through all of that. and part of the tax thing i went through all the improvements at san clement. he had been accused of taking a lot of taxpayer money at san clement and we went through a whole lot of stuff. we put out a serious white paper. the truth was the charges were quite exaggerated. so i came out with some sense of that. b, haldeman, erlichman and other people kept telling us, he's innocent. i have written, i believe, that the coverup worked better inside the white house than it worked outside. especially when you're young you have a desire if you're working for a boss, especially when he's president, you want him to be innocent. if you invest your hopes and

dreams in somebody you really want them to be above things and i had come to believe he was probably innocent. i was less cynical. i would have liked to have believed he was innocent. i didn't know anybody, i had never known anybody who had gone to jail. a lot of my friends didn't go to jail. i didn't come from that type of environment. i tended to be one of the ones who believed longer than i should have. i do remember one morning driving in on a summer day in my little blue volkswagen bug into the west parking lot there just outside the west wing. and as i came through the gates, i just noticed people were scurrying around in one direction or another. just an unusual bee hive of activity. i had no idea what was going on. i parked and asked, hey, what's happening here? he said, just watch. just wait. you don't know? >> i said no. he said, just watch. >> okay. so i went into my office and about 10:00, 10:30, the phone rang and somebody said, alex butterfield is testifying this afternoon. why don't you join us? we're going to have a get together and watch it on television together in ken klausen's office. i said fine. so i went over there and walked in and there was an open bar.

i said to people, why is there a bar in here? i thought we were just going to watch alex butterfield and go back to our offices. they said, we need to have a bar and keep the drinks up. i said okay. that's fine. and we sat down to watch. and of course it was in that testimony in the afternoon that he broke the news that at richard nixon's instructions there had been a taping system put in. that was quite instructive to me. a number of white house aides were pretty young, wandering around ken klausen's office and all of us who had gone to these elite colleges -- i had gone to yale -- we were just elated because all along we had been trying to move a negative about watergate that he didn't do it.

he didn't know. he wasn't involved in the coverup. great. we finally have proof because we have these tapes that'll show that he's innocent. and all the kids who had come up from, you know, on the wrong side of the tracks who came up from blue collar backgrounds with a little rougher side of life, most of them got drunk. they got totally drunk. and they said, it's over. don't you understand, you idiot? it's over. they're going to have him. i said, no, no. i remember, we all went back our office, the harvard and yale

types, saying great we're going to get out of this. the other guys said, oh, they finally caught him. it was a very interesting, instructive lesson for me about both naivete and how working around in that environment, people who were seeing the same events could see them through a very different lens. >> was pat buchanan one of those who responded that way? >> i was trying to remember whether pat had left, when he left. i didn't think pat was there toward the bitter end. somehow i thought he had moved on. he remained loyal to nixon. i'm sure pat, you know, pat came up from a -- i'm a big pat buchanan admirer and i've always enjoyed his company. and, you know, because he went to gonzaga and a good catholic background, great family. more conservative than i am but so what? but i don't know where he was on that. i do think pat -- pat was a real skeptic about my coming in there at first because is this guy qualified?

and he was probably right. but he became a good colleague. i enjoyed working with pat. but i do want to say this. as this was going on and i was also in a phone contact with bob woodward. in fact, john dean later thought i was deep throat, which i wasn't, but bob woodward and i had gone to college together. we didn't know each other in college but had gotten to know each other in washington after we both got there, and he and woodward -- he and bob had teamed up on the watergate

story. and he started calling me. i remember the first call i got he was at "the washington post" and they -- it was like 8:00 or 9:00 at night and i was in my office and he said, listen. we've got this hot story. ziegler won't talk to us in the press office. and nobody else will talk to us. this is really important. it's a very sensitive story. and we don't have a white house perspective in there and we can't get to anybody. and i said, you know, i don't know anything. he said, i know that but you've got to -- can you help me? we think it's really important for the paper that we at least have some understanding. i've got to talk to somebody who can either set it straight or at least give your version of it. i said, listen, bob. let me see. so i went down and talked to led garmin who was still around and len called ron ziegler and they cleared it for me to let woodward in a back door over the old executive office building, which i did. i took him to len garmin's office and deposited him there. as a result of that, woodward began to develop some back channels which i did with the permission of the president. one of the tapes shows that the president nixon telling, i don't know who it was at the time, haldeman or ziegler or someone have gergen tell woodward x. so it was all through channels. as a result, bob woodward and i had periodic conversations in

