This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing. A few people were deeper into the Watergate cover up than President Nixon's White House counsel John Dene Then he flipped. He was a star witness for the Congressional investigation. And while some Watergate conspirators had religious conversions in prison, Dean left prison with a commitment to teaching in classrooms and beyond the lessons of the scandal and advocating for better government.
I recently had the opportunity to talk with him in front of a live audience at n y US Screwball Center. Tell us the jobs you had in government prior to becoming counsel to the president. I was at the House Judiciary Committee. Was my first job in government, and from there I went to a commission. It was revising the federal Criminal Code. I didn't study enough while they were working on I have a question about I then went from there to become the Associate Deputy Attorney General in
the Nixon administration. At the outset of the administration and while they're working in justice, I was invited to become counsel of the president. Who invited you, Richard Nixon, Nixon, someone's making a recommendation to him, or he knew you personally, well, they sent a feeler out. In fact, I over the years, in going through the archives, I haven't collected at all,
but I have collected bits and pieces. I didn't realize they were doing reconnaissance on me for many many months before they asked me to come over to the White House, questions like could I really be loyal to Nixon? Literally? Literally? What did you think that they saw in you? That they thought you were a Nixon man? Uh? I? You know, that's one of the mysteries to me is why someone as young and inexperienced as I was was given that job.
I was given, actually the title, I wasn't given the job. Initially, John Erlickman had been White House counsel. He was the initial White House counsel. He gave up the title, he didn't give up the job, and I think Nixon throughout really relied on Erlickman for his legal advice. You come from a Republican family. Your dad was he was an executive Firestone. He worked at Firestone. My father's spent eighteen years at Firestone and then went out. He was a. Uh.
He was a turnaround expert. He would go into a plant, a manufacturing plant, could see why it wasn't working. He was the numbers man as well as a mechanical engineer from Carnegie Mellon and could straighten these plants out. But so, did you have some kind of Republican credentials throughout your my My family was not particularly political. Uh were you?
I actually became interested in politics when I was in prep school and my roommate happened to be the son of a United States senator, and we would go up to Washington and stop and see uh, Senator Goldwater his son and I and uh. And that's when I was became interested in in that world. I can still recall and visualized walking down those marble halls with the Senator leading the way, taking us on a tour here there, and saying, this is pretty impressive. He was also, I thought,
an impressive guy. He had a he had one of the first thunderbird for thunderbirds. I was at that age just thinking about getting a driver's life since and we'd ride around in his car that was more like the cockpit of an airplane. He was a ham radio operator and could also talk to any air base he wanted to talk to from his thunderbird. Now, when you finally go to the White House as a counsel to the President, what was your sense of what the job was and
what you to discover the job? Actually was? One of the things that I was really strange is I was never given much guidance as to what the White House counsel did when Lackman was there, he never really told me anything about it. Uh. When Hallaman interviewed me before I went in to have the President, say would you take the job? Uh, he said, I suppose you will just do whatever you lawyers do. He wasn't a lawyer, And uh, that was about the guidance I got. What
what were some of the things you did? What were some of the things you worked though? You start the
job one year? I When I started the job, it was a lot of I realized that Alickman was sending my office all the minutia, things like clearing people for conflict of interest, preparing us for example, there was no staff manual when I got there, so my office prepared a staff manual to tell people, you know, what forms letters had to be in, as well as Uh, the fact they couldn't contact independent regulatory agencies they had to go through our office or uh not at all, sort
of just basic mechanics. And I told initially I was a solo, and I think they were sort of testing to see who I was and what would go on, and it wasn't. It was about six months before they let me hire an assistant. And I needed the help because there's a lot of work are in fact today in the archives, the White House Council's office for the Nixon presidency is one of the largest collections of papers. Well, thank god you weren't doing the conflict of interest work
in the White House. Now you'd be dead from exhaustion. Depend only but and you need about five or there is no clearance at all and no work at all. They probably just closed that office this this term. You know, we're not gonna bother with that conflict. Just send them home. Uh. But but described for me, because I think a lot of people you get into that kind of CULTI personality with someone like Nixon and what what was it like
to work with him? What was he like? Because it's just nothing like being in the presence of the person themselves rather than through the filter of the media. What was he like when you worked with him? You know, when I went over there, I was old enough and been around enough to know there was a tricky Dick. But I believed in the sixty eight campaign that Tricky Dick had matured. He was now a former vice president who really understood how government operated, and he would be
a great senior statesman type person. And uh, that's the image that was put out. The White House staff itself was operated so tightly that very few on the staff actually knew what the president did and how he did it and when he did it. Uh, it was more they read what was in the paper that was being
cranked out by everybody else. As to the image of the president, I've, for example, really other than in group meetings and and uh just passed through meetings, had no dealings with him until eight months after the arrests at the Watergate and then I'll have some thirty seven thirty eight meetings with him. You become more useful to him.
