Speaker 1: Hello friends, and welcome back to the rabbit Hole. I'm
your host Danny, and today we have the pleasure of
having Jeff Shepherd on the podcast. So during my research
for the upcoming Watergate episode, I kept finding interviews that
Jeff had given on this topic specifically, so he actually
worked in DC at the time after graduating from Harvard Law,
and he became a White House Fellow in nineteen sixty nine,
and then he served on President Richard Nixon's White House
staff for five years, including a year as deputy counsel
on the president's Watergate defense team. So like if anybody
knows the stuff, he knows it. He has written three
books and produced two documentary films, as well as an
off Broadway stage play about the internal prosecutorial documents he's
on covered, many of which are posted on his website
www dot Shepherd onwatergate dot com. It's Shepherd without the
h so s H. E. P. A. R. D. Shepherd
onwatergate dot com and I'll link that in the show
notes as well. Hi, Jeff, thank you so much for
coming on the rabbit Hole. I'm really excited to have
this conversation with you.
Speaker 2: I'm glad to be here too. This is gonna be fun.
Speaker 3: It is gonna be fun.
Speaker 1: I'm like deep in the rabbit hole about Watergate. So
it actually didn't start with Watergate. It started because I
started to do I wanted to look into Operation Northwoods
with Cuba, and then I was like, well, I don't
want to just do Northwoods.
Speaker 3: Let's just do like a Cuba episode.
Speaker 1: Well, then when I was doing the Cuba episode, I
started finding all these CIA agents that also worked with Watergate,
and I was like, that's weird. So I need to
look into Watergate now too. So then I went down
that rabbit hole and I found you, and here we are.
Speaker 2: Well at Watergate is a very deep rabbit hole. And yeah,
in summation for your viewers, there's only three facts that
you can count on in Watergate. There really was a
break in. They were caught red handed, so there's criminality
from the start. There really was a cover up because
there was worry about who knew about the break in
in advance, and some pretty senior people on the president's
reelection campaign knew what was going what was going on.
And third, Nixon really did resign, the only president in
our history to resign, but pretty much everything else you've
been told is not true. And you've got this difficulty,
particularly people like me who lived through it, who've gone back,
looked at the records. And what makes it unique? The
special prosecutors, the Watergate Special Prosecution Force was a special recruited,
highly partisan bunch of Democrat lawyers, mainly Ivy League lawyers,
whose gold in life was to get Nixon. And they
got a hold of the prosecutorial machinery and used it
to investigate, as they announced in their press conference, every
allegation of wrongdoing committed by the Nixon administration since it
took office. And that's what you've been taught, that's what
you've heard about. But they were so eager to get
Nixon and his people. They cut corners. Nobody was watching them,
they were in charge. The media was on their side,
and they did secret meetings with the judges. They suppressed
exculpatory evidence, they expanded statutes way beyond their normal meetings,
and what makes it you? Nick and the press could
care less. They hated Nixon too. They left a paper trailer.
Were so proud of what they were doing. They wrote
memos to each other about it. And I learned twenty
years ago. I learned their internal files, those that survived,
are kept at National Archives and you can put in
foier requests, and I've put in a lot of foire requests.
I have filing cabinets filled with this stuff, and they're
held in what's called special access the archives, and that's
where all investigatory files end up. So the JFK Assas Nation,
the Clinton impeachment, they're all there, and they have to
look at the memo you want or that your foyer
request covers, and they have to be sure that there
are no names there who are still alive that were
investigated but not indicted. Okay, some privacy. After you asked away,
you have no privacy. It's the opposite of don't speak
ill of the dead. It's you have no interest in
your reputation, so they keep track. I think most Watergate
people other than me have passed away. Well that's not true,
that's not true. John Dene is still alive and two
of the lead prosecutors are still alive.
Speaker 1: Does he talk about it, John Dene?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, he talks about it all the time. He's
the hero, he's the purported whistleblower. Who is this innocent
kid cut up with these evil people.
Speaker 3: But that's the narrative. He's just like sticking to the
whole forever.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, well, with one exception, I'll get to second
believe FBI agent special agent in charge from the day
of the break in arrests straight through to the conviction
for the cover up. Angelo Leno did in oral history
for the National Archives two thousand and nine, I think,
you know, not that long ago, and he said that
he credits John Dene with ninety five percent of the
cover up. And yet he's he goes scott free. He
never single night in jail. And then you know Gordon
Lenny and I knew Gordon didn't like him, but I
knew him. Gordon spent five years in jail. Now he
planned it. He would not cooperate with prosecutors, and they
threw the book at him. But John Dene's very active.
He wrote a book. He's written a lot of Watergate books,
you know, but he wrote one that was published in
twenty fourteen, that's ten years ago. And there's this infamous footnote,
page fifty four, and it says, you know that smoking
gun tape where Nixon agrees to get the CIA to
tell the FBI not to interview these two people. That's
been misunderstood from the beginning. This is John Dene's footnote.
The lawyers misunderstood he was trying to protect or the
people proposing it. The identities of two very prominent Democrats
contributed to Nixon's re election campaign under the assurance it
would never become public. And when they started tracing the money,
they knew the burglars who had all these one hundred
dollars bills. Yeah, they'd gotten the money from Crete. But
the FBI, being thorough, wanted to know how the money
got to creep in the first place. That would have
exposed these democratic donuts, and that was the reason they
wanted not to interview them. It actually postponed their interviews
for a week, and after they were interviewed, they were
determined to have no involvement whatsoever. And all this was
known that the White House met with the CIA, the
CI called the FBI.
Speaker 1: Oh, that was known when you saw that video, right,
Like you were one of the first people to watch
that video.
Speaker 2: The video with Angelo Orlando.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the the.
Speaker 2: FBI agent Well, yeah, I mean you know it was
taken in two thousand and nine. I happened to see
it last year. I didn't know it existed. There's a
whole set.
Speaker 1: I thought that the smoking gun video is the one
that you had seen.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a tape recording, it's not a video. Excuse Well,
while we're there. I transcribed all the White House tapes
as a young lawyer on the White House staff, and
I was the third person to hear that particular tape
of June twenty third, nineteen seventy two, and I prepared
the official transcript, and I'm the one that called it
the smoking gun, but not because it was my conclusion.
It was because my boss, the president's top lawyer, was
appalled at what he had heard and mistakenly assumed it
showed that Nixon was in on the cover up from
day one. He wasn't. And today I think it's pretty
much agreed nobody on the White House staff. You remember
there's the White House staff and then there's Creep, the
re Election.
Speaker 3: Committee, which are very different.
Speaker 2: Oh well, they happened to be kitty cornered across the
street from each other, and they it was staffed Creep
by former members of the White House Staff or the
Department of Justice for the main part, and they were very,
very different. But the break in was planned and executed
by people who worked for Creep. And the people on
the White House staff Nixon, Holdeman and Earlockman and Colson
had no idea that this was planned. But John Deane
was at two important meetings in Attorney General Mitchell's office
where he heard about the plans, and so he was
fearful he was going to get caught up. So he
ran the cover up to protect himself, of course, and
the White House thought he was protecting them, but in
the course of his cover up, he infected members of
the White House staff and then he turned on them.
Now let's go back over that very carefully. How did
it all start. Well, it started when Bob Haldeman asked
John Dene to prepare a campaign intelligence plan. Every campaign
has one. They call it opposition research. You want to
know everything you can learn about your opponent. Where's his
money coming from, what are his policy positions, where's he
going to speak tomorrow? Who doesn't like him? All those things?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: Well, the trouble was John Deane hadn't been that involved
in campaigns and didn't really know what he was doing,
and he recruited and hired a guy named Gordon Levy.
Now your viewers don't know Gordon, but I had worked
with Gordon when I was a White House fellow at Treasury.
And the nicest thing you can say about him is
that he was very intense, I prefer crazy as a loone,
just eager to go way beyond normal activities. And he
prepared a campaign intelligence plan that was priced out at
a million dollars. This is nineteen seventy two, and it
envisioned mugging, bugging, kidnapping, and prostitution. And you can say, oh, Shepherd,
know you're exaggerating. Everybody exaggerates. But Letty wrote an autobiography
seven years after water Date, and he describes his plan
in loving detail. There's no question what he had in mind.
It was just it just happened to be illegal.
Speaker 3: And he was FBI.
Speaker 2: Former FBI. From the FBI sometime he worked for the
district attorney up in Dutchess County, New York. And he's
got a local celebrity because he fired off a starting
pistol in court. Heard the daylights of people. Yeah he did.
He ran for Congress and he lost in the primary,
but he threatened to run as a conservative in the
Conservative Party. New York's got some splinter parties, and it
was the district where there were the congressman was Hamilton Fisch,
I think, and they decided to buy Lyddy off. So
they said, if you don't run and we win in
sixty eight, we'll give you a federal job. Now you're
not supposed to do that, right, That's got nothing to it, Nixon.
That was New Yorkers. That was Rockfellers people.
Speaker 1: Oh good, Now, some research in the rock Fellers.
Speaker 2: Well they have good and bad points. Yeah, healthy. Well,
so Lyddy ends up as a Special Assistant to the
Sector at Treasury. And I'm assigned to Treasury as a
White House fellow. And he's a gun nut, and I
believe in the Second Amendment, but he's way over the line.
