January 27, 2026 • 57 mins
When John Dean found his conscience, America found its backbone and impeached a president. The Nixon Administration tried to undermine American democracy during the election of 1972 through now-legendary dirty tricks aimed at their Democrat opponents. They almost got away with it. Dean was Nixon’s White House Counsel, and participated in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in. Then he began cooperating with investigators, and blew the case wide-open. Dean is one of the most complicated and fascinating characters in modern American history. In a frank and funny conversation with Alec Baldwin in front of a live audience, John Dean opens up about how it all went down – and how it could go down now under Trump, who he says shares Nixon's paranoia and authoritarian instincts.
Originally aired December 11th, 2017.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing.
Few people were deeper into the Watergate cover up than
President Nixon's White House Council John Dene Then he flipped.
He was a star witness for the Congressional investigation. And
while some Wartergate conspirators had religious conversions in prison, Dean
(00:25):
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 NYU's Skirball Center.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Tell us the.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Jobs you had in government prior to you becoming counsel
to the president.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
I was at the House Judiciary Committee, was my first
job in government, and from there I went to a
commission that was revising the federal Criminal Code. I didn't
study enough while they were working on I have a
question about it. I then went from there to become
(01:13):
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 counselor of the president who
invited you Richard Nixon.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Nixon, someone's making a recommendation to him, or he knew
you personally.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
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?
Speaker 1 (01:54):
What did you think that they saw in you? That
they thought you were a Nixon man?
Speaker 2 (02:03):
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,
(02:26):
and I think Nixon throughout really relied on Erlickman for
his legal advice.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Did you come from a Republican family? Your dad was
he an executive Firestone? He worked at Firestone.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
My father spent eighteen years at Firestone and then went out.
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.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
So did you have some kind of Republican credentials throughout your.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
My family was not particularly political for 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 Senator Goldwater, his son and I
(03:24):
and and that's when I became interested in that world.
I can still recall and visualize walking down those marble
halls with the Senator leading the way, taking us on
(03:45):
a tour here or there, and saying, this is pretty impressive.
He was also, I thought, an impressive guy. He had
one of the first Thunderbird For thunderbirds, I was at
that age just thinking about getting a Drynse, and we'd
ride around in his car that was more like the
cockpit of an airplane. He was a ham radio operator
(04:07):
and could also talk to any air base he wanted
to talk to from his thunderbird.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
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 did you discover the
job actually was.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
One of the things that was really strange is I
was never given much guidance as to what the White
House counsel did when Erlikman was there. He never really
told me anything about it. When Hallaman interviewed me before
I went in to have the President, say would you
take the job, he said, I suppose you will just
(04:47):
do whatever you lawyers do. He wasn't a lawyer, And
that was about the guidance I got.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
What were some of the things you did? What were
some of the things you worked on you start the job?
One year?
Speaker 2 (05:01):
When I started the job, it was a lot of
I realized that Erlickman 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
(05:24):
well as the fact they couldn't contact independent regulatory agencies.
They had to go through our office or 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.
(05:44):
And it was about six months before they let me
hire an assistant, and I needed the help because there's
a lot of work. In fact, today in the archives,
the White House Council's office for the Nixon presidency is
one of the largest collections of papers.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Well, thank god you weren't doing the conflict of interest
work in the White House. Now you'd be dead from
exhaustion and you need about five hundred.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Either that or there is no clearance at all and
no work at all.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
They probably just closed that office this term. You know,
we're not going to bother with that conflict. Just send
them home. But describe for me, because I think a
lot of people you get into that kind of cult
of personality with someone like Nixon, and what was it
like to work with him? What was he like? Because
it's just nothing like being in the presence of the
(06:35):
person themselves, rather than through the filter of the media.
What was he like when you.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
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. That's the
(07:01):
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. 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 just
(07:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
You become more useful to him once the issue.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
What happens is after his successful reelection. I have been
reporting to either Halleman or Erlickman 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
at that point. Nixon decides rather and have well not
(08:02):
at that point, but several months later, in February, he
decided rather than have Hallman Erlickman filtering what I have
to say, he decides to deal directly with me. And
thankfully it was recorded.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
So when you so the news breaks, the burglary breaks
in what month of seventy two?
Speaker 2 (08:24):
June seventeenth of seventy two.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
June of seventy two, he's overwhelmingly elected. After that, And
when you found out of these guys who had links
to the White House or to the Committee to be
elect had broken into the DNC office at the Watergate Hotel,
what did you make of it?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Well, I happn't have been in Manila in the Philippiness
convenience or was it the first mistake was coming home?
That's on June nineteenth, two days after the arrest, I'm
sent to interview Gordon Lyddy, who confesses to me. He says,
(09:04):
it's our men, my men.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
And when he said my men, what was his no, No,
Lyddy was.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
X FBI former FBI was x CIA, x CIA.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
When he said my men, what was there?
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Well, what he was explaining is that there was On
the morning of the nineteenth, 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
(09:42):
that it somehow involved the re election Committee, 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. It didn't take me
very long to realize that that was beloney. Today, I
(10:05):
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 Liddy 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,
(10:26):
but rather walk down seventeenth 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 that
was his supposed principal responsibility. But he was running this
(10:49):
on the side. And on the way back up he
said two things that were back up seventeen tries were
really quite startling. He said, you should know, John, while
I work 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
(11:09):
breaking in Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. What I didn't know
at that time is 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. I didn't know that at that time. Anyway,
(11:39):
I did go back and report to Erlickman what I
had learned. The other thing that Liddy said on the
way back up seventeenth Street, he said, I realized I've
made a terrible error, and if anybody wants to take
me out, just tell me what street corner.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
He yeah, he literally said.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
He said, anybody wants to take me out, just don't
do it at my house. I've got children there.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
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 operation
of the White House, the executive branch of the government,
would want to whack him on a street in Washington.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Why. I have no idea. He's a little dramatic, probably
a mistake not to no, no, just to clarify.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
And of course the day he was shot, you were
in Manila, right right, so, but no explain to people
what were they after.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
It's taken a long time to assemble what they were
really after because 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 the
(12:53):
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's
smart level in most of his undertakings.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Another reference from our childhoods if you don't Maxwell's.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Spot 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 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.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
So during the period where you're called in now and
you become pulled into this circle to help solve this problem,
when does that commence?
Speaker 2 (13:45):
On the nineteenth, I'm the person who's in charge of
finding out what's happening and keeping abreast of 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 then bringing that information in. And
what happened is the re election Committee started calling on
(14:06):
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. He did it in Florida with
Jeb macgruder, who was his deputy, and Magruder then gave
the orders. I'm convinced that Mitchell, from my initial conversations
(14:31):
with him on the nineteenth, was prepared to step forward
and say, hey, this happened on my watch. He also
sent word to the White House over the weekend, stay away.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
From it, deflect all the responsibility from the president.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Take it all that happened. That was the original plan.
But then what happened is he too got a briefing
as to what Liddy had done and learned of the
Ellsburg 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
(15:05):
strained relationship, they often in a 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 lynchpin.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Like a marriage counsel.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yeah, exactly, because that's that's how I became the lynchpin
of this conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
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 Haldeman and Erlckman and missions, they seemed like some
pretty dark crowd in terms of because I'm going to
read a quote for you from because you were on
(15:47):
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 said the following right before he died. He said
the Nicks about Nixon Republicans. He said that Nixon Republicans
had two enemies, the anti war left and black people.
(16:10):
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, do we know we were lying about drugs?
