Speaker 1: Well, hi everybody, and welcome to a special bonus episode
of the Ricochet Podcast. It's Steve Hayward sitting in James
Lonny's host chair, joined today by Peter Robinson with a
very special guest that we are delighted to have with us.
Ken Kachigian, is joining us for the whole hour of
the show. Can has a wonderful new memoir out I
highly recommend called Behind Closed Doors in the Room with
Reagan and Nixon, and Ken started in politics way back
in the nineteen sixties. I'll get a couple of questions
from him about how that went worked for Richard Nixon
and the Nixon White House, and then followed Nixon out
to California after his resignation in nineteen seventy four, whereupon
Ken went on to develop his own very successful law practice,
which he kept going while being called back into service
at crucial moments by President Reagan. And therein lies a
great story. Can, I want to say, welcome to the
Ricochet Podcast. And I guess my opening question is this.
One of the things I love about your memoir is that,
after all this time, it gives us some press perspective
on some old questions and in light of some recent events,
it makes us think differently about some aspects of the
Nixon years and the Reagan years. But I guess the
first question is what took you so long? I would
have loved to have seen this from you a long
time ago. What made you finally decide that the time
was now for your memoir of things?
Speaker 2: Steve?
Speaker 3: I get asked that a lot, and it's a really
easy answer, and that is I had to make a
living in the meantime, all right.
Speaker 2: I had my law practice, and people forget that.
Speaker 3: Besides my law practice and writing speeches. In the interim
for the president's I ran campaigns out here in California
for Governor Duke Magin and Wilson and Dan Lungren, and
I did two school choice campaigns out here in California
and Carly Farina and Bob Dole's presidential campaign. So I
was really busy with a lot of other things. I
just didn't have time, and plus trying to put food
on the table. And it was interesting in my mind.
I had I knew I had to write this book
at some point because I had so much to talk about.
And as you've both written books, so you know, you
know what you have to do. You have to start
with the first word to that blank page. Is that
daunting thing sits in front of you that drives you crazy?
Speaker 2: What's that first word going to be?
Speaker 3: And how are you going to open it up? And
we were on a cruise off the coast of Italy
and I got bored going into these villages or listen
to somebody patter away about some ancient thing. And I said,
I'm going to stay on the boat and have a
cappuccino and smoke a cigar, and I opened up a
legal pad and I started writing. But basically it made
sense to wait. First of all, my memoir is rare
because I wrote it. I didn't ghostwrite it. So many
of my colleagues, Mike Deaber, Larry Speaks, Linn Nozinger, Ed Meese,
and so many others, Jim Baker, they are ghost written,
and mine is I wrote it byself, and so took
four and a half years of research. And one of
the benefits of waiting is that I had all the
other books and all the other years of passage, plus
I had the oral histories that were done, So the
passage of time was a great benefit for this memoir,
and I had the Reagan archives were much more organized,
so it's a much better book having waited.
Speaker 1: Right, Oh, I agree with that entirely. I think we
want to go. I'll toss to Peter in a minute.
I think I want to open and keep us in
rough chronological order and ask a couple of questions about
the Nixon years. I was, I'll put it this way,
pleasantly surprised to read in your book you were one
of the I guess the phrase that most people would
use is one of the diehards defending Nixon to the
last and actually counseling him, like our friend Bruce Hurrchison
and some others, to resist resigning. And you know, lately
I have taken to the work. I think you signed him,
of Jeff Shepherd and a few others. We now look
back on Watergate, especially in the light of the little
affair we've seen recently against President Trump, with a whole
new perspective about Watergate. And what's your summation now of
how we should think about Watergate. We had large parts
of that story wrong all this time.
Speaker 3: For sure, And you cite Jeff Shepherd, and Jeff has
done some extraordinary deep legal and academic research in the
last fifteen years and more is going to come into
a documentary he's done. But he has uncovered the corruption,
and that is not a loose word, how corrupt Judge
Sirica was, and how corrupt the special prosecutor Archibald Cox
and Leon Georski were violating the fifth and sixth Amendments
of the Constitution doing ex parte meetings with the prosecutors,
that is that the judge met separately with the prosecutors
without defense counsel being president, and rigging the appeals so
that they went to the Special Course of Appeals so
that Nano Sirica's dudgeons would be overturned. And so a
lot of the Special Prostitution was rigged in favor of
the prosecution all through the process. So what's being uncovered
is just extraordinary, Steve. And then one thing that's interesting
that I want to write about here somewhere in the
next month, and if I don't do it, somebody else should,
is that the so called Watergate cover up is minuscule
compared to the cover up that was taking place over
the last two or three years of a president whose
mind was diminished. You had the Speaker of the House,
the majority of leader the Senate. You had the Press
secretary of the President of the United States, you had
the Secretary of the State, you have this National Security advisor,
all these people covering for a president with condon and
deficiency holding a nuclear football in his hand, and he
couldn't think straight. And that was a cover up of
Mantra's capacity that dwarfed Watergate by huge degrees.
Speaker 4: Ken, I just have to come in here because there's
a question that our viewers are going to want to
have asked, and I'm going to ask it. Peggy Noonan
put in her column two three weeks ago that she
realized how the Democrats were justifying covering up for Biden,
and it was because they all had it in their
minds that we had done it first, covering up for
Ronald Reagan. Addressed that, Ken, if you would.
