Richard Nixon: The Life

[Applause] [Music] [Music] good evening I'm James Roth acting director of the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and on behalf of my colleague Steven Rothstein and all of our library and foundation colleagues I thank you for coming this evening I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of our underwriters at the Kennedy Library forums lead sponsor Bank of America the Lowell Institute and our media sponsors the Boston Globe Xfinity and WBUR this year marks the centennial of john f kennedy's birth on May 29 1917 as we honor his life and legacy during this centennial year we frequently revisit the pivotal election of 1960 and the indelible televised debates between then senator Kennedy and then Vice President Nixon we look forward to exploring that election as well as so many other facets of President Nixon's career in more detail tonight I'm delighted to introduce John a Farrell author of Richard Nixon the life his previous books include Clarence Darrow attorney for the Damned which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the best biography of 2011 and Tip O'Neill and the Democratic century he is a contributing editor editor to political magazine and a contributor to the Atlantic after a prize-winning career as a newspaperman most look most notably at the Denver Post and the Boston Globe where he worked as White House correspondent and served on the renowned spotlight team I should also mention that mr. Farrell has graciously agreed to sign books following the forum and copies are available for purchase in our bookstore for those interested the signing will take place right outside the Smith Hall lobby here I'm also pleased to introduce our moderator for the evening Brian mcgrory editor of The Boston Globe he has also worked as an award-winning Metro columnist and White House correspondent over his 27 years at the globe since he became editor in late 2012 the globe has won four Pulitzer Prizes for breaking news and coverage of the Marathon bombings for the feature for feature photography for commentary and for editorial writing mr. McCrory has also authored four published novels and a book about his family's pet rooster buddy which I really like Jack and Brian thank you for joining us tonight and welcome thank you thank you so much thank you to everyone who has come out on this beautiful night thank you for to people who are watching at home and thanks most of all to Jack for making the trip back to Boston to be here with us Jack and I were colleagues in the globe's Washington bureau for a long time so it's a it's a real pleasure to be sitting here with you and discuss this great accomplishment I will say that various reviewers have described described your biography as and I'll quote melodious beautifully written deeply insightful experts superb highly detailed a liquid style that slips easily down the gullet these are the types of compliments that can really put a strain in our relationship they're so good from one writer to another congratulations on this extraordinary work but I have to start out by asking you when you how long ago did you begin this six years ago so when you first submitted your proposal and sign your book contract six years ago could you ever foresee the circumstances under which this book was published no it was a editor at doubleday came up with this idea that the world needed a single volume Nixon biography and he came to me and asked if I would like to do it it took me about 15 seconds to say yes but as far as looking far ahead to the idea that Donald Trump would wouldn't be be occupying the Oval Office and that this in turn would make my book such a huge success because I can't get off of radio and television talking about the comparisons between Trump and Nixon the only thing I'll say about this particular editor is that if he assigns a book on the Spanish flu go get your inoculations you're making everyone I'll misty eye to your success with Donald Trump as president this is great good good for Jack bad for the country so are they really alike or they or they not there's more been a series of circumstances that are very alike personally the two men are like mostly in that they practice what I call in the book the politics of grievance Nixon had this amazing ability from his own tortured soul to recognize and is in his crowds their fears he used to tell he told bill sapphire the columnist for The New York Times that people don't react to love they were get act to fear that's not what they tell you in Sunday school bill but but that's the truth and I think that that Trump's campaign was very much like that as well and in times he even adopted some of the Nixonian phrases like law and order and he even actually talked about speaking out and tapping the great silent majority which is what Nixon called his relationship with with middle America so in that regard they were like there was a certain grandiosity in them Nixon's tapes at times can sound as raw as an egotistical as Trump's tweets and but mostly it's this just amazing set of circumstances there was a break-in at the Democratic National Committee there was massive crowds protesting the inauguration in the streets three days later there are allegations of eavesdropping there was a Attorney General let go and then a US Attorney from New York let go and then finally last week we had like the trifecta we had the Saturday night massacre redid redone of course I guess it's just the Daily Double and then Donald Trump talking about the fact that there could be tapes and when I heard tapes I just said well this is it my life is ruined for the next two weeks because I'm going to be on on radio trying to explain to people that it's not Watergate yet we don't know that there's even been a crime the Saturday night Massacre happened six months after Nixon had begun to fire his staff go on television do the limited hangout route for those of you old enough remember the Watergate jargon and then you had John Dean testifying all summer about the president's involvement in this you had memos come out that showed that the CIA had been used to rein in the FBI and finally you had Alexander Butterfield Nixon's aide come and testify and say yeah there are tapes so that by the time Alec Cox came to Nixon with the subpoenas and Nixon was forced to fire him we all knew what the crime was what Nixon was being accused of and what the special prosecutor was after whereas this whole thing was call me as I wrote in the as a globe correspondent on Sunday could just be crazy Don Trump being Trump we just don't know so I this is Twitter world that we live in we want to get to the end real fast but I don't think we're going to get there I think it's going to take weeks months maybe even years it there are key differences between the two as well right I mean just to prime the pump here feel free to because obviously you needed to given the length of my first answer feel free to disagree here but Nixon was somebody who was almost consumed by self-doubt Donald Trump seems to know no self-doubt there's a as you do biography at least I have in three books become much more more fascinated with with family upbringing Nixon had a blowhard borderline abusive father and he had a very religious Quaker mother but she was the cold reserved type who would retreat into her closet to pray and as Nixon himself famously said never once in my life did she tell me that she loved me so Nixon in his whole life was always trying to meet his father's stoney approval and get his mother's love and the fact that he never could really gave him this sort of feeling of doubt self-doubt that bordered on self-loathing there were times when you listen to the White House tapes where you want to reach back into time and grab the president knighted States bother by the lapels and say stop it stop but she today you did good stop it give yourself a little bit of credit you went to China and yet he comes back from China and there it is on the White House tapes he's talking to Henry Kissinger and he says Henry you know the American people are a bunch of dumb sheep you know I went to China shook hands with with Mao it meant nothing you and I know that but these you know stupid stupid voters out there they think that a couple of pictures make a big difference and and you just feel so at least I felt so torn by this poor guy who could never stop whispering in his ear that he that he wasn't good enough he was Iago to his own a fellow and constantly demeaning himself and finally bringing himself himself down that way Trump from what we know had a severe father who favored an older brother as did Nixon's dad I don't know a lot about Trump's mom but I do know that do you know that Don was sent away at the age of 12 or 13 to military school sort of an from the family and you know it's it's it's likely that there is a similarity there between he and Nixon and that they are you know constantly looking to get the love that they wanted in their childhood from the public acclaim of being either a big-shot developer or in both cases president United States talk about the relationship their respective relationships with the news media what you