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Aug. 27, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:02:46
Edition 172 - Nixon

This time Roger Stone - who worked for President Richard Nixon - his view of Watergate...and beyond...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world.
On the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Thank you very much for the crop of emails that I've had recently.
The traffic of emails is getting bigger by the day almost.
A lot of emails from North America, also from the UK and every part of the world.
You seem to like these shows.
You had some very critical things, though, to say about Edition 171, Victor and Wendy Zamet, and their defense in particular of physical mediumship.
Well, I had to remain impartial about that.
But some of it I wasn't sure about, and I did quiz them about it.
And you were particularly sceptical about the voice recording that purported to be Harry Houdini back from the other side.
One of you said, Harry Houdini would never have spoken like that.
Well, I did wonder, and I think some of the criticisms that you put to me through your emails, I'm going to put back to Victor and Wendy and see what they have to say.
They, of course, have this book out called A Lawyer's Case Effectively for the Afterlife, a Defense of the Afterlife, and the definitive case they believe they have.
Well, I would very much like to see the physical medium that they recommended in their book and on my show.
I would very much like to see him do that in front of me sometime.
And if I can make that happen when he's in the UK, then I will.
And we can record the whole thing and we'll see what happens.
But I will put your points to Victor and Wendy.
Some of you loved that show, I have to say, but it was very controversial.
And sometimes the controversial shows are the best ones, aren't they?
Because they get you thinking.
So thank you for your emails.
I'm not going to do shout-outs on this edition.
Just to address one point, a couple of guys asked me about microphones.
Which microphone do I use?
Now, I have to say, because I've been doing radio and recording for years, I've tried pretty much all the microphones.
And my favorite is one called the Neumann U47 that I used on a couple of radio stations, including Capital in London.
These days, if you want to buy one of those secondhand, it will be about £6,000, $10,000 or £11,000, so it's way, way, way out of my price zone.
So to tell you the truth, I've found that some of the cheaper microphones are pretty good and almost as good as the very best microphones.
So I don't recommend spending fortunes on microphones.
Sure SM57 used on the presidential podium with a big thick pop shield, a bit of foam on the top.
Very, very good.
And there's another one called the Rode M3, which is made in Australia.
And I use that for a lot of stuff.
And that is £69 in the UK, about $99 US.
A very good microphone.
And you've got to spend hundreds more to get even a very, very, very small bit better.
So that's my thought about microphones.
Haven't tried them all over the years.
Sorry for that.
It's a favourite topic of mine.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell, who understands my love of microphones.
He's at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, gets the show out to you, maintains the website.
He designed the website.
So Adam's very important to us.
Please keep your feedback coming.
You can follow the link from the website, www.theunexplained.tv.
There you can send me a message or a guest suggestion, whatever.
Always good to hear from you wherever in the world you are.
And please say where you are, won't you?
Because I love to see all the different places you're in and the different things that you're doing when you're listening to this show.
If you want to make a donation to the show too, the website is the place to go for that.
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We are independent media.
We're not part of any big organization.
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You listening, Adam getting the show out to you and me actually putting the shows together.
That's exciting.
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But we do have to have a certain amount of rocket fuel to do it.
So if you can, please make a donation to this show and I intend to develop it in the future.
There are always plans for this.
It's taken a long time to get to where we are.
But I'm actually quite proud of it now.
But that isn't to say that I'm going to get complacent about any of this, because I always think that I and this can get better.
Okay, thank you very much for keeping the faith.
Roger Stone is the guest this time.
We're going to talk about a subject that has fascinated me for most of my life.
A man widely lampooned.
A man who will go down in history as having brought the office of President of the USA into disrepute.
Richard Milhouse Nixon.
What really went on in the White House?
What was there on those 18 silent minutes of Watergate tape?
The gap, the famous gap?
We're going to talk to a man who might know the answers to some of these questions and also have a fascinating insight into the stuff that went on around the life and times of Richard M. Nixon.
I recently re-watched the interview with David Frost.
We, of course, lost David Frost this year.
Great British interviewer.
Did television shows both sides of the Atlantic and he had Nixon.
They made a movie about this at bay.
And they did, was it three shows?
And close to the end of it all, David Frost said, do you want to kind of take this opportunity to say sorry?
And Nixon pretty much did, looking very tearful and basically saying that he let the nation down, let himself down.
What a pivotal moment.
But this man was complex.
There was a lot to him.
He did do some good in amongst all the other stuff that we know he did.
And there are many things that we still have to guess about.
Maybe Roger Stone will fill in some of those blanks because he is a political animal to his very core and as a young man worked for Nixon.
He started out as a Democrat and moved across to the Republicans.
Fascinating man, a political consultant these days and writer on various things.
So it's a great pleasure to get him on.
Lots of good shows in the pipeline.
I've got some big plans and some of the guests that you suggested I'm working on right now.
Please keep those suggestions coming.
W.theunexplained.tv is my website.
Go there to communicate with me.
Let's get to the U.S. now.
Fascinating man, Roger Stone, and we're going to talk about Richard Millhouse Nixon.
Roger, thank you very much for coming on this show.
Delighted to be here.
Roger, you're in Florida, which is about as different climatically right now as you can be from London.
We've got driving rain here.
We've had hours of it.
We've lurched into autumn, and I'm guessing you're probably in the steamy sunshine there, yeah?
Yes, we have blazing sunshine in South Florida today, but it's still, it's a sunny place for shady people.
Well, I do hear that a lot, and I'm sure there are quite a few murky characters.
I did go to Florida.
In fact, the last time I was in Florida was At the time of the disputed election results, you know, the hanging Chad and all the rest of it.
I was there the day after.
That was kind of the last formal political action I took when I was a Republican.
You know, I spent 40 years in the corroded rectum of the two-party system in America, and I got to see, you know, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, particularly the Bushes up close.
And now, frankly, that I'm not in either party and I'm not actively engaged in American politics as opposed to chronicling it, I'm very strangely liberated.
