recovering journalist and a researcher at the university of virginia's miller center for presidential recordings. really a big shoutout to the miller center for all the work they do. a little bitter about ken because he says that nixon entered the white house the same year he entered kindergarten, which if you do the math which ken kindly did for me means when nixon resigned, he was only 10 years old. so he says in his bio, he had a lot of questions about the scandal. the biggest being how could this happen in america? ken has added a really important chapter and piece of history to that understanding. he's got a fascinating new book out, also on sale out front, called "chasing shadows: the nixon tapes, the shen ault affair and watergate." he's going to tell us more about the origins of watergate later.

in the age of really accessible video, we can't talk about nixon 40 years later without taking the opportunity to go back in time and actually see the events of that evening. so if we could do that, that would be great. it never works. we're going to give the sound ten seconds to work and then we'll -- >> he never resigned. >> if anybody can read lips and can tell us what happened. >> it's all a trick. >> so without that dramatic moment, some of us remember it. some of us have seen it on tv when the wireless feed did work.

i just want to take a very brief moment, very briefly, for those who were immersed in the story at the time. elizabeth, carl, bob, just give us very briefly what that particular night of his resignation felt like to you. elizabeth? >> this is the night he announced he -- >> the night he announced he was going to resign. >> and it was the next day that was truly bizarre when he had a good-bye farewell speech to his sta staff, and it was kind of embarrassing and he was reading from teddy roosevelt's memoirs. he associated with teddy roosevelt, the man in the arena and he never gave up and this sort of thing. and he was this sickly boy who became this big, strong figure and nixon had been a sickly boy and i leave the rest to you.

he was talking -- he read from teddy roosevelt about when my dear wife died, what that was about. it was very weird. now i learned in working on this version of the book that at the same time that was going on he had a military aide in there stealing papers that he signed over to the archives but he wanted to write his memoirs, called r.n., like t.r. he was loading these documents into trucks and sending them out to san clemente. he'd been doing it for a while. then a ford person caught them and said you can't keep doing that. it was a very strange event. they went out to the helicopter and who can forget that. the iconic scene of our era. >> carl, the night of the resignation? >> bob and i were in the newsroom. catherine graham, publisher of "the post" had come down from her office. ben bradley, the editor of the paper. there were surprise league fing

people in the newsroom because we knew what was coming. and catherine actually said to the group of us, no gloating. >> how did that work out? >> and there was no need because my feeling was one of absolute total awe that it had come to this. finally, the country was going to be spared in an office and also recognition of the fact that those in the group had some real role in what was happening. but awe, total awe. and the fact that the system had worked. >> i was sitting on the floor of howard simon's office. he was the managing editor watching this and this was before the bezos era.

it was the graham era. they handed out sandwiches that night. i remember the very bad bologna sandwich i was sitting there eating and not only did catherine graham issue the no glo gloating rule but so did brantly. and ben and i went to the elevator because we were going to go down to get something to eat and the elevator opens and there's sargent shriver who has somehow broken into "the post" security system. and shriver, who is head of the peace corps and the kennedy era, married to one of the kennedys. very much a kennedy person. he sees ben and goes, yea!

blue the cover. ben is trying to cover and shriver wouldn't stop and said, oh, i had to be here this night with you. and i think if -- the moment was one of what's happening here. what does it mean, and that was 40 years ago. and to a certain extent, carl and i have spent those 40 years. elizabeth, too, you know, what was watergate. what does it mean. what is its ultimate impact. and what's so fascinating is there are always more and more tapes that come out. aren't there 800 hours of tapes that the nixon library is going

to release in a month or so? >> there's about 800 that they have no plans to release. >> somebody told me they're going to be available. so we'll be back with the headphone headphones. the headphones never go away. >> there are always more tapes and they never fail to astonish and revolt. did you want to say something? >> they don't fundamentally change the story. watergate is so critical. you get caught in the minutia and realize that nixon said, oh, my god did he say that and talk to billy graham about the jews controlling the networks? yeah, he did. and it's not astonishing really of anything that comes out, but the basic outline of what it was about and what happened hasn't changed. actually nothing that says, it was all different than i thought. we have to be careful. >> that's the perfect segue to

the way i'd like to structure this. i believe it is an unwritten rule of moderating watergate panels and it's incumbent upon the moderator to channel the very well known question from howard baker, what did he know n when did he know it? we see that unearthed every time. i'm not going to raise that question, but i'm going to rewrite that question as a way of structuring our discussion. so i want to do it in two parts. what do we now know about watergate and nixon, and why does it matter that we know it? in that regard, i think i'll meet with bob and carl. you can bicker about who goes first. you wrote a few years ago, the watergate we wrote about. i have this type that says 1972 to 1974. it is not watergate as we know

it today. it was only a glimpse into something far worse. by the time he was forced to resign, nixon had turned his white house into a remarkable extent into a criminal enterprise. so talk about that a little bit and address the question if you wou would, what do we know that you wish you had known and can tell people then? >> real quickly, what's interest ing is what started before the watergate burglary. that's important to understand. when we did this piece and looked back at watergate, watergate burglary was in june of 1972. in 1970, nixon authorized what was called the houston plan which he requested. a top-secret plan to expand wiretapping, break-ins, mail

openings and clearly illegal. in fact, in one of the tapes that is coming out in john dean's new book in 1973, nixon is talking to his new chief of staff al haig and he says on the tape, he said, i authorize the houston plan. it was to use any means available including illegal means. and then nixon with kind of a sense of, oh, my god, what did i get into, says, no president of the united states can admit that. and so watergate start ed much before watergate because it was a mind-set of doing anything to advance nixon's policies, his political stature and there was no barrier, including the law.

>> the notion that the nixon white house, and you hear it on the tapes. and i use the term advisedly, was a criminal madhouse. and the more that we learned, the more it becomes apparent and it goes to nixon. it always goes to nixon. never an those tapes do we hear nixon say -- and bob calls it the dog that never barks. never do we hear nixon say, what would be right for the country about almost anything? not just what's happening, but what is happening is a whole presidency in which the focus is retribution on enemies real and imagined going back to the early 1950s. and that there is an assumption made that various institutions from the press to the democratic

party to the anti-war movement are undermining the nixon presidency and the prospects of re-election. the tapes is about somehow finding a way, usually illegal, through criminal means to thwart those other democratic processes and institutions. you know, we thought early on and we wrote by october 10th, 1972, that watergate, the break-in was just part of a massive campaign of political espionage and sabotage to undermine the very system of free elections in this country. to produce the nominee of the democratic party for the presidency through espionage and sabotage that would be the weakest opponent of richard nixon. when we wrote that story, we thought, ah, now it makes sense.

