there is pat nixon. pat nixon is up from to dick nixon literally during the speech he is sitting watching him nervously not sure what he is going to be saying that. she is crucial to the strategy of making her husband into a normal looking guy. she writes a slew of articles where she talks about her being a normal suburban housewife. there is also a fascinating thing about pat nixon, she is weirdly open about the fact that she doesn't seem to like politics and seems to even have some trepidation about being with her husband. she writes an article for her husband with the title a wonderful guy in which he has a quote i make a lot of which is dick doesn't do anything in a half-hearted manner. i know we are in for a rugged time. this isn't a peace that is supposedly a celebration of her husband's and virtues and she is saying she is worried about him, about what her life is going to be and things like that. you get a real sense that with both eisenhower and at nixon that politics transforms people in ways t

nixon your portrayal of nixon was that he was a criminal i mean the cia is portrayed as this evil entity almost the supernatural entity or you know one point the movie the director of the cia is even threatening to kill nixon what do you say to people who say that you were too forgiving of bush and your movie w but i don't see that in nixon that the cia director tried to kill dick said we would that we hinted at there was a controversy between helms richard helms and nixon and part of the problems was that cuba papers and what you are it's a thirty story the cia was we nicknamed sometimes capitalisms invisible. army goes back to nine hundred forty seven and its creation in the anti-communist red scare and the cia has misused its mandate for so long and still is in the in with a drone attack it has its own drones now and its targeted assassinations it's essentially i've always regarded the cia as a criminal organization of like a mafia operating inside the us government scaring presidents because they have separate information and it's the same time they they've been battered they've lost

nixon's recently released private documents. this is just under 50 minutes. >> welcome to the richard nixon presidential library and museum. my name is paul and i'm the acting director of the library. i appreciate all of you coming to one of our continuing author talk recitations. today, we are very fortunate to have really the leading scholar on pat nixon who is by the way of warren 100 years ago this year. mary brennan, did much who did much of her research here for her book, is the chair of the department of history at the university of texas and san marcos. her specialty is post-world war ii conservative movement and she has written to date, three different books those being turning right at the 60's, conservator capture of the gop, wives, mothers and the conservative women conservative women in the crusade against communism and of course the book we love the most around here which is "pat nixon" embattled first lady. her book is an outstanding work and i look forward to -- i would like you to help me welcome her out onto th

as a traitor. >> when nixon did it, do you th

literally no one except nixon and me and one or two people. to technicians. >> but let me ask you about the risks here, because the chinese are a complete black box to you. all you know is that they're pretty crazy, at least seemingly so from the cultural revolution. >> absolutely. >> the revolutions they're fermenting everywhere. so this whole thing if exposed could have been a disaster. >> and therefore it was to the enormous credit of nixon that he would take those risks. >> did he worry about the risks when you would talk about them? >> you know, nixon on national issue issues, was enormously courageous. and what was even more remarkable is that nixon was inherently a pessimist. and even when taking these risks had a certain sense of doom. that they might not really work. but he felt this was the move that had to be made to unfreeze the situation. >> so he decides that you will go to china. >> yes. >>> when we come back, the secrets and the stealth diplomacy that made it all happen. >> they went to mao and he said who cares who invited who

>> and he said both trips. >> your trip and nixon's trip? >> that was implied. >> with time running out, the men began drafting an official announcement. but they deadlocked on one key point. >> the issue was who had invited whom. the chinese wanted to say that we had invited ourselves. we wanted to say that the chinese had invited us. so between 2:00 at night and 10:00 in the morning we didn't know what was going to happen. what we now know is that they went to mao and he said who cares who invited whom. why don't they say we invited each other. >> the announcement i will now read is being announced simultaneously in pay king and in the united states. knowing of president nixon's express desire to visit the peoples republic of china, the premier on behalf of the government of the people's republic of china has extended an invitation for president nixon to visit china at an appropriate day before mate, 1972. president nixon has accepted the invitation with pleasure. >> a few months later in february 1972, as the world watched, henry kissinge