I can tell you things that I know, that I've known for 30 years.
I can write things that I know to be true that, of course, are counter to the standard mainstream media narrative of what really happens in American politics or what has happened in our political history.
Well, I think the person we're about to talk around, Richard Milhouse Nixon, his era was the era that was a rite of passage for most of us.
We suddenly realized that these people who were elected president were not entirely altruistic in everything that they did, were not entirely operating for our benefit, and sometimes achieved ends through means that we would be very questionable about or we would be very concerned about were we to know what the means were.
And in Watergate and Nixon, we got to discover what some of the means were.
Well, Watergate media coverage really changes the entire way we look at presidents and politics.
Up until that time, presidents like Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson committed egregious crimes, enormous crimes, and they were generally ignored by the media.
Up until 1974, really a confluence between the Vietnam War and Watergate, we have a new attitude towards the media, and now they report what our politicians do in a micro sense, including their foibles and their criminal acts and their venal, petty, personal agendas.
So it really changes the entire way we look at politics.
What I've sought to do in my new book, which is called Nixon's Secrets, is to put Richard Nixon in perspective given the way the times were, given the way politics was functioned in the 1950s and the 60s.
It's really quite unfair that he bears a scar in many cases for doing things that all of his predecessors did.
Using the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service, to harass your political enemies?
Nobody was better than that than Franklin Roosevelt.
Nobody used the IRS more effectively against political opposition groups than Jack and Bobby Kennedy.
But unfortunately, when we talk about it in the United States, it's always Nixon.
Well, Nixon did it.
The truth is, he did a lot of things great.
He did a lot of things wrong.
He had some very great achievements.
He had some very great flaws.
He was brilliant and naive.
He was bold and hesitant.
He was visionary and obtuse.
In other words, and I've reassessed him over the years, especially having re-watched the David Frost interview with him, re-watched it recently.
I've got it on some DVDs.
He is in many ways a reflection of all of us.
Well, there's that great line in the Oliver Stone movie, which may be apocryphal or not, but it's still very great, where Nixon, as played by Sir Anthony Hopkins, is looking at an oil portrait of Jack Kennedy on the wall, and he says, when they see you, they see what they want to be.
And when they see me, they see what they are.
And that is profound indeed, because Nixon had his failings, but then we can look back in our own families.
If we look back generations in our own families, I bet we had grandparents or uncles, people like that, who were just like Richard Nixon, but he did get a bad rap.
The only thing is that because you worked for him, with him at one point, and because you've researched him so intensively, I know that on the internet you do get a bit of a rap yourself for being an apologist for him, don't you?
I really do, but if anybody will actually take the time to read my book, they'll see that that's somewhat unfair.
My book is not a love letter to Richard Nixon, nor is it an excoriation.
So I'll give you an example.
There is no question that early in his political career, when running for the House, when running for the Senate, that organized crime, the mob, helped fund his early career.
That's just a fact.
I know some of the Nixonites in this country will be unhappy that I unearthed it and I report it.
But Lyndon Johnson took money from the mob.
The Kennedys took money from the mob.
Adlai Stevenson took money from the mob.
We had no campaign finance laws in the 50s and 60s.
There was no reporting.
Everything was done in cash.
And organized crime in this country, as around the world, is big business, big business with interest.
And you've only got to look at the hotels in Vegas and a lot of other businesses as well.
And back in those days, the mob was somewhere behind them.
And so if you're taking money in the form of donations from big business, then inevitably some of that's going to come from that direction, isn't it?
No question about it.
So Nixon definitely takes money from organized crime.
On the other hand, it's very hard for me to find what specifically he may have done for them in return.
Lyndon Johnson takes $10,000 a month from Carlos Marcelo, the mob boss of Texas, in order to protect Marcelo's illegal gambling operations in Houston and Austin and San Antonio from the U.S. attorneys who are controlled by Lyndon Johnson.
This would be an unknown fact, except for I wrote it in my book, The Man Who Killed Kennedy, The Case Against LBJ.
So I use that just as an example.
I mean, Nixon is a paradox.
He is both magnanimous and petty.
He is both confident and paranoid.
It's not a simple analysis, but I think I produce on the 40th anniversary of his resignation a more balanced portrait in the ashes of Watergate.
His great achievements are lost.
Let's go through them.
He brings all the troops home from Vietnam and ends the Vietnam War.
He opens the door to the Chinese and he utilizes that to leverage an arms control agreement with the Soviets.
He desegregates the public schools of the United States without violence or bloodshed.
He gives us the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, environmental protection.
He ends the military draft, gives us the 18-year-old vote, desegregates the trade unions, launches the war on cancer.
Very far-reaching and progressive policies in terms of family assistance and scientific research, medical research.
He's really a pioneering president in terms of solid achievements, leaving behind a safer world and a safer United States.
And very sadly, all of that gets airbrushed away in the narrative of Watergate.
Now compare that with the political leaders we have today and how much, or I should say how little they are accomplishing.
Yeah, I mean, Obama, you have a president there who, and I'm a journalist and I studied politics at university.
I don't understand what Obama's all about.
He seems to be a man who is there on my TV screen saying things.
But could I say, could I stand up at any time if anybody asked me and said, what does Barack Obama stand for?
God knows.
I don't know.
Or what has he done other than presiding over the transfer of power in every country in the Middle East to our enemies?
That's about the only thing I can see that he has achieved.
Our radical, hateful enemies.
So, no, I think if you compare on any level, Richard Nixon and Barack Obama, Nixon gets the better of this comparison.
Look, the articles of impeachment against Nixon said that he abused the IRS against his political enemies.
Well, Obama could be impeached for that.
It said that he bombed Cambodia without congressional approval.
well, we're bombing Iraq right now without congressional approval.
It said that he...
Yeah, he's wrong about that.
But what it does speak to is the expansion of executive power since Nixon was president.
The president today can get away with things that the president could not get away with then.
Or look at it this way, which bothers me even more.
Nixon and his cronies wiretapped one building.
Obama and his cronies are wiretapping the entire world.