know of Nixon and what you've seen of Donald Trump from your vantage point Trump is an interesting case because I don't really believe that he hates the news media the way that he tries to portray himself in his okay can I can i interject I know it's your night but he needs the media I mean it's he has an almost pathological need to be accepted by the news media and that and he manipulated it quite expertly in his rise in New York he played the tabloid culture there which as you know being a political reporter is is like nothing anywhere else in the world he played it well he rose he became known between the New York tabloids and then finally reality television so the media to him is is met yet for Nixon it was this constant nagging enemy this constant he was a very private man and the press was always poking and prodding to try to find out what made Nixon tick right Trump doesn't care the press pokes and prods he loves it loves it yeah so the interesting thing is that when they finally came out with their famous phrase in Nixon's case that presses the enemy that presses the enemy write that on your blackboard Henry a hundred times the press is the enemy he didn't go on to say the press is the enemy of the people and that's what Trump did and that's that's a step further that's demmick that's really demagogic turning turning the First Amendment on against the American people turning their their their their watchdogs as the enemy of the American people Nixon never went that far he he'd been Eisenhower's vice president and he had a certain reverence for the office despite what he did when he became president that you get a feeling the trunk doesn't have you had many many revelations in the course of this book tell us about the bombshell of Nixon's role in the Johnson attempts Lyndon Johnson's attempts to reach a peace treaty in Vietnam during the 1968 campaign yeah I mean I learned many things in journalism at spotlight one of them is turn every page however long you're in there going through the documents make sure you turn every page because you never know what's going to be misfiled or what's going to pop up on the next page and now I knew that one of the things I would have to address in the biography of Richard Nixon is Vietnam and I knew that there was this story that had gone on for many many years that Nixon had interfered with Johnson's peace process in 1968 but although the major bones of those that story had been in place by other historians nobody could ever tie it tie the orders the directives to Richard Nixon's mouth and in a famous tape at the Johnson library Presidential Library you can hear Nixon denying it to Lyndon Johnson a week before the election and gore you can go online you can watch him deny it specifically to David Frost and the famous frost Nixon interviews so he always denied it and nobody has ever been able to pin it on Nixon himself and there was there was a release of political papers from the 1968 campaign I was turning every page and all of a sudden there was this vane very rich vein of documents that had been gathered together by Bob Haldeman who was Nixon's chief of staff remember HR Haldeman and they all were about this episode and in the midst of those episode the midst of those papers was a yellow legal pad with Nixon's orders that he had barked out to hauled him this what I want you to do and the first one was to get his people get their people working on the South Vietnamese any way we can monkey wrench the peace talks Johnson's peace initiative and and it happened LBJ had eavesdropping on the South Vietnamese embassy and they recorded somebody from the Nixon campaign calling and saying drag your feet you'll get a better deal and so the question is open to history as to whether or not there could have been a peace settlement that fall it's probably unlikely given the stubbornness of the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese in the years to follow but for me as a biographer trying to capture a president's character and what he was willing to do to advance his own career the idea that you would play with an undetermined number of lives that later turned out to be 20,000 American lives and two million Cambodians and Vietnamese lives the idea that you would risk all that risk an actual peace shoot that was stomp on it on a shoot that was growing to get yourself elected I thought was reprehensible and I think it's far worse than anything that Nixon ever did in even in Watergate so let's step back a little bit you have this Doubleday editor who was apparently the only person in America six years ago who had this notion that Donald Trump might be President someday and then we might want a Nixon biography to draw comparisons when you first had the idea of being a Nixon biographer raised to you what were your vague impressions but more important how did you view of Richard Nixon change over time and the years of research to what you devoted it changed pretty drastically I think that unless you do a biography of maybe Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin Lenin maybe there's a there's a there's a chance that in looking at the human being and looking at the factors that made the human being who they were that you're going to develop sympathy you're going to be empathetic about this person even this diabolical political villain and so pretty early in the process I had changed the I had a working title for the book that was Richard Nixon and America tragedy because I would read through Elliott Richardson's notes or Henry Kissinger's commentary and they were struck and while they watched it happen as how this person reminded them of a Shakespearean or a Greek tragic villain with a with a fatal flaw that was dragging him down that even this person in the end came to recognize and yet could not stop himself from going down that path and so over time Nixon who for me had been over the Nixon of Hunter Thompson or the Nixon of the Simpsons or the Nixon's the Nixon of the of all the movies where the bank robbers pulled on a rubber mask before they go in to pull off the heist it's always a Nixon mask and that was that was tricky dick to me and I gradually began to see more of the man and one of the nicest reviews I got was from NPR in which they said Farrell humanizes Nixon without excusing him and that was pretty much my target of what I was trying to do and that that is incredibly true there is a humanity to this book and you show the vulnerability of this guy in a way that I had never thought about before and I think a lot of people hadn't thought about before and the other print I fell in love with Pat Nixon I mean I'm sorry at the time when I was 16 she was plastic patch she was so square she was just like everything that the 60s were not about and the only square a person on the planet was probably her husband or maybe Queen Elizabeth but as I got to know Pat through her writings through their love letters to each other to her diary entries she has this amazing tart sardonic sense of humor there was a mate there was a moment during Watergate where the House Minority Leader had said something nasty about Patton and he was do that after I took talk about Nixon he was drew that afternoon to be in a photo session with Pat and so he saddled up to her and he said mrs. Nixon I want you to know that I was misquoted and she said yeah that's what they all say and then dick wood writer these letters there you'll find them in the book these amazing letters you know I'm sitting at my desk this lonely barrister and the rain has stopped and the Sun is out and the flowers are here in Whittier and my thoughts turned to my gypsy princess my lovely vagabond who you know doesn't love me because I'm such a creep but who I will forever you know follow anyway and Pat when you just Pat sort of exhale and then she would write back dear dick why don't you come over on Wednesday and I'll burn a hamburger for you and you know if there's a illustration in the dictionary for long suffering it should be a picture of Pat Nixon's what was a relationship like though as it progressed which were did they have a close relationship through their white house here's she hated politics hated what it did to Nixon it turn Nixon into a very tense constantly uptight scheming the the scheming caricature that we see and she didn't like that happening to her husband so she hated politics every time he ran for a big office he had to like do the work to convince her that she would go along but finally she just recognized that this is who he was and that you know as he famously said I'll be intellectually dead in two years and physically dead in five years if I don't run again in 1968 and she finally went along with that she did a great job raising her daughters she was a great grandmother and after they both left Washington you know she didn't have to stay at San Clemente she didn't have to you know hang out with with him and there was a repair in their relationship in those years and in exile and there was some warmth that grew back into the into the in their love of each other to the point that it's very difficult to see the pictures or the film of dick Nixon that Pat Nixon's funeral