senior political correspondent for the center for public integrity, a nonprofit center for investigative journalism in d.c. in 1996 he received the gerald r. ford prize and the aldo beckman award from the white house correspondents association for coverage of the presidency. the first time anyone had captured both the wars awards ie year. he's a frequent guest lecturer at various yufruniversity inclu stanford, harvard, the united states military academy, university of chicago and other institutions abroad. he is the author of three books, clarence darrow, attorney for the damned and chip o'neal. tonight his third book on richard nixon, a biography of the 37th president of the united states. this book has won the pen america award for the best biography of the year, the new york historical society's barbara and david zalosnik book prize in american history and was a finalist for the pulitzer prize. after the program, please join us in the atrium where his book is for sale and signing. please join me in a warm welcome for mr. farrell and enjoy the program. [ applause ] >> thanks very much. >> that was terrific. thank you. grocho marx used to sabz afty a thatintroduction, i can hardly wait to hear what i have to say. it's a great honor to be at the smithsonian, at a time when history and maybe even objective knowledge is under fire, smithsonian is this great wonderful institution asset that we have. and just today i was reading through the smithsonian magazine website, and they have this marvelous story about how the black curator of an african-american museum in virginia got together with the white curator of the museum of the confederacy, and together they sat down over beers. he had three great grandfathers who fought for the south. together they sat down and they combined their two institutions to this new museum called -- i think it's called the museum of the civil war in richmond, and it opened up. it's a marvelous story. i recommend that you read it like almost everything in smithsonian magazine. but it's -- i think it's also very -- it's a great illustration, a great example of where we can go if we forget a lot of the -- some of the things i'm going to talk about tonight. thanks for coming out on a night where you could sit home and watch on c-span events very similar to those 50 years ago, and, you know, one of the first questions i got asked and asked repeatedly was why nixon now? and i was accused of being something of an oracle when the book came out right after donald trump had been elected, facing off against a special counsel over a break-in at democratic national headquarters, staging his own saturday night massacres, declaring war on the press and declaring that the press is the enemy, accused of colluding with a foreign power to illegally affect the outcome of a presidential election, obstructing justice, democrats muttering about impeachment. a friend of mine from the faculty at the university of virginia told me, we have packed six years of nixon into two years of trump. it's like nixon speed dating. [ laughter ] richard white, i don't know how many of you are readers of the great oxford history of america, but basically they take the civil war, the revolutionary period, the cold war, and they give them to a fantastic scholar and he writes a book of history about just this era, and richard white got the assignment to do the gilded age, reconstruction and the gilded age by 1870s to the 1890s, and he had a reaction very similar to mine. he said i've written a book about a time of rapid and disorienting change and failed politics, and i finished it in a parallel universe, which reminds me of what harry truman said which is that there's nothing new in human nature. men don't change, the only thing new in the world is the history you don't know yet. and we can be sure that somewhere from his perch in the great hereafter, that richard nixon is looking up at us now [ laughter ] saying see, bob, i told you they'd miss me when i'm gone. so why nixon, why nixon now? well, one reason selling books is a commercial enterprise, and one reason is that we have this amazing string of 50th anniversaries. this is the 50-year mark of the nixon presidency. 1968 the year that he was elected began with the tet offensive in vietnam, senator eugene mccarthy's antiwar challenge in new hampshire, robert kennedy entering the race, george wallace entering the race. lyndon johnson, abdication, the murder of martin luther king, the murder of robert kennedy and the huge rioting at the democratic national convention in chicago. all that led up to november 1968 when richard nixon was elected, and he almost didn't make it. he won by 500,000 votes in one of the closest elections ever. and he barely clinched the republican nomination profiting mainly from the blunders of his rival, michigan governor george romney, mitt romney's dad was the republican front runner until attempting to change his position on the vietnam war. he claimed that he had been brainwashed by the pentagon. romney was already considered a bit of a lightweight, and this did not persuade a skeptical public that he had the brains or the guts to be the next commander in chief, and eugene mccarthy, brainwashed, a light rinse would have been sufficient. [ laughter [ laughter ] it was during that 1968 race on the eve of the election that the ni nixon campaign pulled off a dirty trick that i argue in my book was worse than anything he did in watergate. in october of that year he announced he reached an agreement for peace talks with the north vietnamese. at the urging of the soviet union, which was the north's armor and supplier, the united states would suspend bombing in southeast asia, and in return the russians promised lyndon johnson that hanoi would engage in productive talks. productive was the word the russians used. the south vietnamese refused to join the talks. johnson was furious, and you can hear these on the johnson tapes, which are online. all the more so when he learned that anna shanult a nixon campaign official had been heard on an american wiretap of the saigon's embassy in washington urging saigon to drag its feet. they would get, she promised, a better deal if nixon were elected. johnson got on the phone with everett dirkson, we can stop the killing out there, he said, but they've got this new formula put in there, namely wait on nixon, and they're killing 4 or 500 a day waiting on nixon. this is treason said lbj. i know, said dirkson. johnson faced the choice that barack obama faced in the fall of 2016. he did not have proof of nixon's personal collusion with a foreign power, and nixon vehemently denied it. does any of this sound familiar? so johnson like obama sat on the information. he sealed all the records and documents in an envelope, which became known as i kid you not the x file. somehow mysteriously the news leaked out, and it became a grail for investigative reporters and historians to prove that nixon himself had known of and directed anna sha nault's activity. you can google it to see how the pieces of the puzzle were put into place over the last 50 years as one journalist or researcher after another took up the case. nixon always denied a personal role, and in his famous interviews with newsman david frost, he insisted he was not aware of nor had he authorized any contact with the south vietnamese and quote, could not have done that in good conscience. so it was not until 2013 when conducting the research for my biography of nixon that i found the scrawled notes of his chief of staff bob haldeman recording nixon's orders to quote, keep anna shanult working on the south vietnamese and do what they could do to monkey wrench johnson's announcement of the peace initiative. now, we cannot know what might have happened if the nixon campaign had not interfered in johnson's initiative. most likely those of you who are my alk who can remember, the enmitty and the stubbornness that the north and south vietnamese displayed toward each other in the years that followed. the russian's promise of productive talks very well may have failed. but i'm a biographer, not a vietnam or military war historian. i judge my subjects by what they knew and what they did in the moment, in the time. given nixon's willingness to engage in such a dark and risky plot and given the bloody debacle that would follow in cambodia and vietnam, the hundreds of thousands of lives that would be lost i came to the conclusion that this was more reprehensible than anything that took place in watergate. that was 1968. 