they can understand the complexity of the this world the world beyond. and so to pull aside the veil is in many ways to is an invitation to the world. of the kind of knowledge from those from behind the veil of various sorts. right, so i'm taking it out of the experience of southern african americans, but actually trying to open it up for those of us who are behind the veil and so many different ways because it's a way of rethinking it's an invitation to reordering a conception of who we are and i'm so thrilled that there are people who are who are willing to sort of travel with me to do that.

are most esteemed moderator mark thompson his face faithfully been on standby for two years for our festival through the cancellations in this darn pandemic. as i said at the opening of the show today, it's been both terrifying and boring this pandemic. it's done a number on our festival. we are humbled to finally have mark here. he is the former ceo of the new york times where he presided over an expansion of its digital and global operations. under his leadership digital subscriptions grew from 500,000 to nearly four million subscribers. before joining the times mr. thompson served as director general of the bbc. i could go on and on about mark,

but i think you get the point. i told you our moderators there is about as exciting as our authors today. okay, garrett graff. his book has hit the new york times bestseller list twice in the last two weeks. so that's exciting. it's good to know that people are still reading 800 page history books. we maybe he will tell us how watergate measures up to today's political scandals. garrett graff a distinguished journalist and best-selling historian has spent more than a dozen years covering politics technology and national security. today he serves as the director of cyber initiatives for the aspen institute. and it's a contributor to wired cnn and politico. he's written for publications from esquire to rolling stone to the new york times. garrett graff is the author of multiple books including another new york times bestseller the only plane in the sky.

please welcome mark thompson and garrett graff. well enough goth good afternoon everyone and good afternoon garrett. um, let's just begin. this book's called watergate a new history. why did the world need a new history you pretty much every put every single person in this book. it seems not literally but rhoda might a memoir they've been lots and lots of of histories of every kind. so why why are new history? yeah, so it's it's a natural question and it's one that i this as you said is not the most obvious target for a big sweeping book except as it turns out it is and there was her two reasons that drew me to this as a topic i have spent the last

five years as a journalist covering trump and russia and the mueller investigation and sort of all of the various aspects of that. and it made me interested in. last time that our nation confronted a moment like that in terms of how the institutions of american government responded to a a president and presidential abuses of power and sort of the controversies around that as well as sort of why washington worked then versus now and then the second reason was that was what sort of launched me on the project and then what ended up turning out to be so fascinating. is that the watergate story that we sort of think that we know turns out not to be the story that as it unfolded it all. and that actually this book is the first time in a quarter

century that anyone has tried to tell the full sweep of the watergate stories. so the story that the most of us think we know which is heavily influenced by all the president's men the movie and he's blur of the watergate building and the plumbers and the break-in and there's there's there can be no whitewashing in the white house. there's a there's a kind of flurry of independent prosecutors. there are the tapes playing away the two heroic journalists would and then very quickly you're at the helicopter of a tearful nixon leaving and that kind of that isn't that doesn't tell the whole story is yeah, and that was sort of part of what i found so fascinating in researching this is you know, this is actually the first time anyone has sat down to write a full history of watergate knowing the identity even of deep throat the the sort of critical source mark felt the fbi deputy director who

turns out to be a very different actor than the one that we sort of think. we know how holbrook playing in all the president's men this sort of shadowy figure in the parking garage, who who we have sort of anticipated for decades. is this, you know, good government protector of democracy trying to you know, make sure that nixon faces justice actually turns out not to be the reason that mark felt is leaking at all. mark felt is a playing sort of self-serving bureaucratic knife fighting to try to think the usurper fbi director who has taken the job that he thinks he has spent the last decade trying to to take it's great to establishing is to be acting directly the fbi, which he achieves the 43 minutes or something. that's right. it doesn't one thing which is redo the way that the fbi

administratively handles file folders. it's literally the only thing mark felt accomplishes as fbi director before he's replaced yet again. he's really very important thread of kind of confirmatory evidence. he's really really doing yes. he's you're right about he's telling bob woodward you'll write about this. you're not right about that. it's really important in one of the things by the way that sort of comes out when you go back and you sort of look at the story knowing the full full sun history is as it comes together over the last 50 years. he didn't start out leaking to bob woodward. he started out leaking to the washington daily news, which was the cross town rival. bird yeah who just so happens to coincidentally go out of business in july of 1972 three weeks after the watergate burglary and so sort of but for this it's entirely possible that mark felt would have never bothered leaking to woodward and bernstein at all. yeah. and bob would wasn't bob woodward either. i mean, but would the kid.