Of course we did when you were in the room
with these guys.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
And do you get a sense that you never heard
that kind of talk. It wasn't until I years later,
my last book, I cataloged all of the Nixon Watergate conversations.
I heard on those tapes things I'd never heard those
men say in front of me. They were their own
small unit that would talk about these things at a
(16:49):
level that I wasn't privy. There were some chilling stuff
that and racist stuff that I'd never seen in Erlichman before.
In those tapes. It's a remarkable record. No president's ever
going to leave that behind again.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
When well, because I'd be too hasty. Now you're hopeful,
(17:28):
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing, now,
more of my conversation with John Dean. Both houses of
the Congress were in Democratic hands at the time.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Correct, But it was a different Democratic party.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Of course.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
It was a party with Southern Democrats who are today Republicans,
so it divided. He believed 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 an impeachment bill of impeachment in the House,
(18:03):
if not defeating that, certainly not getting two thirds of
the Senate to vote against him for removal. So it's
a different Democratic party. It's true, it was not controlled
by the South either. It was more more moderate to progressive.
It did, and if you recall, it's very slow that
the impeachment process starts with Watergate. It isn't until he
(18:27):
removes the special prosecutor Archibald Cox, 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.
He certainly politically had made a terrible mistake.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
There were Republicans, obviously on the Judiciary Committee and in
the Congress who were willing to vote for it.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Slowly but surely they did. They were with the moderates
first and then finally by the end when they heard
the so called smoking gun tape, which showed Nixons 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 twenty first, in a conversation
(19:18):
that was labeled to Cancer on the Presidency conversation, he
said that was the first he'd learned. Well, that was
a pretty outrageous lie, and he got caught in it
just by really the special prosecutor fishing for a tape
and one of that, and that tape showed him telling
(19:41):
or agreeing with Holloman's plan to have this CIA block
the FBI's investigation in the Watergate, and.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
That conversation with Haliman takes place.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
When June twenty third, right after the year of breaking right,
six days after after right.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
And these are the tapes that he was was to surrender,
which he would. I don't understand that he did surrender
the tapes other than the gap, the famous gap.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
There would have been an interesting constitutional crisis if he
had said to the Supreme Court, Okay, I've got your willing,
I think it's wrong, and I'm president. I've got the troops.
You come get the tapes. This is my property, this
is my pa. You're not entitled to have this property.
And history would have been very different.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
As everybody knows, it's a famous gap. Is eighteen minutes.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Eighteen and a half minute eighteen. It's a media it's
a media invented event.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
So there was no erasure at all.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
No a strong man could press the record button and
cause the eraser, and the experts saw seven to nine
efforts to erase that material.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Well, what do you think was erased on those tapes?
Is there everybody in the satisfied you?
Speaker 2 (21:00):
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 on June twentieth,
his first conversation back. That's why it was subpoenaed. And
(21:22):
I think it was just a gaff that resulted in
that probably being erased, and it could have 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.
(21:46):
This was a very foreign kind of machine.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Did Nixon order the breaking himself?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
No, No, there's no evidence of that. There's no evidence
that 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 Lydy's
men being arrested, it was traceable to the White House.
(22:12):
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 a defective
machinery that they'd put in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
You can trace back through tapes and Holleman memos that
(22:33):
Nixon gives an order to put a plant a secretary
or a volunteer or something like that, move it from
Muskie to McGovern, not particularly a wiretap.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
So as we come rolling into seventy three, right as
he's or things changed dramatically for him, what kind of
things is he asking you to do? And what was
he like to work with her in that time?
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Jumping back to August twenty ninth of seventy two, pre election,
he had a press conference and one of the early
questions he's asked, is mister President, giving the factor your
Attorney General is now the head of the reelection committee
and somebody from the re election committee was arrested in
the DNC, why don't you appoint a special prosecutor? And
(23:19):
he has his response all prepared and he says, well,
first of all, the Congress is investigating this, the General
Accounting Office is investigating it, the FBI is investigating it,
but most importantly, my White House Counsel, John Dean, has
investigated this matter and found nobody presently employed in this
(23:40):
administration had anything to do with this bizarre incident. This
was the first I heard of my investigation. And so
after that, his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, called and said, John,
do you have a copy of your report? I said, Ron,
there is no report. He said, well, maybe there should be,
and I said, well, I don't think so anyways, think
(24:04):
so why? Because I didn't want to lie. I didn't
want to You knew that they wanted you to doctor something.
It was quite clear they won't. Yes. Yes. What happens
is when we're going back to when I first start
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. Erlichman makes it pretty
(24:27):
clear that what he can do is have this report
in his desk drawer and say this is all I knew.
It didn't take me long, you know, I figured that
out immediately, that that this would be a setup. And
I had no interest in Lyne, had no interest in
giving the false information to the president. Uh and didn't.
But he presses me on that there were actually three
(24:51):
phases of the cover up. For me, I initially thought
I was just helping out my colleagues and didn't see
anything criminally amiss. H Defense funds were not unusual at
that time. Not announcing them didn't sound horrible to me.
I didn't see any quid pro quo in anything. Nothing
(25:12):
struck me amiss at this point, as I say, I'm
not trained as a criminal lawyer either.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Defense funds.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
What do you mean defense funds? The Barrigan brothers for
the had a defense fund the Chicago Were you talking
about criminal for criminal defense yet? And that's what actually Nick,
there's a tape of Nixon suggesting that there'd be a
defense fund set up for the Cubans who had been
hired by Hunt and Lyddy to pay their lawyer's fees
(25:42):
and what have you. If he had done that openly,
he might have avoided obstructing justice. It's very curious, and
Halleman and Erlikman dropped that I never heard about that.
In fact, when I first hear about it, I don't
know what he's talk really, what he's talking about anyway,
phases the cover up for me. I initially don't think
I'm engaging in criminal conduct. When I realize I am
(26:07):
is after the election Howard Hunt calls Chuck Coulson, and
Coulson records the call on a dictaphone. He had 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 of punch of this conversation because Coulson is because
(26:30):
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 that 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,
(26:53):
this is very bad. Chuck. He said, well, what are
you going to do about it? I said, I don't know.
What I did do is take the tape up to
Halleman and Erlickman and played it for them. They said,
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
(27:17):
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 discover eighteen Usc. Three seventy one, the conspiracy statute,
(27:41):
and I realized we're in a whole lot of trouble. Now.
You might have thought that the first reaction would be
to run for the hills. I mean I had exactly
the opposite reaction. That's when I double down. That's when
I try to make the cover up work. I know
today psychologically what was going on. I was in what
(28:01):
they call the loss frame, where you have no attractive
options and you do stupid things. It's unfortunate part of
human nature happens a lot to a lot of people.
