Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion 20141025

Daughter. [applause] his daughter, and his son are in the audience and my mother and my uncle. We have these fine books that are comprised of 1500 pages and there is no overlap between the two because of the conceptual differences. The book by john dean, legendary watergate figure accountable to president nixon, the nixon defense, New York Times bestseller is an authoritative examination of the 1,000 or so conversations that were taped in the Nixon White House. The nixon tapes by douglas brinkley, they did not these books offer a you remarkable searing view of Richard Nixon and all of his ruthless pragmatism and pettiness and offered glimpses of the possibility of what could have been a great presidency had not been undone by his almost shakespearean problems. I turned this over to the authors and say a few words about the books and i will start with doug and luke. Thank you for being here. I am a professor at rice university. Luke teaches texas a m in history and there you go. This came about, luke and i grew up largely in a town called perrysburg go higher and near toledo and one was working on some other books, mainly a book on wall cronkite, if you want to find out what is on the nixon tapes you turn to luke as a resource because he has been listening for hours, years, a decade of transcribing these voluminous nixon tapes. What we try to do is highlight Foreign Policy because ehrlichman ran the domestic programs you might hear about the nixon years but nixon was hyper involved in Foreign Policy so our books focusing on 71, 72 and what occurs in those years there is domestic policy obviously that we include too but we only have a few minutes to say the gist of our book is about Henry Kissinger and his relationship to nixon in many ways and you can see in the book nick synapse love of china. Is a recognition in 72 that the trip we all remember when he went there and match with mao tse tung costs and the panda Bear Exchange and the walk on the wall and all of that, we are seeing what behindthescenes happened in that case, how nixon thought this was going to be a pet that moment but is mainly away our china policy to punish the soviet union. This is pretty much known by scholars that the amount of new details and listening to how nixon is being so diabolically pragmatic about everything jumps out of our books quite a bit. Theres a lot of cursing. The media loves to pick up that nixon moments and it raises them in our book. We are very conservative in a sense. We are trying to do a compendium of leading as Richard Nixon said. We are trying to get the tone and tenor of them. He was an all purpose in sulfur of all peoples of the world except the chinese. Go figure. It is important when you listen to tapes, people didnt know they were being taped. Cheri kissinger has no idea guys like luke and i are going to be hammering together a book like this and in fact theres a lot of paranoia of people in the Nixon White House, what is said about me on this case and what does nixons say when i leave the room and i will sell you to be fair to players of the nixon years, being a president , anybody else has to be an underling. Nixon isnt looking for a lip, isnt looking for people to say he wasnt right, isnt looking to be challenged. Only haldeman challenged him. It comes up well only because it is yes, boss, yes, sir, you got it and it is constantly trying to to tell the president in a sycophantic way everything he is doing is right. The other part of the book, the vietnam war, you cant get around it when you study this period. Looking at nixon using lets bomb them, lets bomb from the jesus out of them to show china we are not week. A lot of nixon continuing the war in vietnam into cambodia and fall, to show the chinese we did not hold it and it was on when using the bombing as a wedge and even say even if we lose the vietnam war, they will sing con that. This all comes across on the tapes and also recover the Foreign Policy lesser ones in china, the in the pakistani war. We have the president of the United States backing pakistan because they are great ally in trashing india over and over again because india is neutral or friends with the soviet union and so this is a seminal look at what we did at the foreignpolicy years, nato policy, adm and all of this are part of it too. Want to pick up from that . Most of the points, for me where i fit into this was a decade ago i decided what has been written on the nixon tapes, so many books over the years, talk about the tapes, watergate, the tapes released over 40 years and we sit here in 2014, 800 hours, the total number lbj made it, 700 to 800 hours havent been released so we continue to learn a lot of new things about Richard Nixon. There will be other big books like the ones youre interested in here today being written for many years into the future and what i did, my contribution is digitizing this and making it available to the public, digitizing all these real recordings ever made in the white house and putting them on a website, nixontakes. Org. Our book is down the middle. We just want to make these tapes available. Even with these big books, big nixon books published this past summer, 10 to 12 of the total tapes that have been transcribed or published. There is a long way to go in this and it is endlessly fascinating for someone who studies this because every day you learn something new, you learn something shocking, something you didnt know, and other areas of research. I joke sometimes my wife and i have all little baby at home. She heard Richard Nixons voice so much in the house she probably thinks it is one of grandfathers. And can we have no nixon today in the house . It doesnt feel like work. Is a lot of fun. For any other president we probably never will because president s since nixon learned the lesson that if you