The Secret Recordings That Reveal How Presidents Really Think

31:20He would say, get it going, get, get the, get the system going. Nixon was a technophobe. So what he wanted was he didn't want to have to fiddle with anything. So he wanted the taping system to start when he was in the room. So the way the system worked was that the Secret Service, which had a locator on his belt. So wherever the president was in the White House, Secret Service knew. They had a board and it lit up. So when he would move into a room that had a taping system, they flipped up, they turned on the switch. And then at that point, it was sound activated. Everyone says voice. It's more than voice activated.

32:07It's sound activated. So if he went to the bathroom and he left the door open to the bathroom, which is on the side of the Oval Office, that sound is captured. That sound is closed. So we have record of Nixon flushing the toilet? Well, we don't because a judge ruled that Nixon was, like all presidents, had the right to some privacy. So that's private. However, if he's talking to himself while relieving himself about policy, we have that. Because he's creating, yeah, that we have. And yes, I was director of the Nixon Library, and so I'm well aware of these kinds of decisions.

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33:56Coleman Hughes:Late night bites with friends already hard to beat that first too hot bite of fries. You couldn't wait for followed by ice cold Pepsi. Now that hits different. Suddenly the energy kicks back in. The night goes longer, and the laughs don't stop. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today. So I want to ask about Nixon. I don't know how much time you spend, hopefully not much, in the fever swamps of X and conspiracy podcast land. But I sometimes debate folks and otherwise pay attention. Um, and I've been noticing online a rehabilitation of Richard Nixon, uh, based on the sort of vague sense that the people who got Kennedy also got Nixon.

34:54Coleman Hughes:And that's what Watergate was. It wasn't an example of something actually impeachment worthy that Nixon was truly responsible for, or at minimum, the buck had to stop with him. it was the deep state which had taken out Kennedy also taking out Nixon by different means, by sort of political assassination. And this is, I've seen a resurgence of this in the past like two years, and it's appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast elsewhere. So first of all, can you address that? And then if there is anything legitimate in defense of Richard Nixon to say that isn't fever swamp territory, what would that be? Well, Coleman, I will answer your question, but I would say that this is worthy of an entire podcast, this whole question of the deep state and what it is, what it isn't.

35:52Um, let me, um, uh, let me summarize, um, the question of a deep state defense of Nixon. Um, uh, this is not something new. Um, when I would say it starts in the nineties, um, it was not a specialty of mine. I was not, by the way, selected to be the director of the Nixon Library because I was a Nixon specialist necessarily. I knew something about tapes, but more importantly, I was considered to be nonpartisan. And I was going to make the materials accessible to everybody. But I know something about the earlier defenses of Richard Nixon that were based on an assumption about largely CIA, but also FBI misconduct.

36:50And the irony of this argument, which I don't share, by the way, is that the reason Richard Nixon created an unethical and largely illegal White House investigative unit, which we know is the Plumbers, was because the CIA and the FBI wouldn't do what he wanted them to do, which was to violate the civil rights of Daniel Ellsberg. it. So Richard Nixon creates an illegal operation because the CIA and the FBI are not willing to act as a deep state in the way that many people think of the deep state, because many people think of the deep state as a group of people who are engaged in unconstitutional activities, right?

37:53Richard Nixon believed that the FBI and the CIA should follow his direction, even if he's asking them to do something illegal. I don't think that's what people assume when they talk about the pushback from the CIA and the FBI. They're pushing back because they don't want to do illegal, unconstitutional things. Now, that's not to say that J. Edgar Hoover wasn't more than capable over his long career of engaging in certainly unconstitutional things. Absolutely. But in the moment, in 1971, and then again in 1972, you see pushback from the FBI and the CIA. Now, Hoover dies between, in 71, he's alive.

