The Ricochet Podcast - In the Room with Reagan and Nixon

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

Happy Inauguration Day! To celebrate, Peter and Steve sit down with speechwriter and presidential advisor Ken Khachigian to discuss his time working with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, as laid out in his newly published memoir, Behind Closed Doors. Going through his start in politics by landing a job under Pat Buchanan in the '68 campaign to drafting Reagan's first inaugural and serving as an advisor during key moments in the '80s, Ken shares a wealth of knowledge on the finer points of good statecraft. The guys also spend some time on the disaster in their beloved state of California and the prospects for national renewal under the new Trump administration. 

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Sale di mare. Sale di mare? Si, new Birra Moretti Sale di Mare. Well, hi everybody and welcome to a special bonus episode of the Ricochet Podcast. It's Steve Hayward sitting in James Lilac's host chair, joined today by Peter Robinson with a very special guest that we are delighted to have with us. Ken Kachigian is joining us for the whole hour of the show. Ken has a wonderful new memoir out I highly recommend called Behind Closed Doors, In the Room with Reagan and Nixon. And Ken started in politics way back in the 1960s. I'll get a couple of questions for him about how that went. Worked for Richard Nixon in the Nixon White House

and then followed Nixon out to California after his resignation in 1974, whereupon Ken went on to develop his own very successful law practice, which he kept going while being called back into service at crucial moments by President Reagan. And therein lies a great story. Ken, I want to say welcome to the Ricochet podcast. And I guess my opening question is this. One of the things I love about your memoir is that after all this time, it gives us some fresh perspective on some old questions. And in light of some recent events, it makes us think differently about some aspects of the Nixon years and the Reagan years. But I guess the first question is, what took you so long? I would have loved to have seen this from you a long time ago.

What made you finally decide that the time was now for your memoir of things? Steve, I get asked that a lot. And it's a really easy answer, and that is I had to make a living in the meantime. I had my law practice, and people forget that besides my law practice and writing speeches in the interim for the presidents, I ran campaigns out here in California for Governor Duke Magin and Wilson and Dan Lundgren. And I did two school choice campaigns out here in California and Carly Fiorina and Bob Dole's presidential campaign. So I was really busy with a lot of

other things. And I just didn't have time. And plus trying to put food on the table. And it was interesting. In my mind, I knew I had to write this book at some point because I had so much to talk about. And you've both written books, so you know what you have to do. You have to start with the first word. That blank page is that daunting thing in front of you that drives you crazy. What's that first word going to be and how are you going to open it up? And we were on a cruise off the coast of Italy and I got bored going into these villages or listening to somebody patter away about some ancient thing.

And I said, I'm going to stay on the boat and have a cappuccino and smoke a cigar. And I opened up a legal pad and I started writing. But basically, it made sense to wait. First of all, my memoir is rare because I wrote it. I didn't ghostwrite it. So many of my colleagues, Mike Deaver, Larry Speaks, Lynn Nofsiger, Ed Meese, and so many others, Jim Baker, they are ghostwritten. And mine is, I wrote it by myself. And so it took four and a half years of research. And one of the benefits of waiting is that I had all the other books and all the other years of passage. Plus, I had the oral histories that were done. So, the passage of time was a great benefit for this memoir.

And I had the Reagan archives were much more organized. Right. So, it's a much better book having waited. Right. Oh, I agree with that entirely. I think we want to go, I'll toss to Peter in a minute. I think I want to open and keep us in rough chronological order and ask you a couple of questions about the Nixon years.

I was, I'll put it this way, pleasantly surprised to read in your book that you were one of the, I guess the phrase that most people would use as one of the diehards defending Nixon to the last, and actually counseling him, like our friend Bruce Hershenson and some others, to resist resigning. And, you know, lately I have taken to the work, I think you cited him, of Jeff Shepard and a few others. We now look back on Watergate,

especially in light of the lawfare we've seen recently against President Trump, with a whole new perspective about Watergate. And what's your summation now of how we should think about Watergate? We had large parts of that story wrong all this time. For sure. And you cite Jeff Shepard, and Jeff has done some extraordinary, deep legal and academic research in the last 15 years, and more is going to come in a documentary he's done, but he has uncovered the corruption and that is not a loose word, how corrupt Judge Sirica was and how corrupt the special prosecutor Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski were, violating the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution, doing ex doing ex parte meetings with the prosecutors.

