Reflecting on 9/11 with Garrett Graff the author of "The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11.

[00:00:12] Welcome back to another episode of Political Life. Today we are very excited to bring you

[00:00:19] Garrett Graff. Garrett is a journalist and columnist that really does not do him justice.

[00:00:27] He is a best-selling historian, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, so you are that as a first on this

[00:00:36] podcast. He has spent over two decades covering politics, technology, national security, recently

[00:00:45] interviewed Secretary of State Blinken, which we can ask him about. He has written on a wide range

[00:00:52] of topics, technology and nine books, which is incredible on presidential campaigns, Watergate,

[00:01:00] which I'm going to ask him about, and 9-11, which is timely for this episode.

[00:01:07] And Cybersecurity, he has spent time at the Aspen Institute, was editor of Politico,

[00:01:14] and was editor-in-chief at The Washingtonian Magazine while it was still on its heyday.

[00:01:21] Garrett and Maggie Mick is with us as usual as co-hosts. Garrett, welcome to the show.

[00:01:26] Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here chatting with you guys.

[00:01:29] And actually a good week in Watergate history, too. This September 8th, of course,

[00:01:37] the 50th anniversary of Gerald Ford's party. Right. See, we didn't even know how timely we were

[00:01:46] for two of your works. Yes. So, Garrett, welcome. I think that what ties together a lot of your

[00:01:55] body of work is national security. And I'm interested in exploring that from this year's

[00:02:01] presidential election to the learnings of potentially 9-11. But we always start with,

[00:02:07] where did you start your political life? So, I started my political life in,

[00:02:16] I guess, I could cite two places. One, I was lucky enough to be a U.S. Senate page for Pat Leahy,

[00:02:27] my junior year in high school. I grew up in Vermont. And that was my first exposure to

[00:02:35] Washington. That was where I first fell in love with the city and fell in love with

[00:02:44] the world of politics. In Vermont, I had actually worked through high school for

[00:02:53] then Vermont Governor Howard Dean, which is sort of the other place that is my founding myth of

[00:02:59] my political life. And I had been his first webmaster in the late 1990s, had built his

[00:03:09] first website. And then after college, I actually went back and worked on his

[00:03:16] then landmark groundbreaking presidential campaign in 2003-2004, which was really the first

[00:03:25] internet campaign of presidential politics. And then after that campaign moved to Washington

[00:03:36] in the spring of 2004 and spent a year doing online political consulting in Washington.

[00:03:49] And we actually did the digital strategy for a Illinois Senate candidate named Barack Obama

[00:04:00] in 2004 and a couple of other candidates and campaigns. And then in 2005, I decided to

[00:04:13] leave the political side or the consulting side of Washington and was hired to start a

[00:04:23] media blog in Washington called Fishbowl DC, which was the heyday of early blogs.

[00:04:34] And I sort of came up on the blog side of Washington politics and journalism

[00:04:43] and spent the rest of my 12 years in Washington all on the journalism side.

[00:04:49] The Washingtonian and political magazine. Yes, yeah. Jim, I think you had a question on his time

[00:05:01] at both of those. Oh, you're on mute. That's never happened to us before.

[00:05:10] I was typing during taking notes during Garrett's answer. Garrett, what do you miss most of being

[00:05:17] editor-in-chief of Washingtonian magazine? So I was at Washingtonian from 2005 through 2014.

[00:05:31] I was one of the editors for four of those years and then I was the overall editor for five years.

[00:05:39] And Washingtonian was just the most awesome perch to explore Washington that one could imagine because

[00:05:48] it is the one institution that sort of everyone in Washington pays attention to.

[00:06:01] So in any given day, you got to bounce around city politics, the business community,

[00:06:08] the sports community, the restaurant community, the fashion community and then dabble in national

[00:06:17] politics and travel and everything else that the city has to offer. But for me, the thing that I

[00:06:26] literally miss the most, taking your question at its most literal is every month when I was

[00:06:34] editor, I would get a list of restaurants to eat at from our restaurant critics. We had three

[00:06:43] full-time restaurant critics at the time and their entire job was to explore the Washingtonian

[00:06:53] food community. And as you all know from being around Washington for a while, Washington had a

[00:07:01] real explosion in the sort of quality and breadth and scope and style of its restaurants

[00:07:12] during that period, from sort of the mid-2000s up through the end of the Obama years.

