When Kurt Andersen started working on his new podcast, Nixon at War, he thought he knew a lot about Richard Nixon’s presidency, especially the bookend events of his 1968 campaign and his 1973 resignation. Devastating events with far-reaching consequences but unrelated - or so he thought. The surprising connections between the two are at the heart of Nixon at War. Kurt Andersen is a prize-winning novelist, historian, and public radio host (Studio 360). His most recent books -- Evil Geniuses, Fantasyland, and You Can’t Spell America Without Me, were all New York Times bestsellers. For more, visit Nixonatwar.org.
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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from My Heart Radio. When Kurt Anderson started working on his new podcast, Nixon at War, he thought he knew a fair amount about Richard Nixon's presidency, including two defining experiences. His nineteen sixty eight campaign promised to end the Vietnam War and his nineteen seventy three resignation due to Watergate, devastating but unrelated events, or so he thought. The surprising connection between those two are at the heart of Nixon at War. You may know Kurt Anderson from his award winning radio program Studio three sixty. He's a prize winning novelist and historian whose three most recent books, Evil Geniuses, Fantasy Land, and you Can't Spell America Without Me. We're all New York Times bestsellers. Anderson says, to understand Nixon's plans for Vietnam, you need to appreciate how much was at stake for Nixon when he ran in nineteen Richard Nixon, despite the fact that he was not a beloved figure in America as vice president, he had a very kind of meteoric young career. As a very young man, had never really been in politics right out of World War Two, was elected to the House in California, like had promptly after two terms of the Senate in California, before he had even had a couple of years in the Senate, was picked the vice president by Dwight Eysmower. And and so then of course he was going to run for president in nineteen sixty and and barely lost, but then lost again when he ran for governor of California. So this incredible rise, this recent fall, and this is a guy who never felt comfortable in his own skin with the world, didn't like socializing. Was this weirdo, this resentful, paranoid weirdo, who had done really well and now it was all slipping away. This was his last chance. This is his last chance to get back at the Kennedy Ivy League elites who beating him in nineteen sixty He moved to the heart of it, right and moved to the upper East side of Manhattan after he got beaten for the government of California. And and just right there in the middle of it where everyone hated Hi murdered and he hated them, but by god, he was gonna do it. And and so this was this real then Jean's field comeback attempt. That's where he is as as a figure, I often think that someone is chosen as vice president who can come in hand you to do things the president won't do. Eisenhowerd was probably the last president of the United States chosen by acclamation. Did not want to be the president, was pressured into doing that. Not a details guy at that point in his life, wanted to go play golf and take it easy. So he brings Nixon and by my lights to do the dirty work. Who better the Nixons to do dirty work. I mean, Eisenhoward needed somebody who was a political hitman and enforcer. And so because he wasn't going to micromanage that way, Eisenhower and Nixon cuts his teeth on Alger Hiss and all this kind of pumpkin papers and all this other stuff. He's an anti communist tool, if you will, during a time when anti communism seemed too many people in the country the right thing to be doing. My favorite scene about the American nineteen fifties is in Manchurian Candidate when Angela landsbois there with her husband and he says, there are hundred five communists and the government. I said, though a hundred forty five, how many other hundred eighty nine? He just keeps changing the number right in the same paragraph that he's talking, which is not unlike certain moments in Joe McCarthy's real life where he was saying, you know, he changed the number all the time. No, I mean, you know, the Soviet Union having been our buddies in World War Two, suddenly we're not our buddies, and suddenly had the atomic bomb, and then the hydrogen bomb. Anti communism got out of control and created McCarthyism. But it wasn't it wasn't nuts to be frightened of the Soviet Union, even though it went crazily too far. And yeah, Richard Nixon saw this is how he could make his career and did. And making an enemy of the people out of aldra Hiss along with Jeheger Hoover in the around nineteen fifty was the way he did it, and it worked. And squishy soft Dwight Eisenhower, who by the way, and won World War Two for the Islands. I'll pick this anti communists, as you say, tool hitman to uh show that he was good as an e communist, even though that didn't stop the John Birch Society later in the fifties into the sixties of claiming that Dwight Eisenhower was a conscious stooge of the Soviet Union. Well, it's funny when I think when you see Eisenhower, oh, PSC won World War Two. Yes, but I always think Eisenhower's career, even though you think that there's an inextricable link between the military