August 22, 2024 • 32 mins
In his new book, “Behind Closed Doors: In the Room with Reagan and Nixon,” Ken Khachigian offers a compelling insider’s account of his most private moments with Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon during revolutionary changes in our economy, politics, communications, foreign policy, and culture. Newt’s guest is Ken Khachigian. He was the chief speechwriter and trusted political adviser to President Ronald Reagan. He also served in President Richard Nixon’s White House.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of the News World. In his new
book Behind Closed Doors in the Room with Reagan and Nixon,
Ken Kaschigion offers a compelling insider's account of his most
private moments with Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon during revolutionary
changes in our economy, politics, communications, foreign policy, and culture.
(00:31):
Behind Closed Doors is essential reading for anyone wanting to
know how Ronald Reagan shaped his crusading message of economic
growth through tax cuts and limited government. Here to discuss
his new book, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest,
Ken Katchigian. He was the chief speech writer and trusted
(00:52):
political advisor to Ronald Reagan and the go to council
for President Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan in campaigns
in a political crisis. He also served in Richard Nixon's
White House and with Nixon as he emerged from Watergate. Ken,
(01:20):
welcome and thank you for joining me on newts.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
World speaker being Rich's good to be with you, new
old friend.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
I was thinking earlier that we had really interacted over
and over again for gosh, it's on maybe forty years.
I guess right, How did you first get into politics?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Oh? My, you remember something called boy State, don't you Yes,
That's how I got started to got my mind going.
American legient sponsored something called Boyse State and got me
really interested in politics and high school and then college,
ran for office, and I met Nixon when he ran
(02:01):
for governor. I cornered him at one of his rallies
when I was in college, and then got his book
Six Crises. And that's when I met Reagan too. I
was student by the president at UCSB and introduced Reagan
when he came to campus. I cajoled him to come
and speak to campus. And then with my interest in
politics and my interest in Nixon, when I was at
(02:23):
Columbia University Law School and Nixon was starting to run
for president making his comeback. You remember well, back in
nineteen sixty seven, Nixon was not seen as a viable
candidate for president. The big gunners back in sixty seven
were George Romney, Nelson, Rockfeller, and that rising star Ronald Reagan.
(02:49):
And Nixon was still seen as sort of a potential
has been. And I saw this article in the New
York Times that Nixon had a new group around him
fellas Pat Buchanan Ray Price, editorial writer out of New
York and Wright Chapin, a youngster out of California who
(03:11):
was helping him. And so Nixon was surrounding himself with
new people, and I thought, well, maybe this is an opportunity.
So I wrote a letter and said I'd like to volunteer,
and they brought me on just as a young fellow
out of Columbia law Pat Buchanan interviewed me and allowed
me to answer correspondence, and that led to Marty Anderson
(03:32):
offering me a job in the summer after my second
year of law school. In the campaign of eighty eight,
Alan Greenspan was my boss, if you can imagine, head
of the domestic policy group in the sixty eight campaign.
And after the campaign, one of my mentors in that
campaign was another giant in American politics, Bryce Harlowe. I
(03:54):
don't know if he ever got to meet Bryce. Bryce
was another giant. And once I finished law school, I
came back to Washington and finally got a job in
the Knicks and White House. So that's how it all started.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
You get out of Columbia, ended up going to Washington.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Right and spent four and a half years in the
Nixon White House, and of course ended up with a
disappointment President Nixon's resignation, which I opposed. I was, I
think the loan holdout amongst all the staff right at
the final days of August fifty years ago as a
twenty nine year old, And I wrote about this as
(04:33):
an op ed a couple of weeks ago in the
Wall Street Journal, saying that I don't believe he should
have resigned, and he should have forced the hand of
our Republican friends in Congress and the Democrats to at
least take our case to the Congress and force a
trial in the Senate, and at least give us an
opportunity to mate for the President to stand his ground.
(04:55):
And of course knew if we knew then what we
know now of the canery and the unethical conduct of
Judge Sirika and the special prosecutors, and if we had
at least the modicum of support from a conservative press
that we might have had, then we could have made
our case and he could have continued as presidency.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Before we get to Watergate, he barely wins election in
sixty eight and then comes back and wins the largest
popular vote margin in modern times. What was it like
to work for Nixon, and to be in the Nixon
White House during that pre Watergate period, it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Fun all the time. I mean, it was the high adventure.
Of course I was a young man, but we were
facing headwinds the entire time. If you have to look
at it. When he entered the presidency, he had three
massive headwinds. He had inherited the Vietnam War from not
just Lennon Johnson, but Jack Kennedy. We have to remember
(05:56):
that Jack Kennedy begin that adventure with the Eastern elite establishment,
defense and State departments, and then Linda Johnson escalated it.
So when Nixon came in, there were five hundred and
forty thousand troops in Vietnam, five hundred men being killed
every month, with thousands of additional casualties. So he had
(06:16):
that headwind going for him. And then with immediately national
protests going on, the Democrats who had supported Kennedy and
Johnson in this adventure began ducking and running and then
leaving mix and trying to de escalate and get away
from this. Then the other headwind was the fact that
(06:37):
you can imagine what the problem was. Having served in
Congress and a speaker, he had a Democratic House and
Democratic Senate opposing him the entire time of his presidency.
So with an adversary Congress in place, it was monumentally
difficult for him to pass any legislation. He had. Carl
(06:59):
Albert Speaker Mike Mansfield is a Democratic majority leader, and
there was a part of in Congress the entire time.