[00:07:23] So every month I would get a list of new restaurants and amazing

[00:07:28] things, finds of ethnic restaurants out in Strip Malls in Northern Virginia or suburban Maryland.

[00:07:37] And my wife and I got to try an enormous swath of really, really, really good food in that job.

[00:07:46] Those were the years that I was also in Washington and I can co-sign that. The

[00:07:51] coverage and the lists and the reviews, it was a very fun time to be young and bobbing

[00:07:57] around that town trying all those spots. So when you decided to begin writing books,

[00:08:10] can you take us through what maybe motivated that first book? And I do think that there's this

[00:08:17] through line like I said on national security. Is there always that angle in all of your books

[00:08:26] and just reflections on where we are now in 2024, the presidential election and potential

[00:08:33] security concerns versus maybe those first few that were coming online that you worked on

[00:08:40] in the early 2000s? Just I think that combination of both technical expertise but then also

[00:08:49] addressing some of the big topics in your books is just fascinating.

[00:08:54] Yeah. You're right that national security history is the main theme of what I write about

[00:09:03] both in books and for the most part in the magazine writing that I do as well,

[00:09:09] particularly the intersection of technology and national security. To me, my first couple

[00:09:20] of books all started as magazine articles where I finished the magazine article and then sort of found

[00:09:29] that I had something else that I wanted to say or had stumbled on a topic that I was more interested

[00:09:37] in diving into deeper. My second book for instance was a grew out of a profile that I

[00:09:48] written in 2009 of then FBI Director Robert Mueller for Washingtonian magazine that then grew into a

[00:10:00] history of the FBI and its counterterrorism program and its work post 9-11

[00:10:08] that doubled really in many ways as a biography of

[00:10:13] Mueller and his career that came out in 2011. And subsequent books that I have done

[00:10:24] follow some of that same model that what I tried to do is find a topic or moment in what I

[00:10:36] generally call near history which is across my work I will sort of reach back as far as World War

[00:10:47] II but most of my work is much more recent than that. Ten years, twenty years, fifty years after

[00:10:56] the fact and try to pull together a comprehensive narrative of events that people think that

[00:11:13] they know well but that are actually either misremembered or

[00:11:24] where more information has come out in the years since that people may not know as well as they sort

[00:11:34] of think that they do. And so you know that's a lot of you mentioned my oral history of 9-11 which

[00:11:48] was a book called The Only Playing in the Sky that I did after that called Watergate

[00:11:57] tried to pull together sort of everything that we've learned about

[00:12:02] that definitive American political scandal for the 50th anniversary.

[00:12:12] And that those moments I think really help us understand our history in ways that are more

[00:12:21] comprehensive than people who even lived through those events realized at the time because I think

[00:12:30] one of the things that I've really come to understand and believe as a historian is that

[00:12:36] you know even if you lived through an event you probably misremember it or

[00:12:47] misunderstand what actually transpired over the course of that event.

[00:12:53] So your learnings on The Only Playing in the Sky we are talking the week prior to 9-11 and we'll

[00:13:05] take us through that project putting it together talking to those that are in the book and

[00:13:12] the learnings from the publication of that book. Yeah this project began with the 15th anniversary

[00:13:24] of 9-11 in 2016. I wrote a magazine article for Politico Magazine that was called We're The Only

[00:13:34] Playing in the Sky but it was an oral history of being aboard Air Force One with President Bush

[00:13:41] that day and I had gone out for that anniversary and interviewed I think it ended up being nearly

[00:13:51] 30 people who were around the president that day. You know from the pilot of Air Force One to

[00:14:00] White House Chief of Staff Andy Carr, to Carl Rove, to Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary,

[00:14:10] the Secret Service agents, the Air Force communications technicians, the press

[00:14:18] corps who were aboard Air Force One, the staff at the military bases where President Bush was

[00:14:26] evacuated that day, Barksdale Air Force Base in Treet Fort Louisiana then on to Offit Air Force Base

[00:14:32] in Omaha, Nebraska and tried to piece together basically the eight hours that the president

