David Gergen contrasts Nixon’s early brilliance—like his divide-and-conquer Cold War strategy with Kissinger—and principled moments, such as ignoring Chicago voter fraud claims in 1968, against Watergate’s "cataclysmic" fallout, comparing him to Trump while noting Nixon’s eventual shame. He laments bipartisanship’s decline since the WWII generation—seven presidents in uniform—proposing national service programs (backed by Newsom and Morrow) to revive civic unity through shared experiences like disaster response or healthcare work. Meanwhile, Norman Pothoretz warns of Islamo-fascism, a 150–200 million-strong movement blending Nazism and communism, unlike Cold War foes who feared nuclear retaliation, arguing its global reach and willingness to strike domestically—like 9/11—make it uniquely dangerous. The episode underscores how modern leadership lacks the moral cohesion of past eras, even as threats evolve beyond ideological containment. [Automatically generated summary]
He started out as chief of staff, moved over to the Treasury Department, went from the Treasury Department to run the State Department.
This was over two terms.
So it was really good.
But then, you know, water get hit.
And that was just a cataclysmic event.
I was in the position of, by this time, I was running the speech writing and research team, which was a pretty big team.
And I knew Bob Woodward from college.
And Woodward used to call me when they had a hot story at the post.
He would call me and say, I need to read you the first two or three paragraphs of this and see if it's accurate.
I'm not going to change it just because you don't like the way it's written, but I do need to know if the facts were right.
So we had a sort of relationship, and Nixon blessed the relationship.
He knew I was talking to Woodward.
But for a year and a half or so, we talked a lot, and it helped behind the scenes.
It helped to take some of the bumps out of the process, but not all.
It was a.
Richard Nixon was the stuff of Shakespeare.
I mean, this was a man who was one of the most talented I've seen in Washington in the last 30 or 40 years.
He was certainly easily the best strategist along with Henry Kissinger.
The two of them together, you know, they really plotted out.
At that point, both China and Russia were locked at the hip in opposition to the United States.
And Kissinger and Nixon understood that if you can simply, if you can split them apart, you can have a divide and conquer strategy.
And that's why Kissinger went to Beijing.
That's why Nixon had, you know, fell in love with the Chinese and that sort of thing.
And those were big, important changes in American foreign policy.
I don't know, Richard Haas is here.
Could talk about this much more eloquently than I can.
But in any event, had that been all there was to Richard Nixon, this bright side that I saw periodically, he would have been one of our better presidents.
His problem was what happens to so many leaders when victory goes to their heads too easily and they decide, you know, I think I can go for the moon.
And in Nixon's case, he not only thought he could conquer everything, but he could do it surreptitiously and he could do it in violation of the law.
I mean, he was a forerunner of Donald Trump in that respect.
So Nixon had this dark side.
He had a bright side and he had a dark side.
And the clash in that White House was which one is going to prevail.
And it was a close call all the way along.
But Ray Price, who had been my mentor at that point, called me in and he said, you've got to understand the fight in here is between the people who want to go for Broke and break into the Brookings Institution and do all these crazy things versus about four or five of the rest of us who are trying to stop him.
And we were trying to do it very quietly.
And we failed.
I mean, Nixon, Nixon, we did not truly understand it, but he had demons inside him that he never really learned to conquer.
And they eventually brought him down.
He was asked by David Frost, the British journalist, in a TV interview to explain Watergate.
Nixon said, I gave my enemies a sword, and then they ran me through, which is exactly what happened.
But Richard Nixon was a complex person we don't understand, but I think gives us warning about what can happen if you've got the wrong kind of person in the White House.
And that's why what's coming is so damn important.
It's really important to the future of the country.
Let me ask you, using your Harvard and your experience with participating and observing, there is a crucial distinction between Nixon and the 45th president, which is, he's like Voldemort.