What happens is after his successful reelection. I have been reporting to either Hallaman or Eliman everything I'm able to pick up about Watergate and the investigation and where it's going and what its implications are, and nothing looks good. Uh. At that point Nixon decides rather than of uh, well, not at that point, but several months later, in February, he decided to rather than have Hallman and Lan filtering what I have to say, he decides to deal directly
with me. And thankfully it was recorded. So when you, uh, so the news breaks, the burglary breaks in what month of seventy June seventeen seventy two, June of seventy two, he's overwhelmingly elected after that, and when you found out that these guys who had links to the White House, to the Committee to be elect had broken into the d n C office at the Watergate Hotel, what did you make of it? What happened to have been in Manila? Uh?
In the Philippines? Convenient, wasn't. The first mistake was coming home? Uh? That's on June nineteenth, two days after the arrest. I'm sent to interview Gordon Liddy, who confesses to me. Uh. He says, it's our men, my men. Uh he And when he said my men, what was his no? No? Liddy was x FBI former FBI hunt was x C I A x C. I A uh, he said, my men,
what was well, I was. What he was explaining is that there was on the morning of the nineteen the Washington Post knew more than we did at the White House as far as Watergate, and there was a big story that morning that amongst those arrested was the chief of security for the re Election Committee, James McCord, which was a pretty good clue that it somehow involved the
re election Committee. Uh. John Mitchell. Ahead of the re election Committee, the former Attorney General now director of the Election Committee, put out a statement saying, oh, we don't know anything about what these guys were doing. They were freelancing on their own. Well at it didn't take me
very long to realize that that was bologny. Today, I know that really the conspiracy was hatched over that weekend and the decision to cover it up, and there was a real reason to cover it up for the White House, which I learned when talking to Lyddy h on the morning of the nineteenth. In fact, I intercepted him rather than come to my office. I didn't want him in my office, but rather walk down seventeen Street. That's when
he said, these are my men. Who did this. He said, I was foolish to use McCord, who was part of the re election committee. Liddy himself was the general counsel of the Finance Committee of the re election committee where he was that was his supposed principal responsibility. But he was running this on on the side. And on the way back up, he said two things that were back
up seven injuries were really quite startling. He said, you should know John, while I worked at the White House, that Howard Hunt who helped me get the men for this operation. And I did a what he called a national security operation by breaking in Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. Uh. What I didn't know at that time is that that had been really authorized in writing by John Erlickman, my predecessor, who wrote on a sheet asking his approval. So long
is not traceable to the White House. Yeah, yeah, Um, I didn't know that at that time. Anyway, I did go back and report to Erlickman what I had learned. The other thing that Lyddy said on the way back up seventeen Street, he said, I realized I've made a terrible error, and if anybody wants to take me out, just tell me what street corners. Yeah, he literally said, he said, anybody wants to take me out, just don't do it at my house. I've got children there. What
do you think was behind that? Why would he, I mean, other than his own having maybe a screw loose or something. Why did he believe that the the operation of the White House, the governed, the executive branch of the government, would want to whack him on a street in Washington. Why. I have no idea. He's just a little dramatic. It was probably mistake not to no, no, just to clarify. And of course the day he was shot, you were in Manila, right right, So, uh but no, no, no
explained to people what were they after. It's taken a long time to assemble what they were really after because, uh no one really talked about it, and it was kind of embarrassing. One of the reasons I'm convinced that Lyddy was silent is because of the stupidity of all the activities that have been carried on. Uh the for example, he post Watergate acted like he was some James Bond type character who had been hired by the White House
to come in and do these things. As the historical record shows he's not quite at the Maxwell smart level in most of it. His undertaking is another reference from our childhood. So if you don't Maxwell spart anyway, what they were looking for, it appears to me. It appeared to me at the time, and I have since been even more convinced with a pure fast fishing expedition. They were just in there trying to find anything they could of a negative nature and hopefully on Larry O'Brien, the
chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Um So during the period where uh, you're called in now and you become pulled into this circle to help solve this problem, when does that commence? On the nineteen I'm the person who's in charge of finding out what's happening and keeping abreast of what what's happening, talking to people in the Justice Department, talking to the FBI, talking to the re election committee that has its own group of lawyers, and in bringing
that information in. And what happened is the re election Committee started calling on the White House for help. One of the interesting things is I've always been convinced that John Mitchell, who we know did authorize the Watergate break in, he authorized the money. He authorized the plan. Uh. He did it in Florida, UH with Jeb McGruder, who was
his deputy, and McGruder then gave the orders. I'm convinced that Mitchell, from my initial conversations with him on the nineteen, was prepared to step forward and say, hey, this happened on my watch. Uh. He also sent word to the White House over the weekend, stay away from deflect all the responsibility from the president, take it all from That
was the original plan. But then what happened is he to uh got a briefing as to what Liddy had done and learned of the Elsberg break, in which he thought was as bad, if not worse, than what had happened at the Watergate, and he and he and Erlickman, who had always had a strained relationship, they often in the room would talk to each other through me. They would turn to me and say, like the other person
wasn't in the room. And that's how I slowly became the lynchmen like a marriage counselor yeah, exactly, Uh, because that that's that's how I became the lynchman of this conspiracy. When you're in a room with these guys I only have a sense of them from archival footage from the news, and so when they do seem like a pretty uh, not a very lighthearted crowd, you know what I mean?
