you can watch the entire ceremony tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. on c-span 2, it is the communicators with mike doyle on expanding broadband in the u.s.. and on c-span3, "american history tv" with programs on the founding fathers. and a discussion on conservative viewpoints being represented and expressed in film, television, and popular culture. that is at 8:20 eastern on c-span. ♪ announcer: this week on "q&a," longtime journalist and author john farrell. he 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, the source notes, you say this. "he hoped that billy graham or norman vincent peele would handle the prayers -- this is not his funeral -- and 'doesn't want a catholic or jew to participate.'" this comes from a hold them in comments. what was that all about? john: this was at his funeral. a californiaom background. when he was growing up, it was the outback. 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, who was an unlearned man. and over the years nixon learned

, to deal with it because he had to. nixon could do almost anything because he had to. so he had kissinger and others who were jewish, but in private, against his enemies who happened to be jewish, he could be very ugly. i think this was sort of a blanket statement. holdeman had his own biases, but perhaps he took it down a little more severely than it sounds. nixon definitely wanted a protestant, mainstream, white american burial. 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. and anybody watching, usually people are older that watch is kind of a program they are going , to know who knew this -- to know who richard nixon was. i will not go through all of that.

with that in mind, i want you to hear something that you know about from one of the tapes. first of all i will ask you did nixon had anow that taping system? john: he and some others were the only ones. brian: this is holdeman and nixon talking in the oval office. we've got it on the screen, so listen carefully. >> [indiscernible]

brian: they both know they are on tape. what in the world other talking about it for? john: they knew they were on tape, but it would take far too much intellectual concentration and effort to talk all the time for the tape recorder. and he was confident that he

could maintain control on it. he had been eisenhower's vice president, and he had seen eisenhower and truman make the vast claims of executive privilege. able toht he would be safeguard his tapes and papers forever. nobody else would ever hear about them. the bad part about [please stand by] they are spewings. they are next in talking off the top of his head. anytime someone tries to write something off of him, saying he was a decent president he did , things for the environment, presented a health care plan, he created the environmental protection agency. then somebody is going to pull one of these tapes, and it will drop him back down on the list of presidents.

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? that they will forever be 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. it took me about five seconds to say yes. brian: in your acknowledgments

in this book, which is a large book. it's got over 700 pages. john: 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 would insist to see where this stuff came from but also because of there is lots of interesting questions and subtleties that the average reader who wants to read a story about dick and pat are not going to get into a long discussion about the role of cia was in watergate, so i put that in footnotes. acknowledgments, 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 evan thomas. 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 perspective 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 are 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 listened through. spring of 1973, i think january first andd generally listened 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, arehideaway office to there 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 friends and family conducted by colleagues. 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 quaker 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 is 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 lots of questions about 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 or reminiscences 20 years later. brian: what are your conclusions about alger hiss? john: i think absolutely he was a spy. brian: were you a doubter? john: 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 -- brian: was it allen weinstein? john: we can look it up. brian: another thing on the list, 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 faithfully 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.

brian: the first two were about? john: i did a biography of speaker tip o'neill and i did a biography of clearance darrell. i grew up in huntington, new york. brian: how long did you work for "denver post?" "the denvered for 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? john: 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

coup, conspiracy, etc. i brought myself down. i gave them a sword, and they stuck it in and twisted it with relish. i guess 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. i think the first question frost asked was about the tapes and the annan andinto nixon went on and on, and there was great frustration on the frost side that they weren't pinning him down. they don't think 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 an 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 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 fullerton. 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 trope that all politicians are trying to prove that they are as good their saintly

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? john: it was 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 in the extended-stay motel in yorba linda. 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 nixon had fought for years to keep private, his personal and political papers from the campaign, were finally released to the public. if you go through them, they are 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 nixon 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 bits and pieces had come out over 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. but 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. he 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

n't 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 -- 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 it was all 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 as oneor erwin gillman 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 that i did. he knows the collection at yorba linda 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: where 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 comparable to karros work. 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 tranquilizers during the stimulant that could elevate mood in the two psychic dependence. during the evening he had two or three drinks. before going to sleep he took a potentially addictive drug for those who had 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 1950'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 ranoverwhelmed by it and into this huge battle between eisenhower and joe mccarthy. ing that heurprise 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 the 1950's, this is what americans did. they took a lot of pills and they drank a lot.