And of course he's reporting to the Assistant Secretary for Enforcement,
and he's got under him the Bureau of Customs, the
Secret Service at Treasure, and atf Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms,
which regulates firearms and is detested by the gun lobby.
So Gordon would go out and give speeches on how
he was going to protect the gun lobby when his
sister organizations. We were atf and they said, you're don't
stop this, you can't go out and do this stuff,
and he wouldn't listen. So he was going to get fired.
And my boss on the White House Staff was in
charge of the law and order issue, among many other things,
and had good friends at the Department of Justice, and
they liked Gordon. Because Gordon so hated his job at Treasury.
He would tell the Apartment of Justice how they were
messing up. Treasury had customs there after drugs yep. The
Department of Justice had the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous
Drugs there after Drugs. Law enforcement fighting each other for
the competition got to be so intense. There was one
instance where they drew down on each other.
Speaker 3: Oh my goodness.
Speaker 2: They were following different aspects of this smuggling routine. So
Gordon's going to get fired. And my boss, Bud Krogue,
gets convinced to hire Gordon just to thumb our nose
at the treasure and so we did. And I was
so opposed. I'm just a kid, you understand right, I'm
twenty four when I joined the White House staff. But
I threw such a hissy fit that Bud said, let's
set aside a half hour. Let's go across the street
to Noni's coffee, joh, and you can make your pitch
against Gordon with no interruption. So he heard me down,
and my pitch was that Gordon might be a good
field general, but you can't trust him at headquarters because
he didn't follow instructions. But I lost. So we hired Gordon,
and then John Dene hires him to do this campaign
intelligence plan.
Speaker 3: Did John Dene know how crazy Liddy was?
Speaker 2: No? No. In his book he talks about meeting him
and he looked, you know, he looked very presentable in
a vested suit. And I remember the suit. It was
a Glenn plaid summer weight with a vest. And Letty looked, yeah,
I spoke well. He had conducted what's called the Plumber's
break in before nineteen seventy one. Earl Lukman was appalled
at the idea they had broken into a psychiatrist's office.
They'd instructed Bud that Gordon had to go get him
off your staff, right. So John Dene comes around looking
for people to help him with his campaign intelligence plan.
Gordon said at the bus, I got somebody for you.
Speaker 3: He's like trying to offload this weight.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I had no question about it.
Speaker 3: He's like, here, just take this guy off my hands.
Speaker 2: But just to personify this, just for a second, I
really did pitch a hissy fit and I lost. And
then Gordon in his book, he says when he shows
up on the White House staff, Jeff Shepherd was assigned
to show him around, teach him the rogues, you know,
welcome aboard, Gordon. Well, then Gordon does this break in
that I don't know about in Lewis Fielding's office. Uh,
doctor Daniel il Burg's shrink. Yeah, remember Illsburg linked.
Speaker 3: The link to the Pentagon papers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Gordon's supposed to leave. He goes over to
the reelection committee, and I remember walking down the hallway
of the old the gorgeous old building next door to
the White House, saying to myself, you know, Gordon's been here,
and now Gordon's gone, and nothing's gone wrong. Your friends,
their friends must think you're not to have raised such
a hue and cry about Gordon. Man, Man, there's the
Watergate break in. They get arrested. This is June seventeenth,
seventy two.
Speaker 3: Can we talk about that for a second. The burglar, Okay,
I mean I yeah.
Speaker 2: At eighty one, I proceed slowly. So the newspapers start
speculating about somebody who planned the break in but wasn't
caught red handed, who's caught right hand? Four Cubans and
the CIA wireman, James mccordy. But they start speculating about
who else it might be. And my secretary's roommate was
the secretary to the plumbers unit where Gordon worked when
he was on the White House staff. So jo Anne
Kathy was her name. Joanne says, well, you know who
it is, this unknown person. I'm really not that worried
about it. I got a full plate of other stuffs.
I'm just plodding along. I'm busy. She says, let me
give you his initials. Oh Man, and she says gg l.
It doesn't make any sense. Who cares? And then she
says Gordon and g Gordon, and I go oh no,
oh no, And then all the memories of ting to
keep me out of there come flooding back, and Gordon's
got us in a huge trouble with its campaign intelligence plan.
Now go to your question.
Speaker 1: So it seems like they get caught or they have
this lookout, right, and the lookout was like, hey, there's.
Speaker 2: Police, offered Baldwin.
Speaker 1: And they just like ignored the fact that they were police,
and they just kind of like kept going until they
were caught. And then they like the police came in,
they're caught and they're like, oh, yeah, we're guilty, and
they just like give up with no fight. They didn't
call in any favors. Then call like were they trying
to get caught?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, no, no. Well, well I know nothing,
I know nothing. I've read some stuff. I have views,
but they may or may not being better than anyone else,
is to uh. Everybody involved in the break in itself
had some connection with the CIA. James McCord, who's the wireman,
was a career of CIA official, right. Well. Cubans, well, yeah,
we had the four Cubans who a couple they were
all consultants to the CIA. And Howard Hunt had been
the infamous Eduardo during the Bad Pigs when we were
preparing the army to go. So there's a lot of speculation,
a lot of books and I called them the doubter
books because they doubt conventional wisdom and The most influential
is one by Jim Hogan, I think it came out
in the late seventies called Hidden Agenda, And then there
was one by Lynn Colodney called Silent Coup, and Silent
Coup dumps more on. John dene Secret Agenda covers the
CIA involvement because he'd written a previous book called Spooks
Uh and he raises all these questions. So the police
car that you know, the janitor calls in because the
tape right, Well, why was the tape put around the
edge of the door instead of on the thin side.
Speaker 1: Where which the first time they did it like that,
and then this time they did it differently.
Speaker 2: Why did they do it again? Why on earth did
McCord replace the tape? He didn't tell the others. So
the theory I'm attracted to says the Cubans were sent
in to uh photograph and take pictures of what was
going on. McCord was supposed to plant microphones. Remember it's
the second entry. Yes, plant the microphones and get his
ass out before the cops came and arrested the Cubans.
That it was a part of a scheme to be
arrested by In theory, the CIA, who didn't like Nixon. Now,
the CIA didn't like Nixon, but I believe that the
CIA knew what was underwent and they chose not to
warn the president that it was underway. But if you
think about it, who would they tell? Because the president's
best friend and John Mitchell and his attorney general was
said to have approved the plan, So who's the CI
is supposed to sidle up to it and say, you know, oh,
we don't know, we don't know for sure. But the
cops show up because there was a unassigned car with
plain clothesmen in an unmarked car where the guys shouldn't
have been there anyway. And when the call came through,
he from the back seat grabbed the microphone and said,
we're on it. We'll take care of it. So this
car pulls up middle of the night. Baldwin is across
the street in what was at that time the Howard
Johnson's and his walkie talkie doesn't work because the batteries
were fouled up. So he can see the guys on
the I think it to the sixth floor, but he
can't warn them. And then lights go on in the
DNC offices and the cops come in and the people
come out with their hands up and they're in suits
and they have on rubber gloves, and four out of
five or cubans they expected to be sprung that night.
There's this story about one of the Cubans saying to
the police saying, you know, we're both on the same side.
You know, we're the good guys. Right soon, soon you'll
get a phone call saying let us go.
Speaker 1: That's what I was curious about too, Like they didn't
call anybody, like they have all these CIA connections and
they're connected to the creep like the reelection campaign. They
didn't make any phone calls to be like, hey, come
get us, we got caught.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, there's this guy named Douglas Caddy who is
general counsel of Mullen and Company, which is thought to
be a CIA front and employed Howard Howard Hunt. And
the theory is Hunt nearby, maybe in the Watergate office building,
but not caught and Gordon's same thing. There's somebody who
streaks out the door and they don't know who it is,
but they assume it was either Hunter Lyddy and they
go wake up w Caddy and say you got to
get these guys out of jail, go down and represent them.
The Cubans didn't know who he was, didn't know where
he came from, but they were happy for help. Gordon
not Gordon. Somebody approaches Dick Clindingstone the golf course at
a county, the Congressional country Club and says, Mitchell wants
you to call him and get wants you to get
these guys out of jail. This is a message from
John Mitchell. You you were deputy, now your attorney general.
This is your predecessor. You'll do what he asks. And
Klindings said, if John Mitchell wants to call me, he'll
call me. Hes not sending a message through the likes
of you, but he doesn't report that contact. If he
had ordered that to the people down in the bowels
of DOJ, his career prosecutors Watergate would have ended much sooner.
But because there was this massive cover up seeking to
protect John Dene Jim McGruder, who headed the campaign committee,
waiting for Mitchell and Mitchell those are pretty senior people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Mitchell being like Nixon's best friend and like
them being like attorneys together before they were like in office. Yeah,
so like I mean Mitchell was if he's involved, then
Nixon being involved makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2: Now there was something else I was going to say about. Oh.
Libby shows up at Creep on December tenth, nineteen seventy one,
and says to Jeb macgoudor, who's acting in waiting on Mitchell,
I've been promised a million dollars to do a campaign
intelligence plan. Now, Jeb is not the sharpest knife in
the draft. So Jeb says, well, that may be, but
nobody here has the authority to approve a million bucks.