because the agony in his face is is such that it's it's hard to view I don't know another way to ask this so I'll just say it do you like Richard Nixon you know one of the first things that struck me as I began to do this was how protective the aides who have survived were about him George Shultz remember George Shultz he was Treasury secretary and then later went on to be Secretary of State for Ronald Reagan and I had this interview with him where I was trying to get him to say nasty things because he'd had a big run in with with Nixon over Watergate and using the IRS to read political enemies tax returns and so I was prodding him and prodding him and finally George Shultz said well he's like that little girl in the Longfellow poem and I'm like what book girl's a Longfellow poem okay which one is that and he said George Shultz there was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead and when she was good she was very very good and when she was bad she was horrid and that's and that is pretty much how I came to feel about about Nixon I liked him a lot more than I expected to I I can never forgive personally I can never forgive him for continuing that war that war was was both morally wrong and a huge strategic mistake and he continued it for political purposes time and again and I think history should roast him for that but I often say in when I'm asked about the book that and yet is the phrase that pops up a lot because ng yet Nixon also created the Environmental Protection Agency he also signed the law that allowed there to be cost-of-living increases for seniors he signed the Endangered Species Act title 9 did away with the draft lowered the voting age and segregated more southern schools than either John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson did in the wake of the Brown versus Board of Education announcement Nixon is the one who actually finally came around to implementing Brown versus Board of Education so ng ed is a phrase that pops up several times in the book and it pops up a lot when I talk about so let's get to some of this in just a moment but when you're writing a biography you end up basically living with this guy or in your mind for years at a time yeah I did I've done three it's that unhealthy yes Tip O'Neill was a delight right I mean can you imagine living with Tip O'Neill for five years and it's just it was wonderful Clarence Darrow in his own way was a delight slightly prickly a person probably with more sharp sharper edges than tip but a great liberal hero somebody who I admired all my life really was a somebody I was I was I love those courtroom dramas whether it was the Scopes Monkey Trial or the Leopold Loeb murder case I mean there's a reason why there's movie after movie about Clarence Darrow starting with inherit the wind so that he was he was pretty easy to live with Nixon was harder to live with and because it was it was such grim history and there was always this tragedy unfolding and you had to listen to him say incredibly ugly things about Jews and blacks and Irish and Italians and Mexicans and gays on those tapes and you had to listen to a lot of those tapes and it was it was it was a demoralizing experience it really treated you to a part of humanity that doesn't make you jump up out of bed in the morning and say boy what's house tip going to make me laugh today right it was going to be more like you know can I keep from throwing up as I listen to the next day yeah let's talk about the race stuff a very complex topic when it comes to Richard Nixon yeah you have the Southern Strategy you have the overt bigotry but as you said a few minutes ago you have a lot of accomplishment on that down as well there are two places I step out of the narrative one of them you already talked about which is the press I actually devote sort of half a chapter just to talking about how Nixon's relationship with the press developed and then there's race and I think that in 20th century races is very important prison by which to judge Americans especially American leaders and Nixon started out with that Quaker background as a moderate Republican remember when there used to be moderate Republican as a moderate Republican one of many who supported the Voting Rights Act the Civil Rights Act the Fair Housing Act and in 1957 at the for the first civil rights act that was passed since reconstruction Nixon was on the side of the Angels and JFK and LBJ were dragging their feet because they wanted to keep the solid south together in the 1960 election and martin luther king at that time wrote to a journalist who asked him about nixon and he said two things he said first of all i believe that this man could not have a racist bone in his body but if he does if he's that good at lying then he's the most dangerous man in america and it wasn't until the sixty campaign when nixon got a feeling that he could win down south that Martin Luther King was arrested at a demonstration in Atlanta famously taken away in shackles in the middle of the night to a rural prison where his aides and his wife were just convinced he was going to be murdered either on the way or in his cell and the Kennedy brothers interceded with the Georgia governor and got him out and Nixon given the same opportunity declined to do so and his his campaigns only comment was no comment and afterwards Jackie Robinson went to see him Jackie Robinson was the the ball player integrated major league baseball was a Nixon supporter in 1960 and he went to see him in his hotel room in Chicago and nobody knows what went on in that room but the Sapphire tells us that when Jackie Robinson came out he had tears streaming down his face he was so frustrated and Martin Luther King at that point said that that Nixon had failed this test of moral courage well it was this big dangling plum for the Republicans and the Republicans had been the party of civil rights since Lincoln and they couldn't resist the idea that if they added the south to the west and to the Midwest and if you last bastions in the Northeast but they could become the majority party again as they have and so you had this development of what's called the the Southern Strategy the first inclinations came in Eisenhower's campaign he actually carried Texas and Tennessee and Florida and Virginia Nixon carries those same outside States border South States because he's running against Wallace in 1968 and Wallace is going to take Mississippi George Wallace governor of Alabama racist it's going to take Mississippi Alabama Georgia and Louisiana and and then finally in 1972 Nixon's great triumphant landslide the biggest - it's time he takes he finally sweeps the south and the South begins its final through Reagan's final transformation from Democrat to Republican so at different points along the way Nixon is confronted with political expediency versus principled and he chooses political expediency but once he gets into office the Supreme Court is saying has said to Johnson and I was saying to Nixon desegregate desegregate desegregate no more stalling you have to do it now and Nixon you know does not want the credit he doesn't want white southerners to know that he's going to desegregate the schools but he has to do it so he calls it very quietly he calls in George Shultz and Leonard garment and a few other people and he says we got to do it no violence and we're not going to take any publicity for it and so they go down to the southern states and they put together citizen community groups half black half white the hash it out and hash it out they get Congress to give him a pot of money of three billion dollars and they finally take him to the White House for the final deal and they set him in the Roosevelt Room across from the Oval Office and John Mitchell remember John Mitchell comes in and John Mitchell says it's not if anymore guys it's when and it's now we're going to do this and then they brought into the Oval Office and Nixon hated talking to people he was such an awkward person that one-to-one personal communications was very very difficult for anything that he could train for anything that he could rehearse he was good at he was he gave really good speeches and press conferences but in actual communicating with individuals was hard for him so bringing these people in these black and white people from Atlanta from New Orleans and convincing them that this was the right thing to do and that this is what the majesty of this office demands that we all do be the president and you the citizens it was it was a it was an amazing deal and when it was over more by a factor of maybe 10 more black kids were going to white schools down south and Nixon had a forty three to forty percent approval rating among black voters in the south and yet he did not get there it is again and yet he did not want political approval for this because it would alienate the southerners and so he did it all very quietly never took any credit for it and as daniel patrick moynihan the Harvard professor who worked for Nixon said it was all done quietly because we didn't want to piss off Strom Thurmond and we managed to do it without canonizing him which you certainly didn't let's get into some of the other end