now after 40 years it all makes much more sense about this huge criminal enterprise. >> and, ken, you have probably -- we were talking about this earlier. we have probably spent more hours listening to more presidential tapes than any human being in america. lucky you. you've been immersed in not just nixon tapes but lbj takes. what's your take, leaving aside your 10-year-old self, on what we knew now, what we know now about nixon that we didn't understand at the moment of his resignation? >> first off, i just want to talk about how honored and what a surreal experience it is for my former 10-year-old self to be sitting here between woodward and bernstein talking about watergate with all of you. but that said, in between then and now, i have listened to an awful lot of tapes. and i think the biggest thing

that i've learned about watergate from the tapes is that nixon had little choice but to launch a cover-up. once the watergate bugulars who are rested and the investigation went to the so-called masterminds of that break-in, nixon had to obstruct the investigation because the investigation of the crimes would lead back to his own. the white house hired liddy to be part of this secret illegal unconstitutional special investigations unit that nixon ran out of the white house. he had put it together, we now know, for illegal reasons. one to engineer a break-in at the brookings institution. the think tank not too far from here, to gather information about his enemies in the anti-war movement in the democratic party through illegal

processes, through the grand jury investigations of the pentagon papers leak and use that information illegally to destroy his critics. so people say, you know, it's not the crime. it's the cover-up. nixon had too much criminality to really allow any sort of investigation to go forward. >> and why don't you just take a moment to tell us about the chenault affair and what that was and the role that played in the criminality that resulted in watergate. >> which is your new book. >> which is for sale outside. >> thank you all. the chenault affair occurred during the closing days of the 1968 presidential campaign. a close race between nixon and vice president hubert humphrey.

less than a week before election day, lyndon johnson ordered a halt to the bombing of the north vietnam. the public knew that in return for that, he would get the peace talks to begin involving the north vietnamese and the south vietnamese will be able to take part in those. he had two military conditions as well, which were that the north vietnamese had to respect the demilitarized zone dividing vietnam and refrain from shelling civilian populations in south vietnam. the chenault affair was the nixon campaign's attempt, a successful one, to make sure that those peace talks didn't start before election day. nixon feared the beginning of peace talks would help hubert humphrey and possibly ruin nixon's last chance at the presidency. so through a republican fund-raiser named anna

chennault, the nixon campaign transmitted messages to saigon saying, hold on, we're going to win. we'll do better by you once we're elected. lyndon johnson found out about what chennault was up to for a variety of reasons. the national security agency was intercepting cables from the south vietnamese embassy to saigon. the cia had a bug in the president of south vietnam's office, and -- >> imagine that. >> what a surprise. >> when i said it a few years ago, there would be a few gasps. now we know. and lyndon johnson had the fbi put a wiretap on the phone in the south vietnamese embassy. november 2nd, three days before the 1968 election, and chennault calls up the ambassador of south vietnam and says, i have a message from my boss. hold on. we're going to win.

so johnson knows that the republicans are interfering with this peace talks but he doesn't have the goods on nixon. he calls the senate minority leader everett dirksen. goes into a tirade. sort of implies he has the goods on nixon. the next day he talks to nixon and nixon kind of gives him an evasive assurances that he would never do that. and make a long story short, nixon never really knew how much the federal government had collected with regard to the sabotage on the bombing hall. j. edgar hoover at his meeting following the '68 election said to him, not only did we have a tap on the south vietnamese embassy phone. we had a tap on anna chennault's phone with the fbi requested, and a bug on your cam pan plane for the last two weeks of the campaign. so nixon -- if that had been

true, then -- any interference that nixon personally did with the peace talks would have been in the fbi file. so nixon takes office obsessed with getting his hands on the file. he has h.r. haldeman work on it. houston says, we've looked at the -- it doesn't make johnson look good. doesn't make us look good. huston comes up with a strange story in which he says there's a complete bombing halt report with all the documents from the time at the brookings institution. and it was prepared by clark clifford's defense department. his top aides. and this is exactly the sort of thing we need. probably going way longer than i should. >> if you want to know the rest, read the book. there, that's fair.

>> elizabeth, one of your dispatches you wrote about a time in which the unfolding story, quote, began to take on the characteristics of a russian novel. someone we had never heard of suddenly emerged as an agent in activities that were almost inconceivable. and that really resonated for me because i was always unable at the time to keep any of these characters straight but, of course, the main character was richard nixon. and complex and impenetrable and not understandable but you've done about as good a job as anyone of trying to understand the kind of tortured mind that led us to this national crisis. and to look at nixon's activities even post watergate as a way of interesting him. so tell us a little bit about

nixon and what compelled him to do these things from your point of view. >> some talk about when did wattergate begin? was born in this little town in yorba linda, california, where he was born. i think he was trapped in his own personality, in his own hang-ups. and hang-up is too light. but i don't do any psychobabble. this is a man who all his life felt that everybody else was getting a break and they all had more advantages than he did and he had to show them that he was going to be -- he went out for football. he couldn't run or throw. he didn't care how much he got banged up. high school, he rebelled against the most important distinct classy fraternity and started his own. he was always resenting and feeling that others were having

advantage over him, and he had to show them. and he was going to get even in some way. it's not hard to see how this evolved when you get into the oval office and you have all of this that you are controlling. by then it wasn't -- he confused political opponents with enemies. his idea of foundation presidents or university presidents or newspaper publishers or anybody who wasn't forhim, not his opponent or his critic, his enemy. and he felt you could use the instruments of government. and watch presidential candidates or certain governors. do they use the instruments carefully with boundaries? with these people, there were no boundaries. they said -- somebody testified that they put the houston plan away. they didn't. it was never really put away. the break-in at the watergate was one in a series. but the cover-up had to happen

because things that happened before. they had broken into -- this is the big one. the psychiatrist. daniel elsburg who leaked the pentagon papers. they went berserk on the pentagon papers. he ordered the study n these two people had worked on the study. their understanding was that two chapters were still sitting in the brookings institution. and you hear nixon on the tape saying go in there and blow it up and get that safe. and -- >> fire bomb the god damn place he says. >> i want it done on a fevery basis, he says at one point. >> go in and get the files. he is one of my favorites because he was always doing something extremely stupid. there's questions whether he got

stopped by a guard. they had no files. they had no papers, nothing but these things grew up in their minds and they had to act on them. when the burglars were caught in the watergate, what haldeman and nixon talked about was, oh, there's all those other things they did. and it was really worried. nixon was more worried, the way i read what they said and talked to people about the break-in at the psychiatrist's office. nixon had standards. he knew that was such a blatant violation of the constitutional right. fourth amendment. right to privacy in your home and place. to go in and get somebody's psychiatric files, well, once again, there were no files. one thing that might have saved us all is the burglars, the cubans, the plumbers. they messed up everything they did. that's how they got caught.

they actually had been in the wattergate office building as you two know, memorial day weekend before then. they got in but they put the tap on the phone wrong and the pictures were blurry. they took it to john dean and john mitchell, the chairman of the re-election committee is supposed to have said, i doubt that's the word he used. go back in. now i don't know how stupid you have to be to go back in. the tape comes out you put it up. they tried four times, okay? the first time they were going to -- they gave a dinner. they did a banquet in the watergate. they were in the building and got caught in an elevator. for the night. then they got up there and, oh, we don't have something to undo this lock. so one of the cubans went down to miami to get the right thing to do the lock.

