Episode 743: In the Room with Reagan and Nixon

Published Aug 23, 2024, 12:12 AM

In his new book, “Behind Closed Doors: In the Room with Reagan and Nixon,” Ken Khachigian offers a compelling insider’s account of his most private moments with Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon during revolutionary changes in our economy, politics, communications, foreign policy, and culture. Newt’s guest is Ken Khachigian. He was the chief speechwriter and trusted political adviser to President Ronald Reagan. He also served in President Richard Nixon’s White House.

On this episode of the News World. In his new book Behind Closed Doors in the Room with Reagan and Nixon, Ken Kaschigion offers a compelling insider's account of his most private moments with Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon during revolutionary changes in our economy, politics, communications, foreign policy, and culture. Behind Closed Doors is essential reading for anyone wanting to know how Ronald Reagan shaped his crusading message of economic growth through tax cuts and limited government. Here to discuss his new book, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, Ken Katchigian. He was the chief speech writer and trusted political advisor to Ronald Reagan and the go to council for President Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan in campaigns in a political crisis. He also served in Richard Nixon's White House and with Nixon as he emerged from Watergate. Ken, welcome and thank you for joining me on newts.

World speaker being Rich's good to be with you, new old friend.

I was thinking earlier that we had really interacted over and over again for gosh, it's on maybe forty years. I guess right, How did you first get into politics?

Oh? My, you remember something called boy State, don't you Yes, That's how I got started to got my mind going. American legient sponsored something called Boyse State and got me really interested in politics and high school and then college, ran for office, and I met Nixon when he ran for governor. I cornered him at one of his rallies when I was in college, and then got his book Six Crises. And that's when I met Reagan too. I was student by the president at UCSB and introduced Reagan when he came to campus. I cajoled him to come and speak to campus. And then with my interest in politics and my interest in Nixon, when I was at Columbia University Law School and Nixon was starting to run for president making his comeback. You remember well, back in nineteen sixty seven, Nixon was not seen as a viable candidate for president. The big gunners back in sixty seven were George Romney, Nelson, Rockfeller, and that rising star Ronald Reagan. And Nixon was still seen as sort of a potential has been. And I saw this article in the New York Times that Nixon had a new group around him fellas Pat Buchanan Ray Price, editorial writer out of New York and Wright Chapin, a youngster out of California who was helping him. And so Nixon was surrounding himself with new people, and I thought, well, maybe this is an opportunity. So I wrote a letter and said I'd like to volunteer, and they brought me on just as a young fellow out of Columbia law Pat Buchanan interviewed me and allowed me to answer correspondence, and that led to Marty Anderson offering me a job in the summer after my second year of law school. In the campaign of eighty eight, Alan Greenspan was my boss, if you can imagine, head of the domestic policy group in the sixty eight campaign. And after the campaign, one of my mentors in that campaign was another giant in American politics, Bryce Harlowe. I don't know if he ever got to meet Bryce. Bryce was another giant. And once I finished law school, I came back to Washington and finally got a job in the Knicks and White House. So that's how it all started.

You get out of Columbia, ended up going to Washington.

Right and spent four and a half years in the Nixon White House, and of course ended up with a disappointment President Nixon's resignation, which I opposed. I was, I think the loan holdout amongst all the staff right at the final days of August fifty years ago as a twenty nine year old, And I wrote about this as an op ed a couple of weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, saying that I don't believe he should have resigned, and he should have forced the hand of our Republican friends in Congress and the Democrats to at least take our case to the Congress and force a trial in the Senate, and at least give us an opportunity to mate for the President to stand his ground. And of course knew if we knew then what we know now of the canery and the unethical conduct of Judge Sirika and the special prosecutors, and if we had at least the modicum of support from a conservative press that we might have had, then we could have made our case and he could have continued as presidency.

Before we get to Watergate, he barely wins election in sixty eight and then comes back and wins the largest popular vote margin in modern times. What was it like to work for Nixon, and to be in the Nixon White House during that pre Watergate period, it wasn't.