yet stuff that you mentioned earlier the Clean Air Act the Marine Mammal Protection Act affirmative action program yes let's talk about some of what else you down good the leaders of the major environmental groups were polled several years back and asked which the presidents was the greatest for the environment and Teddy Roosevelt of course the great conservationists creator of the national parks was came in first and Richard Nixon came in second and in part it was Nixon's political expediency because eight days after he took the oath of office America had its greatest environmental catastrophe the Santa Barbara oil spill fouled the beaches of Southern California all the way from Santa Barbara down to to Catalina and so that was happening Rachel Carson had written about Silent Spring about use of pesticides and in 1970 you had the first Earth Day so there was this movement that was growing that Nixon as a politician recognized and wanted to take advantage of but as with everything that the Democratic Congress of that time gave him he had the veto he could have vetoed it he can and he had aides who worked with the crafting of the legislation and much of that legislation had Republican majorities because those were the days when there was actually bipartisanship remember that bipartisanship in Washington and the two parties cooperated in a lot of this legislation and Nixon was happy to sign it in part because he wanted to get on to International Affairs which is what really interested him it's kind of interesting now that if you go out to the Nixon Library there's a big placard there about title nine and the fact that generations of young woman have been able to go on scholarships to college and and and play sports because Nixon sign title nine well if you look at the paper behind that decision he had Nixon's best buddy was Woody Hayes at Ohio State and had father Herzberg from Notre Dame writing and constantly saying you can't have this it's going to ruin our football programs and you have Nixon saying we can't do this it's kind of ruin their football programs and and yet in the end he signed it and and so I just say end yet again I just did it and so if you listen to the tapes you hear Nixon going back and forth talking to himself about about these these issues but in the end when he had a chance he could have vetoed he signed these things stay on that issue for a moment of bipartisanship who did you cover the White House for a good number of years George HW Bush first term Bill Clinton yeah you're familiar both bushes and then Clinton in between you're familiar with Washington as a bipartisan place Washington is a place where things actually got done is you spent years looking back at the late 60s and early 70s it was even more pronounced back then does that make today seem all the stranger or looking back that it seemed like a foreign land to you not really wording the scribe which is as you see it now as you saw then as you saw it yourself which one doesn't fit now is the aberration just because it's so extreme and I think it's because this is really sad I mix it actually warns us about this in his goodbye speech the David Wright before it gets on the helicopter and says goodbye he has a speech in the East Wing of the White House and remember he talks about hate and those who hate you will fail unless you hate them and then you destroy yourself that's these are these are strong cautionary words that this is one place where we should listen to Richard Nixon because we're at that that place we're divided into tribes and you know these are our fellow Americans this is not an enemy these are neighbors these are people who happen to live in a different state I think Obama's greatest failure was that you know Obama lit a spark in my life when he talked about no red states no blue states there's just the United States and he he offered that moment that we possibly could go back there are some signs very tiny signs that that people are getting that people now recognize the danger you hear more and more people speaking like I just did cautioning about this polarization how damaging it it is but it's really really bad and while I was doing the Clarence Darrow book I worked for a year at a magazine called national journal a national journal just for the walks and one of the things it does is it every year it examines every member of Congress and it draws a line down the center and it's been doing this since the 1960s and you always had a dozen Republicans to the left of that line and you always had a dozen Democrats to the right of that line and for the last five or six ten years that the National Journal has been doing it that number has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and now there's nobody on either side of that line and that's happened now for two or three congresses in a row so it's it's it is this is the extreme that that worries me and you mentioned in the book Lowell Weicker as an example somebody or in your in the globe essay somebody who would have stood up back then where there's nobody who stands up now in the Republican Party except for John McCain bill Cohen of Maine you had members on the House Judiciary Committee who voted for impeachment you had members on the Senate Watergate committee like weicker who were effective cross-examiners you had Howard Baker the Republican leader of the of the Senate Watergate committee working you know not standing in the way of an investigation even though it's his party but making sure that the subpoena had done fairly but that they actually get to the bottom of things you don't have that yet in the case of Donald Trump and I don't I think the big difference between Nixon and Trump is that Nixon had this antagonistic Democratic Congress and Trump is protected by a Republican Congress and until you the voters begin to register your outrage at the polls or your agreement the Republicans are not going to change they're going to be like this until they get to by four to the head and it's only going to be delivered at on Election Day I don't think that public opinion polls are going to change things talk about foreign affairs which it sounds like was Nixon's true passion go through his greatest achievements and a tigress every president wanted an arms deal with the Soviets mixing got the first one strategic arms limitations treatment treaty first American president to go to Moscow hardly remember about this at all anymore because his even greater accomplishment was of course to go to China as mr. Spock says in one of the Star Trek movies is there's an old Vulcan proverb only Nixon can go to China which is actually a paraphrasing that famous is paraphrasing is something that Chairman Mao told him which is that men of the right can do what metal left cannot do but it's interesting one more difference between he and Trump Nixon was it was a foreign policy scholar and something of a visionary in 1965 he wrote this article called beyond Asia beyond Vietnam this is 1965 and he writes about how all we have to do is buy a little bit more time in Southeast Asia because the next century and the closing years of this century are going to be all about the Information Age the dawning information age where computers and creativity and nimbleness are going to be the values that carry the day not some totalitarian government's ability to put workers into factories or onto factory farms and he so he really looks ahead and he says the big the biggest problem about this scenario is that is China because China is sitting there 800 million of the brightest and best people on the planet he had great regard for the Chinese and and their their talents and their strengths and we cannot let them sit there stewing in their own juices we have to pull them into into the family of Nations if this trend is going to work and if it works he said we could have 20 years of peace no more no world wars for 20 years that was his goal and no nuclear war and in fact we've now had 50 years since he was in office and even more if you go all the way back to World War 2 in part because an unbelievable accident of history the Soviet Union and the Chinese get into a fight over a godforsaken stretch of Siberia that nobody in their right mind would ever want but became a matter of pride to them they both the Soviets took all their tank divisions that were faced in West Germany and move them to this river in Siberia they got in touch with with the American government and asked if we would join them on a bombing strike on the Chinese nuclear facilities before they could develop a nuclear arsenal that's how against each other they were and so Nixon and Kissinger saw Nixon in particular thought there was a chance to drive a wedge between the two great Communist Giants and he did so very effectively and he brought China into the family of Nations where it has developed this huge middle class so instead of 800 million irate Red Guards with a nuclear arsenal ready to wreak havoc on on Asia there now our finance ears there our trading partners and this this balance that he and Kissinger had in mind of Nixon used to hold up his hand and close it into a fist and he would say the United States Japan