Speaker 1: Hey, it's Alec Baldwin here. Before we launch our next
Speaker 1: season of Here's the Thing at iHeartRadio in January, I
Speaker 1: thought I'd play some of my favorite shows from the archives.
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 Watergate 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. Tell
Speaker 1: us the jobs you had in government prior to your
Speaker 1: becoming count to the President.
Speaker 2: I was at the House Judiciary Committee. It was my
Speaker 2: first job in government, and from there I went to
Speaker 2: a commission that was revising the federal Criminal Code. I
Speaker 2: didn't study enough while they were working on I have
Speaker 2: a question about it. I then went from there to
Speaker 2: become the Associate Deputy Attorney General in the Nixon administration
Speaker 2: at the outset of the administration, and while there, working
Speaker 2: in Justice. I was invited to become counsel of the president.
Speaker 1: Who invited you?
Speaker 2: 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?
Speaker 1: Literally?
Speaker 2: 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 wasn't working. He was
Speaker 2: the numbers man as well as a mechanical engineer from
Speaker 2: 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 driver's license, and
Speaker 2: we'd ride around in his car that was more like
Speaker 2: the 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 Erlickman 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 started the
Speaker 1: job 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 wasn't. It was about six months before they
Speaker 2: let me hire an assistant, and I needed the help
Speaker 2: because there's a lot of work. In fact, today in
Speaker 2: the archives, the White House Council's office for the Nixon
Speaker 2: presidency is 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 exhaustion.
Speaker 1: But and you need about five.
Speaker 2: Hundred Either that or there is no clearance at all
Speaker 2: and 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 of just
Speaker 1: send them home. But describe for me, because I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people you get into that kind of
Speaker 1: cult of personality with someone like Nixon, and what was
Speaker 1: it like to work with him? What was he like?
Speaker 1: Because it's just nothing like being in the presence of
Speaker 1: the person themselves, rather than through the filter of the media.
Speaker 1: What was he like when you worked with him?
Speaker 2: You know, when I went over there, I was old
Speaker 2: enough and been around enough to know there was a
Speaker 2: tricky Dick. But I believed in sixty eight campaign that
Speaker 2: Tricky Dick had matured. He was now a former vice
Speaker 2: president who really understood how government operated, and he would
Speaker 2: be a great senior statesman type person. That's the image
Speaker 2: that was put out. The White House staff itself was
Speaker 2: operated so tightly that very few on the staff actually
Speaker 2: 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,
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 than have well, not
Speaker 2: at that point, but several months later in February, he decides,
Speaker 2: rather than have Hallman Erlickman filtering what I have to say,
Speaker 2: he decides to deal directly with me. And thankfully it
Speaker 2: 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 that 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 haven't have been in Manila, in the Philippines.
Speaker 1: Ho's convenience?
Speaker 2: Or was it? The first mistake was coming home? That's
Speaker 2: on June nineteenth, three days after the arrest, I'm sent
Speaker 2: 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 x FBI, former FBI was x CIA, x CIA.
Speaker 1: When he said my men, what was there Well.
Speaker 2: What he was explaining is that there was on the
Speaker 2: morning of the nineteenth, the Washington Post knew more than
Speaker 2: 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. Well, it didn't take
Speaker 2: me very long to realize that that was beloney. Today
Speaker 2: I know that really the conspiracy was hatched over that
Speaker 2: weekend and the decision to cover it up, and there
Speaker 2: was a real reason to cover it up for the
Speaker 2: White House, which I learned when talking to Liddy on
Speaker 2: the morning of the nineteenth. In fact, I intercepted him
Speaker 2: rather than come to my office. I didn't want him
Speaker 2: in my office, but rather walk down seventeenth Street. That's
Speaker 2: when he said, these are my men who did this.
