i don't even know if i need this microphone i think small mics pick up my voice i know that pretty well  anyway the power point really i put together just to show the labors i had to go through to complete this project which i'm not quite sure i would have done this most recent book that extent offense had i known what i was getting into what happened is my editor came to me well before the approaching forty eighth anniversary of the watergate break in which was on june seventeenth of tw twelve and said are there any questions you have at this late date about watergate and i said sure there are a couple of them i said you know but really there's one overriding question that i've really never been able to figure out as close as i was to it all how could anybody as savvy as richard nixon get himself into the mess he got into how could he let his presidency literally just disintegrate on our on a bungled burglary and i said as close as i was to the story happened behind the scenes when i wasn't there that i really would love to get the answer that question i press and i figure the tapes probably answer most that those questions and i think probably enough of the tapes have been transcribed that i can find the answer with maybe a few more transcriptions so that's where the project started in two thousand and nine after my last book and i began researching and looking at the tapes and first of all discovered nobody in all these years has ever had along the mom i found i found there were about four hundred tapes in varying degrees that someone had tried to transcribe not full transcript the there were eighty transcripts i found from the watergate special prosecution office effort twelve of which were really good because they were used in the trial of paula men erlichman mitchell at all b and they had obviously gone through them very closely to figure out you know who was saying what and when the rest of the eighty watergate special prosecution force tapes really were terrible they were they were pretty good for yelling what someone said but not having the right person say it so i asked one of the prosecutors who i knew pretty well i said who did these and they said these were done by i secretaries so i realized those would have to all be redone and then i looked at stanley kutler zx transcripts stanley did a book in fact stanley a professor from wisconsin who forced nixon to release the tapes long before he really wanted to release them and he got in the archives right after he got a court order and did a slew of tapes all what they call the abuse of process tapes as quickly as the archives could process them and what they when i say they're in the archives process them what they've done over these four decades in fact i dedicate my book to the  women at the national archives who spent four decades processing these tapes because this is this was a monumental assignment and you have to have worked with these tapes as much as i have to appreciate how how hard this work was that they did so i figured i'd actually name them all as well as the in the acknowledgements because i think they really deserve a lot of credit because what they had to do is go through and take out any personal information and then take out any national security information and then at that time they were doing them with all analog tapes that was no small assignment and to do it what they did is they prepared what they call a subject law and that subject log would have the name of the person speaking and then the not a transcript the just that they could pick up of what was being said for example it might be henry kissinger and it might be paris peace talks and it might have ambassador bunker saigon or something you know a little clips like that that would give you the gist of the conversation so when i started the project i went through all the subject logs of all the tapes and was able want to gate became very quickly a subject and who was who and what they were the gist of what they were talking about and i came i came up with a thousand conversations and so i realized very quickly that there were probably six hundred conversations that nobody outside the archives in preparing the subject logs ever listened to so i asked them a cut i said how did you select the four hundred conversations on watergate you selected he said he said i thought they looked like they'd be good conversations but not a really strict historical criteria which stanley admitted he said i just was looking what looked interesting based on the subject logs where there is no continuity and you might not get the conversation before or after so you could know he put it in context so to make a long story short i mean you're into the project and i say to myself i am the only way i'm going to answer this question of how nixon got in this mess because i started it sort of  end his last defense when he claims and puts out first of all statement and then he puts out a written document later that he knew nothing about watergate until i had told him on march twenty first of hundred seventy three you recall the break in occurs on june seventeenth one nine hundred seventy two during the campaign and it's march of seventy three or four march of seventy three when he puts out sort of his final defense and that's the basis he'll fight to keep his office on and i was working back from that to figure out how he came to that statement and i kept having to go back earlier and earlier so to make that story very short i realized i had to go back to the first tape he recorded from the time he got knowledge of the want to get a break in and get them all so they're in essence all but about twelve conversations that were well done i had a file basically a thousand conversations i had to transcribe and i'm a year into the project i told my editor i said god this is just an awful mess i will never i don't know how i will complete i certainly can't  well i got i got lucky i got one woman the first one i hired