then they got in -- it was like the marx brother goes to a constitutional -- but my real point was it wasn't a constitutional crisis. was deadly serious. it was nervous hilarity while this is going on because you couldn't believe it. what was going to happen next and who were these characters. but it was whether a president will be held accountable to the courts, to the congress and really to the people. and they did everything they did -- they could to not only avoid that but to defy the other institutions. and the other part of it which carl talked about was to interfere with the inner workings of the opposition party to try to maneuver who their nominee is going to be. and i exaggerate not when i wrote these are bully boys. not quite the ragstown fire but in that area of immorality. was a very scary and still is,

the system where there was a lot of cowardice that went on. also a lot of greatness. it was not clear, really, until you can look back and say, obviously, he was going to get caught but it wasn't obvious at all. >> i want to pick up from that point. and imagine a kind of thought experiment of what if we had richard nixon today. what the watter. >> guest: -- watergate story would have been like. and i want to do this in two stages. i'm just going to throw it open to anybody who has thoughts about that. the first is, you guys might have noticed, in fact, the room that you are sitting in used to have presses. we literally in the good old days when -- had newspapers, hot literally off the presses down here from upstairs to the fifth floor newsroom. times have changed. journalism has changed. what would watergate have looked

like in an age of twitter and the internet and 24/7 cable news? would it have simply evolved more quickly or would it have evolved differently? you hear some of the folks here during the wattergate era talk about the good old days when they couldn't wait to get to the end of the driveway to pick up "the washington post." >> you make it sound like we're dinosaurs. >> we are dinosaurs. >> we're still here. the dinosaurs aren't. >> to get the latest chapter in this unfolding story. just talk for a minute, whoever wants to tackle this, what it might have been like if watergate were happening today. >> let me try one thing, and i don't believe that if history works incident. at the same time, i think that

there's an aspect of the journalistic part of this that gets ignored too often. yes, we have twitter, and yes if this story were covered today there would be a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there. there would be -- we had the advantage in this build iing. and the support of maybe the greatest puppet show of our time and we were not -- out there alone. we had an institution that systemically was brave, courageous and conservative. about what would go in the paper. and we had to be right. we made some mistakes, but we had to be right. and i think in today's atmosphere, you don't need watergate to see how much

information out there every day it gets an the evening news. it's on twitter. that we absorb all the time is not right. but one of the things that's totally different today is that a consensus evolved in the country, political system and we can talk about that more. based on the best obtainable version of the truth, which is really what good reporting is, and the people of the country came around by reading and knowing the best obtainable version of the truth that nixon was a criminal and had to go. today, i suspect, that those -- if you look at who -- why people are seeking out information, it's no longer predominantly for the best obtainable version of the truth. it's for partisan and ideological ammunition to

reinforce what they already believe. their political beliefs, religious beliefs, ideologies. so we have to look at a different country where the citizens themselves are not open in the same way to the truth that they were at the time. >> real quickly on that, obviously, the internet environment is driven by impatience and speed and when we were working on this story, carl and i could work for two or three weeks on one story. we would write it on things some of you may remember. typewriters. and there would be paper that produced six copies and the drafts would go to the editors. they would look at it. they would say, well, what about this or get more sources. work harder. dig into it. ben bradley, the ultimate editor

was a -- carl is right. certainly probably the greatest editor of the last century, but it wasn't just for what he'd put in the paper but what he'd keep out of the paper. and there was a kind of patience and real quickly, tell the story about catherine graham who is the publisher and the owner in january '73 after carl and i had written this series of stories that essentially said, as carl points out, is a criminal enterprise in the nixon white house. one of the problems we had, most people did not believe it. it was thought inconceivable that nixon or the people had conducted this espionage and sabotage operation that there was all this illegal money. $700,000 in a safe in cash for

undercover activities. at the time that was lots of money. and so catherine graham invited me up for lunch one day. it was a day when carl had to go to a funeral. and i remember walking in. she had supported the publication of these stories. we knew her a little bit. and she -- when we sat down, she started asking me questions about watergate and blew my mind with what she had followed and read. i think at one point she read something about watergate in the chicago tribune and i remember thinking, why is she reading the damn "chicago tribune" for? no one in chicago does. world's greatest newspaper. i read as a child. and she had absorbed all of this and it was a kind of management

style of mind on. she had intellectual control of what was going on but hands off. she didn't tell us how to report, the editors how to edit. and then at the end, she, like a great ceo, she had the killer questions. she said, well, when is all of the truth going to come out? when are we going to find out what really happened? or when are we going to find out that we've got it right. and i said to carl and i was there was an active cover-up going on there was not a strong investigation to say the least by the federal government that they were paying the watergate burglars for their silence. the answer is never. i remember looking across that luncheon table and she had this expression on her face of -- she said the following.

never don't tell me never. i left the lunch a motivated empl employee. >> let me add something. >> but she was not -- i'm sorry this is a long anecdote, but it captures the essence of what she was doing and what she said with that was, look, we are in the newspaper business. we are -- if it is a moment of peril and we're not believed and one of the secret strategies of the nixon campaign was to challenge the very valuable fcc tv licenses that "the washington post" company owned, but she said, look. keep at it. this is the business we are in. and i was 29 at the time. i remember walking out thinking,

it's great to have a boss who understands the business we're in, is supportive of it and it doesn't get wobbly when the pressure in the denunciations were visited upon us as they were. >> carl quickly and then elizabeth. >> he's made the point of what was at stake with the licenses. there's another part i'll tell later on. >> these guys did a fantastic job of summoning the tenor at the time. you had the luxury of observing and reporting an a weekly basis which seems amazing now. >> i want to -- >> but nobody has really done the thought experiment that i asked you to do. of imagining in the age of -- in the age of twitter, would this have all come crashing down and nobody would have been able to be diligent enough to get it out or what would have happened?

