but i felt, oh, my god, this is going to be -- this is going to be a tough sell. so i was really concerned about how this thing was going to come out at the time, and then since -- this is a hillary story. then -- so that evening, an evening just about that time, i had a big oldsmobile toronado. i was a partner in a law firm. i had resigned, but i was still in a better economic position -- i was older. i was one of the oldest people on the staff. that's another thing, it was a very young staff. i was 36 years old. i became 37 during the impeachment. everybody was younger than me other than joe woods and dick cates and john doar. since i had a car and it was washington in the 70s, it was my job to drive young staff members home at night. i told this story before but it's a good story still.

i would call people to my car at 11:00, 12:00, we were working around the clock. i would drop them off one after another and then i would go to my little apartment that i had, and so one night i'm dropping all these people off and the last person is hillary, who i have been working with. hillary rodham who was a star on the staff and dole liked her and i liked her. she was a hard worker, really aggressive, and really smart. so anyway i'm driving -- she's now in the car alone with me. i'm about to -- i'm driving to where she lives. she was living with a woman named sarah who ended up in the white house later on with me. in any case i'm about to -- sort of pulling up to a place, not quite there, and she says to me, i want you to meet my boyfriend. he's coming in tomorrow, something like that. i say, oh, great. what's his name? and she said bill clinton. i met him in law school, we've been going out.

i didn't -- i wasn't paying attention to people's personal lives at the time. really, i was so driven at that point. i didn't know she had a boyfriend even. she said no, you have to meet bill. that's great, i'd be happy to meet him pi liked hillary a lot. i said he just graduated, what firm is he going to? no, he's going to politics and he's going to be the senator from arkansas. he's from arkansas. be a senator from arkansas and the governor or something from arkansas and he'll be president of the united states. and i look at this woman, this 26-year-old woman, and i -- i remember, i say what have i gotten myself into. i am now a senior person on this staff. i'm sort of in charge of the tapes. i presented these tapes to the committee. now these tapes are devastating evidence with respect to the impeachment. the committee hears it and realizes it and then comes back

later and it's rationalizing them away. we're not going to be able to make the case. be we're going to be looked upon as the dumbest lawyers in history not being able to make a case and doar refuses to hire people that i want down here such as tony and peter, real trial lawyers. he hires a bunch of kids who are bright kids, one of these kids is now sitting next to me, a young woman who i like a lot, was very bright. but never really tried a case or anything, and now she's telling me her boyfriend is going to be president of the united states. i said, this is nuts. so i start -- i blow up. i start screaming at her. i said, that's idiotic. i said the stupidest thing i ever heard. what kind of child are you that you think your boyfriend is going to be president of the united states? i started screaming. all this frustration, away from home, the tapes, the committee, you know, not hiring certain people and i start screaming at her because she tells me her

boyfriend is going to be president. i said i'm working with a bunch of children, children here. and she looks at me. we pull up to this place, i still remember this. she looks at me. she glares at me. she says to me, she gets really mad, she said, you're an asshole she says to me. you don't know what the -- you're talking about. she says this guy is great. you know, you haven't even met him and you're just a big jerk or something and she opens the door and slams the door and stalks out of my car and goes into her place. i'm sitting there, i'm sort of blaming myself. what did i do? she says her boyfriend is going to be president. why should i get so upset about it? very upset. the next day i go into the office and the first thing i do is seek her out to apologize. i wanted to apologize to her. even though i'm her superior

because i screamed at her. i started the screaming at her. and before i could apologize, she comes to apologize to me for saying this and we apologize to each other, you know, we make up immediately, and then sure enough she brings in this tall good looking guy who i never met named bill clinton and he comes in and i chat with him for a little while, five minutes. he tells me he's going to run for congress or something that year. i said, good luck, i don't want to start any more fights with clinton, bill clinton or hillary rodham, his girlfriend. we greet and then it's the last i see of him at that particular point in time. of course, as time goes on at the end of the impeachment after president nixon resigns, she tells me she's going to arkansas. i'm trying to talk her out of going to arkansas. nice guy, i'm not telling her