who's just beginning and just beginning to learn the craft and it's another serendipity of that very striking. i want to take you to something you write at the start of the book, which is because we'll talk a bit about the book and how it came and then we'll s sts but early on um in the introduction garrett. says this watergate represents much more than an individual moment decision event or target. it has so many parts that there is no simple motif or story to tell no single thread that makes all the pieces come together. now anyone who's done journalism? that you know, that's a striking thing to say. i mean in 2020 probably more than ever. you know, we're all taught. find a narrative find the line through the story find the ark

which gets the reader or the viewer, you know if you're writing your your the pilot for your netflix drama series or you're writing a piece of investing in journalism. the editing. what's the line? what's the top line take me through it and it's only you begin this book this project with exactly the opposite thought. yeah, and and that is in some ways again the part of the mythology of watergate that we misunderstand that is you start off talking about, you know, we think this story begins on june 17th 1972 when there are five burglars arrested at the the democratic offices in the watergate complex. most americans sort of have forgotten or didn't know that's not even the first burglary at the watergate that it's actually the second burglary at the watergate where the they put bugs in the dnc where they're trying to fix the mistakes of the first burglary which they bungle and so america, i think for 50 years has sort of

misunderstood watergate because we think of this story as beginning on the night when it sort of comes into public view when really it was america walking in on the second or third act of a play that had been underway the entire time and so i the sort of point of this book was to try to tell watergate less as an event and more as the mindset of this sort of paranoid criminal conspiratorial presidency and white house that ends up in this sort of shaggy. dozen scandals that unfold really from 1968 right through 1974 and encompasses many events that actually at the time people didn't even understand were intimately linked the chenault affair which we can talk a little bit more about this sort

of moment of outright treason by candidate richard nixon in the fall of 1968 where he intervenes in the paris peace talks to keep the vietnam war going for political for electoral benefit, which becomes the original sin that he is then paranoid is going to come out among the pentagon papers which leads to the creation of the plumbers. which brings gordon liddy and e howard hunt into the white house. who a year later are involved and along the way you have itt and the data beard ammo you have probably can't say this on stage but campaign rf-ing bot and roger stone and the campaign, right? yes of the campaign community friends. the president is the is the right effort in key, right the illegal bombing of cambodia the

the radford affair which is when the joint chiefs actually the pentagon joint chiefs actually plays a spy inside the national security council who is pilfering documents from henry kissinger's briefcase and feeding them to the pentagon and then presidential tax fraud which ends up being this thing where the most famous line of watergate, you know, richard nixon standing there saying i am not a crook actually turns out to be unrelated to watergate the burglary and entirely about the campaign. contributions and tax fraud investigations that spawn out of this. so first i want to interrupt this interview to for a brief advertisement the way we're talking about. this sounds like it's an incredibly complicated story and it is it is this book is an

incredibly compelling read the brilliance of this book is the given that there's no simple story garrett finds. it's a kind of chronicle. it's not an oral history, but there's such complete mastery of what everyone said about this and what all the primary and second second resources say that you're as a reader you're taking through this. like a really satisfying really complicated thriller, but really intriguing kind of the story draws you in and the basic premise that this is about the the creation the arrival of a culture um in which crazy things are crazy people gather all kinds of crazy individuals with their own agendas many of them are career as many of them are really there because they want to achieve some personal goal or get promoted or whatever but somehow in this environment mad things are going to happen of which the the the break-in at.