>> i think i'm very glad we didn't have that. now we have what seems like a stately pace but then you had the morning paper, the radio, an awful lot of, did you hear? did you hear? you won't believe this. they've lost two tapes. they erased 18 1/2 minutes. something was always going on. but at least it wasn't being made excessive amount about. i think it was carl who said, the country came along. that didn't just happen. and there's a very underreported, underestimated chapter of this. what happened when they -- the question went to the house of representatives. it was -- this is very important to understand. it was a long time before -- impeachment? you don't impeach presidents. nobody had been impeached since andrew johnson after the civil war and then he wasn't convicted in a sense.

this was a really rare, frightening thing to talk about. remove a president from office? these people, they are talking about removing people from office. it's a whole different thung. they very much cheapened and undermined the rather, very important constitutional concept. and it wasn't just about crimes. what the constitution says is, you can be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. that house judiciary led by peter. he had just been elected. short italian from new jersey. he must be mobbed up, but he never was. >> as a jersey girl, i'm trying to think whether i want to take offense at that or not argue with the premise. >> that was white house stuff. they put that junk out there. what happened was this ordinary group of people in this judiciary committee and they

hired a committee counsel john dore. then bobby kennedy was civil rights hero. nobody could question his fairness. and another person named francis o'brien who was 27 and was rodino's administrative assistant. nobody knew how to do this. there was a book. but it didn't say, how do you impeach a president? nobody knew. so, look, for the country to accept it, they kept their eye on the ball. it could not be partisan and it cannot appear to come from one way or another wing. they pushed it out. the very far right that way and the very far left members over that way. sorry, we're not going to have something about the cambodia bombing because that's a political question and we're not going to impeach on a political question. and they took a long time. they had hearings, and that's what brought the country around.

by the time that committee voted, people thought, yes, this is fair. and it came from the committee. there were some democrats and republicans who formed a coalition at the core, at the center of this committee and if you listen to john dore, you know this was no lynch mob guy. it was carefully done. interesting communications that went on there, ruth, which was mr. o'brien who thought of everything at 27. i don't want cameras, all the television cameras. i want all the people to be able to see this. he made the networks go outside the room and open little holes in the wall. open holes in the wall. they could put their cameras through. then to go back and try to remember that it was just us and you and the country watching on television without these instruments and things in between. it had a very interesting effect. but you knew they were serious. they voted the first article of

impeachment on a saturday neat. c-span is running these now. it's fascinating. very slow. very deliberate. nobody was -- i went out on the white house lawn of the capitol and cried. it was such a dramatic thing. there was no, oh, we got him. article 2, this is important. you're right. there was criminal enterprise. but they went over and above that and said the president is accountable for these things. you do not have to prove. howard baker's question was a minimizing question. he was trying to narrow the question. he was working with the white house. i hate to disillusion you but that's the truth. if he says you have to prove the president knew and when he knew it, probably -- we still don't know what he knew. it doesn't matter. we know that this all happened under his aegis with people he hired and he set a tone and had goals of destroying the enemy and there were no boundaries. that's how it happened.

this was all drawn together and the public accepted it. nixon would have been impeached had they not found this little piece of taper later.&zfñ+9!> let me pick up on that, if i may. and that's about the republicans and about the difference today. >> that is in fact, my next question. when i say the system worked and where it didn't work. had to be a smoking gun which was absurd. pardon me? >> that was also because the republicans didn't really want to have to vote -- >> early on. >> no, at the end. >> let me just go through what the republicans did and how heroic many republicans were. first of all, the senate watergate committee was -- and think of this today. it was created by a 77-0 vote of the senate.

imagine the 77-0 vote in the senate today for anything. >> post office. the post office. >> you couldn't get a post offi office. then you had a judge in the district -- u.s. district court who had been appointed by a republican president. who had been reading our stories and forced in his courtroom from the watergate burglars their confession that they, indeed there was a cover-up going on. but they were being paid for their silence. and then you have the watergate committee in which republicans -- and she's right. howard baker originally was a kind of white house plant almost on the committee. as the evidence accumulated, he, too, was open. not mere ideology or party. he was open to the truth.

and then when nixon would not turn over his tapes and the saturday night massacre occurred and he fired the attorney general of the united states. and the deputy attorney general resigned because they wouldn't carry out nixon's orders on the tapes he was trying to with hold. the question eventually went to the supreme court of the united stat states. nixon expected the chief justice was going to save him. and yet whatever reluctance berger may have had, he also was intent that there be a unanimous decision by the supreme court that nobody, including the president of the united states was above the law. n then at the very end when nixon did not want to resign, a

delegation of republicans, this is after everything is known and nixon thinks that he might be able to survive and win in a senate trial where you needed two-thirds, a vote of the senate to convict, barry goldwater, 1964 nominee of his party, the great conservative, leads a delegation of republicans to the white house and sits down across from nixon and nixon asked barry goldwater how many votes do you think i have in the senate? and goldwater looks at him and says, well, you don't have mine, mr. president. and indicates he's going to lose and that's when nixon really, realizes he cannot survive and will resign. >> so this is the ultimate thought experiment, right? it's not knowable but it's never stopped us from speculating before. what if we had watergate today and the age of darrell issa and

ted cruz instead of barry goldwater. >> there was newt gingrich in 1996. we've been there. and that was the stepping -- that was when impeachment got cheapened and ruined. >> but that was -- but impeachment cheapened and ruined whatever you think about president clinton's activities and what level that they rose to. if we had a world in which there was nixonian conduct, do you think the political parties, whatever the opposition party is, could summon the statesmanship and outrage? >> here's the point. peter rodino made it possible for the republicans to be -- by push aside political questions. and departisanizing it. it didn't just happen. he had to make enough of them comfortable in voting for the articles of impeachment. by narrowing them, keeping them

inarguably the case and the big one was to say, you don't have to prove he was in on that crime or this one. he was accountable. that was article two, which was the big one. i agree with you. this wasn't just valor on the part of the republicans. they didn't want to go through this trial. nixon still had a base, 30, 35%. something in there. and they were very strong for him. you had the midterms coming up. there's always a midterm. and they were terrified, rightly so, because the republicans just got washed out to sea. 70-something watergate babies coming into the house as democrats. so there was greatness and cowardice. it was a mixture of not wanting to really confront it. just get it out of here. a lot of republicans talked to me that way as i kept my journal. i just talked to people all the time and then divide it up into sections, seasons and periods. they just wanted to be done with

it. they hated it. they'd go home. how are you going to vote? and his people would turn up. it was not the obamacare of the time, but it was unpleasant and they were scared and just wanted to get him out of there to save their own skins. >> this is not a knowable -- the answer to this question isn't knowable so you may imagine with the rest of us. >> what's central and unique to watergate are the tapes. and carl and i spent some time looking at transcripts, listening to tapes, taking the work that ken hughes did. has done at the miller center. and what expelled nixon from office, carl is right, was the republicans, but they listened to those tapes and heard the transcripts and there was a kind of rage in nixon. there was a sense of -- he said

it in a very self-revealing moment the day he resigned. that speech elizabeth was talking about which was very strange. i mean, he was sweating. he had called all of his senior staff, cabinet officers and friends into the east room. had his -- this was published -- this was broadcast on live national television. and nixon's closest friends were worried that nixon was going to be the first person to go stark raving mad and bonkers on live national television. i mean, he was just talking about his mother and his father. but at the end, in a moment of clarity, he kind of waved his hand like this is why i called you here. and he said the following. he said, always remember, others

may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them and then you destroy yourself. and that's exactly what happened. the piston in the nixon presidency is revealed particularly on the tapes is hate. it is the driving force. and he realized at that moment he's leaving that the hate in hating others he destroyed himself. and it is precisely what happened in this case. >> did you have anything -- >> talked about that later, too. >> i want to shift to the second half of whatever the motivation was, the baker formulation, which is why does what we now know about watergate matter. in other words, the question i want to think about is this. is watergate a matter -- when i say mere historical curiosity,

