Transcripts For CSPAN3 American Political History Conference - Presidential Scandals 20240707

thank purdue c-span who's filming this live? hi everyone. who's watching? hi, mom. and especially katherine brownell nicole emmer and leah wright gregor for this fantastic conference. i'd like to also thank the three of them for inviting me for participate in this year's planning committee and for agree green to carve out a space to talk watergate and presidential scandals. my name is michael conswitz. i'm a research scholar who works at the tenement library and robert f wagner lieber archives at nyu brief side note. i previously worked at the nixon library with my former boss tim. naftali and my first book they said no to nixon examine some of the stories of republicans who stood up to the 37th president within the administration. next week is the 50th anniversary of the watergate break-in. and it's been fascinating to watch. how recent books essays documentaries podcasts and films have framed the watergate saga to the american public. 46 years after the release of all the president's men was a huge hit the public still seems to be very interested in learning about watergate. also need to acknowledge that even though there is a continued fascination with the scandal there is also either a hangover about talking about watergate or talking about presidential scandals in general specifically from the steady stream of nixon callbacks during the trump years. it seemed like we had a new serenade massacre every other week when a key advisor to the president roger stone has a nixon tattoo on his back. what else is there to say? that's a feeling that i i certainly felt throughout the trump presidency trump was impeached twice but not removed from office and he still has sadly a realistic shot of winning in 2024. the republican party is either ignoring the january 6 hearings or calling it old news. unlike watergate where the left was pretty much united over nixon's impeachment parts. the left today are deeply skeptical of prioritizing trump's recent scandals. it's a few years old, but i'd recommend reading actually a story inviting a bill black. he wrote piece for contingent magazine called does the left view watergate as a distraction provides a nice overview of the differences between 1974 and 2019. given all this i think we need to take more take a break from the news and examine how we all talk about right and teach about presidential scandals. what do we gain and lose from these comparisons to watergate or any other scandal? how can we contextualize watergate iran-contra the clinton impeachment and other more recent scandals in the 21st century to the american public in a way that properly explains their legacies? and how is the public's perception of presidential scandals changed or remained the same over the last several decades? while others try to litigate different scandals try to rehabilitate presidents, these are the questions i think are important when trying to explain these stories to future generations they are also important as a they're also important because i think the public needs a more thoughtful history of presidential scandals given the current state of our democracy. we're fortunate today to have four scholars who are ready to talk about just that so i'll introduce each of them with brief biographies. they don't cover all the work, but i will do my best to least cover some of their accomplishments. julia razzari is a professor of political science and marquette university. she studies the american presidency and political parties with particular attention to partisanship in the united states azari is the author of delivering the people's message the changing politics of the presidential mandate and she studies the history of the idea of a political mandate for the president from herbert hoover to 1920 in 1928 to barack obama in 2008. azari is also a frequent contributor to 538 a writer of the blog mischiefs of faction and a host of the podcast politics and question. really gauge is a professor of us history at yale university her first book the day wall street exploded a story of american its first age of terror examines the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries focusing on the 1920 wall street bombing. her current book project g-man j edgar hoover and the american century is a biography of the former fbi director. gage has written for numerous journals and magazines including the new york times the washington post slate and the nation she appears regularly on pbs newshour among other programs. david greenberg is a professor of history at rutgers university currently at work on biography of congressman. john lewis. he's the author and editor of several books of on american history including nixon shadow the history of an image and and republic of spin and inside history of the american presidency. really acting editor of the new republic he now writes for politico and many other scholarly and popular publications. tim naftali aside from being my former boss is a clinical associate professor of history and public service at nyu. he's the author of books such as one help of gamble khrushchev castro and kennedy 1958 to 1964 cruise ship's cold war and a biography on george hw bush. most recently with peter baker jeffrey engle and john meacham. he wrote impeachment in american history. now tally is also a cnn presidential historian and the founding director of the federal return nixon presidential library and museum where he authored the library's exhibit on watergate and oversaw the release of 1.3 million pages of documents and 700 hours of nixon tapes. so, thank you all for being here. we're gonna we have just three questions that we're going to try to cover during this part of the conversation and we want to make sure that there's plenty of time for the q&a. so get ready start thinking about those questions. so my first question is what changed between 1974 and the present in terms of how politicians and the american public react to presidential scandals. anyone wanna believe on that one i'll start if no one else wants to i would say there are two features that i would highlight in terms of thinking about this long scope. the first is to say that i think of watergate as a on the one hand very particular set of very contingent historical events involving richard nixon and things that he did and did not do and conversations head in the oval office on the other hand watergate took place in the midst of a set of much bigger institutional crises that had to do with the military and the war in vietnam that had to do with the powers of the presidency that had to do with american intelligence agencies that had to do with democracy and culture more broadly and i think one of the features that's been really notable in the years since watergate are the ways in which a kind of anti-institutional turn that was very powerful in the watergate scandal in the 1970s coming from the left as well as the right a suspicion of people with power a suspicion of government institutions has really become much more entrenched in the 50 years since watergate. i think you can see this in all sorts of ways in public polls. and so we have a situation where we have a fading living memory of watergate, but i think some of the forces that it's set in motion particularly a suspicion of the federal government of political actors in general but of some of the major institutions of government has become more entrenched and in many ways, i think has served the right much better than it has serve the left or has served liberals. so many people in the 1970s wouldn't have seen that the other theme that i would bring out. is something of a disjuncture within the historical profession which is to say that? in the 1970s if you had asked people what are the defining events of the 1970s watergate would have been absolutely at the top of the list right and some of the very first histories of the 1970s that were written were sort of political syntheses that really centered watergate i think as we look at where we are now 50 years out. there's still a lot of public and journalistic interest in watergate. it's a powerful metaphor within the historical profession. watergate is fading away. we've had enormous boom on scholarship in the 1970s. we had a whole panel yesterday. that was about the 70s particularly about bruce schulman's book on the 70s the words richard nixon and watergate. we're not mentioned once in that entire panel. so i think his story ends have become much more interested in things besides watergate in cultural shift to the 70s in politically economy intellectual life the of labor various rights movements and watergate is increasingly heading into the realm of kind of journalism and even a kind of obscurantist presidential history, and i'm a little disturbed by actually some of that disjuncture and i think we could we could bring watergate back in a little bit. i'll add a few thoughts. you know, mike posed the question and your introductory march use the word scandal in michael's schudson's book watergate in american memory, which is one of the best watergate books now many years old. scandal and crisis and actually says watergate was both and was understood in both ways. and you know, we may mean different things by those terms but the scandal suggests the personal dimension which certainly was there and there was at the time and ever since a great deal of now of analysis of richard nixon's own, you know, unique warp personality brought us watergate and was kind of the the seed bed of this kind of vast sprawling scandal, but you know as bev said it was also a crisis in that there's for democracy for the system. know the separation of powers for our institutions and this in a way was actually i think really what made watergate more profound and important and lasting and why i think you know, maybe despite some of this scholarly neglect in recent years. it will continue to be seen as important, especially in light of january 6th and trump and because this really the first set of scandals that had the same kind of major constitutional crisis implications the way watergate. i mean we can argue about a rent contra and some other but they were i think it's clear now lesser in scope. we don't commemorate. i ran contra, you know the way we do watergate. we don't commemorate lewinsky scandal like it's not every five years every 10 years, you know, they're seeing segments all