December 10, 2024 • 58 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 12, 2017
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, it's Alec Baldwin here. Before we launch our next
season of Here's the Thing at iHeartRadio in January, I
thought I'd play some of my favorite shows from the archives.
Few people were deeper into the Watergate cover up than
President Nixon's White House Council John Dene then he flipped.
(00:28):
He was a star witness for the Congressional investigation, and
while some Watergate conspirators had religious conversions in prison, Dean
left prison with a commitment to teaching in classrooms and
beyond the lessons of the scandal and advocating for better government.
I recently had the opportunity to talk with him in
(00:49):
front of a live audience at NYU's Skirball Center. Tell
us the jobs you had in government prior to your
becoming count to the President.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
I was at the House Judiciary Committee. It 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
(01:25):
become the Associate Deputy Attorney General in the Nixon administration
at the outset of the administration, and while there, working
in Justice. I was invited to become counsel of the president.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Who invited you?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Richard Nixon?
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Nixon someone's making a recommendation to him, or he knew
you personally.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
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?
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Literally?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Literally?
Speaker 1 (02:06):
What did you think that they saw in you? That
they thought you were a Nixon man?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
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,
(02:38):
and I think Nixon throughout really relied on Erlickman for
his legal advice.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Did you come from a Republican family? Your dad? Was?
He an executive Firestone? He worked at Firestone.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
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 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 (03:08):
So did you have some kind of Republican credentials throughout your.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
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
(03:36):
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
(03:57):
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 driver's license, and
we'd ride around in his car that was more like
the cockpit of an airplane. He was a Ham radio operator,
(04:19):
and could also talk to any air base he wanted
to talk to from his thunderbird.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
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 (04:36):
One of the things that was really strange is I
was never given much guidance as to what the White
House counsel did when Erlickman 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
(04:59):
do whatever you lawyers do. He wasn't a lawyer, And
that was about the guidance I got.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
What were some of the things you did, What were
some of the things you worked on you started the
job one year.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
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
(05:36):
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,
(05:56):
and it wasn't. It was about six months before they
let me hire an assistant, and I needed the help
because there's a lot of work. 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 (06:14):
Well, thank god you weren't doing the conflict of interest
work in the White House now you'd be dead from exhaustion.
But and you need about five.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Hundred Either that or there is no clearance at all
and no work at all.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
They probably just closed that office this term. You know,
we're not going to bother with that conflict of 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
(06:47):
the person themselves, rather than through the filter of the media.
What was he like when you worked with him?
Speaker 2 (06:51):
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 sixty eight campaign that
Tricky Dick had matured. He was now a former vice
president who really understood how government operated, and he would
be a great senior statesman type person. That's the image
(07:14):
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,
for example, really other than in group meetings and just
(07:38):
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 (07:48):
You become more useful to him once the issue.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
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 than have well, not
(08:14):
at that point, but several months later in February, he decides,
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 (08:29):
So when you so the news breaks, the burglary breaks
in what month of seventy two?
Speaker 2 (08:36):
June seventeenth of seventy two.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
June of seventy two, he's overwhelmingly elected after that, and
when you found out that these guys who had links
to the White House 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 (08:53):
Well, I haven't have been in Manila, in the Philippines.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Ho's convenience?
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Or was it? The first mistake was coming home? That's
on June nineteenth, three days after the arrest, I'm sent
to interview Gordon Lyddy, who confesses to me. He says,
it's our men, my men.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
And when he said my men, what was his no. No,
Lyddy was x FBI, former FBI was x CIA, x CIA.
When he said my men, what was there Well.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
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
(09:54):
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. Well, it didn't take
me very long to realize that that was beloney. Today
(10:17):
I know that really the conspiracy was hatched over that
weekend and the decision to cover it up, and there
was a real reason to cover it up for the
White House, which I learned when talking to 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, but rather walk down seventeenth Street. That's
(10:40):
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. He was running
(11:00):
this on the side, and on the way back up
he said two things that were back up seventeen trees
were really quite startling. He said, you should know, John,
while I worked at the White House, that Howard Hunt
who helped me get the men for this operation. And
I did what he called a national security operation by
(11:21):
breaking in Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist 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,
(11:51):
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. Yeah, he
literally said, he said, anybody wants to take me out,
just don't do it at my house. I've got children there.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
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 (12:24):
Why? I have no idea.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
He's a little dramatic.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Probably a mistake not to.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Just to clarify. 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 (12:43):
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. For example,
(13:05):
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 (13:22):
Another reference from our childhood sad you know Maxwell's spot.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
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 (13:49):
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 (13:57):
On the nineteenth I'm the person who 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
(14:18):
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 Magruder, who was his deputy, and Magruder then gave
the orders. I'm convinced that Mitchell from my initial conversations
(14:43):
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 from it, deflect all the responsibility from the president,
take it all that happened. That was the original plan.