Speaker 3: That's insane. It is owing capacity. There was no cognitive
restriction on President Reagular. Look, I worked with him exactly.
Speaker 4: This is the point. You're an eyewitness. This is why
it's important to hear from you.
Speaker 3: I am an eyewitness, and even though I wasn't there
full time, I came in at critical moments in eighty
five and eighty six and eighty seven and eighty eight.
I was with him in eighty eight working on the
convention speech that he delivered in New Orleans and worked
with him intensely. He was on point throughout that whole process,
and I write about it extensively in the penultimate chapter
of my book about how he and Missus Reagan went
back and forth about how the speech should look.
Speaker 2: Like and then how he edited it.
Speaker 3: And I didn't see any deficiency in his mind until
four years later in nineteen ninety two. Was the first
time I ever saw him lag. And that's when the
first time I bumped into him at a front and
the first time he didn't instantly recognize my face. But
that was four years after he left the presidency, in
two years before he recognized that he had Alzheimer's.
Speaker 1: Well and right, and after he'd taken a serious fall
from horse with I gave him a concussion.
Speaker 4: I just want I just wanted to bring this out
because it's on people's mind, sure, and it is a
matter of record eye witness testimony that Ronald Reagan had
full cognitive.
Speaker 5: Capacity absotely throughout.
Speaker 4: His presidency to the last day. I just wanted to
get that on the record from Ken.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. Now, look, I had personal interaction with him. Peggy
did not have the same kind of interaction with him
that I did. That's one of the great myths is
that Peggy had a bond with him, that she had
a lot of interaction, that she had a special relationship
with him. And look, she's a creative and good writer,
but she did not have the same kind of relationship
that I did.
Speaker 2: And I had.
Speaker 3: The times that I worked with him, I had very
strong personal interaction with him. He and I had a
special relationship, and that means that we worked closely together.
We interacted closely together, and that means I saw him
close up and we edited back and forth.
Speaker 2: So I can attest to that personally.
Speaker 1: Well, I think, well, I want to hold that point
for the elaboration. I want to ask one more revisionist
question from the next that this stems back the Nixon
years and then turned Peter loose on you and YouTube
speech writers.
Speaker 5: Draw them things out. So it's important.
Speaker 1: I think you got your start with Nixon through Pat
Buchanan and working for Pat Buchanan, and like the Watergate story,
I look back now on Pat Buchanan and say, boy,
hasn't he been vindicated in a lot of ways and
the way American politics has gone, what people think about
national identity questions, immigration, foreign policy to a very large extent,
And whether or not you say that you think that
Trump is an epigon of Buchanan nder Buchananism, Say a
little bit about Pat Buchanan, whether you think my proposition
that he's been vindicated here in recent years is correct.
Speaker 3: Pat recognized the new majority before there was a new majority.
He wrote about this going back into the seventies and eighties.
If you look at if you get into the archives
and read Pat's memos from the Nixon administration written in
the late sixties and early seventies, he recognized the rising
Republican majority. Of course, this goes back to ancient political
history that some of us remember when Vick Scammon and
Ben Wattenberg wrote the book The Real Majority of recognizing
how the working men and women in America who were
Democrats had risen up against the elitism of the Democratic Party.
And Pat recognized this immediately and was writing memos to
President Nixon about this, and then later on, as we
were approaching the seventy two campaign was urging President Nixon
to recognize this as well, and then later on he
started publishing books about this, and then of course he
ran his campaign for president on these premises when he
challenged George Bush for the presidency. So Pat has indeed
been vindicated. Pat was, as I recognized in my book,
Pat was my mentor in politics and at the White House,
and I still recognize that to this day. The man
is absolutely brilliant, by the way, He's one of the
most prolific writers. And if you want to be edited
by Pat. Anytime I put anything in front of him,
the minute he saw it, he started editing it.
Speaker 6: Sort of scary, Ken, I'm trying to I'm trying to
give think how we can give a flavor for the book,
which is a large piece of work, some sort of
slight memoir.
Speaker 4: It's a large, serious piece of work. You quote from diaries,
contemporaneous documents again and again. So how do we give
a flavor of that to our listeners in a conversation.
And here's a question that might be a way of
getting into it. I think of my own experience where
I worked for George H. W. Bush, first when he
was vice president and then for President Nixon. So in
my mind, I have this contrast between the two men
that in some ways helped me to understand both of
them better. How do you think of Richard Nixon? What
are the ways in which Nixon and Reagan, the substantive
ways in which they differed, and what did those two
men nevertheless have in common? They respected each other although
they were such different kinds of men.
Speaker 3: Why well, they differed in the sense that Nixon was
every waking moment he thought politically had a political equation
to it, and I don't think Reagan thought that way.
Reagan his political mind was more philosophical and there was
focused on the philosophy of politics and more as a
political crusader, and Nixon thought more about the tactics and
the strategy of politics. And because Nixon began as a
congressional candidate and then as a Senate candidate and then
had to defend himself against the establishment, the elite establishment,
he had to fight and scrap his way through the
political world, and then he campaigned across the country for
more candidates, And so I think Nixon really engaged himself
a day to day more in that kind of political thinking,
whereas Reagan didn't wake up in the morning thinking, you know,
what some congressional district in Ohio would look like in
the next campaign. Or let me put it in another way,
if you sat down with Nixon and started chatting about politics,
he started telling you a story about Charlie Hallick in
Indiana and some good story about him, or about what
carl Mont would do in South Dakota about treating some issue,
or what Milton Young how he campaigned in North Dakota,
or what Tom Dewey told him about some mistake he
made the campaign, or then he'd start reflecting about it.
