From the Archives: John Dean: Watergate's Legacy in the Age of Trump

When John Dean found his conscience, America found its backbone and impeached a president. The Nixon Administration tried to undermine American democracy during the election of 1972 through now-legendary dirty tricks aimed at their Democrat opponents. They almost got away with it. Dean was Nixon’s White House Counsel, and participated in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in. Then he began cooperating with investigators, and blew the case wide-open. Dean is one of the most complicated and fascinating characters in modern American history. In a frank and funny conversation with Alec Baldwin in front of a live audience, John Dean opens up about how it all went down – and how it could go down now under Trump, who he says shares Nixon's paranoia and authoritarian instincts. Originally aired December 12, 2017 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:12Alec Baldwin?

  Hey, it's Alec Baldwin here. Before we launch our next season of Here's the Thing at iHeart Radio in January, I thought I'd play some of my favorite shows from the archives.

• 1:26Alec Baldwin?

  Few people were deeper into the Watergate cover-up than President Nixon's White House counsel, John Dean. Then he flipped. He was a star witness for the congressional investigation. And while some Watergate conspirators had religious conversions in prison, Dean left prison with a commitment to teaching in classrooms and beyond the lessons of the scandal and advocating for better government. I recently had the opportunity to talk with him in front of a live audience at NYU's Skirball Center.

• 2:02Alec Baldwin?

  Tell us the jobs you've had in government prior to you becoming counsel to the president.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  I was at the House Judiciary Committee. It was my first job in government. And from there, I went to a commission that was revising the federal criminal code. I didn't study enough while they were working on that.

• 2:24Alec Baldwin?

  I have a question about that.

• 2:28Speaker 04

  I then went from there to become the Associate Deputy Attorney General in the Nixon administration, at the outset of the administration. And while there, working in justice, I was invited to become counsel of the president.

• 2:44Alec Baldwin?

  Who invited you?

• 2:45Speaker 04

  Richard Nixon.

• 2:46Alec Baldwin?

  Nixon. Someone's making a recommendation to him, or he knew you personally?

• 2:49Speaker 04

  Well, they sent a feeler out. In fact, I, over the years, in going through the archives, I haven't collected it all, but I have collected bits and pieces. I didn't realize they were doing reconnaissance on me for many, many months before they asked me to come over to the White House. Questions like, could I really be loyal to Nixon?

• 3:10Alec Baldwin?

  Literally?

• 3:10Speaker 04

  Literally.

• 3:12Alec Baldwin?

  What did you think that they saw in you that they thought you were a Nixon man?

• 3:21Speaker 04

  You know, that's one of the mysteries to me, is why someone as young and inexperienced as I was, was given that job. I was given, actually, the title. I wasn't given the job initially. John Ehrlichman had been White House counsel. He was the initial White House counsel. He gave up the title. He didn't give up the job.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  And I think Nixon, throughout, really relied on Ehrlichman for his legal advice.

• 3:50Alec Baldwin?

  You come from a Republican family? Your dad, was he an exec at Firestone, or he worked at Firestone?

• 3:55Speaker 04

  My father spent 18 years at Firestone and then went out. He was a turnaround expert. He would go into a plant, a manufacturing plant, could see why it wasn't working. He was a numbers man, as well as a mechanical engineer from Carnegie Mellon, and could straighten these plants out.

• 4:14Alec Baldwin?

  So did you have some kind of Republican credentials throughout your...

• 4:18Speaker 04

  My family was not particularly political.

• 4:21Alec Baldwin?

  Were you?

• 4:23Speaker 04

  I actually became interested in politics when I was in prep school. And my roommate happened to be the son of a United States Senator. And we would go up to Washington and stop and see Senator Goldwater, his son and I. And and that's when I was, became interested in, in that world. I can still recall and visualize walking down those marble halls with the Senator leading the way, taking us on a tour here or there and saying, "This is pretty impressive."

• 5:07Speaker 04

  He was also, I thought, an impressive guy. He had a, he had one of the first Thunderbird, Ford Thunderbirds. I was, at that age, just thinking about getting a driver's license. And we'd ride around in his car that was more like the cockpit of an airplane. He was a ham radio operator and could also talk to any airbase he wanted to talk to from his Thunderbird.

• 5:31Alec Baldwin?

  Now, when you finally go to the White House as counsel to the President, what was your sense of what the job was and what you discovered the job actually was?

• 5:41Speaker 04

  One of the things that was really strange is I was never given much guidance as to what the White House counsel did. When Ehrlichman was there, he never really told me anything about it. When Holloman interviewed me before I went in to have the President say, "Would you take the job?", he said, "I suppose you will just do whatever you lawyers do." He wasn't a lawyer. And that was about the guidance I got.

• 6:13Alec Baldwin?

  And what were, what were some of the things you did? What were some of the things you worked on? You started the job what year?

• 6:18Speaker 04

  I, I, when I started the job, it was a lot of, I realized that Ehrlichman was sending my office all the minutia, things like clearing people for conflict of interest.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  Preparing us, for example, there was no staff manual when I got there. So my office prepared a staff manual to tell people, you know, what forms, letters had to be in, as well as the fact they couldn't contact independent regulatory agencies. They had to go through our office, or not at all. Sort of just basic mechanics. And I told, initially, I was a solo, and I think they were sort of testing to see who I was and what would go on. And it wasn't, it was about six months before they let me hire an assistant. And I needed the help because there was a lot of work.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  In fact, today, in the archives, the White House Counsel's Office for the Nixon presidency is one of the largest collections of papers.

• 7:20Alec Baldwin?

  Well, thank God you weren't doing the conflict of interest work in the White House now, you'd be dead from exhaustion.

• 7:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:27Alec Baldwin?

  Apparently. But, and you'd need about 500 assistants.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  Either that, or there is no clearance at all, and no work at all.

• 7:34Alec Baldwin?

  They probably just closed that office this, this term, you know? We're not going to bother with that conflict of interest. Send them home. But, but describe for me, because I think a lot of people, you get into that kind of cult of personality with someone like Nixon. And what was it like to work with him? What was he like? Because there's just nothing like being in the presence of the person themselves, rather than through the filter of the media. What was he like when you worked with him?