1969, 50 years ago this summer, the moon landing, chat quitic, woodstock, the moratorium, and nixon's great repost to the moratorium, the silent majority, the great silent majority speech. next spring at this time we'll be witnessing the anniversary of the invasion of cambodia and the shootings and the deaths at kent state. and then comes 1972, and just as we're beginning to think really awful nasty things about richard nixon, he pulls a rabbit out of his hat. why nixon now? we live in a world that richard nixon made. that february 1972 opening to china, that planet stunning handshake with mao set earth and its peoples on a new and liberating course. it was the first great crack of the cold war, the first bell tolling for the iron curtain, that indispensable step that would lift billions of human beings from want and grant them as nixon fervently hoped a measure of peace. you can hear him on the tapes talking, this vision in mind. after losing the 1960 election to john f. kennedy and the 1962 race for the governor of california, the one where he held the famous last press conference and said you won't have nixon to kick around anymore? he moved to new york and as an international lawyer he roamed the world for a prominent client, pepsi cola, but everywhere he went in those wilderness years as he called them, he would stop and he would talk to u.s. diplomats and foreign statesmen, many of whom he knew and met on international missions he was vice president under president dwight eisenhower. it was like one great post-great semina -- post graduate seminar. and then in an article called asia after vietnam, nixon described the world to come. monolithic communism is doomed. there's a new age coming, the new age is an information age. it's going to be a computer revolution, and this age is going to require freedom and intellectual nimbleness, not factory lines or collective farms or five-year plans, and so was especially ill suited to the muscle bound totalitarian regimes like the u.s.s.r. the nations of the pacific rim, japan, indonesia, singapore, malaysia, korea, would lead the way in this new age, nixon wrote, but there was one great threat, china. the chinese had to be brought out of their shell and integrated into this new international economic order because all of that progress and the promise of peace that could last a generation could be lost if a rampant nuclear arm red china sought to solve the problem of a billion hungry restless and enslaved people with violent expansion and aggression. and so in 1969, almost as soon as he took office, chinese and the soviets engaged in a ridiculous border dispute over a god forsaken river bank in siberia, and the door to beijing was opened a crack, and nixon was prepared and he had the foresight and the courage to reach out. in the 20 years of peace that he hoped for and talks about on the tapes, which he defined not as a time where there would not be war in the world, but a time free from the kind of battles he had witnessed in world war ii where the threat of a nuclear and a third war war is also now at 50 years and counting. and not for nothing did mr. spock urging the hot tempered captain kirk to negotiate with the evil klingons, remind captain kirk there's an old proverb, only nixon could go to china. [ laughter ] >> and there were domestic accomplishments as well. again, in the first week after he was elected, i can't tell you how -- what an impact it made at the time, but there was this huge oil spill off the coast of santa barbara in california, as an adviser to his campaign and william ruk ls house ready to serve in his administration so nixon with a stroke of his pen doesn't wait for congress to pass a law, creates this thing called the environmental protection agency. first of the great domestic environmental accomplishments. he follows it up with the environmental policy act. for anybody who's ever been in a fight over an environmental impact statement, you have richard nixon to thanks for signing it. he signed legislation creating noaa, he signed the clean air act in 1970. automobile emission controls, regulation of pesticides, a ban on ocean dumping, protection of marine mammals and coastal zone management all in the nixon administrati administration, and that's not all. there's no denying that he did more to integrate southern schools than any president before or since. brown versus board of education was in 1953. eisenhower, kennedy, and lyndon johnson wanted nothing of it. they dragged their feet. they had their administration, the justice department go in and file some, but it fell to nixon to get the schools integrated. in 1969 there were 186,000 african-american kids in desegregated schools in the south. in 1970, a year later, that number had grown to 2.5 million. grants for integration went from $75 million to $2.6 billion, as the single great expert has said, it was the greatest school desegregation in american history. they moved on. they created something called the philadelphia plan, the first muscular affirmative action program, and they denied tax exempt status to segregated private academies. those are the two biggies, the environment and civil rights, but there was more. he passed in conjunction with the democratic congress, of course, tax reform for low income individuals, increased aid to education, increased food stamp budget, the social security cost of living raises and system of cost of living raises that secure old folks from inflation. the occupational safety and health act, the war on cancer. he doubled federal funding for the arts. he signed title nine. he signed the volunteer military. he dropped the voting age to 18, and in one of the most little noted accomplishments of his administration but something that if you ever go out west you'll hear about on almost every indian reservation, he had a policy called self-determination for indian tribes, which to this day makes him a hero on the reservations. he had three biggies that didn't get passed, and you'll chuckle when you hear what they are. the first was something called nixon gear. a mandated private insurance with government subsidies. if barack obama had gone out on the first press conference and said i'm asking the republican congress to pass -- or the democrats and republicans in congress to pass richard nixon's health program, probably he would have gotten all the republican votes and none of the democratic votes, but because it was called obamacare, the nixon plan when presented 50 years later was shot down by congress. there's also a great memo i found in my searches through the nixon library. it's from daniel patrick moynahan, that wonderful guy who went on to become ambassador to india and united states senator from new york. it's a memo to the president, and it says, you know, the scientists have come up with something worrisome. we're really worried about this thing called climate change, and global warming could be, quote, and this is what he called it, an apocalyptic danger to world civilizati civilization. 