You know, Ken, if I had put Thruston Morton in
my ticket in nineteen sixty, I might have won the presidency.
I don't think Reagan would ever think that way. You'd
sit down with him and he'd say, you know, I
really got bothered by the way they taxed me back
in when I was an actor in nineteen fifties, and
they got me those ninety percent taxes, and I worked
so hard and they took those taxes away from me.
And then you know, when I went on that speaking circuit,
I was an MC at a program where they were
giving awards at a bakeoff is the Pillsbury Bakeoff, and
who could provide the best recipe And this lady won
this award and they had her or a check for
it was like something like ten thousand dollars. And you know,
right off stage there was an IRS agent waiting to
collect the tax.
Speaker 2: Money from her.
Speaker 3: They and he viewed it as somebody as I'm taking
away that all are incentive for having done something creative.
So I don't know, it's just minds thinking so differently.
And yet they were both great communicators, but they communicated
in different ways as well.
Speaker 4: The two of you will be very brief here. This
is Ken's show, not mine, but I'll tell a story
that gets to your point about Reagan that I think
the two of you will get a kick out of.
I went to visit him down in the Fox Tower
the year after he left office, and I knew I
was going to see him that day, so I s
paid special attention to the newspaper The La Times had
three anti Reagan stories on the front page Saw Risk
of Impeachment, Meese says, star wars Oversould. Cheney says there
was a third anti Reagan headline. I get in there,
mister and Ronald Reagan. The first thing he says was
did you see the paper this morning? And I said, yes, sir,
I did. I thought, braced myself, and he said, well,
I just don't understand how the judge can decide the
outcome of a sporting event. And I thought, what the
hell is he talking? And he kept talking. I realized
he wasn't talking about the front page. He was talking
about the sporting page because a judge had just overruled,
had just awarded the America's Cup to They ruled the
New Zealand entry was illegal because it was a catamor
as something like that. He hadn't even looked at the
front page. He didn't care, and he said, well, at
least it wasn't a judge I appointed. That was Reagan.
That was Reagan. He'd when he when he quit, he quit.
So Ken's here's what strikes me. Old speech writer. Nixon
and Reagan were both writers. Nixon was more obviously intellectual.
This is one of the things that people don't know
about Reagan, but that comes through in your book. So well,
he cared about the text. He worked hard on it,
and I don't quite know how to put it, but
I've always felt that no human being really knows what
he thinks until he's put it in words himself. And
both of these men, all their lives they had they
approached politics differently, but all their lives they submitted themselves
to the discipline of writing. They used us writers, of course,
but they used us as extensions in some ways of
their own minds. And so I always had the feeling
you would know this. I never even met Richard Nixon,
and you knew Ronald Reagan far better than a junior
guy like I ever would. But I all had the
feeling that they respected each other as men who were
standing on the ground, who had reached firm conclusions, and
that always struck me. Then the other thing that always
struck me was that although they both moved in elite worlds,
and the Republican Party in those days still had an
Eastern establishment wing, which of course you know in detail
that tortured Richard Nixon, they both came from working backgrounds
and they understood that about each other too. I felt,
does that sound right to you?
Speaker 3: You know, they if people don't understand how similar to
their backgrounds were by the way. They both were rooted
in the Midwest. Originally, Nixon's family originally came out from
the Midwest, and of course Reagan was came out from
the Midwest. And they both came out from very sort
of impoverished roots, and both made their way.
Speaker 2: Out on their own.
Speaker 3: And and Nixon, as he said, you know, they they
in law school, they called him Nixon had an iron butt.
He studied very hard and worked very hard, and it
was very intellectual in that sense. And you're right, both
of them used their writers as extensions of themselves. Nixon
liked to work on his own speeches and edit. He
edited heavily his own memoirs. He liked the nuance and words.
He admired Reagan a lot for his ability to tell stories,
and that's I mentioned that in the book quite a bit,
and he told me that all the time. He says,
Reagan is so good at telling stories. Kenny says, look
at Reagan. I was always observing about colors and about scenes,
and he's always looking at at things and graphically that
makes him such a good communicator. And that's what how
I learned about when I worked for Reagan. I learned
a lot of about how Nixon observed Reagan. And I
think Nixon admired that of Reagan, and he wished he
could do it as well as Reagan, and he tried
to do it.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: And what's what's interesting about both of them, by the way,
they both neither one of them used teleprompters when they spoke.
Speaker 2: I hope you noticed that in campaigns.
Speaker 3: Nixon has spoke extemporaneously all the time, never used teleprompters
at all in his campaign. He didn't even speak from notes. Now,
Reagan used notes, but he never views teleprompters. If you
go back and look at Reagan's inaugural address in nineteen
eighty one, he didn't use a teleprompter.
Speaker 2: Mike Neaber talked him out of it.
Speaker 5: Oh really, yeah, Well, what was Diver getting at there?
