we are delighted this evening on the program to welcome michael dobbs who's written a wonderful book that has been well received called king richard. he's also a journalist formerly with of 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 t coming thursday we have another offer and he has

written a book called when truth matters of the may 4th incident at kent state. and monday june 7th we have the book june 10th we have the author of the book in the small shours, his conversations with frank sinatra. but i want to return to tonight's program and author michael dobbs who will talk about his book king richard. to those of you that haven't seen it, this is a copy of my book that came out last week. between an american tragedy and

it has as you can see a rather dark picture of richard nixon on the front cover. i'm going to explain in a little bit the structure of the book and why i chose to call it king richard. but first of all i will tell you a little bit about myself and why 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 am originally from the uk but i am now living in the u.s. i worked for a long time for the "washington post" and when i was a kid, i don't know if this is typical of everyone, but to me i used to take these train rides d around the uk and it would go through suburbs across towns and

villages and often the houses were very close to the railway. i used to look inside the house as the train went past and i was so i curious about what was goig on inside ofin these houses. what were the conversations around the dinner table and lunch table, what were the family dynamics so perhaps it isn't surprising that i became a reporter as a profession because it is the 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 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 was a witness to that, to the collapse of communism but i understood when i was a reporter that there was a lot of that i didn't know that was going on behind closed doors so i was curious to know what was happening in the kremlin as opposed to the part of politics that they chose to reveal of themselves and sometimes it's the first rough draft of history

but i wanted to find out all the things that i hadn't understood or known about when i was a reporter in moscow so i wrote a book called down with big brother which is a narrative which i was able to include because of the release of kremlin documents and interviews with participants in these events. behind what was happening in these closed doors i was able to penetrate as a reporter so i always felt like a little boy trying with my nose pressed to the glass trying to figure out what's going on 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 book about nixon and watergate particularly as the presidency begins t to unravel. the answer is that we will never get the archival resource or as close to any as we were able to get to the 37th president richard nixon at this crucial time of his political career as he was facing the political crisis and existential crisis for him that ended up with his own resignation. as you know no doubt, nixon

taped himself and other presidents taped themselves before nixon. with nixon he was among other characteristics interested in technology and nobody would trust him and he wouldn't trust himself to turn on the recording equipment so they invented a system that would turn on automatically when nixon went into a room or picked up the telephone so that means that we've got much more recordings than any other president. with lbj it's about 700 hours of lbj telephonee conversations.

with nixon there is nearly 4,000 tape recordings not just of the telephone conversations but he had microphones planted in the oval office, the cabinet room in camp david and then on telephones including the most private t room in the white houe where he like to retire at the end of the day was the link in the 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 had this entire record of nixon sounding off about everything that happened during the day. in addition to that, the chief of staff kept an audio diary every night and the memoirs of

the former white house aides and hundreds of thousands of documents from the white house so you end up with the richest information you could imagine and because no president is ever going to tape themselves again we are never going to get as close a view of what's going on in the white house as we do with richard nixon even though it was never nixon's intention. nixon regarded these as private property which he intended to use for his memoirs and was horrified when the recordings started to be publicly released because it was completely indiscreet in the conversations.

so now this wealth of documentation poses both a challenge as a blessing and a curse of biographers of nixon because if you are trying to describe all of nixon's life from birth to death, you don't have the space to go into detail about what was occurring day by day and minute by minute so you have this sort of intimacy that the tapes allow so instead of choosing to write about all of nixon's life and all of watergate and the most dramatic moments of all which a i think r reasons i will try to explain our the hundred days after the second inaugural from

january 20th, 1973 when he seemed to be at the top of his game he still had an approval rating at that time and it won e by one of r the largest marginsf the popular vote in american history if not the largest and it put watergate behind him. he was about to include a disagreement in vietnam with triumphs including the détente with russia and so on so he was feeling sort of pretty confident and then within 100 days it all falls apart and this disciplined white house the aid starts fighting with each other. the cover-up disintegrates and everybody is running for cover

so the aides start trying to shift the blame onto each other and then finally, they all start shifting the blame onto the presidents themselves so it's a very traumatic period all of which is captured on tape so if you just focus on that period, i bring in a lot of background but kgthe narrative of the story is about that 100 days and it allows me to do something i don't think has been done before which is to tell the story in a very intimate way. i see nixon as a tragic figure

but he was told another reason for the title is his mother who was a pious quaker in california named all her boys after kings of england including richard who she named after the crusader king richard theth lion heart so this title is very apt i feel. so the book begins the opening scene is between the sitting room as i said, the favorite room in them white house on the second floor of the white house and the private quarters, the smallest room in the white house actually and nixon would go every night to listen to music and phone his cronies.