So to get Supreme Court appointments and the fact that
he got any legislation through was a miracle. The third
headwind he had, of course, was an adversarial press. There
were only three networks at the time, three newsweeklies and
(07:22):
basically two major dailies, The New York Times in the
Washington Post, all major negative media outlets. So can you
imagine entering the presidency with these massive headwinds against you
and still achieving what he achieved, balancing off the Soviet
Union against China, opening China, which was a rogue outlaws
(07:46):
state in nineteen sixty nine and nineteen seventy and seventy one,
having major achievements in legislative battles, desegregating the schools in
the South, getting Supreme Court appointments through despite opposition, and
eventually lowering like the eighteen year old vote making the
draft of voluntary and having getting welfare reform through, so
(08:10):
imagine new You can even lecture me on what it
would be like having a Congress being opposed to the
president the entire time.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
In our case, I think we Frankly wanted to get
stuff done and so we were able to work with Clinton,
and he concluded that his re election required him to
work with us. So we're in a different environment, I think,
than you were. But I'm curious when you think back
to that and you think about how really close the
three way race was in nineteen sixty eight, and then
(08:41):
you get to seventy two. Did you think all year
that you would in fact be able to beat mcgoverned
by the size margin you guys did, or was that
sort of a surprise.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
I'd say by mid October it became pretty clear that
McGovern was a hopeless candidate. We had so much going
for us and so much going against him. He was
such a hapless left winger, much like Frankly taking the
positions that Kamala Harris is taking today. He was handing
(09:12):
out money left and right. He was going to hand
out a thousand dollars, he said, he would call on
his knees to Hanoi to get peace, which was such
a stupid statement. He was basically a socialist before even
Bernie Sanders was a socialist, and he was unapologetic about
his left winging positions. Even as Nixon was trying to
(09:33):
solve the Warren Vietnam, My government was taking the worst
of silly positions on the Warren Vietnam. And of course
mc government had, unfortunately for him, made a big mistake
in putting Eagleton on his ticket. Tom Eagleton on his ticket. Well,
Eagleton had some emotional mental problems that had to get
(09:55):
him off the ticket and be replaced with Sergeant Schreiber.
In fact, it turned out that it was widely known
that the Eagleton had these issues before Montgomery even put
them on the ticket. So I think by mid October,
those of us who were politically involved, and I was
deeply involved on the political side of the campaign, we
certainly knew it was going to be a massive landslide.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
You come off of this huge victory, remarkable turnaround from
nineteen sixty eight and nineteen sixty then, in fact, I
mean a bigger victory than Eisenhower won and he was
a great war hero. And then all of a sudden
it starts to fall apart. When did it begin to
be obvious that Watergate was going to be more than
just a passing nuisance.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Probably when Kennedy managed to get that Senate selet Committee
set up. Kennedy was set on getting Nixon and taking
him out, and the press once the inauguration had taken place,
they weren't going to let up. The stories were continuing
to leak out, and there was no let up, and
(11:04):
Kennedy knew that the only way to get momentum going
on this was for the Congress to take over and
use the subpoena powers to extract more and more information
that they couldn't get through just political reporting from the newspapers.
People forget it was. Kennedy introduced the resolution for the
Senate and they gave it a fancy named Senate Select
(11:26):
Committee on Presidential Campaigns. Then they renamed the Senate Jadier Committee.
But you know, they never investigated any other presidential campaign
other than Nixon. They didn't investigate McGovern's or Muskies or
anyone else's. So that's when the momentum started to turn
seriously I'd say in the winter and early spring of
(11:47):
nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
And of course you also go through the crisis of
getting rid of Spiro Agnew and replacing a majority Ford.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Yeah, well that happened in October of seventy three. And
of course the next step was when la Richardson decided
to appoint a special prosecutor, and stupidly he appoints not
just any normal special prosecutor, He appoints Archibald Cox, who
was the opposition research director for Jack Kennedy's campaign against
(12:19):
Richard Nixon in nineteen sixty. I mean, how much number
can you get? The odds were building up against this
early on, and then Cox, five of his top people
he brings in were some of the top people in
Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department. The deck was stacked against Nixon
to begin with, and so that's when it started really
(12:40):
getting troublesome and serious. And by the way, Nixon cooperated,
He cooperated with the prosecutors, he cooperated with the Senate
Watergate Committee. Nobody resisted going up to these committees at all.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
What was it like in the White House after Nixon left?
And now you have Jerry Ford as the new president.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Well, for me, it was very troublesome. Maybe about ten
days after he resigned, I came out to Sant Clementi
to help the president out, who still had massive legal
problems and they were going after him so for back taxes.
They were subpoenaing him, they were trying to disbar him
in California and New York, and the press were still
(13:42):
after him, and the prosecutors still wanted to indict him.
But then when I returned, a lot of my colleagues
were still trying to cover their backsize and get jobs
with the White House. But Ford was scouring around. His
staff were scarring around for those who seem to have
cleaned the Nixon during the antime peachment battles. And I
(14:05):
had a prime target on my back since that was
one of those who fought the antime peachmot wars. So
it wasn't long before I returned from Sant Clementia that
my new boss came and gave me my walking papers
and said, look, I'm sorry, we're going to have to
let you go. But they did in a nice way.
I got another job and transition job before I came
(14:26):
out to Saint Commentia, to help President Nixon, then.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
You end up in San Clemente. Nixon had to be
in enormous pain, he had to have been depressed, and
yet within a few years he starts to turn the
whole thing around. What was that like to be there
with him, coming from the largest popular victory to being
out of office in a two year period.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
I try to tell people, and I described this in
the book. He was down in the sense that he
had lost everything that he had worked so hard for,
but mainly because he had to work his way back.
He was not depressed in the sense that you would
think he would be. In my first meetings with him,
I was probably more down than he was. I was
(15:12):
twenty nine years old. I thought my life was gone.
In our first meetings, he said, Ken, you can't look back.
We've got to look forward. You can't get down, and
we've got to move on. We've got to move forward.
