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>> and we're delighted this evening on our author program to welcome author michael dodd. 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 ofof michigan, princeton and georgetown. he is goingng to speak to us ths 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 giles, and he has written a book called "truth matters" about the may 4th incident at kent state. and on monday, june 7th, we

have -- . [inaudible] and on june 10th we have the author of the book "in the wee, small hours," his conversations with frank sinatra. but i want to return to tonight's program andur to authr michael dodd -- dobbs. um, michael. who's going to talk to us about "king richard." so, michael, what can you tell us about "king richard"? y of my book which came out last week. it's king richard nixon and watergate in american tragedy. and it has, as you can see, a rather dark picture of richard nixon on the front cover.

i will explain in a little bit the structure of the book and why we chose to call it king richard. i will tell you a little bit about myself and why i chose to write this book, which is usually the first question which is aimed at authors why did you write the book. as you can tell from my accident, i am originally from the uk but now living in the u.s. i worked for a long time for the post for 25 years and when i was a kid, i don't know if this is typical of everyone, but for me i used to take train rides around the uk and it would go through suburbs across towns and villages and the houses were very close to the railway and i

used to look at the houses the train went past and i was curious about what was going on inside of these houses. what were the conversations around the dinner table, the lunch table, were people arguing with each other, but for the family dynamics inside of these anonymous houses. so, perhaps it is not surprising that i became a reporter as a profession because it is the profession that allows you to exercise your insatiable curiosity and pry into other people's lives. i started covering big political events and i was sent by the "washington post" as a foreign correspondent first to poland in the middle of the whole collapse of communism and then later on i

went to russia and when i arrived in russia, the whole system was in the process of collapse and unraveling. so, i was a 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. i was curious to know what was happening in the kremlin as opposed to the politics that russian soviet politicians chose to reveal of themselves and sometimes it's said journalism is the 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 i was a reporter in moscow and so i

wrote a book called down with big brother which is a narrative of the history of the collapse of communism, which i was able to include because of the release of kremlin documents and the interviews with participants in the events i was able to describe what was happening behind all these closed doors, but i was unable to penetrate as a reporter so i always felt like kind of a little boy trying you know, with my nose pressed to the glass trying to figure out what's going on inside of places that had no right to be and first the kremlin and then later here in washington, the white house. this gets me to the subject of why i chose to write this book about nixon and watergate in

particularly as the presidency begins to unravel and at the beginning of 1973. the answer is we will never get as rich of an archival resource or 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 crucial time of his political career as he was facing the gravest political crisis unimaginable and existential crisis for him and that ended up with his own resignation. as you know, no doubt, nixon taped himself and other presidents taped themselves

before nixon, but they controlled the recording and turned it off and turned it on when they wanted to record something. with nixon, he was 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 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've got, you know, much more recordings of nixon than any other president. there was about 700 hours of lbj telephone conversations but with nixon, there is nearly 4,000 tape recordings not just of his telephone conversations but he

had microphones planted in the oval office, the cabinet room in camp david and then on telephone including the most private room in the white house where he liked to retire at the end of the day. his favorite room in the white house 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 in the day. the chief of staff, bob haldeman kept in audio diary every night. the memoirs of the everybody that plays an important role in

watergate, hundreds of thousands of documents from the nixon white house, so you end up with the richest information you could imagine for any president and because no president is ever going to tape themselves again, they 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 this was never nixon's intention and horrified when the recordings started to be publicly released because he's completely indiscreet in these conversations. so, now this sort of wealth of documentation causes both the

challenge is a blessing and a curse for biographers of nixon because they tried to describe nixon's life from life to death so you don't just have the space to go into detail about what was occurring day by day and minute by minute. so, you access a sort of intimacy that these tapes allow so i, instead of choosing to write about all of nixon's life now all of watergate, i chose to focus on the most dramatic moments of all, which i think for the reasons i will try to explain are the hundred days after the second inaugural from january 20th to 1973 when he seemed to be at the top of his game. he still had a 60% approval rating at that time and he had

won the reelection by one of the largest margins of the popular vote in american history, if not the largest. and it largely put watergate behind him. he was about to conclude in vietnam and hound of triumphs including the opening to china détente with russia and so on. so he really was feeling sort of pretty confident and then within 100 days, it all falls apart and this very disciplined white house the aids start fighting with each other and watergate, the cover-up of watergate, the attempted cover up disintegrates and everybody is running for cover so they start trying to shift the blame onto each other.