And uh Holdeman and ran and they seemed like some pretty dark crowd in terms of Because I'm gonna read a quote for you from uh, because you were on the Commission on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws right as the War on Drugs was beginning. And then the next thing you know, you're intimately working with in a room with Erlickman, who uh said the following right before he died. He said the Knicks about Nixon Republicans. He said that Nixon Republicans had two enemies, the anti war left and
black people. We knew it couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. And he said, did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did. When you're in the room with these guys, when you get a sense that you've never heard that kind of talk, It wasn't until years later. My last book, I cataloged all of
the Nixon Watergate conversations. I heard on those tapes things I've never heard those men say in front of me. They were their own small unit that would talk about these things at a level that I wasn't privy. There are some chilling stuff that and racist stuff that I've never seen in Rlickman before in those tapes. Uh, it said, it's a remarkable record. No presidents ever gonna leave that behind again when uh, well, mus not be too hasty now,
uh you're hopeful. Well, we're gonna get to the comparisons and contrast in a minute. Both houses of the Congress were in Democratic hands at the time, correct, but it was a different Democratic party. It was a party with Southern Democrats who were today Republicans. So it it it divided. He believed and and held out the belief for a
long time. I think that he could with a combination of Republicans and Southern Democrats keep a keep his office through a an impeachment bill of impeachment in the House, if not defeating that, certainly not getting two thirds of the Senate to vote against him for removal. So uh, it's it's a different Democratic party. It's true. It was not controlled by the South either. It was more more moderate to progressive that did. And if you recall, it's
very slow that the impeachment process starts with Watergate. It isn't until he removes the special prosecutor, Archibald Coxs that they take this seriously. That while that itself may not be an obstruction of justice or an impeachment or a criminal offense, he had the power to do it. A lot of parallels with today. Uh. He certainly politically had made a terrible mistake. There were Republicans obviously on the Judiciary Committee and in the Congress who were willing to
vote for slowly, but surely they did. They were the moderates first and then finally by the end when they heard the so called smoking gun tape, which showed Nixon had based his defense up until the end on the fact he knew nothing of the Watergate cover up until I had told him on March first, in a conversation that was labeled a cancer on the presidency. Uh. Conversation. Uh,
he said that was the first he'd learned. Well, that was a pretty outrageous lie, and he got caught in it, uh, just by really the special prosecutor fishing for a tape uh and and one of that and that tape showed him uh telling hall Or agreeing with Holloman's plan to have the c I a block the FBI's investigation in
the Watergate. And that conversation with Hallaman takes place when June, right after the breaking, right six days after uh and and and and these are the tapes that he was forced to surrender, which he don't understand that he did surrender the tapes other than the gap, the famous kid, there would have been an interesting constitutional crisis if he had said to the Supreme Court, Okay, I've got you really, I think it's wrong, and I President, I've got the troops.
You come get the tapes. But this is my property. This is my You're not entitled to have this property. And history would have been very different. As everybody knows, it's a famous gap is eighteen minutes, eight and a half minute. It's a media it's a media invented event. There was no eraser at all. No a strong man could press the record button uh and cause the eraser and it they're the experts saw seven to nine efforts to erase that material. Well, what do you think it was?
Was it based on those tapes? Is there everybody? You know? Because I've listened to the conversations that precede and follow Nixon had a pattern of repeating things that were important or sort of sensitive. They would come up in subsequent conversations. This is a very early conversation. This is in June, his first conversation back. That's why it was subpoenaed. And Uh, I think it was just a gas that resulted in
that probably being erased. Uh. And it could have even the person that occurred to me that could have done it was somebody who had a terrible time opening those medicine bottles you press in turn. I'd see it in his mouth occasionally trying to get the cap off. He had trouble opening its drawers. He hadn't driven a car in years. This was a very foreign kind of machine. Did Nixon order the breaking himself? No, he didn't. No evidence of that. There no evidence of anybody in the
White House knew. What's ironic, Alec is that had the mission of the evening actually been accomplished, rather than Lyddy and his men being arrested or Liddy's men being arrested. It was traceable to the White House. Their mission that night was really to go plant a bug in McGovern's headquarters on Capitol Hill. The reason they didn't do that is they got arrested fixing the defective machinery UH that
they'd put in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. You can trace back through tapes and Hollaman memos that Nixon gives an order to put a plant a secretary or a volunteer or something like that, move it from Muskie to McGovern and not particularly a wire tap. So as we come rolling into seventy three, right as he's uh where things changed dramatically for him. What kind of things
is he asking you to do? And what was he like to work with here in that Jumping back to August of seventy two, pre election, he had a press conference and one of the early questions he's asked, is Mr. President, giving the fact of your Attorney General, UH is now the head of the re election committee, and if somebody from the re election committee was arrested in the d
n C, why don't you appoint a special prosecutor? And he has his response all prepared, and he says, well, if first of all, the Congress is investigating this, the General County Office is investigating it, uh, the FBI is investigating it. But most importantly, my White House Counsel John dene has investigated this matter and found nobody presently employed in this administration had anything to do with this bizarre incident.
