>> they were always very welcoming to me. and i have to tell you that publishers and authors do all kinds of sorts of things to be able to speak at this marvelous place. and it was lovely and as david said, brad and melissa had carried on the wondrous tradition that began with the energy and ingenuity. and they are keeping going and tonight is a testimony to the job that they do and the reverend that they did for books that we all share. richard nixon is a hard man to let go of. [laughter] i first remember him as a child in a black-and-white fuzzy television, seeing this odd man. he was on the ticket with general eisenhower. there was some problem of taking money from this secret funds. he was blaming his daughter's dog. and i thought, isn't he interesting. well, he never stopped being interesting. richard nixon was never boring. and if david mentioned, he was probably as interesting in his after presidency as he was during his presidency. i chronicled in the book, beginning when spiro agnew got into some trouble. and i said to my editor at the new yorker that the legendary william shah said what do you think of writing next. i said, i don't know. i think that we will write something about changing vice presidents and presidents within a year. this was back in 1973. we agreed that i would write a journal, not a diary, but we would interpret it and talk about it. and we knew where it was going. as we said at the time, we don't know how to change vice presidents. we didn't know how to do anything. we didn't know how to change vice presidents, we didn't know how to impeach a president, we didn't know how to get another president, it was all kind of made up as we went along. and the loose way that the word impeachment is tossed around is disconcerting. i have so much to talk about, so we might have to get to the later. but if there is such a thing, the way that richard nixon was almost impeach was really the model, a change from the center, it was bipartisan and it was a very fair and methodical way. so richard nixon had no choice finally but to resign. he held out and he held out and the republican senators and to conduct the trial. they went to get this thing over with and they wanted gerald ford in there before the election. so we held this iconic goodbye as he ran into the helicopter to go to san clemente, his western white house where he would retire and never be heard from again. and so we thought. well, that is not the nixon that i know. when he got to california he was understandably deeply depressed. he had worked for decades to get to the highest place that he possibly could that anyone can in his country, politically. and it was a dog on smash. and he had done a fair amount to bring it on. but he always believed that people were out to get him which is what really brought about his downfall and this became a big problem for him. he was depressed. he was not well. he had a trip that he took toward the end. but he was not going to give up. he had never given up all his life. he had been seen as lesser and lower than others. he was poor. his family was dysfunctional. there was no word back then about this, but they were a dysfunctional family. but they admired the constitution. he had been down upon as a kid, he read a lot and he was not popular. he never really had friends. in a strange person to go into politics, but he was determined about everything. so he was determined that this would not be the end of richard nixon. no, no, he was going to work his way back into respectability. to you can imagine that this was a situation that sort of crush most people and so he drew up a plan. he always had a plan. and they chew up a plan called wizards. this was supposed to be the resurgence of him as a statesman. he was smart enough to know that how do you get to be a statesman. well, people are going to listen to you on foreign policy and not just education or environment, there are issues for him. they had great triumphs with the soviet union and the opening to china and china was really the one dearest to his heart. and so he began to make speeches and he began to take trips and he went to china and he issued pronouncements as if he were still presidents or he thought he was and he never quite really changed. and then of course deleted to the press and it would be in the papers and he had the famous interviews with david frost, which were not as per trade. you can look it up and take that apart. they just lucked out a few words that were inconvenient to the story. and then he began to get bored and san clemente. he moved to new york where he lost the california governorship and the presidency in 1960 and everybody thought, well, he's gone. but he was never gone. he was so much fun. and he was so interesting. in any event he moved to new york and he and pat nixon, she was thrilled to be out of politics at last. and they bought a brownstone. and they had been living at various co-ops and so forth. and he would have contact with the bankers and publishers and whatever. and this was just in the last two years that we discovered during his presidency, which i found was interest them. so he would have these dinners and everything was clockwork. at 7:00 o'clock he met people at the front door and they went upstairs and he really prided himself on the dry martinis that he made. this was not a man that was good at small talk him up but he chatted away. the house will run up in chinese the core and the appetizers were chinese. the waiters were chinese. the dinner was chinese. and then after dinner they would go upstairs and it wasn't organized subject at dinner and then they would go upstairs and there would be some were chatting and nixon would look up at 10:30 p.m., he would look of a clock and say, oh, it's 10:30 p.m., and i promise that i would hit david cohen to the house of prostitution by 11:00 o'clock. so everyone new