around the news and so on. it's it's different watergate, you know from teapot dome until watergate teapot. dome was the benchmark and people still in the early days of watergate invoked it quite a lot. well, you don't really hear but teapot dome that much but you do still hear about watergate as reference point even you know with trump who you know is probably the first president to rival or surpass watergate in its magnitude and implications for democracy. i guess one other comment. i'll throw out there is it seems to be possible that one reason for? the relative scholarly neglect is that watergate has proved rather immune to revisionism. i mean there was an effort say in the early nineties joan hoff wrote a book that his aged particularly poorly called nixon reconsidered where she calls nixon a dim. i called watergate that dim and distant memory. but it's it's not i mean the details of you know, what tony you lastowicz put in a black bag in an airport locker may fade or maybe of interest only to the buffs or you know, but you know the the fact that remains and the recent books kind of both scholarly like mics, they said no to nixon or some of the popular ones michael dobbs is i think it's called king richard garrett graff's new history of watergate. sort of tell us that we although we've learned more details and there's facts that have, you know been revised. we sort of got it right the first time and that's a kind of unappealing story for historians because we want to revise we want to see how the old stories wrong and there's you know, because of the thoroughness of the watergate investigations and other reasons. that that narrative has more or less held and i think i think in a way i mean i sort of came i said last night to someone. yeah, i need to think of something to say about watergate. that's not blindingly obvious. and i think that is kind of the challenge. i'll stop there. weigh in on this a little bit, i think. political scientist, i think what everyone probably is that what's different now? is that polarization and partisanship is so much worse and that's what's driving every every aspect of impeachment politics. and i think that that is wrong. i mean obviously partisanship and polarization are different and depending on where you stand much worse, but i think that if you look at the history of actual impeachment crises part is an animosity is always part of that story and divided government is always part of that story what it was most surprising to me to pull this into the 21st century and and what we're you know, everyone's really thinking about right trump january 6th and the second impeachment. what was most surprising to me there. was the number of republican senators who voted to convict trump in 2021? and in some ways that i think kind of shows us that in some ways that actually violated the historical pattern in the opposite direction of what the conventional narrative would suggest that that part isn't ship created this intense loyalty to trump. obviously that is something that has that has occurred, but it's not it's not an uncomplicated story. so i think that what we actually see here is is a point of continuity. i think the other continuity that is the case not only trump. to back to nixon back to andrew johnson in the 19th century and the other point of continuity is the importance of kind of a crisis in the polity and a crisis in the polity around executive branch norms that i think ultimately are linked up with a crisis around the politics of race or changing a transition and the politics of race. i think that's a that's a continuity across the centuries and i'd be happy to talk about how clinton fits into that i'll touch on that briefly by saying i think there are two things that have that have changed. one, is that our politics is a result of this polarization and i think as a result of this sort of unfinished. rights revolution of the 1960s is much more combustible all the time than it was in the middle of the 20th century that it's it. seems like there's a perpetual crisis because people are constantly negotiating the correct role of institutions. they're constantly negotiating who in the polity constantly. negoti. all the informal roles of the game rules of the game and i think that's what's changed the second thing that's changed and i'm really influenced here by reading everybody on this panel. this is like my whole literature review for the future. i'm working on but most recently a chapter tim wrote on watergate that really emphasizes. the extent to which in 1974 and 1973. nobody knew there was nobody alive who had experienced a presidential impeachment now, you know, we got some experience and i feel like something that sort of has emerged is a set of kind of a beginning of an informal script about how an impeachment goes and the conditions under which it happens and specifically i think bringing congress in is an important element of this the conditions under which congress is willing to undertake to kind of take the political risk of an impeachment so that i think is is what's different and perhaps i think the sense of that political risk was heightened in 1998 when republicans paid a political price for for impeaching bill clinton, and then maybe that was mitigated some in the most recent round with trumps impeachments. we'll see how that story i think ultimately plays out, but that's what i think is changed and i also think that the continuity backdrop is really critical here. um i guess i'm i i guess it wouldn't be surprising if i said that i think every every child in the united states in high school as part of civil literacy should learn about watergate. but they don't have to learn about it as watergate, right? they learn about it in in a discussion the guardrails on presidents. and how we secure the constitution. and so you don't have to make it about a crime story. you actually make it about well, what are the protections that we have and january 6 we're watching it right now. i mean the fact that that we're having this conversation at the beginning of what will be a series of unsure important informative. i'm not sure how influential but hearings by january 6 committee and what is it all about? it's all about the guardrails. on power and i'd like to make a couple of comments about some differences, but i want to start with something that came up at the nixon library when i colleagues and i were doing these video oral histories. we we would ask similar questions of the participants and we had participants from all all sides of the administration. it wasn't just about watergate although we started or i started this because i i needed i wanted to populate a new gallery with members of the nixon administration discussing the crime. so i knew that they were already many of them were owning up to the abusive power and it was important. i felt that that you know, east coast person me should not be delivering some new script wasn't a script but that the folks there who were nixon defender should actually listen to their own people talk about what it happened. and i suspect gentle, january 6th. sort of the same thing, right? we heard bill barr the other night. okay. so one of the things we would ask the folks was and we didn't just interview nixon people interviewed members media and his defenders of congress and and peter's not was you know, what is the lesson of watergate and a lot of people said the system worked? he said it over and over again. the funny thing for those of us were steeped in i mean marinated is probably the way to say marinated in the tiktok of tiktok meant something different of watergate was that the system what system what do you mean the system worked had there not been tapes richard. nixon would probably have finished his second term. what is the system that people are talking about and they think system works? that's it. so the point was that whit happened is that after it ended anybody new theandering ending they they reimagined the narrative. when in fact and we're not going to go through it because there's not the time and i don't think anybody's the patience to actually walk through. well beth mentioned the accident the contingency and the unforced errors. thank god by richard dixon. so so part of this is the system. there was no system. that worked. and then what was tested what we had our constitutional order was tested again under trump? and many of the weaknesses that were clear in 1972-7374 returned but but the players were different the background was different the culture was different. the media environment was different. so in another in a way you replayed this story and and the outcome was different wasn't it? so what i would hope is that scholars were look at those gray areas and weaknesses in the in our constitutional system because it's going to happen again. i'm not saying it's with trump, but it's there and since as julia said we haven't combustible if we can call it civic society, right? it's someone is going to test this again, and so so for me, you don't have to call it teaching of a watergate, but it should be teaching about guardrails and and you know doing the kind of analysis that mike did in his book where he looked at how individuals matter in trying to rein in and abusive president. i'm gonna mention, you know, a top-down factor because understandably is historians. we we do bottom up we're gonna talk down and interaction of two. the president matters and for all of his dark side and abusive presidential abusive behavior, richard nixon was an institutionalist. now what richard nixon wanted was you not to he didn't want you to know that he was subverting institutions that was covert, but overtly he wanted to be viewed as an institutional. he wanted people to think. that he defended presidential norms. he wanted to be remembered as a great president. we just saw we ran the experiment with the president who didn't care. who didn't care about being viewed as as a successor of george washington and abraham lincoln, in fact rarely if ever talked about the presidents before him? the system when you have someone who is not in an institutionalist at least overtly and is not interested in american constitutional legacies. then you see the weaknesses in the system. because the things that reigned in richard nixon i'll give you some examples. we're not there for trump. richard nixon is the one who turned over the cancer on the presidency take. that's the tape of the john dean