1969, and the final third biggie that did not get passed was something that moynahan and nixon dreamed up called the family assistance plan, which i think you're going to see us coming back to sometime in our children's generation. guaranteed basic annual income, day care, and job training, replacing the welfare system completely. all of this liberal legislation bubbling up from the nixon administration in conjunction, of course, with the democratic congress. but this is why many scholars like to look at the nixon years not as some sort of isolated thing by itself, but as the third act, the third act of great fulfillment of the new frontier and the great society. if you take those, that time period from 1960 to 1972, it's where we really built the modern government structure in society that we have today. we might have seen it coming in young tricky deck, he was elected to the house in 1946 and instantly made an impression on their leadership and when they needed a committee to travel to europe and evaluate george marshal's plan to rebuild that shattered continent, nixon was chosen. he roamed far and wide impressing all who met him. he stood amid the ruins of hitler's chancellor ri where berlin's our fans came up to him trying to sell his father's war medals. much was at stake, he came from orange county, california, which in those days was rock red republican and conservative, and the very men who plucked richard nixon to obscurity, sent him to congress, built and paid for the campaign, were thoroughly against the marshal plan. they saw it as socialism, pouring money down a rat hole is what they told him. they warned him, they told him not to count on their support if he endorsed george marshal's mushy thinking, but nixon saw what he must do, so he returned to his district and for six months in 1947 and early 1948 he campaigned for the marshal plan. he went to every rotary club, every chamber of commerce, every vfw, and american legion hall. every crowd that would take him, he told them -- he owed them his best judgment, not his obedience, and he convinced them, and when the party primaries were held in california in the summer of 1948, richard nixon did not just win the republican nomination. he won the democratic nomination. he had wagered everything and carried the day. he ran unopposed his first relebs campair re-election campaign. and yet this is the story i thought off of calling the book, and yet. and yet not having opposition made him one of the few republican congressmen who was available that summer of 1948 to begin the red hunt to launch an investigation and try to chase down the soviet spy alger hiss, who is a forerunner to mccarthyism. so why nixon now, it's a compelling story. there may be no american airport named after nixon, but there are films and books and one hell of an opera. did you know the evil empire in the star wars films was patterned by george lucas on the nixon administration? or that the tortured don draper, the star of the mini series "madmen" was modeled on the young richard nixon. is there's a reason why in the movies the bad guys pull on richard nixon masks when they prepare to rob a bank. he's the only president to resign in disgrace. it was senator bob dole who joining the u.s. delegation to egyptian president anwar sadat's funeral. he walked into the white house, with gerald ford, richard nixon, there they were, see no evil, hear no evil, and evil. [ laughter ] and yet it was that same bob dole, terribly wounded in northern italy in world war ii, so wounded that they wrote on his forehead in his own blood not to waste your time on this one. this one's gone. recovered but lost the use of his right arm, and therefore could not perform the most elemental of political tasks, the handshake, and it was bob dole who will tell you that of all his fellow senators, of all the republic committee men and delegates and chairmen around the country, there was one man who never neglected to extend his left hand when greeting bob dole, and that was richard nixon, and it was dole who broke down his features contorting, weeping while giving the eulogy at nixon's funeral. so the original title for the book was going to be richard nixon, an american tragedy, for his story most definitely has elements of classic greater shakespearean tragedy. it's not my poetic original flourish, cabinet members like henry kissinger wrote it talked amongst each other at the time. as kissinger wrote, quote deeply insecurity nixon first act z as if cruel fate had had singled him out for rejection, and then he contrived to make sure that his premonition came to pass. it was said of kisinger that he was a self-made man who worshipped his creator. [ laughter ] that was not richard nixon. nixon was not an easy man to like, and he knew it and it hurt. his dad was brutal and abusive, two of richard's brothers died in childhood, one the golden haired curly baby of the family. arthur died in days from tu burningular meningitis. the eldest, the pride of the family, harold took years to succumb from tu buberculosis splitting the family and wrecking the family's finances. the middle brother made it into yale and harvard but his family could not afford to send him. he came to believe that it was his father's stubbornness that was at fault, for refusing to discard the family cow whose tainted milk had killed his brother. his mother was cold. she would retreat into her closet to pray, and as nixon said famously, never once did she tell him that she loved him. that was not his family's way. he came to feel as he told david frost in the famous television interviews that he was an unlovable human being and had all left him plagued by an intense, painful insecurity and self-doubt. he became miago to his own othello whispering in his ear, you're a loathsome creature, no one likes you. when he campaigned he campaigned with ferocity and ruthless aggression, and in doing so he became a truly tragic figure. we can glimpse the seeds of watergate in nixon's actions as the precursor, a kind of john the baptist for joe mccarthy. his red baiting campaigns which helped launch the mccarthy era are infamous. nowhere is that clearer than in the matter of race, and here we come to another and yet. for all the good that he did as president of the united states, his record on race is checkered and revealing. regrew up in whittier, a quaker outpost in southern california. in college he was the founder of a social club that remarkably for the 1930s recruited and accepted black members. when he first ran for congress in 1946 he spoke out for racial justice, and the local naacp made him an honorary member in the same season that the kl an was burning crosses in southern california. when nixon won his first senate races in 1950 one of his great supporters was kenny washington, a teammate of jackie robinson in the ucla and the first black athlete to integrate the national football league, a year before robinson took the field for the dodgers. they held a victory party. he befriended jackie robin son and martin luther king, a daring move. after getting nixon's help in passing the 1957 civil rights bill, king wrote him a letter, quote, it is altogether possible that nixon has no basic racial prejudice, and it wasn't just the public nixon. i came across this letter to his old law partner from the time, wittier had a black shoe shine man who worked in the town barbershop and saved and sent his brilliant daughter to columbia university, and when they came to visit washington, nixon had them as guests. two years before brown versus board of education, amongst always southerners richard russell, samm ervin in the senae dining room. nixon wrote in a private letter to a former law partner, she's a very pretty and intelligent girl. it renews your faith in this country to realize that the daughter of a barbershop boot black could get a masters from columbia standing in the highest percentage of her