This was the first I heard of my investigation. Uh. And so after that, his press sectary, Ron Zigler, called and said, John, do you have a copy of your report? I said, Ron, there is no report. Uh. He said, well, maybe there should be, and I said, well, I don't think so. Anyway. I don't think why because I didn't want to lie. I didn't want to You knew that they wanted you to doctor something that it was quite clear. Yes, what happens is when you're we're going back to when
I first started dealing with with Nixon. He starts on the report again that he wants a Dean report. He is convinced somehow this will make things go away. Uh. Erlickman makes it pretty clear that what he can do is have this report in his desk drawer and say this is all I knew. Uh. It didn't take me long. You know, I figured that out immediately, that uh, that this would be a setup, and I had no interest in line, had no interest in giving the false information
to the president uh, and didn't. But he presses me on that there there were actually three phases of the cover up. For me, I initially thought I was just helping out my colleagues and didn't see anything criminally amiss. Uh. Defense funds were not unusual at that time. Uh. Not announcing them didn't sound horrible to me. I didn't get see any quid pro quo in in anything. Nothing struck me amiss at this point. As I said, I'm not
trained as criminal lawyer either, defense defense funds. The Barragan brothers for the had a defense fund the Chicago criminal yet and that's what actually Nick. There's a tape of Nixon suggesting that there'd be a defense fund set up uh for the Cubans who had been hired by hunting lyddy uh to pay their lawyer's fees and what have you. If he had done that openly, he might have avoided obstructing justice. It's very curious, and Hallman and Erckman dropped
that I never heard about that. In fact, when I first hear about it, I don't know what he's talking really know what he's talking about anyway, phases of the cover up for me, I initially don't think I'm engaging in criminal conduct. When I realized I am is. After the election, Howard Hunt calls Chuck Coulson, and Coulson records the call on a dictaphone. He his phone hooked up to a dictaphone, as many did in the White House, and he brought this tape down to me to play
of his conversation with Hunt. And he's proud as punch of this conversation because Coulson is because it exonerates him in the Watergate that he had nothing to do with the Watergate break in, I hear something very different. I hear Hunt demanding did he get paid sooner rather than later? That promises have been made to him to take care of him, they haven't been delivered and the ready isn't there. I immediately say to Chuck, this is very bad. Chuck uh.
He said, well, what are you gonna do about it? I said, I don't know. What I did do is take the tape up to Haliman and Erckmann and played it for them. They said, uh, take it to John Mitchell and get him to solve the problem, which I next did that same day and took it up to New York and played it for Mitchell, whose first reaction is don't you ever have anything good news to report?
And I said, no, John, I don't anyway. It's after listening to that conversation, I let my fingers do the walking in the criminal code to figure out what in the world are we doing? And I discovered eighteen USC. Fifteen oh three, which is the obstruction statute, and I discovered eighteen Usc. Three one, the conspiracy statute, and I realized we're in a whole lot of trouble. Now. You might have thought that the first reaction would beat two run for the hills. I mean I had exactly the
opposite reaction. That's when I doubled down. That's when I try to make the cover up work. I know today psychologically what was going on. I was in what they call the loss frame, where you have no attractive options and you do stupid things. Uh it's it's it's unfortunately part of human nature. Happens a lot to a lot of people. Uh, I don't you feel a loyalty personally too of these people. Had you developed any kind of closeness with them as a person, as a co conspirator, Yes,
I did. I wanted to cover up to work at that point, and that's when I do dumb things like destroyed documents, uh knowing yes, Uh you know, and and and I never understood and for years you know what had happened. And the last phase of my involved in the cover up is when Hunt sends a message to me, uh that he's going to have semi things to say about John Erlickman and by implication, Bud Crogue, one of his assistants, regarding his break in at the Elsberg uh
psychiatrists office fiasco. Uh. That's when I sort of say, my god, this is never gonna end. We're being extorted. Uh, there will be no end in it. It's this cover up is not going to work, and it's we've got to figure out how to stop it and get the president out in front of it. And that's March nineteen when that word comes in. I have by then started to have enough dealings with the President that I think
he's got trust in me. And so on March the morning of March one, I go in after setting it breaking precedent because you weren't supposed to go to the President of and through Haldeman. When he called me that night, I said, Mr President, I really need to talk to you, and he said, how about ten o'clock. I said, fine, I'll be there. Uh. I called Hallaman that morning and said I need to go in and lay it out
to the president. He really doesn't get it. I don't know if Halloman understood what I was talking about or not, but he said, fine, you do what you think is necessary. I went in and tried to give him enough back, given the benefit of the doubt that he didn't know anything I know today he knew almost virtually everything. But I took him through each step, and every time I would raise one of the problems, he'd have an answer. I'd raise. For example, Uh, Bud Crog is worried he's
committed perjury. Nixon's response, Well, John, perjury is a tough rap to prove. I raised the fact that Hunt was demanding a hundred and twenty thousand dollars yesterday. He wanted fifty thousand for his attorney's fees and seventy for his living expenses and what have you, because he had by then been convicted. What's the line X and the famously, we could get the money if we had to. That's exactly the line. That's you're coming to it. Uh. And and and I and I said, Mr President, I have