We've got to move on. So he wanted to focus
on the future and not look back. He didn't relive Watergate.
(15:32):
He didn't try to relitigate the past. I won't say that.
He never talked about it. It bothered him that he
made some bad decisions along the way, that's not the question.
But the point is, and this is a real lesson
in life for anyone listening to this, is that Nixon
had a very forward looking attitude from the time he
(15:54):
got to San Clementi to remake his life. Part of
it was financial, but part of it was that he
felt like he was still young enough he can make
a difference. And of course he did make a difference.
You know, he wrote nine best selling books, He ended
up traveling the world. He ended up, of course, advising Reagan.
(16:14):
Once I joined the Reagan campaign. He ended up using
me as a conduit to advise Ronald Reagan later on
advised Bill Clinton. I'm sure he advised you when you
were a speaker. This is a person who had enormous resiliency,
and that's a big lesson in life.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
You know, he also had an extraordinary work ethic.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
That was amazing. He'd come in here very early in
the morning, and first thing I showed up, I'd get
buzzed and I'd come in and I'd have to brief
him on all the political whatever, even though we were
writing the memoirs or getting prepared for the David Frost interviews.
Whatever it was I'd be buzzed into make sure he
got briefed on all the political happenings of the day.
(16:58):
And we were going through the nineteen seventy six campaign
where Reagan was challenging Ford, so he wanted to know
everything that was going on, and I was his chief
political council during those days to advise him on what
was happening. He'd work very hard, then he'd go out
and play quick round of golf, and then a night
(17:19):
he'd had dinner, and then after dinner he'd go into
his study and he'd work late into the night, thinking, reading,
making notes, and then boom back the next morning, is
at work again. And he'd work on the weekends. I
worked on saturdays all during that time. I worked at
least a half a day on Saturdays, and he was
in every weekend working amazing work ethic.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Now, you say in your book that the conversations with
Nixon and san Clemente I'm quoting you now would prove
indispensable to the success of your relationship with Ronald Reagan.
Why was that? What's the bridge from sitting there San
Clemente to working with Reagan.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Well, it's the education I received the way he would
counsel Reagan remotely, even though he couldn't do it in person.
He would look at the mistakes he was making, or
look at the mistakes Ford was making later in the
seventy six campaign against Jimmy Carter, and he would point
out to me what amateur mistakes would making, or how
(18:25):
they could communicate better. When Nixon would have conversations about politics,
he would reach back into history, talking about something that
maybe Tom Dewey was doing at forty eight, and he
spent his story. But when he'd spent his story would
be about some piece of wisdom that they would pass
along during Nixon's career, and I would store that in
(18:47):
my head and either be a piece of strategy or
some art of communication. Another thing he did was he
would make observations about how Reagan communicated, how Reagan used illustrations,
or how Reagan noticed things he observed, how Reagan would
see things, and how Reagan would vividly describe things in
(19:11):
his communications. I sort of just cataloged all these, and
then when I joined up with Reagan, I had all
that stored in my head, this extraordinary background, and so
as I describe it to people that by the time
I got my PhD in the University of Reagan, it
was because I had a masters and bachelors at the
(19:32):
College of Richard Nixon.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Where was Nixon in the Ford Reagan primary fight in
seventy six.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
He was bifurcated, if I had to say, mainly, he
wanted it to be a spirited contest. He didn't want
it to be a runaway. He just enjoyed watching the
back and forth every day to have something to talk about.
The other thing that I think is important remember is
(20:00):
that the Ford people, and not necessarily a president for himself,
the Ford people were not treating him very well. There
were ways in which Ford's staff were passing along through
our staff back in Sant Clementy discourtesies that were not
proper for any former president. And I think that's because
(20:24):
they probably thought the pardon was arming. On the one hand,
they thought maybe the pardon was harming Ford. But on
the other hand, it's because they got struck by the
power all of a sudden, they were injected by the
elixir of power that the mantle that they took on.
And that's one of the ultimate sins in Washington is
(20:45):
what happens with people who come from a lower place
in politics, and all of a sudden they get into
the Oval Office or have access to the Oval Office,
like a lot of Ford's people did. They came from
the House of Representatives and then they get to the
Vice Pray. Next thing you know, they're in sitty next
to the President. And while in eighteen months they've come
(21:06):
from staff positions in the House, they have access to
signal core lines in the White House, and they're flying
on Air Force one and I'm Marine one and they're
hot shots, and now they can call the Saint Clemente
and treat a shabbily. And that was bothering Nixcent a lot.
So to some extent, he was troubled by some of that.
And so because of that, I think you liked the
(21:27):
idea of Reagan keeping it competitive and making sure that
the Ford people kept on their toes.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
Let's put it that way.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
You're in a unique position the two dominant Republicans from
nineteen sixty, I would argue to the rise of Trump
or Nixon and Reagan, and you worked with both of them.
What was Reagan like to work with in contrast with Nixon?
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Nixon was much more aggressively involved in the political conversation
of what was going on around him. Politically, he was
much more hands on and more engaged in that sense.
Reagan was not quite so engaged, but yet on the
(22:32):
communication side, Reagan was very much engaged in whatever speaking
role he had or whatever communication he had. I would
say this about Reagan. On the philosophical side, Reagan had
very strong views. He had very very very deep and
strong views about his economic views, about his philosophical views
(22:54):
about the role of government, about what he wanted to achieve,
about how he wanted to re strain it's growth, about
the free enterprise system. Those were shaped very strongly, partly
during his time heading the Union SAG, but mostly on
his time representing General Electric, traveling in the country, talking
(23:16):
to people and seeing the effects of the corrosiveness of
big government, and speaking on behalf of General Electric.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Well, I've always had this sense of Nixon is a
little more introverted, sort of the guy who had set
in the corner reading and writing. Reagan is more of
an extrovert. Was that your.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Experience, It's just the opposite. I have to say. Reagan
appears to be more extroverted, yet was more difficult to
get close to. He had very few close people on
the staff. He had a lot of people on the
staff that were meetings with them all the time, but
(23:55):
probably rarely knew who they were, what their names were.