i mean, even nixon. you couldn't leave more broken than dicks nixon. he becomes the sage of saddle river, having journalists at the dinner, rewriting history books. even nixon can come back. there is life after the presidency if you handle yourself. but history is like -- >> another reason this is so much fun and so important ultimately is remember the way the founders described -- i think it was washington described the senate as the saucer in which -- >> where the tea cools. >> right. >> that's what history is. and it takes our friend michael beschloss as a rule, you can't write about a president in full until 25 years after they leave office. >> yeah. >> and again and again that's true. >> let me ask you this. by the way, you talk about a time that richard nixon came over to your house and you were a young man -- young woman. >> mean joe all the time. >> ex-presidents would come over. he came to talk to your dad and you just talked about how broken and how sad -- >> it might have just been the timing but he was on a seat on our porch and it was suns

and therefore, if he didn't know nixon's mind. he might do foolish things. and so, by this process, nixon came to the conclusion that he had to send me because i had worked with him intimately. hours every day. >> i'm just going to finesse all questions on china. >> pulling the trip off would also require keeping the press entirely in the dark. >> it is enigmatic as hell. >> that would be the best possible position to take. >> and let them thump around and squirrel and squeal as they will. >> even the smallest leak could shut down this ambitious plan. the two men schemed to play into reporters' queries, sending them on a series of phony diplomatic meetings. >> it was a cover for the trip. >> and you go to pakistan. >> it started out in vietnam. go to thailand. go to india, go to pakistan. excruciatingly boring program at each trip. have a lot of technical discussions, having absolutely nothing to announce and losing news every trip we were down to one. associated press reporter by the time we left india. >> by design, because you were making it so boring. >>

this is what the world looked like when you enter into the white house with richard nixon. the united states has had no relations with china. we have been implacably opposed to this regime. we fought against them, american soldiers died in the korean war fighting the chinese, we fought them indirectly in vietnam. we recognized taiwan as the republic of china, and you come into office and within three years you open relations to china, agree to withdraw american troops from taiwan. what made you make that decision? >> the conviction was that a country of the magnitude of china could not be kept out of the international system indefinitely and would distort the international system. also, we thought if the soviet union, which had just occupied czechoslovakia could now do the same to china, that would change the psychological and strategic position in the world. >> and it was here in the growing wedge between the two communist powers that nixon and kissinger saw an opening. they would lean toward china. trouble was how to contact a regime whose very existence the united states

particularly on the american right, taiwan is the true china and now richard nixon has

nixon still remembered that. one of the early dirty tricks of the nixon white house was finding a way to get rid of ray. nixon's housing secretary was george romney whose son has been in the news lately. mitt romney's dad complained ray was not being cooperative. he felt he could run fannie mae any way he saw fit. there was also talk that ray might have used fannie mae posted your letter head to raise money for democratic candidates and the white house was getting complaints from republican lawyers in south carolina that democratic lawyers were getting all the fannie mae work related to foreclosures, all the fees. in nine months of taking office nixon hired him -- fired him without giving any public explanation. lapin resisted, said that nixon was turning fannie mae and to what he called a patronage putting. lapin tried to get a restraining order from a federal judge. the judge wouldn't budge. beret kept showing up for work anyway. at one point of the lights went out at fannie may's offices and the phone lines we

and nixon he's without a doubt one of the most controversial and influential filmmakers of our time and that's why i'm very pleased to be joined by producer director oliver stone thank you so much for joining me for having staged a great pleasure so wall street is a film that challenge people to rethink human nature one of the most notable lines in movie greed is good what was your original message about that line and how do you feel looking back twenty five years later at the relationship between wall street and our government. don't get me started you know my father was in wall street so i grew up republican conservative in new york city and my life and underwent a lot of changes and by the time i was thirty five forty years old i was rethinking everything and i had a chance to go back and visits my dad's world of wall street from that i knew from the fifty's and sixty's but it completely changed in the eighty's and there was a new breed of banker investment trader shark that had come into the pool and was devouring some of the smaller fish the emphasis being on money not on serving t

