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never slowed down. schools and businesses went virtual and repowered a new reality because atiacom we are built to keep you ahead. >> media, along with these television companies support c-span2 is a public service. >> good morning. it feels like afternoon already. welcome back to the book festival, i'm a former member of the city council and proud supporter of the book festival since its inception. if you join us for the first book festival, welcome back and it's great to be here in person this year after two years of virtual book festivals. gaithersburg is a city that values and supports arts and humanities and we are pleased to bring you this festival things are part of the generous support sponsors and volunteers. volunteers are wearing bright orange shirt so say thank you.

... ou post about the festival if you're one of those people that social media savvy, please use the gbf hashtag. your feedback's really important to us surveys are available on our website, which you available web site which can ask to be spurred book festival. by submitting the survey to be entered into the drawing for a 100-dollar gift card which we have in our bookstore. michael dobbs will sign books immediately after this presentation in the air-conditioned comfort of the activity center so please meet him there.

copies of his books are on sale at the politics and pro-store which is also ann activity center.ve this is a free event but it does help our festival if you buy books, lots off books. the more books we sell at our event the more publishersd want to bring their authors to speak with us. politics and prose supports one of the great booksellers in the world and the benefits are local economy and makes jobs and books make great gifts by the way. please stop by the activity center and purchase a book. they are there presented today are authored today michael dobbs has been a foreign correspondent for reuters and covered the collapse of the soviet union in a recent biography of madeleine

albright. during the 2008 presidential campaign he returned to the on line fact checker column so we have michael to thank for that. "king richard" nixon and watergate - an american tragedy' is michael's most recent work in counting the days following the landslide re-election victory of nixon and how the investigation of watergate blew it all up. reading "king richard" brought me back to college days when all this was happening when we crowded into the tv lounges because that's how we watch tv. it was a shared experience. we watched the select committee hearings instead of going to class. it was educational and rivetings and for many was traumatic. like the title suggests the story is a shakespearean tragedy. no heroes and no stories bigamist character in the center of it all to watergate for me like a me like a car crash he can't turn away from. with this post book michael

helps us relive it again but bu. so i'm looking forward to hearing what michael has to say about his book in the process of writing it so please join me in welcoming pfoa to the gaithersburg book festival. [applause] >> thank you very much. has this explained i'm a former journalist and i used to work for the "washington post" and after 30 years of being mainly a foreign correspondent kate turned myself into a historian and actually to distinguish myself from all those presidential historians out there i called myself a presidential -- historian. i tried to focus on not just the entire life of somebody else writing biographies like the biography of nixon but i tried

to focus on the most dramatic moments of that person's life when they faced an existential crisis of one kind or another. i wrote a book about the cuban missile crisis called one minute to midnight which is about the time in 1962 in the world came closer to never before sent perhaps with the exception of thee current times to some kind of nuclear exchange. nixon also faced a crisis. he faced a personal crisis and a national crisis and that's the crisis that d i try to describen this book. why did ii call it "king richard"? at i don't think i'm very good at titles but i think "king richard" is fitting. it sums up the spirit of what i

was trying too do. obviously that phrase evokes a shakespearean tragedy. shakespeare wrote king layer and two books into plays richard the second and richard iii but also there's a connection to let -- nixon'sbe life. his mother as you know he came from a poor quaker family in pennsylvania she called her sons, she named her sons all three of her sons after the kings kings of englanded and she named richard after the first king richard. two others were named after other english kings and effect they died when richard was very youngug from tuberculosis. he had a tough upbringing.

and is trying to get away from this background to become president of the united states and then the same qualities of% since an drive and hatreds of his enemies and a determination to g get even his policies carrd into the presence and ended up bringing him down. which is a very shakespearean story. that tragedy you have a tragic hero that has a fatal flaw. he could be b capable of greatns but a fatal flaw brings him down and i think that'sha the case wh nixon. sola that explains why i chose e title king richard because it's personal to nixon's life in the subtitle of the book is an american tragedy.

we can talk and in the questions and answers about whether you agree with me that nixon is a tragic figure or not. okay so i went to talk a littleo bit about my push because i'm a former journalist and i'm not a professionally trained historian. therefore i tried to tell history as a story using techniques of fiction to apply to nonfiction. actually there are a lot of journalists, outstanding popular historians. david mccubbin is an example and at the "washington post" one of my mentors wrote a wonderful trilogy of the second world war and wrote, is writing it trilogy of the american revolution.

