Episode 794: Best of Newt’s World: Ben Stein

Newt talks with writer, actor, economist, and lawyer, Ben Stein about his new book, “THE PEACEMAKER Nixon: The Man, President, and My Friend.”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of Newts World. It has been almost
fifty years since President Richard Milhouse Nixon resigned from the presidency.
Nixon normalized US relations with China, and by so doing,
he encircled the Soviets and made certain they knew they
were on the losing side of the Cold War. Nixon
signed the first major strategic arms limitation treaty with the Soviets,

(00:25):
which involved real cuts done out of mutual respect and fear.
Nixon made peace possible in them at least, and saved
the children of Israel by assuring that Israel would not
be defeated in the om Kipper War. Nixon ended the
war in Vietnam and brought home the prisoners. Nixon said
he would leave us a generation of peace, and he did.
My guest today was a speech writer and friend of

(00:48):
President Nixon and says he misses him every day, and
he's joining me to discuss his new book, The Peacemaker. Nixon,
the man President, and my friend. I'm really pleased to
welcome my guest, Ben Stein. He is a writer, actor, economist,
and lawyer. He writes the Dreams column for Newsmacks magazine.

(01:08):
Ben Stein's Diary for the American spectator and is the
host of the World according to ben Stein Podcast. His
comedic role as the economics teacher in the film Ferris
Buehler's Day Off has been ranked as one of the
fifty most famous scenes in movie history. He was the
co host of the Emmy Award winning win ben Stein's Money.
He's also the New York Times best selling author or

(01:30):
co author of over thirty books. Ben Welcome, and thank
you for joining me on Newtsworld.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
You're very kind, Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
When did you first hear about Richard Nixon and who
did he first sort of enter your life?

Speaker 2 (01:57):
I would say when I was about seven years old,
and I lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, right outside Washington,
d C. We lived there because even though my father
had quite a good job, extremely good job, Jews were
not allowed to live in the nicest neighborhoods in Washington,
like Spring Valley or Wesley Heights. And some nice developers
had taken some raw land out in Maryland and built

(02:19):
them in developments that were by no means fancy, but
perfectly adequate. And we lived there, and we were perfectly
happy living there. And I might add, every single day
and I woke up and thought, holy smoke, Benji, you
are in America. It was a great, great day, Benji,
You're in America. You're not in Germany, or not in Poland,

(02:41):
or not in Russia. You are in America. And it's
all gravy after that.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
And I noticed, also because it was described brilliantly that
you had a brand new Magnavox TV. I remember those
those really big wooden cabinets.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yes, blond wood.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
But you ended up watching the House on American Activities
Committee on television at a young age.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes yes, with my mother and
father and my mother. I'm positive that you must have
met her at some function in Washington. Mildred's sign. She
was an extremely militant anti communist. She is probably one
of the few Jews in Montgomery County who was a
fan of Joe McCarthy. And she brought me up on

(03:25):
that that anti communism was mother's milk to me, Sir,
and I happened to live next door to our family,
who were well Communists, and they had a different view
of the world from mine, but they were still very
good neighbors. Their child turned out to be Carl Bernstein,
a quite famous so called journalist, and I loved him
a lot, loved his parents a lot. But you and

(03:48):
I were on different sides of the fence, but we
were still good friends. And that's the way America was
in those days. You could be wildly on the other
side of the fence from the other guy or gal,
and you can still be friends. That's not true anymore.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
This is kind of amazing. I did not know this story.
But you end up meeting Richard Nixon when he is
vice presidential candidate. How old are you at that point?

Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yes, I was probably seven years old, and he was
campaigning a genuine whistle stop tour. I don't think they
have whistle stop tours anymore, but they used to have
whistle stop tors. My mother took me up to Silver Spring,
Maryland b and O Railroad station and I heard mister
Nixon give a speech. I thought he did a great job.
My neighbors, all kind of left wingers, thought it was terrible.

(04:32):
They couldn't get over the fact that I had gone there,
that my mother had lifted me up on her shoulders
to see and hear mister Nixon. But my parents loved him.
They started out loving him. They never stopped loving him.
My parents had been Republicans since basically since there was
a Republican party. That was very, very blessed to have
parents who are parents and other ancestors who were born

(04:55):
in the United States of America, and they were all Republican,
mostly because Republicans were against alcohol, and our family has
always been against alcohol. So there you are.

