David Gergen Oral History

TN: Museum goers, scholars, because we use parts of the this interview in the museum. I'm putting, I'm putting in, well, we're finishing up a Watergate exhibit. We're also going to have interactive exhibits on domestic policy. Your audience is also scholars who might want to access this, this interview. Uh. DG: So, is it both audio and a transcript? TN: There is a, when we put it on the web,   we're gonna, because of the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act], we have to have a transcript. DG: Okay. TN: Are we rolling? You ready? DG: Hold on one second. Unknown: [unintelligible] TN: Tell me when we have speed. Thanks.   Unknown: And we are at speed. TN: Hi. I'm Tim Naftali. I'm director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. I am in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have   the honor and privilege to be interviewing David Gergen for the Richard Nixon Oral History Program.   David Gergen, thank you very much for joining us. DG: Thank you. It's a privilege to be here.  TN: As I told you, I'm not going to go in chronological order, and I want to start by asking you about   the relationship, if you can call it that, that  developed between former President Nixon and Bill Clinton. DG: It was a, an odd relationship between Bill Clinton and President Nixon, one that would have, I think never, you never could have predicted. You will have to remember that Hillary Clinton, after all, was on the staff of that helped to impeach him and put him on trial, and that Bill Clinton was no great   lover of Richard Nixon, but, uh, Bill Clinton came to have great respect for Richard Nixon's insights.   I remember he told me once that he had received a private letter from Richard Nixon    about the Soviet Union and he said it was the single most insightful and helpful paper that he received, had   received up until that time on the subject. I had an unusual experience working for President Clinton   in that I had worked for President Nixon, I had kept up with him off and on in the years intervening,   and shortly after I got to the Clinton White House, I had a call from President Nixon who said, "I'm going to be in Washington in a couple of weeks. Would you come have breakfast with me?"   I said, "Sure. I'd be, I'd be honored to come,"  and I asked him if I could bring, uh, bring somebody from the White House and I told him I'd like to bring the Chief of Staff, which he agreed to,    Mack McLarty, who was then Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton, happily agreed to go and we went over to the Washington Circle Hotel, which is on Dupont Circle, and I, I remember arriving there in the morning, it was just the three of us but the young woman who was there with him was then his research assistant   but then went on to write, you know, books about him, who's become now a television and radio   personality was there, and Monica Crowley, and, uh, I can't remember whether Manolo was there and I can't remember who else but, any event,  while we were talking and we're having a fas-- we're having one of these fascinating meals,  the President Nixon looked at me and said, "I'd like you to take a message to President Clinton," and I realized suddenly that we weren't there because he appreciated or admired what I had to say, he   wanted me to be a messenger. I figured well, I, you know, once a staff person, always a staff person. Sure, what is it? [Laughs] He said, he said, "I want you to talk to him about NAFTA,"    which was something that was the President, a treaty with Mexico and Canada, of course, on trade that President Bush's   administration, H. W. Bush, had it, had negotiated but was then sort of dormant in the early months of the Nixon-- the early months of the Clinton administration. He said, "I want you to take a message to President Clinton about NAFTA."  He said, "He should embrace NAFTA. He should come out very strongly for it. I know he doesn't have the votes but tell him that there are things worse than losing and it's really important that he stand up for this." And then he added, "If he wants    to understand why it's so important to embrace NAFTA,     tell him to read up on the repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain." And I thought to myself, only Nixon, of all the Presidents I've known,   would reach back into history in that way and find this illuminating example that really was quite telling, because   I went back and double-checked myself to make sure I knew what the heck I was talking about,   and, of course, the repeal of the Corn Laws in mid-19th century in Britain against the protests of many farmers and others. It was a, it was a, it was a move away from protectionism toward free trade and   it's often regarded as one of those turning points that unleashed the British economy, and even though there were people who got hurt in the interim  because they were no longer protected, it actually did a great deal for the country over time, and it was one of the sort of, free trade was one of the things that made Great Britain a great nation and it was... So, it was a very apt comparison,   and I, again, I was reminded that Richard Nixon had a great love of history and love of biography    and I think that informed much of what he did and it made him a wiser leader, in many ways. You know, if you've ever been out to Independence, Missouri to go to the Truman Library, you'll, Harry Truman was the only President in the 20th century who never went to college   but you'll find a talk out there he gave to high school students that I thought  was so applicable to Nixon, and, and Truman said,   "Not every reader is a leader but every leader is a reader," and Richard Nixon was a reader. It made a great deal of difference to his his presidency. You know, he was a clearly a flawed leader and deeply flawed but he did have a bright side and he had a very dark side, and we learned   the consequences of the dark side. Sometimes, we need to remember the bright side.   I would go back to that that conversation in   that Washington hotel with him and which--  He also talked about Hillary Clinton. He thought, "I think she may be too tough for the public.   I think if he gives her too much responsibility, it may not sit well with the public,"   which was, yeah, also a foretaste of what was to come. I found Richard Nixon, toward the end of his life, to be a person who was always perceptive. You know, you, once you came to accept who he was as human being and his   human flaws and came to then appreciate that there were other sides to him,   there was much about him that was also admirable and I found his, his, his assessments were really quite apt. I might add, in that regard, just one other story, because I, you should know about my evolution with him.   I, I was one of those who stayed 'til the end in August of '74 and felt very betrayed at the time and quite angry. And then, over time, sort of the wounds healed and I tried to see Nixon whole as   he is, the more complete Nixon, and come to grips with that, and as years passed, I went out to see him in 1970...late '75 - early '76. I went out with Bill Simon, his former, the former Treasury Secretary. He was,   Nixon had recruited Bill Simon. Bill Simon was one of my bosses and one of my mentors.   We had a very, very good dinner with President Nixon and he made his famous drinks and, you know, made drinks for us, the three of us. TN: Martinis. DG: Martinis. The Nixon martini.   You, you slurred a few words after the martini but it always helped to get the evening off to a good start. In any event, he and I, we weren't... I don't want pretend to be close to Richard Nixon but there were times after that when we called, we talked to each other periodically and I saw him, and I saw him in New Jersey again, and but he would call   me sometimes during the election seasons and want to... He said, "Let's talk about States.  Let's go over the Electoral College," and he said, "Well, how do you think Ohio is?" You know, he'd say, "Here's how I've got this scored..."  And I realized I was one of the long list of people he would call but it was   always a pleasure. But I, the story that I really want to relate, because I think it's important to understand that generation, he was part of the World War Two generation, a generation that was governing the   the country. It really governed the country from Jack Kennedy through George Bush Senior. They were all people who, young, people were young when the war came   and were very much seared and tempered by war. They came of age during World War Two and I think they returned to the United States... We have seven Presidents in a row from    Kennedy through Bush Senior who served in a unit, military uniform, all seven served in a military uniform, six of them in the war itself. Only one, Jimmy Carter was    in the Naval Academy and was too young and he grad-- he was still in the Naval Academy when the war ended. He then served as a Submariner. But the point of all of this is that I think that as   they were a generation that shared certain values from early in the 20th century.  They had been in a triumphant war so that they had a very positive view about what America's role in the world was and could be. They were proud of the country, but most of all, they had engaged in common sacrifice when they were young and I think it gave them a bond in governing that, uh, that when I came to Washington, I like to say that there were strong Republicans and there were strong Democrats    but the people I met from the World War Two generation,  first and foremost, thought of themselves as strong Americans. They didn't see themselves as first and foremost either Republican or Democrat. And so, the last conversation that I had with Richard Nixon, which was by phone two or three weeks before he died, he, he was talking to me, he was reflecting on his past, and he told me, he said, "You know, one of my proudest moments in politics actually came at the beginning of my political career not at the end. I'd come back from the war. I hung up my uniform in 1946. I ran for Congress." And you'll recall Harry Truman was then President and the Democrats, the Democrats lost badly that year and Republicans swept the house and swept the Senate and Richard Nixon came in on that tide   of Republican votes from California as a freshman member of the Congress sworn in in January of 1947,   and it was in 1947 that a beleaguered Harry Truman, watching Europe go down,   had his Secretary of State, George Marshall, propose the Marshall Plan right here at Harvard in the commencement address of 1947, and then tried to muster public support for the Marshall Plan, and and as Nixon recalled,   the Marshall Plan was very unpopular in its original conception. As I remember, it had 18% support in the first Gallup poll that came out, but Truman, as a Democrat with a, with a Republican Congress,   then started calling in Republicans to help put together the plan itself. So, Arthur Vandenberg, for example, of Michigan, Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was called in   to help write the Marshall Plan and Nixon got enlisted in this cause and others got enlisted.   