Fun all the time. I mean, it was the high adventure. Of course I was a young man, but we were facing headwinds the entire time. If you have to look at it. When he entered the presidency, he had three massive headwinds. He had inherited the Vietnam War from not just Lennon Johnson, but Jack Kennedy. We have to remember that Jack Kennedy begin that adventure with the Eastern elite establishment, defense and State departments, and then Linda Johnson escalated it. So when Nixon came in, there were five hundred and forty thousand troops in Vietnam, five hundred men being killed every month, with thousands of additional casualties. So he had that headwind going for him. And then with immediately national protests going on, the Democrats who had supported Kennedy and Johnson in this adventure began ducking and running and then leaving mix and trying to de escalate and get away from this. Then the other headwind was the fact that you can imagine what the problem was. Having served in Congress and a speaker, he had a Democratic House and Democratic Senate opposing him the entire time of his presidency. So with an adversary Congress in place, it was monumentally difficult for him to pass any legislation. He had. Carl Albert Speaker Mike Mansfield is a Democratic majority leader, and there was a part of in Congress the entire time. So to get Supreme Court appointments and the fact that he got any legislation through was a miracle. The third headwind he had, of course, was an adversarial press. There were only three networks at the time, three newsweeklies and basically two major dailies, The New York Times in the Washington Post, all major negative media outlets. So can you imagine entering the presidency with these massive headwinds against you and still achieving what he achieved, balancing off the Soviet Union against China, opening China, which was a rogue outlaws state in nineteen sixty nine and nineteen seventy and seventy one, having major achievements in legislative battles, desegregating the schools in the South, getting Supreme Court appointments through despite opposition, and eventually lowering like the eighteen year old vote making the draft of voluntary and having getting welfare reform through, so imagine new You can even lecture me on what it would be like having a Congress being opposed to the president the entire time.

In our case, I think we Frankly wanted to get stuff done and so we were able to work with Clinton, and he concluded that his re election required him to work with us. So we're in a different environment, I think, than you were. But I'm curious when you think back to that and you think about how really close the three way race was in nineteen sixty eight, and then you get to seventy two. Did you think all year that you would in fact be able to beat mcgoverned by the size margin you guys did, or was that sort of a surprise.

I'd say by mid October it became pretty clear that McGovern was a hopeless candidate. We had so much going for us and so much going against him. He was such a hapless left winger, much like Frankly taking the positions that Kamala Harris is taking today. He was handing out money left and right. He was going to hand out a thousand dollars, he said, he would call on his knees to Hanoi to get peace, which was such a stupid statement. He was basically a socialist before even Bernie Sanders was a socialist, and he was unapologetic about his left winging positions. Even as Nixon was trying to solve the Warren Vietnam, My government was taking the worst of silly positions on the Warren Vietnam. And of course mc government had, unfortunately for him, made a big mistake in putting Eagleton on his ticket. Tom Eagleton on his ticket. Well, Eagleton had some emotional mental problems that had to get him off the ticket and be replaced with Sergeant Schreiber. In fact, it turned out that it was widely known that the Eagleton had these issues before Montgomery even put them on the ticket. So I think by mid October, those of us who were politically involved, and I was deeply involved on the political side of the campaign, we certainly knew it was going to be a massive landslide.

You come off of this huge victory, remarkable turnaround from nineteen sixty eight and nineteen sixty then, in fact, I mean a bigger victory than Eisenhower won and he was a great war hero. And then all of a sudden it starts to fall apart. When did it begin to be obvious that Watergate was going to be more than just a passing nuisance.

Probably when Kennedy managed to get that Senate selet Committee set up. Kennedy was set on getting Nixon and taking him out, and the press once the inauguration had taken place, they weren't going to let up. The stories were continuing to leak out, and there was no let up, and Kennedy knew that the only way to get momentum going on this was for the Congress to take over and use the subpoena powers to extract more and more information that they couldn't get through just political reporting from the newspapers. People forget it was. Kennedy introduced the resolution for the Senate and they gave it a fancy named Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaigns. Then they renamed the Senate Jadier Committee. But you know, they never investigated any other presidential campaign other than Nixon. They didn't investigate McGovern's or Muskies or anyone else's. So that's when the momentum started to turn seriously I'd say in the winter and early spring of nineteen seventy three.

And of course you also go through the crisis of getting rid of Spiro Agnew and replacing a majority Ford.

