lerner-gate, that history -- i feel confident that history will not tell us that there was an obama administration drive to target political opponents that is in any way comparable to what nixon did. i may end up being proved wrong. >> i was going to make that point. >> that i was going to end up being proved wrong? thank you, bob. i should have just practiced law. >> you have a point of view. it's a reasonable one. i know you are a terrific at digging things out. if carl and i were 29 years old, we would be on our knees to the editor saying, let us go to cincinnati for two weeks. the editor would say to carl, just don't rent a car and leave it in a parking lot. which he did. >> i'm all for two weeks. i'm not arguing about reporting

first and coming up with the opinion later. that's sort of what i believe. i'm all for sending you to -- you can have three weeks in cincinnati, as far as i'm concerned. i'm just sort of giving you my best assessment of the evidence so far based on the reporting have i have done. >> we have elizabeth, carl, ken hughs -- >> we already know. >> what is it? >> i did some of the reporting. because i have -- the only part do i know, but i got to somebody who has been in the irs for a long time. >> i was for cincinnati. >> who has begun to explain some of this to me. there is more to the story. you are absolutely right, we need more reporting. but thus far, the facts at least

as far as i could find out talking to a few people, including -- that there is no evidence whatsoever, as ruth suggests, that this goes to the heart of the obama administration or presidency. but there is a question of whether in that cincinnati office some things were interpreted as a license and at the same time, it would appear that "the new york times" did a good story on this. the whole question of investigating political groups so they can get a tax exemption is at the heart of this. maybe you can talk about this. >> i can talk about this until the end of time. i'm going to let elizabeth talk. >> they got the tax exemption. that's the scandal. >> that's what -- she's right.

[ applause ] including democratic groups. >> exactly. here is the point. >> it's true. >> if you reported it all that week, there was one week there where we had the irs and we had -- do you remember the -- the justice department is going after the ap and it was the end of the freedom of the press. it was one week. bill sapphire was very clever. he started this business of putting gate at the end of everything to diminish watergate. they all do it. it's all the same. it was -- anybody who does this now, i won't shoot you, but i will be very unhappy with you. you are falling for this trick that he did. it diminishes the horror, the important of what watergate was. that was exactly what bill was after. if you look for a minute that week, if you talk to people at all, you knew they were also doing this liberal groups. people went out of business

because they couldn't get tax exemption in time. why did it not make sense? suddenly all these groups, you enter code words, because that's how you will find them. nobody was denied their tax exemption. what's going on on the hill is they are trying to weaken the irs. they have done so. there's a question of proportion here. this is highly shocking thing to say. one problem with watergate is we're so scandal prone. if it's not a scandal, it's not interesting. the thing that we went down the path of not spending -- what's the word i'm looking for? that's very big thing that's happened to politics, to our country. it's a president -- maybe that wasn't such a good idea. i didn't come up with the word. >> this happens to me all the

time. >> a scandal is something. but there's about governing and what goes on on the hill that's not going to be a scandal but it's terribly important. we should not get in the fire engines so quickly. >> i would say that one things of nixon was that for very good reason he instilled in many of us a capacity to believe the absolute worst about our leaders. he had done so many truly evil, corrupt, terrible things that we really imagine a democratic president or a republican president, a president of any sort capable of -- because we saw it. it happened. it's not that we shouldn't be very suspicious when suspicious things occur, it's not that we shouldn't spend as many weeks in cincinnati as we need to, but we have lost the capacity to

believe in the fundamental decency in politicians might not be the right words to put together. but they're not all corrupt. they have all descended to that level. >> your assignment would be to go out and find decency? >> i found it. >> i'm all about getting as many page views as he can get. >> it doesn't sell. >> because i think we're getting a little off track and we're kind of thinking, get to the bottom of these things. we understand them. we can do a little reporting. this was 30 days after nixon resigned. ford was president. it was september 1974. some of you may recall, he went