I don't did you.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
Feel a loyalty personally to any of these people. Had
you developed any kind of closeness with them as a person.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
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, knowing, yes, you know,
and I never understood, and for years you know what
had happened. Then the last phase of my involvement in
the cover up is when Haunt sends a message to
(28:44):
me that he's going to have seemi things to say
about John Erlickman and by implication, Bud Krogue, one of
his assistants regarding his break in at the Elsberg psychiatrist
office fas go. That's when I sort of say, my god,
(29:04):
this is never going to end. We're being extorted. There
will be no end in it. It's this cover up
is not going to work, and we've got to figure
out how to stop it and get the president out
in front of it. And that's March nineteenth when that
word comes in. I have by then started to have
enough dealings with the President that I think he's got
(29:27):
trust in me. And so on March the morning of
March twenty first, I go in after setting it breaking
precedent because you weren't supposed to go to the president
other than through Haldeman. When he called me that night,
I said, mister President, I really need to talk to you,
and he said, how about ten o'clock. I said, fine,
I'll be there. I called Haleman that morning and said,
(29:48):
I need to go in and lay it out to
the president. He really doesn't get it. I don't know
if Hallaman 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
(30:12):
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, Bud Krog 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 one hundred and twenty thousand
(30:32):
dollars yesterday, he wonted fifty thousand for his attorney's fees
and seventy for his living expenses and what have you,
because he had by then been convicted.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
What's the linix in the famousite, we could get the money.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
If we had to. That's exactly the line. That's your
coming to it. And and I said, miss President, I
have no idea how much this might cost and he said, well,
what do you think. What 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, never having tried
(31:09):
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. I know. And what I
didn't know is, well until I actually did this book
with all the tapes is after that conversation, he goes
over to rose Woods door, which is adjoining his off
(31:31):
the Oval office, and asked Rose in a voice you
can hear on the tapes, how much is in the
slush fund. There's six hundred thousand. He will within a
week or so be selling an ambassadorship to raise money.
He's on the job. He's going to solve this. He's
(31:52):
going to get the million bucks and say take care
of it.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
If John Deane was the ultimate Nixon insider, essay and
satirist Lewis Lapham was the ultimate outsider. Despite their shared
patrician roots, Lapham skewered the administration and its Wartergate troubles
from behind the covers of Harper's Magazine, where he was
the managing editor throughout the scandal.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
I never liked or trusted Nixon. I came out of
the the affluent, privileged.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
San Francisco society.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
San Francisco society. My father had been very strongly in
favor of Roosevelt. In nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
Hear my conversation with Lewis Lapham at Here's the Thing
dot Org coming up more from Richard Nixon's White House
Council on lessons from Watergate for Trump and the rest
of us. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's
(32:55):
the Thing now more of my conversation with John Dean.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
When you talk.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
About this period, you say that I'm going to stop
this or I'm having my doubts because the cover up
you don't think is going to work. Would you have
kept going if you thought the cover up would work?
Speaker 2 (33:12):
You know? The President at the end of my March
twenty first cancer on the Presidency where I used that
phrase to get his attention, and I had it after that,
I was I think that's the day I met Richard Nixon,
the real Nixon, because I took him through one problem
(33:33):
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. 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, and that there was no short
(33:53):
term answer. He wanted the cover up to go on.
I had nothing to do with Hunt getting he did
get paid. Mitchell took care of it, and Hunt would
remain a bought man until the Watergate prosecutor is trying
Halleman and Erlikman and Mitchell in the cover up trial
in October of nineteen seventy four, which is quite remarkable.
(34:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Now you mentioned the three phases of the cover up.
Did you cover all three of.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Those or was there another way 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 who'd you hire? I hired a college law school
(35:02):
classmate initially to talk about a man who later became
the chief judge of the Federal District Court in DC,
Tom Hogan, and we talked about it, and he suggested
Charlie Shaffer, who had worked here in the Southern District,
was a very accomplished prosecutor and had become a very
(35:24):
successful criminal defense lawyer, and he was terrific. 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.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
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 of the whole thing.
Is the case, as you said, the camera found her.
You're a beautiful wife, Maureen Dean, and she was there.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
She had a huge influence on me. I want you
to explain it about you every day, you know, I
did not want to get married, but I did not
want to lose her. I had been married and divorced
and had a child from that first marriage, and I
had fallen in love with her and we'd had a
(36:18):
wonderful relationship. She wanted to get married, and I just
knew this was a bad time. I didn't know how
bad it was. I got married, how much? When did you?
I get married in October of nineteen seventy two, very
bad time. We have now been married forty five years,
(36:41):
so you know the you know, the first time that
happened to me was not long ago when I said
that to somebody. I happened to be in Nashville giving
a talk because of Jim Neil, who was one of
the Water Special prosecutors. They became like fime friends, many
(37:02):
of these guys and one woman and 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. It's a very fine academy, and
they asked me to come out and do their assembly,
and seven hundred kids filed in and I somehow, in passing,
(37:23):
mentioned that I had been married to Maureen forty five
years and the kids broke out in applause, and I thought,
isn't that nice? I mean, I was very please. I
can't imagine what that's like to be married for forty
five years? Like, what really now?
Speaker 1 (37:43):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Confide protected her? I you know, I tried to warn her,
you know, until you give me your wife what's going on.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
I tried to.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
Explain to her there were going to be problems, but
I wasn't terribly.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
I just got married.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Depth about it, I must. Somebody recently asked me how
did I get through it all? And my answer was vodka.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
So you did not confide a great deal in.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Her, No, I didn't you. 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. 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
(38:51):
was I didn't want to disappoint her. I wanted to
live up to the standard. She thought.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
March sixteenth is when you said the meeting was with
him cancer on the president of March twenty first, twenty first,
and so how soon after that do you get canned?
Speaker 2 (39:04):
End of April.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
There's very tight.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
It's tight, but the tapes are fascinating. The tapes. My
editor happens to be here tonight and he helped me tremendously.
That there were four I ended up with four million
words in twenty thick notebooks of transcripts that we had
to bring down to narrative and dialogue. And when I
(39:28):
got to those tapes and in that period at the end,
after I'd given him the cancer and 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 going to do? And generally the only
answer is to make me the scapegoat. He's afraid of me.
(39:49):
When he lets Halleman and Erlikman go, he just, in
a one sentence, says, and so is White House Counsul
John Dene 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 seventeenth that there had been the break in
(40:10):
at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and Erlikman had been behind it.
Erlkman 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, and they
had their own agenda, and they were protecting themselves. I
(40:32):
actually tried to get everybody to flip inside. I thought
that was I thought that would be so sobering for
Nixon and everybody else could just stand up and take
responsibility that his presidence. I tried.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Did you get close to anyone?
Speaker 2 (40:50):
I think some people did. You know? Based on the tapes,
there is some indication that people did give it some thought.
They realized that it was the end of their careers.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
So in nineteen seventy 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,
do you notice, 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
(41:25):
under Eisenhower, not somebody who was adored by the staff
of the White House in the Eisenhower miss he was.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
He was Eisenhower's heavy I mean, he had the job
of going out and being the hatchet man and being
the attack dog.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
And then he obviously loses a couple of elections, most
notably the presidential election in nineteen sixty. I mean, the
Nixon has always been somebody who's a bitter, bitter, you
know type, who is this what you begin to see?
I mean, Nixon wins election in sixty eighty, wins re
election in seventy two by a landslide, and you're in
(42:00):
that room with him in the spring of seventy three,
and is the old Nixon?
Speaker 2 (42:04):
What I realize 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, I didn't wear hearing
aids before that experience. I made the mistake of having
(42:28):
earphones on which destroyed my hearing. And I told Moe
at one point, God forbid the last voice I hear
as Richard Nixon in this project. But 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 and
(42:50):
returned it to the Nixons. But there are some very
personal conversations. For example, in 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
(43:11):
have a lovely conversation. It really struck me that their
marriage was much different than I had perceived it. And she,
you know, is pleased with him, proud of him. It's
a lovely husband. Wife conversation. Same thing happened to occasionally
when I found conversations with the President and his daughters,
(43:34):
Tricia and Julie. They're some really nice conversations. I'm sure
that family was stunned when these tapes came out, and
that's probably one of the reasons he spent so much
of his life after even leaving to try to prevent
the tapes from ever all surfacing. One of the reasons
Nixon covers up is he's worried about John Mitchell. Becomes
(43:57):
very clear from the tapes. It's not that he's worried
about his own guilt. He's not worried about the Elsberg
break in. He's worried about the impact it's 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.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
So you finally get canned by Nixon himself.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
When well, I'm out of town on April thirtieth when
he gives a.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Speech, so he didn't fire your face to face.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
No. On April sixteenth, he called me in and said,
I think 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. I said, this is obviously John Erlickman's handiwork.