Well, there are those who say that that is the case, and there are those who say that none of us can make a move or make a call or contact anyone without somebody somewhere knowing about it.
And that is chilling.
And I think it's a chilling reality of this modern world, wherever in it you live.
Richard Nixon, though, we can't leave aside the fact that the guy had and made very readily enemies.
You know, he wasn't, in terms of interpersonal skills, it seems that everything you read about him suggests this man was not ideally placed.
He didn't have the charisma.
He didn't have the charm of the Kennedys.
He couldn't make things happen by charming persuasion.
That wasn't his way.
No, I think hard work and persistence and gut performance was his way.
Look, Richard Nixon wrote his own speeches in first draft, and then he would turn them over to a team of speech writers, and they would massage them.
John Kennedy never wrote a word in his life.
He was too busy at the pool with two hookers.
His words were written for him by a PhD named Ted Sorensen.
When he said them on TV, it was usually the first time he'd ever read them.
He made it look effortless.
He made it look graceful.
He had style.
Nixon had none of those things, so he had to rely on gut performance.
But the other thing I would say, Howard, is that Nixon is a polarizing figure really starting in the 40s because he decided that Alger Hiss, who was a high-level State Department official in the United States, was a communist spy.
And the mainstream media in this country of its day didn't believe that.
They poo-pooed it.
They ridiculed him.
He ultimately proved at a minimum that Hiss was lying, and Hiss was therefore convicted of perjury and sent to prison.
Fast forward 50 years to the fall of the Soviet Union, we get our hands on the KGB records.
Guess what?
Alger Hiss was a spy.
He was passing U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviets.
That is the beginning of the polarization of Nixon, where in this country, while he has a very fervent base of followers, he also has a very fervent base of detractors.
And therefore, he is never what you would call popular.
He is always controversial and polarizing.
On the other hand, politics is the art of getting 51%.
Say what you want about Bill Clinton.
He never achieved 50% in any presidential election in this country.
He was in three-way races in which he was two times elected with less than 50% of the vote.
Nixon, on the other hand, despite his lack of physical grace, his personal popularity, carried 49 states in a landslide that even to this day has been unmatched.
And we have to say that when the Kennedys came to power, when John F. Kennedy came to power, following that famous TV debate that Nixon won on the radio and Kennedy won on the television because it was a personality and visual contest more than anything else at that point, we entered the TV era.
But had things gone slightly differently, then Nixon would have been the president from them and the Kennedys would not have been a factor.
Well, actually, a victory in 1960 would have changed anything.
In my book, I analyze the 1960 election very carefully because the narrative of Theodore H. White in his seminal book, The Man Who Killed Kennedy, The Case Against, pardon me, The Making of the President, 1960, is an airbrushed, romantic narrative in which the Kennedys are graceful and intellectual and stylish and clever, and Richard Nixon wears the black hat, but that's not really the way it was.
Well, you say in this book, don't you, that the Kennedys wiretapped Nixon at his hotel The night before that debate?
I think the whole story of the 1960 election begins with an admission that Nixon made a number of very bad early mistakes.
First of all, he pledged to campaign in all 50 states, which was an error because it meant he wasted time in states that he already had locked up.
Then he decided to debate Kennedy, which was also, in retrospect, a mistake, because Nixon was far better known in the country and Kennedy was little known.
And therefore, the debates elevated Kennedy to the same level as Nixon.
And then famously, Nixon bumps his knee on a car door right after Labor Day in early September.
He's hospitalized for two weeks.
He loses 15 pounds.
He is gone.
He's still on antibiotics and running a fever when he comes out of the hospital.
He hits five states on his way to Chicago for the debate.
He shows up mentally and physically exhausted.
Now he wears a light gray suit that's almost as gray as the color of his complexion.
Kennedy, on the other hand, gets to Chicago early.
He spends the day on the rooftop getting a suntan with two prostitutes.
And he looks like a bronze god.
I think you grasped it.
Kennedy understands that the way you appear, your style and your image will be more important in the debate than the substance, the words.
Nixon doesn't grasp that.
So the first debate is a disaster for Nixon.
Now, yes, the Kennedys break into his hotel suite on the eve of the second debate and they wiretap it.
They break into his psychiatrist's office and they steal his medical records.
The Kennedys break into his accountant's office and they steal his financial records.
They print millions of pieces of virulent anti-Catholic literature and they mail it to Catholic households, making it appear like it came from Nixon.
By the way, Roger, how do you know all this?
It's very well documented in the book.
It could have been documented at the actual time if reporters had bothered to do a little digging.
It's all on the historical record.
All you have to do is be prepared to go through old documents, old newspaper clippings, old books that are out of print and obscure, sometimes hard to find.
But I think you'll find in my book that it's very, very meticulously footnoted in terms of source material.
And do you believe that the Kennedys knew all about this?
Or was there some plausible deniability going on?
None whatsoever.
Bobby Kennedy is his brother's alter ego, and he's running the dirty tricks operation against Nixon.
Here's the bottom line.
Nixon, despite those early mistakes, he scores in the second, third, and fourth debate, which there's very little even written about.
The fourth televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy has a television audience that is almost as large as the first.
More importantly, Nixon hoards his campaign money for the last 30 days, which means on television and radio, he's out advertising the Kennedys.
Now, Dwight Eisenhower, the sitting president, very popular, he comes off the bench and he goes to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles campaigning for Nixon.
And he excoriates Kennedy on the stump, which is not his style.
He was generally non-political, but he has real misgivings about Kennedy's intellectual heft and his experience, and he really lambastes him.
Bottom line, Nixon closes fast and he actually wins the 1960 election.
So the mob boys in Chicago and the Daily Machine, they steal Chicago.
And more precisely, Lyndon Johnson, the most corrupt and amoral man to ever fill the United States presidency, steals the election through voter fraud in Texas.
In Dallas County, 56,000 Nixon Lodge ballots are burned the night of the election.
But Kennedy and Johnson only carry Texas by 46,000 votes.