Speaker 1 (05:05):
That's wild. So we leaped forward. And after eight years
as vice president, Nixon is running for president and you
meet him again.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yes, I met him. He actually met him several times,
but this time I met him when he was I
think I met him several times in that campaign, but
one of them was at Montgomery Blair High School in
Silver Spring and he was giving another whistle stop to her,
and I thought he gave a great, wonderful speech. And
I still remember, although I think I didn't remember time
to incod in my book, mister Nixon gave us such

(05:35):
a good speech that people were demonstrating outside against him.
But that was just a sign what a good speech
he gave. And I remember thinking myself, Wow, I wish
I were old enough to vote for him, but I wasn't,
and I didn't vote for him, but I liked him
well enough to vote for him when I was younger
than ten years old. I just loved him. He just

(05:56):
seemed like my kind of guy. He loved America, he
loved the Republican Party, and the Republican Party, as far
as I'm concerned, is the main instrument of loving democracy
and loving law in the United States of America. And
I don't regret one second of loving Nixon. I don't
regret it at all. I mean not at all. And

(06:17):
it's even my wife, the world's finest human being. Even she,
for a time when we were at Yale, did not
love Nixon, but I always did. Well.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
You know, it's interesting you point out the one he's
running for election in nineteen sixty. He's talking about something
which the modern media has mostly covered up, and that
is that the initial steps on ending segregation were being
taken by Republicans, and in fact it was Democrats who
were segregationists, and Democrats who had for a hundred years

(06:46):
been oppressing blacks, and that the whole story has been
turned on its head by the modern media.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
Exactly right. And if I may mention this, really really
really ver boten subject. Delaware was a reliably segregation state,
and mister Biden was a reliable voice for segregation. He
was a reliable voice against bussing, and we just thought
he was not a nicer guy where black people were concerned,

(07:14):
and we were right about that, And of course now
he's their best friend. And I don't know how that
got also turned around. But it's interesting. The Republican Party
was founded founded to end the depression of black people
in the United States of America, and that's what has
been ever since. And somehow the media has gotten in
there and swirled everything around and gotten confused. So now

(07:38):
the Republicans are the oppressors of black people, which is
just nonsense. Republicans have never been the oppressors of black people. Democrats.
I don't think the Democrats are necessarily now, although to
the extent that they enable people to have feelings of
racial animals, I think there they have done extremely bad
things and doesn't make me love them.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
You'd already gotten to meet Nixon and then he of
course loses in sixty by a very narrow margin. It
was my first campaign as a volunteer.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
I would say a negative margin, complaied Mickerburn.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
It was one of the longest nights of my life
because I had worked very hard. That's the first time
I'd really been active as a volunteer. An election night,
listening to Illinois slip away and Texas slip away. It
was just amazing.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
Yeah, it was amazing because, of course I think, and
of course it wasn't there I was watching it. It
was amazing because it was so clearly corrupt. It was
so clear that mister Kennedy, as very rich father, had
appeared on the scene with boxes full of money. It
gives the people who would make sure that the count
in their area came out pro Democrat. And so mister

(08:46):
Nixon lost by a very narrow margin. Had it been
today's world, I imagine you would have gone to litigation.
But it was not the way things were done in
those days, and mister Nixon did not want to tear
the party apart, especially when we were a fit seeing
a long decade turned out to him, very very long
decade of resistance to so we hat Bolshevism and the

(09:07):
Cold War horrors of machinations of Communism. We wanted America
to re united, even if it was united under a mistake.
And by the way, I don't think Kennedy was a
terrible present. Certainly not pro Communists, no doubt about that
in my mind. But mister Nixon was a real patriot.
He sacrificed his career to keep America united, and boy

(09:29):
did he do a good job. But then the Democrats
and the media undid it and turned everything to a
swirling mass of garbage and lies. And by the way, sure,
letter speaker, I like calling you that. It's amazing. It's
been fifty years roughly a little more actually, since the
Watergate breaking. I still don't understand what it is that

(09:50):
the Watergate burglars was supposed to have done. I still
don't understand what mister Nixon's crimes and misdemeanors were that
got him thrown out of office. I still don't understand,
and I was pretty darn close to it all. I
don't understand what he did wrong.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
Before we get that far down the road when he
comes back having lost and then lost the governorship of California.
He only comes back in sixty eight, wins the nomination,
and was always remarkably popular with the party base. Your
dad ends up through his ties to Milton Friedman, writing
economics material for the campaign and then ends up working

(10:28):
with the Nixon administration. But apparently your dad actually turned
to you and asked whether or not he ought to
be actively involved in the Nixon campaign given everything else
that had gone on, and you were adamantly in favor.