and the government at that point, there wasn't necessarily one and and and the man that won World War Two, of course exited the office in his farewell speech warning about the creating the phrase military industrial complex papabah. But what I was thinking is I see Eisenhower to me as president was like as if Ted Williams was president. It's like the guy that won all these games. He was a hero, but he wasn't necessarily what we could we equate now with the president as an executive. No, and figurehead is unfair too, but he was. He was a hero and then beat twice the same liberal elite egghead and like Stevenson who was running against him. You mentioned passingly in the piece about your own background, in your own family and for your Republican household. Would you say, when Nixon is elected in sixty eight, where are you well? When Nixon's elected in sixty eight? Just fourteen? Your fourteen and your parents were pro Nixon. Oh, definitely, I was pro Nixon when I was thirteen. I was. I was a little teenage republic I went to teenage Republican camp. Had a had a poster of Nixon on my wall. I wish I had photographs of that whole He had a poster of Nixon on your wall. In terms of decorating your room. You were like the Roger Stone of your generation. I hate to say that a little bit, but then again, you know, summer of sixty eight came. My older brother and sisters took me in hand, and by the fall I was a hippie. Now, comparatively speaking, now you have how many siblings. That's you plus three, It is me plus three. And the other ones were more liberally inclined than they were older. So I was the youngest and they've gone through the countercultural transformation ahead of me. It was the one window where your siblings were more politically evolved than you were. That didn't last long. And then they definitely, definitely were politically culturally all that they were, you know, fifteen eighteen one, so they were into the late sixties. And and what happened to you when you were four to I don't know. I smoked pot, I started reading other books and other things than William F. Buckley Jr. And Uh, I self radicalized like but no, I but your parents did Republicans absolutely, although interestingly I described the kinds of Nebraska Republicans my parents were, which is to say atheists, big public radio enthusiasts, when when public radio began, big environmentalists and and pro choice and so on and so on. And my mother, who outlived my father, finally left the Republican Party at the end of the ninety nineties because it was no longer her party. Gasp. Did she vote for Bill? She probably didn't vote for Bill, but she started a Bob Terry, who was our senator, was a sort of her entryway drug to becoming a now sixty eight, I'm ten years old, big turning point for me politically. Through the eyes of my father and through the lens of his progressive he was a democratic commitment in our town and so forth, through his eyes and This is after Kennedy is killed, of course, so everybody's just, you know, just just seething with emotion. Bobby Bobby Kennedy. So we're watching the convention and it's like, are you rooting for the Chicago police? Are you rooting for the demonstrator? Who are you rooting for? My dad, I was rooting for the protesters. He was an anti police. He was a very, very middle of the road Democrat, but he was rooting for the protesters. And I'm wondering, what was that like for you? Were your parents rooting for the Chicago cops. So they weren't. They were the extinct species of decent liberal Republicans, although they considered themselves conservative and we're kind of very Goldwater Fans back then. But as the party moved right and they didn't, they thought they didn't have a party. So, no, they weren't in favor. Were the issues more important to them? Military? Strong military was somewhat important, but conservation actually was a huge thing for them, and actual liberty not to be run by religious nuts, because they were anti religious, really, and they wanted to live a free life with as few you know, rules and regulations as possible. Really, and my father also his his profession, he was a lawyer, and and he his specialty was labor law, representing corporations and management. And so he was not viciously anti union. And in fact, subsequently school teachers against whom he negotiated contracts had said to me since he died, like, you know, your dad was always a decent guy, and he always was fair and somebody managements well exactly, so I was the opposite of a red diaper baby. You were a boss baby something like that. You were suiting tie baby. Well I wasn't. I didn't go that whole Alex Keaton thing. Ever, although in retrospect, I guess you could you could see that. I mean as no as a twelve thirty funeral. I must have been an insufferable little dick, you know, with my little Republican talking points. Pretty but as you mentioned, I'm conveniently using you and your family to frame what Republicanism was back then. You say Goldwater Republican on in the heartland, but at first is New Yorker was Rockefeller right? Correct? Were the whole thing? We're like, we don't give a shit about abortion, we don't give a shit about you want to order a gay wedding cake. Just lower my taxes and cut the regulation on my business exactly. And my parents were very