public service by american cable television company and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. ♪ ♪ announcer: this week on "q&a," longtime journalist and author john farrell discusses his book "richard nixon, a life." brian: john farrell, better known as jack, author of the book "richard nixon, a life." at the very end of your book , in the footnotes, you say this. "he hoped that billy graham or norman vincent peele would handle the prayers, and 'doesn't want a catholic or jew to participate.'"

what was that all about? john: this is that his funeral. nixon came from a very provincial background. we think of southern california as highways and subdivisions but when he was growing up it was orange groves and hills and small towns in between. he grew up with a certain provincial bigotry. i think he got some of that from his father, an unlearned man. over the years, nixon learned to deal with it because he did do almost anything if he had to. he had great advisors like linen garment, henry kissinger, arthur burns who were jewish, but in private against his enemies who were jewish, he could be very ugly. i think this was sort of a blanket statement. holdeman had his own biases, but

nixon wanted a protestant, mainstream, white american. brian: i found the last 120 pages where there were source notes, not a part of the narrative in your book, some of the most interesting stuff. anybody watching, usually people that are older, they are going to know who richard nixon wasn't -- nixon was and all that you i'm not to go into the details. that's why i am focusing on this. with that in mind, i want you to hear something that you know about from one of the tapes. first of all, did holdeman know that richard nixon had a taping system? holdeman and president nixon talking in the white house in 1971.

>> [indiscernible]

john: both of them knew they were on tape. what in the world are they talking about? brian: both of them knew they were on tape. it would take far too much intellectual concentration and effort to talk all the time for the tape recorder. he was confident that he could maintain control of it. he had seen eisenhower and treatment make a vast claims of executive privilege said he thought he would safeguard his papers and takes forever and no one else could hear about them. the bad part about the tapes is that they are ramblings. they are spewing's.

nixon talking of the top of the head. they don't show in a be positive sign of nixon. anytime anyone tries to say he was a decent president, he did things for the environment, presented a health care plan, one of these tapes is going to drop them back down on the list of presidents. is very revealing. it is fantastic for a historian. we have two or three presidencies in a row where we have kennedy, johnson, and nixon caught on tape talking to their aides. we never had anything like this. can you imagine if you had washington, hamilton and jefferson talking on tape in the cabinet? but they will forever be a hinge -- a hindrance to the the rehabilitation of richard nixon.

brian: how long did you work on this book? john: six years from start to publication. brian: why do you do it? john: because i had a very smart editor at doubleday who looked five years into the future and said, i think that five years from now, people are going to be ready with all the new stuff coming out and this whole new audience of millennials and gen xers, they are going to be interested to find out who nixon is in one volume. comments ascertain whether or not i would like to do it and he -- it took me five seconds to say yes. brian: in your acknowledgments in this book, which is a large book. it's got over 700 pages. john: of the text is only 500. -- but the text is only 500. you can read it on the beach. it is aimed at people who want to read the story in a readable way. i had to do 200 pages of footnotes because i knew that historians, journalists, academics women's this to see where this stuff came from but

also because of there is lots of interesting questions and subtleties that the average reader who want to read a dory andt dickens pat -- dicka nd pat are not going to get into a long discussion about the role of cia was in watergate, so i put that in footnotes. brian: in your announcements, you say stephen ambrose took three volumes to tell a story of the 37th president. then you list all that is new. how many books like this on the whole life of richard nixon have been written? john: since the turn-of-the-century, i think there is only one person who has tried to do a well-rounded biography. that was evident comments. everyone else wrote in the 1990's. they were good books. it was amazing how much they were able to get to the essence of the man and find revealing stuff.

with several of them he cooperated. but with people like thom wicker he did not cooperate but they managed to have a good first active on him. brian: this list, and you have a long list of things that have come since stephen ambrose, you say he did not have access to any but a few of the 3700 hours of white house tape recordings. how much of those did you listen to or read about? john: fortunately, there are three or four massive books of transcripts and several places online where there is lots of transcripts. you don't have to listen to everything. there's two ways to listen. one is to listen for greatest hits, and the others to pick a day and listen through. there were points where i picked a day and listen through. spring of 1973, i think january 1 and listen through april. the pentagon papers days, i did that month and december of 1971.