But then what happened is he too got a briefing
(15:04):
as to what Liddy had done and learned of the
Ellsberg break, in which he thought was is bad, if
not worse than what had happened at the Watergate. And
he and he and Erlickman, who had always had a
strained relationship, they often in a room would talk to
each other through me. They would turn to me and say,
(15:24):
like the other person wasn't in the room. And that's
how I slowly became the lynchpin, like.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
A marriage counseter.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yeah, exactly, because that's that's how I became the lynchpin
of this conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
We're taking a break, stay with us. 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 not a very
(16:01):
lighthearted crowd, you know what I mean. And Haldeman and
Erlickman and Mitchell. 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 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 in a room with Erlickman, who said
(16:26):
the following right before he died. He said that Nicks
about Nixon Republicans. He said that Nixon Republicans had two enemies,
the anti war left and black people. We knew it
couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war
or black, but by getting the public to associate the
hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing
both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. And he said,
(16:49):
do we know we were lying about drugs? Of course
we did. When you're in the room with these guys
and you get a sense that you have.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
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 level that I wasn't privy. There were
(17:17):
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 (17:30):
When well, I'd be too hasty.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Now you're hopeful.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Well, we're going to get to the comparisons of contrast
at a minute. Both houses of the Congress were in
Democratic hands at the time.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Correct, But it was a different Democratic party. Of course,
it was a party with Southern Democrats who were today Republicans.
So it divided. He believed and hell out the belief
for a long time. I think that he could with
a combination of Republicans and Southern Democrats, keep his office
(18:10):
through an impeachment bill of impeachment in the House, if
not defeating that, certainly not getting two thirds of the
Senate to vote against him for removal. So it's a
different Democratic party. It's true, it was not controlled by
the South either. It was more more moderate to progressives.
It did, and if you recall, it's very slow that
(18:32):
the impeachment process starts with Watergate, it isn't until he
removes the Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox, that they take this seriously.
That while that itself may not be an obstruction of justice,
an impeachment, or a criminal offense, he had the power
(18:52):
to do it a lot of parallels with today. He
certainly politically had made a terrible mistake.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
There were Republicans, obviously on the Judiciary Committee and in
the Congress who were willing to vote for it.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
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 that
he knew nothing of the Watergate cover up until I
had told him on March twenty first, in a conversation
(19:28):
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
(19:51):
or agreeing with Holloman's plan to have this CIA block
the FBI's investigation.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
In the Watergate station with hold them.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
It takes place when June twenty third, right after the breaking,
right six days after after right, and.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
And these are the tapes that he was forced to surrender,
which he would I don't understand that he did surrender
the tapes. Other than the gap, the famous.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Gap, there would have been an interesting constitutional crisis if
he had said to the Supreme Court, Okay, I've got
you 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 (20:36):
As everybody knows, it's a famous gap. In eighteen minutes,
eighteen and a half minute eighteen, I was going to say,
it's a media.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
It's a media invented event.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
So there was no erasure at all.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
No, a strong man could press the record button and
cause the eraser, and the experts saw seven nine efforts
to erase that material.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
What do you think was erased on those types? Is
there everybody well satisfied you?
Speaker 2 (21:09):
No, 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 I think it was just a gaff
(21:34):
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
(21:55):
car in years. This was a very foreign kind of machine.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Did Nixon order the breaking himself?
Speaker 2 (22:02):
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.
(22:22):
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
(22:43):
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 (22:55):
So as we come rolling into seventy three, right as
he's a 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 (23:06):
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 re election
committee and somebody from the re election committee was arrested
in the DNC, why don't you appoint a special prosecutor?
(23:29):
And 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
(23:50):
administration had anything to do with this bizarre incident. This
was the first I heard of my investigation. 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 so?
(24:14):
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 want 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
(24:37):
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 line, I had no interest
in giving the false information to the president and didn't.
But he presses me on that there were actually three
(25:01):
phases of the cover up for me. I initially thought
I was just helping out my colleagues and didn't see
anything criminally amiss. 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 struck me
(25:23):
amiss at this point, as I say, I'm not trained
as a criminal lawyer either. Defense funds. What do you
mean defense funds? The Barrigin brothers for the had a
defense fund the Chicago What are you talking about criminal
criminal defense yet? And that's what actually Nick, there's a
tape of Nixon suggesting that there'd be a defense fund
(25:44):
set up for the Cubans who had been hired by
Hunt and Lyddy to pay their lawyer's fees and what
have you. If he had done that openly, he might
have avoided obstructing justice. It's very curious, and Halleman and
Erlikman dropped that I never heard about that. In fact,
when I first hear about it, I don't know what
(26:06):
he's really what he's talking about anyway, phases of the
cover up for me, I initially don't think I'm engaging
in criminal conduct when I realize I am is. After
the election, Howard Hunt calls Chuck Coulson, and Coulson records
the call on a dictaphone. He had his phone hooked
(26:26):
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 it exonerates him
in the Watergate, that he had nothing to do with
the Watergate break in I hear something very different. I
(26:49):
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 is there.
