five pages. you'd have 20 of these things arriving, plus you'd have 15 ear drafts written by outside people, one thing or another. and it was stitching all that together and playing off all the constituencies. by '73 both haldeman and ehrlichman, watergate was starting to close in. there was a lot of stuff starting to happen. there was no -- but the speech writing staff became sort of a cockpit where a lot of these differences got hammered out. one of the reasons speech writing was so much fun, especially when you're young is you're allowed to be at the table, when you've got people around the table that have paid many more dues than you have, but somebody has to put words on the paper, try to provide some music. but you are obviously -- >> well, pam bailey at one point said you had a story. but let me -- maybe it will come back. >> i think the world of pam bailey, but i don't remember the story. >> did you have more face time with the president when you became head of the speech writing shop? did you have face time with the

president? >> i had face time with the president. it was -- it's very important to remember richard nixon was a -- was an insular figure, was introverted. didn't like to spend a lot of time with people. and so it wasn't as if you went and spent a lot of time with him. just in the very nature -- i spent a lot of time in group meetings with him. from the beginning back when ray

first hired me, there was always -- the speech writers always had a chair in the cabinet room where there was always a space for a speech writer to be there to take notes and to bring them back to the speech writing team and make sure everybody knew where the direction of the conversation was. and ray went over pretty frequently, went over and asked me to be at the cabinet meetings. and so from 1971 on, i was -- '73, '74, i spent a lot of time in those kind of settings. but that's not obviously what we call face time and one-on-one time. so my times with him were usually when haldeman or somebody called and said, we would like to see you. you'd go over and you'd talk about a speech or something he was working on. and -- or some instructions he wanted to give you because he didn't like something. he was always -- he always wanted -- he was never really fully happy with staff. he always knew ways to do it better. but he sort of took me in hand to help me learn a bit more about writing. at that time the networks were extraordinarily powerful.

sound bites were extraordinarily powerful. he called me over and said, look, david, before you send me a speech before i'm going to be out there, whether it's rose garden rubbish or some other spiel, i want you to send me the draft and when you send it to me at night, underline three sentences. i want you to be tested about does one of those sentences, the line from the speech that's actually quoted, is the lead on the speech. i want to see if you can write and learn how to write sound bites. so we used to sort of, as an exercise, it was a very good exercise because you begin to realize -- i didn't -- i had some background in journalism but i wasn't an accomplished journalist. you began to understand how do journalists think, how do you communicate through the press to the public. how do you get your line out instead of having them control, how do you control what sentence gets out there. that sound bite becomes very important for that purpose. especially on television. so we would spend a lot of time crafting and then polishing that

line to make sure it got done. and then he would come back and say, okay, where was it? what happened? let's go figure that out. we had to write -- when he had to do something in the press room, it had to be a certain amount of words, usually 100, 150 words. he wanted it to be very crisp. you had to learn to write as if you were a television producer for that particular thing, or in his speeches he wanted 750 words, we had to count the words. and the draft would go in with that. he was very meticulous about and he would work hard and try to teach me. i i can't say i spent a whole

lot of time with him, but i spent enough time with him to know what was going to work and what wasn't going to work. what i found and what was quite interesting was, when you first got to work for richard nixon, especially -- i was just a kid. you were very much on the outer circle. i was the most junior of lieutenants when i first got there, just an ensign in the navy. you had to learn your way up, trust and confidence, those two things were very important to him. and gradually -- so when you first were out in the outer circle you saw the public nixon. the public nixon was very prim and proper, but as gradually you got closer in, you began to see this was something of a show. i had times when i would be with him and he'd come out of the oval office and go into a cabinet meeting and come out and be looking just hugely angry or terribly slumped over, despondent about something. he would be in a really bad mood, really bad place. just before he opened that door in the cabinet room, he'd straighten himself up, put a big

smile on his face, on show. i would see him in the cabinet room. i thought, he's always that way. but gradually as you got to know him better, you began to see that side of him. then when i got closer in, i got to swearing. i remember to this day a time when we were working on a speech that was last minute. it was radio. zeigler was there and i was there. i forgot whether it was rosemary woods or who it was, we were working on a speech draft. i was running back and forth, everything getting typed up. we were running pages back and forth. and he was swearing -- i had been in the navy, i had heard a lot of swearing. this was sort of well one level beyond what i was used to. i said to zeigler, i don't get this, this is not the nixon i've ever seen. he said i'll tell you why. i'll tell you why he's talking like this.

