I think where we are in his head is with the tapes. Thats as close as we want to come. The country was obsessed with vietnam. Lynn don johnson had abday kated as the president of the United States. We had had chicago, riots in the streets at the democratic convention. So the whole country was in upheaval of a kind that we had never seen. Antiwar movement such that we had never seen in this country. So thats the context. Yeah, but nixon was a smart politician. Well, now im going to go to this. What you hear on the tapes and if you read dougs book, if you read this book that these two jentle men, and i have not read the whole doorstoper, but im giving it a pretty good look. And what you see in the nonwater gate tapes, and doug and i were just talking about it, is the same darkness of nixons mind. Its about nixon, the dog that doesnt bark is what would be right for the American People. You dont hear that. What you do hear is what you just referred to. Nixons fine intelligence. You dont hear that in the watergate. You hear only the darkness. But, here, you see the intelligence, what you just cited about the strategy, the chinese, the russians, you know, a student of history, which he was. A great political analyst, which he was. But then the darkness protrudes and we lose another 27,000. Largely because of nixons vanity, to some extent. But you could have gone eerts way. Lets go back to 1968, 69. Youre absolutely right. The country expressed itself in an antiwar mood. Here, in washington, there was a time when the secretary of defense said that he is going to do something with his troops to protect the country. And not to tell the white house about it. In other words, we were in a particularly difficult moment. Nixon could have been a hero. You could have gone the other way. He could have said what doug was saying. That this is not my war. This is what the democrats did. Let me move on from here. Absolutely. And everybody would have cheered. But he couldnt do that. Look what we also know now from another set of tachs. It was the subject of another book. A private citizen is not to there is a big law, title 18, section whatever that a citizen is not to interfere with the conduct of the United States in Foreign Relations sabotages the negotiations. So its all a continuum. And then nixon gets to the white house, establishes and, again, on the tapes, he says there are things that i have done that are illegal. The same group of people who eventually break into the watergate. You have a criminal presidency. This is what bob was talking about in that review. Weve had president s who have abused power, but this is different. A criminal president of the United States from the beginning to the end. So the term watergate begins in those first days and goes to what we see up here. And there is one great triumph. And we need to say it. There is the opening to china. And there, again, we see nixons bill yans and how it could have been different. But what i see as a war that totally obsessed this politician. How you end the war, how you continue the war, the bombing. All of this in his mind was at a level of obsession. He didnt really learn the right lessons from johnsons failures. And he thought he was the smaller guy in the room. In our tapes, hes constantly saying nixon. Guts and courage. He figures i can do it all. Even if i dont win in vietnam, ill be able to get china and become this great world leader. Hes really a diabolical pragmatist. Hes doing whats good for Richard Nixon. He thinks you have a great knowledge of churchhill and a great knowledge of history. One of the reasons he doesnt burn these tapes is why would you burn the work of a great man. It was like evil on evil, in some ways. When kissenger works with jermd ford, he does much better. When you read the two of them together, theyre constantly back stabbing everybody and themselves. And to the point where nixon doesnt believe his own state department. The state department is filled with liberals. And nixon goes on antisemitic rants. Not once does kissen jer say mr. President , maybe youre not quite right about the position. I covered him, it seems forever. He comes through in these tapes in the most obama see kwee yous ways. You know, i go wac to the war. To me, thats the heart and soul, the beginning and the end of the presidency, although it began with watergate, i aappreciable dwrat that. He wanted so desperately to beat the North Vietnamese. He unlieshed a ferocious air campaign. We have one quote right now which i would like to play if you dont mind. If the tech person could play that now. Its an 18. 5 minute gap. Its only a. Everybody would approve of it and then he goes onto say well, i dont know about that. You get an odd sense that he was all there, of course. But not necessarily on all issues. He was bombing North Vietnam because of the vietnam war. And Richard Nixon. This is where this book is so terrific. It always comes back to nixon and how he will be viewed. Well, this is the points i was getting at. How, in fact, was he aware that he was playing a game . Was diplomacy a great game . A sport there are just a few moments, really, its the days before he goes to china in 1972 where he lets his guard down for a minute. Nixon read history. He said were like the british in the 19th century. The british always played the weaker against the stronger. And thats what were doing here. And thats why im going to china. But how, in fact, did that work . What was in his mind at the time . The chinese are not exactly stupid people. The russians maintain a rigorous kind of diplomacy. They, too, are not a stupid people. Couldnt they see through nixon . Nixon will backpack stan in the pakistanindo war. So by backing pakistan and dissing india. And he says the ugliest things on the tape about the people of india. But hes telling the chinese, we