Only John Mitchell can approve that kind of expenditure. And
he's still over DJ. So they go over to talk
to John Mitchell. On January twenty seventh, nineteen seventy two,
Gordon has charts prepared by the CIA describing Jimstone is
series of of sreptitious entries and kidnapping and all that
because of a budget issue, because Jeb can't approve a
million dollar budget. And you see there's a you understand,
the whole government came down right because this tom fool
Yeah creeps, only only Mitchell kind of approved this, you know,
the shooting, I mean, you know it's it's money issue,
and it's just that the water gets filled with those
kinds of little vignettes that if you, if you did it,
live through it, you can't fully appreciate how bizarre they
really are.
Speaker 1: Well, then you have like the the in the journalists
right that they're like being fed this information by Mark
Felt from the FBI.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, it's Woodward and Bernstein mainly, but it's I'm
blocking on Seymour Glanzer out of the New York Times
and Woodward and Bernstein off the Post, and all kinds
of mystery about how Woodward knows felt but felt identity.
It's kept secret till about two thousand and four. On
the same tape with Angelo Atlano, the FBI agent, the
questioner says that weren't you helped by Woodward and Bernstein
And he says, no, not a single bit. They were
printing what we already knew. And the questioner says, yeah,
but didn't they give you some leads? And he says, no,
not a one. Did we give them leads? Oh hundreds?
You know, But what woodwarn of Bernstein? You call them
the greatest investigative reporters of all time. No way they
were reporting. But the government already knew. The public didn't know,
but the government was leading the investigation. He was very
thorough and they had hundreds of FBI agents working on that.
Speaker 1: So were they did they do this? Were they said
the information to sway the the court of public opinion
because Nixon was winning by a landslide. This guy would like,
this was a huge win for Nixon for a second term.
Speaker 2: But you got to get this, You got to get
the dates straight. Two things. Nixon was going to wipen
the governor out without question, but the Democratic Convention had
not yet been held. Oh, Tummer in Miami. It's there.
He's talking with Mitchell about bugging Larry O'Brien's suite down
at this Miami hotel, and Mitchell says, be sure you
get the bugs out before I go down because the
Republicans are coming in next. He's kind of kidding about it, right,
But Nixon had already had one election stolen from him
in nineteen sixty by Jack Kennedy and his people and
Mayor Dailey of Chicago, and then they thought they'd run
Robert against him, but Robert got assassinated too, and they're
down to Teddy and Teddy's damaged goods. He's fourteen years
younger than the brothers. He's arrested three times for drunk
driving at UVAS. They're not a Harvard College for hiring
somebody to cheat on his Spanish exam. He's a real
weak league. But he's the last candidate. Okay, Joe dies
in the war, Jack and Bobby are assassinate. You're down,
You're down to Teddy. And the theory was Nixon feared
Teddy would skip all the primaries leading up to the
convention because of chap Aqutic and Mary Joe Kopecne drowning
that role. Yeah uh, and he would skip the primaries
where he might lose, but emerge at the convention as
the great hero. The Kennedy the restoration of Camelot. So
Nixon was was much more anxious than his staff. This
is a metaphor, but he grabbed people in the hallway
by their lapels and say, you're not taking this seriously.
You don't understand the Kennedys. You know, I lost one.
I'm not going to lose again. So there was an
intense concern about the Democrat Party.
Speaker 3: I can see that.
Speaker 2: And then there was another issue that escapes me, but
a little come up as we can to talk. Nope,
don't have it.
Speaker 3: That's okay.
Speaker 1: So we have the burglary, right, we have this cover
up that John dene is like leading this cover up.
Speaker 2: I know, I know. Why did they bug the DNC headquarters.
Everybody knows the real information was out with the campaigns.
Why didn't they bug McGovern? Why didn't they bug the
guy from Maine? And the answer it's in Earl Silbert's diary.
Earl s the lead prosecutor, the career prosecutor who broke
the cover up, one of the few real heroes in Watergame.
He says, well, One, they tried to infiltrate in McGovern's
campaign a couple of times and couldn't do it. Two,
the assumption was after the convention, which is going to
occur in a week or two. After the convention, McGovern
will take over the NC headquarters in the Watergate Hotel
and we'll already have our bugs in place. So with that,
that's not not as crazy as it sounds. Yeah, maybe
they know, maybe there was some method in their madness.
Now back to your questions.
Speaker 1: So I just I was going to move on to
the cover up because we have John Deane like trying
to cover all this up, and that actually like pushes
the narrative more that Nixon and his administration has evolved.
Speaker 2: Two things. He sits in on all the FBI interviews
of important people, and Atlanto says, I'm the same. Did
you to listen to the interview Alano's oral history? He says,
we could tell because we interview somebody, And then half
the time they'd be in John Dene's office for the
interview that they've been coached, they weren't telling us what
stuff for strict they'd already reviewed all that stuff with Dean,
so we knew he was running it from day one.
And ordinarily the FBI would never allow a lawyer to
sit in on an interview, but this was the White House,
you know, and he was the president's lawyer. Then what happens,
cover up collapses. Dean's been running it, and he decides, well, Magruder,
who is the main reason for the cover up. There
two main reasons for the cover up. Magruder is a
very weak read. And they if they can shut it
off at Gordon Liddy that Gordon's crazy one. It's probably
true and Liddy will be magruder will be part acted.
And two, they've got to prevent disclosure of the earlier
breaking out in the Beverly Hills offices of Daniel Ellsberg's
shrink because it's the same people. Yeah, that break in
is has the appearance of being author authorized directly from
the Oval Office. So that's not oh, it's that campaign.
That's when the Pentagon papers Lake Nixon said, spare no
sparrino expanse, spare no effort. Go find out what this
guy's going to do. This Elsberg guy, he has access
to fifty four thousand pages of other classified documents as
a consultant for Rand Corporation out in Santa Monica.
Speaker 1: How did he not get arrested for leaking all that
he was?
Speaker 2: The case is brought out in Los Angeles. Big case.
Takes a while for these things to gin up, and
it's presided over by Judge Matthew Byrne b y Orne
Good judge used to be an FBI agent. So when
we get rid of Pat Gray as head of the FBI,
the acting head of the FBI, he can't be confirmed.
He gets up there for confirmation and he admits he
has given John dene At one different investigative reports prepared
by the FBI. He's leaking to the president's lawyer, who's
leaking to the defendant's counsel. So Pat Gray's gone, He's done.
Got a find another guy. We asked the Department of Justice.
So I was in this because I did law and
order related very closely to people at DJ. Who you
got in mind? Who's the best person? Well, it's this
judge of California named Matthew Byrne. Trouble is, he's presiding
over the Elsberg prosecution for leaking the Pentagon papers. And
I tell John Erlickman that, so we can't talk to him, right,
It says, Oh, yes we can. I'm not waiting till
that trial's over to pick the next FBI guy. We
got to get somebody in line. So they're out at
San Clemente, the Western White House, and he meets with Burne.
He meets with the judge presiding over the Elsberg trial,
but they don't talk about the Elvesburg trial. They ask
about his interest in being head of the FBI, and
he's interested. But he's interested, So Earlokman brings him back
and introduces him to Nixon. Who's out there at the
Western Lighthouse. Well, one that leaks, you know, hell breaks
thought and burn has to step down as judge. What
he does is dismiss the case because we had wire tapped.
We had overheard Elsberg on a wire tap that Henry
Kissinger had demanded of somebody else on the National Security Council,
guy named Mark Halpern, who happened to write the Pentagon Papers.
There's three people at the Department of Justice who are
the three most senior anti Vietnam War officials at DOJ.
Paul Warnkey, who's General Counsel, Mord Halpern, who's one of
the thinkers, and a guy named Les Gelb. And they
authorized this giant secret study. Nobody at the White House
knows they're reviewing it, Nobody at the Department of State. It's
not peer reviewed. This Pentagon Papers report. It's done by
people who hate the war. And less Gelb prepares the summaries.
And if we had a moment, I could show you
the report. It's four volumes of printed up forty eight notebooks.
Everything started in nineteen forty five forward. But and they've
got dozens of Army people working on preparing this report.
And they divided it up, and you know, there's the
World War two involvement, there's the Geneva can Accords, there's this,
there's that. It stops with Linda Johnson, doesn't go into Nixon.
Speaker 3: So why did this look bad on Nixon?
Speaker 2: Then let me finish, let's go hold the thought. So
Gail summarizes different parts of the report, and so he's
really what you don't want to read four volumes and
it's posted on Narrow's websites. You go see the Pentagon papers.
It's all declassified today. You could read. Nothing else to do.
But what you do is you go and you print
out the executive summaris and that will end up with
a stack about this high. And instead of.
Speaker 3: Four volumes, well is better?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And what's interesting, I've read his summaries. He's summarizing
work prepared by differentferent people, different officers in the army.
And if they liked the president, they're kind to him.
If they didn't like that particular president, they're not kind
to him trying to summarize this. So they liked Eisenhower.
And if you read the summary of going into the
Geneva courts, coming out Eisenhower's treated very fairly. So's Jack Kennedy.
