 Good evening, good evening, this small gathering tonight. I'm Tom Staley, the director of the Harry Ransom Center, the home of the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers, and many other important cultural archives. In 1976, two years after the publication of Woodward and Bernstein's book of the same name and the resignation of President Richard Nixon, this film was released a great public and critical acclaim. In 2005, the Ransom Center opened to the public the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers. Since that time, students, scholars, historians, and journalists had visited the Center to study these papers and learn about not only one of the most significant crises in presidential history, but also First Amendment rights, freedom of the press, executive power, and the limits of the presidency, and other issues related to American politics. The Ransom Center is pleased to renew a partnership with our colleagues at the OBJ Library to make this program available to you. We're deeply grateful to Mark Uptegrove, the director of the library, and we're pleased to tell you that he's going to be serving as moderator tonight, and I'm now going to introduce Mark Uptegrove. Here he comes. Thank you, Tom, and welcome everybody. In the 35 years since all the president's men made its debut, it's become not only a classic film, but a film for the ages, and that's not only because of the remarkable narrative storytelling abilities from its producer and its star, Robert Redford, but because of the compelling story that he was able to tell. That of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein breaking the Watergate burglary story, which ultimately resulted in the resignation of our 37th president, Richard Nixon. At the center of this film, at its core is a message. No man or woman in the United States of America is above the law. That message is as important today as it was in April of 1976 when the film debuted, and it's just as important as it will be tomorrow and for the ages. I'm gonna run two clips. The first clip is the actual trailer that audiences saw around the time of the premiere of the film 35 years ago. And then we're gonna see another clip of the intrepid reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, going to the home of their editor, Ben Bradley, and giving him a shocking revelation in the Watergate investigation. Let's run those clips. How are we doing, fellas? Not gonna happen? All right. This is not anti-climactic at all because what I'm about to say is gonna change everything and you're going to be very, very excited. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Robert Redford, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. That was terrific. Yeah, you know what? We saw, it was Rosemary Woods who was... That's right. And all of a sudden, it got erased. They got it. Okay, Woodward and Bernstein were this close to doing shadow puppets. Bob, Redford, I'm gonna start the question with you and that is, I want to talk about how you got involved in this film. And generally, when a filmmaker gets interested in a project like this, he buys the film rights to the book, does a screen adaption and embarks on the project in that manner. It was very different for you. You got interested in this project well before there was a book. Talk about how you gained an interest in what Carl and Bob were doing. Well, it was a four-year journey and we don't have time to tell the full story, but the story's pretty interesting about how it came about. And I'll see if I can shortcut it. I had finished a film called The Candidate and we were promoting that film on a whistle-stop train ride in Florida that the candidates always took as a ritual every four years. And the idea is, since the candidate was about the message of the film, if there was one, was that we are electing people by cosmetics rather than substance. And I was the guy. So, and then, wait, when it came time for the, it was a very low-budget film because studios weren't interested in politics as the subject matters. So we were trying to come up with a plan and the guy had a plan said, okay, why don't you take this train ride that all these candidates took? And that year it was Muskie, McGovern, Lindsey, Scoop Jackson, Kim, and what they would do was like a ritual that went all the way back to La Follette where you stop at these spots along the way and they would get out in the back of the train, they would make a speech and then it would pull off. So the idea was to make the point that the film was making that we would see if I could out draw the candidates. And so we did this and so the train, on the train was political press and entertainment press. So we were gonna go from Jacksonville, Florida down to Miami and there was a whole plot, well, if this really goes well, then we'll go all the way in and have you be a right-in candidate at the convention. It was really, at any rate. So I go out in the back of the train and I had these stats with me that said how many people came for the other candidates and there was range from 500 to 750, maybe Lindsay 1500 and so forth. So when I went out there, they had done a whole advance thing. There was maybe 3,000, 4,000 people. So I would get out of the back of the train and I would thank everybody for coming and I would say, guys, it's such a pleasure to be here. It means so much to me that you've all come. I'd just like to tell you all that I have absolutely nothing to say and I do that in the train before I go out. That was okay for about two stops and then I got uneasy with it. I didn't enjoy it anymore. So anyway, I would go in between the stops and chat with the guys and that was the political press and they were, this was July 9th, I think that was the date. Of 72. Of 72, yeah. And the break-in had been just a couple of weeks before. So I, like everybody else, didn't know a whole lot about it and they were gossiping. They were buzzing about something with that event. And I said, oh, hey, what happened to that deal? I said, was that burglars with my, were they Cubans? I couldn't really, kind of went away. What happened with that? And they'd sort of smiled and looked at each other and rumbled around and I sensed that they knew something or suspected something. And I said, what's going on? I kind of pushed it. And what came out of it was that, no, they didn't think it was Cubans and the inference was that it maybe has something to do with the White House. Since I already had issues with Nixon, I was very primed to see something not go right with it. And so I said, well, what's going on? And then I said, wait a minute, you're gonna watch me make a fool out of myself here on this thing and you're not gonna do anything about it? Then I got a lecture and I was telling these guys, I got a lecture about how it works. And they said, look, it's both parties do it. It's dirty tricks, both parties do it. That's not new. Secondly, Montgomery's gonna self-destruct. Nixon's gonna win on a landslide and nobody wants to be in the wrong side of this guy if we've been going after him at that time. Third, you have to go outside to run a story that it would take to run a story like that down. You'd have to go to a magazine or something like that. And most people of this summer are only gonna be interested in whether Hank Aaron beats Babe Ruth's record. So I thought, I got very depressed by that. And I thought, I went home. And because of what they had said, I was curious whether it was kind of a, I felt it was kind of a cynical view. And so I hawked the newspapers at home. I was gonna start a film the way we were in New York. And so I had three months before I was starting the film. And I watched the newspapers and sure enough, nothing. And they were gonna be right. And then suddenly this little thing appeared and it had dual byline. I didn't remember the name, it was just two guys. And it was a committee to reelect, a slush fund, and then it grew and it grew and every few days it just grew and it grew, but it was always the same two guys. So I got all excited and I thought, somebody's doing something. This is really exciting. So I was like a cheering section, a public citizen cheering section. Of one. Right. Yeah. And then it blew up big time in September and it blew up and most everybody. In Utah. Yeah, right. So anyway, when it blew up and there was a glitch in the testimony with the grand jury testimony. Suddenly these guys were