He could converse, but he would be uncomfortable, and you
could census discomfort because he would start telling stories or
telling jokes. But with Nixon, people thought he was intro
and uncomfortable. But Nixon could start engaging instantly once you
got him going, he could engage you very easily. And
(24:18):
if you start asking him about politics or government or
foreign policy, he would engage you instantly. You probably had
meetings with him where he was very interested in meeting
with you and talking over policy.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
He was a major strategic advisor in how we became
a majority. I first started seeing him in the early
eighties I go to New York. Nixon was remarkable.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
He enjoyed having people around him. He was not a
recluse at all.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
You end up being deeply involved in Reagan's first inaugural,
which I was at and which was a remarkable speech
at a key turning point in American history. What was
that like to work on an inaugural address that was frightening.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Somebody assigned you to write the inaugural address, and you said,
what do I do now? I'd written a lot of
speeches in the campaign. But you look at all the
inaugural addresses written, and you start reading all the previous
inaugural addresses, like Lincoln's and some of the great ones,
and you try not to be overwhelmed. Asked my colleagues
(25:25):
for help. I got examples writing from several of them.
But I sat with Reagan and our first meeting he
had so much other things out of the mind. But
then after a couple of meetings, he had some ideas.
He wanted a draft to work with, and I think
he wanted to do most of the speech himself, so
(25:47):
it really ended up as a collaboration. I played more
of a minor role at the end of the day,
because once he had a draft that he could work with,
some language and rhetoric, and then he had a plane
ride back from Washington where he had some downtime on
his own, and he said he could work on it
(26:07):
by himself. So then he took my draft and he
edited a good part of it. It was daunting, to
say the least, to try to come up with pros
that would not change the world, but to try to
get things across. The main thing at the very end
was to give some concept of a new beginning, that
change was on its way, and to give people a sense,
(26:29):
especially a sense that after this years of dreariness and
Jimmy Carter, and of course that's where you came from,
whence you came, the dreariness of those Jersey he was
certainly a hapless president in every respect. I call him
the accidental President. At the inaugural, we wanted to leave
(26:50):
the message that this was really something new, that people
would get some sense of uplift, that this was after
all these years of inflamation and high interest rates America,
with the hostages in Iran, and with our defense where
we had planes that couldn't fly, there was no spare
parts we had, Our navy was way down, America was
(27:13):
disrespected across the world, and now America would be coming back.
And that's the message we wanted to leave and want
of freedom, prosperity and hope and that there was going
to be something new coming.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
The other speech you worked on that was very emotional
to me personally, was after Reagan had been shot. I
still remember it was just a remarkable moment when he
walks into the joint session and the place goes crazy
because he really could have died and here he was,
and then his recovery was pretty rapid, and you had
(27:47):
this sense of heroic figure. That's a very unique speech.
What was it like to work on that?
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Candidly, the intention was to exploit the opportunity. We knew
that be a lot of sympathy following his recovery. We
wanted to exploit the opportunity because we want to pass
the Economic Recovery Act. Tip O'Neil was an aggressive antagonist
(28:14):
to run o' reagan on policy matters, and he did
not want that economic package to pass at all. So
we didn't need to roll tip O'Neil very badly. And
so that speech was intended to move the Congress, and
so we had to come up with some language to
ensure that we use that opportunity of all the sympathy
(28:39):
to Reagan, Plus we had to make sure that the
rhetoric was strong enough to say, listen, we are at
a turning point in America where we've got to change.
We have this opportunity now we may never have this
opportunity again to change how our economic system works. We've
got to get control of our government, and one way
(29:01):
is to get control of our budget and to lower
our taxes to get our economy moving again. And this
was the opportunity to do it. Not just to do
it by taking advantage of the sympathy, but we thought,
let's have a little bit of humor to lighten everybody up,
and including that dour phase tip O'Neil sitting behind Reagan
(29:23):
in the background. And that's where I came up with
that letter from this young boy from New York and
had everybody laughing at the front end of it. So
I think it turned out to be a pretty stirring evening.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
No, it was remarkable, and I still remember how powerful
it was, how emotional it was for all of us.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
We got the blue dogs. We wanted the blue dogs.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
One of the amazing things that Bob Michael achieved as
the Republican minority leader was he was able to work
with conservative and moderate Democrats and roll Tip O'Neil again
and again on some very big issues, the biggest of
course being the tax cuts. But we had to get
about a third of the Democrats to come with us
(30:09):
to make sure we could pass things, and it was
a huge effort, and without Reagan's charisma and his ability
to reach the American people, we couldn't have done it.
You know, Ken, I want to thank you for joining me.
Your new book, Behind Closed Doors in the Room with
Reagan and Nixon is available now on Amazon and bookstores everywhere.
(30:31):
You were there, you were in the room. It's a
remarkable book. You've had a remarkable career. You are a
great patriot. I highly recommend your book to all of
our listeners, and I thank you for being with me today.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Thanks for having me, and I hope they'll go to
my website too, that's ww dot Reagan and Nixon dot com,
Reagan and Nixon dot com. There's a lot more information there.
Thanks for having me new.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Thank you to my guest, Ken Kachigiam. You can get
a link to buy his new book, Behind Closed Doors
in the Room with Reagan and Nixon on our show
page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by Gagish
three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Slump.
Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
(31:20):
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
at Gingris three sixty. If you've been enjoy Newtsworld, I
hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us
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can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
Newtsworld can sign up for my three free weekly columns
(31:42):
at Gangwishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter I'm nut Gingrich.
This is Newtsworld.
On this episode of the News World. In his new
book Behind Closed Doors in the Room with Reagan and Nixon,
Ken Kaschigion offers a compelling insider's account of his most
private moments with Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon during revolutionary
changes in our economy, politics, communications, foreign policy, and culture.
(00:31):
Behind Closed Doors is essential reading for anyone wanting to
know how Ronald Reagan shaped his crusading message of economic
growth through tax cuts and limited government. Here to discuss
his new book, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest,
Ken Katchigian. He was the chief speech writer and trusted
(00:52):
political advisor to Ronald Reagan and the go to council
for President Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan in campaigns
in a political crisis. He also served in Richard Nixon's
White House and with Nixon as he emerged from Watergate. Ken,
(01:20):
welcome and thank you for joining me on newts.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
World speaker being Rich's good to be with you, new
old friend.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
I was thinking earlier that we had really interacted over
and over again for gosh, it's on maybe forty years.
I guess right, How did you first get into politics?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Oh? My, you remember something called boy State, don't you Yes,
That's how I got started to got my mind going.
American legient sponsored something called Boyse State and got me
really interested in politics and high school and then college,
ran for office, and I met Nixon when he ran
(02:01):
for governor. I cornered him at one of his rallies
when I was in college, and then got his book
Six Crises. And that's when I met Reagan too. I
was student by the president at UCSB and introduced Reagan
when he came to campus. I cajoled him to come
and speak to campus. And then with my interest in
politics and my interest in Nixon, when I was at
(02:23):
Columbia University Law School and Nixon was starting to run
for president making his comeback. You remember well, back in
nineteen sixty seven, Nixon was not seen as a viable
candidate for president. The big gunners back in sixty seven
were George Romney, Nelson, Rockfeller, and that rising star Ronald Reagan.
(02:49):
And Nixon was still seen as sort of a potential
has been. And I saw this article in the New
York Times that Nixon had a new group around him
fellas Pat Buchanan Ray Price, editorial writer out of New
York and Wright Chapin, a youngster out of California who
(03:11):
was helping him. And so Nixon was surrounding himself with
new people, and I thought, well, maybe this is an opportunity.
So I wrote a letter and said I'd like to volunteer,
and they brought me on just as a young fellow
out of Columbia law Pat Buchanan interviewed me and allowed
me to answer correspondence, and that led to Marty Anderson
(03:32):
offering me a job in the summer after my second
year of law school. In the campaign of eighty eight,
Alan Greenspan was my boss, if you can imagine, head
of the domestic policy group in the sixty eight campaign.
And after the campaign, one of my mentors in that
campaign was another giant in American politics, Bryce Harlowe. I
(03:54):
don't know if he ever got to meet Bryce. Bryce
was another giant. And once I finished law school, I
came back to Washington and finally got a job in
the Knicks and White House. So that's how it all started.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
You get out of Columbia, ended up going to Washington.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Right and spent four and a half years in the
Nixon White House, and of course ended up with a
disappointment President Nixon's resignation, which I opposed. I was, I
think the loan holdout amongst all the staff right at
the final days of August fifty years ago as a
twenty nine year old, And I wrote about this as
(04:33):
an op ed a couple of weeks ago in the
Wall Street Journal, saying that I don't believe he should
have resigned, and he should have forced the hand of
our Republican friends in Congress and the Democrats to at
least take our case to the Congress and force a
trial in the Senate, and at least give us an
opportunity to mate for the President to stand his ground.
(04:55):
And of course knew if we knew then what we
know now of the canery and the unethical conduct of
Judge Sirika and the special prosecutors, and if we had
at least the modicum of support from a conservative press
that we might have had, then we could have made
our case and he could have continued as presidency.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Before we get to Watergate, he barely wins election in
sixty eight and then comes back and wins the largest
popular vote margin in modern times. What was it like
to work for Nixon, and to be in the Nixon
White House during that pre Watergate period, it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Fun all the time. I mean, it was the high adventure.
Of course I was a young man, but we were
facing headwinds the entire time. If you have to look
at it. When he entered the presidency, he had three
massive headwinds. He had inherited the Vietnam War from not
just Lennon Johnson, but Jack Kennedy. We have to remember
(05:56):
that Jack Kennedy begin that adventure with the Eastern elite establishment,
defense and State departments, and then Linda Johnson escalated it.
So when Nixon came in, there were five hundred and
forty thousand troops in Vietnam, five hundred men being killed
every month, with thousands of additional casualties. So he had
(06:16):
that headwind going for him. And then with immediately national
protests going on, the Democrats who had supported Kennedy and
Johnson in this adventure began ducking and running and then
leaving mix and trying to de escalate and get away
from this. Then the other headwind was the fact that
(06:37):
you can imagine what the problem was. Having served in
Congress and a speaker, he had a Democratic House and
Democratic Senate opposing him the entire time of his presidency.
So with an adversary Congress in place, it was monumentally
difficult for him to pass any legislation. He had. Carl
(06:59):
Albert Speaker Mike Mansfield is a Democratic majority leader, and
there was a part of in Congress the entire time.