pro civil rights, and my mother, until she left the party, always referred to it as the Party of Lincoln, the Party of Lincoln. We're the Party of Lincoln. Everett Dirkson was was her and their hero, who, by the way, helped Lennon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. So you know, they were economic conservatives, absolutely, and they believe in the strong military. But all the other stuff, all the culture war stuff that didn't know, which wasn't part of Republicanism very much back then until Richard Nixon made it so was not their cup of tea at all. Now, I don't expect you to concur with me here, but before we launched into Nixon full blown in the war, I want to just go trace backwards and say that if Elsberg, who himself was a self described hawk during the period prior to the Pentagon Papers and working at RAND, eventually realized that this policy is a catastrophic and immoral. But I'm assuming that when the truth of the Pentagon Papers, when the Rand Corporation submits their report that's around what year sixty seven, no, sixty eight they finished, and it was it was really right before Nickson mcame president that they finished. So there was it was it safe to assume that kind of information, that's specific cash of paperwork was not made available to Johnson. Johnson did not know about the Rand Report. Well, it was actually I mean Rand was part of it, and Elbert worked for Rand, as you say, um, but it was it was a Defense Department report, commission commission, and so it was under commission under mcnamaraon LBJ and finished under Clark Clifford and lb J. So yeah, Johnson was very much aware of it. Did it go to him? I don't actually know that, but it was secret, So, but I'm always wondering, and I've said this to his face to Bob Caro. You obviously have all this worship of Johnson and his political acumen and the kind of heft and the grandeur of his career and his position in our history and how determinative was in our history beyond Kennedy's death and sixty three and what he did in those years. But let's face facts. At one point, did he know that the Vietnam War was wrong anymoral and why don't you call him on that? And I'm wondering in the research you did, did Johnson know before he left? Yes, he definitely did. I mean that we have a bit of a phone call he had had back in the nineteen sixties six, you know, with Eugene McCarthy saying, I want to get out of it as much as you do. Jeane hated you know, it's awful. Um. I mean, he was not a you know, a moralist in the in the Bobby Kennedy sense, say, you know, but he knew it was a bad deal and he made a mistake and he needed to get out. And then you know, in sixty eight and as you hear in this show with his conversations with Nixon and his conversation with his Secretary of State Dean Russ and other people like I will tell America I'm not running and I got nine months to try to really start our way out. Johnson wants to get out and Nixon doesn't want to get out because he wants it to stay so he can get us out. He could be the hero. Well he wants to, Yes, he wants to. Nixon wants it both ways. Nixon wants to get elected by saying, these Democrats have met bungled this war, and I'll be a tough minded guy who will finish it right and and soon. But then when when peace is at hand in the night, Nixon goes, oh, this is gonna beat me. This is gonna elect Humbert Humphrey the vice president, and we I gotta I gotta postpone this piece thing. So explain to the listeners what's the thing. Johnson tells Nixon in the phone call not to do that. Nixon does well Johnson Johnson tells Nixon not to do multiple times. Nixon says he's not going to do it multiple times in the fall of sixty eight, which is talk and and say I'll do a better deal for you South Vietnam. I'll do a better deal for you North Vietnam. Elect me, everybody, and I'll end this war because I won't have this Johnson Kennedy baggage. And and he keeps quiet for a little bit, but then he Nixon freaks out, thinks he's gonna lose, and just like goes full Nixon and tries to mess up these Paris piece talks to end the Vietnam War had really started to take off and there was about to be a big breakthrough, and Nixon didn't want that to happen. A week or two, Well, he does a lot of stuff. Most he does this thing that he spent the rest of his life covering up. He gets this fascinating woman named Anna Chenault, this Chinese teenage reprovocateur. Well, but she's she deserves her own podcast, she deserves her own biopic. Anyway. She meets this uh as a nineteen hole reporter in China during World War Two, meets this General Marrison. They moved to America. He dies right away. She's rich. She's this glamorous, rich, anti communist, right wing widow living at the Watergate like too good to be true, and becomes Nixon's biggest female donor and finagler. She also is good pals in her anti communist way with the South. FETA music ambassador to the US introduces the two of them at this secret meeting in the summer of n at which Richard Nixon says, Okay, Mr Ambassador, you and President too of South Vietnam. You've gotta understand this woman your pal, and Channault is my person to you. She she is my whatever I'm want you to do, she's the person telling you that. And when a couple of a few months later, when the election gets closed and this and this He's