wrong. And Nixon did get reelected. And just two weeks later he got reelected. And I read a little story about a little profile of who the two guys were that caused all this trouble. And who were also wrong. And so when I read the profile of the two guys, their differences really interested me. I thought, gee, they're so different. Politically, they're different. They're, you know, when they go into why they're different, but they were different in many, many ways. And it also suggested the article, but they didn't really get along that well. But they had to work together. And that's what got me. And I thought, now, that is really, I would love to know what that was like. How did those guys work together? So that's how it all started. And I thought, I would be really interested in making a really small, little low-budget film, black-and-white film with two unknown actors that I would produce, about their process. What did they do? How did they do it? Furthermore, there had not been a film in my, to my knowledge, that was about investigative reporting. There had been film about the journalism, but they were like front page or others. But not one about investigative journalism. And of course that interested me because I felt that it was through investigative journalism that we got to issues that were important, like truth and justice. So I wanted to find out if I could get permission to pursue that. So I called Carl first, and I didn't get a callback. And then I called Bob Woodward, didn't get a callback. And I tried a couple of times, and then I forgot about it. And I started filming in New York, and then I would remember it. And finally, I got Woodward, and it was probably in November, late November of 72. And he was very chilly. And wasn't too welcoming or friendly. And I said, hi, this is Bob Redford. And he says, uh-huh. Okay. And I said, I have an idea. I want to talk to you guys about what if I could meet with you. Excuse me, he said, we're busy right now. Not a good time, maybe some other time. So he blew me off, and I forgot about it. Then, oh, a little while later, McCord wrote the letter to Judge Sereca, turning the whole thing back around again, and they were right. I called Bob again. I said, look, can you just give me a few minutes? I want to talk to you about this idea. So that was the journey, getting to Bob. And I flew to Washington, and he and I met briefly, and he said, look, this is not cool right now. And he apologized. He said, we didn't know it was you. We thought we were being set up, because we knew we were being watched. We knew we were under surveillance. We were paranoid. We were nervous and frightened. So let's come up to, we'll meet you after you're done with your film. They came up and we met, and I told them what I wanted to do. Well, by this time, things were moving rapidly. It was before the hearings. I said, I don't know where this is gonna go. And they said at that time, we don't either. We don't know where it's gonna bottom out, but it's still going on. And I said, well, wherever it goes, I don't know where it's gonna go either, but I'm only interested in this little piece of the puzzle, what you guys did that other people didn't do and how you did it. And so that's how it all began. And then what came back was they were gonna go write a book. The hearings then came on. They said, look, we'll make it possible because of our connection. They said, we'll make it possible that you can have the movie rights to this, but the rest of it selling to a studio will be up to the publishers. So I had to wait for nine months while they wrote their book. In the meantime, the whole thing escalated into this giant national event with the hearings and then ultimately the resignation of Nixon. And so I guess I felt that I had stumbled into this with the idea of a really small story about process and the character of these two guys against this frame that just got bigger and bigger and bigger. So I basically stumbled into a pretty major event in history and I was fortunate in that way. And then when the book was over, I went down to Washington and they were fortunate enough to, I was fortunate enough that they were generous enough to give me time to really spend time with them to understand them and understand their character. At that time, the studio was not inclined to be too much for this because they felt this was now a national event that people wanted to get passed. Everybody knew what the story was. They didn't want to spend the money that Simon and Schuster was asking. And the way I was able to push through that was to say, but it isn't about Nixon. It isn't about the national event. It's about what these guys did that other people weren't doing underneath the story that everybody knows. And so I see it as kind of a detective story. And I'm banking on the fact that that would be interesting to an audience. But mainly, it's a character study. Two characters involved in a process that I think people would welcome seeing because that's what it took. It took hard work, it took digging. And to make that dramatic was gonna be a challenge, of course. But anyway, that was how it all came. But let me... Can I say something about the backstory here? The backstory of this is that while he is dreaming up this grand thing, we're covering the story. And we're in rough shape covering the story. We are at the nadir of the Watergate coverage in November of 1972. Nixon has one reelection. As Bob said, we have made a very small mistake which has been magnified into allowing the Nixon White House, as you see in the movie itself, to attack us very effectively. And the last thing that we could ever have is the White House knowing that we were sitting down with Robert Redford to make a movie about what we were doing to go after Richard Nixon. One, because we weren't going after Richard Nixon, we didn't see it that way. We saw this as really what the movie is about, the best obtainable version of the truth, how you go about reporting. And the last thing we also intended to do was ever write a book about us. That we had signed a book contract right around this time. In fact, we signed it on the day that we made the mistake. The publisher got a 10% discount. That's right. And we figured, not only is there a movie, forget about a book even, forget about our career. We were thinking of resigning that day. You'll see in the film there's a scene in the rain. I don't know if you knew this, but this was the day that we thought we were gonna have to resign when we met with the publisher and signed a contract. And meanwhile, so eventually we did decide to write a book because we thought that even with the Watergate hearings that all of the truth was not going to come out. So we started to write a book that was about kind of speculative in nature about things we knew and what they might have meant. And then the Watergate hearings blew up and the truth really became known. They had subpoena power and we had nothing left to write about. No book. No book. Even at a 10% discount. That's right. Then you pick up from here. Yeah, and so the question is, what do we do? Who would help? And we did a draft of kind of about Nixon and his people and so forth. And there was nothing new. And one of the rules of journalism and filmmaking is focus on what you know. So we did a draft of us is the characters and the book. Actually, Bob did the draft of what is the first chapter of all the president's men, but he wrote it in the first person plural, which was rather difficult to follow. So it said weed. It was like this two-headed machine. And so I took it and I said, oh, it's got some possibilities. And from all things from reading Norman Mailer's armies of the night in which Mailer called himself Mailer, I saw how it gave him a great remove to write about himself as if he were a character outside his own skin. And so I then took what Bob had written and I made the two-headed machine Woodward Bernstein and suddenly they were like a little beyond ourselves. And that became, and then each of us then would write more about what we do individually. And what was in the conversations with you, Bob, you told, you know, this is what you wanna focus on. And it planted quite frankly the seed of, okay, let's write about the reporting of this story. And I think if you hadn't been involved, the book, I mean, maybe it certainly would have been different and maybe non-existent. But that your, quite frankly, your