So rampant voter fraud and a little help from the mob puts John Kennedy in the White House.
People say to me, well, you were close with Nixon.
He was paranoid.
Well, you know what?
Howard, you'd be paranoid too if the presidency was stolen from you by a millionaire gangster and his lightweight Playboy son, Jack Kennedy.
And the problem is that Nixon came up the hard way.
He had some knocks and kicks in his early career.
So anybody telling him about stuff being done against him, that is going to fuel any element of paranoia the man may have had.
Well, there's no question that deep resentment is an important piece of his psyche.
But in a certain sense, his deep resentment of the cultural elite, of those who are handed everything.
I mean, Nixon is, you know, when he's high school age, he is driving to Los Angeles every morning to buy fresh vegetables at 3 a.m., get them back to the family store by 5, wash them, get them set up for sale, and then he goes to school.
I mean, this guy is working a hard scrabble life in a very poor family.
He views the Kennedys as privileged brats who've been handed everything they have.
Sure, Jack Kennedy won a Pulitzer Prize for a book that he didn't write, Profiles and Courage.
He didn't write a word of that.
But the Pulitzer committee was no problem because Jack Kennedy's father paid them to give his son the award.
You can see how Nixon would be deeply resentful.
But that resentment feeds an ambition and a drive and a persistence that ends him up in the White House.
But was there not, Roger, a kind of persecution complex?
There was one contest that Nixon failed in, wasn't there?
And he said, I'm withdrawing now.
And you can explain to me what this was, but he said you won't have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore.
Well, I think that this resentment definitely fuels his resilience and his resolve to come back.
In 1960, I argue the election is stolen from him.
In 1962, he decides that the way to extend his political career and to seize a base and to stay in the arena, as it were, is to run for governor of California in his home state.
The early polls show him winning that contest handily, but by election day, it's very close.
And then, unfortunately for Nixon, the Cuban Missile Crisis becomes public roughly 10 days before the election, and that's the end.
It sucks up all the oxygen in the electorate.
The voters rally to the support of the president, the sitting president, and his party, and Nixon is ignominiously defeated in his home state.
Angry, dispirited, he holds a press conference in which he announces that he's finished with American politics.
Just think what you'll be missing, he says to the press.
You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore.
Howard, it's only six years later that he is raising his hand to say, I, Richard Nixon, do solemnly swear to fulfill the office of President of the United States.
Problem is, experiences like that, though, inevitably create people, we have a phrase over here, I'm sure you have it there, who have a chip on their shoulder.
So Nixon's going forward with a chip on his shoulder, isn't he?
Definitely true, and I think that leads to his most calamitous mistakes.
Those who broke into the Watergate should have been immediately identified and fired.
They were John Dean.
John Dean is not the naive young man sucked into the Nixon cover-up by the evil Nixon men.
So you can read his book.
You can read my book.
I think you'll see I'm right.
But the view that we have, certainly the view that we're presented by fiction and the popular press and stuff that we've read and studied over the years is that Nixon was very much a part of this, knew it was all going on.
His hands were very dirty all the way through.
And ultimately, although he thought the fuse burning away at the people who were involved in this that would eventually reach them and blow up, that fuse would never reach him, he believed.
And it did in the end.
And that was a shock to him.
He should have fired those involved immediately and made a clean breast of it.
As far as the tapes are concerned, he probably should never have made the White House tapes.
But he was determined.
I mean, they were taping stuff that went on in the White House, weren't they, well before Nixon.
Johnson had had a taping system and had urged Nixon to install one.
We now know that Kennedy's phone calls were taped.
Let's just say both of them were more careful about what they left on tape.
But I'll tell you why Nixon made the tapes and I'll tell you why he didn't destroy them.
He viewed them as his protection against Henry Kissinger.
Nixon knew after his death, Henry Kissinger would attempt to take credit for Nixon's accomplishments in the foreign policy realm.
Well, I was the strategist and Nixon was the implementer.
No, it was actually the other way around.
Nixon was the guy with the broad visionary view of how to change American relations around the world, how to extract us from Vietnam, how to get a peaceful coexistence with the Chinese, how to get arms control from the Soviets.
Henry Kissinger was the errand boy.
And Nixon unwisely kept the tapes because they believed, he believed, that they would prove what Kissinger's role really was and what Nixon's role really was.
You said that the way to have dealt with this situation involving Watergate, the break-in, and all the rest of it was to fire a fight at a very early stage, get rid of the people involved in the break-in, come clean about it.
Or what difference would that have made?
Well, I think, first of all, the tapes are really what bring Nixon down.
He should have destroyed the tapes prior to their being subpoenaed, which I argue would not have been criminal.
Worst case, if the public controversy had been John Dean versus Richard Nixon, I think Nixon would have survived.
Recall, he just carried 49 states in the most sweeping mandate in presidential elective history.
And he was very popular at the time that Watergate began.
It took two years for Watergate to unravel his presidency.
He should have come clean right up front.
People would have viewed it as political.
And I don't think there's any evidence anywhere, not in Mr. Dean's book, not in any historical record, that Nixon knew about the break-in in advance.
At the time of the Watergate break-in, Nixon was leading his opponent, Senator George McGovern, by 19 points.
He was on his way to a 49-state blowout.
So why even bother?
And you can hear Nixon and Tape saying, why?
Who did this?
Why would they do it?
Anyone who knows politics knows that there's nothing of value in the Democratic politics.
But is this not a kind of Thomas a Beckett kind of thing?
You know, will somebody rid me of this troublesome priest or this meddlesome priest?
So if Nixon called for the thing often enough and then somebody close to him made that happen, then he is complicit.
Is he not?
Is he not?
Well, yes, except for I don't think he ever gives an explicit order to break into the Watergate.
I don't think he has any advanced knowledge of that.
But to stop defending him for a moment, he very clearly engages in the cover-up.
Even though he begins in the cover-up later than Dean tells us, he still actively moves to protect the people around him in the cover-up.
