The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – King Richard: Nixon and Watergate–An American Tragedy by Michael Dobbs

Episode Date: June 27, 2021

King Richard: Nixon and Watergate--An American Tragedy by Michael Dobbs From the best-selling author of One Minute to Midnight: a riveting account of the crucial days, hours, and moments when the Watergate conspiracy consumed, and ultimately toppled, a president. In January 1973, Richard Nixon had just been inaugurated after winning re-election in a historic landslide. He enjoyed an almost 70 percent approval rating. But by April 1973, his presidency had fallen apart as the Watergate scandal metastasized into what White House counsel John Dean called “a full-blown cancer.” King Richard is the intimate, utterly absorbing narrative of the tension-packed hundred days when the Watergate conspiracy unraveled as the burglars and their handlers turned on one another, exposing the crimes of a vengeful president. Drawing on thousands of hours of newly-released taped recordings, Michael Dobbs takes us into the heart of the conspiracy, recreating these traumatic events in cinematic detail. He captures the growing paranoia of the principal players and their desperate attempts to deflect blame as the noose tightens around them. We eavesdrop on Nixon plotting with his aides, raging at his enemies, while also finding time for affectionate moments with his family. The result is an unprecedentedly vivid, close-up portrait of a president facing his greatest crisis. Central to the spellbinding drama is the tortured personality of Nixon himself, a man whose strengths, particularly his determination to win at all costs, become his fatal flaws. Rising from poverty to become the most powerful man in the world, he commits terrible errors of judgment that lead to his public disgrace. He makes himself—and then destroys himself. Structured like a classical tragedy with a uniquely American twist, King Richard is an epic, deeply human story of ambition, power, and betrayal.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast.

We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thank you for being here. Go see us on goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss. You can also see us on youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss. You can also see us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. There's like a million groups, Instagram, all that sort of stuff. Go check out all those wonderful things we have going on there, and you can subscribe to them if you like. Go see us in the new Spotify green room that just got launched today. We'll hopefully be doing some podcasting over there.

And of course, the Chris Foss Show is syndicated on Spotify. How about them apples? Anyway, we have a great guest who's on the show with us today. He's written a brilliant book called King Richard, Nixon and Watergate, An American Tragedy. It's just out May 25th, 2021.

His name is Michael Dobbs, and he's written several books. And we're excited to have him with us today on the show to tell us about this great home that he's built or he's written. It's huge. It's just huge. It's like almost 400 pages. It's crazy. We're going to be talking to him. Michael Dobbs was born and educated in Britainain but he's now a u.s citizen

we don't hold that against him he was a longtime reporter for the washington post covering the collapse of communism as a foreign correspondent he has taught at a leading american universities including princeton the university of michigan and georgetown his previous books include the best-selling one minute to Midnight on the Cuba Missile Crisis, which is part of an acclaimed Cold War trilogy. He lives outside of Washington, D.C. Welcome to the show, Michael. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Good to be with you. There you go. You like how we were U.S. citizens holding the U.S. citizen against you? I thought you meant being a Brit. No, we love Brits. We love Brits. It's just,

why would anyone want to come here and be here? I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, I'm just kidding. The jokes aside. So Michael, you've written this wonderful book. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the internet. So I'm on Twitter at Michael Dobbs, quite easy to remember. And I have a website, michaeldobbsbooks.com. And I'm also on Facebook, but I've forgotten the handle there. But Twitter and my website are probably the best ways to reach me. There you go. There you go. What motivates you to write this book on Richard Nixon? It seems like he was pretty boring. Nothing really happened there to see. Not a lot going on with that guy. Things happened. I should correct you. But

I was a reporter for many years, for almost 30 years at the Washington Post. And as a reporter, you're on the outside and you're trying to look in and figure out what's happening in all these places that you shouldn't be, including the White House. Actually, I was a long time in Russia. So I was trying to figure out what was happening inside the Kremlin. And this is really an opportunity for somebody who's a lifelong outsider to see how things are from the inside. There's going to be no presidency

that is as well documented as the Nixon presidency. And thanks to his tapes and various other sources, you can get into those rooms and follow the president at the moment of his greatest crisis, when his presidency is falling apart. It's absolutely unique in American history. It's never going to be repeated, in the sense that we're never going to get this close up to a president, as intimate with a president as we are able to with Richard Nixon, thanks to his tapes. Yeah, he ruined the whole taping thing for presidents, didn't he?