So to get Supreme Court appointments and the fact that
he got any legislation through was a miracle. The third
headwind he had, of course, was an adversarial press. There
were only three networks at the time, three newsweeklies and
(07:22):
basically two major dailies, The New York Times in the
Washington Post, all major negative media outlets. So can you
imagine entering the presidency with these massive headwinds against you
and still achieving what he achieved, balancing off the Soviet
Union against China, opening China, which was a rogue outlaws
(07:46):
state in nineteen sixty nine and nineteen seventy and seventy one,
having major achievements in legislative battles, desegregating the schools in
the South, getting Supreme Court appointments through despite opposition, and
eventually lowering like the eighteen year old vote making the
draft of voluntary and having getting welfare reform through, so
(08:10):
imagine new You can even lecture me on what it
would be like having a Congress being opposed to the
president the entire time.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
In our case, I think we Frankly wanted to get
stuff done and so we were able to work with Clinton,
and he concluded that his re election required him to
work with us. So we're in a different environment, I think,
than you were. But I'm curious when you think back
to that and you think about how really close the
three way race was in nineteen sixty eight, and then
(08:41):
you get to seventy two. Did you think all year
that you would in fact be able to beat mcgoverned
by the size margin you guys did, or was that
sort of a surprise.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
I'd say by mid October it became pretty clear that
McGovern was a hopeless candidate. We had so much going
for us and so much going against him. He was
such a hapless left winger, much like Frankly taking the
positions that Kamala Harris is taking today. He was handing
(09:12):
out money left and right. He was going to hand
out a thousand dollars, he said, he would call on
his knees to Hanoi to get peace, which was such
a stupid statement. He was basically a socialist before even
Bernie Sanders was a socialist, and he was unapologetic about
his left winging positions. Even as Nixon was trying to
(09:33):
solve the Warren Vietnam, My government was taking the worst
of silly positions on the Warren Vietnam. And of course
mc government had, unfortunately for him, made a big mistake
in putting Eagleton on his ticket. Tom Eagleton on his ticket. Well,
Eagleton had some emotional mental problems that had to get
(09:55):
him off the ticket and be replaced with Sergeant Schreiber.
In fact, it turned out that it was widely known
that the Eagleton had these issues before Montgomery even put
them on the ticket. So I think by mid October,
those of us who were politically involved, and I was
deeply involved on the political side of the campaign, we
certainly knew it was going to be a massive landslide.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
You come off of this huge victory, remarkable turnaround from
nineteen sixty eight and nineteen sixty then, in fact, I
mean a bigger victory than Eisenhower won and he was
a great war hero. And then all of a sudden
it starts to fall apart. When did it begin to
be obvious that Watergate was going to be more than
just a passing nuisance.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Probably when Kennedy managed to get that Senate selet Committee
set up. Kennedy was set on getting Nixon and taking
him out, and the press once the inauguration had taken place,
they weren't going to let up. The stories were continuing
to leak out, and there was no let up, and
(11:04):
Kennedy knew that the only way to get momentum going
on this was for the Congress to take over and
use the subpoena powers to extract more and more information
that they couldn't get through just political reporting from the newspapers.
People forget it was. Kennedy introduced the resolution for the
Senate and they gave it a fancy named Senate Select
(11:26):
Committee on Presidential Campaigns. Then they renamed the Senate Jadier Committee.
But you know, they never investigated any other presidential campaign
other than Nixon. They didn't investigate McGovern's or Muskies or
anyone else's. So that's when the momentum started to turn
seriously I'd say in the winter and early spring of
(11:47):
nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
And of course you also go through the crisis of
getting rid of Spiro Agnew and replacing a majority Ford.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Yeah, well that happened in October of seventy three. And
of course the next step was when la Richardson decided
to appoint a special prosecutor, and stupidly he appoints not
just any normal special prosecutor, He appoints Archibald Cox, who
was the opposition research director for Jack Kennedy's campaign against
(12:19):
Richard Nixon in nineteen sixty. I mean, how much number
can you get? The odds were building up against this
early on, and then Cox, five of his top people
he brings in were some of the top people in
Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department. The deck was stacked against Nixon
to begin with, and so that's when it started really
(12:40):
getting troublesome and serious. And by the way, Nixon cooperated,
He cooperated with the prosecutors, he cooperated with the Senate
Watergate Committee. Nobody resisted going up to these committees at all.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
What was it like in the White House after Nixon left?
And now you have Jerry Ford as the new president.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Well, for me, it was very troublesome. Maybe about ten
days after he resigned, I came out to Sant Clementi
to help the president out, who still had massive legal
problems and they were going after him so for back taxes.
They were subpoenaing him, they were trying to disbar him
in California and New York, and the press were still
(13:42):
after him, and the prosecutors still wanted to indict him.
But then when I returned, a lot of my colleagues
were still trying to cover their backsize and get jobs
with the White House. But Ford was scouring around. His
staff were scarring around for those who seem to have
cleaned the Nixon during the antime peachment battles. And I
(14:05):
had a prime target on my back since that was
one of those who fought the antime peachmot wars. So
it wasn't long before I returned from Sant Clementia that
my new boss came and gave me my walking papers
and said, look, I'm sorry, we're going to have to
let you go. But they did in a nice way.
I got another job and transition job before I came
(14:26):
out to Saint Commentia, to help President Nixon, then.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
You end up in San Clemente. Nixon had to be
in enormous pain, he had to have been depressed, and
yet within a few years he starts to turn the
whole thing around. What was that like to be there
with him, coming from the largest popular victory to being
out of office in a two year period.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
I try to tell people, and I described this in
the book. He was down in the sense that he
had lost everything that he had worked so hard for,
but mainly because he had to work his way back.
He was not depressed in the sense that you would
think he would be. In my first meetings with him,
I was probably more down than he was. I was
(15:12):
twenty nine years old. I thought my life was gone.
In our first meetings, he said, Ken, you can't look back.
We've got to look forward. You can't get down, and
we've got to move on. We've got to move forward.
We've got to move on. So he wanted to focus
on the future and not look back. He didn't relive Watergate.
(15:32):
He didn't try to relitigate the past. I won't say that.
He never talked about it. It bothered him that he
made some bad decisions along the way, that's not the question.