Speaker 2 (10:41):
Adamantly. I mean, I remember my father saying, well, I mean,
he's involved with this guy, Murray Chattner, and he does
not have the best reputation. And I don't know, do
I want to be involved with a guy who was
involved with Murray Schattner. And I said, sir, he's our guy.
He's our guy. I mean, you may not have all
perfect friends, but I don't think anybody's running against is

(11:01):
going to have all perfect prints. Bear in mind, mister speaker,
I loved Hubert Humphrey. He was a great, great man
and a kind of man you don't see in the
Democrat Party anymore. A thorough progressive in the sense that
he really wanted full civil rights for African Americans and
other people of color. But he was not anti American.

(11:22):
He did not slap America in the face. He really
believed in America. He was a kind of person that
you would be proud of. A little tiny note about
Hubert Humphrey. There very few of us, i'm sure, who
are involved in this event right now that we're doing,
who know that Hubert Humphrey from Minnesota was one of
the only senators who owned a home in what was

(11:43):
not a restricted neighborhood. Of restricted neighbors in Washington in
those days were a standard upper class neighborhood which did
not admit Jews, and mister Humphrey purposely chose to live
on the street in Chevy Chase. It was not a
particularly fancy street at all, and they chose to live
there because it was not segregated against Huser Blacks. No.

Speaker 1 (12:04):
I think comfort in that sense lived out his beliefs.
I think he was a very sincere person.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
He was a genuinely great man. Genuinely great man.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
But in this period, you're a student of Yale, but
your dad invites you to a prayer service at the
White House, I mean, what was that like?

Speaker 2 (12:20):
It was great? It was great. I mean, first of all,
I had and still have an incredibly beautiful, charming, friendly
wife with a winning smile, as one might say, so
I was very proud to be there. I had been
to a number of Christian services before, because my best
friend as a child was a fellow who's prominent in
Montgomery County politics, in David Skull, and this had been

(12:42):
to many Christian services. Didn't frighten me at all, and
I went to the service. I forget who I heard speak,
but I think it might have been his Majesty, one
might say, at the top of the Christian pyramid, possibly
Billy Graham himself. I'm not sure. I do remember that
singing was George Beverly Sha, a great pay singer of gospel. Anyway,

(13:05):
as we were leaving, mister Nixon was shaking hands with
his guests. The service had been held in the east
rim of the White House. One of his guests was
an incredibly beautiful, astoundingly beautiful woman I could tell roughly
my age, and that was his daughter, Julian, And she
smiled at me. She was very friendly to me. She's
told me that she understood from her father that I

(13:26):
was a great fan of dogs. She had several dogs.
What I want sometime to join her and take the
dogs for a walk out on the back lawn of
the White House. Not I said, yes, you've got anything
you want, how high? And I just she just won
my heart over in that instant, and I've never except

(13:48):
for my wife. It's a saint, a living, breathing saint.
I've never met a woman that I admired more than
Julia Eis now. She's just brilliant, loyal, time forgiving. If
you had to draw a picture of the perfect Christian,
it would be Julie Nixon Eisner.

Speaker 1 (14:07):
That's quite a tribute.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
I love her. I love her.

Speaker 1 (14:26):
You end up coming out of law school, you know,
and then you end up working in the Knicks administration.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
Yes, I did well. I wound up working two places
I worked. Wound up working in the so called War
on Poverty, which was the part I was in. Was
headed by a guy named Terry Lenzner who became a
kind of controversial figure. But I also worked for a
man at the White House named Bob Brown, who was
in charge of monitoring progress in minority affairs, and it
was another wonderful guy, and I worked on collecting data

(14:56):
about how much progress did Nicks administration make dec education
and other efforts to create a better life for African Americans.
I'm extremely happy I had the opportunity to do that.
We learned a lot about how much progress the Nicks
administration had made in the desegregating schools place of work.