on the night at one in the morning among other things hehi had trouble sleeping he couldn't get to sleep he called his aid and talked about his wish to get even with his enemies and how he was going to wrap up the vietnam war and also how he was going to get even with the "washington post" pursuing this investigation into watergate so i'm going to play a little extract from that tape so you can see how rich this material is. he's just come back from the kennedy center and they played

the 1812 overture. he's pumped up about that and he doesn't like the washington symphony orchestra because of political reasons. he's brought thefr philadelphia monarch down to play d for him d considers them all politically aligned particularly the conductor. he goes on another extract is about hisis inaugural address tt he's about to deliver and he shares portions of it and then talks about the vietnam war. i'm going to try to share this with you and we will meet you on

the other side here. i think i'm sharing this with you. the sitting room 1973 president nixon and chuck colson. segment one. [inaudible] [inaudible]

you want to hear a little bit of the speech [inaudible] [inaudible]

[inaudible] and the challenges we face together.

>> statement three. [inaudible] [inaudible]

[inaudible] without going into the last thing, at the campaign to bring down the price of the post i think you get the flavor of it and you see this allows the writer and hopefully the reader to be flies on the wall to these conversations and go to places that are normally completely out

of bounds. within 100 days of that conversation, nixon's life had completely unraveled and the presidency unraveled and if i said all of the aides were fighting with each other and you heard chuck colson was in charge of the daily trips and others including the chief of staff and john ehrlichman in charge of domestic policy, they were forced to resign as the kind of sacrificial sacrifices so among other things i'm interested in

this group and how they started fighting with people and different personalities. we can talk about this more later but you have colson willing to do absolutely anything that he even hinted at and believed the president's orders should be carried out immediately without question and somebody like the chief of staff who sat as a buffer between nixon and the rest of the white house and hold him in tried to restrain nixon when he was in the mood of doing things that he felt wouldn't be good for the country or wouldn't be good for the presidency. then you have people like henry kissinger who comes across in the tapes and in the book and tells nixon you saved this country, mr. president.

the history books will show no one knew what watergate means. excuse my bad german accent. but there is a rivalry between nixon and kissinger because one of the reasons nixon wanted to record his conversation is to show that he was the architect of these moves and not henry kissinger. but at the center of this story, the figure of nixon himself who i and many other historians and biographers find endlessly fascinating. one of the reasons i read this book as i had a conversation with a man who has 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 stanley up as a reporter for the "washington post" and was surprised when he said to me about ten years ago 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. i structured this book as a kind of shakespearean tragedy from hubris in january of 1973 when he's about to be re- inaugurated through crisis, catastrophe and

in the end the downfall of the president for setting the stage but as you will see there is a twist at the end which i am not going to reveal now but you have to read the book so it's not exactly a shakespearean tragedy. as i said, it's an american tragedy or drama that is different from a shakespearean tragedy from one important reason you will have to read the book for that. so the other character in the book it's these tape recordings which kind of developed a dynamic of their own that nixon cannot control and ultimately lead to the downfall.