That is that the judge met separately with the prosecutors without defense counsel being present and rigging the appeals so that they went to the special courts of appeals so that none of Sirica's judgments would be overturned. And so a lot of the special prosecution was rigged in favor of the prosecution all through the process. So what's being uncovered is just extraordinary, Steve. And then one thing that's interesting that I want to write about here somewhere in the next month, and if I don't do it, somebody else should, is that the so-called Watergate cover-up is minuscule compared to the cover-up that was taking place over the last two or three years of a president whose mind was diminished. You had the Speaker of the House, the Majority Leader of the Senate, you had the Press Secretary of the president of the United States. You had the

secretary of the state. You had the national security advisor. All these people covering for a president with cognitive deficiency, holding a nuclear football in his hand, and he couldn't think straight. And that was a cover-up of monstrous capacity that dwarfed Watergate by huge degrees. Ken, I just have to come in here because there's a question that our viewers are going to want to have asked, and I'm going to ask it. Peggy Noonan put it in her column two, three weeks ago that she realized how the Democrats were justifying covering up for Biden. And it was because they all had it in their minds that we had done it first, covering up for Ronald Reagan. Address that, Ken, if you would.

That's insane. It is. There was no incapacity. There was no cognitive restriction on President Reagan. Look, I worked with him. Exactly. This is the point. You're an eyewitness.

This is why it's important to hear from you. I am an eyewitness. Yes. Even though I wasn't there full time, I came in at critical moments in 85 and 86 and 87 and 88. I was with him in 88 working on the convention speech that he delivered in New Orleans and worked with him intensely. He was on point throughout that whole process. And I write about it extensively in the penultimate chapter of my book about how he and Mrs. Reagan went back and forth about how the speech should look like and then how he edited it and i didn't

see any deficiency in his mind until four years later in 1992 was the first time i ever saw him lag and that's when the first time i i bumped into him at a fundraiser and it's the first time he didn't instantly recognize my face but that was four years after he left the presidency and two years before he recognized that he had alzheimer's well and right and after he'd taken a serious fall from a horse with i think gave him a concussion i just want i just wanted to bring this out because it's on people's minds and it is a matter of record eyewitness testimony that r Reagan had full cognitive capacity throughout his presidency to the last day. I just wanted to get that on the record from Ken.

Absolutely. Now, look, I had personal interaction with him. Peggy did not have the same kind of interaction with him that I did. That's one of the great myths is that Peggy had a bond with him. That she had a lot of interaction, that she had a special relationship with him. And look, she's a creative and good writer, but she did not have the same kind of relationship that I did. And I had, the times that I worked with him, I had very strong personal interaction with him. He and I had a special relationship. And that means that we worked closely together, we interacted closely together. That means I saw him close up and we edited back and forth.

So, I can attest to that personally. Well, I think, well, I want to hold that point for further elaboration. I want to ask one more revisionist question from the Nixon, that stems back to the Nixon years, and then turn Peter loose on you, and you two speechwriters can draw some things out. So it's important, I think you got your start with Nixon through Pat Buchanan and working for Pat Buchanan. And like the Watergate story, I look back now on Pat Buchanan and say, boy, hasn't he been vindicated in a lot of ways in the way American politics has gone, what people think about national identity questions, immigration, foreign policy to a very large extent, and whether or not you think that Trump

is an epigon of Buchanan or Buchananism, say a little bit about Pat Buchanan and whether you think my proposition that he's been vindicated here in recent years is correct. Pat recognized the new majority before there was a new majority. He wrote about this going back into the 70s and 80s. If you get into the archives and read Pat's memos from the Nixon administration written in the late 60s and early 70s, he recognized the rising Republican majority. Of course, this goes back to ancient political history that some of us remember when Dick Scammon and Ben Wattenberg wrote the book

The Real Majority, recognizing how the working men and women in America who were Democrats had risen up against the elitism of the Democratic Party. And Pat recognized this immediately and was writing memos to President Nixon about this. And then later on, as we were approaching the 72 campaign, was urging President Nixon to recognize this as well. And then later on, he started publishing books about this. And then, of course, he ran his campaign for president on these premises when he challenged George Bush for the presidency. So Pat has indeed been vindicated. pat was as i recognize in my book pat was my mentor in in politics and at the white house and i still recognize that to this day the man is absolutely brilliant by the way he's yes he is he's one of the most prolific uh writers um and and if you

ever want to be edited by pat anytime i put anything in front of him, the minute he saw it, he started editing it. It was sort of scary. Yeah. Ken, I'm trying to think how we can give a flavor for the book, which is a large piece of work. It's not some sort of slight memoir. It's a large, serious piece of work you quote from diaries, contemporaneous documents again and again. So, how do we give a flavor of that to our listeners in a conversation? And here's a question that might be a way of getting into it. I think of my own experience where I worked for George H.W. Bush first when he was vice president

and then for President Nixon. So, in my my mind i have this contrast between the two men that in some ways helped me to understand both of them better how do you think of richard nixon what are the ways in which nixon and reagan the substantive ways in which they differed and what did those two men nevertheless have in common they respected each other although they were such different kinds of men. Why? Well, they differed in the sense that Nixon was, every waking moment, he thought politically. Everything had a political equation to it.