richard nixon meeting and march 21st, 1973 when dean for all kinds of reasons tells the president, you know, there's a cover-up going on and we're not very good. we're not the mafia. it's very interesting because the cult the godfather just come out so but we're not the mafia. we're not really good at this. well, actually they had been not so bad at it for a while. well that tape that conversation that's turned over to the grand jury after richard nixon. a fires archibald cox the american people and the political class in this country are so angry at nixon nixon is a phrase can be impeached now. that's one of the things when we look at the differences between the 70s and now we've got to think about public opinion. because this was bipartisan revulsion. there would not have been an impeachment process of richard nixon had he not fired archibald cox the leaders of the democratic party were against impeachment. despite the senate watergate hearings despite the john dean very influential testimony. if it had not been for nixon's overreach. in in the fall of 1973 you would not have had the impeachment process. so it's it's nixon in a sense. who who gives rope to his opponents the sword? yeah, well again the sword and and so when you have what if you have a president who doesn't care? who knows that you know, the history of impeachment was all by the way norm based, it's george washington who said, you know if you ask me for information to congress about an impeachment i had to give it to you that's washing it there's nothing in the constitution that says that the president actually has to comply with impeachment inquiry nothing. so what happens when you have a president says i'm not going to do it. and that's what we just had. we had a present who stonewalled every request. guess what? impeachment inquiries are hubbled richard nixon fortunately for this country was enough of institutionalists that he wanted to be viewed now, by the way, there was sneakiness here. he wanted to be viewed as complying and by the way something we i learned later from looking at diaries after i left the nixon library republicans wanted him to comply they said to mr. president you need to do this because we're getting pressure. now in 2019-2020 how much pressure was there from? the base on republicans to get trump to comply with the first impeachment. very little so something's different there the final point i'd make about the importance of the person who happens to be an oval oval office. is it richard nixon? could have said no to the supreme court. there's nothing in our constitution that actually says what happens when article one when the article 2 institution and the article three institution disagree. in fact, it's john of eyes understand it. it's just as chief justice john marshall who basically said the supreme court is the final arbiter of constitutional interpretation. that wasn't clear indeed. andrew jackson later said that he was as much a source of constitutional interpretation as the court. richard nixon dithered we don't he there was no taping system by then and was never any taping system in san clemente, but there's none at all in 1974 and he's in san clemente and it's clear from the timetable. he did it for a few hours and had to be convinced. i by al hague largely i think to to accept what if he had not accepted. because we saw in 2020 what happens when the president does not accept that he's lost. while nixon accepted and we know it followed. so the character that person sitting in the oval office is extraordinarily powerful and that means the system is not as short up and strong as one would imagine. so that leads me to think is the lesson and i'll turn this into a question, but the lesson about watergate for an increasing number of americans that nixon was weak. he wasn't strong enough. well my fear is that that people like roger stone made that argument donald trump, you know, and of course tim and you and i are particularly sensitive this based on who worked on the hall from us for you know a few years, but i'm also just struck by this and i agree with david. i think the mainstream watergate narrative is still the dominant one, but there are cracks that are worrisome, you know everything from well, just roger stone existing to to taco carlson broadcasting live from the nixon library. that's not something someone would have done in the 1980s 90s or 2000s and this was less publicized the tucker carlson speaks from the next library and says, you know turns out water it wasn't a big deal. you know, i my whole life i thought this was a big deal and i was tricked by the media. i'm paraphrasing but that captures the essence of his argument and he's broadcasting with richard nixon's grave just right behind him just a couple years ago. so why is that happening now? and so i'm just wondering what has even the mainstream narrative is. correct? it still has a lot of power. how is the legacy of watergate altered if it has because we've seen serious ships with the clinton impeachment, you know and how it's depicted in popular culture. to electric extent iran contra. there's at least some interest among younger people in terms of digging into that. but what about watergate how has that changed over the last decade or so? well, i'm skeptical that. say the tucker carlson position represents anything terribly new. i mean there was always i mean at first there was actually bob dole george bush senior, you know mainstream republican position to say nothing to see here. everybody. does it nixon's only, you know problem was that he got caught nixon himself saying oh my the lesson of watergate is i should have burned the tapes. this was said a lot. once we got the smoking gun tape and is accumulating evidence. and i think tim's right sarah massacre of october 73 is a huge turning point. there is a shift and more and more republicans. actually abandon their stalwart defensivenixon and say yeah, he's guilty. i mean you can see this in the page of the national review william f buckley and george will and james jacob patrick all kind of changing sides and saying i was wrong nixon was guilty and i think you know, but there was always i mean you can see this in books like paul johnson the british journalist historian did a history of the united states in which he describes watergate as a push and you know, i mean that that you know counter narrative was always there. always had a certain following. but look at the textbooks like why do they say about nixon? look at obituaries, like whenever anyone remotely associated with watergate dies. like that's the headline. that's the first paragraph. i don't i don't think the fundamental narrative is changing. i mean i do think. the republican party has changed a lot and you know, despite what julia says about. yeah, there was sort of a few more republicans in both the house and the senate voting for the second impeachment then maybe you would have thought. i think it's actually you know, the glass 90% empty, you know, i think the overall picture is one of republicans like being like kevin mccarthy knowing trump's guilty, but still refusing to go or even mitch mcconnell right refusing to vote for impeachment. so i think there is a big shift in our political culture and particularly in the republican party and with it. a lot of the people who are in the in the republican party as voters supporters the world of fox news. but i don't see it as fundamentally. changing the nixon or watergate narrative yeah, i would jump in on that. so even right in 1974. there's the dominant narrative and then there are still a substantial number of nixon supporters. i mean nixon never was universally reviled. you probably know the the statistics one of you better than better than i do but 84% of 30% of people even in 1974 even at the moment of resignation think no big deal. we support nixon and people don't just disappear right that 30% was there it's a powerful counter narrative and in fact, it was a counter narrative that was mobilized in many ways that many different movements. so one of the first moments i think of a shift was when ronald reagan was elected, right? i mean the narrowed the the big narrative in 1974 is that's it. the republican party is done in the white house for a generation right forward comes in and he loses in six and people say that's it. you know, we've got the watergate babies. we've got the new era of liberalism. and of course, that's not what happens with history at all. and so in that moment. people said oh well, i guess watergate wasn't as big a deal as we thought that it was and then i think you see a series of revisions over time or mobilizations around certain kinds of narrative and counter narrative that have that have a lot of power despite the real staying power of the kind of mainstream narrative, you know nixon himself, of course, so i am just finished writing this biography of jay edgar hoover who died in may of 1972 and the watergate burglary happened in june of 1972 and nixon and hoover had been great friends for a long time. they have been someone at odds during the nixon presidency for a variety of reasons, but nixon himself on the tapes often says, you know the edgar hadn't died right one of these kind of contingent scenarios if only edgar hadn't died. he actually would have been able to contain things for me in a way that he had contained things for a lot of previous presidents and the fact that he's not here and we have both at the head of the fbi. el patrick gray was not super competent but who was supposed to be a nixon loyalist? and then the number two guy at the fbi mark felt who is actively betraying nixon and who who is deep throat, but nixon's own narrative, of course, is that that every other president had done this this is a really common story for nixon insiders that there was just a blip in this particular moment of which hoover's death was one factor that allowed for it to unravel in ways that it wouldn't and didn't unravel in. the 40s 50s 60s leading up to that moment now, i don't accept that narrative, right? i think that in many ways what nixon did was far more serious than the kinds of precedents that they that they ended up pointing to but nonetheless, i don't think any of those nixon insiders really ever gave up on that narrative and it's it's had a lot of legs since two other things. i will just add about subsequent presidential scandals. so one is that of course in the 1990s part of the narrative about bill