So I took them back. I took the letters and
(44:49):
I said, mister President, I'll write my own letter and
send it to you, and which I did.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
So this event in American history obviously is chronicled the
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 does
well in the film, or will come out within a
couple of years, eighteen months, what did you think of
the film when you first saw it.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
I first saw a directors showing of it. Alan Pakula
had a showing and invited me, and after, you know,
there were fifty people in a little theater. After the movie,
I went up to him and said thank you. He said,
why are you thank you me? I said, I'm thanking
you for not mentioning my name anywhere in the movie,
(45:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
Why do you think that is?
Speaker 2 (45:52):
I don't know. Okay, but he didn't change it. He
didn't go back and add my name.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
But you appreciated the film. You thought it was accurate.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
I think it's a I think it's a slice of
the story. From the media point of view. You don't
drive by the Jefferson or Lincoln memorial every time you
cross Washington, though, as you know, what.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
About Nixon, about Oliver Stones from what you were a consultant.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
I was a consultant on Nixon, and.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
That's a far more turgid movie than all the presidents.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
You know, it's much more than Watergate. And 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 expose a call go ring
that my wife worked at. And I had already sued
(46:46):
the publishers of that story and was in litigation which
would go on for nine years.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
You're saying your wife did not work at the call girls.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
She did not work at the GARM.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Be clear, she did not work at the I won't
be walking to anyone with any misconceptions.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
People might dream that. But uh, Anyway, the I told Oliver,
I said that this is a fraud and and you'll
end up being named in the lawsuit. Anyway, 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 VERI similitude as possible.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
What do you think he captured that was accurate about Nixon?
Same a scene, because I mean I.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Went to 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 David Hyers. Uh. And I said, Oliver,
(47:49):
that scene never happened. He said, I've paid for it.
It's going to happen.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
That many people applaud if you've ever seen Oliver Stone Nixon. I,
oh my god.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
I thought I thought that I can actually suspend disbelief
with Anthony Hopkins. I think I know you admire him greatly,
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 seeing them, but one
of the docents spotted them at the end of the
(48:26):
tour and she said to Hopkins, who's reporting this to me?
At lunch right after they had come back, he said,
the dosn't stopped me and said, I understand you're playing
mister Nixon. And he said, yes, I am, and he
said 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 a job
(48:48):
on him. 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. 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
(49:09):
and that's what I think he tried to do. 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.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
With the time we have left, I want to ask you,
obviously about the comparisons and contrast to how we.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
Live our lives now.
Speaker 1 (49:42):
And Uh, it's unlikely that every public can control Judiciary
committee in this particular Congress is going to return an
article to impeach.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
I think that's very true.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Yeah, but they have they as you'll have a president,
a sitting president who's indicted for a crime.
Speaker 2 (49:57):
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 impeached.
They took the question to the Office of Legal Counsel,
(50:19):
which issues those sort of opinions by the Department of Justice,
and said no, mister Vice President you're wrong. You can
be indicted. 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 when Robert Ray, Independent last one and one of
(50:43):
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 departments. No, no corpse
ever ruled on it, and many scholars disagree with it
that they think that no president's above the law. And indeed,
the twenty fifth Amendment makes it possible to have the
(51:05):
president's 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. The
issue has not been resolved. There are some who think
that Special Counsel Muller might test it.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
What do you think Mullett would do?
Speaker 2 (51:29):
You're a lawyer, have a fascinating case. It's a tough issue.
There are arguments on both sides, but I think that
the bottom line argument is that no person in this
country is above the law.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
I mean the country right now. It seems like it's
so much trouble. Yeah, the country is in so much trouble.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
And you I have never had a knot in my
stomach before before an election. I did before this election. Right,
that not has really never gone away.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
Just the damage that proved it and Devace alone will
do and their departments is going to take a decade
or more to undo.
Speaker 2 (52:15):
You know, just that things are really bad and too
little attention is being paid to what's happening out in
those departments and agencies. And most striking to me Alec
is the fact he has no competence for the job.
He has no training, he did no he has no
knowledge of the office. He's winging it from day to day.
(52:39):
He's got a constituency that 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
(52:59):
going to learn how the machinery works, and then I
think it's ripe for even greater abuse.
Speaker 1 (53:06):
Well, that's sort of my ultimate question is is that
is it? Do you think, because I've said this to
people before, that that to remove the President of the
United States from office is a tremendously different, painful and
difficult thing. It's also painful for the country.
Speaker 2 (53:19):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (53:19):
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 him out of office? Or do
you think impeachment is a healthy path for the country.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
I think it's I think it's an appropriate path because
it's it's a constitutional path. The system is designed to
deal with a president who is not 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, is the House. While we might have
(53:52):
a highly gerrymandered House House today, write that I'm not
I'm not sure that. I'm not sure. I think the
next election, the off year election, is going to be
very telling in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1 (54:09):
So I wonder if if they get swamped in the
midterm and you come out the other side of that.
Unto January of twenty nineteen, and if Pence were to
succeed a Trump that designs Pence would want to come
in right after January of twenty nineteen, so he was
eligible for ten years in office because if he steps
(54:29):
if they impeached Trump, now Pence is only eligible for
that piece of Trump's term and only one full term
of his own.
Speaker 2 (54:36):
Well, you're assuming he could get re elected. I think
this is going to splash over on Pence.
Speaker 1 (54:42):
I don't refute that. I'm just saying that, but that
right now in their hope is that they're going to
wait and see what the damage is in the midterm,
if Trump can be rehabilitated. I thought Trump would be
gone by the summer. I thought they'd say to themselves,
we got to get the smell of the cordite out
of the room here and bring Pence in here and
let everything clear, if not for twenty eighteen, then for
twenty twenty and prop up Pence as the nominee. But
(55:04):
they've hung in with him.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
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 twenty four to 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
really I'm an independent California. We don't have to declare,
(55:28):
and I have not declared, and I have voted both
Republican and Democrat.
Speaker 1 (55:35):
What do you think is going to What do you
think is the future of the Republican Party?
Speaker 2 (55:38):
Bad?
Speaker 1 (55:38):
Bad, bad bad. We were going to do a sketch
on SNL the other day where Trump was going Christmas
shopping with Roy Moore the mall.
Speaker 2 (55:55):
We didn't, you know, they killed that idea. The great
mistake I have made since Watergate was when Louren sent
out a feeler if I would host Saturday Night and
not too late and Saturday Night or Simon and Schuster
said no, we don't want you doing that.
Speaker 1 (56:16):
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 sad to me
about this Republican Party. Either're going down the drain with.
Speaker 2 (56:30):
This, the difference between opposition and polarization, and we don't
seem to have distinguished that. When when majority doesn't rule,
we're in trouble in a democracy, and right now a
minority is controlling the country.
Speaker 1 (56:50):
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 exposed
what you did, told the truth about what you did.