Western Europe Soviet Union and China five different power bases instead of one superpower balancing each other off will bring us stability and a world of peace and with the exception of the Islamic Revolution it has been a time of peace for a long time I am still shocked that you have the audacity to suggest that Donald Trump is not a foreign policy scholar but we'll continue on nonetheless before there was Romney care before there was Obama care there was wasn't called this but it was Nixon care I mean he in many ways was the pioneer of making sure that people got the health care coverage which he felt was a not necessarily a right but part of being a person in the United States yeah he had seen it in his own family his family had been torn apart by the death of his older brother Harold who was the brightest and the best and I took a long time to die six years of tuberculosis and wasted the family's finances it's the cause of some of Nixon's resentments because he couldn't go to the Ivy League where he had been accepted because the family's finances had been ruined by Harold's death it also separated Nixon from his mother because she went with Harold to Arizona where the air was better and left and left the household and then his his younger brother who was like the baby of the family with golden curls Arthur and Arthur died of meningitis in a week shocking in its own way as much as the as Harold's lingering death and if you get parenthetically handed Nixon named all her sons after English kings so that's why you have Richard Arthur and Anne Harold so Nixon had this personal feeling and in 1946 Harry Truman comes out with a proposal for national health insurance and Nixon's advisors write in this amazing memo which says we cannot be republican party cannot be the party of no and goes through this whole rationale of how Americans like their health care system they like their family doctor but they don't want to be exposed to the idea of if tragedy strikes that well our fight we're going to lose our home and all our finance is going to be wiped out so we need to have a matching proposal this 1946 Nixon comes up with with something that later emerges when he's president as Nixon Kerr later emerges here in Massachusetts as as Romneycare which is the idea that you instead of going to a government single-payer system you have you keep the the current private insurance system but you subsidize it so everybody is covered very simple as far as Nixon was concerned the only big difference between the two plans is that Nixon had a mandate on the employers but not a mandate on individuals but in those days so many more Americans worked at one company for all their lives and their big companies and and and had health care plans I wouldn't be surprised at all if he had not adopted the individual mandate over I'm and Ted Kennedy interviews with me and many others said that his biggest legislative blunder during the is all his years in the Senate was not accepting Nixon's offer for Nixon care because Kennedy saw it as a step in there looking back he saw it as a step in the right direction that could eventually have brought us to single-payer but still it was looking back he realized that this was a good deal and he should have taken it instead of hanging tough at the time give us everything we need to know about Watergate and three minutes or less don't believe the conspiracy theorists it happened Nixon was guilty of the cover-up guilty guilty guilty very guilty as the tape show over and over again when you say guilty what was he guilty of well let's go back to what caused it first of all Nixon Nixon Haldeman said famously Nixon didn't order Watergate didn't order that particular breaking but he caused Watergate it created this atmosphere in the White House where he was constantly demanding political intelligence he was constantly telling Haldeman that the little boys on the campaign don't know how the big boys play it we need more bugging we need to tail Ted Kennedy we need to put infiltrate the Democratic campaigns it was huge pair annoyed he was scared to attend he was going to lose in 1972 right and all this stuff happened there wasn't on the top aides in the domestic side of the White House there were very few who were not running an agent somewhere they had plans to break in and bug Edmund muskie 'z presidential campaign they tried repeatedly to break in and bug the McGovern headquarters and they were caught trying to bug the Democratic National Headquarters so this was indeed a wide based effort a campaign that that is astonishing as I as I added it all up 48 individuals or corporations pled guilty and 40 I think in vigils went to jail from Watergate and when the burglars were caught Nixon had well maybe 48 hours where he could have called in the Attorney General and said do your investigation and we're not covering this up follow it wherever it goes and he would have lost most of his top aides including his campaign chairman John Mitchell and Haldeman and Ehrlichman because they're all were involved in Watergate or in the the break-in in the psychiatrist office of Daniel Ellsberg remember him the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers that was another one of their dirty tricks so but Nixon just jumped in he couldn't hit stand not not being part of it and he was constantly asking Haldeman and Ehrlichman what's going on and in that first week you had what was called the smoking gun tape which is the tape in which Nixon orders Haldeman to get the CIA to intercede with the FBI block the investigation on the ground so there was a national security issue that needed to be protected so that is what Nixon was guilty of obstructing of justice in the cover-up and that's why he was impeached and as he as he later said I impeached myself when he resigned so there is there's their son Nixon or loyalists who are still trying to fight and tell you it didn't happen but it happened talk for a moment about his relationship with the Kennedys obviously there's that small matter of the 1960 presidential campaign but it actually it goes beyond that to relationship with Bobby and then Ted when he was in the Senate and Richard Nixon was president another something I discovered about Nixon doing this book in 1946 he wins election to the House representatives and he's chosen on a committee to go over to Europe to see the effects of World War two and whether or not we should House should ask something called the Marshall Plan in his district at Southern California they hate the Marshall Plan I think these are lazy socialists and why should we be giving our money to pour it down that rat hole in Europe Nixon goes over and of course he sees the devastated cities and the starvation and the hunger he visits tuberculosis hospitals comes back convinced that the Marshall Plan absolutely has to pass we have to be internationalists we cannot be isolationists and he goes back to his district and campaigns to change public opinion in his district remember they have billed Edmund Burke about whether you're you owe your constituents your Allegiance or your reason well he decides that he owes them his judgment and his reason and he goes back there and he turns his district around to such an extent that in California had a screwy political system in those days he wins both the Republican and the Democratic nomination for Congress in 1948 from that district Gamble's his entire career that first that those first 24 for 24 months in office and and wins and John Kennedy tells a friend Richard Nixon is the kind of man we need to have in Washington and they become fast friends when Nixon runs for the Senate in 1950 John Kennedy shows up in Nixon's office with a check for the Republican campaign you know got to be on the quiet this is dad Joe's money but here's a thousand dollars for your campaign dick and dick holds the check and says you know he just marvels at it they Jackie and Jack invite Patton dick to their wedding and throughout the as you can hear in the Kennedy tapes throughout the Eisenhower years Jack Kennedy is on the phone and dick Nixon there they love to talk about foreign affairs and when Jack Kennedy has one of his health crises and he's being operated on in Walter Reed and it's thought that he's going to die Richard Nixon is seen clutching the wall on the corridors at at Walter Reed weeping and saying poor brave Jack is going to die poor brave Jack is going to die and that's how close that relationship was and so when on election night 1960 Nixon not just loses to JFK but believes that Kennedy stole the election from him in Texas in Illinois he feels personally betrayed and this and and I did not get a lot of cooperation from the Nixon family but this is one thing that Julie confirmed for me was that if you really want to trace Watergate back there are several steps along the way but if you go back to election night 1960 that was that was a starting point for Watergate all that followed with Nixon's insistence that he was never going to be this is his words he was never going to be out cheated again and there's an amazing story that's not in the book of a Secret Service agent walking down the aisle of a campaign airplane