enthusiasm and your sense, this is the story. Now, we're not that interested in our personalities, but what we're interested in is how you do it. And you made it very clear when you got involved that you moved into the Madison Hotel across the street from the Washington Post and you would look at notes. You wanted the granularity of what it was like when we talked to sources, when we dealt in the newsroom. And so there was this convergence here that made it possible to tell the story of what it's like to piece something together. No idea what the ending is going to be. No idea whether there is even going to be an ending. I mean, this was on the run and we were doing this simultaneously. We did the first draft, which is most of the book in six weeks. And the book was published before Nixon resigned. And the last line of the book is it will be up to the Congress of the United States to decide what will happen to this president. And he is assertion I will never, ever resign. That's right, you should go on. But that's why we ended the film without you guys really knowing what was going to happen. Even though the public did. Yeah. Let me go back to something you were talking about earlier, Bob. You were confident moviegoers would be engaged by this movie, but I think you mentioned that. Did you not mention that earlier? If I did, I lied. Well, I'm... You're in Richard Nixon. But the Watergate scandal rocked the faith of the American people in the government. And traditionally, you saw this during the Depression, movies have been a place for escapism. So what made you confident that Americans would be willing to walk back into the mire of Watergate less than two years after Nixon had resigned from office? Well, I don't know that I was confident. I think I became, at a certain point, obsessed. I was just obsessed with what I thought was a really good story. I guess I've always believed that a good story well-told will attract people. Whether or not, how many people, I don't know. But I just felt that there was a story underneath the story that people thought they knew. But the challenges and the obstacles were huge. And I won't go through all of them. But starting with the fact the studio did not want to put money up for that sale, because they felt the American public didn't want to hear any more about it. They were angry and humiliated. And it made America look bad. And we all went, yeah, you don't want to go back there. And so I had to try to convince them. It's not about that. It's about something that they don't know. And what it took to get to that. And if they don't know it, then it's fresh and new. And then it's my job to make it exciting and dramatic. And the other obstacle was there's no shoot-up. Nobody gets shot. But I saw that there should be an underpinning of potential violence that looks like it could erupt at any time that would make it kind of mysterious and more of a thriller. And then there was the other problem of getting access. The Washington Post, understandably, was very nervous. I'm talking about the head honchos there. There was Kay Graham and Ben Bradley. Talk about that a little bit, if you would, Bob. Well, Kay Graham, understandably, was protecting an enterprise that she mothered. And she thought, because Hollywood had a reputation of screwing things up and so forth of historical interest. And so she didn't want the film made. And so Alan Pakula and I had to go to her and try to convince her that we were going to do a good job. And we were going to be accurate and as authentic as possible. And she just couldn't go there. And so she begged me. She said, look, I beg you, first of all, don't make the film. But if you're going to make this film, please do not use the Washington Post name. I don't want anything to do it. Don't talk about me. And don't use the editor's name. I said, well, you know, what am I going to do? Call it the day of the movie. Meanwhile, there was a best-selling book that had laid out the whole thing. That's right. So that took a while. And then Ben Bradley, who's a smart, shrewd, tough guy, was intrigued by this. But he wasn't about to let things go awry. So what he did was, well, Pakula and I were across the street trying to get as much accurate information as possible and really studying the Washington Post. He had the style section do a piece on us. And I thought, what the f***? Yeah. So I said, OK, I get it. It's called transparency. Now there is a wonderful story about how you mentioned Bradley, how you got Jason Robards to play Bradley. And you're looking for somebody to take that part because he's integral to the coverage of Watergate to our book and the movie. And Jason Robards, as I understand this, was a friend of yours, somebody that you went way back with. And it was a low point in Jason Robards' life. And so you called him up and said, look, we want you to play Ben Bradley. Come look at the script, and we're going to pay you $50,000 to play the role. And at that time, for Jason Robards, that was big money. So Robards comes in. They give him the script. He takes it home, comes back to Ciel and Bakula, the director, and Bob the next day. And I read the script. I can't play Ben Bradley. Why not? I said, I'm going to quote here. Because all Bradley does is run around and say, where's the f***ing story? And Bob then says to Jason Robards, that's what the editor of the newspaper does. And Robards is kind of deflating that. That's all. And then you or Bakula say to him, what you're going to have to do in playing this part is you're going to have to find 15 different ways to say, where's the f***ing story? That, in fact, is the genius of Bradley. Because Bradley had more than 15 ways to say. I'm so glad the baby isn't here to hear this. The other challenge was the amount of f***ing in the picture that were figurative and not literal, the fact is he said that all the time. But that made it our rating. So we had to go through a whole strategy going to religious groups and educational groups to get them on board to say this should be treated as an educational thing. That's the language you use. That's the language you use. We might have to do the same thing here tonight, by the way. But you know, there's also not a single romantic interest in the movie, which is another interesting thing about it. There's absolutely no. No, that was the other part. It didn't reveal your relationship with Bob. That's what it is. That's the other thing. That's why we were worried about the weed. Because the opening scene. The other thing I want to say was that while I was in the movie, I did not want to be in the movie. I thought that would distract because these guys were unknowns and they should be played by unknowns. So when the studio finally said, OK, we'll buy the rights, but then they said, you've got to be in the movie. And I didn't really want that. But that was the deal. So then I went to somebody of my level and I went to Dustin Hoffman and that was that. Now, the next thing, the next difficult part, was trying to find out as much as I could about Bob and let Dustin work on Carl. Carl, at least in those days, was more outgoing. And Bob was kind of reserved. And so I spent a lot of time with Bob. And I said, look, I want to try to get to understand you. Don't get bothered by that. And he said, well, no. Look, I'm really boring. And he said, no, I'm telling you. I'm not that interesting. Carl's the interesting one. I'm not that interesting. I'm kind of boring. I thought, well, that's great. I get to play a boring guy. So then I began to push to try to find out things about Bob. And I did. And we don't need to go into all that. There was a couple of things he told me, and I don't know, Bob, correct me if I'm wrong in this. But one of the things that really impressed me, I said, what is it about Woodward that has him almost obsessively dedicated like a workaholic? He was obsessive about working, working. He seldom slept. He was always working, always thinking, always working. And I thought, well, that's how do you? I said, where does that come from? And he said, well, that obsession with working so hard, and tell me if I have this wrong. No, you have it right. He said, well, when I was a student at Yale, I took these comprehensive tests. And I had messed around. I didn't really study for the first one. I got so upset with myself. I went in and I realized, oh my god, I don't really know what I should know here. And he kind of winged