these authors and former journalist used techniques of writing nonfictional history that using fictional techniques of developing t characters using plenty of dialogueti creating themes in moving from one scene to another. a of course if you're writing nonfiction every bit of it has to be accurate. you can't just invent things and one of the reasons i chose this subject of watergate if you don't have to invent anything because we have seen it on the recordan that it's so rich and it's much more interesting and much more colorful. i have a great imagination. if i'm a novelist i invent many of the lines a pop-up and watergate and of course an amazing source of

real life authentic style. how do i write this t book? i focus on nixon's re-election in 1972 and this is after six months after watergate. he was and i graded for the second time is president and one of the outstanding election victories in american history. he won by the largest popular vote margin up until that date. he thought he had largely. watergate behind him. watergate in june of 72 he is reelected in december of 1972 in my book begins with a scene just before his inauguration in january of 1973. actually the 20th of january

and in 1973. nixon you know he's feeling pretty good about watergate comes to a peace treaty with north vietnam and these acclaimed as the great foreign-policy president and watergate doesn't seem to be all that important. the "washington post" had run out of leads to investigate. and then suddenly within three months or 100 days it all falls apart. this varied discipline presidency unraveled completely and nixon is facing the greatest personal crisis of his life and one of the greatest political . crises in american history. it's anor incredible story with thenc unraveling of a presidency which we are able to witness from the inside.

thanks to these tapes. so i begin the story at 1:00 a.m. january the 20th at noon and nixon is about to take the oath of office for the second time. yet a favorite room in the white house which was the lincolnm. sitting room in the corner of the second floor overlooking washington's monument in the smallest and most intimate room. nixonn love to go there and he would go up there and his daughters like k to even in the height of summer on a day like this he would go to his cubbyhole in the sitting room and have the fire going set by his faithful retainer and then he'd have the air-conditioning up full blast to counter the

heat of the fire. basically this is what he is doing in the early morning hours of january 20. he can't get to sleep. he's too excited andnd thinking about what he will tell the american people the next day. at 4:00 a.m. he calls chuck colson and they start talking about everything he wants to do in his second term. and he won't and his second term he wants to all of nixon's enemies and if the tremendous -- tremendous triumph in securing peace in vietnam and is colson said we are going to slash that the out of them.

then they start talking about how they will the "washington post" because they mostly the "washington post" and so colson has a plan to drive down the "washington post" shares. think it was $38 colson has succeeded in driving it down to what he says $25. actually $28 he is posting about about this nixon but he's delighted to inform nixon that the economy was doing great in everybody's fortunes are up except those of thedl post. oddly enough their stock has dropped three more points since i talked to last and it's now $20. that'ss too bad nixon replied sarcastically. isn't that a shame. it was $38 in december and had record earnings and it dropped 10 points. keep them busy nixon instructed him.e it was nearly 2:00 a.m. time to

go to bed. the president have to be up early the next morning for the inauguration day ceremony. he said goodnight to the special counsel and hung up the phone. two floors below in a locked cabinet in the west wing basement 4000 reel-to-reel tapes stop worrying. if any of you did ap literature in school you know an ensemble mean to put in a little detail to suggest what is going to happen later in the story. so i'm introducing the tape recorders and the tapes as a kind of character in the book and they are a witness to everything that happens but they are also an inanimate character of course that they are also the agent of the tragedy. i'm convinced that nixon not

taped himself he would have survived his presidency but you assume existence of that smoking gun his own tape recordings that eventually brought him to his resignation. so tapes have incredible historical importance but they also have been important info history because we are never again going to get as intimate a look at what it's really like to be president as we do during this very crucial period of the nixon presidency. noe president because of the precedent of nixon is ever going to tape himself away president nixon did. you could say that for sure. this historical record is never going to exist again. some people say trying to it a

lot. i'm sorry. the tweets were intended to be public in the first place with the tapes were not intended to be public. tapes were private documents that nixon never intended to become public and when they became public he was horrified. so no nixon was not the first president to tape himself. taping in the white house began with franklin roosevelt who taped a few of his press conferences during the second world war because he was angry with the press about exposing him and he had a device in his desk i which was constantly on t he got fed up with it after a few sessions and stopped it. after the war kennedy tape himself in a taped meetings in a cabinet room down from the oval

office. and i draw most t tapes to write about the cuban missile crisis. they are a very valuable source. again kennedy was able to turn the recording on and off and then johnson taped himself and taped his telephone conversations. the difference between these former presidents and nixon was that some genius in the white house thought nixon is a technological klutz to say the least. and as halderman put it no one will ever trust you and you aren't going to trust yourself to turn on the tape recorder when you need to. so let's have a tape recording system without an on/off switch. it will take everything. it will start recording when you go into the room and if you think about in your private houses if you had tape recorders

that record absolutely everything you said when you walk into the room or whenever you picked up the telephone. they thought this was a great thing so they wouldn't have to worry about it. but in the end it proved his undoing because the tape system reporter tapes a good, the and illegal. they were things on these tapes. intimate conversations with his family and his daughters but there's also of course the illegal stuff. so in retrospect this was the biggest act of self-harm that a president could ever do to himself. but for a historian or and hopefully for a reader it's an incredible gift and it's the gift that keeps on giving his people have said because it enables us to see this presidency unraveling before our eyes and the president facing all these incredible strains.