the watergate building is just one. and it's extremely well achieved but it's very and in my experience very unusual most books about watergate. that as far as i can tell. have been published around some new revelation or some new theory and this book doesn't really offer that. yeah, and in fact that was exactly the corrective that we were trying to do in writing this which is the challenge of this book the challenge of this topic is that this isn't the story that people are familiar with and that it's been sliced and diced in a thousand ways over the years but never really told truly start to finish and that what we now understand about it is the way that this sort of shaggy series of semi-related scandals with overlapping but not entirely the same players start to finish unfolds throughout the nixon

presidency. and by the way, berries in the middle of it events that if they had happened during any other presidency would be among the most dramatic moments in all of american presidency and yet our sort of random side notes and sidelines of this, you know spiro agnew the vice president, you know taking bribes in the white house from contractors from his old gig as you know, baltimore county executive. i don't really realizing that the secret service keep meticulous record great of every coming and going so the the investigation of his corruption was incredibly easy because they could just read it. yes, what time specifically did the person delivering the bribe arrive and what time specifically did the person leave i can tell you and then you know that all unfolds in in some of you maybe old enough to

remember this in this single month in october 19. 73 which begins with spearowag do resigning continues with the saturday night massacre this showdown over just explained. yeah, the showdown over the nixon tapes and the special prosecutor. where nixon sort of becomes fed up with the special prosecutor orders his firing the attorney general resigns the nixon orders the deputy attorney general william russell's house to fire the special prosecutor. he resigns they finally end up with robert bork a name who also goes on to have a role in american politics later who actually follows through with the firing of the special prosecutor. all of this is unfolding against the backdrop of the yom kippur

war when and again in sort of the way that we lose these moments in history. what was one of the tensest moments in the entire cold war one of the moments where the us and the soviet union come closest to actual conflict not unrelated to where we are right now in modern geopolitics and and nixon, you know, totally consumed by the saturday night massacre is drinking heavily on pills and is drunk in the residents when henry kissinger and al hey his chief of staff raise the defcon level the defense condition level of the us military one of only a half dozen times in the entire cold war that the us raises. its nuclear threat level. and nixon does not even participate in. the decision or the meetings because he's too drunk upstairs in the residence in the wake of this and again like these would

be one of the like great moments of american, you know, presidential scandal and yet it's sort of like this is just one month in three years of unfolding drama. and so let's just let's just now dip in we may dipping several times dip into this business of contemporary relevance. i mean, i i feel i mean, you know when this is unfolding, i was a i was probably 14 15 16 living most much of the time in a village in the middle of england in warwickshire staying up late every night. to watch hearing the bbc was was broadcasting live, but we often very very late at night because of time difference. watergate and i became obsessed with watergate. and by the way, we had a we had a senior you us air force commander also living in the village working at one of the big naval air force bases nearby

and definitely the defcon the move their contour remember this guy it had been the talk of the village that the guy gone off and this might mean something very big for not just for americans, but for the brits and i have a sense over over 50 years of 20 30 years where it's like watergate recedes into history. and it feels like another world an earlier world and the fall of the berlin wall and and the end of everything that went with that era including paranoid paranoia and government and paranoia in politics seems to receive and history ends but that in over the last decade also of it all kind of coming back and when you read this book. it's uncanny how often. you know, there are parallels the saturday night massacre the resignation of elliot richardson and the and the firing of cox

that echoes very clear. there was clearly a moment when robert mueller looked like he might be about to suffer the same face during the during the mueller investigation. the backdrop of great power tension i mean with talking this afternoon in the middle of a really horrific. a war taking place between russia and ukraine and the in the book you have one of the things the guys are doing while the president's drinking is trying to figure out how to get phantoms from from america to the israelis because the israelis during the early part of yankovar are losing very badly to can you get jets to help your guys stop this incursion right by egypt and syria, and of course the issue of whether or not polish migs can be somehow midwifeed via the us to ukraine is that with how much is that being in your mind? yeah, writing and after the writing of the book so i i said