Speaker 2: He said, I was foolish to use McCord, who was
Speaker 2: part of the re Election Committee. Liddy himself was the
Speaker 2: general counsel of the Finance Committee of the re Election Committee,
Speaker 2: where that was his supposed principal responsibility. He was running
Speaker 2: this on the side, and on the way back up
Speaker 2: he said two things that were back up seventeen trees
Speaker 2: were really quite startling. He said, you should know, John,
Speaker 2: while I worked at the White House, that Howard Hunt
Speaker 2: who helped me get the men for this operation. And
Speaker 2: I did what he called a national security operation by
Speaker 2: breaking in Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist 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. Yeah, he
Speaker 2: literally said, he said, anybody wants to take me out,
Speaker 2: just don't 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.
Speaker 1: He's a little dramatic.
Speaker 2: Probably a mistake not to.
Speaker 1: Just to clarify. And of course the day he was shot,
Speaker 1: you were in Manila, right right, so, but no explain
Speaker 1: to people 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. For example,
Speaker 2: he post Watergate acted like he was some James Bond
Speaker 2: type character who had been hired by the White House
Speaker 2: to come in and do these things. As the historical
Speaker 2: record shows, he's not quite at the Maxwell's smart level
Speaker 2: in most of his undertakings.
Speaker 1: Another reference from our childhood sad you know Maxwell's spot.
Speaker 2: 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 who's in charge
Speaker 2: of 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 Magruder, 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
Speaker 2: away 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: Ellsberg break, in which he thought was is 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, like.
Speaker 1: A marriage counseter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, because that's that's how I became the lynchpin
Speaker 2: of this conspiracy.
Speaker 1: We're taking a break, stay with us. When you're in
Speaker 1: a room with these guys, I only have a sense
Speaker 1: of them from archival footage from the news, and so
Speaker 1: when they do seem like a pretty not a very
Speaker 1: lighthearted crowd, you know what I mean. And Haldeman and
Speaker 1: Erlickman and Mitchell. They seemed like some pretty dark crowd
Speaker 1: in terms of because I'm going to read a quote
Speaker 1: for you from because you were on the Commission on
Speaker 1: Reform of Federal Criminal Laws right as the War on
Speaker 1: drugs was beginning. And then the next thing you know,
Speaker 1: you're intimately working in a room with Erlickman, who said
Speaker 1: the following right before he died. He said that Nicks
Speaker 1: about Nixon Republicans. He said that Nixon Republicans had two enemies,
Speaker 1: the anti war left and black people. We knew it
Speaker 1: couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war
Speaker 1: or black, but by getting the public to associate the
Speaker 1: hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing
Speaker 1: both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. And he said,
Speaker 1: do we know we were lying about drugs? Of course
Speaker 1: we did. When you're in the room with these guys
Speaker 1: and you get a sense that you have.
Speaker 2: Never heard that kind of talk, it wasn't until I
Speaker 2: years later my last book, I cataloged all of the
Speaker 2: Nixon Watergate conversations. I heard on those tapes. Things I'd
Speaker 2: never heard those men say in front of me. They
Speaker 2: were their own small unit that would talk about these
Speaker 2: things at a level that I wasn't privy. There were
Speaker 2: some chilling stuff that and racist stuff that I'd never
Speaker 2: seen in Erlichman before. In those tapes. It's a remarkable record.
Speaker 2: No president's ever going to leave that behind again.
Speaker 1: When well, I'd be too hasty.
Speaker 2: Now you're hopeful.
Speaker 1: Well, we're going to get to the comparisons of contrast
Speaker 1: at a minute. Both houses of the Congress were in
Speaker 1: Democratic hands at the time.
Speaker 2: Correct, But it was a different Democratic party. Of course,
Speaker 2: it was a party with Southern Democrats who were today Republicans.
Speaker 2: So it divided. He believed and hell 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 his office
Speaker 2: through an impeachment bill of impeachment in the House, if
Speaker 2: not defeating that, certainly not getting two thirds of the
Speaker 2: Senate to vote against him for removal. So it's a
Speaker 2: different Democratic party. It's true, it was not controlled by
Speaker 2: the South either. It was more more moderate to progressives.