on television early on a sunday morning announcing he was giving nixon a full pard pardon. he went on television hoping no one would notice. [ laughter ] well, it was noticed but not be my. he was carl called me up and said, you have heard? i said, no, i was asleep. carl, who then and still has the ability to say what occurred in the fewest words with the most drama -- [ laughter ] said the son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch. [ applause ] [ laughter ] happy to report, i figured it out. [ laughter ] we thought from that moment on, it's -- the pardon is the final

perfect corruption of watergate, that the guy -- nixon, who instigated it all, gets a pardon. 40 people go to jail. if you look at the history of this in 1976, ford lost to carter perhaps because of pardon and the suspicion about it. 25 years later, i undertook one of the book projects about the legacy of watergate in the presidencies of ford through clinton and called ford up, who i had never met, never interviewed and said i want to talk to you about the pardon. he said, fine. i interviewed him six or seven times in new york, his home, in colorado, his main home. i had two assistants, have the luxury of time. what happened? why did you pardon richard nixon? i kept asking him that.

it was only in the sixth or seventh interview in his home -- why did you pardon nixon? he said, you keep asking the same question. and i said, i don't think you have answered it. and then he said, okay, i will tell you. these are the moments you live for in journalism. and he said, what happened -- he said, nixon's chief of staff came to me and offered a deal. it would have been illegal if i had said i will accept the deal. in fact, i rejected the deal because what he said, if nixon resigns, you get the presidency and nixon needs to know he will be pardoned. ford convincingly said, look, i rejected that deal. i pardoned nixon not for nixon, not for myself but for the good of the country. and then he laid out his

reasoning, which was very compelling, i thought. he said, look, i had a letter from the watergate prosecutor saying, nixon say private citizen now. he will be investigated. will be indicted, tried, probably convicted, go to jail. ford said, have two or three more years of watergate. the economy was in trouble. the cold war was still on. he said the country could not stand it. and he said, very plaintiffly said, i needed my own presidency. convinced me and i think convinced carl and many people that this was an act of courage rather than the final corruption. looking at that 25 years later, it makes you real humble. it makes -- in fact, to a certain extent, it's humiliating that we were so sure in 1976

what it was and then it's subjected to a neutral in-depth inquiry 25 years after the fact and what looks like that looks exactly the opposite. >> i believed him at the time. it made a lot of sense. that would have been the story for the next couple years. he wouldn't have been able to govern. as he said, the x years of watergate is enough. we were tired. the country was tired of it. we had to move on. it was a wise decision then. >> one could imagine you being forgiven a little bit of paranoia, after -- suspicion and questioning after what you had seen and after what he had done. you knew what presidents -- knew what nixon was capable of and you knew what presidents were capable of. but i'm glad we kind of came to an agreement on decency. >> we were looking for the decency. >> now you are going to make fun of me until the end of time. right here in the red.

>> given all that we have talked about today about nixon and having been old enough to live through working for kennedy's election and the re-election against nixon, why did nixon get more or less not just pardoned but forgiven to the point that all the ex-presidents went to his funeral and we don't -- i know that the republicans want to do that. but why do we forgive him? >> thank you very much. ruth mentioned this earlier and i didn't get to it. after his presidency, i added a 10,000 word section to my journals of time. i wrote it this winter about nixon -- give the guy credit. how low could you have been brought? again, he was not -- he was going to come back and he was going to show them.

they drew up a plan called the wizard plan. that section shows how -- he would have adored his funeral. it was what he was looking for. he set himself out to be respected and be considered a statesman. >> it didn't work. it's not true. >> it worked in his terms. it worked. he got accepted by the establishment in new york. he got five presidents to his funeral. it worked in terms of what he wants. of course not. but what he wanted, he got. presidents. he made presidents ask him about foreign policy. he got himself invited to the state dinner for the chinese. nixon got the chinese. he was on the cover of "time" and "newsweek" and publishers -- he spoke to the publishers and editors and he predicted politics. he was wrong. they gave him standing ovations. there was a period in which

people wanted to say, okay, we beat up on him enough. he blackmailed clinton into consulting. he was a very, very careful planner. for what he wanted, it was a success. do we love him now? that wasn't the point. that's the answer to your question. >> no, no. >> it's not the answer. >> after the press, the justice system, the democrats the against history. nixon conducted it as you are indicating. but he didn't win. we wouldn't be here today having this, ken wouldn't have written the book he wrote that in fact, look, there is always going to be, in a huge body of people, some who are going to believe what they want to believe.

