john ehrlichman. >> is that right? >> who bought mean porcelain birds. >> carl has written for "vanity fair," "time," "usa today," "rolling stone" and "the new republic" in addition to being an abc correspondent. and welcome to him. now it's so exciting to feel taller than somebody. thank you for doing this, elizabeth. elizabeth drew, whatever her actual physical height here is a washington institution. the washington journals she wrote were a citizen's guide to watergate and washington as the nixon presidency was unraveling. i have to tell you, though i read them at the time and reread them some years later, i have been rereading them now, and they really fit the goal that she had which was to explain to people what was going on in a way that would be understandable and comprehensible and illustrative to them of what that time was

about 40 years from now. she captured the anxiety and really the insanity of that era. and the thing that's really remarkable about elizabeth is she just never stops reporting. her 14 books about washington rivals bob. when i first started writing now many years ago about money and politics, her work was really the seminal work in that field and we all owe her a debt of gratitude for her work. finally, ken hughes is a recovering journalist and a researcher at the university of virginia's miller center for presidential recordings. really a big shout-out to the miller center for all the great 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 chennault affair and origins of watergate." he's going to tell us more about the origins of watergate later. in the age of really easily 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 -- >> wireless internet. we'll try to get it back. >> 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 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. teddy roosevelt 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. so this guy 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 surprisingly few 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 room had some real role in what was happening. but awe, total awe. and the fact that the system had worked. >> bob? >> i was sitting on the floor of howard simon's office. he was the managing editor watching this speech, 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

gloating rule, but ben bradley did. and he was kind of going around the newsroom slowly, not showing any emotion. 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 in the kennedy era, married to one of the kennedys. very much a kennedy person. he sees ben and goes, yea! >> blew the cover. >> ben is just trying to pretend and shriver just wouldn't stop and he just 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. in fact, 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 headphones. the headphones never go away. >> there are always more tapes, and they never fail to astonish

and revolt. elizabeth, did you want to say something about this? >> they don't fundamentally change the story. watergate is so complicated. it's about some big things, which i hope will be asked, but 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 mattered hasn't changed. i've seen nothing and said, oh, it's all different than what 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 and 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 start with bob and carl. you can bicker about who goes first. you wrote a few years ago, the watergate we wrote about in "the washington post," i have this type that says 1872 to 1874, but i think it was 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 to a remarkable extent to a criminal enterprise. so talk about that a little bit and address the question, if you would, what do we know that you

wished you had known back in the day and can tell people? >> real quickly, what's interesting is what started before the watergate burglary. that's very 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 had requested. a top-secret plan to expand wiretapping, break-ins, mail openings and it was 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 started 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 on 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 imaginedk'çbgqné86jíg )

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.

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 burglars

were arrested and the investigation went to the so-called masterminds of that break-in, nixon had to obstruct the investigation because the investigation of hunt and liddy's crimes would lead back to his own. the white house hired hunt and 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 cover up before the watergate break-in to really allow any sort of investigation to go forward. >> and why don't you just take a moment to tell us about the chennault affair and what that was and the role that played in the criminality that resulted in watergate. >> which is your new book. >> which is your new book. which i've already plugged. we're going to keep plugging it. >> thank you all. the chennault affair occurred during the closing days of the 1968 presidential campaign. a very 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 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 would be permitted to take part in those. the public did not know he had these 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 chennault 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, correctly, 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 through 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, says i've got a message from my boss, not further identified. 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 with nixon following the 1968 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, which johnson requested but the fbi had not done, and we had a bug on your campaign 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 as h.r. haldeman work on it. houston says, we've looked into it. well, it doesn't make lyndon johnson look good, it doesn't make us look very good, either. 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 this 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.