make the recordings they will be public one day. Even today president obama send a text message. In theory by statute they should be available for researchers one day in the National Archives. President s since nixon learned their lesson. We will never have a glimpse like this does not just a glimpse into nixon but a glimpse into the presidency, a glimpse into a period in American History that was terribly turbulent and after the 1960s. About nixon but more than nixon. The quicker side, the point of the nixon tapes, most of you know but it is worth reiterating their going back, and the lbj library and would listen to johnsons case talking on the phone, and everything is being picked up. If you listen to tapes you will hear glasses clinking or secret service guy coming and or helicopter, that is why it is so vast. Everything is fair and never have a record like that of a white house in real time as you do with these nixon tapes. I am the one on this panel who knows small microphones picked up my voice. I was cleaning my glasses which made me think about the fact that some of my friends have said to me you used to wear those round glasses either with the tortoise shell or non shell and people wont recognize you any more. There is greater true to is that. First i wear the reading classes going through l a x and guy comes up and does a conspicuous look at me. True story. Exactly what he said because i can never forget it. Didnt you used to be dick cheney . [laughter] let me ask this crowd how many of you people either watched the house impeachment inquiry or the Senate Watergate committee . We know your age. My book, one of the questions i had it can be addressed in this opening is the process i went through to assemble its and the first thing i discovered is nobody had catalogued the socalled watergate conversations. The National Archives have gone through all the tapes now and prepared a subject log. That is not a transcript but they are able to hear in most instances the voice of the person speaking and the subject they are addressing. At the time i did it they were not digitized. Today they are so i manually went through and extracted all the watergate conversations. I found roughly a thousand conversations. They run from five minute to five, almost one of the runs eight hours. Of all varying lengths. Once i had those i began the process of figuring out who may have transcribed them. I found the watergate Prosecutors Office did 80 tapes for the various trials and parts of their investigation. I found another 320 partial transcripts done by historian stanley cup here who brought the legal action could force the archives to release the tapes of little before they were prepared to do so. That was 400 tapes. The other 600 tapes i found i dont think anybody outside the National Archives has ever listened to them when they were preparing the subject lot said they contained a lot of new information. I also found the earlier release tapes that had personal information because one reason the archives has to go through the tapes is to remove National Security information and personal information, personal information being conversations with the daughters, julie and tricia and in rare instances they are recorded when talking about government business but as a rule, not. When i started through them i started transcribing myself and did a number of conversations working primarily with those who had done partial transcripts. For example the Watergate Special prosecutor, who did these transcripts . The 12 that were used in the trial were excellent. The rest were varying quality, and the wrong person speaking. So i had to go through and correct all of those. In the process i realized i cant do this. This is a big job so i hired a crew of grad students and was very fortunate in finding a former legal secretary who was working on her phd and archival science. We put braces on her daughter, she did believe it or not, 500 of the thousand conversations. She was remarkable. When i did them, i dont know if you did the analog copies or not. Paper tougher with the analog so i found in the u. K. A machine that i could take the referenced 8, put it in this little gadget i pled into a mac book row and digitized and 90 minute conversation in five minutes and once it is in digital form you can do some doctoring with it. It distorts the voices that you can also pick up things you might not otherwise pick the. We did a good job on the tapes. I told my editor i dont know which was more difficult, transcribing them or turning around and converting them to dialogue and narrative. They were both difficult. So that is generally the process. I told my wife along the way that the men in my family started using losing their hearing in their mid 70s where i am for. God forbid the last voice i hear is Richard Nixon. With that broad outline, let us go to our moderator who hasnt done nixon tapes but he certainly knows president ial history. Thank you. Let me start with a question to you. You point out in your book a common misconception of among the media and the public, which is that president nixon had prior knowledge or ordered the watergate breakin. There is no evidence he did. We do know that the burglars themselves, the operation was run by g. Gordon liddy, jim mcgregor signed off on the operation, perhaps approve or ordered it but how far up does it go . It is not all the way to nixon. John mitchell, the attorneygeneral, notes special counsel to the president , who else in the white house knew about the operation . You dont learn who actually approved until very late in the story. It hasnt happened to be on the tape but mitchell will actually admit to haldeman on march 28th, 1973, that he approved the plan in florida so we do know that. There is absolutely no evidence that Richard Nixon had advance knowledge of it. One of the interesting things i found in the early