And that is, in the end, what brings him down.
As they famously say in the United States, it's not the act itself that gets you, it's the cover-up.
And indeed, the cover-up is what ends his presidency.
Now, do you think that was because of his loyalty to the people close to him?
Because he was, in things that I've read, he was seen to be a very loyal man to those closest to him.
Or was that also because he felt he'd achieved a great deal, which arguably he had, and this small thing would light the fuse underneath his presidency, and that's a shame.
So, you know, in other words, the only way to stop that all happening is to do something you shouldn't really do, and that's to cover it all up.
I think it is a combination of loyalty to his men, indecisiveness, because he clearly thinks about destroying the tapes for a long time, but he doesn't do it.
But then lastly, as he says in my book, hell, everybody wiretaps everybody.
He knew that the Kennedys had broken into his headquarters in 60 and 62.
He knew he had been wiretapped.
He knew they'd stolen his medical records and financial records.
So his attitude was, hell, everybody does this.
It's politics.
So he made the mistake of assuming the public were as savvy about these things as they are today.
And of course, back then, we were all innocents.
So people were not as accepting of things like wiretaps and stuff like that as they would be today.
Put another way, he thought he would be held to the same standard as his predecessors, and he was wrong About that.
He was held to an entirely different standard.
I mean, you want to talk about immorality?
Lyndon Johnson ordered the murder of 17 men to cover up corruption and vote theft, according to his aide Clifford Clark, who is recorded in the deposition of Billy Sal Estes.
Lyndon Johnson is the most immoral, crude psychopath who ever fills the presidency.
But how can we be sure of that?
His crimes are far more egregious than Nixon, but it doesn't treat him the same way.
You know, a lot has been said and written about LBJ, and I think it's indisputable that he was not exactly a nice man.
But a lot of claims are made about him.
How is it possible at this distance of time, and it's, what, 60 years now, 50 odd years, to make any of that stand up?
Actually, the literature on it is pretty compelling.
Last year, I wrote a book called The Man Who Killed Kennedy, The Case Against LBJ.
It was not reviewed by the New York Times or the Washington Post, although the Sunday Times in London gave it a good review.
And it became a New York Times bestseller.
And it is the next generation in a group of books written by Philip Nelson in his JFK, pardon me, LBJ the mastermind of the JFK assassination, or Barr McClellan in his Money, Blood, and Power.
There's a growing body of literature that makes the case.
Now, last year, the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, so concerned about the fact that we're starting to chip away at the public image of this sociopath who was president, launched a major PR offensive talking about his great civil rights record.
His civil rights record?
Lyndon Johnson was a virulent segregationist his entire career.
He killed every major piece of civil rights legislation.
Now, did he pass civil rights as president?
Yes.
For the wrong reason.
He did the right thing for the wrong reason.
He thought it would buy him cover for the Vietnam War.
You see, Johnson had to go in the Vietnam War.
He and Ladybird owned too much stock in the defense contractors, Brown and Root, Halliburton, Bell Howe Helicopter.
So it may have cost the United States 50,000 lives, but Linden and Ladybird made $30 million on the Vietnam War.
Very, very profitable for them.
God.
All in my book, all carefully documented.
So back to Nixon.
There he is in this situation that he knows is going to blow up underneath his feet.
And the only thing that is uncertain to him, must have been uncertain to him at that point, is who's it going to take with him, with it?
Well, of course, his principal concern is himself.
And that, I think, is the single most important thing about my book.
The very title, Nixon's Secrets, refers to the secret that Nixon uses to avoid prosecution and jail, and in turn allows him to launch his final public comeback.
I believe, and I think I make a pretty compelling case, that Vice President Spiro Agnew is moved out of the line of secession.
They get rid of him quickly.
I think that he's set up.
He ultimately pleads to a very, very minor tax charge and refused in return for his resignation.
Doesn't do a day of jail.
Writes in his own biography that they threatened to kill him if he wouldn't resign, that Alexander Haig made it clear that he had to resign or else.
So they get him out of the way.
Nixon appoints Gerald Ford for vice president for a very specific reason.
Gerald Ford is a man on whom Nixon has enormous leverage.
Right.
And I want to get into that in just a second.
Can I just step back just half a second now and deal with the tapes?
You said that the logical thing to have done and the right thing to have done would have been to have erased the tapes.
However, doesn't that make you look very dirty?
If you are found out to have erased some tapes, then you must have done that for a reason, and that's because you're a bad man.
I don't think it's as egregious as having people listen to hours and hours and hours of you using profane language, denigrating blacks, Jews, Asians, the some total text of the tapes, far more damaging than the idea that you destroyed your personal property that were essentially your tapes.
Then people could argue for decades about what was on them, but no one would be sure.
I don't take that nearly as politically damaging as ultimately being forced by the courts to release the tapes, which, as you know, Nixon's enemies and detractors have had a field day.
By the way, I have to, it's just conjecture, but my guess is if you had taped Lyndon Johnson or Robert Kennedy or even Franklin Roosevelt 24-7 around the clock, I don't think those tapes would have been revelatory of a bunch of nice guys with speaking platitudes.
Well, over here, there was a TV program about a year or two ago of some of the LBJ tapes, and they were pretty shocking, the things he used to say and the way he would express himself.
Well, not genteel and not statesmanlike, particularly.
Look, none of our politicians are flawless.
They're all human.
They all make mistakes.
They all use profanity.
They all say things they wish they hadn't said.
They all say things that at first they didn't really mean.
I don't think you could take any political leader, Barack Obama, any of our presidents, and expect that if they were taped live 24-7, that their comments would be sanitized.
They wouldn't.
But Nixon was the only president, I hate to say this, dumb enough to leave an indelible record.
He could have legally burned the tapes prior to their being subpoenaed, argued that they were his personal property that he had made for his own recollection and his own memoirs, and he decided to get rid of them.
Well, he was a master lawyer.
He was a really fantastic lawyer by any stretch of the understanding of it.
So presumably he didn't take other people's advice because he felt his own advice was the best.