it's one of the central episodes of american history. or does it also tell us something about the political system going forward? so, carl and bob, you guys wrote that watergate was a brazen and daring assault led by nixon himself against the heart of american democracy, the constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law. so anybody in the panel can take off on this. do you see this as an event that's capable of repetition or was nixon a one off, a figure so bizarrely gifted and tragically flawed that we don't have to worry about his like again for some of the reasons of hatered. >> the tapes are so important. when i was doing one of my books on president obama, i went in to interview obama and broad two

tape recorders, because i didn't want to have an 18 1/2 minute gap. his press secretary said, yeah, tapes, oh, you know, we know a lot about tapes. [ laughter ] i reminded them that if you go to the next on library, they have a little doll house mockup of the oval office and it says, press a button here and a red light will go on everywhere there's a microphone. press the red light and the oval office lights up like a christmas tree. there were five maybe six microphones on nixon's desk. there were microphones in the chandeliers in the oval office. so i mentioned this to obama. obama said, i better get somebody to check those chandeliers. [ laughter ] but then he said -- he turned to his press secretary and he said,

can you imagine if everything we said in here was taped? my thought was, i hope so. [ laughter ] and if you get to this -- it's exactly the right question that ruth is asking about, where does this fit in? and it clearly is unique. what is -- ken is the expert on the tapes. what always struck me is nixon as elizabeth said is resenting anyone who had any privilege, oh, yeah, the moment there's a tape which you gave us where nixon discovers that somebody in the -- his white house is meeting with all the ivy league presidents. he goes bonkers. he just says, what? who is meeting with those ivy

league presidents? and then he goes into one of his rages. he said, they will never again be in this white house, never, never, never. >> from there to the jewish ivy league presidents. >> that's a little redundant, right? >> he said jews were all psychiatrists. >> let's take about what you are asking about now then. as i said, i don't think we can know about if history -- what we do know is, one, that it was the accident of that break-in at the watergate that enabled us to know what we know. the second accident was the discovery of the tapes. otherwise, forget about it. what all of this shows is how we need to know about what happens in our government and our presidents. and if you want to go to the day and look at twitter dominated

news and look at the 24-hour free-for-all, what is so apparent is we are not learning what's really going on. and it's particularly true of the presidency. take a look at bob's work. in watergate, what happens here, our books and continuing in bob's other books about the presidency, if it hadn't been for those books, we wouldn't know much about the succeeded presidents. we would know very little about the truth. and i don't want to -- i did a book on hillary clinton and discovered that, oh to understand the clinton presiden presidency, you had to understand everything about her and her role. you didn't see that reflected in the coverage. >> i think just to pick up on this, that to find out what's really going on takes time.

>> that's right. >> it takes months or years. if you take carl's book "woman in charge" about hillary clinton, it is long, exhaustively reported. if you read that book, as i have, it is -- at the end in the final chapter -- i'm sorry. he's my pal. i love him. but this is a wonderful book. and it is so relevant right now, because i think hillary clinton is in the news every now and then. >> really? >> at the end of the book you quote one of her associates who is a supporter who says, you know, i think about hillary running and, you know, bill as the first -- whatever he would be, the first husband. and this person says, i'm not sure i want the circus back in

town. [ laughter ] and i think that's a question everyone should ask. the clintons, both of them, have very strong points. but it gets-uóóó[ñ mutilated by news system we have. you don't get the details. and the point carl makes in this book at the end, which sh incredibly balanced account, goes back to her childhood, the difficulty she has dealing with the truth and reality. but in the end, you make the point which people should understand is, we're now thinking about whether she is going to run for president, whether she should be president. you say that hillary in a way is her own worst enemy because she's misrepresented herself, that she has so caught up in the ho

politics, the secrecy of things that the better side of her, which is religious -- am i right? >> yeah. >> somebody who has a really large heart and cares about these issues has been masked by the way she presents herself. if you look at that book, you look at -- pardon? >> finish the point. i wanted to go back to a few watergate points. >> okay. but that's -- this is watergate. this is watergate. the question is, what is the standard we're going to make our judgements on? is it good information? is it solid? is is it well reported? is it balanced? is it fair? or is it a bunch of sound bites in a bunch of tweets. >> the aftermath of nixon's experience, no same president will ever -- we will not have

lbj tapes, tapes, we will not tapes. people are scared to keep diaries. >> we have different technology. >> we have reporting. >> will we be able to know either in real time or after the fact what we were dealing with? >> that's why we need more in-depth reporting. >> that's it. if you go -- i just was looking at something -- i hate to come back to something the two -- i was looking at one of bob's books. [ laughter ] or elizabeth's books, actually. in fact, if you look at what elizabeth has reported through these administrations, which is a very different take than the conventional wisdom of this town, read her new yorker pieces, read her pieces in the new york review of books and you see that the conventional wisdom of this town is so far off the mark, so consumed by questions

of who is in and who is out as opposed to what the real story is. that's where i'm trying to go here. look, what woodward and i -- let's take a look at one of the greatest pieces of reporting of all time, the boston globe did on the catholic church and pedophiles. >> our editor here was the editor of the globe at the time. >> that's right. this is one of the greatest pieces of reporting of all time. and to penetrate the institution of the catholic church as well and the secrecy of it. it's doable. that's the point. it is -- we don't have enough editors, publishers -- there's plenty of great reporters out there. but the reporting is getting lost, one, in this can-- it's n

our priority among the so-called serious news institutions. the cable networks, the network news. you are down to a couple newspaper institutions in america that really are concerned about reporting. we have some alternative sites and some alternative things. you don't need tapes. it's great if you have the tapes. this is generous what we learned and accidental. you need reporters and you need to be asking the right questions and banging on the doors. that's what this whole conversation is about. >> i agree that we need reporters, especially like these two. but i want to get back to ruth's point.

[ applause ] could it happen again? could we do it today? 40 years ago the system just barely worked. it took heroic efforts from people like this and people on the hill and people within the executive branch. and while it succeeded then to an extent, the tapes show that to another extent, nixon was able to get away with a lot. the worst abuses of power that nixon engaged in had to do with foreign policy, a field in which he was extremely well respected and is respected to this day. he prolonged the vietnam war because he knew he could not win it. if saigon fell before election day 1972, it would take his second term down with it. so he made a decision. he was going to continue the war to aid his own re-election campaign. >> 25,000 american soldiers died

in the interim. they say no one died atwat w watergate. >> it is one much his latest offenses. >> wait a minute. >> maybe i misphrased that. >> the foreign policies are debatable. there's evidence on the tapes, you are right. to say he is -- his crimes were in a significant -- his significant crimes were in foreign policy, i think -- look, this was an assault on the constitution. this was go to the tapes again, nixon sits there and says, well, we will do this, we will break not just random citizens but the democrats, the big democratic contributors. he said, i want -- on that he got the secret service to bug the telephone of his renegade

brother. could y you have argued to be president had you to have a renegade brother. that's no longer the case. >> you have a half brother out there somewhere. running around pretty good. >> okay. up. >> i can cut everybody off? i'm cutting you off to get in audience questions. we have microphones in the room. if you would raise your hand and wait for the microphone. i'm going to try to go this way. i will go all the way to the woman in the pinkish sweater over there with your hand up. thank you. >> i think in all the president's men there's a line, follow the money or something like that. the campaign finance laws or lack of them. i was wondering if you could comment about then versus now.