other than that i jumped around, because they are very hard to listen to. the ones on the telephone are crystal clear, but the ones in the executive office building, clattering cups, he murmurs and turns away from the microphone. is just a bad technological setup, so it is much more frustrating. brian: again on the list, the 400 oral history interviews of nixon's colleagues and family. when did that become public? john: within the last two or three years. brian: what was unique about the oral histories? john: it was great because they went out and talked to all of his old relatives, all the old neighbors where he grew up on the farm, all the people who use the store in whittier that his father ran on the highway outside of town. so it was, i think, the hope

that the opening chapters capture the formation of his character. they are made far richer because of these oral histories. is a huge treasure trove. brian: nixon's grand jury testimony for the watergate case, how did that become public and when? john: i think both were the result of court cases. i know the nixon one was. the alger hiss one is fantastic because it is a very contentious debate over whether he was a spy and what nixon's motives were, and what happened in the progression. here you have nixon and whitaker chambers, the person who accused alger hiss, and hiss saying exactly what they did over the previous six months.

it was to me, contemporary testimony given under oath, about the best you are going to get as a historian. far better than memoirs are reminiscences 20 years later. >> what are your conclusions about alger hiss? >> i think absolutely he was asked by. >> were you a doubter? >> i try to keep an open mind. i have a neighbor in kensington who wrote some of the books about the secret american eavesdropping case where they broke the russian code and found traces that showed that -- --was it out on feinstein was it allen weinstein? >> we can look it up. brian: another thing on the list, hr holman's -- hr haldeman's transcripts of henry kissinger's white house telephone conversations, all of which have been since opened up to scholars. did you use those two sources? john: nixon is so wonderful to do as a biographer because there is nothing more revealing than

haldeman's diary, which he kept safely every night and wrote down almost everything of what nixon says and what his moves were during the day. then henry kissinger, who has this brilliant analytical mind and is a wonderful writer, put together three volumes of memoirs almost immediately after he left government service. they are just magical sources. you could go back to them time and time again. brian: what book is this for you? john: the third. the first two were about i did a biography of speaker tip o'neill and i did a biography of clearance darrell. i grew up in huntington, new york. i worked for the denver post twice, each time five years stents.

i came back and worked for the denver post in washington. brian: how long have you not worked for a newspaper? >> since about 2003. the buyouts began and the newspaper industry began to crater. i decided that i would try to do this full-time. brian: you make a particular point of the importance of the following comment that richard nixon made in the david frost-nixon interviews in 1977. this is only 25 seconds. >> i don't go with the idea that what brought me down was a conspiracy, etc. i brought myself down. i gave them a sword, and they stuck it in and twisted it with relish. if i had been in their position, i'd have done the same thing. brian: how long did it take david frost to get to that point?

john: that was almost to the end of the interviews. nixon opened up the interviews almost like a filibuster. the first question he asked about the tapes and he asked vietnam and there was great frusion on the frost side that they weren't pinning him down. i think they do they're going to get to watergate. they didn't want to be filibustered the way he is done on vietnam. frost is this wonderfully dramatic thing where he takes his clipboard and puts it down on the ground and says mr. president, i'm going to put this aside and just let you have a chance to say something that you're going to be very sorry if you don't say this and come to grips with what you've done to the american people. it is a great moment. not as great as the final goodbye at the white house. that i think is one of the greatest moments of american political history, bar none. brian: did you ever meet him?