I immediately say to Chuck, 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
(27:09):
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 news to report? And
(27:29):
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, and I
(27:51):
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 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 they call the
(28:11):
loss frame, where you have no attractive options and you
do stupid things. It's unfortunately part of human nature. Happens
a lot to a lot of people. I don't did you.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Feel a loyalty personally to any of these people. Had
you developed any kind of closeness with them as a person.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
As a co conspirator, Yes, I did. I wanted the
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
(28:54):
me that he's going to have seemy things to say
about John Erlickman and by implication, Bud Krogue, one of
his assistants regarding his break in at the Elsberg psychiatrist's
office fiasco. That's when I sort of say, my god,
(29:15):
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
(29:37):
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,
(29:58):
I need to go in and lay it ou 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
(30:22):
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 Pergree is a tough rap to prove. I raised
the fact that Hunt was demanding one hundred and twenty
(30:42):
thousand 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 (30:55):
What's the linix in the famousite we could get the
money if we had to.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
That's exactly the line. That's your coming to it. And
and and I said, miss President, I have no idea
how much this might cost? And he said, well, what
do you think? What you give me an estimate? I
pulled out a thin air what I thought was a
hefty number. I said, a million dollars. That would be
what about five and a half today, never having tried
(31:19):
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. And what I didn't know is,
well until I actually did did this book with all
the tapes, is after that conversation, he goes over to
rose Woods door, which is adjoining his off the Oval office,
(31:42):
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 gonna solve this. He's going to get the million
(32:03):
bucks and say take.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Care of it. If John Dean was the ultimate Nixon insider,
essayist 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 (32:27):
I never liked or trusted Nixon. I came out of
the you know, the affluent, privileged San Francisco society, San
Francisco society. My father had been very strongly in favor
of Roosevelt. In nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
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
(33:05):
the Thing now more of my conversation with John Dean.
When you talk 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 (33:23):
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
(33:43):
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
(34:03):
term answer. He wanted the cover up to go on.
I had nothing to do with Hunt getting paid. 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.
(34:28):
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 (34:44):
Now you mentioned the three phases of the cover up.
Did you cover all three of those or was there
another one?
Speaker 2 (34:48):
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 a 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
(35:10):
college law school 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
(35:33):
become a very successful criminal defense lawyer, and he was
terrific 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 (35:48):
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,
your beautiful wife, Maureen Dean, and she was there.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
She had a huge influence on me. I'll want you
to explain that My huge was the anxiety though 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
(36:27):
had a wonderful relationship. She wanted to get married, and
I just knew this was a bad time. I didn't
know how bad it was.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
I got married how much? When did you know?
Speaker 2 (36:39):
I get married in October of nineteen seventy two, very
bad time. We have now been married forty five years,
so you know, you know, the first time that happened
to me was not long ago when I when I
(37:00):
said that to somebody, I happened to be in Nashville
giving a talk because of Jim Neil, who was one
of the Watergate Special prosecutors. They became like fang friends,
many 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
(37:22):
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 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 pleasing.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Can imagine what that's like.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
To be married for forty five years? Like?
Speaker 1 (37:50):
What really now? When you go home? I mean, I'm
trying to get you to talk about something just in
terms of your personal feelings and your emotional life. Were
you going home and 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 and not?
Speaker 2 (38:09):
I protected her? I you know, I tried to warn.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Her, you know, until you give me your wife what's
going on. I tried to.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Explain to her there were going to be problems, but
I wasn't terribly.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
I just got married.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
And depth about it. I must. Somebody recently asked me
how did I get through it all? And my answer
was vodka.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
So you did not confide a great deal.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
In her, No I didn't. You did 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
(39:01):
was I didn't want to disappoint her. I wanted to
live up to the standard. She thought.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
March sixteenth is when you said the meeting was with
him cancer on the president March twenty first, twenty first,
and how soon after that do you get canned?
Speaker 2 (39:14):
End of April.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
There's very tight.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
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
(39:38):
got to those tapes 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.
(39:59):
When he he lets Halleman and Erlkman go, he just,
in a one sentence says, and so is White House
counsel 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 at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and Erlikman had been behind it.
(40:25):
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
actually tried to get everybody to flip inside. I thought
(40:46):
that was I thought that would be so sobering for
Nixon and everybody else could just stand up and take
responsibility that his presidence tried.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
I tried. Did you get close to anyone?
Speaker 2 (41:00):
I think some people did? You know? Based on the tapes,
there is some indication that people did give it some
thought but they realized that it was the end of
their careers.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
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
(41:35):
under Eisenhower, not somebody who was adored by the staff
of the White House in the Eisenhower bus.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
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 (41:48):
And then he obviously loses a couple of elections, most
notably the presidential election of 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
(42:08):
election in seventy two by a landslide, and you're in
that room with him in the spring of seventy three,
and is this the old Nixon.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
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
(42:38):
earphones on which destroyed my hearing. And I told Moe
at one point, God forbid. The last voice I hear
is Richard Nixon in this project. But I when I
was listening to these tapes occasionally I would, in queuing
them up, would find things that I thought that the
archives had removed. They theoretically have taken out all the
personal material and returned it to the Nixons. But there
(43:02):
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 have a lovely conversation. It really struck
(43:25):
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, Tricia and Julie. They're some really
(43:47):
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 ever all surfacing. One
of the reasons Nixon covers up is he's worried about
John Mitchell. Becomes very clear from the tapes. It's not
(44:09):
that he's worried about his own guilt. He's not worried
about the Ellsberg 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 (44:27):
So you finally get canned by Nixon himself.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
When well, I'm out of town on April thirtieth when
he gives a speech.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
So he didn't fire your face to face.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
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. I said,
(44:59):
mister President, I'll write my own letter and send it
to you, and which I did.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
So this event in American history, obviously is chronicled in
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
it does well in the film, or will come out
within a couple of years or eighteen months, what'd you
think of the film when you first saw it.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
I first saw a director 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,
(45:48):
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 (46:00):
Why do you think that is?