all of it is captured or most of it is captured on tape if we focus on that period, i bring in a lot of background but the narrative of the story is about that hundred days it allows me to do something that hasn't been done before which is to tell the story for the shakespearean tragedy but he was told another reason for the title is that his mother who was 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 so this title is very apt. the book begins the opening scene is between the sitting room as i said, lincoln's, nixon's favorite room in the white house on the second floor of the white house in the private quarters. the smallest room in the white house actually. and nixon would go up every night to listen to music and a scribble on his yellow legal pads and on the night of januare morning among other things he had trouble sleeping.

he couldn't get to sleep. he called his aid who was also known as his hatchet man and talks about his wish to get even with his enemies and how he's going to wrap up the vietnam war and 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. now he's just come back from the kennedy center. they played the 1812 overture so

he's pumped up about that and he doesn't like the washington symphony orchestra because of political reasons. he's brought up philadelphia from the monarch down to play for him. he considers them more aligned with him, particularly the conductor. so i'm going to play a little bit of that and then he goes on. another is about the inaugural address that he's about to deliver and he shares portions of it. then he talks about the vietnam war and finally how he's going to stick it to the "washington post." so, i'm going to try to share this with you and we will meet you on the other side here.

lincoln's sitting room, january 20th, 1973 president nixon and chuck colson. statement one. >> [inaudible] and normandy was fantastic. [inaudible]

>> statement number two. [inaudible]

[inaudible] [inaudible] statement number three.

[inaudible] [inaudible]

okay. i'm going to end there without going into the last thing which was just attacking the "washington post" and expressing pleasure at the campaign to bring down the price of the "washington post." but i think that you get the flavor of it. you see that this allows the writer and hopefully the reader to be flies on the wall to these very intimate conversations, very frank conversations and go to places we normally completely are out of bounds to ordinary models. so, within 100 days of that

conversation, nixon's life completely unraveled and his presidency unraveled and as i said, all of his aides were fighting with each other and you had heard chuck colson who was incredibly loyal to nixon and was in charge of the tricks he was the first to go and then later on other aids including the chief of staff who was in charge of domestic policy, they were forced to resign as kind of sacrificial sacrifices to push the blame of watergate onto someone else. so, among other things i'm interested in this group of people around nixon and how they started fighting with each other and their different personalities. we can talk about this later but you had tolson who was willing

to do anything that nixon even hinted at and believed the president's orders should be carried out immediately without question and somebody like the chief of staff, bob haldeman who said as a buffer between nixon and the rest of the white house and haldeman tried to restrain nixon when he was in the mood, when nixon was doing things haldeman felt wouldn't be good for the country or good for the presidency. then people like henry kissinger who comes across in these tapes as the arch flatterer and sycophants. he tells nixon you saved this country, mr. president. the history books will show that no one will know 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 the conversation is to show he was the architect of all of these foreign policy moves, not henry kissinger. so, at the center of this story is the figure of nixon himself, the 37th president who i and many other history and biographers find endlessly fascinating. i had a conversation with a man named stanley cutler who's 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 i was surprised when he said to me that in 20 years nobody will know or 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 is about to be re- inaugurated through the crisis catastrophe and then in the end of the downfall of the president or setting the stage for the

downfall. but as you will see, there's a twist at the end which i'm not going to reveal now, but you will have to read the book. it's not a shakespearean tragedy. it is, as i said, and 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, it isn't a human character. it is these tape recordings which really kind of developed a dynamic of their own that nixon cannot control and ultimately they lead to his 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