he said, it shows he trusts you. he's willing to show who he is in front of you. he didn't trust you before. and he's being more himself now. and so it was another layer of inside -- closer to the inner sanctum. i never got to the point of being so close in, like hague or kissinger or, say, haldeman did. they saw i think the closest level in. so i never saw the drinking that you find, that comes through in some of the accounts from people who were there toward the end. i thank you he couldn't hold his liquor. to this day i don't accept as real the portrayal of him that came through the -- >> the final days? >> the final days. who is the guy that did the jfk movies?

>> oliver stone. >> oliver stone. i'm sorry. i should remember that. i actually know oliver stone. i have come to have a higher regard for oliver stone over the years. i didn't recognize the nixon of hole very stone. the nixon of nixon frost i recognize. but the nixon of oliver stone i didn't recognized. i thought this was a harsher portrayal than i thought was appropriate. i went to the preview in washington and i remember walking out and bob woodward and i were there walking out together. we compared notes. i think he shared my view, that it had too harsh a view of

nixon. he came through as a real drunk there. that's not what i saw. i did know when you got closer in you saw the darker side more clearly. and you saw -- i thought what you saw when you got closer in also was a lot of vulnerability, personality vulnerability and loneliness. i have -- one night i was taking a speech to him over in the residence and you normally went over to the usher's office and asked the usher if you'd take it up to him, if you were late on trying to get a speech in for the next day. the usher said he's waiting for you but he's over at the old executive office building. he's bowling over there. he wants you to take it over to him. i said, fine, i'll be glad to. but i didn't know there was a bowling alley. and he said, yeah, there's a bowling alley in the basement, go here and go there. you'll see secret service if you look around long enough. i said fine. so i went trotting over to the old executive office building and went through all these tunnels an dark places, one thing or another and finally found this bowling alley and opened it up. it was a long, thin room. there was richard nixon in gucci shoes i think, suit pants, a white shirt, tie, cuff links bowling alone. and he looked like the loneliest fellow than i had seen in a long time.

>> i just really felt badly for him. gee, you think some one would have a friend there, a child, somebody who was another human being you could share that with. but i think ultimately he was a very lonely man. and there was a part about that that you felt like you just wanted to say, it's okay. it's going to be okay. but you couldn't. >> is it that sense of vulnerability that kept you there? why did you stay so long? >> the question of whether to stay or go was an increasingly difficult question for several

of us on the staff but i think for others as well, especially the younger generation. i had come in as a third or fourth level down person, you know. i was way down in the pecking order and very young. and through the evolution of time i had moved into -- i was now still a junior lieutenant but i had responsibility. i had 50 people i was responsible for. and i had a little bit of a public profile. not much but i had a little bit of a profile. and by that time ray price was still writing the principal speeches. he wrote all the watergate speeches with the president. but i was increasingly called in to help deal with some of the other charges and they were, as

you know, numerous charges against him. i was called in as i recall first on the question of his taxes. whether he had abused the tax system in a variety of ways. i remember i was in north carolina and the call came in on december 29th or 30th. i was there for christmas and new year's. and saying you got to come back to the white house. i spent that new year's eve at the white house. i remember this very well. we had a tax team in, a big philadelphia law firm and some other people. we were all working to go through his taxes and i was in charge of the white paper that was going to come out to write this white paper. and, you know, we spent a lot of

time on that issue and a lot of the charges turned out to be wild. they were not accurate. now, some were closer to the mark and there were some things he had done that had been close to the line but there was nothing egregiously illegal. and so you came out of that feeling like, well, if he's not guilty of this, why is he guilty of the central charge of watergate? this was more peripheral charges. then we went through another thing. the milk scandal and i went 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