Known as jack, author of the book Richard Nixon, a life. At the very end of your book in the footnotes, the source notes, you say this. He hoped that billy graham or Norman Vincent peele would handle the prayers this is not his funeral and doesnt want a catholic or jew to participate. this comes from a hold them in comments. What was that all about . John this was at his funeral. A californiaom background. When he was growing up, it was the outback. It was orange groves and hills and small towns in between. He grew up with a certain provincial bigotry. I think he got some of that from his father, who was an unlearned man. And over the years nixon learned , to deal with it because he had to. Nixon could do almost anything because he had to. So he had kissinger and others who were jewish, but in private, against his enemies who happened to be jewish, he could be very ugly. I think this was sort of a blanket statement. Holdeman had his own biases, but perhaps he took it down a little more severely than it sounds. Nixon definitely wanted a protestant, mainstream, White American burial. Brian i found the last 120 pages where there were source notes, not a part of the narrative in your book, some of the most interesting stuff. And anybody watching, usually people are older that watch is kind of a program they are going , to know who knew this to know who Richard Nixon was. I will not go through all of that. With that in mind, i want you to hear something that you know about from one of the tapes. First of all i will ask you did nixon had anow that taping system . John he and some others were the only ones. Brian this is holdeman and nixon talking in the oval office. Weve got it on the screen, so listen carefully. [indiscernible] brian they both know they are on tape. What in the world other talking about it for . John they knew they were on tape, but it would take far too much intellectual concentration and effort to talk all the time for the tape recorder. And he was confident that he could maintain control on it. He had been eisenhowers Vice President , and he had seen eisenhower and truman make the vast claims of executive privilege. Able toht he would be safeguard his tapes and papers forever. Nobody else would ever hear about them. The bad part about [please stand by] they are spewings. They are next in talking off the top of his head. Anytime someone tries to write something off of him, saying he was a decent president he did , things for the environment, presented a health care plan, he created the Environmental Protection agency. Then somebody is going to pull one of these tapes, and it will drop him back down on the list of president s. It is fantastic for a historian. We have two or three presidencies in a row where we have kennedy, johnson, and nixon caught on tape talking to their aides. We never had anything like this. Can you imagine if you had washington, hamilton and jefferson talking on tape in the cabinet . That they will forever be a hindrance to the the rehabilitation of Richard Nixon. Brian how long did you work on this book . John six years from start to publication. Brian why do you do it . John because i had a very smart editor at doubleday who looked five years into the future and said, i think that five years from now, people are going to be ready with all the new stuff coming out and this whole new audience of millennials and gen xers, they are going to be interested to find out who nixon is in one volume. It took me about five seconds to say yes. Brian in your acknowledgments in this book, which is a large book. Its got over 700 pages. John but the text is only 500. You can read it on the beach. It is aimed at people who want to read the story in a readable way. I had to do 200 pages of footnotes because i knew that historians, journalists, academics would insist to see where this stuff came from but also because of there is lots of interesting questions and subtleties that the average reader who wants to read a story about dick and pat are not going to get into a long discussion about the role of cia was in watergate, so i put that in footnotes. Acknowledgments, you say Stephen Ambrose took three volumes to tell a story of the 37th president. Then you list all that is new. How many books like this on the whole life of Richard Nixon have been written . John since the turnofthecentury, i think there is only one person who has tried to do a wellrounded biography. That was evan thomas. Everyone else wrote in the 1990s. They were good books. It was amazing how much they were able to get to the essence of the man and find revealing stuff. With several of them he cooperated. But with people like thom wicker he did not cooperate but they managed to have a good perspective on him. Brian this list, and you have a long list of things that have come since Stephen Ambrose, you say he did not have access to any but a few of the 3700 hours of white house tape recordings. How much of those did you listen to or read about . John fortunately, there are three or four massive books of transcripts and several places online where there are lots of transcripts. You dont have to listen to everything. Theres two ways to listen. One is to listen for greatest hits, and the others to pick a day and listen through. There were points where i picked a day and listened through. Spring of 1973, i think january first andd generally listened through april. The pentagon papers days, i did that month and december of 1971. Other than that i jumped around, because they are very hard to listen to. The ones on the telephone are crystal clear, but the ones in the executive office building, arehideaway office to there clattering cups, he murmurs and turns away from the microphone. Is just a bad technological setup, so it is much more frustrating. Brian again on the list, the 400 oral history interviews of nixons friends and family conducted by colleagues. When did that become public . John within the last two or three years. Brian what was unique about the oral histories . John it was