It became a bipartisan effort and what Nixon said to me was one of the proudest moments of his life, political life came when the Marshall Plan was put to a vote in the House of Representatives,   a plan from a Democratic President, and he stood up on his side of the aisle as a freshman member of the House of Representatives, and there on the other side of the aisle stood up another freshman   member of the House of Representatives, Jack Kennedy. And Nixon said, "You know, when the chips are down in this country, we try to stand up together.  That's been the great tradition and I'm very proud of that vote." And so, there were... As I recall that  generation, as I recall Richard Nixon, for all of   its flaws in that generation and for all Nixon's enormous flaws as President, there were redeeming qualities and there were parts of it that are that legacy that should really remembered in a positive way, as well as the things that we all brood about and wonder how did we ever get there? How did this, how did the tragedy ever unfold the way it did? TN: Let me ask you, did you, do you recall   President Clinton's response to the message about NAFTA? DG: [Laughs] Well, I think it was then that he may have told me about the, about the message about Russia. I can't remember exactly the exact sequencing but, uh, it's very important that President Clinton took his advice   and did exactly what he said. I thought  that was one of the bravest moments of President Clinton's presidency. He took on his labor unions, he took on his own base for what he thought was right. He got bashed for it but, as you'll remember, that's when he called in the former Presidents who could come and visit there to support him and stand with him, and I have, you know, very positive memories of the way other, George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter and Jerry Ford, as I recall, all came there to be with Bill Clinton and support that on day one, and it was exactly what Nixon recalled as one of the better parts of the   country's traditions, and that is when the chips are down, people stand up together. That was a time...We're in a more protectionist period today in 2009 than we were then, but protectionism ran very strong   in the country in the mid-90s, and Clinton took a lot of heat for it. TN: Did you pass any messages from Clinton to President Nixon? DG: I did not. Not that I recall.    Um. It was during the Clinton presidency, of course, that Richard Nixon died, and, uh, I...He, and President Clinton called me in to talk about the death,   and there was a, a debate inside the White House about whether he should go to the funeral and I came down strongly on the side you've got to go. It's really important that you go. It's, uh, it can be part of the healing process. He did. I was, I was impressed that he did that.   TN: He said something very important about Richard Nixon when he was there. Where did that paragraph come from? DG: Well, as you know when Presidents give speeches, all the words come from the President. TN: Yes. DG: So, it was Bill Clinton's speech   and it was something...and he said, if you recall, in that speech that  we should remember the whole of Richard Nixon  not just for his flaws but we should remember the whole of man.  That was something he and I talked about. We talked about on the plane on the way out   and I was very, I was very pleased he took that view. I thought it was a generous, compassionate, healing perspective, and I thought it was the right perspective, and it was, you know, that you're   when you're President, as I learned from Nixon and from others, you're President of all the people. You're not President of your party, you're President of a large, contentious, dynamic, and often squabbling country and, but it was important to be, to be healing and to, and to let Nixon, let let him be at peace. I'll also tell you  a footnote from that. I was, I was back, as, as you can imagine at the, at this, at the outdoor ceremony where Bob Dole spoke and others spoke. All the Nixon alumni, the White House staff were all up in front  and I was with the Clinton staff and we were all in the back, and suddenly this note arrived back to me, passed from one row back to the next to the saying, and it was from Jim Cavanaugh, a strong Nixon assistant, a wonderful man, and I think he said something to the effect, 'Gergen,' you know, 'if you're still a Republican, you'd be sitting up front.' [Laughs] It was a...I have to tell you something that I have very fond memories of the Nixon alumni because yeah, there were many, many flaws in that team and I had friends that went to jail and, and I thought paid an unspeakable price for what happened. I thought they got caught up in something that was bigger than they were. It was just tragedy to see a Dwight Chapin go to jail.  Dwight Chapin was the, one of the most creative people of his generation, politically,   and I remain...You know, he, I put Dwight Chapin and Mike Deaver as sort of the same -   both very gifted, imaginative, and loyal to their, to their Presidents. But because of what we went through as young men and women in those years, it was sorta like going through the Marine Corps together. You know, you you you come out of it...We really got roughed up and, uh,   and you're in a fox, the same foxhole with a lot of guys, you know, and a lot of stuff coming in on you all the time, and when you do that, when you have that kind of experience, you come out very, feeling very strongly about the individuals you went through it with, and very positively, very bonded. And so, I, to this day, for all the turmoil, for all the prices we paid as a country, and as, you know, most of us felt we were finished when Nixon went down, you know, we thought there's no place.. We're...If you were on the Nixon White House staff, you felt like you had just finished playing for the Chicago Black Sox. Your days were over. You know, you, there's no comeback. And, as it turns out, America is a very forgiving society and a lot of people went on to illustrious and very strong careers of   public service as well as private success. But, to this day, a lot of us, I think, have a    strong loyalty to each other as human beings for what we came through, and I still have a lot of affection for the people that I worked with. TN: Please tell us a bit about Ray Price. From reading your book it seems he was a very important influence on you in this period. DG: Well, I've been, I've been blessed in life and   not only working for presidents but having extremely good mentors and Ray was right at the top among the mentors I've had in life. He...You should know that Ray Price brought me into the White House and I never would have been there had it not been for him and for another dear friend   I went to school with, Jonathan Rose, and I was,  to cut a long story short, I was, I had come back to, I'd gone to law school and then after college and then after law school went in the Navy, and my last   year of naval service was in Washington and I did a little work with the White House but when I was mustering out of the Navy, thought I was going back to North Carolina and was in conversations there, in fact, at the University of North Carolina  to, to stay there but I, in the mean, in the meantime, I had   Jon Rose, who worked in that White House, had been  my law school roommate, called me and said, "There's an opening here at the White House with Ray Price.  Do you know Ray Price?" I said, "I have no idea who he is."   He said, "Well, Ray has just become head of the speechwriting team and it's a speechwriting and research team, it's about 50 people,  and he needs an administrative assistant. Why don't you come in and interview for the job?" And I said, "Jonathan," this is 1971 I'm just coming out of the Navy, "I am available, I'm very fascinated by it but, as you know, I voted for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and I   can't imagine that they're going to be interested."    And he said, "Come on over and have an interview." So, I did, and, uh, and I...   Ray was in one of these great, big, cavernous offices in the Old Executive Office Building at the corner office, southwest corner, down, catty-corner from the Corcoran Art Gallery,   and we sat down and talked and turned out he had gone to Yale ten years earlier than I had,   been very involved in the political union, I think with the Conservative Party, had known Bill Buckley, had gone on from there to become editorial page editor for The New York Her-- for the New York Herald Tribune,   Jock Whitney's paper, and had written the 1964 editorial endorsing Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater, but had also become very close to Richard Nixon and was hired by Richard Nixon to come in   as one of his three key speechwriters. There was Ray Price, Pat Buchanan, and Bill Safire, and then Jim Keogh from Time magazine was their, was their boss. He was the head of the speechwriting team   and Ray was one of the three principal speechwriters and very gifted writer.   A really lovely lilt to his writing, and, uh... In any event, and then Jim Keogh moved out or retired from government and   Ray moved up the number one job, and then he was looking for an administrative assistant. So, I went in to have an interview, this interview with him. Sat down and we talked, and because we both gone to Yale, we sort of struck up this conversation and we went on for a while and we had a very, very engaged conversation, and   he said, "I'm really interested in you, possibly. I've got some other candidates..." and one of them was married to Richard Nixon's daughter, Tricia Cox, Tricia Nixon Cox, or was engaged - I don't know what the relationship - but Eddie Cox, at that time, was a candidate for that job. So, I said, "I have zero chance but   it's a great chance to talk to Ray Price, a great chance to go in the White House, this is a lark, I'm having great fun," and, uh, but I told him, I said, "You ought to know that I voted for Humphrey.   I'm actually a great admirer of Richard Nixon's foreign policy  but I'm more liberal than his domestic policy,   and, you know, but I'm in interested talking to you but, you know, I know you're gonna hire somebody else."    So, we had this conversation. And then I went and I was in North Carolina and was right on the verge of accepting a job there, and then the phone rang and they fished me out. It was the White House calling, it was Ray Price on the line. He said, "Well, I've interviewed everybody and I'd like you to come to work for me."   And I said, "I can't believe this." So, I said, "Ray, I want to sort of remind you..." and so forth, and he said, "That's fine."   