Transcript
Amy Davidson (0:07)
This is a special preview from the New Yorker Radio Hour, December 21, 1987. Dear Donald, I did not see the program, but Mrs. Nixon told me that you were great on the Donahue show. And as you can imagine, she is an expert on politics and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office, you will be a winner. With warm regards, sincerely, Richard Nixon. That's a letter from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump that the new President said he was going to hang in the White House. It's not hard to find parallels between the two men, particularly the hatred of the news media and the so called elites. But maybe Nixon's blessing was not such a good omen for Trump because the new administration, right off the bat, is engulfed by a scandal inevitably nicknamed Russiagate. That's reminding a lot of commentators of Nixon's Watergate. The New Yorker's Amy Davidson talked about those parallels recently with one of Nixon's inner circle. John Dean was the White House counsel who advised Nixon, but eventually testified against him in the Watergate hearings. Since then, Dean has written extensively about politics and the presidency.
Interviewer (1:20)
You've spent thousands of hours listening to and transcribing Nixon's secret White House recordings. Do you hear now? Do you hear the echoes now? When you hear Trump, he talks about himself rhetorically, would like to talk about himself as Ronald Reagan's heir, but in terms of his language, his style, how much is he Nixon's heir?
John Dean (1:45)
He is very much Nixon's heir. Like Nixon, you hear Trump speak in the third person. He hasn't started using, as Nixon did, the royal we, but he's approaching that. But he does talk about Trump as a Persona that he refers to. I guess I see it most in the fact they both look for their enemies and hold great resentment towards those they perceive as their enemies. I would have thought we all learned a lesson from Nixon having enemies list and things of that nature, but it seems not. We see it playing out with his presidency.
Interviewer (2:28)
What's the most corrosive part of being in a Nixonian environment? Is it the lies? Is it the problems with the rule of law? Is it just the sense of, of enemies everywhere? In your book you describe it as a moral abyss. When you're in an atmosphere like that, what gets to you?
John Dean (2:50)
Well, at first, when I went there and I decided to go to work for Nixon, I thought there was a new Nixon and there was a new portrayal of Nixon. The old Tricky Dick had grown up and had made, matured into a statesman. When I got there, that seemed to be the case his presidency was so tightly run that other than a handful of people in his inner circle, even his White House staff didn't know him. When I would go in with group sessions as opposed to when I had later one on ones, I realized he was acting, he was portraying the way he wanted to be seen and putting on a little show for the staff and, and a lot of theater. I hear that on the tapes.