[00:14:43] had from his when he started his morning in Sarasota, Florida at the Emmer Booker Elementary

[00:14:51] School and then was evacuated from there up into the sky and Air Force One

[00:15:01] spent the day sort of hopscotching across the country before the skies were deemed safe for

[00:15:08] the president to return to Washington at the end of the day and he gives his famous

[00:15:15] overlawless address that evening to the nation from the White House and that article when it

[00:15:24] published in for that 15th anniversary in 2016 the response was tremendous it became the best

[00:15:35] read article in the history of Politico and I heard from readers all across the country and there were

[00:15:47] you know dozens of you know emails and tweets and social media messages from people all around

[00:15:57] the world as well and it caused me to think anew about the breadth and impact of 9-11 not just in

[00:16:06] the United States but around the world you know hearing from you know people in Poland about

[00:16:13] how they had you know watched the attacks live in the same way that people in America did

[00:16:20] and you know reacted as if the attacks of 9-11 were an attack on them and not just on us

[00:16:30] and there were two letters that really stuck with me in reaction to to that piece one was

[00:16:40] from a young soldier who had done three tours I think it was two in Afghanistan one in Iraq

[00:16:52] and he talked about how he had been too young on 9-11 to understand the real impact of

[00:17:01] that day and that my article helped him understand the terror that people actually felt that day

[00:17:10] and there was another article or another letter from another soldier a mother a woman

[00:17:19] who had two children I think there were seven and nine at the time and she said that she had printed

[00:17:27] off my article and set it aside so that when her children were old enough for her to talk about

[00:17:37] why she had left them as kids to go off to war they could understand sort of why

[00:17:46] that event meant so much to the country and those two letters made me really think about

[00:18:01] what 9-11 would mean to a generation who had grown up in the wake of 9-11 but not actually lived

[00:18:13] through it in the way that you know at that time you know most of us in in the United States had

[00:18:24] I was a junior in college and so that led me into writing this book which came out in 2019

[00:18:37] for the 18th anniversary which was this I think really important turning point for the country

[00:18:47] in in terms of memory which was at that 18th anniversary you had the first

[00:18:57] you know US military personnel who had been born after 9-11 being deployed to fight in

[00:19:06] Iraq and Afghanistan in wars that had begun literally before they were born

[00:19:14] you know you had the first recruits coming into the fire department of New York

[00:19:18] who had been born after 9-11 you know stepping into a fire department that was still very much

[00:19:27] reeling from the deaths of 343 firefighters that day and my book pulled together about 500 voices

[00:19:40] from Americans morning to night coast to coast all across America to tell the story of 9-11

[00:19:49] in their own voices in the you know the way that they had actually lived and experienced that day

[00:19:58] and I think it's so important to remember that because I think that the history that we teach

[00:20:09] of 9-11 is incomplete it's not wrong because the way that we sort of talk about it in history

[00:20:20] books now is factually accurate but emotionally inaccurate you know that we we tell the story

[00:20:29] of 9-11 now you know as it was four planes it was the Pentagon, Shanksville, the Twin Towers it was

[00:20:40] you know began at 846 in the morning it was over at 1028

[00:20:46] am with a collapse of the second tower the whole thing unfolds in 102 minutes

[00:20:53] you know there were 3000 casualties etc etc and for those of us who lived through 9-11

[00:21:04] that's not the day that any of us actually remember you know we did not know when the attacks

[00:21:11] began we did not know when the attacks were over we didn't know how many attacks there had been

[00:21:19] we did not know how many planes there were you know well into the early afternoon the US

[00:21:26] government actually still believes that there might be a dozen or more hijacked planes still in the

[00:21:32] sky is over the United States the first death tolls the estimates that day were not

[00:21:40] 3000 it was 20,000 it was 50,000 you know we didn't know what took place what might take place

[00:21:50] on the afternoon of September 11th we didn't know what might take place on September 12th

[00:21:57] what might take place in October what might be coming in 2002 and what the nation felt that day

[00:22:06] and what the world beyond felt that day was not this neat and clean and simple version of

[00:22:16] four planes three attacks 102 minutes but you know the fear the chaos the confusion

[00:22:23] and the trauma of trying to make sense of what was actually taking place that day