And I don't think Reagan thought that way. Reagan, his political mind was more philosophical and was focused on the philosophy of politics and more as a political crusader. And Nixon thought more about the tactics and the strategy of politics. And because Nixon began as a congressional candidate and then as a Senate candidate and then had to defend himself against the establishment, the elite establishment, he had to fight and scrap his way through the political world. And then he campaigned across the country for more candidates. And so I think Nixon really engaged himself day to day more in that kind of political thinking, whereas Reagan didn't wake up in the morning thinking, you know, what some congressional district in Ohio would look like in the next campaign.

Let me put it another way. If you sat down with Nixon and started chatting about politics, he started telling you a story about Charlie Halleck in Indiana and some good story about him, or about what Carl Munt would do in South Dakota about treating some issue, or what Milton Young, how he campaign do in South Dakota about treating some issue, or what Milton Young, how he campaigned in North Dakota, or what Tom Dewey told him about some mistake he made the campaign, or then he'd start reflecting upon, you know, Ken, if I had put Thurston Morton in my ticket in 1960, I might have won the presidency. I don't think Reagan would ever think that way. You'd sit down with him and he'd say, you know, I really got bothered by the way they taxed me back

in when I was an actor in 1950s. And they got me into those 90% taxes. And I worked so hard and they took those taxes away from me. And then, you know, when I went on that speaking circuit, I was an emcee at a program where they were giving awards at a bake-off. It was the Pillsbury bake-off and who could provide the best recipe. And this lady won this award and they handed her a check for it was like something like ten thousand dollars and you know right off stage there was an irs agent waiting to collect the the tax money from her and then and he viewed it as somebody as as i'm taking away their all her incentive for having done something creative right so i don't know it's It's just minds thinking so differently, and yet, they were both great communicators, but they communicated in different ways as well. The two of you, I'll be very brief here. This is Ken's show, not mine.

But I'll tell a story that gets to your point about Reagan that I think the two of you will get a kick out of. I went to visit him down in the Fox Tower the year after he left office, and I knew I was going to see him that day, so I paid special attention to the newspaper. The LA Times had three anti-Reagan stories on the front page. Saw risk of impeachment, Meese says. Star Wars oversold, Cheney says. There was a third anti-Reagan headline. I get in there. Mr. President and Ronald Reagan, the first thing he says was, did you see the paper this morning? And I said, yes, sir, I did. I thought, braced myself. And he said, well, I just don't understand how the judge can decide

the outcome of a sporting event. And I thought, what the hell is he talking and he kept talking i realized he wasn't talking about the front page he was talking about the sporting page because a judge had just overruled had just awarded the america's cup to a cat they ruled the new zealand entry was illegal because it was a catamaran something like. He hadn't even looked at the front page. He didn't care. And he said, well, at least it wasn't a judge I appointed. That was him, right. That was Reagan. That was Reagan.

When he quit, he quit. So, Ken, here's what strikes me, old speech writer. Nixon and Reagan were both writers. Nixon was more obviously intellectual. This is one of the things that people don't know about Reagan, but that comes through in your book so well. He cared about the text. He worked hard on it. And I don't quite know how to put it, but I've always felt that no human being really knows what he thinks until he's put it in words himself. And both of these men, all their lives, they approached politics differently, but all their lives, they submitted themselves to the discipline of writing. They used us writers, of course, but they used us as extensions in some ways of their own minds.

And so, I always had the feeling, you would know this, I never even met Richard Nixon, and you knew Ronald Reagan far better than a junior guy like I ever would. But I always had the feeling that they respected each other as men who were standing on the ground, who had reached firm conclusions uh and that always struck me then the other thing that always struck me was that although they both moved in elite worlds and the republican party in those days still had an eastern establishment wing which of course you know in detail that tortured Richard Nixon, they both came from working backgrounds. And they understood that about each other too, I felt. Does that sound right to you?

You know, people don't understand how similar their backgrounds were. By the way, they both were rooted in the Midwest originally. Nixon's family originally came out from the Midwest and of course Reagan came out from the Midwest and they both came out from very sort of impoverished roots and both made their way out on their own And Nixon, as he said, you know, in law school, Nixon had an iron butt. He studied very hard and worked very hard. And he was very intellectual in that sense. And you're right. Both of them used their writers as extensions of themselves.