to it. but these individuals were all over new york and they all wanted to come. and so he became a celebrity. and after a while he talked about the atmosphere for his grandchildren, on whom he dealt it. and there was another generation to cultivate. so he had a series of dinners in saddle river where roger stone, he was an operative who invited journalists and he could be very impressive. he spoke just with a microphone and he talked about foreign leaders he had known and everyone was very impressed. and he had something that he just sort of love. henry kissinger sort of choked as he gave this little talk. bob dole had a tear coming down his eyes and he bob dole had been asked, would you like him to make an appearance in kansas and bob dole said a flyover would do. [laughter] and so nixon would have seen straight through these guys. he knew that kissinger was bad mouthing him and he understood everything that was going on and he was on to them. but he would've been pleased with this. and i have to say that i kind of miss him because he was so interesting. so why did i write this journal in the first place? per spoke to mr. shaw in the bathroom, he had this idea for keeping the journal at the time. and we didn't know what was going. so we came back to washington and this is also why we are here again. my mentor at the time, john gartner came to me and said elizabeth, write it so that four years from now people will know what it was like then. it cannot be recaptured. and i don't know that i wrote it any differently with them in mind. i didn't know whether i would be around him for in 40 years. but it does happen that in order years from now this is not an anniversary book and the book was out of print. and so i wrote to peter mayer of the press and i had a very distinguished book list and he wrote back and said yes, we are going to reissue the book in hardback. well, my heart skipped. and then i said, welcome i will write an afterward to clear things up. and it was a 10,000 word addition, part of which i told you. and i also look back on what was watergate? with all due respect it wasn't to reporters doing outstanding reporting. it wasn't petty crimes or a weekend. the break-in that was caught, and i learned this as i was doing my reporting many years later, it was actually the fourth attempt of the burglars to get into watergate. the first time they planned a grand dinner inside and they didn't get up to the building and there is just one thing, one thing led to another and they ended up there that night. so the next time they went out and they got their but they didn't have any equipment to pick the lock. so one of the burglars was back in miami and got a good lock pick and they came in and they actually got in over the memorial day weekend. but as is often the case, they screwed it up and they put the tap on the wrong phone and the pictures were all blurred heard one of the burglars took this to john mitchell, the former attorney general that was then head of the committee to reelect the president. and mitchell reportedly said that go back and get better pictures and fix the tap. then they went in and they were caught. and so when you think about watergate, we think about this. we had a white house that when the president came in with a lot of people he hated, they hired this bunch of strange people end his first job was to track ted kennedy because he thought that ted kennedy would be his opponent in 1972 and he learned to get the goods on him. always willing to get a good on people. the main person he wanted to get the goods on was daniel ellsberg who had leaked the pentagon papers. kissinger was very worked up about this and had gotten nixon worked up. and there was actually then committed the most dangerous. he was far more concerned about having been found out then the watergate break-in. and the plumbers were looking for leaks and they went out to california and they raided the offers of daniel ellsberg's psychiatrist. so imagine that. and there was just one problem. they broke nok and they had their picture taken and they were so proud in front of the doctor's office door. and they were using cia equipment and cameras. the cia got these pictures and said, this is a violation of the fourth amendment beyond anything we can imagine. that is what the cover-up was really about. and fortunately for the country, the plumbers must have everything they did and we would've been in far deeper trouble. and that was just an amazing time, things were coming at you all the time. with all due respect it would've been total chaos in some ways. we have the morning paper and we've had the morning papers and the evening news. and you won't believe what we just heard and it was just like that all the time. there was the famous saturday night and i was actually on a television program at the time and we were sitting there and it was like banana republic, the president has ordered this and that, the chinese general to fire archibald cox and he has refused and he has been hired. and so he refused and he was fired. so this went on through the night and the bulletins were coming in. and it was banana republic. it was very disturbing. downtown san diego. the fbi surrounded headquarters of the often and so it was kind of crazy. and so we just never knew what was coming next. i did a reflection on the freighter about what kind of people were these and how did this happen and i would say we didn't have the time to even think about that then. i tried to and i had various reflections through the book about what are we to draw from this and what kind of country is this and how can this be. and i said that too much is going on to put these things through. we are absorbing events one after the other and trying to prepare ourselves for a bigger struggle to come. so the administration said to me that the story of the nixon admin at region is