my kids are able to play here. i'm able to drive down here, go to the church of my choice, talk to a reporter. what were you defending? i was defending the right of someone at a high level working for the president to make a decision to strip away from another american citizen his right to be free from an unwarranted search. i said i wanted to plea guilty. ask him if he would agree to have me sentenced before i would talk to a grand jury or u.s. attorney. i'm forever in his debt that he accepted that. i pleaded guilty november 30th, 1973. >> how did you get along with the other inmates? >> my gosh, i got my first job offer. >> what was the job? >> he was a -- specialized in stereos. and he asked me, would you like to work with me when you get out or are you going to go straight? i said, i've given crime at it. i'm not very good at it. he said you're the worst i've ever seen.

why didn't you call me when you needed help? i said i didn't have your number. it was bizarre but you have to survive there. jail was the right place. prison was the right place for me. i think i was the only guilty person in the prison that i was in. executive clemency would not have been good for me. i had a wonderful lawyer who said own up to it, plead guilty, take the hit. don't write a book and then we'll work with it. i was disbarred for six years, was eventually reinstated in 1980. >> let's move this back to richard nixon. one of the still enduring questions that people don't get is he was a smart man, you know, how is this possible? if he were here tonight, what would you be asking him? >> i think we've been talking about has to do with a discussion of ethics but also contempt and hatred, a sentiment

that fueled richard nixon toward certainly the kennedys but also toward members of congress and the institution itself. it's interesting. i was listening -- the other day my wife and i had a chance to go to a luncheon where morgan freeman was honored and janet was talking and was asking him, do you think it's in a human being's dna to hate? and he said yes, but it's also in the dna to love. and i think that that is something that struck me, as i was listening to her tell this. i remember reading john gardner many, many years ago, former secretary of what was then health, education and welfare. he had a book called "recovery of confidence." he said something that really stayed with me to this day. he said our institutions have become caught in a savage cross fire between critical lovers and unloving critics. if i look back at the richard

nixon experience, the sense of being not a loving critic, but someone who held anger and resentment and hatred for others. and i think that fueled him. i think hatred is a consuming passion. and it ends up destroying the people -- the person who holds it as much as the people against it. there's no way to go back and ask richard nixon what lessons he learned. i had occasion to meet him following the impeachment process. we got along very well. i wish that he had shown the kind of serenity and tranquility that he had after the experience during the time that he was president. i think we would have had a very different result. >> he was going to win in a landslide. why did he hire you? >> well, one thing -- bill, one thing he said -- it was the last day before he got on the helicopter and he waved. he said something that is at the back of the wonderful story that bob woodward and carl

bernstein's article in the post. he said there are always who hate you but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them in return. and then you destroy yourself. i think some of those hatreds coursed through us. they were political opponents, they're adversaries, you go after them. you don't need to hate them. that triggers and brings to bear emotions and decisions that are excessive and disproportionate to what you're doing. he could have accomplished so much but for that. but i think he did recognize that. >> we're running out of time. i just want to end it very briefly, you know, that watergate had a huge impact on the american system. what would you say is the top of your list about what it changed? >> not enough has changed. we saw a repetition of it during iran-contra, where you have a secret funding mechanism outside the constitutional process. i think that was almost as dangerous to the system as watergate was.

we've learned lessons, but i think i've always felt that within the core of every single reform we have ever conceived, there is a seed of its own abuse. so, we have to constantly be aware that reforms also lead to its abuse and we have to constantly understand we're never going to reach a plateau of perfection. we have to constantly criticize ourselves, have a vigilant presence, we talked about before, but constantly examine what we're doing, how we're doing it and how we can become a better nation. >> bill? >> i would say that watergate was a high watermark that set the stamp on the united states as a country that would engage in critical self examination, when the circumstances warrant it. not too many countries are in that boat. i think of the traditions in the united kingdom and in israel and in south africa, since nelson mandela, qualifying them as members of that club.

