Roger Stone Nixon's Secrets

[Music] all right good evening everybody thank you all for coming down tonight we are live from books and books in coral gables florida so a quick note for our internet audience watching at home if at any time during the presentation you'd like to purchase a copy of tonight's book you can call the number on your screen we'll take care of that for you we'll get it signed and we will ship it to wherever you are in the united states free of charge this evening books and books is very happy to welcome back mr roger stone presenting his new book nixon's secrets mr stone was the youngest member of the nixon staff in 1972 and was credited with nixon's rehabilitation in his post-presidential years he has been a washington insider for the last 40 years and he played a key role in the election of republican presidents nixon ronald reagan and george h.w bush his previous book the man who killed kennedy was the second best-selling book related to the 50th anniversary of president kennedy's murder in this book mr stone offers us an insider's look at a variety of compelling episodes in richard nixon's history including the 1960 election watergate and his pardon by president gerald ford here to tell us more about it please give a very warm welcome to mr roger stone [Applause] welcome back thank you very much first of all let me say uh i love books and books i could just i could spend hours looking at the stock here and it's uh it's just a very special place for me because uh actually history was made in this very room the night that i spoke here on my book the man who killed kennedy the case against lbj was the night that c-span filmed an hour presentation including the q a and then put it up uh you know in real time and it really it helped catapult that book to the new york times bestseller list which was an accomplishment in that unfortunately there are those in the mainstream media who are not open to the idea of any alternative history other than the one told us by the federal government which let's face it now has a record of lying to the american people over a long-term period of time whether they lied about the war in vietnam or whether they are lying about obamacare or whether they are lying about irs records or and it's and it's bipartisan i mean this is not even a partisan screen under both republicans and democrats i think in many cases that people have been disserved by the narrative of history fed to us by the uh by the government so um it was a i was very proud of the man who killed kennedy the case against lbj uh and it is now out in paperback uh which hopefully we have some of uh with us tonight with two new chapters and an update which make the case that lyndon johnson was the most amoral greedy corrupt sadistic mentally unbalanced individual to ever fill the presidency i mean in all honesty you can be harshly critical of richard nixon and barack obama and all of our presidents but i i would submit to you based on the record i compiled that this man had a depravity that is uh shocking somebody who fathered three illegitimate children while either vice president or president someone who impregnated five different women on the white house secretarial pool this is someone who lived like a pasha and his help his close friend j edgar hoover whose funding johnson had quadrupled as senate majority leader also his next-door neighbor a man who attended the victory celebration when lyndon johnson stole his election in 1948 mr hoover the fbi director flew all the way to texas for his friend lyndon to give you some instance you know they have i think uh corrupted the history of that period so i'm very i'm very grateful for the reception that book that god this book by the way is reading the newspaper on the way down here it is it's amazing what you read i read that these hasidic jews in brooklyn were arrested with 50 pounds of weed i guess it was for the high holidays it is uh i also read that that governor chris christie was coming to campaign for governor rick scott who thought that was a good idea uh so uh what i do want to focus on really is uh the subject at hand and that is richard nixon this book is uh is a is in essence the continuation of a thread of history that begins uh really uh with operation 40 which is a cia mafia plot in the late 1950s under the eisenhower administration that was honchoed by vice president richard nixon which was designed to enlist assassins from the cia with informants from the mafia to infiltrate cuba and assassinate castro this was this was vice president nixon's october surprise he was hoping this would happen just before the 1960 election vaulting him ahead of the better funded john kennedy for a number of reasons and of course the federal government's involvement with the mob was a deeply held secret well unfortunately that the assassination attempts didn't happen that became the bay of pigs invasion which became not only the assassination of castro in the planning but also a an amphibious landing uh on the at the bay of pigs that in turn in my view is connected to the assassination of john f kennedy is not coincidental that the men on the ground in daly plaza on december 22 1963 are the same men four of them who break into the watergate all of whom were involved in the planning of the bay of pigs so i've tried to create one thread of history and then follow the careers of richard nixon john kennedy lyndon johnson and try to put uh and try to give some feel for how politics in those days was was practiced uh i had the honor of knowing richard nixon we became very good friends intimate friends late in his post-presidency in 1972 i was the youngest member of the staff of the committee to elect the president i worked as a volunteer in the 1968 campaign i became the protege of john davis lodge who was the governor of connecticut also a movie star ambassador to spain in france he was the very he was the swashbuckling good-looking older brother of henry cabot lodge the u.s senator from massachusetts and he after i worked for him in the 68 campaign really as a driver gopher he wrote a letter of introduction to me for the nixon white house and i became an intern working low down in the press shop under patrick buchanan but mr buchanan was so much higher at that point that i rarely saw him my job was clipping up newspaper clippings and i would paste them down and then they'd be copied and they'd be sent to the president so i had to get up go to union station buy the chicago paper by the new york papers by the all the other papers get them back to the white house cut them up paste them down copy them and give them to my boss and then i had to go out