john: no i did not. the closest i ever got, he is driving down pennsylvania avenue with an open top limiting -- open top limousine waiting to the crowd, and all the sudden there are antiwar protesters. they start throwing cans and rocks and they had to button him back up inside the limo musso's presidency got off to a rocky -- inside the limo and his presidency got off to a rocky start because of vietnam. i was there as a spectator in the crowd. that was the only time i ever saw him in person. brian: you have a lot in your book about frank nixon, his father. where did you learn it? john: mostly from the oral histories from whittier. there is another set of oral histories from california state university at tillerson. it is amazing how many times you come across the word belligerent, stubborn, rude. just sounded to be a very unpleasant man. and richard nixon was a very sensitive guy and sensitive child.

had two brothers die as a youth. i think he, in some ways, was bruised by that dad. a fellow wrote a book called "nixonland," and it talks about the very sturdy political trick -- political trope that all politicians are trying to prove that they are as good as their mother thinks they are in the face of the skepticism of a father from whom they can never win approval. brian: how you go about doing this? physically, where were you? >> it is a nightmare. if i had gotten the contract three years earlier, i could have done all the research 30 minutes from my house. everything was at the national archives in maryland. in those three years before i got the contract, everything was packed up and moved to

yorba linda, california to the nixon private library. now it has become a national archives library. i spent lots of time and the best in the extended-stay motel in your belinda. brian: of all the things you got access to, what either changed your mind or maybe biggest impact on you? john: the biggest news nugget was finding -- you had robert carroll on here, he does a great series of books on lyndon johnson -- he gave me some great advice, which is turn every page. when you get what you think could be a good vein, keep going even though you are finding nothing great. several years ago, i think about 2007, something that they sent -- something nixon had fought for years to keep private, his paper from his campaign, or made -- were finally released to the

public. them, theirrough page after page of haldeman saying this is how we are going to deal with the bumper stickers, this is what the polls show in alabama, this is where we are going to go next week. but if you keep turning the pages, as bob told me, i came across this section of notes that haldeman kept. what he used to do was sit down with nixon with a yellow pad, and everything he would tell him to do, haldeman would write it down. then he would make the phone calls to put the machinery in operation, and it would put a big checkmark next to it when it was done. so here was a yellow pad where haldeman writes down, in the midst of the october 1968 "we are going to monkeywrench lyndon johnson's peace initiative." this is something that had always been rumored and just

pieces had come out every the years. nixon denied it at the time to lyndon johnson and david frost and his biographers. always said he never played any role in doing this. in fact, he had used a go-between, a campaign aide, and had her communicate to the south vietnamese they would get a better deal if they held back from the peace process, and he got elected. i did, he got elected and the war went on. he probably went too far there to leave the impression the war would not have gone on if he had done this. we don't know that. but certainly lbj thought there was a decent chance that a peace deal was possible. whatever nixon did to disrupt it, i make the argument that this was far worse than watergate given the great loss of life that followed. brian: in your sources, you say that ashland wanted the job and didn't get it.

where did you find that? >> -- john: there is a whole section of not just haldeman's scrawled notes, but also it shows the degree of self-consciousness because haldeman had collected all that stuff together. there were memos and timeslips showing the number of phone calls that went back and forth between the nixon campaign and anna, and is at all but nicely put aside and nixon's lawyers make sure we didn't see it. brian: this is a lot of personal stuff, and i found it new. but this is one from historian erwin gillman. you say positive things about professor gelman is one of the most foremost authorities on richard nixon. who is he? john: he is this wonderful man who has taken it upon himself to write richard nixon's history in government and politics starting with a book called "the contender."

he just did a book called "the apprentice and the president," about nixon's vice president years. he has probably gone through -- you'd asked me how many pages i've gone through, he's probably gone through three or more times he knows the nixon years backward and forward. he is a great help to me and other nixon authors who are invariably told, why don't you ask him where that stuff is? we do, and he helps us. brian: would you put him on the list of people who have done books on richard nixon? john: he fulfills his goal, which is to chronicle all the way through the end of the presidency. i think this would be something comparable. brian: this is from his book "the presidency and the apprentice." this goes back to the 1950's.

