BEING NIXON | JFK Library

TOM PUTNAM:  Good evening. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy

Presidential Library and Museum. And on behalf of Heather Campion, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I welcome you and thank you for coming, and acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: lead sponsor Bank of America, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation; and our media sponsors, the Boston Globe, Xfinity, and WBUR.  

The last time Evan Thomas spoke here at the Library, our focus was on spying, from Eisenhower to Obama. He and his fellow panelists compared the work of the CIA under the Dulles brothers with the rise of the NSA. When asked if in terms of the balance between security and privacy, we as a country are better off today than 60 years ago, a few of the speakers suggested we were not. Mr. Thomas happened to have the last word that evening, and here is what he said: 

There are terrible moments in our history. We get frightened and round up Japanese citizens and put them in concentration camps. We committed genocide with the American Indians. But our history is also full of examples of the rule of law reasserting itself. It gets battered, but then comes staggering back because of a vigorous press, because our court system and, at times, because of the ballot box. Compared to the rest of the world, we really are governed by the rule of law in this country. It has a way of reasserting itself and saving us, if you will, from ourselves. Not always and at all times, but eventually. 

One is not surprised, then, to find this same fair-minded and objective historical analysis, at times generous in spirit, in Mr. Thomas's new book, Being Nixon: A Man Divided, which is on sale in our bookstore, and there will be a signing after this Forum. 

And it is noteworthy that the end of the Nixon presidency might be viewed as a stirring example of the reassertion of the rule of law, saving our political system from itself. 

There is a poignancy to this new portrait of Richard Nixon's "heroic, if ill-fated struggle to be a robust, decent, goodhearted person." While Nixon could be cynical about voters, "politics would be a hell of a business," he once remarked, "if it weren't for the goddamn people." [laughter] He propelled himself forward as a campaigner, wading into crowds, doggedly, bravely, even recklessly. “It was," Mr. Thomas writes, "as if fear of heights made him a cliff-diver." 

Evan Thomas is the author of nine books. He served as a writer and editor for 33 years at

Time and Newsweek. And he has taught at both Harvard and Princeton, where he was Ferris Professor of Journalism. 

Our moderator this evening is Tim Naftali, the founding director of the Richard M. Nixon

Library, where he led the transition of that institution from being the only privately run Presidential Library of a modern 20^th century president, to one that is now a proud federal facility, run and operated by the National Archives. He is the author of four books, and is at work on a volume on John F. Kennedy. He has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Hawaii, Yale and is currently a professor at NYU.

"The question I kept asking myself," Evan Thomas writes in the conclusion of this new book, "is whether Richard Nixon could see the true Nixon." "No," Brent Scowcroft observed, "but sometimes he took a peek." 

We're honored tonight to sit in on this conversation between two talented and thoughtful historians offering us a peek at Richard Nixon, a man divided. Please join me in welcoming Evan Thomas and Tim Naftali to our stage. [applause] 

TIM NAFTALI:  You know, Evan, we can't do any better than those introductions. Perhaps we should just leave now. [laughter] 

Evan is a great model and mentor. When I was in college or grad school, I read The Wise

Men. This is a book that Evan wrote with Walter Isaacson. It's one of the best books that I've ever read about the American establishment. How did you find yourself writing about Richard Nixon?

EVAN THOMAS:  A bit in reaction to that. I worked for what people call the East Coast media establishment for a long time; I'd worked for Time and Newsweek for 33 years. And I worked for Katharine Graham. And I was Washington bureau chief and often went to her house. And I saw that world. And I subscribed to their view of Nixon, which was pretty hostile, pretty unforgiving. 

But I was approached about four years ago by Jon Meacham, my Newsweek colleague, and he said, "Would you like to write a book about Nixon?" And at first I said no. And then he said, "If you don't do it, I will." And then I said, "Well"– I thought about it, and I got into it. And a big reason for getting into it was to try to switch sides, if you would, to try to have an empathic view of Nixon, to try to understand what it was like to be Nixon.

That's the title of the book, Being Nixon.

And it took a long time. I whined about it for a couple of years to my wife, that I didn't like Nixon, that it was difficult, I was going nowhere. But as I got into it– and with Nixon, there's a heck of a trail on Nixon, as Tim knows; he was the Director of the archives.

Presidents of the United States leave a big paper trail, all of them. And Nixon has a very big one. A lot of people watching, observing, writing memoirs. Nixon also left behind 3,000 hours of tapes. So it gave me a chance to try to get inside. 

Now, did I really get inside? Do I really know what it was like to be Nixon? No. I'm not even sure Nixon knew what it was like to be Nixon. But I took my best shot at it. And I began to feel for him. And as time went on, I actually– I wasn't just trying to be empathic towards him, I actually did feel some empathy for him. He's a poignant figure. He had a dark side, for sure; a big dark side. He's the only president who's ever been disgraced by being run from office. He deserved that; in fact, he brought it upon himself.

But that doesn't mean that he didn't try to be a better person. And often he wasn't a better person. He often was. And that struggle I found to be unbelievably riveting and just a great journey for me.

TIM NAFTALI:  Tell us a little bit, please, about your struggle, as your own empathic development proceeded. What were the milestones as this happened for you?

EVAN THOMAS:  I started with the standard notion of Nixon as a scheming criminal mastermind. And certainly some of those tapes sound pretty bad. And he could scheme, all right; he was a big schemer. But the more I listened to those tapes – and I listened to them with my wife Osce out at the Library; you can also listen to them on line, NixonTapes.org – I began to hear somebody who was less a schemer than somebody who was insecure, somebody who was blurting. He was a blurter; he would say things, stupid things, wrong things, vile things. He was anti-Semitic. But a lot of it was posturing. 

I think many of you have seen the show Mad Men, the TV show. There's a certain '50s and '60s macho male swagger that Nixon had. It's very unattractive. But it's also not entirely real. A lot of it is just swagger, of showing off, to show off that you're one of the guys. 

At other times on those tapes, Nixon is a lot more reflective and certainly substantive. Nixon was that rare American politician; he actually read. He read books. And he read briefing papers. And he would get way into things in ways that were somewhat unusual for an American president, for a politician. He was deeply thoughtful. A little crazy about some of these things, but thoughtful. There was another side to him.

So the combination of seeing the substantive side and hearing Nixon less as a wicked, malevolent force, and more of an insecure person who was mouthing off affected my view of him and made me feel– people have asked me: did you like Richard Nixon? No.

You wouldn't like Richard Nixon either if you listen to those tapes; you can't like him.

But I did feel for him.

And he did things that captured – a couple of things I want to recount – that affected me and caught my attention. One was, late at night, he would sometimes make notes to himself about the person he wanted to be. And he would words like joy, and inspiring, and serene. Words that don't describe Richard Nixon as we know him, but represent the person he wished to be.

Now, you could say he's just making lists. Because he was always trying to persuade reporters that he was somebody he was not. And you could say he was doing that for a Hugh Sidey column – and he was doing it partly for that– but I think he was also trying to convince himself that he could be that person. There was an earnestness and a desire to be that person.

I was also struck that his daughter Julie – there's an oral history she has at Whittier College – she described Dad coming home at night. He would come through the door whistling. And he would turn on all the lights, and he'd put a show tune on the record player. And he wanted to have a cheerful, upbeat conversation. He wanted to be upbeat, he wanted to be happy. He was not upbeat and happy, that's not who he really was. But he wished to be that person, he tried to be that person.

That, to me, was affecting. 

TIM NAFTALI:  One of the challenges for anybody writing about presidents or people close to them is to try to differentiate between spin and what people actually want to do and what they actually think. You've worked on RFK, you've worked on one of the great–

EVAN THOMAS:  Nobody was better at spin than the Kennedys. [laughter] 

TIM NAFTALI:  We talked about the establishment that you studied when you did The Wise Men. How did you build a smell test for Richard Nixon, to try to figure out the difference between spin and what he guy actually wanted?

EVAN THOMAS:  He was so transparent. He was bad at spin. There was a huge PR machine at the White House. They had these so-called anecdotalists. Aides would be assigned to listen and take notes, to leak heartwarming anecdotes about Richard Nixon to the press. There aren't that many heartwarming anecdotes. And when they did leak them, the press didn't believe them, because they were so palpably false. 

So Nixon's spin efforts, although they were mighty and extremely well organized, were I thought transparently weak and bad. And so, it was easy in that sense.

Now, Nixon is a clever guy. And it is also true about Nixon, the famous saying of John Mitchell, his Attorney General, "watch what we do, not what we say." That was important, because Nixon said a lot of things that he didn't really mean, and he'd do the opposite. Both for better and for worse. Obviously, he talked about obeying the law, and then didn't. Watergate proved that. 

But also, on the positive side, he pandered to Southern voters. Remember back in 1970, the South was still pretty Democratic, because there were still Southern Democrats. And he pandered to them with the so-called Southern strategy to try to win their votes, basically sending the message "come over to our side, come over to the Republican side and we'll get the federal government to be less onerous to you; we won't lean on you." And that worked, the Southern strategy worked in '68.