He believed in the institutions enough that it wouldn't have occurred to him when Goldwater and John Rhodes and Hugh Scott come down, I think, on the 5th or 6th of August, and say, you haven't got the votes to survive in the Senate, he didn't say, all right, let's get the proud boys together.
And equally so, what's often forgotten, but you know so well, was the beginnings of the Nixon administration when there was actually a legitimate controversy about whether, in fact, Nixon had won the election and there were a lot of voters in Chicago, for example, in the graveyards of Chicago, you know, brought forth a lot of voters.
And it made a big difference.
And Nixon was urged to challenge in courts the case against him because people around him said, you will win this case.
The relative projection of force against commonly agreed upon foes and rivals.
And Truman and LBJ are over here as part of that conversation.
President Reagan and George W. Bush are over here, but Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Bush 41, Clinton are all kind of in the middle of the field, so to speak.
And that conversation in many ways ended in 2017.
And part of the Biden project, I think, is to restore that conversation.
I do think that there was an alliance or an alignment of people who in public life who did believe in working with each other and working across lines.
Senator Jack Danforth, a Republican, is here in this group today.
And he worked as so many of the best leaders of these earlier years.
He worked really to bring a bipartisan set of solutions.
But I think it had partly to do with sort of the intellectual conversation, but it also had to do with the fact that we had a rise of the World War II generation after the war.
And for like in the late 40s and then through the 50s and into the 60s, there was a lot of bipartisanship that came through at that time.
And it was partly influenced by the fact that the members of the World War II generation were so tied into the military and into sacrifice for the country.
That made a big, big difference in the conversation.
Starting with Jack Kennedy and going through George Bush Sr., those were our World War II presidents.
There were seven of them.
Every single one of those seven presidents wore a military uniform.
Six of them were in the war.
And Jimmy Carter was in the Naval Academy when the war ended, and he went on to serve honorably.
Those years in the military were bonding experiences and helped people understand there's a set of values that guide this country and we're in this together.
We all came, as the saying goes, we all came in different ships, but now we're in the same boat together.
And I think the World War II generation ethic of service, of sacrifice, has sort of passed from the stage.
And we're into a different era now.
It's just people are trying to pulverize each other.
We haven't seen this since the 19th century.
And it's been a big, big change.
And I think the challenge now is: can we revive some of the, and Richard Hollis talked about this earlier today, can we revive some of those civic commitments and civic feelings and said a sense of civic principle?
Can we make those kind of steps and reunite the country with a different kind of generation?
I believe that instead of the military, what we have right now, what we ought to be building, is a national service program, a serious national service program.
If we could do that, I can just assure you that for a lot of young people will get out there and spend a year, whether in the forests and the woods, as they did with the old Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, or they're working as first responders to the storms and the fires and everything else.
There are a lot of, or they're working in hospitals.
There are a lot of things our young people could be doing.
They give us a year back.
We take a year off their tuition debt.
And we set them up with some other things to help them get started in life.
But they become the foundation for moving forward and reuniting the country.
I think we desperately need that.
And we've got people.
John and I both have been watching Desert Westmore.
We can talk more about him.
He's the new governor of Maryland, but he's very much into national service and a really heck of an interesting and aspiring individual.
But along with that is Gavin Newsome, governor of California on the other side of the country.
West Morrison, Maryland.
Here's Gavin Newsom in California.
And the two officers are talking to each other about how to build this national service program because they're both champions.
And I think something similar to that could make a huge difference.
It was a plumber from Brooklyn, an agricultural worker from California, a couple of Irish Catholics from Boston, and this scion of an immigrant dynasty.
And our mutual friend, whom we just lost, Charlie Peters, used to tell the story about there was an old JFK war friend named O'Malley that Kennedy always loved.
And he was not, how to put it, he was not Jackie Kennedy's idea of a dinner guest.
I think it's a fair way to put it.
And so Mrs. Kennedy would say, I just don't see what Jack sees in O'Malley.