>> i think elizabeth drew is the best person in america to answer that. >> the best person is in front of me in the front row. would you like to answer? >> watergate brought to a head the issue of -- the idea that big globs of money floating around and people like howard hughes could write big checks or give a suitcase of hundred dollar bills and -- then they didn't match and it was all very strange. after that, a good campaign finance bill was passed. i believe it was limited contributions. it limited spending. i have this to shock you with. the supreme court in the major decision on that did not say money equals speech. they did not. and you now have these supreme court decisions since then based on this mythical sense of what they said. and they didn't.

that serves of the purposes of people who want to get the regulations off. so what buckley says, you can't put limits on what people want to spend on their campaigns. now what you have is a supreme court determined to -- we had mccain fine. mccain understood then. this was a different mccain. he understood it and those of us involved in campaign finance understood. rolling reform, of course, if you put these regulations, somebody will figure a way around it. then you plug that and you move on. it's really very broken down now. there are limits on individual contributions but not really. citizens united and an associated decision and then -- last year?

anyw anyway, theydeconstructed. they were redoing things including finance reform. they upheld and two years later they unupheld it. you have a political thing. i don't think there's a -- now money has gotten so big and so important, i don't think there will be a move in congress to reregulate this. they have gotten dependent on the system as it is. >> good luck with that. let's try to get in another question. the gentleman in the blue right there. then i'm going towards the back of the room, because i don't want to disenfranchise you guys. >> mr. bernstein and mr. woodward, i was impressed tonight of the far reaching implications of this.

i didn't think that it went back that far. is there something that nixon could have done that would have stopped this whole thing besides -- >> no. again, go back to what ken was talking to a moment ago. we wrote about him undermining the free electoral system through political espionage and sabotage. what ken is talking about before he was president he was doing the same thing. this is about a mindset. as elizabeth has pointed out. one of the things that -- it is -- we come back to nixon's hatred. if you read the final dates about his last year in office that we wrote, you will find it's a very empathic book. it's about what nixon is suffering as this is all closing

in on him. when i hear the tapes -- it's a little historic asteric. i'm always hearing nixon go back to hiss. those god-damn jews. what nixon knew that most of the rest of us didn't was that he was right about hiss. he was a spy. we know it now from the cryptography and other things. but he felt maligned -- this is not to excuse anything. but it's just an interesting thing. comes up -- how many times does he talk about hiss? >> all the times. and he talks about in the context you are mentioning. he thought it confirmed what he thought about jews and ivy leaguers. hiss wasn't jewish. >> he was establishment.

he was worse. >> nixon said, hiss might have been half a jew. he did, yes. >> let's try to go to the gentleman in the white shirt right in front of the cameras there. >> thank you. i want to question ken, who i think is under utilized tonight. do you think the fact that no president will ever, ever record things like that hurts our perspective on the past because we're unable to fully understand how certain things come into being as a president, how they make decisions and who really is saying one thing on meet the press or cnn or fox news but in a closed room maybe saying something very different because that's what they really want to get accomplished but they can't say it publically? >> my motto is tape them all. i think you are absolutely right. certainly, listen to the nixon tapes has been a perspective expanding experience for me

because for once in history we have this time machine that allows us to be in the past with the president as he is making these very fateful decisions for himself and the nation and the world. the lack of that troubles me. we would like to point out that all of us -- most of us are carrying more sophisticated recording devices than the one i just broke. no. than the one that nixon had in the white house. i used to say with confidence after nixon nobody would tape. but the technology has gotten to the point where a certain amount of typing might take place without our full knowledge of it. there might one day be employment for somebody like me with regard to another administration. >> i'm going to make one very short point on your question which i think is a terrific

question. the tapes i find more interesting are the lbj tapes. in the lbj tapes, you don't see a terrible,xx= corrupt, torture mind railing about people and failing to think about the good of the country. you actually see a president being a president, using the levers of power. that is the sort of thing i think we really will -- as a big a believer in reporting though not as good a reporter, but that's the thing that we will really miss from not having that again. another question. yes, ma'am, right here in the black. >> lady in black instead of man in black. whenever i think of watergate i also think of snowden and his revelations. i was wondering if you would comment on -- i realize he's not

a reporter. comment on what has happened in government, what do we expect and why are some of us not shocked that something like that has happened? >> one, you are not shocked because we have known it has been reported for years that an awful lot of this has been going on. >> it came out in 2006. >> there's been too much shock. and a lot of things taken out of context over this whole debate about is he a hero or is he a traitor or all or else. it seems what we have -- terrorism has changed our world. it is a real threat, and to pretend otherwise is nonsense.

it's the new method of warfare. it affects us all. so obviously, we're going to use as we have in the past these capabilities that we have because it's the most basic tool of learning -- of getting intelligence. signals intelligence, human intelligence. this is the signals part. we're going to do everything we can. what we have learned is that -- bill sapphire, many years ago in t"the new york times" was the first to say we are heading in the direction where privacy is over, where this huge capacity of the government to eavesdrop is becoming more and more problematic. so we have a conflict of civil liberties. the necessary protection of the country and ourselves. >> but snowden is -- it informs

people of -- in detail in a way that clearly we did not know. the massive nature of it and i think particularly our paper, the post, has been responsible and aggressive in presenting that information. there are no grand juries, to my knowledge. there is apparently no crime. this is a policy discussion which is going on which is going to go on for a long time. president obama himself has said it's good we're having this policy discussion. so i think this is about informing the public in a very important way. it is not the criminality of watergate. >> one quick think, and that is what snowden has really done is shown how insufficient the

oversight of this is in the courts that have been established to look at this kind of intelligence gathering and the congress of the united states. in that, he has performed a great service. >> elizabeth? >> you said something that pulls together the question that ruth keeps asking us and we keep not answering. [ laughter ] >> i'm a failure as a moderator. >> context is everything. yes, it has been driving me crazy, too. we knew about this gathering of phone calls in 2006 revealed by usa today. why didn't it cause a big fuss then? george bush was president. had you mid-terms coming up. you had the wars going on in iraq. people were afraid. they didn't really want to -- carl rode was ordering up ads showing a three-part amputee,