• 7:58Speaker 04

  You know, when I went over there, I was old enough and been around enough to know there was a Tricky Dick. But I believed in the 68 campaign that Tricky Dick had matured, he was now a former vice president who really understood how government operated, and he would be a great senior statesman-type person. That's the image that was put out. The White House staff itself was, operated so tightly, that very few on the staff actually knew what the president did, and how he did it, and when he did it. It was more, they read what was in the paper that was being cranked out by everybody else as to the image of the president. I, for example, really...

• 8:40Speaker 04

  Other than in group meetings and, and just pass through meetings, had no dealings with him until eight months after the arrests at the Watergate. And then I'll have some thirty-seven, thirty-eight meetings with him.

• 8:55Alec Baldwin?

  You become more useful to him, once the issue arises.

• 8:59Speaker 04

  What happens is, after his successful reelection, I have been reporting to either Holloman or Ehrlichman, everything I'm able to pick up about Watergate and the investigation and where it's going and what its implications are, and nothing looks good.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  At that point, Nixon decides, rather than have, well, not at that point, but several months later, in February, he decides, rather than have Holloman and Ehrlichman filtering what I have to say, he decides to deal directly with me. And thankfully, it was recorded.

• 9:34Alec Baldwin?

  Right. So, so when you, so the, the, the, the news breaks, the burglary breaks, in what month of seventy-two?

• 9:42Speaker 04

  June seventeenth of seventy-two.

• 9:44Alec Baldwin?

  June of seventy-two. He's overwhelmingly elected after that. And when you found out that these guys, who had links to the White House or to the committee to be elected, had broken into the DNC office at the Watergate Hotel, what did you make of it?

• 9:59Speaker 04

  Well, I happened to have been in Manila, in the Philippines.

• 10:03Alec Baldwin?

  How convenient.

• 10:07Alec Baldwin?

  Or was it a double?

• 10:08Speaker 04

  First mistake was coming home.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  That's on June nineteenth, two days after the arrest, I'm sent to interview Gordon Liddy, who confesses to me. He says it's our men, my men.

• 10:27Alec Baldwin?

  And when he said "my men," what was his, now, now, Liddy was ex-FBI?

• 10:31Speaker 04

  Former FBI.

• 10:33Alec Baldwin?

  And Hunter was ex-CIA?

• 10:34Speaker 04

  Ex-CIA.

• 10:36Alec Baldwin?

  When he said "my men," what was their official capacity?

• 10:38Speaker 04

  Well, I would, what he was explaining is that there was, on the morning of the 19th, The Washington Post knew more than we did at the White House, as far as Watergate. There was a big story that morning, that amongst those arrested was the chief of security for the reelection committee, James McCord, which was a pretty good clue that it somehow involved the reelection committee. John Mitchell, the head of the reelection committee, the former Attorney General, now Director of the Election Committee, put out a statement saying, "Oh, we don't know anything about what these guys were doing. They were freelancing on their own." Well, it didn't take me very long to realize that that was baloney.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  Today, I know that really the conspiracy was hatched over that weekend, and the decision to cover it up, and there was a real reason to cover it up for the White House, which I learned when talking to Lyd, on the morning of the 19th. In fact, I intercepted him rather than come to my office, I didn't want him in my office, but rather walked down 17th Street, and that's when he said, "These are my men who did this." He said, "I was foolish to use McCord, who was part of the reelection committee." Lyd himself was the General Counsel of the Finance Committee of the reelection committee, where he was, that was his supposed principal responsibility, but he was running this on the side.

• 12:08Speaker 04

  And on the way back up, he said two things that were, back up 17th Street, were really quite startling. He said, "You should know, John, while I worked at the White House, that Howard Hunt, who helped me get the men for this operation, and I did a, what he called a national security operation, by breaking in Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office." What I didn't know at that time is that that had been really authorized in writing by John Ehrlichman, my predecessor, who wrote on a sheet, asking his approval, "So long is not traceable to the White House."

• 12:55Speaker 04

  I didn't know that at that time. Anyway, I did go back and report to Ehrlichman what I had learned. The other thing that Lydi said on the way back up Seventeenth Street, he said, "I realize I've made a terrible error, and if anybody wants to take me out, just tell me what street corner to be on."

• 13:10Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, he literally said...

• 13:12Speaker 04

  He said, "Anybody wants to take me out, just don't do it at my house. I've got children there."

• 13:16Alec Baldwin?

  What do you think was behind that? Why would he, I mean, other than his own having maybe a screw loose or something, why did he believe that the operation of the White House, the executive branch of the government, would want to whack him on a street in Washington? Why?

• 13:31Speaker 04

  I have no idea.

• 13:32Alec Baldwin?

  He's just a little dramatic.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  Probably a mistake not to.

• 13:35Alec Baldwin?

  No, no, just to clarify. And of course, the day he was shot, you were in Manila, right?

• 13:43Speaker 04

  You're right.

• 13:43Alec Baldwin?

  So, but, no, no, explain to people, what were they after?

• 13:49Speaker 04

  It's taken a long time to assemble what they were really after, because no one really talked about it, and it was kind of embarrassing. One of the reasons I'm convinced that Lydi was silent is because of the stupidity of all the activities that have been carried on. The, for example, he, post-Watergate, acted like he was some James Bond-type character who had been hired by the White House to come in and do these things. As the historical record shows, he's not quite at the Maxwell Smart level in most of his undertakings.

• 14:28Alec Baldwin?

  Another reference from our childhoods, if you don't know Maxwell Smart.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  Anyway, what they were looking for, it appears to me, it appeared to me at the time, and I have since been even more convinced, was a pure fishing expedition. They were just in there trying to find anything they could of a negative nature, and hopefully on Larry O'Brien, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

• 14:55Alec Baldwin?

  So during the period where you're called in now and you've become pulled into this circle to help solve this problem, when does that commence?

• 15:03Speaker 04

  On the 19th, I'm the person who's in charge of finding out what's happening and keeping abreast of what's happening, talking to people in the Justice Department, talking to the FBI, talking to the reelection committee that has its own group of lawyers, and then bringing that information in. And what happened is, the reelection committee started calling on the White House for help. One of the interesting things is, I've always been convinced that John Mitchell, who we know did authorize the Watergate break-in. He authorized the money, he authorized the plan, he did it in Florida with Jeb Magruder, who was his deputy, and

• 15:43Speaker 04

  Magruder then gave the orders. I'm convinced that Mitchell, from my initial conversations with him on the 19th, was prepared to step forward and say, "Hey, this happened on my watch." He also sent word to the White House over the weekend, "Stay away from it."