breakthrough is about to happen, he Nixon and Nixon's people set out what he called the Dragon Lady to go tell too and the ambassador no, no, no, no, don't go along with this piece deal. You gotta you gotta make sure this doesn't have a better deal. When we come in, you'll get and I'll owe you right. And so don't make anything happen before November five. You know, it reminds me of the whole hostage crisis with Carter. And they go and they basically, if I'm not mistaken, they do the same thing. Don't release the hostages to weaken in there. We gotta get rid of Carter. Is it similar? Well, is it's comparable. This was an ongoing war. This wasn't a few dozen hostages. This was an ongoing war where hundreds of Americans were dying every week. And they're saying, let's extend this so I can get elected. I mean, what's interesting to me about this part of the story. It was eclipsed in history and in the popular understanding by Watergate. But this is where it all began. This is the thing he did which was illegal and and a federal crime. Undoubtedly a citizen messing around with foreign policy, you know, in this very specific way. And then he was worried the rest of his time alive and certainly as president, that this was going to come out and uh lead to his downfall. So what did he do? He committed burglaries that led to his downfall. Author and podcaster Kurt Anderson. If you want to deep dive on the Vietnam War, Ken Burns and Lynn Novic's eighteen hour documentary is a good place to start. Ken Burns told me he screened a final version for Senator John McCain, a decorated pow who was particularly fascinated by the interviews with North Vietnamese soldiers. What you begin to realize is that at that point of combat, which is where human beings are at their very worst, they're really good at killing the other people and avoiding being killed or all this stuff happens, but it's hell, and we couldn't even possibly imagine what it's like, and we've tried so hard in so many films from Civil War through World War Two into this. But they recognize each other, and they that recognition is transcendent, and so he wants to see what they're saying, and what they're saying sounds so exactly like our marines and our army guys. And so you have a marine, for example, Karmar Lantis, who says, you know, we're not the dominant species on the planet because we're nice, right, And people complained that, oh, the military turns young men into killing machines. I'd suggest it's only finishing school. Here more of my conversation with Ken Burns and Lynn Novik that Here's the Thing dot Org. After the break, Kurt Anderson talks about Nixon and Henry Kissinger's faithful decision to bomb neutral Cambodia. Bi'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing. Kurt Anderson says, Richard Nixon had a number of close advisors, but on they listened to a few. Henry Kissinger definitely had his ear and his trust, even though they mistrusted each other because they were both manipulating guys. They were scorpions in the Oval office together but Bob Holdenman, his chief of staff, he he thought was a smart political guy and a tough guy and all that. But like in terms of oh should I get out of Vietnam sooner rather than later? Kissinger, if he was of a mind to do that, I think could have done that, and could have you know, could have talked him out conceivably of all kinds of things. Did he have his trust though? Because when he gives that speech, and you're talking about like episode five or six, he gives that speech and Kissinger there's a long clip of kissing going, I've never heard of speech delivered like this, to the greatest speech that an actor never could have read, that written that speech, And he said, I think I was as good as any actor in Hollywood. He says, and and and what's what's the speech again? He gives There was the famous silent majority speech back in the fall at sixty nine he gave. But this was afterwards and the Kissinger actually says the one non ass kissing thing in these hours of tapes with Nix and he says, he but that wasn't as well delivered as this one, Mr President, And yes, you're right, and we run that so long those calls. Kissinger called him I think five times that night, just to keep trying to keep giving him the drug was praised. The only thing that cemented since trust for kissing him was that all you had to do. No, that was part of the anti he That was the entry admission. He had to do that just constantly, obviously because Nixon was so needy for it. But no, they had actual substantive conversations about politics and geopolitics and Russian Vietnam and all the rest. But they were both a moral people and just full of just amazing to me listening to these hours of tape, kind of grotesque. A morality about killing, killing on the massive scales, whether it's Mela, the Meli massacre, or tens of thousands and then eventually millions in Cambodia now much as made not by you. You You've mentioned it glassingly. Nixon was a profound anti Semite. Apparently that never entered Kissinger's mind. I Kissinger was unaware of that. Oh, he was fully aware of it. He just had to shut up and stuck it up. Yeah, not be be one of the good Jews, as Nixon more than once talked about. Um, you know, William Sapphire, who later became a New York Times columnist, was Jewish and