class. martin luther king was very impressed by this kind of liberality from nixon, but being a perceptive man he was a bit wary. there's a danger in such a personality, king wrote. it will be -- that it will be turned on merely for political expedience, when at bottom the real man has insincere motives. i hope this is not the case with nixon, wrote dr. king, for if richard nixon is not sincere e he is the most dangerous man in america. it was born out in the 1960 presidential campaign, which nixon lost to john f. kennedy. there are many reasons for that loss. nixon bungled the first debate. he made a rash promise to campaign in all 50 states and wasted his last week in alaska. and as importantly in keeping that 50 state promise he found he could draw large crowds in the then democratic solid south. and so he, like kennedy, sought to walk the edge and to balance a campaign for white southern votes with that from black votes in northern cities. and the telling moment arrived when near the end of the campaign, king was arrested in georgia on an old traffic charge. shackled and take tn to a backwoods prison in the middle of the night, his family and friends fearing with reason he would not emerge alive. john and robert kennedy intercede with the charge of governor and get king freed. the nixon campaign said no comment. jackie robinson flew to where nixon was campaigning in chicago and begged the candidate to intercede, nixon refused and robinson left the hotel suite with tears of frustration, anger and disillusionment. i had known nixon longer, king recalled. he had been supposedly close to me. he would call me frequently about things, seeking my advice. and yet when this moment came, it was like he never heard of me you see, so this is why i really considered him a moral coward. and so it was the candidates needed to do a better job of walking the line that fall, holding on to enough border states while turning out to make a difference in a race that was decided by 113,000 votes. and when nixon ran again 1968, jackie robin son supported rockefeller. when nixon became president, the white house had jackie robinson investigated. jack kennedy was dick nixon's friend. they had been invited to attend jackie's wedding. nix he is the kind of man the country needs said the young kennedy after meeting nixon in the house of representatives, and nixon prayed aloud when kennedy dodged death on an operating table at walter reed in 1954. poor brave jack is going to die. oh, god, don't let him die. so the hurt and the anger were twice as intense when nixon concluded that the kennedys had stolen the '60 election, and nixon's daughter julia said it was the experience of 1960 that left her father with a grim resolve of never going to be out cheated again. nixon took his anger and his hatred, p and he honed it, and used it, and he had an unequalled ability to tap grievances and resentments of class, of race, of envy. he could see in his audiences what he felt in himself. in part through this self-discernment, nixon recognized the defects of human character. he persuaded americans to gnaw as he did on grooechbievances a resentments. if you want to look back at the start of the great polarity, go back to richard nixon. he was the first post war politician and the most successful to build a career on the deliberate and contrived polarization of the american people on issues like class and race. his staff wrote internal memos calling for quote, the calculated and carefully contrived form of polarization that would occur by telling white americans that their rights and taxes were being taken, quote, to appease a lazy racial minority. the repercussions echo today. fox news was founded by rogers ailes who was richard nixon's media adviser. don't let them tell you watergate was a hoax, that nixon was railroaded out of office by a democratic congress. the white house tapes are all online. you can listen to them wherever you want, just like you can read the mueller report. [ laughter ] in the case of nixon, you have to stomach the cynicism, the cruelty, the insecurity and the anti-semitism. the little boys on the white house staff don't know how to play the game nixon told haldeman in the spring of '71. he would have to coach them himself. quote, i want more use of wiretapping he told haldeman, why don't you put your money on surveillance and so forth. maybe it's the wrong thing to do, but if i've got a feeling if you're going to start, you have to start now. maybe we can get a real scandal on any one of the leading democrats. scandal, the leading democrats haldeman echoes. now you're talking says nixon. so this too is nixon's legacy and his mark upon our world, a country divided clawing at itself as he did, and he did not recognize all of this until the end. but there's no scene in politics, law, art, or commerce to match that of august 9th, 1974, the tormented nixon standing in the east room pouring out his guts in a rambling plea. only in war assassinations do americans experience such mythic moments. no scene in a career of astonishiastonish spectacle was as memorable as nixon's farewell talk to the white house staff that friday morning. the actor met the moment, and may well have been the most raw, acutely painful and unforgettable speech in american political history. his daughter trisha recorded the scene. do not trip over wires. stand on name marker, reach for momma's hand, hold it, applause. daddy is speaking. people are letting tears run down their cheek must not look, must not think of that now she wrote in her diary. the real nixon was being revealed as only he could reveal himself by speaking from the heart, people could know, daddy, it was not too late. he tried one more time to tell them who he was, how lonely, how alone. no one will ever write a book probably about my mother, he said. well, i guess all you would say this about your mother. my mother was a saint, and i think of her two boys dying of tuberculosis, nursing four others in order that she could take care of my older brother and seeing each one of them die and when they died, it was like it was one of her own. she'll have no books written about her, but she was a saint. then came proof of his astonishing resilience. we think that when someone dear to us dies, we think that when we lose an election, we think that when we suffer defeat that all has ended, he said. not true. it's only a beginning always. the young must know it, the old must know it. it must always sustain us because greatness comes and you're really tested when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes because only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain. there was a faded doom about the man kissinger thought, men in the audience we waence wept andd came word, rich in self-knowledge purchased at a price, always remember others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself. dick and pat made their way out to the south lawn, walked down the long red carpet, shook hands with the vice president and climbed the steps of the presidential helicopter, army one. at the last, nixon turned and in grimacing gave one wave as if to ward off inquenchable grief and stretched his arms skyward flashing the trademark v for victory. army one lifted from the lawn, rose above the muggy capital, the national mall dimmed in a summer morning's haze. below remedius halls and corridors, pulsed with visionaries, and hustlers with dreams and scheming with avenuerous, ambition rivalry and purpose. the chopper soared over heroes with such american audacity, the awkward groesher's boy had presumed to join, come so near only to fail. it's so sad pat said so no one in particular. they spent the night the flight to california alone each in his or her cabin on air force one. the president had a cocktail. at noon somewhere over in missouri the