• 16:00Alec Baldwin?

  And deflect all the responsibility from the President.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  Take it all from the President.

• 16:03Alec Baldwin?

  And short-circuit everything that happened.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  That was the original plan. But then what happened is, he too got a briefing as to what Liddy had done, and learned of the Ellsberg break-in, which he thought was as bad, if not worse, than what had happened at the Watergate. And he and Ehrlichman, who had always had a strained relationship, they often in a room would talk to each other through me. They would turn to me and say, like the other person wasn't in the room. And that's how I slowly became the linchpin...

• 16:36Alec Baldwin?

  Like a marriage counselor.

• 16:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. That's how I became the linchpin of this conspiracy.

• 16:53Speaker 05

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• 18:29Alec Baldwin?

  When you're in a room with these guys, I only have a sense of them from archival footage, from the news and so forth. They do seem like a pretty, not a very lighthearted crowd, you know what I mean? And Haldeman and Ehrlichman and Mitchell, they seem like some pretty dark crowd in terms of, because I'm going to read a quote for you from, because you were on the commission. On reform of federal criminal laws, right as the war on drugs was beginning. And then the next thing you know, you're intimately working with, in a room with Ehrlichman, who said the following right before he died. He said, about Nixon Republicans, he said that Nixon Republicans had two enemies, the anti-war left and black people.

• 19:14Alec Baldwin?

  We knew it couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. And he said, do we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did. When you're in the room with these guys, did you get a sense that you were...

• 19:33Speaker 04

  Never heard that kind of talk. It wasn't until years later, my last book, I cataloged all of the Nixon/Watergate conversations. I heard on those tapes, things I'd never heard those men say in front of me. They were their own small unit that would talk about these things at a level that I wasn't privy. There was some chilling stuff and racist stuff that I'd never seen in Ehrlichman before in those tapes. It's a remarkable record. No president's ever going to leave that behind again.

• 20:08Alec Baldwin?

  When... Well... Let's not be too hasty now.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  You're hopeful.

• 20:20Alec Baldwin?

  Well, we're going to get to the comparisons and contrasts in a minute. Both houses of the Congress were in Democratic hands at the time, correct?

• 20:28Speaker 04

  But it was a different Democratic party.

• 20:29Alec Baldwin?

  Of course.

• 20:30Speaker 04

  It was a party with Southern Democrats who were today Republicans. So it divided. He believed and held out the belief for a long time, I think, that he could, with a combination of Republicans and Southern Democrats, keep his office through an impeachment, a bill of impeachment in the House, if not defeating that, certainly not getting two-thirds of the Senate to vote against him for removal. So it's a different Democratic party. It's true, it was not... ...controlled by the South either. It was more moderate to progressives that did. And if you recall, it's very slow that the impeachment process starts with Watergate.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  It isn't until he removes the special prosecutor Archibald Cox that they take this seriously. That while that in itself may not be an obstruction of justice or a criminal offense, he had the power to do it. A lot of parallels with today.

• 21:33Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  He certainly, politically, had made a terrible mistake.

• 21:38Alec Baldwin?

  There were Republicans, obviously, on the Judiciary Committee and in the Congress who were willing to vote for impeachment.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  Slowly but surely, they did. The moderates first, and then finally, by the end, when they heard the so-called smoking gun tape, which showed Nixon had based his defense up until the end on the fact he knew nothing of the Watergate cover-up until I had told him on March 21st in a conversation that was labeled the "Cancer on the Presidency" conversation. He said that was the first he'd learned. Well, that was a pretty outrageous lie, and he got caught in it just by, really, the special prosecutor fishing for a tape.

• 22:23Alec Baldwin?

  And what did that tape say?

• 22:25Speaker 04

  And that tape showed him telling, agreeing with Haldeman's plan, to have the CIA block the FBI's investigation into Watergate.

• 22:37Alec Baldwin?

  And that conversation with Haldeman takes place when?

• 22:39Speaker 04

  June 23rd.

• 22:41Alec Baldwin?

  Right after the break-in?

• 22:42Speaker 04

  Right, six days after.

• 22:44Alec Baldwin?

  Immediately after.

• 22:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 22:46Alec Baldwin?

  And these are the tapes that he was forced to surrender, which he, for people who don't understand, he did surrender the tapes, other than the gap, the famous gap.

• 22:54Speaker 04

  There would have been an interesting constitutional crisis if he had said to the Supreme Court, "Okay, I've got your ruling. I think it's wrong. And President, I've got the troops. You come get the tapes."

• 23:09Alec Baldwin?

  This is my property.

• 23:10Speaker 04

  This is my property.

• 23:11Alec Baldwin?

  You're not entitled to have this property.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  And history would have been very different.

• 23:14Alec Baldwin?

  As everybody knows, there's a famous gap, what is it, eighteen minutes or something like that?

• 23:18Speaker 04

  Eighteen and a half minute gap.

• 23:19Alec Baldwin?

  Eighteen, I was gonna say eighteen and a half minutes.

• 23:20Speaker 04

  It's a media, it's a media invented event.

• 23:24Alec Baldwin?

  So there was no erasure at all?

• 23:26Speaker 04

  Uh, no. A strong man could press the record button, uh, and cause the eraser. And it, there, the experts saw seven to nine efforts to erase that material.

• 23:41Alec Baldwin?

  Well, what do you think, was it, was it based on those tapes? Has there ever been any speculation that satisfied you?

• 23:48Speaker 04

  No, because I, I've listened to the conversations that precede and follow. Nixon had a pattern of repeating things that were important or sort of sensitive. They would come up in subsequent conversations. This is a very early conversation. This is on June twentieth. His first conversation back, that's why it was subpoenaed. And, uh, I think it was just a gaffe that resulted in that probably being erased. And it could have, the person that occurred to me that could have done it was somebody who had a terrible time opening those medicine bottles you press and turn. I'd see it in his mouth occasionally, trying to get the cap off.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  Uh, he had trouble opening his drawers. He hadn't driven a car in years. This was a very foreign kind of machine.

• 24:38Alec Baldwin?

  Did Nixon order the breaking himself?

• 24:40Speaker 04

  No.

• 24:40Alec Baldwin?

  No, he did not.

