Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Few people were deeper into the Watergate cover up than
Speaker 1: President Nixon's White House Council John Dene Then he flipped.
Speaker 1: He was a star witness for the Congressional investigation. And
Speaker 1: while some Wartergate conspirators had religious conversions in prison, Dean
Speaker 1: left prison with a commitment to teaching in classrooms and
Speaker 1: beyond the lessons of the scandal and advocating for better government.
Speaker 1: I recently had the opportunity to talk with him in
Speaker 1: front of a live audience at NYU's Skirball Center.
Speaker 2: Tell us the.
Speaker 1: Jobs you had in government prior to you becoming counsel
Speaker 1: to the president.
Speaker 2: I was at the House Judiciary Committee, was my first
Speaker 2: job in government, and from there I went to a
Speaker 2: commission that was revising the federal Criminal Code. I didn't
Speaker 2: study enough while they were working on I have a
Speaker 2: question about it. I then went from there to become
Speaker 2: the Associate Deputy Attorney General in the Nixon administration. At
Speaker 2: the outset of the administration, and while they're working in justice,
Speaker 2: I was invited to become counselor of the president who
Speaker 2: invited you Richard Nixon.
Speaker 1: Nixon, someone's making a recommendation to him, or he knew
Speaker 1: you personally.
Speaker 2: Well, they sent a feeler out. In fact, I over
Speaker 2: the years, in going through the archives, I haven't collected
Speaker 2: at all, but I have collected bits and pieces. I
Speaker 2: didn't realize they were doing reconnaissance on me for many
Speaker 2: many months before they asked me to come over to
Speaker 2: the White House, Questions like could I really be loyal
Speaker 2: to Nixon? Literally? Literally?
Speaker 1: What did you think that they saw in you? That
Speaker 1: they thought you were a Nixon man?
Speaker 2: You know, that's one of the mysteries to me is
Speaker 2: why someone as young and inexperienced as I was was
Speaker 2: given that job. I was given, actually the title, I
Speaker 2: wasn't given the job. Initially, John Erlickman had been White
Speaker 2: House counsel. He was the initial White House counsel. He
Speaker 2: gave up the title, he didn't give up the job,
Speaker 2: and I think Nixon throughout really relied on Erlickman for
Speaker 2: his legal advice.
Speaker 1: Did you come from a Republican family? Your dad was
Speaker 1: he an executive Firestone? He worked at Firestone.
Speaker 2: My father spent eighteen years at Firestone and then went out.
Speaker 2: He was a turnaround expert. He would go into a plant,
Speaker 2: a manufacturing plant, could see why it wasn't working. He
Speaker 2: was the numbers man as well as a mechanical engineer
Speaker 2: from Carnegie Mellon and could straighten these plants out.
Speaker 1: So did you have some kind of Republican credentials throughout your.
Speaker 2: My family was not particularly political for you. I actually
Speaker 2: became interested in politics when I was in prep school
Speaker 2: and my roommate happened to be the son of a
Speaker 2: United States senator, and we would go up to Washington
Speaker 2: and stop and see Senator Goldwater, his son and I
Speaker 2: and and that's when I became interested in that world.
Speaker 2: I can still recall and visualize walking down those marble
Speaker 2: halls with the Senator leading the way, taking us on
Speaker 2: a tour here or there, and saying, this is pretty impressive.
Speaker 2: He was also, I thought, an impressive guy. He had
Speaker 2: one of the first Thunderbird For thunderbirds, I was at
Speaker 2: that age just thinking about getting a Drynse, and we'd
Speaker 2: ride around in his car that was more like the
Speaker 2: cockpit of an airplane. He was a ham radio operator
Speaker 2: and could also talk to any air base he wanted
Speaker 2: to talk to from his thunderbird.
Speaker 1: Now, when you finally go to the White House as
Speaker 1: a counsel to the president, what was your sense of
Speaker 1: what the job was and what did you discover the
Speaker 1: job actually was.
Speaker 2: One of the things that was really strange is I
Speaker 2: was never given much guidance as to what the White
Speaker 2: House counsel did when Erlikman was there. He never really
Speaker 2: told me anything about it. When Hallaman interviewed me before
Speaker 2: I went in to have the President, say would you
Speaker 2: take the job, he said, I suppose you will just
Speaker 2: do whatever you lawyers do. He wasn't a lawyer, And
Speaker 2: that was about the guidance I got.
Speaker 1: What were some of the things you did? What were
Speaker 1: some of the things you worked on you start the job?
Speaker 1: One year?
Speaker 2: When I started the job, it was a lot of
Speaker 2: I realized that Erlickman was sending my office all the minutia,
Speaker 2: things like clearing people for conflict of interest, preparing us
Speaker 2: for example. There was no staff manual when I got there,
Speaker 2: so my office prepared a staff manual to tell people,
Speaker 2: you know, what forms letters had to be in. As
Speaker 2: well as the fact they couldn't contact independent regulatory agencies.
Speaker 2: They had to go through our office or not at all,
Speaker 2: sort of just basic mechanics. And I told initially I
Speaker 2: was a solo and I think they were sort of
Speaker 2: testing to see who I was and what would go on.
Speaker 2: And it was about six months before they let me
Speaker 2: hire an assistant, and I needed the help because there's
Speaker 2: a lot of work. In fact, today in the archives,
Speaker 2: the White House Council's office for the Nixon presidency is
Speaker 2: one of the largest collections of papers.
Speaker 1: Well, thank god you weren't doing the conflict of interest
Speaker 1: work in the White House. Now you'd be dead from
Speaker 1: exhaustion and you need about five hundred.
Speaker 2: Either that or there is no clearance at all and
Speaker 2: no work at all.
Speaker 1: They probably just closed that office this term. You know,
Speaker 1: we're not going to bother with that conflict. Just send
Speaker 1: them home. But describe for me, because I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people you get into that kind of cult
Speaker 1: of personality with someone like Nixon, and what was it
Speaker 1: like to work with him? What was he like? Because
Speaker 1: it's just nothing like being in the presence of the
Speaker 1: person themselves, rather than through the filter of the media.
Speaker 1: What was he like when you.
Speaker 2: Worked with him? You know, when I went over there,
Speaker 2: I was old enough and been around enough to know
Speaker 2: there was a Tricky Dick. But I believed in the
Speaker 2: sixty eight campaign that Tricky Dick had matured. He was
Speaker 2: now a former vice president who really understood how government operated,
Speaker 2: and he would be a great senior statesman. That's the
Speaker 2: image that was put out. The White House staff itself
Speaker 2: was operated so tightly that very few on the staff
Speaker 2: actually knew what the president did and how he did it,
Speaker 2: and when he did it. It was more they read
Speaker 2: what was in the paper that was being cranked out
Speaker 2: by everybody else. As to the image of the president, I've,
Speaker 2: for example, really other than in group meetings and just
Speaker 2: passed through meetings, had no dealings with him until eight
Speaker 2: months after the arrests at the Watergate and then I'll
Speaker 2: have some thirty seven thirty eight meetings with him.
Speaker 1: You become more useful to him once the issue.