i don't think nixon would have been forced to resign had it not been for those tape recordings because it would have been his version of events and those of the accusers particularly the former legal counsel and it would have been a he said she said. story. it was because of the existence of the tapes which nixon was finallyes forced to release on e orders of the supreme court that really sealed nixon's fate. t one of the reasons i see nixon is a tragic figure and one can argue about this is that we can see his suffering and the pain he felt as he gets involved in a situation from which he cannot extricate himself and his entire

career he is specialized in getting out of the crisis but in watergate he finally met a crisis he couldn't get out of and it was also very painful to him to part with people who had worked with him for many years bob haldeman. donald trump went through four presidents in four years. nixon, sorry, donald trump went through four chiefs of staff in four years. nixon had the same man through those four years and found it extremely painful to demand the resignation as a scapegoat for watergate in april of 1973. i'm going to end before taking questions by playing one little extract of the conversation between nixon and haldeman after

nixon has announced the resignation. it's so painful to him that he starts drinking and by the time he talks to haldeman he's put back if you whiskeys so you can hear that in his voice. i think this is a reference to his own brother, one of his brothers who died from tuberculosis when nixon was a young man and when he's forced to part, he's thinking of this tragedy that happened to him when he is a young man with two of his brothers that died of tuberculosis but there's one to whom he is very close. i'm just going to share the screen again and then we can

talk on the other side of this littleor recording that i'm goig to play for you. >> april 208th, president nixon -- >> sorry, that's the wrong one. just before that. april 30th, 1973 president nixon and bob haldeman.

[inaudible] [inaudible]

[inaudible] [inaudible]

[inaudible] [inaudible] >> 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. if there are any questions, i would love to respond. thank you for bearingg with me.

i don't know if you could hear those audio extracts without any trouble. happy to answer any questions. >> thank you. we do have questions but first and foremost, can you talk a little bit about how you access these tapes and about how many hours of tape there are. >> 3,700. a small fraction of which were released 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 3,700 hours which were only released in the last ten years or so. so they are actually all up on the library website. it takes a bit of navigating but can find them and you

can also listen to some of the extras on my website at least some of the tapes i used in the book. if you go there you will find some of the tapes that i've quoted from including the ones that i just played this evening. >> why do you think we are still fascinated with this president? >> partly it's the important nature of the presidency and i think that this was a turning point for america at the end of the 60s it was the combination of the vietnam war, important moves in foreign policy including the opening to china of course we are always living with the implications of that now but in the personality this man who brought himself up from

nothing. he was born to a dirt poor quaker family in california. he is often compared to trump. nixon had everything he achieved he did through his own efforts and then he threw it away because of the flaws in his characterha particularly his sot of paranoia and mistrust and determination to fight for everything he achieved to get even with his enemies and so on but he's a contradictory character, great vision. he worked extremely hard and i might say that he's a kind of ordinary american but even more so. he has all the virtues and

flaws. he worked harder than anybody else and with greater intensity so he took everything to an extreme. for me at least that is a fascinating character study. >> interested and then make up of the court at the time and if nixon had i any vision of this. >> he chose to keep the tapes. this is july, august of 1973 after one of his aides has revealed that the president has been taping himself so then when nixon hears about this, he's in the hospital suffering from pneumonia, the same hospital

where i live just outside of washington in bethesda the same hospital president trump was taken to with covid a few months ago. nixon is there and feeling terrible so his mind is clouded because he's on heavy pain killers and so on. he has to take a decision on what many 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 they will be his ally in this fight with john dean and others that he will be able to release selective portions of the conversations that would bolster his version of the events and that is terrible we know that now but at the time it seemed logical.

as for the supreme court, it was the conservative justices on the supreme court but when it came to the question of whether they should be released, there was a unanimous decision among all the justices including the conservative ones to release those tapes that would shed light on whether the crimes had been committed in the white house. >> did the supreme court require transcripts of those tapes or makinges the tapes publicly accessible? >> there'sle a long argument ovr exactly how he would release the

tapes. this is kind of what happens afterwards in the political argument from being a personal psychodrama that i described in the book. so initially he says i won't release the tapes. i will release transcripts so he releases very doctored transcripts. people at my age remember he released these transcripts with every expletive deleted so it was expected he wasn't really releasing all the incriminating stuff on theti tapes so finally the court said the transcripts are not goodd enough you have to release the tapes themselves. >> you talk about nixon in the beginning of your book in hubris. can you expand upon that a little bit, that hubris that