that donald trump's name appears precisely once in the book, but that chapter that we have just lived through and are still living through in many ways it looms over every page of this book because this in many ways is the start of many of the things that sort of become our modern moment and i date in many ways the creation of modern washington to watergate. this is when you see this fundamental fissure with the american people between their trust in government their trust in the presidency this moment of vietnam and the pentagon papers and watergate. you see the modern moment of congressional oversight. i mean one of the things that we again forget is the urban committee when it begins, it's hearings sam irvin's, you know televised hearings in the summer

of 1973 were new that congress had very little history of of oversight hearings and so when they set out to figure out what they they're actually going to do and how to do this. they actually go back to congress's hearing's to investigate the 1861 battle of bull run. i mean, that's how far they have to stretch back to look for analogs of confessional oversights. the must see hearings that you you those are televised that summer for something. 240 hours on national tv in a moment when there were far fewer tv choices, of course, i mean it's the three networks and pbs and the average american household that summer watches nearly 40 hours of televised hearings and which is just a tremendous amount of news consumption to imagine and the whole battle over executive privilege.

i mean something that we still see playing out in the papers literally day by day right now begins with richard nixon the that in fact before nixon before watergate the idea of their being in executive privilege had never been codified had never been formally recognized by the courts and it's the battle that the nixon takes all the way up to the supreme court and we should just just explain. i mean, i guess many many people who remember this but this is fundamentally about the tapes that exactly president to them finally in retrospect. it looks like wise unwise moment is decided to record all his conversations in the oval over office. as the various investigations i get underway subpoena start arriving for the release of the of the tapes to the investigators and the nixon white house refuses to do that initially completely on the

basis of executive privilege in the and the the need for confident confidentiality by the executive arm and then attempts and ultimately fails to broker a compromise where basically richard nixon himself is going to examine the tape and release the bitsy once again released and keep the rest and one of the things that we're just fascinated mean in doing my own research was realizing for that final year of nixon's presidency. he does almost nothing but listen to the tapes um that he you know when you were president of the united states, there is nothing more valuable. there's arguably nothing more valuable in the entire country than the time of the president of the united states. i mean it is the ultimate finite resource. yeah and what you see in these documents these incredibly detailed presidential daily

diaries where the secretaries to the minute more how long the president is doing something who he's meeting with when a telephone call begins when a telephone call ends, you know when someone walks into the oval office when someone walks out you have every minute of any presidency documented in in this and what you see over the course of that final year of the nixon presidency? is the guy just disappears that there are entire days that go by where nixon just sits by himself in this hideaway office in the old executive office building listening to these tapes and writing on legal pads about sort of what's on them and listening to other tapes and pulling other tape and it's just this incredible. which is void at the heart of the presidency, but it's also it's saying that the tapes are

it's so the points you make is the tapes are i mean, they're not particularly high quality audio. people are talking over each other. they are it takes about. somewhere you eat. somebody says a hundred hours to transcribe one hour. it's so hard to make out what's being said. so presumably he's also kind of craning into the loudspeakers kind of work out. what on earth. did i say? yeah, what does it mean and but unfortunately for him it turns out there are passages which are ultimately comes alive where you know as well any lawyer who listens to it? basically, it says you better get the best criminal lawyer you've got but that's and and it tells you something about nixon's personality that the tapes exist in the first place, which is the first thing he does as president is rip out the recording systems that lindon

johnson had and he wants nothing to do with the recordings that had been the history the historically in place during the kennedy administration in the johnson administration. recording by the way had an important feature which were they could be turned on and off. yeah that the that johnson and kennedy decided when to record something and when not to record something nixon though as his presidency unfolds becomes convinced that his presidency is actually going very well. and that he is afraid that he is not going to get the credit for his genius as a geopolitical strategist because they always denying the credit because they and by this means henry kissinger always deny him the credit and that he has this sense that basically henry kissinger says one thing behind