it. And then he got so upset by that he went home and really studied for the next test and had it nailed. He went in and took the test. And when the results came back, it was reversed. That he did well on the first one and not so on the second. And he went to the professor and he said, holy, you got this all wrong. Show me. And when the guy showed him, this is the deal, he said, it was then that I realized I wasn't quite sure what good work was. I was going to have to work twice as hard to know. Is that right? And the other thing to be generous when you said, on the second day where I thought I'd done well, I'd actually flunked it. But on the first day, when I'd winged it and kind of talked and written answers in general terms, I got the highest grade you could get. And so I had a perfect score and it flunked. And that was painful, painful. Well, well, I can relate to that. I mean, I flunked everything I could. I was going to say. To drop out to Woodward. Going back to these guys and tipping my hat to them, it was going to be very hard to break through the predisposition that Hollywood was going to screw this up. And so we were going to work harder than ever to be as authentic as possible, to be detailed as possible. Because I thought this is really a story where detail becomes very important. But we didn't have, the original draft had not worked in the script, and that writer went on his way. And so there was very little left of that draft that we could use. So what happened was that Fakul and I were trying to cobble together as much accurate information as possible. Had it not been for Bob and Karl being so generous, they didn't have to be. They could have shared the other view of the other people and said, well, we're not going to. They shared their notes. And in those notes are a lot of the script of the film, like the scene of the bookkeeper. Yeah, that are now at the Ransom Center, those exact notes. But in the process, you showed us the first draft. And Karl and his then-girlfriend wife, Nora Ephron, decided they were. No, ex-wife. And decided they would work on some suggestions. And I said, well, you might as well do a whole script. So you and Nora did a whole script and brought it over to you. And you read it and you, I think your comment to Pakula was, gee, Errol Flynn is dead. Because all of a sudden, he'd been reincarnated in Karl Bernstein. Everything but the sore. We ought to explain, though, thank you, about the Washington Post trepidations about this movie. Because you came to us, and the two of us sat there for a couple weeks and, well, should we do this? Should we really do a movie? And people who knew us said to us, you guys always knew you were going to do it. And that might have been true, I don't know. But we said, OK, we'll do it. We then went to the Washington Post. And as you found, they were a bit horrified. But from their point of view, especially Catherine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, who had been the most courageous publisher probably in the history of modern journalism as a result of what had happened. And you see it in the movie. And you see this courageous editor. They had just been through a two-year experience where the future of the newspaper was in doubt daily. Where the head of the free world was determined to bury this newspaper. They had come out triumphant to president of the United States and left office in disgrace. And she was standing atop an institution at the top of its game. So the last thing from her point of view that she wanted at this point was, why the hell take another big gamble on Hollywood? We could screw it up after having done this thing. And I'm not sure. That is part of what was behind it. I understood it. And there was a scene that you were going to do between yourself and somebody playing Catherine Graham, which is important in the book where she really says, look, I want you to get to the bottom of this story. I don't care what the consequences. And you were gonna shoot it. And she said, no, no, absolutely. I can't be in the movie. And then she saw the rough cut of the movie. And she said in her own way, is it too late to shoot that scene? I'll tell you just quickly about that scene. I really liked that scene a lot. And because she was part of the picture. And I did think she should have a role in it. And so we wrote this scene that Geraldine Page was gonna play her at that time, 35 years ago. We compressed what was in the book to make it kind of tense and mysterious where Bob and Ben Bradley go upstairs because she calls for them. And she says as he walks in, and Bob's nervous, obviously. And this is all right around this deep throat stuff. She says, what are you doing with my paper? And Bob says, trying to get to the bottom of it, get to the story. And she said, yes, I want that. And goes on just for a little bit longer. And then she says, in this deep throat, what is that? And he says to her, that's my source. And she says, and do you trust this source? Yes, I do. If I asked you to tell me who deep throat was, will you tell me? And his answer was, if you ask me, I'll have to tell you. And then there's this long pause. And she says, well, we all have enough burdens to carry around. Be careful with my paper. So I really loved that scene. I thought it was a really good scene. And it would have been very dynamic, I feel, on the scene. So she begged me not to have her in the movie. And then when we screened the movie, the really sweaty moment was, after all was done, the film was made, and the editing was a monster. And I had to take it to Washington to show the Washington Post people. It was really a sweaty moment. And so they came in. Bob and Carl came in. They were nervous as hell, and they were sitting in the front row. And Ben Bradley, there's a thing I loved about Bradley. Robards and I had been together years earlier in the Iceman television. And I was just starting my career. And he was very generous with me. We happened to be from the same part of Los Angeles. And we could connect to that. And I went to high school with his sister. So we had that connection. He was very generous with me at a time when he didn't have to be. So when it came around for this, and he had a very serious drinking problem and had a terrible accident. So he disfigured plastic surgery. He had to put them back together again. But he couldn't work. People wouldn't hire him. So I felt this was a chance to return. And I thought he just did a magnificent job. And so he is Ben Bradley. And Bradley is him. I mean, it's true. Interestingly enough, after the movie came out, Bradley became more like Bradley in the movie. Both of them were like, yes, oh, ah! There was a moment that there was a great moment. We screened the movie. These guys get in the front row. I'm in the back. I'm sweating bullets. Bradley, Robards managed to spend enough time with Bradley to pick up some mannerisms. And Bradley had a habit of putting his hands behind his head and leaning back and rocking back and forth. And he wore these striped shirts a lot. Tie and striped shirt. So there's Robards in the movie that Lysko and Robards. And at that moment when Robards comes on and he's like this, Bradley was like that in the audience. And suddenly he sees it on the screen. He goes, that was a great moment. This is a sweaty moment where Bob is playing this film. Talk about your reaction to this film. There are many unusual aspects of this film. One is the fact that you're watching yourselves on film less than two years after all this happened. What were your impressions of this film? The first one after, also wasn't there a moment that Jack Flenty came through in tennis shorts? Yeah. He just said, that really got me. I just want to make sure I remembered that right. Whatever the case, we're in here and they've been working on this film all this time. And we're all terrified, I mean really of what this is going to be. And this film starts to play and I certainly started to gradually relax a little because it became evident, hey, this is about the process of journalism. This is about the reporting. It's about the institution. This is not about Woodward, his personal life. It's not about Bernstein. It's not about Bradley. It's not about your personal life and you said, thank God. But we knew, you know, we saw. There's a whole other movie in there. It's been done. So, so there was this movie. You thought we were going to let you off the hook