• 24:41Speaker 04

  There's no evidence of that. There's no evidence that anybody in the White House knew. Uh, what's ironic, Alec, is that had the mission of the evening actually been accomplished, rather than Lyd- Lyd and his men being arrested, or Lyd's men being arrested, uh, it was traceable to the White House. Their mission that night was really to go plant a bug in McGovern's headquarters on Capitol Hill. The reason they didn't do that is they got arrested fixing the defective machinery, uh, that they'd put in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. You can trace back through- tapes and holoman memos that Nixon gives an order to put a plant, a secretary

• 25:25Speaker 04

  or a volunteer or something like that, move it from Muskie to McGovern, not particularly a wiretap.

• 25:33Alec Baldwin?

  So as we come rolling into seventy-three, right as he's, well, things changed dramatically for him, what kind of things is he asking you to do and what was he like to work with there?

• 25:44Speaker 04

  Jumping back to August twenty-ninth of seventy-two, pre-election, he had a press conference and one of the early questions he's asked is, Mr. President, given the fact your Attorney General is now the head of the reelection committee and if somebody from the reelection committee was arrested in the DNC, why don't you appoint a special prosecutor? And he has his response all prepared and he says, well, first of all, the Congress is investigating this, the General Accounting Office is investigating it, the FBI is investigating it, but most importantly, my White House counsel, John Dean, has investigated this

• 26:25Speaker 04

  matter and found nobody presently employed in this administration had anything to do with this bizarre incident. This was the first I heard of my investigation. And so after that, his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, called and said, John, do you have a copy of your report? I said, Ron, there is no report. He said, well, maybe there should be. And I said, well, I don't think so. Anyway.

• 26:51Alec Baldwin?

  He said, I don't think so, why?

• 26:53Speaker 04

  Because I didn't want to lie. I didn't want to.

• 26:55Alec Baldwin?

  You knew that they wanted you to doctor something?

• 26:57Speaker 04

  They, it was quite clear.

• 26:58Alec Baldwin?

  They wanted you to cover up with that report.

• 27:00Speaker 04

  Yes, yes. What happens is when, we're going back to when I first start dealing with Nixon. He starts on the report again, that he wants a Dean report. He is convinced somehow this will make things go away. Ehrlichman makes it pretty clear that what he can do is have this report in his desk drawer and say, this is all I knew. It didn't take me long, you know, I figured that out immediately, that this would be a setup and I had no interest in lying, had no interest in giving the false information to the President, and didn't. But he presses me on that. There were actually three phases of the cover-up for me.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  I initially thought I was just helping out my colleagues and didn't see anything criminally amiss. Defense funds were not unusual at that time. Not announcing them didn't sound horrible to me. I didn't see any quid pro quo in anything. Nothing struck me amiss at this point. As I say, I'm not trained as a criminal lawyer either.

• 28:05Alec Baldwin?

  When you say defense funds, what do you mean?

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Defense funds, the Barragan brothers for the, had a defense fund. The Chicago...

• 28:13Alec Baldwin?

  You're talking about for criminal, yeah.

• 28:14Speaker 04

  Criminal defense, yeah. And that's what, actually Nick, there's a tape of Nixon suggesting that there be a defense fund set up for the Cubans who had been hired by Hunt and Liddy to pay their lawyer's fees and what have you. If he had done that openly, he might have avoided obstructing justice. It's very curious. And Haldeman and Ehrlichman dropped that. I never heard about that. In fact, when I first hear about it, I don't know what he's, really know what he's talking about. Anyway, phases of the cover-up for me. I initially don't think I'm engaging in criminal conduct.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  When I realize I am is after the election, Howard Hunt calls Chuck Colson and Colson records the call on a dictaphone. He had his phone hooked up to a dictaphone, as many did in the White House. And he brought this tape down to me to play of his conversation with Hunt. And he's proud as punch of this conversation because...

• 29:17Alec Baldwin?

  Colson.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  Colson is, because it exonerates him in the Watergate, that he had nothing to do with the Watergate break-in. I hear something very different. I hear Hunt demanding that he get paid sooner rather than later, that promises have been made to him to take care of him, they haven't been delivered, and the ready isn't there. I immediately say to Chuck, "This is very bad, Chuck." He said, "Well, what are you gonna do about it?" I said, "I don't know." What I did do is take the tape up to... to Hallerman and Ehrlichman and played it for them. They said, uh, take it to John Mitchell and get him to solve the problem, which I next did that same day and took it up to New York and played it for Mitchell, whose first reaction

• 30:02Speaker 04

  is, don't you ever have anything good news to report? And I said, no, John, I don't. Uh, anyway, it's after listening to that conversation, I let my fingers do the walking in the criminal code to figure out what in the world are we doing? And I discovered, uh, eighteen USC fifteen oh three, which is the obstruction statute, and I discover eighteen USC three seventy-one, the conspiracy statute, and I realized we're in a whole lot of trouble. Now, you might have thought that your first reaction would be to run for the hills. I mean, I had exactly the opposite reaction. That's when I double down. That's when I try to make the cover-up work.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  I know today psychologically what was going on. I was in what they call the lost frame, uh, where you have no attractive options and you do stupid things. Uh, it's, it's, it's unfortunately part of human nature, happens a lot to a lot of people. Uh, I don't-

• 31:02Alec Baldwin?

  Did you feel a loyalty personally to any of these people? Had you developed any kind of closeness with them? As a person?

• 31:08Speaker 04

  Uh, as a co-conspirator. Yes, I did. I wanted the cover-up to work at that point. And that's when I do dumb things like destroy documents, uh, knowing-

• 31:19Alec Baldwin?

  You did?

• 31:20Speaker 04

  Yes. Uh, you know, and, and, and I never understood for years, you know, what had happened. Then the last phase of, of my involvement in the cover-up is when Hunt sends a message to me, uh, that he's gonna have seamy things to say about John Ehrlichman and by implication, Bud Kroge, one of his assistants, regarding his break-in at the Ellsberg, uh, psychiatrist's office, Fiasco, uh, that's when I sort of say, my God, this is never gonna end. Uh, we're being extorted, uh, it, there will be- No end in it, this cover up is not going to work.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  And we've got to figure out how to stop it and get the president out in front of it. And that's March nineteenth, when that word comes in. I have by then started to have enough dealings with the president that I think he's got trust in me. And so on March, the morning of March twenty first, I go in after setting it, breaking precedent, because you weren't supposed to go to the president other than through Haldeman. When he called me that night, I said, Mr. President, I really need to talk to you. And he said, how about ten o'clock? I said, fine, I'll be there. I called Haldeman that morning and said, I need to go in and lay it out to the president. He really doesn't get it. I don't know if Haldeman understood what I was talking about or not, but he said, fine,

• 32:45Speaker 04

  you do what you think is necessary. I went in and tried to give him enough, give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't know anything. I know today he knew almost, he virtually everything. But I took him through each step. And every time I would raise one of the problems, he'd have an answer. I'd raise, for example, Bud Crowe is worried he's committed perjury. Nixon's response, well, John, perjury is a tough rap to prove. I raised the fact that Hunt was demanding a hundred and twenty thousand dollars yesterday. He wanted fifty thousand for his attorney's fees and seventy for his living expenses and

• 33:30Speaker 04

  what have you, because he had by then been convicted.