and distribute them to various people the most important people in the in the entourage that's my first job well one of the people i had to send them to was jeb magruder of the committee or elected president was a good-looking kind of stand-in who was a protege of the white house chief of staff john bob haldeman who was running the president's re-election at least until john mitchell the attorney general could resign to take the helm which was the plan so i so completely brown-nosed magruder that they gave me a job and i was 19 years old and of course he was happy because i later learned that the scheduler's job they hired me for had a budget a lot of 37 000 a year and he could hire me basically in college for 22. so i shifted my classes to the evening was working for the committee to elect the president i didn't really become friendly with president nixon on an intimate basis until 19 until his post-presidential period 1977 i was elected young republican national chairman and he invited me to saint clemente and it was supposed to be a 15-minute grip in grin became a four-hour discussion of politics he kind of warmed up we were talking this is 1979 about who would be president he told me he thought governor john connelly would be the republican nominee and i said well mr president with all due respect i think you're wrong about that it will be ronald reagan he i guess he thought that was kind of audacious since he'd known reagan for 50 years and or longer at that point but we became friends and i began doing errands for him vetting and vetting invitations sending messages carrying memos to presidents bush and presidents clinton he traveled very widely he was very prolific he wrote 10 bestsellers on foreign policy in his post-election day so i had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with him now this book is not in any way a whitewash or rehabilitation of richard nixon i say some shocking things about him uh as as much as i have enormous affection for him i've tried to write a warts in all biography that tells you how politics was practiced in the 50s so for example i will tell you richard nixon's early career was definitely funded with funded with mob money so was john kennedy's so was lyndon johnson's so was harry truman's so was adlie stevenson there was no campaign finance laws in 1950s and 60s everything was done in cash and the mob were players and the fact the mob was entwined with the democratic machine in most of the big cities like chicago we'll return to that in a moment people don't realize that nixon's rise from the his first term in the house in 1946 to the vice presidency is only a span of six years and that is a meteoric rise and nixon used those years to try to establish foreign policy credentials taking the opportunity to travel as widely as possible and in many cases meeting with the presidents and more importantly in some cases the vice presidents of other nations who by the time nixon became president or vice president were now presidents of their country and this foreign policy expertise becomes his ace card throughout his career it is his largest argument for election in 1960 it is what allows him to achieve the historic opening to china the end of the war in vietnam the assault agreements for arms control with the soviets it is what he uses to rehabilitate himself after the the ashes in the disaster of watergate and the pardon and we'll talk about how he in the end of his career becomes a valued foreign policy advisor for president bill clinton but my book is neither a a a a a whitewash for nixon nor is it an excoriation i tell you what i think is missing the good with the bad this is a man who is both very brilliant and very paranoid this is someone who's both very visionary and very petty this is somebody who's both very bold and very hesitant this is someone who's very confident and very uh uh plagued by demons this is a very complex and therefore compelling man and his story is a greek tragedy which is why i seek to sell it to tell it but i knew at the 40th anniversary there would be a spate of books about nixon and the nixon years and i think that the great tragedy here is that the great accomplishments of richard nixon get lost in the ashes of watergate this is a man who opened the door to china let's start from the beginning this is a man who ended the kennedy johnson war in vietnam yes he increased the bombing to give a cover to withdraw our troops and get them home which he did he gets no credit for this he overruled the pentagon he overruled his own defense department he got american boys out of harm's way because it was clear to him that there was not going to be a success the way we were conducting the war it is not his fault that south vietnam fell because the second part of the nixon proposal was to fund the south vietnamese after we left and we failed to do that and they fell this is a man who opened the door to china over the objections of his own government in 1969 it is nixon who tells kissinger i think i'm going to go to china and nixon says kissinger says this can be heard in the tapes you're crazy this is a man who then used the china card to squeeze deep arms concessions out of the soviets saving this country hundreds of millions of dollars the clean water act the clean air act the environmental protection agency in those days we had no environmental protection yes i agree those things have gone too far in the age of big government but the idea itself of minimal environmental protection to have clean water and clean air and i think that was a good thing ending the military draft the 18 year old vote the war on cancer federal revenue sharing desegregating the schools in the south without violence or bloodshed when nixon became president 15 percent of the schools in the south were desegregated when he left 87 percent you can talk about the southern strategy all you want if the southern strategy meant i'm going to go slow going slow worked nobody got killed and the schools were desegregated but unfortunately when you say richard nixon people talk about watergate and therefore i think watergate has to be put in some perspective to do that we have to look at nixon's 1960 campaign for president there's a great book a seminal book a book that they probably even still sell here at books and books called the making of the president 1960. it's a romantic tale teddy white the man who wrote it a pulitzer prize winner was a good friend of mine he was a great drinking companion but he was enthralled with the kennedy mystique jack kennedy the dashing charming intellectual sophisticate versus versus this boob from uh california uh who stands for the the