tonight? Oh, no, no, no. But this great relief, but also felt great about the institution at the end of it. I'll tell you about, I think it was six years ago. What was your reaction? Yeah, well, let me tell it this way. Six years ago there was a screening at NYU, the movie, and I hadn't seen it for 25 years. And my wife and I took our seven-year-old daughter, Diana, she's sitting next to me during the whole movie and she's squirming. Like, you know, I thought, oh, this isn't a good sign. And after it's over, I said, well, what did you think of the movie now? She's going to school in Washington, so she talks like one of these policy people. So when I said, I said, well, what do you think of the movie, she said, A, the guy playing you doesn't look like you at all. B, boring, boring, boring. You know, how to wipe out dad's ego, just like that. Now, my reaction, my first reaction, honestly, was, gee, there's a lot of detail in here. It is boring and it has that sense of names and amounts of money and how does that, how are people going to be captured? And we saw a rough cut. It wasn't as smooth. There wasn't, some of the parts were missing, I think, at that point, or at least they didn't go from one scene to the next scene. It was not like you would see a normal movie. And I was worried that it was going to be boring for people. But what is so interesting, and I think the heading of this is what's the legacy here. The legacy is when you're on a story like that, you go home with a lump in your stomach every night because you don't know. You've got good sources, you've checked, you've tried to verify, but you don't have the kind of certainty that leads to a good night's sleep. And you are churning it, you are living in a world of doubt and uncertainty. And that is so captured. And so that is what newspapering in the end is about. You are dealing with a government, Nixon, right up through Bush, Obama, incredibly secretive. It's very hard to kind of crack it and get inside and get the reality. And so by telling the story of what happened to Nixon from the point of view of the Washington Post, no one plays Nixon. He's on a TV screen. No one plays John Mitchell. He's on the phone telling you the Katie Graham is going to get her tit caught in a ringer. But all of these people are voices or images or pictures. And so they have obviously heard comments from people who are in the journalism business for years. And they say, this is what it's like. There was another thing that what we do have in common is when you talk about doubt, every artist, every artist that I know of, including myself, lives with doubt constantly. You never know what you're doing is good enough. In fact, you keep telling yourself it isn't. You doubt things that you do, but you do it out of passion, out of instinct, out of whatever. So I think we have that in common. A couple of things I might add to this thing that happened. One was when the film was over, we were rushing to go into distribution. And there was no time to do a trailer. And so we could, and as you could see tonight, I'm glad you showed that. We'll continue with the tradition. But what happened, we had a photographer who was a photographer that had covered the political scene, named Stanley Tredick. And he had covered the political scene. He knew how to capture the feeling of it. Well, he had done a lot of photography on the film. We didn't have time to put together a trailer. So what we did was we came up with a new idea where we'd take voiceover, we'd do clips of pieces of dialogue from the film, and run it over fast moving photo images. So there was no live film footage. And we used that as our trailer. And that was kind of a new thing that was exciting because it worked. Second thing that kind of excited me but eventually didn't work was I thought, how are we going to start this movie? I would love to find a way to jar the audience. They came up with this idea whereby, for those of you who've seen the film, it begins with the typewriter keys hitting the paper in a macro shot, June 17th, blah, blah, blah. So I thought, well, what if we run some film and we run a certain amount of seconds of film over white paper? And then I will try to see how much time an audience would wait to see a blank screen before they get uneasy. Like, come on, let's go. So the idea was that the curtains would be pulled back after intermission. The audience would come in, the lights are on, and there's a blank screen. From the time the audience got seated and the lights were coming down, we were running film of just the paper. But it looked like just the screen with nothing happening on it, but it was actually film running. So the curtains pulled back. There's actually film running on the white paper. But to the audience, it looks like nothing's happening yet. So the question was, how long before we had to figure out how many seconds we would run film on this white paper? So I would go to theaters and imagine an audience sitting there after the lights went down, lights went down the screen and there's nothing happening. At some point, they're going to say, hey, we're going to start that stuff. At that moment, when they start that, wham, we'd hit, it would go live, the film would have been running. So we figured that it would be 18 seconds from the time the lights went down and nothing was happening. The audience would start doing it. So 18 seconds from the film running to the typewriter key. And so it's the J from June that just shoots up, like a cannon shot. I always thought it was meant to sound like a bullet. That was part of the idea, was to give the power of a bullet. But it was also meant to shock the audience. So therefore, the thrill I got was when we previewed the film. Can't remember where it was. I think it was somewhere in Connecticut or something. I sat there and sure enough, because we had to talk to the theater owner and make sure they did the curtains and all that stuff. So the thing goes back, the lights go down, and just about 17 seconds in, hey, what, boom. And the audience jumped. I thought, ah, that's really a good feeling. Problem with it is that that was about the end of it, because theater owners didn't want to mess around with pulling curtains back. And there's an interesting, this has to do with Bradley as a manager. Carl and I were on the Metropolitan staff. And when we were first told that looks like the dimensions of this are greater, that there'd been wiretapping, maybe lives were in danger, Carl said, we've got to go see Bradley, skip the chain to come in totally. And you called him at 2 AM at home. We have to come see you. And so we go to his house, and he comes to the door in his jammies, or a bathrobe or something. And then we say, we can't talk in the house. We have to come out on the lawn. It looks like we're totally crazy. Right. And it was, you know what? In the middle of the night, you're going to take me out on a lawn in my underwear? And you kind of think, is he going to call the guys with the white coats to have these guys hauled off? And we tell him that this is all going to explode, that the dimensions are much larger. It involves parts of Watergate, the intelligence community, which we learned, which came out later. And Ben is kind of disbelieving in, you know, what the hell is going on here? And we've totally circumvented the chain of command. But in the movie, after we're done, he says, OK, you have to go back, take a bath, and then get back to work. We've got a lot. And he says, in the movie version, you know, not much is at stake here. Just the future of the country and the first amendment and so forth. And I remember seeing that the first time and saying, I don't think Bradley said that. I remember him saying something along the lines of a very private part of our anatomy is on the chopping block. That's right. And you better get it right. That's exactly right. OK, that's what he said. No, no. See, I thought we both thought he said that. That was later or earlier. And so I had this memory of the chopping block and then the every day we remembered the chopping. Yeah, that's right. And there's no mystery about the private part of the anatomy either. And then this version about the speech about the Constitution and the future of the country. So I went back and we kept notes to find out what he actually said and what he said after hearing all of this was not what we remembered and not what is in the movie, which is incredibly