(15:18):
His progress was simply phenomenal, and nobody ever talked about
it to this day, You, sir, are never going to
have another person on your show. We'll talk about it
the way I will.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
You were really inside in that sense.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
I was inside. I like to think that in a
small way, I was inside their family. The first time
I ever met Missus Nickson enough to have a conversation
with her, that is to say, Julie's mother, who was
at a birthday party for Julie down at Jack and
Helen Brown's house in Palace, Verdis. It was for Julie's birthday.
Missus Brown said to me, man, Julie has been talking

(15:52):
so much about you, it makes me want to throw up.
That's a very very good sense of you, remember, by Julie.
Very good sense of you were by Missus Dixon, and
I just felt wonderful about it. But I will say that,
however much animust there was against mister Nixon at that time,
it's nothing compared to the animus against the Republican Party

(16:12):
and against conservatives generally in America right now.

Speaker 1 (16:16):
In that sense, It really was a very, very different era.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Very different are the atred viciousness of the agent was
just off the map. I can remember when I got
out of the White House and I wanted to write
something about my experiences there. There are plenty of people,
lots and lots of people who wanted to publish the book.
My agent was a very fine agent. I'm sure you
know him too, since you to know everybody, and I

(16:41):
think you know everybody. His name, as Dick was and
is David Oaps. He said, everybody would like to buy
this book. I got so busy working for Bob Bartley
and I didn't have time to do it. But now
I think I would have a much harder time doing it.
But then there was a much freer press than there
is now.

Speaker 1 (16:58):
You're working really at the heart of the White House.
You're working with all of the key players in that period.
I mean, that was really quite a tribute to you
that so many of these folks were willing to rely
on you. That really one of the highest about as
high level as you could get, and you end up
being brought in to be a speech writer.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
Yes, and I was extremely extremely grateful for that opportunity
and I just loved it. I can't tell you how
much I loved working at the White House, but sure,
mister speaker. Bear in mind, as I mentioned before, my
father at that time was chairman of the President's Council
of Economic Advisors, and he worked two stories above me
in the Executive Office Building, and I could go up

(17:39):
and see him anytime I wanted, and I could have
lunch with him almost any day I wanted. And very
few young people get to have, well, fairly young people
get to have lunch with their father every day or
almost every day. That was an astounding, astounding gift from
God that I could have lunch with my father just about.

(18:00):
I mean, that's it. If very few people get to have.

Speaker 1 (18:03):
What was the process like working with Nixon and drafting
speeches for Nixon? He himself had been a significant writer
in his own right.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
He was a very good writer. I would get a
call from my boss, who was at that time Dave Gergan,
and he would say, we want speech on such and
such as. Usually it would have something to do with
economics or law, because they knew I was an economist
and a lawyer by training. And I would go in
and get briefed on what they wanted. I would probably
talk to someone else under mister Nixon, but your truly

(18:36):
are Dave Gergan, and they would tell me what they
want me to talk about it I would be happy
to do it. I rarely rarely required much in the
way of research because it was generally fairly broad area
of interest that I was dealing with, and I would
set to work on doing it. And I was so sure.
I was so happy to be there doing it. I

(18:56):
knew the end was going to happen. I knew we
were going to kicked out, and I was going to
be really sad about it. But boy, I was such
a happy young man. You can't imagine. Well, you were
in the fight, well put, very well put, sir very
well put, mister speaker. I was in the fight, and
I felt great about it. I felt absolutely great about it.

Speaker 1 (19:18):
You know, Ben, I'm curious, given all your experiences, what
is one of your fond memories of interacting with President Nixon.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
Well, several times when I was walking down the halls
at the Executive Wifice building, which is a beautiful building
with the marble floors, and I was walking down there
and ran into mister Nixon. I think he was with
ron Ziegler, and I was with my father, and we
were on our way over to the White House mess
which was where the high ranking people like my father

(19:47):
could have lunch. And mister Nixon asked what we were doing,
and I told him. I said, would you like to
join us? And he said no, he said, I'm too
busy to do that. He said, but do you ever
think how lucky you are to be able to have
lunch with your father? And I said, I think of
it every day that I'm allowed to do it, so
I can hardly tell you how much it means I'm
allowed to do this. I said to mister Nixon, what

(20:10):
would it have meant to you to have been able,
when you were already out of school, to have had
lunch with your father pretty much anytime you wanted. And
he looked at me and he took my arm. He
took my arm, I remember, he took my wrists, and
he said, it would have meant the world.