all the presidents before nixon were proud of their ability to drink or make a cocktail. drinking as the use of tranquilizers and sleeping pills is much more, as, now as the anti-anxiety drug are today. brian: at what point in the process it did you write all the source notes? john: i keep making the same mistake, which is not doing them while i write the book. i have to dig back through the files. i think i've done enough on a and i realize i have to go back because i didn't get the exact date right. 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 of that when you were writing them? john: i like that, and i have a direct editor who encouragese 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. it fills up stuff without blocking the narrative. brian: to the reports nixon was fortifying himself with liquor 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 unwind, he still adhered to his self-imposed code on no alcohol when he was attending receptions or dinners, nor did he drink 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. what would happen is when kissinger's national security advisor would have a conversation with a foreign leader, he would have a secretary on the phone taking notes. 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. within the last decade. the drinking was a problem. winston lord, who if i had to pick one person on the great scale of liability, he was one and 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 large oral history he gave and 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 who were 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 pardoned 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. everybody and their brother 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. he told me again. finally, the third time, 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 stopped and said, i predicted. i wasn't conveying word. i talked to the two of them and 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 these things. having written a memoir which doesn't say this at all may have been mistaken. brian: let me jump in with another source note on another page. pardoned by ford on the same advised 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. where did you find that? john: i think there were lots of the nods and winks. i think everyone had a good idea of what was going to happen.

there was 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. how they all went to him and said, you can't say that. you have to call them back and say you were not dangling a pardon. it 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. it would've been a nice new piece. you asked me how many people close to nixon i talked to. i wasn't quite as enthusiastic enthusiastic, i wasn't quite as diligent of 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 the man. and richard nixon was by far the most fascinating. a great intellectual challenge. cannot be honest in looking at his life and 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. he wouldold someone

not succeed in politics because he was not a good enough liar. 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. always trying to see how his actions could be explained in a way that could turn the tables on the other guy. and if that meant lying, that meant lying. brian: another from your source notes. leaked everything. nixon told kissinger and

haldeman, tell the smb and the press, that is how it was done. john: that was in the pentagon papers case. he had taken the secret history of the vietnam war and give it ." "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 brother conduct of the war, --ause is under eight him on egged him on, he launched himself into this fight. in the process he had this big anti-leaking drive that brought this group called the plumbers into the white house. it was the same plumbers who

were the guys caught at watergate. brian: 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 a $60,000 advance for one of his books before he was elected president, of which $20,000 was paid to the researcher and writer alan moscow, one of the several aides that had helped him. dreyfus corporation? john: 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 and sports. nixon was this huge sports fan.

there was at this instance in the midst of the watergate crisis where a reporter at him -- reporter asks 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 lists. one is before integration and the second one is after baseball was integrated by his one-time good friend jesse robinson. hunter thompson, who hated him, the gonzo writer who hated nixon over politics, once did a car ride in his limousine 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. gotn: you also said he hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 1970's, and nixon said "agony,"ing a book was but that corporate law was of ading, and the idea former president excepting honorariums for speeches is abhorrent to me. john: it is very ironic that the president who is often known for that wonderful clip, where he crook," alsoot a had these incredibly high standards when he left office. he did have a reverence for the

office, probably because he revered ike, and he watched eisenhower the president, but there were things he was not going to do because they would tarnish the office, and that is why he never to money for paid speeches. ,rian: here is another story seeking to secure himself a place among the vietnam veterans who claimed to have been spent at when they returned home from the war. at when they returned home from the war. do you remember that? and the story is he went to a conference in williamsburg, and while he was there, a young girl came up to him, face consumed with hate, him in the face, and that was his recollection in the arena, and i went looking for it, and i could not find it in all of the news coverage of that trip, so i figured maybe it happened in private, but it

probably did not happen at all, but then i found a memo from pat not aan that describe young girl but a young man shouting from the crowd, "how does it feel to be a war at williamsburg, at this conference, so when we talk about nixon line and exaggerating, that is a great example about how what actually happened lasted a little seed that actually became bigger and grander and put him with the returning pow's and veterans of vietnam as having in the victim of being spat on. brian: has anyone in your orearch in the last 50 years so live from the presidency aside from richard nixon? john: absolutely. we had three amazing row, and 100in a

years from now, i think they will all be grouped together as , withar presidents radioactive as, and they did a good job. they protected us. they made these huge swings act and forth. did some horrible things, like hiring the mafia, jack kennedy hiring the mafia to try to assassinate fidel castro. which wentmittee into the history of administration after administration and spied on americans, opened their mail, bugged their telephones. , but peacee mob activists, people like john lennon, and even richard nixon, when he was out of office, was spied on by one of these programs, so i think people will look back and say, ok, they were