It's what Hitler did with that mustache, ruined it for everyone. I mean, that's why this is unique, because no president is ever going to tape himself the way Nixon did. Through his tapes, as he put it, gave his enemies the sword, which they later used to topple him from his throne or to kill him. And no president is ever going to take that risk again. So we're never going to get this kind of insight into the life of a president as we have with Nixon. Give us an overall arcing view of the book. What are the details? What segment of time did you cover, etc.? It's about Watergate, but it's of 1972. And by January of 73,

Nixon felt that he had pretty much put Watergate behind him. And there'd been investigative pieces in the Washington Post and so on, but the leads were running out. And he had a 67% approval rating when he was inaugurated president for the second time in January of 1973. Within 100 days, his presidency falls apart. And this very disciplined group of people, whipped into shape by the chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, begin, as Nixon puts it, all pissing on each other and eventually pissing on the president. So it's a very dramatic period. And that's the one that I wanted to examine. It's a pretty interesting story. We had Jill Weinbanks on the show. She talked about being a Watergate prosecutor during that thing. So you mostly cover that time period of the Watergate

break-in and investigation. Is that correct? I just want to make sure I nailed that. In the book, actually, the first scene in the book is the night of Nixon's second inauguration. A few hours before the second inauguration, he can't get to sleep. It's one o'clock in the morning, and he calls his hatchet man, Chuck Colson, and talks about all the things they're going to do in the second term,

including stick it to the Washington Post and talk about driving down the share price of the Washington Post. So the actual action in the book takes place between January the 20th, 1973. And most of the action leads up to April the 30th, when he has to sacrifice his two closest aides. But then I actually end the book with the revelation about the existence of this taping system and Nixon making what, in retrospect, from his point of view, is the fatal mistake of not destroying those tapes. This is the psychodrama of his presidency, that he doesn't destroy the tapes,

and then after that there's a kind of political struggle for control of the tapes, a legal constitutional struggle. But I'm interested in these few months leading up to the revelation about the tapes, which is really the heart of the psychodrama of Nixon's presidency unraveling. And I imagine you knew about the enemies list where the Washington Post was on it. We had Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan on the show to talk about Trump on trial. And it was right after Trump had said that they were making dossiers on the Washington Post reporters. And now we know that they went even further and the Justice Department started getting into people's emails and phones and different things. What do you think about how crazy that is? Marx said that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. This is Karl Marx, not Groucho Marx.

But in any event, Watergate is the model for all subsequent scandals, of course. And you can find echoes of Watergate in any scandal these days, including the various scandals of the Trump administration. With everything you found, did you go through a lot of the tapes or the whole tapes? Or I don't even know. Can anyone go through all the tapes in a lifetime? Some of the tapes are more easy to decipher and understand than others. There's some that you'd have to spend many dozens of hours trying to just decipher them. So the National Archives has done a great job in indexing the tapes and pointing out which bits are interesting, which bits are less interesting,

so you can zero in on the bits that are really interesting. The telephone conversations, late at night, Nixon would retire to a room that was called the Lincoln Sitting Room, which is in the corner of the White House on the second floor in the residence. And it was his favorite room in the White House. And he would telephone all his cronies. And those phone conversations are really very easy to follow. That was one of the best sources. But actually, it's not just the tapes, and not just Nixon's

tapes, because as the whole thing fell apart, everybody started taping each other. And that's one of the symptoms of this administration in crisis. But then there's also various diaries. The chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, kept diaries. There were multiple investigations. Nixon kept a diary. So it's multiple sources. So you wrote the book in four different, or hold on, yeah, four or five, four different acts. I'm still working on Roman numerolettos. Hubris, crisis, catastrophe, and catharsis. Let's start with hubris. What were some of the things that you found in your book under the chapter on hubris? This is a kind of pattern of a Greek tragedy or a Shakespearean tragedy.