his and Agnew's most uh you know, Nixon and agnew esque speechwriter before he went off to become a cultur prize winning columnists. So he was of two minds. I mean, he wasn't, you know ku klux Klan committed and devoted to his anti Semitism. But he was. And again it's they're all over the tapes, especially when he was with Bob Holdaman alone, and they could just expose and and share their anti Semitic feelings. But no, I mean he understood that Kissinger was a really smart guy who was as ruthless and amoral as he was, and it was a match made in hell. The you and I worked on a book together, our Trump parody book. But I would say to people that I found it just absolutely I was dumb struck by how Trump was able to draw together so many bad people. I thought, were there really this many bad people who wanted to come to Washington and to pervert the course of this government to these purposes? I thought, I couldn't even imagine there were that many of them. Can the same be said of Nixon or was Nixon not as bad. It's a complicated question. I was talking about the other day comparing Trump to Nixon. Now, I mean, on the one hand, Nixon had actual noble ambitions of being a word, accomplished good things and China, so the Union, those were good things, and Kissenger helped him stipulating those an E p A, Oh my god. On domestic politics, he was the most liberal president between you know, lb J and Joe Biden. I mean literally, I mean, but what he did with and in Southeast Asia is unforgivable because it was to him a side show to the big game with China and the Soviet Union. It was just let's not let Saigon follow the comedies. Before November seventy two, that that was it. I mean, after his first year, we realized we're not gonna win this. They're not gonna stand up. This is gonna fall. I just got to make sure it doesn't fall. Before November seventy two, it was inexcusable and it was awful. Now he had bad people. Well, when when you hear the quotes, when you interrojected, when you hear the quote when Haig says we're within an eyelash of victory. And this is in nineteen seventies, seventy one. This is like, no, we aren't General Haig, and no, Haig was his military right hand guy throughout this. And what's extraordinary about that line from Hague at that point it's Kistener and Nixon knew that wasn't true, that they knew that this was a lost game, but that we couldn't speed up the withdrawal because then Saigon would fall and he would have lost Vietnam. And there's no comparison between Donald Trump and Richard Nixon and I Q and even in morality, although I mean an experience, yeah so, but I don't want to say and therefore Nixon is good. I mean, in the argument between who's the worst president, it's a kind of a tie between an apple and orange, you know, I mean, Nixon was intelligent, Nixon actually had some things he wanted to do. Nixon was not bad as a domestic president, Henry kissing, you're really smart guy, on and on and on. But what they did in Vietnam and what they did in Watergate, what he did in Watergate to undermine American confidence in this possibly fatal way along with extending Vietnam? Is this one to punch? I mean, that's that's just inexcusable. I mean if I mean, we'll see, right, or maybe we'll see if we live long enough, what happens to this country. But was Richard Nixon were responsible for its downfall if we come to a downfall, or Donald Trump? Both together and and in a certain way, which I did really realized before working on this piece. You know, marinating in Nixon for a year during the last year of the Trump administration, I saw the connections between them, even though one was a moron, one was more mentally ill than the other, one was a bigger liar than Nixon. But you saw how Richard Nixon began the rot in the Republican Party and in just this cynicism and nihilism that became so big in the beginnings at the beginning of the Republican mantra of he's a sociopath, but he's our socioth Yes, exactly. Even though they got rid of him, and when people, as people have said to me, as I've been talking about this podcast, well water Gate, we got rid of him and it was all good and we're all fine. Well, yeah, and it was good what Baker and Goldwater and all those Republicans didn't said, Mr President, you gotta get out of here, you gotta resign. This isn't this is no longer tenable. But there's a certain self flattering focus on as opposed to what was just beginning to happen in the Republican Party. It's like, you know, don't end in nineteen seventy four when Gerald four takes over and everything's good, We're gonna have tanks in the street and look enough, yeah, no, and and and I get it, and it was a good thing that we did that, but like here in one Land, we haven't had that moment where who good, We're safe now, you know. No, well, I mean, I mean that proposed the book that we did, and the whole crap I did on S and L and so forth with Trump, And people would ask me for some thumbnail analysis and they say to compare Trump and Nixon, and I'd say, well, I'm going to paraphrase, and I say, all honorable presidents are the same, and all dishonorable presidents are dishonorable in their own way. You know that you really can't compare them. They're very very very different people. And again Nixon because of the breath of his experience and Trump