clinton and clinton's impeachment was a kind of payback narrative right people who saw a thought that watergate had basically been this kind of partisan attack at a moment of weakness. we're going to turn around and do it at a moment of weakness for a democratic president. so you have that narrative being mobilized then and then under trump, you know, i think one of the things that was really fascinating for me as a historian of the fbi was to see the ways in a lot of these contests about who can investigate the president about struggles over fbi power and autonomy beginning with the russia investigations actually beginning with the firing of james comey. which in many ways was the first signal that we were in a different era those we did not see the response to comey's firing now lots of people hated james comey in that moment for a variety of reasons. so there might be a reason there wasn't to a massive partisan rush to defend call me but that to me was one of the signals that we were we were in a different moment, but that a lot of these kind of institutional power struggles were playing out under trump as well. um sure i'll jump in i do want to defend my my partisanship remarks. just i think that's true. the republican party has changed no question and it's sort of array of how ideology works in the two parties is obviously changed, but i think when you look at when you look at how people were responding to watergate over the course of 1973 in 1974, you still see ideological patterns, right? you still and people members of congress are still influenced by their districts. it's sort of looks different now, but those same i just want to argue that dynamics haven't fundamentally shifted the other thing so i want to kind of address michael's question in terms of three different audiences. i'll start with with my students, but we'll maybe say more broadly people who are aging into the electorate during the trump years. one thing that's been interesting to me over the course of teaching through a recent presidencies is that my students are very very engaged on the question of whether ford should have pardoned nixon, which is really surprising to me, right this happened before they were born and before most of the faculty in my department were born and that they're very engaged on that question and i think as with with trump's first and then second impeachments that really highlights i think a narrative that's already familiar to them, which is that the system doesn't really work and doesn't really hold people accountable and that's i think sort of part of what's changed is just like more of the same of this story the you know power abusive power sure nixon had to resign but that pardon really kind of changed the dynamic of what accountability looked like and that idea that the system doesn't work is just sort of a threat of continuity the second audience. i want to emphasize in terms of this and change in how we understand watergate is the sort of people like us people who come to these conferences and read articles about historical politics and pay attention to this and i think there has been kind of a shift toward a dominant narrative of water at least this is true on the political science side. the watergate was about the cover-up to really thinking about abuse of power and i think some of the dynamics in the trump administration kind of opened that up and it's it's very, you know, it's very interesting to me again kind of teaching watergate over this period really diving into those those articles of impeachment that came out of the house judiciary committee look very different when you're teaching the trump years and they did during the obama or bush years that kind of pattern of abuse of power and what what was really at stake not just in the cover-up, but in what actually happened and i think that that i think that substance of emphasis on what happened in watergate is a good thing. i think those are good conversations to have about presidential abuse of power. don't think directly to this this tucker carlson point and broadcasting from the nixon library. this is i think one potential label for this is the politics of defiance and norm violation and i think what i do on these panels is come in promote my own work, so i had a piece in mischief's affection almost exactly two years ago in 2020 about kind of the trump administration and their use of norm violation as a set of appeals and someone else is called this vice signaling and i think that's going on here. i think that's that's noah burlesque's term. i think i think that that's essentially what we're seeing here is so in some ways. it doesn't change the narrative exactly right? it's sort of what's the real subtext there. isn't this was? okay, but like we don't care that it wasn't. okay. we don't have to play by those particular. rules and you know, why is that the case why is it the case that that it's politically advantageous to make appeals that are casting institutions in this lake. why is it why is it, you know when we're talking? it's beverly was talking about nixon as an institute or sorry tim. i think you were talking nixon as an institutionalist. you know, why have institution why is presenting oneself as an institutionalist because unfavorable in one segment of the political system, and i think you have to really ask questions about who is perceived to control those institutions. and i think that's where you see the story of the change in american politics where it's i think the media has seen maybe as as control as feminized institutions are seen as controlled more prominently by african americans other non-whites and that is really the heart of the politics of defiance. and so i think the developments in racial politics and gender politics and cultural politics are part of what's changing this narrative, even if we don't typically think of watergate is spitting into that narrative. i know we're going to want to turn to questions, but i want to make two points one is that i think watergate is a useful moment to study the evolution of the idea of the deep state that was basically talking about that. we know that the idea that deep state. the the birchers assumed that the us government was communist. so the idea that deep state actually doesn't start with watergate, but what you see in the watergate in the 70s is the left understanding of a deep state and the rights understanding of the deep state actually converge and it's now at its most powerful. i think it's the most influential moment in this idea of a deep state and watergate feeds that so i think that's a useful question for further analysis. to get to this point about partisanship that julia is raisins very powerful. i'm gonna very quickly tell you a story story that links nixon and reagan. trent lott a politician from mississippi is important part of the reagan story and in fact reagan's very first is the kickoff of his campaign is in philadelphia mississippi, which most of you know something about mississippi burning. this is a this is a this is a searing it's a scar on our on our quality in our history. the tread light is the one who suggests that reagan start the campaign there. i'm branching trent lott because nixon thought he could count on trend lot. and when nixon decided that yes, he would comply with the supreme court decision usb nixon internal over the tapes. he already had identified and his inner circle had identified one of those tapes david mentioned. it's the smoking gun conversation of june 23rd 1972. it has to do it's where nixon agrees to use the cia to prevent the fbi from doing its job, which it's it's an obstruction of just okay. nixon still thinks he might survive, but he's only going to survive of southerners help him and he needs he needs southern democrats and needs needs the few southern republicans. so he has transcripts made of this conversation and he shares it. he shares one or has one shared with trent lock. now you would think the trent lot would have said to him. fight on mr. president, but we know what trend lot said because we know how the white house reacted and we and trent law talks about this in an oral history not just for us, but he did it for the next library trend lot looks at the transcript and he says mr. president where he says to the presidential aids you're done it's over. okay, we i can't i can't defend you now. now in 2022 some republicans would say oh, this is a fraud. this is a forgery it's never happened. this this is not you didn't have mr. president. this is wrong clearly the taping system malfunction. this has been invented. now trent lot looked at it said it's done and the message was sent back to the white house and he wasn't the only one they went to into a building wiggins is very important. he's not from the south though. he's actually represented nixon's district yorba linda. and the other person who said no. was george wallace? george wallace didn't see a transcript but george wallace was -- at nixon because it turned out that nixon had actually given money to his opponent. it was a dirty trick that george wallace found out and george wallace made clear. i'm not i'm not supporting you anymore, which meant all the southern democrats who looked at george wallace. for you know advice on how to deal with nixon turned against nixon. so my question is how has our political class changed? why is it in 2022 facts? are debatable not their interpretation are always interpreted. they're always debated. that's always they should be debated. it's healthy, but the actual reality of facts are debated in a way that they they weren't in 74 now in 74 you had tapes and maybe it was because of the idea of technology, but i will tell you that when we release tapes back in 2010, i think was that one that had nixon once again engaging in any semitic discussions there were people at the library came to me and said that i had created those things. these are these are people who were actually our volunteers who said we think you did this you you left these in washington have created these days, but what has so you have an issue of the change in our political class, but also in the change of our our political discussion and our understanding of facts that makes this period different and i would say more dangerous than 1974. before we open up the q&a. i want to touch on a point and this sprite connected to well two points one that julia made about teaching and then david talking about scandals as