Speaker 2: What happens is after his successful reelection. I have been
Speaker 2: reporting to either Halleman or Erlickman everything I'm able to
Speaker 2: pick up about Watergate and the investigation and where it's
Speaker 2: going and what its implications are. And nothing looks good
Speaker 2: at that point. Nixon decides rather and have well not
Speaker 2: at that point, but several months later, in February, he
Speaker 2: decided rather than have Hallman Erlickman filtering what I have
Speaker 2: to say, he decides to deal directly with me. And
Speaker 2: thankfully it was recorded.
Speaker 1: So when you so the news breaks, the burglary breaks
Speaker 1: in what month of seventy two?
Speaker 2: June seventeenth of seventy two.
Speaker 1: June of seventy two, he's overwhelmingly elected. After that, And
Speaker 1: when you found out of these guys who had links
Speaker 1: to the White House or to the Committee to be
Speaker 1: elect had broken into the DNC office at the Watergate Hotel,
Speaker 1: what did you make of it?
Speaker 2: Well, I happn't have been in Manila in the Philippiness
Speaker 2: convenience or was it the first mistake was coming home?
Speaker 2: That's on June nineteenth, two days after the arrest, I'm
Speaker 2: sent to interview Gordon Lyddy, who confesses to me. He says,
Speaker 2: it's our men, my men.
Speaker 1: And when he said my men, what was his no, No,
Speaker 1: Lyddy was.
Speaker 2: X FBI former FBI was x CIA, x CIA.
Speaker 1: When he said my men, what was there?
Speaker 2: Well, what he was explaining is that there was On
Speaker 2: the morning of the nineteenth, the Washington Post knew more
Speaker 2: than we did at the White House as far as Watergate,
Speaker 2: And there was a big story that morning that amongst
Speaker 2: those arrested was the chief of security for the re
Speaker 2: election Committee, James McCord, which was a pretty good clue
Speaker 2: that it somehow involved the re election Committee, John Mitchell.
Speaker 2: Ahead of the re election Committee, the former Attorney General
Speaker 2: now director of the Election Committee, put out a statement saying, Oh,
Speaker 2: we don't know anything about what these guys were doing.
Speaker 2: They were freelancing on their own. It didn't take me
Speaker 2: very long to realize that that was beloney. Today, I
Speaker 2: know that really the conspiracy was hatched over that weekend
Speaker 2: and the decision to cover it up, and there was
Speaker 2: a real reason to cover it up for the White House,
Speaker 2: which I learned when talking to Liddy on the morning
Speaker 2: of the nineteenth. In fact, I intercepted him rather than
Speaker 2: come to my office. I didn't want him in my office,
Speaker 2: but rather walk down seventeenth Street. That's when he said,
Speaker 2: these are my men who did this. He said, I
Speaker 2: was foolish to use McCord, who was part of the
Speaker 2: re election Committee. Liddy himself was the general counsel of
Speaker 2: the Finance Committee of the re Election Committee. Where that
Speaker 2: was his supposed principal responsibility. But he was running this
Speaker 2: on the side. And on the way back up he
Speaker 2: said two things that were back up seventeen tries were
Speaker 2: really quite startling. He said, you should know, John, while
Speaker 2: I work at the White House, that Howard Hunt who
Speaker 2: helped me get the men for this operation. And I
Speaker 2: did a what he called a national security operation by
Speaker 2: breaking in Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. What I didn't know
Speaker 2: at that time is that had been really authorized in
Speaker 2: writing by John Erlickman, my predecessor, who wrote on a
Speaker 2: sheet asking his approval so long is not traceable to
Speaker 2: the White House. I didn't know that at that time. Anyway,
Speaker 2: I did go back and report to Erlickman what I
Speaker 2: had learned. The other thing that Liddy said on the
Speaker 2: way back up seventeenth Street, he said, I realized I've
Speaker 2: made a terrible error, and if anybody wants to take
Speaker 2: me out, just tell me what street corner.
Speaker 1: He yeah, he literally said.
Speaker 2: He said, anybody wants to take me out, just don't
Speaker 2: do it at my house. I've got children there.
Speaker 1: What do you think was behind that? Why would he,
Speaker 1: I mean, other than his own having maybe a screw
Speaker 1: loose or something. Why did he believe that the operation
Speaker 1: of the White House, the executive branch of the government,
Speaker 1: would want to whack him on a street in Washington.
Speaker 2: Why. I have no idea. He's a little dramatic, probably
Speaker 2: a mistake not to no, no, just to clarify.
Speaker 1: And of course the day he was shot, you were
Speaker 1: in Manila, right right, so, but no explain to people
Speaker 1: what were they after.
Speaker 2: It's taken a long time to assemble what they were
Speaker 2: really after because no one really talked about it, and
Speaker 2: it was kind of embarrassing. One of the reasons I'm
Speaker 2: convinced that Lyddy was silent is because of the stupidity
Speaker 2: of all the activities that have been carried on the
Speaker 2: For example, he post Watergate acted like he was some
Speaker 2: James Bond type character who had been hired by the
Speaker 2: White House to come in and do these things. As
Speaker 2: the historical record shows, he's not quite at the Maxwell's
Speaker 2: smart level in most of his undertakings.
Speaker 1: Another reference from our childhoods if you don't Maxwell's.
Speaker 2: Spot anyway, what they were looking for? It appears to me.
Speaker 2: It appeared to me at the time, and I have
Speaker 2: since been even more convinced with a pure fishing expedition.
Speaker 2: They were just in there trying to find anything they
Speaker 2: could of a negative nature, and hopefully on Larry O'Brien,
Speaker 2: the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Speaker 1: So during the period where you're called in now and
Speaker 1: you become pulled into this circle to help solve this problem,
Speaker 1: when does that commence?
Speaker 2: On the nineteenth, I'm the person who's in charge of
Speaker 2: finding out what's happening and keeping abreast of what's happening,
Speaker 2: talking to people in the Justice Department, talking to the FBI,
Speaker 2: talking to the re election committee that has its own
Speaker 2: group of lawyers, and then bringing that information in. And
Speaker 2: what happened is the re election Committee started calling on
Speaker 2: the White House for help. One of the interesting things
Speaker 2: is I've always been convinced that John Mitchell, who we know,
Speaker 2: did authorize the Watergate break in. He authorized the money,
Speaker 2: he authorized the plan. He did it in Florida with
Speaker 2: Jeb macgruder, who was his deputy, and Magruder then gave
Speaker 2: the orders. I'm convinced that Mitchell, from my initial conversations
Speaker 2: with him on the nineteenth, was prepared to step forward
Speaker 2: and say, hey, this happened on my watch. He also
Speaker 2: sent word to the White House over the weekend, stay away.
Speaker 1: From it, deflect all the responsibility from the president.
Speaker 2: Take it all that happened. That was the original plan.