in 68 and Richard Nixon is thinks he's alone and he's sitting there in his seat and he's doing this he's saying got to be tougher got to be tougher got to be tougher and this is one of the most aggressive toughest political campaigners ever but that's the way the Kennedy has got under his skin and yet there's this amazing exchanges of letter between dick Nixon and Jackie Kennedy the first one is after JFK is assassinated Nixon writes this very nice letter to Jackie talking about remember the days when we all were young at heart and then Jackie writes back and says I know and I'm paraphrasing here I'm never going to get her her eloquence but he says she says I know what's going to happen I chased this prize for so long and now that Jack is dead you're going to be drawn inexorably back and I just want to tell you if you if you don't get it if some this doesn't happen please value your family and the time that you have together beautiful beautiful letter and then Nixon gets elected president and Jackie and Jack's paintings are finished the official portraits at the White House and she doesn't want to come cheese this is when she's living in seclusion with John and Caroline and Nixon invites them back to the White House in secret never tells the press they're put on a White House plane LaGuardia flown down they come in they're given dinner at the White House the daughters play with a Caroline and John and again the exchange of letters is amazing Jackie writing to thank him talking about how the things they had discussed over dinner like the fact that and you never think about this but it's true the fact that they never could stand campaigning because every hotel room smelled like fresh paint because every hotel manager wanted to impress the presidential candidate by having a freshly painted room and they would share these little these little things that only that only they knew with each other and then and and John was having a bad day a bad time in school that semester and I don't know if Nixon was there or he learned about it afterwards but John sat on the Lincoln bed in the Lincoln Bedroom and thought this would be a lucky place to make a wish that he'd do better in school and Caroline complained to Nixon at one point that she didn't like history class and so Nixon sits down at his desk he writes these in longhand he writes these two amazing letters one to John saying well I heard that you're doing better in school and I'm really glad that you're your wish came true and if you ever need to come back and sit on the bed again make the wish you know just let your mom know and then he writes to Caroline this letter and he talks about how you know I didn't like history once when I was your age too but you know it's probably just the teacher and you really need to stick with it because biography and history shows the truths of of great men and it's that's it so one more and yet you read the book where just as you really want to get into a really righteous sense of hating Nixon you come across a moment like this where he shows some humanity even with these people who he later identified as his greatest political enemies what about Ted Kennedy any anything worth noting about that relationship um he feared Ted Kennedy because Ted Kennedy was the successor and he had his aides slip a infiltrate Kennedy Secret Service detail even though he wasn't a president or a candidate they had Ted Kennedy had Secret Service protection for a time and Nixon made sure that somebody was on that detail that was reporting back to the White House about who Teddy was seeing and what he was doing one of the first things again this is within the first hundred days remember the first hundred days we just finished with with Trump well the first hundred days of the Nixon administration they go out and they hire their first private detective to start doing the dirty tricks in the infiltration and the surveillance and the first target is to tail Ted Kennedy and when Chappaquiddick happens this guy poses as a reporter and goes to Chappaquiddick and hangs out with the press trying to pick up every all the dirt that he can to to nail Kennedy so he was he was fascinated by Kennedy and he was determined that he was never going to lose to another Kennedy and yet when Ted Kennedy jr. had his leg amputated it was Richard Nixon who called the hospital and really moved Ted Kennedy senior by the way that he talked to young Ted not a big deal probably think that most presidents would do but the fact that Nixon did it and did it well I think is important and after Chappaquiddick although it's never come out what the two of them said the first time Kennedy came to the White House Nixon pulled him aside for a conversation for half an hour of 45 minutes in which he reportedly gave him some of the secrets of resilience that had kept Nixon always bouncing back and sort of fatherly advice to this young senator you know don't worry it's not all over so complexity they are I mean the short answer is 80% of the time he probably hated the Kennedys wanted to get do anything possibly that he could to foil them but he still had that little but one little spark of humanity in a man and could relate to them we are going to get to audience questions in just a moment I just have a couple of quick ones for you so where does Nixon fit in in history in terms of and it's a bit stick to do it but in terms of rankings of presidents history does not have to be dreary Brian we can have fun with lists we can do listicles of the president I always get upset when George Washington is not number one and Abraham Lincoln is eternal debates Nixon ranks surprisingly high he ranks in like 28 or 29 would you think about it the only President to resign and to have bungled Vietnam as he did and to have Watergate as a legacy many of the things that was talked about tonight have struck a chord with historians and they recognize that he doesn't below doubt the bottom with Andrew Johnson and and James Buchanan I think that that one thing that historians do rank presidents is we view them through the prism of our days and so one of the leading issues in our day still haven't fixed it his race and so you see Andrew Jackson who in the 1930s soared all the way up to number five or number six because pluralism and populism and the economy were such important issues right before the coming of the New Deal you see him now slipping and sliding because of what he did to the Indians and and because he was a slave owner you see the Virginians basically their their their perch which seemed concrete forever Jefferson and the others seem seems to be shaking a little bit because of slavery so I think that Nixon will stay where he is JFK and LBJ surprised me they're both in the top ten still I would not be surprised to see them slip out of the top ten because of Vietnam Obama debuted at number 12 which seemed pretty high but not totally unfair to me the ones that you remember went because they were presidents while you lived always do better in the polls so Reagan's up there JFK's up there LBJ is up there and and who knows that could be a reason why Nixon stills hanging in the 20s instead of down in the 40s if anybody has any questions feel free to step right up to the microphones and either ilm will call on you in just a moment Nixon in retirement did you ever get invited he was in New Jersey for a while his estate and he would invite groups of reporters to have lunch with him ever no the only time I saw Nixon was in 1969 when he took the oath of office he was he went down Pennsylvania Avenue in an open-top car waving to the crowds with Pat and then at one juncture outside of the Department of Labor building I think it was there was a crowd of Vietnam protestors who started throwing beer cans and stones and so he retreated into the car and I was there not as one of the protesters but just as as a spectator and so I the only thing I saw him was him peering out the window at the at the radicals who were protesting the war I would have liked to have gone to we've been very valuable I've talked to several the reporters who went and to some of Nixon's aides including Roger stone infamous Roger stone and again Nixon was just horrible at one-to-one interpersonal communications so he would rehearse for two days before these reporters arrived he would memorize each each one of them he would memorize what he was going to say when he sat down at dinner and he had this whole script in his head and he was quite an actor he was a very disciplined actor in community theater it's where he met Pat and so he could do that he could apply himself and act as the charming host but then when it was over they said that he would just collapse in sweat from the tension of having to be on for that entire two or three hours yes first question I wondered if you could talk a little about Nixon's smear campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglass and calling her a communist which had a devastating effect on her and also his relationship with Senator Joe McCarthy and the whole anti-communist witch hunts Oh when Nixon came to Washington he was on the house on American Activities Committee and he participated in the