being about an individual person. and i think we need to think about the limitations of that. not only with nixon and trump any any president because one thing i've noticed when teaching about nixon and watergate, is that the students? in the last six to seven years are no longer. that bothered by these famous nixon moments. whether it's the 62 speech after he loses the pat brown. i'm not a crook speech all these things that seem to be breaking norms at the time don't really matter that much to them the one encouraging things i wanted to press everyone is what does matter is when they actually hear the nixon tapes. and they hear richard nixon actually. you know actually involved in the cover-up. you know, whether it's i mean the two famous ones, of course, they're smoking gun and cancer in the presidency that actually still interests them. this is all anecdotal. it's not scientific study, but i was relieved that's still the case when i taught us history course the first time in a couple years this spring, but with the other moments year by year. the students are just less interested by these kind of like very interesting, you know moments where a president seems strange and eccentric and i want to read a quote from donald trump actually from 2016 before we opened and maybe we'll then move to a q&a where he was asked by bob woodward in the spring of 2016. what would what has he learned from the legacy of nixon and he's pressing him he brings up the those who hate you don't win unless you hate them and then you destroy yourself and woodward is trying to get something from trump. and and this is what trump says he says. nixon failed i think to a certain extent because of his personality, you know, it was just that personality very severe very exclusive. in other words people couldn't come in and people didn't like him. i mean people didn't like him and woodward says any broke the law and in terms like yeah and then later on trump then says no, i don't really see any comparisons what i do see is what i'm amazed at is i'm someone that gets along with people. i'm some i'm sometimes i'll notice i'll be i have the biggest crowd. it's actually and then he starts talking about his crowds. um now this is trumping trump, of course, but what what bothers me is that perhaps been people who don't like nixon or trump. aren't that different in terms of how they remember watergate? it's about nixon being a centric figure nixon being even a shakespearean figure. i know this is something you've written about david in recent book reviews. and so i think it's something the ponder in terms of you know, what are the limitations of focusing on a president's quirks? in terms of explaining an entire scandal any any quick comments before throw at the q&a? i don't need to always start but i i'll jump in and say well i think some of it. i think you're right. and actually, you know, it's partly because watergate is it's really kind of boring and very particular so so we know that people who lived through watergate were glued to the hearings. we're waiting for every blow by blow and new haldeman and erlichmann and dean right these names had powers, but it's actually very hard to translate that to if you look at those hearings and you try to explain what was so compelling about this. it is not at all self-evident. so i think it's in that sense. we can't really blame students for it, but i would also point to i think a pretty simplistic story about watergate that got solidified in the in the 1970s very quickly by woodward and bernstein which was a you know, all bad man, nixon courageous journalists. you just expose things and he tumbles which is actually not at all the story of watergate and in many ways so though, i've said that it's really hard to watch the hearings because they're kind of boring and weird and you have to have so much knowledge on the other hand. i do think that the story of kind of how and why over this more than two-year period a series of actors came into place that yielded this outcome. that is not a nixon-centered story in some way but it's actually a very compelling drama and i think in my experience if you can lay out, you know first there weather journalists and you know mark they'll leaking and then others had to pick it up, but he won the election anyway, and then congress began to say, but we're going to do something that's and then there were the massacre then there was the supreme court and then with i mean that's kind of high drama and it's it's a way of kind of understanding. i think some of the questions that tim's trying to raise which is what are the mechanisms of accountability and the incredible number of actors that actually had to participate in this from your republicans to the supreme court to the press to all of these figures who had to come into play in order to produce. what was still highly contingent outcome. i think that story has a lot of drama to it and can be a way to kind of get around the you know, nixon was a was a was a paranoid strange man, which of course he was. i say i think you know, this is true of all history. you have to look at it with both lenses the individual and the kind of institutional slash cultural. i mean, maybe that's three lenses, but that you know, yeah, there's some people especially in a journalistic being well over emphasize the individual and it's about the personality but you know after a period where historians were really neglectful of the role of contingency and individual agency. we now know. that that's important too and you know, i do think the individual differences in personality between trump and nixon are instructive, you know, obviously there are similarities in their megalomania and desire for power and that is a very strong similarity that resonates with our to deeply see deep seated national. fear of monarchy like that. the country is based on that. i think you know is a lot of our scandals are crises are about executive power executive abusive power. but yeah, i think the difference between nixon and trump can be understood the tapes like when you hear nixon on the tapes. it's a different nixon from the public nixon, you know as as tim was saying but with trump if you look at his tweets, they're like nixon's tapes only he's deliberately putting out there totally unconcerned. like that's the shift the shift. is that the expectation that the audience will accept it. whereas with nixon is the expectation is this all has to be concealed and that seems like a personality shift. it probably also speaks to a shift in the political culture that trump can count on that and then the last thing i want to say is there are sure two ways to tell the narrative of watergate. they're sort of the inside story of so what's going on in the white house and there you start with kissinger and the 69 wiretapping that's you know, and you go through a whole series of crimes the creation of the houston plan the ellsberg break-in and so on and i actually find that students when you lay out these things, you know, well before 72 all these illegal activities emanating from the white house. it actually is quite compelling then there's the narrative of the unraveling and the exposure which which i think it is kind of the all the president's men drama, but it does have an inherent drama to it. so i think yes some of the details about you know, the rosemary woods stretch or who was someone had a good line about the huge loan and hugh sloan and you know getting all those details for that. that mean that may sort of be receiving but i do think there's like an inherent drama both to the accumulation of power the white house and then closure of them that remains compelling history department where i taught i spent quite a bit of time in in watergate and i taught it as part of a constitutional unit. so it wasn't entirely chronological. and i found this is a really good way to teach about the institution of the presidency you teach it an fdr and it's sort of like we have the creation of this new white house staff and all of these people who work directly under the president and are working on stuff and the student you show them this in the new deal and it's like oh fine lovely and then you show the role that in watergate and that does i think really illustrate how that institutional development had some unintended consequences and how that empowered the president in ways. that wouldn't wouldn't have been there had that institution developed differently and it does show i think the distinction that otherwise feels pretty abstract between the executive office of the president the white house staff the people working directly. the president and the cabinet where people are at least theoretically operating with a bit more independence and oversight and i think the sort of justice department versus what goes on in the white house is a good illustration of that. so i think being excited about institutions is something that i consistently trick myself into thinking and students excited about but you know here, you know at the margins right we're working. at the merchants as i'm they were responsive to the barbara jordan stuff and teaching that in the context of we also watch some stuff from from alexander vinement and talking about people who made kind of a constitutional pitch and a pitch about our enduring and overarching values kind of got kind of i think pierce through some of that cynicism about the system working. so those were some of the pieces of that that worked. for me, i think some of also we're talking about what david was talking about in terms of the developments and response to tim's excellent question about what has happened with the political class. i mean, those are questions that are compelling to undergraduates and i think that it does reach back into this politics of defiance and it does reach back into the fact that that in the 70s was at the margins and now is a really dominant set of political commitments that are widely shared particularly one in one political camp. so that's that's my that's my feel about teaching this and political scientists context. i want to just add that we haven't used the phrase cold war and that's another important element here because what richard nixon does is he uses national security as a way to further his own political interests donald trump did it too? but the reaction of the political class to donald trump doing it is not the same as the reaction of the political class in the cold war to