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 justice,
Speaker 2: an impeachment, or a criminal offense, he had the power
Speaker 2: to do it a lot of parallels with today. He
Speaker 2: 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 first,
Speaker 2: and then finally by the end when they heard the
Speaker 2: so called smoking gun tape, which showed Nixons had based
Speaker 2: his defense up until the end on the fact that
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.
Speaker 1: In the Watergate station with hold them.
Speaker 2: It takes place when June twenty third, right after the breaking,
Speaker 2: right six days after after right, and.
Speaker 1: And these are the tapes that he was forced 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.
Speaker 2: Gap, there would have been an interesting constitutional crisis if
Speaker 2: he had said to the Supreme Court, Okay, I've got
Speaker 2: you willing, I think it's wrong, and I'm president. I've
Speaker 2: got the troops. You come get the tapes. This is
Speaker 2: my property, this is my pa. You're not entitled to
Speaker 2: have this property. And history would have been very different.
Speaker 1: As everybody knows, it's a famous gap. In eighteen minutes,
Speaker 1: eighteen and a half minute eighteen, I was going to say,
Speaker 1: it's a media.
Speaker 2: It's 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 nine efforts
Speaker 2: to erase that material.
Speaker 1: What do you think was erased on those types? Is
Speaker 1: there everybody well satisfied you?
Speaker 2: No, Because I've listened to the conversations that precede and
Speaker 2: follow Nixon had a pattern of repeating things that were
Speaker 2: important or sort of sensitive. They would come up in
Speaker 2: subsequent conversations. This is a very early conversation. This is
Speaker 2: on June twentieth, his first conversation back. That's why it
Speaker 2: was subpoenaed. And I think it was just a gaff
Speaker 2: that resulted in that probably being erased, and it could
Speaker 2: have The person that occurred to me that could have
Speaker 2: done it was somebody who had a terrible time opening
Speaker 2: those medicine bottles you press in turn. I'd see it
Speaker 2: in his mouth occasionally trying to get the cap off.
Speaker 2: He had trouble opening its drawers. He hadn't driven a
Speaker 2: car in years. 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 a or things changed dramatically for him. What kind
Speaker 1: of things is he asking you to do? And what
Speaker 1: was 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 re election
Speaker 2: committee and somebody from the re election committee was arrested
Speaker 2: in the DNC, why don't you appoint a special prosecutor?
Speaker 2: And 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. After that,
Speaker 2: his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, called and said, John, do
Speaker 2: 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 so?
Speaker 2: Why because I didn't want to lie. I didn't want
Speaker 2: to You knew that they wanted you to doctor something.
Speaker 2: It was quite clear they want 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 line, I had no interest
Speaker 2: in giving the false information to the president 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. Defense funds were not unusual at that time.
Speaker 2: Not announcing them didn't sound horrible to me. I didn't
Speaker 2: see any quid pro quo in anything. Nothing struck me
Speaker 2: amiss at this point, as I say, I'm not trained
Speaker 2: as a criminal lawyer either. Defense funds. What do you
Speaker 2: mean defense funds? The Barrigin brothers for the had a
Speaker 2: defense fund the Chicago What are you talking about criminal
Speaker 2: criminal defense yet? And that's what actually Nick, there's a
Speaker 2: tape of Nixon suggesting that there'd be a defense fund
Speaker 2: set up for the Cubans who had been hired by
Speaker 2: Hunt and Lyddy to pay their lawyer's fees and what
Speaker 2: have you. If he had done that openly, he might
Speaker 2: have avoided obstructing justice. It's very curious, and Halleman and
Speaker 2: Erlikman dropped that I never heard about that. In fact,
Speaker 2: when I first hear about it, I don't know what
Speaker 2: he's really what he's talking about anyway, phases of the
Speaker 2: cover up for me, I initially don't think I'm engaging
Speaker 2: in criminal conduct when I realize I am is. After
Speaker 2: the election, Howard Hunt calls Chuck Coulson, and Coulson records
Speaker 2: the call on a dictaphone. He had his phone hooked
Speaker 2: up to a dictaphone, as many did in the White House,
Speaker 2: and he brought this tape down to me to play
Speaker 2: of his conversation with Hunt. And he's proud of punch
Speaker 2: of this conversation, because Coulson is because it exonerates him
Speaker 2: in the Watergate, that he had nothing to do with
Speaker 2: the Watergate break in I hear something very different. I
Speaker 2: hear Hunt demanding that he get paid sooner rather than later,
Speaker 2: that promises have been made to him to take care
Speaker 2: of him, they haven't been delivered, and the ready is there.