those who were in over their heads. and that does not explain it. it was a fanatic quality and the weaving together of their public policy and piety which may have deceived even then. and they cannot escape the thought that the president set the tone and my feeling throughout this is that you can look at many situations and say, well, you don't have to do talk about who knew what when. how did this come about. and one cannot escape the thought that the president said that his own. a man with a striking amount of connections, he seems to have gone through life as if in constant combat. confusing legitimate opposition with vendetta. most of us have an inner jury, those whose judgment we trust and who we count on to level with the. nixon does not seem to have had an inner jury. he was also very interesting but very strange. just to give you a flavor of what it was like to try to follow him and see what he's trying to tell us, there was a rather famous event or he spoke to a group of editors and just to give you a sense of the language of this, david told me when to pull the plug. we were in this disclosure stage and we talked about how the break-in was june 17 and nixon came back from florida where he also had a place near his one friend. and he came back and we know that he called john mitchell. but this is when the cover-up began. but we didn't quite know that then because the transcripts didn't come out until later that summer. and it told us a lot, but there was a lot more to come in the last couple of years. and tonight he said that he did call them in order to cheer him up after watergate. and he goes into detail and he talks about how there were 18 and a half minutes missing and they tried to pin it on his secretary, rose mary woods and it didn't work, she couldn't do it. in the end it was nixon at camp david and erasing 18.5 minutes from that day with the cover-up. and i put that all together later. and so we are further and further from the point and they explain these little things that they had. this little pill box on my desk, he said it was nixon who started this and i remember them saying that we should all do this and we should put the flag decals on our cars, don't let them take that with us. and so they had appropriated that symbol to this day. so he said that president johnson had much matter material and there had been reports about it. and he said i am not criticizing , far be it for me from me to do a thing like that, that would be wrong. and the conversations with mitchell didn't exist and he said it was one of the great disappointments because i wanted the evidence out. he said the plumbers were established that were endangering national security and senator baker agreed. when asked what they were doing, they were critiquing the johnson administration and of course it raise questions about the vietnam war and kissinger continued for about five years and then in the end i got about the same deal when they first came in. when asked how watergate could happen, the president replied 72 was a very busy year and the measurements have been taken in this trip to the south and he said the backup plane hadn't been brought down so they had used as much fuel at the time. he asked if it went down then they don't have to impeach me. and so he talked about the vice president, which he had held out from the government and then he said i want to say this to the television audience. i've made my mistakes. i have never profited from public service and i have earned every cent and in all my years i have never obstructed justice. then came the famous immortal line that we welcome this kind of thing that people have to know whether or not their president is a crook. well, i am not a crook. now, this is the president of the united states. and when you remember dignity, it appeared at times to be funny but we didn't know that some people's phones were tapped. some journalists phones were tapped. a friend of mine learned that her very intimate conversations with her close friends were being listened to at the justice department or in the right situation of the white house. the paper hadn't come and they said that they took the papers and nothing became preposterous because it was all preposterous but also scary. the president suggested that they blow up the brookings institution because he believed and he was told by these individuals that some papers left over from the pentagon papers are still there and they should go in there and get those papers. the president suggested this that they blow up the bookings institution. so someone tried to top it. but that was rare. and then we also have a president who drink a lot of the time. slur his words and he was also on a medication that was really for convulsions and it was not meant for depression. but suddenly they were given him this for depression. and it enhances the effects of alcoholism. he would pick up the phone at 3:00 a.m. and called david cohen and he would say fire everyone on this's floor of the state department. and he would say that is not appealable. but it was up to people like him in such folks to decide whether or not to carry out these orders, which was a scary thing and we didn't know it at the time. and as i told you i have a passion about the subject of impeachment and it is turned around so easily now and it is so very dangerous and it's a very serious business and serious people went about it seriously. he would have been impeached by the house, but some people were so afraid and he still had a following. he was not an easily dismissed figure. but he had a substantial following and republicans are very torn and they wanted him out of there. and they also didn't want the followers to be coming at them for reelection. and so they were saying where is the smoking gun. i happen to hate the concept of a smoking gun because that simplifies it. and there was a