(57:12):
And I want to say thank you very much for
coming and sitting with us tonight.
Speaker 2 (57:15):
Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (57:24):
John Dean, whose life was forever changed by the bungled
break into the Watergate Hotel in nineteen seventy two. By
I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you
by iHeart Radio.
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing.
Few people were deeper into the Watergate cover up than
President Nixon's White House Council John Dene Then he flipped.
He was a star witness for the Congressional investigation. And
while some Wartergate conspirators had religious conversions in prison, Dean
(00:25):
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 NYU's Skirball Center.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Tell us the.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Jobs you had in government prior to you becoming counsel
to the president.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
I was at the House Judiciary Committee, was my first
job in government, and from there I went to a
commission that was revising the federal Criminal Code. I didn't
study enough while they were working on I have a
question about it. I then went from there to become
(01:13):
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 counselor of the president who
invited you Richard Nixon.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Nixon, someone's making a recommendation to him, or he knew
you personally.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
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?
Speaker 1 (01:54):
What did you think that they saw in you? That
they thought you were a Nixon man?
Speaker 2 (02:03):
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,
(02:26):
and I think Nixon throughout really relied on Erlickman for
his legal advice.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Did you come from a Republican family? Your dad was
he an executive Firestone? He worked at Firestone.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
My father spent eighteen years at Firestone and then went out.
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.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
So did you have some kind of Republican credentials throughout your.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
My family was not particularly political for 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 Senator Goldwater, his son and I
(03:24):
and and that's when I became interested in that world.
I can still recall and visualize walking down those marble
halls with the Senator leading the way, taking us on
(03:45):
a tour here or there, and saying, this is pretty impressive.
He was also, I thought, an impressive guy. He had
one of the first Thunderbird For thunderbirds, I was at
that age just thinking about getting a Drynse, and we'd
ride around in his car that was more like the
cockpit of an airplane. He was a ham radio operator
(04:07):
and could also talk to any air base he wanted
to talk to from his thunderbird.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
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 did you discover the
job actually was.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
One of the things that was really strange is I
was never given much guidance as to what the White
House counsel did when Erlikman was there. He never really
told me anything about it. When Hallaman interviewed me before
I went in to have the President, say would you
take the job, he said, I suppose you will just
(04:47):
do whatever you lawyers do. He wasn't a lawyer, And
that was about the guidance I got.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
What were some of the things you did? What were
some of the things you worked on you start the job?
One year?
Speaker 2 (05:01):
When I started the job, it was a lot of
I realized that Erlickman 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
(05:24):
well as the fact they couldn't contact independent regulatory agencies.
They had to go through our office or 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.
(05:44):
And it was about six months before they let me
hire an assistant, and I needed the help because there's
a lot of work. In fact, today in the archives,
the White House Council's office for the Nixon presidency is
one of the largest collections of papers.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Well, thank god you weren't doing the conflict of interest
work in the White House. Now you'd be dead from
exhaustion and you need about five hundred.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Either that or there is no clearance at all and
no work at all.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
They probably just closed that office this term. You know,
we're not going to bother with that conflict. Just send
them home. But describe for me, because I think a
lot of people you get into that kind of cult
of personality with someone like Nixon, and what was it
like to work with him? What was he like? Because
it's just nothing like being in the presence of the
(06:35):
person themselves, rather than through the filter of the media.
What was he like when you.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
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. That's the
(07:01):
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. 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 just
(07:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
You become more useful to him once the issue.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
What happens is after his successful reelection. I have been
reporting to either Halleman or Erlickman 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
at that point. Nixon decides rather and have well not
(08:02):
at that point, but several months later, in February, he
decided rather than have Hallman Erlickman filtering what I have
to say, he decides to deal directly with me. And
thankfully it was recorded.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
So when you so the news breaks, the burglary breaks
in what month of seventy two?
Speaker 2 (08:24):
June seventeenth of seventy two.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
June of seventy two, he's overwhelmingly elected. After that, And
when you found out of these guys who had links
to the White House or to the Committee to be
elect had broken into the DNC office at the Watergate Hotel,
what did you make of it?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Well, I happn't have been in Manila in the Philippiness
convenience or was it the first mistake was coming home?
That's on June nineteenth, two days after the arrest, I'm
sent to interview Gordon Lyddy, who confesses to me. He says,
(09:04):
it's our men, my men.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
And when he said my men, what was his no, No,
Lyddy was.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
X FBI former FBI was x CIA, x CIA.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
When he said my men, what was there?
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Well, what he was explaining is that there was On
the morning of the nineteenth, 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
(09:42):
that it somehow involved the re election Committee, 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. It didn't take me
very long to realize that that was beloney. Today, I
(10:05):
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 Liddy 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,
(10:26):
but rather walk down seventeenth 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 that
was his supposed principal responsibility. But he was running this
(10:49):
on the side. And on the way back up he
said two things that were back up seventeen tries were
really quite startling. He said, you should know, John, while
I work 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
(11:09):
breaking in Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. What I didn't know
at that time is 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. I didn't know that at that time. Anyway,
(11:39):
I did go back and report to Erlickman what I
had learned. The other thing that Liddy said on the
way back up seventeenth Street, he said, I realized I've
made a terrible error, and if anybody wants to take
me out, just tell me what street corner.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
He yeah, he literally said.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
He said, anybody wants to take me out, just don't
do it at my house. I've got children there.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
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 operation
of the White House, the executive branch of the government,
would want to whack him on a street in Washington.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Why. I have no idea. He's a little dramatic, probably
a mistake not to no, no, just to clarify.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
And of course the day he was shot, you were
in Manila, right right, so, but no explain to people
what were they after.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
It's taken a long time to assemble what they were
really after because 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 the
(12:53):
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's
smart level in most of his undertakings.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Another reference from our childhoods if you don't Maxwell's.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Spot 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 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.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
So during the period where you're called in now and
you become pulled into this circle to help solve this problem,
when does that commence?
Speaker 2 (13:45):
On the nineteenth, I'm the person who's in charge of
finding out what's happening and keeping abreast of 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 then bringing that information in. And
what happened is the re election Committee started calling on
(14:06):
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. He did it in Florida with
Jeb macgruder, who was his deputy, and Magruder then gave
the orders. I'm convinced that Mitchell, from my initial conversations
(14:31):
with him on the nineteenth, was prepared to step forward
and say, hey, this happened on my watch. He also
sent word to the White House over the weekend, stay away.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
From it, deflect all the responsibility from the president.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Take it all that happened. That was the original plan.
But then what happened is he too got a briefing
as to what Liddy had done and learned of the
Ellsburg 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
(15:05):
strained relationship, they often in a 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 lynchpin.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Like a marriage counsel.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yeah, exactly, because that's that's how I became the lynchpin
of this conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
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 Haldeman and Erlckman and missions, they seemed like some
pretty dark crowd in terms of because I'm going to
read a quote for you from because you were on
(15:47):
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 said the following right before he died. He said
the Nicks about Nixon Republicans. He said that Nixon Republicans
had two enemies, the anti war left and black people.
(16:10):
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, do we know we were lying about drugs?
Of course we did when you were in the room
with these guys.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
And do you get a sense that you never heard
that kind of talk. It wasn't until I years later,
my last book, I cataloged all of the Nixon Watergate conversations.
I heard on those tapes things I'd never heard those
men say in front of me. They were their own
small unit that would talk about these things at a
(16:49):
level that I wasn't privy. There were some chilling stuff
that and racist stuff that I'd never seen in Erlichman before.
