Name: John Ehrlichman on Letterman, March 25, 1982 audio fixed
Uploaded: 2019-04-09T15:28:10.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'John Ehrlichman on Letterman, March 25, 1982 audio fixed' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-04-09. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'John Ehrlichman on Letterman, March 25, 1982 audio fixed' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-04-09. Transcript available.

Thank you. Now it's time to sit back, relax, light up a smoking monkey, and
enjoy the rest of the show.
John Ehrlichman not only was a presidential advisor to Richard Nixon, he also
made some
nifty home movies with a Super 8 camera of the happier times, as they say, of
the Nixon years.
Would you please welcome, to narrate this exclusive footage, Mr. John Ehrlichman.
John, pleasure to meet you. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you very
much for bringing your home movie footage, and I think we might as well just
get right into that.
Tell us what we're going to be looking at, and we can talk over the footage as
we see it, taken by you on a Super 8 camera.
And take a look at the monitors in the studio, and as we like to say at home,
the TV should work.
And what are we looking at, John?
We're looking at flowers in the office. Great florist in the White House. Fresh
flowers every day.
There's a meeting in Bob Haldeman's office. There's Ron Ziegler.
What year are we...
He was a press secretary. This would be about 1969.
There's Bryce Harlow, who was a congressional liaison man.
There's Haldeman by his custom-made desk.
There's my son, Tom, sitting by the swimming pool in San Clemente.
And there's Peter, who's my older boy.
And I don't know why they have those towels, but those are their towels.
Probably nude underneath would be a guess.
That's as close as we got to a hippie in those days.
That's Peter with his brand-new mustache. That's Peter's first mustache.
I don't know what that's all about.
Fingerprint on the towel.
The direction of these films is wonderful, John.
Thank you.
I'm sort of hoping this will turn into a whole new career.
There's Richard Nixon and his dog.
There's a hummingbird.
Lots of hummingbirds at San Clemente.
And whales. Lots of whales at San Clemente.
That's Lyndon B. Johnson.
And there are the president and the ex-president
and a motorcade of golf carts.
And that's John Mitchell and Martha and their daughter.
Good heavens.
And more hummingbirds.
More hummingbirds, yeah.
I was very fond of hummingbirds in those days.
There's Spiral Agnew.
And George Romney and some guys from the cabinet.
And there's Henry Kissinger.
Boy, oh boy.
Remember, you saw it here first.
Yeah, I don't believe I've ever seen Henry topless.
Yeah.
And that's his little boy, David, and my little boy, Bob,
who aren't little anymore.
And that's when Henry had all his hair
and I had more of mine than there I am.
Great beached whale.
We had a nifty house that year in San Clemente
about ten blocks from the office.
The president would go out there in the summertime.
That's my daughter, Jody.
We had a slide in the swimming pool.
And, uh, why are they laughing?
You know, that, as I told you before,
it's so amazing because for all practical purposes,
those look like 99% of the home movies ever shot by anyone in the United States
except for the fact Henry Kissinger, Spiro Agnew,
Richard Nixon, Martha, and John Mitchell.
What is your reaction now when you look back on obviously more pleasant
circumstances
for all of those folks?
Well, those were just the folks that lived in the neighborhood, you know.
Yeah.
It was that neighborhood in those days.
And there's a lot of interesting stuff going on.
There was an interesting discussion with Henry Kissinger the other night
and Garrick Utley.
Yeah, I saw that.
And he was ruminating about the political people that he had dealt with.
And he said that he felt that Nixon was destined to have Watergate
or the way it came about or the way that it ended up was his destiny.
Yeah, that's a little metaphysical for me.
I think, in fact, once the Watergate break-in took place,
Nixon couldn't leave it alone.
He loved that kind of intrigue and political machinations and all of that.
And he, you know, drew it to him.
He got himself involved in it at a time when he could have just stayed away
from it.
Now, he was advised to stay away from it, right?
Oh, sure.
I mean, did you suggest to him just to leave it alone?
How would that have happened?
We were walking down that beach at San Clemente.
And it was within a couple of weeks of that break-in.
And we discussed the importance of his just pulling up the drawbridge
and putting alligators in the moat and just staying as far away from that as he
could possibly get.
And he agreed with that intellectually, but he just couldn't leave it alone.
I want to find out a little more about that and other matters with Mr. John Ehrlichman.
We'll be back after station identification, folks.
Paul Schaefer, thank you very much, gentlemen.
We're back with John Ehrlichman later in this half hour, author of the runaway
bestseller, Gorky Park.
Martin Cruz Smith will be joining us and we'll take a look at some new TV shows
for NBC.