was a working on her master's at that time in archival science she was a former legal secretary  she was terrific she would end up transcribing five hundred conversations i have a clip in my power point where charity explains how she did this what i did is i was i was over at microsoft today and because i used a lot of their equipment i thought i ought to explain how i they've been very helpful in one regard that in i found a digitizer for the cassettes they gave me these little ninety minute cassettes analog cassettes and they said these are where the conversations are they may or may not be broken up but you know this is this is it and i mean stacks of these things which i have a picture of and i said i said this is a problem too because the analog is really digital had come in but nobody had digitized them yet i did some research and found in the united kingdom a company that makes a digitize for cassettes to convert cassettes to digital form the problem was that the computer specifications to do this were way beyond anything i could find around and it would only work on the old windows p software so to make a long story short i called the people in england talk to them i said what would happen if i got a got some x p windows software and put it on a mac book in virtual operation a macbook can operate as a windows machine because it far exceeded the specifications they needed and they said we don't know what to try it so i did and it worked much to their delight because they were procrastinating they said we don't have a big market to to digitize all analog conversations so i did and i say that i worked and i would just take me five minutes to digitize a ninety minute conversation the archives just drooled when they saw my machine because i was so far ahead of them in digitizing us and once i got them in digital form they were actually a little easier to transcribe the this is a very primitive system i do have a once in wonderful graphics of where nixon put them in the oval office and his other offices basically in the desk his desk for example  belonged to woodrow wilson and to put these little small microphones in the desk they simply drilled holes in woodrow wilson's desk in four places there were one on the side two in the  front one on the other side and then one down by his drawer at the bottom and the problem with that microphone which is known as m one if you see that the chart is he would sit back in his chair with his feet up on his desk and always be talking through his legs in his pants to that microphone in a particularly difficult to hear him right side is that with his chair back i tended to sit right over a microphone almost every time i was in the office thankfully actually haldeman is very good and kissinger is very good and ehrlichman is very good the e o b office is is pretty good  executive office building office where they tape a lot of their conversations is terrible nobody sat around the desk where they drilled the holes and put the microphones out he had a chair and an ottoman beside his desk  stopped way back from that that location and some of the most important conversations happened there so what we found the remedy for that first of all trying multiple software and tweaking  it to try to it distorts the voices terribly but you can actually pick up words and the secret anybody who's ever done transcription is doing it over and over and over sometimes you know it's interesting different machines i c hear it on better than other machines and the repetition though is the key in fact really my but i sticks playing some of this in the preface of the book and i had a call just before i came up here from george lardner who was the washington post reporter that for years went out to the archives when they released new tapes and had to listen to them and george said john i just finished your preface and said you brought back memories of that over and over and over listening at that you actually can pick it up he said yes he said did it ever happen to you where some days you couldn't hear the next he walked in and you could hear i said absolutely jord he said it's a weird experience where you sometimes just your own mood makes it different and i'm very good at recognizing the voices and i have found i heard things that other transcribers didn't like stanley cutler's court reporters he brought in could not hear wonderful example is mark felt who was deep throat or has a transcript as a result of my going over to the criminal division to the at the department of justice and henry peterson the head of the criminal division telling me in october hundred seventy two right at the height of the cover up he said john he said mark felt who's the number two man at the f b i is leaking like a sieve i said henry how do you know that he said well he said the general counsel for the news organization to whom he's leaking came in today is very worried that they could be involved in obstruction of justice or they're getting secret information out of the grand jury and is he's in here to protect his clients he asked for confidentiality i'm not going to tell you his name but henry said i'm not surprised he said i i've known mark felt since we both were in the f b i together in fact he's known because it is premature white hair and his propensity to talk to the media as the white rat which i had no one until that time anyway he said i haven't told the attorney general declined as i haven't told the acting director  conversation at one point in the conversation he hears nixon responding to what he do he says in essence bob you know what i would do with felt and then cutler's got an expletive that nixon just like dropped off and said something really nasty which wouldn't be unusual for an action but i heard something very different and everybody now who listens that tape here's what i heard what and what he says is you know what i would do with felt bob embassador ship he would basket or to get him out of there