But then you get to Lyndon Johnson and they just
dump all over him. It's all Linden. And again it's
not peer reviewed. It's not the official view of the Pentagon.
It's the anti warview of three Pentagon officials. So that's
what that's what leaks. You had another question.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that all this is leaked during Nixon's first
why is he so concerned about it, Like if it
doesn't really have anything to do with Hey.
Speaker 2: It's lated on June seventeenth, nineteen seventy one. Okay, June
seventeen keeps coming up because of the break can date two.
And the beginning reaction is who cares? It's all Linda,
It stops with us, right, Yeah, well, well we'll come
out looking better, and Kissinger throws a hissy fit. Kissinger says, listen,
I am negotiating in secret with three totalitarian regimes Russia,
China and North Vietnam. If they conclude we can't keep
a secret, they won't talk. Just like today, you know
we are meeting with Iray. Well, yes, we are meeting
with Iron nowhere you know, and you're you're sitting there.
You've got back channels apparently today through Pakistan, maybe maybe
through Spain to or somebody else. Pakistan is always eager
to be a facilitator. But it's the same situation back then.
Now why was it top secret? Well, they would describe
some event we heard from the ambassador to Vietnam, our
ambassador that we should do something, that we were going
to do something, and it is an encrypted communication that
comes back to us that is broadcast. But our enemies
can't break the code. Well, with the Pentagon papers, they
would tell you about all the stuff that was going on.
And then at least according to Gordon, they attached the
memo in question in the last four notebooks, So hundreds
and hundreds of pages of highly classified documents. And if
your opponents had the document, they could break the code
because they had the encrypted Now they had it's the
Rosetta stone. I mean, you don't do this. And and
so one of the two plumbers, Bud Krog and David Young.
David comes from the NSC, Bud comes from the Domestic Council.
David told me he's a good friend. He just died,
died maybe two months ago. He said, you know, Jeff,
people died because the Pentagon Papers lead. It exposed networks
of spies and secret government helpers across the world.
Speaker 1: So that pissed off the deep state.
Speaker 2: Well, yes, of course it did. But they hated Nixon too,
So you've got this this back and forth. The media
loved it. The New York Times, of course, Prince. It's
it's a very If you get a hold of the page,
to the front page of the New York Times, there's
a color picture of Trisia's wedding to the Cox kid David,
I'm not Cox, David Eisenhemmer, okay, in color, and then
below the fold there's the first leak of the Pentagon Papers. Yes,
rather historic, historic issue of the New York Times. They
try to stop it in advance. They want to stop
papers from printing it again because they think people are
going to die. It is alleged to be the biggest
national security leak its World War Two, and the district
judge says no, no, no, there's no Official Secrets Act,
there's no prior restraint, and twenty nine different judges, district court,
different newspapers start. They shut down the New York Times,
than the Post starts, they shut down the post in
Miami Herald starts. It's what I call whack them mole.
Speaker 3: With the different papers like posting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what the judges would say is, you can't do that.
You can't prevent it. You can indict them for causing damage,
but you can't prevent publication. But I will issue a
temporary restraining order while you appeal. So they were, they
were stopping, and then somebody else would pop up more
and they'd stop there, and somebody else'd pop up. Moore
And the only judge out of DC who refused to
grant a temporary stained order was Judge Gerhard Gazelle and
not particularly notorious, but he's the one that presided over
the later Plumbers trial. So this guy who was involved
in it from the beginning. And then we're going to
add a different point at this point, my books about Watergate,
secret meetings between prosecutors and judges, suppression of exculpatory information,
and changing of stories by witnesses that's not shared with defense.
I'm currently working on my fourth and last book about
the Plumbers. Okay, and what is so interesting? I even
had a have a draft right here. First draft, different
issue Plumbers is plumbers in Watergate. Different lawyers working for
the Watergate Special Proscution Force, different task forces, same secret
meetings with the judges, same suppression of exculpatory information, same
situation of witnesses changing their story that not being shared
with defense counsel. It's called a Brady rule violation, right, mean,
just ex blame that viewers just for a second. If
you flip, you're a bad guy. You're one of six
they're covering down. You can conclude you'd better be the
first to flip. You'll get a better deal. And then
having flipped, your new best friend is the prosecutor, because
he's going to determine what they say to the judge
about how helpful you've been. So you start to polish
your story to please your new protectors. Right, And that's
very human and it's very well known. So the rule
is if a witness changes their story in the hands
of the prosecutors, the prosecutors must share that with defense counsel.
So defense counsel says, you said you were last in,
and yet before the Congress you said you were first in.
And so the question is were you lined then or
are you lying now? We don't care which it is,
but the fact matters. You lie, right, And so they
hid that. In both of these major trials, the cover
Up trial and the Plumbers trial, witnesses changed their.
Speaker 3: Stories and they didn't talk about it.
Speaker 2: No, they didn't share that with defense. But I've uncovered
the memos that document the changes. See about two thousand
and three, I learned the Special Prosecution Force specially recruited,
highly partisan. They were government employees, so their records are
at National Archives if they survived. A lot of the
top people took their records with them, prosecutors, four top
obscuters took their records with them. Not supposed to do that,
but they did.
Speaker 1: But because they didn't want anybody to know what was
in their records.
Speaker 2: Well, no, they didn't want that. No. The memos confirming
secret meetings with the judges. Yeah, demos saying how can
you I think this guy he's not guilty. Well, we
want to break the government hold, you know, we know
what we want to do. And they those records, those
internal records, official official government documents, no question as to
their authenticity. They first began to surface in twenty thirteen. Wow,
George is the second special prosecutors. The key takes all
his records, goes back to Texas, finishes his career. He
heads up a big firm, full Brighton Jeworski Houston, and
when he dies, he gives his papers to his alma mater,
Baylor Law School in Waco, Texas, and they sort through
them and get them ready to make them available. And
they become available about twenty thirteen, and somebody else is
down looking and they say, these are grand jury transcripts.
You can't have these. So Archives goes down, fetches all
these and goes through it. I was told they had
an all hands on deck effort to redact the names
of people who investigated but not indicted. And I had
a Foyer request pending about something else, and the head
of this special access section said, Jeff that these papers
aren't particularly responsive to your foyer requests, but we just
finished clearing them and we want to get them out
to the public, so we're going to make them available
to you. So I'm down there, and I got to
drive from my house outside of Philly down to Archives
two romanum Wal two, which is in College Park, Maryland, Okay.
And it takes me about three hours. It's rush hour
rush hour to Philly at Wilkington, out of Baltimore into Washington.
It's a big project, and I was going down to
prove something else in my mind, find documents that showed
something that I was interested in in. What you do?
You take what's called a flat bed scanner, and if
you look right off my right shoulder under the picture
that there's a flatbed scanner there. It doesn't curl the document.
The scanner moves like the old Xerox machines, you know,
the documents held and then the scanner, so you don't
you won't hurt the document. Perfect In a full day's stay,
I could scan approximately four hundred pages, but I couldn't
read them. You'd look, here's a memo. Here's a five
page memo. Quick decision, scan or don't scan. And then
when you're scanning page one, you can read a couple
of sentences of page two. Flip. Takes about a half
minute to complete the scan at one page. I'm driving home.
This is twenty thirteen. I'm talking to a good friend,
former assistant Attorney General at the Department, and I say,
you know, it was a wasted trip. I didn't uncover
the documents I wanted on this other topic. Then I
get home and you print out all the documents. You
put them in order, because they aren't in order when
you got them. Okay, they're usually backwards by the calendar
because you keep putting stuff in in the next month
and it gets fouled up. And highlight the dates and
get them in order and their advance and then set
of a gun. These guys were meeting secretly with a judge.
It's right there in black and white. I mean, you know,
the so my second book, the real Watergate scandal. You see,
that's that's over my other shoulder. I can't do this
with a screen. I'm left candidates, everything gets felled. But uh,
that's based primarily on documents from Juwarski's counfinancial Watergate files,
meeting with the judges, discussion with the attorneys about who
to hold responsible and why, how to phrase the cases.
It's fascinating to me, but it's for all outward appearances,
it's the same thing going on today with Trump. Right,
You've got five different assaults on Trump, the person trying
to convict him of criminal and civil cases where it
turns out there tempted to take shortcuts and reinterpret statutes
and cause new law. There are four phrases today popular
today that didn't exist during Watergate, deep state, fake news,
false narrative, and most of all law there the misuse
of the criminal law to destroy your political opponent. Well,
I maintain all those things existed during Watergate didn't have
We didn't have those terms. And what's changed everything is
people today are willing to consider the idea that these
specially recruited Watergate prosecutors hated Nixon so much they cut corners,
and they're willing to listen to my pitch that this
is what was going on now. As I say, these
internal documents have come to light since twenty thirteen, so
they've been out a dozen years. Reproduce ce them on
my website. They're in the appendix to all of my books.
Not one single document has ever been challenged by anybody
as inauthentic or misunderstood. Not what Shepherd says. It says
no one. There's absolute silence from the other side. But
what's picking up is podcasts by people like you saying,
you know, we have to take another look at this,
We'll to take another look at this. So I've written
three books, produced, two documentaries, and a off Broadway stage play,
all with roughly the same thing. They're these documents that
have come to light that change everything. And as I
just showed you, I'm just starting on a book about
the Plumbers. The Plumbers is a lesser known prosecution, but
same games, same was it.