38:44By the time of Watergate, he's just died. He died in May of 72. The CIA leadership is the same over the two periods. The CIA was very uncomfortable participating in the cover up of the connection between the committee to reelect the president and the Watergate break in. um uh Nixon wanted the CIA to uh tell the FBI to stop investigating the money uh that was found on the burglars at at the Watergate Hotel this made Nixon very bitter at the CIA that bitterness has been carried at sort of managed to survive among many of Nixon's defenders But I don't think they understand that what they're defending is Nixon's bitterness because the CIA wouldn't break the law.

39:42It's not really involving foreign operations. It's not really a law involved. But the CIA wouldn't do something unethical for him. And I don't think they understand that. I think what has happened here, and that's why I think we could have a whole conversation about it, is that we are reaping the unintended consequences of a decision made in 1948 when the Truman administration recognized covert action as not only a legitimate but a significant tool of American foreign policy. that the National Security Council, of which Truman was the head, decided that American documents and American public statements should be designed to obscure presidential authority and presidential direction of corporate action.

40:38In other words, they deliberately broke the dots to connect the dots or the pathway of breadcrumbs, whatever term, whatever analogy you want to use, to connect the president's decision to do covert action and the covert action. Thus, our documentary system created the sense that the CIA operated by itself. But it was at the direction of President Truman and every president who followed him until the reforms of the 70s when we got oversight committees that said, no, no, no, no, no. Presidents have to sign a document. They have to actually, at least a secret document saying that they approved covert action.

41:26But it's very hard. It's not impossible, but it's very hard to prove presidential authority for covert action before the 1970s. And that was by design. So it's understandable that many people believe that the CIA and some extent the FBI did all kinds of things without presidents knowing. My view of it is there certainly is closed. These are both closed cultures, the CIA and the FBI. There was drawing outside the lines. But when it came to the most significant operations of both agencies, they had presidential authority. I'm writing a book about Kennedy right now. And one of the themes of the book is that, yes, there was a deep state, but John Kennedy created it.

42:20That he authorized these secret activities, but the connection between him and those activities, well, first of all, was never tightly drawn. And then after his death, because of the nature of how he, you know, how his presidency ended, the tragedy of Dallas, a lot of people protected his memory and thus confused us about Kennedy's deep commitment to covert action. I mean, John Kennedy, yes, Bay of Pigs, but John Kennedy does not fire the people responsible for the Bay of Pigs. If he thought that he had been betrayed by the CIA, he would not have created such a nice retirement for Alan Dulles months later.

43:12And the man responsible for the Bay of Pigs, a man named Richard Bissell, he invited to stay in his administration. Well, you don't do that if you think you've been betrayed by the institution. Now, John Kennedy was a great advocate of the CIA, and his brother Bobby had a day-to-day understanding of CIA activities. In many ways, Bobby Kennedy was the overseer of U.S. secret activities after the Bay of Pigs. So it's hard to square that reality with arguments that the deep state killed Kennedy and therefore, by extension, later ended the presidency of Richard Nixon. I think this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of presidential use of secret warriors.

44:08Yeah.

44:09Coleman Hughes:So you've written at least two books, I think, focusing on the Cuban Missile Crisis. You have One Hell of a Gamble and Khrushchev's Cold War, although I think it's not limited to the Cuban Missile Crisis. So presumably, both of these books were written in a period when the Soviet archives were now open. So you had not only access to what historians prior to you would have had to explain those events, you had access to some extent to the other side. How did that influence or overturn previously held notions about the Cuban Missile Crisis in particular? Well, I don't know. I mean, I'll leave it to other people to determine the effect that our book, because I co-wrote it with a, or I produced it with a Russian scholar named Alexander Verzenko.

45:06And I thank you for asking. I can tell you how it changed my view. And I also want to explain the role that I played. I studied Russian, Russian language in college and in grad school. Alexander Forzenko couldn't write in English. There was no Russian text of this book. I wrote the book using his notes. And I translated the Russian into English from the notes. And Alexander, who is 35, he's no longer alive. Alexander was 35 years older than me. And he had a period, he had a position of real significance in Russia, and he was well-connected. And we were originally tapped to do this book because of a remarkable, I guess, arrangement or book arrangement between Random House, actually the Crown Division of Random House, and the Russian intelligence service.