Speaker 2 (46:02):
I don't know. Okay, but he didn't change it. He
didn't go back and add my name.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
But you appreciated the film. You thought it was accurate.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
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 (46:23):
About Nixon about Oliver? Still from what you were a consultant.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
I was a consultant on Nixon, and that's.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
A far more turgid movie than all the presidents.
Speaker 2 (46:31):
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
(46:56):
the publishers of that story and was in litigation which
would go on for nine years.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
You're saying, your wife did not work at the col girl,
she did not work at the car. Want to be clear,
she did not work at I won't be walking anyone
with any misconceptions.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
People might dream that. But anyway, the I told Oliver,
I said that this is a fraud 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 (47:34):
What do you think he captured that was accurate about Nixon?
Uhame a scene because I mean I want that.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
One of the scenes. The last scene I objected to
was a scene where he has me meeting with Howard
Hunt on the Memorial Bridge. And I said, Oliver, that
never occurred. Harris ed, Harris right, it's a great scene
and you're played by uh David hype person, David Huh.
And I said, Oliver, that's never happened. He said, I've
(48:02):
paid for it. It's going to happen.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
That many people applaud if you've ever seen Oliver Stones.
Nixon said, oh my god, I see.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
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
(48:36):
tour and she said to Hopkins, who's reporting this to me?
At lunch right after they had come back, he said,
the dosent 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
(48:58):
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
(49:19):
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, 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
(49:43):
capture the man.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
With the time we have left, I want to ask you,
obviously about the comparisons and contrast to how we live
our lives now. And it's unlikely that every public can
control Judiciary committee in this particular, Congress is going to
return an article to him.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
I think that's very true.
Speaker 1 (50:02):
Yeah, but they have as you'll have a president, a
sitting president who's indicted for a crime.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
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,
(50:29):
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 week and one of
(50:53):
the last Independent councils, raised that issue regarding Clinton and said, no,
he cannot be indicted as a sitting president. So that's
the policy right now of the Department that no, no
core has 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
(51:15):
have the president step aside who would be impaired in
his ability to govern and function if he was in
a criminal trial, and to sort that out it could
be done. The issue has not been resolved. There are
some who think that Special Counsel Mueller might test it.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
What do you think Mullett would do?
Speaker 2 (51:39):
You're a lawyer, have a fascinating case. It's a tough issue.
You know, 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 (51:58):
I mean the country right now, it seems like it's
so much trouble. You know, the country is in so
much trouble. And you've got.
Speaker 2 (52:08):
I have never had a knot in my stomach before
before an election. I did before this election. Right, that
knot has really never gone away.
Speaker 1 (52:19):
Just the damage that proved it and Devace alone will
do and their departments is going to take a decade
or more to undo, you know, just that things are really.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
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 had no training, he did no
he has no knowledge of the office. He's winging it
(52:46):
from day to day. 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
(53:08):
going He's not dumb, He's going to learn how the
machinery works. And then I think it's ripe for even
greater abuse.
Speaker 1 (53:16):
Well, that's my ultimate question is that is it? Do
you think, because I've said this to people before, 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. Yes, do you believe that what's
best for the country is to not impeach Trump and
to wait until the next election cycle and vote him
(53:36):
out of office? Or do you think impeachment is a healthy
path for the country.
Speaker 2 (53:41):
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
(54:02):
a highly gerrymandered House Paul Ryant House to write, 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 (54:19):
So I wonder if if they get swamped in the
midterm and you come out the other side of that
into 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
(54:39):
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 (54:46):
Well, you're assuming he could get re elected. I think
this is going to splash over on Pence.
Speaker 1 (54:52):
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,
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 they've
(55:14):
hung in with him.
Speaker 2 (55:15):
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 it.
Speaker 1 (55:30):
Are you a Republican now?
Speaker 2 (55:31):
I haven't been since then? You haven't really I'm an
independent California. We don't have to declare, and I have
not declared, and I have voted both Republican and Democrat.
Speaker 1 (55:45):
What do you think is going to What do you
think is the future of the Republican Party?
Speaker 2 (55:48):
Bad?
Speaker 1 (55:48):
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 (56:05):
We didn't you know, they killed that idea. The greatest
mistake I've made since Watergate was when Lorn 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 (56:26):
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 is they're going down the drain
with this.
Speaker 2 (56:41):
The difference between opposition and polarization, and we don't seem
to have distinguished that when when when majority doesn't rule,
we're in trouble in a democracy, and right now a
minority is controlling the country.
Speaker 1 (57:00):
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.
(57:22):
And I want to say thank you very much for
coming and sitting with us tonight.
Speaker 2 (57:25):
Thank you, Thank you. M.
Speaker 1 (57:34):
John Dean, whose life was forever changed by the bungled
break into the Watergate Hotel in nineteen seventy two. I'm
Alec Baldwin.
Speaker 4 (57:43):
Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio
Speaker 2 (58:00):
Two.
Hey, it's Alec Baldwin here. Before we launch our next
season of Here's the Thing at iHeartRadio in January, I
thought I'd play some of my favorite shows from the archives.
Few people were deeper into the Watergate cover up than
President Nixon's White House Council John Dene then he flipped.