He said, "Look, why don't we do this: why don't you come in for a year? It's 1971. You'll be here for a year, we won't have an election campaign. I'll try you out, you try me out, we'll see how it fits,    but I'd like, I think we need diversity around here and I like the fact that you have views that are not consistent with everybody else. We've got Pat Buchanan who's as far over to the right as you are to the left. It's a good, it's a good fit, and well, let's try it, and, and let me run interference on   the fact that you're not a big Nixon loyalist and didn't work in the campaign, et cetera, et cetera."   I said, "Okay. For a year, what the hell."   I, you know, it sounded like great fun, very interesting. Now, what Ray did not know was I'm probably the world's worst administrator. I have, as my team will tell you, you know, you cannot give me any piece of paper without having a duplicate, because you will lose it, we will lose it within about 15 minutes, and my office was like the worst pig pen you ever saw.   It was right next to Ray's, and Richard Nixon came by there one day at lunch. I wasn't there but I   was, had heard from people, and the door was open, he looked inside, and he just shook his head and he   said, "I can't believe this guy's working for me." Because he was a well-organized person but, in any event...    TN: How did you escape the wrath of Bob Haldeman? DG: I never knew. I think I flew under the radar screen. I don't think   Haldeman had a clue that I was over there for a long time.  TN: Because if he had seen your office...  DG: Oh. Well, it was just...Well, listen. If he'd seen my political pedigree, seen my office, and   seen what a geek I was, he probably would have said forget it, we're not bringing this guy in here, but, but   Ray was a extraordinarily good writer and he was, he was a wonderful mentor for me and he really...We spent a lot of time together, um, and we had evenings I recall most vividly. At that time, Barack Obama actually does this regularly now but that time, Richard Nixon, on Saturdays, liked to have a packet   of the most interesting letters from the week, 20 or 25 or 30, I've forgotten what it was, so, because he  could get a sense of what the public mood was and the tenor of letters is actually interesting,  and in our 50 people on this staff that Ray ran, we had the correspondence unit.    So, all the letters came through and we had a woman named Eliska, Eliska Hasek, who wrote our special letters, but it was very... So, they would send up a bundle of letters,    like 200 or something, like 300 if they thought most interesting. It was my responsibility to then sift  them down to 50 candidates, whatever,   and then Ray and I, on Friday nights, would go through these letters and put them in for the President for the next morning,   and as a result, just for one reason or another, we tended to stay late Friday nights and   we'd sit there talking 'til 11, 12 o'clock at night, and, uh, he just taught me a lot about where I was, what we were doing, and Ray made the argument to me, he said, "Look," you know,  he introduced me to this idea that Richard Nixon has a very bright, luminous side and Richard Nixon also has this troubled side, this darker side. It's very Jungian, Carl Jung kind of concept of a bright side and a dark side, and he said, "There are people in the White House who like to exploit that dark side and they want to, they will draw out the worst of him, in part because it will advance their careers, they will draw closer to him,   and but it's also very dangerous, and the contest in here is between those  of us who try to appeal to his bright side and what he can become versus those who are appeal to the dark side. And I'm here and you've got to be here to enlist on the bright side. I need you to help do that. Len Garment is there, there are others around here who understand what Richard Nixon is capable of becoming. He is capable of becoming one of the great Presidents in this country but   there is this other dark side that if it gets, if it takes control, we're going to be in great danger as, as a White House and it won't be good for the country." And Ray understood something that I did not I understand in the beginning, but he got the tensions and he got the tensions within Nixon and within the staff. And, uh, and it was very tempting, by the way, if you were young, to join up on the dark side. Now, historically, people have always identified Chuck Colson with that dark side and said, 'Well, he was the guy who exploited...' Now, I happened to go to meetings with Chuck Colson   for a long time, something called the "attack team." At 9:15, we met every morning in 1972 for the campaign and   I never saw that in Colson. I went to the attack team meetings every morning. Ken Khachigian was there,   a whole bunch of people there, and Pat Buchanan was there, and there was nothing. We never did, discussed anything illegal. I mean, we discussed once calling  fire engines and having them go out to a Sarge Shriver  picnic or something, some Democratic get-together out at his house,   as just, it was sort of fun and games house stuff but there was nothing,  there were no, none of the dirty tricks that were associated with the '72 campaign came through that at all. That was all sort of hidden away, it was compartmentalized, and there was a lot within that White House which was compartmentalized. You didn't see it in the beginning, you didn't realize what structures were there. There were    circles within circles. It was a very complex, Byzantine place, as I later learned, but Ray understood that and he began introducing me to some of that and he began introducing me to the... I think that not just the spiritual side of Richard Nixon but sort of his idealism and what he,   and he helped me understand that Nixon was a... He...That something, something cruel had happened to him   somewhere along the way. He, you know, he, he... I don't know where these, this deformity of character came from or where these demons, as I call them, came from in him but something that, you know, he...   One never knows. I mean, Bryce Harlow, who was another friend there, used to say to me sometimes, he said publicly, "Something terrible happened to Richard Nixon when he was young and we'll never know quite what it was." But Nixon, Ray understood that about Nixon, tried to help me understand it, and   tried to enlist me in trying to build up the positive side, and Ray was a positive influence in the White House. He was very close to Nixon,  and he always, uh, he always looked out for me and I've, I've revered that friendship and that relationship for a long time. You know, he's been, I've always looked   up to Ray Price. The last time I saw him was here at the Kennedy Library here in Boston and he came up for a conversation about speechwriting and it was just really good to see him. Ray Price also was... We recruited some of the speechwriting team. You know, they, we had a, I think, I think was Peggy Noonan who wrote that, you know, that Nixon's speechwriting team was like the 1927 Yankees.   It was a really, really strong group of people. You know, we had some real heavy hitters, when I got, when Safire was there, Buchanan was there, and, uh, with Ray, I was there to help sort of recruit, you know, some of the people who came in, and, um, Lee Huebner was there. Lee went on to become publisher of the International Herald Tribune. But we recruited, we recruited John McLaughlin who went on to "The McLaughlin Group," uh, and we also, you know, there were like 14 speechwriters. There was a fella named Aram Bakshian there who was a wonderful, wonderful writer that Ray had recruited, and Ken Khachigian was part of that group, went on to California politics, had an enormous influence in California and beyond as a Republican. But we also recruited Ben Stein as a writer or hired Ben Stein, and I'm not sure that Ray was still in charge at that point but Ben was a...Then Ben eventually worked with me and    he had two requirements when he came to the White...Ben was Herb Stein's son. Herb Stein was a chief economist, a  wonderful man, and Ben was a, he taught drama, I think, out at Santa Barbara, someplace in California and   also was a lawyer, of course, worked the Federal Trade Commission. I think he was somewhere in California   when he came to us and he wanted - or maybe it was the FTC - but he said, "I got two requirements if I come here as a speechwriter and that is that, the first one is that I be..." and was this was an appeal to me, "...that I'd be given a television set and a couch." I said, "Okay. That's easy."  He said, "The second one is I want to be able to lie down on my couch every day at lunchtime and watch the soap operas   and I don't want anybody to question me." I said, "Why in the hell should we do that?" [Laughs]    "Because the soap operas, David, are where you've got a true understanding of where American culture is at the moment, and   if you understand where culture is, you can talk to people through the speeches and can relate   to them. So, it's really important I be able to watch the soap operas." [Laughs] I said, "Well, what the heck. You know, we've got all sorts here. Well, let's try it." So, we did. And when Ben left, he became, he became the, he went to the Wall Street Journal as the soap opera reviewer. [Laughs]   While he was there as the soap opera reviewer, he was writing about the lack of conservatism in Hollywood and that's when Norman Lear wrote him a letter or called him and said, "Ben," and Lear was doing, you know, it was "All in the Family" or whatever, and he invited Ben out to work for him, which he did, to introduce conservative, conservatives to Hollywood, and it's been a great love affair ever since between Ben Stein and Hollywood. But we had a, we had a wonderful group and I, you know, Safire later organized the, the, the alumni of the speechwriters as the Judson Welliver Society and it was all   the speechwriters from all the administrations stretching all the way back to Harry Truman, and we all decided in our early meetings the one badge of distinction that we had as speechwriters,   especially those of us who came from the Nixon administration, were that we were the only group in the speech--- in the White House staff over the last 40 years who've never been indicted. [Laughs] That was our main claim to fame. TN: That's a good claim to fame. What did you do, what, what innovation did you bring into the State of the Union when you, when you took charge of the, the speechwriting group in '73? DG: I, you know, the honest answer is I can't remember bringing much innovation to the State of the Union. To retrace the story, after the 1972 election, I had been, I had agreed to stay, I came in for one year, and then Ray said, "Why don't you stay through the elections," and I said fine,   and I wasn't, you know, I wasn't quite sure but I... By that time, I'd become sort of, you know, quite loyal to the program and to him  and I liked the people I was working with. So, I decided to stay through '72, still as Ray's assistant   and still a terrible administrator. But at the end of, after the election was over, Ray went to Bob Haldeman and said, "Bob, I'd like to, I'd like to move into more of a counselor role. I'd like, I'd like not to run   this large staff and but I'd like to continue working with the President on big speeches and   sort of be a intellectual-in-residence," which I thought was great role for Ray but at that time, he recommended to Bob Haldeman that I'd become head of the speechwriting staff, which surprised me because, you know, I was just a kid and given my background, and then Haldeman called me over for conversation   and uh, and uh we had one and he offered me the job and which I accepted. Not... There was some, some unhappiness at home. Putting 'some happiness' is a very mild phrase, um, but, in any event, I agreed to do that and I remember walking back to my office...  