Nixon liked to work on his own speeches, and he edited heavily his own memoirs. He liked the nuance of words. He admired Reagan a lot for his ability to tell stories. And I mentioned that in the book quite a bit, and he told me that all the time. He says reagan is so good at telling stories kenny says look at reagan he's always observing about colors and about scenes and he's always looking at at things and and graphically that makes him such a good communicator and he that that's what how i learned about uh when i worked for Reagan, I learned a lot about how Nixon observed Reagan. And I think Nixon admired that of Reagan, and he wished he could do it as well as

Reagan, and he tried to do it. And what's interesting about both of them, by the way, they both neither one of them used teleprompters when they spoke. I hope you noticed that. In campaigns, Nixon spoke extemporaneously all the time. He never used teleprompters at all in his campaign. He didn't even speak from notes. Now, Reagan used notes, but he never used teleprompters. If you go back and look at Reagan's inaugural address in 1981, he didn't use a teleprompter. Mike Deaver talked him out of it. Oh, really?

Yeah. And what was Deaver getting at there? Deaver just knew he would be better at doing it? Deaver, I mentioned it in the book, and I said, I don't even know what Deaver was talking about. But Deaver said to him, he said, Governor, I think you lose yourself in the teleprompter. Now, I don't know what the hell he meant by that. But Deaver seemed to know Reagan. Yes.

And whatever he meant by you seem to lose yourself in the teleprompter. So Reagan agreed with that. And so he decided just to speak from his half sheets his famous half yes yes yeah if you watch his inaugural address uh he doesn't use a teleprompter and as a result uh he doesn't have that phony look about himself where his head bobbing and bobbing and bobbing back and forth like all the other presidents do now. If you watch Obama give a speech, his head goes bobs back and forth like crazy. It's weird.

Like you're watching a tennis match, practically. Yeah, you're watching a tennis match. Yeah, they use these teleprompters. And it's so obvious. And then you see the glass reflection. And if it's a bad day, the sun reflects off the teleprompter. Yeah. Now, Ken, I think you're being too modest in a couple of ways, or Peter hasn't done you full justice. I can criticize Peter instead. So, first of all, I mean, you already hinted at the

fact that, well, you mentioned most everybody else, cabinet members, they have their memoirs ghostwritten. I think that's virtually true of everybody, that yours is not. It's obviously an original work and quoting from your diary and so forth. And so, it has a style that's so engaging. But the second point is, it makes some real news. I mean, new news, as you might say these days. And especially on this question of Nixon. Now, I know that Nixon and Reagan knew each other. Reagan mentions in his diary several places, oh, Dick Nixon had a great idea, he told me, about arms control or some other thing. So, you knew they communicated with each other. What I did not know until your memoir is that you were, especially the campaign in 1980, the go-between between the two of them quite extensively.

And, of course, you do mention very candidly that that needed to be concealed a little bit because of all the political baggage of Nixon and it would be used to attack Reagan and so forth. But I think you should say a little more about that for listeners, because you don't find this, I don't think in any other accounts that I've read, how extensive was Nixon following it day by day and communicating with you, communicating through you to Reagan and vice versa? And how did that begin? Maybe that's a good way to start. How did that start?

Steve, you know what's fascinating about this? when Reagan was running for president because he and I sat down in San Clemente and we would watch the campaign. I was his political eyes and ears, so I would go in every day with all the clips and the background and watching television and tell them what was going on with the Reagan campaign. And I was in touch with David Keene and Marty Anderson and Lynn Offsager. They would tell me stories from the campaign.

And Nixon would look at Reagan and say, this was going right, this was going well, or he's making this mistake. But it was driving him nuts that he couldn't pick up the phone and call Reagan. He couldn't pick up the phone and call reagan he couldn't give him advice and nixon would have been was such a great strategist and that he he was dying to give reagan direct advice in that 76 campaign now not necessarily that he wanted him to beat ford or anything else but he was he he saw that reagan has such raw talent he wanted to mold him like a piece of clay and uh and he and he was frustrated and then when reagan uh put

schweiker on the ticket it just nixon brain exploded and what a stupid mistake that was. So I'm going back only to say that. So now 1980 rolls around and here it is. Nixon's protege, me, ends up on the campaign plane with Reagan. And Nixon's not stupid. He's, oh, here's a rare opportunity. I've got a mole in the rain and i can now give advice and so he's he starts with phone calls and then next thing you know he's got nick ruey who former nixon advanced man and now chief of staff to nixon he Nick calls me up and he says, look, I've got some memo.

He says, the old man or the boss, those days we called him the boss. He says, can you meet with me? We have this secret meeting. It's like a KGB agent meeting with the CIA in Kansas City. And I gave him a codeename, Mr. Hudson, and we meet two blocks away from the hotel because there's still a Watergate baggage with Nixon that we're worried about, and Nixon writes this long memo that for the first time I reveal in the book. So, we're going back from 76 to 80.