closed doors in the oval office and then at the fancy george town parties where he's rubbing shoulders with reporters, you know takes all of the credit for the things that goes right and all lays all of the team on nixon for all the things that goes wrong and so he installs this secret recording system, which is voice activated. and so there's no way for him to turn on and off. and doesn't tell anyone about it. and and so there's this incredibly small set of aids. i think it's five or six people henry kissinger. notably not being one of them who understand these were these conversations are being recorded and this fact comes out in the midst of the urban committee hearings in the summer of 73 where alex butterfield who's one of the aids is asked on camera whether there's a recording system in the white house and

says to everyone surprised. yes, there is and then this whole battle shapes up this titanic battle that will consume the lot next year over access to the tapes, but it's just this incredible insight into you know how nixon views himself in history and again the paranoia that permeates almost all of his decision-making that he installs. incredibly suicidal recording system out of the hubris of i'm not going to get credit and my staff is stealing all of my good ideas. and actually it is one of the things about the book that you know, somewhere in the in the middle of what it's a it's a it's a it's a the story some in the middle you begin to realize that you know, and when there may not be a clear story. but there is clear evidence and

sooner or later and we know we know how the story ends. is it and the story of you know that those tapes sitting there as this kind of ticking time bomb and then the awful dread where and the number of people who know about taking time or gets bigger and the the one of the struggles in the book. is they've created not something like a kind of evil master plan conspiracy? that they've created a kind of informal not particularly guided culture. in which bad things happen and have to be covered up. but then the covering up adds further complications, you know, once the once the plumbers have been arrested. you don't want them blabbing. so they've got to be paid money. where's the money going to come from? so? i mean, it's like a awful kind of, you know, kind of morality tale where every every bad deed creates further complications

and requires more badly. yeah well and it ends up i think actually being this interesting corrective of what is probably the most famous lesson to come out of watergate, you know, if you talk to any crisis communications person they will tell you, you know, the cover-up is always worse than the crime. you know, that's like the number one lesson that it sort of feels like everyone learns out of watergate. we're in fact with 50 years of hindsight the crimes we're actually quite terrible that i actually on the tapes weirdly enough. there's no knowledge that nixon understood or new of or ordered the watergate burglary in 72. in the summer of '71 though. he is on the tapes repeatedly and vociferously trying to order a burglary and bombing of the brookings institution a think tank in washington where he not normally regarded as a kind of

you know, kind of communist right? where come on center. yeah where and again this trace is back to the chenault affair, which was this moment again in the fall of 68 where nixon vietnam war is raging lyndon. johnson is trying to bring it to a close with the paris peace talks and richard nixon and his campaign manager john mitchell use this washington socialite, dwayne anna chenault to sort of funnel a message to the south vietnamese that they should stall the peace talks and keep the vietnam war going and nixon if he's elected will give the south vietnamese government a better deal than lyndon johnson would offer. johnson on johnson because of nsa intercepts on the south vietnamese embassy comes to learn all of this in the final hours before the 68 election

confronts nixon about it nixon denies any knowledge of it whatsoever. but he johnson is is storming all over washington to other figures to tell people, you know, tell nixon to knock it off. this is treason, you know, he's he's out there keeping the literally keeping the vietnam war going for political benefit then after the election johnson decides that he can't ever speak of this publicly because it would undermine the moral authority of nixon coming in the results of this are buried for 40 years. we only really learn if this event about 10 years ago when some of these documents are declassified, but nixon knows that he's done this and so nixon becomes paranoid that the that papers somewhere in the brookings institution about this

event and that when the pentagon papers are leaked in 71 pentagon papers, by the way, which have nothing to do with nixon whatsoever and he should have not cared at all about their rules about his presidency. they're about the earlier president of johnson kennedy. there are two million words in the pentagon papers, richard nixon's name does a single time. so in theory, this should be a great scandal for him. it's about tearing down lyndon johnson and john f. kennedy two democrat presidents. yeah. he he becomes afraid that this this chenault affair is going to become public so he orders a break-in of brookings to try to retrieve these papers, which he thinks exist, which don't really exist the plan that they come up with is that they are going to buy a fire engine staff it with the same. cuban emigraves who are later caught breaking into the