(00:28):
He was a star witness for the Congressional investigation, and
while some Watergate conspirators had religious conversions in prison, Dean
left prison with a commitment to teaching in classrooms and
beyond the lessons of the scandal and advocating for better government.
I recently had the opportunity to talk with him in
(00:49):
front of a live audience at NYU's Skirball Center. Tell
us the jobs you had in government prior to your
becoming count to the President.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
I was at the House Judiciary Committee. It 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
(01:25):
become the Associate Deputy Attorney General in the Nixon administration
at the outset of the administration, and while there, working
in Justice. I was invited to become counsel of the president.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Who invited you?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Richard Nixon?
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Nixon someone's making a recommendation to him, or he knew
you personally.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
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?
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Literally?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Literally?
Speaker 1 (02:06):
What did you think that they saw in you? That
they thought you were a Nixon man?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
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,
(02:38):
and I think Nixon throughout really relied on Erlickman for
his legal advice.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Did you come from a Republican family? Your dad? Was?
He an executive Firestone? He worked at Firestone.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
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 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 (03:08):
So did you have some kind of Republican credentials throughout your.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
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
(03:36):
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
(03:57):
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 driver's license, and
we'd ride around in his car that was more like
the cockpit of an airplane. He was a Ham radio operator,
(04:19):
and could also talk to any air base he wanted
to talk to from his thunderbird.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
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 (04:36):
One of the things that was really strange is I
was never given much guidance as to what the White
House counsel did when Erlickman 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
(04:59):
do whatever you lawyers do. He wasn't a lawyer, And
that was about the guidance I got.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
What were some of the things you did, What were
some of the things you worked on you started the
job one year.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
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
(05:36):
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,
(05:56):
and it wasn't. It was about six months before they
let me hire an assistant, and I needed the help
because there's a lot of work. 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 (06:14):
Well, thank god you weren't doing the conflict of interest
work in the White House now you'd be dead from exhaustion.
But and you need about five.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Hundred Either that or there is no clearance at all
and no work at all.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
They probably just closed that office this term. You know,
we're not going to bother with that conflict of 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
(06:47):
the person themselves, rather than through the filter of the media.
What was he like when you worked with him?
Speaker 2 (06:51):
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 sixty eight campaign that
Tricky Dick had matured. He was now a former vice
president who really understood how government operated, and he would
be a great senior statesman type person. That's the image
(07:14):
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,
for example, really other than in group meetings and just
(07:38):
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 (07:48):
You become more useful to him once the issue.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
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 than have well, not
(08:14):
at that point, but several months later in February, he decides,
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 (08:29):
So when you so the news breaks, the burglary breaks
in what month of seventy two?
Speaker 2 (08:36):
June seventeenth of seventy two.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
June of seventy two, he's overwhelmingly elected after that, and
when you found out that these guys who had links
to the White House 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 (08:53):
Well, I haven't have been in Manila, in the Philippines.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Ho's convenience?
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Or was it? The first mistake was coming home? That's
on June nineteenth, three days after the arrest, I'm sent
to interview Gordon Lyddy, who confesses to me. He says,
it's our men, my men.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
And when he said my men, what was his no. No,
Lyddy was x FBI, former FBI was x CIA, x CIA.
When he said my men, what was there Well.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
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
(09:54):
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. Well, it didn't take
me very long to realize that that was beloney. Today
(10:17):
I know that really the conspiracy was hatched over that
weekend and the decision to cover it up, and there
was a real reason to cover it up for the
White House, which I learned when talking to 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, but rather walk down seventeenth Street. That's
(10:40):
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. He was running
(11:00):
this on the side, and on the way back up
he said two things that were back up seventeen trees
were really quite startling. He said, you should know, John,
while I worked at the White House, that Howard Hunt
who helped me get the men for this operation. And
I did what he called a national security operation by
(11:21):
breaking in Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist 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,
(11:51):
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. Yeah, he
literally said, he said, anybody wants to take me out,
just don't do it at my house. I've got children there.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
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 (12:24):
Why? I have no idea.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
He's a little dramatic.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Probably a mistake not to.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Just to clarify. 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 (12:43):
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. For example,
(13:05):
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 (13:22):
Another reference from our childhood sad you know Maxwell's spot.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
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 (13:49):
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 (13:57):
On the nineteenth I'm the person who 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
(14:18):
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 Magruder, who was his deputy, and Magruder then gave
the orders. I'm convinced that Mitchell from my initial conversations
(14:43):
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 from it, deflect all the responsibility from the president,
take it all that happened. That was the original plan.
But then what happened is he too got a briefing
(15:04):
as to what Liddy had done and learned of the
Ellsberg break, in which he thought was is bad, if
not worse than what had happened at the Watergate. And
he and he and Erlickman, who had always had a
strained relationship, they often in a room would talk to
each other through me. They would turn to me and say,
(15:24):
like the other person wasn't in the room. And that's
how I slowly became the lynchpin, like.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
A marriage counseter.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yeah, exactly, because that's that's how I became the lynchpin
of this conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
We're taking a break, stay with us. 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 not a very
(16:01):
lighthearted crowd, you know what I mean. And Haldeman and
Erlickman and Mitchell. 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 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 in a room with Erlickman, who said
(16:26):
the following right before he died. He said that Nicks
about Nixon Republicans. He said that Nixon Republicans had two enemies,
the anti war left and black people. We knew it
couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war
or black, but by getting the public to associate the
hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing
both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. And he said,
(16:49):
do we know we were lying about drugs? Of course
we did. When you're in the room with these guys
and you get a sense that you have.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
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 level that I wasn't privy. There were
(17:17):
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 (17:30):
When well, I'd be too hasty.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Now you're hopeful.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Well, we're going to get to the comparisons of contrast
at a minute. Both houses of the Congress were in
Democratic hands at the time.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Correct, But it was a different Democratic party. Of course,
it was a party with Southern Democrats who were today Republicans.
