger. many of us saw this coming from a mile away, many in the country did. i think i've represented probably millions of americans who felt the same way. at that very moment the entire country including myself recognize the fragility of our democracy. i had great appreciation for the traditions in the congress and the courtroom. i do not like to violate it but i do not regret it because it was what i i was feeling and t was four years of pent up anxiety about what was transpiring right in front of our eyes. >> this week to alter from democrat jamie raskin a a of d republican brian fitzpatrick of
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pennsylvania. january 6, views from the house sunday night at ten eastern on c-span, c-span.org or listen on the c-span radio app. >> we are delighted this evening on our author program to welcome author michael dobbs. michael has written a wonderful book that has been well received called "king richard." he is also a journalist formerly with the "washington post" and he has taught at the university of michigan, princeton, and georgetown. he is going to speak to us this evening for a little bit about his book and we will answer questions later in the book, excuse me, later in the program. i do want to alert you to the fact that this coming thursday we have another author robert kyles and use written a a book called when truth matters about the may 4 incident at kent
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state. and on monday june 7 we have the book kindred, and on june 10 we have tony who is the author of the book in the wee small hours, his conversations with frank sinatra. but i want to return to ten nights program and author michael dobbs who's going to talk to us about his book "king richard", the 37th president president and incidence of watergate. so michael, what can you tell us about king richard? >> thank you very much. for those of you who haven't seen it, this is a copy of my book which came out last week. its full title is "king richard: nixon and watergate--an american tragedy" ." it has as you can see a rather dark picture of richard nixon on
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the front cover. i'm going to explain in a little bit the structure of the book, why i chose to call it "king richard" but first of all i would just tell you a little bit about myself and what i chose to write this book, which is usually the first question that is aimed at authors, why did you write the book? as you can tell from my accent, i'm originally on the uk but i'm now living in the u.s. i worked for a long time with the "washington post" for 25 years. when i was a kid i don't know if this is typical of everyone, but for me i used to take these train rides around the uk and it would go through suburbs, past towns and villages, and often the houses were very close to
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the railway. i used to look inside the people's houses that the train went past, and i was so curious about what was going on inside these houses, what with the conversations around the dinner table, the lunch table, workpeople arguing with each other, what with the family dynamics inside these anonymous houses? so perhaps it's not surprising that i became a reporter as a profession because it's a profession that allows you to exercise your insatiable curiosity and to pry into other people's lives. i started covering big political events. i was sent by the "washington post" as a foreign correspondent first to poland in the middle of
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the whole collapse of communism actually, and then later on i went to russia and when i arrived in russia the whole system was in the process of collapsing and unraveling. so i wrote, i was a witness to that, witness to the collapse of communism, but i understood when i was a reporter that there was a lot that i didn't know that was going on behind closed doors. so i was very, again in a in a curious to know what was happening in the kremlin, as opposed to the part of politics that russian soviet politicians chose to reveal of themselves. it's sometimes said that journalism is a first rough draft of history, but i wanted to particularly when i left russia i wanted to find out all the things that i hadn't understood or known about when it was the reporter in moscow.