And the allusion in the title, King Richard, is obviously to Shakespearean tragedy, King Lear. Shakespeare actually wrote several plays with the title Richard. I see what you did now. This period is a kind of, it's not exactly the same as a Greek tragedy. I say this is an American drama or an American tragedy, not a Shakespearean one. But at any rate, there's some parallels. But anyway, it begins with hubris. And by that, Nixon, at the top of his game, feeling supremely self-confident, everybody congratulating each other on what they're going to do in the second term, how they're going to stick it to their enemies. And generally,

pride, hubris is the Greek word for pride, before a fall. That's what I just tried to describe in that first section of the book. Yeah, I love that. I love how you base, I didn't even put together the i just like king richard i'm like what a great title and i didn't put together the acts but yeah that now that makes sense it is a tragedy an american tragedy if i just just explain the title uh a little more because it alludes to these shakespearean tragedies but also n's mother, who he came from a struggling Quaker family out in California. She named her three of her four boys after the kings of England. And she deliberately named after one of the most well-known kings of England,

King Richard I, the Lionheart. He was called the Crusader King who went off to fight crusades in the Holy Land. So it's also got an allusion to the name that Nixon was given at his birth. Oh, wow. There you go. That's wild, man. I'm learning all sorts of new stuff, and it's just in the title of your book. And now it's shaped. So they get into this. What are some of the things?

When do they really start running into problems in that second term? I think the turning point actually happens in the courtroom of Judge John Sharika, the Watergate burglars, a number of Cubans and their American handlers, including Gordon Liddy and a man called James McCord, both of whom had worked at the CIA. James McCord had worked at the CIA, Gordon Liddy at the FBI. And anyway, Shirika, the judge, puts pressure on the defendants to start telling him the truth. He doesn't believe their story, that they just happened to think it was a good idea to break into the Watergate. And perjury is committed in the trial. And Jeb Magruder, who's at the committee to re-elect the president, one of Nixon's aides, he denies having anything to do with it when,

in fact, he authorized the burglary. So when James McCord hears this in open Magruder line, he thinks to himself, why should I take the fall for what we've been ordered to do? So he writes a letter to the judge and says perjury was committed in this trial. And then he later gives the names of the people who committed perjury. Wow. So that is the moment when this whole conspiracy begins to fall apart and they all start turning on each other. And this is in February, March of 1973. And that really triggers the later betrayals of people like John Dean, and Jim Magruder himself,

who go to the prosecutors in an effort to save their own skin, and start informing on everybody else. It all breaks apart. It's really a study in how a small, very cohesive group, they can all start turning on each other. And I guess you could draw a parallel with after, we'll see if it happens after January 6th, perhaps it will happen, perhaps it won't happen. Yeah, this is interesting when you look at the Trump administration, how they use pardons as a way to keep people from turning on him. Different other things, God knows what sort of dirty business deals or Cayman Island, Virgin Island, shell companies or packed away monies put away there for some people. But certainly a lot of people got off and got away with a lot of stuff, which is very different than

the Nixon thing where everyone turned on him. I'll never forget seeing John Dean sitting there at the congressional hearings and he starts talking about the enemies list and the tapes i think someone else talks about the tapes don't they yeah yeah a man called alexander butterfield who was one of the top aides he reveals the taping system and it's just it's just like bombs dropping on cambodia's moment you're just like wow man what a seminal moment in US history. So take us into the next few chapters as we go through the book. Okay, I think after the hubris, which basically depicts Nixon at the height of his power, and thinking he's put Watergate behind him, and planning all these things he's going to do to get