So it divided. He believed and hell out the belief
for a long time. I think that he could with
a combination of Republicans and Southern Democrats, keep his office
(18:10):
through an impeachment bill of impeachment in the House, if
not defeating that, certainly not getting two thirds of the
Senate to vote against him for removal. So it's a
different Democratic party. It's true, it was not controlled by
the South either. It was more more moderate to progressives.
It did, and if you recall, it's very slow that
(18:32):
the impeachment process starts with Watergate, it isn't until he
removes the Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox, that they take this seriously.
That while that itself may not be an obstruction of justice,
an impeachment, or a criminal offense, he had the power
(18:52):
to do it a lot of parallels with today. He
certainly politically had made a terrible mistake.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
There were Republicans, obviously on the Judiciary Committee and in
the Congress who were willing to vote for it.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
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 that
he knew nothing of the Watergate cover up until I
had told him on March twenty first, in a conversation
(19:28):
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
(19:51):
or agreeing with Holloman's plan to have this CIA block
the FBI's investigation.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
In the Watergate station with hold them.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
It takes place when June twenty third, right after the breaking,
right six days after after right, and.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
And these are the tapes that he was forced to surrender,
which he would I don't understand that he did surrender
the tapes. Other than the gap, the famous.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Gap, there would have been an interesting constitutional crisis if
he had said to the Supreme Court, Okay, I've got
you 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 (20:36):
As everybody knows, it's a famous gap. In eighteen minutes,
eighteen and a half minute eighteen, I was going to say,
it's a media.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
It's a media invented event.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
So there was no erasure at all.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
No, a strong man could press the record button and
cause the eraser, and the experts saw seven nine efforts
to erase that material.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
What do you think was erased on those types? Is
there everybody well satisfied you?
Speaker 2 (21:09):
No, 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 I think it was just a gaff
(21:34):
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
(21:55):
car in years. This was a very foreign kind of machine.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Did Nixon order the breaking himself?
Speaker 2 (22:02):
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.
(22:22):
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
(22:43):
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 (22:55):
So as we come rolling into seventy three, right as
he's a 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 (23:06):
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 re election
committee and somebody from the re election committee was arrested
in the DNC, why don't you appoint a special prosecutor?
(23:29):
And 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
(23:50):
administration had anything to do with this bizarre incident. This
was the first I heard of my investigation. 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 so?
(24:14):
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 want 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
(24:37):
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 line, I had no interest
in giving the false information to the president and didn't.
But he presses me on that there were actually three
(25:01):
phases of the cover up for me. I initially thought
I was just helping out my colleagues and didn't see
anything criminally amiss. 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 struck me
(25:23):
amiss at this point, as I say, I'm not trained
as a criminal lawyer either. Defense funds. What do you
mean defense funds? The Barrigin brothers for the had a
defense fund the Chicago What are you talking about criminal
criminal defense yet? And that's what actually Nick, there's a
tape of Nixon suggesting that there'd be a defense fund
(25:44):
set up for the Cubans who had been hired by
Hunt and Lyddy to pay their lawyer's fees and what
have you. If he had done that openly, he might
have avoided obstructing justice. It's very curious, and Halleman and
Erlikman dropped that I never heard about that. In fact,
when I first hear about it, I don't know what
(26:06):
he's really what he's talking about anyway, phases of the
cover up for me, I initially don't think I'm engaging
in criminal conduct when I realize I am is. After
the election, Howard Hunt calls Chuck Coulson, and Coulson records
the call on a dictaphone. He had his phone hooked
(26:26):
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 it exonerates him
in the Watergate, that he had nothing to do with
the Watergate break in I hear something very different. I
(26:49):
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 is there.
I immediately say to Chuck, 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
(27:09):
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 news to report? And
(27:29):
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, and I
(27:51):
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 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 they call the
(28:11):
loss frame, where you have no attractive options and you
do stupid things. It's unfortunately part of human nature. Happens
a lot to a lot of people. I don't did you.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Feel a loyalty personally to any of these people. Had
you developed any kind of closeness with them as a person.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
As a co conspirator, Yes, I did. I wanted the
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
(28:54):
me that he's going to have seemy things to say
about John Erlickman and by implication, Bud Krogue, one of
his assistants regarding his break in at the Elsberg psychiatrist's
office fiasco. That's when I sort of say, my god,
(29:15):
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
(29:37):
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,
(29:58):
I need to go in and lay it ou 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
(30:22):
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 Pergree is a tough rap to prove. I raised
the fact that Hunt was demanding one hundred and twenty
(30:42):
thousand 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 (30:55):
What's the linix in the famousite we could get the
money if we had to.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
That's exactly the line. That's your coming to it. And
and and I said, miss President, I have no idea
how much this might cost? And he said, well, what
do you think? What you give me an estimate? I
pulled out a thin air what I thought was a
hefty number. I said, a million dollars. That would be
what about five and a half today, never having tried
(31:19):
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. And what I didn't know is,
well until I actually did did this book with all
the tapes, is after that conversation, he goes over to
rose Woods door, which is adjoining his off the Oval office,
(31:42):
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 gonna solve this. He's going to get the million
(32:03):
bucks and say take.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Care of it. If John Dean was the ultimate Nixon insider,
essayist 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 (32:27):
I never liked or trusted Nixon. I came out of
the you know, the affluent, privileged San Francisco society, San
Francisco society. My father had been very strongly in favor
of Roosevelt. In nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
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
(33:05):
the Thing now more of my conversation with John Dean.
