Cspan created by americas Television Cable companies and brought you as a Public Service by a public cable provider. Youre watching book tv on cspan2 and as we get closer to the election, book tv and American History tv which is on cspan three have teamed up to bring you programs about past president ial races. Beginning now with book tv its a Panel Discussion about Richard Nixon with authors evan thomas and taylor weiner. This is from this years Annapolis Book festival. Immediately following this program on book tv, touring American History tv on cspan three to watch the first ever televised debate between then massachusetts senator john f. Kennedy and incumbent Vice PresidentRichard Nixon. Were talking today to two superb authors who have both been treating Richard Nixon. Nixon is back. Something more recently said of baltimore. But also nixon. Nixon is back and i remember just after he got on the helicopter, the Vice President , he appointed who became president joe ford said my fellow americans, the Long National nightmare is over. But like a lot of nightmares, there are flashbacks so we thought this through, i hope there will even be a few remarks that reflect on our current crazy primary season but in any case, these two topflight writers have given their sharply contrasting readings of Richard Nixon. Tim weiner on my far left, one man against the world the tragedy of Richard Nixon records in dramatic detail exactly how long and devious nixon really was. His indictment is just excruciating and fascinating. Detailed and deep, very convincing. Evan thomas on my immediate left by contrast in being nixon a man divided seeks to explain what it was like to be Richard Nixon. He summoned the great sympathy and compassion and understanding that the conflicted andultimately selfdestructive person. There is plenty in tim weiners book about selfdestruction. But the approaches are very different and thats why these two major books by different offers, both of them experts in National Security, both of them and written books about the cia. These are people who really ought to be read together. Their books are very complementary. And its great to focus in tims book about some events like dealing with brezhnev and then to turn to evans book and here in much more detail that for example brezhnev when he insisted in staying at the western white house is offering his wife but thought of her a masseuse who wore the same perfume as pat nixon and paraded up and down the hall. Nixon was not pleased. So in weiners career. Oh, so bad. Tim weiner was the National Security correspondent for the New York Times. His book about the fbi is called enemies, the history of the fbi and his book about the cia is calledlegacy of passions. The history of the cia and he has won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book award. And evan thomas is a journalist and an editor with newsweek for much of his career and his book about the cia iscalled the very best men. And he won the National Magazine award. It strikes me that both men who are excellent candidates for nixons enemies list area these were the kind of journalists with establishment journals like newsweek and the Washington Post or New York Times or in weiners case, evans went to Phillips Academy and harvard and hes the grandson of a man who ran six times for president as a socialist. Norman thomas, he was not nixons kind of guy. Yet he writes a very compassionate biography. And Mister Weiner went to Columbia University and Columbia School of journalism and the New York Times, almost as much as the Washington Post a real antagonist of mister nixon, at least in nixons point of view so my argument is, read these books together. One concentrates much more on specific events like the war in vietnam, chile , the dctente dealings with china and russia, thats Mister Weiners book and its very well complemented by evans study of what it was really like to be Richard Nixon, evan thomass book takes the entire life of mister nixon through the full extent of his life and offers a great deal of insight about him as afather, as a husband , as a man who is just always striving whereas tim weiners book tends to capture the way that he was truly a raging insomniac who as you remark attemptedto deal with his insomnia by medicating himself with alcohol. Not a good form. So each book is so convincing need to sit down with the two of them together. Evans book is not so sympathetic. In his last paragraph he does remind us nixon was no saint but he does seem to have martyred himself in a lot of his selfdestructive behavior. I thought i would ask first Mister Weiner to tell us what it was that caused him to set out to write this book. . Three years ago i was at the nixon president ial library and archives in his hometown an hour south of los angeles talking about nixons relationship with J Edgar Hoover. Who nixon called entirely, sincerely, my closest friend in all political life over the course of 25 years. Who actually died six weeks before the watergate breakin. It probably wouldnt have happened. Nixon actually said, the old boy died at the right moment, didnt he . Trying to figure out how to get rid of over four years. Three years ago, after giving this speech, the Nixon Library took me aside and said whats happening . They said by the end of 2014, everything, all the dates, the quarter of 1 Million Words of haldemans diary that were classified top secret will be out. I said, thats amazing. A 40 year struggle to get this material in the hands of the American People where it justly belongs so i