with none. But what I do see is that both of them brought a lot of bad people with him, and Haldmen and Irlckman were bad people. Hague is a bad guy in terms of what what I believe the world of government should be. Lately, we've been reading about as we already knew, but the details of Trump's politicization of the Justice Department, his attorney generals. Well, there was Richard Nixon who had taken his campaign manager, John Mitchell and made him attorney general and just made him like part of the criminal gang that then went on to do Watergate and cover it up and all the rest. So that politicization of the Department of Justice, that we're all, look what he did, Look what Trump said? Well, this guy did it? You know, yes, exactly. Now, obviously something that is as sweeping as this in terms of history, there's a lot of history there. Nixon becoming elected in nine and why uh, you know, as I've told people, it's like Dracula polls the stake out of his art, gets out of the coffin and goes to marry your girlfriend. You're like, you just can't believe the improbability of this whole fucking thing. But in the breadth of this the convention, Nixon wins silent majority. On through the war, I want to stop and take a moment because there's so much there to cover and talk at out of the expansion of the war into Cambodia and allows which I viewed as war crimes. I mean, these are guys should have been prosecuted for war crimes. I mean, to me, the war crime that we're committed were what they caused to happen in Cambodia. That they caused the crazy faction of Communists in Cambodia to win the civil war that had barely started in six sixty nine when the Wigs and presidency began. But then this bombing, this this relentless bombing this neutral country of not very many people by the US to get rid of those Vietcong centuaries, whipped up this civil war and certainly made it. You know, who are you for, the communists or these people who are sending thousands of tons of bombs into your homes every day and every week for a year after year. And of course that made the camer Rouge eventually win that war, and and the genocide of killing two million of their seven million fellow citizens. So what happened there really is, I mean, very arguably a war crime. It's not hyperbole, but yes, expanding the war when he was elected to end it, and then thinking that they could at least be seen as not giving in, not bugging out, and and maybe we can just scare the North Vietnamese a little bit enough to be more tractable at the peace talks. That's what going into Cambodia was about. That's what going into Louis was about. And just also a kind of bloody minded desire to keep fighting and not losing a war. Americans don't lose wars. We've never lost a war. That was for both of them, but especially I think Nixon, both of them, meaning Kissinger and Nixon, but for Nixon, like, I just can't be the guy who loses the war. And yeah, now I'm gonna lose the war, but I'm gonna just bomb the hell out of him, even on the way out, even if I can't do North Vietnam. I think it's literally I want to kill as many of them as I can before I signed a document in Paris, yes, which they justified to themselves in a rational way as all we're getting you know, it's it's part of the negotiation process. But now, I mean they really didn't get anything more than they could have gotten, you know, much earlier in the presidency. But they just kept at it. And it's yeah, it's absolutely inexcusable. It's almost impossible, I guess. I mean this is true of any president. We've imposed a contemporary seco analysis of them. Uh, and people positive things like if all these guys have been given a really cursory psychiatric examination, they would have been ruled ineligible for the job, but no one more so than Nixon. And I feel like Nixon is somebody who if only he had a friend, if only he had a counselor if only he had someone who said to him, don't do this. I mean, you have a chance to become I'm not gonna see a great president. Because it was a very turbulent time because Vietnam is the anti communist thing overdone if you will. Everybody knew if you study Vietnam and college that they were not a Sino based or Russo based communist satellite they were like fuck you to the Chinese and fuck you to the Russia. They wanted to be left alone. They wanted to be their own independent tree, and they would take from different people to fight the United States, which was a very wealthy country at that time, and we were doing the whole guns and butter thing which would later come back to haunt us by spending trillions of dollars to fight a war halfway around blah blah blah, all things we know about Vietnam and the kind of thumbnail way. But I do believe that Nixon is somebody who if he only had an advisor that really had his heart, he could have become a very good president. Do you agree? I totally agree. And again a dozen years ago I developed this contrarian view of Nixon as this reading about what he had done and allowed to be done um domestically that we talked about earlier. I mean, between that and ending the war in Vietnam, if you'd done it more expeditiously and hadn't let the Pentagon papers and everything else throw him off the rails and go go nuts, and then China in the whole Union, yeah, I think he would have been