In those tapes. It's a remarkable record. No president's ever
going to leave that behind again.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
When well, because I'd be too hasty. Now you're hopeful,
(17:28):
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing, now,
more of my conversation with John Dean. Both houses of
the Congress were in Democratic hands at the time.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Correct, But it was a different Democratic party.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Of course.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
It was a party with Southern Democrats who are today Republicans,
so it divided. He believed 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 an impeachment bill of impeachment in the House,
(18:03):
if not defeating that, certainly not getting two thirds of
the Senate to vote against him for removal. So it's
a different Democratic party. It's true, it was not controlled
by the South either. It was more more moderate to progressive.
It did, and if you recall, it's very slow that
the impeachment process starts with Watergate. It isn't until he
(18:27):
removes the special prosecutor Archibald Cox, 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.
He certainly politically had made a terrible mistake.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
There were Republicans, obviously on the Judiciary Committee and in
the Congress who were willing to vote for it.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Slowly but surely they did. They were with the moderates
first and then finally by the end when they heard
the so called smoking gun tape, which showed Nixons 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 twenty first, in a conversation
(19:18):
that was labeled to Cancer on the Presidency conversation, he
said that was the first he'd learned. Well, that was
a pretty outrageous lie, and he got caught in it
just by really the special prosecutor fishing for a tape
and one of that, and that tape showed him telling
(19:41):
or agreeing with Holloman's plan to have this CIA block
the FBI's investigation in the Watergate, and.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
That conversation with Haliman takes place.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
When June twenty third, right after the year of breaking right,
six days after after right.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
And these are the tapes that he was was to surrender,
which he would. I don't understand that he did surrender
the tapes other than the gap, the famous gap.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
There would have been an interesting constitutional crisis if he
had said to the Supreme Court, Okay, I've got your willing,
I think it's wrong, and I'm president. I've got the troops.
You come get the tapes. This is my property, this
is my pa. You're not entitled to have this property.
And history would have been very different.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
As everybody knows, it's a famous gap. Is eighteen minutes.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Eighteen and a half minute eighteen. It's a media it's
a media invented event.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
So there was no erasure at all.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
No a strong man could press the record button and
cause the eraser, and the experts saw seven to nine
efforts to erase that material.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Well, what do you think was erased on those tapes?
Is there everybody in the satisfied you?
Speaker 2 (21:00):
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 on June twentieth,
his first conversation back. That's why it was subpoenaed. And
(21:22):
I think it was just a gaff that resulted in
that probably being erased, and it could have 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.
(21:46):
This was a very foreign kind of machine.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Did Nixon order the breaking himself?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
No, No, there's no evidence of that. There's no evidence
that 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 Lydy's
men being arrested, it was traceable to the White House.
(22:12):
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 a defective
machinery that they'd put in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
You can trace back through tapes and Holleman memos that
(22:33):
Nixon gives an order to put a plant a secretary
or a volunteer or something like that, move it from
Muskie to McGovern, not particularly a wiretap.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
So as we come rolling into seventy three, right as
he's or things changed dramatically for him, what kind of
things is he asking you to do? And what was
he like to work with her in that time?
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Jumping back to August twenty ninth of seventy two, pre election,
he had a press conference and one of the early
questions he's asked, is mister President, giving the factor your
Attorney General is now the head of the reelection committee
and somebody from the re election committee was arrested in
the DNC, why don't you appoint a special prosecutor? And
(23:19):
he has his response all prepared and he says, well,
first of all, the Congress is investigating this, the General
Accounting Office is investigating it, the FBI is investigating it,
but most importantly, my White House Counsel, John Dean, has
investigated this matter and found nobody presently employed in this
(23:40):
administration had anything to do with this bizarre incident. This
was the first I heard of my investigation. And so
after that, his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, called and said, John,
do you have a copy of your report? I said, Ron,
there is no report. He said, well, maybe there should be,
and I said, well, I don't think so anyways, think
(24:04):
so why? Because I didn't want to lie. I didn't
want to You knew that they wanted you to doctor something.
It was quite clear they won't. Yes. Yes. What happens
is when we're going back to when I first start
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. Erlichman makes it pretty
(24:27):
clear that what he can do is have this report
in his desk drawer and say this is all I knew.
It didn't take me long, you know, I figured that
out immediately, that that this would be a setup. And
I had no interest in Lyne, had no interest in
giving the false information to the president. Uh and didn't.
But he presses me on that there were actually three
(24:51):
phases of the cover up. For me, I initially thought
I was just helping out my colleagues and didn't see
anything criminally amiss. H Defense funds were not unusual at
that time. Not announcing them didn't sound horrible to me.
I didn't see any quid pro quo in anything. Nothing
(25:12):
struck me amiss at this point, as I say, I'm
not trained as a criminal lawyer either.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Defense funds.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
What do you mean defense funds? The Barrigan brothers for
the had a defense fund the Chicago Were you talking
about criminal for criminal defense yet? And that's what actually Nick,
there's a tape of Nixon suggesting that there'd be a
defense fund set up for the Cubans who had been
hired by Hunt and Lyddy to pay their lawyer's fees
(25:42):
and what have you. If he had done that openly,
he might have avoided obstructing justice. It's very curious, and
Halleman and Erlikman dropped that I never heard about that.
In fact, when I first hear about it, I don't
know what he's talk really, what he's talking about anyway,
phases the cover up for me. I initially don't think
I'm engaging in criminal conduct. When I realize I am
(26:07):
is after the election Howard Hunt calls Chuck Coulson, and
Coulson records the call on a dictaphone. He had 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 of punch of this conversation because Coulson is because
(26:30):
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 that 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,
(26:53):
this is very bad. Chuck. He said, well, what are
you going to do about it? I said, I don't know.
What I did do is take the tape up to
Halleman and Erlickman and played it for them. They said,
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
(27:17):
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 discover eighteen Usc. Three seventy one, the conspiracy statute,
(27:41):
and I realized we're in a whole lot of trouble. Now.
You might have thought that the first reaction would be
to run for the hills. I mean I had exactly
the opposite reaction. That's when I double down. That's when
I try to make the cover up work. I know
today psychologically what was going on. I was in what
(28:01):
they call the loss frame, where you have no attractive
options and you do stupid things. It's unfortunate part of
human nature happens a lot to a lot of people.
I don't did you.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
Feel a loyalty personally to any of these people. Had
you developed any kind of closeness with them as a person.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
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, knowing, yes, you know,
and I never understood, and for years you know what
had happened. Then the last phase of my involvement in
the cover up is when Haunt sends a message to
(28:44):
me that he's going to have seemi things to say
about John Erlickman and by implication, Bud Krogue, one of
his assistants regarding his break in at the Elsberg psychiatrist
office fas go. That's when I sort of say, my god,
(29:04):
this is never going to end. We're being extorted. There
will be no end in it. It's this cover up
is not going to work, and we've got to figure
out how to stop it and get the president out
in front of it. And that's March nineteenth when that
word comes in. I have by then started to have
enough dealings with the President that I think he's got
(29:27):
trust in me. And so on March the morning of
March twenty first, I go in after setting it breaking
precedent because you weren't supposed to go to the president
other than through Haldeman. When he called me that night,
I said, mister President, I really need to talk to you,
and he said, how about ten o'clock. I said, fine,
I'll be there. I called Haleman that morning and said,
(29:48):
I need to go in and lay it out to
the president. He really doesn't get it. I don't know
if Hallaman 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
(30:12):
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, Bud Krog 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 one hundred and twenty thousand
(30:32):
dollars yesterday, he wonted fifty thousand for his attorney's fees
and seventy for his living expenses and what have you,
because he had by then been convicted.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
What's the linix in the famousite, we could get the money.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
If we had to. That's exactly the line. That's your
coming to it. And and I said, miss President, I
have no idea how much this might cost and he said, well,
what do you think. What 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, never having tried
(31:09):
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. I know. And what I
didn't know is, well until I actually did this book
with all the tapes is after that conversation, he goes
over to rose Woods door, which is adjoining his off
(31:31):
the Oval office, and asked Rose in a voice you
can hear on the tapes, how much is in the
slush fund. There's six hundred thousand. He will within a
week or so be selling an ambassadorship to raise money.