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so i wrote a book called down with big brother which is a narrative of history really of communism which i was able to include because of the release of kremlin documents and interviews with participants in these events, i was able to describe what was happening behind all these closed doors that i was unable to penetrate as a reporter. so always felt like kind of a little boy trying to, you know, with my nose pressed to the glass trying to figure out what's going on inside places that i have really got no right to be. first the kremlin and then later here in washington, the white house. so this gets me to the subject of why i chose to write this
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book about nixon and watergate, in particularly as his presidency begins to unravel at the beginning of 1973. and the answer is that we will never get as which archival resource, or we will never get as close to any american president as we were able to get -- as we are able to get to the 37th president, richard nixon, particularly at this very crucial time of his political career as he was facing the gravest political crisis imaginable, existential crisis for him that ended up with his own resignation. as you all know, no doubt, nixon taped himself, and other
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president had taped themselves before nixon, but they all controlled the recording. they turned it off and turned it on wendy wanted to record something. with nixon -- when they -- among other characteristics he was rather ham-fisted with technology and nobody would trust him and he wouldn't trust himself to turn on the recording equipment when he wanted to turn it on. so they invented a system that the recording devices would turn on automatically whenever nixon went into a room or picked up a telephone. so that means that we have got much more recordings of nixon than any other president. i mean, i think with lbj there was about 700 hours of lbj's telephone conversations with nixon there's nearly 400 -- 4000
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hours of tape recordings, not just of his telephone conversations, but he had microphones planted in the oval office, the cabinet room, up in camp david, and then on telephones including the most private room in the white house where he liked to retire at the end end of the day, his favorite room in the white house actually was the lincoln sitting room. and at the end of the day he would call people up and talk to them about the events of the day so you have this entire record of nixon talking and sounding off about everything that happened during the day. then in addition to that, his chief of staff bob halderman captain audio diary every night, memoirs of the former house white -- why does it come back to that but who plays an
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important role in watergate, you know, hundreds of thousands of documents from the nixon white house. so you end up with the richest repository of information that you can imagine for any president. because no president is ever going to taped themselves again, we will never get as close of you of what's really going on in the white house as we do with richard nixon, even though this was never nixon's intention. nixon regarded these recorded as is private property which he intended to use for his memoirs, and was horrified when the recording started to be publicly released, because he's completely indiscreet in these conversations. so now this sort of wealth of
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documentation poses both a a challenge, is both a blessing and a curse by biographers of nixon because if you're a barter for trying to describe all of nixon's life from birth to death you don't have the space to give, to go into detail about what was occurring day by day, minute by minute. .. for reasons i'll try to explain, the hundred days after his inaugural from january 20 1973 when he
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seemed to be at the top of his game, he still hada 67 percent approval rating at that time . and one reelection by one of the largest margins of the popular vote in american history if not the largest margin and largely put watergate behind him. he was about to conclude a peace agreement in vietnam. he had varioustriumphs including the opening to china , russia and so on but he really was feeling pretty confident and then within 100 days it all falls apart and this very disciplined white house, the aides start fighting with each other. watergate, the cover-up of watergate, the attempted cover-up disintegrates and everybody is running forcover . the aides start trying to shift the blame onto each
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other and finally they all start shifting the blame onto the president himself. it's a very traumatic period, all of which is captured or most of it iscaptured on tape. even really if you focus on that period , i bring in other background but the narrative of the story is about that hundred days and it really allows me to do something i don't think has been done before which is to tell the story in a very intimate way . now, i called it, why did i call the book king richard? king richard is an allusion to shakespearean tragedy, king lear. i see next and as a tragic figure but he was told another reason for the title is his mother who was a pious
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quaker out in california named all her boys after kings of england. and including richard who she named after the crusader king richard the lion heart it. so this title is very apt i feel. so the book begins, the opening scene is between is set in the lincoln sitting room as i said, nixon's favorite room in the white house on the second floor of the white house in the private quarters. smallest room in the white house, actually ãand would go up there every night to listen to music and to scribble on his yellow legal pad and to phone in his cronies and on the night of january 20, 1973 at one in
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the morning among other things he had trouble sleeping. he couldn't get to sleep. he called his aid chuck colson who was also known as his man and talks about the, his wish to get even with his enemies. and how he is going to wrap up the vietnam war and also how he would gain to get even with the washington post with pursuing my former newspaper was pursuing this investigation into watergate so i'm going to play a little extract from that tape and so you can see how rich this material is. now, he's just come back from the kennedy center. there's an inaugural day concert at the kennedy center and he's actually they played tchaikovsky's 1812 overture
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and the pianist was ben clyburn so he's pumped up about that . he doesn't like the washington symphony orchestra or political reasons. he's brought the philadelphia harmonic down to play for him . he considers them more politically aligned with him. the conductor usually, so i'm going to play a little bit of that and he goes on another extract about his inaugural address he's about to deliver and he shares portions of it with chuck colson and then he talks about the vietnam war and he talks finally about how he's going to stick it to the washington post so i'm going to try to share this with you. and i'll meet you on the otherside here .