TN: Unhappiness because more hours at work? DG: Well, just the whole hours. It was hugely long. It was always just endless,  and but I really liked the people. Lee Huebner became my deputy and he was wonderful, and it was just, Aram Bakshian and Ken, you know, Ben Stein. It was just, it was a, and John Coyne. It was just a wonderful group of people and... But I remember walking back and I was thinking myself, I was, I don't know, I was like, '73, I must have been around 30 or just around then, and I said, "You know, my goal in life," this is a long time ago, "I think it's really important in life to be able to earn a thousand dollars for each year of your life." So, if you're 30 years old, you really ought to be earning $30,000, and Haldeman had offered me twenty-seven when in our meeting, and I took it and just went back, and and, and half an hour after our meeting, he called me and said, "You know, I've been thinking about our meeting. I like talking to you. I think you're gonna be terrific. Let's raise it to thirty," and I said, "Right! That's right. Right there." So, I hit the nail and boy, times have changed, haven't they? But I... Those were, those were extremely tough years working for Nixon, '73, '74, and yet, all of us learned a great deal about ourselves and about the country, about leadership. I, frankly, don't remember having very many innovations. We did have   another writer there named Noel Koch, who was a, K-O-C-H, who was a extremely gifted...Well, we had a whole slew of people. I've left out some but I do remember on the, on the State of the Union addresses    tended to be extremely complicated affairs,  because, in those days, you had each Cabinet department would  send you, in effect, their part of the draft, and they'd send you five pages, and they wanted every program in the five pages, and you'd have 20 of these things arriving. Plus, you'd have 15 other drafts written by outside people and one thing and another, and it was stitching all that together and playing off all the constituencies and by '73, you know, both Haldeman and Ehrlichman, you know, Watergate  was starting to close in and there was a lot of stuff starting to happen, and it was, there was no... And but, but the speechwriting staff became sort  of a cockpit where a lot of these differences got hammered out. One of the reasons speechwriting was so much fun, it was, especially when you're young,   is that you're allowed to be at the table.   When you, when you've got people around who paid many more  dues than you have and they're someone in the field but somebody has got to actually    put the words on paper and try to provide some music. And so, but I, you are obviously, there's questions... TN: Well, Pam Bailey, at one point,   had said that you had a story that, uh...   But let me, maybe it'll come back to... DG: I think the world of Pam Bailey but  I don't remember the story. TN: Did you have more face time with the President when you became head of the speechwriter,   his writing shop? Did you have face time with the President? DG: I had face time with the President and it was, uh, it, it's very important to remember that  Richard Nixon was a, um, was an insular figure, was introverted, didn't like to spend a lot of time with people. And so, it wasn't as if you went and spent a lot of time with him. Just in the very nature... I spent a  lot of time in group meetings with him. From the beginning, back in when Ray first hired me, there was always, the speechwriters always had a chair in the Cabinet Room, there was always a space for the speechwriter, for a speechwriter, to be there to take notes and to bring them back to the speechwriting team and make sure everybody knew sort of where the direction of conversation was, and Ray went over sometimes but he frequently asked me to go over and be at the Cabinet meetings. And so, from 1971 on, I was, and '73, '74, then I I spent a lot of time in those kind of settings but that's not obviously what we call face time and one-on-one time. So, my times with him were usually when Haldeman or somebody would call and   say, 'He'd like see you," and then you just go over and talk about a speech and or something he was working on and or some instructions he wanted to give you because he didn't like something.  You know, he was always, he always wanted... He was never really fully happy with staff work. I don't... He always knew ways to do it better. But he sort of took me in hand to help me learn a bit more about writing. At that time, you know, the networks were extraordinarily powerful and sound bites were extraordinary powerful. So, he'd call me over said, "Look, David. I want...What I want you to do  is before you send me a speech that's going to be   out there, I'm gonna be out there Rose Garden, whether it's Rose Garden rubbish or some larger speech,    I want you to take the draft and when you send it to me at night, underline three sentences,   and I want, and I want you to be tested and about does one of those sentences, the line from the speech   that's actually quoted as the lead on the speech, I want to see if you can write and learn how to write sound bites." And so, we used to sort of as an  exercise, it was a very good exercise because   you begin to realize, you had to begin to real... I didn't, I had some background in journalism but I   wasn't an accomplished journalist, but you begin to understand how do journalists think, how do   they, how do you communicate through the press to the public, and how do you get your line out.   Instead of having them control, how do you control what what sentence gets out there, and   that sound bite becomes actually quite important for that purpose, especially on television.    So, we would spend a lot of time sort of crafting and then polishing that line to make sure it got done and   and then he would come back and say, "Okay. Where was it? What happened? Let's go figure that out."   We had to write, do, you know, when he had a, had to do something in the press room, he wanted to   go out and do something in the press room, it had to be a certain number words, usually around 100-150 words,   he wanted it, he wanted it to be very crisp and you had to learn to write as if you were a television producer for that particular thing or, and his  speeches he wanted 700-750 words. We   had to count the words, and the draft would go in with that. There was a lot... He was very meticulous   about it and he would work hard and tried to teach me. Now, I can't say I spent a whole lot of time   with him but I spent enough with him to know what he wanted and what was gonna work and what wasn't gonna work, and what I found about him, which was quite interesting, was that when you first got to work for Richard Nixon, especially when you're a kid, I was just a kid, you know, and when I, you were very, very much on the outer circle. I was the most junior of junior lieutenants when I first got there. I was   just an ensign in this big navy, and you had to sort of earn your way up and that was with   trust and confidence. Those two things were very important to him. And gradually, as you... And so, when you   first were out on the outer circle, you saw the public Nixon, and the public Nixon's very prim and proper,   you know, and but as gradually you got closer in, you began to see that this was something of a show. I mean, I had times when I'd be with him and he'd come out of the Oval Office and going into a   Cabinet meeting, and he would come out and be just looking just hugely angry or terribly slumped over or despondent about something. He'd just be in a really bad mood, a really bad place, and just before he opened that door into the Cabinet Room, he'd straighten himself back up, put his head up, get a big smile on his face, and walk in the Cabinet Room on show. And so, I'd always been inside the Cabinet Room and saw, seen him come in that way, I always thought "Well, he always that way," and when,    but gradually, as you got to know him better, you began to see that side. Then, when I got closer in,   I got to swearing. I remember to this day a time when we were working on speech that was last minute that was   a radio and Ziegler was there and I was there, and I forgot whether it was Rose Mary Woods or who it was, but we were working on a speech draft and I was running back and forth. We were having it typed up and and Nell Yates was there, who used to work there,    and we were running pages back and forth and he was scribbling and he was swearing in the... You know, I'd been in the Navy. I'd heard a lot of swearing. This was sort of one, well one level beyond what I was used to and, um. So, I said to Ziegler, "I don't get this. This is not the Nixon I've ever seen." He said, he said, "I'll tell you why, I'll tell you why he's talking like this. He said, "It shows he trusts you. He trusts you. He's willing to show who he is front of you now. He wasn't, he didn't trust you before and he's being more himself now." And, you know. So, it was another layer of inside, closer to the inner sanctum. Now, I never got to the point of being so close to him like Haig or Kissinger or, say, Haldeman did. They saw, I think, the closest level in. So, I never saw   the drinking that you find it comes through in some of the accounts   from people who were there toward the end. I knew he couldn't hold his liquor but I never saw him, the... And to this day, I don't accept as real the portrayal of him that came through the, um...    TN: "The Final Days"? DG: "The Final Days", and but, but who was the, who was the guy who did the JFK movies who's done all these... TN: Stone? Oliver Stone. DG: Oliver Stone.  