richard nixon and so some of what you see in seventies and again bev nicely sort of foreshadow. this is an unraveling of a consensus about cold war institutions and nixon's misuse of national security. most most notably in the smoking gun conversation is a red flag. that presidents have accumulated this power and have used it for reasons other than defending group the country now. there's also debate over how you defend the country and what vital interests are. of course, that's all about vietnam, but it's also how presidents have used. this cold war power. so that's going on in the 70s. and we're not in that moment anymore. despite the never wore concerns because trump has sold himself as someone against the national security institutions. so when he does something nixonian like use national security to promote his own personal power, there's almost like it's it's discordant with who he says he is and it's and it doesn't have the reaction that nixon's misuse of institutions for national security. did there were some republicans who caught that and i think we're learning that others did it privately but wouldn't take a risk. i mean romney understood but the political class in our era was not as threatened by this as the political class was in the 70s. we have time for questions, please use the microphone in the middle of the room. this questions thanks everyone for like a really terrific panel and i asked this for all of you because so many of you are not just experts on the history of american media, but actually very much a part of it is how much can we think about the legacy about how much the media has changed and especially since bev brought up? the hearings are right. now the way that these hearings are covered are actually different and i think about even the reports of the millions who are watching but just the media landscape the choices about what you could turn into has so change in a lot of people are going to be getting this through social media. how does us think about how the sort of trajectory for the impact of something like this actually sort of changing over time and i think too especially thinking you talk about what we do talk about in the 70s now, it's really sort of you know, this long crisis of inequality less time more time spent at work for less money. much now when dolly parton is seeing about working from five to nine. just not nine to five and who actually will and this gets this question about how disengage so many americans are from the global. says even though in 2020 we had record turnout for the first time long time related to that is i really appreciated the points that you all made about the roles of individuals on this, but i wonder about the toll on this in terms of the toll on the american people not just actually sort of thinking with this question of the deep space state or just that there's like this is just more of the same. this is actually happening a time when we're starting to see the erosion of voting rights part of it with gerrymandering these kinds of things, but actually the power of the individuals the sleep watergate podcast. i thought that a great job of talking about martha mitchell that individual told that person but i think about mark felt at the end of his life living in his i believe it was a room above his daughter's garage because he didn't lose his federal pension that they had this sort of sense. that's a big toll on that man as opposed to gordon. litty went on to a great career in right-wing radio and if we can think about that kind of legacy about who in the long run benefited in terms of thinking about what help us understand this current era. thank you. thank you. and when does anyone want respond to that one? well, i'll just say this may not be directly on point that i do think. you know the media played tremendous role not only in watergate but in shaping the culture afterward and i mean most obviously the kind of heroic narrative of journalism that emerges leads a lot of journalists to become and here i think scandal actually not crisis is the right word to kind of get you know need deep elbow deep and scandal chasing and scandal mongering and you know, everything becomes a gate and you know, you get you know, mike is a cough standing on his desk, you know, otherwise was shouting his phone. i want my pulitzer like there's you know, and there was so there was this tremendous disjunction where with the clinton impeachment where the whole washington media thought. this was like a really important story and the rest of america didn't i mean, that's where we got the organization and the phrase move on right? and so there you know, the media stock had been declining for a while, but i think in terms of erosion of news media credibility, you know that that sort of part of the story just went too far in terms of chasing scandal chasing sex scandals in particular, but also inflating all kinds of scandals, you know petty conflicts of interests are turned into, you know, evidence of huge corruption and this kind of thing and then there's like another twist to it which then that leads to kind of jaded quality. so then it's kind of i don't know if it's crying wolf is quite the right metaphor, but you get to a point where people tend to shrug and it becomes much harder to capture the public's attention even with say some of the truly frightening trump scandals or trump. yeah abuses of power because that we've been so conditioned through media coverage. to kind of treat this as just part of the wallpaper. yeah, i want to jump in on a similar point. i think there's a really challenging question for media right now about how to how to shed light on the way institutions work and the way that institutions may be, you know affect abuse of power affect a politics that excludes ordinary americans yet at the same time. be part of maintaining enough confidence and institutions that we can function as a country, which if you sort of look at some of the data on that it seems like maybe we've passed that point a while ago. i think that's sort of i think that's part of the legacy of watergate. i think it's sort of it. it's heightened magnified and the legacy of trump and now i'm not sure where to go with with that in terms of the tool. i think that also kind of speaks to the role of partisanship and like the broader partisan universe. so conservative radio would be a big part of that how that how that has a critical role in a kind of post-administration that i think often gets ignored and we often have this sense that when an administration is over that then they move into this realm of statesmanship and being above politics and that would be true for some administrations, but i think largely the legacy and kind of the fate of what happens people after it. it's very much in the hands of this more broad partisan universe and that means there's not a lot of incentive to be to defy the norms of partisans interpreter to five the norms of what you're expected to be doing and that sort of speaks to what you are talking about. south you had a question well, thanks a lot. i know you were saying it's hard to come up with new things about about watergate, but i've been thinking about watergate for a long time and this my head's exploding with questions. so you've done it a couple couple things. the first is this notion of and you were talking about this a little bit. julie was this idea of who's around the president right? and i know you know, mike wrote a book about people who said no to him, but there are a lot of people who said yes, or like here's an idea and so and some ways, you know, i think with i think with these conspiracies and you know, maybe even with reagan we think about that conspiracies, but you know these types of events we think about the rot from the top and i think in a lot of cases the rock comes from the bottom. i don't think trump knew to call the ag and georgia or you know, i think about we were talking about the the pentagon papers. that was the first time that that nixon leveraged national security for his own abusive power. and so we see that history but also going back even further to you know the term i know where i think we're live. i'm tv or something. so i'll just say rat effing, you know this idea of you know, this came from usc campus politics conservative student politics and and these are the people that surrounded nixon and i don't want to let him off the hook here, but and a lot of ways this is about the way that the structure incentivizes really corrupt people around the most, you know powerful person in the world with no controls. and so that's sort of a question. i'm wondering is is that something that maybe gets needs more emphasis? we always talk about watergate and you know nixon's the boogie man and trump's the boogeyman but is the problem more pervasive and the other question i had is about the tapes because we seem to be and i think this is true that the tapes made a difference especially with the people that i look at moderate republicans who like bill brockett stuck with talk about then they heard the tapes and he said that's it. that's his story at least and what is it about the tapes that change their mind is it first of all the break-in that we find out about the break-in. i think that might be something different than trump that we have actually a crime that people can imagine like an actual, you know crime where someone broke into a room with trumpets a little harder to to see the crime the they're there but you know, the other thing is, is it the cover up that really just made people so indignant or was it just nixon's personality. i got so much of that from people saying, you know, i was getting calls from my constituents from conservative constituents saying i can't believe he talks that way right so that he lost the public opinion. i think we're talking about it that the teacher about public opinion. so what was it in the tapes that really changed people's minds. it could be all of them of course, but can you choose one? thank you. i want to respond to that because i think they're are two different elements. number one nixon denied a number of things that the tates disproved and his denials repeated by his defenders in congress. he actually denied putting pressure on the cia to do anything about the fbi. he actually denied it. it's in a very important statement. he makes in 1973. nixon had this sort of ability to deny things that he had done. and make a point of it and