Now, Nixon can finally advise Reagan. And you know what he's advising him? Stick to the economy. And don't talk about foreign policy. And then he's giving advice about and then he does a second memo about how to do the debate with Jimmy Carter. And in the meantime, he's calling me in different places on the road. And this is so gratifying to Nixon at the time. Now, I don't know the extent to which Reagan took all the advice,

but this gave Nixon such gratification that he was, for now, he was back engaged in politics. And I did think at the end of the day, because the advice was going through Stu Spencer, and Stu, just to give you another little twist of history, Stu Spencer's dad was on the original committee of 100 that recruited Nixon to run for Congress in 1946. I never heard, oh, I had no idea that was Ken

Spencer right yeah yeah my dad knew Ken Spencer pretty well from many 100 that recruited so do respect that Nixon a lot and uh uh and so stew would take these memos and then give and give them to reagan i so i would give the memos to stew stew would give them to reagan so there's one other uh aspect where you're being too modest ken and and and peter also kind of picked up on it but I really want to make this explicit for listeners. It struck me as I was reading the book and also remembering from the history of the time and my own research over the years how often you were brought in by Reagan at key moments of crisis, like after the first debate in 84 when he performed badly, for certain other key speeches.

I'm not aware of many other presidents that had an outside advisor with their own private life and own life going on the way you did. And one of the things that becomes clear in the book, and as I say, you're too modest to boast about it, and I totally get that and respect it, but that you immediately had a bond and a great trust with Reagan and Nancy Reagan in particular. You know, you do mention in there. You're very candid about how times she was sharp with you, as she could be with everybody when she was mad about something going wrong, or she thought. But the subtext is very clear there that Reagan had you, maybe not a pedestal is exactly right, but how do you explain that? I mean, did you, were you conscious of this at the time how unusual this

was and what's your explanation for that i think my explanation for that is that it started with the ad campaign and it took a while for us to sort of create a relationship together. But I think he liked that by the end of the campaign, I was giving him good, I gave him some good lines. I was a good script writer. And he appreciated good script writers. And so by the end of the campaign, I had given him some good zingers.

And so he said, here, I've got a pretty good guy that knows how to give me some zingers. And then I had I had helped edit his last 30-minute speeches and gave him some good lines there. I was one person he was familiar with. I was a face that he knew. He was comfortable. I created a comfort zone. And then I worked with them, of course,

on the inaugural address and then the first few days. Then what I would ascribe it to Steve is that I didn't fight with him. I didn't argue with him about, Mr. President, no, no, I don't like the way you're phrasing this. Here's what you should say. Or, you know, this is what the way you should do it. I think there are a lot of people, and I know later in the presidency, a lot of his writers would try to tell him what to say or put policy in his head. I don't want to name names. Peter would be one of them, but no, I'm kidding.

Well, I think Tony Dolan was one that was always trying to make policy with this or would meet with him and try to, you know, and certainly Darman and Baker sort of implicitly or explicitly tried to make policy but i didn't argue with him i did what he wanted i i never thought i nobody elected me to anything so i worked with him and uh if i thought there was a way to make a phrase better i would suggest maybe we can do it this way, but I didn't fight with him because I thought he was a good writer. So, he felt comfortable. That made him comfortable. Right. I mean, one of the lines in your book that really jumps out at me was you're quoting Nancy

saying, Ronnie, Ken's idea is good. You should listen to him. I don't know how often she may have said that, but that strikes me as me as very you know where that came from it came from my education with nixon and i tell people i got my graduate i got my phd at the university of reagan but i got my bachelor's and master's at the college of richard nixon and you can't spend four and a half years in the nixon white house and four years in San Clemente with Nixon without learning good politics and good phraseology and good communications. And so what we were talking about in that particular occasion was an interview with Barbara Walters and how to shape a message. And during Watergate and dealing with the Vietnam War and dealing with all the controversies that we had during the Nixon administration, you learn how to shape a message. And so when we got into any situation where Reagan had to give an answer to a question, I think I was in a better position

than most people on his staff, because I had already had about six, seven, eight years of experience dealing with a lot of high-level troublesome situations than any of his other staff people. And that came from Nixon. How did you get, I about to ask i was about to say how did you handle nancy reagan that is the wrong way to phrase that question that is the wrong way to phrase that question um but how did you get did she make up her mind about you quickly that you were all right as long as he was happy with me she was she was happy with me got it it was always reflective of his relationship with me there were some exceptions she was not happy with me when i wouldn't come back full-time that was we were at camp david in june of of 1981 when i was called

back on a special situation after i left the white house and and i refused to leave my family to come back full time and she was angry because because because ronnie wanted me back and ronnie needed him needed me and he was unhappy with me but generally if the president was happy with me she she was happy with me. But if she thought that I wasn't serving him well, she would get unhappy. And there was that confrontation on Air Force One after the first debate, or just prior to the first debate, where she thought I wasn't serving him well. And she thought I was the blame. She went after me, even though it wasn't my fault. So we had a little tiff the blame was on jim baker not

me so it depended on the situation but this is also this is also very important for the record that an eyewitness a man who knew them both well and there are not many left and there were never many and that and who both mr knew both the governor knew both the president and Mrs. Reagan well, that Mrs. Reagan's concern was her husband. Not policy. Right. Not her own fame. We're not talking about a Hillary Clinton who wanted her own career.