his own back at the various enemies he has. Then you have the turning point, which I call crisis, which stems from this moment when James McCord writes a letter to the judge saying that perjury has been committed. And then you see immediately they're all turning on each other. Another one attempts to blackmail the White House, says Howard Hunt, says that unless you pay me $125,000, I think, by the close of business, I might tell all to the prosecutors. And they're trying to get out of this terrible situation. So that's what that section of the book describes. And then the next section, as in Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, I call catastrophe, which is when the whole thing falls apart and Nixon comes to realize that he has to sacrifice his closest aides. Now, there's a difference between Nixon and Trump. Trump went through four chiefs of staff in four years and didn't seem to have any trouble firing people. Nixon, you can, by getting inside the room, as I was able to with the tapes, you can see how much

Nixon suffers and the pain it causes him to sacrifice his aides, particularly Bob Haldeman. His chief of staff is being closer to him than anyone else. In fact, there's a tape after Haldeman's resignation in which Nixon is talking to Haldeman from the Lincoln sitting room. And he says, I hope he talks about how terribly painful it was for him. And then he says, I love you like my brother. And that, if you know what happened to Nixon, two of Nixon's brothers died of tuberculosis when Nixon was a very young man. And so I think at that moment, Nixon is experiencing a degree of pain comparable to the loss of his favorite brother to tuberculosis when he was just a young man. It really brings it home.

But Nixon, at one point, he goes up to Camp David. He says that he had this habit of kneeling down by the side of his bed every night. And one night he kneels down and prays that he won't wake up in the morning. Wow. It's interesting he had that to draw from, and that made it more painful for him in what he had to do. He was a really, I don't want to say emotionally complex, or emotionally simple. I think that's a fair description. He's a very complicated and contradictory person. You know, I mean, there are many things that we criticize Nixon for, and obviously he committed, you know,

terrible mistakes, including, you know, what were later considered to be criminal actions. But there's also another side to Nixon and just the sheer resilience of the man, the way he sort of multiple times in his career picked himself up. I mean, he wasn't born on third base. He struggled for everything that he achieved in life. And then he proceeded to throw it away. So he both made himself and then he destroyed himself. Yeah. And that's an interesting line right there if you watch the pictures of a man you see who's tortured or seems to be tortured like you see the pictures of him i think it came from the secret service where he would go and walk on the beach out in whittier and and he couldn't take his suit off he would barely take his socks off i think you just think of that and you're just like, what the hell kind of person

does that? Well, he was a very restless, very awkward person. One thing, he's a bit of a klutz technologically. So one of the reasons he installed his taping system or the difference with his taping system and other presidents had taping systems. Nixon's taping system didn't have an on-off switch. It started automatically when Nixon entered a room. And that was done because Nixon was such a technical klutz that they didn't trust him and he didn't trust himself to turn the recording machine on. So it went on automatically. So it was this kind of diabolical machine that recorded absolutely everything. And he was a football player in his youth at college. He wasn't particularly athletic, but he, and he was the kind of joke. He became the team mascot because he wasn't actually very good at playing football, but he did have one quality,

which he, whenever he was knocked down, he would pick himself up again. That's the sort of guy, the guy he was. Yeah, it was really interesting. He had trouble in marriage, drinking at the end there. I think he was drinking and wasn't he taking pills too sometimes? I don't remember. Yeah, he would take pills for insomnia. He suffered from insomnia.

And I don't think he was an alcoholic. He drank to relieve himself of the pressures of the day and also to get to sleep partly because he would get so tensed up during the day that he would have to have a few drinks in the evening to get to sleep and it didn't take i don't think he would probably he did drink excessively but he didn't you can hear him slurring his words on some of these tapes it didn't actually take a large number of drinks for him to start slurring his words because he was also taking various pills.

So the interaction of the pills and the alcohol caused him to sound worse than he was. But there were a couple of occasions when his aides were worried about him because he was obviously, yeah, he had too much to drink. Walking around talking to portraits of Abraham Lincoln in Washington, and I think the chief of staffs had to say, stand down if Nixon calls in a Cambodian bombing of nuclear proportions. Crazy stuff. What else can we tease out about the book to readers?