great because they went out and talked to all of his old quaker relatives, all the old neighbors where he grew up on the farm, all the people who use the store in whittier that his father ran on the highway outside of town. So it was, i think, the hope is that the opening chapters capture the formation of his character. They are made far richer because of these oral histories. Is a huge treasure trove. Brian nixons grand jury testimony for the watergate case, how did that become public and when . John i think both were the result of court cases. I know the nixon one was. The alger hiss one is fantastic because it is a very contentious debate over whether he was a spy and what nixons motives were, and lots of questions about what happened in the progression. Here you have nixon and whitaker chambers, the person who accused alger hiss, and hiss saying exactly what they did over the previous six months. It was to me, contemporary testimony given under oath, about the best you are going to get as a historian. Far better than memoirs or reminiscences 20 years later. Brian what are your conclusions about alger hiss . John i think absolutely he was a spy. Brian were you a doubter . John i try to keep an open mind. I have a neighbor in kensington who wrote some of the books about the secret american eavesdropping case where they broke the russian code and found traces that showed that brian was it Allen Weinstein . John we can look it up. Brian another thing on the list, hr haldemans transcripts of Henry Kissingers white house telephone conversations, all of which have been since opened up to scholars. Did you use those two sources . John nixon is so wonderful to do as a biographer because there is nothing more revealing than haldemans diary, which he kept faithfully every night and wrote down almost everything of what nixon says and what his moves were during the day. Then henry kissinger, who has this brilliant analytical mind and is a wonderful writer, put together three volumes of memoirs almost immediately after he left government service. They are just magical sources. You could go back to them time and time again. Brian what book is this for you . John the third. Brian the first two were about . John i did a biography of speaker tip oneill and i did a biography of clearance darrell. I grew up in huntington, new york. Brian how long did you work for denver post . The denvered for post twice, each time five years stents. I came back and worked for the denver post in washington. Brian how long have you not worked for a newspaper . John since about 2003. The buyouts began and the newspaper industry began to crater. I decided that i would try to do this fulltime. Brian you make a particular point of the importance of the following comment that Richard Nixon made in the david frostnixon interviews in 1977. This is only 25 seconds. I dont go with the idea that what brought me down was a coup, conspiracy, etc. I brought myself down. I gave them a sword, and they stuck it in and twisted it with relish. I guess if i had been in their position, id have done the same thing. Brian how long did it take david frost to get to that point . John that was almost to the end of the interviews. Nixon opened up the interviews almost like a filibuster. I think the first question frost asked was about the tapes and the annan andinto nixon went on and on, and there was great frustration on the frost side that they werent pinning him down. They dont think theyre going to get to watergate. They didnt want to be filibustered the way he is done on vietnam. Frost is this wonderfully dramatic thing where he takes his clipboard and puts it down on the ground and says mr. President , im going to put this aside and just let you have a chance to Say Something that youre going to be very sorry if you dont say this and come to grips with what youve done to the american people. It is a great moment. Not as great as the final goodbye at the white house. That i think is one of the greatest moments of american political history, bar none. Brian did you ever meet him . John no i did not. The closest i ever got, he is driving down pennsylvania avenue an open top limousine waiting to the crowd, and all the sudden there are antiwar protesters. They start throwing cans and rocks and they had to button him back inside the limo and his presidency got off to a rocky start because of vietnam. I was there as a spectator in the crowd. That was the only time i ever saw him in person. Brian you have a lot in your book about frank nixon, his father. Where did you learn it . John mostly from the oral histories from whittier. There is another set of oral histories from California State University at fullerton. It is amazing how many times you come across the word belligerent, stubborn, rude. Just sounded to be a very unpleasant man. And Richard Nixon was a very sensitive guy and sensitive child. Had two brothers die as a youth. I think he, in some ways, was bruised by that dad. A fellow wrote a book called nixonland, and it talks about the very sturdy political trope that all politicians are trying to prove that they are as good their saintly mother thinks they are in the face of the skepticism of a father from whom they can never win approval. Brian how you go about doing this . Physically, where were you . John it was a nightmare. If i had gotten the contract three years earlier, i could have done all the research 30 minutes from my house. Everything was at the National Archives in maryland. In those three years before i got the contract, everything was packed up and moved to yorba linda, california to the nixon private library. Now it has become a National Archives library. I spent lots of time in the extendedstay motel in yorba linda. Brian of all the things you got access to, what either changed your mind or maybe biggest impact on you . John the biggest news nugget was finding you had Robert Carroll on here, he does a great series of books on Lyndon Johnson he gave me some great advice, which is turn every page. When