Right. If you were serving her husband, you were all right with her. Exactly. Yeah. Correct? Right. Exactly. Yeah. Correct? Right. Yeah. Except there was one exception, and that was in that I think I sort of diplomatically deal with, with regard to the end of the 1988 convention speech.

And she wanted it a different way than he wanted it. And I got caught in the middle at the very end. And it's reflected in the lunch we had at the ranch. And if you read between the lines in the conversation that i kept my notes i always kept my notes very it was hard to eat the shrimp salad and take notes and listen to the president and first lady uh not getting along with each other uh on how a speech should be written uh she wanted it one way and he wanted it another way and i felt that if the president wanted it his way that he should get it his way and she wanted a different way and in the end because he got it his way and not her way i think she was unhappy with me it lynn novsiger told me this story that

in you may lynn you probably know this excuse me the question here is what happened when the two of them disagreed and lynn told me the story that she called him this is 76 reagan's been losing they're now in north carolina mrs reagan calls lynn up to the suite the president or the then former governor is not there it's just the two of them and it becomes clear she starts in on lynn it becomes clear that it is her idea that it's up to lynn to talk reagan into dropping out of the presidential race and lynn said, as we know, she was a force of nature. And all of a sudden, the door opens and Reagan walks into the suite unexpectedly, whereupon Lynn and Mrs. Reagan both fall silent and just look at him. And Lynn said, somehow Reagan knew immediately what they

had been talking about. And Reagan looked at both of them and said, I don't care what she says. I'm staying in the race. So when it came to it, he tended to get his way. Well, there is one other scene in the book that I described where I was extremely uncomfortable, where in the 1987 State of the Union uh we're looking at the very final draft 1987 okay right this is when don regan lost control of right right and we're we're not i've delivered the final draft i guess we're in the residence and i i don't have the book in front of me but i i've described it in the book very distinctly and he says okay it looks like we're pretty much done

here said but ken uh we don't have a reference here uh to to the right to life and I'm a little troubled by that and don't you think we ought to insert something in here about protecting the life of the unborn and Mrs. Reagan is standing behind him and I'm looking at her over his shoulder and she's shaking her head furiously no no no no and mouthing the words no and i'm and i say to him uh and i sort of stutter um going well mr president then i say well i i think you've said it.

Well, but our friends, our friends, you know, they're upset when I don't put that in speeches. And she's still shaking her head furiously. OK, so he's arguing to put it back in. And if I go with him, she's going to put a stiletto in me that goes from stomach to back. And, you know, I'll never be seen again and uh so i finally come up with this uh line where i i sort of a gutless line where i said well you know you've you've made your point so many times mr president i think they'll forgive you this one time for not putting it in and it was sort of a cowardly exit on my part but in the in the in the facing certain death yeah well uh it would have meant probably not serving him again so i don't know but i don't i don't know if that's such a

bad moment for you ken i mean remember that i'm sure you do remember, that Reagan was the first sitting president to publish a book while in office, and it was his book some months before the campaign on abortion and the conscience of a nation. And as you probably know, there was a huge fight among Reagan's political staff about him publishing that book. At the end of the day, he said, I want to do it. So, anyway, I think you were right. In other words, I think the line you made was substant substantively correct even if it was an awkward and difficult moment uh anyway peter you got a couple more no i'm just i got it i had a pro-life passage in a speech that we got into a

meeting in the oval office and darman and baker were there and they both tried to talk him out of it and reagan just listened and smiled and then he's the president stood up and went to his desk and said by the way i have i just received a letter from some medical doctors telling me about the that fetuses can feel pain earlier and we understood and this is right he just he read this passage signed by six medical doctors as if it was just interesting to him. And then he walked back to his chair, and on the way to his chair, he dropped the letter in Darman's lap and said, I think we should put that in the speech, too. And oh my goodness, Baker and Darman went white as sheets with fury, but of course, they controlled themselves, he felt strongly on that one. So, Ken, here's the question of the hour. Richard Nixon gets dealt a very bad hand. Vietnam, the erosion of our position in the Cold War,

stagnant economy, an establishment that was against him. But by the end of the administration, the economy's beginning to turn around. We're finally out of Vietnam. Reagan comes in, and the 70s are put behind us, and we get a national renewal. I mean, I'm just so struck, I think about this often, that 79, we're in such a weak position that the Soviets feel free to go into Afghanistan and the Iranians feel free to take Americans hostage. And 89, this is just 10 years later, there's been such an American renewal that it spills over into the rest of the world and the Berlin Wall comes down.