Speaker 1: Just overshadowed by Watergate? Like, do you think that the
Plumbers would be would have been bigger if Watergate hadn't happened.
Speaker 2: Yes, they were huge on their own, but present a
totally different question. We have this little thing called the
Fourth Amendment to our Constitution prohibiting the government from unreasonable
search and seizure. Okay, so you've got to have a
judge's order to go into your house. It's got to
be specific where they can look, when they can look
all that stuff. So those are search ones. Yes, government
can't do that unreasonably. They can't come into your house
without a judicially approved search one. But as the argument goes,
the president is also a commander in chief responsible for
protecting America from all enemies foreign and domestic. Does the
president's responsibility is mandarin chief give him the authority in
certain instances where national security is involved to break in
without a warrant, they don't have to go to it. Judge,
this is too important, moving too quickly. The bad guy
is moving between four houses and we don't know who's
coming up next. We've got to move now, Okay. Is
that okay?
Speaker 3: It feels like an abuse of power to me.
Speaker 2: It should. So the way that issue is presented is,
is there a national security exception to the Fourth Amendment? Okay?
Speaker 3: No, I mean right, there is, but like no, but.
Speaker 2: You see, that's the plumber's case. They broke in to
Ellsberg's shrinks office without a warrant. Okay, that's the violation.
They violated the Fourth Amendment. In less there's national security.
And as I said, it was the biggest national security
league since World War Two. He had access to fifty
four other class of documents. Somebody had just leaked the
United States backup position for the SOUL to the Strategic
Arms Limitation Dogs Treaty. We were being picked to down.
Nixon said, you've got to stop this. You know, you've
got immense pressure. One of the meetings they held, the
meetings where they created this Plumber's unit. They held the
meetings in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing, right
across the hall from the Oval Office, and they leaned
hard on these government bureaucrats, THEBI and the CIA and
the Department of the Demand. Elsberg was a Department of
Defense guy, what's going on? How did he get this stuff?
Why didn't you know? They were told in one of
those meetings by the FBI that a full set of
the Pentagon papers had been delivered to the Soviet embassy.
On the same day, the New York Times printed the excerpt,
Oh my goodness, it's big stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So they got prosecuted in the plumber's trial for violating
the Fourth Amendment. Okay, you went in without a search. One.
The difficulty is that for the previous four decades, the
position of the Department of Justice was, well, of course
there's a national security exemption. We go in when damn we'll.
Speaker 3: Please, right, because they like that law.
Speaker 2: Well, hell, I mean, you know, now, there are eight
hundred federal judges, give or take some not all of
them even have a national security clearance. They can't even
read this stuff. Why should we have to go to
some Yahoo in Minnesota and get his permission to go
protect the name?
Speaker 1: But At the same time, here's a question, why do
they break into his psychiatrist's office instead of bringing into
like his home or something which makes more sense. This psychiatrist,
he's got a lot of patients, not just Ellsberg.
Speaker 2: You know, we should do duels duets more frequently. Because
when the break in was not successful and they did
not find an Elsburg file, they recommended breaking into his home.
That was their comeback.
Speaker 3: And so let's just start there early.
Speaker 2: I'm going to said, enough of this ship. Get let
get letty, get Lyddy off your stead out of here.
So he foisted him onto the re election campaign. I
want to go back to uh four decades of there
being a national security One of the most significant Watergate reforms,
after we send everybody off to jail, was the creation
of the committee to go have a look at what
the government had been doing. And it's called the Church Committee.
It's the Special Senate Senate Select Committee on Domestic Intelligence.
And they held hearings and they reviewed, and it was
a different era. Luther had died, Jaeger Hoover had died,
Richard Helms the CIA had been relieved and reassigned as
our ambassador to Iran, the people who were left behind
actually responded to subpoenas from the Church Committee and they
asked them for all kinds of documents, and then they
produced a report. Happened to have it right here. Look
at that book two of the Intelligent Activities and Rights
of Americans, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study
Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligent Intelligence Activities. And they
lay out chapter and verse of what we've been doing
for four decades, all right, laid out there for the
world to see.
Speaker 3: It's a game plan. Yeah, and there's like following.
Speaker 2: It's what we've done. We don't do this anymore because
we're telling you we used to do this. That Church
Committee geared up within one year of the Plumber convictions.
So you're appealing this case with these Republicans, broke into
the Fielding's office and you're holding extensive hearings. The government
had done this for four decades, same situation. Yeah, and
and and nobody says, well, wait to say, you know,
how come you didn't tell Why? Why weren't we informed?
Why didn't we know this at the trial? Never comes up. Now,
there was a guy named Phil Haymon, Harvard law professor.
They all go to Harvard. It came with Archie Cox,
and he felt, as a matter of policy, just like
you feel, that there is no exception, the government's been
doing it. But the government's wrong. So he argued in
the Plumber's case and in related cases perjury by Bud Crogue,
one of the head plumbers, other spinouts from this intrusion,
and the appeals, he argued, there was no such exception
that this was groundless to begin with. There was no exception.
And you ask yourself, well, wait a second, what right
does a specially recruited, highly partisan Democrat prosecutor have to
argue that position as though it were the position of
the Department of Justice, which it demonstrably was not. For
an extraordinary liberal judge who rule at the conclusion of
the Plumber's trial, any government review of your private papers
is a per se violation of the fourth man without
a court work. So you've got this, and I hate
to dwell on it, but that's what I'm working on. Yeah,
you have on the Pentagon papers, you have the Elsberg
break in and the plumbers, and then have the Church
Committee which undercuts all that, and nobody gives it. Nobody,
nobody wants to raise that question because that would make
Democrats look bad instead of Republicans.
Speaker 1: The whole thing is so stupid when it comes to politics.
They're like, well, we need you to look bad. We
can't look bad. And then all in all, like you're
screwing over the people that you're supposed to be representing.
Speaker 2: Well, it's all about power, right, not issue take the day.
If we could just for a second, absolutely apparently this
morning at two am, we voted to fund DHS. Voted
to fund DHS, and went home. We'll see if the
House concurs. Each side thought they have an absolute, unassailable position.
The Republicans wanted to fund the department. The Democrats, still
upset by long lines in the airports, wanted to fund
TSA on a standalone basis. We said, no, it's all
or none. They said, no, it's us. We got the votes.
You may be in charge, but you don't have sixty votes.
And then at the end my understanding, we said, okay,
let's fund TSAY. This is crazy and they said, now
that's not enough. We want ton Dice. In addition, yeah,
we're winning the pr battle and all those people in
those lines are blaming you. Because we go out and
say you control the government. Now you don't because you
can't break the filibuster, right, But the public doesn't know that,
and the press won't write it that way. You're being
blamed for the long lines. We're going to win the midterms.
The longer this keeps up, it's going to destroy the economy.
Will blame you. Yep, it's going to cause massive disruption,
will blame you. And the Republicans are sitting there saying,
you know, we're going to remember this one because this
has nothing to do with good government. This is just
all power, and that's human nature, and that's why our
founding fathers divvied it up. Three branches, checks and balances.
Smart people. They couldn't solve everything. But my goodness, are
we better situated than other countries.
Speaker 3: The whole thing just blows my eye.
Speaker 1: Politics, the power that they feel like they need to
have is crazy to me because at the end of
the day, like you're affecting people's like day to day lives,
and we don't really care about your power. We care
about like just paying our bills in like liters.
Speaker 2: What they almost sanctimonious as can be. Hiens sit there,
look you right in the eye. We had a reporter,
Virginia something or other here around Philadelphia, fast rising star,
local station, hardly thought of. She ran her car off
the road at the Kennan Allen drowned. But she was
a rising star before them. In one of the lines
she was famous for, how did you do it? How
did you? How do you do so well? You know,
all you do is local news is interview with people
whose kid is just falling off the roof, you know, Oh,
local news at Gore And she said, oh, once you
get false sincerity down, you've got it made. It's all fake.
It's all theater and they're actors. These are not distinguished people.
We lost distinguished people right right about the time of Watergate.
There used to be really distinguished people who fought like
mad during the day and went out for drinks with
the opponent that night. I mean, you know it was
that they really did play it on good government. But
no more. The other one that happened, and I should
really stop on this. What's caused the change since the
year two thousand is there's a tie. When there's a tie,
the House, the Senate, the White House could change in
any given election, they're all at risk. And when there's
a tie, you fight harder, You fight like man, because
maybe just one more vote, one more story that dumps
on the poor guy's wife or kid who got into
a fight in high school, one more false accusation might
swing enough that you could win. Yeah, then you could
be reasonable. Then you could be congressman for all the
voters in your district. But you've got to beat that tie.
Speaker 1: But like, if you're willing to go that far, then
you're already you've already proven that you're going you're going
to go that far, So you're not going to come
back and be like moderate.
Speaker 2: Now, who's who did you have in mind? Who's not
willing to go that far?
Speaker 1: Everyone is willing to go like however far to get
the vote they need.