accurate. What Ben said is, what the hell do we do now? And if you think about it, it's exactly the right thing to say. We were in a new realm. Bob talks about doubt and uncertainty and that he as a leader was willing at that moment to say, I don't know what the hell we do now. And what's all new. And what's not in the movie is what happened the next day because it is the one day that all of us hit the Washington Post went nuts. We got to the office. And the first thing we know is we were told to go up to Catherine Graham's office. We went up to Catherine Graham's office and we were then taken up to the roof. Were there would supposedly be no electronics surveillance? We had never been on the roof of the Washington Post before. And we proceeded to have a strategy meeting on the roof of the Washington Post. We decided we would get our homes swept that day for bugging devices. And I think that might have happened once before. But it was like science fiction. It was so crazy. And we were really paranoid. Because what had happened that night was that we had been told that the dimensions of this. We understood the dimensions of this involved. Nixon did he might well be impeached. But what we didn't understand was how this permeated every aspect of what this presidency had been about, about the anti-war movement, about really what was Watergate. Watergate was an attempt by a criminal president of the United States to violate the Constitution, to try and determine who the nominee of the other party would be. That's what those so-called dirty tricks were about, so that the other party couldn't have a free and fair election in the United States. To wiretap reporters, to take the anti-war movement and undermine its credibility through a whole campaign of lies and distortion. And as Bob said, as we were told that night, it went everywhere. It was like a toxin that went through every aspect of what was under the control of the president of the United States. And it was so stunning, I cannot tell you. Well, and then even over almost every season, there's a new batch of Nixon tapes that come out that show new. I mean, listen to him talk. Alderman and Nixon talking about Teddy Kennedy, how they've got somebody in the Secret Service who's reporting on what he's doing in his personal life. No file drawer, no office, no telephone. As far as Nixon was concerned, they had to spy on everyone and find out what they were doing and get the dirt on them. That's what this was about. We now know how a breach is Watergate was. Bob Redford has said that the lesson of Watergate is that, again, no one's above the law. And that we can now question the morality of our president. It's no longer un-American to question the morality of our president. But there had to have been times during the investigation when you felt downright unpatriotic. In fact, the clip that we should have seen shows Ron Ziegler on television playing the victim. How did you feel at some point during the investigation somehow unpatriotic or un-American? I certainly didn't. I thought, in fact, what we saw was that the president of the United States was un-American. And one of the things that there's also one other thing that's not in the movie and it's not in the book. And that is that, and we should have put it in the book. And we didn't. It's not too late. Right. So about eight weeks after the break-in, we had discovered this slush fund that paid for the undercover activities at Watergate, other undercover activities that had been controlled. We knew then, by among others, John Mitchell, who had been the Attorney General of the United States, was the person closest politically to Nixon. And every day, Woodward and I would go into a little vending machine room, off the newsroom floor, and prepare for our meeting with the editors. It was a good cop, bad cop routine. And as I said earlier today, you can imagine who was the good cop and who was the bad cop. And on this occasion, I put a dime in the coffee machine and we were talking about how we were going to handle this Mitchell story and this secret fund and what it meant. I put the dime in the machine. I felt literally chill go down my spine, my neck. I turned to Woodward and I said, oh my god, this person is going to be impeached. And Woodward turned to me and said, you're right. And we can never use that word impeachment in this newspaper office because somebody here might think we have an agenda. I mean, we were really there to cover the story. It was not about animus to Richard Nixon or anything else. Yeah, it had a direct answer to your question. I never felt unpatriotic. I felt just the opposite. The opposite, absolutely. The idea that some people took a position, oh my god, we can't stand to know this. My attitude was we can't stand not to know. Yeah, and that it's exactly so there was never that question. There also was the question of risk. And as we've thought about it and talked about it over the years, our careers were at risk, but they were just beginning. The real risk was Bradley and Catherine Graham. They had to be absolutely right. They had to be careful. And what they did, because they supported us, we lived and operated in a bubble. We were, it was that newsroom. It was going out to meet in an underground garage or to go out and knock on doors or go see the bookkeeper or use loan the treasurer. And there was never any sense that, I mean, they absorbed all of the risk. We didn't feel endangered the way they did. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Because they were going to close down Catherine Graham's newspaper. We learned later one of the secret strategies was to get people to challenge the FCC TV licenses that the Washington Post company owned. And they did. A bunch of Nixon people did this. And the stock, which had just gone public, was in the toilet because of that. And so there was business side jeopardy and journalistic peril in all of this for them. And they're kind of going and what? Journalistic peril beyond the Washington Post, too. Because you had had the great president of the Pentagon papers, this same administration in which it had been shown. The Nixon administration had shown how far it was willing to go to suppress the truth even about previous presidencies in Vietnam. The press had won. And the claim in Watergate, once again, was that we were endangering national security. Kissinger was getting up every other day and saying we were endangering with emboldening the enemy in Vietnam. And had they succeeded, had they succeeded the effects, and that's why that piece of Bradley's speech is so great in the movie. Because it's absolutely prophetic. Back to a movie you talked about earlier, Bob, which is the Canada. Canada takes a very dim view of politics. Clearly, you can't look at politics in a very bright way with all the presidents. You recently said that your view of politics is so dim, it's almost black. I'm wondering, has there been a time between the middle 1970s when you did those films and today where you were optimistic about our political system? I felt that maybe I'll just say this in summary here. Put some things together. What drew me to it was something that was bred much earlier in my life. I was saying earlier today that I grew up in a lower working class neighborhood in Los Angeles. And my out was through sports and art. And I remember there was a lot of, it was at the end of the second award just after. There was a lot of sloganeering. And the big one that hit me, there was a lot of sloganeering, which I understood. We were in a very patriotic mode. We were winning the war, just won the war. People were coming home. All this sloganeering, it was a red, white and blue time. And I remember being told, it isn't how whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game that's important. And through my own experience in sports, I realized that was a lie. That everything mattered in this country as to whether you won or not. It was a country that was really kind of obsessed with winning. And so as a kid, I would have these, they would give these tests. I don't know what they call them now. I guess maybe SATs or something like that. But it was called the Iowa test when I was a kid. And they would go through, you had geography, you had this, you had that, you had science math. And one page was dedicated to what's wrong with this picture. And it was, and I couldn't wait to get to that. And I always got it because it