• 33:33Alec Baldwin?

  What's the line Nixon, the famous line, we could get the money if we had to?

• 33:36Speaker 04

  That's exactly the line. You're coming to it.

• 33:39Alec Baldwin?

  I've seen a few movies about this.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  And I said, Mr. President, I have no idea how much this might cost. And he said, well, what do you think? Give me an estimate. And I pulled out of thin air what I thought was a hefty number. I said, a million dollars. That would be what, about five and a half today? Never having tried to even calculate what it might be. And that's when he said, that's no problem. I know where we can get that. And what I did- Didn't know is well until I actually did did this book with all the tapes is after that conversation, he goes over to Rose Wood's door, which is adjoining his office, the Oval Office, and asked Rose in a voice you can hear on the tapes, how much is in

• 34:26Speaker 04

  the slush fund? There's 600,000. He will, within a week or so, be selling an ambassadorship to raise money. He's on the job. He's gonna, he's gonna solve this. He's gonna get the million bucks and say, take care of it.

• 34:43Alec Baldwin?

  If John Dean was the ultimate Nixon insider, essayist and satirist Lewis Lapham was the ultimate outsider, despite their shared patrician roots. Lapham skewered the administration and its Watergate troubles from behind the covers of Harper's magazine, where he was the managing editor throughout the scandal. I never liked or trusted Nixon. I came out of the affluent, privileged... San Francisco society. San Francisco society. My father had been very strongly in favor of Roosevelt in 1932. Hear my conversation with Lewis Lapham at here's the thing.org. Coming up, more

• 35:26Alec Baldwin?

  from Richard Nixon's White House counsel on lessons from Watergate for Trump and the rest of us.

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• 37:18Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Now, more of my conversation with John Dean. When you talk about this period, you say that I'm going to stop this, or I'm having my doubts because the cover-up you don't think is going to work. Would you have kept going if you thought the cover-up would work?

• 37:38Speaker 04

  You know, at the end of my March 21st cancer on the presidency, where I used that phrase to get his attention, and I had it after that. I was, I was, I think that's the day I met Richard Nixon, the real Nixon. Because I took him through one problem after another problem after another problem, waiting for his fist or hand to come down on the desk and say, this has got to stop. That isn't, that isn't the man I met that morning. He had answers for everything, and that it had to continue, that somebody should take care of this problem with Hunt, and that there was no short-term answer. He wanted

• 38:21Speaker 04

  the cover-up to go on. I had nothing to do with Hunt getting paid. He did get paid. Mitchell took care of him. And Hunt would remain a bought man until the Watergate prosecutor is trying Haldeman and Ehrlichman and Mitchell in the cover-up trial in October of 1974, which is quite remarkable. And then he would decide that he would tell the truth, and he was the Perry Mason witness that came into the trial and nobody knew was going to arrive and explained what the Watergate break-in was, how things had operated, and was very candid and very honest.

• 39:00Alec Baldwin?

  You mentioned the three phases of the cover-up. Did you cover all three of those, or was there another one?

• 39:04Speaker 04

  I did. The last phase was ending the, trying to end the cover-up and realizing the only way I could end it, and telling my colleagues, "I'm going to the prosecutors." This has got, you know, we've got to deal with this. We need criminal lawyers in here. I'm going to hire a criminal lawyer and...

• 39:23Alec Baldwin?

  Who'd you hire?

• 39:24Speaker 04

  I hired a college, a law school classmate initially to talk about it, a man who later became the chief judge of the federal district court in DC, Tom Hogan. And we talked about it, and he suggested Charlie Schaffer, who had worked here in the Southern District, was a very accomplished prosecutor and had become a very successful criminal defense lawyer. And he was terrific. I, for a while, had one foot in the White House and one foot out of the White House, but didn't hide it from my colleagues what I was doing either.

• 40:03Alec Baldwin?

  You're a very young man when this is happening, and you're married. I mean, we talked backstage about how your wife becomes kind of a bit player of the whole thing. As you said, the camera found her, your beautiful wife, Maureen Dean, and she was there.

• 40:19Speaker 04

  She had a huge influence on me.

• 40:22Alec Baldwin?

  I want you to explain that.

• 40:23Speaker 04

  A huge influence.

• 40:24Alec Baldwin?

  What was the anxiety level when you went home every day?

• 40:27Speaker 04

  You know, I did not want to get married, but I did not want to lose her. I had been married and divorced and had a child from that first marriage, and I had fallen in love with her, and we'd had a wonderful relationship. She wanted to get married, and I just knew this was a bad time. I didn't know how bad it was.

• 40:54Alec Baldwin?

  Married how much, when did you get married?

• 40:55Speaker 04

  I get married in October of 1972.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  Very bad time. We have now been married 45 years.

• 41:06Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:07Speaker 04

  So it...

• 41:11Speaker 04

  You know, the first time that happened to me was not long ago when I said that to somebody. I happened to be in Nashville giving a talk.

• 41:23Speaker 04

  Because of Jim Neal, who was one of the Watergate special prosecutors. They became lifetime friends, many of these guys, and one woman. And I, his former law firm, he's deceased now, but his former law firm had a program. And I came down to speak and there was a boys' school there. It's a very fine academy. And they asked me to come out and do their assembly and 700 kids filed in. And I somehow, in passing, mentioned that I had been married to Maureen 45 years. And the kids broke out in applause and I thought, isn't that nice? I mean, I was very pleased.

• 41:59Alec Baldwin?

  They can't imagine what that's like.

• 42:02Alec Baldwin?