you think of stress in your daily life, think of it dealing as a president trying to deal not only with the crisis of the country but also the crisis in your personal life and as we have have here. i sometimes say my ambition was to make the reader a fly on the wall to all these events that normally people like you and me would never get to see, to witness and we can imagine ourselves as a fly on the wall and the white house or camp david or the lincoln sitting room.hi actually think a better analogy is the desk because they actually drilled holes in the desk in the oval office to plant their bugs so the perspective we get is exactly that of being a bug in nixon's desk and he comes in with a cup of tea and they

start moving coffee cups around on the table. you get a sort of screech when nixon puts up his feet on the desk and it sounds like a thunder roll or something. so that's how we are listening to this. so what interested me was how this presidency fell apart and how one thing leads to another with all these unintended consequences. after watergate happened there's an election in november and there is no -- nixon wanted a lot of things but there's no evidence that nixon ordered watergate. he certainly coasted to happen and created a culture for to happen but it didn't actually ordered the break-in. so had he been honest with the country in the summer of 1972 he could have blamed it on that a few of his aides and probably have gotten away with it.

but his instincts because there was an election in two or three months time was toer cover it up and that's what brought them down wasn't water gatehe that brought them down today was the cover. and he interested that himself because coverups destroy people and it happened with these tapes. there's a go on it -- a guy named jim accrue to the stars we can tell is a person who authorizeded the committee to reelect the president. and mcgrew to light before the grand jury and before the fbi and his rationale was well we were covering up a burglary we were safeguarding their safeguarding world peace. it was essential that nixon be reelected as president is

probably a lot of presidential aides thanks so that was his justification. one thing leads to another so in january of 1953 nixon was reelected and he thinks he's got watergate behind him that something happens that is the trigger for this unraveling in the trigger is james mccord was one of the supervisors of the burglary a former cia guy and he had been arrested because he had the answers to the berkeleyche which could be prov. he's thinking to himself, he's an upstandingim citizen consided himself an upstanding member of the community. he could have been one of your neighbors and he thinks to himself why should i go to jail

when magruder is getting off scott free. he was was running the a knock grove festivities at that time. so the court is not willing to put up with it and the judge said perjury was committed in this trial and ordered some of the much higher up's we decided of their own accord to break-in. particularly magruder so that triggers the whole long episode of one of nixon's aides running for cover and one nixon aide accusing the other and nixon himself had a very colorful expression for this. he said might aides are going to start testing onhe each other ad then they are going to startt pressing on the president. excuse my language.

so this book describes what has happened and how this happened. magruderec leads to john dean becoming worried about his future and john dean incorporates with the prosecutors. it's like y in shakespeare you have inha the greek tragedy you have hubris and then you have crisis and then you have catastrophe and then you haven't and some kind of catharsis, a resolution and so this is what happens. hyou've got the hubris of them thinking that everything is wonderful and believes all this watergate problem and then you have the crisis with the letter to the judge and then the catastrophe above the aides turning on each other and nixon was forced to -- with holderman.

nixon thinks he'll have to resign himself to he manages to hang on for another year but he hangs on while there's a big fight in you probablyy remember it over whether or not the case will be published. okay so we see, the other quality or characteristic of that tragic stories that you have to see the hero suffering. and i think we do see nixon sufferer. receive his human side to him. he gets rid of haldeman and he said i'd love to and then there's applause, like my brother. i think he's referring to his two brothers who died of tuberculosis as young men and it

was painful for him to get rid of haldeman as it was to lose his two brothers as a young man. he wasn't like trump. to nixon it was extremely painful. he said to kissinger at one point nobody willpo ever know wt they put a president threw in a time like this. so we can talk about later on how nixon is the true tragic hero in talk about the right minds of watergate and i love the line from haldeman he says to dean, dean once the toothpaste is out of the tube it will be hard to put it back in. he described a problem they faced because once the aid started talking in dean started talking in particular it was hard to put the toothpaste back

in the tube. and then nixon to david frost after his resignation he says i gave them a sword meaning his enemies which they twisted with relish into my wounds. if i had been in their place i would probably have done the same thing. and nixon on his own downfall where he says, he tells his staff always remember others may you. those who you don't win unless you them and then you destroy yourself. i think that pretty much sums up the tragedy of richard nixon. so thank you very much and let's have a nice conversation. [applause]