46:14That's how weird a moment this was, which was to provide five books, one with a non-Russian author and then one non-Russian author and a Russian author. Alexander was the Russian author. While doing this book, Alexander learned that there were notes of the presidium, that's the Politburo, the Central Decision-Making Council of the Soviet Union, and that he could get them declassified. That was just how the system was working then. And so for the second book, I had access to the minutes, the decision-making minutes. For the first time, I was the first non-Russian to have had access to them ever.

47:02and so built the Khrushchev's Cold War to try to answer big questions about what were the Russians up to? So what did I learn from this? What I learned, and I don't know if other people learned it from reading the books. I learned about the concept of agency. In other words, it was a mistake to think of the Cold War as driven by two capitals. That was all about Moscow and Washington. I found not only in the American records, but in the Soviet records, them having to deal with the interests and desires of other revolutionary leaders. Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao. And for the Americans, Sukarno and Nasser and the Soviets to Nasser.

47:51And the fact is that to understand the Cold War, if you just study Moscow and the United States, you won't get it. So, you know, I spent a lot of time looking at Russian conversations with the Cubans and Russian conversations with Laotians, Patat Lao, with the Chinese, with the Vietnamese. And I realized, oh, my God, the Russians are they weren't in control. Yes, they could influence the policies of these countries on the margins. And they did it by offering military supply and economic assistance. But if Mao or Ho or Fidel had it in their mind to do something, the Russians couldn't do it. And it was like that for us with Sokarno and with Nasser.

48:49And, you know, it's an amazing story because it shows you that leaders matter. And it shows the complexity of empire. So you have a guy like Nasser. He was the head of Egypt. He's the most important Egyptian nationalist leader. even to this day, although I think Sadat was significant later, obviously. But Nasser has this, wants to create an empire for Egypt. It's going to be United Arab Republic, but he wants in it to, he wants Iraq in it. He wants Syria in it. For a while, he wanted Jordan in it. He wanted Yemen in it. I mean, he was an expansionist. Same with Sukarno, this Indonesian leader.

49:35He wanted to take bits of islands that had no cultural, religious, or linguistic similarity at all to Java, which is the island where he's from, but he wanted them because European colonists, colonial powers that have them, and he wanted them. He wanted to be the biggest guy in the neighborhood. How do you deal with people like that when you're trying to create some kind of stable system so you don't have nuclear war. And I realized the Soviets had the same problem the United States had. And to learn that was to change my, complete my view of the Cold War, making it far more interesting and also giving agency, in other words, authority and power and importance to leaders like Fidel and Ho and Mao and Sukarno and Nasser, making, and Ben-Gurion in Israel, making these leaders very important to understanding how the Cold War went.

50:38And that I learned from sitting in the archives in Moscow.

50:42Coleman Hughes:So the lesson is when you hear someone today described as a puppet of some other regime, you should have a little point of skepticism. It's actually culturally patronizing. Examine the view of these people. I'm not saying that they're necessarily, I'm not saying they're racist. But it's very patronizing. I mean, when people say that, you know, Nkrumah or Sikarno was a puppet, or when they say ZM in South Vietnam was a puppet, examine, ask them, do you think these folks had agency? Why don't you think that they had their own view about what they wanted? Why do you assume that they're going to let Moscow or Washington tell them what to do?

51:35Because you'll find that many of the people who make the puppet argument don't know very much about the countries and leaderships and political cultures they're talking about. Yeah.

51:48Coleman Hughes:I'm curious. Was George H.W. Bush the most underrated recent president?

51:58Well, you're asking me that question because I wrote a little slender little book about him and changed my mind a little bit about him in doing the research. Anyway, George Bush deserves enormous credit, and I think for that reason, and he doesn't get it, but he's underrated. though not as underrated as he used to be thanks to Barack Obama because I think Barack Obama described George Herbert Walker Bush as one of his favorite presidents and said he was a model for him so so I'm not I think if we if you and I had this discussion right after the book came out in 07 I would have said he's without a doubt the most underrated but Barack Obama over two terms and I think he even gave the presidential medal of freedom to George Herbert Walker Bush I think Barack Obama did a lot for elevating George Bush's reputation because obviously he's a Democrat and Democrats don't usually say such things about Republicans.

