Democratic party for the presidency through espionage and sabotage that would be the weakest opponent of Richard Nixon. When we wrote that story, we thought, ah, now it makes sense. Now after 40 years it all makes much more sense about this huge criminal enterprise. And, ken, you have probably we were talking about this earlier. We have probably spent more hours listening to more president ial tapes than any human being in america. Youve been immersed in not just nixon tapes but lbj takes. Whats your take, leaving aside your 10yearold self, on what we knew now, what we know now about nixon that we didnt understand at the moment of his resignation . First off, i just want to talk about how honored and what a surreal experience it is for my former 10yearold self to be sitting here between woodward and bernstein talking about watergate with all of you. But that said, in between then and now, i have listened to an awful lot of tapes. And i think the biggest thing that ive learned about watergate from the tapes is that nixon had little choice but to launch a coverup. Once the watergate burglars who are rested and the investigation went to the socalled masterminds of that breakin, nixon had to obstruct the 2icx3r investigation because the investigation of the crimes would lead back to his own. The white house hired liddy to i be part of this secret illegal unconstitutional special Investigations Unit that nixon ran out of the white house. He had put it together, we now know, for illegal reasons. One to engineer a breakin at the brookings institution. The think tank not too far from here, to gather information about his enemies in the Antiwar Movement in the Democratic Party through illegal processes, through the grand jury investigations of the pentagon papers leak and use that information illegally to destroy his critics. So people say, you know, its not the crime. Its the coverup. Nixon had too much criminality to really allow any sort of investigation to go forward. And why dont you just take a moment to tell us about the chennault affair and what that was and the role that played in the criminality that resulted in watergate. Which is your new book. Which is for sale outside. Thank you, all. The chennault affair occurred during the closing days of the 1968 president ial campaign. A close race between nixon and Vice PresidentHubert Humphrey. Less than a week before election day, Lyndon Johnson ordered a halt to the bombing of the north vietnam. The public knew that in return for that, he would get the peace talks to begin involving the north vietnamese and the South Vietnamese will be able to take part in those. He had two military conditions as well, which were that the north vietnamese had to respect the Demilitarized Zone dividing vietnam and refrain from shelling civilian populations in South Vietnam. The chennault affair was the Nixon Campaigns attempt, a successful one, to make sure that those peace talks didnt start before election day. Nixon feared the beginning of peace talks would help Hubert Humphrey and possibly ruin nixons last chance at the presidency. So through a republican fundraiser named anna chennault, the Nixon Campaign transmitted messages to saigon saying, hold on, were going to win. Well do better by you once were elected. Lyndon johnson found out about what chennault was up to for a variety of reasons. The National Security agency was intercepting cables from the south Vietnamese Embassy to saigon. The cia had a bug in the president of South Vietnams office, and imagine that. What a surprise. When i said it a few years ago, there would be a few gasps. Now we know. And Lyndon Johnson had the fbi put a wiretap on the phone in the south Vietnamese Embassy. November 2nd, three days before the 1968 election, and chennault calls up the ambassador of South Vietnam and says, i have a message from my boss. Hold on. Were going to win. So johnson knows that the republicans are interfering with this peace talks but he doesnt have the goods on nixon. He calls the Senate Minority leader everett dirksen. Goes into a tirade. Sort of implies he has the goods on nixon. The next day he talks to nixon and nixon kind of gives him an evasive assurances that he would never do that. And make a long story short, nixon never really knew how much the federal government had collected with regard to the sabotage on the bombing hall. J. Edgar hoover at his meeting following the 68 election said to him, not only did we have a tap on the south Vietnamese Embassy phone. We had a tap on anna chennaults phone with the fbi requested, and a bug on your cam pan plane for the last two weeks of the campaign. So nixon if that had been true, then any interference that nixon personally did with the peace talks would have been in the fbi file. So nixon takes office obsessed with getting his hands on the file. He has h. R. Haldeman work on it. Houston says, weve looked at the bombing. It doesnt make johnson look good. Doesnt make us look good. Huston comes up with a strange story in which he says theres a complete bombing halt report with all the documents from the time at the brookings institution. And it was prepared by Clark Cliffords defense department. His top aides. And this is exactly the sort of thing we need. Probably going way longer than i should. If you want to know the rest, read the book. There, thats fair. Elizabeth, one of your dispatches you wrote about a time in which the unfolding story, quote, began to take on the characteristics of a russian novel. Someone we had never heard of suddenly emerged as an agent in activities that were almost inconceivable. And that really resonated for me because i was always unable at the time to keep any of these characters straight but, of course, the main character was Richard Nixon. And complex and impenetrable and not understandable but youve done about as good a job as