But – and this is where you've got to watch what Nixon actually does – Nixon decided that– the courts were still insisting "you've got to desegregate the schools," and Nixon did. I think in 1969, something like 10% of black kids went to integrated schools. Within a couple of years, 70% did. Nixon did that. He did it quietly, under the radar screen. He didn't advertise it. He used George Schultz and these little committees to do it. 

Publicly he was saying one thing, which was sort of a pandering thing. But privately he was saying, "The time has come to desegregate. We're going to do this." And he even understood the economic argument for it. He'd say to Haldeman, to his chief of staff, "If blacks are ever going to get to Pali High" – Palisades High School in California, middle class high school – "or Whittier College, they're going to have to have some economic advantages. We have to help them." So he didn't advertise this, but he did it. 

And so, with Nixon, it was important to actually watch what he did. He could be very contradictory. I begin every sentence about Nixon by saying "but," because there's always another side to it. But it was important to watch what he did and not just what he said.

TIM NAFTALI:  And I'm not just asking this about person because we're at the Kennedy Library, but Kennedy is in your book; John F. Kennedy's all over your book because John F. Kennedy appears to be in the mind of Richard Nixon a lot.

EVAN THOMAS:  A lot.

TIM NAFTALI:  Tell us, what effect do you think the 1960 campaign had on Richard Nixon?

EVAN THOMAS:  Bad. Because it made him sour. One of the least appealing sides of Nixon is there's a bitterness to him; talk about having a chip on your shoulder. And I feel sorry for Nixon, because imagine– you've seen the videos of the debate. There's Jack Kennedy looking cool and tan, and poor Richard Nixon's beady-eyed, sweating through this makeup. It's just not a fair fight.

And Nixon, he just suffered from coming against such an attractive person. He felt that the 1960 election had been stolen from him. Now, I'm not sure what the truth is here. We know there were a lot of votes stolen in Illinois, there were some votes stolen in Texas; I don't know what the truth is. But the point is, Nixon believed that the election had been stolen from him. He didn't protest it, he didn't challenge it. He felt we're in a Cold War, it'd be bad for the country. But he brooded over it, and he brooded over dirty tricks.

Now, Nixon is the one who's famous for dirty tricks. But in Nixon's mind – again, I'm not talking about the reality here, I'm talking about Nixon's perception – Nixon's perception was the Kennedys were better at dirty tricks in 1960 than he was. There's a guy named Dick Tuck; some of you know about Dick Tuck. He was a famous prankster that the Kennedys used. He would do things like move the street signs around before a Nixon rally, so people would go in the wrong direction. He would put a pregnant woman out in front with a sign that says "Nixon's the One." [laughter] And this drove Nixon crazy. He said he wanted his own Dick Tuck – "The next time we do this, in 1961, I want my Dick Tuck."

And things, more serious things, abusing the IRS. Nixon famously used the IRS to attack his political enemies. His excuse for it was that his own tax returns were audited in 1961, 1962, 1963 at the order of Attorney General Robert Kennedy. So he felt that the Kennedys invented that. Were the Kennedys actually great masters at dirty tricks? There's historical debate about all this. Bobby had a guy named Paul Corbin, who was a pretty tough customer.

The point is that Nixon, to answer your question, Nixon believed that Kennedys were better at this than he was. And he was going to catch up. Very unfortunate, because as soon as he's president, you can see him plotting and conspiring. He wants to stick it to Teddy. He's obsessed with the Kennedys. He is obsessed with Larry O'Brien, a Kennedy aide, who'd become head of the Democratic Party.

And it drives him kind of nutty. His envy and resentment of the Kennedys is deeply, sadly distorting.

TIM NAFTALI:  How do you explain somebody who is now at the top of the Hill – and John F. Kennedy sadly is dead – and Richard Nixon is now in the White House. Why is he spending so much energy attacking a dead president and the dead president's family?

And he uses federal resources to do it, and federal time to do it.

EVAN THOMAS:  He's obsessed about Teddy Kennedy, Senator Edward Kennedy coming along and becoming the nominee in '72. And this is so classically Nixonian and so contradictory. Edward Kennedy drives off the bridge at Chappaquiddick, and Nixon immediately cheers. You could see it; H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, kept a diary.

And right away, Haldeman's diaries show Nixon is sending an ex-New York cop up to

Boston to pretend to be a reporter, trying to dig up dirt on Chappaquiddick. Ugly stuff.

Meanwhile, about a week later, I think it was, Teddy Kennedy happens to come over to the White House on some official business, and Nixon takes him aside and, as Bill Safire is watching, Nixon is genuinely sympathetic with Senator Kennedy about how the "press is out to get you." And I think genuinely sympathetic. 

You can't reconcile the Nixon who's committing dirty tricks to get Teddy with the Nixon who is genuinely sympathetic and solicitous with Edward Kennedy. Both of those Nixons existed in this kind of uneasy juxtaposition, this very uneasy equipoise.

TIM NAFTALI:  But the challenge though for the biographer is to know whether the sympathy is ever genuine. Maybe he was just acting.

EVAN THOMAS:  Maybe. He certainly was an actor. The Checkers speech; I mean, Nixon was an actor, for sure. And some of it probably was an act. But people have a way of becoming their act. And if you act a certain way long enough, you can actually become that way.

We used to joke about Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post, a very flamboyant, charming, uber-charming guy. And we always joked that Been Bradlee had become his act, this charming, flamboyant guy. Been Bradlee probably wasn't that, but he became that.

And Nixon may have been acting, but at some point you do become your act, or it becomes hard to tell where the act stops and the real person begins. This is true of actors and politicians generally, but I think it's true of Nixon.

I did my best to sort out, to find the line, because the job of a biographer is to have, as you say – excuse me – a bullshit detector. And I tried to have one, but I don't pretend that it's easy, especially with Nixon. 

TIM NAFTALI:  Your previous book, a wonderful book, was about Eisenhower. Please tell us a little bit about the Eisenhower/Nixon relationship.

EVAN THOMAS:  Not good. General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower barely knows

Richard Nixon. Nixon is put on the ticket really for political reasons. He's from

California, he's a link to the far right in the party. He's young. Eisenhower had met Nixon maybe twice. So they put Nixon on the ticket. Nixon comes into Eisenhower's hotel suite there and says, "Hiya, Chief." That's not what you say to General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower. So right away, Eisenhower's kind of "who is this guy?" And Nixon's uncomfortable with him. 

Eisenhower never got comfortable with Nixon. I wrote a book about Eisenhower and I talked to Eisenhower's son John, and John Eisenhower told me, "My father gave himself an order to like Dick Nixon." [laughter] 

First, there's the famous Checkers speech. There's a little, phony scandal over a slush fund for Nixon. And Ike's people are going to dump Nixon from the ticket, and Nixon has to save himself with the famous Checkers speech. That's example number one.

They don't get along that well during the campaign. Nixon's a very loyal and dutiful vice president, but by 1956, Nixon has been sort of pushed off the ticket again for '56, kind of for a good reason in Eisenhower's eye. Eisenhower thinks, "You ought to get some management experience by being Secretary of Defense." Kind of the way a general officer would think training a young officer. All Nixon can see is, "This guy's trying to dump me from the ticket. The headline's going to be 'Ike dumps Nixon.'"

So Nixon hangs on for dear life. He gets psychosomatic illnesses, has to check into

Walter Reed. It's just a terrible experience. And then to top it off, 1960, August 1960,

now Nixon's running for president. At a press conference, President Eisenhower is asked by a reporter, "Can you tell us something that Vice President Nixon did to further American foreign policy?" And Ike says, "If you give me a week, I'll think of something." [laughter] I mean, it's just heartbreaking to Nixon.

TIM NAFTALI:  Some have argued that Eisenhower was having a senior moment.

Other people say, no, Eisenhower meant to say that because he couldn't stand Richard Nixon. But he really was very unhappy. Eisenhower was very unhappy when Nixon lost, wasn't he? He did not want John F. Kennedy to win.

EVAN THOMAS:  Right. Partly because he was a reflection on Dwight Eisenhower. It was a rejection of Eisenhowerism and this new– Ike had a condescending view of Jack Kennedy, called him "little boy blue" and thought he was kind of a whippersnapper. He didn't like Joe Kennedy.

But Ike felt that his own administration had been rebuffed by the rejection of his vice president. I think it more personal than it was sympathetic for Nixon. He became sympathetic with Nixon, especially when Nixon's daughter married Eisenhower's grandson. And there was some empathy towards the end, I think. Although, boy, it never was easy.

In 1968, Eisenhower wants to campaign for Nixon, and Mamie gets worried about

Eisenhower's heart; he has a heart condition. And the story's disputed, but they go to Nixon and say, "Don't make Ike campaign for you." So Nixon doesn't ask Ike to campaign for him, and Ike misunderstands that and thinks that Nixon is just being weak.