Speaker 4: What?
Speaker 5: Diver just knew he would be better at doing it?
Speaker 3: Dever, I mentioned it in the book, and I said,
I don't even know what Deer was talking about. But
Deaver said to him, said, Governor, I think you lose
yourself and the teleprompter. Now, I don't know what the
hell he meant by that, but Deaver seemed to know Reagan, yes,
and whatever he meant by you seem to lose yourself
and the teleprompter. So Reagan agreed with that, and so
he decided just to speak from his half sheets, his
famous half sheetes. Yes, if you watch his inaugural address,
he doesn't use the teleprompter and as a result, he
doesn't have that phony. You look about himself where his
head and bobbing and bobbing and bobbing back and forth
like all the other presidents do nowadays, if you watch
Obama give a speech, his head goes, Bob's backing like crazy.
Speaker 2: It's it's weird, like you're.
Speaker 5: Watching a tennis match practically.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you're watching a tennis match.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: They use these teleprompters and it's so obvious. And then
you see the glass reflection and if they if it's
a bad day, the sun, the sun reflects off the teleprompter.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, Ken, I think you're being too modest in a
couple of ways, or Peter hasn't done you full justice
I can make.
Speaker 5: I can criticize Peter instead.
Speaker 1: Uh So, first of all, I mean you've already hinted
at the fact that, well you mentioned most everybody else,
cabinet members, they they have their memoirs ghost written. I
think that's firstly true of everybody that yours is not.
It's obviously an original work and quoting from your diary
and so forth, and so it has a style that's
so engaging.
Speaker 5: But the second point is it makes some real news,
I mean.
Speaker 1: New news, as you might say these days, and especially
on this question to Nixon. Now, I know that you
know Nixon and Reagan knew each other. Reagan mentions in
his diary several places, Oh, Dick, Nixon had a great idea.
He told me about arms control or some other thing,
and so you knew they communicate with each other. What
I did not know until your memoir is that you were,
especially the campaign in nineteen eighty the go between between
the two of them quite extensively. And of course you
do mention very candidly that needed to be concealed a
little bit because of all the political baggage of Nixon,
and it would be used to attack Reagan and so forth.
But I think you should say a little more about
that for listeners, because you don't find this. I don't
think in any other accounts that I've read, how extensive
was Nixon following it day by day and communicating with you,
communicating through you to Reagan and vice versa.
Speaker 5: And how did that begin? Maybe that's a good way
to start. How did that?
Speaker 2: You know what's Steve, You know what's fascinating about this.
Speaker 3: Nixon went nuts in nineteen seventy six when Reagan was
running for president, because he was He and I sat
down in San Clementy, and he would we would watch
the camp. I was his political izing ears. So I
would go in every day with all the clips in
the background and watching television and tell him what was
going on with the Reagan campaign. And I was in
touch with David Keenan, Marty Anderson, and Linn Offsinger. They
would tell me stories from the campaign. And Nixon would
look at Reagan and say this was going right, this
was going well, or this or he's making this mistake.
But it was driving him nuts that he couldn't pick
up the phone and call Reagan, he couldn't give him advice.
And Nixon would have been was such a great strategist,
and that he was dying to give Reagan direct advice
in that seventy six campaign. Now not necessarily that he
wanted to to beat Ford or anything else, but he
was he saw that Reagan has says raw talent. He
wanted to mold him like a piece of clay, and
he and he was frustrated. And then when Reagan put
Schweiker on the ticket, it just nixon brain exploded at
what a stupid mistake that was. So I'm going back
only to say that. So now nineteen eight year rolls
around and here it is Nixon's protege Me ends up
on the campaign plane with Reagan. And Nixon's not stupid. He's, oh,
here's a rare opportunity. I've got a mole in the
rege and I can now give advice. And so he's
he starts with phone calls and then next thing you know,
he's got Nick Ruey, who former Nixon an advanced man
and now chief of staffed to Nixon. Nick calls me
up and he says, look, I've got some memo. He says,
the old man or the boss those days call him
the Boss. He says, can you meet with me? We
have this secret meeting. It's like a KGB agent meeting
with the CIA in Kansas City. And I gave him
a code name, mister Hudson. And we meet two blocks
away from the hotel, because we're still there's a Watergate
baggage with Nixon that we're worried about. And Nixon writes
this long memo that for the first time I revealin
the book. So we're going back from seventy six to eighty.
Now Nixon can finally advise Reagan. And you know what
he's advising him, and it's stick to the economy and
don't talk about foreign policy. And then he's giving me
advice about that, and then then does a second memo.
Speaker 2: How to do the debate with Jimmy Carter.
Speaker 3: And in the meantime he's calling me in different places
on the road. And this is so gratifying to Nixon
at the time. Now I don't know the extent to
which Reagan took all the advice, but this this gave
Nixon such gratification that he was for now he was
back engaged in politics. And I did think at the
end of the day, because the advice was going through
Stu Spencer and Stu just to give you another little
twist of history, Stu Spencer's dad was on the original
committee of one hundred that recruited Nixon to run for
Congress in nineteen forty six.
Speaker 5: I never hurt. Oh, I had no idea.
Speaker 2: That was Ken Spence.
Speaker 5: H yeah, yeah. My dad knew Ken Spencer pretty well from.