anyone of trying to understand the kind of tortured mind that led us to this national crisis. And to look at nixons activities even post watergate as a way of interesting him. So tell us a little bit about nixon and what compelled him to do these things from your point of view. Some talk about when did watergate begin . Was born in this little town in yorbalinda, california, where he was born. I think he was trapped in his own personality, in his own hangups. And hangup is too light. But i dont do any psychobabble. This is a man who all his life felt that everybody else was getting a break and they all had more advantages than he did and he had to show them that he was going to be he went out for football. He couldnt run or throw. He didnt care how much he got banged up. High school, he rebelled against the most important distinct classy fraternity and started his own. He was always resenting and feeling that others were having advantage over him, and he had to show them. And he was going to get even in some way. Its not hard to see how this evolved when you get into the oval office and you have all of this that you are controlling. By then it wasnt he confused political opponents with enemies. His idea of Foundation President s or University President s or Newspaper Publishers or anybody who wasnt for him, not his opponent or his critic, his enemy. And he felt you could use the instruments of government. And watch president ial candidates or certain governors. Do they use the instruments carefully with boundaries . With these people, there were no boundaries. They said somebody testified that they put the houston plan away. They didnt. It was never really put away. The breakin at the watergate was one in a series. But the coverup had to happen because things that happened before. They had broken into this is the big one. The psychiatrist. Daniel ellsberg who leaked the pentagon papers. They went berserk on the pentagon papers. He ordered the study n these two people had worked on the study. Their understanding was that two chapters were still sitting in the brookings institution. And you hear nixon on the tape saying go in there and blow it up and get that safe. And fire bomb the god damn place he says. I want it done on a fevery basis, he says at one point. Go in and get the files. He is one of my favorites because he was always doing something extremely stupid. Theres questions whether he got stopped by a guard. They had no files. They had no papers, nothing but these things grew up in their minds and they had to act on them. When the burglars were caught in the watergate, what haldeman and nixon talked about was, oh, theres all those other things they did. And it was really worried. Nixon was more worried, the way i read what they said and talked to people about the breakin at the psychiatrists office. Nixon had standards. He knew that was such a blatant violation of the constitutional right. Fourth amendment. Right to privacy in your home and place. To go in and get somebodys psychiatric files, well, once again, there were no files. One thing that might have saved us all is the burglars, the cubans, the plumbers. They messed up everything they did. Thats how they got caught. They actually had been in the Watergate Office building as you two know, memorial day weekend before then. They got in but they put the tap on the phone wrong and the pictures were blurry. They took it to john dean and John Mitchell, the chairman of the Reelection Committee is supposed to have said, i doubt thats the word he used. Go back in. Now i dont know how stupid you have to be to go back in. The tape comes out you put it up. They tried four times, okay . The first time they were going to they gave a dinner. They did a banquet in the watergate. They were in the building and got caught in an elevator. For the night. Then they got up there and, oh, we dont have something to undo this lock. So one of the cubans went down to miami to get the right thing to do the lock. Then they got in it was like the marx brother goes to a constitutional but my real point was it wasnt a constitutional crisis. Was deadly serious. It was nervous hilarity while this is going on because you couldnt believe it. What was going to happen next and who were these characters. But it was whether a president will be held accountable to the courts, to the congress and really to the people. And they did everything they did they could to not only avoid that but to defy the other institutions. And the other part of it which carl talked about was to interfere with the inner workings of the Opposition Party to try to maneuver who their nominee is going to be. And i exaggerate not when i wrote these are bully boys. Not quite the ragstown fire but in that area of immorality. Was a very scary and still is, the system where there was a lot of cowardice that went on. Also a lot of greatness. It was not clear, really, until the end. You can look back and say, obviously, he was going to get caught but it wasnt obvious at all. I want to pick up from that point. And imagine a kind of thought experiment of what if we had Richard Nixon today. What the watergate story would have been like. And i want to do this in two stages. Im just going to throw it open to anybody who has thoughts about that. The first is, you guys might have noticed, in fact, the room that you are sitting in used to have presses. We literally in the good old days when had newspapers, hot literally off the presses down here from upstairs to the fifth floor newsroom. Times have changed. Journalism has changed. What would watergate have looked like in an age of twitter and the internet and 24 7 cable news . Would it have simply evolved more quickly or would it have evolved differently . You hear some of the folks here during the watergate era talk about the good old days when they couldnt wait to get to