[00:22:29] you know there was no sense that day that these attacks were confined to just New York

[00:22:37] Washington and Pennsylvania you know Disney shut down in Florida you know skyscrapers were

[00:22:44] evacuated in Boston and Los Angeles and Chicago they shut down the subway system in Toronto

[00:22:53] that day you know there the fear that spread out across the country and the continent in the world

[00:23:02] that day is really important to understanding the American reaction to 911 and I think and I see this

[00:23:18] um not in a partisan or a political way but I don't think you can really understand

[00:23:28] why America reacted in the way that it did how fully America was transformed by the events of 911

[00:23:39] until you understand the visceral fear and chaos and confusion and trauma that the

[00:23:48] country actually experienced that morning um and I talk about it in the context of the book

[00:23:57] um in what to me is the most interesting 17 minutes of 911 which is the time between the

[00:24:09] first plane and the second plane the time from 846 to 903 where America sort of looks at that first

[00:24:22] crash and trucks and everyone across the country has sort of some version of

[00:24:33] the same set of reactions you know must have been a mechanical failure um maybe it was probably a

[00:24:41] small plane maybe the pilot had a heart attack maybe it was an air traffic control error you

[00:24:47] know what a weird thing and they went on about their day and you see that in New York City one of the

[00:24:56] most poignant quotes in the entire book um for me comes from a New York Waterways

[00:25:04] ferry captain you know one of the passenger ferry captains who is coming across New York

[00:25:11] with his boat full of commuters that morning they watch the first plane crash into the north tower

[00:25:18] at 846 and then he pulls his ferry into wall street terminal right there at the base of

[00:25:26] Manhattan in the shadow of the world trade center and every single person gets off the boat

[00:25:35] and walks into lower Manhattan to start their day and they walk off the boat through the falling

[00:25:42] wreckage and the paper you know spinning down from the the first plane crash um but there's not a

[00:25:52] single person on the boat who says this just kind of seems like it's going to be a weird day I'm

[00:25:58] going to turn around and you know go home to New Jersey for the day um you know everyone sees this

[00:26:05] plane crash and says you know it's New York weird things happen and goes on about their day um

[00:26:14] condi writes the national security advisor at the white house um she calls president bush in uh

[00:26:20] at that elementary school in florida um and you know gives him an update on this plane crash and they

[00:26:31] you know both have been basically the same conversation well that's weird and then they

[00:26:37] go on about their mornings and condi writes walks into her 9 a.m staff meeting and president bush

[00:26:43] you know hangs up the phone and walks into his uh classroom at uh emma booker elementary school

[00:26:50] and you see that reactions of all across the country and it is not until the second crash

[00:26:58] at 903 that america realizes it's under attack it's not until that second crash

[00:27:04] that people begin to be afraid and panic and you think about how different

[00:27:15] that america was at 846 on the morning of tuesday september the 11th 2001

[00:27:21] and the america that we live in today and the the sort of visceral fear of public spaces

[00:27:30] that americans now have you know you see you know a motorcycle backfire or you know a loud bang in

[00:27:40] a shopping mall or you know a church or a school and you know there is sort of instant

[00:27:48] fear and panic now in a way that america just didn't have on the morning of tuesday september

[00:27:57] the 11th and i think again when we talk about the legacy of 9 11 when we talk about why america did

[00:28:08] the things that we did in the wake of 9 11 you need to understand the emotional trauma

[00:28:17] of living through that day and how it affected you know the whole country's psyche but

[00:28:24] you know also our political leaders are our national security leaders and

[00:28:32] you know today a third of the country is now too young to remember 9 11

[00:28:40] either they were too young on 9 11 or they've been born since and you know to me

[00:28:50] reading the only plane in the sky and and experiencing that day as america actually

[00:28:58] lived it and not as the history books that teach it is such an important

[00:29:07] reckoning with why america is the way that it is today well you and i met through your

[00:29:18] election security expertise in 2020 but that article that you wrote the year before

[00:29:28] or i'm sorry years before is actually how i commemorate 9 11 every year i read it

[00:29:34] in the morning to start my day it is an incredible encapsulation of history so thank you for

[00:29:42] writing it and i'm glad that you took a step forward and wrote the book