Speaker 1 (20:27):
In this new book of yours, though you really focus
on I think something which is very undervalued about Nixon,
and that is the degree to which he consciously worked
at ending wars and at creating environments of peace rather
than conflict. Talk a little bit about how you concluded
that you wanted to write about Nixon and his role

(20:49):
trying to make peace.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
Well, mister Nixon said to me, and I think too
many others as well, that he wanted to leave behind
a generation of peace. Bear in mind, we had had
a lot of wars in the post war period, and
mister Nixon said he was going to leave behind a
generation of piece, or at least that was his goal.
People scoffed and thought that that was just blow hard bragging. No,

(21:13):
he meant it, and he did it. I think if
he were a president right now he would be able
to brag about peace between certain factions in them at least.
But mister Nixon was very, very very pessimistic about the
Palestinians very I mean, he respected Arabs, he respected the
people who wanted and people of any ethnicity who wanted

(21:34):
peace and who wanted to work hard. But for people
who wanted to struggle for conflict and for war and
for death, he had no respect for them at all.
And he wanted to see them going off the face
of the earth, and largely he got to see that done.
He certainly did not expect there to be what happened
in this past summer, whereby the Israelis were caught completely napping,

(21:56):
a gigantic catastrophy of military intelligences, a catastrophe on a
scale that's maybe never been equaled in the United States before,
and certainly well, I don't know. I hope it never
is equaled again. Nixon liked pace. His mother had said them,
I told you. Maybe I didn't tell you this. I
think I told us. I'm losing my mind because I

(22:16):
get very emotional when I talk about Nixon. I really
loved you, and I didn't just like him. I loved him,
he has said. His mother had said to him, you
will someday have the opportunity to do something for the
children of God Israel, and you will have a chance
to do something dramatic for them. Please do not walk
away from that chance.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
And I think it's fair to say that, after the
shock of the surprise attack by Syria and Egypt against Israel,
that Nixon's willingness to intervene into airlift equipment and airlift
capabilities was decisive in the survival of Israel. I think
if he had not done that, they might have actually lost.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
I not surely would have lost mister Speaker, but they
could possibly have lost missus Mair. I'm sure you'd know
this story very well, had out on our desk two
suicide tablets for her to take. But she also was
apparently prepped to use the Adam mom against the Arabs
if they couldn't stop them. They had the had a

(23:17):
Mom by then, and they were preparing to use it
against I don't know whether Cairo or Damascus or where
they're planning to use it, but yes, they're planning to
use it in some extremely dramatic way.

Speaker 1 (23:29):
Ironically. Of course, she was from Milwaukee, so you had
a prime minister of Israel who could speak in the
American idiom as a native because she was. And I
think that she had a pretty good relationship with Kissinger
and Kissinger in this period.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
Is you know Nixon's right arm Well, I think mister
Nixon had mixed feelings about mister Kissinger. He obviously admired
him a great deal, trusted him a great deal. He
made some quite funny jokes about The one I remember
most is he was talking about how Kissinger was complaining
about somebody being a self promoter and mister Nixon laughed

(24:08):
and laughed. Can you imagine Henry calling someone else a
self promoter? And of course he was totally right about that. Sure,
this was a man who said what he believed. He
called balls and strikes, as a very close friend of
mine said, he called balls and strikes, and he really
wanted there to be a generation piece, and he wanted

(24:28):
to be left in his hands there would be a
generation piece, and it was. And his accomplishmanments along those
lines were astronomically wonderful.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
It was interesting to me. It came totally out of
the blue. I would not have ever think of thought
of this myself. One of the most complicated and difficult
things you got involved with involved the Nixon family taxes,
which I think is just fascinating. And how did that happen?

Speaker 2 (25:11):
Well, the people at the White House, especially Dave Gergan
and his boss, Great Price, I think, had someone exaggerated
idea of my ability. And one night we all worked
very late at night, and one night, just before I
was going home, Gergon and Price gainery and said that
we have a really difficult task for you. Look here
in this room. There's a very large conference room, and

(25:32):
there are several good sized banker's boxes whatever we were called,
the tons and tons of files in them, and Gergin said,
these boxes contained very important confidential documents, do not show
that anyone under any circumstances period. And I would look
at them, see what you can do with them to
make them come out all right, And mister Nich's helping

(25:53):
them to get out of it. Let's say, I'm getting
out of this. And I started reading reading, and I
saw something drastically wrong. It happened mister Nixon had been
given advice by a man who I'm sure was a
great man and a wonderful tax layer. But he had
been told that he could take a deduction for gifts
to the US archives of his presidential papers and documents