Speaker 3: Ken Spencer was on the committee of one hundred that recruited.
Speaker 2: So Peter.
Speaker 3: Stu respected Nixon a lot. And uh, and so Stu
would take these mamals and then give and give them
the Reagan. So I would give the memos to Stu.
Stull would give them the Reagan.
Speaker 1: So there's one other aspect where you're being too modest
ken and and and Peter also kind of picked up
on it, but I really want to make this explicit
for listeners.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: It struck me as I was reading the book and
also remembering from the history of the time and my
own research over the years, how often you were brought
in by Reagan a key moments of crisis, like after
the First Debate in eighty four when he performed badly
for certain other key speeches.
Speaker 5: I'm not aware of many.
Speaker 1: Other presidents that had an outside advisor with their own
private life and own life going on the.
Speaker 5: Way you did.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that becomes clear in the book,
and as I say, you're too modest to boast about it,
and I totally get that and respect it, but that
you immediately had a bond and a great trust with
Reagan and Nancy Reagan in particular. You know, you do
mention it in there. You're very candid about how time
she was sharp with you, as she could be with
everybody when she was mad about something going wrong or
she thought. But the subtext is very clear there that
that Reagan had you maybe not a Pedestal's exactly right,
But how do you explain that? I mean, did you
did you was this? Were you conscious of this at
the time, how unusual this was? And what's your explanation
for that?
Speaker 3: I think my explanation for that is that it started
with the eighty campaign, and it took a while for
us to sort of create a relationship together. But I
think he liked that by the end of the campaign,
I was giving him good I gave him some good lines.
I was a good script writer, and he appreciated good
script writers, and so by the end of the campaign
I had given him some good zingers, and so he said, here,
I've got a pretty good guy that knows how to
give me some singers. And then I had edited helped
edit his last thirty minute speeches and gave him some
good lines there. And so I was one I was
one person who was familiar with I was a face
that he knew, he was comfortable. So I had created
a comfort zone. And then I worked with him, of
course on the inaugural address and the and then then
then the.
Speaker 2: First few days.
Speaker 3: Then then what I would ascribe it to Steve is
that I didn't fight with him. I didn't argue with
him about uh, mister president, No, no, I don't. I
don't like the way you're phrasing this. Here's here's what
you should say, or you know, this is what the
way you should do it. I think there are a
lot of people, and I know later in the presidency
a lot of his writers which try to tell him
what to say or put policy in his head.
Speaker 2: I don't want to name names.
Speaker 5: But Peter would be one of them.
Speaker 3: But not kidding well, I think Tony Dolan was one
always trying to make policy with his or would meet
with him and try to you know, and certainly Darman
and Baker, yeah, sort of implicitly or explicitly try to
make policy.
Speaker 2: But I didn't argue with him. I did what he wanted.
Speaker 3: I never thought nobody elected me to anything, So I
worked with him. And if I thought there was a
way to make a phrase better, I would suggest, maybe
we can do it this way. But I didn't fight
with him because I thought he was a good writer.
So he felt comfortable. That made him comfortable, right.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, one of the lines in the book
that really jumps out of me was you're quoting Nancy
saying Ronnie Ken's idea is good. You should listen to him.
I don't know how often she I have said that,
but that's.
Speaker 3: You know where that came from. It came from my
education with Nixon. And I tell people I got my
graduate I got my PhD at the University of Reagan,
but I got my bachelors and masters at the College
of Richard Nixon. And you can't spend four and a
half years in the Nixon White House and four years
and sant commentated with Nixon without learning good politics and
good phraseology and good communications.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 3: What we were talking about in that particular occasion was
an interview with Barbara Walters and how to shape a
message and during Watergate and dealing with the Vietnam War
and dealing with all the controversies that we had during
the Nixon administration. You learned how to shape a message.
And so when we got into any situation where Reagan
had to give an answer to a question, I think
I was in a better position than most people on
his staff because I had already had about six, seven,
eight years of experience dealing with a lot of high level,
troublesome situations in any of his other staff people.
Speaker 2: And that was that came from Nixon.
Speaker 4: How did you get? I was about to ask. I
was about to say, how did you handle Nancy Reagan?
That is the wrong way to find that question, That
is the wrong way to phrase that question.
Speaker 5: But how did you get? Did she make up her
mind about you quickly? You're all right.
Speaker 3: As long as he was happy with me, She was
happy with me. God, it was always reflective of his
relationship with me. There were some exceptions. She was not
happy with me when I wouldn't come back full time.
That was we were at Camp David and June of
of nineteen eighty one when I was called back on
a special situation after I had left the White House,
and I refused to leave my family to come back
full time, and she was angry because Ronnie wanted me
back and Ronnie needed him, needed me, and.
Speaker 2: He was unhappy with me.
Speaker 3: But generally, if the President was happy with me, she
was happy with me. But if she thought that I
wasn't serving him well, she would get unhappy. And there
was that confrontation on Air Force one after the first debate,
or just prior to the first debate, where she thought
I wasn't serving him well and she thought I was
the blame. She went after me even though it wasn't
my fault. So we had a little tiff. The blame
was on Jim Baker, not me, So it depended on
this situation.