52:56Anyway, here's why he deserves credit. Here's why he deserves attention. He was willing to take some risks. I'm always, I always admire presidents who take political risks. The first one was that he broke his promise not to raise taxes. That's tough. Go back to our initial discussion about presidents who go to Washington and change their minds. George Bush hadn't really left Washington. He was the vice president. But as president, he had different responsibilities. And he looked at the fiscal situation created by the Reagan Bush administration and realized this is unsustainable. We've got to do something about the budget deficit.

53:49And he raised taxes. And he tried to explain to Republicans why his fellow Republicans in the Congress, why he needed to do it. And they, in the end, many of them turned their backs on him. Most significantly, Newt Gingrich refused to stand next to him in the Rose Garden when he announced his position on tax reform, which in this case meant tax increases. That took political guts, and he never recovered from it. Politically, he never recovered. The second reason that he deserves, the second source of, I think, courage is that he didn't go for the cheap play on the Cold War. he could have declared, not only declared it over, but said America won.

54:49He could have said that 1989, the Berlin Wall falls. John Kennedy had been criticized, I think unfairly, for letting the Berlin Wall happen. But it falls and he could have said America won. And he didn't. Now, why didn't he? Partly, it was that his mother had taught him that there's no I in team. But that's a bit of, you know, that's a little bit of the story, but it's not really the full story. George Bush understood that he needed a partner in the Soviet Union. If you would go from, if you wanted to go from the sort of collapse of the Soviet Empire in Europe to a new kind of Soviet Union, you needed Gorbachev around.

55:37And one of the best ways to get Gorbachev overthrown by his own people is to make him look like a loser. And that was an instinctive, because George Bush was in many ways an instinctive leader. And that was the right instinct to have. In the end, the Soviet military, the deep state, if you will, of the Soviet Union tried to overthrow go, Gorby, and did, but it was too late. By that point in 1991, there are so many other institutions and individuals that want to remake the Soviet Union and didn't feel fear, Boris Yeltsin being the biggest example, but not the only one, that the coup collapsed. But if the coup had happened in 1989, who's to say that it wouldn't have collapsed?

56:31and thus we would have had a rejuvenated Soviet Union that might have continued for another decade or two. So George Bush understood, I need Gorbachev as a partner, which meant that George Bush not only wasn't gonna jump and dance on the Berlin Wall, which he wouldn't have done anyway, but when Gorby did some things in 1990 to try to stem the whirlwind, contain the whirlwind of change in the Soviet Union, which included using troops in Lithuania. When Bush didn't end the conversation with the Soviet Union, he was attacked for being an appeaser. He was attacked, by the way, by Henry Kissinger and former President Nixon, who was still around then, for not being tough enough.

57:33George Bush knew what he was doing. He wasn't supporting the use of violence against the right to self-determination in the Soviet Union. He was just trying to keep Gorby in place because Gorbachev was a world historical figure, a once in a century figure who was willing to take risks and risk actually entire political system of his country to put it on a more normal path. and those kinds of leaders are so rare in history, you do what you can to keep them in place. Only Gorbachev could have dismantled the Soviet empire peacefully. An American couldn't have done it. It would have been impossible for Reagan or Bush to have achieved the dismantling of the Soviet system from the outside.

58:24It had to be done by an insider. And so George Bush understood that and took risks to protect Gorbachev and caught a lot of flack for it. And finally, I think he deserves a lot of credit for taking the tough decision to use force in Kuwait and Iraq. And you contrast what he went through in making that decision was really hard with how easy some presidents in later years have made the decision to use what we now call kinetic actions, just violence. George Herbert Walker Bush knew that with the world changing after the collapse of the Soviet Union, so many countries reunifying and other countries beginning to strain, former Yugoslavia, that it would be harmful to international security if Saddam Hussein could change borders using violence.