remembered as this unlikable guy he was, but as a really really good president. Absolutely are think eight years in the White House would have helped him erase the image unlikable guy that he was. Well, I don't know. I mean, he was such an un Californian, Californian and a deeply unlikable tip shoes on the beach. I was took exactly, not a natural politician, so beloved never but he said he was gonna in the war he did, and look at all this other stuff he did, and look at China. No, he would be today, absent Watergate and absent all the Vietnam craziness that I didn't really realize before doing this show led directly to Watergate, he would be not in the bottom five or ten, he be in the top five or ten. Best selling author Kurt Anderson, If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow here's the thing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Kurt Anderson talks about how Nixon became fixated on winning over protesters at home. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. In the early morning of May, just days after four students were killed at Kent State University, Nixon went to the Lincoln Memorial to talk to protesters himself at five am. He recorded the experience on a dictaphone, which is memorialized in Kurt Anderson's podcast, Nixon at War. I walked over to a group of them, walked up to them, and your hands. They were not unfriendly, as a matter of fact, they sad, of course, quite surprised. As one of the protesters said afterward, it was so freaky because I have tried to explain it. Michaels in Vietnam were the same as there is to stop the children and the war, to bring peace. Our goal was not to get into Cambo again by what we were doing, but to get out of Vietnam. There's need to be wished. They did not respond. I hope that they're hatred of the war, WHI try could well understand would not turn into a bitter hatred of our whole system, our country and everything. And it stood for I said, I know you, probably most of you think I'm an s op, but I want you to know that I understand just how you feel. Kurt Anderson says Nixon's frustration was that his plan to draw down US troops while training the South Vietnamese just wasn't working. Nixon did start vietnamizing the war pretty rapidly and significantly, which means for our listeners, which means saying, hey, this is not our war to win the South Vietnamese, the non communist southern half of this country that was divided after the French occupation failed in the nineteen fifties between the North who became communists, in the South, who, in the view of the communists, became the puppet of the United States. So Nixon is is elected to in the war, and he begins reducing the draft. First year was drawing not very many truths, but then more and more. We had five and fifty thousand when he was elected, and as many as five hundred dying a week, and six thousand boys my brother's age and even my age almost being drafted every week. And he brought all that down because he understood that was not politically tenable and it was for better or worse, all about politics for him. If I can end the draft and reduce the number of Americans killed. He knew it would not country at doubts it would not be a problem for him anymore. And so his approval ratings for how he was handling Vietnam stayed high for the almost the whole time, and he went up and down, and he responded by giving speeches and announcing further reductions in the draft and everything else. So vietnamization and was saying, Hey, South Vietnam, it's on you. We're getting out of here. We're not getting out here immediately, but we're getting out of here, and therefore you will be fighting your own war against your North Vietnamese brothers. During the time that you did this, and you had mentioned getting into the weeds quote unquote and the research. What was something that surprised you that you found out? Well, I mean not so much facts, although this in anal story. I had heard of her, maybe, but I knew nothing about that. And it was interesting because he had covered it up and then and then the Nixon Nights to this day, the Nixon Library still so no, no, no, that's not don't even pay attention to that. Don't look in those files, paying no attention to that woman in the channel dress in the corner well exactly, So that was a kind of surprise to me. But these moments on the tape, listening to the tapes gave me a sense of their humanity or in humanity that I just didn't have before that I just reading you just don't I didn't get as much as hearing them talking admitting we're screwed, or laughing about massacres. All those things were just in the sense that I now feel as though I was there with these guys as they were running their horror show. So not so much facts, although I had heard, because it's well known about this visit of Nixon's at five am to hang with the protesters at the Lincoln Memorial, which is an amazing scene, and I think we did pretty good justice to it. But I never knew the thing that he didn't did at dawn and went to the empty capital alone and sat in his old chair where Representative Nixon sat. And then as they're leaving, going through the statuary hall in the middle of the Capitol, there's this black woman mopping the floor at six am in the morning, and he goes over to her and says, you know, my mother