[00:29:48] after you received such a response it's um you know i think it has uh

[00:29:57] it has become a um you know what is what is surely my best known uh book and and is is probably

[00:30:06] uh you know for me the the most important work that i will do in my entire life um i'm

[00:30:11] i'm sort of hard pressed to imagine and um ever writing something that uh has more lasting uh

[00:30:21] power and importance than than that history of 9 11 well it uh you raise a very interesting point

[00:30:32] about the uh you know um a third of americans who and the americans who went and served who

[00:30:39] were born uh after 9 11 and the world that we live in and how that event uh transformed

[00:30:46] this country uh and it really was um just you know shock for a long period of time

[00:30:56] you know people going home and watching the planes hit those towers

[00:31:01] and then towers falling i think people as you said that you know that morning people

[00:31:05] going to work and things were normal and and then you watch that and the and they fall out from that

[00:31:12] but as you were telling your story i can't imagine what it was like for you to interview all these people

[00:31:17] um and hear their stories about 9 11 uh it must have been um quite an emotional

[00:31:25] roller coaster for you personally yeah i think my my dumbest comment is uh uh about writing

[00:31:37] that book is i was totally unprepared for the emotional toll of writing a book about 9 11 um and that

[00:31:46] uh uh you know i i i interviewed you know a couple hundred people as part of that process um

[00:31:59] and read through um you know literally thousands of of oral histories and and personal

[00:32:09] testimonies and letters and um and memories of that day um and you know then sort of sorted it

[00:32:17] down to the i think it ended up being about 480 voices that that made up the the book um and

[00:32:26] you know it was uh it was really really emotionally taxing to to do that um but it has become

[00:32:39] i think a pretty important uh chapter of my work um uh you know doing that type of oral history

[00:32:50] i i have in the years since done a number of other sort of oral histories about other major

[00:32:57] moments um of modern american history um including another political magazine piece that ran on the

[00:33:06] 10th anniversary of the killing of osama bin laden that was an oral history of the white house

[00:33:13] being inside the white house as that operation came together um and then actually this year um for

[00:33:21] in june i published another book um it was called when the sea came alive that was in oral history

[00:33:29] of d-day for the 80th anniversary of normandy invasion that we had in june this year um

[00:33:39] and the 80th anniversary sort of felt again um you know if the 18th anniversary of 9 11 you know was

[00:33:49] was a moment where you began to see uh the events of 9 11 slip from memory into history

[00:34:00] in many ways it's the 80th anniversary when we see an event slip effectively

[00:34:06] uh entirely from memory into history um you know the that uh on on d-day there were a million

[00:34:16] allied personnel um uh on the move across uh england and the english channel

[00:34:25] and uh that number today is really just in the hundreds that are that are left um and so

[00:34:34] at this moment um when we have effectively every first person memory we will ever have of

[00:34:43] of d-day um i wanted to go out and write a similar book that traced the experience of d-day

[00:34:53] in the voices of the people who participated in it because again i think

[00:35:01] one of the things that you really get in that first person experience in the oral history

[00:35:08] um that's hard to capture in narrative history is it puts you back in the shoes of the people

[00:35:19] as they live these events knowing only the things that they know at the time um and that i think

[00:35:26] you know narrative history is so often uh written with the knowledge of how things turn out um and

[00:35:38] that uh oral history has this unique and important power i believe because it reintroduces the

[00:35:51] uncertainty of the events ahead um that um you know of course we now view d-day as this

[00:36:01] enormous historical triumph um you know in in the same way that 9-11 is is arguably the most

[00:36:08] important single day of the 21st century um d-day was probably the most important single

[00:36:15] day of the 20th um and yet when you hear the memories when you read the letters of the soldiers

[00:36:27] and sailors and airmen um you know on the evening of June 5th um you know they don't know that they're

[00:36:35] about to be part of some historic triumph um you know they are um you know they are wondering

[00:36:42] whether they have what it takes to be in combat you know they are wondering um

[00:36:50] you know whether they're going to be able to survive the next day whether they're

[00:36:55] going to let down their their friends and comrades um and it is this incredibly uh again

[00:37:05] sort of visceral realization of the uncertainty uh that those who actually live history

[00:37:14] experience in the moment so one of your recent works um both looked back but also looks ahead

[00:37:24] and also looks up um your ufo book i feel like this was such a step in the different direction

[00:37:31] using some of the same technical application of how you write um should we all be talking about

[00:37:38] ufos more often yeah you are absolutely right that on the one hand this is uh a totally

[00:37:47] different subject than these other momentous moments of d-day or 9-11 or watergate um but the

[00:37:56] um i i published a book uh last year um as you said that was called ufo um inside the u.s.