he notes nixon was taking a three equal milk tranquilizer he was alsoay -- taking a pill that could elevate mood in lead to psychic dependence. during the evening he had two or three drinks. before going to sleep he took a potentially addictive drug for people that trouble sleeping. he was also prescribed the barbiturate seconal for depression, sleeplessness, and fatigue. that is heavy stuff. john: he was a very tightly wound guy. in the 50's he was treated rather badly by eisenhower. he was always worried. his rise was so quick. he went from nobody to a vice presidency in six years and he was overwhelmed by and run into this huge battle between

eisenhower and joe mccarthy. heis not a surprise is that took to self-medicating himself or going to the doctors when he had the estimates of tension and being prescribed these medicines. on the other hand, if you are remembering the famous jackson suzanne novel "valley of the dolls," this is what americans did. they cost a lot of pills and they drank a lot. all the presidents before nixon were proud of their ability to drink or makes a cocktail. drinking as the use of tranquilizers and sleeping pills , as, now as the anti-anxiety drug are today. >> at what point in the process it did you write all the source of? -- source notes? john: i keep making the same mistake that i don't write them as i am writing the book, and i

have to go back finally i didn't get the exact date right and have to go back and do it again. each time i get a little bit better at it. the next book, i swear i'm going to have them all done when the text is done. brian: it seems to me that this was unusual, that they were more narrative than normal and longer than normal. were you aware that when you are writing them? john: i like that, and i have a direct editor who encourages me to do that. she likes that. it is for people who like the -- what's the phrase? -- the extra taste after you finish the book. you can go back in there and find more about the cia and watergate and nixon's father. is fills more out without blocking the narrative. brian: to the reports nixon was fortifying himself with later

that fall, is the daughter julie is this. the drinking rumors were perhaps the most persistent because it seemed he was drinking a little more than ever before, but at dinner time, when he was trying to help unwind, he still adhered to his self-imposed code on no alcohol when he was attending receptions or dinners, nor during the day. you go on to this. on october 11, he said the switchboard just got a call from 10 downing street to inquire whether the president would be available for a call within 30 minutes from the prime minister. the subject was to be the middle east. kissinger can we tell them no? , when i talked to the president, he was loaded. where did that come from? how do you get access to that telephone conversation? john: that was the result of a court case filed to get kissinger telcons.

i think it was filed by the national security archive, or maybe a public citizen. they got access to thousands of pages. when kissinger's national security advisor would have a conversation with a foreign leader he would have a secretary , on the phone taking note. this was a common practice that went back as long as there have been telephones. but kissinger fought very hard, he wanted them kept under his control throughout his lifetime. these government organizations went to court with a suit and won access. the drinking was a problem. winston lord, who if i had to pick one person on the grayscale of liability, he was one and a lingard was another -- lynn

garnet was another. people, when they spoke to me, it was either that i agree with them exactly are they spoke such sense that i was overwhelmed by listening to them. winston lord had a marvelously long oral history he gave said it was a problem. we shouldn't over exaggerate it but it was a problem. brian: how may people were you able to talk to them are close to richard nixon? john: i talked to probably a dozen. one of the problems -- i will tell you a story. i talked to his secretary of defense. as i'm talking to him, i say, you were a close friend of jerry ford, who succeeded nixon and pardon him, and a close friend of nixon. did you play any role and nixon's resignation? he said, oh yeah. i told nixon he would be pardoned. everyone has denied throughout the years that there was any deal between jerry and dick and

here was mel in his mid-90's telling me this. i asked him to tell me again. finally i said, you are telling me something that is going to be very controversial because there has always been both presidents insisting that there was no deal, and you are saying that you did convey word that he would get a pardon if he resigned. he said, i predicted. i wasn't conveying word. this was my conclusion that i predicted. so what do you do with that? do you put that in the book and make it a selling point, that you've got proof of a deal? or do you realize that at 95, he's an old man doing his best to remember the things. having written a memoir which doesn't say this at all may have been mistaken. brian: let me begin with another source note on another page. pardoned by ford on the same issue, he advised for more than