was, they would show you a picture that was so perfect. There was a woman standing on a porch with a broom talking to a mailman two steps down. The house was on a corner. Across the intersection was the school bus park. Everything was perfect. And you just looked at it and you said, well, there's nothing wrong with this picture. Everything's fine. But when you really looked at it and you dug deep into it, you realized she was only wearing one sock. Or there was only one O in the word school bus. And I used to get so excited about that. Now why? I don't know, but you put two things together being told certain things where the truth was maybe underneath that. And also that the picture you were given, you, is that really the picture that's true? So I think that led towards this film, that what's the story underneath the story we think we know? And as I, as somebody asked me not too long ago, they said there was an anniversary of all the presidents man, the book. And I said, well, for me, now that I've grown older and I can look back over my life and time and look back at history, I guess I can say I feel sorry that America doesn't seem to learn from its own history. It doesn't have enough of an interest in its own history to learn from the mistakes it's made to correct them. As a result, we keep repeating. And these repeats keep happening. And so therefore in my lifetime, we came out of the Second World War and my memory had the first scandal being the McCarthy hearing. And then came the assassination of our president, the shock to our system, our belief system, the shock of the quiz shows that we're ripping the entire country off for the sake of money. Then came Watergate, then came Iran Contra, and then the last several years. So I look at that from a treetop position and I say, this keeps repeating itself and it's always the same reason. It's always a greed factor, self-interest, something like that. And what gets threatened is the very staple of our country, the constitution, the rule of law, and so forth. Well, when this came, I can say this now. I mean, I was just obsessed with making this film. But now I look back and I say, well, they say, how do you feel about that? And I say, well, I feel very privileged to have stumbled into something that became a national event that I could be somehow part of. But it was a moment in time. Now, this is gonna sound cynical to you guys and I think Bob and Carl corrected. But to answer your question, I said, that was a moment in time. I never dreamed that it would slide so far off the back end after that. I had some notion that this would lock into position the value of journalism. And journalism had its own ethic or getting two people to go on record before you could print something. And to see it devolve so fast, shocked me. And then to see the results of it that suddenly had gossip passing for facts, you had competition where money was the issue and therefore people were competing just to get the story and forget whether it was true or not or right or not. And I saw that and I thought something has fallen off here. So when you ask the question, I guess that's sort of my answer, perspective of how valuable journalism is and how valuable good journalism is and how much we need it. Now we're in a whole different world, a whole different condition of the internet creating a whole other changes, the only thing that really is gonna happen. So we're in this big change. My hope is that the Bob and Carl's, I don't think you can make this film today because everything's sort of known already. The candidate you couldn't make today because we know what happens behind the scenes. So my hope would be in this new generation coming, which I have a very high hopes for. And the new condition we're living in that we can bring back what Bob and Carl in the Washington Post did at a very key point in our history. Your film is very important and this story is so important because it shows the importance of the Fourth Estate as another check in the balance of power. So my question to you, Carl, Bob, are we still, Bob, we're talking about how the landscape of media has changed. Is the Fourth Estate still in a position to do that or is strong a position to do that? As it was in 1972 through 1974. I think that what has changed is the landscape of the United States. And that means the people of the country as well as journalism. But particularly the culture itself. That to a terrible extent, what Bob Redford is talking about is people in media, in quotes, giving readers, viewers, consumers what they want. And what people want, more people want today, I think, in this culture, instead of real news, instead of the best obtainable version of the truth, instead of traditional standards of what's important and what's relevant and what's contextual and what's truthful, too many people want and we supply too much of information that is merely intended to confirm what people already believe. The ideologies and prejudices that they already bring to the national debate or to the local debate. So that truth, which really, what is good reporting really about, the best obtainable version of the truth, is devalued in the culture itself. And you can't separate journalism from that because we're somewhat reflective of that culture and at the same time, there are great reporters all over the place, in newspapers, even with the stripped condition of the print press today, in magazines, on the internet, in new institutions like ProPublica, which just won the Pulitzer Prize. The question in my mind is, if this story Watergate broke today, how would people receive it? And my tentative guess would be in a very different way because what happened in Watergate was the American system worked. The press did its job, the Congress did its job, the judiciary did its job, the Republican party did its job and insisted that a president of its own party had to leave office. Would that happen today? So I think those are the questions that become relevant. But here's, I think real quickly to answer, the remedy for people in the business of journalism, book writing, whatever you're doing to try to find out what happened is to just stick to it. Absolutely. I mean, there've just been too many times over the decades where I realized, we just aren't so smart. We miss all kinds of things. We could have missed what happened in Watergate at 25 points in the story, the evolution of it. The thread of disclosure could have just been cut. You didn't go see the bookkeeper. I didn't meet Mark Felt in the White House when I was working in the Navy. All kinds of things might have happened. And you get things fixed. And I wanna tell this quickly, this anecdote. 30 days after Nixon resigned, Ford is president. Some of you may recall. Ford went on television early on a Sunday morning announcing he was giving Nixon a full pardon for Watergate. Now, of course, Ford went on television early on a Sunday morning, hoping no one would notice. But it was noticed. But not by me. I was asleep in a hotel room in New York and my colleague here called me and woke me up and said, have you heard? And I said, I haven't heard anything. And Carl, who then and now has the ability to say what occurred with the fewest words and the most drama, said, the son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch. He got it. Yeah, I even figured it out. I figured it out. I was able to decode this. And we felt, I think like lots of people in the country, there was evidence of it that there was something dirty about the pardon. There was evidence of the deal, the question of where's justice? Why does the person at the top get off and 40 people go to jail? Hundreds of people literally have their lives wrecked with this. And I thought that. And I think it would. We both did. We both did. And then I, That goes on, doesn't it? Pardon? Look at Mark Rich. Yeah, yeah. Leonard Paltier is still in prison. Yeah, that's right. Mark Rich, he gives me. He still goes on. The money. You follow the money, always. But I then 25 years later decided to look at the legacy of Watergate in the presidency from Ford to Clinton. And I called Gerald Ford up and said, I'd like to interview you about the pardon. Figuring there is no way he would agree. But he agreed. And I interviewed him for hours in New York, his home in Colorado, his main home in Rancho Mirage, California. I had the time. And again, this is the time against the problem. To read all the