Youre a member, would you please stand up and be recognized . Oh, come on, theres a couple of you here. There we go. Thank you. [applause] the president s society with an exclusive group of members that supports the ongoing works of president nixons foundation which awe applies the legacy and the vision to, that he had to opportunities facing our nation and the world today. And if youre interested in joining, please see any member of the staff, come track me down [laughter] or one of the front desk associates. Anybody can get you signed up this evening. Id also like to tell you about a a few special events that are on the horizon. On august 20th we will host Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino for their new bestseller, justice on trial, about the Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings. On september 11th, we will host two programs. The first is an annual commemoration of patriot day, and then we will host Supreme CourtJustice Neil Gorsuch that evening at 7 p. M. For a discussion with Nixon Foundation president hugh huwen. And finally, james mattis will appear in conversation with hugh hewitt from this very stage, and tickets can be purchased by visiting Nixon Foundation. Org. Were pleased to host the author of a new book on the postpresident ial years of Richard Nixon. This very important and littlestudied of nixons life of achievement, setback and comeback is certainly deserving of a book of its own. In fact, probably a series of books. Not one to be written off, Richard Nixon rose from the worst of defeats to become america easeledder statesman elder statesman n. This 20 year period of 19741994, he reinvented what it means to be a former president , serving as an advise arer to every one of his successors. He made 29 foreign trips and worked with World Leaders all across the globe. To tell this remarkable story of after the fall, we are joined this evening by kasey pipes. Mr. Pipes is an historian whose previous book on president izenning hour is well acclaimed president eisenhower. He served in the administration of president george w. Bush as a speech writer and later at gettysburg college. Would you please join me in welcoming for after the fall kasey pipes. [applause] well, thank you all very much. Thanks for being here and thanks for having me. Jim, thanks for those kind words. I want to thank jonathan and chris and the entire nixon staff for making us feel welcome here today. And, wow, after hearing all the people that are coming up later this month or or later this fall, i kind of want to come back. [laughter] i want to hear neil gorsuch as well, so thats awesome. I also want to thank hugh hewitt, the president of the foundation, who was indispensable to me in the writing of this book and had me on the radio last week to help promote it. You could not be in better hands with anybody else than hugh. I want to thank a couple of the archivists that worked with me on the book, greg couple us and pamela isenberg did great work greg cummings. So many people helped me along the way. Sandy quinn that you all remember, ron walker, many of you remember, fred fielding. Just a tremendous number of people helped make this possible. I also want to say hello to linda and larry sarlos who are right here. These are the parents of friends of ours in important worth, kirk and kristin. Kirk is the pitching coach at tcu, and we live right around the corner from tcu and kirk and kristin. You guys get the award for traveling the farthest, two and a half hours, so thank you very much for being here. I hope the book is worth it. Let me know. Ill be asking you. And thanks to all of you for being here as well. Gosh, its great to be back. The first time i came to the Nixon Library was in 1995. I was an intern at the Ronald Reagan president ial library, and Richard Orton smith, who was the director of the Reagan Library at the time, brought me down. His friend john taylor was running things down here, and john showed us around. Ill never forget it. It was wonderful to be here x. Then i came again in 19 or 2007 with the release of the eyesenning hour book. Eisenhower book. Sandy quinn was kind enough to have me come down. And then in 2010, once the book was out, i began once the book was inked and i had a deal and was able to research it, i came here and began going through the files and spent a number of months here in 2007, 31, 12 and 13 doing the research. So its been amazing. When i first started this project, i wondered is there really an audience for this, is there really a market in last week with we were the number one new arrival ahead of bill oreilly. Weve aa arrived. This is awesome. [laughter] i did an interview last week in the Dallas Fort Worth area with the number one morning show, and the anchor is a football playbyplay guy, and i thought, wow, i better have my nixon sports stories ready for this interview. He spent 15 minutes walking me through the postpresidency. And at the end of it i sent him an email and i e said i really appreciate having me on today, and he wrote me back and said nixon is one of the most fascinating peel. Ive always been a people. Ive always been a fan of nixon. Its amazing how there are nixon people all over the world. An amazing man and an amazing career. My story as a historian has always been to try to tell the stories that have been untold but need to be told and to focus on stories that we know something about but we need to know a lot more about. And so for me, the road less traveled in historical scholarship first led me to story of eisenhower and civil rights and a story which came out in 2007 in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock Central High School crisis. And, of course, the road less traveled has also led me to nixon postpresidency. This is a story that needs to be told. And its a story that needs to be understood in a way that