  To be married for 45 years. They're like, what? Really? Now, when you go home, I mean, I'm trying to get you to talk about something, just in terms of your personal feelings and your emotional life. Were you going home and, you know, and having dinner with your wife and sitting, having a drink and saying, "What the hell am I gonna do?" Or did you try to protect her and not confront her?

• 42:25Speaker 04

  I protected her. I, you know, I tried to warn her.

• 42:28Alec Baldwin?

  You're like in the mafia. You don't tell your wife what's going on.

• 42:31Speaker 04

  I tried to explain to her there were gonna be problems. But I wasn't terribly...

• 42:37Alec Baldwin?

  We just got married. You had to kind of keep everything on the down low.

• 42:39Speaker 04

  In depth about it.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  I must, somebody recently asked me, "How did I get through it?" And my answer was vodka.

• 42:50Alec Baldwin?

  So you did not confide a great deal in her?

• 42:53Speaker 04

  No, I didn't.

• 42:54Alec Baldwin?

  You didn't?

• 42:54Speaker 04

  You know, essentially, none of the men talked to their wives about what was going on. I'm sure more lamps would have been overheads if some of the women had learned about what was going on, when it was going on. I think all the wives were shocked at some of this. But, anyway, as I said, she had a tremendous influence on me. When I decided to break rank, one of the reasons was I didn't want to disappoint her. I wanted to live up to the standard she thought.

• 43:21Alec Baldwin?

  March 16th is when you said the meeting was with him, "Cancer on the Presidency"?

• 43:25Speaker 04

  March 21st.

• 43:25Alec Baldwin?

  March 21st. And how soon after that do you get canned?

• 43:29Speaker 04

  End of April.

• 43:31Alec Baldwin?

  So it's very tight?

• 43:32Speaker 04

  It's tight, but the tapes are fascinating. The tapes, my editor happens to be here tonight, and he helped me tremendously. There were four, I ended up with four million words in 20 thick notebooks of transcripts that we had to bring down to narrative and dialogue. And when I got to those tapes in that period at the end, after I'd given him the "Cancer on the Presidency," the conversations are so repetitive. I mean, they just go over and over, trying to figure out how to deal with me, what are they gonna do? And generally, the only answer is to make me the scapegoat. He's afraid of me.

• 44:15Speaker 04

  When he lets Holloman and Ehrlichman go, he just, in a one sentence, says, and so is White House Counsel John Dean. No shots at me at all. Because when I get in there, I start telling him things he doesn't even know. He didn't know until I tell him on March 17th that there had been the break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, and Ehrlichman had been behind it. Ehrlichman had never shared this with him. The reason I'm convinced those men never got pardons by Nixon when he was on his way out the door is he figured out that they really hadn't kept him informed, and they had their own agenda, and they were protecting themselves.

• 44:57Speaker 04

  I actually tried to get everybody to flip inside. I thought that was, I thought that would be so sobering for Nixon, and everybody else could just stand up and take responsibility, that his presidency...

• 45:10Alec Baldwin?

  You tried?

• 45:11Speaker 04

  I tried.

• 45:12Alec Baldwin?

  Did you get close to anyone?

• 45:14Speaker 04

  I think some people did, you know, based on the tapes.

• 45:18Alec Baldwin?

  That's interesting.

• 45:19Speaker 04

  There is some indication that people did give it some thought.

• 45:25Speaker 04

  But they realized that it was the end of their careers.

• 45:31Alec Baldwin?

  So in 1970, if you begin working in the White House in 1970, an hour in the spring of 73, which is an eternity to be in the White House for a couple of years for some people. The, do you notice, and I want to preface this with something, do you notice the old Nixon returning? Because there's Nixon, as everybody knows, who's the vice president for two terms under Eisenhower, not somebody who was adored by the staff of the White House and the Eisenhower administration.

• 45:58Speaker 04

  He was Eisenhower's heavy. I mean, he had the job of going out and being the hatchet man and being the attack dog.

• 46:03Alec Baldwin?

  And then he, and then he, and then he obviously loses a couple of elections, most notably the presidential election in 1960. I mean, Nixon has always been somebody who's a bitter, bitter, you know, type, who, is this what you begin to see? I mean, Nixon wins election in 60, 80, wins reelection in 72 by a landslide, and you're in that room with him in the spring of 73, and this is the old Nixon with his back against the wall?

• 46:30Speaker 04

  What I realize is that the old Nixon has never gone away. He's always been there. What they've done very effectively is portray a new Nixon. You know, in doing the book, where I listened to all these conversations, as I was telling my editor tonight, I didn't wear hearing aids before that experience. I made the mistake of having earphones on, which destroyed my hearing, and I told Mo at one point, "God forbid the last voice I hear is Richard Nixon in this project."

• 47:02Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, my God.

• 47:03Speaker 04

  But I, when I was listening to these tapes occasionally, I would, in queuing them up, would find things that I thought that the archives had removed. They theoretically have taken out all the personal material and returned it to the Nixon. But there are some very personal conversations. For example, in January of 73...

• 47:24Speaker 04

  He learns that he, from a lower aide, that he, indeed, they may have peace in Vietnam. The first person he calls is not Henry Kissinger, he calls Pat Nixon. They have a lovely conversation. It really struck me that their marriage was much different than I had perceived it. And that she, you know, is pleased with him, proud of him. It's a lovely husband-wife conversation. Same thing happened occasionally when I found conversations with the president and his daughters, Tricia and Julie. They're some really nice conversations. I'm sure that family was stunned when they, when these tapes came out.

• 48:09Speaker 04

  And that's probably one of the reasons he spent so much of his life, after even leaving, to try to prevent the tapes from ever all-surfacing. One of the reasons Nixon covers up is he's worried about John Mitchell. It becomes very clear from the tapes. It's not that he's worried about his own guilt, he's not worried about the Ellsberg break-in. He's worried about the impact it's going to have on his attorney general, John Mitchell, who he thinks will never survive it and can't handle it. So, he's trying to protect Mitchell. Different people have different motives at different times along the way, so...

• 48:44Alec Baldwin?

  You finally get canned by Nixon himself, when?

• 48:48Speaker 04

  Well, I'm out of town on April 30th, when he gives a speech.

• 48:53Alec Baldwin?

  So he didn't fire you face-to-face?