And he says, "This guy's a loser. He's like one of these officers I relieved under combat. Why isn't he putting me in? Why isn't he using me? Why is he so weak?" not realizing that Nixon is solicitous of Eisenhower's heart condition. This kind of tragic misunderstanding between them.

They were dissimilar. They were not meant to be friends. 

TIM NAFTALI:  Do you think Richard Nixon had an ethical system inside that checked his actions? Or do you think it was simply whether he could get caught or not, the reason he did things?

EVAN THOMAS:  Oh, I think he had an ethical system. It was a very imperfect one, obviously. He did a lot of bad stuff. He had this whole pragmatic side–  that people are driven by interests and if you can manipulate their interests– it was a very kind of coldblooded view of geopolitics and politics itself. You have to appeal to people's interests.

But I think that some of this was him putting a tough-guy veneer on his own soft side. I think there was a soft side. There was a sympathetic side to Nixon; a tender side, even. You could see it would occasionally show itself. Nixon would act in tender ways, to his own family and often to other defeated politicians.

I think that Nixon felt that he was doing the ethical thing by not challenging Jack Kennedy in 1960, when he thought the election was stolen. I think that Nixon always thought that he was serving his country. And I think he was genuinely patriotic about that; he wanted to live a life of service and he felt that he was. I think Nixon thought he was doing the right thing by enforcing the laws that the Southern schools had to integrate in the South. So in his own mind, I think he was doing ethical things.

Now, he also did some very unethical things, there's no doubt about it. It's on tape. He rationalized it. He's a bad ends-and-means story– of the end justify the means. It's all on tape for us to see. Not only that, it's delivered in a particularly ugly fashion. Again, Nixon had this way of showing off that he was a tough guy. It's really unappealing. But I think it's an act. I think it's a veneer on a softer side.

TIM NAFTALI:  I'm just wondering, how do we know that? Because oftentimes he would say those horrible things and then implement them. Or his staff would.

EVAN THOMAS:  The other thing that's complicated about Nixon, he was a blurter. He would just say stuff. He would shoot his mouth off. His aides knew to ignore a lot of those orders, and Nixon expected them to ignore those orders. Henry Kissinger told me in the summer of 1969, an American airplane is hijacked and lands at Damascus. And Kissinger calls up Nixon, who's having drinks with Bebe Rebozo, and Nixon says, "Bomb the airport." And Kissinger doesn't know what the hell to do. He doesn't want to do that. 

So he and Mel Laird, the Defense Secretary, spend the night moving the Sixth Fleet around. And in the morning, they don't do anything. They realize that Nixon wasn't serious. He was just blowing off steam.

Now, that's a dangerous way to blow off steam.

TIM NAFTALI:  When you're Commander-in-Chief of the United States–

EVAN THOMAS:  Extremely dangerous. I'm not excusing it, but his staff came to understand that, especially when Nixon had a drink or two, he didn't mean it. Brent Scowcroft told me this. They all did. They understood that.

Now, that's the top level staff. The junior staff, the dean level, they didn't understand it so easily. So when Nixon was venting, they took him seriously and they did carry out his malign designs.

TIM NAFTALI:  A number of Richard Nixon's supporters focus on Vietnam and say part of the reason that Richard Nixon seems to stress out at moments in his presidency is Vietnam. And you have to understand the era, and you have to understand the pressures on the White House. Tell us a little bit about what this book taught you about Richard Nixon's handling of Vietnam.

EVAN THOMAS:  Painful from beginning to end. His first night in the White House, there's a safe in his bedroom that LBJ had used. And inside this safe there's a list. It's a list of the Americans who had been killed in Vietnam in the last month, with their names.

Wake up. And Johnson kept it to remind himself of this.

So Nixon right away, he's got 550,000 Americans in Vietnam. The Democrats say "let's just go home again." I don't think it would have been that easy. Bobby Kennedy used to say, "We're going to withdraw.'" I wonder, if Bobby Kennedy had been elected president, if he would have just put those 550,000 men on airplanes and brought them home. I doubt it. Because I don't think it was so easy for a superpower who's in there to get out. 

I think Nixon wanted to get out. Initially, he thought he could do it by what he called the madman's strategy, this idea that threaten them, even threaten them with nuclear weapons and bomb the hell out of them and they'll say, "God, we don't know what the hell Nixon is going to do. We'll make a deal that we'll preserve President Thieu and allow the Americans to get out." 

They started down that road, and in the fall of 1969, in his first year, he and Kissinger planned something called Operation Duck Hook, which was going to be a massive bombing. But Nixon did not give the execute order because the antiwar movement was coming on strong. You remember the moratorium, October 1969? Nixon, good politician that he is, sees, "Oh, my god, if I do this massive bombing thing, our cities are going to blow up. Our campuses are going to blow up. I really can't do that."

Meanwhile, he's trying to draw down American forces through Vietnamization. And he's sort of stuck. He can't bomb. He's drawing forces. He's trying to negotiate a withdrawal. Kissinger really doesn't have the bullets to get much from the North Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese are endlessly patient. They've defeated the Japanese, they've defeated the French. So Nixon is just stuck. And he stays stuck for about three or four years. 

He has spasms of violence – Cambodia, 1971, they bomb again. Some of it actually works a little bit. By '72, when they mine the harbors in Haiphong, it actually finally – finally, this is 1972 – moves the North Vietnamese negotiating position a little bit. So they agree to allow President Thieu to stay – for a while; obviously not going to survive.

But enough for us to finally make a bad deal in January of 1973.

It just takes four years. We lose another 30,000 American men. It's a damn mess. It drives Nixon crazy. But it was a very difficult problem. 

TIM NAFTALI:  This brings up the question of his relationship with Kissinger. How do we separate, can we separate Nixon from Kissinger?

EVAN THOMAS:  Talk about awful, wonderful relationships. Wonderful, awful relationships. The good news is they had a world view that was very sophisticated. They worked together to achieve real things – opening up China; arms control treaty with the Soviet Union; real progress in the Middle East. Real, measurable, tangible foreign policy triumphs. They worked together to do that. They were well matched, they were substantive.

They also viciously undermined each other, lied to each other, play mental games on each other, for instance, in ways that really were hurtful for Nixon, certainly. Nixon, one of his weak spots, one of his deep insecurities was the so-called Georgetown set. This is the

cool crowd in Georgetown, senior State Department, CIA people, they'd been around since after the war. And Nixon felt deeply insecure around them. Including my old employer, Mrs. Graham of the Washington Post.

And Nixon sends Kissinger off to be his ambassador to this crowd; the ambassador to the court of Katharine Graham. And Kissinger does great at it. Because Kissinger is charming and he's funny and he's self-deprecating in ways that Nixon could never be himself. He's too successful. He starts making fun of Nixon with this crowd. He really does. He jokes about "my maniacal commander-in-chief, the mad drunk." It was kind of harsh.

Of course it gets back to Nixon. Of course Nixon hears about it. Nixon tries to be philosophical, he says, "Well, Henry needs that for his ego." He starts making bad jokes, lame jokes when Kissinger leaves at night. Nixon would say, "Well, there goes Henrythe-leak to the Washington Post," or, "There goes Henry to see his pals in Georgetown."

He was not wrong about it. In the Nixon Library, there are transcripts between Kissinger and Mrs. Graham. One in particular I remember, where Kissinger's supposed to be at Pat Nixon's birthday party, but instead he's sneaking out to go to a dinner party for Katharine Graham. And they're joking about what'll happen to them if they get caught; they'll get their heads chopped off. And they're kind of giggling about it. It's like high school.

So Nixon is deeply wounded by this. And Kissinger's bragging that the foreign policy triumphs are Kissinger's idea, the China initiative is Kissinger's idea. Now, Kissinger brilliantly executed the China initiative, but it was Nixon's idea. In fact, Nixon had been thinking about it for years before he became president. And when HR Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, tells Kissinger in 1969, "Hey, the boss wants to go to China," Kissinger says, "Fat chance." Kissinger doesn't think it's possible.

So Kissinger does come around and he executes it, but he's leaking to reporters that, "Hey, China, that's me." Nixon hates this. And so, what does he do? He installs the taping system. February 1971. The reason why those tapes go in; Nixon had torn out Johnson's tapes. Johnson had a very elaborate taping system. Nixon took it out, because he didn't want the Pentagon to spy on him, or anybody else. But now he wants to have a record to be able to rebut Henry Kissinger in his memoirs, or whenever he wants. He wants a record of what really happened in the Oval Office. So he put in this taping system. 

As Henry Kissinger himself said, "It was a high price to pay" to have a record on Henry Kissinger, because of course it was a record of everything else, too. And it hung him in Watergate.

TIM NAFTALI:  Why do you think he didn't get rid of the tapes when he could have?

EVAN THOMAS:  A couple of reasons. One is, he had a temperature of 103; he was sick with pneumonia. There was a narrow window – when it goes public and Butterfield announces to the Watergate committee that there's a taping system – maybe 48 hours before the subpoenas arrive. And so, there's a little window in there when they probably could have gotten away with destroying the tapes. Now, there would have been a huge furor. But I think Nixon would have survived it.