could be your friends, too. I could beat you up or be friends. In a way, he learned to respect the chinese partially because of how nice they were of him when he went in 72. H continues to dispiez the soviet union. You cant find him saying anything negative about ma orksz. Could you say the chinese took him to the cleaner sns what was it that they did . When they greeted him at the very beginning, he said time and time again to all of his people, weve got to be he used these words weve got to be exquisitely careful when we deal with the chinese. Theyre an exquisitely gifted people. Nixon bought into this. He wasnt all that brilliant. At a certain point, the chinese could see through him and the russians could see through him, as well. And i mentioned india and pakistan. India is our great ally, the great democracy. And he threw india under the bus, so that showed a lack of diplomatic. Nixon saw himself as a master strategist. Brilliant is the word, actually. It is a brilliant profile of degall that he wrote. But youve got to come back to basic, moral question of who died. You started the discussion there. You state it to everybody in the room. And you say but nonetheless, were going to use our troops and a couple hundred thousand yellow people, which is also in the tapes. And we are going to sacrifice them for a grand strategy. That goes to the question of what was in his mind. Which you see over and over on the fames, nixon was surprised at how quickly the ice was thawing. Theyll had the accelerator and the break. And, of course, nixon had china in mind as a kind of tool, a weapon, that he would use against the russians. And youre absolutely right. In his mind, china was an instrument. Russia was the essential enemy. And that was the dwie you had to deal with. For nixon to be the First American president to visit on a summer level, its a big deal. Nixons impetus was partly that he was going to have the greatest mem wors of any president of the United States. And he would be able to draw, verbatim, from these meetings in which we would see this brilliance. It did ultimately end up in his resignation. And he began to think about resignation way before he actually acted on resignation. He worry ied. The moscow summit which was in may of 1972. He had just been in china in february of 1972. He was a heck of a pr guy for himself. They were attacking ferociously in north veet that. And the question was are we going to have the summit . Will the russians pull out of the summit . Can we continue to bomb in vietnam and have our summit at the same time. If we cant, he was saying it may very well be that were going to lose the election. That, i think, was never in the cards. Never the less, that was in his mind. Id like us to play another tape now of the way nixon thought about veet. Thaukt about the moscow summit. Thought about the resignation, if it didnt all work well. So dear mr. Technician, could you run that second tape. Can i ask luke and doug about this . Ive looked at this quite a few times and am quite mystified as to this playing with ether that nixon is doing here. Theres about as much chance that he is going to abdicate the presiden presidency. But this is the point about nixon that is so fascinating. I think its one of the reasons that rooms fill up when people want to talk about nixon. Why there is so many books coming out now about nixon. You would think 40 years ago, the guy left. He was a disdwras. A humiliation of the country. The heck with him, no. Youre always drawn to a negative character. What im trying to get at here, this last sequence that we ran has a lot of pure nixon. Youre playing this against that. And i. s all connected to the next policy. Ill take this democrat from texas and turn him into a republican. And you have the sense of a man operating on many Different Levels with himself manipulating the game of politics and diplomacy. I want to go out and ask what hes really saying here. What is this thing about abdicating. It seems kind of silly. Was he really serious about resigning . Its kind of like president obama resigning over health care. In hindsight, we say he couldnt have been serious. I think this is partly why were still fascinating by nixon 40 years later. We have the top third and the bottom quarter and we put president s in boxes sometimes. I think which box do you put Richard Nixon in. Who else is in that bloxz . Nobody. You have to remember he rides the national consciousness. But im wondering if he deserved all of that striding and emulation and admiration. Its not just emulation. If you go back to looking at herb blocks cartoons of nixon of the dark shadows. This is a man about whom the country was passionately divided. It was passionately divided when he made the checkered speech during the eisenhower years. It was passionately divided when he lost the presidency to kennedy. He came back and won the presidency. It was passionately divided over the war. And then over water gate. No one in history has caused this kind of visceral reaction. And thats part of the fascination. I was going to say, i get asked a lot of times, what makes a human being listen to Richard Nixon for ten years now. We have it especially at your age. There are a lot of other things to do. We have a baby now and probably has heard nixons voice and thinks hes a grandfather or something. But i think, though, there are a lot of questions i dont have the answers to, even after ten years. None of us. And i think is Richard Nixon really this interesting to us 40 years later . Or is it just because hes the only one who left us all of these recordings. Now, he did say that 1972 is the year that a great book ought to be written about 1972. And you guys have laid out the spade work. Water gate was a wac waterer story but they just kept building and building and building. Nixon survived, won