it has never been fully understood before. We have an idea of what nixon was doing during this period. We have an idea that he was active. Hopefully, after you realize this book read this book you will agree he was more active than you thought he was. Hopefully, after reading this book youll realize he was even more successful than you could have ever realized. But before delving into the book and talking about it and whats contained in it, i think we have to understand how high he climbed as president to appreciate how far he fell at the end of his presidency. You think about Richard Nixon in 1972, hes opened the tour to china the door to china, hes closing in on a deal to end the war in vietnam, and he wins 49 states in the largest land slide in american history. Hes on top of the world. And yet less than two years later with public Approval Ratings hovering in the 20s, hes forced to resign, and he finds himself, as he says, really fighting for his life as he talks about in his diary. Well talk about that more here in a minute. Now, there have been entire libraries of books written about nixons life, entire libraries of books written about his presidency, even the vice presidency and certainly about water gaipt, but there has been precious little written about the last 20 years of his life. We have the Monica Crowley memoirs which are wonderful and detailed, the last four years which she worked with him. We have a book that covers the first few years in exile. Theres never been a 20year volume that covers the entire story of what happened to him after watergate. Now, historians will always debate whether nixon was a great Prime Minister i think this book president. I think this book makes clear theres no debate he was a great expresident. Nixon is one of the Great Stories in president ial history. And the history of his postpresident ial years is the greatest nixon story thats never really been told. So why a book about nixons life after watergate, and if its so important, why has no one done it before . Nixon is a shake shakespearean figure. Weve all experienced triumph and tragedy, suffered setbacks, but none of us will experience professional setbacks the way he did. So in a sense, the storys about us. Its about how we all come back and we all find our way within when we get lost. When we get lost. But the other reason this story has not been written is because the papers, of course, are privately owned by the family. Theyre deposited here. And i was able to secure the cooperation of the family in writing this book. And is so not only is this a new book about a new period of life for nixon, but it has new material in it. So i think that makes it interesting, and i think it makes it worth reading and worth with thinking about because this is a very extraordinary period in the life of a very extraordinary man. When Richard Nixon left the white house in august of 1974, he had no money, he had no future, and he had no obvious way to make a living. Within weeks of moving back to san clemente, he faces a health scare that almost claims his life. And after that he faced years of litigation and battled through a case of what was almost certainly depression. Heres or what he wrote in his diary in late 1974 about how he might climb his way out. Write books. Make speeches. Try to put things into context. This is the road map that he would use for 20 years; writing books, giving speeches, television where possible, and putting things into perspective for the people and for history. And its amazing how well he did this. He does it so well and becomes so effective and so well known for his books and his speeches and his appearances that people begin to accept him back again. The public begins to accept him back and the president s do too. Part of the story in this book is his relationship with three president s, reagan, bush and nixon. And his advice and counsel to all three of them and how it helped change policy and change history. Let me quickly mention three changes youll read about in this book. Two changes that occurred because of nixon and one change that occurred because of nixon. And i think this is really the heart of what this book is about, is change. First, nixon in the postpresidency changes the very nature of the postpresidency. When nixon becomes postpresident , there are no postpresident s. Theyve all died. Johnson has died in 73, truman died in 72, eisenhower died in 79. He had watched what they did in retirement, and what they did was different than what hes going to do. They basically retired. Eisenhower writes his memoir and another book, thats pretty much it. He becomes a doting grandfather. Johnson goes to his ranch. I mean, these are men that basically accept retirement and go away. Nixon has no such choice. He has no such choice. He has to make a living. He has no money. He has to resign from the bar in california, he has to resign from the bar of the Supreme Court. He wants to resign from the bar in new york and they wont let him because they want the privilege of kicking him out. He cant practice law. He has no way of making a living, and he has to find a way. And what he does, with no template in front of him of what an expresident should do, is he invents the template that all Prime Ministers to this day president s to this day more or less follow. He writes books. He travels the country and the world giving speeches. He stays in contact with other World Leaders. He stays in contact with political leaders in washington. He talks to president s. He used his ideas, the power of his ideas to influence events in washington. You think about the postpresident s today, you think about clinton with the clinton the fund, george w. Bush with his own think tank in dallas churning out policy proposals. You think about barack obama writing books. They are all in some way following the nixon model. Nixon didnt have