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okay, so i think i'm sharing this with you . lincoln's sitting room, january 20, 1973 . resident next and and chuck colson, segment one. >> i think the idea of having true context is great. it's a great symphony, without that goddamn washington symphony . [inaudible] [inaudible] the said he doesn't want to put his arm around me in front of
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these blood ringers. >>. [inaudible] >> segment 2. >> you want to hear a little bitof the acceptance speech ? >>. [inaudible] >> the time has come to turn away from the mercantilism washington knows best. >> that was great. >> a person can expect to act responsibly only if it's human nature so let us improve at home and do more for themselves. let us work more closely. [inaudible] let us measure what we would do for othersby what they would do for themselves . >> it's beautiful. >> that's why offer no governmental solutions to the problem . we have lived too long with that promise, this leaves
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only two expectations. [inaudible] government must learn to take less from people people can do more for themselves . let each of us remember that america was built not by government but by people not by welfare but i work. not by shirking responsibility but taking responsibility . and in our own lives let each of us asked not just what the government will do for me but what can i do for myself? and the challenges that each of us have, not just how can we helpbut how can i help ? >>. [inaudible] what you're really saying is you do believe in the self-reliance of nationsaround the world .
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>> segment 3. >> the important thing to remember -- [inaudible] >>. [inaudible] cbs news, time began every night. >> you think about what eisenhower did in world warii . not that he wanted to kill people, he wanted to end the war but whether truman dropped the common bomb not
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because he wanted to demolish these people, he wanted to end the war but if eisenhower bombed the ship out of the cities in north korea and that's what ended the war. >> i'm going to end it there without going into the last name which was just attacking the washington post and expressing pleasure at colson's campaign to bring down the share price of the washington post . but i think you get the flavor of it. you see that this allows the writer and hopefully the reader to be lies on the wall to these very intimate conversations where, very frank conversations and go to places with that are normally completely out of bounds to ordinary mortals. so now within 100 days of
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that conversation, nixon's wife had completely unraveled and his presidency had unraveled and as i said all his aides were fighting with each other. you heard that chuck colson who was incredibly loyal to nixon and was really in charge of the dirty tricks, he was the first to go and then later on other aides including bob haldeman, the chief of staff, john ehrlichman in charge of domestic policy , they were forced to resign as kind of sacrificial sacrifices to try to push the blame of watergate on to someone else. so among other things i'm interested in this group of people around and how they started fighting with each other and their different personalities.
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we can talk about this more later but you have colson who was willing to do absolutely anything that nixon even hinted at. and believed that the president's orders should be carried out immediately without question. and you had somebody like the chief of staff bob haldeman who served as a buffer between the and the rest of the white house and haldeman tried to restrain nixon and he was in the mood to, when you said was doing things that haldeman felt wouldn't be good for the country or would be good for the presidency and you have people like henry kissinger and kissinger comes across in the states and in my book as the arch flatter her and sycophant. he tells nick sent you saved this country mister president . the history books will show that when no one would know what watergate means.
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excuse my bad germanaccent . but there's a rivalry between nixon and kissinger because one of the reasons that nixon wanted to record his conversations was to show that he, next and was the architect of all these foreign-policy moves, not henry kissinger. so but at the center of this story is the figure of nixon himself, the 37th president who i and many others historians find endlessly fascinating. one of the reasons i wrote this book was i had a conversation with a man old stanley color is written one of the classical books about watergate in which he goes into every twist and turn in the scandal, most of which don't mean very much to modern-day readers or listeners but i called
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stanley color up as a reporter for the washington post and i was surprised when he said to me that in 20 years, this was about 20 years ago before hisdeath , nobody will know, nobody will pay much attention to all the other people in the watergate saga. but they will pay attention to richard nixon and nixon will endure forever. he's a -- i structured this book as kind of a shakespearean tragedy from humorous in january 1973 when he's about to be re-inaugurated to throw crisis, catastrophe and then in the end the downfall of the president so setting the stage for the downfall of the president.