center of the country the flyover states uh in in his telling kennedy wears the white hat and nixon is the black-headed villain but i'm here to tell you that's not how that campaign unfolded now it is absolutely true that nixon and kennedy started in all the polling you can see in the appendix of my book nixon secrets that the polls were always had this race close from the beginning so there was never any presumption for nixon in fact the party had taken a whomping in 1958 it held the lowest number of governors and the lowest number of members of both house that it had since the 20s so they had very lit less substantially less grassroots activity nixon always ran ahead of the party and therefore was more than competitive with all the democrats he underestimated kennedy in the beginning of that campaign he made several huge mistakes the first one was a mistake it was a pledge to visit all 50 states now the reason he did this was because his candidacy had a dilemma that the kennedy johnson ticket did not have they could run both as they ran as both advocates and opponents of civil rights john kennedy traveled the country saying i'm for civil rights for black people and his running mate lyndon johnson lifelong segregationist followed behind him and said don't worry folks he's only kidding to the courthouse crowd to the old southern democrats to the crackers to the segregationists and indeed the kennedy johnson ticket held the deep south there was no republican incursions into the deep south because of this ability to play race both ways nixon had didn't have that luxury he either had to make a decision about seeking black votes in the north israel in northeast industrial states of new york and pennsylvania and and uh michigan and ohio and california or to try to make the first historic republican in concursions into what was called the solid south does he make a play for georgia he went to atlanta and they had the largest crowd that's ever visited a presidential candidate at the at the airport he was encouraged so instead he makes a pledge to try to do both which is an enormous mistake because it means that he has to spend his time flying to alaska and wyoming and vermont states that he has completely locked up kennedy meanwhile is barnstorming in the big 10 states and never leaving them he doesn't need to go to massachusetts in rhode island he's got them locked up then he compounds this mistake by knocking his knee on a car door right after labor day his car his knee becomes infected he's hospitalized for two weeks at walter reed's hospital post-labor day and he sees kennedy pulling out to a lead in the polls he comes roaring out of the hospital against his doctor's advice he is still on antibiotics he's still running a fever and he's 15 pounds underweight he he hits five states on the way to chicago for rallies furiously trying to make up ground on his way to chicago for the debate john kennedy he arrived early in the day and he spent the the entire day on the roof with two hookers getting a suntan nixon made classical mistake of thinking that substance was more important than your appearance and that what you had to say was more important than than how you presented it uh nixon uh therefore goes to the lighting check which is kind of like a a weigh-in and the cbs technician comes up to senator kennedy nixon writes in his memoirs he looked like a bronzed god i'd never seen kennedy looking so fit the makeup man walks up says senator kenny will you be having makeup no no make up for me nixon hears this now the cbs makeup man says mr mr vice president you'd be having makeup no no makeup for me whereupon kennedy goes to his private dressing room where his personal makeup man makes him up nixon goes to his dressing room his tv advisors say you look terrible on tv you need makeup he says no if he's not going with makeup they'll say i had makeup he didn't have makeup i'm not having makeup totally fakes him out they convinced nixon at a minimum to use a product called beard stick which is meant to conceal the five o'clock shadow which was problematic for nixon well unfortunately halfway through the debate and under pressure nixon underweight with a collar too big as gray as the color of this wrong suit that he choose nixon's kenny's wearing navy blue and a white shirt and a dark tie for television they say nixon's complexion is almost as gray as his suit in the middle of the debate he starts to sweat and the beard stick starts running down his face uh the debate is so damaging that nixon's own mother calls his private secretary uh rosemary woods or immediately after debate and says is richard unwell mayor daley says to a crony jesus christ he's not even dead yet and they've embalmed him already appears they don't tell you there wasn't one debate there were four debates so nixon went on a regimen of milkshakes and he got a sun lamp and he bounced back big in debates two and three now some uh arguable the size of the television audience wasn't as great for debates two and three there was a huge drop off and they're correct but here's the part they don't tell you debate four consider nixon's best debate only had one hundred thousand fewer people than the first debate so nixon made ground secondarily nixon had hoarded his money for the last 30 days where old joe kennedy was writing the checks so they were just spending balls out from the beginning kennedy was really out of steam nixon outspent kennedy on television radio for the last three weeks and then frankly dwight eisenhower got off the bench and he visited pittsburgh and philadelphia in new york city and los angeles and he drew enormous crowds he called senator kennedy little boy blue a man unprepared to be president uh nixon really believed that he closed fast in that in that race but the other part that mr white misses that i think is more interesting is the fact that we now know that richard nixon's hotel room was wiretapped on the evening of the second debate at the ward sheridan park by robert kennedy we also know that someone broke into nixon's psychiatrist's office and stole his medical records and we know that somebody broke into nixon's accountant's office in los angeles to steal his financial records we know that men working for robert kennedy wiretapped the republican national committee in 1960. this is 12 years before watergate folks so this airbrushed narrative of the kennedys is good guys robert kennedy played very rough john ambassador kennedy paid a an informant two hundred thousand dollars for a copy of nixon's financials because he was a he was a disgruntled accountant and he had access these these were very tough people there's no question