-- forward more than a week before the resignation that the president expected to step down. at the same meeting, haig presented ford the option of bargaining nixon. ford seemed amenable. both he and ford insists there was no explicit quid pro quo struck. what do you make of this? >> i think there were lots of the nods and winks. i think everyone had a good idea of what was going to happen. there is a big congressional investigation after the pardon. all of ford's aides then and since have all testified to this meeting between ford and haig and exactly what happened. they all went to him and said, you can't say that. you got to say you were not dangling a pardon. is a big, long, convoluted

history. the simplicity of what mel told me was, i was a go between and gave the assurance to dick he would be pardoned. i wasn't quite as enthusiastic or diligent and going out and talking to these old guys because i question their memory. i have a great skepticism about testimony from memory. brian: doing tip o'neill, clarence darrow, and richard nixon, which was the most interesting or fun? john: i'm always going to like tip o'neill. clarence darrow, i adored the personality of demand. and richard nixon was by far the most fascinating. an intellectual challenge.

you can't have much more sympathy for them, because he did have a tough life, and he was trying to be a good guy. yet he had part of his character, this great shakespearean fatal flaw that brought him down. brian: from your source notes, "politicians have been known to exaggerate, and nixon was a veteran liar." john: definitely. nixon was a great high school debater. in high school debate or college debate, you have take both sides of an argument and be able to stand up one day or one round and argue the positive, and later be able to argue the negative. it gives you such a flexibility

of mind and such a willingness to see that facts can be turned in your advantage. throughout his political career, he was one of the best at that. chinese how his actions could be explained in a way that could turn the tables on the other hand and if that meant lying, that meant lying. brian: another from your source notes i leave everything. nathan told kissinger and haldeman, can make the smb and the press, that is how it was done. >> that was in the pentagon papers case. he had taken the secret history of the vietnam war and give it to the new york times. the great irony there and the revealing thing about that story, it was about the johnson years and the kennedy years.

their first instinct at the white house was to leave it alone. nixon, because it was the time because it was a threat to his further conduct of the role of the war. because kissinger and him onto long he launched himself into , this fight. in the process he had this big anti-leaking drive that brought this memcpy plumbers into his back this group of men called the plumbers into his white house and it was the same plumbers who were the guys caught at watergate. >> it was not supposed to be an interview from start to finish. folks can go out and buy her book and get the whole story. this is a another thing that i have not heard. nixon was offered a chairmanship of the dreyfus corporation and a chance to serve as commissioner of major league baseball. nixon again in the interviews,

he got 60,000 advance for "six crises" of which 20,000 paid to the researcher and writer alan moscow, several aides that has helped him. dreyfus corporation? >> the dreyfus corporation, he was friends with mr. dreyfuss and his first name escapes me. more interesting thing to that one is i am preparing a speech i have to give in boston at fenway park and it is supposed to be about nixon. nixon was at this huge sports fan. there was at this instance in the midst of the watergate crisis where a reporter at him who he thinks the greatest baseball players of all time are and nixon pulls out all the books with all the batting averages and he makes not one list but two list.

one is before integration and the second one is after baseball was integrated by his one-time different jesse robinson. hunter thompson, who hated him, the gonzo writer who hated nixon over politics once did a car ride in his limousine with an -- with the nixon and they talked football the whole time and that afternoon and in the next dispatch thompson wrote he is not a bad guy. he really knows what linebackers do and what versus a good linebacker and a good safety. he seems to have mellowed. nixon and sports is fascinating. he probably would have been far overqualified to be commissioner of baseball which is why he turned it down. >> you also said he got $600,000 in the frost interviews that he did. that was a long time ago in the 1970's. issue.as momentarily an

while still in office nixon told him that writing a book was agony but that corporate law was degrading and the idea of a former president excepting honorariums for going on television is abhorrent to me. it is very ironic that the president that is most often known for that wonderful clip where he says i'm not a crook. people have the right to know their president is not a crook, i'm not a crook. he had high standards when he left office. he had a reverence for the office because he had watched eisenhower be president but they were things he was not going to do because they would tarnish the office. he never took money for paid speeches. he spun and egregious whopper trying to secure himself a place among the vietnam veterans that had been spit at coming home.