We talked about, or you were talking about walking on the beach with Nixon and
saying,
leave this sucker alone, everything will blow over and be all right.
Was that a possibility that everything, people would have just forgotten about
the break-in and so forth?
Oh, no, no, but he could have kept space between the presidency and the crime
itself.
But by, I didn't know it, but at the time that we were walking on the beach, it
was already too late.
He'd already gotten himself so deep into it.
And by his own choice?
Yeah, oh, sure.
And why couldn't he leave it alone?
Why couldn't he just?
That's the way he was built.
He couldn't leave alone how to serve the salads at the state dinners.
You know, he really got himself into minutiae a lot.
So he was, what you're saying, he was a bad administrator and that was part of
his downfall.
Either that or he was, Haldeman was a good administrator and Richard Nixon didn't
have enough to do a lot of the time.
And so he got himself into things.
Too much free time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, you have done time for what we're discussing here or peripheral activities.
And you feel that had Nixon testified at your proceedings, you probably would
not have done time, right?
Who knows?
Who knows?
The mood at the time of those trials was so pervasive as a result of all the
televised Senate hearings that, you know, you can't tell how those cases would
have turned out.
We've never seen television coverage like that in this country before or since.
And it obviously had an impact on how things turned out.
When, I believe, Nixon was talking to David Frost, you were incarcerated at the
time?
That's right.
And he made reference to your firing and also to the firing of Haldeman.
How did that sit with you as you were in?
Not real well.
Yeah.
He kind of dumped on us.
And, matter of fact, I was listening to it on a radio.
We couldn't get television where I was.
We could get some television, but there was a big mountain in the way, so you
couldn't get PBS or whatever the network was.
So I had to listen to it on the radio.
Yeah.
And I was very resentful of the way he handled that.
The name of the book, of course, is Witness to Power, and it seems to me, I've
read the first half of it, that that's what you're portraying yourself to be, a
guy who was in the room when the stuff was going on.
Is that a fair assessment?
No.
Oh, no.
As you get farther into it, and particularly in the last couple of chapters, I
try and be very plain about what I did.
Yeah.
And how I got myself in trouble.
What did you do?
Well, I let myself get into the money, the passage of money from this great
trust fund that Nixon had in California, of old campaign money, to the burglars.
Mm-hmm.
And it was being given to them for an illegal purpose, so that made me a co-conspirator.
Yeah.
So, and remember, kids, don't try this at home.
Mm-hmm.
The other thing about the first part of the book which fascinated me was it
seemed like you were reluctant, really.
You never, in the beginning at least, jumped on this man's bandwagon and said,
this guy is a political savior.
You sort of assessed him and walked away, and then, in fact, at one point, you
went to him and said, you've got to quit drinking if I'm going to come to work
with you.
Yeah, that's true.
And I wasn't even aware of the fact that the guy tossed him back.
Well, he didn't toss him back, not all that many, but he was very susceptible.
You've probably known people who could take one drink and, you know, and they're
wiped out.
Yeah.
But he was like that, particularly when he was keyed up.
Uh-huh.
And a couple of drinks, and he was just absolutely blitzed.
So, he had to, I didn't feel like I wanted to go out and campaign for him.
No.
If he was going to blow it, you know, and so we had a very frank talk about it.
Did he abstain, then, for the rest of his time in the White House once he got
in?
To my satisfaction, yeah.
I never saw it get in his way.
There was never a point when the President of the United States, as far as you
know, was just out on his feet?
Not when he was on duty, certainly.
When is the President off duty?
Well, he's off duty at Camp David on the weekends, for instance.
And, as I say, when the organization is working well, you know, there's all
this business about not waking Ronald Reagan to tell him about the incident in
Libya.
The fact is, if the President's got things running right, you don't have to
wake him.
It's a symbolic thing if you wake him almost.
Because everybody knows their job, and they know what to do, and they do it.
Let's go back to Kissinger.
There was a rivalry there, I guess, between Kissinger and Nixon.
Yeah, but it was a silent rivalry.
It was never out in the open.
Each one of them cares a whole lot about his place in history.
And there was a good deal of feeling on both sides that the other guy was going
to get the credit.
And so, I think that was the reason for the taping system, as a matter of fact.
Yeah, well, taping now, as we've come and said...
Everybody does it, yeah.
Yeah, apparently it was just operating, standard operating procedure.
Hello, hello.
It's hard for me to imagine Nixon, or anybody in that administration, being fun
to be with.
Was it...
Henry was fun.
Henry was fun.