that that that the ambassador kennedy makes a deal with caught with the sam g and khan and the chicago mob and they deliver so i talk a lot about the 1960 election but the the simple truth is when nixon got to california late at night and spent he thought he had won that's because he had and this election was stolen from him the momentum in the end the trajectory of this race was a victory for nixon he was he was on the rebound so if you look at the wards of chicago you will see rampant theft by the daily machine with a little help from the mob now some such as a professor who i've quoted in here or his name it believes kelleher argues that just changing illinois wouldn't have changed the outcome of the 1960 election kennedy would still have been elected that's true but it ignores the real voter threat in texas where lyndon johnson is counting the votes let me tell you how the texas ballot works there's a paper ballot there are 10 candidates for president including the independents and the vegetarians and the two top tickets you're supposed to cross off the names of those you are not for and leave the name you are for untouched that's the way to vote legally if you circle nixon and lodge and lyndon johnson is doing the counting in that county out 56 000 of those were thrown out in dallas county and burned within the hour lyndon johnson leaves no evidence when he steals votes so and there is no recount law in texas so yes richard nixon was robbed now for those who say to me well you like nixon you knew nixon nixon was paranoid you'd be paranoid too if a millionaire gangster and his lightweight son who never wrote a speech that he read in his life and didn't write his book profiles in courage and was handed everything in his life by his wealthy corrupt nazi loving father had cheated you out of the president i presidency i think you would be paranoid too they wired tap nixon again in 1962 when he ran for governor in california you can hear him say in the white house tapes hell everybody wiretaps everybody we know that lyndon johnson wiretapped nixon's campaign plane in 1968 folks it's the way the game was played but to uh to try to understand watergate is difficult at the time that the watergate burglars break into the the democratic national committee nixon is running 19 points ahead of mcgovern he's on his way to a 49 state blowout i think it's very important to understand that there's something else going on in the administration nixon becomes president with a reputation as the hardest line anti-communist army intelligence the joint chiefs the cia they think they're going to be unfettered in vietnam which it says a lot when you look at the way johnson escalated the war and therefore the rapid withdrawal of our troops is bitterly opposed by the defense establishment and the central intelligence agency the opening to china is offensive to them because nixon uses kissinger who talks directly to them to go around the cia so they don't know their talk he's talking to the chinese to stop them from undermining him this is why he is a master of foreign policy they are really upset about the arms reductions assault agreements where they think nixon gave away the store so as early as 1969 the military begins spying on nixon a a naval yeoman named radford is copying documents going through files desks burn bags even henry kissinger's briefcase and sending the stuff right to the head of the joint chiefs in fact i reveal in my book that the cia is so opposed to nixon and his policies and the fact that he continues to press for the records to the kennedy assassination and the bay of pigs because he also knows that they are connected that the central intelligence agency mounts two attempts to assassinate nixon here in miami the first one on key biscayne where the plan is to infiltrate a vietnam veterans against the war event and to kill nixon with a shoulder launch rocket while he's sitting in his living room this plan is aborted then uh frank sturgis one of the watergate burglars uh enlists a contract gunman who's given a gun and told that they are going to shoot nixon outside vietnam veterans for the war demonstrate uh uh convention when it comes to speech you're supposed to shoot him as he goes to leave hiding behind some anti-war demonstrators this plot falls apart when kaiser's when kaiser learns that the target is the president of the united states he declines and the plot collapses i will show you in my book that later it is the cia who infiltrates the watergate break-in term and sabotages the break-in as the way to take nixon down why they are against daetant they're against peace policies in fact as soon as nixon is gone henry kissinger's done don rumsfeld then dick cheney the secretary of defense and his deputy in the ford administration they end dayton henry kissinger has a title and no more power this is the beginning of the neocons the same people who later drive us to warren uh in iraq and so on so uh that is part of the story but there's no question that four of the six watergate bloggers are working for the cia they're the same four who are on the ground in the bay of pigs the truth is that the watergate explanation that you've been given is a grotesque and fantastic distortion of historical truth i mean i was a little late tonight because i had to find john dean's book and move it to the fiction section i mean in all honesty this book is fraudulent and i'll tell you why mr dean tells us he bases his book on 342 transcripts that only he has seen that he had transcribed fair enough let a pure historian look at them for accuracy and listen to the tapes he won't allow that he'll let no one to see his secret memos and in this in this version he has airbrushed himself out of the narrative so the tapes of his conversations with nixon of march 13th 16th 17th and 20th which showed that he is the watergate weasel who sucks nixon into the cover-up and not the other way around he's there brushed them out of the picture they're not in the book it's it's it is a it is a grotesque cover-up job and it's and he has gotten away with it for 40 years here are the facts mr dean ordered the casing of the watergate six weeks before the break-in it is in the memoirs of two decorated new york cops tony elassowitz and jack caufield both of whom were sent on the mission to case the joint it is john dean who tells jeb magruder get a t tell liddy to get a team into the watergate the watergate break-in is not in the liddy gemstone plan it is added at the suggestion of john dean not in the book so i have had the fortunate experience of having a galley of mr dean's book before it published and therefore i have written a point