i was aware of listening devices. yes, sir. it was a bombshell. the pressure is on the president to produce those tapes. if not for those tapes nixon would have completed a second term. instead nixon would have spent the rest of his presidency from trying to hear them. he fought subpoena after subpoena. i have never heard of seen such outrageous vicious disturbing reporting. even as they tried to convince the american people that watergate was a press creation. what is it about the television coverage of you in these past weeks and months that has so aroused your anger? don t get the impression thaw arouse my anger. one can only be angry with those he respects. mr. president. mr. president. finally, a drastic step. nothing like this has ever happened before. our offices have been sealed
harsh and forceful language. there s also in the tapes nixon the strategist. there s no doubt about it when he s talking about russia or the cold war day taunt or the 1972 break to china and you think what a stateperson, but the overall impression is he s trying to bully advisers or anyone around him when it s at a private moment. if the boy scouts come in the office, he puts on the smiley nixon, but most of the tapes are unvarnished. you wrote about the tapes and they turned out to be the smoking gun. when you look at the scandal that president trump is navigating right now, what precedent have those tapes set? you know, it s both nixon and trump overthink their executive privilege in my opinion. they constantly want to see how far you can go with executive privilege. neither the nixon white house, the trump white house wants to cooperate, for example, with the house judiciary committee.
investigative authority that would hamstring the president or tie the president s hands. it requires a great deal of pressure. the institutions are in the hands of the president s party. 20 seconds, tim. do you think the public pressure had something to do with the way the watergate hearings went? though of course that was a democratic house and senate. i think it was that alexander butterfield announced to the world there was a taping seasonsystem. once you had tapes you could find out the truth. perhaps we should hope trump has tapes. in fact, before butterfield, trump had enough votes to survive impeachment. no question without the tapes nixon, i think, would have finished his second term. on that note, we are going to come back and talk about jared kushner s sister, the kushner company s selling american citizenships, the scandal that s perfectly legal.
the source of evil. in many ways very anti-semitic. you believe he was the source? every time you go to the tapes nixon s talking to halderman. the really vicious stuff was halderman. let s talk about this. he s playing to a guy. every five years there are nixon supporters that are trying to sort of you can t do that. they re not going to succeed. this isn t france. they re trying to in france that ll work. the french really do like him. chinese like him. the buses come from when they get off at the l.a. airport, the chinese tourists go to the nixon library. worldwide he s a big figure. you said something in your introduction which i thought was fascinating about how big a role he s played in our history. there s nobody bigger. it s unbelievable. here s a stat. from 1952 when i first started to 1972, a 20-year run, a whole generational run, he was on the republican national ticket every single time except once when he didn t want to be on it in 64.
to undermine the anti-war movement. then the democrats, the press, wiretapped the press. then at war against history and against the system of justice, the coverup. there s this line, you know, the coverup is worse than the crime. not in this case. really. these crimes were enormous and egregious. it s why he was removed from office. now we have a much better sense 40 years later from these additional tapes and participants of how brazen and corrupting a democracy this was and this president was. john dean, you were on the inside. you weren t corrupted in the end. you were able to break free. why did so many people i m not saying this is nazi behavior or anything like that, but why did so many people go along with nixon. why did so many people go along with this stuff?