Speaker 2: But then what happened is he too got a briefing
Speaker 2: as to what Liddy had done and learned of the
Speaker 2: Ellsburg break, in which he thought was as bad, if
Speaker 2: not worse, than what had happened at the Watergate. And
Speaker 2: he and he and Erlickman, who had always had a
Speaker 2: strained relationship, they often in a room would talk to
Speaker 2: each other through me. They would turn to me and say,
Speaker 2: like the other person wasn't in the room. And that's
Speaker 2: how I slowly became the lynchpin.
Speaker 1: Like a marriage counsel.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, because that's that's how I became the lynchpin
Speaker 2: of this conspiracy.
Speaker 1: When you're in a room with these guys, I only
Speaker 1: have a sense of them from archival footage from the news,
Speaker 1: and so when they do seem like a pretty uh,
Speaker 1: not a very lighthearted crowd, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: And Haldeman and Erlckman and missions, they seemed like some
Speaker 1: pretty dark crowd in terms of because I'm going to
Speaker 1: read a quote for you from because you were on
Speaker 1: the Commission on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws right as
Speaker 1: the War on drugs was beginning. And then the next thing,
Speaker 1: you know, you're intimately working with in a room with Erlickman,
Speaker 1: who said the following right before he died. He said
Speaker 1: the Nicks about Nixon Republicans. He said that Nixon Republicans
Speaker 1: had two enemies, the anti war left and black people.
Speaker 1: We knew it couldn't make it illegal to be either
Speaker 1: against the war or black, but by getting the public
Speaker 1: to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin,
Speaker 1: and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
Speaker 1: And he said, do we know we were lying about drugs?
Speaker 1: Of course we did when you were in the room
Speaker 1: with these guys.
Speaker 2: And do you get a sense that you never heard
Speaker 2: that kind of talk. It wasn't until I years later,
Speaker 2: my last book, I cataloged all of the Nixon Watergate conversations.
Speaker 2: I heard on those tapes things I'd never heard those
Speaker 2: men say in front of me. They were their own
Speaker 2: small unit that would talk about these things at a
Speaker 2: level that I wasn't privy. There were some chilling stuff
Speaker 2: that and racist stuff that I'd never seen in Erlichman before.
Speaker 2: In those tapes. It's a remarkable record. No president's ever
Speaker 2: going to leave that behind again.
Speaker 1: When well, because I'd be too hasty. Now you're hopeful,
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing, now,
Speaker 1: more of my conversation with John Dean. Both houses of
Speaker 1: the Congress were in Democratic hands at the time.
Speaker 2: Correct, But it was a different Democratic party.
Speaker 1: Of course.
Speaker 2: It was a party with Southern Democrats who are today Republicans,
Speaker 2: so it divided. He believed and held out the belief
Speaker 2: for a long time. I think that he could with
Speaker 2: a combination of Republicans and Southern Democrats keep a keep
Speaker 2: his office through an impeachment bill of impeachment in the House,
Speaker 2: if not defeating that, certainly not getting two thirds of
Speaker 2: the Senate to vote against him for removal. So it's
Speaker 2: a different Democratic party. It's true, it was not controlled
Speaker 2: by the South either. It was more more moderate to progressive.
Speaker 2: It did, and if you recall, it's very slow that
Speaker 2: the impeachment process starts with Watergate. It isn't until he
Speaker 2: removes the special prosecutor Archibald Cox, that they take this seriously.
Speaker 2: That while that itself may not be an obstruction of
Speaker 2: justice or an impeachment or a criminal offense, he had
Speaker 2: the power to do it a lot of parallels with today.
Speaker 2: He certainly politically had made a terrible mistake.
Speaker 1: There were Republicans, obviously on the Judiciary Committee and in
Speaker 1: the Congress who were willing to vote for it.
Speaker 2: Slowly but surely they did. They were with the moderates
Speaker 2: first and then finally by the end when they heard
Speaker 2: the so called smoking gun tape, which showed Nixons had
Speaker 2: based his defense up until the end on the fact
Speaker 2: he knew nothing of the Watergate cover up until I
Speaker 2: had told him on March twenty first, in a conversation
Speaker 2: that was labeled to Cancer on the Presidency conversation, he
Speaker 2: said that was the first he'd learned. Well, that was
Speaker 2: a pretty outrageous lie, and he got caught in it
Speaker 2: just by really the special prosecutor fishing for a tape
Speaker 2: and one of that, and that tape showed him telling
Speaker 2: or agreeing with Holloman's plan to have this CIA block
Speaker 2: the FBI's investigation in the Watergate, and.
Speaker 1: That conversation with Haliman takes place.
Speaker 2: When June twenty third, right after the year of breaking right,
Speaker 2: six days after after right.
Speaker 1: And these are the tapes that he was was to surrender,
Speaker 1: which he would. I don't understand that he did surrender
Speaker 1: the tapes other than the gap, the famous gap.
Speaker 2: There would have been an interesting constitutional crisis if he
Speaker 2: had said to the Supreme Court, Okay, I've got your willing,
Speaker 2: I think it's wrong, and I'm president. I've got the troops.
Speaker 2: You come get the tapes. This is my property, this
Speaker 2: is my pa. You're not entitled to have this property.
Speaker 2: And history would have been very different.
Speaker 1: As everybody knows, it's a famous gap. Is eighteen minutes.
Speaker 2: Eighteen and a half minute eighteen. It's a media it's
Speaker 2: a media invented event.
Speaker 1: So there was no erasure at all.
Speaker 2: No a strong man could press the record button and
Speaker 2: cause the eraser, and the experts saw seven to nine
Speaker 2: efforts to erase that material.
Speaker 1: Well, what do you think was erased on those tapes?
Speaker 1: Is there everybody in the satisfied you?
Speaker 2: Because I've listened to the conversations that precede and follow
Speaker 2: Nixon had a pattern of repeating things that were important
Speaker 2: or sort of sensitive they would come up in subsequent conversations.
Speaker 2: This is a very early conversation. This is on June twentieth,
Speaker 2: his first conversation back. That's why it was subpoenaed. And
Speaker 2: I think it was just a gaff that resulted in
Speaker 2: that probably being erased, and it could have The person
Speaker 2: that occurred to me that could have done it was
Speaker 2: somebody who had a terrible time opening those medicine bottles
Speaker 2: you press in turn. I'd see it in his mouth
Speaker 2: occasionally trying to get the cap off. He had trouble
Speaker 2: opening its drawers. He hadn't driven a car in years.
Speaker 2: This was a very foreign kind of machine.
Speaker 1: Did Nixon order the breaking himself?
Speaker 2: No, No, there's no evidence of that. There's no evidence
Speaker 2: that anybody in the White House knew. What's ironic, Alec
Speaker 2: is that had the mission of the evening actually been accomplished,
Speaker 2: rather than Lyddy and his men being arrested or Lydy's
Speaker 2: men being arrested, it was traceable to the White House.
Speaker 2: Their mission that night was really to go plant a
Speaker 2: bug in McGovern's headquarters on Capitol Hill. The reason they
Speaker 2: didn't do that is they got arrested fixing a defective
Speaker 2: machinery that they'd put in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
Speaker 2: You can trace back through tapes and Holleman memos that
Speaker 2: Nixon gives an order to put a plant a secretary
Speaker 2: or a volunteer or something like that, move it from
Speaker 2: Muskie to McGovern, not particularly a wiretap.