But as a master lawyer, he left evidence of his own obstruction of justice.
Yeah, yeah, no, that's what I'm saying.
That there would have been people, had he been in receipt of legal advice that he would accept from other people, then he would have got rid of the tapes.
But because presumably he felt that he had the greatest intellect in that department, he didn't do it.
I would have to argue, though, that history is richer for him Having not destroyed the tapes, because we could very clearly hear him say, for example, that the Warring Commission is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.
That is one thing in the tapes.
Well, I think a lot of people believe that all these years on from it, that we're never really going to get the full truth of what happened in that instance.
All right, Gerald Ford, you contend that Nixon had something over Gerald Ford.
Nixon knew that in 1964, Congressman Gerald Ford, as a member of the Warren Commission, was responsible for altering the Kennedy autopsy in his own handwriting, changing the description of the wound in Kennedy's upper back to his lower neck in order to accommodate the government's single bullet theory.
And the American people did not learn about this alteration until the 90s when that document, the autopsy of John Kennedy, was declassified by the federal government and made available to the media.
The New York Times reported the Ford alteration.
So did Associated Press.
But Nixon knew about it in real time.
He also knew about the Central Intelligence Agency's involvement in Daley Plaza on November 22nd, 1963.
So essentially, Nixon sends Al Haig, his chief of staff, to Gerald Ford and says, look, if Nixon goes to trial in the Watergate matter, he's taking everybody down with him.
He's going to talk about what you did in the Warring Commission.
He's going to talk about the CIA's role in the Kennedy assassination.
He's going to talk about foreign assassinations.
He's going to talk about wiretaps on embassies.
He's going to talk about illegal activities throughout the 60s by the federal government that will splash all over the incumbents.
And therefore, it's very clear from August 1st, 1974, when Haig meets privately with Ford, that Ford has agreed to pardon Nixon prior to Nixon's resignation on August 9th.
So there was a quid pro quo done there.
Two questions really arise from that.
Number one, could Nixon have done that?
And number two, if he had done that, would he have been believed?
I think he definitely did it.
He only needed one person to believe him, Gerald Ford.
And Gerald Ford knew exactly what he had done on the Kennedy autopsy.
If you look at the memoirs of William Sullivan and also the memoirs of Deke DeLoach, those are the number two and three men prospectively in the FBI.
They both record in their memoirs that J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, went to Ford and said, you have to make this alteration in the Kennedy autopsy because we have some Warren Commission members who won't go along with the single bullet theory.
So Ford is guilty.
When the New York Times says to him, why did you make these changes?
He said, well, the country needed clarity.
You notice he didn't say the country needed truth.
So Nixon had the goods on Ford and he avoids prosecution.
There's a long struggle between Nixon and the federal government over his tapes and his records.
It's funny.
Every president prior to Nixon is allowed sole custody of his tapes and his papers, but Nixon is not allowed sole custody of his tapes and his papers.
There's a long legal struggle over those.
Ultimately, all that information becomes public.
But because he avoids prosecution, because he is pardoned, has a full and unconditional pardon, Nixon gets to launch his last and final comeback.
And that is as a foreign policy advisor to President William Jefferson Clinton.
Before we talk about that, what about the gap in the tapes?
What's that all about?
I think that the gap in the tapes is initially caused, the first five minutes are caused by Nixon's secretary, longtime personal secretary, Rosemary Woods.
If you listen to the actual 18 and a half minute gap, there's a very loud buzz in the first five minutes, which is caused by the static from a wall socket in her office.
Then there's an additional 13 and a half minute erasure, which is really two erasures because one starts and stops and a second one starts.
I believe that those erasures happen when the tapes are in the custody of General Alexander Haig.
I think that they are made by Haig's direction.
I think the purpose of them is to cause the firestorm that brings Nixon down.
You ask me what was on the tape, what's in the 18 and a half minutes?
I think the answer is nothing significant.
It's the act of the erasure itself that takes Nixon down.
Seriously, it would have been better to get rid of all of them than to get rid of a small part of it.
No question.
But we do know, according to all the president's men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, before the tapes even go to the Senate committee, Deep Throat tips off Woodward.
There's an erasure on, first that there are tapes, and there's a deliberate erasure on the tape.
Now, what was Haig's motive?
Haig's loyalty was not to Nixon.
Haig's loyalty was to the Pentagon.
And it is very clear from 1969 on that the hardliners, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, the Army Intelligence, the Pentagon, they're opposed to the withdrawal of Vietnam.
They're opposed to the timetable for troop withdrawals.
They're opposed to the opening to China.
They're adamantly opposed to the arms control agreement with the Soviets.
The Pentagon and the so-called neocons, they're later called the neocons, they're opposed to détente.
Nixon is taken down in the end by the same people who took Kennedy down.
They didn't kill Nixon.
They killed him politically.
I think Al Haig is responsible for the 18 and a half minute gap.
The tapes are in his custody at the time that the erasure is made.
And it has the desired result.
If you look at Bob Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff's contemporaneous notes that Go along with the conversation that is detailed in the 18 and a half minute gap, it appears to be fairly innocuous.
You mentioned deep throat, but one of the things that is said in the publicity for your book is that there is no deep throat.
There is no deep throat in the sense that deep throat is one person and one source.
I think deep throat is invented by Woodward because much of Woodward's information is coming from grand jury proceedings in the United States.
And in the United States, either giving or possessing grand jury testimony is a felony.
And Woodward cannot cop to having an illegal source.
So he invents a composite that he calls deep throat.
So deep throat is Mark Felt.
I think he is one of the sources that is deep throat.
And Mark Felt was an FBI guy.
Right, who later claims that he is the sole deep throat.
Ben Bradley, the editor of the Washington Post, the boss of Woodward and Bernstein, says to New York Magazine in an incredible interview with Jeff Himmelman, an interview that Woodward tried legally to block publication of, there is no deep throat.
If you think flower pots were moved or people hid in garages, none of that happens.