Speaker 4: But this is also this is also very important for
the record that an eyewitness, a man who knew them
both well, and there are not many left and there
were never many who knew both. Mister knew both, the
government knew both the president and Missus Reagan well. That
Missus Reagan's concern was her husband right, not policy right,
not her own fame. We're not talking about a Hillary
Clinton who wanted her own career right. If you were
serving her husband, you were all right with her exactly. Yeah, correct, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Except there was there was one exception, and that was
in that I think I sort of diplomatically deal with
with regard to at the end of the nineteen eighty
eight convention speech, and she wanted it a different way
than he wanted it, and I got caught in the
middle at the very end, and to reflected in the
lunch we had at the rant and if you read
between the lines and the conversation that I kept my notes.
I always kept my notes very It was hard to
eat shrimp tallad and take notes and listen to the
president first lady not getting along with each other on
how a speech should be written. She wanted it one
way and he wanted it another way. And I felt
that if the President wanted it his way, that he
should get it his way, and she wanted it a
different way. And in the end, because he got it
his way and not her way, I think she was
unhappy with me.
Speaker 4: Linn Navsiger told me the story that you may Lynna,
you probably know this.
Speaker 5: Excuse me.
Speaker 4: The question here is what happened when the two of
them disagreed, And Lynn told me the story that she
called him this seventy six Reagan's been losing. They're now
in North Carolina. Missus Reagan calls Lynn up to the suite.
The president or the then former governor is not there.
It's just the two of them, and it becomes clear
she starts in on Lynn. It becomes clear that it
is her idea that it's up to Lynn to talk
Reagan into dropping out of the presidential race. And Lynn said,
as we know, she was a force of nature. And
all of a sudden, the door opens and Reagan walks
into the suite unexpectedly, whereupon Lynn and Missus Reagan both
fall silent and just look at them look at him,
and Lynn said, somehow Reagan knew immediately what they had
been talking about. And Reagan looked at both of them
and said, I don't care what she says. I'm staying
in the race. So when it came to it, he
tended to get his way.
Speaker 3: Well, there is one other scene in the book that
I describe where I was extraxtremely uncomfortable, where in the
nineteen eighty seven State of the Union, we're looking at
the very final draft.
Speaker 4: Nineteen eighty seven. Okay, right, this is when Don Reagan
lost control, right.
Speaker 3: Right, and I've delivered the final draft.
Speaker 2: I guess we're in the residence.
Speaker 3: And I don't have the book in front of me,
but I've described it in the book where he distinctly
and he says, Okay, it looks like we're pretty much
done here. He said, but Ken, we don't have a
reference here to the right to life. And I'm a
little troubled by that. And don't you think we ought
to insert something in here about protecting the life of
the unborn? And missus Reagan is standing behind him, and
I'm looking at her over his shoulder, and she's shaking
her head furiously. No, no, no, no, and mouthing the
words no, I'm and I say to him, and I
sort of stutter, going, well, mister President. Then I say, well,
I think you've said it, and there, well, but our friends,
our friends, you know, they're upset when I don't put
that in speeches. And she's still shaking her head furiously. Okay,
So he's arguing to put it back in, and if
I go with him, she's gonna put a stiletto in
me that goes from stomach to back, and you know,
I will never be seen again. And so I finally
come up with this line where I sort of a
gutless line where I said, well, you know you've you've
made your point so many times as president. I think
they'll forgive you this one time for not putting it in.
And it was sort of a cowardly exit on my part.
Speaker 5: But in the facing certain death.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well it would have meant probably not serving him again.
So I don't know, but.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's such a bad moment for you, Ken.
I mean remember that, I'm sure you do. Remember that
Reagan was the first sitting president to publish a book
while in office, and it was his book some months
before the campaign, on Abortion and The Conscience of a Nation.
And as you probably know, there was a huge fight
among Reagan's political staff about him publishing that book.
Speaker 5: At the end of the day, he said, I want
to do it. So anyway, I think you were right.
Speaker 1: In other words, I think the line you made was
substantively correct, even if it was an awkward and difficult moment.
Speaker 5: Anyway, Peter, You've got a couple more. No, No, I'm
just I got it.
Speaker 4: I had a pro life passage in a speech that
we got into a meeting in the Oval office. Endarment
and Baker were there, and they both tried to talk
him out of it, and Reagan just listened and smiled,
and then he's the President stood up and went to
his desk and said, by the way, I have I
just received a letter from some medical doctors telling me
about the that fetuses can feel pain earlier and what
he understood, and this is ray. He just he read
this passage signed by six medical doctors as if it
was just interesting to him, and then he walked back
to his chair, and on the way to his chair,
he dropped the letter in Darman's lap and said, I
think we should put that in this speech too. Oh
my goodness. Baker and Darman went white as sheets with fury,
but of course they controlled themselves. It was it was
he did he was He felt strongly on that one.
So Ken, here's the question of the hour. Richard Nixon
gets dealt a very bad hand Vietnam, the erosion of
our position in the Cold War, stagnant economy, an establishment
that was against him. But by the end of the administration,
the economy is beginning to turn around. We're finally out
of Vietnam. Reagan comes in and the seventies are put
behind us and we get a national renewal. I mean,
I've just so struck. I think about this often that
seventy nine we're in such a weak position that the
Soviets feel free to go into Afghanistan and the Iranians
feel free to take Americans hostage. And eighty nine, this
is just ten years later, there's been such an American
renewal that it spills over into the rest of the
world and the Berlin Wall comes down. There are a
lot of Americans who have their hopes up this time.