which he was looking for help on a story and i would try to plug him in with somebody there, sometimes ziegler and, you know, i knew he had other contacts but i was one. but he and i would have these conversations about what was really happening. and we both began to understand that he was playing with the pillars of the government. i mean, his stories were starting to really threaten those pillars. and it was so interesting because he had a -- what i was hearing inside was so different from what he was gathering in his reporting. the world that was being painted for me on the inside as a player inside was a much, much more innocent, they don't understand, they don't get it. they're just out to get us. this is the liberal press. they're trying to bring us down. it's kay graham is just, you know, on a vendetta against nixon. she's never liked him, etcetera, etcetera. and what i then was discovering was woodward was getting a much sharper view and as time went on it became clearer to me the woodward view was much closer to reality than i was hearing and it became clear to me there were people lying in here. they're lying to me and they're lying to the public.

we didn't know what the extent of it was. woodward began to realize this game is not played straight. we're not on a level table here. now around then as it began to dawn on us this may be a lot more rotten than we thought into the very core of it. still didn't know whether nixon was -- we started having conversations, should we leave? what should we do? and i did have one -- i had a conversation with several of the speechwriters, one in

particular, john andrews went to live in colorado. extremely -- a man of great integrity, great social conscience and was extremely bothered and he finally said, david, i've got to go. i just don't feel comfortable being with this. i told him -- he came to me and so we had a long talk about it. and i told him, i didn't feel comfortable going yet, that i did feel that, a, i didn't think full proof was in and, b, i wasn't an important player but had a profile by the time i was running the unit would have sent a signal i didn't believe in. i had lost faith and i was out of there. it was one thing for john who did not have as much after profile to leave but i thought it was another and i felt i couldn't leave. and then frankly when al hague called and asked a group of us to come in toward the end to i remember walking into his office and he got a group of us around for the junior lieutenants if

you would, and he said, gentlemen, are your sphincters tight? i said where are we going here? that's when he told us about the smoking gun, the tape of june 21st. i think that was the day. at that point we knew it was over. and it was only a matter of time before he left. having stayed up until that point i felt you couldn't leave because it was a rat leaving a sinking ship. it was like you had to stay through the end. now that we knew you had to go down with the ship. as i say, i thought we were all going to be drowned in the storm that would follow and we weren't. but i felt the only honorable thing to do was to stick it out. now, did i stay partly because i was fascinated by the whole

thing? probably. you know, this was one of the most important dramas of my life. here i was in this place that i had a potential role and potentially could be helpful. i was writing some memos trying to get some things to go public and of course they didn't want to know where. and i felt in the end i had failed to bring good out of it. but i wrestled a lot with whether i should leave or not. but i -- i honestly felt in the end that my career is over and so is that of a lot of my colleagues but we've done the best we could under the circumstances. >> did you talk to ray price about these things? >> some. ray knew a lot more than i did. he had a young man working for him that's no longer alive by the name of tex lazar who was a very bright fellow, went back to practice law in texas. ray and i talked some but he was very guarded. very guarded. and he -- i didn't know the

truth until i learned from hague, al hague. i was one of the people that came out of that by the way feeling al hague had done a real service for the country. i thought he held the white house together during this time of chief of staff and i went into the reagan white house, i had a picture of al haag on my wall and he was secretary of state. of course a loft the reagan people hated it i was going to say that didn't make you that popular. made me very unpopular. i also had a situation where dwight chapin, we had come back in the reagan presidency and dwight chapin or somebody was in

town and i asked a group of the nixon alumni to come to the roosevelt room for a get together just to talk like ten or 12 or 15. i can't remember. and some of the reagan people hated me for that. because i was trying to say we're the chicago black socks. it's okay to come to me. life has gone on. a number of you have gone on to really good things. let's come back and have a closing of the circle. be my guest. i'm here working in the white house. and do that. but it -- and i think they liked it -- but i must tell you i think some of the reagan people hated it. there was no love lost between some of the reagan people and some of the nixon people. the reagan people when he had been governor felt the nixon people were terribly arrogant and it's important to remember that. they felt that they had been treated dismissively. so there was a lot of bad blood. you know, life is funny like that. but i will tell you, i tell some of these tales in a book i wrote, a reflective book i wrote on the -- "eyewitness to power"

which has chapters where i try to treat richard nixon in a three dimensional way and be fair to him. it's been striking to me in people who read that book how many tell me you gave me an entirely new understanding of richard nixon. i hadn't appreciated those parts of him. i'd always seen him as this one dimensional evil figure and yet there was a lot more about him. but i -- those last few days, of course, were hell as he was leaving. and i didn't know when he -- because ray was working close with him the night he gave his farewell address. i did not know that was exactly what he was going to say. i knew we were probably close to the end but i didn't know if he was going to try to fight on, try to fight impeachment in the senate so rather speechwriters