59:25that it would send a signal to Hungarians, to others who were unhappy with the borders that they inherited at the end of the Cold War to do something about them. And George Herbert Walker Bush was in some ways a Rooseveltian figure. He had fought in World War II as a very young man. He just turned 18. And he wanted in some ways to create the international security system that was impossible to achieve in 1945 and 46 because of Stalin, really. And he wanted that system. And the term was terrible, New World Order. It's not a really smart term. It sounds really fascist, actually. That's not a great term.

1:00:11He was not a great wordsmith, and he knew it. But the idea is that you wanted to set rules of the road. And if you let Saddam get away with taking Kuwait, you are undermining the rules of the road. And so in that case, I think Bush deserves credit for launching the Gulf War and then stopping before he got to Baghdad. He knew that the international coalition assembled to liberate Kuwait would not have supported the occupation of Baghdad. Yes, he did want Saddam Hussein to be overthrown, but by his own people, it didn't happen. But he knew that it would be wrong to go to Baghdad, even though it was militarily easy at the point at the time when he said it's all over 100 hours into the start of the war.

1:00:57And I think that showed statesmanship.

1:01:00Coleman Hughes:He gets criticized, though, for that decision by, I guess, the neoconservative wing of his own party, in that the idea being that that set the stage for the later Iraq war, that we didn't actually take Saddam out, that we allowed him to massacre Shia. And so that's cited as an example of him sort of maybe not having a stiff enough spine. What do you make of that critique? One of the advantages, one of the things I've gained and anyone else, and everybody who does this would gain, it's not just me, from listening to tapes, is I realized how hard it is to make decisions as a president. And I realize that you are balancing lots of different issues simultaneously.

1:01:50In fact, few presidents have the luxury of dealing with one crisis at a time. So this argument about spying was made about John Kennedy in not attacking North Vietnam at the time of the Laos crisis. I'm not going to go into the details because we'd have to go literally into the weeds. or into the rice paddies. But the fact of the matter is that you don't know as president what the world would be like 10 years after you. And many of your decisions have to be made at the moment with the information you have available to you and given the many objectives you have at that time. So we'll talk about Bush.

1:02:42We can say JFK for another time. I'd love to talk to you about JFK in Vietnam, for example. But that's for another time. But Bush, what was Bush's goal? What were his goals? Well, one was to set rules for the road. Taking out Saddam, when you didn't have an international coalition behind you for it, would have violated that and made the United States look like an empire. The beauty of the Gulf War, it was a coalition, a real coalition. It wasn't the coalition of the so-called willing for George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. The Russians were on the side of the United States. The Russians were. You look at the countries that supported this.

1:03:35It wasn't unanimous, but it was a broad international coalition. It was a real coalition. It was what the United Nations was meant to do. So why break that up just to topple Saddam? And, you know, these neocons that make this argument should study the work of a man named Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney opposed going to Baghdad in 1990. He did. And if you want evidence of that, just, it's available online. Go to his oral history interview with the Miller Center Public Affairs, where I used to be, although I did not participate in this particular oral history. And this oral history was done before he became vice president.

1:04:31And look at what he says about the decision. He supported the decision not to go to Baghdad. So these neocons that say George Bush lacked spine, well, then Dick Cheney lacked spine, and most of them love Dick Cheney. So I think it's so easy 20 years later to know all of this. I mean, one of the advantages, I guess, of being a historian is as you're looking in the rearview mirror all the time. Well, look, one of the joys and challenges of writing about presidents is you have to recreate the decision-making environment when they make these decisions. And then you have to step outside and you have to say, given what they knew, given their objectives, did they make the right call?