Are we in a position for another national renewal? Is
the are the predicates, the political predicates, the will of
the people, the political system, or is this more likely
to be Donald Trump just holding the line as best
he can, holding things together, which I take to have
been Richard nixon gifts. Richard Nixon's gift to the nation.
He held things together in a very difficult time. What's
the correct parallel, what do you expect?
Speaker 3: Well, the benefit Reagan had was he had an adversarial press,
but not an enormously adversarial press. He entered the presidency
with a pretty pretty balanced media, and it got tougher
as he went, and it got tougher, especially during the
Bitburgh controversy. They went after him, and then during the
Iran contra. But when he started with the economic recovery
in eighty one and the defense build up, he didn't.
He wasn't confronted with the massive adversarial press that Nixon
had in nineteen sixty nine when Nixon was dealing with
the Vietnam War. Trump's issue is that he's going to
have an adversarial press from January twenty first day one.
So Trump's going to be faced with a lot of
the same problems Nixon had. Now he has what Trump
has going for his favor that Nixon did not have,
And I mentioned this in all my presentations, is that
Nixon never had a Congress going for him. Nixon had
the Congress in the hands of the Democrats for the
entire five and a half years of his presidency. When
you see what Nixon accomplished during his presidency with Democrats
in charge of the Senate in the House the entire
the absolute entire time Nixon was in office, and He's
still got a lot of things done. Trump has the
advantage of having the Senate in the House for at
least first two years of his presidency. If he's very
clever and very careful, then I think he can what
you're saying is potentially possible, and he has to he
can't squander that advantage. If he squanders that advantage by
behavior that goes overboard, or by not being presidential, by
not using his powers wisely, then he'll he'll lose the
ability that he has.
Speaker 2: But he has that.
Speaker 3: Potential going for him because that's that's an ability that
he has to take and regularly had a Senate going
for him in the first part of his presidency. So
and Trump, I will say this about Trump. He knows
how to use the bully pulpit. He really does. I
think he needs to be a bully. But you're right right,
he doesn't. He does, he does know how to use it.
And but if he uses it, but he can, he
has he also has the ability to squander it away,
and he has to be very careful. And I do
think when he's one thing he's doing wisely is he's
bringing loyalty into the into the equation on his staffing.
And I don't I'm not quite sure he's everything he's
doing in terms of his appointments is is wise, But
within his internal staffing, I think he's making wise decisions.
Speaker 5: You know, there's the Peter's question.
Speaker 1: Your answer reminds me of the apocryphal Mark Twain line
that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And so
in the last couple of weeks, when Trump has been
going on about the Panama Canal and maybe we ought
to get it back, I kind of wish his next
sentence would be because Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 5: Was right about it after all.
Speaker 1: But beyond that, I mean some of his things now
that are you know, either outrageous or amusing, or some
deliberate combination, like the goal of America instead of Gulf
of Mexico, and you know, we want Greenland. Never mind
of those are may really be about or not. But
underneath that, the subtext to me is very reagan Esque,
but in Trumpian bombast. In other words, he's really trying
to turn the page and reverse this what you might
call a little America again. It's an echo, distorted echo
of Jimmy Carter's Age of decline in Malais that we've
been having the last several years. And so in that respect,
all of the personalities are so different and rhetorical styles.
And you know, as you say, his own character, which
is erratic, I do see some Reaganesque parallels there. You know,
is that reasonable or is that Peter thinks it's reasonable.
Speaker 5: I think go ahead, Peter.
Speaker 4: Going through the last question, Ken, this is this is
just occurring to me, but it's almost mandatory in light
of what's happened the last few days. So if the
rest of the country would like to tune out, Ken
and Steve and I have something in common with both
Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and that is, we can't
help ourselves. We love California. So California meant an enormous
amount to both of those men. It's Nixon grew up here.
He couldn't help himself from returning to California. He was
always felt drawn like a moth to a flame, to
New York and to the power structures in the Eastern establishment.
But he was always most at home out here in California.
And of course Reagan loved the place. It was where
everything good happened to him. I once heard him say
you may have heard him say it a dozen times.
I think I only caught it once as he said,
if the pilgrims had landed in California instead of back east,
nobody would have bothered to discover the rest of the country.
Speaker 5: All right, So Pete Wilson. I can't remember the year
in which Pete left office. But Pete was the last
of two things. He was the last real Republican.
Speaker 4: Governor, which means I'm not counting Arnold Schwarzenegger. We can
argue about that if anybody wants to argue, but that
man was no Republican when it came to it. And
he was also the last competent governor. He was competent
in politics, he had that Nixon element in him, but
he was competent as a governor. He got the state
government to do what it ought to do, to treat
citizens well, to permit economic growth to take and recover
from big disasters. Let's keep that right now, and recover
from big disasters. So what I'm wondering is is their
hope for California. Can these unbelievable catastrophe As we record this,
these fires are still raging, and as far as I can,
I just checked the news. They think they have the
Pacific Palisades fire controlled by two percent. These things are
still out of control. Are California is going to finally
demand competent governance again? Is there even an opening for
some rebirth of the Republican? How can it be that
the most beautiful, talented, magnificent state in the country can
be so messed up for so long?