tapes in particular is that nixon is not well informed. Haldeman and ehrlichman do not share their full knowledge with him so even if he wanted to make decisions at that point, he didnt have the information to make the decision. I am not exactly at nixon apologist but i must say it was unfair to the president , they gave him a hint. They said there are avenues that are dangerous, the investigation goes down that avenue but they didnt explain that the white house for example is deeply involved in the breakin, daniel elsburgs Psychiatrist Office in the fall of 71 where hunt and liddy have done another bundle operation. Gordon liddy has portrayed himself in the post watergate year as a james bond figure that was hired by the Nixon White House. In fact the historical record shows he is not quite a Maxwell Smart [laughter] let me ask you a question. As a historian, as all you guys know following the watergate breakin the first line of defense you can hear on the tapes as memorializing johns book nixon is saying so they were trying to bug the democratic ad orders, who cares . Everybody but everybody. When nixon was running for governor in 62, a bug me in 1968 when i ran, lbj but his Vice President hubert humphrey. Is that true . Was everyone bugging everyone and if so, was the burglary a non event . Of berkeley was a very real attempt but it is an excellent question you are asking to get into the mind of nixon. Nixon liked hardball, blood letting politics and admired people that were tough. One moment to indicate he is saying, want to be known for is something kennedy sold this camelots mystique that he is an intellectual and beat man and all listed i want to be known for one thing, strong, confidence, kissinger said the president will be no overconfidence. I want to be known for guts. He never held against Lyndon Johnson if he was bugged by johnson because it showed johnson had guts and we have got to not forget the name j. Edgar hoover who was wiretapping everybody, bugging everyone so there was a culture of this going on to be sure, but to take it to the limits that the Nixon White House did, and to go in, the brookings institute, the watergate, to do it in such a sloppy fashion it becomes embarrassing and one of the things i took away from this as a historian is how can a man as brilliant as nixon, and he was brilliant, have such a dark side to him, such a blind spot, and achilles heel and the chip on nixons shoulders larger than the chip i have ever seen on an american major american politician. He was a major one. That is the question i set out to answer in my book. I really wanted to find out how somebody as intelligent as nixon, as politically savvy, let a bungled burglary destroy his presidency. The bottom line, absolutely when you go through these tapes, he is not as savvy, not as intelligent as you think. Where he is most articulate on the tapes is in areas of Foreign Policy. He is also surprisingly very articulate with regard to budgetary matters and finance. When you get him outside those areas he is stumbling, he is bundling, watergate itself is a cs of total miscalculations, totally seat of the pants decisions. Once he makes the decision he tries to make it the standard and often it is totally in factual but he will push to make this the fact of the matter and eventually this will bury him. As i talked with several people, others have recognized this. Nixon is not as savvy and able as we think he is and i think one of the things my book certainly should lead scholars to do is look at other areas of his presidency. John ehrlichman for example created the epa, Environmental Protection agency. Henry is really is a master at making the China Initiative a reality. Is it henry who does detente, these gentlemen can answer that better than i can. Nixon clearly had the ideas but he is not a good chief executive. He in fact is one of the worst i have ever seen. You also get a glimpse in your book of nixons peculiar morality, he talks at some length about homosexuality for example land on the one hand he views himself as very tolerant and says so, he says they cant help but, they were born that way, lets leave it alone but on the other hand he talks about how basically they marked the decline of every civilization that we know. Talk about how nixon reveals his own morality. That is a good example. So many sides of Richard Nixon. The tapes have come out fur a drink at a time a few of is this year and the next year might be a couple hundred more. Almost 4,000 hours recorded. Theres a lot of material that has to be released and when it comes out a trip at a time, sound bite at a time you might get you get one kind of nixon. When you listen to the tapes, a sufficient sample size of the tapes, not a few seconds but an hour, a full day, week or month, you see there are different types of Richard Nixons. When talking about domestic policy one hour he sounds like one kind of president. The next hour he is doing something else, talking about Foreign Policy or personal matters he sounds like a different person and when you hear the tapes you see how complex he is. Chuck paulson picking up on the last one invited a few years ago, said what made Richard Nixon and me so compatible was we shared the same school of thought when it came to politics. Chuck called it the knee in the groin school of politics. That draw out the worst of Richard Nixon. If you look at the broader art of nick and he is complicated. Sometimes you hear something, sounds like a good president in a conversation. Other times you hear something horrifying and and president ial. The example of homosexuality is a perfect example. On the one hand he says we cant persecute gay people, leave them alone, they are born that way. That was not a position of any National Political leader in the host 70s. To me it sounds like lady gaga single that came out a few years ago. So he is