b point point by point rebuttal to his book in my book in the watergate section for those who are interested in what watergate was really about now let me say again you can't rehabilitate nixon the idea of breaking into the watergate is postulated by liddy and magruder and dean was not about political intelligence what they really wanted were the records of a call girl ring that was being used by the democratic national committee to arrange escorts for visiting democratic dignitaries and the funny thing about this call girl ring was it was also being used by the republican national committee the white house and the state department it was two blocks from the white house at columbia plaza and in the draw at the democratic national committee a lock draw of a secretary there was a portfolio where they had pictures of the girls who you could choose to be your companion i believe that the purpose of the watergate break-in was to get that portfolio the reason that they tapped the phone the phone they tapped was not larry o'brien's phone it was the phone was used for assonations with the whorehouse pardon me john dean had a period interest and interestingly enough mr dean has a relationship with the woman who runs the cat house in fact his wife maureen may have worked there now i'm not the first one to say this two word award-winning journalists that found the the escort service found the prostitute ring at the columbia plaza j anthony lucas and anthony summers these men are liberals they don't agree with roger stone on much but they confirm the existence and then in his seminal book james haugen in in their book len kolodny and robert getlin and now in a new book john dean's real role in the existence of the call girl ring is finally revealed that's why i recommend to you this incredible book because it really bolsters what i have said it's like a companion but it's written in a noir style like a thriller it's very sexy and it's quite good but it will tell you the truth about what watergate is about and mr stanford got the little black book of the woman who ran the house secretary of commerce is in there several of the watergate figures are in there john dean is in there senator lowell wyker's in there sam dash the white house the senate uh democratic council on the watergate committee is in there this is an incredible read and i recommend it um i also because i think that the the coverage needs some balance and that nixon needs to be viewed both in view of the huge mistakes that he has made but also in his accomplishments i also uh produced these which uh kind of uh so that there's an alternative story here that i think that young people need to know people young people look at watergate and they say to me well i don't underst what was this about it seems like a rather venal crime i mean in many ways that's true look at it this way nixon wiretapped one building they threw him out barack obama is wiretapping all of us and reading our mail nixon was article of impeachment against him was that he used the irs to harass his political enemies this administration issues the irs to harass its political enemies nixon was missing 18 and a half minutes we'll talk about that in a second this administration is missing hundreds of thousands of documents for obamacare and and and the irs and i'm not here to make a partisan regard because the republicans under the bushes were no better when they were there so uh i will take questions we can get into watergate deep throw anything that you would like to ask i'm open to talk about the johnson book talk about this book but i appreciate you being there and then we will move on to some serious book signing yes sir what document do you have to suggest that the cia was attempting to assassinate nixon well let's see there's the uh memo from j edgar hoover that tells president johnson about a kgb report that reached that conclusion there's a french intelligence document that was uh essentially commissioned by jacqueline kennedy that reached that conclusion uh senator barry goldwater is on the record he's saying uh well i sir have you read my book well i would urge you to read the book because it's very hard to have this conversation my book is not just a book of conjecture there's 40 pages of endnotes and sources there's no let's talk about the cia's motive one the bay of pigs where they blamed kennedy and kennedy said he would smash them to pieces but more importantly the cuban missile crisis where jack and bobby got snookered by kennedy and we weren't told for 40 years that our missiles were removed from turkey and italy in a secret boston style political deal that was not told to the american people until 40 years afterwards do you think that might give the cia and the military guys some motive or the fact that john kennedy was a methamphetamine addict read max jacobs read dr feelgood out right now the story of dr max jacobson who he injects kennedy just before the 60 debate injects him three times in vienna ostensibly for his back we know that president kennedy has to be subdued by secret service agents when he gets a a a an overdose at the carlisle hotel so as far as the motive of the defense intelligence agency and their morbid fear that kennedy will give away everything to the communists that's why i think it is true i would urge you to look at the book and you can email me and i'll answer any question thank you yes sir well the cover of your book it says what is really on the eighteen and a half minute gap yes hinted that yes uh there's two seminal events that i think take nixon down the first one is obviously the fact that he taped himself and the tape was a self-beginning meaning that as soon as a question as soon as he began to speak it was voice activated it's very clear that early on he does not remember that he's taped and the reason i think that al haig is the man who makes the 18 and a half minute erasure al haig is a nixon's chief of staff he is affiliated with the neocons and the hardliners his real loyalty is the joint chiefs of staff he makes a number of mistakes in nixon's defense that cannot be mistake the most important one is that hague learns on a friday that the senate watergate committee has stumbled on the existence of the tapes he knows that it will be revealed monday morning nixon legally has 48 hours to destroy the tapes before they're subpoenaed because once they're subpoenaed their destruction is a crime but right now they're nixon's property hague never tells nixon all weekend nixon learns about the tapes on television the first five minutes of the tapes were in fact uh erased by um rosemary woods nixon's secretary you can tell because there's a