what to do with heriot man tick life but i really think she should go to new york or washington. she's going to go to arkansas to live with bill clinton. all right. she's going to go. sure enough, she goes, and we stay in touch with each other, and he runs for congress that year in 1974, and he loses, but not by very much. he ran against a guy who was in office for eight terms or something like that. loses by four or five percentage points. he's 27 years old at the time and the next year i get a letter from her saying he's running for attorney general of arkansas. would i send a contribution? i'm not going to fight with hillary anymore so i send a contribution. i'm back in my law firm so i have money now. sure enough, he wins as attorney general and two years later, 1980 i think it was, he runs for

governor, and she gets in touch with me and asks me to contribute to help, so i do, a little bit. and actually i was in touch with her over the years also because she's at the rose law firm and my firm is using that firm or working with that firm on certain major matters. so i'm sort of in touch with her, not very much, so i think i contributed to the 1980 race and, of course, he's elected governor, and i'm thinking, oh, my god. this is crazy. and she invites me to the inauguration in arkansas, but i can't go because i'm in the middle of some big trial at the time, so i never went to the gubernatorial inauguration. and two years later he runs for governor again in 1982 and he loses. i said, see, i knew i was right. he should have gone to a law firm. and he runs for governor two years after that and he wins. next week we'll air the second part of bernard

nussbaum's oral history here on american history tv. and you can watch oral histories every weekend saturdays at 8:00 a.m., you know, at 3:00 p.m., and early monday mornings at 4:00 a.m. eastern time on c-span3. squlun 17th marks the 40th anniversary of the watergate break-in that ultimately resulted in president nixon's resignation. too commemorate the anniversary, a symposium was held on watergate's lasting impact. over the next few weeks american history tv will air highlights of that symposium. now, we feature john dean, former white house counsel to president nixon, and a key figure in the investigation and political scandal that followed. he spoke at length about watergate, president nixon, and his own involvement in the events that led to the end of the administration. this program is just over an hour. >> good afternoon and welcome.

may i have your attention? may i have your attention? thank you. thank you very much. for those who are joining us now, i'd like to reintroduce you to our study, our symposium today, on the legal, constitutional, statutory implications of watergate, 40 years ago. my name is tom campbell. i'm the dean of the law school here at chapman. it's my privilege to introduce my colleague professor ron rotunda who played an important role in putting our panels together today because of his own background. professor rotunda will introduce our keynote speaker which is appropriate but for professor rotunda we would not have our keynote speaker. he will also chair the panel. professor ron rotunda is a distinguished professor of jurisprudence. he's been a professor at chapman

since 2008. from 2002 to 2008 he was a professor at the law school of george mason university, and for 28 years at the university of illinois. at all three institutions holding the most distinguished chaired professorships. he started his legal career as a law clerk to judge mansfield of the second circuit and became assistant majority counsel for the watergate committee. professor rotunda has co-authored "problems and materials on professional responsibility" which is now in its tenth edition. it's the most widely used text in american law schools -- in america i should say in general on legal ethics. he's also the author of "modern constitutional law", which is currently in its ninth edition. the co-author of a six volume treatise on constitutional law. he has advised the constitutional creation process of many foreign countries, including cambodia, romania,

ukraine, and the czech republic. he's the 11th most cited law professor in the united states, and that's a little dated. i suspect it's higher than 11 by now but that's from a couple years ago. also commissioner of the fair political practices commission of the state of california. won't you join me in welcoming professor ron rotunda? [ applause ] >> thank you, tom. i wish my mother-in-law were here. today we talk about lawyers. in fact, i'm not a subtle person, but this is a subtle bow tie, unusual for me. it shows a picture of sharks carrying briefcases. that's what people think about lawyers. lawyers cause problems. but they also solve them. that's why it's my pleasure to introduce john dean. he earned his jd from georgetown in 1965.