>> he went to williamsburg, virginia for a conference and while he was there a young girl came up to and spat at him in the face. that is his recollection in the arena. i went looking for it. i could not find it in all of the news coverage of that trip so i figured maybe it happened in private but maybe it didn't happen at all. i found a memo from at hand in -- from pat buchanan and it described not a young girl but a young man shouting the crowd how does it feel to be a war criminal in williamsburg, at this conference. when we talk about nixon and , that is exaggerating

a great example of how what planted a little seed in his brain that over time became bigger and grander and conveniently put him with the returning pows and the veterans of vietnam as being a victim of being spat on. >> has anyone else from your research in the last 50 years or so lied in the presidency besides richard? >> we had three presidencies in a row. 100 years from now they will be grouped together as the cold war president and they will be ranked and how good they did. since we're sitting here and are not incinerated, radioactive ash, they did a good job. they protected us. they did horribly aberrational things like hiring the mafia, jack kennedy hiring the mafia to try to assassinate fidel castro.

the full report of the committee that went into the history administration after administration spying on americans, opening their mail, bucking their television -- telephones. and not just of the mob, peace activist like john glenn and even richard nixon when he was out of office was spied on by these programs. people will look back and say they were under tremendous pressure but lincoln suspended "richard nixon, a life. -- lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the civil war. distance in the case of ferocity and morality, when you will get -- when you look at roosevelt,

eisenhower, kennedy, johnson and nixon, there is not a huge bit of difference as to what they would do to advance their own political future and protected the country. >> he was here 25 years ago and i had a question about the media and his attitude and you have an interesting source i'm going to ask you about on the list and we will delve into this more. did you ever ask yourself why so many in the media are against you? >> they did not agree with what i stood for. this is a long before watergate. this case was hard for the media. they all thought he was innocent. if they did not think he was innocent, they did not want him exposed because as an individual said it would be a reflection on the foreign policy of the roosevelt administration. which of course was not my goal at all. and with that it was difficult.

not that i didn't have very many friends in the media but media people while they try to be objective they also have strong convictions and frankly they generally are not particularly enamored with conservatives as i am even though i am probably more reasonable than some of the conservatives they go after. >> i cannot argue with any word that he said except he doesn't tell the whole story. it is a fascinating relationship and to several times during the narrative i do a couple of pages , about where he stands at that moment because it really did twists his perception and feed his paranoia over the years. what is really interesting is that he first ran in southern california as a conservative and at that time the los angeles times was the conservative voice in the country and dominated southern california politics.

they heavily promoted him all the way up into the united states senate. he had a very jaundiced view of the free press. a free press to him was either for me and will advance my career because they are conservative or they are liberals who are against me and are going to tear me down because of that. >> this is a little complicated amid the later watergate scandal, republicans chairman george h.w. bush produced an affidavit that the democrats sought to eavesdrop on nixon's hotel room before the second presidential debate. the evidence was inconclusive but it would not have been terribly unusual. throughout the 1950's and 60's, electronic eavesdropping was viewed as somewhat underhanded but a trifling offense. cbs had bugged the closed-door

sessions of the credentials committee at the republican 1952 convention. journalist jack anderson was caught bugging during the sherman adams case and nbc newsman admitted they bugged a private session of the democratic platform committee in 1968. the chief investigator for the watergate committee resigned from that role after some remembered that he is been convicted of an illegal bugging in 1968. all of these incidents were quickly forgotten. where did you find them? >> nixon's defenders over the years have tried to assemble collections of past misdeeds to show that nixon was the victim of a double standard. i think their argument is very well taken. everything, i think, a step further, a step too far