Yeah, Henry was a lot of fun, and he was the butt of a lot of practical jokes,
which he took in very good grace.
And particularly at the time of those movies, which was 69, his kids and mine
and the families kind of spent time together socially,
and it was a great pleasure.
He progressively got upper-tighter as time went along.
But you were actually playing practical jokes on the Secretary of State.
No, he was National Security Advisor in those days.
And what were you doing to the guy?
Well, he had a girlfriend named Jill St. John.
And I sent over to the motion picture producers, and I got a whole lot of stills
of Jill St. John with Frank Sinatra and with John Wayne and with, you know, a
lot of people.
And we had a caption contest.
And everybody put captions under the pictures, and then we put them in envelopes,
one to an envelope.
Stamped, top secret, eyes only, you know, all this.
And we sent them to Henry one an hour through the courier service.
Wherever, every hour.
Yeah, wherever he was.
And, you know, he'd be sitting with the president, and one of these big envelopes
would come in.
And Nixon said, go ahead, Henry, open it.
Oh, no, that's all right, Mr. President.
The captions were a little rude, trifle crude.
And they were coming to him in the middle of the night and, you know, during
briefings and all this kind of stuff.
He took that in quite a good place.
He took it pretty well.
Oh, yeah, not bad.
It's good to know that there was a lot of important work being done.
Yes, it did.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine it functioning without some of that
goofing around.
Oh, you've got to ease it up.
That whole, the Watergate situation just deteriorated exponentially, geometrically.
And the Ford taking the office for the pardon, was that a deal, an actual deal,
an unwritten deal?
I suspect so.
I don't know.
See, I was fired and long gone by that.
But I have never seen Richard Nixon take a step into darkness.
He always knew where the next step was going to land.
And I can't imagine him resigning without knowing that he was going to get the
pardon.
So it seemed like a...
It was the right thing, though.
I mean, Ford was used in good sense, I think, because it would have torn up the
government.
Everything would have ground to an absolute stop.
What would that procedure have been?
Where would it have gone?
Well, it could have gone two ways.
It would either impeach him in the Congress, in which case there wouldn't have
been any legislation for about eight or nine months,
which might not have been all bad.
Or it would have gone into the criminal courts.
And everybody who worked in the White House, Hague, and all those people would
have to be witnesses.
It would have been impossible for Ford to do any business.
Have you seen Richard Nixon recently?
No, I haven't talked to him since 1973.
Roughly ten years.
Yeah.
If you ran into him in the hallway or in the audience, he's here frequently.
How would that be?
Were you ever close to the guy, a friend?
No, we had a professional relationship.
We didn't have a social relationship because he didn't believe in socializing
with the staff.
And so, you know, the professional association ended, and so that was the end
of it.
Do you resent the guy because you did time and he did not?
No.
He's paid his dues, I think.
Yeah.
That's the only thing he wanted in his life, was to be President of the United
States.
And to have it, you know, taken away from him or have him see himself blow it
as he did is a really cruel fate for him.
Okay.
This is interesting.
Mr. John Ehrlichman, thank you very much, sir, for bringing your home movies
here.
The book is Witness to Power.
We're going to pause.
We'll be right back.

John Ehrlichman on Letterman, March 25, 1982 audio fixed

Thank you. Now it's time to sit back, relax, light up a smoking monkey, and
enjoy the rest of the show.
John Ehrlichman not only was a presidential advisor to Richard Nixon, he also
made some
nifty home movies with a Super 8 camera of the happier times, as they say, of
the Nixon years.
Would you please welcome, to narrate this exclusive footage, Mr. John Ehrlichman.
John, pleasure to meet you. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you very
much for bringing your home movie footage, and I think we might as well just
get right into that.
Tell us what we're going to be looking at, and we can talk over the footage as
we see it, taken by you on a Super 8 camera.
And take a look at the monitors in the studio, and as we like to say at home,
the TV should work.
And what are we looking at, John?
We're looking at flowers in the office. Great florist in the White House. Fresh
flowers every day.
There's a meeting in Bob Haldeman's office. There's Ron Ziegler.
What year are we...
He was a press secretary. This would be about 1969.
There's Bryce Harlow, who was a congressional liaison man.
There's Haldeman by his custom-made desk.
There's my son, Tom, sitting by the swimming pool in San Clemente.
And there's Peter, who's my older boy.
And I don't know why they have those towels, but those are their towels.
Probably nude underneath would be a guess.
That's as close as we got to a hippie in those days.
That's Peter with his brand-new mustache. That's Peter's first mustache.
I don't know what that's all about.
Fingerprint on the towel.