So Al Haig is deep throat.
Mark Felt is deep throat.
John Sears, a White House aide, is deep throat.
Donald Santorelli, who is an aide to Attorney General Don Mitchell, is deep throat.
Hugh Sloan, the treasurer of the committee of re-elected.
They're all talking to Woodward.
They are all sources.
And they are lumped in the persona of deep throat to cover Woodward's posterior over the fact that some of his sources are illegal grand jury sources.
And crucially, you're saying that Nixon was taken down because of the same dynamic that conspiracy theorists and others argue over even right now to this day, that there are people in the higher echelons of everything, the military-industrial complex, who do not want detente, do not want the world's nations to get on together because it's bad for business.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true.
Look, we know for a certainty that beginning in 1969, the very first year of his presidency, the military is spying on Nixon.
A naval yeoman named Radford is copying top secret documents out of files, off of desks, out of burn bags.
He even goes into Henry Kissinger's briefcase.
These documents are being copied and being given to Admiral Wielander, who in turn is giving them to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Thomas Moore.
So the Pentagon knows Nixon's every move on China, on Russia, on Vietnam in advance, and they are not happy.
They expected the ultimate anti-communist hardliner.
Nixon turns out to be a proponent of peace.
There's a shocker, and they're opposed to his pro-peace policies.
I outline in the book that they actually think about assassinating him twice, as late as 1972.
There's two different plots that fall apart.
One of them in which the CIA plans to infiltrate Vietnam veterans against the war who are having a demonstration outside Nixon's presidential compound in Key Biscayne, Florida, not many miles from where I'm sitting right now.
And they intend to use a shoulder-launched rocket to kill Nixon while he sits in his living room.
They abandoned that plan.
Then Frank Sturgis recruits a paid assassin, a CIA contract killer named Ed Kaiser.
Ed Kaiser's son, Scott Kaiser, very generously gave me the opportunity to review all of his father's secret papers, his top intelligence papers.
And Kaiser is recruited to shoot a political figure.
He's led to believe it is a Cuban communist he's going to kill.
At the last minute, they reveal to him that his target is the president, and he withdraws, saying, I don't do political assassinations in the United States.
So the plot falls apart.
By 1972, the CIA learns about the Watergate break-in, infiltrates the Watergate burglar team through James McCord, through E. Howard Hunt, and they purposely botch the break-in.
I'll give you the best possible example.
When E. Howard Hunt, who is in a crow's nest lookout point in the Howard Johnson's hotel across the street from the Watergate, leaves in a hurry after the burglar team has been arrested, he leaves behind a laundry receipt with his name, address, and phone number on it.
Why would you do that unless, of course, you wanted to be caught?
You're leaving behind the smoking gun.
Well, why would you tape the doors open horizontally instead of vertically so the tape shows?
You would always tape vertically so the tape didn't show.
McCord tapes the doors open.
Then when he comes back 15 minutes later, he sees the tape has been removed by the security guard, so he puts it back on.
Now the security guard doing his next round sees that the tape has been replaced and he calls the police.
It's the beginning of the end.
The Watergate burglar team was infiltrated and sabotaged with the purpose of getting caught.
And ultimately, Nixon was the first president to be taken out of office in that way.
But remaining a clever man.
And I think it needs the capper, which is as soon as Ford is president, Henry Kissinger is kneecapped by Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Richard Cheney.
Detente is over.
The outreach to the Chinese and the Soviets is over.
The hardliners win, and detente is finished with the elevation of Gerald Ford.
The Pentagon gets its way.
But Nixon hasn't completely lost because it seems to me that he engineered his own rehabilitation.
And the first step on that route was the Frost interview.
The Frost interview becomes very important for a couple of reasons.
First of all, Nixon realizes that he needs to make some public act of attrition, of contrition for the American people.
And Frost is the perfect vehicle for doing that.
Secondarily, Nixon's broke.
Unlike Lyndon Johnson, who stole a billion dollars in gold when he left and who took massive bribes through the 60s and 70s, Nixon has never lined his own pockets.
Nixon has never stolen on his own behalf.
He has probably raised campaign money illegally, as did every other major politician of the time.
So, Nixon, between his legal fees and his lack of any income whatsoever, is forced to write.
His books all become bestsellers.
That generates the cash for him to survive.
And then, of course, in the Frost interviews, he makes $600,000, which is an enormous sum for the time.
And it also gives him a forum.
Frost turns out to be a tougher interview than Nixon thinks, but it's riveting television, and it begins Nixon's journey on the comeback road, if you will.
And Frost gave him the opportunity to do what he must have really wanted to do, and that was to emotionally almost look at the camera and say, I'll let the nation down.
I'll let the presidency down.
And that's the message we came away with.
Yeah, I think the average voter, neither the Nixon lover nor the Nixon hater, but the average voter wanted to hear some words of contrition from Nixon.
They just wanted him to say, look, I made a big mistake.
I'm sorry.
I did it.
I was wrong.
And the Frost interview achieves that.
Now, there, of course, is the famous out, it's not an outtake.
There's the famous claim by Frost that in between takes, Nixon, in an effort to be jocular and to be a regular guy, says to Frost, so did you do any fornicating this weekend?
Yes.
I got to tell you, Nixon was in the Navy.
He had a foul mouth.
He never said that.
He might have said the F word, but he didn't say it the way Frost depicted it, in my opinion.
Really?
Because, you know, all I know is what I saw in the movie.
Yeah, no, Nixon used very salty language when he wanted to prove that he was one of the boys.
He would always use salty language, and I believe he would have used it with Frost.
Now, the movie left Nixon standing there by the ocean, and David Frost went to visit him at his home, and they shook hands, and that was the last time, apparently, Frost saw him.
And we get this view of Nixon being an old guy left with his memories, but he had a future beyond that, yeah?
Yeah, I think Nixon serves his country right up until the day he dies.
And I play a, personally, played a substantial role in this.
During the Bush years, the Bushes didn't pay much attention, did not receive Nixon at the White House, but once.