gathered in my office. by this time i was in the southwest corner office where ray price had been and so it was a big room that could accommodate a lot of people. and we watched the speech. it was shortly after the farewell speech al hag, chief of staff, called me. i can't remember exactly what he said but it was in effect, david weerks forgot one thing. i said what's that? he said, we forgot a resignation letter. i said, well that's very interesting. i'll be glad to read it. he said you don't get it. he said you need to write it. i said, al, don't you think the president ought to write his own resignation letter? he said, look. he is in no place to do that. we need you to write the resignation letter. i said, well, al, i don't know what to say. but first of all, to whom does the president resign? you know, does he send a letter to the president pro tem of the senate, speaker of the house, god? where do you send the letter? he said, i don't know. figure it out. i'll see you in the morning. boom. phone goes down.

so i go down to fred fielding who is our deputy general counsel. i think by then our general counsel was in the clinker. but fred was a terrific guy and very -- a man of great integrity. continued to play a very important role in public life right through the 9/11 commission. i said, fred, we've got to get -- i've got to do this resignation letter. so we couldn't figure it out. and he said, let me work on it. so we wrote three letters to the president pro tem and the speaker of the house. i don't know who else. we had three different drafts and fred said, i'll figure it out in the morning. i decided, this is not a time for a flowery letter. this is not exactly a time -- oh, gee. i'm really sorry about leaving. we had a great time. tricia will be back and julie will be back and sorry about the

dog pooping on the rug. i didn't think it was that kind of letter. so i wrote one sentence. i hereby resign, president of the united states, effective immediately. and the next morning -- i think it went to the president pro tem. but fred had figured it out. the president signed it and he said i'll hang this in the national archives. so my tiny little footnote at the end of the whole thing was writing the resignation letter of one sentence but going to the -- going over to the east room on the morning of his departure, it was so bizarre to start with because we had the marine band there and they were playing very upbeat music. >> you wrote that they were playing show tunes. >> i think they were playing show tunes. it was incongr uos.

it was just so -- it was like, what in the hell are we doing here? you know, this is a farewell -- this is the first time in the history of the country -- hopefully the last -- when a president of the united states has been forced to resign in a scandal. and then president nixon came in with his wife pat and the family and of course gave this speech that was -- that went back to his mother. it was a speech in which he talked a great deal about handling nixon but he never talked about his wife. it was clear that that childhood relationship had been so important. had been that positive force in his life when he really didn't have a father and had a really terrible relationship with his father and lost two brothers to tuberculosis. it again brought back the sense i had of nixon's vulnerability as a human being even though he had all the great power and in the end he said i'm not saying good-bye. he said i'm saying i'll see you again. then we went out to watch the helicopter pull away.

it was a very shakespearian tragedy. it was this man with this enormous capacity who had deep flaws that brought him down. that is the stuff of tragedy. >> did bryce harlow mention the fact that he must have had a deep wound from his childhood? did he mention that during the administration? or does he mention -- or did you hear this second hand? >> bryce and i used to talk some. bryce was always very kind to me. he was a mentor to lamar alexander, to me, to a number of other people. i recall that bryce said that in

one of his interviews at the university of virginia and one of the -- i've read it and have quoted it on that but i did read it in a credible source. but i can't put my finger on it right now. >> what effect did the last few weeks have on ray price? as his friend? >> i can't say for sure. i didn't spend the last weeks with ray so it would be unfair to fully characterize it. i sense that he knew and understood from the beginning that richard nixon had this dark side and he knew and understand that if that became the upper part or the dominant part of this presidency it was going to be trouble. but i also think he believed to

the end and believed to this day that there was much good in nixon and dea lot more for the country than people are willing to acknowledge. he wrote a book later on about the press. felt the press never really fully understood how the country was torn apart by the vietnam war and i think shared this view with len garmin that there is a direct line from vietnam to watergate. that the president inherited a war and a country -- that the war was unwinnable and the country was in enormous tension and that it really jeopardized the national security of the country and the attempts to bring to split china and russia apart. there was a sense that this was an administration under siege and people weren't being fair to nixon and what he was trying to do and that he -- the vietnam