But the point is, and this is a real lesson
in life for anyone listening to this, is that Nixon
had a very forward looking attitude from the time he
(15:54):
got to San Clementi to remake his life. Part of
it was financial, but part of it was that he
felt like he was still young enough he can make
a difference. And of course he did make a difference.
You know, he wrote nine best selling books, He ended
up traveling the world. He ended up, of course, advising Reagan.
(16:14):
Once I joined the Reagan campaign. He ended up using
me as a conduit to advise Ronald Reagan later on
advised Bill Clinton. I'm sure he advised you when you
were a speaker. This is a person who had enormous resiliency,
and that's a big lesson in life.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
You know, he also had an extraordinary work ethic.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
That was amazing. He'd come in here very early in
the morning, and first thing I showed up, I'd get
buzzed and I'd come in and I'd have to brief
him on all the political whatever, even though we were
writing the memoirs or getting prepared for the David Frost interviews.
Whatever it was I'd be buzzed into make sure he
got briefed on all the political happenings of the day.
(16:58):
And we were going through the nineteen seventy six campaign
where Reagan was challenging Ford, so he wanted to know
everything that was going on, and I was his chief
political council during those days to advise him on what
was happening. He'd work very hard, then he'd go out
and play quick round of golf, and then a night
(17:19):
he'd had dinner, and then after dinner he'd go into
his study and he'd work late into the night, thinking, reading,
making notes, and then boom back the next morning, is
at work again. And he'd work on the weekends. I
worked on saturdays all during that time. I worked at
least a half a day on Saturdays, and he was
in every weekend working amazing work ethic.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Now, you say in your book that the conversations with
Nixon and san Clemente I'm quoting you now would prove
indispensable to the success of your relationship with Ronald Reagan.
Why was that? What's the bridge from sitting there San
Clemente to working with Reagan.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Well, it's the education I received the way he would
counsel Reagan remotely, even though he couldn't do it in person.
He would look at the mistakes he was making, or
look at the mistakes Ford was making later in the
seventy six campaign against Jimmy Carter, and he would point
out to me what amateur mistakes would making, or how
(18:25):
they could communicate better. When Nixon would have conversations about politics,
he would reach back into history, talking about something that
maybe Tom Dewey was doing at forty eight, and he
spent his story. But when he'd spent his story would
be about some piece of wisdom that they would pass
along during Nixon's career, and I would store that in
(18:47):
my head and either be a piece of strategy or
some art of communication. Another thing he did was he
would make observations about how Reagan communicated, how Reagan used illustrations,
or how Reagan noticed things he observed, how Reagan would
see things, and how Reagan would vividly describe things in
(19:11):
his communications. I sort of just cataloged all these, and
then when I joined up with Reagan, I had all
that stored in my head, this extraordinary background, and so
as I describe it to people that by the time
I got my PhD in the University of Reagan, it
was because I had a masters and bachelors at the
(19:32):
College of Richard Nixon.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Where was Nixon in the Ford Reagan primary fight in
seventy six.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
He was bifurcated, if I had to say, mainly, he
wanted it to be a spirited contest. He didn't want
it to be a runaway. He just enjoyed watching the
back and forth every day to have something to talk about.
The other thing that I think is important remember is
(20:00):
that the Ford people, and not necessarily a president for himself,
the Ford people were not treating him very well. There
were ways in which Ford's staff were passing along through
our staff back in Sant Clementy discourtesies that were not
proper for any former president. And I think that's because
(20:24):
they probably thought the pardon was arming. On the one hand,
they thought maybe the pardon was harming Ford. But on
the other hand, it's because they got struck by the
power all of a sudden, they were injected by the
elixir of power that the mantle that they took on.
And that's one of the ultimate sins in Washington is
(20:45):
what happens with people who come from a lower place
in politics, and all of a sudden they get into
the Oval Office or have access to the Oval Office,
like a lot of Ford's people did. They came from
the House of Representatives and then they get to the
Vice Pray. Next thing you know, they're in sitty next
to the President. And while in eighteen months they've come
(21:06):
from staff positions in the House, they have access to
signal core lines in the White House, and they're flying
on Air Force one and I'm Marine one and they're
hot shots, and now they can call the Saint Clemente
and treat a shabbily. And that was bothering Nixcent a lot.
So to some extent, he was troubled by some of that.
And so because of that, I think you liked the
(21:27):
idea of Reagan keeping it competitive and making sure that
the Ford people kept on their toes.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
Let's put it that way.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
You're in a unique position the two dominant Republicans from
nineteen sixty, I would argue to the rise of Trump
or Nixon and Reagan, and you worked with both of them.
What was Reagan like to work with in contrast with Nixon?
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Nixon was much more aggressively involved in the political conversation
of what was going on around him. Politically, he was
much more hands on and more engaged in that sense.
Reagan was not quite so engaged, but yet on the
(22:32):
communication side, Reagan was very much engaged in whatever speaking
role he had or whatever communication he had. I would
say this about Reagan. On the philosophical side, Reagan had
very strong views. He had very very very deep and
strong views about his economic views, about his philosophical views
(22:54):
about the role of government, about what he wanted to achieve,
about how he wanted to re strain it's growth, about
the free enterprise system. Those were shaped very strongly, partly
during his time heading the Union SAG, but mostly on
his time representing General Electric, traveling in the country, talking
(23:16):
to people and seeing the effects of the corrosiveness of
big government, and speaking on behalf of General Electric.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Well, I've always had this sense of Nixon is a
little more introverted, sort of the guy who had set
in the corner reading and writing. Reagan is more of
an extrovert. Was that your.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Experience, It's just the opposite. I have to say. Reagan
appears to be more extroverted, yet was more difficult to
get close to. He had very few close people on
the staff. He had a lot of people on the
staff that were meetings with them all the time, but
(23:55):
probably rarely knew who they were, what their names were.