resignation took effect. why nixon now? it's essential that we learn from nixon's parting words, today's hate and polarization are more than just political phenomena. they threaten in this 21st century world the american ideal, and that ideal is this, of course, that a self-governed people varied in national origin and faith and the color of their skins can still be like ronald reagan told us and as john winthrop praeeached to his fell pilgrims as they sailed towards massachusetts bay, a city upon a hill. that the new world beacon not only shines for others about such virtues as liberty or equality but demonstrates that in nations as diverse as ours, these values are achievable. that is the challenge americans face right now. if we lose this battle in this country with its wealth and sturdy institutions and deep abiding beliefs, and we surrender all the hard won gains we have made in equality of gender, race, sexual orientation, then it's difficult to see how other democracies resist hatred there. i would argue that that was the meaning of barack obama's nobel prize. obama hadn't done anything particularly wonderful to qualify for it except to win an election. it wasn't awarded to him. it was awarded to us. it was the world saying to us bravo, keep it up. you inspire us. keep being america. we were that people then, and we'll be that people again, but we have to work at it. american success is no done deal. we may be exceptional, but we're not predestined to succeed. the american experiment is just that, an experiment, and experiments can fail. dr. benjamin rush, signer of the declaration said after the revolution, nothing but the first act of the great drama has now closed, and john adams said we cannot guarantee success, but we can do something better. we can deserve it. our exceptionalism doesn't guarantee we'll always make the right choice and the price today of the wrong choice is steep. after writing three books i've been christened an historian now by the "new york times" no less, quite heavy stuff for an old newspaper man, and one thing that historians get to do is quote abraham lincoln. it's sort of like getting your union card. [ laughter ] in 1838 for seeing civil war, lincoln told his countrymen, quote, all the armies of europe, asia and africa combined with all the treasure of the earth with a bona part for their commander could not be force take a drink from the ohio river. if destruction be our lots we must ourselves be its author and finisher as a nation of free men, we will live through all time or die by suicide. nixon taught us that, teaches us that as well. why nixon now? it's only a beginning, always he said there in the east room on the day he relinquishedroom, one day he relinquished the presidency. i'll be invited to author at vanderbi vanderbilt, brandeis, washington college, magill, university of texas. it's reassuring having toured these campuses engaging in debate with my children's generations that the millennials had it figured out long before parkland. i saw their values are good, fair and generous. so our tanks, i believe, i submit, in the immediate future is to give them a chance to not tear ourselves apart, to not die by suicide or succumb to hatred. we rally, war, terrorist attacks, my generation proved that. an army of free men and women, an arsenal of democracy as lincoln warned the threat comes not from afar but others ourselves. others may hate you, but if you hate them, that's when you destroy yourself. that's the real answer to the question, why nixon now. so, we have some time for questions. i can go on forever. and his life is immensely rich. and we will have someone with a boom mic, so c-span can get everything down. here he is. [ applause ] >> did nixon ever have a friend? >> did nixon ever have a friend? he had a famous friend, a fellow named bb robozzo, they would get in the boat, and they would not say anything and come back two hours later and get off the boat. nixon valued him. nixon had this amazing brain. because he was so personally awkward, almost everything had to be rehearsed. he'd go through week-long rehearsals for his press conferences. there's a story i was today, after he had left the presidency, making his comeback, he brought a bunch of reporters and journal efforts and editors to his home in new jersey, after they sat around and had chinese food. he stood up and with no notes gave this amazing tour de force about the world situation, and the american political situation. and they were astonished. they were just amazed at this brain. one of the guys had to go to the bathroom, he went upstairs, as he was walking down the hall there was a table on the hall and on the table was one of nixon's famous legal pads. and there almost word for word was the speech that they had just heard which they thought was spontaneous at the table. so that was nixon's way of doing things. he would sit in an arm chair with his feet up on a hassock with legal pads. just tens of thousands of pages at the nixon library. what he wanted, he wanted quiet. his brother told me one of the things that nixon loved is the sea. i said, why didn't nixon love the beach so much. his brother said, ah, white noise. waves. create this barrier to everything else. that amazing brain could keep ticking. so his closest friend was probably pat, that was a rocky relationship over the years. his relationship with his daughters was sometimes strained. he was just an awkward human being, somewhat peculiar. henry kesissinger makes the argument that a large allegiance for nixon, they feel sorry for him, they emphasize for him. i have to say, as i wrote the book, i did, too. >> as far as -- now you can compare nixon answed trump. >> how would i compare the moral character of nixon and trump? i think it's safe to say now that we're not going to see a comparative record of accomplishment at the end of the trump years, unless something miraculous happens in the next year that we don't know about. again, as i wrote the book, there are always surprises that come to you. nd the surprise to me was just this amazing record of accomplishment that nixon left behind. and as somebody said in my speech, nixon was all about expedience. there really was not too much that he had locked in his heart as a guiding principle. b pat buchanan said that ideology buffet of the nixon administration was like a smorgasbord. pick a little conservative here. a little liberal here. it didn't make a difference. he was not an ideologue. but the grade moral characteristic that nixon had, i think, is this amazing devotion to peace. he had been this young soldier in world war ii, young sailor in world war ii. served in the same -- believe this, same south pacific battlefield on sullivan islands as ben mccarthy, all knew each other, a couple miles of each other. he came home like many guys of world war ii, determined that they were going to stop it happening again. and he had a great devotion to his mother who was a quaker. so he was determined, his great moral characteristic that he had was his drive for peace. and i don't see it in the current president. but it's early yet. presidents have a way of surprising us when the diaries and the books come out later. but nixon definitely wanted to bring home this chinese/moscow peace plan and lay it on his mother's grave and say, see, mom, see what i've done. sure. >> how could have such a flawed man with such a flawed character accomplish so much? >> he had -- how could such a flawed man with such a flawed character accomplish so far? if you think about his story, he was amazing. he comes back from war 1946, and nobody knows his name, except for a few back in orange county who decide that, we get some young serviceman. he'll be the sacrificial goat against the six-term congressman jerry voorhees. nixon goes out, the governor doesn't