1:05:21If you add to it, given what we now know, well, they didn't know it then. I don't think that's really fair. You can speculate about that. That's fair. But to think that they would know that, you know, 10 years later, there would, because of an attack by an unaffiliated Islamist group, unaffiliated to Iraq, that there would be momentum to remove all the monsters in the world. and that that momentum would be led by his son, well, how would he have known that? How would he have known that in 1990? How would JFK have known that he would be assassinated in Dallas and LBJ who lacked his self-confidence in foreign policy and who was much closer in thinking about foreign policy to Dwight Eisenhower than he was to John F.

1:06:16Kennedy, I'm talking about Lyndon Johnson, that Lyndon Johnson would, in order to make a non-political issue of Vietnam, would send hundreds of thousands of troops to Vietnam. How would he know that when he was trying to figure out a way to neutralize Laos in 1961, 62, and 63? I mean, it's not possible that he would have known this. So I think some of our post facto criticisms of presidents are tone deaf because they don't really know the environment, political and strategic in which those decisions are criticizing were made.

1:06:58Coleman Hughes:Okay, just two or three more questions for you. If you could get access to a recording of one private presidential conversation that doesn't actually exist, what conversation would you most want to hear? Oh, I can only have one. Coleman, that's not fair. I'll allow you two or three. No, no, no, no. Let me put it this way. I'll tell you who would be involved.

1:07:29John F. Kennedy, and we're talking about Americans, I guess. And the president says, so we're Americans. Because there's some foreign leaders conversations I would love to hear too. John F. Kennedy had a button that he pressed. He rarely pressed that button when he and his brother were alone. RFK, not Ted. One of the reasons why John F. Kennedy remains an enigma is that the inner presidency, which was these two men talking to each other, wasn't well documented by choice. So we have a few. We have a few conversations, telephone conversations or tape between the two of them. We have a little bit of them talking about how John F.

1:08:19Kennedy saying to his brother during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I would have been impeached if I didn't do what I'm doing now. That was captured. It's rough. It's hard to hear, but it's possible to make some sense out of it. That conversation. So RFK, JFK, there are lots of moments in the presidency when the two of them I know are chatting. And boy, would I love to have those discussions because my analysis of the presidency is that's the center of the presidency. As for Nixon, Nixon finds out about the break in at the Watergate when he's not near a taping system, sadly. He's actually in the Bahamas at the home of one of his, he has basically two friends.

1:09:10They're both rich. Bob Aplanap is one and Bibi, the famous Bibi Rabozo, or not so famous, I guess, anymore, but Bibi Rabozo is the second. He's at Bob Aplanap's house. So we don't actually know what he's saying when he first finds out. We have a lot of what he says later, But that initial when he's not curating himself, what he actually said, we know there's a description of him throwing an ashtray when he talks to Chuck Colson, one of his, I'd say his top political advisor. So we know he's really angry. But did he throw it and say, how could they do this? I told them not to do this. Or did he say, ah, you know, who knows?

1:09:56But we don't have that. So, yeah, that particular moment is not captured on tape. With FDR, I think I wish I had the conversation between the doctors and him in 1944. I think he was told that he had heart failure. He was told that he was not well, but I'm not sure. in that era, doctors were not actually fully transparent with their patients. And then Roosevelt told his daughter, he did not tell Eleanor Roosevelt that he was sick. And what did he tell Anna? Those are very private conversations. But I wonder whether, my point is, did he know he was dying? Or did he think he was just getting weaker?

1:10:49So when he's running for office in 44, does he know that he's dying? And I guess a more recent example, what were the conversations between President Biden and the First Lady, Jill Biden, Dr. Jill, when he was deciding to run for a second term? Were there conversations? I told you I couldn't do one, just one. Okay.

1:11:18Coleman Hughes:You wrote or contributed to a book about impeachment a few years ago. Is impeachment still a functional mechanism in an era of such intense polarization? because you talk often about how Nixon's impeachment proceeded through a gradual persuasion and accumulation of evidence such that even Republicans admitted this was impeachment-worthy behavior and therefore turned on their own president, but based on evidence and a consensus. You know, it's hard to imagine today what Trump could do such that one-third of Republicans would turn on him, Certainly, if he did what Nixon did, I don't believe that would be enough for a third of Republicans to turn on him.