ahead of his time in some ways. Later in the same conversation and most people would stop at that point that they got the sound bite they want and move on and later in the same conversation you have a different Richard Nixon, blame them for the downfall of greek, roman and classical civilization, strong societies collapse due to corruption and the source of corruption is homosexuality advice and all these things. This is a perfect example of what the nixon tapes really are. You hear one thing and he will retract it a few minutes later. You are talking how complicated, we are going to open this up to questions. A line up to the microphone, please do so now. Relating to nick synapse complex character he is one individual who knew he was being taped, yet from time to time as it pertains to watergate theres a quality of him being aware, the only person in the room who is aware he is being taped but other times he sounds as unguarded as anyone else. When you learned that these unguarded confidential conversations have been taped and were about to enter the Public Domain how did you react . First of all, he clearly forgets he is being taped. It is obvious. This is a voice activated system. By that i mean what happened is there were three rooms where there was a room taping system and many more telephones and is clear he comes into the room and forgets the machine is going on. Only if he comes into the room, he wears every day what he puts in his pocket a small device that emanates a signal so the secret service, he is in the barbershop where the east room or the oval office or wherever he may be, the taping systems were set to only be triggered when he was in a given room where it was prearranged taping system so he forgets, no question about it. He never tells for example how his second chief of staff taping system, hague thinks there is a taping system where he has a switch where he was able to record certain people but not others. He is dumbfounded when he learns on july 16th, 73 from butterfield said there is this voice activated system. He thinks it is insane. Nixon asked to have the system removed in april. Haldeman agrees and talk some of of it, henry makes a lot of notes, record some conversations, you might want to have your own copy of what happened in china so there was a good National Security reason to keep some and you wants to get rid of the rest. Haldeman never gets around because he gets consumed in watergate. I am the one who happened to realize i was being taped and held the senate that fact. The question will be asked of Alex Butterfield is is dean says he was taped. Is that true . He said yes, it probably is true and the rest is history. The reason i thought i was being taped is on april 15th, if i go into the office that night i have been working with the prosecutor. I was open with my colleagues, working with the prosecutor and hired a lawyer and he starts asking a series of leading questions which were very unlike the norm of our sessions and in those questions he says at one point, i told you that it would be no problem to raise 1 million for these people. You was joking, didnt you . I didnt realize that but if you say so. Another point he gets up from his easy chair and goes to the corner of the office and this is the moment that happens. He says to me in a stage whisper i was foolish to talk to chuck colson about clemency, wasnt i . I said yes, that was probably an obstruction of justice. I decided at that moment he didnt want that on tape but he wanted the answer. I also found out that that april 15th tape which purportedly has disappeared because it never was triggered by a second machine on april 15th to del off, did exist. I will circulate the fire with 12 other questions you dont want to answer. Thank you. Roger, come and take the answer please. Just as Lyndon Johnson did not kill jfk i did not order the watergate breakin. No one could have been more amazed the ninth tried to turn off on two occasions i know you like to write books of fiction. That is fine. I move u. S. To the fiction section in barnes and noble. Everyone who has read your book told me it is a good book of fiction. I like to deal with facts. Ideal with primary sources, not secondary sources. If and maybe when we go to court we wi i welcome that opportunity because truth is the ultimate defense. On these revisionist i am harold denton, i want to ask mr. Dean if you could comment on your involvement or your knowledge of the highlevel meetings that occurred and the people who attended those meetings that led up to the war on drugs and the Operation Intercept in el paso. I had absolutely none. No knowledge of that . None. None whatsoever. Do you have an opinion of what occurred . Buried the letters and newspaper you dont know the causes of the war on drugs. I do not. If you dont mind lets move on. Sorry i cant help you. I must say in post watergate are was running everything. I have always thought one of the more interesting episode of the Nixon Administration was the Nixon Administrations out reach if you want to call it that to the south vietnamese government in 1968 to sabotage the peace talks. I am wondering if such a charge had been made by an impeachment committee, what would the defense would have the tape showed about these charges . Nixon lbj was absolutely convinced nixon destroyed the 68 peace treaty. Good question and something we are learning about today. At the lbj library there are files on this subject that the public is welcome to look and see the actual records, intelligence cables, records from the lbj white house, concerns the lbj administration had about the Nixon Campaign. The facts as i understand that is there was contact between the Nixon Campaign and the south vietnamese government in the 68 election period. We dont know nixons exact involvement. John nicks was the liaison for this. There was contact, we dont know