There are a lot of Americans who have their hopes up this time. Are we in a position for another national renewal? Are the predicates, the political predicates, the will of the people the political system or is this more likely to be donald trump just holding the line as best he can holding things together which i take to have been richard nixon gifts richard nixon's gift to the nation he held things together in a very difficult time. What's the correct parallel? What do you expect? Well, the benefit Reagan had was he had an adversarial press, but not an enormously adversarial press. He entered the presidency with a pretty balanced media. And it got tougher as he went.

And it got tougher, especially during the Bitburg controversy. They went after him. And then during Iran-Contra. But when he started with the economic recovery in 81 and the defense buildup, he wasn't confronted with the massive adversarial press that that Nixon had in 1969 when Nixon was dealing with the Vietnam War. Trump's issue is that he's going to have an adversarial press from January 21st, day one. So Trump's going to be faced with a lot of the same problems

uh nixon had now what he what he has what trump has going for his favor that nixon did not have and i mentioned this in all my presentations is that nixon never had a congress going for him right nixon had the congress in the hands of the Democrats for the entire five and a half years of his presidency. When you see what Nixon accomplished during his presidency with Democrats in charge of the Senate and the House, the absolute entire time Nixon was in office, and he still got a lot of things done, Trump has the advantage of having the Senate and the House for at least the first two years of his presidency. If he's very clever and very careful, then I think what you're saying is potentially possible.

And he can't squander that advantage. If he squanders that advantage by behavior that goes overboard or by not being presidential, by not using his powers wisely, then he'll lose the ability that he has. But he has that potential going for him because that's an ability that he has to take. And Reagan only had a Senate going for him in the first part of his presidency. And Trump, I will say this about Trump, he knows how to use the bully pulpit. He does. He really does. He wants to be a bully, but you're a ready one.

He does know how to use it and but if he uses but he can he has the he also has the ability to squander it away and he has to be very careful and i do think what he's one thing he's doing wisely is he's bringing loyalty into the into the equation on his staffing and um i i don't i'm not quite sure he's everything he's doing in terms of his appointments is is wise but within his internal staffing i think he's making wise decisions you know there's the peter's question your answer reminds me of the apocryphal mark twain line that history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes and so in the last couple weeks when trump has been going on about the panama canal maybe we ought to get it back, I kind of wish his next sentence would be

because Ronald Reagan was right about it after all. But beyond that, I mean, some of his things now that are, you know, either outrageous or amusing or some deliberate combination like the Gulf of America instead of Gulf of Mexico, and, you know, we want Greenland. Never mind what those may really be about or not. But underneath that, the subtext to me is very Reagan-esque, but in Trumpian bombast. In other words, he's really trying to turn the page and reverse this, what you might call a little America. Again, it's an echo, a distorted echo of Jimmy Carter's Age of Decline and malaise that we've been having the last several years and so in that respect all the personalities are so different and rhetorical styles and you know as you say his own character which is erratic uh i do see some reagan-esque parallels there um i don't know is that reasonable or is that uh peter thinks it's reasonable i think

go ahead peter go through your last question uh ken this is this is just occurring to me but it's reasonable, I think. Go ahead, Peter. Go through with your last question. Ken, this is just occurring to me, but it's almost mandatory in light of what's happened the last few days. So if the rest of the country would like to tune out, Ken and Steve and I

have something in common with both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and that is we can't help ourselves, we love California. So, California meant an enormous amount to both of those men. Nixon grew up here. He couldn't help himself from returning to California. He always felt drawn like a moth to a flame to New York and to the power structures in the eastern establishment,

but he was always most at home out here in California. And of course, Reagan loved the place. It was where everything good happened to him. I once heard him say, you may have heard him say it a dozen times, I think I only caught it once, is he said, if the pilgrims had landed in California instead of back east, nobody would have bothered to discover the rest of the country. Right. Yes. All right. So, Pete Wilson, I can't remember the year in which Pete left office, but Pete was the last of two things. He was the last real Republican governor, which means I'm not counting Arnold Schwarzenegger.