1:12:10Coleman Hughes:And that's partly because, well, it's partly because of maybe things idiosyncratic to Trump and his own loyalty, kind of effective loyalty demands and stuff. But it's also partly just because I think we are in a more polarized era. Democrats and Republicans hate each other more and close ranks more in high-stakes situations. So is there a way in which impeachment fails in this context? Well, the mechanism exists, but it's not effective. And when I say effective, for it to be effective, it has to be a viable threat to an abusive president. But if they don't think it's going to, if they don't worry about it happening, it's not effective.

1:13:04It still exists. It's on the books. It's in the Constitution. um you know uh our framers when they set in motion a lot of reforms they didn't expect with those great words they also couldn't imagine how this country would evolve and one of the things that they did not anticipate uh was the two-party system and and when you read the constitution you got to keep in mind they didn't think there would be parties. When they thought of parties, they thought of factions. In other words, actually what we have now, the Republican Party is mainly a faction. It's a pro-Trump, very personalized group. It doesn't really have any stated principles other than whatever the president wants to do when he wakes up in the morning.

1:13:55I mean, a party that is concerned about whether there was vandalism in the reflecting pool is not a party that's really held together by ideas. It's held together by wimps. So that's actually what our founders would have thought of as a faction. They did not anticipate political parties. So when they put together impeachment, which by the way, they borrowed from, as they did in many ways, from British common law, they assumed that if you had an abusive president, That's not a president whose policies you disagreed with. That would be maladministration, and that was not grounds for impeachment.

1:14:38What they decided were grounds for impeachment after a debate, they decided this, was high crimes and misdemeanors. High crimes were crimes against the state, crimes against the constitutional system that they were putting together. and they wanted a president to be, to sit in a constitutional court and the court would be the Senate. The House would draw up the indictment. That's the impeachment and the trial would be in the Senate. And the only way this would operate was if members of the Senate would sit as a constituent body of a constitutional court, which would mean that they would be thinking about the constitution first and not the party that they happen to belong to.

1:15:38And that was the fundamental flaw of the system of impeachment, which was it was based on the assumption that when sitting as part of a constitutional court, Senators would not have any other loyalty other than to the Constitution. But now we have senators who see themselves as part of the president's party and therefore have, they wouldn't see it this way, I'm sure. But functionally, it is this way. They see themselves as having divided loyalties to the president and to the Constitution. and the framers never assumed that. Now, as a result of the development of partisanship, but first of all, as a result of the development of parties, removal is less and less likely.

1:16:38Changes in those parties since the Nixon era has made impeachment, successful impeachment and removal, even less likely. So it was hardly likely in the 70s, but it would have happened because Nixon had offended the sensibilities of Republicans, not just Democrats. He knew he was going to be removed, which is why he resigned. He resigned because he didn't want to lose his pension. He's not a rich man. And he didn't want the stain of being removed from office. He wasn't leaving on his own terms, but he knew he had to leave. What has happened since the 70s is the parties have changed. I mentioned I'm writing about Kennedy, and I'm writing about Kennedy and his moment starting the process.

1:17:37when he starts the process which should lead to the Civil Rights Act of 1974 and the Voting Rights Act of 64 and the Voting Rights Act of 65.

1:17:51And the Republican and Democratic parties were fundamentally different then than they are now. There's been a winnowing out of major differences. And another time, or perhaps with somebody else, you'll talk about how that's changing, certainly in the Democratic Party. But let me put it this way, that in that era, in the 70s, let's go back to the 60s, the Democratic Party was divided between Southern segregationists and many white supremacists and Northern liberals and Western liberals and progressives. And the Republican Party had liberal Republicans and moderate Republicans and conservative Republicans.

1:18:41And the conservative Republicans, some were libertarian. There were very few that were cultural conservatives, but there were a few. So to hold these parties together, the leaders of these parties had to cut deals. Compromise was the name of the game. You couldn't, it was very hard to maintain a my way or the highway. Now, Southern segregationists in the Democratic side were the most inflexible. But most everybody in Congress was flexible because these parties were coalitions. So if you weren't flexible, you got nothing done. That sense of flexibility, that understanding of coalition building does not exist among members of Congress today.