nixon t has? >> i approach the man you heard at the beginning that says the hubris became the mark because it was the quality that nixon admired most. it's a greek word that means excessive pride, presumption and in the greek tragedy the hero is always brought down by the sort of arrogance or pride. i think this pretty much sums up nixon in january of 73 that everything is going right for him and he's kind of coasting after the reelection and thinks he can stick it to his enemies. he uses more colorful language

than this but i'm turning it down. he is reall setting himself up for the fall. that's what hubris means and there's plenty of evidence of it in those early scenes that i described in the book. it's been said that he had the languagead of a drunken sailor d certainly sometimes he had a very objectionable languagees ad tone. are there conversations and with whom do you find some of these were most surprising? he was horribly bad about swearing. what do you find most surprising as a reporter? >> there are a lot of generally

racist remarks that he indulges in the. of course he wasn't doing this in public and these are private tapes not like trump's tweets. they are private he never intended to be public and to be fair to him, if we were tape recorded many of us we would say things that are embarrassing that we wouldn't want the general public let alone everybody in the world to listen in on our private conversations, so you've got to cut him some slack for that but there's also he did swear more than the average person and he's got this colorful turn of phrase. one of the things you see even from a completely differentpl background they are trying to compete with each other so

partly you asked what surprised me. i guess it's this dynamic of all the people in which they try to competeey against each other to gain the attention and benevolence of the king. it's a very interesting internal dynamic going on that i tried to describe.sc >> let's speak a little bit about that competition among the aides. what then prompts? >> that is a good question. it really starts unraveling when

the burglars that broke in back in 1972 are caught red-handed and put on trial and the administration tries to cut off responsibility at the level of the burglars and their immediate boss so they are put on trial and it starts at the same time that i begin the narrative. .. democratic nationall committee and this young very ambitious

aid in his 30s he says nothing to do with him acting without any authorization at all. mcgruder himself is authorized but one of the burglars listen tof this and he thinks why shoud i and the rest of us take responsibility for this when we know the real people who gave the orders including mcgruder getting off scott free while we are about to be sent to this horrible jail, washington d.c. jail so he decides he's not going to put up with it and writes a letter to the judge and that's really one of whole corrupt starts unraveling.

he says perjury has been committed in the trial, his legal counsel realized the white house is being blackmailed, he will beou sent to prison, he is not willing to be sent to prison for the crimes of other people so he turns on nixon, he turns on mcgruder and tries to get mcgruder to show responsibility so to see him fighting between mcgruder and dean as nixon puts itit, his aides are on each othr and when they stop on the president to be crude about it which is what nixon was so once it's been broken, just one

person is not willing to go along with the cover-up and starts blowing the whistle on it. in this "house of cards" begins to fall apart. >> i think mostly it's attorneys and lawyers. from my memory it seems that nixon was quite the law student several aides were law students. >> right, that's one of the points john dean makes. at one time he writes up a list of everybody he's involved in the watergate either in the white house to elect the president and he does the lawyers and most of them are lawyers including himself.

of course the whole legal question of obstruction of justice and conspiracy is a specialized branch so they weren't necessarily criminal lawyers so some of them were smarter than others realizing legal jeopardy they were in, he realized he could be sent to prison for p many years and that was one reason he blew the whistle on the whole conspiracy but they should have meant better. at one time that means it's legal. he thinks if the president orders breaking heekin claim he is justified for national security reasons and this was the whole political legal

dispute of watergate in the end they decide just because the president orders it doesn't mean it's legal at all. it became a constitutional crisis precisely for that reason. >> carol wants to know about his enemies and who was nixon out to get? >> he was out to get anybody from a long list of enemies beginning with the kennedys because if you recall, nixon lost an election to jack kennedy in 1960 and here is a modern-day echo about the events of the past few months 1960 election was extremely close, much closer than the lastex election and it was determined by a few thousand in illinois and texas that would

control daily of chicago so nixon had a much more legitimate basis for challenging the results of the election than donald trump did in my view in the last election but he did not challenge the results of the election, he decided for the good of the country he would accept the results of the election but he held a lasting grudge against the kennedys and he was determined he would never again allow himself to be cheated so this explains, in part, his first political intelligence and when it came to the 1972 election he was determined not to be describing