loud hum which is probably caused by interference from a electrical socket but then there is a a 13 and a half minute additional two erasures back to back clearly made in a different location now those are made while the taper in the custody of general hague and we know from bob woodward's book which has a lot of fiction in it that deep throat in this case hague who is not deep throat but a part of a composite of deep throat that deep throat tells him on monday ask if there's a taping system there's a deliberate erasure on the tape so there's the setup what's on it that's the interesting thing nothing significant if one goes to bob haldeman's handwritten notes contemporaneous with the conversation there's nothing in there particularly about watergate it is the act of the erasure itself that is the setup that causes nixon's fall the erasure is the second blow after the existence of all these tapes uh it gets compounded by the firing of the senate watergate apparently the watergate special prosecutor mr cox again hague nixon sends hague his chief of staff general hague former deputy to henry kissinger to attorney general richardson and says if the president issues an order to fire cox will you will you fire him and richardson says no i would i disagree that i would have to resign hague never tells nixon in fact he tells nixon the opposite you can fire cox and richardson will stick so the saturday night massacre is an enormous shock to nixon it's probably also the second largest blow yes ma'am i have a question you know nixon mentioned bringing up the bay of pigs and i have a personal interest my dad one of the four american pilots who died there which my government lied to us and threatened us for years the cia even had a plan to quote quiet the daughter's curiosity what was nixon's wanting to bring up about the bay of pig he believed that the same people who were involved in the bay of pigs invasion were the same people on the grassy knoll who assassinated the president that he thought it was a cia payback he never liked helms he never trusted helms he knew all about the bay of pigs because operation 40 his operation had become the bay of pigs had split into two different fronts one that still focused on assassination and one that focused on an invasion and bob haldeman says in his memoirs when nixon referred cryptically to the bay of pigs he was speaking to the connection of the jfk assassination haldeman's words not mine and haldeman i think is nixon's boswell in terms of constantly reflecting his views yes sir uh a little bit more about uh richard helms and the cia yes why what would explain the hostility though because uh one of the things that they keep uh nailing nixon for and especially kissinger for is uh having had a having sent the cia back on a uh throwback to its glory days in the 1950s eg the coolant you like chile yes so why would i mean helms is a political character senator howard baker put it best helms and nixon had so much on either that neither could breathe senator baker delves into the cia fingerprints all over watergate it's not roger stone saying it go to the senate watergate committee there's an entire appendix about the odd activities of the cia who destroys all their records about watergate even though they've been subpoenaed by the senate watergate committee why does the cia man go to watergate burglar jim mccord's house and burn his records in the fireplace within hours of he's arrested at the break-in uh i mean the cia has its fingerprints all over watergate and when senator baker and fred thompson who was then the counsel to the committee and later a pitch man for reverse mortgages and a senator and the uh and the prosecutor on law and order when he and baker wanted to look into this senator lowe wiker voted with the democrats to end the inquiry and we never got any deeper into what the cia knew about watergate yes sir yes mr stone from your personal experiences with uh president nixon uh what is your impression of uh his emotional uh uh re-feelings towards the end of the vietnam war i think he makes the uh he figures out that the war is lost i mean first of all he finesses the war in 1968 he never really says he has a secret plan that is not cannot be documented but he sure as hell implies it he wants to be a peace candidate for the peace voters he wants to be the hard-line candidate he's been a hard-line critic generally speaking to johnson's right and johnson's conduct of the war but that's because he needs the republican nomination and the republican rank-and-file party post-goldwater is rabidly anti-communist so uh but he tries to finesse it it he he figures out pretty quickly that that the war is not going to win the way we're waging it and therefore against all the advice of the cia and the defense department and kissinger at that time kissinger being a protege of fritz kramer the ultimate hardliner he wants an accelerated troop withdrawal uh timetable they keep saying the the south vietnamese can't make it on their own nixon says we're going to have to try we'll give them money we'll give them bullets but we can't spend any more lives yes roger wouldn't you say that going all the way back to when nixon was vice president he saw this kind of rogue element the cia that they would do things without president eisenhower's knowledge when they were told to stop various operations by the kennedys he just continued and i think he saw that accelerating all the way through his presidency and maybe he attempted to wrestle more control after after he was reelected well there's two ways to look at this uh first of all he liked them fine he was very close to alan dulles when he was vice president and it looked like their maneuvers would help put him in the white house then he realized that that then they had their face off with kennedy which was bitter the agency blamed kennedy for the failure of the bad pigs and kennedy blamed the agency the agency said he didn't send in the air power kennedy said i never agreed to send the air power they really were talking past each other but it left deep bitterness and the cuban patriots were cut down on the beach nixon i don't think would have made that mistake nixon would have sent the bombers so i think there's a fundamental difference right there secondarily though uh nixon is this is used against him in the 1960 debates because the cia tips kennedy that there's a pig's operation you know a uh an invasion planned and kennedy uses it in the debate attacking nixon for not being sufficiently tough on cuba knowing that nixon cannot say well we're supposed to invade any week now because that's classified information i'll get to you in one