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but as a c, there's an american twist at the end which i'm not goingto reveal now but you'll have to read the book . it's not exactly a shakespearean tragedy. it's as i said an american tragedy or drama that is different from a shakespearean tragedy for one important reason. you're going to have to read the book for that . so the other character in the book, very important is not a human character it's the tape recordings . which really kind of developed a life, a dynamic of their own, become a monster but nixon cannot control and ultimately lead to his downfall. i don't think it would have been forced to resign had it not been for those tape
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recordings because there would have been his version of events and there would have been the version of events of his accusers, particularly johndean , his former legal counsel and it would have been a he said she said story. it was only because of the existence of the tapes which nixon was finally forced to release for the smoking gun tapes to on the orders of the supreme court that really seal nixon's state. one of the reasons i see nixon as a tragic figure and of course one can argue about this is that we can see his suffering and the pain that he felt as he gets involved in a situation from which he cannot extricate himself. in korea he specialized in getting out of crisis but in watergate he finally met
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crisis that he couldn't get out of and it was also very painful to him to part with people who had worked for him for many years, particularly bob haldeman and donald trump went through 4 presidents in four years. sorry, donald trump went through 4 chiefs of staff in 4 years. nixon had the same man as his chief of staff throughout those 4 years and found it extremely painful to demand haldeman's resignation as a scapegoat for watergate in april 1973 . so i'm going and before taking any questions by playing you one little extract of the conversation between nixon and haldeman after nixon has announced haldeman's resignation. and it's so painful to him
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that nixon's starts drinking and by the time he talks to haldeman he's quite already has put back a few whiskeys and so you can hear that in his voice. he talks about haldeman as you're going to hear my brother. i think this is a reference to nixon's own brother, one of his brothers who died from tuberculosis when nixon was a young man. and you know, so when he's forced to part company with haldeman he's thinking of this tragedy that happened to him when he was a young man but actually two of his brothers died oftuberculosis but there was one in particular he was very close . so i'm just going to share the screen again and then we can talk on the other side of the last little recording
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thati'm going to play for you . >> april 28, 1973, president nixon and john ehrlich. >> that's the wrong one beforethat . >> lincoln's sitting room april 30, 1973. president nixon and bob haldeman . >> sorry i let you down. [inaudible] >>.
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[inaudible] >>. [inaudible] they know they can get through. i just want you to know -- you're a strong man dammit and you've got to live.
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[inaudible] >> i want to get the facts. >>. >>. [inaudible] god bless america . >> don't tell a soul. to me from you, officer
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weinberger, they've got another staff member. >>. >> i love you as you know. keep the faith. >> okay, so that was the end of this 30 day period. i actually go a little beyond that but this is the main arc of the narrative. so if there are any questions i'd love to respond. but thank you for bearing with me. i hope you'll hear those little audio extracts without any trouble. i'm happy to answer any questions.
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>> thank you michael. we do have questions. but first and foremost can you talk about how you accessed these tapes and how many hours of tapes there are? >> a total of 3700 are, only a small fraction of which were the release back while nixon was still president on the orders of the supreme court. so most of the standard nixon watergate books do not include this 3700 hours, most of the 3700 hours of tapes were only released in the last 10 years or so. so there actually all on the nixon library website. it takes a bit of navigating but anybody can listen to them and you can also listen to some of the extracts on my website, at least some of the
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tapes that i use in the book. michael dobbs books.com, if you go there you'll find some of the tapes that i've quoted from including the ones that i've just played this evening . >> thank you. why do you think we're still fascinated with the 37th president ? >> partly it's the important nature of his presidency and i think this was the turning point for america at the end of the 60s. was the culmination of the vietnam war. important moves in foreign policy including the opening to china which we are living with the implications of that now but mainly it's nixon's own personality. this man who really brought himself up from nothing. he was born to adirt or quaker family out in california .
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these often compared to trump but trump was born on third base . nixon had everything he achieved, he did through his own efforts and he threw it away because of the flaws in his character. particularly his sort of paranoia and mistrust and his determination to fight for everything he achieved. that sort of became also his fatal flaw. determination to get even with his enemies and so on but he's a contradictory character. he's a man of greattalents, great vision . he worked extremely hard and i say that he's like kind of ordinary american but also he has all the virtues and the flaws of the average american. he worked harder than anybody else.