He's not in any way involved in the intellectual or policy loop.
After Clinton becomes president, Nixon decided that he wanted to meet Clinton because he thought that the situation in the Soviet Union was deteriorating very quickly.
And he also had a number of thoughts about how to play the Chinese off against the Russians.
And therefore, I was deputized to communicate with the Clintons to angle for an invitation.
Now, as you can imagine, protocol dictates that you can't invite yourself to the White House.
You have to be invited.
And Nixon was angling for an invitation.
And therefore, intermediaries on my behalf, Senator Bob Dole, Bob Strauss, who was the Democratic National Chairman and our special trade representative under Carter, my friends James Carville and Paul Bagala, who both worked for Clinton, all spoke to Clinton on Nixon's behalf at my request.
And in every case, Clinton said, great idea.
I'd love to meet him.
I could benefit from his wisdom.
We'll definitely invite him.
And then nothing happened.
Months would go by and nothing would happen.
I then dug a little deeper and found out that in every case, Hillary had spiked the invitations to Nixon.
Hillary has an animosity to Nixon going back to her service on the 1974 House Impeachment Committee, where she had been fired as a counsel to the committee because she was leaking.
And she was arguing that Nixon should be denied legal representation in any impeachment proceeding.
So she has a deep-seated animosity.
Finally, the political consultant Dick Morris, a good friend of mine, goes directly to Clinton saying, look, Hillary keeps killing these invitations.
You really need to reach out to Nixon to be good for him, but more importantly, be good for you.
And by the way, Mr. President, it buys you immunity.
He can never criticize your foreign policy publicly, as he did Bush, if he's advising you, even if you don't take all of his advice.
So you get him inside the tent spitting out.
Right.
So Clinton invites Nixon.
And sure enough, because they're both from dirt poor backgrounds, because they're both amazingly resilient, because they're both 100% political animals, they hit it off very famously.
There's a mutual high regard.
And Nixon becomes a regular memo writer and a regular advisor on a back-channel basis to the president.
And Nixon persuades Clinton that the one thing he cannot do is allow the return of totalitarianism on his watch to the Soviet Union.
And of course, we do get a return of totalitarianism, but it is not under William Jefferson Clinton, who does everything possible to foster democracy in Russia.
So at the end, I wonder if you, I mean, you were close to Nixon, so you maybe have an idea.
And I've often wondered about this.
How did Nixon feel about himself in those final years?
I think he's satisfied.
I mean, Nixon authorizes me to reach out to Clinton six months before Nixon's death to get a commitment that Clinton will attend his funeral and speak.
And to his credit, again, using Dick Morris as the channel, Clinton agrees even before Nixon's death that he will give the eulogy.
Nixon, in essence, planning the grandiosity of his own public funeral.
And it is Bill Clinton who shows up at Nixon's funeral and says, let the time for judging Richard Nixon on anything less than his complete record of accomplishments be passed.
And I think that that would have given Nixon an enormous amount of satisfaction.
What a fascinating conversation, Roger, and what an amazing book you've written.
Truly, truly fantastic.
Thank you very much.
Just as interesting as our last conversation, which was very interesting in itself.
Can I ask you one thing?
And this is a bit left-field, But it's because of when this interview, this conversation will be going out.
It'll be going out once again at another anniversary of 9-11 around that time.
It's only, what, a matter of days away now.
Do you believe, through the connections that you have and the people that you speak to, that we were ever really told the truth about 9-11?
It's premature for me to say.
It is just not a subject that I have immersed myself in.
I immersed myself in Lyndon Johnson in order to write the book on him.
I found out things I didn't know in 1964.
Arlen Specter was a very close friend of mine.
I worked on three of his campaigns.
I had no idea some of the things he had done to conceal who really murdered John Kennedy until I began researching the entire question of Kennedy and Johnson.
I have immersed myself in Richard Nixon for the writing of this book.
I will candidly tell you, I have not immersed myself in the facts of 9-11, and therefore I remain at this point an agnostic as to what did and did not happen.
Do you think it's worth investigating?
Yes, because I'm predisposed never to believe the government.
If the government's telling you something, the odds are good that it's a lie.
But I have no hard evidence, and therefore I'd like to punt on your question until such time that I do have the opportunity to research it.
Well, please, if you do that, can we have a fairly early interview about it?
Well, I think there's a book on the Bushes that is in order.
Right.
And I think that may be the next project that I tackle.
I'd like to know more about the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and what John Hinckley's connection to the Bush family really is.
I'd really like to know more about what George Bush's role in Iran-Contra really is.
He says he was out of the loop, but I think he's very much in the loop.
And I think he's setting Ronald Reagan up for impeachment and removal to become president earlier.
So there's a Bush book in the works.
And, you know, who was Osama bin Laden, really?
And how much U.S. aid did we give him to get to where he got?
So those may be the next topics that I tackle.
But at the moment, I really want people to get a more balanced view of Richard Nixon.
He is neither saint nor sinner.
He's both.
And I think my book would show that.
Well, I remember my father, when Nixon used to come on the TV, my dad thought he was a good president.
And I think in many respects he was, but as a human being and a political human being, deeply flawed.
And maybe that's how history will always remember him.
Roger Stone, please tell me the title of the book and give me a clue as to how people can get it.
Sure.
It's called Nixon's Secrets.
You can buy it on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, BooksAMillion.com.
I don't know how easy it is to get on your side of the pond, but it's well worth the effort.
I really think it is different than any other book written on Richard Nixon because it will tell you the good and the bad.
It shows the light side and the dark side.
It's a warts and all biography, and it reveals, finally, the deep secrets of Watergate and the fact that the mainstream media version of Watergate is a grotesque distortion of historical truth.
Roger Stone, good to talk to you.
Hope we talk again.
Many, many thanks.
Glad to be here.
A man who will forever fascinate me, Richard Milhouse Nixon, and the goings-on in the White House.
Our perception of power was never the same after that, was it?
Tell me what you thought about that interview.
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And until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
Stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
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