the tapes showed him to be a liar. now what has changed in our political culture that we don't care as much about presidents who lied to us. what is it about the way in which those lies were presented from the presidency in that era and then dismantled by the tapes that that brought down trust a sense of trust among people would voted for example, but remember most of america voted for nixon, right? he won a huge landslide. so most americans actually had to change their minds about someone they voted for we talk a lot about how americans it's an emotional commitment when you did when you vote and your emotionally tied up with it. well think about the number of people who voted for nixon actually turned against it, but nobody ever voted for nixon wasn't me? yeah. no whenever it is good. like everyone was in the french resistance exactly the second point second point is about something david ancient which is the difference between the private nixon and the public nixon. when nixon decided to transcripts of tapes because he was subpoenaed. and again, this is nixon wanting to comply but not really comply. the public was aghast. at the cynicism of nixon their image of the president was different from the cynical politician. let alone the let alone the crimes. he was just cynical he was never time but what was good for the american people never not that anyone thought he was a populist but never in the other thing is a mistake he made you know, he edited the transcripts. well, donald trump was out around the country having these rallies right and showing he was vital and couldn't fight nixon in his period in his crisis was in the residence. seeing no one and going through transcripts of the tapes. he was going to release this is in the spring of 74. he decides oh my goodness. i use -- a lot. i don't think that'll be believed. my you know, and he had a quaker upbringing and he said, you know, i i'm gonna have those deleted. now he used the f-bomb occasionally, right? but he had them put expertly deleted or were used god. --. and so the pages are full of these red now now the america for what it's worth and that's why that's why i think part of our story is studying us how we've changed. the america of that period was repulsed by the idea that the president was lying all the time. now we're in a different place now, but that's part of it too. the tapes revealed a cynical. man and the america of that period didn't want their present to be like that now he kept 24 percent of the american people, but he lost many people who voted for him. if i can jump in on that, so i would say that there are two elements to this a one is the surprise maybe among his supporters, but they're all is also a way that watergate fit into what a lot of people already thought about nixon, right? and then there was the proof and i think that this has been true of bill clinton right that when the scandal happened. it was stuff you already knew and then you really knew and so i think there's some tension around that right? i mean, he was already tricky --. he already had this reputation for being a kind of schemer and manipulator. so for people who already didn't like him this was total affirmation that everything that they had thought was in fact true and then there's this element of surprise for others. i wanted to just pick up on the question of staffers because david mentioned the houston plan, which is a really interesting moment in the history of the nixon administration. in 1970 nixon appoints this very young staffer who had been the president of young americans for freedom. so unlike actually a lot of people in the nixon administration was a very serious kind of campus conservative really understood himself to be part of the conservative movement and was sort of one of the leading figures in the nixon administration for the idea but one of the goals of the nixon white house was going to be to politicize the bureaucracy right that the bureaucracy and the administrative state were enemies they had become too autonomous. they have become too liberal that there were all of these career government servants who were no longer responsive enough to the white house responsive enough to the presidency. it was the deep state, but it was also other elements of the bureaucracy. i mean the social security agency, right? i mean all of these and so this is one of their big goals and houston is one of these young staffers who's very ideological and in 1970 nixon puts him. in charge of coming up with a plan to get the intelligence agencies to work together more aggressively to contain what they see as a violent and out of control left. so that's the anti-war movement. it's black radical organizations. it's the weather underground and of course, we should remember that 1970 in particular is a year of like 68 and 69 but of kind of growing sentiment around violence and its utility revolutionary violence anti-war all of these sorts of things, so they're very worried about this, but they're also worried about what these groups are doing to nixon's reputation. so the upshot of this what's really interesting about this kind of politicized white house versus a set of institutions and as a biographer of j edgar hoover, it's one of his better moments one might say because houston comes up with this plan to just conduct incredibly widespread. surveillance of the anti-war movement in particular going to get all the intelligence agencies together to do this and and hoover actually says no, i think this is a bad idea. the fbi is partly already doing a lot of this and they don't want other people meddling and what they're doing, but he also makes the case that a lot of what makes them wants to do is actually illegal but more to the point that public opinion if this comes out is not going to support this in a way they might have against the communists in the 1950s and so he sort of scotches this plan and it's a fascinating moment because he says no and nixon sort of says to houston we'll just kind of try to go ahead and do it. anyways like there's a president. i think you're gonna need to, you know, come down and say edgar we're doing this anyway and nixon says oh in that case, let's just forget about it and hoover actually wins and in a funny way contains the nixon administration and there are a number of these showdowns. what are the reasons nixon creates the plumbers is that the fbi will not do the kind of highly politicized dirty tricks that he that he wants to do. so in terms of people who said yes to nixon versus people who say no to nixon, you know, there is this story about the deep state about institutional actors who don't want to be brought into into the nixon orbit and a lot of that is not super public at least it's not public until after after watergate in many ways with the church committee etc if i can make one last point to that goes back to the previous question. just about the january 6th hearings the media and what we're seeing right now. i think one of the things that i've been a little realized by is even as the january 6th hearings are getting started even as we have tapes there too, right because everything is now recorded right so we actually have all this footage of real things happening, but still a lot of oh those are doctored or it's really antifa etc. so that's interesting and its own right but one of the things that's been a little striking to me is the number of people have said well, we're going to have these hearings but nothing's gonna happen and if you look to the 1970s actually a lot of what people learned in the 1970s out of watergate out of the church committee out of things like the mcgovern commission produce incredible waves of real reform in that moment, and i think 1970s are kind of understudied as a period of transformation and reform in the way. we do our politics. so, you know, you've had rights changes in the 60s that are then playing out in the 70s, but you know in response to the crises of that moment americans transform the primary system for better and for worse because it's one of the reasons we ended up with donald trump is our bad primary system at the moment, but you know, they changed the primary system. they put new constraints on the intelligence agencies. you get campaign finance laws you get the war powers act you get a pretty big scale political reforms some of which are effective some of which are not so effective some of which last some of which fall away but all of which are real responses to real problems in that moment driven by this series of both media and congressional expose, and so it's striking to me in our moment that there is so little confidence that even really kind of dramatic and sensational hearings aren't fact going to a reform response and that is a lot to do with partisanship. it has to do with the kind of divided government the fact that we don't have big landslides anymore. there are a lot of reasons to think about why that is but it's been a little disheartening to me that even before the hearings have gotten fully underway. there's already a story that that nothing will happen and nothing possibly could and i'll just make a quick comment on this the staffing question. i think it's it's very valid point. in some ways the title all the presidents men actually gets at this and there there wasn't understanding of nixon being sort of meconomy for a whole circle around him. you know i have this poster was kind of popular poster at the time of you know, all of these nixon aids kind of arrayed with like, you know access through them like all going to jail. you know, how many of like yeah how many attorneys general of his went to jail like three or four, you know, and so i think that is sort of implicit in there, but it's also the case that the president ultimately is the one choosing the people around him and sort of setting the tone and you know, what kind of people he branding nixon really wanted those usc types in there and he didn't want these ideally typed. i mean not that they're necessarily more virtuous, but you know, so there was there was a tone that there's a culture and i think a bev was saying about the very real fears of political violence. there was a treasury department report with forgetting the number now some insanely high number of bombings and bomb threats in the year 1970, you know when we talked about the capital riot, you know people talk about precedence people forget that the weatherman blue, you know planet bomb in the