we debated the issue to nixon, and nixon finally said, go ahead. but agnew raised the defense that a president could not be indicted while in office. he had, you had to wait until his term was up, or he resigned or was impeached and e removed that way. and that he was the same n that sense, had the same immunity that the president did. so i and two other lawyers in the office of the solicitor general wrote a brief in a hurry. we didn't have much time. contrasting the position of vice president and president and concluding that a president could not be indicted while in office without removing him first, but that a vice president could be. now, that debate has come up not only that debate came up with nixon, the question of indicting nixon, it came up again with bill clinton when some people wanted to indict bill clinton. but i continue to think that the president and the president alone has that kind of immunity until he's out of office. >> host: there was one other during nixon's presidency major issue you faced -- >> guest: there was of only one

so i got that sense from nixon. practical back to your book on 1775, how did you pursue it > how did your research and where did you have to go? how long a process? you talk about going all over the east coast, on the back. correct the principal thing i did was i had been interested in the revolution since i was a kid. i think i was probably eight or nine when i would make list set of british generals. my father was not sure i was headed for anything useful. but i always enjoyed that. then when i did "the cousins wars," focus me in a big way on the american publishing. my way of writing books is generally to buy all the books i need for the research so i don't have to go to a library, i don't have to worry about where they are. i have them. i can look at them whenever i want to. 600, 800,ve wound up 1000 books on the revolution. i read and read and i would get a lead for something else. with all the stuff i did on politics and political realignments and grass-roots politics, i knoew where a lot of counties were in t

if it was a ballet of frost nixon, is it a valuable argument to say frost never sached around nixon? it's not a documentary. so it's more about -- i think an audience response on a whole as to the complexity of something. the's a balancing act of facts. i watched "argo" the other day and one of the things i was unclear about was the most exciting part of it was something that didn't actually happen. it's an interesting question to talk about it how much can an entertainment rely on things that didn't happen if it is supposed to be based on real events. that is something that with each piece i've been involved with you have to judge along the way. >> talk about your new piece. >> i will be working on a piece about masters and johnson which is about real people and real events. >> a piece about mouse and johnson which has not been done. these conventions of how popular entertainment gets made. we do historical pieces but real 20th century figures, they are done in movies, but not done in series so of course a series over the course of however many episodes we end up making we'll take g

. >> what did you think of richard nixon when you worked with him? >> i liked him better after i wasn't working with him and he was out of the presidency. he is a very intelligent man, a man with enormous personal problems in terms of relating to people. and i understand much better, which i did not a time when i worked for him, how he was not an effective administrator and how he couldn't keep all those worms in the can, whether you are talking about the administration or especially watergate. >> how did you keep up with him after the years that he was president? >> he read one of my books from the early 1980's that he liked. somehow, we started having correspondence again. i would see him max four times a year. his office was up in new york and then in saddle river, new jersey. so when i would go from washington to our house in connecticut sometimes i would stop and see him. and we would discuss politics and some of the things that had not been discussable before. >> did you ever get insight into watergate and how that happened? >> i think i got a

byrd certainly helps drive nixon out of office. when you cross a constitutional line, byrd goes after you. it did not matter whether he liked you and nor not. the memorial service for byrd in west virginia, this is where clinton said there is nothing he would not have done for you, meaning the people of west virginia as long as you did not cross the constitutional line. a powerful statement. one of the administration i talked about is the carter administration. workyou look at byrd's with president carter, you realize how much legislation is accomplished in those congresses. incredible. carter's failures are basically external. oil and cargo driving up inflation are beyond carter's control. but what carter and bird did, he was a difficult -- byrd did, carter was a difficult person, but they were able to bring together. it was a truly successful administration legislatively. the second time since george washington -- the most important environmental laws we have today came out of the carter administration. carter enacted an energy p

people who say that you were too forgiving of bush and your movie w but i don't see that in nixon that the cia director tried to kill dick said we would that we hinted at there was a controversy between helms richard helms and nixon and part of the problems was the cuban papers and what you are it's a dirty story the cia was we nicknamed sometimes capitalisms invisible army goes back to one thousand nine hundred. and the cia has misused its mandate for so long and still is in the in with a drone it's now and it's targeted assassinations it's essentially i've always regarded the cia as a criminal organization of sort like a mafia operating inside the us government scaring presidents because they have separated from it they've lost the pentagon is taking over a lot of the old cia. special operations command has become almost an equivalent to the cia invisible army. for me and personally as a documentary that we use we get to an untold history. junior. everything that could go wrong could go wrong after two things but the two of two thousand and eleven was missed. the movie that you made