Well, what he saw in O'Malley was that they had fought the Japanese together.
But at any event, Jerry Ford came into the White House and I got recruited back into the White House staff to be there.
And frankly, it was a very difficult situation because Ford always gave these speeches that were so simplistic that it was hard to build a build support for them.
But he tended to use a lot of one-syllable words.
And it just didn't make it very, very interesting.
But that's the foundation for this point.
So Ford goes through the period.
He's seen as not very smart, but a nice guy.
You know, a guy trying hard.
And he commanded a lot of respect.
It's just people, he wasn't ready to be president.
But there was Ford, because he was sort of just sort of going slowly through on the path.
And then he left office.
Well, two or three months after he left office, I got a call from his office one day, and they said, the president's got a speech to give in the future, and he would really like to have you read the speech and give me your feedback.
And I said, oh, fine, okay.
Send it to me.
They said, okay, we'll get it to you overnight.
Call us tomorrow afternoon.
So he got me the thing, and I got the speech.
It was a beautifully written speech.
Gorgeous speech.
A lot of two or three syllable words, really interesting arguments.
A lot of like, boy, what compound sentences.
You're good.
And so, and he said, I could hear he was puffing on his pipe sort of behind scenes there as he was listening to me and he was sort of laughing at me.
And he said to me, after he heard all this and said, no, because I told him, Mr. President, I don't know, it's a beautiful speech, but I'm not sure why you're calling me.
Do you want me to rewrite it for you and put it in your name, you know, ready to write it as you would have written it?
And he said, no, and he said, no.
And he said, the point is, David, this is the first time I've had enough free time on my schedule to write my own speech.
And it was in part, Jim Baker had been a mentor of mine for a long time, and he was partly responsible for rounding up a group of people to be on staff.
And I think Reagan understood better than anybody else how important it is to be organized before you get there.
And what had happened to two or three other presidents just before that was the president would get elected and he would bring with him the people who had been with him when he was back home in the state, but he wouldn't bring any new people.
And it was a very closed little circle, and it didn't work as a way of governing.
And so that was an issue.
And Reagan understood that.
Baker convinced him of that.
And a lot of time went into preparing the White House staff.
And Baker really did that.
We had two groups of people.
We had the California people who were on his team.
They basically were in charge of setting up a lot of the ideas.
And because we didn't feel it was the conservative wing of the Denver Republican Party got elected.
And we felt you can't walk away from that.
You've got to make sure you honor that.
So we set it up so that the California people were the guardians of the faith, but the Washington people knew how to get things done and were very, very good at that.
Baker and company, Baker was the best single chief of staff, I think, in American history.
And if you took any list of top 10 people who have come into government over time, not only would he be on it, but three or four would be out of the group that Reagan inaugurated.
Now, look, I'm not as conservative as Reagan was.
I'm pro-choice, for example, and have been all my life.
But I did think that he, you know, when you get your president and get your leader, you're not going to get 100% of what you want.
And you've got to decide.
And I think Reagan will go down with FDR as two of the strongest.
FDR is clearly more important, significant president.
But I think Reagan, if you look at the years since, Reagan stacks up pretty well.
But so, and the one thing to remember about Jim Baker is How a man managed to get past Nancy Reagan, having run two campaigns against Ronnie, because he ran the Ford campaign in 76 when Reagan challenged him and the Bush campaign in 1980.
And I've always had a slight theory that one of the reasons Mrs. Reagan said yes is that Baker looked like her idea of a chief of staff.
Conservative writer and commentator Norman Pothoretz passed away on December 16th.
Pothoretz served for decades as the editor-in-chief of Commentary Magazine, a publication focusing on Judaism, Israel, and politics.
In 2007, Pothoretz appeared on C-SPAN's book TV to discuss his book, World War IV.
Norman, let's start with what I would call a technical question about your book rather than a substantive one.
And there are plenty of substantive questions.