parts going on in his mind, he is determined not to allow the kennedys to cheat him about election again, it wasn't so much the kennedys butut it was e democrats and that was one of the political intelligence was one of the sources of watergate but as far as the enemies are concerned, they range from kennedys to journalists to the entire eastern foreign policy establishment, the elites in general, he drew up along enemies list and there is some humorous enemies. he had a dispute with the washington dean. he dies inof the middle of all this and they are deciding whether tog bury or have a memorial service for president

johnson in the national cathedral in washington but nixon, one of his enemies is the dean of the cathedral was a big leader of the anti- war movement so he goes off on a tirade against the dean of the cathedral is not going to allow them to take place if it does take on and so forth so all the best insight into the depth of his hatred of the other side which is revealing. >> kathy wants to know about the environment at the post during that time. what you know about that? >> i started working for the post s-uppercase-letter what i do know some involved and bernstein. it was a journalist but those

two, very young reporters at the time. this was the kind of story perhaps they dreamt of and it was under great pressure from the administration, it had just begun going public so there is pressure on it to restrain the reporters but sided with the reporters, the post was breaking all this news and it was extremely exciting and you had a whole generation of reporters and they wanted to model themselves, that's another story but it was really a lot of reporters like myself went into journalism in part because of the whole story of woodward and bernstein and w watergate.

>> i hate to take you back but i want to ask, there is this tremendous amount of hate and you focused on these. he said were the most passionate? the most critical perhaps, did you listen to them all? >> i didn't listen to them all but i listened to the key ones. some of them, a defense, some of the tapes are better quality than others. those i played were recorded on the telephone so they were fairly easy to understand and some tapes are pretty much impossible and professional whose job it was to listen to the tapes and make transcripts, they calculated that you need to listen for 100 hours in order to get one hour of transcript so if you multiply that by 3700 tapes,

you can see that it would take several lifetimes was somebody to listen to the tapes and decipher them all in some of them are completelyst unintelligible so i have to confess i didn't listen to them all. >> are the portions missing, something very famous about the missing minute? >> the famous missing 17 minutes which probably this is one of the firstte tapes after the watr great breaking when nixon is talking to his aid. obviously there are conversations about watergate and it. i don't answer this in a lot of conspiracy theories about what's in the missing 17 minutes. does actually review nixon order to watergate? i don't think it does because you have to triangulate with

other sources of information including bhandari so we know pretty much what was in those 17 minutes. i think it's just mixing being fisted and he started listening to the tapes and pressing all these buttons on his tape recorder he probably wanted to get rid of some bits that were compromising to him but actually they are not anymore compromising and a lot of other things on the tape. that's what must most historians, including me believe what you could argue that. >> what you think we've learned from all off this? >> well, nixon kept on saying you shouldn't promote the problem wasn't the original crime, it was corrupt and he had experienced himself the

unraveling a cover-up when he was young congressman so he shows whatever else you do in cover-up because the cover-up and u watergate was worse than e original crime. he could have claimed watergate on various ordinance but covering up, covering it up obstruction of justice was what really brought him down so on a larger level i would say at least my book is an insight into this introverted world, an american version of royal court and their are all these around the president and the president in the white house becomes extremely isolated.

it's an echo chamber in which everybody is telling the president what they think he wants to hear about us a dangerous situation, not just nixon but for all presidents that after a bit they become isolated, distant from reality and it's particularly a problem of second term. first term and in reality anybody living in that pressurized fishbowl type of environment you have to be a very sane person to remain grounded in common sense at some degree of humility. he needs somebody more people say traditionally this is what the spouses do in the family

because, they keep the president sort of rounded disease of any president and some presidents suffer from more than others. >> thank you for your discussion this evening and for doing the research and for appearing tonight via zoom. we greatly appreciate it. i would encourage people to pick up the book, king richard. it's available 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, great to be with you and i hope you are encouraged to invite the book or at least borrow it from the library. to give. >> thank you and i wish all of you a good evening. thank you for joining us. good night. ♪♪ >> weekends on c-span2 on intellectual gift ever satellite

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