He could converse, but he would be uncomfortable, and you
could census discomfort because he would start telling stories or
telling jokes. But with Nixon, people thought he was intro
and uncomfortable. But Nixon could start engaging instantly once you
got him going, he could engage you very easily. And
(24:18):
if you start asking him about politics or government or
foreign policy, he would engage you instantly. You probably had
meetings with him where he was very interested in meeting
with you and talking over policy.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
He was a major strategic advisor in how we became
a majority. I first started seeing him in the early
eighties I go to New York. Nixon was remarkable.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
He enjoyed having people around him. He was not a
recluse at all.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
You end up being deeply involved in Reagan's first inaugural,
which I was at and which was a remarkable speech
at a key turning point in American history. What was
that like to work on an inaugural address that was frightening.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Somebody assigned you to write the inaugural address, and you said,
what do I do now? I'd written a lot of
speeches in the campaign. But you look at all the
inaugural addresses written, and you start reading all the previous
inaugural addresses, like Lincoln's and some of the great ones,
and you try not to be overwhelmed. Asked my colleagues
(25:25):
for help. I got examples writing from several of them.
But I sat with Reagan and our first meeting he
had so much other things out of the mind. But
then after a couple of meetings, he had some ideas.
He wanted a draft to work with, and I think
he wanted to do most of the speech himself, so
(25:47):
it really ended up as a collaboration. I played more
of a minor role at the end of the day,
because once he had a draft that he could work with,
some language and rhetoric, and then he had a plane
ride back from Washington where he had some downtime on
his own, and he said he could work on it
(26:07):
by himself. So then he took my draft and he
edited a good part of it. It was daunting, to
say the least, to try to come up with pros
that would not change the world, but to try to
get things across. The main thing at the very end
was to give some concept of a new beginning, that
change was on its way, and to give people a sense,
(26:29):
especially a sense that after this years of dreariness and
Jimmy Carter, and of course that's where you came from,
whence you came, the dreariness of those Jersey he was
certainly a hapless president in every respect. I call him
the accidental President. At the inaugural, we wanted to leave
(26:50):
the message that this was really something new, that people
would get some sense of uplift, that this was after
all these years of inflamation and high interest rates America,
with the hostages in Iran, and with our defense where
we had planes that couldn't fly, there was no spare
parts we had, Our navy was way down, America was
(27:13):
disrespected across the world, and now America would be coming back.
And that's the message we wanted to leave and want
of freedom, prosperity and hope and that there was going
to be something new coming.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
The other speech you worked on that was very emotional
to me personally, was after Reagan had been shot. I
still remember it was just a remarkable moment when he
walks into the joint session and the place goes crazy
because he really could have died and here he was,
and then his recovery was pretty rapid, and you had
(27:47):
this sense of heroic figure. That's a very unique speech.
What was it like to work on that?
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Candidly, the intention was to exploit the opportunity. We knew
that be a lot of sympathy following his recovery. We
wanted to exploit the opportunity because we want to pass
the Economic Recovery Act. Tip O'Neil was an aggressive antagonist
(28:14):
to run o' reagan on policy matters, and he did
not want that economic package to pass at all. So
we didn't need to roll tip O'Neil very badly. And
so that speech was intended to move the Congress, and
so we had to come up with some language to
ensure that we use that opportunity of all the sympathy
(28:39):
to Reagan, Plus we had to make sure that the
rhetoric was strong enough to say, listen, we are at
a turning point in America where we've got to change.
We have this opportunity now we may never have this
opportunity again to change how our economic system works. We've
got to get control of our government, and one way
(29:01):
is to get control of our budget and to lower
our taxes to get our economy moving again. And this
was the opportunity to do it. Not just to do
it by taking advantage of the sympathy, but we thought,
let's have a little bit of humor to lighten everybody up,
and including that dour phase tip O'Neil sitting behind Reagan
(29:23):
in the background. And that's where I came up with
that letter from this young boy from New York and
had everybody laughing at the front end of it. So
I think it turned out to be a pretty stirring evening.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
No, it was remarkable, and I still remember how powerful
it was, how emotional it was for all of us.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
We got the blue dogs. We wanted the blue dogs.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
One of the amazing things that Bob Michael achieved as
the Republican minority leader was he was able to work
with conservative and moderate Democrats and roll Tip O'Neil again
and again on some very big issues, the biggest of
course being the tax cuts. But we had to get
about a third of the Democrats to come with us
(30:09):
to make sure we could pass things, and it was
a huge effort, and without Reagan's charisma and his ability
to reach the American people, we couldn't have done it.
You know, Ken, I want to thank you for joining me.
Your new book, Behind Closed Doors in the Room with
Reagan and Nixon is available now on Amazon and bookstores everywhere.
(30:31):
You were there, you were in the room. It's a
remarkable book. You've had a remarkable career. You are a
great patriot. I highly recommend your book to all of
our listeners, and I thank you for being with me today.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Thanks for having me, and I hope they'll go to
my website too, that's ww dot Reagan and Nixon dot com,
Reagan and Nixon dot com. There's a lot more information there.
Thanks for having me new.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Thank you to my guest, Ken Kachigiam. You can get
a link to buy his new book, Behind Closed Doors
in the Room with Reagan and Nixon on our show
page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by Gagish
three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Slump.
Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
(31:20):
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
at Gingris three sixty. If you've been enjoy Newtsworld, I
hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us
with five stars and give us a review so others
can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
Newtsworld can sign up for my three free weekly columns
(31:42):
at Gangwishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter I'm nut Gingrich.
This is Newtsworld.
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