no idea how much this might cost. And he said, well, what do you think? What what you give me an estimate? I pulled out a thin air what I thought was a hefty number. I said, a million dollars. That would be what about five and a half today? Uh, never having tried to even kind of, you know, calculate what it might be. And that's when he said, that's no problem. I know where we can get that. Uh. And what I didn't know is that went until I actually did
did this book with all the tapes. Is after that conversation, he goes over to rose Wood's door, which is adjoining his offer the Oval office, and asked rose And in a voice you can hear on the tapes, how much is in the slush fund? Uh, there's six hundred thousand. He will uh within a week or so be selling an ambassadorship to raise money. He's on the job. He's gonna he's gonna solve this. He's gonna get the million
bucks and say take care of it. If John Deane was the ultimate Nixon insider, essayist and satirist, Louis Lapham was the ultimate outsider. Despite their shared patrician roots, lap them skeward the administration and its Watergate troubles from behind the covers of Harper's Magazine, where he was the managing editor throughout the envill I never liked or trusted Nixon. I came out of the you know, the affluent, privileged San Francisco society, San Francisco society. My my father had
been very strongly in favor of Roosevelt. Two. Here my conversation with Louis Lapham at Here's the Thing dot org coming up more from Richard Nixon's White House counsel on lessons from Watergate for Trump and the rest of us. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing now, more of my conversation with John Deane. When you talk about this period, you say that I'm gonna stop this or I'm having my doubts because the cover up. You don't think it's gonna work. Would you have kept going
if you think the cover up would work? You know the President at the end of my march the first cancer on the Presidency where I used that phrase to get his attention, and I had it after that, Um, I was, I was. I think that's the day I met Richard Nixon, the real Nixon, because I took him through one problem after another problem after another problem, waiting for his fist or hand to come down on the desk and say this has got to stop. Uh, that
isn't That isn't the man I met that morning. He had answers for everything and that it had to continue, that somebody should take care of this problem with Hunt. Uh, and uh that there was no short term answer. He wanted to cover up to go on. I had nothing to do with with Hunt getting paid. He did get paid.
Mitchell took care of it. Uh. And Hunt would remain a bought man until the Watergate prosecutor is trying hauled him in and Elman and Mitchell in the cover up trial in October of nineteen seventy four were which is quite remarkable. And then he would decide that he would tell the truth. And he was the Perry Mason witness that came into the trial and nobody knew was going to arrive and explain what the Watergate break in was, how things had operated, and was very candid and very honest.
You mentioned the three phases of the cover up. Did you cover all three of those or was there another? I did? The last phase was ending trying to end the cover up and realizing the only way I could end it, and telling my colleagues, I'm going to the prosecutors. This has got you know, we've got to deal with this.
We need criminal lawyers in here. I'm going to hire a criminal lawyer, and would you hire I hired a college law school classmate initially UH to talk about a man who later became the chief judge of the UH Federal District Court in d C. Tom Hogan UH. And we talked about it, and he suggested Charlie Affer, who had worked here in the Southern District, was a very accomplished prosecutor and had become a very successful criminal defense lawyer,
and he was terrific. Uh. That would I for a while had one foot in the White House and one foot out of the White House, but didn't hide it from my colleagues. What I was doing. Either you're a very young man when this is happening and you're married. I mean we talked backstage about how your wife becomes kind of a bit player or the whole thing of the kid. As you said, the camera found her, Uh, your beautiful wife, Maureen Dean, and she was there. Uh. She had a huge influence on me. I want you
to explain about was the anxiety. And you know, I did not want to get married, but I did not want to lose her. I had been married, uh and divorced and had a child from that first marriage, and I had fallen in love with and we'd had a wonderful relationship. She wanted to get married. Uh, and I just knew this was a bad time. I didn't know how bad it was. Gotten married how much? When did you get married? In October of nineteen seventy two, very
bad time. We have now been married forty five years. Uh, so it you know, the you know, the first time that happened to me was not long ago. When I when I said that to somebody, I happened to be in Nashville, Uh, giving a talk, Uh because of Jim Neal, who was one of the Watergate special prosecutors. They became lifetime friends, many of these guys and one woman and I his former law firm. He's deceased now, but his former law firm had a program and I came down
to speak and there was a boys school there. Uh it's very fine academy. And they asked me to come out and do their assembly, and seven kids filed in, and I somehow, in passing, mentioned that I had been married to Maureen forty five years. And the kids broke out in applause, and I thought, didn't that nice? I mean, I was very can't imagine what that's like to be married for years? Like what um really? Now? When you
go home? I mean, I'm trying to get you to talk about something, just in terms of your personal feelings and your emotional life. Were you going home and uh, you know, and having dinner with your wife and sitting having a drink and saying, what the hell am I going to do? Or did you try to protect her or not? I protected her? I you know, I tried to warn her in the mafia. You don't tell you
even your wife. I tried to explain to her they were going to be problems, but I wasn't terribly I just got married on the down love and depth about it. Uh uh I must somebody recently asked me how did I get through it all? And my answer was vodka. So you did not confide a great deal in her, No, I didn't not none of you know. Essentially, none of the men talked to their wives about what was going on.
