. >> next is william sapphire. and part of this -- william sapphire is jewish, he was an observer, and tell us what you -- >> this is actually -- for me it's hard. this is heartbreaking because he was really mad at me. >> for the interview? >> oh, afterwards. gosh, i had a terrible conversation with william sapphire about a month before he died. he called me. >> died in 2009 at 79. >> 79. he was so angry that i had invited john dean to the library. i explained to him in order to establish had this as a nonpartisan space people would take seriously as a research center, given the fights there had been over access to the tapes, the nixon tapes and the documents, it was essential to establish beyond any doubt that this was a nonpartisan space and i felt it important that john dean, an important witness, an important player in the watergate story actually come to the library and speak. and sapphire was furious. i was talking to him because i had invited him to come to the library to do a master class. every summer, or

the -- one of my favorites which is, actually, william sapphire is the one who proved this before he died was, who a lot of this stuff is, of course, deeply involved with of sapphire, and i did some, a lot of research for sapphire and some of these terms including mulligan with eisenhower. i'll come back to that in a second. but the term that teddy roosevelt which was loose cannon meaning not in the nautical sense of the cannon on a carriage floating around on the deck of a ship killing, taking the legs off seamen, but the loose cannoning being the errat, you know, the person out of control. that, you know, the person who's the loose cannon. so you can go on with teddy roosevelt. you go through the book, you'll find -- the other one which was quite curious was good to the last drop which he invents. he's at the maxwell house which was a famous restaurant and hotel in nashville, tennessee, and they pour him a cup of coffee, and he says, ah, this is good to the last drop, and before you know it, they're promoting this coffee all over the country, it becomes a national brand using teddy

richard nixon, most interesting of all, the year before he died in 1994 told william sapphire, his friend and former speechwriter, guns are an abomination. he said if it was up to him he would ban all handguns. it's not something he ever talked in public about while president. obviously reagan supported the brady bill. george h.w. bush resigned. >> resigned from the nra. >> 1995 after oklahoma city. yet, if you look at the history of the last 50 years in terms of presidents willing to confront this issue while in office, pretty rare. johnson did it in 1968. got a pretty watered down bill. >> harold, there's been a lot of washington analysis about how far any of this is going to go. i, for one, think that we are in -- newtown was an inflexion point, and i do think that the landscape has changed, and i don't know that it's as trite as if you believe in magic, but eugene robinson has an op ed, and i think we are well to listen -- we would do well to listen to eugene's words, which basically amount to don't listening to those that say that president obama's bold plan to reduce gun violence, i