When you talk 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 (33:23):
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
(33:43):
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
(34:03):
term answer. He wanted the cover up to go on.
I had nothing to do with Hunt getting paid. 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.
(34:28):
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 (34:44):
Now you mentioned the three phases of the cover up.
Did you cover all three of those or was there
another one?
Speaker 2 (34:48):
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 a 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
(35:10):
college law school 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
(35:33):
become a very successful criminal defense lawyer, and he was
terrific 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 (35:48):
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,
your beautiful wife, Maureen Dean, and she was there.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
She had a huge influence on me. I'll want you
to explain that My huge was the anxiety though 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
(36:27):
had a wonderful relationship. She wanted to get married, and
I just knew this was a bad time. I didn't
know how bad it was.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
I got married how much? When did you know?
Speaker 2 (36:39):
I get married in October of nineteen seventy two, very
bad time. We have now been married forty five years,
so you know, you know, the first time that happened
to me was not long ago when I when I
(37:00):
said that to somebody, I happened to be in Nashville
giving a talk because of Jim Neil, who was one
of the Watergate Special prosecutors. They became like fang friends,
many 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
(37:22):
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 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 pleasing.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Can imagine what that's like.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
To be married for forty five years? Like?
Speaker 1 (37:50):
What really now? When you go home? I mean, I'm
trying to get you to talk about something just in
terms of your personal feelings and your emotional life. Were
you going home and 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 and not?
Speaker 2 (38:09):
I protected her? I you know, I tried to warn.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Her, you know, until you give me your wife what's
going on. I tried to.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Explain to her there were going to be problems, but
I wasn't terribly.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
I just got married.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
And depth about it. I must. Somebody recently asked me
how did I get through it all? And my answer
was vodka.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
So you did not confide a great deal.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
In her, No I didn't. You did 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
(39:01):
was I didn't want to disappoint her. I wanted to
live up to the standard. She thought.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
March sixteenth is when you said the meeting was with
him cancer on the president March twenty first, twenty first,
and how soon after that do you get canned?
Speaker 2 (39:14):
End of April.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
There's very tight.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
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
(39:38):
got to those tapes 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.
(39:59):
When he he lets Halleman and Erlkman go, he just,
in a one sentence says, and so is White House
counsel 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 at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and Erlikman had been behind it.
(40:25):
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
actually tried to get everybody to flip inside. I thought
(40:46):
that was I thought that would be so sobering for
Nixon and everybody else could just stand up and take
responsibility that his presidence tried.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
I tried. Did you get close to anyone?
Speaker 2 (41:00):
I think some people did? You know? Based on the tapes,
there is some indication that people did give it some
thought but they realized that it was the end of
their careers.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
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
(41:35):
under Eisenhower, not somebody who was adored by the staff
of the White House in the Eisenhower bus.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
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 (41:48):
And then he obviously loses a couple of elections, most
notably the presidential election of 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
(42:08):
election in seventy two by a landslide, and you're in
that room with him in the spring of seventy three,
and is this the old Nixon.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
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
(42:38):
earphones on which destroyed my hearing. And I told Moe
at one point, God forbid. The last voice I hear
is Richard Nixon in this project. But I when I
was listening to these tapes occasionally I would, in queuing
them up, would find things that I thought that the
archives had removed. They theoretically have taken out all the
personal material and returned it to the Nixons. But there
(43:02):
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 have a lovely conversation. It really struck
(43:25):
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, Tricia and Julie. They're some really
(43:47):
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 ever all surfacing. One
of the reasons Nixon covers up is he's worried about
John Mitchell. Becomes very clear from the tapes. It's not
(44:09):
that he's worried about his own guilt. He's not worried
about the Ellsberg 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 (44:27):
So you finally get canned by Nixon himself.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
When well, I'm out of town on April thirtieth when
he gives a speech.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
So he didn't fire your face to face.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
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. I said,
(44:59):
mister President, I'll write my own letter and send it
to you, and which I did.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
So this event in American history, obviously is chronicled in
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
it does well in the film, or will come out
within a couple of years or eighteen months, what'd you
think of the film when you first saw it.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
I first saw a director 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,
(45:48):
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 (46:00):
Why do you think that is?
Speaker 2 (46:02):
I don't know. Okay, but he didn't change it. He
didn't go back and add my name.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
But you appreciated the film. You thought it was accurate.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
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 (46:23):
About Nixon about Oliver? Still from what you were a consultant.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
I was a consultant on Nixon, and that's.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
A far more turgid movie than all the presidents.