thr end of the driveway to pick up the Washington Post. You make it sound like were dinosaurs. We are dinosaurs. Were still here. The dinosaurs arent. To get the latest chapter in this unfolding story. C just talk for a minute, whoever wants to tackle this, what it might have been like if watergate were happening today. Let me try one thing, and i dont believe that if history works incident. Theres an aspect of the journalistic part of this that gets ignored too often. Yes, we have twitter, and yes if this story were covered today there would be a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there. There would be we had the advantage in this building. And the support of maybe the greatest puppet show of our time and we were not out there alone. We had an institution that systemically was brave, courageous and conservative. About what would go in the paper. And we had to be right. We made some mistakes, but we had to be right. And i think in todays atmosphere, you dont need watergate to see how much information out there every day it gets an the evening news. Its on twitter. ]vvenylc6o5kwcyj its no longer predominantly for the best obtainable version of the truth. Its for partisan and ideological ammunition to reinforce what they already believe. Their political beliefs, religious beliefs, ideologies. So we have to look at a different country where the citizens themselves are not open in the same way to the truth that they were at the time. Real quickly on that, obviously, the internet environment is driven by impatience and speed and when we were working on this story, carl and i could work for two or three weeks on one story. We would write it on things some of you may remember. Typewriters. And there would be paper that produced six copies and the drafts would go to the editors. They would look at it. They would say, well, what about this or get more sources. Work harder. Dig into it. Ben bradley, the ultimate editor was a carl is right. Certainly probably the greatest editor of the last century, but it wasnt just for what hed put in the paper but what hed keep out of the paper. And there was a kind of patience and real quickly, tell the story about Catherine Graham who is the publisher and the owner in january 73 after carl and i had written this series of stories that essentially said, as carl points out, is a criminal enterprise in the nixon white house. One of the problems we had, most people did not believe it. It was thought inconceivable that nixon or the people had conducted this espionage and sabotage operation that there was all this illegal money. 700,000 in a safe in cash for undercover activities. At the time that was lots of money. And so Catherine Graham invited me up for lunch one day. It was a day when carl had to go to a funeral. And i remember walking in. She had supported the publication of these stories. We knew her a little bit. And she when we sat down, she started asking me questions about watergate and blew my mind with what she had followed and read. I think at one point she read something about watergate in the Chicago Tribune and i remember thinking, why is she reading the damn Chicago Tribune for . No one in chicago does. Worlds greatest newspaper. I read as a child. And she had absorbed all of this and it was a kind of management style of mind on. She had intellectual control of what was going on but hands off. She didnt tell us how to report, the editors how to edit. And then at the end, she, like a great ceo, she had the killer questions. She said, well, when is all of the truth going to come out . When are we going to find out what really happened . Or when are we going to find out that weve got it right. And i said to carl and i was there was an active coverup going on there was not a strong investigation to say the least by the federal government that they were paying the watergate burglars for their silence. The answer is never. I remember looking across that luncheon table and she had this expression on her face of she said the following. Never dont tell me never. I left the lunch a motivated employee. Let me add something. But she was not im sorry this is a long anecdote, but it captures the essence of what she was doing and what she said with that was, look, we are in the newspaper business. We are if it is a moment of peril and were not believed and one of the secret strategies of the Nixon Campaign was to challenge the very valuable fcc tv licenses that the Washington Post company owned, but she said, look. Keep at it. This is the business we are in. And i was 29 at the time. I remember walking out thinking, its great to have a boss who understands the business were in, is supportive of it and it doesnt get wobbly when the pressure in the denunciations were visited upon us as they were. Carl quickly and then elizabeth. Hes made the point of what was at stake with the licenses. Theres another part ill tell later on. These guys did a fantastic job of summoning the tenor at the time. You had the luxury of observing and reporting an a weekly basis which seems amazing now. I want to but nobody has really done the thought experiment that i asked you to do. Of imagining in the age of in the age of twitter, would this have all come crashing down and nobody would have been able to be diligent enough to get it out or what would have happened . I think im very glad we didnt have that. Now we have what seems like a stately pace but then you had the morning paper, the radio, an awful lot of, did you hear . Did you hear . You wont believe this. Theyve lost two tapes. They erased 18 1 2 minutes. Something was always going on. But at least it wasnt being made excessive amount about. I think it was carl who said, the country came along. That didnt just happen. And theres a very underreported, underestimated chapter of this. What happened when they the question went to t