the option of retiring. He wanted to remain active. He told john taylor during this period that he had to remain active for his own health and to keep his mind as sharp as he wanted it to be. He spent years writing book after book on his main area of expertise, Foreign Policy. And he becomes a trusted adviser and confidant to three Prime Ministers. He to three Prime Ministers. He doesnt just write books, he writes books that matter, that people realize and absorb and Pay Attention to. He didnt just say something, he had something important to say when he was writing these books and when he was speaking. And he showed through this process he still had an Important Role to play as an outside counselor. Ronald reagan realize the real war in 1980. He was inspired by it. It confirmed his own view of the soviet union. He carried it around with him at one point. And in many ways, this led him to have an even closer relationship with nixon. And nixon relished the chance to use the only thing he had left, the only power he had left which was his mind and his ideas to influence policy. He gives counsel to president s. He influences them with his ideas on things big and small. Let me give you an example of something small that nixon did that weve never known before. Nixon, shortly after reagan becomes president , wants to find ways to take advantage of reagans ability. Nixon has great admiration for reagan. They had a complicated relationship, all politicians do. But nixon said to his soninlaw ed cox, i have a great mind, reagan has a great gut. And this is a guy with tremendous political ability. He can speak to the country, he can rally the country, and nixon sees this and he wants to take advantage of it. So early in the Reagan Administration nixon sends a message to reagans longtime communication adviser urging the creation of a weekly tenminute radio talk. To allow the president to dominate the monday papers. Nixon suggests they do this on sunday. Its tweaked, and a saturday morning radio address is born. The saturday morning radio address lasted from 1982 all the way to 2008 when trump discontinued it. Weve always known reagan started, weve never known the idea came from a letter from Richard Nixon. But his real contributions to reagan came on bigger matters of substance. When gorbachev comes to power, nixon meets with gorbachev. He finds this could be a man that reagan, as Margaret Thatcher said, could do business with. He senses theres an opportunity here to move forward and perhaps end the cold war, and he wants reagan to meet with gorbachev, but he wants reagan to do it from a position of strength. And so when reagan announces intentions to build a strategic defense initiative, nixon immediately doubts the science of this. He doubts that the technology of it will ever work. But he loves the idea of using it for leverage in a negotiation. And almost from the beginning, he sees fdi as a key bargaining chip for reagan. Later on, when gorbachev threatens to pull out of any further negotiations unless reagan abandons fdi remember reagan walks out. He says no. Nixon helps come up with a solution. Nixon suggests to bud mcfarland, reagans National Security adviser, quote i feel very strongly that the president could pull off a real coup by formally offering to mutually share with the soviets the results of our research on sdi. This, he wrote to mcfar land, would undercut gorbachevs decision. He was right. Reagan took the advice. He offered to share the technology with the soviets publicly and essentially boxed gorbachev in and brought him back to negotiating table. This maneuver helped the negotiations continue forward and played a role until getting the soviets to agree to the inf treaty in 1987 where an entire class of Nuclear Weapons were eliminated. With president bush nixon privately went to china after Tiananmen Square tragedy, taking advantage of the goodwill that people had for him in that country. He met with chinese leadership and spoke brutally blunt language to him. Ty january 9 11, he told him tiananmen, he told him, would be the, quote, depth with of the relationship with the u. S. If it happened again. Upon returning home, he reported back to the president who was faced with a political crisis at home, something the president didnt want to do, something nixon didnt want to see happen. But the fact that nixon delivered the message helped diffuse the situation and helped the president out of a deep crisis. And, of course, with president clinton heres Richard Nixon and bill clinton working together to assist boris yeltsin, to assist democracy in russia, the breakaway republics. Clinton later said that it was, quote, the best meeting ive ever had as president clinton marveled at the wisdom that nixon gave him as he urged him to be brave and to support the Democracy Movement in ways that, frankly, he didnt believe president bush had done enough to do. So he changes the postpresidency, he changes policy through his work with reagan and bush and clinton. Most importantly, this book shows in many ways nixon changed himself. During this 20year period, he comes to terms with all he had achieved and all he had lost. The conventional wisdom says he accidentally confessed during the watergate section of the interview with david frost. This has, of course, been a myth that frost and others have perpetuated. The reality is quite different. They talked about it in advance, what he wanted to say when this question came up. And he apologized for his moral failures. He said i screwed it all up, but he would never admit to any criminal wrong doing because he didnt think he had violated any criminal laws. This would be the message he would use the rest of his life whenever he was asked about this topic, and it came not as an accident, it came as a planned a answer to a question that he and ken had wordmythed together. Still wordsm