and not cause any problem this is exactly what he'll do with the head of the cia dick helms several months later that didn't happen because as as it would happen when he appoints pat gray to run the f b i he tells him about this problem we've learned about and great doesn't believe him much to his later problem because felt will turn on gray draw him into a criminal action and claim that he authorized an on an authorized break in into the weatherman's headquarters which he hadn't gray wasn't even around the know about it but felt reached out and pulled him in with a couple other people in the f b i and gray was until he got a really good criminal lawyer about to go down the tubes on mark felt's word that he'd gotten approval from packer a at that time gray began to believe that yes this man might have been the leaker or worse so anyway i heard different things on these tapes and other people did and often i would take a passage that would last it could be just a five minute passage but i realize this is really important stuff so i would spend hours sometimes eight hours on on five minutes worth of conversation the long and short of all this is every page of the new book has something virtually every page i didn't know before i did this drill i would take i don't do i didn't do a book a transcript i did i pulled narrative and dialogue out of the  transcripts i had done that in another book called the rehnquist choice it was a book that was well received by historians as it happened most readers never even were ever aware of the book the book was shipped  ten days whether to lay down whether it couldn't be sold ten days before nine eleven and if you didn't have osama in the title after an open after nine eleven your book just disappeared i don't know about this bookstore looked or i visited in that period it was not not a good time to be in the book business or an author anyway the over the years historians have discovered that book and say what a wonderful way to handle the tapes transcripts are pretty tough reading whereas to take the story out of them is exactly the way to do it and that's what i did in the new book and i told my editor i said i'm not sure which was more difficult transcribing them or turning around and then digesting them down to narrative and dialogue because in watergate nixon gets very repetitive he is literally obsessive compulsive anyway what it is this crowd how many of you here what on nothing say on the bestseller list long but this has been on it went on for three stayed on for three weeks anyway so that's better than not making the bestseller list anyway the the basic question i set out to answer i there is no question regain relating to watergate today that i don't have an answer to now there has no mystery left there is nothing that the tapes don't finally answer and that's all in that book unfortunately i couldn't do it in a book that is just a few hundred pages it is a big book and the most difficult part part of the book is this obsessive compulsive nature that nixon has i warn readers in the preface but there's only one way to understand how he handles watergate and that is not well he gets he gets into these conversations where he will repeat them not only with different people the same person five minutes later comes back in the office he'll have the same conversation again so what i answered the question in my mind and i think any reader who i keep the commentary out of it for example i  play a transcript that's kind of fun and interesting too it's pretty serious to call it fun but it is it actually draws a lot of laughter to hear nixon in one of these things i sort of discovered along the way which was i can't really believe i'm hearing this it's a conversation where nixon is selling an ambassadorship to raise money for the wall gate defendants something i had idea he had done on march second holliman tells him that i'm reported to him that john mitchell the former attorney general campaign manager is he who is in charge of raising the money at this point to pay these guys to remain silent is having difficulty but he found an answer with a felon i am of thomas pappas who had been eisenhower's ambassador to greece he was also a member of the finance committee to reelect the president one of the fundraisers and hogan explains that pappas has sold is a very successful american businessman who's been operating griese he has sold one of his major companies as holding described him as one of the j paul getty s of the world now that nobody seems to know and he says best of all it's all cash and he can deal in cash and he's helping mitchell out four nights later nixon holds a dinner for his heavy hitters those who are the six figure in up one hundred thousand and up contributors now today that doesn't sound like a lot of money it's really is a lot of money but it's you know just multiply that by what roughly five point five and you get sort of the the bottom dollar as to that in today's value so these were these are serious contributors and and pappas is at that dinner at the white house and gets a hold of nixon and says i really need to talk to you because he wants to talk about what he's doing with mitchell over at the reelection committee and they have a conversation and so haldeman is in the office next morning sees  money and all of his yes i did he said that he said it just want to understand it a little bit better and so pappas comes into the meeting after some small talk they get right down to it and the conversation kind of sticks out to me because when i wrote the book i tried to not characterize meetings or give a lot of commentary to just let the facts speak for themselves as i digested these conversations and this particular one i discarded as it reminded me of something from the godfather the movie has pappas has this kind of deep raspy voice and nixon and he clearly kind of huddling and talking about this rather sensitive matter and it just struck me and so we used