Yeah, well that happened in October of seventy three. And of course the next step was when la Richardson decided to appoint a special prosecutor, and stupidly he appoints not just any normal special prosecutor, He appoints Archibald Cox, who was the opposition research director for Jack Kennedy's campaign against Richard Nixon in nineteen sixty. I mean, how much number can you get? The odds were building up against this early on, and then Cox, five of his top people he brings in were some of the top people in Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department. The deck was stacked against Nixon to begin with, and so that's when it started really getting troublesome and serious. And by the way, Nixon cooperated, He cooperated with the prosecutors, he cooperated with the Senate Watergate Committee. Nobody resisted going up to these committees at all.

What was it like in the White House after Nixon left? And now you have Jerry Ford as the new president.

Well, for me, it was very troublesome. Maybe about ten days after he resigned, I came out to Sant Clementi to help the president out, who still had massive legal problems and they were going after him so for back taxes. They were subpoenaing him, they were trying to disbar him in California and New York, and the press were still after him, and the prosecutors still wanted to indict him. But then when I returned, a lot of my colleagues were still trying to cover their backsize and get jobs with the White House. But Ford was scouring around. His staff were scarring around for those who seem to have cleaned the Nixon during the antime peachment battles. And I had a prime target on my back since that was one of those who fought the antime peachmot wars. So it wasn't long before I returned from Sant Clementia that my new boss came and gave me my walking papers and said, look, I'm sorry, we're going to have to let you go. But they did in a nice way. I got another job and transition job before I came out to Saint Commentia, to help President Nixon, then.

You end up in San Clemente. Nixon had to be in enormous pain, he had to have been depressed, and yet within a few years he starts to turn the whole thing around. What was that like to be there with him, coming from the largest popular victory to being out of office in a two year period.

I try to tell people, and I described this in the book. He was down in the sense that he had lost everything that he had worked so hard for, but mainly because he had to work his way back. He was not depressed in the sense that you would think he would be. In my first meetings with him, I was probably more down than he was. I was twenty nine years old. I thought my life was gone. In our first meetings, he said, Ken, you can't look back. We've got to look forward. You can't get down, and we've got to move on. We've got to move forward. We've got to move on. So he wanted to focus on the future and not look back. He didn't relive Watergate. He didn't try to relitigate the past. I won't say that. He never talked about it. It bothered him that he made some bad decisions along the way, that's not the question. But the point is, and this is a real lesson in life for anyone listening to this, is that Nixon had a very forward looking attitude from the time he got to San Clementi to remake his life. Part of it was financial, but part of it was that he felt like he was still young enough he can make a difference. And of course he did make a difference. You know, he wrote nine best selling books, He ended up traveling the world. He ended up, of course, advising Reagan. Once I joined the Reagan campaign. He ended up using me as a conduit to advise Ronald Reagan later on advised Bill Clinton. I'm sure he advised you when you were a speaker. This is a person who had enormous resiliency, and that's a big lesson in life.

You know, he also had an extraordinary work ethic.

That was amazing. He'd come in here very early in the morning, and first thing I showed up, I'd get buzzed and I'd come in and I'd have to brief him on all the political whatever, even though we were writing the memoirs or getting prepared for the David Frost interviews. Whatever it was I'd be buzzed into make sure he got briefed on all the political happenings of the day. And we were going through the nineteen seventy six campaign where Reagan was challenging Ford, so he wanted to know everything that was going on, and I was his chief political council during those days to advise him on what was happening. He'd work very hard, then he'd go out and play quick round of golf, and then a night he'd had dinner, and then after dinner he'd go into his study and he'd work late into the night, thinking, reading, making notes, and then boom back the next morning, is at work again. And he'd work on the weekends. I worked on saturdays all during that time. I worked at least a half a day on Saturdays, and he was in every weekend working amazing work ethic.

Now, you say in your book that the conversations with Nixon and san Clemente I'm quoting you now would prove indispensable to the success of your relationship with Ronald Reagan. Why was that? What's the bridge from sitting there San Clemente to working with Reagan.