1:19:28And by the way, we didn't just see it on the right, we saw on the left with Build Back Better. with Biden and how difficult it was for Biden to achieve the Inflation Reduction Act, which is what was left of Build Back Better, because coalition building was viewed as somehow ugly by many members of the Democratic Party, particularly among the Progressive Caucus, the Justice Democrats. It was viewed as somehow morally suspect when you build coalitions. And, well, that was not the way things worked in the 60s and 70s. Well, when you have parties that are coalitions, you can imagine a moment when two-thirds of the Senate would vote against a president because the president's party would itself be a coalition.

1:20:23So that was another reason why impeachment, even with a two-party system, would have happened in the 70s. But by now, it's inconceivable to me that two-thirds of the current Republican Party, where Donald Trump impeached again, would vote to remove him. And I can't imagine two-thirds of the Democratic Party voting to remove a Democratic president. So at the moment, the threat from impeachment is a hollow one. And therefore, as a tool, as a self-correcting tool in an era of abusive executive activities, it's a hollow one. Yeah.

1:21:09Coleman Hughes:All right. Final question. What is the absolute best presidential biography that is not written by you? Well, I wouldn't say I've written the best in any case. One is, I'm going to say a couple. David Donald's biography of Lincoln is beautiful. I think that Henry Adams' work on Jefferson. It's more of the administration than Jefferson the man, but he gets at Jefferson's complexity and Jefferson's deceptions too. I mean, Jefferson's a very complex president. I think Henry Adams' work on Jefferson is just absolutely brilliant.

1:22:00And those are the two that come to mind. I didn't mention any modern presidents because the landscape is always shifting, which is exciting, which means that there are great biographies that have been written. I think Nigel Hamilton's first, it doesn't really fit in your category because it's a pre-presidential biography, but his first volume on JFK is brilliant. It's absolutely wonderful. But I think with modern presidents, the joy of studying and writing and reading about modern presidents is that because the landscape keeps changing, materials get declassified, new records come online, the story changes.

1:22:56So it's not static. So when you talk about a great biography, it's a style that you like. So I think, you know, Robert Carroll's Master of the Senate is an absolutely magnificent study of, again, LBJ pre-president, but of LBJ who understood, who was a master tactician. So you have these books that are beautifully written with the best materials available at the time. But we almost keep our minds open to the possibility of a new narrative because we get new material all the time. I mean, I don't know a professional historian who chose this business because they wanted to tell other people's stories.

1:23:48We go into this business because we're puzzle solvers. We have these questions we want to answer. And it's not that we think we're the smartest ever, but we want to put our energy and our talents to work to see if we can figure out the puzzle. I mean, that's why we're in the business. I mean, that's why I'm in the business. It never ends. You're always learning. So when it comes to modern presidents, there are great books coming out all the time. I chose some older presidents where the documentary field, it's not completely settled. We're still learning more about Lincoln. But what I've referred to are two really important books from an era where there was a lot of material available on that particular president.

1:24:34And so I wouldn't say that the story is settled. But the story is not as much of a movable feast as it is today with our 20th century and now early 21st century presidents. Okay, Tim Naftali, thank you so much for coming on my podcast. Coleman, my pleasure.

1:24:55Coleman Hughes:On Tuesday, September 8th, I will be at the 92nd Street Y in conversation with Dara Horn. Dara's last book was called People Love Dead Jews, and it was an award-winning examination of the ways in which contemporary culture sentimentalizes Jewish suffering while ignoring Jewish life. In her new book, which is provocatively titled The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, Dara takes the next step, not only tracing the myths that have spread anti-Semitism in the past, but asking what can actually be done about them. So get your tickets now, I assume they will sell fast. Once again, that's Tuesday, September 8th at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

1:25:34Coleman Hughes:See you there.