Certainly, some smart lawyers, like Edward Bennett Williams, said they should have had a bonfire, get rid of those damn tapes. Because they really did hang him. But Nixon doesn't do it. 

He doesn't really believe that the courts are going to force him to do it. He believes in executive privilege. He has a pretty high-falutin' notion of the executive, and he thinks that he can survive court challenges. He also thinks, wrongly, that the tapes will vindicate him. John Dean has been telling a story to Congress, and wrongly Nixon thinks that somehow these tapes are going to give his side of the story and impeach Dean. Dean didn't tell 100% of the truth, but he told 90% of the truth. And the tapes, of course, made Nixon look not only terrible, but also showed him conspiring to obstruct justice. 

So it was terrible political judgment on Nixon's part. He should have destroyed the tapes. I guess in the end, he thought that they were never going to come, that he could stonewall, that the courts would side with him. He just didn't believe it was going to happen.

TIM NAFTALI:  Did he ever have a sense that he really should go? That he was a burden to the country?

EVAN THOMAS:  Well, finally he does. It's hard to tell exactly what's going on in Dick Nixon's mind. And I don't pretend to know for sure. But we have some records. He's a politician; he starts counting votes. And by the end, he just doesn't have the votes. 

There's a moment when George Wallace turns against him. He needs Southern

Democrats and he needs Southern politicians. And when George Wallace wiggles out, it's clear and he knows it's over. 

But even when he sees the political reality, he cannot bear giving up. To Nixon's credit, Nixon was a fighter, and he didn't ever want to give up. There are some poignant– he gets beaten by Kennedy in '60. He loses the California governor's race in '62. Everybody writes his obituary. He gives that famous press conference, "you won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore." He's finished. But he comes back. So he always believes that he can come back. Many times through this career he was writing off. 

Now he doesn't have the votes, but he can't quite bring himself to throw in the towel, because he thinks of himself as a fighter. And his family, interestingly, doesn't want him to give up. His wife and his daughters, they don't understand why he would give up. They want him to fight to the bitter, bitter end. 

He realizes that he's going to put the country through an ordeal. I think there's a little bit of a secret signal to Gerald Ford here. This has never been proven, but I think they send Al Haig over to say to Vice President Ford, "You have some options here. It looks like the end is coming near and you have some options here. One is a pardon," wink wink. And I think Ford gets the wink. So I think there was extremely subtle– denied, Ford denied this. In fact, the next morning he called up Nixon and said "no deal, no deal."

I think there was, in that classic Washington way, a little tiny bit of a wink. So Nixon knew that he could probably get – I think – knew he could get a pardon. But it took heaven and earth to finally get him to throw in the towel. His nature was to fight to the bitter end.

TIM NAFTALI:  There are some people who are arguing that Richard Nixon was one of

America's last liberal presidents. What is the connection in your mind between Richard Nixon, the man, and the environmental policies and the other policies associated with the first term of the Nixon administration. Did he support these policies?

EVAN THOMAS:  Nixon and Congress, he signed a lot of bills. There was a lot of social welfare legislation, environmental legislation, 18 year old vote, all sorts of stuff.

Certainly by modern times, an incredibly productive thing. 

Now, different things were going on here. Let's take the environment. You can say it was mostly expedient. This is classically Nixon. Nixon learns that Ed Muskie, the Senator from Maine, has embraced the environmental cause and he thinks, Wow, this guy could be the Democratic candidate in 1972, running on the environment, the new, hot issue. Nixon loved to confound his enemies. He loved to kind of surprise his enemies by outflanking them. And so, Nixon, to outflank Ed Muskie, comes up with the idea of the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. 

So it's politically expedient, but it's also Nixon feeling that that's where the country is going, that there is this emerging move. He's balancing different equities. He would say, "If it's a choice between jobs and the environment, I'm going to choose jobs." But he also tells a young aide, "Stay away from Maurice Stans, my Secretary of Commerce, and my chief fundraiser because he's going to front for big business. Don't let him write the rules; you write them yourself." In other words, he's serious about actually writing some environmental rules. 

So I would say, as we said in environmental law, it's a mixed use zone. There's some expedience, but there's also some genuineness.

And the other thing about Nixon that I think is important: I was so struck looking through Nixon's records and his papers. 1970 was an activist age, and people in government believed that you were supposed to do things when you were there. Even if it was to take power away from Congress, you were supposed to do things. Nixon got up every morning intent on doing things and accomplishing things. 

It wasn't just about going on cable TV and yelling that the other side was immoral and wrong. There was in Washington in 1970 a spirit of "we're going to actually address the problems of the nation." And they did often in bipartisan ways, shockingly. 

Nixon was working with a Democratic Congress. He was the first president in 100 years to have both Houses controlled by the other side. He made a lot of deals, for what his legislative guy Bill Timmons called floating coalitions. They made a lot of expedient deals to get things done. Some of them had unfortunate consequences. One particularly stupid thing he did was wage and price controls. It was classic Nixon outflanking the left.

He took a left idea, wage and price controls, and used it – there's a complicated backstory to why – he was sort of a little too clever by half. That was a bad idea. That hurt the country. So some of his activism backfired.

But some of his activism, particularly on the environment, was a good idea. And it was part of an age when government was doing things, when he was willing to make deals, when he was being pragmatic. All stuff that I think looks pretty good, compared to the current scene.

TIM NAFTALI:  True, but when you listen to the tapes in early '73, he is vowing to dismantle all of this.

EVAN THOMAS:  He is.

TIM NAFTALI:  So he is actually saying, "I never believed in any of this. Let's get rid of it." And the only thing that prevented that from happening was his resignation.

EVAN THOMAS:  I think that's Nixon bloviating in his way. He said a lot of stuff like that, not just in 1973, but in 1971.

TIM NAFTALI:  How can those who are trying to understand presidents tell the difference between a man talking to those he admires and respects so much, because you know there were inner circles. There were things he wouldn't say to people other than Colson and Haldeman. If you really want to know what he really believed, you listen to what he says to Colson and Haldeman. When he's telling them he's going to dismantle it all, how do we, as outsiders, years later, differentiate between bloviating and what he would have done had he had the power long enough?

EVAN THOMAS:  By his record in the first term where he didn't mean it. I remember him sitting with Jim Schlesinger, who was later Secretary of Defense, but was a senior guy in the Bureau of the Budget. And Nixon would say things like, "Cut the CIA in half. Cut the State Department in half." He would say this, and Schlesinger's like, "God, is he serious?" He wasn't serious. He was trying to get Schlesinger enough oomph to go out and at least cut it by 10%. He was exaggerating for effect. It was his nature to talk this way. And his own aides knew to discount what he said.

Now, you can say that's a dangerous way to govern, because what happens if your aides take you seriously? And in fact, in Watergate, his aides did take him– it was a dangerous way to govern. It cost him his presidency. 

But to answer your question, is he really serious about dismantling the government? I don't think he was serious about it. He was trying to get himself revved up to take another run at the welfare state. But at the end of the day, he was going to be pragmatic about it. He was going to make deals. He was going to take what he could get at the end of the day. I don't think his rhetoric was sincere.

TIM NAFTALI:  So when he said he wanted a list of every Jew in the US government and wanted, as he said, a Gentile to be over every Jew in the US government, and that Jews were naturally disloyal to the American government–

EVAN THOMAS:  It was hideous. If you listen to those tapes–

TIM NAFTALI:  Is he bloviating?

EVAN THOMAS:  Yes. You listen to those tapes, particularly on Jews, he's just awful. He wants to count up the number of Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's just terrible. Tim is not exaggerating. And it doesn't happen just a few times; it happens a lot.

But – and there's always a but with Nixon – and I'm not excusing his anti-Semitism, but

I'm giving it some context. Richard Nixon was loved in Israel for saving Israel in the 1974 Yom Kippur War, because when Egypt and Syria are advancing and the Israelis are running out of tanks and the State Department and the Defense Department are dragging their feet on resupplying Israel, Nixon says "send all the planes, send them everything." He's the guy who, at least on the Israeli side, they believed that he rescued them.

Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel, is a close friend of Richard Nixon's. So Nixon could say some hideously anti-Semitic things, but be close to Golda Meir. Nixon's National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, was Jewish. His top speechwriter, Bill Safire, was Jewish. Arthur Burns, head of the Federal Reserve, was Jewish. You can go down the list.  

Nixon had no trouble hiring high-ranking Jewish people, which suggests that a lot of his anti-Semitism, though gross and vile, was him mouthing off. You listen to him on the tapes, it's awful, but with Nixon, you have to watch what he did, not just what he said.

TIM NAFTALI:  Although the challenge in citing the Yom Kippur War is that Nixon actually is in the residence and doesn't participate in these. We really don't know what Nixon wanted. All we know is that Haig went to the residence and would come back, and it's unclear whether Haig made up some of these things.