I'm sorry. I should have remembered that. I actually know Oliver Stone. I think somewhat I've come to have a   higher regard for Oliver Stone over the years but I didn't recognize the Nixon of Oliver Stone. The Nixon of Nixon/Frost, I recognized, but the Nixon of Oliver Stone, I didn't recognize. I thought this was, this was more a harsher portrayal than I thought  was appropriate and it was striking to me. I went to the preview, I think Jack Valenti showed it in Washington, and I remember walking out and Bob Woodward and I were there, we were walking out together,   and we compared notes and neither one of us, I think Bob, I think he shared my view that it had too harsh a view of Nixon. So, you know,   because he came through as a real drunk there and that's not what I saw. But I did know that when you got closer in, you saw the darker side more  clearly and you saw... I thought what you saw when you got closer in also was a lot of vulnerability,  personal vulnerability and loneliness. I have a...One night, I was taking a speech to him over in the Residence,  and when you normally went into the, you went over to the Usher's Office and ask the Usher if you can take it up to him, you know, if you were, if you were late on trying to get a speech in for the next day,   and the Usher told me, "Listen, he's waiting for you   but he's actually over at the Old Executive Office Building. Maybe you'll find him. He's bowling over there and he wants you to take it over to him."   And I said, "Fine. I'll be glad to but I didn't know there was a bowling alley." You know, there's sort of a labyrinthine building, and he said, "Yeah, there's a bowling alley over in the...It's in the basement. You go here, you go there, you'll find, you'll see Secret Service, if you look around long enough." And, uh, I said fine. So, I went trotting over to the Old Executive Office Building and went through all these tunnels and dark places, one thing and   another and finally found this bowling alley and opened it up,    and it was a long thin room, and there was Richard Nixon in Gucci shoes, I think, suit pants, a white shirt, tie, cufflinks, bowling alone,  and he looked like the loneliest fella I'd seen in a long time. I just really felt badly for him, you know, and there was something about that I understood why he needed a break but,   gee, you just think someone would have a friend there, a child or somebody who was another human being that you could share that with, share some time. But I think, ultimately, he was a very lonely man, and there was a part about that that you felt like you just wanted to say "It's okay. It's gonna be okay," but you couldn't,   you know, you're staff. You can't say that. TN: Did it, that sense of vulnerability that kept you there? Why did you stay so long? DG: The question of whether to stay or go was an increasingly difficult  question for several of us on the speechwriting staff especially, but I think for others as well, especially the younger generation.  I had come in as a third or fourth level down person, you know. I was way down the pecking order and very young and   through the evolution of time, I moved into where I was now still a junior lieutenant but I had  responsibility. I had 50 people I was responsible for  and I had a little bit of a profile, public profile. Not much but I had a little bit of a profile. And by that time, Ray Price was still writing the principal speeches. He wrote all the Watergate speeches with the President but I was, uh,  I was increasingly called in to help deal with some of the other charges    and there were, as you know, there were numerous charges against him, and I was called in, as I recall, first on the question of his taxes, whether he had abused the tax system in a variety of ways, and I remember   I was in North Carolina, in my home state, and the call came in on December 29th or 30th, I was for Christmas-New Year's, and saying "You got to come back to the White House," and I spent that New   Year's Eve at the White House. Snow was falling. I remember this very well. We had a   tax team in from a big Philadelphia law firm and some other people and  we were all working to go through his taxes  and I was in charge of the white paper that was going to come out, to to write this white paper,   and you know, the honest answer is we spent a lot of time on that issue, and a lot of the charges turned out to be wild, they were not accurate. Now, some were closer to the mark and there were some   things he'd done that had been close to the line but there was nothing egregiously illegal.   And so, you came out, I came out of that feeling like, well, if he's not guilty on this, why is he guilty on the central charge of Watergate? This was more a peripheral charge. And then we went through another thing, the milk scandal, and I went through all of that.   And, and part of the tax thing I went through, all the improvements at San Clemente. He'd been accused of taking a lot of taxpayer money on San Clemente and we went through a whole lot of stuff on that. We, we put out a series of white papers and the truth was the charges were quite exaggerated. And so, I, yeah, I came out with some sense of that. B. Haldeman and Ehrlichman and other people kept on telling, telling us he's innocent. I've written I believe that the cover-up worked better inside the White House than it worked outside,  especially when you're young, you have a  desire, if you're working for a boss, but especially when he's President, you want him to be innocent.  You, you, if invest your hopes and dreams in somebody,   you really want them to be, you know, above things and I had come to believe that he was probably innocent. I was, I was blessed cynical, and I probably should have been a lot more so, but I would like to have liked   to have been able to believe he was innocent. I didn't know anybody, I never knew anybody had gone to jail. None of my friends had ever gone to jail. I didn't come from that kind of environment. So, I tended to be one of the ones who believed longer than I should have. Now, I must say that at the same time, and I've got to be mindful of the time here. Do... What's happening with Baruch and the time here? [Unknown voice]: Baruch just ran down the hallway doing something. DG: Okay. Let me just... TN: Let's stop for a minute. [Unknown voice]: Tone. Twenty seconds of room tone. [Unknown]: Ten, at least. [Unknown]: And ending tone. DG: There's another door open but  they may come, they may, they may, a couple of them may come in. They can come in quietly. TN: Thanks.  DG: So, we were talking about why I didn't leave and I can tell you a story and tell you a little bit more about that or you can move on somewhere else. Whatever you want. TN: Let's do that and then I've got a few questions and then we'll round it out.  DG: Okay. Great. TN: Thanks.  [Unknown voice]: Speed. DG: You're rolling? [Unknown voice]: Yeah. DG: So, back to the question of...  I pressed my naivete but also the main issue why I do think the cover-up worked better inside the White House than anywhere else. Any event. I do remember one morning driving in on a summer day in my little blue  Volkswagen bug into the West parking lot there and there just outside the West Wing, and as I came through the gates, I just noticed people were scurrying around in one direction or another, just an unusual beehive of activity. I had no idea what was going on. I parked and asked Steve Bull, you know, "Hey. What's happening here?" He said, "Just watch, just wait. You don't, you don't know?" And I said, "No." And he said, "Just watch." Okay. So, I went into my office and about ten o'clock, ten-thirty, the phone  rang and somebody said, "Alex Butterfield is testifying this afternoon. Why don't you join us?  We're going to have a get-together and watch it   on television together in Ken Clawson's office."  I said fine. It was a... And so, I agreed to it. At about 2:30 I wandered over there and I walked in and there was an open bar,   and I said to people, "Why is there a bar in here?" [Laughs] "I thought we were just gonna watch  Alex Butterfield and go back to our offices." They said, "We need to have a bar. We need to keep the drinks up." I said, "Okay. That's fine." And I, and I, and   we sat down to watch and, of course, it was in that testimony in the afternoon that he broke the news   that there was a taping system in the White House.  At Richard Nixon's instructions, there had been a taping system put in. And what then happened was quite instructive to me, because there were a    number of White House aides, must have looked pretty young, wandering around, in Ken Clawson's office   and all of us who had gone to these elite colleges, I'd gone to Yale, we were just elated because, all along, we've been trying to prove a negative about Watergate that he didn't do it, you know, he didn't know,   he didn't, he wasn't involved in the cover-up. Great. We finally have proof, because we'll have these tapes that'll show that he's innocent. And all the kids that had come up from, you know, the wrong side of the tracks, who'd come up, you know, from blue-collar backgrounds, who'd come up with a little rougher side of life.   Well, some got drunk. They got totally drunk [laughs] and they said, "It's over. Don't you understand, you idiot? It's over. They're gonna have him." And I said, "No, no, no." So, I remember there were the Harvard and Yale type, we all get back to our office saying, "Right.   We're gonna get out of this." And all the other guys went back and said, "Oh god," you know, "they finally caught him." And it was, it was a very interesting, instructive lesson for me about, both about naivete   and about how working around in that environment, what people who were seeing the same events could see them through a very different lens.   TN: Was Pat Buchanan one of those who, who responded that way?  DG: I was trying to remember whether Pat had left, when he left. I didn't think Pat was there toward the bitter end. Somehow, I thought he had moved on. He remained loyal to Nixon. I'm sure Pat, you know, who... Pat came up from... I'm a big, big Pat Buchanan admirer and I've always enjoyed his company and, you know, because he went to Gonzaga and he was just, a good Catholic background. Great family.  More conservative than I, but then, so what? But I don't know where he was on that. I do think Pat... Pat was a real skeptic about my coming in there at first, because he was like 'This guys doesn't qualify,' and he was probably right, but he became, he became a good, good colleague. I enjoyed working with Pat but I do want to say this, we, as this was going on, I was also in phone contact with Bob Woodward and, in fact, John Dean later thought I was Deep Throat, which I wasn't, but I...   Bob Woodward and I had gone to college together. We didn't know each other in college but we'd gotten to   know each other in Washington and after we both got there, and he and Woodward, he and Carl Bernstein had teamed up on the Watergate story, and he started calling me. I remember the first   call I got, he was at the Washington Post and he's... It was like eight or nine o'clock at night and I was in my office and he said, "Listen. We've got this hot story and Ziegler won't talk to us in the Press Office and nobody in the White House would talk to us and this is really important. It's a very sensitive   story about it and nobody in the White House, we don't have a White House perspective in there and we can't get to anybody,"   and he, and I said, "You know, I don't know anything," and he said, 'I know that but you've got a, can you help me? 'Cause we think it's really important for the paper that we least have some understanding.  