You've written quite a bit to talk about, and hopefully we'll be able to get everything in the time we've got here.
But one of the things that you did in your book is you seemed critical of Noam Chomsky for, and if I can quote, including, always including, large number of footnotes, end quote, in his work.
I don't know if you meant to be critical, but it seemed like a criticism on your part.
In contrast, World War IV has lots of citations, lots of quotes, but I couldn't find any footnotes.
And as a book author, fellow book author, that kind of struck me as just a little bit strange, making it difficult for a reader to understand where you've pulled all of this research from, and clearly you've done the research.
So if you wouldn't mind explaining some of that.
Sure.
Well, in the case of Chomsky, I wasn't exactly being critical.
What I was pointing to was what I consider a false patent of scholarship in what he writes.
And those footnotes are there not so much to lead you to check up on his references, but to intimidate the reader.
And it's very, why didn't I have footnotes in my book?
Because my publisher thought they weren't necessary.
And I was happy to be spared the labor of compiling them.
I have nothing against footnotes.
Several of my books have hundreds of footnotes.
Okay, well, then let's jump into the substance of the book.
And the premise, of course, being that we are embroiled in a world war, World War IV, and the threat that you describe is Islamo-fascism.
So I'd like you to elaborate a little bit more, if you could, on who the Islamo fascists are and how exactly they represent a mortal threat to America.
Well, let me say something about World War IV, because very often people say, well, what happened to World War III?
Did I sleep through it?
Which is, by the way, one of the reasons that the president decided not to go with this designation.
The reason I see it as World War IV, and in retrospect, I think the Cold War has to be understood as World War III, is that you have here a succession of totalitarian challenges, threats to our civilization, and they bear a certain family resemblance.
The first of these threats came from the right in the form of Nazism, and we took that on in World War II.
We were only involved for four years of the six years, but we had a major share in defeating that threat.
No sooner had we defeated Nazism than another one came at us from the left and in the form of communism and most powerfully embodied in the Soviet empire.
That one took 42 years to win, 1947 to 1989.
And it involved many different instrumentalities of power, unlike World War II, which was really, or World War I for that matter, which were wars of massed armies contending against each other.
World War III, as I see it, involved not just hot engagements, as in say in Korea and Vietnam, but it involved an ideological struggle, the use of non-military instruments of power, economic, financial, political, diplomatic.
But it was global in reach, which made it a world war.
And it had just different features from World War II.
World War IV, I see, as resembling World War III in that it's going to take a long time, that it has an ideological base, and that it will involve and is already involving many different instruments of power, military where necessary, non-military means where possible.
Why do I say that the Islamo-fascists are a mortal threat?
Who are they?
What are they?
Islamo-fascism, people have called it radical Islamism or Islamist radicalism.
I prefer the term Islamo-fascism.
I'll explain why in a minute.
Islamofascism is a political movement within a religion.
This fourth, this third radical totalitarian challenge to us comes ultimately from the seventh century, neither from the left nor the right.
But the political movement that I call Islamo-fascism is a creature of the 20th century.
And what's interesting in this context is that the Islamo-fascists actually modeled their political movement both on the Nazis and the communists.
We know this from them.
We know this from other scholars.
The Germans moved into the Middle East in World War II.
And the Baathist Party, which eventually was formed and took over Syria, still rules Syria and ruled Iraq under Saddam Hussein, quite consciously modeled itself on the Nazi Party.
At the end of World War II, the Russians moved into the area and the Islamo-fascists took what you might say graduate work, graduate courses with the communists and developed techniques and refined some of the techniques.
If I could just interrupt you for a moment, but the appeal of Islam, of what you call Islamo-fascism, radical Islam, whatever the term might be, I mean, is very small compared to Nazism or communism.
It's very much a minority movement inside the Islamic world.
So I don't see the equation, does it?
Yeah, I would say on the contrary, Charles.