and frankly he was not as good at it. all these people got caught and they were not very good at it either. the way that the watergate burglars team was assembled. it was clumsy. they were former fbi agent supervised by young men on to bes staff that wanted the cat that brought up the dead mouse to the president's door. they all are trying for advanced and trying to be more macho than the next guy. was about something as small as a bugging. compared to the history you just read which was excepted practice. j edgar hoover saw that times were changing and these practices were not going to be seen in the 1960's and 70's. the way they had been in in earlier years. hoover pulled back and said

we're not going to do the black bag jobs anymore. that is what led nixon to have to bring that keep ability and house and in the end got him into such trouble. >> did talk to either one of his daughters? >> i did not talk to either one of his daughters. julie was very nice and every once in a while-found something that i had to have an answer that only she would know and i would send her gmail and in most cases she would write back and say -- there is a famous photograph at the eisenhower inaugural where david eisenhower is there with his grandfather and julie is there with her dad. david is looking at her. it is very cute knowing later they will fall in love and married. she said he was looking at me because i was in a sledding accident and i had this big, black eye. he was just staring at this little girl with a big, black eye.

if you look carefully in the photo you can see she had a shiner. julie was very gracious to doing that. she longed me a picture from the book. think,ee nixon women, i if you go to the dictionary and look up once in, -- look up lonesome, their picture would be there. i can understand their paranoia having seen how their father has been treated with they could do -- but they could do much better to follow the example of the truman family. the truman family opened up the vault of harry truman's letters to his wife. david mccullough linton there that instantly develop -- david mccullough went in there and wrote a book that instantly elevated harry truman 10 steps up to the presidential ladder and will be this great valentine to harry truman area one day someone will write a book that we will have from nixon's diary.

right now they are still pretty burnt and they have no interview, no health. -- no help. >> why in your opinion does the julie talk more than tricia? >> that is a case of personality. there is a wonderful conversation where nixon and haldeman are analyzing the two personalities and they agree that julie and her way is so bubbly and such a nice person that the country loved her whereas tricia is more of a pristine beauty and nixon says tricia is more like me, more contained, more alone and julie has a million-dollar personality. i don't think that is entirely true, but that is the perception. >> my understanding is nixon's

youngest brother is still alive. >> having what i said about the other 90-year-old guys, nothing was more important to me than the day i spent with the nixon. he looks like dick and he walks like dick and you get a sense of what the nixon men were like. he is a geologist and does not have the most sophisticated view of politics but has this really keen, nixonian, rye sense of humor. i wish tricia and julie would sit down and do world histories for the library. -- and just do world histories -- oral histories.

>> what you think of the frank gannett interviews? >> there were 6, 9, something like that. frank was the ghostwriter. he doesn't like the ghostwriter words. he was the writing assistant for the memoirs along with diane sawyer and help them write their memoirs and they decided to have nixon sit down and frank got him to open up on many subjects. it is the only place i remember nixon calling himself about the press. >> here's a short clip about the resignation. >> after the speech i went over to the resident. henry was very thoughtful. he said he would like to walk to the residence with me. he said i've always done this after the important speeches.

as we got to the door of the residence he said, mr. president, history is going to record that you were a great president. i said henry, that will depend on who writes the history. we went down to the lincoln room and made a few calls it to people, heard the chanting outside, reminded me of the vietnam days but this time it was jail to the chief. >> it did not bother me. >> there is a footnote in there --he loved t fact that he will always be famous even as of the only president to resign. -- even as only president to resign. he is a delighted by the idea that this nobody kid from orbit linda -- from yorba linda so

dominated the world stage and so dominated history in the 20th century. even though it ended badly for him and caused him such grief and almost killed him. there is a part of nixon that is like i showed them. >> there is a footnote in the back where it is quoting henry kissinger saying he did not like him. kissinger is a great example of nixon being able to either instinctively or brilliantly pluck- find someone and him and make him his tool. kissinger was very good at what he did. i have a basic argument with the two of them over vietnam than i -- that i carry out over the vietnam chapters but there's no doubt that they saw the split between russia and china and

