Plus since its a threeday holiday weekend, book tv is onon for three days we will re air the entire festival, 8 30 a. M. On monday labor day. That is whats coming up. Now we have one more author speaking tonight and we will go back up into the history and biography room here at the Convention Center and this will be John Aloysius farrell talking about Richard Nixon. Book tv, live coverage. [inaudible conversations] good evening. Welcome to the main event, the last program of the evening here in the ballroom. My name is ron, i am an editor corresponded at npr and also aha fulltime faculty member at American University of school of public affairs. It is my great pleasure to be here this evening with John Aloysius, jack farrell to his friends. He has written his third book. His first book was called clarence, attorney for the damned. I think you should buy that book just for the title. The second book was the democratic century and then he turned to Richard Nixon, the life. Is such just because hes such a popular character. Because of that trajectory, i i have to ask, what made you turn to Richard Nixon. I was drawn to his story. The original subtitle for thee book was Richard Nixon, an american tragedy. I was struck as i did the research that people likee Henry Kissinger and Elliot Richardson would write in their diary or talk on the phone with each other and as watergate was collapsing around him, they would say this is really a shakespearean scene of someone who has so many gifts and yet this tragic flaw which ended up bringing t him down in quite a shakespearean manner. He was iago to his own a fellow. He was whispering in his own ear, youre not good enough, they hate you, there against me, and in the end it destroyed him and he had that one final moment of recognition, some of you may remember on the last day he was in the white house, when he addressed his staff and family in the east room, and he said, remember others may hate you, but if you hate them then you destroy yourself. It was this wonderful moment of self recognition when he sees that the tragic flaw has brought him down in just the way he feared the most, and in the end, thats what he got him. Im struck by your comparison to iago to his own fellow. I dont believe that mine is in the book. I believe you have set it on. Another occasion but i looked for it in the book and i dont believe i found it. Is that something you thought of since youve written the book and what does it mean to you. When you write a proposal for a book, you try to come up with analogy as to what the story is bread when i wrote the book, that was in thee proposal. I didnt use it in the book. I probably should have. As i prepared for the book tour i came across it again and thought i probably shouldve used it but fellow is this great general and the lieutenant is very jealous of him and starts whispering in his ear and he puts these, this paranoia in hi him, and in the end of fellow ends up killing his beautiful wife because iago is so good at doing that. Nixon always had this susceptibility of telling himself over and over again im not good enough. One of the most heart rendering examples is when he comes back from china and he has accomplished everything hewa wanted to do in his life. Ab he became president againstt all these odds, he came from the backwoods of california to become president of the United States. He wants to be a great man and he sees this opportunity in the cold war to drive a wedge between cold china and the soviet union and bring china into the family of nations. Long before he was president , he wrote about this in an article of Foreign Affairs magazine talking about how this new century was going to be an Information Age but this is Richard Nixon in 1965. An Information Age dominatedrm by computers and the old communist monolithic societies would not be able to competehe with the nimbleness of science that will be needed in the 21st century. He sees this happening as he is president. He goes to china, he makes this amazing breakthrough and he comes back and is talking to Henry Kissinger on one of the infamous white house tapes and iago starts to whisper andar he says you know henry, the American People are bunch of sheep. They watch Man Television with all that handshaking in chinait and you and i know it really doesnt mean a thing. G. This is Richard Nixon being cynical of the American People, but badmouthing himself because he had such alf sense of inferiority. I shouldve used it in the book. It is a good bind. You mention that Foreign Affairs piece from 1955 in which he seemed to have a numbeand normas amount of sophistication about asia. You point out he had toured asia as Vice President and he learned a great deal. He seemed to have really taken that on as a study through. Much of the rest of his life. One of the things about the book was you broke a bit of news that had to do with the asian land war that everyone knew we should try to fight but Richard Nixon nixon foundrd us fighting in vietnam, and the news had to do. [inaudible] who was sent on a mission by the Nixon White House before he was elected president , when he was still a private citizen. What was that all about . Its almost 50 years. It will be 50 years next year and nixon was running in 1968, an amazing year of turbulence, the year that bob kennedy and Martin Luther king were assassinated and we had Eugene Mccarthy challenging