The direction of these films is wonderful, John.
Thank you.
I'm sort of hoping this will turn into a whole new career.
There's Richard Nixon and his dog.
There's a hummingbird.
Lots of hummingbirds at San Clemente.
And whales. Lots of whales at San Clemente.
That's Lyndon B. Johnson.
And there are the president and the ex-president
and a motorcade of golf carts.
And that's John Mitchell and Martha and their daughter.
Good heavens.
And more hummingbirds.
More hummingbirds, yeah.
I was very fond of hummingbirds in those days.
There's Spiral Agnew.
And George Romney and some guys from the cabinet.
And there's Henry Kissinger.
Boy, oh boy.
Remember, you saw it here first.
Yeah, I don't believe I've ever seen Henry topless.
Yeah.
And that's his little boy, David, and my little boy, Bob,
who aren't little anymore.
And that's when Henry had all his hair
and I had more of mine than there I am.
Great beached whale.
We had a nifty house that year in San Clemente
about ten blocks from the office.
The president would go out there in the summertime.
That's my daughter, Jody.
We had a slide in the swimming pool.
And, uh, why are they laughing?
You know, that, as I told you before,
it's so amazing because for all practical purposes,
those look like 99% of the home movies ever shot by anyone in the United States
except for the fact Henry Kissinger, Spiro Agnew,
Richard Nixon, Martha, and John Mitchell.
What is your reaction now when you look back on obviously more pleasant
circumstances
for all of those folks?
Well, those were just the folks that lived in the neighborhood, you know.
Yeah.
It was that neighborhood in those days.
And there's a lot of interesting stuff going on.
There was an interesting discussion with Henry Kissinger the other night
and Garrick Utley.
Yeah, I saw that.
And he was ruminating about the political people that he had dealt with.
And he said that he felt that Nixon was destined to have Watergate
or the way it came about or the way that it ended up was his destiny.
Yeah, that's a little metaphysical for me.
I think, in fact, once the Watergate break-in took place,
Nixon couldn't leave it alone.
He loved that kind of intrigue and political machinations and all of that.
And he, you know, drew it to him.
He got himself involved in it at a time when he could have just stayed away
from it.
Now, he was advised to stay away from it, right?
Oh, sure.
I mean, did you suggest to him just to leave it alone?
How would that have happened?
We were walking down that beach at San Clemente.
And it was within a couple of weeks of that break-in.
And we discussed the importance of his just pulling up the drawbridge
and putting alligators in the moat and just staying as far away from that as he
could possibly get.
And he agreed with that intellectually, but he just couldn't leave it alone.
I want to find out a little more about that and other matters with Mr. John Ehrlichman.
We'll be back after station identification, folks.
Paul Schaefer, thank you very much, gentlemen.
We're back with John Ehrlichman later in this half hour, author of the runaway
bestseller, Gorky Park.
Martin Cruz Smith will be joining us and we'll take a look at some new TV shows
for NBC.
We talked about, or you were talking about walking on the beach with Nixon and
saying,
leave this sucker alone, everything will blow over and be all right.
Was that a possibility that everything, people would have just forgotten about
the break-in and so forth?
Oh, no, no, but he could have kept space between the presidency and the crime
itself.
But by, I didn't know it, but at the time that we were walking on the beach, it
was already too late.
He'd already gotten himself so deep into it.
And by his own choice?
Yeah, oh, sure.
And why couldn't he leave it alone?
Why couldn't he just?
That's the way he was built.
He couldn't leave alone how to serve the salads at the state dinners.
You know, he really got himself into minutiae a lot.
So he was, what you're saying, he was a bad administrator and that was part of
his downfall.
Either that or he was, Haldeman was a good administrator and Richard Nixon didn't
have enough to do a lot of the time.
And so he got himself into things.
Too much free time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, you have done time for what we're discussing here or peripheral activities.
And you feel that had Nixon testified at your proceedings, you probably would
not have done time, right?
Who knows?
Who knows?
The mood at the time of those trials was so pervasive as a result of all the
televised Senate hearings that, you know, you can't tell how those cases would
have turned out.
We've never seen television coverage like that in this country before or since.
And it obviously had an impact on how things turned out.
When, I believe, Nixon was talking to David Frost, you were incarcerated at the
time?
That's right.
And he made reference to your firing and also to the firing of Haldeman.
How did that sit with you as you were in?
Not real well.
Yeah.
He kind of dumped on us.
And, matter of fact, I was listening to it on a radio.
We couldn't get television where I was.
We could get some television, but there was a big mountain in the way, so you
couldn't get PBS or whatever the network was.