Speaker 2: Maybe Fetterman, he seems to be voting in his conscience,
driving me. Look, it's crazy, he's my you know, weird
guy Rand Paul Weird. Lisa Murkowski. I don't want voter
ID because my people in Alaska lived too far from
the polling places. And your sister, it's a you know,
your costing us a massive voter fraud, and you've got
your stingy views about people living in rural Alaska. Well,
she's sincere those are her people. Back to wag Back
to Watergate. There were certain Watergate reforms after everybody was
sent off to jail. One was called the Ethics and
Government Act. I think it passed in seventy eight or
seventy nine, and it set up the Independent Council Statute,
Independent Prosecutor Statute, which legitimatized what was done with Cox day. Today,
it's a judge down in Florida, I think her name
is Canon who held that Jeff Smith and his whole
group were illegitimate because they had not been confirmed by
the Senate and they were not enforcing a specific law
passed by the Congress, and that was their holding. Now,
the Department of Justice withdrew the case before it was
heard on appeal, but two Attorney generals ours argued that
it was really operating without legitimacy. Same situation with Watergate.
Archie Cox, the first special prosecutor, was never confirmed by
the Senate. The guidelines that ran the special Prosecutor staff
and gave them complete independence, it's from the Department of
Justice oversight that was never passed by the Congress. It
was done in a romped session by the Democrats led
by Ted Ny Kennedy.
Speaker 3: Any legal, How's any of this legal?
Speaker 2: Well, the argument today is it wasn't. In retrospect that
wasn't legal. Well, so were the due process violations used
to be? Maybe not today, but it used to be.
Most Americans would agree, no matter how henus the crime,
no matter how despicable the defendants, they got a fair truck,
then you'd hang them. But they got a fair truck.
Right now, today that's not quite the same thing, because
they want Trump derangement syndrome, you know, get rid of
them at any cost. Legalities don't matter. But that was
the situation with Watergate. Convict them at any cost because
they're evil. Nixon's evil. He conducted the war. I mean,
there were five hundred and thirty seven thousand US troops
in Vietnam when Nixon took office. But Pat moynihan, one
of his top advisors, liberal Democrat, but neat god. He said,
the public doesn't blame you for the war, but they
will if you don't make significant progress in six months
in getting us out right.
Speaker 3: Do something.
Speaker 2: And Nixon wanted peace with honor. He wouldn't cut and run.
So they started blaming him, and the Democrats who tolerated
Lyndon Johnson's war were suddenly out posturing like mad against Nixon.
It was a very, very tough time. We had this
period that they call the unrest of the nineteen sixties.
And you hear that phrase, Yeah, it's really a twenty
year period from nineteen sixty to nineteen eighty when there
were three assassinations Jack Kennedy, Bob Kennedy, Martin Luther King.
There were riots in at least nineteen major cities. No
president completed two full terms.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Jack Kennedy's assassinated. Then Johnson chose not to run, Nixon resigns.
Ford was never elected to anything.
Speaker 1: He just like took over for the two years and
then it was not appointed.
Speaker 2: Yes, he was confirmed by the Congress and Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter served one term. It wasn't until we got
to Ronald Reagan that we had a president served two
full terms.
Speaker 1: Wow, Skims didn't realize that, Like, oh, and you.
Speaker 2: Think so it's nothing, it's you know, the end rest
of the sixties. Well, we we had a riot last
night in Detroit. You know who cares man. It was.
There were bombings, there was the Symbionese Liberation Army, the
Black Panthers, the weather underground. We're getting close, but it
was much worse than see what happened. What happened was
the Vietnam War, most unpopular war in our nation's history.
One of the main reasons it was so unpopular was
the military draft only applied to guys only impacted guys
born between nineteen forty in nineteen fifty who became draft
eligible at the height of the war. Right, I mean
that group. I was born in nineteen forty four. I
lived through this and.
Speaker 1: Did it it like on fairly, like unfairly. There was
more like minors and not miners, minorities and like poor
people that were drafted versus like people of.
Speaker 3: Influence.
Speaker 2: That is an accusation. It was not confined to minority
Women weren't involved, of course, right, of course, it wasn't
confined to minorities. You every single person had, every single
male had to register at age eighteen. You had local
draft boards, four or five people, prominent citizens. Patriot call
would go out for more soldiers and they would have
a quota. You need to supply twenty five people, and
they came from a list of one a's those are
eligible for draft. Or you could have a medical or
you could have an educational or you could have a
a dependent exemption, or a conscientious objective. But pretty much
those were the five categories. Come now. You don't have
to come because you're medically unfit. You don't have to
come because you're in college. You don't have to come
because you're married. You don't have to come because you're
a conscientious objective. But we're talking tens of thousands of people.
Everybody had this cardboard draft guard had to carry with him.
That's what you burned when you were opposing in the war. Yeah,
and it was like talking about your astrological sign, what's
your draft status? How you doing? How about Bob? Whatever
happened to Bob? Well, Bob failed a course in college,
draft board took him. Well what about George, Well George
had a doctor's prescription saying he had flat feet, so
he's okay. Well what about John claiming conscientious objector? Well,
that's a tough tough loop to fly through because it's
so subjective. How do you prove to the draft board
who wants you that you just said, not get shot
at now. Uniquely, we talked about the Quaker schools. Quakers
have been pacifists from day one. Kids who went to
Whittier with me had a real leg up if they
wanted to claim COO status because they could say, you know,
having been here for four years, I've come to believe
in Quaker pacifism. So I've lived it for four years.
I've got knowledge about it. And they had a much
better argument to make for a tough a tough thing
to qualify. Whittier didn't have any ROTC units or anything
like that. It was above the fray. I graduated in
sixty six. Sixty five marks the first huge draft. The
draft always existed since World War Two, but they really
started calling people up in sixty five. And to me,
the only question was where you go, not whether you
would go. So when I got back to law school
back East, I joined ROTC. And it was very dangerous
to be in ROTC at Harvard because the other students
of the pasty faced peace screeps didn't like you. So
most ROTC units in other college. You have to wear
your uniform on drill day. Once a week, you show
up for class in a uniform. Not at Harvard. We didn't.
Speaker 3: We didn't have to wear uniforms, like maybe don't do that.
Speaker 2: We marched. We practiced in Soldiers Field, which is across
the Charles River where the Business School is. And to
get from the law school to the river you had
to go through Harvard Square. Yeah, you did not want
to go through Harvard Square with your fatigues on. That
was not a wise thing to do. So we go
as a group. See we would We wouldn't march, but
we would, you know, get six or eight guys to
go through it. And they didn't hassle you then, right,
So yeah, well, if you were this was the time
of Timothy Leary you may have heard of him. Uh.
He was a psychiatrist and the phrase was tune in,
turn on, drop out, and it was LSD and all
the psychedelic drugs. Pat moynihand told me once when we
were on the White House staff together, and he had
been a Harvard professor, he said every single member of
the faculty had one relative, one spouse or nephew or
kid on drugs. That it was so liberal, one regulated,
And he said they were everywhere LSD and speed and
amphetamines and uppers and downers. Hell, that's what Jack Kennedy did.
Speaker 1: That's so crazy to me because like you think about
the sixties, and that's kind of what you think about, right,
like the Summer of Love. Everyone's hippies, everybody's on drugs.
But then like it's funny that they have they have
changed the narrative so much. They're like, yes, everyone was
on drugs, everyone was happy, but like they so like
cover up the fact that like we're having like presidents
are not doing two terms, Like we have this war
that nobody like in I mean, we talked about the
Vietnam War, but not like as aggressive.
Speaker 2: Not knowing, not knowing right the word to this group
of ten years, you know, nineteen forty, nineteen fifty, if
you got drafted, you were going to Vietnam. If you
went to Vietnam, you weren't coming home. So to a
lot of them, this was life or death. Yeah, it
wasn't just us kids, It was family and friends and girlfriends.
Every decision you made because to the draft had to
take into account its effect on the draft. If you
dropped a course in college, you wouldn't be promoted to
be a sophomore, your draft board could claim you were
not making satisfactory progress toward a degree, so you're draft eligible.
Speaker 3: That's so scary.
Speaker 2: If it took a summer off, if you got a
d if you were single, you were eligible to be drafted.
If you got married. Imagine the pressure.
Speaker 1: It makes me wonder if that's why, like there are
a lot of really young marriages then, and also a
lot of people like is that the time that college
became really popular and people started going because like, if
I'm going to school, then I'm not going to like
I'm not being drafted.
Speaker 2: Right are professor of contracts at law school said, you know,
you many people here in class, first day of class.
Many of you don't really want to become lawyers. You're
here for another reason. There are four professions. I remember
the lecture very well. There are four professions military, ministry, doctor,
and lawyer and lawyer. Lawyer is the least intrusive and
the most to be able to use in a variety
of ways. So lots of you aren't here to become lawyers.
You're here to avoid being drafted. But we're going to
teach you to think like a lawyer anyway, don't think
you're going to get it, let go or something. We
had lots and lots of students. I mean it was
it was one kid in high school. You had to
register when you were eighteen. One kid didn't register. Okay,
he didn't like that hate. Well he hadn't been caught.