Look, there are somewhere between 150 and 200 million, I mean, somewhere around between 2.5 and 3 billion Muslims worldwide.
It's been estimated by people who know more about this than I do, one of them being Daniel Pipes, that somewhere from 10 to 15% of the Muslim world is either passively or actively sympathetic to the Islamo-fascist cause.
Well, you're talking about 150 million to 200 million people, and that adds up to more people than communists and fascists and Nazis or fascists combined ever recruited.
This is a major block of a major, and mostly in a crucial part of the world, but not only in the Middle East.
It's also important to remind ourselves that neither Hitler nor Stalin ever succeeded in hitting us where we live and attacking us on our home soil.
They would have dearly loved to pull off such a feat if they could.
They couldn't.
And the Islamo-fascists, in this case led by al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, did actually succeed in hitting us right in the heart of our own native land, which suggests that in this kind of war, the instruments of destructive power are somewhat different from the ones that you measure in terms of divisions and troops.
Do they represent a mortal threat to the United States?
In other words, yes, we were struck on 9-11 and certainly taken by surprise by al-Qaeda and their ability to hit us and hit us as hard as they did.
But they certainly don't possess the ability to annihilate us as a country the way, say, the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at us during the Cold War, the way Hitler and his armies could have dominated Europe and perhaps the world.
How is that a threat?
Well, I would say, again, on the contrary, they represent a greater threat of annihilation.
There is a very good chance, unless we're extremely lucky, that they will get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons.
And there's not the slightest doubt that they would be happy to use them against us.
and they certainly would have on 9-11 if they'd been able to.
Now, the threat...
How do you make that claim, though, that you believe they really will get their hands on nukes?
Because that's really the mass destruction weapon that we're all truly worried about.
Well, there's also chemical and biological.
Well, those are hardly, I would hardly call those weapons of mass destruction.
They're nasty, dirty weapons, and certainly we don't want to see those used against us hijra either.
But how exactly would they get a nuke, and why do you seem so certain that eventually they will get a nuke?
Well, because I think the center of Islamo-fascist activity and support is Iran.
And Iran, I hope, will prevent Iran from going nuclear, but I don't think there's the slightest doubt that Iran would supply nuclear weapons to terrorists as the irregular troops, so to speak, of their army.
What people don't understand about Iran, about Islam generally, is that the nation-state, as we understand it, is not a central consideration.
I mean, Ayatollah Khomeini, who of course took over Iran 79, said many times, in effect, we don't care about Iran.
Iran can go up and smoke.
What we care about is the Muslim Ummah, which is the Muslim realm, Muslim peoples.
Ras Van Jani, regarded as a moderate by many in the West, actually said that if there were a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel, and of course Iran has threatened to use nukes against Israel, wipe Israel off the map, Israel would be annihilated.
Not Iran, but the Muslim Ummah would still be standing.
We can absorb that kind of loss.
And what that suggests is that what kept the Soviet missiles in their silos, even though they were indeed pointed at us, that is to say deterrence, the fear that we would retaliate, is not a reliable hope.
You cannot deter an enemy who, for one thing, is not only willing to die for his beliefs, but seems to be eager to die.
Well, certainly we know suicidal terrorists are willing to die for their beliefs.
It's not clear that entire regimes, whether they're the mullahs in Tehran or otherwise, are willing to die for their beliefs.
Let me go back to a notion you made that, I mean, the rhetoric matters.
And we certainly don't want to have deaf ears.
But as somebody who grew up, if you will, as an analyst during the Cold War, we had plans for surviving nuclear war.
The Russians had plans for surviving nuclear war.
It didn't mean that we were interested in trying to survive.
And so just because somebody has a plan to do something, it isn't necessarily an indicator, a strong indicator, that that's what they intend to do.
No, very different.
We didn't have plans to survive exactly.
These were worst-case scenarios.
What do you do if you get hit?
We had plans.