what came of it. As far as the nixon tapes go the best nixon tape we have about this, the name that is mentioned the most about this was in the oval office and it was recorded on nixons taping system in spring of 1971 and she came in to give a report of a recent trip she had taken to Southeast Asia and in that meeting it is Henry Kissinger, nixon and her, nobody else, no takers and in the meeting she basically asks for a job. You, wants to be a president s special emissary. What i come away with these these are audio recordings. They are not the. We cant see what notes they have in front of them. We can see their facial expressions to each other when theyre talking about something but i come when listening to the audio as they dont trust her. She asks for a dog and they dont give it to her. She wants special status as a president emissary and doesnt receive that but at the same time they talked to her. You still friendly, they get information from her so i think there was some contact with the are not enough records to say it was treason or anything like that or even that nixon was directly involved but it is a good question. We are still learning more about it. Very briefly we all want some people ask when you do a project why didnt nixon turned these tapes. A very common question and there is not one definitive answer but he really thought all of this was going to work in his benefit. He was going to own the state and go back to san clemente and write memoirs and somebody disputed something he would have the trump card to say this is what you really said. We forget he grew up quite poor and his whole life was of our ratio out there making it to the top. This was his going to be their nest egg i believe but the fact that he didnt get rid of them is a curiosity. John might have of their insights into that. I have the unique job of getting two different law firms. One in new york and one in california that worked on his estate plan, something the white House Counsel would not do today. The white House Counsel has been designated as somebody who represents the office of the president , not the president. Those assignments would never have gone to an outside counsel but ive learned a lot of his thinking and one of the thoughts he had was that he would do what humphrey and johnson have done and the fact was working on special legislation to do just that because some abuses resulted in the irs taking away the privilege of using the contribution of papers Tax Deductions and he hoped to have all of his post president ial income protected with a very substantial Tax Deduction which would have included the tapes. I didnt know of the tapes, they were certainly included in the language he made sure was in his documents. We have time for one more question and the others would like to make a brief closing remark too. Go ahead. Days and weeks and cements of endless entertainment in the 70s. And republicans too. My question is dick cavett and several of you on this panel mentioned you thought dick nixon was so brilliant. What is the evidence . That is exactly what i said. There is no evidence. You dont make it to the top of the mountain with a great amount of cutting and luck and persistence and he comes off as well read in a certain degree on churchill, his historical analogies analyses of the battle of the bulge or bismarck, i dont think he was an intellectual, i dont sing he was dumb and at one point he even says a lot of president s are smarter than me. I will never be known as an intellect and also one that were dumber is than me. That is probably fair. He was not intellectually dumb but he was morally bankrupt in many ways. That corrodes somebody. Gerald ford becomes be loved. He was not considered a great intellectual but his moral character was so high that everybody honors for today in a way they dont with nixon. Nixon would give great extemporaneous speeches. He would spend hours preparing for an extemporaneous speech. I would add one last thing. The tapes especially when you get away from watergate, looking at domestic policy and Foreign Policy nixon clearly likes ideas. He has people around him who bring new ideas into the oval office and those ideas challenge his own ideas. Pat moynihan in the Nixon White House, John Ehrlichman and as far from Richard Nixon on the political spectrum as you can get and proposing National Health care, war on cancer, of proposing the epa and the clean air and water act, opening relations with china, our cold war nemesis so i think regardless of your politics with the Richard Nixon was right or wrong four years later he like the ideas and you have a lot of that debate go on in the oval office and that is why the stakes are so fascinating because a lot of these ideas were open. Go ahead, sir. My question is for john dean. Given Richard Nixons and erratic brain wave, how did we ever get settled with spiro agnew as Vice President and did he have any role in the dirty tricks . The answer to the last part of your question is no. None whatsoever. Nixon kept him out of the office. I did discover the answer in my work to the first question. And end what i would like to say to we have the system . The system is still going out. What i would like to say is that when somebody tells the truth you find yourself in great peril. There will be many, many people who will be upset with that truth. Over the years, and particularly the tapes, i found a level of cooperation that shows nothing but the fact that i, as i told the senate, was under testifying, particularly about the president. I would also find cooperation corroboration for virtually Everything Else i said, but i try not to make the book about myself, but some of that in the footnotes, there were certain that tapes were certainly my salvation. As a professor teaching cold war history and president ial history, you cannot skip over the nixon years. It is a big