andr tremendous pressure, there were these awful things. habeas corpus, during civil war, and the alien and sedition act, and maybe we can excuse this behavior. gravity -- of just veracity, and you look at this huge difference as to what they would do to advance their own political future and to protect the country. he was here 25 years ago on book notes, and i had a question about the media and his attitude, and then we will ask you, but let's watch that. we will delve into this more. [video clip]

brian: did you ever ask about why they disagreed with you? nixon: if they did not think he was innocent, they did not want him exposed, because, as one individual said, it would be a reduction of foreign policy of the roosevelt administration, and so, with that, not that i did not have many friends, but try to bele, they objective. many of them do. they also have strong convictions, and, frankly, they generally are not particularly am, even though i am probably more reasonable than some of the conservatives. clip]ideo brian: what do you think?

john: several times during the ofrative, there are a couple things about where he stands right at that moment, because it really did twist his perception. it really did feed his paranoia over the years, but what is really interesting is he first ran in southern california as a conservative, and at that time, "the los angeles times" was conservative and dominated seven california politics, and this went to the united states senate, so he had a very jaundiced view. is that press to him they are going to advance my career. liberals are going to tear me down because of that. i think that is reflected a little bit. brian: back to your source notes. complicated,tle but years later, amid the republicancandal,

chairman george h w bush produced affidavits alleging the hotel room-- before the second presidential debate. have been terribly unusual, threat the 1950's and 1960's. wastronic eavesdropping considered a trifling offense. cbs had bugged the closed door sessions of the credentials committee at the 1952 republican convention. journalist jack anderson was caught bugging during a case, and nbc news admitted they bugged a private session of the democratic platform committee in 1960 eight. the chief investigator of the watergate committee resigned from that role after someone remembered he had been convicted for an illegal bugging in 1968. all of these incidents were quickly forgotten, and where did you find all of that? over theon's defenders

year have attempted from time to time to assemble collections of past misdeeds to show that nixon was the victim of a double standard, and i think their argument is very well taken, but think,ied everything, i a step further, a step too far, and he was -- frankly, he was not as good at it. all of the people back home were not very good at it either, but the watergate burglars, their .eam was assembled clumsily they weren't cynical, burned-out , former agents, supervised by young men on nixon's -- and they cynical, burned-out, former agents, supervised by young man -- men by next and, all trying to be more macho than the next

guy. with all watergate, it was about something as small as a bugging compared to the history you just read, which is sort of the accepted practice, but j edgar hoover saw that times were changing and that these kinds of practices were not going to be seen in the 1970's the way they had been seen in earlier years, and hoover pulled back and said we're not going to do these jobs anymore, and so that is what led nixon to bring that capability in-house and in the end got him into such trouble. brian: did you talk to either one of his daughters? john: julie was very nice. foundonce and a while, i something that just had to have an answer that only she would know, and i would send her an email, and she would write back. there is a famous photograph in their of the eisenhower

inaugural, where david eisenhower is there with his grandfather, and julie is there with her dad, and david is looking at her, and it is really cute, knowing that years later, they would fall in love and marry, and she said he is not looking at me the way you think he is looking at me. i had been in a sledding accident, and i had a big, black, and he was staring at a little girl with a black, so if you look closely, you could see that julie had a shiner. there was a picture of nixon after during his exile years. the three makes and women, i think, if you go to the dictionary and look up long-suffering, their picture should be there. their mom and julie and tricia. paranoia,rstand their seeing how their father has been treated, but they really could , following the

example of the truman family. thetruman family opened up vaults of carrie's letters to his wife. david mccullough went in there and wrote a book that instantly elevated truman steps up the presidential latter, and we will someday, they will do this, and someday, they will write a book, because they will have nixon's diaries, more from nixon' is diaries, and letters tricia, but now, they still are pretty bird, and have a no interview, no help -- why, in your opinion, does julie talk more than tricia? john: i think it is a matter of personality. there is a wonderful thing on the tapes, analyzing the personalities, and they agree sot julie in her way is bubbly, such a nice person, that

the country loves her, whereas tricia is more of a pristine and nixon says, yes, yes, tricia is more like me, , andcontained, more alone julie is the one with the million-dollar personality. i do not know if it is entirely true. that is just the perception. nixon's brother is still alive, and i think i saw you quote him in one of the books. have you met with him? nothing was more important to me than the day i spent with ed nixon. first of all, he looked like --k, and he walks like deck he looked like dick, and he alks like dick, and you got of what that family was

like. he is a scientist, a geologist, i believe. he does not have the most sophisticated of of what that fs like. politics, but he has this really sort of keen ry sense of humor. it was very enlightening to me. best interview that i did. that is another reason why i wish julie and tricia would sit down and just do an oral history for the library. if you do not want to talk to "60 minutes," sit down and do that. brian: what do you think of the interviews? he was a friend. john: frank does not like the ," but he was,iter a writing assistance for the memoirs, and he helped him write to the memoirs, and then they decided to have nixon sit down, and frank got him to open up on many subjects.