EVAN THOMAS:  Not the thing about resupplying. We do know that Nixon said that. And Nixon is not – and this is October 1974 – Nixon's drinking too much. We don't know exactly what's going on. But at least on the resupply, that was a top-down decision. It was resisted by Schlesinger at Defense, and the State Department was not keen on it. That wasn't just Al Haig making it up; that was Nixon.

TIM NAFTALI:  What are the mysteries that remain? You've spent a lot of time, you've listened to a lot of tapes. You've talked to folks that listened to almost all the tapes. What are the great mysteries? What would you like to know about Nixon that you couldn't figure out from what's available?

EVAN THOMAS:  The things that we'll probably never know – What's he really thinking in the four a.m. of his soul? What is he really, truly thinking? There's this existential question about Nixon: is he good or bad? What is he really? You keep asking me, what's spin and what's real? And I'm doing my best to explain it as I see it, but of course I don't really know what's truly in his heart as he lies awake. And he was always awake at four a.m.; the guy never slept. What is he truly, truly thinking? Those notes when he's writing to himself, how much of that is him just trying to convince himself?

How much of that is real? We can't know for sure. 

We may know more– there is a diary; Nixon has a diary of about 10,000 pages. I haven't seen it. I've talked to people who have read it. They claim that Nixon is not particularly self-aware in that diary.

One of the things I kept looking for and looking for and looking for: was Nixon selfaware? Did he know himself? And I would ask and ask and ask, and most people said no. As Brent Scowcroft said earlier, "Sometimes I think he took a little peek." I asked James Schlesinger, "Did Nixon know himself?" And Schlesinger said no. And then Schlesinger looked out the window and said, "Well, who does, really?" 

And this raises a complicated question about, how self-aware is anybody? And often great men and great women have to be kind of narrow focused to get things done. They can't wake up in the morning and think, Gee, where are my car keys? Or, How am I getting along with my kids? They've got to think, I'm going to solve the world's problems today. And Nixon had that kind of megalomaniacal drive that a lot of powerful leaders have.

So, was he self-aware? No. But he had a lot of company in the lack of self-awareness department. Not just the rest of us, but certainly great leaders who have to get things done.

Now, it begs this question of, did at some level, was there some consciousness? I did find a couple of times where there is a hint of self-awareness, and they're poignant. Cambodia, the incursion of Cambodia. Kent State; you'll recall those four kids were killed by the National Guard, and Nixon turns to Haldeman and says, "Was this me? Was this my fault?" Because Nixon has given a pretty hot speech about how the United States can't be a pitiful giant. And he's thinking, oh, my god, what have I unleashed here?

And then a couple years later – this could only happen in the Nixon White House – the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been spying on the president of the United States. They've installed a yeoman into Kissinger's national security operation and he's reading from Kissinger's burn bags and going through this garbage cans. And they're spying on the president.

And they catch this guy. And Nixon turns to Ehrlichman, I think, and he says, "Is this me? Did I do this?" He realizes for a moment that he's created this poisonous atmosphere where everybody's spying on everybody else. And he goes, oh, my god, is this me? 

Now, very quickly he turns Machiavellian. He starts saying, "Hmm, how can we use this?" They've caught Admiral Moorer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, spying on him and he says, "Let's not fire Moorer, let's own him. We've got him now." So he immediately switches to "How can I make political use of Moorer? How can I trick this guy into being my guy?" 

But there was a moment there, a fraction of a moment when Nixon sort of went, "Huh, hmm, is this me?" 

And lastly, and most movingly, as he's leaving the White House– you remember he resigns to the nation, and that morning he gives this kind of poignant or mawkish farewell to the staff. The last thing he says before getting on the helicopter is, "Your enemies may hate you, and you may hate them. But if you do, you destroy yourself." Well, whoa! I read about that and I went, hello? Is it just suddenly occurring to you that if you hate your enemies it's going to destroy you? Because there it is, that's what destroyed Nixon, was that excessive hatred of his enemies. It was Nixon's fatal flaw, that's what destroyed him.

He says it at the very end. Did it not occur to him before then? I asked Ed Cox about this. Nixon, there were little flickers. Nixon said a couple nights before he left, "Well, this is like a Greek play or a Shakespeare play. It's got to play itself out." So there's a little, tiny bit of awareness. 

I actually was curious if he actually read a play by Shakespeare or a Greek play. The

Nixon Library, as you know, they have his school papers. And Nixon did in college read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and he wrote a paper about it. It's a really bad paper. He totally missed the point. He didn't get the hubris piece of it. 

So Nixon was quite well read, quite deeply read. But he seemed to have missed the theme of hubris. He seemed to have missed that kind of need to be self-aware about your own overweening pride. And of course, as in a Greek play, he was brought down by it.

TIM NAFTALI:  We are always talking about or thinking about presidents in terms of greatness. Now that you've spent so much time trying to figure out this complicated man, where does Richard Nixon fit as a president? Is the country better off for his having been president?

EVAN THOMAS:  No. He ranks low, and he deserves to rank low because he's the only president in history to disgrace his office and be driven from it. If you listen to those tapes, they're disgraceful. 

But – again, with Nixon there's always a but – he did do a hell of a lot on foreign policy, opening up China and that arms control agreement, and some of his domestic legislation that was great. He did, arguably – and we could get into an argument about this – when he gets in in 1968, the country is in flames; there are race riots, the campus are blowing up. By 1972, things have calmed down. Now, some of that was just these fires burning out and running their course. Some of it was Nixon ending the draft, which took a lot of the pressure off. Nixon deserves some credit in his own way, his own kind of Machiavellian way, for calming things down. 

So Nixon has some marks, some positive marks on his record. But for Watergate, he'd be ranked in the upper half. But, you can't say but for Watergate, because it was a terrible thing. And they caught him, and they should have. He disgraced his office.

The really tragic part to me is that Nixon was a patriot who loved his country and believed in service. He really did. He was sentimental and mawkish about the flag in kind of a sweet way. He loved uniforms. He saluted the military. He's not faking it, that's not spin. That's what he really believed. He believed in public service. When he was out of public service he said to his friend Leonard Garment, "If I don't get back into public service, I'm going to be mentally dead in two years and physically dead in four."

But the guy who believed so much in public service did more than anybody in modern times to discourage other people from getting into public service. Because Watergate made us cynical about service. Just as John F. Kennedy made us idealistic about public service with his famous inauguration address and that appeal that reached so many people and so many hearts in the early 1960s, and really drew people to public life, Nixon's behavior on the tapes and in Watergate had the exact opposite effect. It made people cynical about government and drove them away from public service. That is a tragedy to me. 

TIM NAFTALI:  And because we're not cynical, it's time to have some questions from all of you. Are there any questions for Evan? The mic is over there. Yes, go ahead, please.

Q:  Would Nixon ever stand a chance of being elected president in today's age of social media?

EVAN THOMAS:  No. Would Nixon be elected in the age of Twitter? No. Can you see Nixon twittering?

TIM NAFTALI:  There's a fake Nixon who does a great job. 

EVAN THOMAS:  Oh, you've got to listen to him. What's he called @–?

TIM NAFTALI:  The Real Richard Nixon?

EVAN THOMAS:  Yeah, the @theRealRichardNixon. He's really good. He really gets Nixon. No, Nixon would not have withstood the scrutiny. Although I shouldn't be so flip about that. The press was pretty inquisitive at Nixon's time, and arguably more inside. I think actually there were more leaks back in the days in Nixon than there are– really inside. There's a lot of social media and noise now, but I think that the press kind of probed deeper into Nixon's White House than they do now. People actually return their phone calls from inside government in ways they don't now. There are more PR people fending off reporters.

Nixon went through a terrible press gauntlet, arguably even worse than today. The press was very bitter about Vietnam. They were bitter about being lied to by Lyndon Johnson. They hated Nixon, by and large. They gave Nixon a rough time. So it's not like Nixon had it easy from the press by any means.

TIM NAFTALI:  You once told me a story about how the George W. Bush administration had massaged journalists. I don't mean this in a sexual way, I meant just giving them materials. And I was wondering, one of the problems for the Nixon administration was they didn't really know how to leak.

EVAN THOMAS:  They were bad at it.

TIM NAFTALI:  They didn't because all White Houses leak, but that's part of the press management.

EVAN THOMAS:  Yeah, it is. And some people were great at it. JFK was the greatest leaker from the top, ever. Reporters loved him. I was reading Theodore White, the great campaign chronicler, Making of the President, 1960. I was over at Harvard looking at White's papers. There's a letter, this is Teddy White, this is October 1960, before the election, the letter from Teddy White to Pierre Salinger, Jack Kennedy's press secretary. "Cher Pierre," it begins, "you know my chips are all in for Jack." What kind of objective journalism is that? The votes haven't even been cast! And that's because people loved being around Jack Kennedy.

The other great press handler of all time was James A. Baker, who was chief of staff to

Ronald Reagan, and later worked for HW Bush. I've been personally handled by Baker.

He's a genius, and he's just great. He's great at saying things that are slightly mocking of the principle to establish his own credibility, but only slightly mocking. And he kind of reels you in that way and he feeds you a few documents. And he owns you. And he's just genius at it.