[00:38:06] government's search for alien life here and out there and the um the book uh i would argue is

[00:38:16] is is more closely related to the rest of my work than most people probably realize at first

[00:38:21] glance um in part because um you know what got me interested in ufos was um the national security

[00:38:33] side of it i am actually not a lifelong you know ufologist or or star trek fan or sci-fi

[00:38:43] aficionado um i uh got interested in the subject of ufos because in the last

[00:38:54] five to seven years i began to see serious people in washington talking seriously about ufos um

[00:39:04] and there was actually a specific moment that launched my interest in in writing a

[00:39:08] history of of america's uh involvement with ufos that came in december 2020 when um john brendan who um

[00:39:22] both of you know who he is but he was in 2020 had just wrapped up the better part of a decade

[00:39:30] as cia director and white house homeland security advisor and he gave an interview to a dc

[00:39:37] journalist named tyler callan and had was asked about sort of new information about ufos and gave this

[00:39:45] incredibly strange answer where he said an incredibly tortured syntax something along the lines of you

[00:39:55] know there's something there that we don't know what it is and some might say that the phenomenon

[00:40:01] could constitute something that some might recognize as a new form of life and it was like

[00:40:09] a really really weird comment for someone like john brendan to to say um you know i i knew john

[00:40:19] brendan i'd cover john brendan the interview john brendan and he's a really serious guy

[00:40:26] and had spent effectively his entire career as a career intelligence officer you know

[00:40:31] eight years atop the us intelligence community and you know when your cia director there just

[00:40:38] aren't that many things that puzzle you um you know if you wake up and say you know i want to

[00:40:48] know what maggie had for breakfast last thursday um you know we have an 80 billion dollar a year

[00:40:57] intelligence apparatus that goes out and answers that question um and you know it's satellites

[00:41:03] it's sensor networks it's signals intelligence intercept systems it's um you know covert

[00:41:09] operations teams and you know agents and spies and officers and analysts and like you get the

[00:41:18] answer to the question that puzzles you and so if john brendan was leaving office after eight years

[00:41:25] with access to all of that information and still sort of saying man this ufo stuff is really weird

[00:41:32] that felt to me like a story worth diving into um and so the book tries to trace back

[00:41:40] the last 80 years of america's fascination with ufos um and so much of it really is

[00:41:52] a national security story um you know our fascination as a country and as as as a government

[00:41:59] um with ufos comes in the late 1940s amid all of the cold war anxieties that were fueling

[00:42:10] national security at the time um and you know the first sightings of flying saucers come in

[00:42:20] um

[00:42:25] and it is this moment where america is not at all concerned that these things are aliens what they're

[00:42:35] concerned about is that these flying saucers are secret soviet spacecraft being built by

[00:42:42] kidnapped nazi rocket scientists because well what is the united states doing in the summer of

[00:42:48] 1947 we are building uh you know our first spacecraft in rockets um with the help of we would not say

[00:43:00] kidnapped nazi rocket scientists we would say that we had presented unique employment

[00:43:05] opportunities to talented engineers in exchange for avoiding war crimes tribunals um and you

[00:43:13] know we had deposited warner brawn brawn and all of these other nazi engineers um at places like

[00:43:21] los alamos and white sands proving grounds to build these early rockets um and launch the

[00:43:28] space race and our concern uh was that the soviets were building these spacecraft too and

[00:43:35] preparing an invasion of the united states and that you see this like incredible cold war

[00:43:41] backdrop to america's fascination with ufos and and then sort of from there it unfolds decade by

[00:43:50] decade in this very interesting intermingling of national security concerns pop culture fascination

[00:43:58] um you know public sightings and the book sort of traces that whole evolution up to the modern

[00:44:05] era um you know where we're having you know congressional hearings about things that you