know him. the two senators don't know him "the new york times"s who no idea who he is. in six years, he's president of the united states. an astonishing rise. and eight years after that, he's running for president. so, he was smart. he was shrewd. he had that great ability, i think, to as i said, recognize the grievance in his audience. see it in himself and make that connection because they shared it. might not have been over the same thing. but that sort of feeling of resentment. and when he could, when he did focus his mind on something like -- what he called his structure of peace. he used to do this. he used to hold up his hand and he used to say, united states, russia, china, japan, europe. that's the structure of peace. that's the world. that's the way we keep the peace group. again, he said 20 years but kept it for 50. he did have vision. amazing resilience to come back. almost knocked from the ticket by eisenhower. comes back. loses to kennedy, comes back. loses the '62 election. gets elected by 500,000 votes. then goes on and wins one of the greatest landslides ever. plummets again in watergate. and reaches some kind of uneasy peace with himself, enough that people give him credit as an elder statesman in his later years. but there's just no holding him down. he just had that amazing grit. sure. sir. >> you obviously interviewed many people who dealt with him during his life. is there any one interview or one statement by one of these people that stands out to you, when you were doing research? >> is there any one statement or one interview that i did that stood out when i did the research? with all of my biographical characters there comes a moment where you see a shadow across the stage. you say, wait a minute, you walk over there and you follow him and you say that's him. it's finally -- i got a glimpse of the real him. that moment came when i interviewed his brother ed who was a geologist, many years younger than dick, and lived outside of seattle. but looked always the same as him. and carried many of the same family traits. and some of the same resentments. but we had this -- he must have been 84 or something at the tim time. we had this marvelous discussion and he said you want to get some lunch. i was saying, sure, do you a restaurant around here, i'll be glad to have the publisher pick it up. he said, come on, we go in the driveway, old pilots always have hot cars. we enter this pontiac and he zips out on the intestate going 80 miles an hour. he says, next exit, burger king. but jokes aside, that was the moment that i really got a sense for who did what as a young man. especially since the physical -- it was like i was talking to nixon himself. back there a little bit. >> what did eisenhower picni ki nixon and why did he keep him? >> why did eisenhower kick nixon and why did he keep him? >> eisenhower was -- maybe outside of franklin roosevelt or churchill, eisenhower was one of the great titans of world war ii. he comes home and wins the presidency. he's to tell by ald by advisers somebody young. california would be great. why don't we pick this young kid nixon. it was never really a love affair. it was more like an arranged marriage by the republican party. and i didn't really not like nixon as much as ike sort of ignored him because nixon was staff. eisenhower what europe. he nude what they were for, he was to take that telegram to that office over there. nixon having gotten this far, having these wonderful assignments like going out and picking up churchill. he was gaga. he wanted eisenhower's approval and he couldn't get it. that brought out a lot of nixon's worst traits. his nervousness, his drinking. and eisenhower then began to look at him like -- it made him uncomfortable to have him around. so given the chance to get rid of him after four years, eisenhower tried, but nixon's base in the party was too strong. but even that was so unfair and ike had his heart attack in the first term. and nixon was -- if you were to write a script for how the president of the united states was to behave. richard nixon was there. if he had to go to talk to a cabinet officer, he went to their office. he never took over the oval office. he was respectful and diligent. eisenhower calls him out to the farm and says, thanks a lot, dick. how would you like to not be vice president next term? things like that. when you already have this fragile personality, that kind of thing drove him nuts. by then, ike kept him because nixon had the taft wing of the republican party, the conservative wing of the republican party was very strong behind nixon. nixon had the famous checker speech in 1952 and made a name for himself. in the end, eisenhower just didn't have the guts to kick him off the ticket. >> given the way he had to leave office, how did nixon enter act with presidents who came after him before he died? >> gimp the way he had to leave office, how did nixon interact with presidents who came after him? >> his advice was taken seriously on foreign affairs. not so much -- he liked to write these long memos and pass them around, about who's going to win the nomination next time out. stuff like that. and he was never that good at that. and george schultz told me he was never that good on foreign affairs either. but he had enough of a reputation that the presidents listened. reagan, of course, had known him going way back. and reagan was too smart of a man not to know that nixon thought he was stupid. so, reagan sort of took him with a grain of salt. george h.w. bush always thought that nixon had toyed with him. used him. and this amazing letter in george h.w. bush's letters to his sons talking about how nixon had underspoiled that beautiful white house. but they did talk to nixon. and it was at a crucial time, of course, because gov rbachev was there. and saying let's not get carried away. it wouldn't be prudent to get carried away. bush was an optimist, and baker was an optimist, and they wanted to figure out what was going to happen. and nixon was, no, no, gorbachev was another stalin and line lend he got into a match, saying bush was mishandling this important relationship. you remember the obituaries after george bush died, every single one of them was led by president bush who masterfully handled the fall of the iron curtain. so, nixon was wrong on that one. bill clinton talked to him a lot which was strange, considering that no two people could -- no two politicians could ever have been more opposite. and hillary, of course, had been on the staff of the judiciary committee that voted to impeach him. but clinton respect him and listened to him. and nixon was sort of -- he didn't despair about the fact that he didn't have a great deal of influence in his exile years. but he was a realist enough to know that he was not like -- at that point, he didn't even reach the class of kissinger who really did have all their ears and more input. >> later when you learned in all of the research, if you could interview richard nixon, what one question would you most like to ask him? >> what one question would i like to ask richard nixon if i interviewed him, other than why didn't you burn the tapes? i'm fascinated when i do biography, about the formative years. people say i write too much about the early life, rather than about the presidency. so, if i could, if i could take a walk with richard nixon, i'd probably just say, let me about the lemon farm. how did you feel when your father wouldn't get rid of the cow? you know, i'd try to get to that. arthur schlesinger who was the court historian left a marvelous selection at the new york public library of his diary and records. and he records these conversations with kissinger where he's saying to kissinger how can you work for such a man. and kissinger is saying, you have to understand this amazingly tortured