, nixon's taller than him. and then you see the picture, they are there down in florida in the electionn '60 and he's taller than nixon. it's so strange. he just got healthier and nixon. and poor nixon is watching this guy grow next to him and i don't think he can believe what happened to this guy. >> was he a great president as far as what he accomplished? >> he had three years before he was killed. and if you go in terms of inspirati inspiration, did he lead people into politics, i would put him in the same category as hemingway. think about hemingway and the way he lived and he made all of us want to be writers. all of us wanted to be writers because of hemingway. he is the american writer. and that power of leadership is what kennedy had. he had made all of us growing up in that generation, everybody since, want to get into politics. before jack kennedy went into pl politics, it was stiff guys with three-piece suits, bob taft, nixon, guys that were really boring and who wanted to be one of them? and kennedy

there is richard nixon. and someone appears to be pouring a beer over his head. >> yeah, i put this out without telling what it was. i said what do you think it is. and one person wrote it's nixon celebrating his pardon by gerald ford. 1974. it wasn't. this is nixon actually at the angels stadium 1979, angels won the division title. bobby rich, the second baseman came over and poured champagne on nixon's head. and it is novel-- novel because that not exactly a scene that you normally see with nixon. some of the others wrote in and said is this just dick nixon partying hard. >> ifill: but what is interesting is it goes completely against what we think of when we see even if we think of him partying hard it is not quite that way. >> again hype, and that an image like that is so arresting. and you get not micro-- nixon was delighted to have this done because five years after watergate he was trying to pull himself back. he was enough of a politician to know that a picture in the newspaper of him celebrating tha

if it was a ballet of frost nixon, is it a valuable argument to say frost never sached around nixon? it's not a documentary. so it's more about -- i think an audience response on a whole as to the complexity of something. that's a balancing act of the facts. i watched "argo" the other day and one of the things i was unclear about was the most exciting part of it was something that didn't actually happen. it's an interesting question to talk about it how much can an entertainment rely on things that didn't happen if it is supposed to be based on real events. that is something that with each piece i've been involved with you have to judge along the way. >> talk about your new piece. >> i will be working on a piece about masters and johnson which is about real people and real events. >> a piece about mouse and johnson which has not been done. -- about masters and johnson which, weirdly i think, has not been done. these conventions of how popular entertainment gets made. we do historical pieces but real 20th century figures, they are done in movies, but not done in series so of course a

ford being sworn in in the white house in 1974 after richard nixon resigned in disgrace. here's a picture of -- and it's my final story for the day. this story actually inspired me more than any other to write this book. this is calvin coolidge's 1923, president after the death of warren harding. at the time of harding's death

when nixon signed this it was based on a report that 155 people didn't pay taxes. a small number of people created these things. >> these are people making $200,000 or more which was astronomical money back then. >> republicans and conservative it is don't believe in the amt, but they like to keep it around. when they had chrome of congress during the bush era, they could have gotten rid of it. they keep it around because it up happens to be a tax that falls more heavily on blue states. the amt basically doesn't allow you to deduct for things like your state income taxes and hits states with high property taxes and high income taxes hard, so you're talking california, connecticut, new york. >> it's like the obama donç or closet. >> and orrin hatch made that point this year, a republican senator. he said the amt hurts them more than us. >> they don't have to worry about it. they think that's their leverage. >> i want to think about other things discussed once we get past the tax rates, and i want to hear -- listen to president obama today talking about smflt other

problems earlier i spoke to kevin phillips he's a former white house strategist to president richard nixon he's also author of many books including his latest seven hundred seventy five a good year for revolution i first asked about the problem of overindebtedness it was an issue in seven hundred seventy five i asked how that would compare to what we see now. overindebtedness at this point. it's like ten different flavors i mean you've got the government has way too much there so you have private credit whether it's for mortgages credit cards or just simply private debt various forms and that. they have talked about trying to do to leverage the credit market debt in this country is extraordinary but there hasn't been much work done sure their total credit market maybe has been reduced by four five six percent now. when they were on. the over the problem of. by simply letting a depression happen in the 1930's the credit market really trying and of course that made for a depression right flat out where there's no willingness to do this at this point and what they're trying to do they're not