I try to tell the book from the inside. Lots of books written about Watergate and Nixon. And one of the most famous books about Watergate is All the President's Men, which was made into a movie, obviously, but by my former colleagues at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Bernstein. But they're very talented journalists, but they're telling the story from the outside. They're telling the story of their investigation of Watergate. And it's a big difference between being able to be telling the story and understanding the story from the outside and understanding it from the inside.

And we're also, Bob Woodward's gone on to write bestselling books about other American presidencies, working one on Trump at the moment. But they're all based on after-the-fact interviews with the participants. And there's a big difference between that and actually being able to be a fly on the wall and listen in and follow the president as he moves around the White House, hour by hour and day by day, which is what I've been able to do in this book. And actually, it's not just the jacket is rather bleak and somber. And the tragedy in the title gives it a sort of sense of being a very heavy book. But there are lots of humorous moments in it. And I wouldn't want people to take away the idea that this is just a heavy, serious book. The USA Today described it as a rollicking, good beach read.

And I took that as a compliment. Let's go to the beach and read an impeachment book. It definitely was interesting, his life and how this whole thing went down. It was an interesting tragedy. Looking back on it, him and the Trump administration, maybe he wasn't that bad of a guy. What do you think? Certainly he, Nixon, I think comes off well from the comparison with Trump. And I think Nixon was within the mainstream of American presidents. I think for all his crimes and so on, I think he was basically, you can identify him as in the line

of American presidents before and after. And for example, the 1960 election, which he lost to John F. Kennedy, was a very tight, closely fought election, much closer than the last election. But Nixon didn't contest the result of that election. He accepted the result. He didn't want to be seen as a sore loser. He thought he'd been cheated, but he didn't publicly contest it. I think that's, in a way, sums up the difference between Nixon and Trump, despite some similarities between them. And at least Nixon respected our Constitution to a large part where when the time came, he resigned. It was a peaceful transfer of power in 1974. And of course, he was upset about

leaving and it wounded him deeply, but he stepped down fighting it. Yeah. It's interesting to watch the David Frost interviews with nixon and see him still struggling with it and still having an issue especially the one where they don't censor out a swearing so it was really interesting do you think in your research and writing the book what if nixon had burned the tapes because i think at one point doesn't he make a comment about how i should have burned them or i i gave you thought um you mentioned alexander butterfield who was the aid who revealed the existence of the tapes in to congress and that the tapes had the ability to settle the question of who was telling the truth was it john dean and nixon's critics or was it nixon and without the tapes it would have been

impossible to settle that question 100 so nixon did have the opportunity, and Nixon heard about this, he was in hospital in actually where I live in Bethesda, Maryland, in the Naval Hospital here, the same place where Trump was taken for with COVID. And Nixon had this very bad bout of pneumonia. And he had to decide, you know, whether to burn the tapes or not. And some of his aides were telling him to burn the tapes and or destroy the tapes. And Nixon decided in the end to keep the tapes because he thought the tapes could be his ally, use them selectively to disprove the claims of his critics. But he, so instead of burning them, he kept them. And obviously, from his point of view, that was a fatal error.

I think that if he had destroyed the tapes, there would have been a big scandal and perhaps a crisis, but he would not have been forced to resign the presidency. Yeah, he would have survived. I have a wonder if you could sit, sometimes I want to sit in a man's head and think what he thinks. I wonder if you could sit in Nixon's head and for, I don't know, what, 20 or 30 years or 40 years he wandered in the desert after that and his home if he regretted that like i should have burned them damn tapes sure i think he did yeah i think i would have too i think any man would have they would have said hey what's the worst they could what's the worst that could happen if you burn the tapes he would have to resign right did that anyway so yeah i didn't think he i think the advice he was given was that it would be bad and that he would certainly