the lan slide and he thought that water gate was a back burner story and, of course, he didnt. He did a lot of other things. His ego was high. I called him a diabolical pragmatist. And then add paranoia to that. He did the southern alignment. Hes paranoid about mcgovern in 72. He was breaking in to larry obrian in 72. Hes par noied. His sense of paranoia and politics is not good. Hes par noied about the press. Lets look at the people you just talked about. You know, at first, we thought we wrote in october of 72, that the water gate breakin was part of a Massive Campaign of political espionage and sabotage to undermine the democrats. The candidates was sabotaged. Tried to undercut ted kennedy as a figure of any kind of respect through smearing and investigations and one thing and another. And then all of these dirty tricks out on the campaign trail. And then you find out its after the water gate hearings. Not only was it a campaign to undermine the very basis of doe mock ra sill, which are free elections. But, from the beginning, it was to undermine the Antiwar Movement through illegal means. To undermine reporting. To undermine the democrats and his political entities through the use of the ir which we also hear on the tapes. And then the break in at watergate and then to undermine the very system of justice through the cover up. The cover up is worse than the crime . Not a chance. The crime is on going. And then, the last war, these five wars of water gate. And we wrote, bob and i wrote on the 40 thd anniversary of the breakin, a piece for the post. And afterwards, to a new addition of all of the president s men. Its about how what we know now is so much worse. Back to your diabolical notion here. Its astonishing what we know. Can i just add one quick thing . I think, also, he thought it was blood sport. And you slaughtered your enemy. Thats what life in the arena was like. You thought the kennedys manipulated himts in 1964. That election he should have won. But they outfoxed him. And Jay Edgar Hoover was doing all sorts of nefarious things. And, yet, was this respected figure in washington. So nixon thought that was kind of part in parcel about the big boys playing and im going to be a big boy, too. And those guys didnt go and take on the press of the United States and try to destroy them. I write about president s for a living. The good ones know how to work with the press, rose velt, f. D. R. , ronald reagan. Nixons war in the press with agnew was insane for somebody who wants to stay in there. But he was going to war with them. He was going to be crumbled bec the pace. This might sound surprising. One of the things you hear over and over is it goes back to his case. The liberals, jews, out to get me because of the case. Nixon, indeed, was pill oried for his whole career for being a smear agent and terrible liar, and manufacturing evidence. Because of the hist case. Nixon knew he was right about this. And its very interesting, you see how hes animated by that. And we didnt know that. Of course, we now have whats called the winona transcript of the soviets. In which its pretty definitive. Thats an interesting point, carl. I would like to go back to 1972 for a minute. Nixon was very high in what he had accomplished in 72. Because right toward the end of the year, he had, as doug was saying, this stunning political victory. But right after the stunning political victory, he had to go ahead and launch a murderous Bombing Campaign against North Vietnam, in order to take a negotiation this is my point again about the total lack of ethics here he had to take you bomb North Vietnam in order to get an agreement, which he did get, and was signed on january 23rd of the following year in 73. In 1971, in april, Richard Nixon told Henry Kissinger who was negotiating with the North Vietnamese in paris, he said, look, up to this point, the key part of the negotiation was that we would pull out when we had a ceasefire, and the North Vietnamese pull out. But i have a feeling thats not working fairly well. So we have to try something different. And what they did was to lay out before the North Vietnamese in paris the following idea. Well have a ceasefire, and we, the americans, will pull out. And he never added the next sentence. That the North Vietnamese had to pull out. So the North Vietnamese, very smart, pocketed that. And they wanted in a way, they could absorb the bombing. But they wanted to destroy this guy, in the way they destroyed Lyndon Johnson. Whats fascinating to me, time and time again, is an underestimation on the part of the brilliant Richard Nixon and the brilliant Henry Kissinger, about something as fundamental as vietnamese nationalism, which propelled this country to take on the United States of america, and to beat it. The United States has lost in its entire glorious history one war, and that was the war in vietnam. And what im just advancing as a thought here, and really leaning on you guys for the expertise, but is it entirely possible that were giving too much credit to nixon and to kissinger, for what it is that they did in Foreign Policy . Who gets the credit . Everybody is giving credit. I havent heard a lot of credit up here. But i think youre totally wrong. Totally wrong. Richard nixon is praised for his Foreign Policy. Here, i think you might have succumbed to too much revisionism. Too much what . Too much revisionism. I dont even know how to spell the word. I think you got that entirely wrong. I think that there is a lot made about the opening to china. But the idea of Richard Nixon being a Foreign Policy, i think has been i dont know where youve been the last 40 years. I mean, thats been the book line, thats been the narrative. There have been many, many authors say it. How many people here thought Richard Nixon was a Foreign Policy genius . Thats why theyre h