He's on the job. He's going to solve this. He's
(31:52):
going to get the million bucks and say take care
of it.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
If John Deane was the ultimate Nixon insider, essay and
satirist Lewis Lapham was the ultimate outsider. Despite their shared
patrician roots, Lapham skewered the administration and its Wartergate troubles
from behind the covers of Harper's Magazine, where he was
the managing editor throughout the scandal.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
I never liked or trusted Nixon. I came out of
the the affluent, privileged.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
San Francisco society.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
San Francisco society. My father had been very strongly in
favor of Roosevelt. In nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
Hear my conversation with Lewis Lapham at Here's the Thing
dot Org coming up more from Richard Nixon's White House
Council on lessons from Watergate for Trump and the rest
of us. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's
(32:55):
the Thing now more of my conversation with John Dean.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
When you talk.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
About this period, you say that I'm going to stop
this or I'm having my doubts because the cover up
you don't think is going to work. Would you have
kept going if you thought the cover up would work?
Speaker 2 (33:12):
You know? The President at the end of my March
twenty first cancer on the Presidency where I used that
phrase to get his attention, and I had it after that,
I was I think that's the day I met Richard Nixon,
the real Nixon, because I took him through one problem
(33:33):
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. 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, and that there was no short
(33:53):
term answer. He wanted the cover up to go on.
I had nothing to do with Hunt getting he did
get paid. Mitchell took care of it, and Hunt would
remain a bought man until the Watergate prosecutor is trying
Halleman and Erlikman and Mitchell in the cover up trial
in October of nineteen seventy four, which is quite remarkable.
(34:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Now you mentioned the three phases of the cover up.
Did you cover all three of.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Those or was there another way 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 who'd you hire? I hired a college law school
(35:02):
classmate initially to talk about a man who later became
the chief judge of the Federal District Court in DC,
Tom Hogan, and we talked about it, and he suggested
Charlie Shaffer, who had worked here in the Southern District,
was a very accomplished prosecutor and had become a very
(35:24):
successful criminal defense lawyer, and he was terrific. 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.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
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 of the whole thing.
Is the case, as you said, the camera found her.
You're a beautiful wife, Maureen Dean, and she was there.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
She had a huge influence on me. I want you
to explain it about you every day, you know, I
did not want to get married, but I did not
want to lose her. I had been married and divorced
and had a child from that first marriage, and I
had fallen in love with her and we'd had a
(36:18):
wonderful relationship. She wanted to get married, and I just
knew this was a bad time. I didn't know how
bad it was. I got married, how much? When did you?
I get married in October of nineteen seventy two, very
bad time. We have now been married forty five years,
(36:41):
so you know the you know, the first time that
happened to me was not long ago when I said
that to somebody. I happened to be in Nashville giving
a talk because of Jim Neil, who was one of
the Water Special prosecutors. They became like fime friends, many
(37:02):
of these guys and one woman and 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. It's a very fine academy, and
they asked me to come out and do their assembly,
and seven hundred kids filed in and I somehow, in passing,
(37:23):
mentioned that I had been married to Maureen forty five
years and the kids broke out in applause, and I thought,
isn't that nice? I mean, I was very please. I
can't imagine what that's like to be married for forty
five years? Like, what really now?
Speaker 1 (37:43):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Confide protected her? I you know, I tried to warn her,
you know, until you give me your wife what's going on.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
I tried to.
Speaker 2 (38:06):
Explain to her there were going to be problems, but
I wasn't terribly.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
I just got married.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Depth about it, I must. Somebody recently asked me how
did I get through it all? And my answer was vodka.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
So you did not confide a great deal in.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Her, No, I didn't you. 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. 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
(38:51):
was I didn't want to disappoint her. I wanted to
live up to the standard. She thought.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
March sixteenth is when you said the meeting was with
him cancer on the president of March twenty first, twenty first,
and so how soon after that do you get canned?
Speaker 2 (39:04):
End of April.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
There's very tight.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
It's tight, but the tapes are fascinating. The tapes. My
editor happens to be here tonight and he helped me tremendously.
That there were four I ended up with four million
words in twenty thick notebooks of transcripts that we had
to bring down to narrative and dialogue. And when I
(39:28):
got to those tapes and in that period at the end,
after I'd given him the cancer and 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 going to do? And generally the only
answer is to make me the scapegoat. He's afraid of me.
(39:49):
When he lets Halleman and Erlikman go, he just, in
a one sentence, says, and so is White House Counsul
John Dene 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 seventeenth that there had been the break in
(40:10):
at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and Erlikman had been behind it.
Erlkman 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, and they
had their own agenda, and they were protecting themselves. I
(40:32):
actually tried to get everybody to flip inside. I thought
that was I thought that would be so sobering for
Nixon and everybody else could just stand up and take
responsibility that his presidence. I tried.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Did you get close to anyone?
Speaker 2 (40:50):
I think some people did. You know? Based on the tapes,
there is some indication that people did give it some thought.
They realized that it was the end of their careers.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
So in nineteen seventy 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,
do you notice, 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
(41:25):
under Eisenhower, not somebody who was adored by the staff
of the White House in the Eisenhower miss he was.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
He was Eisenhower's heavy I mean, he had the job
of going out and being the hatchet man and being
the attack dog.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
And then he obviously loses a couple of elections, most
notably the presidential election in nineteen sixty. I mean, the
Nixon has always been somebody who's a bitter, bitter, you
know type, who is this what you begin to see?
I mean, Nixon wins election in sixty eighty, wins re
election in seventy two by a landslide, and you're in
(42:00):
that room with him in the spring of seventy three,
and is the old Nixon?
Speaker 2 (42:04):
What I realize 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, I didn't wear hearing
aids before that experience. I made the mistake of having
(42:28):
earphones on which destroyed my hearing. And I told Moe
at one point, God forbid the last voice I hear
as Richard Nixon in this project. But 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 and
(42:50):
returned it to the Nixons. But there are some very
personal conversations. For example, in 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
(43:11):
have a lovely conversation. It really struck me that their
marriage was much different than I had perceived it. And she,
you know, is pleased with him, proud of him. It's
a lovely husband. Wife conversation. Same thing happened to occasionally
when I found conversations with the President and his daughters,
(43:34):
Tricia and Julie. They're some really nice conversations. I'm sure
that family was stunned when these tapes came out, and
that's probably one of the reasons he spent so much
of his life after even leaving to try to prevent
the tapes from ever all surfacing. One of the reasons
Nixon covers up is he's worried about John Mitchell. Becomes
(43:57):
very clear from the tapes. It's not that he's worried
about his own guilt. He's not worried about the Elsberg
break in. He's worried about the impact it's 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.