shakespearean personality and you have to feel empathy for it. the thing that struck me, they're not happy with me because they didn't particularly like the book, the thing that struck me, the ones still around are still carrying the standard. there's such devotion and there's love and empathy. they understood this guy. they understand foood that he r above the twisted facets of his character. and still managed to do great things, including when a veritable democratic press was against him. if i could ever get richard nixon to talk about -- of course, he recognized it in himself, to address that question, that would be the one i'd ask him. some of those ladies in the back there. guys and ladies. go ahead. >> in the speech in 1968 -- the secret of '68 had been a secret for decades. why was that not vetted or broken during the early '70s, and -- >> so, the question is, given how awful the shinault affair was and the stakes that were played in '68, would he have lost in '72, if that had come out, and why didn't it come out? to answer the question directly, it's because lyndon johnson decided that if he let the country know three days before the election that this was going on, that not only would the country turn on nixon, possibly would turn on johnson, because johnson was bugging his opponent's campaign. and most definitely, it would turn on south vietnam for supposedly being our ally but snubbing us when we asked them to do this diplomatic chore on behalf of peace. so hubert humphrey news aknew a chose not to reveal it as well. it being washington it almost began to leak out. anna shinault wanted a really nice job with the nixon administration and never got it because she was radioactive. theodore wright writes about it. and little bits had come out, enough that when he has the famous interview with david frost, frost directly asks him did you know what anna shinault was doing? the big break comes when lady bird johnson brilliantly decides that full disclosure is the best thing she can do. so she opens everything in texas. all of the johnson tapes which are supposed to be sealed for 50 years are open. the x-files sealed for 50 years is now open. and lyndon johnson becomes a much more human character. vietnam begins to fade. they remember the civil war and civil rights act. and all of a sudden, you find lyndon johnson creeping up with openness. same thing happened with harry truman. his family opens all of the recordings and harry truman begins to climb. sadly, the nixons haven't done that so he's mired down in the low 20s in the low rankings of american presidents. but throughout all of this time, his tapes are sitting there like a ticking time bomb and his papers are there. finally, the nixon administration says we can't afford to store these papers anymore. let's give them to the government. i happen to be the guy in 2013, whatever it was, paging through as the great biographer robert carroll said turn every page came across halderman's notes. it was like one was watergate and the shinault. you know when you go to ocean city in summertime, as we did, you set up a card table and dump a devel1200 piece jigsaw puzzle. and on rainy days, everybody adds to the jigsaw puzzle. it was my lot to have found this piece and say that's the way history was written. >> i read about the vietnam war and i got the feeling that nixon used it as a campaign in 1970, is that correct? >> i had to -- of course, i had to address vietnam. the question is did nixon drag out the war for his own political purposes? and i really had to study it. and the best that can be said for nixon is that he and kissinger coldly, immediately identified vietnam as a backwater. for all of the lives being sent there was not as important as the great game of thrones that he was playing with beijing and with moscow. and that all he wanted to do is tamp it down. probably towards the end of his term, they did make some cold calculations as to, you know, when's the best time to announce that peace is at hand. when do we really need to make sacrifices? it's about a year and a half before the election, he and kissinger announce that the north vietnamese army will be able to stay in south vietnam as part of a peace deal. and, you know, i don't know why, but we americans never put two and two together and said, well, that's not peace, that's -- you know, that's a recipe for what happened. a complete catastrophe. but, you know, on the flip side, i think that being a historian is sort of humbling in that you think, people ask me what do you think historians 100 years or 50 years from now will think about blah, blah, blah. i think vietnam is fading already in historical importance whereas in this technological revolution that nixon spoke about and women's rights are so much more than what happened vietnam. kissinger's people will argue to this day that we bought time in those five years. and in that time, we allowed indonesia and korea, taiwan, japan to become the asian tigers and bring this structure of peace to the world. that, i'm sure, would be nixon's argument if he were alive today. but you have to ask, this is the question i finally came down to which is degaul had the same issue with algeria, he went on television and told the french people, we lost. not my fault, you just elected me. those guys screwed up. we're bringing the troops home. and we're going to figure out a way to get the algerians stuck with us home. and it took years to do it. there's no reason why nixon, the great visionary could see what was happening in beijing and in tokyo and in taiwan, could not have gone on television and said, this is a democratic war. johnson has totally screwed this up. we're bringing the troops home. because i cannot an objective historian who thinks that the deal that we ended up getting is anything but the deal we could have gotten in nixon's first year in office. that's it. anybody else? yep, in the back. >> it's impossible not to cringe when you hear some of the remarks from nixon regarding anti-sm anti-semiti anti-semitism, i'm just wondering if it's possible to reconcile people on the staff -- >> how do you reconcile the anti-semitic comments on the tapes with the fact that nixon employed people like kissinger. arthur burns was named federal reserve chairman. glenn garmon was a one time adviser. bill sapphire was his speechwriter. nixon sort of addresses that in the tapes and he does that in the case of gays, gay americans. he basically says if you're a pro-nixon gay america, and if you're pro-nixon jewish american, you're okay. i have no problem. it's their nature, of course. but what really drove him crazy was not so much -- i mean, it seems to me that the anti-semitism is something that came down to him from his father in particular and his time in rural southern california, where anti-semitism was quite prevalent. bob haldeman was anti-semitic with nixon. what he says are uglier. in nixon's case, expediency wins. and if you were valuable to him like kissinger, you know, it was something easily put aside, so it wasn't that deep, no matter how ugly the comments are. it wasn't that deep a hatred of jews that he could not use them to great effect and put them in the most powerful positions in the government and the economy. does that answer the question? yes. >> you talked a little bit about nixon and civility to reach across the aisle to accomplish his domestic agenda. i feel like we live in a time where nobody reaches across the aisle anymore. he obviously had an art to it. you spoke of his kind of friendship with moynahan. how deep did it go? how did he get his robust domestic agenda passed? and what have we lost? >> well sh, basically -- the question is, how did nixon reach across the aisle, and what has changed since then that keep us from -- that keeps us stuck in this polarized position politically. as