be attacked violently but or viciously but he would get through it yeah no proof no burner proof so there you go do you cover that uh missing part in the tapes at all where is that a race moment or yeah the famous 17 minute gap. That was right at the beginning. That was soon after Watergate when Nixon comes back to the White House and has a conversation with Haldeman about Watergate and somehow 17 minutes are missing. Probably Nixon clumsily erased that probably intentionally or he's probably listening to them and he just didn't like this. So he started rather ham-fistedly pressing the record button multiple times, or his secretary, Rosemary Woods, but I think it's more likely Nixon himself. But on the other hand, I don't think that

even if we had that 17 minutes, it would really change our view of Watergate. Yeah. Because there's, first of all, Haldeman was keeping notes of that conversation, and there's certainly incriminating things on it, but nothing that we don't know from other tapes, other sources. It's really the cover-up that gets him. If you were to just shut off the taping system when Watergate broke and the burglars got caught, you might have had a chance, maybe. I don't know.

Well, curious thing is that Nixon keeps on telling his people around, it's the cover-up. And you have to be, he had, his political career had been founded on his investigation of a Soviet spy in the State Department called Alger Hiss. And the State Department and the Truman administration covered this up, or they attempted to cover it up. And Nixon kept on telling his aides, it's the cover up that hurts you, not the original crime. And so he was well aware of that, but he didn't apply it to himself. Now, there was a reason why they had to cover up because Watergate was not just a solitary crime. It was a whole web of other crimes that were associated with Watergate, including the break into the psychiatrist's office of the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg. And Nixon could have shifted the blame on Watergate to other people.

That's quite possible. But the problem was, A, he was running for re-election and he didn't want to jeopardize his re-election chances. And B, he feared that if he allowed people to tell the truth on Watergate, it would cover up, it would unravel these other crimes, which had been committed by the same gang that broke into the Watergate. The same, very same people had carried out other crimes and break-ins, including the break-in to the Daniel Ellsberg psychiatrist. So it was a can of worms, basically, that Nixon didn't want to open.

Yeah, it's the cover of the Gitche. It is really like a tragedy. I think you said a Greek tragedy or a Shakespearean tragedy. It really is when you think about it from all its aspects. Well, yeah, it's many sort of, it's difficult to explain because at the time, everybody was on the edge of the seats with all the revelations that tumbled out of the congressional investigations and so on. And there were rabbit holes that were endlessly fascinating to people at the time. I mean, there's a lot of it that is of less interest these days. And some of it is really complex. Although I wrote almost 400

pages, I've had to simplify a lot of it. And I've had to focus on the main actor, which is Nixon himself and the psychodrama of Nixon and the the people are closest to him and i haven't gone down absolutely every single watergate rabbit hole tempting as though that is yeah you know we talked a second ago about the the reach of the secretary and we had jill weinbanks on it she was the one who questioned the secretary on how she could reach the thing and i forget what they call it there was a term they came up with. Her name was Mary Rose Woods. And she was trying to explain how she could have destroyed part of the tape by taking a phone call and putting her foot on the record button. And in order to do this, they asked her to demonstrate it.

And perhaps you can get the photograph, you can show me. But she had to completely stretch from one end of the room to the other. Completely implausible. So you think from your research, he was the one who erased those 17 minutes then? I don't know. But I it either she did it on his instructions because she was very loyal to him or he did it himself but the later investigation because they tried to recover that gap and it showed that the record button hadn't just been pressed once it'd been pressed multiple times over the course of the 17 minutes. So it was as though somebody who's not very technologically competent was, and maybe drinking and taking pills was, you know,

multiple trying times hitting the record button. And that just sounds more like Nixon to me than it does. Yeah. She was like really good it. She's used to taking that notation. Did Nixon go back through the tapes before he turned them on over to the SCOTUS over the SCOTUS decision? Yeah, he went through some of the

tapes. In fact, there's a hilarious tape of Nixon trying to listen to all the other tapes and he's saying this is the hardest work that he's ever done in his life, trying to figure out who's talking on these tapes. And he calls up Bob Haldeman later and says, Hugh, I've been listening to these tapes for eight hours

and I now have to go and have a drink because this is terrible, listening to all these tapes. When you commit so many crimes, you're not sure which tape has your crimes on them. I think that's maybe the lesson here. Well, only listen to a few of the tapes because this is the paradox here that he was thinking about listening to all these tapes in his retirement to write his memoirs. But had he tried to do that, he found the tapes, the same problem that we have, historians and researchers, that the tapes are really difficult to listen to.