second sir uh so it is it's an uh i think that he his relationship with them once he becomes president he immediately demands the bay of pigs in the jfk assassination records helms won't hand them over helms has been johnson's boy helms is doing all kinds of dirty work for johnson if nixon had asked helms to break into the watergate he would never have been impeached if he'd used the fbi lyndon johnson used the fbi to hunt homosexuals on barry goldwater staff he used the fbi to wiretap nixon's campaign plan he can't be prosecuted that was the government doing that nixon's mistake was forming the plumbers an extra legal entity to conduct illegal break-ins and wiretappings the other presidents had violated civil liberties just as badly but they'd done it through channels another question sir yes if i may jump on one thing that was mentioned only in passing yes uh and we're thinking here not about so much about what's going on what the public knows about yeah is that uh the democrats wanted nixon's psychiatric record yes when in that day if there had been just the hint that nixon was undergoing any psychiatric treatment that could have been ruined us politically well it's even worse than that because john kennedy had health issues of his own he did in fact have addison's disease somebody broke into his doctor's office in new york uh it is interesting to me that the historian um i believe it is one historian blames nixon for this break-in but it's three weeks later that lyndon johnson uses the story at the democratic national convention to try to derail kennedy the man who broke into kennedy's office is lyndon johnson he even used the the files now that causes robert kennedy to get nixon to get jack kennedy's two doctors dr cohen dr travel to write letters asserting that he's in perfect health those letters are a lie they're a complete fabrication but more troubling is the fact that dr travel has written to the president several times saying stop taking the injections of jack of dr jacobson he's giving you a barbiturates and amphetamines they're not safe for you and those are in the records they we've now can see these records so there was enormous concern and therefore in a certain sense i believe nixon's psychiatric records were sought so you could have a stalemate you don't talk about my addisons and i don't talk about the fact that you're seeing a shrink which are absolutely right in 1960 unlike today where attitudes are somewhat better people don't want a president who's seeing a psychiatrist it would have been taboo would have been death it's interesting by the way the psychiatrist who saw nixon had another famous client who nixon recommended to him a guy named gerald ford anyway yes sir what uh this business about nixon requesting the cia's records about the assassination did nixon have some kind of a closet uh for lack of a better word sympathy for john f kennedy because after what happened he wanted to see whether he was the guy whether it said in the report that he was the guy who hooked up the mob and and the cia that it was all self-preservation now lamar waldron has written a book which i'm sure we have here in which he makes the case that that's what the break-in is about his book is brilliant extremely well wrong well written i don't think he's right about that somebody who hasn't asked the question and then i think we have to yes sir um you being the first and only nixon staff member i've ever met um out of my own curiosity and it's not necessarily related to watergate itself but i was wondering since you were a staff or a staff member what your opinion was on this supposed cutting of all ties of the gold standard uh i identified my book as one of the biggest mistakes he made i think he made three colossal errors taking closing the goal window waging price controls huge mistake the war on drugs the war on dogs has been a colossal expensive failure it doesn't work incarcerating people with drug problems doesn't work it costs more than rehabilitating them it is the worst failure and it's a bipartisan failure both republicans and democrats have made this mistake the gold standard removing us from the gold standard really kicks the props out from your economy and the and the problems we're having now are directly relatable to the fact that the dollar is not stronger you want to crush the soviet union a strong dollar crush the soviet union you you want to you want to play oil politics in the middle east a strong dollar it's crucial all right uh one more time perhaps if we have whoa one or two last questions anyway or shall we sign some books yes sir what is your opinion about the uh the story that president johnson had negotiated a truce uh the vietnam war at the end of his presidency yeah i'm glad you asked this it's unfortunately not that clean basically five days before the election johnson decides to announces that he is going to call a bombing hall and he's calling for talks with the south vietnamese the north vietnamese but that has to address the question of the nlf uh and the uh in the viet cong whether because the north insists that they'd be at the table as if they are separate entities we won't agree to that johnson has no agreement from the south vietnamese he has no agreement from the north vietnamese indeed the soviet ambassador de brennan writes in his memoirs i told johnson this was a crazy idea that the north vietnamese had no interest in negotiation that they wouldn't come to the table why johnson didn't call the bombing halt five months before the election instead of five days before the election has a lot to do with the fact that in the polls nixon is stalled and kennedy and humphrey is coming on the humphrey nixon race folks is closer than the nixon kennedy race of 1960. people have forgotten that nixon is holding on to a thin lead but he's you know running out of cards and johnson calls the bombing hall so there's no question that the people around nixon uh enlist anna chanal who was the uh beautiful asian millionaire widow of general claire chennault who owned the tiger flying tigers airline who lived in the watergate was a major hostess and also the mistress of senator john tower and chanel and tower basically get the word to the south vietnamese embassy don't go to the table in johnson's proposal uh you know he doesn't have he doesn't have anybody else lined up the south vietnamese i think are inclined to do that anyway because they realize johnson's about to close the door on them he just wants a quick piece and he wants to put humphrey over the top so they bail out and the talks collapse liberals say therefore nixon is guilty of treason i say johnson's playing politics