So I had to listen to it on the radio.
Yeah.
And I was very resentful of the way he handled that.
The name of the book, of course, is Witness to Power, and it seems to me, I've
read the first half of it, that that's what you're portraying yourself to be, a
guy who was in the room when the stuff was going on.
Is that a fair assessment?
No.
Oh, no.
As you get farther into it, and particularly in the last couple of chapters, I
try and be very plain about what I did.
Yeah.
And how I got myself in trouble.
What did you do?
Well, I let myself get into the money, the passage of money from this great
trust fund that Nixon had in California, of old campaign money, to the burglars.
Mm-hmm.
And it was being given to them for an illegal purpose, so that made me a co-conspirator.
Yeah.
So, and remember, kids, don't try this at home.
Mm-hmm.
The other thing about the first part of the book which fascinated me was it
seemed like you were reluctant, really.
You never, in the beginning at least, jumped on this man's bandwagon and said,
this guy is a political savior.
You sort of assessed him and walked away, and then, in fact, at one point, you
went to him and said, you've got to quit drinking if I'm going to come to work
with you.
Yeah, that's true.
And I wasn't even aware of the fact that the guy tossed him back.
Well, he didn't toss him back, not all that many, but he was very susceptible.
You've probably known people who could take one drink and, you know, and they're
wiped out.
Yeah.
But he was like that, particularly when he was keyed up.
Uh-huh.
And a couple of drinks, and he was just absolutely blitzed.
So, he had to, I didn't feel like I wanted to go out and campaign for him.
No.
If he was going to blow it, you know, and so we had a very frank talk about it.
Did he abstain, then, for the rest of his time in the White House once he got
in?
To my satisfaction, yeah.
I never saw it get in his way.
There was never a point when the President of the United States, as far as you
know, was just out on his feet?
Not when he was on duty, certainly.
When is the President off duty?
Well, he's off duty at Camp David on the weekends, for instance.
And, as I say, when the organization is working well, you know, there's all
this business about not waking Ronald Reagan to tell him about the incident in
Libya.
The fact is, if the President's got things running right, you don't have to
wake him.
It's a symbolic thing if you wake him almost.
Because everybody knows their job, and they know what to do, and they do it.
Let's go back to Kissinger.
There was a rivalry there, I guess, between Kissinger and Nixon.
Yeah, but it was a silent rivalry.
It was never out in the open.
Each one of them cares a whole lot about his place in history.
And there was a good deal of feeling on both sides that the other guy was going
to get the credit.
And so, I think that was the reason for the taping system, as a matter of fact.
Yeah, well, taping now, as we've come and said...
Everybody does it, yeah.
Yeah, apparently it was just operating, standard operating procedure.
Hello, hello.
It's hard for me to imagine Nixon, or anybody in that administration, being fun
to be with.
Was it...
Henry was fun.
Henry was fun.
Yeah, Henry was a lot of fun, and he was the butt of a lot of practical jokes,
which he took in very good grace.
And particularly at the time of those movies, which was 69, his kids and mine
and the families kind of spent time together socially,
and it was a great pleasure.
He progressively got upper-tighter as time went along.
But you were actually playing practical jokes on the Secretary of State.
No, he was National Security Advisor in those days.
And what were you doing to the guy?
Well, he had a girlfriend named Jill St. John.
And I sent over to the motion picture producers, and I got a whole lot of stills
of Jill St. John with Frank Sinatra and with John Wayne and with, you know, a
lot of people.
And we had a caption contest.
And everybody put captions under the pictures, and then we put them in envelopes,
one to an envelope.
Stamped, top secret, eyes only, you know, all this.
And we sent them to Henry one an hour through the courier service.
Wherever, every hour.
Yeah, wherever he was.
And, you know, he'd be sitting with the president, and one of these big envelopes
would come in.
And Nixon said, go ahead, Henry, open it.
Oh, no, that's all right, Mr. President.
The captions were a little rude, trifle crude.
And they were coming to him in the middle of the night and, you know, during
briefings and all this kind of stuff.
He took that in quite a good place.
He took it pretty well.
Oh, yeah, not bad.
It's good to know that there was a lot of important work being done.
Yes, it did.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine it functioning without some of that
goofing around.
Oh, you've got to ease it up.
That whole, the Watergate situation just deteriorated exponentially, geometrically.
And the Ford taking the office for the pardon, was that a deal, an actual deal,
an unwritten deal?
I suspect so.
I don't know.
See, I was fired and long gone by that.
But I have never seen Richard Nixon take a step into darkness.
He always knew where the next step was going to la