his accusers particularly john dean the former legal counsel and it would have been a he said she said the story. it was only because of the existence of the tapes which nixon was finally forced to release although the smoking gun tape to the orders of the supreme court that really sealed nixon's fate. one of the reasons i see nixon as 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. here mentioned one he couldn't get out of and it was also very

painful to him to part with people who worked for him for many years particularly bob haldeman. donald trump went through four presidents in four years. donald trump went through four chiefs of staff in four years. nixon had the same man as his chief of staff through those four years and then found it extremely painful to demand the resignation as a scapegoat in april of 1973. so i am going to end before taking any questions just by playing one little extract of the conversation between nixon and haldeman after nixon has announced haldeman's

resignation. by the time he talks to haldeman he's already put back a few so you can hear that in his voice he talks about haldeman as you are going to hear i think that this is a reference to nixon's own brother, one of his own who died from tuberculosis when he was a young man and when he is forced to part he's thinking of this tragedy that happened when he was a young man but there was one in particular to whom he was very close so i'm just going to share the screen again and then we can talk on the other side of this last recording that i am going to play for you.

that's the wrong one. april 30th, 1973 president nixon and bob haldeman. [inaudible]

[inaudible] [inaudible]

[inaudible] [inaudible] >> i don't think i can.

[inaudible] that was the end of this 30 day period. i go beyond that. but this is the main arc of the narrative. if there are any questions, i would love to respond. thank you for bearing with me. i hope you could all hear those little audio extracts without any trouble. happy to answer any questions.

>> thank you. we do have questions but first and foremost, can you talk about how you access these tapes and about how many hours of tape there are? >> a total of 3,700 only a small fraction of which were released while nixon was still president on the orders of the supreme court and so most of the standard books do not include this 3,700 hours but most of the 3,700 hours of tapes which were only released in the last ten years or so, so they are actually all up on the nixon library website. it takes a bit of navigating that anybody can go on there and listen to them and you can also listen to some of the extracts on my website. at least some of the tapes i use

in the book, michael dobbs books.com. if you go there you will 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 are still fascinated with the 37th president? >> partly it's the important nature of the presidency and i think this was a turning point for america at the end of the 60s. it was the combination of the vietnam war, important moves including the opening to china which i think the implications of that now it's nixon's personality this man that brought himself up for nothing from a quaker family in california and is often compared to trump the trump was on the third base and nixon had

everything he achieved he did through his own efforts and then he threw it away because of the flaws in his character, particularly his paranoia and mistrust of the determination to fight for everything that he achieved. that sort of became his fatal flaw for getting even with his enemies and so on. but he's a contradictory character. a man of great talent and great vision. he worked extremely hard. i might say he's an ordinary american but more so. he has all the virtues and floors of the average american. he sort of worked harder than anybody else. with greater intensity than

anybody else so he just took everything to an extreme. for me at least that is a fascinating character study. >> interested in the makeup of the supreme court at the time and if nixon had any vision of this ending up at the supreme court. >> he chose to keep the tapes and in july and august of 1973 after one of his aides had revealed that the president had been keeping himself and so then nixon when he hears about this, he's in the hospital. where i live just outside of washington and bethesda he's on

heavy pain killers and so on and he has to take a decision on what many of his aides are urging him to have a buffer on the white house lawn and destroy the tapes, but he still thinks he can control them and they will be his ally in this fight with john dean and others that he will be able to release the selective portions of the conversations that will bolster his version of events and that's a terrible miscalculation. we know that now but it's logical to nixon and for the supreme court it was the equal

number but 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 the tapes that could shed light on whether the crimes had been committed in the white house. >> did the supreme court require transcripts of the tapes or making them publicly accessible? >> there is a long argument over how he would release the tapes and i didn't deal with this in the book myself but this is kind of what happened afterwards as a political argument for being that kind of drama that i described in the book.