capital in 1970. it was at night so it's or didn't yeah kill anyone but it was you know, it was a real thing the violence on the left and there was this kind of mutually reinforcing paranoia. so the left became totally paranoid about the government and the government they can totally paranoid about the laugh and they sort of fed each other's neurosis. and so it was definitely a culture in the white house. that went beyond one person. oh, i'm sorry. you just went add very very briefly with regard to the white house stuff. i mean, i think this is a great question. i would totally read that. i don't know if it's the information is available. i would love to know kind of who gave trump brad reference burgers phone number. um, but you can see like i think that place actually look for this is to look for the the way these institutions play out in these very mundane moments because you see this tension between white house staff and people who's who understand their main job as to drive the president's political goals and to think about what's going to play in the midterms and think about public opinion versus the agencies that are stacked with you know, or tasked with carrying things out like you see this tension between eric holder and ron emanuel early in the obama administration on a bunch of fairly straightforward policy decisions counter terrorism on you see the white house clash with other people on you know, economic stimulus. so i think that's where you see there is a real institutional tension between those sort of president's political fortunes and the kind of carrying out of public policy and then you add in someone who is just out for themselves. someone who has done something. they used to be covered up right all of these sorts of so i think in that sense it's a sort of right i like this phrase the rot from the bottom, but i think there is a sort of like a little bit of a back and forth and i think it's very much, you know very much driven by its by individuals, but there's a sort of institutional imperative that drives how these individuals behave under a lot of like a wide variety of circumstances. yes. um, thank you so much. i'm an early american so i'm making a real encouraging here, but i teach a class on the history of fake news and air quotes conspiracy theory is rumors propaganda and we read about watergate and i had a student say, you know, he's actually surprised that the smoking gun tapes had any effect and he was sort of like, you know, if that came out today, i just don't think that would matter. i mean, why did this matter and i was first thinking i was gonna ask you guys if you agreed with that it seems like you do and you've offered some potential reasons for that, but i was sort of hoping if you could kind of elaborate on that. i mean it struck me that you know, there are a few things it made me think about the first trump impeachment and the transcript of the call and you know, some people as tim, i think you were saying debated the you know, that wasn't real that's fabricated, but and trump's kind of the master of this himself will say, you know, no i didn't do that and then it'll be like, well i did if i did do that it's not wrong, right and i think that kind of gets to what julia was saying, but i wonder if you think it really does all come down to this what david was saying about there is no between the public and private so that notion of revealing something is taken away. and if that's not there then there's just nothing that can really make an impact on public opinion and even if that's why people think these hearings won't have an impact because it's sort of like, well, you know, we already know most of this actually and there's people who know it and are sort of like, okay. yeah, we know and there's people who have discounted it right and that it's not going to make a difference. i don't know. i was just curious if you could speak a little bit more to those differences and where they actually come from i think i have to say i think that if robert mueller. had found evidence of coordination direct coordination between the russian government and the trump. campaign as opposed to the trump campaign taking advantage of information campaign and looking for help from anybody who could provide them with more dirt on if there is dirt on hillary clinton if there had been evidence of that, i think i think the country would have responded. um, and and i think the president knew that well we didn't know whether it was because it was true or not, but the president trump focused a lot on collusion, which is the term that has no legal meaning really but i think that might have been i mean, i we can't run that test because that's not what mueller found but i i think that there might have been a reaction to that the question is, what is the secret of january 6th, that would lead people the rep what secret would have to be revealed about january 6th that we didn't see on television there would be necessary to provoke the uncomfortable changing of minds that certainly happened in 1973 and 74 among people who vote for nixon. i mean, that's the way i would think about what would it have to be? i'm not going to speculate that's how i would frame the question because so much of january 6th was on television and what i thought it was a real shark test. you know for people. i suspect some americans watch that and said yeah that this is what has to happen because otherwise we can't quote unquote take our country back. whereas i would say most americans were probably for eight repulsed saddened by what they saw but that it in itself was a test of what we thought about our country. so what would the committee have to find out for those of us who are following this closely and i suspect most of us in this room are it's looking for direct connections between proud boys and oathkeepers and and the interim center circle, it's what trump was saying as he was watching the mayhem. it's what trump actually believed about what not. only what his vice president should do, but the consequences of the vice president not doing what he thought should have been done. it's whether the president knew all along that he was that it was a lie that in fact the election was was legitimate. the outcome was legitimate. the fraud wasn't in any demonstrable way influential, but he continued to stay in office he pushed but what would the public need to hear about a fraudulent campaign to stay in office for those folks that are primering anti-trump people out of you know running in november what they need to hear. i don't know but i mean, that's how that's how it i would i would i would view it. um i wanted to make one other comment quickly which has to do with this this question of the reforms of the 70s. there was a pushback against those reforms is i'm sure our panel knows and that pushback came in the george w bush era. and one of the one of the interesting ironies for me at the moment. is that what liz cheney is so and she is a heroic. and a real patriot in pushing because the costs are going to be probably politically very high for her, but maybe not. but she's pushing back against is what happens when the executive branch is too powerful. and it's her father the vice president. felt that these reforms of the 1970s hampered the executive branch and was was pushing ideas about unleashing the executive branch. and what's what's interesting is and we can debate who's a good person for the executive branch, but all of these approaches rest on the assumption that your people good people as however, we would define it are the ones in the executive branch, but when you unleash the executive branch and you get someone you don't agree with look what happens. it's for me a very interesting sort of turn about in in our political history, but also in the history of the cheney family, not that not that this is debating her father, but one of the consequences of the push back against the reforms of the seventies is that there's a whole group of lawyers now, who believe that it is their? is there obligation to to undermine the checks on the executive branch and and even though they call themselves? they say that they're true to the origins and the are from pounding fathers ideas and concepts of the country. they're actually undermining separation of powers. i know we're almost out of time. i just wanted to add one point about january 6th, which is to say that unlike watergate where you have sort of a progressive public reaction over two plus years actually for january 6th. you had an immediate public reaction you did have lots of people who had supported trump would give him money corporations who said they were revising their donation policy republicans who criticized him and we've actually seen sort of the opposite so it's been quite a self-conscious process of sort of undoing that moment of reaction and telling people that they didn't in fact see what they thought they saw in that moment and that process is almost the reverse of what we saw in the 1970s the one last thing i'll throw in is there is i think a real question and maybe the political sciences know something more about this about how big a segment of the country is persuadable. how much is not clearly locked down in one get we talked about as we have two camps, but there's clearly people who change their minds if the election of 2016 had been held in mid-october hillary definitely would have won all paul showed that between mid october and election day many people change their minds people do change their minds sometimes but how many are open changing their minds and under what conditions is something? i think we are still figuring out and we have to wrap up there see santa has to turn off their cameras. thank you all for attending this panel. thank you for your questions. and thank you to the panelists. enjoy the rest of okay. you guys this is an afn berlin special report live coverage of president reagan's visit to berlin and now here's your host army sergeant brian hart. good morning. it is just moments now until president ronald reagan officially agrees the people of berlin the president's plane air force one touched down just moments ago at west berlin's temple. hope central airport, which is under the control of the us air force president. reagan is visiting berlin to help the city celebrate at 750th anniversary and we'll make a major speech at the berlin wall in which he

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