remember nixon calling himself paranoid about the press. brian: here he is a just a short clip about the resignation. [video clip] after the speech, he was very thoughtful. he came up to me and said i have always done this. after the big, the important speeches. as we got to the door of the residence, he said, "mr. president, history is going to recall that you were a great president. paul , "henry, that will depend on who writes the history. i went down the hall and made a few calls and heard the chanting outside. like other days, and this time, jails "jail to the chief, to the chief p or will

-- to the chief." john: he loved the fact that he will always be famous. recounting those events, he is delighted by the idea that a kid linda so dominated it. even though it went so badly for him and caused him such grief and almost killed him. nixon who wast of like, boy, i showed them. bryant: but there is a foreboding again, quoting hairy, because he did not like him. not like him. first of all, kissinger was a great example of nixon being able to either instinctively or brilliantly find somebody and plucked him and make him his

tool, and kissinger probably lasted longer probably than anybody, and kissinger was very, very good at what he did. a basic argument of the two of them about vietnam, which carries over into the vietnam chapters, but there is no doubt that they saw a split between russia and china, the soviet union and china, and decided they would exploit it the way that they did, and it changed our world forever. nixon's goal in china was to give us a couple of decades of peace, and he probably gave us 50 years. asan: kissinger is reported saying he did not like him. he was a phony though, because all of the tapes show him kissing up after speeches, "mr. president, you are the greatest p or quote -- are the greatest."

john: he had the witty, self-deprecating ability, and he makes a crack that, yes, the worst thing is that they're going to show me as a kiss up, and in some cases, he was just awful, and it is a flaw of nixon that he needed this, too. brian: did he talk to you? john: no. kissinger has written probably five or six volumes on the nixon years and talked repeatedly, giving speeches, so there is a limit to what i could have asked him. should i have asked him one more time, are you a war criminal? , a hugeoger stone tattoo on his back of richard nixon's space, was here recently, talking about his own book. let's watch what he has to say about richard nixon and donald

trump. [video clip] >> the first person to imagine a trump presidency was richard nixon. i was working with him in his postpresidential years, and he met donald trump in george theybrenner's docs, and hit it off, and he called me the next day and said, "well, i met your man. i have got to tell you, he has got it. he could go all the way." [end video clip] john: roger sat down and gave me a good interview about his experience with nixon. brian: what is the difference? man, he is more of a show but he can talk about nixon.

i do not believe that. like i told you about clarence darrow, people over time convince themselves to believe what they want to believe. believe rogernot stone's story, or you do not believe that richard nixon sat down? to believe a stretch that roger stone would end up working with donald trump years remember that richard nixon met donald trump in a stadium and said he could be president one day, and american history is still of, brian, i cannot tell you, that they sat in the kitchen and said he is a bright guy, and someday, he is going to be president. presidents are going to be president. brian: and the oral history, they had them quoting that and after the fact, but, again, you

did not answer a question i asked you earlier. where --ally about what was your base? john: i lived right off the beltway, and -- brian: how did you set it up? you had all of this material. john: somebody the other day devoted an entire book -- i cannot remember what the topic is, but only online, and they sat in the kitchen, and all they did was online, and we are getting there. all of clarence darrow's papers got online, after i went all around the country. in 20 or 30 years -- the problem is, the cannot everything in the nixon library online. it would take 200 years, so what you rt tealdo is if lazy, you will only do the online.

if all i did was c-span -- i spent hours watching c-span. that, you doly do not get some of the texture that can be from turning every page. books, and a whole lot online. brian: all right, last question. if you were going to pick a chapter in this book that everybody should read that is new, different, unusual, which one would it be? stuffit does not have the which is the big, historical piece of the puzzle that i contributed, but i think the piece on the cambodian incursion in the spring of 1970, that chapter is relatively short. it has got lots of new stuff. it has got lots of quotes. i like that one.

and i also love the 1946 campaign. brian: john ferrell, better known as jack. the book is "richard nixon: the life." thank you for your time. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] announcer: four free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q&a.org. c-span programs are also available as c-span podcasts. announcer: here is a look at our primetime schedule on the c-span

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