Speaker 1: So as we come rolling into seventy three, right as
Speaker 1: he's or things changed dramatically for him, what kind of
Speaker 1: things is he asking you to do? And what was
Speaker 1: he like to work with her in that time?
Speaker 2: Jumping back to August twenty ninth of seventy two, pre election,
Speaker 2: he had a press conference and one of the early
Speaker 2: questions he's asked, is mister President, giving the factor your
Speaker 2: Attorney General is now the head of the reelection committee
Speaker 2: and somebody from the re election committee was arrested in
Speaker 2: the DNC, why don't you appoint a special prosecutor? And
Speaker 2: he has his response all prepared and he says, well,
Speaker 2: first of all, the Congress is investigating this, the General
Speaker 2: Accounting Office is investigating it, the FBI is investigating it,
Speaker 2: but most importantly, my White House Counsel, John Dean, has
Speaker 2: investigated this matter and found nobody presently employed in this
Speaker 2: administration had anything to do with this bizarre incident. This
Speaker 2: was the first I heard of my investigation. And so
Speaker 2: after that, his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, called and said, John,
Speaker 2: do you have a copy of your report? I said, Ron,
Speaker 2: there is no report. He said, well, maybe there should be,
Speaker 2: and I said, well, I don't think so anyways, think
Speaker 2: so why? Because I didn't want to lie. I didn't
Speaker 2: want to You knew that they wanted you to doctor something.
Speaker 2: It was quite clear they won't. Yes. Yes. What happens
Speaker 2: is when we're going back to when I first start
Speaker 2: dealing with with Nixon, he starts on the report again
Speaker 2: that he wants a Dean report. He is convinced somehow
Speaker 2: this will make things go away. Erlichman makes it pretty
Speaker 2: clear that what he can do is have this report
Speaker 2: in his desk drawer and say this is all I knew.
Speaker 2: It didn't take me long, you know, I figured that
Speaker 2: out immediately, that that this would be a setup. And
Speaker 2: I had no interest in Lyne, had no interest in
Speaker 2: giving the false information to the president. Uh and didn't.
Speaker 2: But he presses me on that there were actually three
Speaker 2: phases of the cover up. For me, I initially thought
Speaker 2: I was just helping out my colleagues and didn't see
Speaker 2: anything criminally amiss. H Defense funds were not unusual at
Speaker 2: that time. Not announcing them didn't sound horrible to me.
Speaker 2: I didn't see any quid pro quo in anything. Nothing
Speaker 2: struck me amiss at this point, as I say, I'm
Speaker 2: not trained as a criminal lawyer either.
Speaker 1: Defense funds.
Speaker 2: What do you mean defense funds? The Barrigan brothers for
Speaker 2: the had a defense fund the Chicago Were you talking
Speaker 2: about criminal for criminal defense yet? And that's what actually Nick,
Speaker 2: there's a tape of Nixon suggesting that there'd be a
Speaker 2: defense fund set up for the Cubans who had been
Speaker 2: hired by Hunt and Lyddy to pay their lawyer's fees
Speaker 2: and what have you. If he had done that openly,
Speaker 2: he might have avoided obstructing justice. It's very curious, and
Speaker 2: Halleman and Erlikman dropped that I never heard about that.
Speaker 2: In fact, when I first hear about it, I don't
Speaker 2: know what he's talk really, what he's talking about anyway,
Speaker 2: phases the cover up for me. I initially don't think
Speaker 2: I'm engaging in criminal conduct. When I realize I am
Speaker 2: is after the election Howard Hunt calls Chuck Coulson, and
Speaker 2: Coulson records the call on a dictaphone. He had his
Speaker 2: phone hooked up to a dictaphone, as many did in
Speaker 2: the White House, and he brought this tape down to
Speaker 2: me to play of his conversation with Hunt. And he's
Speaker 2: proud of punch of this conversation because Coulson is because
Speaker 2: it exonerates him in the Watergate, that he had nothing
Speaker 2: to do with the Watergate break in I hear something
Speaker 2: very different. I hear Hunt demanding that he get paid
Speaker 2: sooner rather than later, that promises have been made to
Speaker 2: him to take care of him, they haven't been delivered,
Speaker 2: and the ready isn't there. I immediately say to Chuck,
Speaker 2: this is very bad. Chuck. He said, well, what are
Speaker 2: you going to do about it? I said, I don't know.
Speaker 2: What I did do is take the tape up to
Speaker 2: Halleman and Erlickman and played it for them. They said,
Speaker 2: take it to John Mitchell and get him to solve
Speaker 2: the problem, which I next did that same day and
Speaker 2: took it up to New York and played it for Mitchell,
Speaker 2: whose first reaction is don't you ever have anything good
Speaker 2: news to report, and I said, no, John, I don't anyway.
Speaker 2: It's after listening to that conversation, I let my fingers
Speaker 2: do the walking in the criminal code to figure out
Speaker 2: what in the world are we doing. And I discovered
Speaker 2: eighteen Usc. Fifteen oh three, which is the obstruction statute,
Speaker 2: and I discover eighteen Usc. Three seventy one, the conspiracy statute,
Speaker 2: and I realized we're in a whole lot of trouble. Now.
Speaker 2: You might have thought that the first reaction would be
Speaker 2: to run for the hills. I mean I had exactly
Speaker 2: the opposite reaction. That's when I double down. That's when
Speaker 2: I try to make the cover up work. I know
Speaker 2: today psychologically what was going on. I was in what
Speaker 2: they call the loss frame, where you have no attractive
Speaker 2: options and you do stupid things. It's unfortunate part of
Speaker 2: human nature happens a lot to a lot of people.
Speaker 2: I don't did you.
Speaker 1: Feel a loyalty personally to any of these people. Had
Speaker 1: you developed any kind of closeness with them as a person.
Speaker 2: As a co conspirator, Yes, I did. I wanted to
Speaker 2: cover up to work at that point, and that's when
Speaker 2: I do dumb things like destroyed documents, knowing, yes, you know,
Speaker 2: and I never understood, and for years you know what
Speaker 2: had happened. Then the last phase of my involvement in
Speaker 2: the cover up is when Haunt sends a message to
Speaker 2: me that he's going to have seemi things to say
Speaker 2: about John Erlickman and by implication, Bud Krogue, one of
Speaker 2: his assistants regarding his break in at the Elsberg psychiatrist
Speaker 2: office fas go. That's when I sort of say, my god,
Speaker 2: this is never going to end. We're being extorted. There
Speaker 2: will be no end in it. It's this cover up
Speaker 2: is not going to work, and we've got to figure
Speaker 2: out how to stop it and get the president out
Speaker 2: in front of it. And that's March nineteenth when that
Speaker 2: word comes in. I have by then started to have
Speaker 2: enough dealings with the President that I think he's got
Speaker 2: trust in me. And so on March the morning of
Speaker 2: March twenty first, I go in after setting it breaking
Speaker 2: precedent because you weren't supposed to go to the president
Speaker 2: other than through Haldeman. When he called me that night,
Speaker 2: I said, mister President, I really need to talk to you,
Speaker 2: and he said, how about ten o'clock. I said, fine,
Speaker 2: I'll be there. I called Haleman that morning and said,
Speaker 2: I need to go in and lay it out to
Speaker 2: the president. He really doesn't get it. I don't know
Speaker 2: if Hallaman understood what I was talking about or not,
Speaker 2: but he said, fine, you do what you think is necessary.