he was the associate deputy attorney general of the united states and president nixon appointed him as counsel to the president in july 1970 at age 31. i think the youngest person to be appointed to that position. he was white house counsel for about 1,000 days. what happened 40 years ago this coming july destined our paths to cross. this peculiar burglary to eavesdrop on the democratic national committee. the fallout from that eventually led to president nixon resigning, the only presidential resignation in our history. it led to the conviction of the top administrative officials, many of whom were lawyers, including john dean who pled guilty to conspiracy, served four months, part of the witness protection program, then he voluntarily gave up his law license. and then he turned lemons into lemonade. he took accounting for credit. he became a private investment banker. he was so successful he could retire at age 50 and write

several "new york times" best sellers. he now lives in beverly hills with his wife of nearly a half century, maureen. he's working on his 12th book, the tenth since his retirement. so it's been kind of an active retirement. we never would have unraveled the watergate cover-up without john dean. the special prosecutor had refused to give immunity in exchange for testimony. the senate watergate committee did, although we could not affect what kind of sentence he would get. one of the things he told us is he thought the april 15th conversation was taped the way nixon was taping and asking leading questions. we talked to three people who knew of the taping system, and two of them shall we say were less than candid. h.r. haldeman and then dwight chapin. ehrlichman did not know about the tapes. the third person we talked to was alexander butterfield. he said i have done nothing wrong, i don't node a lawyer. the point of lawyers is for

lawyers to make money. he was not on the special prosecutor's radar screen at all. i don't think he ever would have been called had it not been for our committee. no involvement at all. but he called, he told us about the tapes. john -- or sam dash went to john and told him about the tapes. and john smiled. he knew it would vindicate him, and it did. in fact, people don't realize it but at the time there were many people saying the tapes will vindicate president nixon. he was holding it back. you don't hide your light under a bushel, but the tapes did vindicate him, and president nixon i think never thought they would be turned over. there's a place in the watergate hearings when halderman is called after the tapes are revealed. and he says the president is allowed him to recently listen

to one of the tapes. and i forgot what the statement was. basically something john dean said was on the tape was not there or something that -- john dean lied about this particular conversation is what he said. later he was indicted for that, that as he was so -- and for perjury and was found guilty. he was so confident that the tapes would never be revealed that he lied about what he had heard on the tapes recently, and, of course, he was wrong. the tapes and john dean ended up changing the course of history and linking the president to the cover- cover-up. ladies and gentlemen, john dean. [ applause ]

>> i didn't need to bring it out. this will not be a three-bottle undertaking. what i thought i would do, i was delighted to learn the label on my keynoter, it's called a keynote dialogue, and i thought what would be really interesting is for me just to talk for a very few minutes and then really us have a dialogue. there's a lot of people here who are old enough to know a little bit about watergate. there are many people here who have now been learning about, it and this might be an interesting forum to really have a discussion about it rather than you just hearing my views on it but rearviews that are related to your interest and what i may or may not know about that period of time. with that in mind i thought i might start by telling you the title we selected for this is to address some of the unanswered

questions, and the reason that's on my mind, my publisher has convinced me to go back into this subject. it's not one i really had planned on. there's nothing like a nice big check to change your mind about the book you want to write, and they thought it was timely that i go back and take a look at this subject matter. enough distance and time has passed that i can do it objectively. so i said, sure enough, i think i can. i can look at it as a student of the subject. i know all the players. i know what we do know. i foe what we don't know. we all certainly know the general story, but what i never understood and what i to this day am in the process of figuring out is how did so many really intelligent and very savvy political people make so many disastrous decisions? and the only way i realize i could get the answer to those questions, and there's this