>> i answered the gentleman's question. you are talking about different things. they accepted him because he worked at it. >> i think that they are both -- >> my point is that the judgment -- he did not succeed. yes, there were -- there have been momentary periods in which some people thought maybe he is rehabilitated, he was accorded some respect. there's a debate about him. yet, the overwhelming -- totally yo overwhelming judgment is of his criminality of him. >> he succeeded in his plan. he was on the cover of the magazines, got awards. >> here we are talking about him, which probably -- in ways that probably aren't making him all that happy as his funeral

might have. i want to do two things, which is -- i've been avoiding eye contact with this side of the room, which i promise to get to. i also really want to thank two audiences. first the guests in the overflow room who were watching it on tv but not here. thank you very much for sitting through it. i hope it was as fun there as it was here. second of all, to thank folks who are watching this streaming live or who will watch it live. hopefully tens of thousands of you in the future will have persisted all the way through to the closing moments here. let's get in one last question. sir, in the blue shirt. >> this is for bob and carl. i understand and appreciate the conservative journalistic standards of the post. i wonder if you could say whether there came a point in time during your watergate reporting when each of you became convinced that nixon was

personally involved and responsible for this even though the post wouldn't print it? if so, what were the facts that caused you to come to that belief? it's a great question and here is the answer. five floors up here woodward and i would get together every morning before we were going to write a story, get our ducks in a row. we had a good cop bad cop routine. guess who was the good cop, who was the bad cop. we would present to the editors so that we could get in the paper what we thought belonged in the paper. this was a conservative pull toward making sure that everything was safe. sometimes we thought they were a little too conservative. within ten weeks we found there was a break-in. there had been a secret fund that paid for the bugging atwater gate and other undercover activities against the political opposition. and it was controlled by, among others, john mitchell the former

attorney general of the united states and nixon's former law partner. we were about to write that story. as ben bradley said, you are about to call the attorney general of the united states a crook. there's never been a story like this before. we were in there -- >> bradbly sai blley said, you right. >> we would get coffee in a venting machine. i put a dime in the machine, which is what coffee cost then. and i literally felt a chill go down my neck. and i turned to woodward and i said, oh, my god, this president is going to be impeached. and woodward turned to me and he said, oh, my god, you are right. we can never use that word in this newspaper office ever

unless somebody think we have an agenda. it occurred very early that this -- once that mitchell thing, that connection -- let me tell one more mitchell story that what happened the next night. which was we wrote the story. as usual, the white house -- we called for a comment and the assistant press secretary, we told them what the story was, john mitchell controlled these secret funds, and we wanted to know what the white house had to say. he got back and said, the sources of the "washington post" are a fountain of misinformation. that was the white house response because it was to make our conduct the issue and watergate not that of the president and his men. i wrote that and typed that out on the typewriter. i said aside from that, is the story true, did mr. mitchell control the funds? he repeated the sources of the

"washington post" are a fountain of misinformation. aside from the guiyser, is it o not? i had a phone number for mitchell. i called him. he answered the phone. i identified myself and said we had a story in the paper. and i would like to get his response. he said, go ahead. i began to read. i got as far as john and mitchell while attorney general of the united states controlled a secret fund -- mr. mitchell said jesus. [ laughter ] then i got a little farththertho the first paragraph by which the story was unmistakable. mr. mitchell said, jesus. i got to the end of the first paragraph saying he controlled the secret fund and what it paid for. mr. mitchell said, jesus christ,

all that crap, the publishe eer stairs will get her tit caught in a big fat ringer. i jumped back from the phone worried about my own parts more than hers. then he said, what certainly is the most chilling moment in my years in journalism and i think bob's as well, when this campaign is over, we are going to do a little story on you two boys, too. and he hung up the phone. we were 28 and 29 years old. we knew whatever it was that he was going to do that he meant it. but what it really was was indicative of his attitude toward a free press. i called ben bradley