showing his picture next to hussein -- next to bin lauden or hussein. these people were playing tough. people didn't feel they wanted to go at it then. so snowden does it later. shock. horror. it had really been there. there was more detail. this is why we can't answer your question, ruth, because context is everything. when this was going on, a great mr mentor of mine, he said the next time this happens, it won't be people like this. they will very cool -- they will be very ivy league looking, very respectable. they won't be these kinds of thugs that we were seeing. it will be different. i'm not as discouraged -- as marvellous as your books are, we can't wait for them. with hillary clinton, for example -- carl did a great

book. but people sort of gone on to her in 2008. people pick it up. they smell things. it's happening now. you can't always get at everything. but there's a lot of stuff that gets out into the atmosphere. if it's defined in a responsible way, which a lot isn't, that's my problem with all this. it's there. so i'm not as -- we need their books, but we also can't wait for them. >> there's a really interesting parallel between the usa today report and snowden and the tapes issue, which is -- because i was confused when the snowden report came out because i thought we did know this. but i think it's the actual a-- the -- it's like nixon and the tapes that propelled that story and additional information

and -- information about scope that came out. let's move on to another question. sir, in the vest back there. thanks. >> i just wanted to know if anyone on the panel has any thoughts about whether the abuse -- there is abuse of a constitutional authority involved in every presidency. [ laughter ] >> no, no. there are matters of degree. at some point -- we kept dealing with this with nixon. there are matters of degree that become substantive. it doesn't make up for the grand assault on the constitution or across the board manipulation of government agencies to suit the agenda of the president and how he wanted to get re-elected or those who he wanted to get the

goods on. i want to destroy this or that. we're not going to have anything like that. so there are diegrees. these are not of the gravity of the depth of what went on. they're not close. that's what's so tragic, i think about this cheapening of the idea of impeachment. >> but what -- i think one of the questions imbedded in this is what should we be worried about. >> everything. >> my answer is, secret government. that there is an incredible concentration of power in the presidency now. i think you could argue that president obama has more power than the most recent presidents, the ones that preceded him, at

least four or five of them. that power, as carl pointed out -- look at this century. 9/11 has defined this century in many ways. the power -- the secret power that the intelligence community has is vast, overwhelming. we need to know what's going on. the people with really good intentions and good faith can do things that make absolutely no sense. so it needs to be watched. the point that carl and i are making and elizabeth and ken is, what's the mechanism to find out? the mechanism we have is the media. if we are caught up in this -- talk to a reporter who covers

the white house, any of them of a number of them i have talked to. they say they file a story and then they have to do two blogs and nine tweets. they never understand anything. they acknowledge that, because they are on to the next. you have got these message managers in the congress and in the white house, you call the white house and ask them about something and if they don't like the questions, they will say, why is that a story. they can stop the press. what we need to do is reconfigure ourselves to make sure that we have -- that we are devoted to get to the bottom of things. if we don't get to the bottom of things, there are going to be things from nixon, which is certainly the most serious case, to things that people are uneasy

and uncomfortable about, to say the least, then nsa programs that we have written about. >> there are so many people chomping at the bit here. sir, right here. >> seems one of the legacies of watergate was to create this idea of a scandal which all our scandals would be measured in the years to come with a gate following as a suffix. you talk about the need for great reporting, which the two of you did. the idea of getting to the root of government abuse of power. and i look at the stories of today and wonder why there aren't people like the two of you reporting on the irs abuse of power, this lois lerner idea of losing e-mails today in an age of servers and backups.

why isn't somebody at the post doing something like you did back then to see why we don't have that kind of coverup? if there isn't a coverup, let's find out why not. >> i don't buy that there isn't great reporting going on out there. early on, there was very good reporting on the irs. about the cincinnati office, etc., etc. i agree with you, we need more reporting on what's happening at the irs. i think also we need in this case a real congressional investigation, a bipartisan investigation instead of a witch hunt. >> you can't get one now. >> but i think the reporting is happening. i have a feeling somewhat from our discussion that we're in a sealed chamber here. we are looking at the political

system, we are looking at journalism divorced from the rest of the culture. neither is divorced from the rest of the culture. we have all kinds of problems in the culture about people telling the truth. we have all kinds of -- institutionally, we have all kinds of problems that people are not interested in the truth, that they have been, as i said earlier, wrapped up in this eye delod -- ideological debate. the reporting that bob and everybody up here is talking about, it's not just about the political system that we need. i go to the example of what the boston globe did. people in the culture today, the way we look at the

disintegration of the congress of the united states and the lack of truth telling by members of congress, you can imply that to many institutions in this country. all i'm trying to get at is that this is all part of a larger texture. we needed it in business. we need it looking at sports. we need to find out what's going on about all of these things. we also still have this problem about all of these things about an audience that is less interested in the truth. >> elizabeth has something she wants to say. i really want to respond to your question, because i think having done a lot of reporting about -- even though i'm a columnist with opinions, about the irs matter, i do have an opinion about that also, which is it's a very serious question about misuse of the irs and suggestions that

political groups were being targets because of their politics are very serious and legitimate questions. but my knowledge of therzl developments suggests nothing that is comparable in any way to the abuses that nixon has engaged in. i think there is a real flaw in our kind of understanding and the instinct as you say the gate-ization of every scandal. i don't think there is a 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 up at home and told him what mitchell had said in response to the story and bradley said, he really said that? i said yeah. >> he said do you have good notes, i said yeah, i got my notes. it's all there. he said put it all in the paper but leave her tit out.

[ applause ] >> which we did. the next day mrs. graham came around to me and said, carl, do you have any more messages for me? >> well, i think we can all go home now. that's pretty incredible. do we have a minute for one more question? right there. thanks. >> i'm going to turn the tables a little bit. i'm going to turn the table a little bit and say one of the probably most brilliant political moves in the last 20 years was embedding reporters in iraq and probably the biggest failure in journalism was to embed the reporters in iraq. i'm wondering what you all think about that and you think that

the rise of social media and online media was because of the institutional reporters that were embedded and report what we all know now is that there's no wmds there. >> i don't think the question of wmds came up there. i think that's apples and oranges if i'm correct. >> i think the imbedded reporters did really a good job in reporting what action was taking place. i don't think -- i mean what the soldiers were doing in the service people on the ground is executing a policy that had been decided by president george w. bush supported by 3/4ths of the members of congress. i think the reporting worked in many ways and i don't think it connects to the social media. i'm sorry. >> the lack of reporting was

terrible in not doing a more skeptical job particularly at the new york times and washington post. major institutions that could have been -- perhaps. it's a very difficult story also because there were serious intelligence people who did believe that he had weapons of mass destruction and evidence that he wanted us to believe that. >> just in fairness on the list of the people who did not dig hard enough into that story about wmd. i fault myself mightily for not being more aggressive on it. in fact -- run a story on the front page of the post before the war saying there's no smoking gun intelligence that saddam hussein has weapons of mass destruction. it's one of the many cases in which i should have read what i wrote because when you say there's no smoking gun intelligence that means you don't have hard evidence. if you don't have hard evident,

you really don't have much. i, in particular, who was reporting on that in detail should have been much more aggressive in doing it. i think that's kind of one of the lessons we're talking about. you've got to take some subject and drill down, total immersion reporting and it takes time. it always calls on the patience of the editors and people who run the news organization. >> great. well, if we have time we will take more. >> one more. >> let's do it over here, sir, in the vest right there. do wait for the microphone or else people won't be able to hear you. >> there was a question that you brought up before that i don't think got answered. >> really. >> yeah. that i wanted to hear their answer on.