Speaker 1 (44:17):
So you finally get canned by Nixon himself.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
When well, I'm out of town on April thirtieth when
he gives a.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Speech, so he didn't fire your face to face.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
No. On April sixteenth, he called me in and said,
I think 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. I said, this is obviously John Erlickman's handiwork.
So I took them back. I took the letters and
(44:49):
I said, mister President, I'll write my own letter and
send it to you, and which I did.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
So this event in American history obviously is chronicled the
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 does
well in the film, or will come out within a
couple of years, eighteen months, what did you think of
the film when you first saw it.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
I first saw a directors showing of it. Alan Pakula
had a showing and invited me, and after, you know,
there were fifty people in a little theater. After the movie,
I went up to him and said thank you. He said,
why are you thank you me? I said, I'm thanking
you for not mentioning my name anywhere in the movie,
(45:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
Why do you think that is?
Speaker 2 (45:52):
I don't know. Okay, but he didn't change it. He
didn't go back and add my name.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
But you appreciated the film. You thought it was accurate.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
I think it's a I think it's a slice of
the story. From the media point of view. You don't
drive by the Jefferson or Lincoln memorial every time you
cross Washington, though, as you know, what.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
About Nixon, about Oliver Stones from what you were a consultant.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
I was a consultant on Nixon, and.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
That's a far more turgid movie than all the presidents.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
You know, it's much more than Watergate. And 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 expose a call go ring
that my wife worked at. And I had already sued
(46:46):
the publishers of that story and was in litigation which
would go on for nine years.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
You're saying your wife did not work at the call girls.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
She did not work at the GARM.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Be clear, she did not work at the I won't
be walking to anyone with any misconceptions.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
People might dream that. But uh, Anyway, the I told Oliver,
I said that this is a fraud and and you'll
end up being named in the lawsuit. Anyway, 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 VERI similitude as possible.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
What do you think he captured that was accurate about Nixon?
Same a scene, because I mean I.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Went to 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 David Hyers. Uh. And I said, Oliver,
(47:49):
that scene never happened. He said, I've paid for it.
It's going to happen.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
That many people applaud if you've ever seen Oliver Stone Nixon. I,
oh my god.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
I thought I thought that I can actually suspend disbelief
with Anthony Hopkins. I think I know you admire him greatly,
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 seeing them, but one
of the docents spotted them at the end of the
(48:26):
tour and she said to Hopkins, who's reporting this to me?
At lunch right after they had come back, he said,
the dosn't stopped me and said, I understand you're playing
mister Nixon. And he said, yes, I am, and he
said 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 a job
(48:48):
on him. 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. 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
(49:09):
and that's what I think he tried to do. 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.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
With the time we have left, I want to ask you,
obviously about the comparisons and contrast to how we.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
Live our lives now.
Speaker 1 (49:42):
And Uh, it's unlikely that every public can control Judiciary
committee in this particular Congress is going to return an
article to impeach.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
I think that's very true.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Yeah, but they have they as you'll have a president,
a sitting president who's indicted for a crime.
Speaker 2 (49:57):
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 impeached.
They took the question to the Office of Legal Counsel,
(50:19):
which issues those sort of opinions by the Department of Justice,
and said no, mister Vice President you're wrong. You can
be indicted. 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 when Robert Ray, Independent last one and one of
(50:43):
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 departments. No, no corpse
ever ruled on it, and many scholars disagree with it
that they think that no president's above the law. And indeed,
the twenty fifth Amendment makes it possible to have the
(51:05):
president's 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. The
issue has not been resolved. There are some who think
that Special Counsel Muller might test it.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
What do you think Mullett would do?
Speaker 2 (51:29):
You're a lawyer, have a fascinating case. It's a tough issue.
There are arguments on both sides, but I think that
the bottom line argument is that no person in this
country is above the law.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
I mean the country right now. It seems like it's
so much trouble. Yeah, the country is in so much trouble.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
And you I have never had a knot in my
stomach before before an election. I did before this election. Right,
that not has really never gone away.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
Just the damage that proved it and Devace alone will
do and their departments is going to take a decade
or more to undo.
Speaker 2 (52:15):
You know, just that things are really bad and too
little attention is being paid to what's happening out in
those departments and agencies. And most striking to me Alec
is the fact he has no competence for the job.
He has no training, he did no he has no
knowledge of the office. He's winging it from day to day.
(52:39):
He's got a constituency that 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
(52:59):
going to learn how the machinery works, and then I
think it's ripe for even greater abuse.
Speaker 1 (53:06):
Well, that's sort of my ultimate question is is that
is it? Do you think, because I've said this to
people before, that that to remove the President of the
United States from office is a tremendously different, painful and
difficult thing. It's also painful for the country.
Speaker 2 (53:19):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (53:19):
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 him out of office? Or do
you think impeachment is a healthy path for the country.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
I think it's I think it's an appropriate path because
it's it's a constitutional path. The system is designed to
deal with a president who is not 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, is the House. While we might have
(53:52):
a highly gerrymandered House House today, write that I'm not
I'm not sure that. I'm not sure. I think the
next election, the off year election, is going to be
very telling in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1 (54:09):
So I wonder if if they get swamped in the
midterm and you come out the other side of that.
Unto January of twenty nineteen, and if Pence were to
succeed a Trump that designs Pence would want to come
in right after January of twenty nineteen, so he was
eligible for ten years in office because if he steps
(54:29):
if they impeached Trump, now Pence is only eligible for
that piece of Trump's term and only one full term
of his own.
Speaker 2 (54:36):
Well, you're assuming he could get re elected. I think
this is going to splash over on Pence.
Speaker 1 (54:42):
I don't refute that. I'm just saying that, but that
right now in their hope is that they're going to
wait and see what the damage is in the midterm,
if Trump can be rehabilitated. I thought Trump would be
gone by the summer. I thought they'd say to themselves,
we got to get the smell of the cordite out
of the room here and bring Pence in here and
let everything clear, if not for twenty eighteen, then for
twenty twenty and prop up Pence as the nominee. But
(55:04):
they've hung in with him.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
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 twenty four to 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
really I'm an independent California. We don't have to declare,
(55:28):
and I have not declared, and I have voted both
Republican and Democrat.
Speaker 1 (55:35):
What do you think is going to What do you
think is the future of the Republican Party?
Speaker 2 (55:38):
Bad?
Speaker 1 (55:38):
Bad, bad bad. We were going to do a sketch
on SNL the other day where Trump was going Christmas
shopping with Roy Moore the mall.
Speaker 2 (55:55):
We didn't, you know, they killed that idea. The great
mistake I have made since Watergate was when Louren sent
out a feeler if I would host Saturday Night and
not too late and Saturday Night or Simon and Schuster
said no, we don't want you doing that.
Speaker 1 (56:16):
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 sad to me
about this Republican Party. Either're going down the drain with.
Speaker 2 (56:30):
This, the difference between opposition and polarization, and we don't
seem to have distinguished that. When when majority doesn't rule,
we're in trouble in a democracy, and right now a
minority is controlling the country.
Speaker 1 (56:50):
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 exposed
what you did, told the truth about what you did.
(57:12):
And I want to say thank you very much for
coming and sitting with us tonight.
Speaker 2 (57:15):
Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (57:24):
John Dean, whose life was forever changed by the bungled
break into the Watergate Hotel in nineteen seventy two. By
I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you
by iHeart Radio.
Host
Alec Baldwin
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