the editing system is the internal windows editing system where the editor can leave a little balloon out on the side of the margin with a question and he said do you really want to use that phrase which is unlike anything else you've done you call it as being something from the godfather i he was right i didn't write i took it out but the conversation really speaks for itself and you you hear nixon and pa discussing this and it's really an extraordinary conversation where nixon says he thanks him for doing something and he said you've gone beyond friendship and he claims that all these people are guilty and he knows it and it's  that they undertake anyway it's that it that is it is typical there were lots of revelations along the way there's probably not a page of the book where i didn't learn something even my own conversations because when i wrote the one book before on this subject blind ambition i had something i had a lot of the transcript of my own meetings but i didn't have the audio and you hear something very different when you hear the audio you can really sense the emotions of the conversation you can sense the reactions the pauses for example my march twenty first conversation i didn't hear the audio to it and but there are occasionally long pauses and nixon i found his diary note that night after that conversation he clearly recognizes i've warning him about the problems but he says he thinks i'm being too emotional when he doesn't realize it's not emotion i'm just unbelievably frustrated i can't convince this man that what we're doing is just a disaster and criminal i take him through one point after another trying to persuade him i'm hoping to see his fist hit the desk where he says this is gotta stop and every point i raise he has an answer i tell him one point you know one of the one of his aides but pro has committed perjury really says well john perjury is a tough rap to thought at the time was a pretty hefty number i hadn't really thought about this but just to try to shock him i said well it could be over the next two years across to a million dollars and he says he says well that's no problem i know where we can get a million dollars what i don't know is earlier he's talked to pappas about raising money as soon as i leave he called rose woods in his secretary and they have and she controls a slush fund that nobody had ever known about until i found this conversation and she said i've got four hundred thousand dollars in my little slush fund he says won't tell anybody i may need it so you know he's he's deeply involved in this there are some surprises too he early on  he's not been told by holum and he i don't meet with him for eight months his initial information comes from three sources from halderman initially it from then ehrlichman subsequently and the washington post these are the only places he's learning anything about what are they when he talks to mitchell it's very guarded and he's too embarrassed as he later explained to holman he said i was afraid to ask mitchell if he was responsible for this  and how does a why he says well what he said yes i am what i want to say next so he never asked mitchell if he has approved this these sort of little facts fill in the details none of us have ever known about this story as i say today i've got no questions at all and bob woodward who told me i didn't realize he'd been covering the story for forty two years he reviews it for the washington post  very good and bob might be right so anyway it's been a great drill and it's the reviews have been wonderful i didn't understand the review from the guy in the in the new york times  but he does have something that was in a sense right first above down like who is a presidential scholar did it for the daily times and calls it a defended it work which i think which is nice at that he would appreciate that because he did a book called kissinger nixon and kissinger and had done some of the tapes and he was also aware of this obsessive compulsive operation or the nature of nixon in other areas  the the other if you were a fellow from stanford he says well you know maybe this he doesn't really get the book but he says you know maybe it should be called the dean defense this is what i didn't know that how well i would come out in these tapes i'm enjoying the fact that people are finding it even as heavy a reading as it is a good read which is always what an author likes to hear so that we close on that note one other thing i want to say about the book and i have a copy of the book anyway they did so they reduced it but what i like is it's the nicest produced book i've ever had because the binding is just i've never had a body like this that just opens perfectly everywhere if which is very cool to test a copy but meanwhile meanwhile let me try to answer any of your questions that i can make while we spend a little bit more time here the same yes question over here yes i have but let me first answer why it took so long to figure out who mark felt was i obviously knew this information but mark's bob woodward told me very early that john when you see all the clues that are dropped in all the president's men that all fit they don't all they don't all fit the one that throws it off is the last big clue in felt is a sore and deep throat is a source from june nineteenth two days after the rest for the first week of november hundred seventy three when he purportedly tells woodward that one more of the tapes has been erased or tampered with somehow the problem with that last clue is felt is out of the i in may of seventy three there's and he's not in the loop anymore i can't figure in any way that felt would have had that information from any reliable source at that time i know all the people who had that information bob when i raised that with him because yes i have talked to him about it he said i'm not going to talk to you about that you know he could theoretically say listen i'm just spreading some breadcrumbs