Speaker 2: I went in and tried to give him enough back,
Speaker 2: given the benefit of the doubt that he didn't know anything.
Speaker 2: I know today he knew almost virtually everything. But I
Speaker 2: took him through each step, and every time I would
Speaker 2: raise one of the problems, he'd have an answer. I'd raise,
Speaker 2: for example, Bud Krog is worried he's committed perjury. Nixon's response, Well, John,
Speaker 2: perjury is a tough rap to prove. I raised the
Speaker 2: fact that Hunt was demanding one hundred and twenty thousand
Speaker 2: dollars yesterday, he wonted fifty thousand for his attorney's fees
Speaker 2: and seventy for his living expenses and what have you,
Speaker 2: because he had by then been convicted.
Speaker 1: What's the linix in the famousite, we could get the money.
Speaker 2: If we had to. That's exactly the line. That's your
Speaker 2: coming to it. And and I said, miss President, I
Speaker 2: have no idea how much this might cost and he said, well,
Speaker 2: what do you think. What give me an estimate. I
Speaker 2: pulled out a thin air what I thought was a
Speaker 2: hefty number. I said, a million dollars. That would be
Speaker 2: what about five and a half today, never having tried
Speaker 2: to even kind of, you know, calculate what it might be.
Speaker 2: And that's when he said, that's no problem. I know
Speaker 2: where we can get that. I know. And what I
Speaker 2: didn't know is, well until I actually did this book
Speaker 2: with all the tapes is after that conversation, he goes
Speaker 2: over to rose Woods door, which is adjoining his off
Speaker 2: the Oval office, and asked Rose in a voice you
Speaker 2: can hear on the tapes, how much is in the
Speaker 2: slush fund. There's six hundred thousand. He will within a
Speaker 2: week or so be selling an ambassadorship to raise money.
Speaker 2: He's on the job. He's going to solve this. He's
Speaker 2: going to get the million bucks and say take care
Speaker 2: of it.
Speaker 1: If John Deane was the ultimate Nixon insider, essay and
Speaker 1: satirist Lewis Lapham was the ultimate outsider. Despite their shared
Speaker 1: patrician roots, Lapham skewered the administration and its Wartergate troubles
Speaker 1: from behind the covers of Harper's Magazine, where he was
Speaker 1: the managing editor throughout the scandal.
Speaker 3: I never liked or trusted Nixon. I came out of
Speaker 3: the the affluent, privileged.
Speaker 1: San Francisco society.
Speaker 3: San Francisco society. My father had been very strongly in
Speaker 3: favor of Roosevelt. In nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 1: Hear my conversation with Lewis Lapham at Here's the Thing
Speaker 1: dot Org coming up more from Richard Nixon's White House
Speaker 1: Council on lessons from Watergate for Trump and the rest
Speaker 1: of us. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's
Speaker 1: the Thing now more of my conversation with John Dean.
Speaker 2: When you talk.
Speaker 1: About this period, you say that I'm going to stop
Speaker 1: this or I'm having my doubts because the cover up
Speaker 1: you don't think is going to work. Would you have
Speaker 1: kept going if you thought the cover up would work?
Speaker 2: You know? The President at the end of my March
Speaker 2: twenty first cancer on the Presidency where I used that
Speaker 2: phrase to get his attention, and I had it after that,
Speaker 2: I was I think that's the day I met Richard Nixon,
Speaker 2: the real Nixon, because I took him through one problem
Speaker 2: after another, problem after another problem, waiting for his fist
Speaker 2: or hand to come down on the desk and say
Speaker 2: this has got to stop. That isn't the man I
Speaker 2: met that morning. He had answers for everything, and that
Speaker 2: it had to continue, that somebody should take care of
Speaker 2: this problem with Hunt, and that there was no short
Speaker 2: term answer. He wanted the cover up to go on.
Speaker 2: I had nothing to do with Hunt getting he did
Speaker 2: get paid. Mitchell took care of it, and Hunt would
Speaker 2: remain a bought man until the Watergate prosecutor is trying
Speaker 2: Halleman and Erlikman and Mitchell in the cover up trial
Speaker 2: in October of nineteen seventy four, which is quite remarkable.
Speaker 2: And then he would decide that he would tell the truth.
Speaker 2: And he was the Perry Mason witness that came into
Speaker 2: the trial and nobody knew was going to arrive and
Speaker 2: explain what the Watergate break in was, how things had operated,
Speaker 2: and was very candid and very honest.
Speaker 1: Now you mentioned the three phases of the cover up.
Speaker 1: Did you cover all three of.
Speaker 2: Those or was there another way I did? The last
Speaker 2: phase was ending trying to end the cover up and
Speaker 2: realizing the only way I could end it, and telling
Speaker 2: my colleagues, I'm going to the prosecutors. This has got
Speaker 2: you know, we've got to deal with this. We need
Speaker 2: criminal lawyers in here. I'm going to hire a criminal lawyer.
Speaker 2: And who'd you hire? I hired a college law school
Speaker 2: classmate initially to talk about a man who later became
Speaker 2: the chief judge of the Federal District Court in DC,
Speaker 2: Tom Hogan, and we talked about it, and he suggested
Speaker 2: Charlie Shaffer, who had worked here in the Southern District,
Speaker 2: was a very accomplished prosecutor and had become a very
Speaker 2: successful criminal defense lawyer, and he was terrific. I for
Speaker 2: a while had one foot in the White House and
Speaker 2: one foot out of the White House, but didn't hide
Speaker 2: it from my colleagues what I was doing either.
Speaker 1: You're a very young man when this is happening, and
Speaker 1: you're married. I mean, we talked backstage about how your
Speaker 1: wife becomes kind of a bit player of the whole thing.
Speaker 1: Is the case, as you said, the camera found her.
Speaker 1: You're a beautiful wife, Maureen Dean, and she was there.
Speaker 2: She had a huge influence on me. I want you
Speaker 2: to explain it about you every day, you know, I
Speaker 2: did not want to get married, but I did not
Speaker 2: want to lose her. I had been married and divorced
Speaker 2: and had a child from that first marriage, and I
Speaker 2: had fallen in love with her and we'd had a
Speaker 2: wonderful relationship. She wanted to get married, and I just
Speaker 2: knew this was a bad time. I didn't know how
Speaker 2: bad it was. I got married, how much? When did you?
Speaker 2: I get married in October of nineteen seventy two, very
Speaker 2: bad time. We have now been married forty five years,
Speaker 2: so you know the you know, the first time that
Speaker 2: happened to me was not long ago when I said
Speaker 2: that to somebody. I happened to be in Nashville giving
Speaker 2: a talk because of Jim Neil, who was one of
Speaker 2: the Water Special prosecutors. They became like fime friends, many
Speaker 2: of these guys and one woman and his former law firm.