>> how do you handle the erasure in the tape? did you do it now ballistically or just skip over it or what did you do? >> you're probably referring to the famous 17.5 minutes i think it is of her raised tape. that's actually from one of the first tape recordings, one of the first sessions after watergate. in july of 1972 and my story actually begins in january of 1973 in a way that i tell the story so i'm not trying to include every single detail from the beginning of watergate.ou i'm focused on the downfall of the presidency, the unraveling of the presidency and since you asked about that incident i think it's pretty obvious that was it deliberate erasure. the national archives to investigation to that and it's not just one accidental pressing

of the recording button. there are about 30 pressings of the record button and it was probably either nixon or could haveve been rosemary woods his secretary. it wasn't done very efficiently. suddenly there was embarrassing stuff on that tape but i don't think there was any more embarrassing than a lot of other stuff on the tapes. the reason is nixon repeated himself a lot so you wouldn't have found just one little bit of damaging stuff on one tape is no reference to it somewhere else. at that meeting haldeman, we have another source. every night he would go and record hisis private diary so, d then that was typed up. and that was meant to be a private diary. he had no reason to hold things back and he writes what happened

in that session. it was the discussion of a cover-up. my point is it wasn't any than a lot of other tapes. so i'm inclined not to pay so much attention tors that. of course everybody was interested in what happened and it's one of the big mysteries of watergate but i think it's been sort of exaggerated actually. >> i will hope you'll get a nice long answer and this from a historical perspective. i studied as an undergraduate and a couple of comments just to see if you can shed or information for us. it really is self implosion is an it? he did lots of tricks for years and he was pious. i think we have learned a thing as t a culture and theirs than rehabilitation and diane sawyer

and all these people. if you look back the republican party ended up being. they feel like they decapitate their leader and effective as a self implosion by though there's a cultural history to this and if you could just talk to this from your ve perspective now. did we learn anything? thank you. >> 50 years,ea watergate break-n june of 1972 in the next month it will be the 50th anniversary of the 50th. everything is relative and of course nixon he committed criminal acts while in office for which he was forced to resign. and as i say the cover-up is

typically called obstruction of justice and they blamed -- for that equipment for that. some people say my book is more sympathetic to nixon than some other books and i don't know if it's the right word but it's importanti' for writer to tell e story through the eyes of your protagonists. lot of it is through nixon's eyes were things that happened in nixon's presence. you are obviously not a nixon fan. it's's like to just mention a couple of redeeming qualities. first of all nixon never question the election. well i mean you know the president election at affect the

62 closer run a collection than the last one. he had challengers in illinois and texas and he bore a grudge from it. he thought the democrats are me and i won't allow myself to be again but he resigned. i think the system did work in 1972 and i think the system came close toto the breaking point in recent years particularly with the question of the scheming of the election which nixon never with the question of challenging the results of the election which nixon never tried to do. a reader wrote to me and said thank you for your book. it was well researched and interesting howeverrd richard nixon was not a tragic figure in any way. he was a spiteful, and ball.

[laughter] no moral compass in anyway. compass in any way. and so compass in anyway. i'm 74 years old and i wish i could pass on his grave before i die. [laughter] so that obviously reflects a certain strand of opinion out there about nixon. i read my reply and i said thanks for your note. glad you liked the book even if you nixon. as i hope you noticed i wrote it on principle of show, don't tell. i tried to capture a particularly dramatic period in nixon's life in the country's life as vividly as possible way a novelist for playwright might while sticking strictly to historical facts. it's up to readers like you to decide for themselves what lesson should be drawn from history. , from the story. as for the subtitle an american tragedy that can be interpreted in different ways.