[00:44:11] know navy pilots navy aviators are um reporting that they're seeing you know in the skies over the

[00:44:18] united states so it is um on the one hand um a very weird book for me to have written and also

[00:44:26] um as i say in the book you know the story of ufos is not really a story about them

[00:44:32] it's a story about us um and and all of the evolution of um you know the u.s military and

[00:44:40] the air force um and the intelligence community of the last 80 years well jen before we move to

[00:44:49] our final two capstone questions do you have any final thoughts for garrad or a question

[00:44:54] well i'm just going to say uh i mean um it's incredible that the nine books that you've written

[00:44:59] and um another book that you've written and we're coming up on an anniversary that you had mentioned

[00:45:05] before we went on air uh dealing with watergate uh watergate a new history uh and as you stated

[00:45:11] when the book was released um you said do we really need another book uh on watergate so i'll

[00:45:18] ask you today why um why did we need another book on watergate and what did you discover

[00:45:24] yeah so this was um uh this was a book that that grew out of the again magazine work

[00:45:34] newspaper works that i'd been doing at the time um covering the Mueller investigation

[00:45:38] covering the investigations of donald trump um and it got me interested in going back and looking

[00:45:45] at watergate um and you know the last time the nation had uh uh confronted a

[00:45:54] um you know criminal and corrupt president and how it responded to that and believe it or not

[00:46:03] you know for all that gets written about watergate there had not been a narrative soup to nuts

[00:46:11] history of watergate written since the 1990s and since then we have had three pretty major

[00:46:22] evolutions uh of our understanding of what actually took place in watergate um and the first was in

[00:46:32] um 2005 uh the identity of deep throat came out um you know this the secret source for woodward

[00:46:41] and Bernstein that had been played by hal holbrook in the iconic movie um and we had sort of always

[00:46:50] imagined how holbrook's character as being this you know nixon insider um uh you know

[00:47:00] disgusted at the corruption that he saw in the white house and you know out there fighting for

[00:47:05] truth justice in the american way and what turned out was that actually um deep throat was

[00:47:14] fbi deputy director mark felt who was um a disaffected uh job seeker who had um

[00:47:25] you know sought to undermine the fbi director um who had gotten the job that he thought that he

[00:47:34] wanted and it and it turns out like this isn't some like great fighter for democracy like this is

[00:47:40] someone like we've all worked with in the office the guy who uh like thinks that he got

[00:47:47] passed over for a promotion that he deserved and then does everything that he can to sink

[00:47:52] the guy who gets the job that he wanted um and it just totally changes our understanding of

[00:48:01] watergate because it puts the succession battle at the fbi at the center of the watergate story

[00:48:08] and in some ways president nixon becomes collateral damage to mark felt's quest to undermine

[00:48:17] and sink acting fbi director patrick gray um the second major shift is we finally got an answer

[00:48:27] in 2011 to the question of why richard nixon didn't hang the watergate burglars out to dry

[00:48:36] in the summer of 72 and it's the question that has sort of always dogged historians and

[00:48:43] analysts which is you know nixon was coasting to reelection by june 72 why didn't he just say

[00:48:51] you know man uh you know these guys went rogue i don't condone this type of dirty tricks um

[00:48:59] you know i disavow this whole thing and hang them out to dry um you know the morning of

[00:49:04] june 18th 1972 um and in 2011 there was a series of documents declassified from the lbj

[00:49:14] presidential library um uh i'm actually taping this uh in austin texas where i am for the texas

[00:49:22] tribune festival this weekend um and you know looking out the window at at the presidential

[00:49:28] library where these documents had lay hidden for um you know 40 years and they outlined a series of

[00:49:40] events that now we call the shinoa fair which is uh um in the fall of 68 richard nixon

[00:49:54] nixon former vice president of the united states is running against uh hubert humphrey sitting

[00:50:00] vice president of the united states and the vietnam war is uh you know in in full blown

[00:50:07] combat and the paris peace talks start and um nixon uh and his campaign manager john michael

[00:50:20] used this dc socialite anishinal to get a message to the south vietnamese government

[00:50:30] to stall the paris peace talks that uh they say you know if you stall the paris peace talks i