Speaker 3: I've been thinking about this all day, And of course
it's not. It's not just the governor, it's it's I
watched the speaker responding the question I was watching on
X today, responding to questions, I mean, the man is
an idiot revs.
Speaker 2: Is that his name?
Speaker 5: The Speaker of the Assembly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he couldn't get a declarative sentence out. And so
the entire legislature is an autocracy that doesn't know what
it's doing. And so the entire state is being governed irresponsibly.
But it's but who is voting them in? It's it's
the people whose houses, the five the six thousand houses
that have been raised, my guess has voted two thirds
of them voted for these people in office.
Speaker 4: Of them gave a lot of money. These are rich,
this is these are the rich California right, You're talking about.
Speaker 3: Here, exactly concerned about the fire hydrants that didn't have
water and probably have given the money to the Environmental
Defense Fund. So it's it's and and by the way,
a lot of these problems don't just rest on Gavin Newsom.
They go back to Jerry Brown. People forget this all
began with Jerry Brown. And somebody was talking or writing
about the train to nowhere this Oh, it was John
Hi Bush and his substack this morning that I read
I was talking about the train to nowhere that that
began with Jerry Brown. It didn't begin with Governor Newsom.
And and the the high tax rate of thirteen plus percent,
that was a proposal by Jerry Brown, not by the
legislature or by Gavin Newsom. That began with Jerry Brown.
Jerry Brown is the progenitor of all these problems, and
nobody's pointing the finger at him. So, yes, there's hope
if the people look within themselves.
Speaker 2: But it.
Speaker 3: Has to do with the leadership in the state. The
business community has to has to turn its back against
funding a lot of this. And and but do you
think the editorialists at the La Times, I'm glad that
this man who bought the is Patrick is his name?
Speaker 5: I can't pronounce the name doctor.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can't get around the last name. But who's
bought the La Times. Maybe he'll turn it around. But
I don't think they're writers or anybody else is going
to change. And maybe some of their houses have burned down,
but they they don't even.
Speaker 2: Think about these things.
Speaker 3: It's it's unless that changes, nothing's going to change.
Speaker 2: But it really is sad that the state that I
grew up.
Speaker 3: In, and the wonderful, beautiful state that it is unless people.
Speaker 5: I don't understand how the Armenians could have let this happen.
Speaker 3: Well, George, I can guarantee that none of this would
have happened, of course, not of course, not great right,
great government. By the way, you talked about an era
of national renewal. That was that was one of the
themes of I don't know if you actually did that
on purpose. That was the theme of President Reagan's nineteen
eighty one in honorable address.
Speaker 1: Right right, that you you were the first draft writer
to organize his thoughts and then handed off.
Speaker 3: We called for an air national renewal. I would just
say one last thing about Trump's chances here in the
first two years, whether it's Greenland and Pantamountact, all those
other things. Unless he focuses on the economy, he'll be
making a big mistake.
Speaker 2: He's got to get the economy back on track.
Speaker 5: So Nixon was right again. Ken, We have barely scratched
the surface.
Speaker 1: Of what you revealed and Behind closed Doors, but thank
you for opening some of those doors. I think we
want to have you back when you do some more
work on Watergate and and you know the revisions going
on with that. But in the meantime, thanks for spending
an hour with us. Congratulations on Behind Closed Doors. Peter,
glad you could surface once in a while to join Ricochet.
Speaker 3: Listen. That's the only thing I ever get asked on.
I've made one hundred and two radio interviews, podcasts, TV interviews,
and twenty book presentations. You know the question I always
get asked, did you right tear down this wall?
Speaker 2: One of these days I'm going to take credit for
that damn speech. Peter doesn't deserve it well get asked.
Speaker 3: But I do where credit is.
Speaker 2: Now, you know?
Speaker 4: Okay, So Steve, we're getting we're getting notes here from
our producer who wants to break for launcher, but I do.
So you touch on that. I'm not going to go
through this whole story, but it's important. I think you're
gonna agree with me. I know what you're gonna say, Peter,
go ahead. I wrote that speech. I would not have
written that speech for anybody else than Ronald Reagan. And
by that stage, I've been in Washington long enough to
get to know George H. W. Bush, Howard Baker, a
number of men who might have been president instead of
Reagan would only have written that for Reagan, and only
Reagan would have delivered that. And so yeah, I don't
it feels to me as though we're speech writers. But
I'm sure you agree Ken that over and over again
in your work. It's it's it's you can hear Reagan
in your own mind as you're writing for him.
Speaker 5: Somehow or other.
Speaker 4: The speeches that we wrote for that man belonged to him.
Speaker 2: There was a man who's stagecraft, Yes he did. Yeah, right,
that's very important.
Speaker 5: All right, listeners, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: As we always like to say, or James Lydix likes
to say, please go to Apple's iTunes and other venues
and give us a five star review. Join us in
the comments on Ricochet four point zero. I guess we're
calling it and we will see you back here next
week after you have gone to the bookstore and ordered
Behind Closed Doors by Kenn Kachikian.
Speaker 5: Ken, thanks for joining us, Ken, thank.
Speaker 2: You, thank you very much. See you both.
Speaker 4: Ricochete join the conversation.