u.s. is a member of that club. witness iran-contra and that is -- i think watergate viewed large with his a triumph and i think, as many other people do, that the hero of that drama is benjamin c. bradley, sitting in the front row. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> bud krogh, you get the last word. >> what i try to teach people going into government, you can never check your personal integrity at the door of any organization that you join. start out with reposing special trust and confidence in your integrity, not the integrity of the president or staff. it's yours. if people can keep that foremost in their mind, if that's what

they've got to take them through that experience, i think they can be safe. >> thank you very much. during this fijt panel, we hear from "washington post" reporters who originally broke the story. hosted by "the washington post" live, this is just over 50 minutes. >> now i'm delighted to turn you over to journalist and talk show host charlie rose, the co-anchor of cbs this morning. charlie? >> thank you. i'm pleased for all of you and me, bringing back a byline "the washington post" over the weekend. so let me introduce bob woodward and carl bernstein. >> you're good. we want you to come up at the very end for a picture. so, stay close. >> how is it that you're writing

together again? what kind of tensions? >> can you all hear now? i said it felt good. it was the usual tensions. and it worked creatively, i think. at one point i used the word cravin in a line, in a paragraph and woodward call immediate and said you can't put that in there. we fought over that a little bit, but it worked. a kind of complimentary process. >> why did it work from the beginning? >> because we had a different emphasis working. i don't know. maybe gordon libby -- waiting for his moment.

we just look at the world a little differently. there was a sense of loving reporting. we were both unmarried, very young. we had the running room from the editors and ben bradley, keep going at this story. don't give it up. and that is -- bud krogh was talking about the liberating experience of going to jail. it's liberating to work for bradley. it's the opposite of jail. >> more about that later. when you talk about this story, what don't you know after 40 years? >> i think at this point, it's what we know that's important. and we know that this was about a president that used illegal, unconstitutional means as a basic matter of implementing policy. and that that's what makes this unique in our history. and so we have the big picture.

and through these remarkable, awful tapes, we hear more and more elaborations on that theme. it enables us to learn about the few gaps in our knowledge, but basically i think we understand it. and that's what that piece in the post was about. >> but i asked him, because captain graham said when will we know everything? you said we may never know everything. >> that's right. and, you know, there were a series of events. the senate watergate committee, alex butterfield's testimony, disclosing the tapes. and, you know, you asked the question, which is a really good one. what don't we know? and because of the abundance of evidence, we know so much. but what i think is interesting -- try to step back a little bit. richard nixon did not understand what the presidency was, that

there is this goodwill that flows to any president. and it is something he could not use, because he was driven by -- oh, so-and-so is an enemy. let's get the irs on him. we don't like the brookings institute. let's break into the office there and get something out of the files. and he never -- again, bud krogh was talking about serenity. he never really found it. you listen to those tapes and it is not only the illegality and abuse of power but the smallness of richard nixon. he didn't realize that as president he could really do big things. and -- >> some would argue that he did big things but had this character failure and this insecurity and all these other qualities that led him to do the bad things.

>> i would say he did big things. and yet they were all done in this tent that he could never get himself out of. that was this tent of anger and revenge and illegality. and it defined his presidency and what -- the way he conducted the white house. you know, if you looked -- one of the reasons that this thing about deflating the notion that the cover-up is worse than the crime, these crimes were enormous. the cover-up has been -- absolutely necessary and inevitable to hide these white house horrors, as john mitchell called them. the tent was white house horrors. >> and it began early. if you look at the senate watergate record, they really dug into this.

and they found all kinds of abuses in illegal operations. in early months, 1969, they decided let's set up an investigations unit in the white house. we don't trust the fbi. nixon's personal lawyer paid $130,000 of excess campaign funds to these people and one of the operations was to get somebody to climb the telephone pole behind joe craft's house. he was a columnist for "the washington post" and tap his telephone. now, you know, if they had been caught at that, maybe there wouldn't have been a watergate. but there were so many things regularly done in secrecy and hidden and then there was all this money, all this campaign money. they were just throwing it around. >> you suggested in the piece over the weekend there were five wars. war against anti-war movement, war against the media, war against the democratic party, a

war against justice. he came to office with those -- to fight those wars. >> yes, he did. because, you see within the first three months the apparatus had been set up to fight all these wars. you hear on the tapes him talking to kissinger and kissinger very enthusiastically embracing the wire tapping of reporters and kissinger saying they must be destroyed, about the reporters and those who might be talking to the reporters. this became the m.o. of the nixon presidency. >> and there was a sense of, we have total power. and no one is ever going to hold us accountable. just the installation of the taping system. you would think somebody would have a little pause and say, well, maybe somebody's going to get these tapes or find out about the system. you go to the nixon library in

california. they have little dollhouse mock-up of the oval office and it says press a button and a red light will go on, where each microphone was in the oval office. you press it. and you almost jump back. >> that's right. >> because there are five microphones on the desk. there are microphones in the chandeliers. and, you know, who is -- who is thinking? i mean, you know, carl and i have often talked about if there was one good lawyer, one strong lawyer who knew early on about some of this stuff might have gone to the president and said stop this. it's against the law. you don't need to do this. the fact that there was no one in the white house or in the nixon circle who had that world view or had that authority tells you about how he fed and controlled all of this himself.