• 48:54Speaker 04

  No. On April 16th, he called me in and said, "I think you, we need to talk about resignation, and I've drafted a couple of letters." Well, I knew he hadn't written the letters, and I immediately read them, and they were confessions. And I said, "This is obviously John Ehrlichman's handiwork." So, I took them back, I took the letters, and I said, "Mr. President, I'll write my own letter and send it to you," and, which I did.

• 49:19Alec Baldwin?

  So, this event in American history, obviously, is...

• 49:25Alec Baldwin?

  chronicled in famous books and famous movies made of those books and I was wondering when you first see All the President's Men, which comes out pretty quickly after the movie, doesn't it?

• 49:34Speaker 04

  It does.

• 49:35Alec Baldwin?

  The book and the film are come out like within a couple of years or eighteen months. What did you think of the film when you first saw it?

• 49:41Speaker 04

  I first saw a director's showing of it. Alan Pacula had a showing and invited me. And after, you know, there were fifty people in a little theater. After the movie, I went up to him and said, "Thank you." He said, "Why are you thanking me?" I said, "I'm thanking you for not mentioning my name anywhere in the movie." And he said, "That's not possible." I said, "You might check, it is possible." I said, "Even when that ticker goes across at the end and gets all the names that has not otherwise involved, my name is not mentioned."

• 50:16Alec Baldwin?

  Why do you think that is?

• 50:17Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 50:19Alec Baldwin?

  Okay. That's interesting.

• 50:21Speaker 04

  But he didn't change it. He didn't go back and add my name.

• 50:24Alec Baldwin?

  But you appreciated the film? You thought it was accurate?

• 50:27Speaker 04

  I think it's a, I think it's a slice of the story from the media point of view. You don't drive by the Jefferson or Lincoln Memorial every time you cross Washington, though, as you know.

• 50:38Alec Baldwin?

  Right. What about Nixon, about Oliver Stone, from which you were a consultant?

• 50:42Speaker 04

  I was a consultant on Nixon and...

• 50:44Alec Baldwin?

  That's a far more turgid movie than All the President's Men.

• 50:47Speaker 04

  You know, it's much more than Watergate. And what, what happened is originally Oliver had in that movie a conspiracy theory that claimed that Watergate was about a break-in at the Democratic National Committee to, to expose a call girl ring that my wife worked at. And I had already sued the publishers of that story and was in litigation, which would go on for nine years.

• 51:17Alec Baldwin?

  So you're saying your wife did not work at the call girl ring?

• 51:19Speaker 04

  She did not work at the call girl ring.

• 51:20Alec Baldwin?

  Just want to be clear. She did not work at the call girl ring. There won't be anyone walking out of there with any misconceptions.

• 51:26Speaker 04

  People might dream that, but... Anyway, the...

• 51:33Speaker 04

  I told Oliver, I said that this is a fraud and you'll end up being named in the lawsuit. Anyway, we got off to that start and he said, "I don't want to do that sort of thing in this movie." He said, "I am trying to get as much verisimilitude as possible."

• 51:49Alec Baldwin?

  What do you think he captured that was accurate about Nixon? Name a scene, because I mean, I've devoured that film many times.

• 51:55Speaker 04

  One of the scenes, the last scene I objected to was a scene where he has me meeting with Howard Hunt on the Memorial Bridge and I said, "Oliver, that never occurred."

• 52:04Alec Baldwin?

  Ed Harris.

• 52:05Speaker 04

  Ed Harris, right. It's a great scene.

• 52:08Alec Baldwin?

  And you're played by David...

• 52:11Speaker 04

  Hi Pierce.

• 52:12Alec Baldwin?

  David Hi Pierce, yeah.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  And I said, "Oliver, that scene never happened." He said, "I've paid for it. It's gonna happen."

• 52:23Alec Baldwin?

  How many people applauded you if you've ever seen Oliver Stone's Nixon? Ever seen that film? Oh my god.

• 52:30Alec Baldwin?

  Those scenes with those guys?

• 52:31Speaker 04

  I thought that I can actually suspend disbelief with Anthony Hopkins. I think, I know you admire him greatly.

• 52:40Alec Baldwin?

  Oh yeah.

• 52:40Speaker 04

  And I've met him, when he came back from a tour of the Nixon Library with Oliver, and they had kind of slipped through with nobody seeing them, but one of the docents spotted them at the end of the tour and she said to Hopkins, who's reporting this to me at lunch, right after they'd come back, he said, "The docent stopped me and said, 'I understand you're playing Mr. Nixon.'" And he said, "Yes, I am." And he said, and she said to him, "Well, I hope you're not doing a job on him." And he turned to me and said, "I'm not doing a job on him, am I?" I said, "I don't think so in this script." And he said, "Well, I want to tell you, I kind of sympathize with Nixon." He said, "I..."

• 53:22Alec Baldwin?

  Tony said that.

• 53:22Speaker 04

  Tony said that. He said, "I grew up in very humble beginnings and like Nixon, I could hear the train whistles and have dreams." And he said, "I, you know, I want to play this guy straight and that's what I think he tried to do." He had, I noticed, I was visiting the set a number of times and they had a voice coach for him there and they tried to take that clip out of his accent and they don't always, but that's the only thing that sort of distracts me with him. I can believe this is Richard Nixon. He's

• 53:55Alec Baldwin?

  I thought he did a sensational job.

• 53:57Speaker 04

  He's really, tries to capture the man.

• 54:00Alec Baldwin?

  With the time we have left, I want to ask you, obviously, about the comparisons and contrasts to how we live our lives now and it's unlikely that a Republican-controlled judiciary committee in this particular Congress is going to return an article to impeach.

• 54:16Speaker 04

  I think that's very true.

• 54:17Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, but what you then have is you'll have a president, a sitting president, who's indicted for a crime.

• 54:22Speaker 04

  Well, it's not possible right now to indict a sitting president. What happened is in 1973, Spiro Agnew was being pursued by the, by a grand jury out of Maryland and they went to the Department of

• 54:36Alec Baldwin?

  For tax evasion, correct?

• 54:37Speaker 04

  For tax evasion. And he claimed he couldn't be indicted, he could only be impeached. They took the question to the Office of Legal Counsel, which issues those sort of opinions by the Department of Justice, and said, "No, Mr. Vice President, you're wrong. You can be indicted. It's the president who can't be indicted, can only be impeached." And issued an opinion in 73. That opinion was upgraded or revised and re-adopted in 2000 when Robert Ray, independent, last one, one of the last independent councils, raised that issue regarding Clinton and said, "No, he cannot be indicted as a sitting president." So that's the policy right now of the Department of Justice.