I participated in government-wide exercises where we simulated nuclear war and tried to figure out how we would reconstruct our government and reconstruct our society.
That didn't mean that we were intent on going to war with the Soviets.
But it does mean that when you listen to what the Iranians have said and what I just quoted, and there are many more such statements, I think they have to be taken seriously.
I don't think we dare make the same mistake that the British and the French and the Americans made in the mid-30s when nobody took Hitler's rhetoric seriously.
They thought it was just rota-montade, just throwing red meat to his people.
He meant what he was saying and promising, and the fact that nobody would take that seriously enough to stand up led to World War II and the loss of many millions of lives that might not otherwise have been lost.
I think we're faced with a similar situation in relation to Iran.
You can't prove it, but to me the evidence seems pretty persuasive.
Well, you know, it's interesting because just this week, General John Abbizade, former commander of CENTCOM, has taken just the opposite stance of you.
His belief is, as somebody who's been boots on the ground in the Middle East and Iraq, saying he doesn't want the Iranians to gain nuclear weapons.
And I would certainly say neither do I, and I would imagine everyone viewing this doesn't want the Iranian regime to get their hands on nuclear weapons.
But General Abbizade believes that if that were to happen, that worst case scenario, that deterrence would still work and that we could contain the Iranian regime.
Yeah, well, with all due respect to General Abbizaid, I think he's wrong.
And if I may, if I can quickly locate it, let me read a passage from Bernard Lewis, who is probably the greatest living authority on the history and culture of the Middle East.
And he says, in speaking of Ahmad Dinejad, mad, that is mutual assured destruction was effective right through the Cold War.
Both sides had nuclear weapons.
Neither side used them because both sides knew the other would retaliate in kind.
This will not work with a religious fanatic like Ahmadinejad.
For him, mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement.
We know already that they do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers.
We have seen it again and again.
In the final scenario, and this applies all the more strongly if they kill large numbers of their own people, they are doing them a favor.
They're giving them a quick free pass to heaven and all their delights.
And let me now quote the actual words of the Ayatollah Khomeini that I alluded to before: We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah.
For patriotism is another name for paganism.
I say, let this land of Iran burn.
I say, let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.
Now, I submit to you that those statements, both Lewis's analysis and the statement by Ayatollah Khomeini, presents us with a clear, serious, radical difference between the situation of today and the situation with respect to the Soviet Union and World War III.
Well, what about China under Mao?
Mao said some pretty radical and crazy things, not too unlike what we're hearing emanating from the mouths of certain leaders in the Middle East who don't as yet have nuclear weapons.
And the Chinese had nukes.
I mean, so by your line of reasoning, we should have taken out China under Mao.
Well, but see, I don't think Mao would have said, let China go up in smoke, let it burn.
He would not have said that, even though he massacred God knows how many millions of his own people.
But he would not have said that patriotism is a form of paganism.
I mean, he had an interest in preventing a retaliatory or, for that matter, a first strike against China.
Deterrence worked with Mao.
It worked with Stalin precisely because they did not have this kind of belief, this kind of not just indifference to the nation-state as something to be protected, but even hostility to it.
I mean, the primary consideration is Islam.
Islam is a worldwide movement.
They openly aspire to spreading it, creating a new caliphate.
That's what they care about.
They don't care about specific nation-states.
And they're willing, by their own account, to sacrifice nation-states if they think that this will contribute to the spread of the Muslim ummah.
For the first time, we said, as moral citizens, we have to do what is right for our country.
Our country is not always right.
Nobody wants to be a failure, but I had failed in trying to protect the president.
And I knew that.
Humor is the universal solvent against the abrasive elements of life.
What can we in the older generation do to make a better world for this country?
Before we leave the stage, what can we accomplish?
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We do have a problem in baseball, and using steroids is not respecting the game.
We were so curious, so excited about being at the moon that we are like three school kids looking into a candy store window watching those ancient electrons go by.