put aside what i was working on and the tapes began coming out in 2013, they continue to come out and ive now listened to so much Richard Nixon i can plausibly do Richard Nixon which i will spare you. And when i finally understood were two things that i dont think had been fully understood although god knows Richard Nixon has been written about and put on these analysts couches for lo these many years and by the way, being psychoanalyze he contested area one was how the war in vietnam was fought on two fronts. Abroad and at home and how the war at home became the war of watergate. Was nixon going after his political enemies, those who opposed the war and who opposed him that led to the crimes that brought him down. The two wars was on, vietnam and watergate. And the second was after listening to the newly released tapes which cover roughly the end of the summer of 1972 until the mechanisms were revealed that the watergate hearings in 1973, the torment of this man went through, he knew before he was sworn in for his second term that he was doomed, that the president ialchalice was poisoned. And the agonies that he put himself and this country through chronicling the power was never repeated. The violations of the constitution under the next and administration were as grievous as anything weve witnessed since the civil war. No Free Republic has survived for longer than 300 years since the Ottoman Empire in the history of civilization. Weve made it to 240. We need to remember what happened, what really happened nixon years to make it to 300. Devon, i would suppose theres a theory behind your book. I work for the Washington Post for years and where i worked, nixon was the devil. Of you i share. But john meacham, who i went to about writing about nixon, i felt this was the 13th nixon biography and i thought the picture of nixon as a bad guy is pretty wellestablished by now and rightly so but i want to see what it was like to be him. I sort of put myself into his shoes. So i set out to do that. I was writing about a president that left an amazing paper trail. He took a lot of notes himself. He called his yellow legal pads best friend. So he rock road a lot of notes to himself. I was in the house with his aides , and nixon would have quite a wellrun, for all his actions and crimes, the white house was a fairlywellrun place under hr haldeman. Then of course nixon wrote thousands of pages, literally thousands of pages of memoir of varying degrees of rope reliability and there are the tapes, 3000 hours of tapes which are really only covering a couple years of his presidency but they are a mother load so you can get pretty close to nixonand thats what i endeavored to do. What i found was not the criminal mastermind but rather someone who was pathologically shy and unable to comport with his subordinates. One of the reasons he dug himself into this big hole was his fear of others, his inability to confront his own top aides. For instance, nixon did not know about the gift, he participated in coverups. He did but he could not get everybody, his top aides in one room to ask them what the hell happened for about nine months after the breakin. By then it was way too late. Felonies had been committed, it was a coverup and thats not criminal malevolence but shyness on his part. Thats conspiracy to commit fraud but im interested about his worldview and how he got along with people and the way he dealt with those people because i think tim mentioned that the next thing, vietnam and watergate. There certainly is. Watergate, we get to various places but one big thing is when they decide to break in with nixon. There three times on tape that he wants to break into the Brookings Institution after the pentagon papers had been released. The pentagon papers, you remember in 1964, its a secret history of the vietnam war. The pentagon papers never mentioned Richard Nixon but he was running a secret diplomacy and hes upset about leaks and hes upset about the times and he thinks that somewhere in the Brookings Institution there is a report that he himself commissioned on a long and convoluted story about how he did something illegal before the 1968 convention election, excuse me of communicating with the south Chinese Government to tell them not to take it. And nixon is upset that theres some report, he tells his folks to break into the Brookings Institution. One of his aides, hr haldeman says why dont we just go ask them . But nixon was crazy at various times and certainly at this time and this is where Historical Context is useful. For a long time, first of all, he should have asked but if you wanted to find something or get political intelligence, for a lot long time the fbi did that for a president. Thats how fdr stayed in office for all those years was acting as a political spy and also blackmail. But by 1971 the wind is changing here. The war on court is there, theyre liberal, theyre starting to outlaw wiretapping or put restrictions on wiretapping and restrictions on what the president can do and J Edgar Hoover, hes hopeful. He stated office for a long time because of political instinct and he can see the wind is shifting so when nixon says i want you to dig up dirt on ellsberg, hoover refuses to do it. Hes out of the game of black bags and burglaries. The fbis not doing that anymore so what does nixon do . He goes inhouse and creates his own Investigative Unit within the white house call the plumbers, remember them . Heres the thing about the plumbers. They sound like a bunch of arch criminals, hunt and liddy. Those guys were stumbled