>> and everybody fed his own diabolicalism. >> that's what they said about bring me the dead mouse. the discussions with coleson on those tapes and then you hear nixon say in the presence of very close guys to the top in the oval office, nixon says of the brookings institution, i want to crack that safe. i want to break in. i want to get those papers out of that file. and what was that file for? it was to blackmail his predecessor as president of the united states, lyndon johnson. can you imagine that john adams is sitting there and saying, i want to break into the safe. let's get the goddamn file and then we're going to blackmail george washington. really. that's basics. >> let's go back to motive. do you believe richard nixon thought everybody -- his view of

the world was distorted so that he thought this is the way politics is? everybody else does this? in his own distorted view. so i better get them before they get me. >> i think that's some of t but, again, it was the arrogance and it was that sense of no accountability of one of our old editors at the post. len downey talks about accountability reporting. and in the nixon white house in the early years, i think they said, you know, it's not out there. they're not going to find out what we did or what we're doing. and then when the press started to find out, one of the celebrated horrors in the nixon white house was the 17 wiretaps against reporters and white house aides. they thought he was a national security threat. well, he was when he went on to be a columnist for the new york times.

but not at that time. and if you go into why -- why they tapped his telephone, it was because he was hanging out with somebody that they thought was a national security threat, another reporter. >> when you were trying to explain the story, trying to understand the story, what was the biggest mistake you made? >> well, the biggest mistake was actually one of attribution. we said that held the fund that paid for all of these. the grand jurors and the prosecutors had never asked haldeman the question. that was the big mistake. >> and that was a real low moment. >> awful.

>> because we did -- we wondered, were we wrong in substance? were we wrong in attribution? we fanned out and found out that, in fact, the story was true. when you look at the record now and the tapes and the trial of bob haldeman and even his own memoir, you see this was an operation. because he was the person closest to richard nixon. >> what was ben's reaction to this? >> bradley? >> stand by the boys. he sat there and he typed out his own nondenial denial. we called what the nixon white house did the nondenial denial. he said let's stand by the boys. he typed out this thing saying we stand by the story and, in fact, substantively, the story was right but we had made a serious error of attribution. >> when he did that statement,

let's stand by the boys, he didn't come in and waterboard us or hold us upside down. he just said what happened? and we explained, as best we can. and, you know, goddamn it. >> there was a lot more than that. >> no kind of -- maybe even something worse. >> yeah. >> but instead of -- he believed in the empirical method. okay. go find out where you screwed up, which we did. and we found out. and we corrected it in the newspaper. and went on. and that was -- you know, i mean, we weren't happy that we screwed up but we were happy we weren't fired. >> what pressure -- what pressure did you feel when you were building the story? >> i think this story was like

getting into a warm bath and then it got hotter and hotter and hotter. so, you were able to withstand the heat. i think the most remarkable thing was early on, about eight weeks after the break-in, we found out john mitchell, nixon's campaign manager, former law partner, former general of the united states control this had secret fund. we were having coffee off a vending machine room. i put a dime in and i felt this chill go down my neck and said to woodward, oh, my god, this president is going to be impeached and woodward looked at me and said, oh, my god, you were right. and we can never use that word impeach around this newspaper, lest ben bradley or someone else thinks we have an agenda and we don't. and i think there was awe at that moment and some fear, that the stakes became so obviously

huge. we're 28, 29 years old. every day the spokesman for the leader of the free world is getting up and making the conduct of the press the issue in watergate, our conduct specifically that of "washington post." bradley, bob, myself. >> and did you feel the pressure that was being put in terms of the paper itself and journalism itself and katherine graham and ben bradley? >> no, because we were kind of operating in a bubble. >> that's right. >> go get the story. what's the next story? and there was an absence of that pressure. we knew -- we could turn on the television and see ziegler, for 15 minutes, scream and denounce us and the campaign manager for nixon and so forth. there was a point in october, october 10th, 1972, when we did a story that essentially was the dna of watergate.