So there are great masters of the leak. Nixon was personally terrible at it. Haldeman, although he had many strengths as a chief of staff running quite a tight ship with good paper flow and really high quality paper flow, was an ad man who just had a tin ear about the Washington press corps. And these things about the anecdotalists that I mentioned, these attempts to humanize Richard Nixon just grated on the cynical ears of journalists, and flopped.

TIM NAFTALI:  Next question, over there.

Q:  Thank you for a wonderful presentation, first of all. The question I have, and I recall hearing a couple of tapes with Kissinger and Nixon in the Oval Office and Nixon ranting about Jews in front of Kissinger, who everybody knew was Jewish. And I would listen to that and say, why in the hell doesn't Henry say, "Mr. President, knock it off. I'm Jewish. My friends are Jewish. What are you doing here?" He never did, in all the tapes I've ever listened to, Kissinger never stood up and said "that's outrageous." Why?

EVAN THOMAS:  It's sad, because Kissinger was one of the most successful suckups in history. [laughter] He was great at it; he was a great flatterer. But this was demeaning. And Nixon did this to him. Nixon makes him wallow in it. I think for purchase. It's a kind of bullying. It's a way of getting authority over Henry, is by making Henry be antiSemitic, by making a Jew be anti-Semitic. It was a cruel and ugly form of dominance, if you will.

I mean, all government is high school. And it's like a bully in the high school cafeteria trying to bully another kid. And I agree, it's ugly. We don't have tapes of every president, so this may have been done in other presidencies, too; probably was. But it's not pretty to listen to.

Q:  So essentially Kissinger did not have the integrity to stand up to him.

EVAN THOMAS:  Easy for me to say. I'm not in the Oval Office. That's a different kind of place. I remember Bob Strauss telling me– Bob Strauss is an old fixer, Democratic fixer, and he would say, "People would come to me and they'd say, 'Take me to see the president. I'm going to tell him a thing or two.'" And Strauss would bring them into the Oval Office. And the person would look at the president and say, "Oh, Mr. President, you're doing a wonderful job." [laughter]

That's an intimidating office and people are easily intimidated there. So it's easy for us to say, I'd have the integrity to tell the president to go to hell. My impression is that most people in the Oval Office don't do that. And it's a problem, because presidents need the occasional wise man or grownup to tell him, "Mr. President, don't do that." 

And Nixon did not have that. He did a little bit with John Mitchell in the first couple of years. Mitchell on a couple of occasions said, "Hey, don't." And Nixon wanted to use Mitchell as kind of a wise man, listened to him. But by '71/'72, Mitchell's been not a very successful Attorney General. He's spread thin. His wife is drinking too much; he's drinking too much. He's distracted. He wants to go back to Wall Street. Nixon loses that grownup in the room. Nixon needed – we all do – Nixon needed one. 

Instead he's got brilliant sycophants, like Kissinger, who was brilliant and really served

Nixon well in many, many ways. He was incredibly successful – Middle East negotiations, China, you name it. Kissinger was a great Secretary. But there was an unattractive side of Kissinger as a sycophant, as a toady. 

There are hilarious things online. There's a parody of this online, where they're just reading from the tapes. And it's laugh-out-loud funny; they're just reading, it's just two actors reading from the tapes of Kissinger and Nixon. If you go online and watch it, you'll just laugh until you cry, it's so awful. 

But it's also true. 

TIM NAFTALI:  I might add that Henry Kissinger wanted to participate in Middle East policy. Richard Nixon had made it clear to a number of people that he did not want

Kissinger involved because he was Jewish. One of the things I'm convinced that Kissinger spoke that way was to say, "No, no, don't worry. I will be tough-minded about the Middle East, as I am about every other part of the world." And the way he proved that was by denigrating the Jewish people. So it was part of Kissinger's effort to be a player on the Middle East policy side, because the president at least publicly had given that responsibility to Secretary of State Rogers.

EVAN THOMAS:  I think that's absolutely right.

Q:  Thank you for delving into the enigma that was Richard Nixon. I wondered, did Nixon have any historical figures he looked at or mentors?

EVAN THOMAS:  He sure did. Unfortunately, one was Charles De Gaulle. He wanted to be Charles De Gaulle, le grand Charles because he liked – Nixon was shy – liked the idea of being remote and mysterious. Now, Nixon made a bad De Gaulle in many ways, one of which is just no resemblance, because Nixon doesn't have the grandeur that De Gaulle did. But more dangerously, it helped reinforce Nixon's idea of isolation and being this kind of guy who floats above. Nixon started referring to himself in the third person, as RN, like he was just a whole separate person. It was a way of not taking responsibility, in a way.

Q:  Did he have any mentors in his political career?

EVAN THOMAS:  In his political career, did he have any mentors. Sure. I'm afraid to say one was Murray Chotiner, who was an early California, dirty– well, not dirty. Hardball, I would say, a hardball political consultant who taught him the art of rock 'em, sock 'em politics, of taking the low road sometimes to manipulate public opinion. That was sort of unfortunate. 

Nixon revered Teddy Roosevelt for being in the arena. The famous speech by Teddy Roosevelt about being in the arena, being covered with grime and sweat and blood, but being a fighter. He admired that.

TIM NAFTALI:  You make a nice point in your book about the role that John Foster Dulles played.

EVAN THOMAS:  Nixon was a student of John Foster Dulles in the 1950s. Dulles was Secretary of State. Kind of going to school with Dulles. Learning about foreign policy from him. They would have drinks together in the evening. And both of them were socially awkward, shy, strange men, who had a kind of bond, I think, of unlikeability in a way. But also a seriousness of purpose and a deep intellectual interest in the world. And they shared that. And it was a good thing, I think, for both men.

Q:  Kissinger was a Bismarckian. Did any of that rub off, the balance of power?

EVAN THOMAS:  Kissinger and Nixon both were. More Kissinger, I suppose. But Nixon was a pragmatist who believed in interests. You appealed to and exploit. Don't get all gooey and goopy about ideals. Play to people's interests, either the interests of voters or the interests of nations. So they had a Metternichian, if you will, or Bismarckian view. You can overdo this, or overstate it, but they were able to talk on that level. And did talk on that level. 

Q:  We've talked politics all day. I think of all the First Ladies that I've been involved with since Eleanor Roosevelt in my case, the least we've ever heard was Pat Nixon. And I wonder what kind of– everything I've heard about Nixon, he was a great father, he was a very sentimental guy as far as his family goes. What was he like as a family man? What was she like?

EVAN THOMAS:  Good question. And like all things with Nixon, a little contradictory. We have this picture of Pat Nixon as tired and drawn and thin and kind of sad. I intentionally put in my book a picture of Pat Nixon taken in 1953. She's a knockout, she's a beauty. She's about 15 pounds heavier; she's radiant. And Nixon's standing next to her, and he looks like one of these guys in high school who can't believe his good luck that he married the babe. [laughter] 

And I think early in their marriage– I mean, there are very affecting love letters between them. I don't think those are spin; I think they're for real. I think she, Pat, I found five times when Nixon talked about getting out of politics, each time she would say "You can't." Because she understood him. She knew he would be miserable.

She hated politics herself, increasingly, as time went on. But she stood by him. Now, maybe he was staging these events to kind of force her to reassure him. Marriages are complicated; who knows what's really going on?

But the point is, she stood by him. She did. She loved him. She was ambitious for him. She was ambitious with him. By the time Watergate comes along though, there is real strain between them. A president has a coterie around him and Nixon both encouraged and allowed HR Haldeman, his chief of staff, to separate her. Increasingly you see her being pushed to the outskirts. This was a great loss for Nixon.

Among the things I noticed, Julie says a couple of things. One is that Nixon never talked to Mom about Watergate. Big mistake. He should have talked to her. And that she wanted to get rid of the tapes. But she never said that to Nixon, because by then she was just sort of stepping back. The marriage, I think, had gotten kind of dysfunctional by about 1972/3.

Q:  Was she a total introvert as opposed to no?

EVAN THOMAS:  No. I think she was kind of– Susan Eisenhower, other people said she could be really affectionate and warm. Not with the press, not in public; she as bad at that. But with other people in her coterie, with her friends, there was a warmth. And she was easier with people, with her kids' friends, easier with them than Nixon was.

Although even Nixon, a teacher at Nixon's kids' high school, Chapin School, told me he was the most popular father. All the other fathers were these Wall Street guys; they weren't around. Nixon made an effort. Nixon was bad at making small talk, so when he talked to kids he didn't make small talk. He'd say, "What do you think about arms control?" [laughter] And they were flattered; these kids were flattered to be asked. And he would get into serious conversations about world affairs. And he kind of did want, in his own Nixonian way, he did want to know what they thought.

But Pat, there was a sweeter to side Pat. I just want to say one last thing about Pat. The marriage was, they were both drinking too much. It was a mess by 1973. But if you want to see how Nixon felt about his wife, Google "Pat Nixon funeral." The video of Nixon, he's not just crying, he's bawling. He's undone. He is completely destroyed by the death of his wife, and he was dead himself a year later. 