Well, it's the education I received the way he would counsel Reagan remotely, even though he couldn't do it in person. He would look at the mistakes he was making, or look at the mistakes Ford was making later in the seventy six campaign against Jimmy Carter, and he would point out to me what amateur mistakes would making, or how they could communicate better. When Nixon would have conversations about politics, he would reach back into history, talking about something that maybe Tom Dewey was doing at forty eight, and he spent his story. But when he'd spent his story would be about some piece of wisdom that they would pass along during Nixon's career, and I would store that in my head and either be a piece of strategy or some art of communication. Another thing he did was he would make observations about how Reagan communicated, how Reagan used illustrations, or how Reagan noticed things he observed, how Reagan would see things, and how Reagan would vividly describe things in his communications. I sort of just cataloged all these, and then when I joined up with Reagan, I had all that stored in my head, this extraordinary background, and so as I describe it to people that by the time I got my PhD in the University of Reagan, it was because I had a masters and bachelors at the College of Richard Nixon.

Where was Nixon in the Ford Reagan primary fight in seventy six.

He was bifurcated, if I had to say, mainly, he wanted it to be a spirited contest. He didn't want it to be a runaway. He just enjoyed watching the back and forth every day to have something to talk about. The other thing that I think is important remember is that the Ford people, and not necessarily a president for himself, the Ford people were not treating him very well. There were ways in which Ford's staff were passing along through our staff back in Sant Clementy discourtesies that were not proper for any former president. And I think that's because they probably thought the pardon was arming. On the one hand, they thought maybe the pardon was harming Ford. But on the other hand, it's because they got struck by the power all of a sudden, they were injected by the elixir of power that the mantle that they took on. And that's one of the ultimate sins in Washington is what happens with people who come from a lower place in politics, and all of a sudden they get into the Oval Office or have access to the Oval Office, like a lot of Ford's people did. They came from the House of Representatives and then they get to the Vice Pray. Next thing you know, they're in sitty next to the President. And while in eighteen months they've come from staff positions in the House, they have access to signal core lines in the White House, and they're flying on Air Force one and I'm Marine one and they're hot shots, and now they can call the Saint Clemente and treat a shabbily. And that was bothering Nixcent a lot. So to some extent, he was troubled by some of that. And so because of that, I think you liked the idea of Reagan keeping it competitive and making sure that the Ford people kept on their toes.

Let's put it that way.

You're in a unique position the two dominant Republicans from nineteen sixty, I would argue to the rise of Trump or Nixon and Reagan, and you worked with both of them. What was Reagan like to work with in contrast with Nixon?

Nixon was much more aggressively involved in the political conversation of what was going on around him. Politically, he was much more hands on and more engaged in that sense. Reagan was not quite so engaged, but yet on the communication side, Reagan was very much engaged in whatever speaking role he had or whatever communication he had. I would say this about Reagan. On the philosophical side, Reagan had very strong views. He had very very very deep and strong views about his economic views, about his philosophical views about the role of government, about what he wanted to achieve, about how he wanted to re strain it's growth, about the free enterprise system. Those were shaped very strongly, partly during his time heading the Union SAG, but mostly on his time representing General Electric, traveling in the country, talking to people and seeing the effects of the corrosiveness of big government, and speaking on behalf of General Electric.

Well, I've always had this sense of Nixon is a little more introverted, sort of the guy who had set in the corner reading and writing. Reagan is more of an extrovert. Was that your.

Experience, It's just the opposite. I have to say. Reagan appears to be more extroverted, yet was more difficult to get close to. He had very few close people on the staff. He had a lot of people on the staff that were meetings with them all the time, but probably rarely knew who they were, what their names were. He could converse, but he would be uncomfortable, and you could census discomfort because he would start telling stories or telling jokes. But with Nixon, people thought he was intro and uncomfortable. But Nixon could start engaging instantly once you got him going, he could engage you very easily. And if you start asking him about politics or government or foreign policy, he would engage you instantly. You probably had meetings with him where he was very interested in meeting with you and talking over policy.

He was a major strategic advisor in how we became a majority. I first started seeing him in the early eighties I go to New York. Nixon was remarkable.

He enjoyed having people around him. He was not a recluse at all.

You end up being deeply involved in Reagan's first inaugural, which I was at and which was a remarkable speech at a key turning point in American history. What was that like to work on an inaugural address that was frightening.