on. They in classic washington faction. It wasnt like james bond. They were actual humans. They were fools that had been dumped on the white house by the cia. They are dumping them on the cia because they didnt want to keep them in the cia. Even liddy. Liddy was an idiot whod been dumped on the treasury who had been dumped him on the white house. Working for the plumbers were hunt and liddy and they were run by a gay guy named eagle grove. This guy was a former eagle scout. His nickname at the white house was the evil crow, it was a joke. But he was intimidated by nixon and he ran into this crew of clowns and they screwed up. They broke into ellsbergs office, made a hash of that then broke into watergate, did other things as well and got caught. They were not criminal masterminds. Nixon didnt even know about these breakin attempts, there was some evidence that his top aides there, certainly probably not. The record is a little squiggly on that. But mostly, the point is it wasnt a conspiracy to violate the constitution, it was a bunch of hapless clowns running around to carry out the will of the deeply shy leader. This might be a time to bring crow on stage. But you make it clear to him again and again the phrase gutter politics. We may think of nixon just as a man who was out of touch and had some devious and totally ungoverned stumble bums working for him but you tell the story in a much more sinister way well, they didnt call him tricky dick for nothing and they had called him tricky dick for a long time because of his political career but we get in one man against the world is on top of the insecurity and deep personal security, a sense of a man coming apart. And there was no better witness to this then eagle blood crow. The time is may 1970 which later hoover would say no to nixon for the first time, im not going to do your dirty work and then appreciate the plumbers in 1979 but this is may 1970. Nixon has just invaded cambodia so its this nonexistent bamboo pentagon, coordinating enemies roots on the ho chi minh trail. The campus explodes, you all remember this and the National Guard kills for kids at penn state. Nixon at this point hasnt been able to sleep fora solid week. Haldeman notes in his diary, the president really needs some good rest. And then comes the shooting at kent state. And then theres 100,000 kids coming to washington to protest the invasion of cambodia. Nixon is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Hes up all night and by the end of saturday, in his own words is agitated and uneasy, making more than 50 phone calls and finally calling on his valet to accompany him to the Lincoln Memorial so he can rap about the war. And blood crow was on duty that night at the white house and he vividly recalls in an oral history that 4 30 in the morning i was in the secret Service Command post and over the loudspeaker came the wordssearchlight is on the lawn. Searchlight being the president s codename and i immediately punched in the number andsaid the president is out and about and i think hes in the rose garden. They said, render assistance now and so i did and i saw where the president was going to the Lincoln Memorial. I couldnt have gotten more than two or three minutes after he got there, went up the stairs to see what was going on and found him in discussion with 15 Young Students who had come in from all over the east coast and there were these three women there whose eyewitness accounts of the conversation are the only ones we have read their names are lynch s and ronnie thunder. He didnt look anyone in the eyes, he was mumbling. As forest structure, there was none. Someone asked him to speak up and he look up and poked his head around but then he would go back to looking at his feet and was all gone again, there was no train of thought. Nothing he was saying was coherent. At first i felt off and that changed right away to respect and hes as he went talking it changed to disappointment and disillusionment and then i felt pity because it was so pathetic and just plain fear that hes the president of the united states. I think we all went through that. Anyone who lived through this , not many in this room did went through all to fear. That is terrifying and this is a microcosm of what happened to Richard Nixon as he disintegrated in the next four years. Thats just the difference between then and now. It took an entire presidency to reach that point of fear of such a man in office whereas with trouble weve already gotten there and we havent even completed the primaries as a nation. Thats the difference then and now was really that you have these thousands of hours of tapes that youve listened to, everything that was said in the oval office and nowadays we have tapes from the oval office. For emails, no, they learned that. The oval office has all of our emails, tapes of us so its an inverse. Do we really need though to bring nixon down so hard can mark i mean, it seems like after reading the indictment that you lay out, theres really nothing left of the man. I get the idea that he was so anxious, so afraid constantly but also was very effective in protecting himself but did you feel that it was necessary . He sometimes comes across as kind of a political dracula in each one of your chapters is another state in the heart. It was nixon who famously said i gave them a sword. And they stuck it in and twisted it with relish and i guess if ive been in their position i would have done the same thing area the man has said hours before he left the white house, we all remember that in 1974, one o