• 55:20Alec Baldwin?

  Has the court itself ever ruled on that?

• 55:21Speaker 04

  No, no court has ever ruled on it and, and many scholars disagree with it, that they think that no president's above the law and indeed the 25th Amendment makes it possible to have the president step aside, who would be impaired in his ability to govern and function if he was in a criminal trial and to sort that out, it could be done. The issue has not been resolved. There are some who think that Special Counsel Mueller might test it.

• 55:52Alec Baldwin?

  What do you think Mueller would do? You're a lawyer.

• 55:58Speaker 04

  Have a fascinating case. It's a tough issue. You know, I, there are arguments on both sides. But I think that the bottom line argument is that no person in this country is above the law.

• 56:13Alec Baldwin?

  I mean, the country right now, it seems like it's in so much trouble. You know, the country is in so much trouble. And you've got people who are-

• 56:24Speaker 04

  I have never had a knot in my stomach before, before an election. I did before this election.

• 56:30Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 56:30Speaker 04

  That knot has really never gone away.

• 56:33Alec Baldwin?

  Right. Just the damage that Pruitt and DeVos alone will do in their departments is gonna take a decade or more to undo. You know, it's just, things are really bad.

• 56:42Speaker 04

  And too little attention is being paid to what's happening out in those departments and agencies.

• 56:48Alec Baldwin?

  Right, and-

• 56:49Speaker 04

  Most striking to me, Alec, is the fact he has no competence for the job. He has no training.

• 56:56Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 56:57Speaker 04

  He has no knowledge of the office. He's winging it from day to day. He's got a constituency that is unshakable for lots of reasons. I think he was shocked to win, unprepared to govern, but is growing into the job as he learns it. He's learning it on the spot. What worries me is he is going, he's not dumb. He's going to learn how the machinery works, and then I think it's ripe for even greater abuse.

• 57:31Alec Baldwin?

  Well, that's what my ultimate question is, is that, do you think, because I've said this to people before, that to remove the President of the United States from office is a tremendously painful and difficult thing. Well, it's also painful for the country.

• 57:45Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 57:45Alec Baldwin?

  Do you believe that what's best for the country is to not impeach Trump? And to wait until the next election cycle and vote him out of office? Or do you think impeachment is a healthy path for the country?

• 57:57Speaker 04

  I think it's an appropriate path because it's a constitutional path. The system is designed to deal with a president who is not- Uh, playing the game as it's supposed to be played. And that's a determination made by the House of Representatives, which is the closest to the people, uh, i- is the House. While we might have a highly gerrymandered House.

• 58:20Alec Baldwin?

  We got a Paul Ryan House, too.

• 58:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 58:23Alec Baldwin?

  Who's the little bat boy.

• 58:24Speaker 04

  I'm not, I'm not sure that, I'm not su- I think, uh, th- the next election, the off-year election is gonna be very telling in 2018.

• 58:35Alec Baldwin?

  See, I wonder if, if they get swamped in the, in the, in the midterm, and you come out the other side of that into January of 2019, and, uh, i- if Pence were to succeed a, uh, a Trump that resigns, Pence would wanna come in right after January, uh, of 2019, so he was eligible for 10 years in office. Because if he steps, if they impeach Trump now, Pence is only eligible for that piece of Trump's term, and only one full term of his own.

• 59:02Speaker 04

  Well, you're assuming he could get re-elected. I, I think this is gonna splash over on Pence.

• 59:07Alec Baldwin?

  I, I don't, I don't refute that, I'm just saying that, but that right now, in their hope, is that, uh, they're, they're gonna wait and see what the damage is in the midterm, if, if Trump can be rehabilitated. I thought Trump would be gone by the summer. I thought they'd say to themselves, "We gotta get the smell of the cordite out of the room here, and bring Pence in here, and let everything clear, if not for 2018, then for 2020, and prop up Pence as the, as the nominee." But they've hung in with him.

• 59:31Speaker 04

  But I, I don't think Trump has that idea of leaving, either. He likes the attention, he likes the fact he can demand the kind of, uh, 24/7 coverage he gets. His narcissism is large enough to handle that.

• 59:45Alec Baldwin?

  Are you a Republican now?

• 59:47Speaker 04

  I haven't been since then.

• 59:48Alec Baldwin?

  You haven't? Really?

• 59:50Speaker 04

  I'm an independent.

• 59:51Alec Baldwin?

  You're an independent.

• 59:52Speaker 04

  In California, we don't have to declare. And I, and I have not declared, and I have voted, uh, uh, both Republican and Democrat.

• 1:00:00Alec Baldwin?

  What do you think is gonna, what do you think is the future of the Republican Party?

• 1:00:04Speaker 04

  Bad.

• 1:00:05Alec Baldwin?

  Bad. Yeah, bad, bad. We were gonna do a sketch on SNL the other day where Trump was going Christmas shopping with Roy Moore at the mall.

• 1:00:20Speaker 04

  You know...

• 1:00:22Alec Baldwin?

  They killed that idea.

• 1:00:23Speaker 04

  The greatest mistake I have made since Watergate was when Lorne sent out a feeler if I would host Saturday night.

• 1:00:33Alec Baldwin?

  It's not too late, it's not too late!

• 1:00:35Speaker 04

  And Saturday night, or Simon and Schuster said, "No, we don't want you doing that."

• 1:00:42Alec Baldwin?

  It's a very tough, tough, painful time for this country right now because I think that, I think we need both parties to be healthy and not have an effective opposition. And that's one of the things that saddens me about this Republican Party, is they're going down the drain with this insane agenda of theirs.

• 1:00:58Speaker 04

  Well, there's a difference between opposition and polarization, and we don't seem to have distinguished that. When, when, when majority doesn't rule, we're in trouble in a democracy. And right now, a minority is controlling the country.

• 1:01:15Alec Baldwin?

  Well, I want to say, please, go ahead.

• 1:01:21Alec Baldwin?

  Well, I want to say I'm grateful, I'm sure you've heard this before too, that I'm grateful that you found your conscience back then in March of 1973, and did the right thing, coming out of Camp David and exposed what you did, told the truth about what you did. And I want to say thank you very much for coming and sitting with us tonight. Thank you.

• 1:01:41Speaker 04

  Thank you, Alex.

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