When I lived in Whittier, I always thought about maybe going over to, I think his library's in Whittier. There's libraries in Yorba Linda, the high school, the college is in Whittier, Whittier college. Okay.

I always pass some signs that say it's over here. So yeah, that's where he went to college, actually not high school college in Whittier, but he lived in Whittier before. I guess he also went to college. Actually, not high school, college in Whittier. But he lived in Whittier before. I guess he also went to high school there. But he went to college. That was where he was on the football team.

And I always thought about going by his place, but I'm like, nah, he's a really awful president. But now after this last one, I'll probably go by and pay my respects. You mean Yorba Linda? Yeah. Well, the most interesting thing about Yorba Linda is Nixon's birthplace. And his father failed in practically everything he did. Before becoming a failed grocer,

he was a failed lemon farmer, citrus farmer. But he built, the story is that he built the house where Nixon was born out of a kit, out of a mail order kit. So he hammered this house together. And you can still go and visit the house, which gives a very, it's a very good experience to, if you want to understand the world that Nixon came from. Yeah, it really is.

It's a different world than we have now. My grandfather built his house with his kids and helped them build their house. I don't know if it was off a kit, but they definitely built it. And you were just like, seriously, you guys are, you know, me, I'm just sitting here eating chips and playing video games. So that's what I'm doing with my time. Michael, is there anything else we should tease out about the book to get people who want to pick it up? I would try to say that it's, it's not a heavy lift. I've tried to tell it like a novel. In fact, I've written a number of history books, and I try to use the techniques of fiction to apply them to writing nonfiction. And that means there's a lot of dialogue in the book, which is drawn from the tapes. There's a lot of detail in the book describing what it's like to be in the White House

to give you this, to situate the reader in the White House. So it's rather like, it's more like reading a novel than opposed to reading a book of serious history or nonfiction, although I hope it's serious. And the difference between fiction and this book is that everything in the book is based on fact, and not just based on fact, is fact. There's a lot of foot end notes in the back where you can look up every single conversation or quote from the book. But I've tried to make it entertaining and a light read. And that's why when the USA Today referred to it as a beach read, I took that as a compliment. So think of it when you go out to the beach, might think about picking this book up. There you go. And it's got a lot of great

photos in it too, and pictures that I had never seen before. I thought I'd seen a lot of pictures of Nixon, but a lot of descriptive photos that you have in the book that I was like, wow, I've never seen that one and that one. So that was pretty cool to find in the book. Yeah, actually, the Nixon Library was closed this year because of the pandemic, which was a terrible blow to people conducting historical research. But fortunately, their entire photo archive, they had put it up digitally. You can't just go online and get it. But with the help of archivists, I was able to get access to their entire photo archive and published some of those photos in the book. That's awesome.

This has been wonderfully insightful. Were you surprised that Liddy went all the way to his deathbed? He never recanted anything. He went all the way. He deathbed. He never recanted anything. He went all the way. He didn't recant, but he wrote an excellent book about Watergate. It's called Will. And although my politics are completely different from Liddy's, and Liddy, in a way, is a precursor to the people who broke into the capital on 9-11,

they wanted to blow up the system in order to save it, as Liddy thought. He wrote an excellent book, very outrageously frank and entertaining, which really gives you an insight into his mindset and why he acted as he did. I actually wrote an obituary of Gordon Liddy for the Washington Post, which appeared after his death. Oh, wow. I mean, he's a, whatever else he is, he's an all-American original and a very interesting character. The players in this thing were interesting. Richard Nixon reminds me a lot of my father.