whole array of things. but this one thing was found that shows him ordering obstruction of justice and that gave the republican senators excuse to say that you have to go, because they didn't want to deal with it any longer. so what is the moral of the story? the moral of the story is watch out. we had several occasions when distinguished novelist had said oh, there is a new nixon. but there was not. and so reading the stories with some care is important. we had some reforms that stayed with us and some that did not but there was campaign finance on the agenda. many of the things we were involved in and i have a passion for the subject and wanted to keep the book alive. i hope you and your children to read it. those that have no idea what happened during the ordinary time. the constitution was truly at stake. and i hope if you've read it before that you would enjoy it again. i found myself shrieking and laughing as i read it again. and i hope that i've made some little contribution to history and to your children's understanding of our history. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, elizabeth. you helped us from generation to generation and this is perfect for lots of reasons. we will begin the question and answer period. so just go to the microphone and if you feel comfortable, please say your name. elizabeth will then begin to answer your questions. >> don't be shy. >> tom hughes, don't you have a question? you always have a question. [laughter] >> hello, my name is gregory and i'm from the caribbean. i'm from a different part of the world. the most important thing is do you believe based on her own experiences that what happened to nixon and while reagan could also basically potentially result in impeaching him. >> iran-contra. >> yes, but it is an important question here. a constitutional question, in my opinion. do you believe that watergate might potentially show that there are problems with the u.s. constitution that may be there is too much power within office of the president and if you have people there surrounding the president, that things can get under control of it parliamentary system and so i was wondering if maybe it's possible that you could talk about that and what you feel about that. >> i thought about it a lot and i read about it as well. the founding fathers were pretty smart men, but there is a lot they couldn't anticipate. and they certainly didn't spell out what they meant by impeachment, they said high crimes and misdemeanors. so we've spent a lot of time discussing this. and it was really a kind of heady constitutional discussion that went on. and you are right, i cobroadcasters with judy woodward on pbs and they made the decision that it was impeachment. but it was a serious problem and it off the books operation that went against a congressional law. a lot of it was a series of events and across the board and i'm often asked unexpectedly what about now and that this is nothing. we have had nothing remotely like it where the president himself condones not just criminal activities but this whole atmosphere of fear and vengeance and enemies. and there was nothing like it and i pray that there will be nothing like it and i think we just have to be sure to hold the president accountable and then get after the congress if they're not doing their job. especially on one particular issue that i don't have to even mention. because they're so obsessed with looking for that they sometimes end up finding it. so it should balance out in the end. the constitution works and it varies, but it works. i can't think of a better system and i'm also very concerned with ideas for tinkering with the constitution and that is a whole other subject. and we don't want to play tough politics with the first amendment or any of it. >> hello, my name is richard. you think that there's any truth to the thought when nixon had phlebitis that he was sort of not taking his own life, but not necessarily writing to live? >> know, nixon was not a quitter. and then he finished when he quit. and i am not a quitter. and he never quit. he was just down and out as a person could be when he landed in san clemente. imagine the shame and the horror of team driven out of office. but he didn't quit. so i have some admiration for that. it would have depressed most people and he just kept going. >> as you say, watergate did show that the constitution would be upheld and i also feel that watergate probably coming after the vietnam war also wore during the end of it, that it really took the respect for our institutions, which has been a long-running ring and the problem is government ideas that have been floating ever since. so in other words ronald reagan and the current republican party. >> that is a long way from there to here. richard nixon was probably the last republican president who believes that government can do good things. he was a liberal and he was a centrist kind of by circumstance and aimed at the conservative side but he had a democratic congress who is very strong on a number of issues and so he compromise. a lot got done domestically and he wasn't really interested. but no, i think the you can take watergate as you want to see a you can also see it as institutions work in the end and this man and this government, there were three articles of impeachment. the first was obstruction of justice which was a procedural thing in very serious. it was abuse of power. to me, that is where the story really was and it should be today in certain circumstances. not here, but maybe in certain states. but the administration of this person, these things went on and they were very careful with what they put in this abuse of power. and i think that we will be able to recognize it when we did. and so it doesn't discourage me. i didn't think it was a triumph because we all know things that need to be done and i always thought