watergate a year later dressed as firefighters. they're going to fire bomb brookings then have this fake fire engine respond these burglars run up burglarize the safe get these papers out and flee in the chaos of the fire at brookings. yeah and gordon liddy. explains the plan fell apart not because it's actually like an incredibly criminal and awful thing for the president of the united states to try to order by the way completely crazy as well, but completely crazy in addition to being criminal but because the white house turns out to be too cheap buy the fire engine. that and it because some of it's really sinister. there's a there's a there's a very notable syndicated columnist jack anderson, and they they sort of contemplate an assassination a murder. i mean murder and outright murder of jack anderson.

who's this very famous columnist, you know the walter winchell of this period and who in the spring of 71 or the yeah spring of 72 ignites this other controversy, which has to do with campaign financing and itt and is hugely complicated and not worth explaining in short but in the midst of this gordon litty and e howard hunt somewhere emerges a desire to assassinate jack anderson, and so they sit down with a psychologist from the cia to map out how you actually would kill him and they come up with a plot to they tried lots of crazy things. i mean the car crashes. is in concrete lsd on upstairs

steering wheel that would you know could cause him to fly out of control while driving and then they decide ultimately that the best way is just to mug him on the street and kill him just like a normal street crime and again this plot and then it sort of dis. sipates and it doesn't happen it disappoint quickly. why doesn't it and this is this is part of what makes the watergate stories. so shaggy in all of these parts is that these things sort of emerge without any clear? progenitor and then there are very few people who are putting their hand up and saying that's illegal and completely morally and the president in particular. far from in any sense saying we can't do that too much. he's enthusiasm for you know, the various schemes. there's astonishing isn't something it's called and there's this incredible moment that just boggles the

imagination where g gordon liddy and howard hunt or are given this dirty tricks portfolio for the 72 campaign. and he presents his plan in january 1972. to john mitchell john mitchell is the attorney general of the united states the chief law enforcement officer for the united states and also the would-be campaign director for for 72. gordon litty goes into john mitchell's office at the justice department with this series of charts charts that he actually had drawn up by the cia that outline this plan. to kidnap political activists drug them and take them to mexico to hire prostitutes to seduce democratic officials and

lure them back. the 72 convention democratic convention was supposed to be in miami and lure them back to a houseboat in miami that was going to be raped for photos and sound surveillance a surveillance plane that was going to follow george mcgovern around that entire year doing all sorts of other dirty tricks. i mean this and all of these break-ins he walks through the lydi calls this operation gemstone and each of these plans has its own gemstone pool or opal and sasfiring ruby sort of each of these sort of sub plans with their own code names presents all of this in john mitchell's office. yeah at one point lays out this team of former cuban bay of pigs killers and assassins that he is

recruited and and brags to mitchell that between them. they've killed something like 24 people and mitchell says, where did you find these people and he says they're all organized crime and mitchell sort of takes his pipe out of his mouth and says, well, let's make sure we're not supporting organized crime anymore than we have to and then and then at the end of this again the attorney general of the united states. has not gordon litty. this is a criminal enterprise of monumental proportions, and i have fbi agents and the anti-room who are going to arrest you on your way out the door. he just says this is probably a little bit more ambitious than what we had hoped for really minis to expensive. right? could you come back in a couple of weeks with about half the budget and this is this is what ultimately sort of rolls down the hill over the spring of 72

and ends up with the watergate burglary itself in june, which again is one of sort of several burglaries of that summer that they had planned, but it's just this, you know, no one ever firmly says yes to anything but also no one ever firmly says no to anything and all of this shenanigans just continues to unfold and there are so many wives on answered wise on and we didn't really know. the second break in at the watergate building happened. yeah, and in fact, i lay out in the course of the the book the there's they're really five somewhat diametrically opposed theories about what the burglars were doing inside the watergate building that night in in the first place and that at this point. we actually will probably never know why they were there in the first place and it's been