I'm sure more lamps would have been overheads if some of the women had learned about what was going on and when it was going on. I think all the wives were shocked at some of this. But anyway, as I said, she had a tremendous influence on me. When I decided to break rank, one of the reasons was I didn't want to disappoint her. I wanted to live up to the standards she thought. March sixteenth is when you said the meeting was with him cancer on the president?
How soon after that or do you get canned? Uh? End of April? It's tight. But what the tapes are fascinating That the tapes. My editor happens to be here tonight and he helped me tremendously. There were four I ended up with with four million words in twenty thick notebooks of transcripts that we had to bring down to to narrative and dialogue. And when I got to those tapes and in that period at the end, after I'd given him the cancer on the presidency, the conversations are
so repetitive. I mean, they just go over and over trying to figure out how to deal with me. What are they gonna do? And generally the only answer is to make me the scapegoat. He's afraid of me. When he lets Hallaman and Erlickman go, he just, in a one sentence says and so is White House Council John dene Uh. No, no shots at me at all, because when I get in there, I start telling him things he doesn't even know. He didn't know until I tell him on March seventeen that there had been the break
in at Ellsberg psychiatrists office and Erlickman had been behind it. Uh. Erlickman had never shared this with him. The reason I'm convinced those men never got pardons by Nixon when he was on his way out the door is he figured out that they really hadn't kept him informed. Uh, And they had their own agenda and they were protecting themselves. I actually tried to get everybody to flip inside. I thought that was I thought that would be so sobering
for Nixon. Uh, and everybody else could just stand up and take responsibility that his president tried. I tried. Uh. Did you get close to anyone? Um? I think some people did, you know, based on the tapes. Uh, there is some indication that people did give it some thought. UM, but they realized that, uh, it was the end of
their careers. So in nineteen seven, if you begin working in the White House in nineteen seventy an hour in the spring of seventy three, which is an eternity to be in the White House for a couple of years for some people, the do you notice uh? And I want to preface this with someone, do you notice the old Nixon returning? Because as Nixon, as everybody knows, who's the vice president for two terms under Eisenhower, not somebody who was adored by the staff of the White House.
In the Eisenhower man, he was there heavy. He was Eisenhower's heavy. I mean that's he He had the job of going out and being the hatchet man and being a dog. And then he and then he uh. And then he obviously loses a couple of elections, most notably the the presidential election in nineteen sixty. And then the Nixon has always been somebody who's a a bitter, bitter, uh, you know type. Who is this what you begin to see?
I mean, Nixon wins election in six eight, he wins re election in seventy two by a landslade, and you're in that room with him in the spring of seventy three, and this is the old Nixon. What I realized is that the old Nixon has never gone away. He's always been there. What they've done very effectively is portray a new Nixon. You know, in doing the book where I listened to all these conversations. As I was telling my editor tonight, the I didn't wear hearing aids before that,
uh experience. I made the mistake of having earphones on, which destroyed my hearing. And I told Moe at one point, God forbid. The last voice I hear is Richard Nixon in this project. But I when I was listening to these tapes occasionally I would, in queuing them up, would find things that I thought that the archives had removed. They theoretically have taken out all the personal material uh and returned it to the Nixons. But there are some
very personal conversations. For example, in uh January of seventy three, he learns that he from a lower aid that he indeed they may have peace in Vietnam. The first person he calls is not Henry Kissinger. He calls Pat Nixon. They have a lovely conversation. Uh. It really struck me that their marriage was much different than I had perceived it. Uh, and that she, you know, is pleased with him, proud of him. Uh. It's a lovely hus and wife conversation.