that gerald ford did the right thing and as he said, enough of watergate is enough, enough wallowing in watergate and the country had moveon. and i agree with that. and so we would've been able to pay attention to this and there was a very distinguished judicial friend who could've been held to this account and we could go on and on that way and i think it worked out kind of a way that it should. a lot of these people went to jail. most of them went to jail and they all went to jail. so there was an accountability that went on. >> hello, my name is ted and i was a college student back and i can still remember watching president nixon resign. i've read quite a few books on watergate and i just want to ask you as an author one of those books, is there anything that we don't know about watergate or anything that you think still needs to be answered that has not come out? >> i do not think so. because i think in the end it was the little details. and so what is the difference? the story is what nixon and the white house were doing and it was the intrigue of who was leaking to these good and hard-working reporters. but no, there's nothing that i'm curious about if some little detail that we don't know. we have enough to understand and i hope that is what this does. it follows the events and also reflects on them as they are happening. and then i go back to what was watergate, who was richard nixon, and i think that i got him at last. he was a rather complicated, very complicated person. but he was fascinating. and so i think that he is the most fascinating president that i know of and he was extraordinary. so no, i'm not a conspiracy type anyway. i think we have the big picture and that is the important picture. >> my name is jack hopkins and in chris buckley is wonderful phrase, i am a self-loathing republican. it happened during the watergate, and so forth. and therefore i was in a very tense position. but taking this microphone for two reasons. one is the compliment you. i think the you have dealt evenly with president nixon. he was an extremely complicated man and a wonderful intellect, by the way. i admire his mind tremendously, but he had a care or fun we all have to admit. the second thing is i have a lot of differences with bob and i hated his guts. however i am convinced that he was the man who stopped those idiotic crazy presidential vocal orders more than anything house and i think he gets credit for that. and he did what a good chief of staff should do. he disregarded his orders when necessary. thank you. >> not a lot was stopped after all. some of the middle of the night calls were, i think, and they would say what we do now? but except for the brookings institute order, i don't know of any during that time. there was a plan that was drawn up early and even j. edgar hoover thought that this was a bit much and he would not implement it. but bit by bit it was implemented. so they there were not a lot of people that understood boundaries around the place. >> as you know, i am like you and a watergate junkie. there are a lot of us around. i agree with you that it wasn't destined that nixon get caught and get taken out of office and it may not have happened except for a series of lucky happenstance is and having the right people at the right place at the right time. so i agree with you. but i'm still troubled about the gerald ford question. because the first one who tried to do something about stopping the watergate investigations was gerald ford when the first investigation started. and that is going to be my bottom-line question. do you think that he was -- that there was a quid pro quo and there was a deal somewhere along the line. i know many people have looked at it, including the board of directors of the profiles encourage award it had awarded that honor to gerald ford, they came out and decided what you said on the day that he help the country avoid this fight. but do you think that there may be more that we don't know? >> i don't think so. the question is was there a deal and it was very much a question when ford pardoned nixon. had they made a quid pro quo. and there are many investigations of it. but nobody has found anything and ford, as president had bought before the subcommittee to testify on what had happened. gerald ford was picked, i believe, a lot of people were nominating themselves because he was safe and he was old gerald ford and he had been a critic of nixon and he was a decent guy, a decent man, a good guy from michigan and ohio, having a partiality for midwesterners. but he was no sparkling figure and i described the scene here in the white house when nixon was going to announce who is going to be his vice president after they got rid of spiro agnew for accepting cash and the vice presidential office from some contractors like that. so he was out. and i remember and i described the scene at as he was talking in sort of building it up and people stand up and applaud and i thought, there has to be a mistake. he must be confused and sure enough it with him. and he turned out to be just right for this. he was steady and he set the right tone and it was right to say let's put this behind us and keep going and there was a big discussion, a big argument as to whether or not he should be prosecuted. i don't know what would have been gained by that. i don't know how the man could've been shamed anymore. but his impeachment was closing in on him and he said some of the greatest quotes from jail. but i don't think there was anything there or towards that. >> i just wondered if you had a theory on why nixon was so paranoid. >> i stayed away from that kind of battle here and it just began very early, he felt that people were looking down on him and he was resentful. his family and his father kept talking about the various businesses. and it was very difficult for him to win her approval even after he