TIM NAFTALI:  Next question.

Q:  I'd like two minutes to tell my story of Nixon and me and my father, if I may.

TIM NAFTALI:  Okay.

Q:  You will find it interesting, I'm sure. 1968, when Nixon was running, my father had loved him for 20 years, because of the Alger Hiss affair and how Nixon had gotten rid of Alger Hiss. And he loved him. And me, I was a high school senior, a radicalized high school senior, in-your-face teenager. And I said to my father, "If he wins, I'll give you one week before you hate his guts." And of course, everyone is elected on Tuesday. Four days later he calls me from Detroit or Cleveland, wherever he was, and he said, "Let's get rid of Nixon. He's no good." [laughter] 

EVAN THOMAS:  How did he know?

Q:  Well, that's the point. That's the crux of it. And I said to my father, "What turned you against your hero so fast?" And my father's answer to me was, "It's his Ku Klux Klabinet." 

EVAN THOMAS:  His what?

Q:  His Ku Klux Klabinet. In other words, my father at that moment had X-ray vision, and he saw that Nixon was surrounding himself with bad guys that would ruin him later on.

EVAN THOMAS:  I think he was a little premature, actually. 

Q:  Yes, he was, of course.

EVAN THOMAS:  I think Nixon's cabinet was sort of a mixed bag, don't you, Tim?

Some people, Schultz was great. 

TIM NAFTALI:  We were talking about mysteries before. One of the mysteries is that President Nixon set up a very, very smart seminar of people somewhat on the left, and people on the right, to debate policy. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the person somewhat on the left in that era. He moves a little to the right over time. And a man named Arthur

Burns is the one on the right. And they're talking about social policy in the meeting of President Nixon's domestic advisors. And these are smart discussions. They're government at its best, absolutely. 

And then, Nixon has it dismantled, and he puts John Ehrlichman, a lawyer, an advance man, in charge of domestic policy. And that give-and-take that had been so rich for the first year of the first term disappears. Now, why Richard Nixon did that, we still don't know.

So when Evan says that this cabinet starts out as America's cabinet, it's true. But after time this cabinet of all talents begins to collapse. And Richard Nixon's world gets narrower and narrower, and the circle gets smaller and smaller. Do you think that's fair?

EVAN THOMAS:  Yeah, but Ehrlichman is, this is my stock answer, is complicated.

Because Ehrlichman, true he's a zoning lawyer, and it's true he's pushing out the sainted Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan's a great public policy intellectual. Ehrlichman is not. But Ehrlichman is a fairly effective guy. A lot of legislation gets passed under Ehrlichman's chop. Ehrlichman's actually fairly liberal. I think Nixon's kind of tuned out of it. Nixon's focusing more on foreign policy.

So I think even after the so-called balloon droppers– Ehrlichman was an advance man and the nickname for him was the balloon dropper. So even though the staff is complaining, "Oh, my god, the balloon droppers have taken over," even after they take over, there's actually quite a bit of legislative activity in the last three years of his fouryear term. 

And Nixon is open enough to it to sign the bills and to embrace it enough. We are in this kind of liberal activist age in the early '70s. They're trying to do some novel stuff. Some of it's transferring power back to the states for the new federalism and revenue sharing.

There's a lot going on, even under Ehrlichman.

Q:  May I finish the story?

TIM NAFTALI:  We should give somebody else a chance.

Q:  I wanted to finish. All right, how about after this gentleman?

TIM NAFTALI:  We want to thank you. It was very funny and true.

Q:  Can I have one-quarter minute? A year later, my father was saying, "I've got to get rid of Nixon. Somebody's got to shoot Nixon, somebody's got to kill him. I'm going to go kill Nixon!" 

TIM NAFTALI:  I'm glad he didn't.

Q:  He says, "I'm an old man, what can they do to me? Somebody's got to do it. I'm going to go kill Nixon." Anyway, thank god he didn't do it, but I'm always wondering if the FBI listened to our conversations and recorded us somewhere. I'd like to hear it.

TIM NAFTALI:  It would be the Secret Service. But thank you for your contribution.

Your turn, sir.

Q:  Thank you. There are a couple other books out now about Nixon. Bob Woodward has written one. I think he's focused on the Butterfield relationship in which I've heard him say that Butterfield knew Nixon better than anybody, with the possible exception of Pat

Nixon. And the other one, I've forgotten the author, but did a lot of focus on–

EVAN THOMAS:  Tim Weiner.

Q:  Yeah, exactly. Focuses on, at least the earlier part of the book, which is all I've read at the moment, but Nixon falsifying bombing records in Cambodia and some of that. So

I'm curious, since you're familiar with those other two books, how your perspective on Nixon differs from those other two.

EVAN THOMAS:  They are different books. Woodward is using Butterfield, who was close to Nixon. He was not actually in the true inner circle. He was an outsider even when he was an insider. So I think that's just not true that he was that close to Nixon. He was physically close to him. Haldeman brought him in. But he was not part of the political, the true believer inner circle.

It's an interesting book. Bob's an amazing reporter. If it was easy to do what Bob Woodward has done, how come no other reporter has done it? You don't have 12 number-one New York Times bestsellers for nothing.

But it's a slice of Nixon. There's Butterfield. Obviously I'm writing a biography of the guy's whole life so it's a different book.

Tim Weiner looked more at the presidency itself. Weiner is very critical of Nixon, extremely critical of Nixon. I was trying to write a different kind of book, intentionally trying to look at it from the Nixon side, to see what it was like to be Nixon. I felt that there had been plenty of critical books written about Nixon. I don't think that Tim Weiner's book adds a whole lot new to that that we didn't know before. There are some interesting details in there, but the general picture of him was familiar.

I was trying to come at from a different side. I was the 13^th Nixon biographer. There are going to be 13 more, I guarantee you, if not 25 more. That's good. Nixon is a gift that keeps on giving. [laughter] But also, that's how history works. You keep studying him; he was a very consequential figure, one of the most consequential of the 20^th century. We ought to be studying him forever. There are going to be plenty of books after mine. Bring them on.

Q:  Weiner seems to say that Nixon was on the verge of a nervous breakdown for a lot of the early '70s.

EVAN THOMAS:  I think he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown at the very end. I think he was drinking too much and taking too many pills. One thing you notice, Tim, the paper trail on Nixon kind of grinds to a halt in about October 1973. He's not gone until August 1974. I couldn't figure out what the hell he was doing there, except for looking at the portraits and drinking.

TIM NAFTALI:  He also loses– he had two note-takers who were very close to him – Haldeman and Ehrlichman. And as you know, they're gone by April 30^th. And the tapes are gone because the tapes stop in July. So you don't have the inner circle note-takers.

Ken Cole, who replaces Ehrlichman is not as close; his notes are not as good. So we don't have the note-takers, we don't have the taping system, and Nixon also stops his diary. It's a little like studying a modern presidency; there's not much being written down. 

EVAN THOMAS:  Nothing happy was going on, I'm sure of that. And I think he was probably having a cocktail or two too many. There's an endless debate over how much Nixon drank. He had a low tolerance. 

TIM NAFTALI:  He took a lot of drugs, prescription drugs. 

EVAN THOMAS:  I think you'll be the first today– this needs some context. Nixon took some amazing drugs. In the 1950s, he's on uppers and downers, amphetamines, barbiturates. You sort of can't believe what he's taking. But the pharmacology of the 1950s is crude, as many of you know in his room. 

TIM NAFTALI:  Mad Men. 

EVAN THOMAS:  John F. Kennedy had a doctor known as Dr. Feelgood who would make cocktails of amphetamines and barbiturates that he would inject. Bobby was a little worried about it, had the FDA look at it, and President Kennedy said, "I don't care what it is, I don't care if it's horse piss if it works." That's the view of pharmacology circa 1961. 

So Johnson drank too much. Took some drugs himself. The sainted President Eisenhower was addicted to Seconal – I know this from his doctor's diary – a barbiturate-based sleeping pill. 

So Nixon did take some bad pharmacology and too much of it, but he was not unique.

TIM NAFTALI:  We do know that he had insomnia.

EVAN THOMAS:  Right, bad insomnia.

TIM NAFTALI:  And he would call people in the middle of the night. And he would talk until he dropped. What would happen is the phone would drop out of his hand, because he would fall asleep on the phone.

EVAN THOMAS:  Leonard Garment tells that story. It is hotly denied by Chapin, but–

TIM NAFTALI:  But Chapin denied a lot of things. 

EVAN THOMAS:  Right. I'm just saying. 

TIM NAFTALI:  There's a tension among the inner circle, the surviving inner Nixon circle.

EVAN THOMAS:  There is.