investigation that brought down Alger Hiss identified this new deal official former New Deal official as a communist agent so he had this immediate payoff it's one reason why he went from literally a political nobody to vice president in six years this was in 1946 and he made this speech in the house representatives where he talked about the threat of internal communism and Joe McCarthy was there and Joe McCarthy had to go to West Virginia in two weeks to talk on Lincoln Day festivities and he cribbed whole parts of Nixon's speech and read it to the people of West Virginia and I was the famous speech where he reached into his pocket and he said I have here in my pocket a list of 200 communists who were still in the State Department and so McCarthyism began and 1950 Nixon ran for the Senate in California there was an internal battle on the Democratic side Helen Gahagan Douglas a an actress beautiful woman and also the wife of Melvyn Douglas Hollywood leftist ran and Nixon's campaign was awful it was some of the toughest stuff that I've ever seen in all my years of political campaign reporting especially when in the middle of that campaign the Korean War breaks out and for the first time you actually have communists killing American boys in Korea and by the by the end of the campaign the Nixon press releases sound like something out of 1984 calling on Helen Douglas the pink lady to to recognize the positive aspects of recantation and doesn't she know that the Red Chinese that she supports are killing Americans across the Pacific it was really brutal awful stuff and Nixon's number one issue in his early career one reason why the left Democrats never forgave them was this virulent anti-communism and he was caught in the first couple years of the Eisenhower administration his vice president he was the guy that I kept sending to McCarthy sings tone it down keep it down and then Nixon would go back and he would say to the White House of aides we cannot lose anti-communism as an issue it's too important we have mid-year elections in it finally I turned against McCarthy when McCarthy came out against started investigating the US Army and Nixon was left to drift without his number-one issue sir Monday morning after Watergate I called my old secretary patty O'Brien who had gone to work for my good friend Chuck Colson and I said patty this thing stinks and she said you wouldn't believe it but turn six months ago Attorney General Mitchell went to Colson Haldeman and Ehrlichman and said I've got this great idea for Watergate and they said not on your life she said the four of them have just gone across the hall in the Nixon's office because they've decided they're going to hang Mitchell I called patty at noon and she says you won't believe it she said Nixon decided not to hang him but instead to cover up for him so I called my old colleagues on Edie senator and Brooke staff and I said what's happened and 18 months later you had the resignation I wonder if today's speech by senator bob Corker republican a tennessee saying enough is enough and something has to be done about Trump is going to be the beginning of the week after Watergate for Nixon I good question yeah you got an answer I think it's I think it's kind of I think well first of all we have to member the Watergate took a long time to play out I mean the burglars were arrested in 1972 and it wasn't until 1974 that Nixon finally resigned who knows what's going to play out but I really don't believe that the Republicans are going to crack until they suffer reverses at the fall at the polls maybe as close as this fall and if not then in the mid-year elections in 2018 but I would strongly urge you sir to write your thoughts down and send them to your to the Kennedy Library or send them to the Nixon Library where they can be put on file because that's a fascinating fascinating story that in all my research I didn't come across it and I wish I'd interviewed you for the book that is an incredibly artful Dodge of a good question there is a difference though between Watergate and what we're seeing now no I mean water nobody ever questioned Richard Nixon's competence is a is a leader today I mean the question is motivation but not as competence that's what's happening now in fact in the 68 campaign you find that people like Hunter Thompson and Norman Mailer Bob Woodward young Navy lieutenant votes for Richard Nixon because they see they see Nixon at Walter Lippman they all seen Nixon as the competent moderate who can help us out of the fix of these horrible events in 1968 so quite different from this sort of visceral knee-jerk expression of populism that we get with with Trump sir that less artful it's no it's very artful it's more director so and yeah Oh first off I got it I love the idea that you did a book on Clarence Darrow I will bat up he's one of my heroes yeah you know by far you know and he didn't win any cases but you know he brought these things forward so we could advance them Nixon is not one of my favorite people in 1971 I was in Laos and I had a little Panasonic radio Oh transistor ones like we've had no pull out the antenna and I picked up on VOA and here is telling the American people that we are not in Cambodia allows I'm 15 miles into Laos and a buddy of mine is 23 miles into Cambodia and we're burning everything we see one of the great nightmares that I see in Nixon is I think he believed his own garbage I mean he really did I've heard stories have been walking up and down the hall talking through pictures of former presidents which silent Cal must have been really a lot of farm young guess he would have said was shut up you know but the point is is if you believe your own garbage and we're in that situation right now then we can wind up as a nation that is just falling apart and I think we have a lot to learn from the Nixon presidency and and what's happening now and and I think we better learn really really fast because I really love this country and I don't like the idea that being torn apart by a clown thank you I didn't hear a question in there but it was a one hell of a one hell of a statement I appreciate it sir what previous writers on Nixon if any did you find helpful in their insights I'm thinking of - Gary wills in Nixon agonist ease and Roger Morris who wrote a very psychologically inward and dramatic biography that only went up to 1952 and I don't think he ever got it together to write another volume question throw Evan Thomas in there too fair for all his complaining Nixon has been blessed with really good biographers Stephen Ambrose did a fine job in the 1990s Morris did a great job on the role around the on the early years Garry wills certainly with his book on the 68 campaign you had Norman Mailer writing about the the 68 campaign as I said in Hunter Thompson I mean is there's no shortage of great American letters writing about Nixon it just hasn't been in in in this century and there hasn't been written for the Millennials and one of the things that I had to keep in mind when I wrote this book is that the largest generation of Americans is the millennial generation and that two-thirds of Americans were not alive or living in this country when Richard Nixon resigned the office so their knowledge of the sky is as a caricature and there haven't been great books in the 21st century about Nixon while at the same time there's been this flood of new work and I'm sorry of new information that we who work on Nixon can contact Evan Thomas and Tim whiner both wrote books that came out two years ago and I believe they started after I started then we held mine for a year or 18 months to give some space between them but I think that that that shows that Rick Pearlstein is another one who's written I recently wrote this very nice book called Nixon laughs so there's there's there's plenty of he's almost an endless font of inspiration for people but Tom wicker wrote a book remember Tom work of the New York Times correspondent wrote a book called one of us back in the and and the books on Watergate are fantastic but the best I got to say the two best we're really blessed is that Bob Haldeman kept a diary every night and the Haldeman diaries are invaluable as a glimpse of the real Nixon and Henry Kissinger is a great writer he's a self-made man who worships his creator but that three-volume set deserves the Pulitzer Prize that it wanted was that's remarkable stuff so does that make it easier or harder when you've had so many biographers come before you well my next biography is going to be Edward Kennedy and that's a tough one because probably if I took a poll tonight you'd say what's there still to be said about the Kennedys but one thing that we count on is that old men and women die and they leave their letters to archives tapes pop up that nobody ever expected that they would hear grand jury testimony is released the constant you know sort of drip of history happens and Ted Kennedy left a collection of 300 oral histories at the University of Virginia and he left his papers here at the JFK Library and there will be a time of renewed scholarship even for for Ted so does that answer your question anything yeah yeah yeah sure uh so I just wanted to