Speaker 2: I immediately say to Chuck, this is very bad. Chuck.
Speaker 2: He said, well, what are you going to do about it?
Speaker 2: I said, I don't know. What I did do is
Speaker 2: take the tape up to Halleman and Erlickman and played
Speaker 2: it for them. They said, take it to John Mitchell
Speaker 2: and get him to solve the problem, which I next
Speaker 2: did that same day and took it up to New
Speaker 2: York and played it for Mitchell, whose first reaction is
Speaker 2: don't you ever have anything good news to report? And
Speaker 2: I said, no, John, I don't anyway. It's after listening
Speaker 2: to that conversation, I let my fingers do the walking
Speaker 2: in the criminal code to figure out what in the
Speaker 2: world are we doing. And I discovered eighteen USC. Fifteen
Speaker 2: oh three, which is the obstruction statute, and I discover
Speaker 2: eighteen Usc. Three seventy one, the conspiracy statute, and I
Speaker 2: realized we're in a whole lot of trouble. Now. You
Speaker 2: might have thought that the first reaction would be to
Speaker 2: run for the hills. I had exactly the opposite reaction.
Speaker 2: That's when I double down. That's when I try to
Speaker 2: make the cover up work. I know today psychologically what
Speaker 2: was going on. I was in what they call the
Speaker 2: loss frame, where you have no attractive options and you
Speaker 2: do stupid things. It's unfortunately part of human nature. Happens
Speaker 2: a lot to a lot of people. 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 the
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 seemy 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's
Speaker 2: office fiasco. 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 ou 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,
Speaker 2: John Pergree is a tough rap to prove. I raised
Speaker 2: the fact that Hunt was demanding one hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: thousand dollars yesterday he wonted fifty thousand for his attorney's
Speaker 2: fees 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
Speaker 1: money if we had to.
Speaker 2: That's exactly the line. That's your coming to it. And
Speaker 2: and and I said, miss President, I have no idea
Speaker 2: how much this might cost? And he said, well, what
Speaker 2: do you think? What you 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. And what I didn't know is,
Speaker 2: well until I actually did did this book with all
Speaker 2: the tapes, is after that conversation, he goes over to
Speaker 2: rose Woods door, which is adjoining his off the Oval office,
Speaker 2: and asked Rose in a voice you can hear on
Speaker 2: the tapes, how much is in the slush fund? There's
Speaker 2: six hundred thousand. He will within a week or so
Speaker 2: be selling an ambassadorship to raise money. He's on the job.
Speaker 2: He's gonna solve this. He's going to get the million
Speaker 2: bucks and say take.
Speaker 1: Care of it. If John Dean was the ultimate Nixon insider,
Speaker 1: essayist and satirist Lewis Lapham was the ultimate outsider. Despite
Speaker 1: their shared patrician roots, Lapham skewered the administration and its
Speaker 1: Wartergate troubles from behind the covers of Harper's Magazine, where
Speaker 1: he was the managing editor throughout the scandal.
Speaker 3: I never liked or trusted Nixon. I came out of
Speaker 3: the you know, the affluent, privileged San Francisco society, San
Speaker 3: Francisco society. My father had been very strongly in favor
Speaker 3: 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 1: When you talk about this period, you say that I'm
Speaker 1: going to stop this or I'm having my doubts because
Speaker 1: the cover up you don't think is going to work.