and he's wrapping it he's wrapping it in national security but he doesn't have a deal and he knows it it's just to prop up humphrey and in fact the deflation of the prospects for peace talks rapidly dissipate and nixon hangs on to a to a narrow lead so put another way the grocer's boy from yorba linda out snuckered the man from the perdinells river kind of a payback for stealing the presidency from him in 1960. these guys did not like each other listen to both their tapes kissinger is uh ironically just to tell you what a weasel kissinger is he is on the payroll of presidential candidate nelson rockefeller as a foreign policy advisor he's secretly writing foreign policy memos to vice president humphrey telling him how to deflate nixon at the same time he's a paid consultant to johnson state department he gets wind of the bombing hall he sees an opportunity for henry the k he knows nixon hates him nixon hates him because he's been a big critic of nixon he's a rockefeller guy nixon and rockefeller were epic rivals so what he does is he calls his friend bill buckley the only friend he has in common with nixon buckley calls nixon and says guess what johnson's going to spring a bombing hole on you five days out suddenly john mitchell is calling anna chanal and senator tower and they're on their way to the south vietnamese embassy to scuttle the bombing the peace initiative so i i it's uh this is all very detailed in the book yes sir in regard to the 18 and a half minute gap yes did you say that holdemon said after hearing it there was nothing significant now what i said was if you looked at haldeman's handwritten notes he was an inveterate note taker so during the calls he would make notes about the course of the call there's and he actually they're published they're online they're extraordinary correct but he has no reason at that juncture he's transcribing every tape he doesn't know the tapes will ever be discovered he's basically taking notes of his car during his conversation you can't take that as a fact in view of the fact that nixon is already on the tapes at least sounding like he's ordering the ci the fbi to break the uh the investigation of the cia in other words nixon has definitely joined the cover-up that is his giant mistake when john dean comes to him on the 13th it is the first time dean tells him after knowing for nine months that somebody at the white house is involved in that gordon strong has been getting transcripts of the watergate bugs the first time nixon learns that is on the 13th dean tries to shed the attention to the to the conversation of the 21st when he first says mr president there's a cancer on the presidency haldeman air liftmen are involved i myself have obstructed justice his words remember john dean has got the cia party he's got the fbi and the u.s attorney telling him what's going on in the current investigation of the watergate break-in so the cover-up can stay one step ahead of the government so uh i guess my point is since nixon has already killed himself a dozen other places in the tapes why erase that one section what could he had say that would have been worse than what he's already said he could be clearly his biggest mistake is joining the cover-up he obstructs justice it's what brings him down and of course he gets a pardon because he knows that he vice president agnew was moved out of the way he pleads to a minor tax evasion he would never have pardoned nixon they make gerald ford president because nixon knows that gerald ford in 19 in 19 1963 as a member of the warren commission that ford has changed in his own handwriting the in the the autopsy document of john kennedy changing the description of the wound from his upper back to his lower neck to accommodate the single bullet theory reported in the new york times the the autopsy is declassified by the american by the uh assassinations review board reported in ap it's ford's indelible handwriting nixon knows this in real time so nixon sends al haig according to two witnesses to tell ford look for look mr president mr vice president august 1st 1974 if nixon's going down he's taking everybody with him the agency you the the warren commission the bay of pigs it's all it all comes out if nixon stands in the dock i think he this is how he secures his pardon and the pardon saves him from prosecution saves him from prison and puts him in a position to launch his greatest comeback of all becoming a foreign policy advisor of of uh bill clinton it is clinton who says it next to his funeral let the days of judging richard nixon on anything other than his entire record be over so let me wrap this up by saying this most of you know i have a tattoo of nixon on my back about the size of a grapefruit it's in the middle of my back it's you can see it at the end at the back of the book when you buy a book and we'll even show it to you if you don't i guess uh and it's not an ideological statement it's it it simply says this that in life when things don't go your way when you suffer defeats when you suffer setbacks when things seem futile when you're when you're when you doubt you have an obligation to get yourself up dust yourself off and get back in the game the story of nixon's authority of tenacity and persistence and focus and discipline it is a man who who in 1962 flames out of the race for governor and only six years later was sworn in as president of the united states who famously says you won't have nixon to kick around anymore so it's a story about resilience that's what impresses me about nixon it's not ideological he had no ideology he was a pragmatist he had conservative views and liberal views he had a very progressive government by today's standards he couldn't get nominated in today's republican party so that is the story thank you very much for coming and please come get a book thank you all right folks a quick reminder for our internet audience watching at home there's still time to call the number on your screen get a copy of the book we'll get it signed and we'll ship it to wherever you are in the u.s free of charge also a reminder that all of our live stream events are archived so if you don't get to watch it live you can go to the books and books website and all the events will be saved there for you to watch at your convenience for those of you here in the house we have nixon secrets as well as mr stone's previous book the bestseller the man who killed kennedy for sale at the counter he'll be signing over here at the table to the left of the podium thanks very much [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

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Published: Mon Aug 17 2020