Speaker 2: He's deceased now, but his former law firm had a
Speaker 2: program and I came down to speak, and there was
Speaker 2: a boys' school there. It's a very fine academy, and
Speaker 2: they asked me to come out and do their assembly,
Speaker 2: and seven hundred kids filed in and I somehow, in passing,
Speaker 2: mentioned that I had been married to Maureen forty five
Speaker 2: years and the kids broke out in applause, and I thought,
Speaker 2: isn't that nice? I mean, I was very please. I
Speaker 2: can't imagine what that's like to be married for forty
Speaker 2: five years? Like, what really now?
Speaker 1: When you go home? I mean, I'm trying to get
Speaker 1: you to talk about something just in terms of your
Speaker 1: personal feelings and your emotional life. Were you going home
Speaker 1: and you know, and having dinner with your wife and
Speaker 1: sitting having a drink and saying, what the hell am
Speaker 1: I going to do? Or did you try to protect
Speaker 1: her or not.
Speaker 2: Confide protected her? I you know, I tried to warn her,
Speaker 2: you know, until you give me your wife what's going on.
Speaker 1: I tried to.
Speaker 2: Explain to her there were going to be problems, but
Speaker 2: I wasn't terribly.
Speaker 1: I just got married.
Speaker 2: Depth about it, I must. Somebody recently asked me how
Speaker 2: did I get through it all? And my answer was vodka.
Speaker 1: So you did not confide a great deal in.
Speaker 2: Her, No, I didn't you. None of you know, Essentially
Speaker 2: none of the men talked to their wives about what
Speaker 2: was going on. I'm sure more lamps would have been
Speaker 2: overheads if some of the women had learned about what
Speaker 2: was going on. When it was going on. I think
Speaker 2: all the wives were shocked at some of this. But anyway,
Speaker 2: as I said, she had a tremendous influence on me.
Speaker 2: When I decided to break rank, one of the reasons
Speaker 2: was I didn't want to disappoint her. I wanted to
Speaker 2: live up to the standard. She thought.
Speaker 1: March sixteenth is when you said the meeting was with
Speaker 1: him cancer on the president of March twenty first, twenty first,
Speaker 1: and so how soon after that do you get canned?
Speaker 2: End of April.
Speaker 1: There's very tight.
Speaker 2: It's tight, but the tapes are fascinating. The tapes. My
Speaker 2: editor happens to be here tonight and he helped me tremendously.
Speaker 2: That there were four I ended up with four million
Speaker 2: words in twenty thick notebooks of transcripts that we had
Speaker 2: to bring down to narrative and dialogue. And when I
Speaker 2: got to those tapes and in that period at the end,
Speaker 2: after I'd given him the cancer and the presidency, the
Speaker 2: conversations are so repetitive. I mean, they just go over
Speaker 2: and over trying to figure out how to deal with me.
Speaker 2: What are they going to do? And generally the only
Speaker 2: answer is to make me the scapegoat. He's afraid of me.
Speaker 2: When he lets Halleman and Erlikman go, he just, in
Speaker 2: a one sentence, says, and so is White House Counsul
Speaker 2: John Dene No shots at me at all, because when
Speaker 2: I get in there, I start telling him things he
Speaker 2: doesn't even know. He didn't know until I tell him
Speaker 2: on March seventeenth that there had been the break in
Speaker 2: at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and Erlikman had been behind it.
Speaker 2: Erlkman had never shared this with him. The reason I'm
Speaker 2: convinced those men never got pardons by Nixon when he
Speaker 2: was on his way out the door is he figured
Speaker 2: out that they really hadn't kept him informed, and they
Speaker 2: had their own agenda, and they were protecting themselves. I
Speaker 2: actually tried to get everybody to flip inside. I thought
Speaker 2: that was I thought that would be so sobering for
Speaker 2: Nixon and everybody else could just stand up and take
Speaker 2: responsibility that his presidence. I tried.
Speaker 1: Did you get close to anyone?
Speaker 2: I think some people did. You know? Based on the tapes,
Speaker 2: there is some indication that people did give it some thought.
Speaker 2: They realized that it was the end of their careers.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen seventy If you begin working in the
Speaker 1: White House in nineteen seventy an hour in the spring
Speaker 1: of seventy three, which is an eternity to be in
Speaker 1: the White House for a couple of years for some people,
Speaker 1: do you notice, and I want to preface this with someone,
Speaker 1: do you notice the old Nixon returning? Because as Nixon,
Speaker 1: as everybody knows, who's the vice president for two terms
Speaker 1: under Eisenhower, not somebody who was adored by the staff
Speaker 1: of the White House in the Eisenhower miss he was.
Speaker 2: He was Eisenhower's heavy I mean, he had the job
Speaker 2: of going out and being the hatchet man and being
Speaker 2: the attack dog.
Speaker 1: And then he obviously loses a couple of elections, most
Speaker 1: notably the presidential election in nineteen sixty. I mean, the
Speaker 1: Nixon has always been somebody who's a bitter, bitter, you
Speaker 1: know type, who is this what you begin to see?
Speaker 1: I mean, Nixon wins election in sixty eighty, wins re
Speaker 1: election in seventy two by a landslide, and you're in
Speaker 1: that room with him in the spring of seventy three,
Speaker 1: and is the old Nixon?
Speaker 2: What I realize is that the old Nixon has never
Speaker 2: gone away. He's always been there. What they've done very
Speaker 2: effectively is portray a new Nixon. You know, in doing
Speaker 2: the book where I listened to all these conversations. As
Speaker 2: I was telling my editor tonight, I didn't wear hearing
Speaker 2: aids before that experience. I made the mistake of having
Speaker 2: earphones on which destroyed my hearing. And I told Moe
Speaker 2: at one point, God forbid the last voice I hear
Speaker 2: as Richard Nixon in this project. But when I was
Speaker 2: listening to these tapes, occasionally I would, in queuing them up,
Speaker 2: would find things that I thought that the archives had removed.
Speaker 2: They theoretically have taken out all the personal material and
Speaker 2: returned it to the Nixons. But there are some very
Speaker 2: personal conversations. For example, in January of seventy three, he
Speaker 2: learns that he from a lower aid that he indeed
Speaker 2: they may have peace in Vietnam. The first person he
Speaker 2: calls is not Henry Kissinger. He calls Pat Nixon. They
Speaker 2: have a lovely conversation. It really struck me that their
Speaker 2: marriage was much different than I had perceived it. And she,
Speaker 2: you know, is pleased with him, proud of him. It's
Speaker 2: a lovely husband. Wife conversation. Same thing happened to occasionally
Speaker 2: when I found conversations with the President and his daughters,
Speaker 2: Tricia and Julie. They're some really nice conversations. I'm sure
Speaker 2: that family was stunned when these tapes came out, and
Speaker 2: that's probably one of the reasons he spent so much
Speaker 2: of his life after even leaving to try to prevent
Speaker 2: the tapes from ever all surfacing. One of the reasons
Speaker 2: Nixon covers up is he's worried about John Mitchell. Becomes
Speaker 2: very clear from the tapes. It's not that he's worried
Speaker 2: about his own guilt. He's not worried about the Elsberg
Speaker 2: break in. He's worried about the impact it's going to
Speaker 2: have on his Attorney General, John Mitchell, who he thinks
Speaker 2: will never survive it and can't handle it. So he's
Speaker 2: trying to protect Mitchell. Different people have different motives at
Speaker 2: different times along the way.