around to keep people off the track  he doesn't want to talk about it in fact in if he any of you saw the interview we did on c span anybody see that nobody saw they've been playing a lot which surprised me anyway he he interviewed me for about a forty five minute conversation before we started i said to him bob and i actually had looted this at the table i said the two of us probably know more about this subject any two people in the world which i think is true and i said we have to be very careful we don't get so far inside baseball that nobody knows what we're talking about which we did we stayed out of the kind of really sort of nuanced things that might interest me and i mean i have talked about him on some occasions but anyway on mark felt there's one paragraph in the book he said the only thing i have an it when he paragraph in this whole book i don't i'm just not fascinated by it because he said john he said i didn't know all this stuff he said we did the final days we did you know we'd you know i've been on this story for forty two years you showed you told me a whole new story filled in everything i didn't know so it was new to him which was encouraging he can actually call me to tell me he was doing it but i didn't know he was and he would have taken on it be hadn't opened it and found it getting his attention  one of the things that we the one paragraph that he has trouble with that i wrote i said in that somewhere in the narrative there's a reference the fact that i can never have never found what mark felt was referring to when he talks about this large espionage conspiracy operation it's being run out of the white house or by nixon some now and to this day i don't know what the hell he's talking about i don't think it exists and bob says well there's cigarette he doing this in twenty two states i said bob sigrid he wasn't reporting to the white house we had no idea what he was doing we talked on it we  inside baseball for a while and he said well john let's just leave it at this we'll agree to disagree on this point i think i could win this argument i tell him i said you give me a jury with my argument and you take your argument we'll let the jury decide who's got this right because there are lots of problems felt has got lots of things wrong to be the number two man the in essence number the number one man in the f who has access to all this information there's remarkably misinformation bubble confessed to a little of it but not all of it and the sad thing is some of it has become part of the law or as actually being of celts former colleagues felt was not held in the highest esteem by all of his colleagues yes they were the ones who called him the white rat but he he's a very very interesting  fellow whose story never was really told the book he would write and fact i ran into his lawyer who rewrote his book after he was involved in his disclosure when i was doing a presentation a couple weeks ago in san francisco able guy and but a lot of it you know felt just got a lot wrong and never told his full story he wants to be director he's trying to ease pat gray the acting director out he doesn't withdraw but the white house have been tipped by peterson so he's never even considered a question but here how i think the paranoid aspect of nixon's personality contributed to watergate he's a he's a great character he's he's fascinating he's very complex he's a different person with different people he has he's on a very high plane with me  with some of the speech writers people like chuck colson and and bob haldeman bringing the worst out of him and the real dark side but he with he's a shy person he's not good with people for somebody who's a politician and that's his true forte it's unbelievable how difficult a time he has with strangers we had to prepare talking papers for one sheet talking papers when you brought somebody in the office because he wanted to know why they were in there and what was the purpose and what how long was the meeting supposed to last move heavy always the bottom line that he could look at quickly if you didn't look at the rest is what should he say to start a conversation you know like oh i understand you just won the allentown bowling contest or something like that you know so could he just wasn't good at that sort of thing  i don't know how paranoid nixon was i do know that after doing the book i decided i went into the book trying to figure out how somebody so savvy could make the mistakes he made the problem is he's not so savvy that's what really comes out of the book readers are telling me that now that they have seen the mistakes it's not always sort of a pure criminality a lot of it is just stupidity believe it or  not the way he makes decisions and watergate i think scholars are going to have to look at this presidency again and really raise questions if nixon is sort of the master executive that he portrayed himself as because he paranoia there is an element of that but it's not terribly serious what i think you're referring to are things like his enemies list where the more he succeeds the more vengeful he becomes it's fascinating that we see as he knows he's going to win reelection he's doing more and more planning about how he's going to get after his perceived enemies he is going to level he's going to spend his and pop her second  term taking care of them like god forbid you know that happened he really is crippled as he goes into the second term because of watergate and never gets that opportunity that there was going to be nothing left unturned as far as his ability to use the system to try to hurt the people and he has a long memory as to who has offended him and who he wants to get after which is a very odd trait for somebody he's not a gracious  winner he's a very bitter winter that he's won they've lost and they're going to pay for question i did oh i did a special appendix just for you on that i'd tell you the six people who could have done it and the fact