marvelous historical record, yes, there are documents, but the most interesting document is the document we talked about this morning, that system that taped conversations. i assumed when i undertook this project that given the fact of howard baker's question, what did the president know and when did he know it? that as soon as the tapes had become available, virtually all of the interesting and important conversations had probably been transcribed. the watergate special prosecutor's office, i discovered, had transcribed about 80 conversations. most of these are full transcripts. some of them are excellent. some of them were used in the cover-up trial and the parties who were involved have listened to them, heard what they have heard, made krecorrections in t conversations, in the transcripts, so they are pretty good transcripts. there are maybe 60 more transcripts prepared by the prosecutor's office that were

really just done by fbi secretaries and they're sort of first drafts. a couple of them have been polished a little more obviously by some attorneys thinking they might be useful, but they're pretty raw material. then there are another slew of conversations that a historian by the name of stanley cutler looked at and did a book called "abuse of power: the new nixon tapes." these are basically partial transcripts. only a few complete conversations. there are roughly 320 conversations relating to watergate that stanley did. that's 400 conversations. i thought maybe that's it. as soon as i did something that nobody after all these years has ever done, and it took me literally many, many months to complete it is to prepare a total catalog of all the nixon watergate conversations from the time he arrives back after the arrest on june 20th, the morning when there will be an 18 1/2

minute gap in a conversation, right down to the day they pull the plug after they learn that alex has revealed to the senate the existence of the system. so the when i started piecing it all together, i found there are almost 2,000 conversations, 2,000 conversations on this subject. some of them are very brief. some of them are very long. there are a couple very short, you know, just a few-minute conversations. the quality of the conversations as the watergate prosecutors discovered are very difficult to even transcribe. what's happened though, technology has improved over the last three, four decades now. i was able to take the tapes that the archives has, they are now digitizing and improve those. i was also able to find equipment to digitize tapes they haven't yet gotten around to

digitizing. so i'm way ahead of them. in fact, i have equipment that makes them salivate for the speed with which i can digitize as well as the quality i can get out of the tapes. it isn't perfect. it actually distorts the voices, the equipment i am using, but it improves the ability of transcribers to do it. i have had a team of graduate students and one former legal secretary who is also a graduate student working on these for over a year. we're pretty well along. we're just passing the halfway point, and when we get to the end, it won't take quite as much. there will be more summarization in some of the tapes because nixon has a practice of being highly duplicative in points he makes to his staff. so there's no sense in doing it over and over and over when he's making the same points, but there's no way to follow what in the world really happened, and it's fascinating what i'm discovering. as i say, we know the general

story, but you don't know how it happened in essence day by day, and when there were dates, when he was learning, what was he learning it, what was he learning it, what was provoking it, what action was he taking as a result. a different picture of events is emerging. i can't obviously share with you in this time because i'm still gathering the facts. one of the most striking things is how little information he is given early. very little information. he is not given, for example, one of the most important elements of the cover-up, what was driving certainly my superiors bob halderman and john ehrlichman was the fact that there had been a break-in in daniel ellsburg's office for the white house. some of the same men who were used in that break-in were now in the d.c. jail after watergate

having participated in both. this is what brought the white house's concern, the cover-up might have been cut loose at the re-election committee level had there not been that link right back to the white house. that's what's concerning everybody. nobody knows if it's so-called national security, nobody really knows all of the details of it. we do, of course, today. we didn't early on. so finding out what nixon knew and how he deals with the facts he's being told and also figuring out why he's not being told things and being informed of other things has been a fascinating process. i'm very early in it. i have to get this bed of basic information completed first. what i listen to, what my transcribers have prepared because i hear things nobody else hears on those tapes. i was telling scott last night, for example, one of my favorites is one day in october of 1972 i

was over visiting henry peterson, the head of the criminal division, and henry shared with me the fact that mark felt of the fbi, who we now know is deep throat, was leaking. he had had a lawyer for "time" magazine come in and tell him -- he didn't say "time," i now know it was "time" magazine, tell him felt was leaking and they were concerned they were getting a lot of grand jury information. the quality of leaks going to "time" magazine were much better than the quality of the leaks going to bob woodward at the "washington post." peterson gives me this information. i take it back to the white house, tell halderman. halderman goes in and reports it to nixon. stanley cutler in making his transcripts spotted this yfertion and he's very arbitrary in his conversations. he just looked at summaries and thought this would be an interesting one for a book to boil it down.