war and all the national security issues and eventually the sort of splits that occurred and the pentagon was spying on the white house and essentially the white house began spying on the pentagon and people's phones were being tapped. that all grew out of the war. ray felt as i came to feel that what started as a highly questionable and i would still object to all the phone tapping, i think bill saphire was right about that, but what started as a national security apparatus was taken by some people including nixon over into the political realm and the various kind of plumbing operations started about the war were transferred over into the politics of the '72 campaign. that's what led to watergate. to this day, i don't think there is hard evidence that richard nixon ordered watergate but i do believe that he was responsible for creating a culture within the white house among some people who were there that some there thought that's what he

would have wanted. i think he -- you have to bear responsibility for that and i do believe that white house was as he himself was compartmentalized. there were very good people and very good parts to that white house in the administration. i put ray price and len garmin and people like that, brad patterson, the whole group of people that i put on the bright side and some who went over to the dark side. >> is there something you could have done that you didn't? >> i don't know. i worry and wonder about that. i do know when john dean's book came out i was shocked because this guy was working down the hall three doors down. i was in the corner office and he was in the middle. a big suite of offices right in the middle. it was like a mafia operation

going on down there. i didn't know that. it was -- maybe i should have inquired. maybe i should have asked harder questions than i did but even -- i'm not even sure. fred fielding was working in the john dean suite and friends, terrific guy, well respected since. i'm not sure he understood. but when i read the john dean book i came away feeling like there was a white house within a white house that i didn't know anything about. i didn't even know it existed. and i had come to believe that the white house can be more compartmentalized than you would think. look, i work for two or three years next to -- sitting next to mike dever in the west wing in the reagan administration. i knew mike had a glass of wine. i knew he liked terrific wine. i didn't know he was an

alcoholic. i didn't know he had a dependency. there's a tendency i think if you're working in the white house to -- you're so focused on the job at hand and you have so much coming at you so fast that maybe you are blind to some things going on around you. there is a famous experiment psychologists have that putting a group of people in a room and saying we have a ball we're going to ask you to toss back and forth and we want you to toss this as fast as you can and count the number -- see how many times you can do it without dropping it. so you get six or seven people tossing that ball around and about and this has been filmed. if you watch the film, i've shown this to a class. okay. i want you to watch this film and tell me how many balls get dropped so people intently watch that film. you get all sorts -- i say did

you notice anything else about the film? what are you talking about? did you see the bear? bear? you didn't see the bear? i want you to watch the film again. so you show the film again. and there's a person dressed in a back bear costume who walks through the middle of that group of people throwing that ball back and forth. most people watching the film never see the bear. they're watching the ball and they don't see the bear. i sort of thought to myself, that was sort of what it was like working in the nixon white house. you didn't see the bear. you didn't see what was obvious when it was over, but you didn't see it when it was there. it is -- like i have regrets about a lot of things i did in

public life. things i should have done better. places i should have blown the whistle. times maybe i should have left. i didn't feel that so much about watergate. i really felt most of us did not understand until pretty close to the end. and once we understood it was over. >> what did you think of the pardon? >> i thought the pardon of richard nixon was the right thing to do. i thought it was a brave thing to do. i thought jerry ford deserved the honor when the john f. kennedy library some years later gave him the kennedy medal for bravery citing the watergate -- the pardon of richard nixon. i thought it was the right thing to do. i also thought it was as a little matter handled very clumsily so that it was a complete shock to the country.

i remember it happened at 11:00 on a sunday, about 30 days into the presidency of jerry ford. i was working for president ford at that time. of course, i was an outsider because i was a nixon person. and they brp were about to repl me, which i didn't know. i remember driving with my wife. we were coming back from church or something. we heard the news of the pardon. i near went in the ditch. i was stunned at the pardon. and the reason i thought it was clumsily handled is there was no preparation of the public. there was no balloon that went up, trial balloon. instead, there had been the, no, we're not doing that. we would never do that. even if we were to think about that it wouldn't be until all the legal avenues were exhausted. we were talking two or three months. so i think -- as i say, i think

jerry ford did the right thing and i think he paid a huge price for it because it clearly was a major, major factor in his defeat at the hands of jimmy carter. may have cost him the presidency. it was a brave thing to do. i thought, wow, you could have thought that one through. and it's -- it goes to some things that happen in the nixon administration. and it's a tendency in the white house, on the most sensitive issues, the more sensitive the issue, the smaller the circle of people the president likes to consult. because of leaks. and so an issue in which really should require a lot of different voices tends to have just one or two or three voices. and in this case, jerry ford just made up his mind. he can be a very stubborn man when he doesn't -- and jerry ford, i to this day