nixon's on there and the fact that it is not as important as who as to what that's much more important because who is not going to make a bit of difference in history i think he is a potential but given the way it happens it's more important why he would have done it and what he would have done and i answer that to get right down to the bottom line it blows away his defense that he knew nothing before march twenty first is the reason it was a race when you look at the time sequence the interesting thing i also found along the way is rosemary woods could not have done it and she confessed to doing it it was mechanically impossible as a guy in portland who the f b i found one of the few who worked on this your five hundred or five thousand taping machine it was an important machine and not many technicians in the united even knew about it or how to work on it or anything about it it was mechanically bell so you could not do what rose said she did where she hit the foot battle and she'd accidently turn and hit the record button won't work absolutely will not work the machine in every combination you can think of rose could have done it it is mechanically impossible the way the machine was designed so i can't give you a you want to look at that appendix but i also i just really got my ebook i decided to read that and i realize i wrote that so it would be much more understandable if you've read all of book in front of it it makes much more sense i'm sorry well he actually tells halderman in april to destroy to destroy the tapes on two occasions and haul them in doesn't do it halderman get so consumed first of all holman convinces him not to do it for the national security matters because he tells him you know henry has got his own recording system and his own records and you might want to have your records to your history is more accurate than henry's so that's one reason and he agrees that he's going to protect the national security stuff but then he tells home to get rid of everything else he's actually kind of embarrassed about the fact that he's recording it and then it's just amazing he just keeps  specially had a way he could record me and nobody else and haig is dumbfounded when he hears butterfield testified and can't believe anybody would would do this themselves or you're getting everything you know every swear word you make and every stupid statement you make in a conversation and what have you what that's another to think about nixon he is at times he is very articulate when he no talks about somebody knows something about foreign affairs the budget to my surprise but he is very in articulate on most everything else and that makes it very difficult for transcription as well and i try to clean that up and  occasion into mexico is where it really happens and what what i found out in doing this book is that i had gone over to patent gray's office and grey had told me about the fact that the f b i had discovered this mexican money i come back to the white house at six o'clock or so hours later halderman has been all day in a meeting at the kennedy center where he's a member of the board so with the cia's assistance they've gotten to skies as they've gotten cameras they've gotten all kinds of help from them they used them for psychological studies of dan ellsberg and he doesn't know you know where this is all going this is and truly he's you know he just as former attorney general said this is bad john what you need to do is call halderman in the morning i go to the staff meetings but it's not something i can raise there would you before i get to the staff meeting do have an understanding that neither one will investigate each other's activities and he said this is a perfect ensign just pull up tell me to pull back until we figure out what this is all about this is the conversation then halderman writes all this down in his notes and takes the men and he spends it he pushes it even further than i had told him i never told him to call now i never told him to talk to anybody other than walters i certainly didn't tell him to try to stop the f investigation i told him the only thing that was of concern that mitchell didn't understand was the mexican money they didn't know if it was you know where it was from that it was a corporate contribution of the general contribution as it turns out it was legitimate there was no reason to be really concerned about it so one of the conclusions i come so i just really put it in a footnote i actually have like a fifty page memo i wrote and i got really interested in working on the book and i'm waiting for the transcribers to get ahead of me to show that the smoking gun tape was firing blanks i mean it really was a perfectly legitimate it's not an obstruction of justice it is not a fraud presidents do this all the time if you prosecuted a president for the kind of action nixon took with the cia every president who's preceded him would have to be prosecuted you can go down to f d r who tells the f b i not to bait and investigate sumner wells because they're afraid he's worried  become discovered that he's a homosexual you can go to i'm just pulling that randomly now eisenhower who has the weather bureau painting the that survey that you two plane and telling the world that's a weather plane when it's clearly a spy plane i mean this is a this is using an agency for some purpose other than what it was designed to do that's what he's doing in this instance and i just don't think that's criminal and  no prosecutor whatever survive if he you know tried to prosecute that the statute to do that they cited is so broad it could cover that but then it could cover almost half the presidency  former new york city detective comes into the office and he's wanted to hide and new york city detectives don't get wide eyed about much of anything that they've seen about everything and he says to me says johnny said you got to help me i just came from colson's office and he wants me to fire bomb the