there's some surely what you have what nixon closed the gold one of the fraser seventy one the united states was not really still on gold standard until the point that it was just modifying the end of the gold standard to be a complete end of the gold strike and he had started the printing process dollar. but other countries have had printing for us currency and otherwise. i think i agree that the downhill slope started in a major way during the sixty's and seventy's but the war in vietnam was responsible for a lot of the economic dislocation and the extent to which inflation was coming on the dollar weakening and that was on the front thing that was a mistake in foreign policy i want to. you know when you look at countries when they get in this kind of pickle it's generally been a failure of more than financial policy it's been the failure across a broad range just for example look at pictures of the pros or the stealing most not only warm presidential aspirant i didn't support him but he did do this in charge and everything ross perot you know remember a whole world and we put up th

it was the beginning of the nixone n\ where the l.a. police chief blamed the turmoil on those people, meaning democrats, too much too soon and they told black people about racism and they were being mistreated rather than they were being mistreated. in some of my research i found the lyndon johnson right afterwards said i have done more for these people than any other president, how could they be doing this to me? there was a sense of awe cause and effected between beginning to reckon with allegis the -- legacy of slavery and the unrest that followed. i write a lot about race in my book but when i look backpacking actually the war had more to do with parts of the country than race and those of us who were anti-war were on the right side but we became judge by a violent fringe -- i don't want to say with good reason but we can talk about, it was a bad war. i didn't mean all americans were bad people but democrats got associated with a critique of the country that was both fair but probably went too far. what i fear when we talk about a g

nixon is out before he resigned before the second midterm shallacking. you can see in that midterm in 1950, democratic party lost 28 seats in the house and 6 in the senate. in ike's second term, the democrats wiped out. 48 and 13 seats. reagan, 1986, eight and five seats. not so bad. more about that in a minute and did cost the republicans control of the senate in the process. president clinton is the big outlier here if you will recall. because he didn't lose anything in the second midterm. winning five house seats for the party. staying even in the senate and then president bush was hammered. republicans lost 30 seats in the house, 6 in the senate and more importantly control of the both houses were gone from the republicans. a couple things to note here. the 1998 election, of course, under president clinton marked the only time a sitting two-term president saw gains in the second midterm in the modern era. in addition, two-term presidents typically have a bad midterm and one not so bad. truman's party was much worse in '46 than it was in '50. reagan s

governor jay nixon nixon is a democratic governor dealing with a republican controlled state legislature and as such yes a deal with really bad ideas fairly often the latest being a proposal by republican state legislators to allow teachers in missouri to carry handguns and the schools on monday governor nixon flat out rejected the idea saying quote i have serious concerns about recently introduced legislation that proposes not only to arm teachers but to do so by taking away the authority of local school districts to keep guns out of classrooms this legislation would put our children at risk and limit the ability of local school districts to keep their schools safe and close now recognizing someone for saying arming teachers is a bad idea maybe setting the bar low for good behavior but considering that republican governors like rick perry in texas and bob mcdonnell in virginia support doing exactly that arming teachers and we should give props to a sane governor in a nation increasingly being taken over by insane governors. now the bat dick armey according to a new report by the washing

. >> that was nixon's dog. >> but remember checkers was given to nixon by -- that was the whole scandal. we're both dating ourselves. >> i wish i could date myself. (laughter) again, i'm paying a lot more attention to me than i dog is. cats war war worshipped by ancient egyptians. does anybody worship dogs? >> new yorkers worship their dogs. the particular status of the new york city dog who is pampered but also the same time whose owner feels guilty about having their dog in new york city. right? i mean, it's an extraordinarily -- this relationship defined by guilt >> i think one of the most extraordinary things, the most unique things about dog in new york is that this is one of the few places in the world where humans also poop on the sidewalk. (laughter) >> yes, there is. >> stephen: they fit in. (laughter) well on that note, malcolm gladwell, thank you so much for joining me. "the "new yorker" book of dogs." be a good boy and go fetch one. we'll be righck.. (cheers and applause) >> stephen: welcome back, everybody. now for your yuletide enjoyment the new host from live at lincoln c