My father was a bit of a narcissist. I don't know if Richard Nixon, was Richard Nixon a narcissist in some ways? I think anybody who makes it all the way up to the presidency, with the possible exception of Gerald Ford and Harry Truman, who were accidental presidents, they didn't campaign for the presidency. But anybody who's got that sort of ambition and drive and belief in themselves to become president, there must be a streak of narcissism in them. Yeah. Yeah. And it was hard for my dad to admit failure, even at the smallest level. At one point,

I asked him, tell me that you turned right today instead of turn left, or that you did something wrong, just in the simplest format, and he couldn't. And I saw a lot of that when I watched Nixon in the frost tapes, where just the struggle of watching Nixon go through trying to reconcile it or give his version or justify his position. And so just watching the man, and I think you framed it really beautifully as a tragedy, as a play, because that's really what it is when you look at him. He's a very complex man. He has a very complex life. He reaches the point of the presidency and he almost seems more unhappy than what most people should be when they get there. I don't know.

Nixon himself said, actually, after his re-election victory in 1972, he felt rather, he didn't feel happy. He felt disorientated. Once he'd achieved his lifelong goal, then he became restless. And so he talks about that in his own memoirs. He was always restless. He never quite was happy with his life. And then for him, the whole thing was the struggle to get wherever he was getting. And once he had achieved it, then he begins starting to make mistakes. And that's, I think Watergate is symptomatic of that. And when you want something so bad bad you look at the the kennedy election in some ways maybe was stolen from him you hear of all the little

stories of the games being played at voting booths and different things and who knows so many losses for him where he like you say he would come back but then he finally gets there and gets what he's been after for all these years and it really really is American tragedy and American story. I think I've always just, I've always just looked at the man and thought, what would it be like to be him, to be inside of his head? And you make the monumental error of losing that thing that you've been driven for, what was it? Maybe 60, 70 years or 50. Hold on. He's not. Whenever he was, I was looking at the Alger Hiss picture of 48. He's been chasing it for decades. And then he finally gets it and blows it.

And you just, wow, man. But it really is. But I think there's, I say right at the end of the book, in a kind of afterword, that it's not your classic Shakespearean tragedy because at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, the hero or the tragic hero always dies.

And Nixon, he did die eventually, of course, but he doesn't die at the end of the story. He reinvents himself for one last time. He reinvents his post-presidency and fights back. So this is a kind of, it's got an American twist to it. It's not a Greek tragedy. It's an American tragedy or an American drama in which the hero is constantly reinventing himself. It's a bit like The Great Gatsby or something like that. There you go. There you go. It's been wonderful to have you on,

Michael, to talk about your book. Thank you very much for spending some time with us today. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, sir. It's been wonderful. And of course, your other books as well. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs and learn more about you. So my website is michaeldobbsbooks.com. And on Twitter, you can find me at Michael Dobbs, all one word, and hope to talk to you. There you go. We'll look forward to your next book, which will be about, I don't know. Are you working on one yet? I've got some ideas but haven't started yet. There you go. You could do

King Trump. No, I'm just kidding. Do what you want. Enough people writing about Trump. We're supposed to have Woodward on for Rage, I think. We got the book sent to us and it just didn't come through. He doesn't need to tour a lot. I think at this point, he's just, I'll just go bark on CNN and be done. I don't know. that's the horrible bob woodward impression but we respect them and

yourself thanks for coming on the show it's my audience be sure to check out king richard nixon and watergate and american tragedy can just came out may 25th 21 so you can still be the first one on your block or book club to say you read it order it up to wherever fine bookstores you have in your area there or the big house on the a word.com you can order up there the chris faust show is also on the a word.com amazon.com you can find us on audible and and and amazon so i'm not sure why i'm kicking their tires but also you can find us on youtube.com for just chris faust you can find this everywhere on the internet facebook linkedin twitter all the groups we have over there as well search for the chris faust show goodreads.com groups we have over there as well. Search for The Chris Voss Show.

Goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss. Thanks so much for tuning in. Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time.