there's a theory that they were there trying to uncover dirt about richard nixon that they were which they told the democrats will hold that they thought that the democrats had which some of which was the fact that the nixon campaign had actually taken the legal campaign contributions in 68 from the greek military and junta, you know, another one of these sort of random scandals that nixon was caught up in some idea that they were trying to uncover dirt on the democrats. there's actually pretty compelling evidence that the cia knew that the burglary was underway. one of the burglars was actually on the active cia payroll at the time and had been reporting to his handlers about the lydi and hunts involvement and there's some some, you know, not conclusive but compelling evidence that the cia was

attempting to sabotage the burglary that night some some sense that there may have been a call girl ring actually wrapped up in in it either by potentially even run by the cia. i mean, it's just like this sort of crazy weird thing in the middle of this where again it ends up as this strange shaggy story that we will never fully. stand and the biggest why really is inside nixon's hey, right, i mean and where do you end up with richard milhouse nixon at the end of all of this. i mean with well what what it's so fascinating and ultimately i think so about nixon is he would. on any other measurement stand as one of the most consequential figures of the 20th century. he is the hinge i think actually upon which the entire 20th century changes, you know, the

ushers out the era of the new deal and the great society, you know reinvents the republican party he appears on the national ticket five times between 1972 and 1952 and 1972 record tied only by fdr. he creates the epa. he creates osha. he signs title nine he is he reopens relations with china. he's the first president to visit moscow. he's the first president to visit p king. he's the first president to visit a communist country. he's the first he signs strategic, you know arms treaties with the soviet. and ushers in the era of dayton, you know, this is an arrow. so jake i mean genuine vision genuine vision deep strategic. he i mean his game plan. yeah, he'll game plan. of taking the south for the

republicans the southern strategy doesn't strategy. we're living with today. so that is that's remains the how strategy the republic and and at the end of the day. he is undone entirely in his presidency is shorthanded today simply by the one word watergate. yeah, and that this is a man who in an era when the news weekly's dominated american discourse. he appears on the cover of time magazine 55 times. yeah over the course of his career. i mean more than a year's worth of magazines feature richard nixon on the cover. he's convinced they are out to get it. yeah, and they do he tricks all the time and it's like you wouldn't be being true to yourself if you resp. it's like it's like a legitimate self-defense. yes. it seems to be the cycle and that's exactly right and it's similar in some ways to i think some of the paranoia and conspiracy that we see in donald trump's way of politics and

donald trump's presidency where you have this man just convinced that his enemies are out there doing evil to him all the time and that he's got to give his good as he's good. he's getting everyone is a dirty gay and don't use dirty taxes yourself that you'll get. it's all corrupt, and i just need to be as corrupt as everyone else when in most cases richard nixon is the only corrupt figure in the conversation. yeah. but to me, that's the the i want to say about this book by the way that the i think in an extraordinarily. clever and kind of convincing way. there are all the way through brilliant character studies. we haven't really got time to talk about them all but you know, people are like john dean. who's a who's a rather more complicated thing? we might briefly talk about john d.

a martha mitchell john mitchell's wife is larger than life rather tragic war. i mean talk a bit about how you've thought about bringing and maybe choose someone. well, yeah beyond nixon these sort of extraordinary vivid characters, i think and often again. the book is very funny because i mean partly because what's happens funny. it's very it's very in a dry way. it's a very amusing book as well about the this this strange convocation of of not jobs and extraordinary. yeah in and i think that that again it's it's a character study in all of these people who never should have been anywhere close to the white house, you know should have never been in the rarified staff circles that they are, you know, john mitchell this this municipal bond lawyer, you know from new york with no political experience whatsoever, you know,

basically ends up as his campaign director nixon's campaign director in 68 with the southern strategy then becomes attorney general no sense of law enforcement or or capability, you know g gordon liddy and and howard hunt these, you know crazy people who you know never should have been close to the presidency end up, you know causing all of this mischief again, just because they're never told no and then how accountable people like hold them and gone back. yeah holderman and erlich man john dean human and then, you know, martha mitchell, who is this figure who? it is huge in that era and then is is sort of lost for 45 years or so, and i think it's come back into prominence a little bit now the basically the first conservative pundit in american history the wife of john