decided they would exploited the way that they did. that led to the opening of china and changed our world forever. nixon's goal in china was to give us a couple of decades of and he gave us probably 50 years of peace. >> kissinger said he was a phony because all the tapes show him kissing up after speeches. mr. president, you are the greatest area >> in three volumes of memoirs, kissinger says -- he has a great way of witty, self-deprecating nod towards the obvious and he makes a crack somewhere about the worst things about these tapes is there going to show me as a kiss up and in some cases they are just awful. >> did he talk to you? >> no, kissinger did not talk but again th henry kissinger,

he has written probably five or six books on the nixon years. there is a limit as to what i could have asked him. should i have asked him one more time are you a war criminal? >> roger stone who works for richard nixon and has a huge tattoo on his back of nixon's face, he was here talking about on book. let's watch what he had to say about richard nixon and donald trump. >> the first person to imagine a trump president was not me but former president richard nixon. i was working for nixon doing political chores in his presidential -- postpresidential years and he met president trump in george star miners box in yankee stadium. they hit it off. he said i met your man, i want

to tell you he has got it. he could really go all the way. >> roger in private sitdown with me and gave me a helpful interview about his experience with nixon. >> what is the difference between public and private? >> roger and his books is a show man but he can speak to you on nixon with the depth and insight. i don't believe that. like a told you about clearance darrell people over time can , convince themselves to believe what they want to believe. >> you don't believe roger stone or you don't believe richard nixon said that. >> it is a stretch for me to believe that roger stone would end up working for donald trump all these years later and remember that richard nixon met donald trump in a box in yankee stadium and said he is going to be president one day.

american history is filled -- hundreds of relatives said in their kitchen and said to and bertha that young dick is a bright guy and he is going to be president. everybody predicts presidents are going to be president. >> one of your wittier oral histories has people quoted that after the fact. again you did not answer a question i asked you earlier. it was really about where did you write this. what was your base? base face -- was here. i live right off the beltway near the mormon temple. >> all this material you had in-depth? >> it is mostly online. somebody the other day wrote an entire book only online.

they sat in their kitchen and all the research they needed was online. we're getting there. all the cases of clearance darrell got online after i went around the country finding them. the problem is they cannot put everything that is at the nixon library online. it would take 200 years. what you tend to do is if you are too lazy, you only do the online stuff. you only did the oral histories online. c-span archives, you have a lot about nixon. but if you only do that then you do not get into some of the texture they can only be done by turning every page. both the darrell and the nixon book, an awful lot is online. >> if you are going to pick a

chapter in this book that everybody should read that is new, different, unusual, which one would it be? >> i think the piece on the cambodian incursion in the spring of 1970, that chapter is relatively short, it has lots of new stuff. great quotes from the tapes i came across. i like that one and i also love the 1946 campaign. >> john aloysius pharrell, as we say, better known as the jack. the book is called "richard nixon: the life." thanks for joining us. >> thank you. ♪

for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q&a.org. announcer: if you enjoyed this week's q&a interview with john pharrell, here are some other programs you might like. reverend thomas brown his book "being nixon, a man divided." and former nixon white house staffer that buchanan and his book "how to rose from the to create the new majority."

search our video library at c-span.org. andan's washington journal wife everything with the policies you that impact you. morgan --monday discuss the will new law on lgbt workplace discrimination. and irs national taxpayer advocate nina wholesome will join us to offer her concerns about the complexity of the tax code. be sure to watch c-span's washington journal live at seven >> tomorrow, judge neil gorsuch officially joins the supreme court. asked judge, we anthony kennedy about new members to the court. >> you have seen others come and

go. how much does the court change when a new justice arrives? is there a cultural shift and what do you do to get a new member acclimated? justice kennedy: it is a new court. when i was trying jury cases, it's a juror had to be replaced, it was just a different dynamic. it was a different jury. in the same way, this will be a very different court. becauseressful for us we so admire our colleagues. we wonder if it will ever be the same. i have great admiration for the system. the system works. betomorrow, gorsuch will sworn in as an associate justice of the supreme court. watch at the ceremony administered by justice anthony kennedy live at 11:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. >>