that is, imagine that we had another president who had the ethical construct of mr. nixon not necessarily his whole personality but his willingness to violate all the laws to misuse all the government. all the things he did. is there any reason to believe he wouldn't be as successful today as nixon was back then at doing all of the bad things that nixon was able to do? >> well, i go back to this notion unfortunately that if history doesn't work. i think we don't know. what we do know is that there are some pretty terrific reporters around. that we have a media configuration that is a mess in terms of some of that reporting getting through and getting out there. that we have a situation with people receiving the information

who, to much too great an extend and different than in water gate are more inclined to put it into boxes of left, right, democrat, republican, kajcatholic, jewish whatever. instead of having an open mind. we have a different culture. i don't think in this culture whether journalistic, political, or the larger culture we could know the answer to your question. >> yeah. but quickly. i'm optimistic about that. i think the news organizations if i may say, this one we have a new owner whose putting money into expanding -- just talking about our editor. he said this year, they hired 60 new people in the newsroom. [ applause ] i mean, that's a great thing. there is a sense of let's drill

down and position ourselves so if something like happens in the white house or the irs or whatever it might be, we will send people who will have a method and a procedure to talk to people and listen. let -- it was carl when we were working on water gate who said these people won't talk in their office. let's go see them at night. let's knock on the doors without an appointment. i've asked a group of reporter the other day, how many of you have gone in the last five years to somebody you wanted to talk to and knocked on their door at home without an appointment? >> zero hands went up. when i was working on the fourth bush book, there was a general who would not talk. e-mails.

messages, intermediariys, nothing. i found out where he lived. the bernstein method. when do you go see a four star general at home without:ró{elx appointment? i think 8:15 on tuesday is the time to go because it's not monday. it's not the end of the week. 8:15 he probably hasn't gone to bed. you know he has had his dinner. so i knock on the door, he opens it and he looks at me and he says, are you still doing this -- [ applause ] i didn't say anything because i knew he was sincere. he looked at me and got a disappointed look on his face and then he kind of went, come on in. sat for two hours and answered not all but most of the

question. why? because someone showed up and said i want to listen to your account of what occurred. he went from a firm no to maybe .2 seconds to a yes in one second just because somebody was there. what's the lesson? i don't know what you do but if i want to find out and you won't talk, i'm going to be knocking at your door even at 71 years of age. [ applause ] i want to say this is the most fun i've had in ages. thanks to all of you. bob, ken, carl, elizabeth. this has been just absolutely terrific event thanks to your thoughtfulness and knowledge and memories of this amazing moment

that is amazingly 40 years ago -- we can be back this evening, we guarantee you will hear new facts and some of your opinions may change. mr. cowan, the floor is yours. [ applause ] >> oh, you're all here. how nice.

we'll start with fact one. fact one, this place is jammed. filled. why? because you're all fascinated with richard nixon. not because he necessarily did great things for the country, but you're fasz nated by the personality. 40 years ago, he resigned. one step ahead of almost certain impeachment. this past weekend washington post, there were a number of reviews. there are a lot of books out now about nixon. bob woodward who knows a lot about nixon, interviewed john dean. i want read you some of the words that woodward writes about nixon. he says that nixon and the

watergate ranks as the most consequence shl, self-infliblgting wound of 20th century america. the criminality abuse of power, obsession with real and perceived enemies, rage, self focus, small mindedness, contempt for the law, i go on, a white house full of lies, chaos, distrust, speculation, self protection, maneuver and counter maneuver with a crookedness that makes netflix's "house of cards" look unsophisticated. you get the picture? >> yeah. >> okay. the thing about nixon, however, that for my money, is something that i can't laugh at. when he first took over as president of the united states, the war in vietnam was still raging: at that time, when he

took over, 15,979 americans had already been killed. by the time he left office, an additional 27,623 americans also died in the war. what did he think of that war? when he first won the election and before he came president as president elect, he turned to henry kissenger and richard whelan, one of his speech writers and said the following. i've been saying an honorable end to the war. but what the hell does that really mean? there is no way to win this war. but we cannot say that. of course, in fact, we have to seem to say just the opposite. just to keep some kind of

bargaining leverage. that, to me, is minimally contemptib contemptible, unethical. but, never the less, a president who knew the war could not be won and felt he had to pursue the worth of one's self. so i start with this question and with doug first. why the obsession about vietnam? what was it about the war that so totally engaged this president. >> well, first off, it's wonderful to be here. i grew up watching marve and cal and cole bernstein who was an undergraduate when i was at ohio state. the key thing for nixon in vietnam was he had an opportunity to get out. it was seen as kennedy and johns johnson's war. nixon had been vice president for dwight eisenhower in 1952. ike ran for president saying i will go to korea. that was essentially ike's

secret plan. i'm the supreme allied commander and i'll find a way out of this mess in korea. nixon, on the tapes, admits i could have done that and maybe done the right thing for history chlts but he decides he's not going to give up on vietnam and he's growing oing to increase t bombing. he wants to show the chinese that he could bomb the bajesus out of him. at one point, he tells kissenger let the chinese think i'm mad. we've got to worry about taiwan, japan, american interest in the pacific. also, it will show a toughness as a cold warrior against the soviet union. so you ne gauche yat with the soef yats from a position of strength. this was a mistake to continue to war.

you have all sorts of domestic unrest saying how can you ask a man to die for a mistake. the mistake being the continuation of the vietnam war. >> the same ke question to you. why the obsession for nixon? >> i have to admit. i don't want to let my age betray me. but i was on the august tth, 1974, i was minus three years old. around here it is today, i'm sitting next to carl bernstein on the panel. so it's a real treat. i teach 18 and 20-year-olds for richard nixon, who is almost as ancient of the civil war. the 18-year-old barely has living memory of 9/11, after all. i have to always keep this in mind. i think the best way that i

answer is to go to the tapes. doug kind of got that started there. but, you know, nixon thought it was important to stay in veet nap. because of nixon's image, do mesically, for his voters. and it was important, whether we agree or not, it was important for our allies. it was important for our allies with the troops in germany, south korea, japan. and i think it was nixon's image at home and it was the image of the u.s. abroad. whether he was right or wrong, that's what the image was. he didn't cut and run. >> but the cut and run is a political phase. and it's used by presidents and others in order to uplift or downgrade. if you know in your heart and in your mind that what you're doing cannot be won, that's my point. carl, what was going on in his head? >> well, first of all, the last thing i want to do is get into