Speaker 1: Would you have kept going if you thought the cover
Speaker 1: 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 paid. He
Speaker 2: did get paid. Mitchell took care of it, and Hunt
Speaker 2: would remain a bought man until the Watergate prosecutor is
Speaker 2: trying Halleman and Erlikman and Mitchell in the cover up
Speaker 2: trial 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 those or was there
Speaker 1: another one?
Speaker 2: I did. The last phase was ending trying to end
Speaker 2: the cover up and realizing the only way I could
Speaker 2: end it and telling my colleagues, I'm going to the prosecutors.
Speaker 2: This has got you know, we've got a deal with this.
Speaker 2: We need criminal lawyers in here. I'm going to hire
Speaker 2: a criminal lawyer. And who'd you hire? I hired a
Speaker 2: college law school classmate initially to talk about a man
Speaker 2: who later became the chief Judge of the Federal District
Speaker 2: Court in DC, Tom Hogan, and we talked about it,
Speaker 2: and he suggested Charlie Shaffer, who had worked here in
Speaker 2: the Southern District, was a very accomplished prosecutor and had
Speaker 2: become a very successful criminal defense lawyer, and he was
Speaker 2: terrific for a while. Had one foot in the White
Speaker 2: House and one foot out of the White House. But
Speaker 2: didn't hide 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: your beautiful wife, Maureen Dean, and she was there.
Speaker 2: She had a huge influence on me. I'll want you
Speaker 2: to explain that My huge was the anxiety though every day.
Speaker 2: You know, I did not want to get married, but
Speaker 2: I did not want to lose her. I had been
Speaker 2: married and divorced and had a child from that first marriage,
Speaker 2: and I had fallen in love with her and we'd
Speaker 2: had a wonderful relationship. She wanted to get married, and
Speaker 2: I just knew this was a bad time. I didn't
Speaker 2: know how bad it was.
Speaker 1: I got married how much? When did you know?
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, you know, the first time that happened
Speaker 2: to me was not long ago when I when I
Speaker 2: said that to somebody, I happened to be in Nashville
Speaker 2: giving a talk because of Jim Neil, who was one
Speaker 2: of the Watergate Special prosecutors. They became like fang friends,
Speaker 2: many of these guys and one woman and his former
Speaker 2: law firm. He's deceased now, but his former law firm
Speaker 2: had a program and I came down to speak, and
Speaker 2: there was a boys' school there. It's a very fine academy,
Speaker 2: and they asked me to come out and do their assembly,
Speaker 2: and seven hundred kids filed in and I somehow in
Speaker 2: passing mentioned that I had been married to Maureen forty
Speaker 2: five years and the kids broke out in applause, and
Speaker 2: I thought, isn't that nice? I mean, I was very pleasing.
Speaker 1: Can imagine what that's like.
Speaker 2: To be married for forty five years? Like?
Speaker 1: What really now? When you go home? I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: trying to get you to talk about something just in
Speaker 1: terms of your personal feelings and your emotional life. Were
Speaker 1: you going home and you know, and having dinner with
Speaker 1: your wife and sitting having a drink and saying, what
Speaker 1: the hell am I going to do? Or did you
Speaker 1: try to protect her and not?
Speaker 2: I protected her? I you know, I tried to warn.
Speaker 1: Her, you know, until you give me your wife what's
Speaker 1: going on. 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: And depth about it. I must. Somebody recently asked me
Speaker 2: how did I get through it all? And my answer
Speaker 2: was vodka.
Speaker 1: So you did not confide a great deal.
Speaker 2: In her, No I didn't. You did 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 March twenty first, twenty first,
Speaker 1: and 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 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 he lets Halleman and Erlkman go, he just,
Speaker 2: in a one sentence says, and so is White House
Speaker 2: counsel John Dene no shots at me at all, because
Speaker 2: when I get in there, I start telling him things
Speaker 2: he doesn't even know. He didn't know until I tell
Speaker 2: him on March seventeenth that there had been the break
Speaker 2: in 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 tried.