so, initially nixon says i won't release the tapes. i will release the transcripts and you know, so he released the doctor transcripts and people of my age remember he released the transcripts with every other sentence with expletives deleted. so he wasn't really releasing all the incriminating stuff on the tapes, so finally the supreme court said no, the transcripts are not good enough. you have to release the transcripts themselves. >> you talk about nixon and the very beginning of the book in hubris. can you expound a little bit upon that and that nixon has? >> i approached the man you heard at the beginning that says

hubris became the mark of the man because it was the quality depth nixon admired the most. hubris is a great word that means excessive pride or presumption and tragedy. the hero is always brought down by his sort of arrogance or pride. 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 he thinks he is going to stick it to his enemies. he uses a colorful language but i'm toning it down. he thinks that he will stick it to his enemies and so he's

he isreally setting himself up r the fall but that's what hubris means and there's plenty of evidence of it in those early themes that i described in the book. >> it's been said mr. nixon had the language of a drunken sailor and certainly sometimes very objectionable language and tone. are there conversations and with whom do you find in a reporter that were most surprising? he was bad about swearing. what do you find most surprising as a reporter? >> there were a lot of generally racist remarks that he indulges in. of course he wasn't doing this in public. they are private tapes. it's not like trump's tweets.

he never intended for them to be made 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 i think more than the average person and he's got a very colorful tone of phrase. one of the things you see is even someone like mike kissinger from a completely different background they try to compete with each other to swear like nixon so partly you ask what

surprised me. i guess it's this dynamic of all the people it's like a royal court they try to compete against each other to gain the attention and benevolence of the king so it's an interesting dynamic going on that i try to describe. >> let's speak a little bit about that competition. what then prompts the deflection i suppose? >> that is a good question. well it really starts unraveling when the burglars that broke into watergate back in 1972 are caught red-handed and put on

trial and the administration tries to cut off responsibility so they are put on trial and it starts at the same time i begin the narrative. the head of the committee to reelect the president goes before the judge and commits perjury. the prosecutor asks if he gave any instructions for the break-in of the watergate with the taping of the democratic national committee and this young very ambitious aid in his 30s says it's nothing to do with him and he was acting without any authorization at

all. he himself authorized the break-in but one of the men listens to this and he thinks why should i and the rest of us take responsibility for this when we know the people they gave the orders are getting off scott free while we are about to be sent to this horrible jail, the 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 when the whole cover-up starts unraveling because he says perjury is being committed in the trial. the president's legal counsel

realizes the white house is being blackmailed and could be implicated. he would be sent to prison and he isn't willing to be sent to prison for the crimes that he sees of other people so he turns on nixon or first of all he tries to get mcgruder to shoulder the responsibility so there's kind of this inciting as nixon puts it they are on each other and then on the president to be crude about it which is what nixon was so once the taboo has been broken there's just one person not willing to go along with the cover-up and he starts

blowing the whistle on it and then the whole house of cards begins to fall apart. >> aren't they mostly attorneys and lawyers? from my memory it seems nixon was quite the law student and several of the aides were law students. >> that's one of the points john dean makes. at one point, he writes up a list of everybody involved either in the white house or with the president. most of them are lawyers including nixon himself. of course the whole legal question of obstruction of

justice and conspiracy they weren't necessarily criminal lawyers but so some of them were smarter than others realizing the legal jeopardy that they were in. i would say dean was the smartest and realized he could be sent to prison for many years and that was one reason why he blew the whistle on the whole conspiracy. they should have known better but at one point as he says if the president does it then that means it's legal so he thinks if the president orders a break-in, he can claim he is justified for national security reasons and this was the whole political legal dispute of watergate that in the end they decided just because the president ordered it

doesn't mean it's legal at all it became a constitutional crisis precisely for that reason. >> who were the enemy is and who was nixon out to get? >> he was out to get anybody who, at the long list of enemies beginning with the kennedys because if you recall nixon had lost and election to jack kennedy in 1960 and as a modern-day echo if we think about the events of the past few months that actually it was extremely close much closer than the last it was determined by a few thousand votes in illinois and texas including disputed votes in cook county controlled by the mayor daley of chicago so