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he hated people with greater intensity than anybody else. so he just took everything to an extreme. and you know, that's to be at least a fascinating character study. >> anyone interested in the makeup of the supreme court at the time if nixon had any vision of this ever ending up at the supreme court ? >> he chose to keep the tapes and actually i and the book with this seed, there's in july, august 1973 after the one of his aides, alexander butterfield has revealed the president has been taking himself. and so then send when he hears about this he's actually in the hospital suffering from pneumonia in the same naval hospital actually where i live just
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outside washington in bethesda, the same hospital president trump was taken to with covid a few months ago and nixon is there and he's feeling terrible so his mind is a bit kind of clouded. because he's on heavy painkillers and so on. and he has to take a decision on what many of his aides are urging him to have a bonfire on the white house lawn and destroy the tapes but he still thinks he can control the tapes and the tapes will be his ally in this fight with john dean and others that he will be able to release selected portions of the conversations without, that will bolster his version of events and it's a terrible miscalculation obviously, we know that now but at the time it seems logical to nixon. as for the supreme court, it was actually the, there were
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probably equal numbers of liberal and conservative justices on the supreme court when it came to this question of whether the tapes should be released, there was a unanimous decision among all the justices including the conservative ones to release, to order nixon to release those tapes that would shed light on whether crimes have been committed in the white house. >> did the supreme court require transcripts of those tapes or did they require making those tapes publicly accessible? >> know, and there's a long argument over how exactly he would release the tapes. that is again, i didn't deal with this in the book myself
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but this is what happens afterwards becomes a legal political argument from being a personal psychodrama that i described in the book . soinitially nixon says well, i won't release the tapes . i will release transcripts and so he released very sort of doctored transcripts. people of my age will remember he released these transcripts with every other sentence was expletive deleted. so it was suspected he wasn't really releasing all the incriminating stuff on the tapes so finally the supreme court said no, your transcripts are goodenough. you have to release the tapes themselves . >> you talk about nixon in the very beginning of your book as humorous, can you expound a bit about that hubris that nixon has? >> actually i quote chet
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wilson, the man you heard at the beginning says that hubris became the mark of the nixon man because numerous was the quality that nixon admired most. hubris is a greek word which means excessive pride, presumption or arrogance and in greek tragedy, the hero is always brought down by his arrogance or pride. and so i think this pretty much sums up nixon in january 1973, that everything is going right for him and he's kind of coasting after his reelection. he thinks he can stick it to his enemies.
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he uses more colorful language than this often but i'm tuning it down here. he thinks he will stick it to his enemies and you know, so he is really setting himself up for the fall later but that's what hubris means and there's plenty of evidence of it in those early themes that idescribed in my book . >> michael, it's been said mister nixon had the language of a drunken sailor and certainly sometimes he had very objectionable language and tone. are there conversations in which, and whom do you find other reporters that some of these were most surprising? he was horribly bad about swearing and what do you find most surprising as a reporter ? >> there are a lot of anti-semitic, generally racist remarks he indulges in . of course he wasn't doing
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this in public and these are private tapes, not like trump's tweets where he never intended them to be made public and to be fair to him, if we were tape-recorded for many of us, we would say things that were embarrassing that we wouldn't want the general public let alone everybody in the world to listen in to our private conversations. so you've got to cut him some slack for that but there's also, he did swear i think morethan the average person . and he has got this very colorful turn of phrase and you know, one of the things you see is that even someone like kissinger who is from a completely different background, a german jew is trying to all the aides are trying to compete with each other to swear like nixon. so partly you ask what
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surprised me and i guess it's this dynamic of all the people, all the aides, it's rather like a royal court in which all the courtiers are trying to compete against each other for the to gain the attention and the benevolence of the king. there's a very interesting internal dynamic that is going on that i triedto describe . >> let's speak a little bit about that competition among the aides . what then really props the defection i suppose of the aides? >> that's a good question. it really starts unraveling when the burglars broke into the watergate back in 1972.
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they're caught red-handed and there put on trial and the administration tries to cut off responsibility at the level of burglars and their immediate boss, gordon liddy. so there put on trial and the trial starts at the same time that i begin the narrative. and the man called jeff mcgruder who is the head of the committee to reelect the president, he goes before the judge and commits perjury. the prosecutor asks mcgruder if he gave any instructions for the break in watergate or the taking of democratic national committee. and mcgruder was this young sort of charity looking sort of very ambitious aid in his 30s, he says no, it's nothing to do with him and that
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gordon liddy was acting without anyauthorization at all . and mcgruder himself is authorized the break-in. one of the burglars, a man called james mccourt listens to this and he thinks why should i and the rest of us take responsibility for this when we know that the real people who gave the orders including general mcgruder are getting off scott free and we are about to be sent to this horrible jail, the washington dc jail so mccourt decides he's not going to put up with this and write a letter to thejudge . and you know, that's really when the whole cover-up starts unraveling because nixon or mccourt says that perjuryhas been committed in the trial .