But we all knew it, you know. And what's what's
Bob going to do when they finally catch him. You know,
it's a fellow me all the rest of us. We
got that card. We got that silly card in our wallet.
I mean, it was do you after a while when
they started running low on draftees, being married wasn't good enough.
You had to have a kid. So they had a
lot of young kids that were created for that same reason. Yeah.
I had two roommates my sophomore year of college. You
one fled to Canada, never came back, became a professor
at the University of saskatch one. Thousands of people went
to Canada. Many came back after the pardon when Jerry
ford Is chewed to pardon. The other one became a
conscientious subjector. And he was telling me how he was
going to play it because he went to Whittier. You
know that's what and it worked for him. He never
served And I joined ROTC as I say it, at
law school. Then the faculty at Harvard College kicked ROTC off.
Speaker 3: Campus because they were so against it.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, if you were in college, you wouldn't be drafted.
They belonged to the college, to the Faculty of Arts
and Sciences, the college faculty. None of the students cared.
They weren't going to be drafted out of college. The
ROTC and it was made up of kids who went
to law school and the business school because in many
draft boards, colleges weren't I mean, graduate school wasn't protected.
And then one more story will stop just because I'm
working on this right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I love that you were working on this
because I feel like it gives like a like more
of a perspective of what was happening at the time.
Speaker 3: Why Watergate was like.
Speaker 2: Right, well, I'm debating whether to keep all my personal
stories in my book. But law schools in the beginning
didn't require you to have gone to college. You went
to law school straight out of civilian life, and therefore
you got an LLB a Bachelor of Laws. If you
went to college you'd get a BA or a BS,
a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of Science. Some
draft boards again getting down to the bottom of the barrel.
They got to meet their quota, took the position you
already have a bachelor's degree. You're going for a second
bachelor's degree, Bachelor of law. That's not making satisfactory progress.
You're out of here. Okay, it really happened. Where was
this law school, the University of Michigan the way I
understand it, and they awarded the top twenty five percent
of their class a jd. A doctorate of law or
doctor and whether they had to write a paper or not,
but you got a doctorate degree.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, word spread and in one year, virtually every law
school in the nation flipped and started issuing JD's to
protect their students. In my class at Harvard, class of
nineteen sixty nine, but it entered in nineteen sixty six,
it's the first class to be awarded j d's, and
we were right at the cutting edge.
Speaker 3: That's awesome, isn't that it is?
Speaker 2: That's really cool, some dippy little change, you know.
Speaker 3: But it made a big deal. I go. I was
a big deal for a lot of people.
Speaker 2: You bet it was. They even started telling them retroactively.
You know, if you had graduated the year before and
you were afraid of being drafted, shit, we'll sell you
a JD.
Speaker 3: That's great, that's so funny. You're like, yeah, I just
bought it.
Speaker 2: But that shows you how all persuasive. And then in
nineteen seventy they institute the lottery. We're going to have
a drawing, and it's your birthday. Who's ever picked for
one through three sixty five? Because of the drawdown from
Nixon ending the war, they didn't need but about five
percent of the draft eligible pool to maintain what they
were doing as they were bringing troops home. But everybody
was scared shitless, excuse me, scared to death about and drafted.
So the lottery broke the back of the opposition. They
were only to take the first twenty five numbers. Say
who got drawn not I don't remember what my number was,
but it was two hundred or something. Nobody cared well. Immediately,
the opposition to the war effectively deflated. Sorry about that one,
that five percent if you're in that group, But I'm
home free right around, see around, I'm gonna go break
my engagement.
Speaker 1: I'm not having kids anymore, like I was gonna marry her.
Speaker 2: Because I'm getting out of this school. I'm going to
take summer off. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh man, Jeff, When does your Plumber's book come out?
Speaker 2: I don't know, but usually usually it takes a year.
But I show you I just assembled that yesterday.
Speaker 3: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: Because I was working on individual aspects. I researched most
of it five years ago. But my agent said it's
too soon for another book. You just came out with
The Nixon Conspiracy in twenty twenty one. Okay, So we
were talking the other day and he said, enough time
has passed. That book over here there, The Nixon Conspiracy.
It's now sold eleven thousand copies.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: I produced royalties, not big royalties, but royalties five years
after publication. And he said, that's very rare. Your books
have a timeless quality. Because Vietnam is fifty years years
ago but still topical. That book will probably be producing
some kind of royalties for ten years. And the book
before it, the Middle Book on the Shelf, published in
twenty fifteen, it's still producing I'm not talking big numbers,
but it's still producing royalties. About half the inquiries. I
get to do podcasts like yours. They're keen off that
second book. They don't even know about the third book.
We had poor marketing.
Speaker 3: To your website, and I had seen it.
Speaker 1: But mostly I didn't know about your books at all,
like i'd like I had told you before, like I
had seen your interviews. And then I went I was like, well,
who is this guy?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Like I want to know more about you? And then
I learned about your books. I learned about all the things,
and so I didn't even find you from your books
at all.
Speaker 3: From other podcasts.
Speaker 2: Take it from the other side, the bad guy who
are heroes. I'm still so obscure. They don't have to
respond to my accusations, they don't have to respond to
my books. They'll ask John Dene we have a mutual friend.
They'll ask Johnny what about Shepherd? And he'll go, well,
he was a young I vaguely remember him. He was
a young lawyer on the White House staff. But I
can't comment, and I've never read his books. You know,
I can't come in on anything about them. But if
somebody invites us both to be on the same program,
oh boy, let's see. You know, John won't.
Speaker 1: Come interesting because your evidence is just so blatant.
Speaker 2: Well, and he owns the status quo. He was the
hero of the Irvine Committee. He's this innocent whistleblower. Why
risk that when Shepherd's not really making a lot of progress? Now?
Three books, Little Finger, fourth one. Two documentaries. You probably
haven't heard of the documentaries either. We put one out
Watergate Secrets and Betrayals, the same day as the Tucker
Carlson interview, which was the fiftieth anniversary of Nixon's resignation.
That won an award on March fifth.
Speaker 3: Okay, wow this month, Yeah, amazing from.
Speaker 2: The Golden State Film Festival that's held at Grumman's Chinese
Theater in Hollywood, and we were awarded Best Editing for
a Feature Documentary, which means we think you presented your
factual case quite well and we're chuting that. Yeah around,
we'll see that. After my second book came out, this
guy contacted me and said, I want to write a
play about your book. And I checked with my agent
and they said, please, don't make any money. I said, yeah,
but I got time. I'm not going anywhere. And so
he wrote a play and it took us five years.
It's very hard to take a book, you know, three
hundred eight and reduce it to an hour and a
half and introduce.
Speaker 3: All the characters.
Speaker 2: The characters and the conversations. A factual book doesn't have conversations.
It has facts, right, but you need to take a
chapter and reduce it down to two scenes. And if
somebody walks off exit stage left when they next appeared,
they got to come from stage left because there's no
path behind the curtain to get to the other side.
We spent and what we did it was really it's
fascinating stuff. We said, we're going to give Nixon the
impeachment trial in the Senate. He never got so the
name of the play was ran off Broadway in twenty
twenty one, was called Trial on the Potomac Okay Impeachment
of Richard Nixon, and it starred this Nixon impersonator, rich
Little Rich made his career impersonating Nixon fifty years ago.
But he'd never been in a Broadway play. Really wanted
to do it. He's eighty and and he didn't anyone
he lives. He performed still in Las Vegas, moved to
New York for six weeks, produced the play, we treated
the audience as senators. Okay, the lights would dim and
the voice would say, the Senate will come to order.
Today's issue is the trial of Richard Nixon. There isn't
going to be an intermission. The only vote that will
be taken is at the end of the trial, when
you'll get to determine his guilt or innocence. And then
we would run the trial, fake trial, as best we
could hypothetically produce. It never occurred. He's in our play.
He's been impeached by the House. This is the trial
before the Senate. Unfortunately, the Clinton, you know, the Trump
first Trump impeachment came up. Yes, so we had two
examples of what to work from. And the only difference
from Watergate forward was the documents I had uncovered came
out during the course of the trial, okay, And so
we showed the prosecutors that cheated and all that, And
then the audience got to vote on the way out,
and we would really count the votes and we would
post them on our website by performance.
Speaker 3: So, did he get impeached?
Speaker 2: No, the question is did he get convicted?
Speaker 3: Did he get convicted? Excuse me?
Speaker 2: Once out of twenty eight performances. Wow, Now, to be fair,
it's got to be two thirds to remove him from office.
One time, one matinee, there were enough votes to remove
him from office. Five or six there were a majority
hating men. But you got to understand the dynamics of
that theater.
Speaker 1: But they also have like the history of like what's
been pushed in real life versus what you're seeing on
the play.
Speaker 2: Well, of course, and the play is totally hypothetical. And
they don't know what to do with these documents were disclosing.
They'd never heard about them before. They're like you, they
didn't read the books. Yeah, and a self selected group
of people that live in midtown Manhattan aren't going to
be conservative. Half of them may have come thinking it
was going to dump on Nixon, you know, travel on
the Potomac. We'll get to relive the sacrifice of Richard Nixon.
Speaker 3: Kick him out of there again.