mitchell this the mouth of the south this outspoken woman. who has a habit of develops a habit of late-night drunken telephone calls to reporters like helen thomas. she eavesdrops on the extension. so part of what's also funny about the this book is the extent to which almost all of the figures in the book live in the watergate totally separate from the burglary yeah, anna chanel who i talked about. she is one of the original residents of the watergate condo complex, john mitchell ends up liking her apartment. and so he and martha mitchell move into another condo in the watergate. so many of the great scenes of the book take place in the watergates totally separate from the burglary. so martha mitchell is like listening all night on the extension in her watergate condo to the conversations that her

husband is having a tumblr viewers in your hand and and then at the end of the night when john mitchell goes off to bed starts, you know cold calling in the order. he yeah upi and other reporters and then in the she was a big field. it was a huge figure. she was very little talk shows. she was appearing on talk shows. she was barnstorming across the country. she was the the second most requested republican speaker in 1971 1972 behind the president himself. i mean she becomes you know, the the face of the republican party you know, it's sort of this weird combo of like rush limbaugh and you know, all of these other figures and then the burglary happens june 72. she's out in california with her husband at a fundraiser with pat

nixon. they flee back to to washington and leave martha mitchell in california under guard to try to keep her from understanding who's been arrested because she will immediately recognize that one of the people who's been arrested was her bodyguard. yeah, and so she'll know that these are campaign operatives. and then she she finds a newspaper finds news of this starts trying to call reporters back in washington. all them sort of the dirty tricks of foot the bodyguards who are with her. wrestle her away from the phone tear the phone out of the wall. hold her down and shoot her with tranquilizers. she flees eventually again

completely criminal. yes completely criminal there may or may not have been fbi or secret service agents involved in this she alleges that there were it's unclear she ends up fleeing to new york where she calls reporters to tell them this no one believes her because she's she's you know, this larger than life sort of crazy woman and then you watch in in one of the great sort of tragic moments of the story. basically she and john mitchell her husband never speak again. and their marriage unravels over the course of the next year. she he ends up leaving her, you know, amid his own, you know literal trials as he's arrested and and indicted and put on trial and it just again this

incredible character study of this woman who knew everything and was not believed by the the press. she was a cassandra in a way. yeah. now we might have time for a couple of questions. i'm going to ask one more and then i will take some questions from the floor. the media i mean in some ways the the the there's a myth which is not entirely false about two great reporters wood wouldn't burn steve. you actually feature both some of the mistakes they made in their reporting and also some of the great reporting done by others. out on what i mean? i became a journalist. i think significantly was a watergate as many people. yeah generation did and investigative journalism to this day feels like it didn't begin but it feels in some ways if that story and the the kind of narrative shape of that story influences journalism. so give me something about about the journalism of that. yeah, and where we stand today

with things like and i think you're right that in many ways the media landscape that we have today is the landscape of watergate. yeah, and that is the moment where we see, you know, investigative journalism really arrive. we see this moment of a new style of journalism arrive and one of the things that i spend some time in the book talking about is is trying to understand the role that woodward and bernstein play in in that story which is different than the one that we have have grown up with. you know, i'm a child of the 1980s like i literally grew up on, you know all the president's men as a inspiration in journalism, and that actually what it turns out is that there's this constellation of about a half dozen reporters who help keep the story of watergate alive in the fall the summer and fall of 1972 and 73 and that

part of what is so fascinating again is we look at the end of watergate as if this is an inevitable story. and it very much is not. and then there are a solid half-dozen moments between june of july of 73 and sorry july of 72 and march of 73 where the cover-up almost succeeds where nixon has really buried every thread of the story and then just one more thing will pop up loose and in fact the three biggest stories of that time actually are all done by reporters who are not woodward and bernstein and they're one-offs woodward and bernstein, you know deserve all of the credit that they get for keeping the watergate story alive during certain portions of it.