say I recently received my master's degree and I budding Nixon historian and my hope is to create books that reach the next generation and and the character but I've loved all of your end end moments but I kind of want to have you talk about the strangest if not the strangest ever in history and then moments which is Nixon's May 9th visit to the Lincoln Memorial um I was wondering without going into it you might be able to explain it a lot more better than I could um is that the closest that we get to the true Nixon the the the ripped apart emotionally Nixon who doesn't know what to do who makes 15,000 phone calls and then decides to make this big leap that we don't we've not seen since so as wonderful maybe you could talk a little bit about that and wonder if that's a really important part of the Nixon mystique thank you sure there are always moments in Nixon's life where he had it didn't take much to have too much to drink but when he has too much to drink and the the inner mournful Nixon comes out in moments of crisis moment of anger moments of anger in this case this is 1970 we've just had the invasion of Cambodia the campuses have erupted we've had the deaths at Kent State and Nixon decides in the middle of the night that he's going to go to the Lincoln Memorial he's going to reach out and and communicate with these students who are nobodies more stunned than these kids who have driven all night to protest and there's no sudden the president United States walking up up the steps and talking to him and he does in his own clumsy way tried to reach out and talk to them and he talks about the environment and for some reason that gets him into the beaches of California and surfing and he talks about foreign affairs and he talks about when he was a young man what trips he would take and how that opened his eyes to the world and that you need to experience the world and and that moment was was amazing we don't have a tape of it we have recollections of it but the only other moment I think that matches that in the Nixon presidency is those remarks right before he gets on the in the East Room where he talks about hatred he talks about his mother nobody's going to write a book about my mother and my father was a common man and all the strains of Nixon come out and and that last line about if you hate then you destroy yourself very very hard one knowledge that he didn't get until the end it's not something that I pass on to you just as I Nixon slogan like on a fortune cookie this was as he was going out the door you know torn and bleeding he passed on this this had this had this moment of insight and passed it on ma'am I have a question about the Nixon daughters I know you said you didn't have much access to the family but I'm curious if you learn anything about where the daughters are now in their thinking about their father and particularly their father in Watergate not having talked to them about that it's I'm going to have to take a leap but I I know that they and the sir and the remaining aides who are part of the private Nixon foundation have been for twenty years very very protective of Nixon very suspicious of scholars and I think the reason that they didn't cooperate with me is that it's painful but also that they believe just that anybody from the liberal media intellectual establishment is they're never going to give him a break yeah how does that work do you send them letters do you pay a visit to them why I approach them both personally and introduce myself and said what I was doing face to face at an event yeah and the event is obviously not the time to whip out a tape recorder and say what you know what about Watergate why not exercise and and then follow up with a letter that in some cases was answered other cases was not Julie told me right from the start no no interviews and and one of the saddest part is is that there's there's a great oral history program at the Nixon Library and everybody from John Dean to Bob Woodward to to one of the guys who was on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial have contributed to it but as far as I know Julian and Tricia have not I did speak to his brother his younger brother ed is still alive and Edward King Edward um and he lives outside Seattle and he's a former pilot and I went interviewed him all morning and I said this has been fascinating and so helpful can I buy your lunch and he said she said know what let's have lunch he said but I but let me buy you I got a coupon for the Burger King so we go out to the driveway and I'm I walk over to my car and he says no no I'll Drive man we get his car and here's 86 year old ed Nixon former helicopter pilot for the Navy driving up the highway so we can get to that the next interchange where he has a coupon for the Burger King so sure I was reading John Lewis's second volume of the March the graphic representation of this history and there's a scene in there which really moved me where he talks about Bobby Kennedy coming up to him at a meeting in the White House before the before the great March and saying you changed my mind you've changed me could you talk because I didn't hear you talk about the relationship between Bobby Kennedy and Richard Nixon given their history with McCarthy together which I think is really interesting man it says famous comment about Bobby Kennedy was how come he gets to be a son of a and I don't the the real turmoil was I think the relationship between Jack and dick and Bobby was sort of the operative and I don't think that Nixon's feelings about tumultuous feelings about the Kennedys extended so much to Bobby Bobby was just and then when Robert Kennedy ran in 68 Nixon did not have a great opinion of his campaign and I think he was going to beat Humphrey but there is a there is a moment in the book where remember there was a time period after the Robert Kennedy was shot and when he died like 48 hours maybe or three days and so the Nixon's were watching the television like everybody else and there is a scene there where my Pat Nixon in particular was was torn up and said that that poor young that poor young boy has died and so not quite the big psychic fascination as with JFK but part of the Kennedys let's take one more question from the audience sir thank you very much in the National Portrait Gallery there's an exhibit called the gallery presidents and they're in the midst of all this greatness I came across this wonderful wonderful portrait of Nixon by Norman Rockwell now I hated Nixon long after the time when I got over my hatred of LBJ I still hated Nixon but there in this portrait I saw a human being am I going to find in your book in ink something that will explain to me what I found in Norman Rockwell's oil painting well that's no small challenge I I was very proud of those words as I said humanizing without excusing it's interested in that Norman Rockwell painting which is very evocative is now been blown up to the size of maybe half of that wall that's the first thing you see when you walk into the Nixon Library is this huge portrayal by normal and who better suited to portray the the architect of the silent majority the Norman Rockwell I mean you you can't say it but I can you present this man in all his fullness you you you really do when critics agree you present a very complex human being who did a lot of good and had a lot of faults and that was the kind of magnificence of this book and looks better every day so with that in mind let's conclude you uniquely having lived this man for the last six years and having seen up you know through scholarship the only president who is left in resignation what's your prediction how does a Donald Trump presidency end not to put you on the spot somebody somebody said badly and that's the that's the one-word answer I think he's going to make it through four years could be proven wrong as close to us tomorrow but I you know I I know they're hiding something they're acting just like Nixon's men did they're not telling the truth they are stonewalling they put the second-most disparaged press secretary in the history the United States out there the only one who was of course was Ron Ziegler who was Richard Nixon's press secretary so they're acting just like just like all the president's men did and yet there is still a possibility that especially with both houses in Republican hands that there there won't be an impeachment there won't be a removal for 25th minute for physical reasons I personally don't think he's going to serve a second term because he'll either be so sick of it and older and not want to do it I think there are signs that he's showing he's not showing his age well and so the second process and but I think that impeachment I don't see impeachment in the court good ending on an enormous respective note I want to thank Jack for coming up and being here tonight I want to thank the audience for being terrific in the Kennedy Library the hosting us thank you

Channel: JFK Library

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Keywords: John, F., Kennedy, Presidential, Library, and, Musuem

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Length: 87min 47sec (5267 seconds)

Published: Tue May 16 2017