I've got to talk to somebody who can either set us straight or at least give your version of it," and I said, "Listen, Bob. Let me see." So, I went down and talked to Len Garment, who was still around, and Len called Ron Ziegler  and they cleared it for me to let it Woodward in a back door over at the Old Executive Office Building, which I did. I took him over to Len Garment's office and deposited him there, didn't stick around very long. And as a result of that, Woodward began to develop some back channels, which I facilitated but with the permission of the President. In fact, one of the tapes shows that the President Nixon telling I don't know who it was at the time, whether it was Haldeman or Ziegler or somebody telling, "Have Gergen tell Woodward 'x'..." So, it was all, it was all through channels but   as a result of that, Bob Woodward and I had periodic conversations  in which he was looking for help on a story and I would try to plug him in with some, somebody there, sometimes Ziegler, and, you know, I know, I knew he had other contacts but I was one of them and,   but he and I would have these conversations about what was really happening, what was the... And, and we both began to understand that he was playing with the pillars of the government.   I mean, he, his stories were starting to really threaten those pillars, and it was so interesting because he had a, my, what I was hearing inside was so different from what he was getting and his reporting. The world that I was, that was being painted for me on the inside as a player inside was a much, much more innocent 'they don't understand...they don't get it...they're just out to get us... this is the liberal press...they're trying to bring us down...' You know, it was 'Kay, Kay Graham is just,' you know, 'is on a vendetta against Nixon...she's never liked him...' Et cetera, et cetera. These... And what I then was discovering was Woodward was getting a much darker view and, as   time went on, it became clear to me that the Woodward view was much closer to reality than what I was   hearing on the inside of the government, and it became clear to me there are people lying in here, they're lying to me and they're lying to the public. We didn't know what the extent of it was but we began to realize   this game is not played straight. We're not on a level table here. Now, around then, as we began,   as it began to dawn on us this may be a lot more rotten than we thought into the very core of it. Still didn't know whether Nixon was involved. We started having conversations - should we leave, what should we do - and I did have one, I had a conversation with several of the speechwriters. One in particular,   John Andrews, who went to live in Colorado, extremely, a man of great integrity,  great social conscience, and was extremely bothered   and he finally said, "David, I've got to go. I can't, I just don't feel comfortable being with this," and I told him, and he said, "You," and he came to me and said...and we had a long talk about it and   I told him I didn't feel comfortable going yet, that I did feel that A. I didn't think the foot proof was finally in, and B. Because I was, I wasn't an important player but I had   a profile by that time, I was running a unit, for me to leave would have then sent a signal I didn't believe in and, you know, I lost faith and I was out of there. It was one thing for John who did not have as much of a profile to leave but it was, I thought another  and I felt I couldn't leave. And then, frankly, when Al Haig called and asked a group of us to come in toward the end to...I remember walking into his office and Haig got a group of us around sort of the junior lieutenants, if you were, if you would, and he said, "Gentlemen, are your sphincters tight?"   And I said, "Oh god. Where are we going here?" And that's when he told us  about the "smoking gun", the tape of June 21st. I think that was the date. And at that point, we knew it was over and it was only a matter of time before he left. Having stayed up until that point, I felt then you couldn't leave because it was a rat leaving a sinking ship. It was like you had to stay through the end. I mean, now that we knew, we had to stay through the end,   you had to go down with the ship, and as  I say, I thought we were all going to be   drowned in the storm that would follow, and we weren't. But I thought the only honorable thing to do was to stick it out. Now, did I stay partly because I was fascinated by the whole thing? Probably. You know, this was one of the most  important dramas of my life. Here I was in this, a place that I had a potential role and potentially could be helpful, and I was writing some memos trying   to get, you know, I was trying to get some things to go public. Of course they went nowhere. And I felt at the end I had failed to bring good out of it but I wrestled a lot with whether I should leave or not. But I, but I, and I honestly felt at the end that my career is over and so is that of a lot of my colleagues, but we   did the best we could, under the circumstances. TN: Did you talk to Ray Price about these things? DG: Some. Ray knew a lot more than I did. He had a young man named, working for him that's no longer alive by the name of Tex Lezar, who was a very bright fella, went back to practice law in Texas, and, uh, Ray and I talked to him some but he was very guarded, very guarded, and he...I didn't know the truth until I learned it from Haig, Al Haig. I was one of the people who came out of that, by the way, feeling that Al Haig had done a real service for the country. I thought he held, I thought he held the White House together during his time as Chief of Staff, and when I went into the Reagan White House, I had a picture of Al Haig on my wall. And, uh, he was Secretary of State. Of course, a lot of the Reagan people hated him. TN: I was gonna say that didn't make you that popular. DG: It made me very unpopular. And, uh, I had, also had a situation where Dwight Chapin had come back in the Reagan presidency and Dwight Chapin or somebody was in town and I asked a group of the Nixon alumni to come to the Roosevelt Room for a get-together just to talk, like 10 or 12, 15, I can't remember, and some of the, some of the Reagan people hated me for that, because I was trying to say 'We're the Chicago Black Sox. It's okay to come back. Life has gone on. A number of you've gone on to really good things. Let's come back. Let's sort of have a closing of the circle. I'd like to invite you back. Be my guest. I'm here working in the White House.' And do that.    But it, it, it, and I think they were, they liked it, but I must tell ya, I think some of the Reagan people hated it. There was no love lost between some of the Reagan people and some of the Nixon people.   The Reagan people, when he had been governor, when Reagan had been governor, felt the Nixon   people terribly arrogant and it's important to remember that. They felt that they'd been treated dismissively. So, there was a lot of bad blood that goes, that went went way back there.   I hadn't been, you know, a party to some of that but, you know, life is funny like that. But I will tell you, I tell some of these tales in my, in a book that I wrote, a reflective book I wrote on the, "Eyewitness to Power", which has chapters where I try to treat Richard Nixon three, in a three-dimensional way   and try to be fair to him, and it's been striking me in the people who read that book how many of them tell me, "I didn't... You gave me an entirely new understanding of Richard Nixon. I hadn't appreciated that part, those parts of him. I'd always see him as this one-dimensional evil figure, and yet, there was a lot more about him." Um. But, uh... I...Those last few night, those last few days, of course, were hell when he, as he was leaving, and I didn't know when he, because Ray was working close with him,    the night he gave his farewell address, I did not know that that was exactly what he was going to say. I assumed we were probably very close to the end but I didn't know if he was going to try to fight on, try to fight impeachment in the Senate. And, um. And so, several of the speechwriters gathered in my office. By this time, I was in the southwest   corner office where Ray Price had been. And so, it was a big room that could accommodate a lot of people   and we watched the speech and it was shortly after the farewell speech, Al Haig, the Chief of Staff, called me. I can't remember exactly what he said but it was to the effect 'David, we forgot one thing,' and I said, "What's that?" and he said, "We forgot a resignation letter."  I said, "Well, that's very interesting, Al. I'll be glad to read it. I'm going to be interested in reading it." He said, "No, no. You don't get it." He said, "You need to write it." [Laughs] And I said, I said, "Al, don't you think the President ought to write his own resignation letter?" He said, "Look. He's in no place to do that. We need you to write the resignation letter." I said, "Well, Al, I don't know what to say but, first of all, to whom does the President resign? You know, does he send a letter to the President pro tem of the Senate?  The Speaker of the House? God? Where do you send the letter?" [Laughs] He said, "I don't know. Figure it out. I'll see you in the morning." Boom! Phone goes down. So, I go down to Fred Fielding, who is our Deputy General Counsel by that time. Of course, I think our General   Counsel John Dean was in the clinker by then, so, but he was gone. But Fred, who's a terrific guy and very, a man of great integrity, has continued to play a very important role in public life, right through the 9/11 Commission. I said, "Fred, let's, we gotta get, I got, I've got to do this resignation letter." So, we couldn't figure it out.   So, and he said, "Let me, let me work on it." So, we wrote three letters   to the President pro tem [laughs] and the Speaker of the House, and I don't know who else.  We had three different drafts and Fred said, "I'll figure out the morning," and I decided this is not a time for a flowery letter, you know, this is not exactly a time... 'Oh, gee. I'm really sorry about leaving and, you know, we've had a great time and Tricia   will be back and Julie will be back and sorry about the dog pooping on the rug...' I just didn't think it was that kind of letter. So, I wrote one sentence: "I hereby resign the presidency of the United States effective immediately." And next morning, I think it went to the President pro tem but in any event, Fred had figured it out and the President signed it, and it now hangs in the National Archives.  So, my tiny little footnote at the end of the whole thing was writing the resignation of one, of one sentence but I...Going to the, going over to the East Room on the morning of his departure...  It was so bizarre to start with, because we had  the Marine Band there and they were playing very upbeat music and...  