TIM NAFTALI:  There's a tension over how much to reveal, and how much of the real man to share, which is why this problem of spin exists. And you can understand why. Those who are alive, obviously, they're a generation of damaged folks; a number of them went to jail. A number of them did not have the careers they thought they would have because of Watergate. And so, my sense is that a lot of them love and hate Nixon at the same time. They love him because he gave them a chance to be in Washington, to be consequential, to help our country, but they also have this unresolved feeling about him, because Watergate was not just his undoing; it affected their careers, too. A number of those people are very contradictory about Richard Nixon when you talk to them now.

And you have talked to a number of them.

EVAN THOMAS:  Yeah, sure did. I think they have genuinely contradictory feelings about him. Not just because he gave them their break and then put them in jail – that's enough to make you contradictory – but because they saw a contradictory figure. They saw his kindness and his consideration. They saw his erratic temper. They saw him being bloviating. They saw him being shrewd. They saw all sides. It was a confusing and kind of scary guy to be around. But they saw the good as well as the bad. I'm convinced of it. 

Frank Gannon, who we've talked about, Frank Gannon helped ghostwrite Nixon's memoirs, and spent a lot of time around him. And he describes the White House at the very end. Nixon and his family can't really talk about Watergate at dinner. They're having polite small talk. But they're leaving little notes for each other on their pillows at night. It was like, he said, out of a Tolstoy novel. It was this kind of very indirect form of communication – awkward, painful. Who knows what they're really thinking. Who knows what kind of stress they're under. What is really going on here? Hard to know. 

I think, truthfully, a lot of things are going on. There are terrible misunderstandings. I mean, very poignant, at the very end, the very last night, Nixon's with his family and he hears the crowd outside roaring outside the White House. And he thinks they're chanting

"hail to the Chief." So he goes to the window. They're actually chanting "jail to the Chief." And his family has to pull him away. You can imagine. 

Q:  Richard Nixon and John Kennedy served together in the House and the Senate. What was their relationship like during that time period?

EVAN THOMAS:  Pretty good. They were friends. They were young naval veterans. Their offices were next to each other. When Nixon went on a Congressional fact-finding mission to Europe in 1948, John F. Kennedy gave him the name of three girls to look up in Paris. [laughter] Nixon was discombobulated, he didn't take the list.

Nixon saw in Kennedy, interestingly, that Kennedy was shy. For all of his glamour, Jack Kennedy had a real shy streak. And I think on some level, they bonded over that. I wouldn't say they were great friends, but there was some closeness to them. When Kennedy almost died in an operation, a guy named Rex Scouten, who was a Secret Service guy, claims that Nixon was weeping inconsolably over it. If that story is true, it suggests a level of feeling that Nixon had.

Now, of course, it soured. Kennedy said, "Nixon has no class." When that quote got back to Nixon, you can imagine how Nixon felt. Nixon became weirdly guarded about Kennedy. Look, a presidential election does not make for warmth and intimacy.

Eisenhower and Truman had a falling out in 1952.

So they were not friends at the end. But there was early on some respect and some friendship. 

Q:  You said something that intrigued me, and I'm not sure if I understood you correctly, so that's why I'm here asking the question. I can't remember if you said it when you were mentioning trying to leak things in a good way, to have good face to the press; or, if you mentioned it later. You had mentioned when Al Haig called Ford and said, "You'd better get ready for a change in your life," wink wink, "you could give a pardon." It sounded like you were saying that Ford understood and to get Nixon out, he agreed.

EVAN THOMAS:  There's historical debate about this.

Q:  I was wondering, because the consensus seems to be quite the opposite, and I know it must be true because he received the Profile in Courage Award here at the Kennedy Library for standing up for the– so I'm sorry to say that, but is that what you're getting at?

EVAN THOMAS:  I'm glad you brought this up, because I think Ford deserved the Profile in Courage Award, even if it's true there was a wink. Why? Because I think that Ford was a practical politician, and Haig is signaling him, "Just give us a little bit of encouragement and maybe Nixon will resign and spare the country this ordeal." And I think, I can't prove this, but there's a late-night phone call, only Haig and Ford are participants in it, and they both later deny it. But I am suspicious that there was a little bit of a wink.

Now, in the morning, when Ford is with his own aides, they call Haig and, reading from notes, Ford says no deal, no deal. But I'm suspicious.

Now, flash forward a couple weeks later, and now Ford is president. He sees what an ordeal it is to put the country through this. He pardons Nixon. He experiences the greatest one-day fall in the history of the Gallup polls by a president. In 1970, a lot believe that it cost Ford the 1976 election, to pardon Richard Nixon. So I think it was a politically courageous thing. I think he deserved the award. But I think it's possible he also gave a wink.

Q:  Hi, thank you for taking my question; I know it's late. How significant is the relationship of Prescott Bush to Richard Nixon's early career? When I think of the Bush legacy, what I've learned recently, what I've read, is that there's a long, strong relationship there. But I was wondering if you had– Prescott Bush in particular. 

EVAN THOMAS:  There's some relationship. Nixon makes George H.W. Bush, thinks he's an up-and-coming guy, makes him head of the party. Poor HW has to be head of the party during Watergate, which is pretty painful for HW. I think Nixon didn't totally trust anybody, including George H.W. Bush, who was about the most trustworthy person you could find, but admired him for being an attractive, young war veteran, who was good for the party.

In those days, the Republican Party actually had moderates, Northeast moderates, and even Northeast liberals. And George HW was somebody who could reach that group, as well as his own, by now his own state of Texas.

So I think, my sense is, and Tim should chime in on this, I think Nixon had a generally positive figure about HW. He didn't feel so great about him at the very– I think HW is the one in that last cabinet meeting who confronts Nixon about Watergate. I don't think Nixon was feeling too kindly about HW then. But I think mostly had a positive view of

HW.

TIM NAFTALI:  He actually saw him as a young man in a hurry, and that was a compliment. HW in that period, if you look at pictures of him in the 1960s, was a handsome man. They thought he was Kennedyesque; they used that term. Thanks to your friend, now my friend, Jon Meacham, I actually met HW last month. And I asked him about Nixon and he said, "Nixon was a strange man." [laughter] 

Q:  I appreciate that overview very much. I'm curious specifically about the significance of Prescott Bush, the father's influence on Richard Nixon as a young politician.

TIM NAFTALI:  I think the issue there is Prescott Bush's close relationship with Eisenhower. Because that's an important relationship. Wouldn't you say?

EVAN THOMAS:  Yeah, I don't think Nixon was particularly close to Prescott. He was close to HW. I think it was Prescott was close to Ike. He was a party elder. And again, Northeast, Connecticut Republicans were important to Nixon's electoral map.

Q:  I'm curious, what if Watergate had not occurred, how do you think Nixon would have gotten out of Vietnam? How would that have ended?

TIM NAFTALI:  Your question is, had Watergate had not had happened?

Q:  Yeah, if Watergate had not happened, or if he had burned the tapes, would Vietnam have ended the same way? Would the Congress have cut off funds? 

EVAN THOMAS:  Oh, I know what you're saying. Would South Vietnam have collapsed?

Q:  Yeah. Thank you.

EVAN THOMAS:  That's a fair question. One review is that because of Watergate, when the North Vietnamese started violating the treaty, which said "get out of Vietnam and stay out"– I guess they could keep their forces in place, but they couldn't go in. When the North Vietnamese inevitably started violating that treaty, had there not been Watergate on the wires, Nixon would have ordered American bombers to try to cut off the North Vietnamese.

I'm not sure. Luke Nichter, who's the great Nixon tapes expert, was telling me the other day that the January 1973 tapes saw that Nixon really wanted to get the hell out of Vietnam for good. It raises a question whether Nixon, even without Watergate, would have intervened to save President Thieu. Nichter's view, from listening to the tapes, is what you hear is Nixon is sick of Vietnam. He's got his deal. He wants out. If the Thieu government falls, too bad. We've done the best we can. We got you the best deal we can.

Too bad. I think that's Nichter's view. 

That's a little contrary to another view, which is, oh, no, Nixon would have gone in and saved President Thieu or propped up his government with bombing, and that Congress would have gone along with it.

Historical counterfactual, we can't know. Watergate happened. I think Watergate in its own way was inevitable. If it hadn't happened quite that way, I think it might have happened some other way. Because Nixon had created this atmosphere that was toxic.

And they were going to get caught.

TIM NAFTALI:  Some final thoughts you'd like to share? Some stories about this search for the inner Nixon that we haven't touched on?

EVAN THOMAS:  I should, but I don't. [laughter] 

TIM NAFTALI:  Before I thank you, I just wanted to say something about my friend Tom Putnam. I was, as mentioned, Director of the Richard Nixon Library a few years ago. And it was my honor and privilege to serve with many fine Library Directors. But among my colleagues, Tom was, and is, my favorite. 

Tom and Evan and I are too young to have known John F. Kennedy, and so I can't say what Kennedy would have said, but for those of us who study John F. Kennedy's idea about leadership and public service, I think they are completely parallel to the way in which Tom Putnam ran this Library. 

I think it would be nice for us together, not only to thank Evan Thomas for a fine presentation, but Tom Putnam for being a great public servant. Thank you.

[applause]