Speaker 2 (46:31):
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
(46:56):
the publishers of that story and was in litigation which
would go on for nine years.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
You're saying, your wife did not work at the col girl,
she did not work at the car. Want to be clear,
she did not work at I won't be walking anyone
with any misconceptions.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
People might dream that. But anyway, the I told Oliver,
I said that this is a fraud 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 (47:34):
What do you think he captured that was accurate about Nixon?
Uhame a scene because I mean I want that.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
One of the scenes. The last scene I objected to
was a scene where he has me meeting with Howard
Hunt on the Memorial Bridge. And I said, Oliver, that
never occurred. Harris ed, Harris right, it's a great scene
and you're played by uh David hype person, David Huh.
And I said, Oliver, that's never happened. He said, I've
(48:02):
paid for it. It's going to happen.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
That many people applaud if you've ever seen Oliver Stones.
Nixon said, oh my god, I see.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
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
(48:36):
tour and she said to Hopkins, who's reporting this to me?
At lunch right after they had come back, he said,
the dosent 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
(48:58):
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
(49:19):
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, 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
(49:43):
capture the man.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
With the time we have left, I want to ask you,
obviously about the comparisons and contrast to how we live
our lives now. And it's unlikely that every public can
control Judiciary committee in this particular, Congress is going to
return an article to him.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
I think that's very true.
Speaker 1 (50:02):
Yeah, but they have as you'll have a president, a
sitting president who's indicted for a crime.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
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,
(50:29):
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 week and one of
(50:53):
the last Independent councils, raised that issue regarding Clinton and said, no,
he cannot be indicted as a sitting president. So that's
the policy right now of the Department that no, no
core has 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
(51:15):
have the president step aside who would be impaired in
his ability to govern and function if he was in
a criminal trial, and to sort that out it could
be done. The issue has not been resolved. There are
some who think that Special Counsel Mueller might test it.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
What do you think Mullett would do?
Speaker 2 (51:39):
You're a lawyer, have a fascinating case. It's a tough issue.
You know, 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 (51:58):
I mean the country right now, it seems like it's
so much trouble. You know, the country is in so
much trouble. And you've got.
Speaker 2 (52:08):
I have never had a knot in my stomach before
before an election. I did before this election. Right, that
knot has really never gone away.
Speaker 1 (52:19):
Just the damage that proved it and Devace alone will
do and their departments is going to take a decade
or more to undo, you know, just that things are really.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
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 had no training, he did no
he has no knowledge of the office. He's winging it
(52:46):
from day to day. 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
(53:08):
going He's not dumb, He's going to learn how the
machinery works. And then I think it's ripe for even
greater abuse.
Speaker 1 (53:16):
Well, that's my ultimate question is that is it? Do
you think, because I've said this to people before, 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. Yes, do you believe that what's
best for the country is to not impeach Trump and
to wait until the next election cycle and vote him
(53:36):
out of office? Or do you think impeachment is a healthy
path for the country.
Speaker 2 (53:41):
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
(54:02):
a highly gerrymandered House Paul Ryant House to write, 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 (54:19):
So I wonder if if they get swamped in the
midterm and you come out the other side of that
into 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
(54:39):
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 (54:46):
Well, you're assuming he could get re elected. I think
this is going to splash over on Pence.
Speaker 1 (54:52):
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,
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 they've
(55:14):
hung in with him.
Speaker 2 (55:15):
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 it.
Speaker 1 (55:30):
Are you a Republican now?
Speaker 2 (55:31):
I haven't been since then? You haven't really I'm an
independent California. We don't have to declare, and I have
not declared, and I have voted both Republican and Democrat.
Speaker 1 (55:45):
What do you think is going to What do you
think is the future of the Republican Party?
Speaker 2 (55:48):
Bad?
Speaker 1 (55:48):
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 (56:05):
We didn't you know, they killed that idea. The greatest
mistake I've made since Watergate was when Lorn 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 (56:26):
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 is they're going down the drain
with this.
Speaker 2 (56:41):
The difference between opposition and polarization, and we don't seem
to have distinguished that when when when majority doesn't rule,
we're in trouble in a democracy, and right now a
minority is controlling the country.
Speaker 1 (57:00):
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.
(57:22):
And I want to say thank you very much for
coming and sitting with us tonight.
Speaker 2 (57:25):
Thank you, Thank you. M.
Speaker 1 (57:34):
John Dean, whose life was forever changed by the bungled
break into the Watergate Hotel in nineteen seventy two. I'm
Alec Baldwin.
Speaker 4 (57:43):
Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio
Speaker 2 (58:00):
Two.
Host
Alec Baldwin
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Monster: BTK
'Monster: BTK', the newest installment in the 'Monster' franchise, reveals the true story of the Wichita, Kansas serial killer who murdered at least 10 people between 1974 and 1991. Known by the moniker, BTK – Bind Torture Kill, his notoriety was bolstered by the taunting letters he sent to police, and the chilling phone calls he made to media outlets. BTK's identity was finally revealed in 2005 to the shock of his family, his community, and the world. He was the serial killer next door. From Tenderfoot TV & iHeartPodcasts, this is 'Monster: BTK'.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.