brookings institute i said all right he says he wants me to fire on the brookings institute to find out and to go in when the fire department responds to break in the vault and get out a copy of the pentagon papers or related government documents that the president thinks there's an in there well i said i said to crawford i said don't do anything just don't do anything  i got on the next courier flight a cow this is him this is in july of seventy one i got on the next courier flight to california where the president was with his senior staff and told ehrlichman i was coming i was a friday i got out there and met with him monday morning went into ehrlichman office meanwhile i'd told before i left the office the d c code and found out that if anybody dies in an arson it's a capital offense in the district of columbia just trying to bolster any arguments the president's brother and i had to call my heels while i'm waiting to get in and i finally get in and i explain this to him in somewhat of an agitated manner because i thought it was just incredibly stupid i mean just outrageously stupid i later learned that libby was behind it which tells me you know lady lady lady sells himself as some sort of james bond character the join the white house he's actually not quite the maxwell smart char o turn it off turns to me said anything else counselor i said no sir that that will take care of it and went back to washington i learned as a result of that and actually bud kroger who ran the plumbers later told me about it that they thought that i had revealed myself as a little old lady for coming out and killing this i didn't know and didn't learn until actually cutler's tapes came out that on three occasions the president is literally pounding on his desk demanding this break in and this has a huge this has one of the things i don't do with a lot of commentary in the book i'm convinced that when watergate occurs nixon does not remember is not quite sure whether or not he has actually instructed colson to send hunt in this mission he gets it confused with the brookings and he has it in the back of his mind and until for a couple weeks until he gets comfort that colson isn't involved he's worried that he might be involved and this is one of the no other reasons the cover up goes forward as it does because of his prior experience at all this kind of all these things just fit together when you hear it  it all goes together yes i do but that doesn't answer why he would colson i don't know i mean he just they just appeared to appeal to each other's darker instincts i think that and in fact i put a footnote in there  that jan the i call them minders who take authors around with perry open the book and saw it and she said i saw this little footnote were colson says he did things that reagan workers that he went to his grave with in fact he tells me it one point he boasts on it he said i did things that are criminal but no one's ever going to find them out because i've never had to tell anybody and he was good to his word he took them to his grave and so i mean yes question how do i feel the nixon presidency influenced those that followed in are they more imperial today than they were then they what happened is post watergate the congress starts exercising its constitutional powers  and becomes something of a co equal institution this seemed to trouble dick cheney deeply i wrote a book called worse than watergate and the root and one of the reasons i wrote that book is the secrecy that dick cheney sold to bush two as what they should have is far exceeds anything nixon and i don't think richard nixon in his deepest darkest moment would have authorized torture post nine eleven i watched him in i know you know he served in the south pacific during world war two he's aware of waterboarding i watched the way he handled some things like mean and atrocities which troubled him deeply and he was a president that he had a wonderful grasp of the potentials of blowback what we call blowback today wasn't that the phrase then but he worried about those kinds of consequences and now today of course you know the the isis people are  waterboarding and same we're doing it because the cia does it so we're getting the full blow back so i think in one sense the imperial presidency has now become something of a  obama who uses drones with no authority he's never done anything about the torture problem he's he's a he's a bend in the policy it's not his policy to use torture but nobody paid the piper for that and  domestic area i do i did not hear the president's speech tonight but i know he's he thinks he can act without congressional authority and i don't think that's quite the way the founders once contemplated it but it's the way it's a ball and a lot of that is because congress doesn't want to make those decisions and would rather not there they'd rather have a president make some of these decisions  the in the sixty eight election when nixon and humphrey are running and the argument being that nixon does this where he sends a back channel to the president of south vietnam  the president to to try to tell him don't accept a deal with lyndon johnson and which will end the war with this bombing halt because i'll give you a better euston who tried to look at it just based on all the evidence he could find it was very inconclusive on what he found this and there is some thought that this is what nixon believed was in the was their version of johnson's bombing study because johnson will later privately on a tell a court of telephone call accuse nixon of treason for this activity there is no evidence that nixon himself does this as high as it seems to go is to spiro agnew and some thoughts at agnew and mitchell had talked about it but you know first of all it is probably not treason but as the as the crime is defined and the the evidence is pretty pretty inconclusive as to whether that happened or no and best i can  i thank you all hope you have a good reason