Same thing happened to occasionally when I found conversations with the President and his daughters, Tricia and Julie. They're some really nice conversations. I'm sure that family was stunned when they when these tapes came out, And that's probably one of the reasons he spent so much of his life after even leaving to to prevent the tapes from ever all surfacing. One of the reason Nixon covers up is he's worried about John Mitchell. Becomes very clear from the tapes. Uh,
it's not that he's worried about his own guilt. He's not worried about the Ellsberg break in. He's worried about the impact is going to have on his Attorney General, John Mitchell, who he thinks will never survive it and can't handle it. So he's trying to protect Mitchell. Different people have different motives at different times along the way. So you you finally get canned by Nixon himself when not well, I'm out of town on April when he
gives a speech, so we didn't fire your face to face. No, not. On on April sixt he called me in and said, I think you we need to talk about resignation. And I've drafted a couple of letters. Well I knew he hadn't written the letters, and I immediately read them and they were confessions. Uh, And I said, this is obviously, uh, John Erlickman's handiwork. So I took them back. I took the letters, and I said, Mr President, I'll write my
own letter and send it to you, and which I did. So. Uh. This event in American history obviously is chronicled, and famous books and famous movies made of those books. And I was wondering, when you first see all the President's Men, which comes out pretty quickly after the movie. It doesn't it doesn't it does in the film, or will come out like within a couple of years, eighteen months. What do you think of the film when you first saw
I first a directors showing of it. Alan Pocula had a showing and invited me, and after, you know, there were fifty people in a little uh theater. After the movie. I went went up to him and said thank you. He said, why are you thank you me? I said, I'm thank you for not mentioning my name anywhere in the movie. And he said that's not possible. I said,
you might check. It is possible. I said, even when that ticker goes across at the end and gets all the names that it has not otherwise involved, my name is not mentioned. Why do you think that is? I don't know. But he didn't change it. He didn't go back and add my name. But you appreciated the film, You thought it was accurate. I think it's a I think it's a slice of the story. From the media
point of view. Uh. You don't drive by the Jefferson or Lincoton memorial every time you cross Washington now as you know, But what about Nixon that Oliver stells from when you work in Sultan. I was a consultant on on Nixon. And that's a far more turgid movie than all the presidents. You know, It's much more than Watergate.
And what what happened is Originally Oliver had in that movie a conspiracy theory that claimed that Watergate was about a break in at the Democratic National Committee to UH to expose a call girl ring that my wife worked at UH. And I had already sued the publishers of that story and was in litigation which would go on for nine years. You're saying your wife did not work at the call girl. She did not work at the She did not work at the win't been walking anyone
with any misconceptions. People might dream that, but UH, anyway, they I told Oliver, I said that this is a fraud and and you'll end up being named in the lawsuit. Anyway, we we got off to that start, and he said, I don't want to do that sort of thing in this movie. He said, I am trying to get as much vera similitude as possible. What do you think he
captured that was accurate about Nixon? Uh, a scene because one of the scenes, the last scene I objected to was a scene where he has me meeting with Howard Hunt on the Memorial Bridge. And I said, Oliver, that never occurred. Harris ed, Harris, right, it's a great scene and you're played by uh David Uh uh. And I said, Oliver, that scene never happened. He said, I've paid for it. It's gonna happen. How many people applaud if you've ever seen Oliver stones Nixon? I don see that found guy.
I thought, I thought that I can actually suspend disbelief with Anthony Hopkins. I think I know you admire him greatly. Uh. And I've met him when he came back from a tour of the Nixon Library with Oliver and they had kind of slipped through with nobody's seeing them, but one of the dozens spotted them at the end of the tour and she said to Hopkins, who's reporting this to me?
At lunch right after they had come back, he said, the dozent stopped me and said, I understand you're playing Mr. Nixon And he said, yes, I am, and he said uh. And she said to him, he said, well, I hope you're not doing a job on him. And he turned to me and said, I'm not doing him a job on him. I am I. I said, I don't think so in this script. And he said, well, he said, I want to tell you, I kind of sympathize with Nixon.