(26:16):
that he had worked on when he was president. And
in fact that was not so. He could not take
a deduction for that, and therefore those deductions were invalid.
And a large, large, large part of mister Nixon's income
for tax urmaces was made to be taxable. And this
was totally shocked mister Nixon, and he was plumbos And

(26:38):
I remember very well at his farewell addressed, the boy
was down. Wow was that a powerful event. Mister Nixon said,
right now, I'm trying to figure out a way to
pay my taxes. And he said it in a way
which said made it sound like he really mentioned it.
I think he did. Mean. I don't think he was
ever a wealthy man, maybe not even a well to
do man, but it was called totally flat foot by

(27:01):
having to pay those taxes. And I just I think
any one of us, even now, where money is very
considerably devalued, would have a hard time if suddenly he
or she were presented with a tax bill of a
couple of million dollars more than he or she thought
it was worthcoming.

Speaker 1 (27:17):
It's interesting to me, though, that you went through it.
You rendered your best, honest judgment, and if anything, it
seemed to strengthen Nixon's belief in you. Rather than him
getting mad at you for telling him he could not
do something which is going to cost him a lot
of money, he actually, I think appreciated your honesty in
sticking to the rules.

Speaker 2 (27:38):
I think he did. And something got very messed up
there because I passed on a memo to mister Nixon
think through Ray Price, saying that he used to have
these two lawyers that aren't loan to you from the bureaucracy,
and they have told you that you're not going to
have to make tax I. With all due respect, they're wrong.
You are going to have to make tax Think you'd

(28:00):
better take this to an attorney in the private sector
and not to a government bureaucrat, although some government bureaucrats
are fine people. And God almighty, if I were a
Nix's shoes and all the burdens pressing upon me and
mister Nixon and they were presented a bill for several
million dollars, I didn't think I was going to have
to pay, I would have been absolutely beside myself, absolutely insane.

Speaker 1 (28:25):
But I think it's also a comment on how good
a lawyer you were. And remember Nixon himself, between vice
president and then getting nominated eight years later, had handled
Supreme Court cases and was considered, I think, an extraordinarily
good lawyer in his own right. So I suspect he
read your memo.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
It was and is brilliant.

Speaker 1 (28:46):
So I suspect you read your memo as a fellow
lawyer and thought this is the fact, And I think
that's important.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
I'm afraid that I wished I had been able to
come up with something, but I just couldn't. I racked
my old brain, a young brain, and I couldn't, just
couldn't think of it. And I remember calling Dave Gergan
from my tiny, tiny, tiny house in Georgetown saying, Dave,
I just can't come up with anything. And he said,

(29:14):
now you're Benstein, your Herbstein's son, you can come up
with anything. And I said, Sir, I can't this time.
I just can't. So I'd like to. And I had
done some other work him one of the accusations and
didn't matter. I could not beat the system at It's
not that.

Speaker 1 (29:31):
System one of the stories that I'd never knew about.
But you did, in fact get one specific impeachment article
dropped because you were able to convince them that they
were just wrong. I think it's the only one that
was dropped out of the whole thing.

Speaker 2 (29:46):
Sure, I am really humbled by the fact that you
read my book so carefully. I really really am humbled.
Because I've published a heck of a lot of books,
I rarely rarely get the comments from people who actually
have read them and read them carefully enough to understand
what was going on. And I'm humbled as I say, yeah.
There was one item where it was alleged by the

(30:09):
impeachment committee that mister Nixon had taken a bribe from
a big hotel company where we used to then call
conglomerate to somehow get various tax charges against him dropped.
And in fact that was all made up. He didn't
hadn't done anything even slightly. He was slightly illegal about that,
So he was in the clear and helped a lot

(30:31):
in terms of my writing about that. He really wasn't clear.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
How did you feel when you watched his resignation speech
and there was a very emotional moment.

Speaker 2 (30:42):
I felt horrible. I felt absolutely horrible. I mean just
incredibly horrible. I was there in the east room where
mister Nixon was giving his farewell address to White House staff.
My mother and father were sitting in the front row.
Because mister Nixon knew that the Stein family didn't just
lie him, weren't just his employees. We loved him, we

(31:03):
would have done anything for him. And my mother was
sobbing on a scale I've never seen her sob Even
now just drives me insane to think about it. I
felt terrible. I felt terrible. I feel terrible. I feel terrible.
I just felt terrible. I thought we were throwing away
the best present we were ever going to get in
my lifetime. And wow, those tears were tears of sorrow, grief,

(31:29):
pain as a really pear tears, tears, tears, tears. There
are a lot of tears in the Stein family when
we're talking about Richard M. Nixon.