Speaker 1: I tried. 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
Speaker 2: thought but they realized that it was the end of
Speaker 2: 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 bus.
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 of 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 this 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: is Richard Nixon in this project. But I when I
Speaker 2: was listening to these tapes occasionally I would, in queuing
Speaker 2: them up, would find things that I thought that the
Speaker 2: archives had removed. They theoretically have taken out all the
Speaker 2: personal material and returned it to the Nixons. But there
Speaker 2: are some very personal conversations. For example, in January of
Speaker 2: seventy three, he learns that he from a lower aid
Speaker 2: that he indeed they may have peace in Vietnam. The
Speaker 2: first person he calls is not Henry Kissinger. He calls
Speaker 2: Pat Nixon. They have a lovely conversation. It really struck
Speaker 2: me that their marriage was much different than I had
Speaker 2: perceived it. And she, you know, is pleased with him,
Speaker 2: proud of him. It's a lovely husband wife conversation. Same
Speaker 2: thing happened to occasionally when I found conversations with the
Speaker 2: President and his daughters, Tricia and Julie. They're some really
Speaker 2: nice conversations. I'm sure that family was stunned when these
Speaker 2: tapes came out, and that's probably one of the reasons
Speaker 2: he spent so much of his life after even leaving
Speaker 2: to try to prevent the tapes ever all surfacing. One
Speaker 2: of the reasons Nixon covers up is he's worried about
Speaker 2: John Mitchell. Becomes very clear from the tapes. It's not
Speaker 2: that he's worried about his own guilt. He's not worried
Speaker 2: about the Ellsberg break in. He's worried about the impact
Speaker 2: it's going to have on his Attorney General, John Mitchell,
Speaker 2: who he thinks will never survive it and can't handle it.
Speaker 2: So he's trying to protect Mitchell. Different people have different
Speaker 2: motives at 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 speech.
Speaker 1: 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. I said,
Speaker 2: mister President, I'll write my own letter and send it
Speaker 2: to you, and which I did.
Speaker 1: So this event in American history, obviously is chronicled in
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: it does well in the film, or will come out
Speaker 1: within a couple of years or eighteen months, what'd you
Speaker 1: think of the film when you first saw it.
Speaker 2: I first saw a director 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? Still from what you were a consultant.
Speaker 2: I was a consultant on Nixon, and that's.
Speaker 1: 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 col girl,
Speaker 1: she did not work at the car. Want to be clear,
Speaker 1: she did not work at I won't be walking anyone
Speaker 1: with any misconceptions.
Speaker 2: People might dream that. But anyway, the I told Oliver,
Speaker 2: I said that this is a fraud and you'll end
Speaker 2: up being named in the lawsuit. Anyway, we got off
Speaker 2: to that start, and he said, I don't want to
Speaker 2: 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: Uhame a scene because I mean I want that.
Speaker 2: One of the scenes. The last scene I objected to
Speaker 2: was a scene where he has me meeting with Howard
Speaker 2: Hunt on the Memorial Bridge. And I said, Oliver, that
Speaker 2: never occurred. Harris ed, Harris right, it's a great scene
Speaker 2: and you're played by uh David hype person, David Huh.
Speaker 2: And I said, Oliver, that's never happened. He said, I've
Speaker 2: paid for it. It's going to happen.
Speaker 1: That many people applaud if you've ever seen Oliver Stones.
Speaker 1: Nixon said, oh my god, I see.
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 dosent 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
Speaker 2: had I noticed I was visited the set a number
Speaker 2: of times, and they had a voice coach for him
Speaker 2: there and they tried to take that clip out of
Speaker 2: his accent, and they don't always, but that's the only
Speaker 2: thing that sort of distracts me with him. I can
Speaker 2: believe this is Richard Nixon. He's he's really tries to
Speaker 2: 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 live
Speaker 1: our lives now. And it's unlikely that every public can
Speaker 1: control Judiciary committee in this particular, Congress is going to
Speaker 1: return an article to him.