it said, look, it was part of a basic campaign, spying and sabotage, directed at the democrats. and if you look at what, in all of these five wars of watergate, the most insidious one was nixon and his people saying we're going to hire saboteurs and we're going to pick who nixon runs again. they derailed and helped destroy senator muskogee and pat buchanan wrote a memo saying this is great. our strategy paid off. so, the idea -- you think about this. we've talked at some length about it's really an attack on the free electoral process to say, oh, i'm running against somebody in your -- let me pick who i think will be the weakest candidate. and the idea that somebody is going to do that who is president of the united states in all of these people around him is pretty horrifying. >> you come back in a piece

saying was nixon the central factor in all of this, in all of the wars, in all of the execution. >> that's what's so astonishing about the tapes. always, it's nixon saying bring me the dead mouse. and he is the one that says break in, break in, break in. i want those files. he comes back to it time and time again. and it's he that is insistent about getting ted kennedy's tax returns, about saying let's get my old secret service agent from when i was vice president, put him in ted kennedy's secret service detail, get him to report back and maybe we'll catch the son of a bitch in a compromising position and ruin him so he can't run in '76.

that's what this was about. that's what's so brazen and horrifying. >> how important was deep throat? >> deep throat helped us a lot. he was confirming -- >> confirming is the word? >> basically. like the october story, it started out as carl had found three people who were recruited to do this sabotage and spying and none of them had done it. i went to meet with mark feld and it's one of the times where he said, no, this is much bigger. and that's when he said there are 50 who did this. and that's been a number that was disputed for a long time. all you have to do is read the senate watergate committee and their report. and it's astonishing. they had 22 people that the chief saboteur paid.

they had spies named ruby one, ruby two, sedan chair one, sedan chair two, chapman's friend and on and on. they hired infiltrators. they threw stink bombs at campaigns. there was nothing off limits. >> why do you think people persist in asking questions about deep throat? for example, on a plane coming from new york to washington, a diplomat that i know came over and said where are you going? i said i'm going down to interview carl and bob as the watergate's 40th anniversary, and there's a big conference to talk about it. and he said ask him how many deep throats there were. curiosity about deep throat. >> one, there was one. >> people didn't believe there was one for a long time. they thought it was -- i think we have a problem, cultural problem to some extent that revisionism -- revisionism can be a great thing if you're open minded and open things up and say let's enlarge the record. but if the person is to merely discredit or to merely debunk, i think there's been an awful lot

of that with watergate and particularly because -- here, to me, is the most important thing about this anniversary. that it not be seen as in the cultural landscape and world fair of ideological conflict that goes on today. one of the things that happen heard -- you heard it from bill cohen and the others. decision to work in that democrats, republicans voted 77-0 to create the watergate committee. nixon's appointees to the supreme court, three of them, including the chief justice of the united states, said you have to turn over these tapes, mr. president, because you're not above the law. this was not an ideological exercise, partisan exercise. it was not about the republican party. it was about nixon.

>> that's true. we should answer the question about -- we should be accountable. >> yes. >> when we wrote "all the president's men," we sat down and said we went to grand jurors. we need to acknowledge that. carl got phone records from private people. we need to acknowledge that. we need to acknowledge and deal with the genuine emotions when we screwed up on the haldeman story, so on and so forth. we should have no objection to people saying how many deep throats there were. happily seven years ago, mark feld, on his own, decided to come out and unmask himself. that day, carl and i were in the newsroom and bradley and len downey are saying, you've got to confirm it. and we weren't worried that he's being taken advantage of. he's over 90, dementia. they're saying, looks this is reality.

we need to confirm it and disclose it. we did. happily, then people started checking and felt wrote another book with his lawyer and so forth. all the details are laid out. so there's not a mystery about this. quite frankly, if he had died before that happened or we were able to write the book "the secret man" to tell about that story, you would have had more doubters. >> did you go to him at any point in the process before it was disclosed and he acknowledged that he was deep throat to ask him to consider coming forward? >> yes. when we were writing "all the president's men" i called him up and said how about coming clean? click. i know what that meant. >> and who conceived the idea of how you would meet? >> he started out --