lbj had riots at the Democratic Convention and in the midst of all this, Richard Nixon built a pretty good lead over his democratic opponent because Lyndon Johnson, the sitting president announced he wasnt going to run for reelection because of vietnam. Then all the sudden, the Democratic Party start coming home in the fall of 1968. The bluecollar Union Workers leave George Wallace and they start going back to the Democratic Party. The antiwar folks start forgiving humphrey because he does a little bit of it tiptoe toward a split with lbj on vietnam, and all the sudden at the beginning of September Nixon had this young guy who was a vote counter and his name was alan greenspan. Alan greenspan sends a memo and says were going to win 410 electoral votes but hell be lucky if he wins a single state. But, it has closed dramatically by the middle of september. Then Lyndon Johnson calls him in and says we are seeing some progress on vietnam, i May Institute a bombing halt. Now Richard Nixon thought he had lost the 1960 election because the kennedy stole it from him. He had seen johnson in 1966 do an october surprise in the off your Congressional Election so his paranoia kicks in. Nd he sees these forces lined up against him, ready to steal something from him, once again, and he uses this connection, a woman named annae who is very well known in the palaces of asia because her husband had led the flying tigers into battle against the japanese in world war ii, and he sends her to the south vietnamese to tell them that if they can just hold on a little bit longer nixon will be elected and youll get a better deal. So rather than going to paris and joining in the peace talks, which nixon thanks is a charade, the south vietnamese resistant dont join the peace talks. This is pretty much a known story because at some point Lyndon Johnson got wind of it w and he sent the fbi out to tail and tape and tap the republican envoy and the south vietnamese and the president ial palace so johnson is getting all this information and he sees whats happening. He gets on the phone and calls his senators and he says im reading their hand and this is darn near treason so he confronts nixon and nixon denies it but it has actually happened in the great tragedy of the story is that there really was a piece steal her from the soviet union and the soviet said, if you do a bombing halt we promise there will be productive talks. Well get the north vietnamese to the table. So what nixon saw as a dirty trick, johnson actually believed was a chance to and the war earlier. Nixon intercedes in the vietnamese pullback in the peace talks dont happen and he selected one of the closest elections in american history. Y. With only 43 of the vote. So elements of the story, over the years, but nixon always denied it. If you go back and watch the famous nixon interviews, david frost asked him specificallytal but he says no, i would never do Something Like that. The last big piece of the puzzle, and the piece that confronted johnson in 1968 was whether Richard Nixon had been directly involved. D as im going through this material thats been released from the nixon library, there are handwritten notes by the chief of staff by bob haldeman. He is writing down what nixon is telling him and he sang keep them working on the south vietnamese. Anyway we can Monkey Wrench that initiative. And that meant. Throw monkeywrench into the gears and stop it. Does my little contribution to history. On a rainy day like todayel youre at the beach and you fill out a jigsaw puzzle andet theres nothing else to do and you start putting the puzzle pieces together and then the sun comes out and you go away, but your brotherinlaw comes behind you and he starts putting a few pieces of the puzzle together and eventually gets assembled. Was so that was my little piece of the puzzle. I was glad to contribute. And a crucial piece it is. One of the things thate strikes me about your book and has struck others as well has been the extraordinary way that you managed to remain passionate and yet have an edge on the involvement on whats going on. Now, you did not live all of this history,. But many of us have lived much of it. I read the book feeling as if i was reliving my life. Did you feel that way at all . Did you feel personally involved in these events, the larger events of not the specific events of Richard Nixons life. I was a little bit torrent. I was in college during watergate. Waat i was in college at the time of the great vietnam protest and yet, nixon was a bad guy for people of my generation. So when i started to go intowh his life, i approach it as a biography which is telling myself, all right, you had to be objective and fair on see it from his point of view. What i found as i looked into his life was that my empathy for him grew even as i was finding things out about watergate or vietnam. I was looking at where he came from and what he had to do to get to where he was. He was born in the california outback, his father was a blowhard, somewhat abusive. He managed to be someone who could fail to grow in Orange County and he took it out in aon his son. He had five sons and two died in his childhood. His baby brother arthur died of meningitis and his older brother harold, the golden boy of the family, contracted tuberculosis and died over a time of six years that wasted the familys finances. By this point they had