you get what you think could be a good vein, keep going even though you are finding nothing great. Several years ago, i think about 2007, something nixon had fought for years to keep private, his personal and political papers from the campaign, were finally released to the public. If you go through them, they are page after page of haldeman saying this is how we are going to deal with the bumper stickers, this is what the polls show in alabama, this is where we are going to go next week. But if you keep turning the pages, as bob told me, i came across this section of notes that haldeman kept. What he used to do was sit down with nixon with a yellow pad, and everything nixon would tell him to do, haldeman would write it down. Then he would make the phone calls to put the machinery in operation, and it would put a big checkmark next to it when it was done. So here was a yellow pad where haldeman writes down, in the midst of the october 1968, we are going to monkeywrench Lyndon Johnsons peace initiative. This is something that had always been rumored and bits and pieces had come out over the years. Nixon denied it at the time to Lyndon Johnson and david frost and his biographers. Always said he never played any role in doing this. But in fact, he had used a gobetween, a campaign aide, and had her communicate to the south vietnamese they would get a better deal if they held back from the peace process, and he got elected. He did, he got elected and the war went on. He probably went too far there to leave the impression the war would not have gone on if he had nt done this. We dont know that. But certainly lbj thought there was a decent chance that a peace deal was possible. Whatever nixon did to disrupt it, i make the argument that this was far worse than watergate given the great loss of life that followed. Brian in your sources, you say wanted the job and didnt get it. Where did you find that . John there is a whole section of not just haldemans scrawled notes, but also it shows the degree of selfconsciousness because haldeman had collected all that stuff together. There were memos and timeslips showing the number of phone calls that went back and forth between the Nixon Campaign and anna, and it was all nicely put aside and nixons lawyers make sure we didnt see it. Brian this is a lot of personal stuff, and i found it new. But this is one from historian Erwin Gillman. You say positive things about as oneor Erwin Gillman of the most foremost authorities on Richard Nixon. Who is he . John he is this wonderful man who has taken it upon himself to write Richard Nixons history in government and politics starting with a book called the contender. He just did a book called the apprentice and the president , about nixons Vice President years. He has probably gone through youd asked me how many pages ive gone through, hes probably gone through three or more times that i did. He knows the collection at yorba linda backward and forward. He is a great help to me and other nixon authors who are invariably told, why dont you ask him where that stuff is . We do, and he helps us. Brian where would you put him on the list of people who have done books on Richard Nixon . John he fulfills his goal, which is to chronicle all the way through the end of the presidency, i think this would be comparable to karros work. Brian this is from his book the presidency and the apprentice. This goes back to the 1950s. He notes nixon was taking a three tranquilizers during the stimulant that could elevate mood in the two psychic dependence. During the evening he had two or three drinks. Before going to sleep he took a potentially addictive drug for those who had trouble sleeping. He was also prescribed the barbiturate seconal for depression, sleeplessness, and fatigue. That is heavy stuff. John he was a very tightly wound guy. In the 1950s, he was treated rather badly by eisenhower. He was always worried. His rise was so quick. He went from nobody to a vice presidency in six years and he ranoverwhelmed by it and into this huge battle between eisenhower and joe mccarthy. Ing that heurprise took to selfmedicating himself or going to the doctors when he had the estimates of tension and being prescribed these medicines. On the other hand, if you are remembering the famous Jackson Suzanne novel valley of the the 1950s, this is what americans did. They took a lot of pills and they drank a lot. All the president s before nixon were proud of their ability to drink or make a cocktail. Drinking as the use of tranquilizers and sleeping pills is much more, as, now as the antianxiety drug are today. Brian at what point in the process it did you write all the source notes . John i keep making the same mistake, which is not doing them while i write the book. I have to dig back through the files. I think ive done enough on a and i realize i have to go back because i didnt get the exact date right. Each time i get a little bit better at it. The next book, i swear im going to have them all done when the text is done. Brian it seems to me that this was unusual, that they were more narrative than normal and longer than normal. Were you aware of that when you were writing them . John i like that, and i have a direct editor who encouragese to do that. She likes that. It is for people who like the whats the phrase . The extra taste after you finish the book. You can go back in there and find more about the cia and watergate and nixons father. It fills up stuff without blocking the narrative. Brian to the reports nixon was fortifying himself with liquor that fall, is the daughter julie is this. The drinking rumors were perhaps the most persistent because it seemed he was drinking a little more than ever before, but at dinner time, when he was trying to unwind, he still adhered to his selfimposed code on no alcohol when he was attending receptions or dinners, nor did he drink during the day. You go on to this. On october 11, he said the switchboard just got a call from 10 downing street to inquire whether the president wo