a personal tragedy,y political tragedy for a national tragedy. perhaps all three, take your pick. so that pretty much describes my approach i think. >> thank you. i've not read your book yet but i was wondering did you bring sphero agnew into the story and did his actions add to the or around the nixon administration? >> with that the former governor of maryland you are talking about. agnew makes it entrance and at the same time this is all going on with the present the vice president is making his own investigationw and nixon used to actually nixon could be quite humorous and he said one thing i've got going for me is if you

get rid of me you don't get agnew into the one agnew and of course the answer was no. eventually agnew resigned and thatn was the text for getting rid of nixon. >> thank you but a couple of comments on technology about tape recordings in ourt homes. they are in our homes and her name is alexa. i'mom curious when you're developing this project how were you able to work with her collaborate with carl b bernsten and bob carl woodruff. >> i knew both of them from the "washington post" particularly carl woodruff and i was interested -- actually asked

woodworth for ava blurb and he said he had hiss own book to focus on so didn't even get me a blurb. anyway no hard feelings. but i didn't feel the need woodruff about watergate and investigated this whole film in the question of who would seek pardons. iec didn't need to talk to peope 40 or 50 years after the event because i have enough problems listening to all these tapes dealing with contemporaneous material that is so rich and it's much more valuable and much more authentic than people's memories 50 years later so if you want to get his perspective

on something just read why lots of books and you can buy his books if you feel the need. plus this unraveling of the presidency and i think all the presidents men created a distorted version. the journalist certainly played a role in the washington place played a role in the woodward and bernstein playedar a role tt a lot of people, investigators and the judge who i mentioned and all these people, there was an internal dynamic inside the white house which we didn't know at the time put all these people turning on each other. mcgruder turning on dean and dean turning on mcgruder. i like to think all the presidents men all the presidents men was the first

draft of history but i didn't want to rehash all that stuff. b i think your book is very even-handed for a criminal like richard nixon. but i would say if there were heroes in the story and the way we have looked at it some people think john dean is a hero and it was interesting to hear their rendition of how he came up with this testimony and now he created his own but the central one perhaps the most important one was someone who didn't get a lot of credit even though we have all these tapes. let's explain the tapes were there to confirm everythingg tht dean said and all of the others.

so maybe you want to comment on that predicting terror here is the story but it's certainly not a protagonist here. >> he had been a colonel in the u.s. air force and haldeman recruited into the white house. he was not a party guy. he was in charge ofge the paperwork and they also happen to be in charge of the taping. he was not going to blow the whistle on nixon. if he was called to congress and asked about the taping system he would answer honestly. i think that's a greatpe perspective that you don't go out and put a knife in the presidents back. if you were called to testify by

the government or investigation if the answer honestly and that's a butterfield did. butterfield is a hero and without those tapes nixon would have been forced to resign. see the thank you so much. it's interesting dean comes up as a quote he wrote and has been rehabilitated as a commentator. there's a series on right now called gaslit which is really kindfu of funny because it's as much about dean as it is about anyone else. i wonder if what we are seeing in gaslit which is deemed as is not comfortable in his own skin very low level thinker but not a high-level player is actuallyha the dean that was in the white house.

>> will dean to me is neither heroll nor villain. perhaps a mixture of the two. sometimes there are shades of gray and i think dean illustrated it. people have different motives for cooperating and not always honorable. in this case he came to detest nixon in the first motive was and actually he was pretty smart. dean was smarter than the other other guys i guess he saw the threat, the legal threat to him which was of him going to prison so he was not prepared to go along with a buddy of personal reasons for that. so somebody like dean is a good example. many people have mixed motives and is not always or. it's somewhere in between and dean was a good example for that. i've been seeing gaslit.

martha mitchell to she was an interesting character but she sort of blew the whistle early on. she was a pretty impossible woman to be married to i would imagine. i have some sympathy for john mitchell but who is seeing gaslit here? i had had enough of nixon and watergate by that time. [laughter] >> thank you. talk about theix nixon story is his shakespearean or greek tragedy but it's really the elements of human nature. it's the elements of human natureo and that repeats themselves over an oversize

wondering if you care to to talk about nice one marries -- similarities with trump and watergate?it tell you think was going to happen with the various players. thank you. >> i tried in terms of rating president i considered trump to be far than nixon. nixon he being forced to resign and he everybody else. in the end he respected the system and he respected it again in 1972. you can draw a straight line between silent majority the race card to be played and you can draw a straight line between nixon and trump in many ways but in terms of, i mentioned nixon

is more of a human character. you see nixon suffering in these tapes having conversations with his daughter sang of course he had family and some of the family crises they faced. he was a loving family person alternately and in 50 years time perhaps we'll get a different view of trump. i'm not sure, can see the human qualities and trump that i can see a nixon and i don't see the suffering or basic respect for the system and i certainly can't see daishen nix and whatever else you think of him was a brilliant mind. he wasn't kissinger who opened up to china because that may not mhave been a great idea now. nixon a very creative foreign policy thinker and he read about american history.

so perhaps i would put them in different categories. i think to me there a lot of things i could accept that to me the end of it was january the sixth and questioning the wizards of the election which is a i continuing threat to americn democracy. c thank you michael. [applause] michael assigned books.