Speaker 1: So you finally get canned by Nixon himself.
Speaker 2: When well, I'm out of town on April thirtieth when
Speaker 2: he gives a.
Speaker 1: Speech, so he didn't fire your face to face.
Speaker 2: No. On April sixteenth, he called me in and said,
Speaker 2: I think we need to talk about resignation, and I've
Speaker 2: drafted a couple of letters. Well, I knew he hadn't
Speaker 2: written the letters, and I immediately read them, and they
Speaker 2: were confessions. I said, this is obviously John Erlickman's handiwork.
Speaker 2: So I took them back. I took the letters and
Speaker 2: I said, mister President, I'll write my own letter and
Speaker 2: send it to you, and which I did.
Speaker 1: So this event in American history obviously is chronicled the
Speaker 1: famous books and famous movies made of those books. And
Speaker 1: I was wondering, when you first see All the President's Men,
Speaker 1: which comes out pretty quickly after the movie it does
Speaker 1: well in the film, or will come out within a
Speaker 1: couple of years, eighteen months, what did you think of
Speaker 1: the film when you first saw it.
Speaker 2: I first saw a directors showing of it. Alan Pakula
Speaker 2: had a showing and invited me, and after, you know,
Speaker 2: there were fifty people in a little theater. After the movie,
Speaker 2: I went up to him and said thank you. He said,
Speaker 2: why are you thank you me? I said, I'm thanking
Speaker 2: you for not mentioning my name anywhere in the movie,
Speaker 2: and he said that's not possible. I said, you might check.
Speaker 2: It is possible. I said, even when that ticker goes
Speaker 2: across at the end and gets all the names that
Speaker 2: it has not otherwise involved, my name is not mentioned.
Speaker 1: Why do you think that is?
Speaker 2: I don't know. Okay, but he didn't change it. He
Speaker 2: didn't go back and add my name.
Speaker 1: But you appreciated the film. You thought it was accurate.
Speaker 2: I think it's a I think it's a slice of
Speaker 2: the story. From the media point of view. You don't
Speaker 2: drive by the Jefferson or Lincoln memorial every time you
Speaker 2: cross Washington, though, as you know, what.
Speaker 1: About Nixon, about Oliver Stones from what you were a consultant.
Speaker 2: I was a consultant on Nixon, and.
Speaker 1: That's a far more turgid movie than all the presidents.
Speaker 2: You know, it's much more than Watergate. And what happened
Speaker 2: is originally Oliver had in that movie a conspiracy theory
Speaker 2: that claimed that Watergate was about a break in at
Speaker 2: the Democratic National Committee to expose a call go ring
Speaker 2: that my wife worked at. And I had already sued
Speaker 2: the publishers of that story and was in litigation which
Speaker 2: would go on for nine years.
Speaker 1: You're saying your wife did not work at the call girls.
Speaker 2: She did not work at the GARM.
Speaker 1: Be clear, she did not work at the I won't
Speaker 1: be walking to anyone with any misconceptions.
Speaker 2: People might dream that. But uh, Anyway, the I told Oliver,
Speaker 2: I said that this is a fraud and and you'll
Speaker 2: end up being named in the lawsuit. Anyway, we got
Speaker 2: off to that start, and he said, I don't want
Speaker 2: to do that sort of thing in this movie. He said,
Speaker 2: I am trying to get as much VERI similitude as possible.
Speaker 1: What do you think he captured that was accurate about Nixon?
Speaker 1: Same a scene, because I mean I.
Speaker 2: Went to one of the scenes. The last scene I
Speaker 2: objected to was a scene where he has me meeting
Speaker 2: with Howard Hunt on the Memorial Bridge. And I said, Oliver,
Speaker 2: that never occurred. Harris ed, Harris, right, it's a great scene,
Speaker 2: and you're played by David Hyers. Uh. And I said, Oliver,
Speaker 2: that scene never happened. He said, I've paid for it.
Speaker 2: It's going to happen.
Speaker 1: That many people applaud if you've ever seen Oliver Stone Nixon. I,
Speaker 1: oh my god.
Speaker 2: I thought I thought that I can actually suspend disbelief
Speaker 2: with Anthony Hopkins. I think I know you admire him greatly,
Speaker 2: and I've met him when he came back from a
Speaker 2: tour of the Nixon Library with Oliver and they had
Speaker 2: kind of slipped through with nobody seeing them, but one
Speaker 2: of the docents spotted them at the end of the
Speaker 2: tour and she said to Hopkins, who's reporting this to me?
Speaker 2: At lunch right after they had come back, he said,
Speaker 2: the dosn't stopped me and said, I understand you're playing
Speaker 2: mister Nixon. And he said, yes, I am, and he
Speaker 2: said and she said to him, he said, well, I
Speaker 2: hope you're not doing a job on him. And he
Speaker 2: turned to me and said, I'm not doing a job
Speaker 2: on him. Am I. I said, I don't think so
Speaker 2: in this script and he said, well, he said, I
Speaker 2: want to tell you I kind of sympathize with Nixon,
Speaker 2: he said. Tony said that. He said, I grew up
Speaker 2: in very humble beginnings and like Nixon, I could hear
Speaker 2: the train whistles and have dreams. And he said, I,
Speaker 2: you know, I want to play this guy straight, and
Speaker 2: and that's what I think he tried to do. He had.
Speaker 2: I noticed I was visited the set a number of times,
Speaker 2: and they had a voice coach for him. There and
Speaker 2: they tried to take that clip out of his accent. Uh,
Speaker 2: and they don't always. But that's the only thing that
Speaker 2: sort of distracts me with him. I can believe this
Speaker 2: is Richard Nixon. He's he's really tries to capture the man.
Speaker 1: With the time we have left, I want to ask you,
Speaker 1: obviously about the comparisons and contrast to how we.
Speaker 2: Live our lives now.
Speaker 1: And Uh, it's unlikely that every public can control Judiciary
Speaker 1: committee in this particular Congress is going to return an
Speaker 1: article to impeach.
Speaker 2: I think that's very true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they have they as you'll have a president,
Speaker 1: a sitting president who's indicted for a crime.
Speaker 2: Well, it's not possible right now to indict a sitting president.
Speaker 2: What happened is in nineteen seventy three, Sparrow Agnew was
Speaker 2: being pursued by the by a grand jury out of Maryland,
Speaker 2: and they went to the Department for Tax evasion and
Speaker 2: he claimed he couldn't be indicted, he could only be impeached.