memoirs. Get the legal memos about the pardon. And talk to everyone who was alive. And then do a draft. And then go talk to Ford. And go talk to everyone again. And it was Ford who convinced me. He said, look, I didn't pardon Nixon for Nixon. I didn't pardon Nixon for myself. I really pardoned Nixon for the country. We had to get Nixon off the front page into history. We had, if there had been more investigations, which were ongoing, an indictment of Nixon, a trial, jailing of Nixon, we would have had two or three more years of Watergate. And he said, plaintively said, I needed my own presidency. I wrote this in the book Shadow about the legacy of Watergate. In Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of John F. Kennedy called me up and said, she and her uncle, Teddy Kennedy, had read this and think that's right. That in fact, it was a gutsy thing for Ford to do. And we're going to give the Profiles and Courage Award to Gerald Ford for pardoning Nixon. And so there at the Kennedy Library, months later, is Teddy Kennedy saying what we all, as human beings, hate to say, I was wrong? This was in the tradition of a leader going against the grain, connecting his office in duty to the larger purpose of the country, and preempting a process, acting aggressively, taking immense political risk, because I think it probably cost him the presidency. But he did the right thing. Now, sobering for the journalist is to think it's this way. Be so sure this is dirty, this is a deal that's unjust. And then you subject it to the test of history and time and neutral in-depth inquiry. And it turns out to be the exact opposite. Happens time and time again. And it puts you in the mode of not judging things too quickly, not judging things until you've done a real extensive examination. And when I talked to George Bush about the Iraq War, member at the end asking, how do you think history will judge your Iraq War? And Bush throws up his hands and says, history, we won't know, will all be dead. Sounds like George Bush to me. Exactly. But he's right. We don't know on lots of these things. He's right. Will all be dead? No, he's right. We don't know how history is going to judge all of these things. I think we do know how history is going to judge Watergate because there's so much evidence in the tapes. And quite frankly, Carl and I and Bradley and Catherine Graham OU. A big debt of gratitude for what you did in this movement. Let me go back to you talked about the part. Let me go back a month to the climax of the Watergate story, which is August 9th, 1974. And the resignation of Richard Nixon, the first president to resign in the history of this country. What did that feel like? You know, kids throw around the word, my kids, awesome all the time. And I remember feeling this incredible awe. And Bob and I were in the office. And we watched that speech. And the post handed out baloney sandwiches for those who wanted to stay that night, remember. Catherine, the first thing Catherine Graham came downstairs. And she said, no gloating. Let me tell you, there was no reason to gloat. It was a moment of such awe that the system had worked. And we had been a part of that working. And the right thing had happened. I would think it would make you rejoice and be sad. Yes, that's absolutely right. And also one of the things I think that led to the next book, which was The Final Days, which was about Nixon's last year, was a sense of empathy for Nixon. That this was also the next part of this story, and it continues today, is a great human story about this tortured man. And Bob was just, we've both been to the Nixon Library. Bob was just out there the other night. Why don't you tell him? Well, no, but that day, he went on television on August 8th and said, I'm resigning. And then did it on the 9th. And he had in the East Room of the White House his staff and friends and cabinet officers and so forth. And some of you may recall seeing this, because it was live on television. He had his two daughters, two son-in-laws, wife standing there. And there was no text. It was Nixon Raw. Free association. Talking about his mother, his father, people in the staff were sitting there in the front row, just really worried that he would be the first person to go off the edge psychologically on live national television. Because he was churning. It was emotional. But then in this, Nixon should get some credit for. Waved his hand the way he would do that. Like here's what I called you all here to say. And then he said this. Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself. Now think of that's the code. The piston in the Nixon era was hate. It was driving everything. And the day Nixon had to leave, amazingly, the self-discovery, the discovery of what happened to me and to be able to get up and tell the world, don't hate it will, in the end, get not your enemies, but yourself. Bob, you talked about the great antipathy that you've had for Nixon for many, many years, well before he entered the White House. He doesn't appear in your film except on television. Did you ever have feelings of sympathy for this very tragic figure? No, I didn't. What Bob is saying, I completely get. And I think it's great. But he never earned my sympathy because of he was so full of self-loathing and he carried that vibe with him. But the reason I had a problem with Nixon was when I was a kid, I received a sports award during Boys Week, and I was about 13. And the governor was Earl Warren, California, and Nixon was the senator. And I heard my dad talking at the dinner table. I was going to school with the son of this guy, Murray Chotner, who was the Halderman to Nixon early in his life when he was in Congress. The hatchet man. Yeah. And Kenny, the son, was in my class. So my mom was a friend of his mother's. Mother's very sweet and nice. My mom liked his mom. My dad was railing against Murray Chotner because of what he did designing the Helen Hagen Douglas hatchet job. All of that went past me. I didn't care much about it. I was too young. I was too interested in other things. But when I went to receive this award, you walk across the stage like you do during your graduation at high school or something. And they were up there talking. And I wasn't paying any attention. And when I went in, he would greet and give and greet and give and so forth. And he came up, and he handed me a ribbon, and he shook by it. And he says, wow, wow, wow. And I was struck by such a dark vibe that I got. And it was nothing more than it was purely visceral, but it was really just whoo. And what I felt was total artificiality in the man and something dark and something unpleasant about the guy. That's all I could say. I hope there's a photo of that. I've mixed in giving you the, you know. Anyway, I'll bet there is some place. In terms of what being on the civilian side of things, these guys are reporters or not. I was on the civilian side seeing what happened and how he treated people. And the self-loathing that was at the heart of this guy that manifests itself in so many of the things these guys have talked about. Because I was a citizen at the receiving end of that, and you could see through it, I was not sympathetic. And so I think there was a wonderful exit. I wonder if he really felt that and he went to his grave for that. Then there's some retribution there. That would be great. But during his time, my time, I was not sympathetic. Well, interestingly, I mean, the evidence available is it was a real fleeting moment of recognition because two minutes later, he was like that, getting into the helicopter and there ensued for the rest of his life, a campaign to declare that no, everything he did was absolutely in the best interest. It was the only time he ever talked about the best interest of the country was after he had left. If you listen to the tapes, what's so extraordinary about the tapes as awful and toxic and poisonous as they are is what's not on the tapes. Not a single instance where Richard Nixon, not to mention Henry Kissinger and some others around him, at no point does one of them, but especially Nixon say, we ought to do what's best for the country, not once. We have outside of this auditorium a number of pictures from the high points in the life of this now 40-year-old institution. And I can tell you, I'm very eager to put up a picture of this evening of you all and the wonderful evening that you've given us tonight. Thank you so much for coming.