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the presidents legal counsel john dean realizes that the white house is being blackmailed. he's afraid hecan be implicated . he will be sent to prison. he is not willing to be sent to prison for the crimes as he sees it up other people. so he turns on nixon or first of all he turns on mcgruder and tries to get mcgruder to shoulder the responsibility so it's kindof this infighting between mcgruder and dean . as next and puts it, his aides are pissing on each other and then they start pissing on the president to be crude about it which is what nixon was. so you know, once the taboo has been broken there's just
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one person, james mccourt who is not willing to go along with the cover-up. starts blowing the whistle on it, then this soul whole house of cards starts to fall apart. >> art they mostly attorneys and lawyers ? from my memory seems nixon was quite the law student in several of the aides were law students. >> that's one of the points that john dean makes. at one point he writes up a list of everybody who's involved in the watergate either in the white house or the committee to reelect the president and he puts asterisks against all of the lawyers and most of them are lawyers including nixon himself . the whole legal question of
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obstruction of justice and conspiracy is a specialized branch of the law they weren't necessarily criminal lawyers but some of them were smarter than others at realizing the legal jeopardy they were in. i'd say dean was the smartest in that respect. he realized he could be sent to prison for many years and that was one reason why he blew the whistle on the whole conspiracy but yes, they were lawyers. they should have been better as nixon says at one point, if the president does it, then that means it's legal so he thinks that if the president orders abreak-in , he can claim that he's justified for national security reasons. this was the whole political legal disputes of watergate that in the end they decided
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just because the president orders it, doesn't mean it's legal all. it became a constitutional crisis precisely for that reason. >> carol wants to know about his enemies and who was nixon to get? >> he was out to get anybody, the long list of enemies beginning with the kennedys because if yourecall , nixon had lost an election to jack kennedy in 1960 and here is a modern-day echo if we think about the events of the past few months that actually in 1960 election it was extremely close, much closer than the lastelection . and it was determined by a few thousand votes in illinois and texas. including disputed votes in
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cook countythat words controlled by matt mayor daley of chicago . though nixon had a much more legitimate basis for challenging the results of the election then certainly donald trumpdid in my view in the last election . he did not challenge the results of the election. he decided that for the good of the country you would accept the results of the election but he or a lasting grudge against the kennedys and he was determined that he would never again allow himself to be cheated so this explains in part is first flawed political intelligence and when it came to the 1972 election he was determined not to be as he put it, i'm justdescribing what's going on in his mind . he's determined not to allow
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the kennedys to cheat him of an election again or it wasn't so much the kennedys but it was thedemocrats . and that was one of the -- that those for political intelligence is one of the sources of watergate but as far as the enemies are concerned , they ranged from the kennedys to journalists to the entire eastern foreign policyestablishment . the elites in general. he drew up a long enemies list. and you know, there's some quite humorous enemies. for example he had a dispute withthe dean of the washington cathedral . lbj dies in the middle of all this and they're deciding whether to have a memorial service for president johnson in the national cathedral in washington but nixon, one of
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his enemies is the dean of the cathedral was a big leader of the antiwar movement so nixon goes off on a tirade against the dean of the cathedral. he's not going to allow a funeral to take place in the cathedral and if it does he's not going to attend . so all this, you get the kind of insight into the depths of his hatred of the other side which is very revealing. >> kathy wants to know about the environment at the host during that time. what do you know about that? >> i started working for the post after this period but i do know some of the actors involved including bob woodward and carl bernstein . of course it was for journalists like those. they were very youngreporters at the time , this was the
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kind of story that perhaps they dreamt of and the post was under great pressure from the administration. it was just going public so there was pressure on the proprietor, catherine glenn to restrain the reporters but she sided with the reporters so the post was breaking all this news and it was extremely exciting and then you have a whole generation of reporters that wanted to model themselves on bernstein and woodward. that's another story but it was really i guess a lot of reporters like myself went into journalism in part because of the whole story of woodward and bernstein and watergate. >> i hate to take you back to the tapes but i want to ask