sold the lemon farm and moved to crossword roads outside of whittier. His father bought an abandoned church and had it towed down the road and opened a Grocery Store and began to sell groceries out of this old church. Dicks job was to drive into l. A. To the market at 3 00 a. M. And get the produce and bring her back to the store and polish it and prepare it and then go off to school. He did this while trying to maintain a lot of extracurricular activities, drama, football, debate and he was very successful and very bright, but all the time knowing that the kids on the garden side of this town look down on him because of hism family situation. He always had this resentment, but at the same time this amazing drive and resilience. If theres anything about him to admire, its the ability to pick himself up and even in the last years of his life, to mount a semi successful comeback Public Relations wise until he appears on the cover of Newsweek Magazine with the big headline, hes back. And nixon one in 1968. He won the Electoral College so then he is president and he does continue the vietnam war, but we get changes in the way the draft work and we start to view the war more aggressively and people step back. In general, he de escalated and moved us toward an american withdrawal which eventually would happen, but he also did a lot of other things, especially not first term which stands to surprise people who dont remember those years. He expanded Social Security benefit, the epa act that he signed, osha, Occupational Health administration, title ix for women athletes, he had a healthcare proposal that we write about in the book that was amazingly like what we now think of as obamacare. His administration pioneered the idea that we should, rather than go through a singlepayer syste system, rather than medicare for all, we should tell Insurance Company that everyone has health insurance, we keep the private insurance framework and will be very slight differences between not visible and obamas, obama wanted to make it a mandate for every employer whereas obamas mandate was that all of us have to buy insurance if our employer isnt doing it. Ted kennedy called me and said this is the biggest legislative error, not taking the steel from nixon. He offered it twice. Especially 1973 when he was desperate for Domestic Support and offered it but the democrats look to him and said you know, hes weak, we will get him out and a new president will come i in. With the new president will get medicare for all. Well get singlepayer. It turned out to be jimmy carter, a conservative from georgia and inflation was raging and carter had promised a balanced budget so instead of Getting National healthcare , you had a huge fight breakout between ted kennedy and jimmy carter and Ronald Reagan is elected and held in this new conservative era. Ted kennedy knew he had missed his chance in 1973 by not taking Richard Nixons proposal when he had opportunity. There were all these other things that nixon managed to accomplish that would, by todays white would count as liberal programs. Expansions and provisions of new programs and benefits for people didnt get any kind of satisfaction. Did he have any joy in it. Two things. One, he had been part of the world war ii generation and they had seen a great crisis with the depression and then world war ii and had seen how muscular government can fix problems. It was not in the post reagan area where bill clinton says the era of Big Government is over, he said its not the solution its the problem. To nixon and Dwight Eisenhower , there was nothing to be ashamed of or afraid up about government. We needed National Defense to build highways across the country connecting every state capital. We would just do it. That was the way light eisenhower thought. When he had to invade normandy and bring down adolf hitler, it was doing need 5000 ships . Lets get 10000 because this was their thinking. There was really no feeling that government was this great evil force in our lives in those days while other generations felt differently. Nixon himself had certain things in the domestic side that he realized he needed to do for the public. Oil sp the environment is a prime example. Hes elected and three days later we have the biggest oil spill in our history up to that time in Santa Barbara california and nixon flies out and its just as the Environmental Movement is kicking out and nixon has two choices. You can either go along with it or he can resist it and he sees its vastly popular. He has a gut feeling that california is a beautiful place and we should keep it that way and so you get this amazing tide of environmental measures. The result of that, at one point the major environmental organizations were pulled and asked to was the best green president. T. Teddy roosevelt came in first and Richard Nixon came in second. But then theres other things that happened. I once said the subtitle to the book should be, and yet because, as you read the book you will see nixon was the one who brought about the polarization of america on racial matters. The socalled southern strategy. Y. In the nixon administrationegren there was more desegregation of schools. His administration very quietly prodded by the Supreme Court and deese segregated the southern schools to the pointn that polls of southern black voters in the 1970s gave nixon 53 47 plurality. In it was really app