TN: You wrote that they were playing show tunes. DG: I think they were playing show tunes. It was incongruous. It was just so...It was like what in the hell are we doing here, you know? What...This is a farewell. This is the first time in the history of the country, hopefully the last, when a President of the United States has been forced to resign in a scandal. And then President Nixon came in with his wife Pat and the family, and of course he gave this speech that  was maudlin, in many ways, but it was, it went back to his mother and, you know, it was a speech in which he talked a great deal about Hannah Nixon but he never talked about his wife, and it was clear that that childhood relationship   had been so important. It had been that positive force in his life when he really didn't have a   father and had a really terrible relationship with his father. He had lost two brothers from tuberculosis. It again brought back that sense I had of Nixon's  vulnerability as a human being. Even though he had all these great powers and armament, in effect,    it really brought that back to me. And when he said in the end, he said, "I'm...This is, I'm not saying goodbye. I'm going to say au revoir. I'll see you again." And then, we went out to watch that helicopter pull away. It was, it was a very Shakespearean tragedy. It was a sense of this wonderfully talented, well-intentioned man who had an enormous capacity,  who had these sort of deep interactable flaws that brought him down and that's the stuff of tragedy.   TN: Did Bryce Harlow mentioned the fact that he must have had a deep wound from his childhood? Did he mention that during the administration to you?  Or did he mention, or did you hear this secondhand? DG: Bryce and I used to talk some. Bryce was always very kind to me. He was a mentor to Lamar Alexander, to me, to a number of other people. I recall that Bryce said that in one of his interviews at the University of Virginia in one of the Miller Center oral histories. I've read it and I've quoted him on that but I did read it   in a credible source but I can't, I can't put my finger on it right now. TN: Did...What affect did those last few weeks have on, on Ray Price, as his friend? DG: I can't say for sure. I didn't spend those last weeks with Ray. So, it would be unfair of me to fully characterize it. I sensed that he knew and understood from the beginning that Nixon had this dark side, and he knew and understood if that became the upper   part of it or the dominant part of this presidency, it was going to be trouble. But I also think he believed to the end, and believes to this   day, that there was much good in Nixon and he did a lot more for the country   than people are willing to acknowledge, and he also, of course, has a better historical press. He wrote a book later on about the  press, felt that the press really never   fully understood how the country was torn  apart by the Vietnam War and I think shared this view with Len Garment that there was a direct line from Vietnam to Watergate, that the, the, the, that the President inherited a war and a country that was,  the war it was unwinnable and a country that was in enormous tension, and that it really jeopardized the national security of the country and the   attempts to bring, to, to split China and Russia apart, and there was a sense, you know, that this   was an administration under siege that Ray had right from the beginning and that the people weren't being fair to Nixon and what he had really was trying to do, and that, and that the, the   the Vietnam War and all the national security issues and, eventually, the sort of splits that occurred, and so that, you know, the Pentagon was spying on the White House and, essentially, the   White House began spying on the Pentagon and people's phones are being tapped.   That all grew out of the war. Ray, I think, felt as I came to feel that what started as a highly questionable, and I   would still object to it, on the phone tapping, I think Bill Safire was right about that,   but what started as a national security apparatus was taken by some people, including Nixon,  over into the political realm, and that the various kind of plumbing operations really started about the war were transferred over into the politics of the '72 campaign, and that's what led to Watergate. I, to this day, I don't think there's hard  evidence that Richard Nixon ordered Watergate   but I do believe that he was responsible for creating a culture within the White House among some people who were there, that there were some who there who thought that's what he would have wanted   or what what he wanted. In other words, I think, I think he,    you have to, he has to bear responsibility for that and I, and I, and I do believe that White House was as compartmentalized as he himself was, that there was a, there were very good people and some very good parts to that White House and to  that administration. I put Ray Price and Len Garment and some people like that, Brad Patterson,   there are a whole group of people that I would put on the bright side of the line and there were some whom I think went over to the dark side.    TN: Is there something you could have done that you didn't? When you think... DG: I don't know. I don't know. I worry about that. I wonder about that. I I do know that when John Dean's book came out, I was shocked   because I felt this guy was working three doors down the hall from me   in the old EOB. I was in the corner office and he was in the middle. There was a great, big suite of offices right in the middle and it's like it was a mafia operation going on down there. I didn't know that. Um. Uh...It was, uh... I, I, maybe I should have inquired. Maybe I should have asked harder questions than I did    but even I'm not even sure. I mean, here was Fred Fielding working in the John Dean suite   and Fred is a terrific guy. As I said, has been well-respected since. I'm not sure he understood. But when I read the, when I read the John Dean book, I came away feeling like   there was a White House within a White House that I didn't know anything about. I didn't even know it existed and I've come to believe that the White House can be more compartmentalized  than you would think. Look, I worked for two or three years next to, sitting next to Mike Deaver in the West Wing in the Reagan administration and I knew Mike had a glass of wine and I knew he liked really terrific wine. I didn't know he was an alcoholic. I didn't know that he had a dependency.   There's a tendency, I think, if you're working in the White House to, you're so focused on the job at hand and you've got so much coming at you so fast that maybe you're blind to some things that are going on around you.   You know, there's a famous experiment that psychologists have; that putting a group of people in a room and saying, 'Okay, we have a ball that we're gonna ask you to toss back and forth and we want you to toss it as fast as you   can and count the number, see how many times you can  do it without dropping it.' And so, you'll get six or seven people tossing that ball around and about and so forth, and this has been filmed, and   then, if you watch the film, I've shown this to a class and said, "Okay, I want you to watch this film and   tell me how many balls, how many times the ball was caught before it gets dropped.   And so, people intently watch that film and then, after it's over, "Okay, how many times do they do it?" and you get all sorts of hands go up. "Five." "Eight." "Nine." You get a lot, a bunch of answers. I say, "Okay, did you notice anything else about the film?" "And what are you talking about?" "Did you see the bear?" "The bear?"   "You didn't you see the bear? Let's, I want you to watch the film again." So, you show the film again, and there's a person dressed in a black bear costume, standing up, who walks through the middle of that group of people throwing that ball back and forth, and most people watching the film never see the bear. They're watching the ball and they don't see the bear. And I sort of thought to myself, that was sort of like what it was like working in the Nixon White House.  You shouldn't see the bear.  You didn't see what was obvious when it was over  but you didn't see it when it was there. It's a, it is... Look, I have regrets about a lot of things I did in public life,   things I should have done better,  places I should have blown the whistle, the times that maybe I should have left. I didn't feel that so much about Watergate. I really felt most of us did not understand until pretty close to the end. And once we understood, it was over. TN: What'd you think of the pardon?  DG: I thought the pardon of Richard Nixon was the right thing to do. I thought it was a brave thing to do. I thought Jerry Ford deserved the honor when the John F. Kennedy Library, some years later, gave him the Kennedy medal for bravery  citing the Watergate, the pardon of Richard Nixon. I thought that was the right thing to do. I also thought it was, as a political matter handled, very clumsily, so that it was a complete shock to  the country. I remember it happened at 11 o'clock on a Sunday about thirty days into the presidency of Jerry Ford.   I was working for President Ford at that time. Of course, I was an outsider because I was a Nixon person and they were about to replace me, which I didn't know. But I remember driving with my wife. We were, I don't know, I think coming back from church or something in McLean, Virginia, on a road when we heard the news of the pardon. I damn near went in a ditch. I mean, I was stunned at the pardon, and the reason I thought it was clumsily handled was there was no preparation of the public, there was no, there was no balloon, you know, that went up, trial balloon. Instead, there had been denial - 'No, we're not doing that, we would never do that. Even if we were to think about that, it wouldn't be until all the, the the legal avenues were exhausted,' which meant he had to go through indictment and potential trial, but it was gonna be a long... we were talking about two or three months off. So, I think, as I say, I think Jerry Ford did the right thing and I think he paid a huge price for it, because it would clearly was a major, major factor in his defeat at the hands of Jimmy Carter,   may have cost him the presidency, but I thought it was a brave thing to do. I just thought it was wow, if you're, if you, you could have thought that one through. And it's one of these    decisions...It goes to some of the things that happened in the Nixon administration and it's a tendency in the White House... On the most sensitive issues,  the more sensitive the issue, the smaller the circle of people the President likes to consult, because of leaks. And so, an issue which really should require a lot of different voices,  tends to have just one or two or three voices and, in this case, Jerry Ford just made up his mind and Jerry Ford could be a very stubborn man, could be a very stubborn man when he,   when he...And Jerry Ford, I, to this day, do not believe there was any deal with Al Haig on Ford's part. I think he did it to preserve his capacity for governing as President. I think he did it because the, for just what he said, that he couldn't, it was taking up all his time. I believe to this day that Jerry Ford is one of the most honest people we've ever had in the White House and, uh, I think one of the least appreciated Presidents.    