Speaker 2: I think that's very true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they have as you'll have a president, a
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 2: Justice and said, no, mister Vice President, you're wrong. You
Speaker 2: can be indicted. It's the president who can't be indicted,
Speaker 2: can 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 week 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 Department that no, no
Speaker 2: core has ever ruled on it, and many scholars disagree
Speaker 2: with it. That they think that no president's above the law.
Speaker 2: And indeed, the twenty fifth Amendment makes it possible to
Speaker 2: have the president step aside who would be impaired in
Speaker 2: his ability to govern and function if he was in
Speaker 2: a criminal trial, and to sort that out it could
Speaker 2: be done. The issue has not been resolved. There are
Speaker 2: some who think that Special Counsel Mueller 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: You know, there are arguments on both sides, but I
Speaker 2: think that the bottom line argument is that no person
Speaker 2: in this country is above the law.
Speaker 1: I mean the country right now, it seems like it's
Speaker 1: so much trouble. You know, the country is in so
Speaker 1: much trouble. And you've got.
Speaker 2: I have never had a knot in my stomach before
Speaker 2: before an election. I did before this election. Right, that
Speaker 2: knot 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, you know, just that things are really.
Speaker 2: Bad and too little attention is being paid to what's
Speaker 2: happening out in those departments and agencies. And most striking
Speaker 2: to me Alec is the fact he has no competence
Speaker 2: for the job. He had no training, he did no
Speaker 2: he has no knowledge of the office. He's winging it
Speaker 2: from day to day. He's got a constituency that is
Speaker 2: unshakable for lots of reasons. I think he was he
Speaker 2: was shocked to win, unprepared to govern, and but is
Speaker 2: growing into the job as he learns it. He's learning
Speaker 2: it on the spot. What worries me is he is
Speaker 2: going He's not dumb, He's going to learn how the
Speaker 2: machinery works. And then I think it's ripe for even
Speaker 2: greater abuse.
Speaker 1: Well, that's my ultimate question is that is it? Do
Speaker 1: you think, because I've said this to people before, that
Speaker 1: to remove the President of the United States from office
Speaker 1: is a tremendously different, painful and difficult thing. It's also
Speaker 1: painful for the country. Yes, do you believe that what's
Speaker 1: best for the country is to not impeach Trump and
Speaker 1: to wait until the next election cycle and vote him
Speaker 1: out of office? Or do you think impeachment is a healthy
Speaker 1: 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 Paul Ryant House to write, I'm
Speaker 2: not sure that. I'm not sure. I think the next election,
Speaker 2: the off year election is going to be very telling
Speaker 2: 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: into 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: Trump can be rehabilitated. I thought Trump would be gone
Speaker 1: by the summer. I thought they'd say to themselves, we
Speaker 1: got to get the smell of the Cordite out of
Speaker 1: the room here and bring Pence in here and let
Speaker 1: everything clear, if not for twenty eighteen, then for twenty
Speaker 1: twenty and prop up Pence as the nominee. But they've
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 2: gets his narcissism is large enough to handle it.
Speaker 1: Are you a Republican now?
Speaker 2: I haven't been since then? You haven't really I'm an
Speaker 2: independent California. We don't have to declare, and I have
Speaker 2: not declared, and I have voted both 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 greatest
Speaker 2: mistake I've made since Watergate was when Lorn sent out
Speaker 2: a feeler if I would host Saturday Night and not
Speaker 2: too late and Saturday Night or Simon and Schuster said no,
Speaker 2: 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 is they're going down the drain
Speaker 1: with this.
Speaker 2: The difference between opposition and polarization, and we don't seem
Speaker 2: to have distinguished that when 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. M.
Speaker 1: John Dean, whose life was forever changed by the bungled
Speaker 1: break into the Watergate Hotel in nineteen seventy two. I'm
Speaker 1: Alec Baldwin.
Speaker 4: Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio
Speaker 2: Two.