i said, the republican party was split. there was a conservative wing of the republican party. but there was also this very liberal wing of the republic tan party at that time, hard as it seems to think of. nelson rockefeller. hugh scott from pennsylvania. had you lots and lots of moderate republicans. the civil rights act made it through the house of representatives on liberal democrats and liberal republican votes, outnumbering southern democrat conservative votes. so, there were already -- and that was during the lyndon johnson administration. so there were already these patterns of conservative republicans, half of the republican party joining with the southern democrats and being a conservative bloc. and outside of that, you had a tremendous amount of room for politicians, as you said, to reach across the aisle. this went up -- i worked at national journal maybe about ten years ago. and we did a survey every year of polarity. and when we first did the survey, there were about 10 or 12, 15 republicans who voted to the left of the most conservative democrat. and there were 10 or 12 or 15 democrats who voted to the right of the most liberal republican. and by the time i got around to doing it in the '90s, there were zero. it was just like -- you know, and there's lots of reasons for that. part of it was the civil rights and the effect that the civil rights movement had on the south. and the south becoming solid south for republicans. newt gingrich's brand of take no prisoners campaigning. the rise of fox news, seeing how to make a buck by dividing people. talk radio. i mean, there's many, many reasons. the guy that i'm working on now, my next book is going to be senator edward kennedy. this is a guy through all of his flaws was a master at reaching across the aisle. each into the '90s and early 2000s. so, it's not that it can't be done, i bet that if there was -- you know, just something that quee party republicans would forget or the talk show republicans would forget about, that there's enough reasonable republican smarts right now that they could easily pass a bill like on infrastructure or something. but everything gets turned into an us versus them. and it's going to take some kind of lightning bolt to sort of shatter that up. i believe, and i'm not smart enough to say what it's going to be. yes, ma'am. >> you talk about cambodia and the aftermath of that. >> question is about the invasion of cambodia. >> so, in 1970, having committed himself to a policy of a very slow withdrawal from vietnam, nixon and kissinger decide that they -- the south vietnamese will not be able to make it if the north vietnamese arrive and continue to operate with impunity along a strip of land along the cambodia border. this is something new. johnson had faced it. there had been some isolated bombing and some u.s. special ops missions into that area. but nothing like this decision by nixon to go ahead and send this out to the army. and with the american army along with them, crossing cambodia. he believed that this was a way to safe guard the organization and eventually get us out with peace with honor. most everybody, barry goldwater in the united states just saw oh, my god, we're invading another country. one of saddest bits of congressional testimony of henry kissinger i think in many ways were the hearings for secretary of state. but he was asked about what happened with cambodia. he said, well, you know, we just did not foresee that this would set a roll of dominos into motion and ending up with kamere ruche with power and led to "the killing fields." it's a chilling statement and all of the unintended consequences of your actions need to be factored in, not just -- i mean, you probably could have argued that george h.w. bush could have gotten that message before he invaded iraq. it's what rumsfeld used tole say, things that you don't know are the known unknowns, or whatever the phrase was. you always should be modest and humble about what you don't know, when you're making life and death decisions like that. in cambodia, yes, it did. i was a high school senior. and the campuses exploded. kent state happened. in the senate, you had the first few cutoffs of funds, resolutions. passing first the democratic caucus. and then moving towards passage in the senate, putting pressure on nixon so that he knows he has to cut a deal. and, of course, then, it also was so stressful that he makes his famous trip in the middle of the night to lincoln memorial. then he gets in a limousine up to capitol hill and with his valet, lets him bang the gavel. he meets with the cleaning ladies 6:00 in the morning and starts talking about his mother and the bible. and it's very scary to read bob haldeman's diary those days because they really thought the president of the united states was coming close to a nervous breakdown. sure, one more question, yes, sir. >> was there a president any other prominent figure that nixon particularly admired? >> yeah. that's interesting, presidents get to point -- was there another president nixon particularly admired. presidents get to put portraits up in -- i think it's in the cabinet room, to sort of signify who great presidents today admire. one was teddy roosevelt. of course, he was the man in the arena. nixon always saw him as the fighter in the arena. it was eisenhower. but the other wassed wi wioodro wilson. he was an admirer because what he sought to do with the league of nations. and nixon sought to draw admiration from woodrow all his life. on his tomb stone, i think i'll get it right. he says the greatest honor that history can bestow is the title peacemaker. that's what's written there. i urge you, if you happen to be in southern california, go see the museum, spectacular. they've redone the whole thing. they kept the objective tough watergate gallery and added all of these things about vietnam, and the domestic record. and it's really worth the trip. if you go to the national portrait gallery, the portrait by nixon chosen by -- what's the guy that did all of the paintings for the "saturday evening post." >> norman rockwell. >> norman rockwell, thank you. it's a famous painting this big and they've blown it up about 20 by 80. as you walk up the drive, there's nixon staring at rockwell. thank you very much for coming out, folks. [ applause ] all week, we're 15ing american history tv programs of a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span3. elections in history. american taartifacts. real america, the civil war, the presidency and special coverage about our nation's history. enjoy american history tv now and every weekend on c-span3. week nights this month, we're featuring book tv programs showcasing what's available every weekend on c-span 2. tonight, the theme is biographies. george packer talks about the life and career of diplomat richard holebin, and josh levin national editor at slate talks about linda taylor, a criminal whose ideas launched the idea of the welfare queen in united states. that's tonight at 8:30 eastern on c-span2. the house will be in order. >> for 40 years, c-span has been provided america unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court and public policy events from washington, d.c. and around the country. so, you can make up your own mind. created by cable in 1979. c-span is brought to you by your local cable or satellite provider. c-span, your unfiltered view of government. this month marks 45 years since president richard nixon resigned from office. american history tv continues now with geoff shepard, a principal deputy to the president's lead defense lawyer. he taught a class at temple university titled "watergate revisited: an insider's view "". and he talked about having to tra transcribe the tapes. this is an hour and a half.

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