Al Simpson introduced him here once at the Kennedy School, President Ford came back after he'd left, and Simpson said, "You know, uh, if, if,  if you have integrity as President, nothing else matters.  And if you don't have integrity as President, nothing else matters." And I thought that had some real application to Ford, and possibly, you know, you could argue to Nixon. So, but I, but I'm, I'm a big, big Ford fan and it was a very, very different   environment working for Ford. It was, this was a much more transparent, you didn't have to put your back against the wall, you didn't know whether the knives were coming at you in the dark,   and there was not a lot of this compartmentalization - it was    not as excessive. There was some but not as excessive as it was in the Nixon days. But I come back to this: Nixon, you cannot get away from   the fact that Nixon came up through this, these very dark passages in politics and that he believed that politics was the law of the jungle, and the law of the jungle was you're either,    you either eat or you eaten, and you have to make a choice.  And he felt people are either for you or they're against you, they're not neutral. Now, that led to a certain paranoia and, in fact, it was a lot of paranoia, and it led to a very, very dark view of human nature and a very dark view, it's sort  of a Hobbesian view of human nature, and a very dark view of how the game is played. He deeply believed that the Kennedys engaged in a lot of the bugging, that he'd been bugged.    He deeply believed the Kennedys always got away with a lot of stuff in politics that he couldn't get away with, that he had been, in a variety of ways, you know, always treated dismissively by the swells, you know, even though he got into Harvard, you know, he still believed that he was the Orthogonians, the Orthonians, whatever they were called back, way back in when, but by the time he got to the White House,  you had this part of Richard Nixon that was Hannah's son, who was the, who was the Quaker who wanted to bring good things, who really    believed it when he went out and talked to those kids at the Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, and was deeply,  cared about the country, who saw Billy Graham as a,   and Billy Graham saw him as a saving figure, had, and he had a redemptive quality about him. And there was this dark, resentful, boiling angry Richard Nixon too and, uh, that made him the fascinating man I've ever known in public life  and, in many ways, the most tragic. I do want to add one thing about the bright side, because I've written about, my belief is the, uh... Nixon, Richard Nixon was the best strategist I've ever met in public  life and I've met a lot. He, he had this capacity to sort of go up on the mountaintop, figuratively go up on the mountaintop, and look out into the future about 20 years, figure out how the forces of history were going to unfold and try to bend those forces to favor America's national security interest. He was a real, he was a real visionary in going to China and understanding if you could break apart the Chinese from the Soviets and play off one against the other, it could be the end of the, of the empire against the United States, and, you know, Nixon, the Nixon to China has now become, obviously, a metaphor in our life, our public life, but Nixon could pull that off and I've always admired that part of him, and I believe to this day that it came, that his capacity for strategic thinking came from an  extraordinary amount of discipline and hard work, and a lot of reading.   I've never known a President who took history as seriously as he did, who drew as much from it.   I remember so well when he would ask Pat, you know, asking Pat Moynihan for the list of books he could read late at night and Moynihan gave him this list and even after...  TN: Is that where he read about Disraeli? DG: Yes, and that was even after...I didn't know Moynihan in those days.   I got to know Arthur Burns but Moynihan had left by the time I got there. But I remember to this day, when after Moynihan left, Nixon would bring up the Disraeli book and he recommended Disraeli to me to read,   which I got a copy of and it was a Disraeli biography and, of course, Disraeli, Moynihan introduced, wanted to talk about Disraeli because Disraeli was the conservative Prime Minister who brought the welfare state to Britain   just as Bismarck had been a conservative bringing the welfare state to Germany, and Nixon was the only Republican who has ever proposed universal health care insurance. And it was very, the, and that part of the domestic life would have been reading that kind of history, understanding that, the arguments he would have with Kissinger about the generals of  World War One I thought gave him a understanding. Churchill once said that that a person who looks farther back in history can also see farther forward, and I thought that was true of Nixon. I thought he could see farther ahead and   it was one of his blessings in life. He had a lot of curses but he did have some blessings, and the, that is, that reflective part of his presidency, you know, coming out with those yellow pads and sitting and thinking over in the, in the... I used to visit him sometimes in the hideaway office and talk to him and he'd talk about history, and he would want to talk about history in Cabinet meetings. Sometimes, I thought he drew the wrong lesson or he could just disagree, you know, but, uh, but I think about drawing parallels from history, trying to understanding from that was... Well, he proved his strategic thinking. I thought it, I thought it brought an extra dimension to his leadership. And by the way, on the Disraeli point, I had this experience. I went to the dedication of the Nixon Library and he was there. Two things which sort of struck me going through there. First, I went through the receiving line and Bob Haldeman was just in front of me, and Haldeman got up to see Nixon and Nixon didn't recognize him. They hadn't seen each other in such a long time. They literally took a - and Haldeman had changed some - and he literally didn't catch who he was, and Bob Haldeman had been central to his presidency. But the other things was, when I got up...I was sorta toward the end of the line and, um, and Nixon said, "Come on. I want to show you some of the library." So, we walked around together,   and what was really striking was he said, "I want you to see, I want you to see this part of the library first." And then we walked through the domestic side of the library and he said, he said to me as we left, he said, "I want you, I want you to know that my domestic presidency was as important   to me as my foreign policy." We'd never thought that when he was the President. You know, he used to be, make disparaging remarks about being a domestic President. You know, the real issues were in the foreign policy side and of course he devoted most of his time, but he was, he was very proud of the, the, the domestic legacy and he wanted to talk about the War on Cancer and what he'd done in health care, his efforts on the environment and, you know,   he was, he brought us the EPA. He'd lost on health care, of course, and he'd lost on the welfare, some of the welfare reform.    But one of the reasons that I remain more of a Nixon fan than many others is because I did think he was the last moderate to liberal Republican   domestic President. I did respect what... Some of my colleagues of that day became more conservative after they left the White House. I found myself, especially after I left the Reagan White House when I became more of a journalist and had a chance to see what was going on around the country,   but I went left on domestic policy. I became much more... I'm still a hawk   on foreign policy and believe strongly in that but I, I am a, I believe, I happen to believe in free trade and I believe if you're   in favor of globalization, in favor of free trade, you have to be in favor of a high safety net   for people who get chopped up in the system. If you're gonna have a highly competitive system, it's really, really important to have a system that's caring about the folks who are not making it,   and I, you know, the Lincoln part of the legacy in the Republican Party is very important to me,   the civil rights part of it, part of, you know, Nixon did, you know, there were more children who started going to  integrated schools in the South, where I'm from,  under Richard Nixon than any other President. A lot happened in a positive way and I relate very much to that part of his legacy. I feel like it was important. I am glad and there were a lot of moderates who came out of that. There were a lot of very good people who worked for Richard Nixon. Nixon,  Richard Nixon had a dark side but he also had a real eye for good talent on that bright side, and he brought a huge number of good people into public service who went on to serve with distinction in the Ford administration. Many of them went on to work for Richard Nixon   and, of course, a great many went on to work for George W. Bush, but they went on and did very good things in life and, you know, we didn't turn into the Chicago Black Sox.   And so, I, a lot of those associations, I'm very proud of but I thought Nixon left a legacy, such as EPA, that Republicans should be proud of. I, I, I believe that the Environmental Protection was positive.   I think his ideas on health care, trying to get the universal coverage, they're right. I happen to be more for a private system than some of the Democrats but he is a...You know, I think there's much that there that in that legacy that   people can look back upon and say, 'Deeply tragic, flawed President. Did enormous to the presidency, but let's remember the whole of Richard Nixon and who he was.' TN: Which is what President Clinton said. DG: Yeah. TN: And perhaps now we know who helped inspire that. DG: Well, I believe that. TN: I'm not sure if you'd...I'm not I don't know if you hadn't been on that plane with him, whether the President would have said it. DG: We talked about it a lot going out on the plane and I was glad he said what he said. It was the right epitaph for Richard Nixon. TN: David Gergen, thank you for your time today. DG: Thank you, Tim. It was a pleasure and a privilege to be here. TN: Thank you, Brook, for your help, and gentlemen. [Unknown voice]: Thank you, Tim. DG: Okay. We're adjourned. TN: Thank you.   Why did you mention Tex? DG: Tex Lezar? TN: Yeah. DG: Well, you know, because he has a widow out there...

Channel: Richard Nixon Presidential Library

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Id: NwvrahcR3_o

Length: 95min 25sec (5725 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021