We can argue about that if anybody wants to argue, but that man was no Republican when it came to it. And he was also the last competent governor. He was competent in politics. He had that Nixon element in him. Right. But he was competent as a governor. He got the state government to do what it ought to do to treat citizens well,

to permit economic growth to take place. And recover disasters let's keep that right and recover from big disasters so what i'm what i'm wondering is is there hope for california can these unbelievable catastrophe as we record this these fires are still raging and as as far as I can, I just checked the news, they think they have the Pacific Palisades fire controlled by 2%. These things are still out of control. Are Californians going to finally demand competent governance again? Is there even an opening for some rebirth of the Republican? How can it be that the most beautiful, talented, magnificent state in the country can be so messed up for so long? I've been thinking about this all day. And, of course, it's not just the governor. I watched the speaker responding to questions.

I was watching on X today responding to questions i mean the man is an idiot revas is that his name the speaker of the assembly yeah yeah yeah he couldn't get a declarative sentence out and so this the entire legislature is is an autocracy that doesn't know what it's doing and so the entire state is being governed irresponsibly but it's but who's voting them in it's it's the people whose houses the five the six thousand houses that have been raised my guess is voted two-thirds of them voted for these people in office two-thirds and ten percent of them gave a lot of money these are rich these are the same this is these are the rich californians we're talking about here exactly and concerned about the fire hydrants that didn't have water and and probably have given money to the environmental defense fund so it's it's and and by the way a lot of

these problems don't just rest on gavin news. They go back to Jerry Brown. People forget this all began with Jerry Brown. And somebody was talking or writing about the train to nowhere. Oh, it was John Highbush in his sub stack this morning that I read was talking about the train to nowhere. That began with Jerry Brown and it didn't begin with, uh, um,

governor Newsom and, and the, um, the high tax rate of 13 plus percent. That was a proposal by Jerry Brown, not by, uh, the legislature or by,

uh, Gavin Newsom. That began with Jerry Brown. Jerry Brown is the progenitor of all these problems, and nobody's pointing the finger at him. So, yes, there's hope if the people look within themselves, but it has to do with the leadership in the state. The business community has to turn its back against funding a lot of this and and but do you think the editorialists at the la times i'm glad that this man who bought the is it patrick is his name uh i can't pronounce the name doctor yeah i can't either write the last name but uh who's bought the LA Times. Maybe he'll turn it around. But I don't think their writers or anybody else is going to change.

And maybe some of their houses have burned down. But they don't even think about these things. Unless that changes, nothing's going to change. But it really is sad. The state that I grew up in and the wonderful, beautiful state that it is, unless people— I don't understand how the Armenians could have let this happen. Well, George Dukhmashian, I can guarantee you that none of this would have happened under George Dukhmashian. Oh, of course not. Of course not. A great governor. By the way, you talked about an era of national renewal.

That was one of the themes of, I don't know if you actually did that on purpose. That was the theme of President Reagan's 1981 inaugural address. Right, right. That you were the first draft writer to organize his thoughts and then hand it off to him. He called for an international renewal. I would just say one last thing about Trump's chances here in the first two years, whether it's Greenland, the Panama Canal, all those other things. Unless he focuses on the economy, he'll be making a big mistake.

He's got to get the economy back on track. Yeah, so Nixon was right again. Ken, we have barely scratched the surface of what you revealed in Behind Closed Doors, but thank you for opening some of those doors. I think we'll want to have you back when you do some more work on Watergate and the revisions going on with that. But in the meantime, thanks for spending an hour with us. Congratulations on Behind Closed Doors. Peter, glad you could surface once in a while to join ricochet listen that's the only thing i ever get asked on i've made 102 radio interviews podcasts tv interviews and and 20 book presentations you know the question I always get asked? Did you write Tear Down This Wall?

Oh, jeepers. One of these days I'm going to take credit for that damn speech. Oh, you said that right. Peter doesn't deserve it. That's all I ever get asked. Isn't that interesting? But I do. I give credit where credit is due.

You know, okay, so steve we're getting we're getting notes here from our producer who wants to break for lunch or something but i do it so you touch on that i'm not going to go through this whole story but it's important i think you're going to agree with me i know what you're going to say peter go ahead i i wrote that speech i would not have written that speech for anybody else than Ronald Reagan. And by that stage, I'd been in Washington long enough to get to know George H.W. Bush, Howard Baker, a number of men who might have been president instead of Reagan, would only have written that for Reagan, and only Reagan would have delivered that. And so, it feels to me as though we're speech writers, but I'm sure you agree, Ken, that over and over again in your work,

it's, you can hear Reagan in your own mind as you're writing for him. Somehow or other, the speeches that we wrote for that man belonged to him. Because the man knew stagecraft. Yes, he did. Yeah, right. That's very important.

Alright, listeners, thanks for joining us. As we always like to say or james likes to say please uh go to apple's itunes and other venues and give us a five-star review join us in the comments on ricochet 4.0 i guess we're calling it and we will see you back here next week after you have gone to the bookstore and ordered behind closed doors by ken kachikian ken thanks for joining us. Ken, thank you. Thank you very much.

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