i am following the thread. but anyway in this particular day when i went back and told this information, i read and chuckled after i listened to the conversation to hear what i heard and there's a lot of ellipses in stanley's transcript but yet there's one point where it just shows a different set of ears hears different things. at one point halderman -- excuse me, nixon says to halderman after hearing the report, he says, you know, bob, what i would do with mark felt, then cutler's transcript says -- has nixon sort of dropping off and saying bastard. which is not unusual for nixon. but when i heard it i heard something totally different. he says you know what i would do with felt, bob? ambassadorship, ambassadorship. this is what he will later do with helms and move him out, the head of the cia. huge difference. so i hear things on these conversations that i guess because of knowing the players, knowing the facts, knowing the circumstances, and this happens

regularly with my transcribers, i'm not doing a book of transcripts. i don't know what i'm going to do with my transcripts because i'm just looking for the information chain as a part of the narrative that i'm pulling together. i find books of transcripts extremely dull and hard to read. i did another book called "the rehnquist choice" that i'm going to follow that model. it was my worst selling book because it came out -- it was shipped three days before 9/11. it was not a good time to have a book out. if you didn't have osama in the title, your book was bound to fail. but over time people have discovered this book where i used the nixon tapes, i had been involved in the selection of rehnquist, and i was able to fill in a lot of the gaps and most historians and lawyers who have read all of my books, say this is the greatest book you have ever written. i think that's probably true. it was -- what i was able to do

is take the transcripts and convert them to dialogue, what you might take away from a conversation if you were making notes rather than a transcript and it works beautifully. it keeps it moving. it's more almost like reading a novel. and that's what i'm going to do with these transcripts this time, is not a book of transcripts but where appropriate because there's 2,000 conversations, i can't tell you, there's a lot of material to deal with, we're going to -- i'm just going to boil that down to its essence to tell the story. anyway, that's what got me into looking at the unanswered questions of watergate. and the other thing that sort of coincides and conflates with that is the fact that it prompted me to call a friend and say, you know, there -- i'm waiting for this process to complete while we can get all these transcripts prepared. i called a friend who is here with us today, jim robineaux and

he had come out of a cle in cleveland. he said this was one of the best cles i have been in. it was on kent state. he wanted to know where i would been. i recounted i had been in a meeting with j. edgar hoover. we talked about it a little bit. i said, jim, maybe we ought to think about a watergate cle. i was kind of raising it not thinking jim, who is an extremely busy trial lawyer, very successful partner at thompson hein in cleveland, a multi-state firm but just kind of throwing it out there. sure enough he said to me, let's do it. this was december of last year. we put together -- spent six months assembling a cle that we didn't know quite what we were going to do. we did it yesterday for ron and some of the people here. we tested it 15 times last year to rave reviews everywhere we went. so we're trying to take this

information also as a teaching tool. we're doing what we call watergate one right now. the watergate anniversary, the 40th anniversary, really runs -- it's a rolling anniversary. it runs from the break-in of june 17th of 1972, which will be 2012, to the resignation of nixon, which was august 8th of '74. so august 8th of 2014. it's a long anniversary period, and we've been having a lot of fun by using this information as a teaching tool as well where i'm sort of the fact witness. we have taken some of the information from some of these tapes. we will add some later and provide something really a little different where we can use these to show other lawyers that hopefully won't make the mistakes that were made during watergate. so these are unanswered questions, but one of the things that has driven it all as i was gathering this