Speaker 1 (31:38):
Interestingly, Nixon leaves. You work briefly in the Ford White House,
then you go to the Wall Street Journal. But it's
really a transition where you end up in Hollywood. Now,
how does that happen?

Speaker 2 (31:50):
Well, it's a little more complicated than that. I went
to work at the Wall Street Journal. Bob Bartley liked
my writing about the political content of the media very
very much. No one else is doing this. I'd like
you to hire you to do it. The pay was miserable,
I mean, really terrible, but I did it anyway, and
they sent me out to Hollywood quite a lot to
interview people in the business, powerful powerful, big time studio heads,

(32:14):
big time agents, big time I guess, let's see, I
guess if there's such a thing a big time writer.
And I learned a lot about how Hollywood worked that
Hollywood really was a one trick pony in terms of politics,
that people in Hollywood who were running Hollywood really were consistently,
always very left wing people. And that wasn't a joke,

(32:37):
that wasn't just a fantasy of US conservatives. It was
really true. And I broke my heart that this supposition
I'd had and how left wing Hollywood was turned out
to be completely factual.

Speaker 1 (32:50):
Clearly, it's a city that's overwhelmingly dominated by the left,
and I think that's had a long term impact on
all of American culture because the the world we operate
within is a world shaped in large part by people
who are very far on the left. I think you're
high point in a sense in your interaction with Hollywood

(33:11):
is the role of the economics teacher in Ferris Buelersdelle.
Did you ever see yourself as an actor? Is the
guy showing up in a movie?

Speaker 2 (33:20):
Never? Ever. I had had one small part in a
movie called The Wildlife, where I played a manager of
a surplus store. It was a sequel to a movie
called Fast Times at Ridgemond High. But I never thought
I would become a well known acting sir. I have
been in something like thirty three movies, hundreds of TV shows,

(33:42):
and thousands if you count my own quiz show. I
had a quite successful quiz show on Comedy Central called
Winn Benstein's Money, and I've done a lot of acting.
I liked it a lot, very very lot. I don't
know how. I mean, God has been so good to
me in so many ways. It's just amazing. With one

(34:02):
of the main ways, I say, the main ways letting
me be an American. Secondly be helping me have my wife.
The world's fine as being, and third would be letting
me be in America. I mean, I just every morning
I went to come, I say, I'm in America. I
cannot believe I'm in America. It's wonderful. It's just wonderful.

Speaker 1 (34:21):
You totally validate my decision many many years ago to
become a historian rather than a social scientist, because I
always believed that life occurred in ways you could not
figure out just by drawing lines on the chart. And
if you think about your life and how it's evolved,
you could never have sat.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
Down and planned it not a billion years.

Speaker 1 (34:42):
So, given the extraordinary range of your experience, if some
young person walked up to you and said, what is
your advice for how I should live my life? What
would you tell them?

Speaker 2 (34:52):
I would say, study something serious, as we just said,
like history, our economics. Study how to learn to think,
and that would be law school. I'd say I learned
more about how to think and analyze situations in law
school than I did anywhere else. And save your money
so that you're not always desperate about money. Go forward

(35:13):
from there, but work, learn habits of hard work, and
learn habits of not taking a word of the media
for anything, and learn habits of bucking and tran don't
expect that the trend is going to carry you. Trend
will not carry you very far. The trend is your
friend if you tell the truth.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
Okay, I want to thank you for joining me.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
I've enjoyed it so much.

Speaker 1 (35:39):
New Well, I've just learned so much more about your
diverse life and your extraordinary range of skills. Having you
join me on news World is terrific, and I think
that our listeners are going to be very encouraged to
get a copy of your new book, The Peacemaker, Nixon,
the Man President and my Friend. This has been just terrific.

Speaker 2 (35:59):
Ben, You're very kind. I cannot tell you how much
I've enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 (36:07):
Thank you to my guest Ben Stein. You can get
a link to buy his new book, The Peacemaker, Nixon,
The Man President and My Friend on our show page
at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by Gingrid three
sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our
researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was

(36:28):
created by Steve Penley. Special thanks the team at Gingrish
three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll
go to Apple Podcasts 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 concerner
for my three free weekly columns at gingristree sixty dot

(36:48):
com slash newsletter. I'm newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.