He said, I, I said, Tony said that. He said, I grew up in very humble beginnings, and like Nixon, I could hear the train whistles and have dreams. And he said, I, you know, I want to play this guy straight and and and that's what I think he tried to do. I he had. I noticed. I was visited the set a number of times, and they had a voice coach for him there, and they tried to take that clip out of his accent. Uh, And they don't always. But that's the only thing that sort of
distracts me with him. I can believe this is Richard Nixon. He's he's really tries to capture the man. With the time we have left, I want to ask you, obviously about the comparisons and contrast to how we live our lives now. And UH, it's unlikely that every Public and Control Judiciary committee in this particular Congress is going to return an article to impeach. I think that's very true. Yeah, but they have You'll have a president, a sitting president,
who's indicted for a crime. Well, it's not possible right now to indict a sitting president. What happened is in nineteen seventy three, Sparrow Agnew was being pursued by the by a grand jury out of Maryland, and they went to the Department for tax evasion and he claimed he couldn't be indicted, he could only be in peached. Uh. They took the question to the Office of Legal Counsel, which issues those sort of opinions by the Department of Justice,
and said, no, Mr Vice President, you're wrong. You can be indicted. Uh, it's the president who can't be indicted, can only be impeached, and issued an opinion in seventy three. That opinion was upgraded or revised and readopted in two thousand. UH when Robert Ray Independent last one one of the last independent councils, raised that issue regarding Clinton and said, no, he cannot be indicted as a sitting president. So that's the policy right now of the Department. No, no corp
has ever ruled on it. And and many scholars disagree with it that they think that no presidents above the law, and indeed the amendment makes it possible to have the president step aside who would be impaired in his ability to govern and function if he was in a criminal trial, and to sort that out it could be done. Uh, the issue has not been resolved. There are some who think that Special Counsel Mueller might uh test it. What do you think Muller would do? You're a lawyer, have
a fascinating case. It's a it's a tough issue. I you know, I um, there are arguments on both sides, but I think that the bottom line argument is that no person in this country is about the law. I mean the country right now it seems like it's just so much trouble. You know, the country is in so much trouble. And you've got I have never had a knot in my stomach before before an election. I did before this election. I've that not has really never gone away.
Just the damage that prove it and divorce alone will do in their departments is going to take a decade or more to undo. You know. It's just the thing are really bad and too little attention is being paid to what's happening out in those departments and agencies. And UH, most striking to me, Alec is the fact that he has no competence for the job. He had no training, he had did no he has no knowledge of the office. Uh,
he's winging it from day to day. Um, he's got a constituency that uh is unshakable for lots of reasons. I think he was he was shocked to win, unprepared to govern, and but is growing into the job as he learns it. He's learning it on the spot. What worries me is he is going He's not dumb, He's going to learn how the machine reworks, and then I
think it's ripe for even greater abuse. Well, that's sort of my ultimate question is is that is that do you think, because I said this to people before, that that to remove the President of the United States from office is a tremendously painful and difficult that was also painful for the country. Yes. Do you believe that what's best for the country is to not impeach Trump and to wait until the next election cycle and vote amount of office or do you think impeachment is a healthy
path for the country? I think it's I think it's a an appropriate path because it's it's a constitutional path. The system is designed to deal with the president who is not uh playing the game as it's supposed to be played. And that's a determination made by the House of Representatives, which is the closest to the people, UH is the House, while we might have a highly gerrymandered house ryant house to write that, I'm not I'm not
sure that. I'm not sure. I think, uh, the next election, the off r election is going to be very telling. In so I wonder if if they get swamped in the in the in the mid term and you come out the other side of that into January, and uh, if Pence were to succeed a Trump that designs Pence would want to come in right after January of so he was eligible for ten years in office because if he steps if they impeach Trump, now Pence is only eligible for that piece of Trump's term and only wonderful
term of his own. Well, you're assuming he could get reelected. I think this is going to splash over on Pence. I don't. I don't. I don't refute that. I'm just saying that, but that right now. In their hope is that they're gonna wait and see what the damage is in the mid term, if if Trump can be rehability to I thought Trump would be gone by the summer.
I thought they'd say to themselves, we've got to get the smell of the cord out out of the room here and bring Pence in here and let everything clear, if not for, and prop up Pence as the as the nominee. But they've hung in with him. But I don't think Trump has that idea of leaving either. He likes the attention, He likes the fact he can demand the kind of seven coverage he gets. His narcissism is large enough to handle that. Are you a Republican now?
I haven't been since then? You haven't. I'm an independent California. We don't have to declare, and I have not declared, and I have voted, uh, both Republican and Democrats. What do you think it's gonna What do you think is the future of the Republican Party? Bad? Bad? Yeah, bad bad. We were going to do a sketch on S and L the other day where Trump was going Christmas shopping with Roy Moore of the mall I think we didn't.
You know, they killed that idea. And the the the greatest mistake I've made since Watergate was when Lauren sent out a feeler if I would host Saturday Night and not too late and and and and Saturday Night or Simon and Schuster said no, we don't want you doing that. It's a very tough, tough, painful time for this country right now because I think that I think we need both parties to be healthy and not have an effective opposition.
And that's one of the things that's sadden to me about this Republican Party either going down the drain with this between opposition and polarization, and we don't seem to have distinguished that. When when when majority doesn't rule, Uh, we're in trouble in a democracy and right now a minority is controlling the country. Well, I want to say, please go ahead. Well, I want to say I'm grateful.
I'm sure you've heard this before too, that I'm grateful that you found your conscience back then in March of nineteen seventy three and did the right thing coming out of Camp David and UH exposed what you did, told the truth about what you did, and UH I want to say thank you very much for coming and sitting with us tonight. Thank you, thank you. M. John Dene, whose life was forever changed by the bungled break into the Watergate Hotel in nineteen seventy two. I'm Alec Baldwin
and you're listening to Here's the Thing. M