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there's a tremendous amount of tape and you focus on these months, these period you said were the most passionate, the most critical for perhaps. did you listen to them all? >> i didn't listen to them all but i do the key ones. some of the dates are better quality than others. those that i just played were recorded on the telephone though their fairly easy to understand. and there'ssome tapes that are pretty much impossible . and the professional archivist whose job it was to listen to all the tapes and make transcripts of some of them, they calculated you needed to listen for 100 hours in order to get one hour of transcript. so if you multiply that by the 3700 hours of tapes you can see that it would take several lifetimes for
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somebody to listen to all the tapes and decipher them all. and the bulk of it are completely unintentional eligible so ihave to confess i didn't listen to them all . >> there are portions that are missing, there's a big famous about these missing minutes. >> the famous missing 17 minutes which probably this is one of the first tapes after the watergate break-in. when nixon is talking to his aides. so obviously there's conversations about watergate in it . i don't, there's been a lot of conspiracy theories about what's in those missing 17 minutes . does it actually reveal that nixon ordered a break-in at the watergate. i don't think it does because you have to sort of triangulate other sources of information including the haldeman diaries but we know pretty much what was in those
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17 minutes. i think it's just nixon being ham-fisted. he started listening to the states, started pressing all these buttons on his tape recorder . he probably wanted to get rid of some bits that were you know, compromising to him. but actually they're not anymore compromising that whole lot of other things on the tapes . that's what most historians including me believe. but you can argue about that. >> what do you think we learned from all this. >> i mean, nixon kept on saying you shouldn't, the problem wasn't the original crime, it was thecover-up . and he had experienced himself of unraveling a cover-up with the affair
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alter this when he was a young congressman so he shows that whatever else you do, don't cover it up because the cover-up indicates that it's worse than the original crime. he could have blamed watergate on various order orderlies and underlings but covering up, i.e. obstruction of justice was what really brought him down. but on a larger level i'd say it's kind of at least my book is an insight into this very introverted world. it's the kind of world, american version of a royal court and there are all these courtiers around the president and the president in that white house becomes extremely isolated. and it's kind of an chamber in which everybody is telling the president what he wants,
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what they think he wants to hear. and that's a dangerous situation, not just for nixon but for all presidents. back after a bit may become isolated, you know, distant from reality and it's particularly a problem of the second term. the first term there most rooted in reality. then anybody who's living in that very sort of pressurized fishbowl type of environment, you have to be a very vain person to remain grounded in common sense and some degree of humility. you need somebody to, people say traditionally that's what spouses do. the family does, they keep them sort of grounded but it's a disease of any
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president and some presidents sufferfrom it more than others . >> thank you for your discussion this evening and for doing the research. and for. tonight via zoom. we greatly appreciate it. i'd encourage people to pick up this book, king richard. it was available at amazon and most bookstores now as i understand . and i hope you enjoyed it and i hope you enjoy the book. >> thank you very much, it's been great to be with you and i hope you are encouraged to go out and buy the book or at leastborrow it from the library . >> i wish all of you a good evening, thank you forjoining us . good night.
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>> sunday night on q and a journalist elizabeth becker, author of you don't belong here tells the story of email vietnam war correspondence at the time when coverage was a male dominated profession. >> there was no embedding like we have now. there was no military censorship per se so it was probably the first and last uncensored american war. there's censorship in the boston telegraph so it was for women, a gift. because it was only because of this codification, this
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openness women could get through what had been the biggest barrier. as the war correspondent that you were not allowed on the field. journalist elizabeth becker sunday night at the eastern on wednesday. you can also findalternate interviews wherever you get your podcast . >> and this week center for public affairs virtual event to renew a conversation with the washington post national politics columnist and multi-we joining us in conversation for her brand-new book the triumph of nancy reagan in addition to washing working at the washington post karen has worked at "time magazine" and the los angeles times and is a recipient of smany awards including the prize for excellence andpolitical reporting . asked four years ago to write this biography book is finally being published tomorrow april 13 2021. kirkus reviews calls the triumph of nancy reagan

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