was a saint. You remind me of my mother. You'd be a saint too. I mean, it's this crazy scene. So so the details throughout of how they sound, how they interact, his his craziness. When Daniel Alsberg appears and arrested and admits you, I'm the Pentagon papers leaker, that he couldn't get Alger Hiss out of his mind. What happened. He was a guy who works in the State Department as a young man in the in the nineteen thirties and into the forties, and then ran a nonprofit, was a big liberal guy, had been a Communist, as so many people had in the nineteen thirties, and it was alleged and perhaps maybe probably true, had given papers, not atomic secrets or anything, but had dealt with the Soviets. And and then that was I put it in a pumpkin. That was part of the pumpkin thing. And that was that became a thing in fifty when Richard Dixon was fresh to the house and Richard Nixon rode that to prominence. Really the persecution, prosecution, call it what you will. Of Aldre was along with Jagar Hoover's help, was how Nixon became famous. Mr Anti communist who wasn't a nut like Joe McCarthy, and that was his beginning of his queer So twenty years later, when there's this leak of the Pentagon papers, wholly different thing. It's not about a Cold War, it's about this actual war we're fighting, and it's all it's so different, but he sees it as just the same. It's another pinko guy and he's Jewish to boot doing this bad thing, and all the newspapers are not only supporting him, they're printing it. So to him it was just it's it's aldre Hess all over again. It's communists against me all over again. It's the liberal elite all over again. And he kind of lost it. The thing that was surprising to me, even though it's silly, was I couldn't believe in Watts said when he was going to resign that he got up and took a swing at a kissinger. Myself, I didn't think men had that kind of passion in that white Well. William Watts, he was the kind of administrator of the National Security Council, so he was an important guy. He made sure the trains ran on time in the National Security Council which Nixon and Kissinger had made more powerful than it had ever been, of concentrating all the national security, foreign policy decision making, policy making in the White House, while was the guy that Kissinger had personally hired and finally got too much for him, as it did for other liberal ivy legal elitist that Kissinger had hired. And he's quit and yeah, took a swing at him, and then Hague al Hague told him right after that you can't quit. Your commander of chief is giving an order. He said, well, I did, General Haig, and as he says, and that was the end of my career in government. I mean, I'm of the belief that we've never recovered from the Vietnam War. Did that take hold of you while you're doing this work about just the kind of suffocating tragedy that was Vietnam Absolutely, and how it combined under Richard Nixon with Watergate and all of the the undermining of the rule of law, of decency and everything else into one horrible explosive thing that began all of the things that we haven't recovered from. And the way Nixon used Vietnam and used the countercultural moment at the time and used all these things at the time politically to make the this this fissure that are broken up between the hard hats and the hippies and all that he turned into this unhealable wound, and this fisher became the chasm that Donald Trump, in his way has been still exploiting, is still exploiting between the regular folks and the working class guys and these liberals and these professors and these newspaper people, and turned into this permanent wound that we have never recovered from. And also the war powers that comes in three during Nixon's second term, which has been flouted by Democrats and Republicans since we've learned nothing about that, which is, if we're going to invest all this power into a commander in chief and an executive without any of the advising instead of the Congress. It was, among other things, the time when we still believed we hadn't had this happen yet, right President's wage war, and here was a president, the third president, to wage this particular war. We didn't know how to stop that or control that that This was a whole new kind of war. So I don't want to excuse Congress's ineffectual exercise of power in the instance, but they didn't fell down on the job. Look at the rock, I mean fell down on the job again. And the kind of expansive authorization of war that happened in two thousand one. But evil geniuses, fantasy Land, your last couple of books, many books prior to that, and again you I'm always she lacking you and laddering you all the time, but but effortlessly. No. Let's quote Nixon in his resignation speech to the staff. When he turns, everybody says, this is not the most elegant house, but he's the best house because that has a heart. He says, that's great speech. And then he said, we don't say goodbye. The French have award for it. Or of war, he says, Or of war to you. Kart Anderson, our revoir to you as well. Kurt Anderson, host of a new podcast called Nixon at War. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing. Is brought to you by I Heart Radio. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Carrie donohue and Zack McNeice. Our engineer is Frank Imperial.