nixon had a much more legitimate basis for challenging the results than donald trump did in the last but he didn't challenge the results. he decided for the good of the country that he would accept the results but he had a lasting grudge and was determined he would never again allow himself to be cheated so this explains in part his thirst for political intelligence and when it came to the 1972 election, he was determined not to be a thief and just describing what's going on in his mind he's determined not to allow the kennedys to cheat him again or it wasn't so much

the kennedys but the democrats. that was one of the sources of watergate bit as far as the enemies are concerned they range from the kennedys to journalists to the entire eastern foreign policy establishments, the elites in general and drew up an enemies list and there's some quite humorous for example he had a dispute with the dean of the washington cathedral. lbj dies in the middle of all of this and they are deciding whether to bury or have a memorial service for johnson in the national cathedral in washington but nixon one of his enemies is the dean of the

cathedral who is a leader of the antiwar movement so nixon goes off on a tirade against the dean of the cathedral and isn't going to allow a funeral to take place and if it does he's not going to attend and so on and so forth so you get a kind of insight into the depth of his hatred of the other side which is very revealing. >> what about the environment in the newsroom at the post during that time period what do you know about that? >> i started working for the post after this period but i do know some of the actors including bob word word and carl bernstein. of course for journalists like those two they were young reporters at the time and this was the kind of story perhaps

they dreamt of and the post was under great pressure from the administration. it had just begun going public so there was pressure to restrain the reporters but she sided with the reporters so the post was breaking this news then you had a whole generation that wanted to model themselves on bernstein and woodward. that's a whole other story but i guess reporters like myself went into journalism in part because the whole story of woodward and bernstein and watergate. >> there's a tremendous amount of tapes and you focused on

these periods of what you said were the most passionate, the most critical perhaps. did you listen to them all? >> i didn't listen to them all that i listened to the key ones. some are better quality than others. those i just played were recorded on the telephone so they were fairly easy to understand. some were pretty much impossible and the professional whose job it was to listen and make transcripts of some of them calculated that you needed to listen for 100 hours in order to get one hour of transcript so if you multiply that by 3,700 hours of tapes you can see that it would take several lifetimes for

somebody to listen to all the tapes and decipher them all and they are completely unintelligible so i have to confess i didn't listen to them all. >> aren't there portions missing? there's something famous about the missing minutes -- >> the famous missing 17 minutes. this is one of the first tapes after the watergate break-in when nixon is talking to his aid so there's conversations about watergate in age. there's been a lot of conspiracy theories about what's in those missing 17 minutes. does it reveal that nixon ordered the break-in of the watergate? i don't think it does because you have to sort of triangulate with other sources of information including the haldeman diary is, so we know pretty much what was in those 17

minutes. i think it is just nixon being ham-fisted and he started listening to these tapes and pressing all these buttons on his tape recorder and he probably wanted to get rid of some that were compromising to him but they are not any more compromising than other things on the tapes so that's what most historians including me believe. but you can argue about that. >> what do you think we have learned from all of this? >> nixon kept saying you shouldn't -- the problem was in the original crime, it was the cover-up and he had experienced himself the unraveling cover-up of the affair of alger hiss when

he was a young congressman so he chose that whatever else you do, don't cover it up because the cover-up and watergate became worse than the original crime. he could have blamed watergate on various ordinances but covering it up by obstruction of justice was what really brought him down. on a larger level let's say it's the kind of -- in my book it is an insight into this very introverted world it's a kind of an american version of the royal court. the president in that white house becomes extremely isolated and it's a kind of eco- chamber in which everybody is telling the president what they think he wants to hear and that is a

dangerous situation not just for nixon but for all presidents that after a bit to they become isolated, distant from reality and particularly a problem of the second term and first term. .. you have to be a very sane person to, you know, remain grounded in common sense and some degree of humility.

you need somebody to -- i mean, people say traditionally this is what spouses do, you know, they -- and family does. they keep the president or sort of grounded. but it's a disease of any president and some presidents suffer from it more than others. >> thank you for your discussion this evening and for doing the research and for appearing tonight via. we greatly appreciate it. i would 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. >> well, 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 least borrow it from the library. thank you very much. >> thank you. and i wish all of you a good evening. thank you for joining us. good night.

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