The New Yorker Radio Hour - Podcast Extra: The "Remarkable Parallels" Between Nixon and Trump

Episode Date: March 2, 2017

In 1987, Richard Nixon wrote to Donald Trump, expressing his optimism about Trump’s future political prospects. Was it a bad omen for Trump?   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is a special preview from the New Yorker Radio Hour. December 21, 1987. Dear Donald, I did not see the program, but Mrs. Nixon told me that you were great on the Donahue show. And as you can imagine, she is an expert on politics, and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office, you will be a winner. With warm regard sincerely, Richard Nixon. That's a letter from Richard Nixon. to Donald Trump that the new president said he was going to hang in the White House.

It's not hard to find parallels between the two men, particularly the hatred of the news media and the so-called elites. But maybe Nixon's blessing was not such a good omen for Trump, because the new administration right off the bat is engulfed by a scandal, inevitably nicknamed Russia Gate, that's reminding a lot of commentators of Nixon's Watergate. The New Yorkers Amy Davidson talked about those parallels recently with one of Nixon's inner circle. John Dean was the White House counsel who advised Nixon, but eventually testified against him in the Watergate hearings. Since then, Dean has written extensively about politics and the presidency. You've spent thousands of hours listening to and transcribing Nixon's secret White House recordings.

Do you hear the echoes now when you hear Trump? He talks about himself rhetorically, would like to talk about himself as Ronald Reagan's heir. But in terms of his language, his style, how much is he Nixon's heir? He is very much Nixon's heir. Like Nixon, you hear Trump speak in the third person. He hasn't started using, as Nixon did, the royal we. but he's approaching that. But he does talk about Trump as a persona that he refers to.

I guess I see it most in the fact they both look for their enemies and hold great resentment towards those they perceive as their enemies. I would have thought we all learned a lesson from Nixon having enemies list and things of that nature, but it seems not. We see it playing out with this presidency. What's the most corrosive part of being in a Nixonian environment? Is it the lies? Is it the problems with the rule of law?

Is it just the sense of enemies everywhere? In your book, you describe it as a moral abyss. When you're in an atmosphere like that, what gets to you? Well, at first when I went there and I decided to go to work for Nixote, I thought there was a new Nixon. And there was a new portrayal of Nixon. The old tricky dick had grown up and had matured into a statesman. When I got there, that seemed to be the case.

His presidency was so tightly run that other than a handful of people in his inner circle, even his White House staff didn't know him. I would go in with group sessions as opposed to when I had later one-on-ones. I realized he was acting. He was portraying the way he wanted to be seen and putting on a little show for the staff and a lot of theater. I hear that on the tapes also. When people talk about Nixon and Trump, they point to some similarities, vengefulness, signs of paranoia, a wounded resentment toward the elites. Are those parallels that resonate with you?

Very much so. What I see in Nixon versus Trump in the two personalities is they're clearly both authoritarian personalities. But it's a huge difference in the way they do it. Nixon did it behind closed doors. On a 10-point scale, I'd put Nixon maybe somewhere between 6 and 7, I'd put Trump at a 10. He is a poster boy for an authoritarian personality. This makes me think about a tweet that you posted recently about a story that the White House is denied, alleging that administration officials tried to get the FBI to push back on reports about Russian contacts.

You tweeted, I have expertise on this matter, pushback on an FBI investigation of the White House is better known as the cover-up. Tell us a little bit more about that, about that process, about how. a cover-up happens and how it turns into something that's often said to be worse than the crime. If there's any lesson from Watergate or from Iran-Contra or the Lewinsky affair, it is that if you don't have a problem, what you truly do is you say to the FBI or whomever, come in and talk to my staff. Hillary Clinton, that's what she did on Benghazi and on her email controversy about her server.

She made her people available and they all talked openly to the FBI and there was nothing there. That isn't what's happening here on questions about whether the Trump campaign had relationships with the Russians knowing they were trying to favor Trump in the election and hurt Hillary, or what happened in that interim between the election and the inauguration, where Flynn was dealing with the Russian ambassador. So if there's no problem with any of those, why not say to investigators begin investigating? You're not going to find anything. They're just not taking that position. And rather they're trying to knock down press reports that are getting the various whiffs of these investigations and putting them out there.

That's just not the way you – innocent people deal with these issues. I'm sorry. How about the whole – when a White House becomes consumed with the hunt for leakers, for who's talking to reporters, Give us a sense of just how unhealthy or healthy from your perspective that can be. It's unhealthy. It's, again, one of the lessons from Watergate is very clear. Nixon's problems emanated from his deep concern about leaks. They started early in his presidency.

They started right out of his National Security Council, similar to what's happening with Trump. Nixon was dealing with problems in Vietnam. There is an interesting parallel in that Nixon had been accused during the campaign by Lyndon Johnson and 68 of trying to interfere with Johnson's effort to settle the war in Vietnam. And indeed, just recently we found out that was true. He had, in fact. And that was something that he did a good job of covering up, at least during his lifetime. No one could ever cooperate it. But a historian recently found notes that Holloman had made when Nixon was giving instructions.

on these very things to block Johnson's efforts. Anyway. Do you see parallels between that idea of whether Nixon had contacts about the Paris negotiations and this whole question of members of the Trump administration having contacts with foreign governments before the election? It's a very, very remarkable parallel. Curious parallel. But Nixon successfully covered that up.

But the leak issue that we were talking about, the concern for it, Nixon went over the top. He called the FBI, just as Trump has done, and pressed them to start investigating. And he wanted surveillance of the potential leakers. Both the, he had something like, I think, a total ultimately of 17 wiretaps placed on reporters, and NSC staffers and even his own speechwriters that were suspect. So, essentially, they never found the leaker by doing all that and seldom do you. I don't think Sean Spicer is going to find by looking at people's cell phones whether they've called the press or not.

Right. But who knows? Let me ask you about Trump's comment the other day about the judge who blocked that executive order being a so-called judge. One of the real dramas of Watergate was whether President Nixon was going to treat certain judges like so-called judges or if he would concede to their authority. What if Nixon had ultimately kept defying? Well, that's a real serious what-if. If he had defied the Supreme Court, he clearly would have been impeached just for that.

But again, the court doesn't have the U.S. Army behind it, and the Congress doesn't either. So these are how you create very serious constitutional crises that can end a democracy. Now, I don't know about Trump. Here's a man who's been involved in litigation his entire business life. He has a sister who's a federal judge that is a good for. federal judge. And so he certainly knows the responsibilities and nature of being a federal judge, how particularly they can't defend themselves when they're attacked. So this is going to be a real test of Trump's personality and his governing. Frankly, I was a little encouraged that the fact

that the media did have an impact on him and forced him to remove General Flynn as his national Security Advisor. That was just a steady momentum and drumbeat by the Fourth Estate to keep those issues alive. And finally, he did what he had to do. And so he's showing a few soft spots. I wonder how crucial the press was in reigning in Nixon and what lessons we can draw from that when we're looking at the Trump presidency. Well, the press never cracked the Watergate story. They never really were in front of the investigation, and they wrote no stories that ever surprised us in the White House. They were way behind where the investigation was any given point. What they did do is they kept it on the front page.

They kept the pressure on the story, and they made it a big deal inside the Beltway. You make it sound like one of the roles of the press is to keep pushing until the president reveals who he is. I think that is one of their roles, yes. John Dean, thank you so much for speaking with us and sharing your experience. Pleasure. Thank you. John Dean, who served President Nixon as White House Council speaking with my colleague Amy Davidson. Dean's most recent book from 2014 is The Nixon Defense, What He Knew and When He Knew It.