Speaker 2: There were twenty eight performances, and all but one he
walked free. Well not he would have been ruined, but
he walked free. It was a foot And then that
same guy just did the documentary that won the Film Award.
So and I would keep saying to him, George this
has got to be accurate. I'm not exposing this one
slight factual error and we'll really get raamed. And he
would say, yes, Jeff, but we're not filing a legal brief.
This is supposed to be entertaining. People are supposed to
enjoy the performance. And he said, look in the play,
you can't hear it. He's a concert pianist, amongst many things.
He said, you can't hear it. But there's a meter
to the dialogue and you can't put in big words
because the actors have to be able to mouth them
and project to the back of the theater, and it's got
to have kind of a lobic progression. Yeah, you leave
these words to me, and you can come tell me
if it's factually incorrect, we'll change it. But you'd be
wasting your time if you tried to write the dialogue.
Speaker 3: That makes sense.
Speaker 1: I think that, Yeah, I think that's a good like
give and take between the two of you.
Speaker 2: Yes, and the reason the documentary won has nothing to
do with me. I happen to uncover the documents, but
it's the fact that documents exist that is so startling.
And he wrote the play, He wrote the he wrote
the documentary, and he really did a very, very creative job.
We're getting it in a word for creativity.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna I'm going to watch it the documentary.
Speaker 2: You can get it if you go on Watergate Secrets
dot com. Charge four bucks to rent, nine bucks to buy.
There's also a link on my website. We want to
pitch my website for a second. Yeahd on watergate dot com.
Speaker 1: Al link that in the show notes too, So that
way it's super easy people.
Speaker 2: Can www Shepherd onwatergate dot com. In law school, particularly Harvard,
the big important professors, they had a casebook and it
was always titled that way Kasner and Leech on real Property,
Chadbourne on evidence, Bison administrative law. So mine is like
a casebook. And what makes the website so intriguing, I've
posted under the books, under the window shade the books,
all the appendix documents are summary of the book, who
the characters are. So if you're cheap, you don't have
to buy the book. You can get the goodie, the
research goodie out of my website. And then I have
an annotated chronology under resources, one hundred and fifty page
chronology every single thing. Because when i'd run across it.
I put it in the chronology so I could reference
it in the future, but it's annotated, so it kind
of tells the story of Watergate. You know, this document
was produced, but doesn't it's not credible, right, and what
it changed their position? And then he was in anticipation
of that document and I'm writing my book about the
plumbers the same way. It's a chronological presentation, which I
think is the only way to understand. I agree Lexis Watergate.
Speaker 1: I think it makes sense because then you can kind
of understand. And I go, like when I do my episodes,
I go into the history a little bit because I
can't just start with Watergate because that's how it starts.
And so I always go into the history a little
bit before I jump into the conspiracy, because I think
that to me, that's the only way that you can
fully understand whatever conspiracy I'm trying to present.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, for Vietnam, you got to go back to
World War two or the misuse of government conduct, you
know is during national security exception, you got to go
back to nineteen thirty six. I mean when they're starting
to go into into World War two and they were
worried about the Germans and then the Japanese. So it's
our opponents in World War Two. Then it's communists. Hoover
was really down on communists. Then it's Women's Live. Interesting
are these women? And then it's anti Vietnam, pasty faced
peace creeps, against the war, and what you can conclude.
I'm conservative, but once they labeled you, I'm forgetting the word.
It begins with an ass a subversive. Once they labeled
you a subversive, he goes World War two, communists, civil
rights agitators, Women's Live, anti Vietnam. Once they culled you
a subversive, you had no rights. They could investigate you.
They opened your mail, they photographed you, they followed your kids.
They sought to all of that against the law. They
sought to destroy your reputation. I mean, they wrote Martin
Luther King seventeen wiretaps. Well, I was saying in three books,
produced two documentaries and done them off Broadway stage play.
But I've done two other things that are not Watergate related.
After Nixon resigned his staff, blew apart and went in
their different directions, And there was no email, and there
was no cell phones, and there was no computers. So
what I did was keep the record of where people
were going, people worked with. Now you got to understand
the organization of the White House staff. There's people who
run campaigns, and campaigns are like kaleidoscopes, constantly changing new nuances,
different initiatives. But governing doesn't work that way. The challenges
of governing don't change very much, and you need people
who've been there before learn on the job how to
be a cabinet secretary. So what we were losing was
the Republican brain trust, particularly after Ford lost, so we
don't hold office anymore. Used to be, if you wanted
to talk to the Secretary of Defense, you'd ask the
White House operator to get you the Secretary of Defense,
or if you had a memo that counted, you'd give
it to Central files. You wouldn't keep an extra copy.
It's only Pat moynihan, who'd been in government before, who
kept his own copy of everything that crossed his desk.
And I asked him, you know what, why would you
do this? It's always there? He said, because I'm going
to write books and I don't want to have to
go there to look for want my copy?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Shortly after we bandied it art. My secretary had one
of the first IBM electric electronic typewriters with those index
cards that fold, spittle or mutilate these cards, and she
could reproduce a page, change two words, and reproduce the
page again. So it was the ability to maintain stuff currently.
We started keeping the phone numbers and addresses of where
our colleagues were going, so we maintained the directory of
Nixon policy planning people. And then that group I started
arranging and hosting annual reunions again of the policy planning staff, NSC,
Domestic Council, and OMB Office of Management, and White House people.
We worked with the speech writers or the congressional relations folks,
so every November after the election. This was not a
campaign group. We'd meet for lunch, three hour lunch and
talk about old times or what people were doing or
where they were going, and you go around the room,
you know who's who's doing well. And we kept that up.
It's even through today, now done by the Nixon Foundations,
but there was no Nixon Foundation. They opened the Nixon
Library in nineteen ninety one. This was nineteen seventy five
seventy seven, so I take credit humbly for keeping the
governing brand trust together and in touch through the Wilderness years.
In addition to that, starting in twenty I started producing
documentaries on Nixon's public policy initiatives, and we call him
Nixon Legacy Forms. They're co sponsored by the National Archives
and will take an issue desegregation in the Southern School's
welfare reform, trip to China, reducing crime, breaking up organized crime,
creating epoch. We've produced since twenty ten over forty Nixon
Legacy Forums, which feature the people who wrote the memos,
the people that developed the policy on a stage at
National Archives, talking about what they did, what they tried,
why it worked or didn't work.
Speaker 1: So that's all like the good that Nixon did while
he was in office to combat like all this evil
that we think of when we think of Nixon.
Speaker 2: We are told by the National Archives we are the
only administration to hold regularly scheduled reunions and to produce
documentary videos on public policy initiatives. And so what you
what I want to mention in addition to Wallgate him,
the chieting and the impropriety you cost the nation the
good of Richard Nixon for the rest of the second term.
You know, we stopped him good and plenty. We cause
him to resign. We lost all of that government knowledge,
all of those initiatives, all of those efforts to make
of America a better place. If you look at his
domestic affairs, I'm a domestic I don't do foreign affairs.
When he got elected, nations tearing itself apart. He looks around.
This is a metaphor. He looks around across this great nation, says, Okay,
who's got a bitch who feels mistreated by that government?
You do, Indians, you feel mistreated by the government. I'll
restore your treaty rights, and he did. You're blacks, you
feel cut out of education. I will peacefully integrate the
Southern schools, and he does it all in the beginning
of nineteen seventy one. Vast majority of Southern schools integrate.
You think we're poisoning the atmosphere, We'll create EPO. We'll
pass the Clean Air, the Clean Water, the Marine Mammal Act.
We'll do those things you think that women are taking
advantage of because there aren't nothing government. I'll quadruple the
number of him and appointed to high government posts in
my administration. You think you can go off and fight
the fight the war, but you can't vote. We'll lower
the voting age at eighteen. We'll do away with the draft.
We'll switch first to a lottery and then to the
all volunteer army. Right across the road, he's got initiatives
to try to give people a fair shake. I may
have missed one or.
Speaker 1: Two, but I bet that's why they needed to frame him.
Speaker 3: They and this is just a conspiracy theory.
Speaker 2: It is no, no, no, but they needed to stop him
because he was he was ripe to the slight biggest
landslide in American history, and they had no comeback. They'd
run they progressive, they'd run George McGovern and got wiped out.
And the only thing they had was Watergate, and they
blew it out of the proportion and they got him.
But now it turns out they left the paper trail
and we know how to cheat. Well.
Speaker 3: I appreciate you coming on. I do.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate. I feel like I learned a lot more,
even though like i've I just did finish my episode
and I'm about to record it actually, and this this
episode will come out right before my Watergate episodes. So
then they'll have like this background to jump in it.
It'll be awesome, so I really appreciate it, Jeff, Thank you,
bye bye now until next week, my friends, stay Skeptical
and we will see you all then.
Speaker 3: Hey. Friends.
Speaker 4: The rabbit Hole is an independent podcast written, hosted, and
produced by me Danny Mercy. Special thanks to Lindsay for
research and writing. If you love the podcast, please leave
us a five star rating and review wherever you're listening.
Follow us on social media at rabbit dot Hole podcast,
and visit our website at Stayskeptical dot com for everything else,