became president, i think she finally said something nice. he had two brothers who died and she was focusing on them. so who's to know what happened. he grew up presenting and he didn't know when to stop. there was a wonderful soliloquy that he did after he went to san clemente. and he gets carried away and he realized he did it much better than i'm doing. so it was just so clearly there and he was very bigoted and i went back and read conversations with members of congress on what they wanted to do and this was a scary prospect. they said that we heard that lbj used kind of bad language, but he was a piker compared to nixon. and there was just a lot of crudeness that went on with the hatred of blacks and jews and things like that. the language is not fit to repeat. so it happened from a very early age and he got away with a willing people away from being his rivals and he just didn't know when to stop. >> first a story. many of you will remember a fellow by the name of harold carswell who was an appointee to the supreme court that was rejected because it was said that mediocrity is entitled to representation. and richard harris wrote a book in three articles for the new yorker and turned it into a book and it's sort of a case study of how he was defeated. everyone mentioned in that book in every organization mentioned in that book who oppose him was audited on their tax returns and that was under richard nixon and john calmly and the secretary of the treasury and that is indeed what happened. some of those organizations, the tax-exempt status was threatened and it is a wise example of how we move to vendetta and enemies. my question is this is also a remarkable time of great public service and going well beyond what was expected and people shared a lot about that. people want to know that there is such a thing as public service and outstanding public service. >> we don't know where it's going to come from. but i dedicated this version of the book to those who rose to the occasion and as the publishers put it on the copyright. but that was one of the most important things that happened here. there was a lot of fuss made over the urban committee hearings because sam talked constitutional law but he was a that of a ham. so he did show the country those who are populating the white house or running around and fixing material in the potomac river. he talked about some material that had been found. but it was when it got to the house at about very serious and very important and there was a relatively new chairman of the house judiciary committee and he was from newark and nobody could find anything and he was a very quiet man and modest. and frances o'brien was a very bright guy. i don't know really how they found each other. he lied and said he was 34. and he was really kind of the brains behind this thing. he had to find a council and there was a really sort of partisan staff left over from those who had been defeated. and he understood that this had to be a theme of nonpartisan that was there. so he and his brother john went out and they found the counsel for the committee who had been in the eisenhower justice department and the bobby kennedy justice department and he was a real hero but nobody would call him a flamethrower or partisan figure. and they understood that this had to come from the center and they have to be in to accept it and that is why the vietnam war and other things suggested to be part of this, they had as much trouble pushing aside those that wanted to go to the far right who could find no wrong with nixon. and then you have these murders that you really didn't know about and there was a man, and butler was one. and we were very serious. and he was a real conservative on the democratic side. and paul was very involved in this article as well and they were beforehand part of every figure, they had not done anything outstanding. they were just sort of plainspoken and they all rose and took it very seriously. and they reached a bipartisan agreement that the country accepted and i can tell you afterwards that i had dinner with one of these heroes clear up some questions for the books and they invited me to this cocktail party on the hell and it was a party and he started telling these stories about how people really wanted to get on the judiciary committee because they were such wonderful people and you could take such neat trips around the world. and so some of the best that went on would not be fit to repeat. but they were pretty normal people who when the occasion came, they really rose to it. this was true of the staff and it was a very complicated thing to keep under control. i can remember seeing in my mind's eye the committee and watching it on television. you may not remember. you didn't see any cameras because frances o'brien got the idea that he didn't want people to -- he wanted people to be right in there with the committee. he said, do you want to cover it, then do it through a hole in the wall. you're not going to be in the room. things like that most people don't think of. and mainly it was the character that came out. they all knew the gravity and it will show you that they were individuals who truly couldn't make up their mind. the deal was i wasn't going to write about until afterwards. but they were very serious to what is a crime, what is a high crime map what is a misdemeanor. what does that mean? you have to burglarize something or is it beyond that? what is accountability? this is a very serious set of questions. and it was sort of a model and impeachment. the stuff that goes on now just sort of got ruined when they talked about the impeachment with clinton and lying under oath and it was really too bad that this thing got out of control and was used so loosely. public servants, regular people and they made it happen and they help the country together while they did it. [applause]