Somebody assigned you to write the inaugural address, and you said, what do I do now? I'd written a lot of speeches in the campaign. But you look at all the inaugural addresses written, and you start reading all the previous inaugural addresses, like Lincoln's and some of the great ones, and you try not to be overwhelmed. Asked my colleagues for help. I got examples writing from several of them. But I sat with Reagan and our first meeting he had so much other things out of the mind. But then after a couple of meetings, he had some ideas. He wanted a draft to work with, and I think he wanted to do most of the speech himself, so it really ended up as a collaboration. I played more of a minor role at the end of the day, because once he had a draft that he could work with, some language and rhetoric, and then he had a plane ride back from Washington where he had some downtime on his own, and he said he could work on it by himself. So then he took my draft and he edited a good part of it. It was daunting, to say the least, to try to come up with pros that would not change the world, but to try to get things across. The main thing at the very end was to give some concept of a new beginning, that change was on its way, and to give people a sense, especially a sense that after this years of dreariness and Jimmy Carter, and of course that's where you came from, whence you came, the dreariness of those Jersey he was certainly a hapless president in every respect. I call him the accidental President. At the inaugural, we wanted to leave the message that this was really something new, that people would get some sense of uplift, that this was after all these years of inflamation and high interest rates America, with the hostages in Iran, and with our defense where we had planes that couldn't fly, there was no spare parts we had, Our navy was way down, America was disrespected across the world, and now America would be coming back. And that's the message we wanted to leave and want of freedom, prosperity and hope and that there was going to be something new coming.

The other speech you worked on that was very emotional to me personally, was after Reagan had been shot. I still remember it was just a remarkable moment when he walks into the joint session and the place goes crazy because he really could have died and here he was, and then his recovery was pretty rapid, and you had this sense of heroic figure. That's a very unique speech. What was it like to work on that?

Candidly, the intention was to exploit the opportunity. We knew that be a lot of sympathy following his recovery. We wanted to exploit the opportunity because we want to pass the Economic Recovery Act. Tip O'Neil was an aggressive antagonist to run o' reagan on policy matters, and he did not want that economic package to pass at all. So we didn't need to roll tip O'Neil very badly. And so that speech was intended to move the Congress, and so we had to come up with some language to ensure that we use that opportunity of all the sympathy to Reagan, Plus we had to make sure that the rhetoric was strong enough to say, listen, we are at a turning point in America where we've got to change. We have this opportunity now we may never have this opportunity again to change how our economic system works. We've got to get control of our government, and one way is to get control of our budget and to lower our taxes to get our economy moving again. And this was the opportunity to do it. Not just to do it by taking advantage of the sympathy, but we thought, let's have a little bit of humor to lighten everybody up, and including that dour phase tip O'Neil sitting behind Reagan in the background. And that's where I came up with that letter from this young boy from New York and had everybody laughing at the front end of it. So I think it turned out to be a pretty stirring evening.

No, it was remarkable, and I still remember how powerful it was, how emotional it was for all of us.

We got the blue dogs. We wanted the blue dogs.

One of the amazing things that Bob Michael achieved as the Republican minority leader was he was able to work with conservative and moderate Democrats and roll Tip O'Neil again and again on some very big issues, the biggest of course being the tax cuts. But we had to get about a third of the Democrats to come with us to make sure we could pass things, and it was a huge effort, and without Reagan's charisma and his ability to reach the American people, we couldn't have done it. You know, Ken, I want to thank you for joining me. Your new book, Behind Closed Doors in the Room with Reagan and Nixon is available now on Amazon and bookstores everywhere. You were there, you were in the room. It's a remarkable book. You've had a remarkable career. You are a great patriot. I highly recommend your book to all of our listeners, and I thank you for being with me today.

Thanks for having me, and I hope they'll go to my website too, that's ww dot Reagan and Nixon dot com, Reagan and Nixon dot com. There's a lot more information there. Thanks for having me new.

Thank you to my guest, Ken Kachigiam. You can get a link to buy his new book, Behind Closed Doors in the Room with Reagan and Nixon on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by Gagish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Slump. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingris three sixty. If you've been enjoy Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my three free weekly columns at Gangwishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter I'm nut Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.

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