Speaker 2: They took the question to the Office of Legal Counsel,
Speaker 2: which issues those sort of opinions by the Department of Justice,
Speaker 2: and said no, mister Vice President you're wrong. You can
Speaker 2: be indicted. It's the president who can't be indicted, can
Speaker 2: only be impeached, and issued an opinion in seventy three.
Speaker 2: That opinion was upgraded or revised and readopted in two
Speaker 2: thousand when Robert Ray, Independent last one and one of
Speaker 2: the last independent Councils, raised that issue regarding Clinton and said, no,
Speaker 2: he cannot be indicted as a sitting president. So that's
Speaker 2: the policy right now of the departments. No, no corpse
Speaker 2: ever ruled on it, and many scholars disagree with it
Speaker 2: that they think that no president's above the law. And indeed,
Speaker 2: the twenty fifth Amendment makes it possible to have the
Speaker 2: president's step aside who would be impaired in his ability
Speaker 2: to govern and function if he was in a criminal trial,
Speaker 2: and to sort that out it could be done. The
Speaker 2: issue has not been resolved. There are some who think
Speaker 2: that Special Counsel Muller might test it.
Speaker 1: What do you think Mullett would do?
Speaker 2: You're a lawyer, have a fascinating case. It's a tough issue.
Speaker 2: There are arguments on both sides, but I think that
Speaker 2: the bottom line argument is that no person in this
Speaker 2: country is above the law.
Speaker 1: I mean the country right now. It seems like it's
Speaker 1: so much trouble. Yeah, the country is in so much trouble.
Speaker 2: And you I have never had a knot in my
Speaker 2: stomach before before an election. I did before this election. Right,
Speaker 2: that not has really never gone away.
Speaker 1: Just the damage that proved it and Devace alone will
Speaker 1: do and their departments is going to take a decade
Speaker 1: or more to undo.
Speaker 2: You know, just that things are really bad and too
Speaker 2: little attention is being paid to what's happening out in
Speaker 2: those departments and agencies. And most striking to me Alec
Speaker 2: is the fact he has no competence for the job.
Speaker 2: He has no training, he did no he has no
Speaker 2: knowledge of the office. He's winging it from day to day.
Speaker 2: He's got a constituency that is unshakable for lots of reasons.
Speaker 2: I think he was he was shocked to win, unprepared
Speaker 2: to govern, and but is growing into the job as
Speaker 2: he learns it. He's learning it on the spot. What
Speaker 2: worries me is he is going He's not dumb, He's
Speaker 2: going to learn how the machinery works, and then I
Speaker 2: think it's ripe for even greater abuse.
Speaker 1: Well, that's sort of my ultimate question is is that
Speaker 1: is it? Do you think, because I've said this to
Speaker 1: people before, that that to remove the President of the
Speaker 1: United States from office is a tremendously different, painful and
Speaker 1: difficult thing. It's also painful for the country.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Do you believe that what's best for the country is
Speaker 1: to not impeach Trump and to wait until the next
Speaker 1: election cycle and vote him out of office? Or do
Speaker 1: you think impeachment is a healthy path for the country.
Speaker 2: I think it's I think it's an appropriate path because
Speaker 2: it's it's a constitutional path. The system is designed to
Speaker 2: deal with a president who is not playing the game
Speaker 2: as it's supposed to be played, and that's a determination
Speaker 2: made by the House of Representatives, which is the closest
Speaker 2: to the people, is the House. While we might have
Speaker 2: a highly gerrymandered House House today, write that I'm not
Speaker 2: I'm not sure that. I'm not sure. I think the
Speaker 2: next election, the off year election, is going to be
Speaker 2: very telling in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1: So I wonder if if they get swamped in the
Speaker 1: midterm and you come out the other side of that.
Speaker 1: Unto January of twenty nineteen, and if Pence were to
Speaker 1: succeed a Trump that designs Pence would want to come
Speaker 1: in right after January of twenty nineteen, so he was
Speaker 1: eligible for ten years in office because if he steps
Speaker 1: if they impeached Trump, now Pence is only eligible for
Speaker 1: that piece of Trump's term and only one full term
Speaker 1: of his own.
Speaker 2: Well, you're assuming he could get re elected. I think
Speaker 2: this is going to splash over on Pence.
Speaker 1: I don't refute that. I'm just saying that, but that
Speaker 1: right now in their hope is that they're going to
Speaker 1: wait and see what the damage is in the midterm,
Speaker 1: if Trump can be rehabilitated. I thought Trump would be
Speaker 1: gone by the summer. I thought they'd say to themselves,
Speaker 1: we got to get the smell of the cordite out
Speaker 1: of the room here and bring Pence in here and
Speaker 1: let everything clear, if not for twenty eighteen, then for
Speaker 1: twenty twenty and prop up Pence as the nominee. But
Speaker 1: they've hung in with him.
Speaker 2: But I don't think Trump has that idea of leaving either.
Speaker 2: He likes the attention, he likes the fact he can
Speaker 2: demand the kind of twenty four to seven coverage he gets.
Speaker 2: His narcissism is large enough to handle that. Are you
Speaker 2: a Republican now I haven't been since then, you haven't
Speaker 2: really I'm an independent California. We don't have to declare,
Speaker 2: and I have not declared, and I have voted both
Speaker 2: Republican and Democrat.
Speaker 1: What do you think is going to What do you
Speaker 1: think is the future of the Republican Party?
Speaker 2: Bad?
Speaker 1: Bad, bad bad. We were going to do a sketch
Speaker 1: on SNL the other day where Trump was going Christmas
Speaker 1: shopping with Roy Moore the mall.
Speaker 2: We didn't, you know, they killed that idea. The great
Speaker 2: mistake I have made since Watergate was when Louren sent
Speaker 2: out a feeler if I would host Saturday Night and
Speaker 2: not too late and Saturday Night or Simon and Schuster
Speaker 2: said no, we don't want you doing that.
Speaker 1: It's a very tough, tough, painful time for this country
Speaker 1: right now because I think that I think we need
Speaker 1: both parties to be healthy and not have an effective opposition.
Speaker 1: And that's one of the things that's sad to me
Speaker 1: about this Republican Party. Either're going down the drain with.
Speaker 2: This, the difference between opposition and polarization, and we don't
Speaker 2: seem to have distinguished that. When when majority doesn't rule,
Speaker 2: we're in trouble in a democracy, and right now a
Speaker 2: minority is controlling the country.
Speaker 1: Well, I want to say, please go ahead. Well, I
Speaker 1: want to say I'm grateful. I'm sure you've heard this
Speaker 1: before too, that I'm grateful that you found your conscience
Speaker 1: back then in March of nineteen seventy three and did
Speaker 1: the right thing coming out of Camp David and exposed
Speaker 1: what you did, told the truth about what you did.
Speaker 1: And I want to say thank you very much for
Speaker 1: coming and sitting with us tonight.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 1: John Dean, whose life was forever changed by the bungled
Speaker 1: break into the Watergate Hotel in nineteen seventy two. By
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you
Speaker 1: by iHeart Radio.