[00:50:39] richard nixon will give you a better deal than johnson will give you as president now

[00:50:46] and you know nixon knows that the end of the vietnam war is bad for him politically you know he

[00:50:52] he thinks if if the paris peace talks succeed um hubert humphrey will probably win and so

[00:51:01] he medals in these peace talks um and to put a you know really fine point on it it is

[00:51:09] you know the most credible allegations of something approaching treason that we have against

[00:51:16] you know any major political figure in the 20th century um you know richard nixon keeps the

[00:51:23] vietnam war going in the fall of 68 as a private citizen for his own political benefit

[00:51:32] johnson figures this out in the final hours of the presidential race and he confronts richard

[00:51:39] nixon and uh and nixon denies it and the um whole um you know the election happens nixon wins and

[00:51:56] johnson says you know i can't start off nixon's presidency by outing him for undermining these

[00:52:03] peace talks um you know i'm going to bury this whole thing and he classifies these files so they

[00:52:09] go off to his presidential library but nixon knows that johnson knows about his treachery

[00:52:19] and it becomes this sort of edgar allen poe uh tell tale heart beating away at the heart of

[00:52:27] nixon presidency in the years ahead and what you see is that it drives richard nixon's

[00:52:37] overreaction to the leaking of the pentagon papers in 1971 because nixon is now suddenly terrified

[00:52:47] that the chenille affair is going to come out as part of these pentagon paper leaks

[00:52:54] and so he creates what we now know is the plumbers and uh you know brings g gordon liby and howard hunt

[00:53:03] and these cuban burglars into the white house into the presidential circle um you know to try

[00:53:12] to help bury the pentagon papers um and to keep the chenille affair quiet and what we sort of now

[00:53:23] realize is that this is the thread that keeps richard nixon from hanging the burglars out

[00:53:30] to dry in 72 because when you start pulling on this thread it unravels everything back to

[00:53:38] nixon's treason in 68 and um that basically by the summer of 72 there was just too much crime

[00:53:47] too many conspiracies too much corruption inside the nixon white house and so um these are sort of

[00:53:55] all of the revelations um along with sort of the third big thing that i'm uh the the release

[00:54:02] of all of the nixon white house tapes that we've seen in in stages over the last um you know 25 years

[00:54:10] that give us this entirely different understanding of what took place in watergate

[00:54:19] across those years from 68 to 74 and uh you know provided for me the fodder for a very fresh

[00:54:32] and different narrative of a story that again people think that they know really well

[00:54:39] but uh actually is like way more criminal way more corrupt and way weirder and zanier than anything

[00:54:46] that people actually remember so um uh to me the watergate book is actually the the most fun

[00:54:57] and funny and humorous book that i've written um among all of these sort of big and weighty

[00:55:04] and serious topics it's just a really rollicking and surprising ride so fascinating um well i uh

[00:55:13] i have not read it and i'm going to read it now uh because clearly the answer is yes we do need

[00:55:20] we did need another book uh on watergate that's incredible all right thank you uh gary that's

[00:55:27] incredible maggie well we always end um our conversations uh knowing that we're talking

[00:55:32] to another road warrior you're sitting in austin what is the best meal that you've had so far

[00:55:38] or restaurant um that you have um been to and where you headed to next so someone wants to

[00:55:46] connect with you on linkedin and give you a restaurant tip um where you headed to so that

[00:55:50] they can make sure you have a really good meal well i am uh um i'm in austin now speaking about my

[00:55:59] d-day book um and uh um of course i have done the um the the barbeque stop yesterday and i've

[00:56:12] already started my day with some breakfast tacos here um and uh what i am actually really excited

[00:56:18] about is at the end of next week um in mid september i'm heading to jackson mississippi

[00:56:25] for the mississippi book festival where i will also be speaking about my d-day book um and will be

[00:56:33] um actually my first trip to mississippi um and uh it'll be my uh 46th state so after this i am down to

[00:56:45] the dakotas alabama and alaska so this i'm looking forward to uh being in mississippi which

[00:56:51] puts on just an incredible book festival um and and seeing a lot of friends there and then

[00:56:58] also getting to experience a little taste of mississippi amazing incredible history down there too

[00:57:03] i suspect maybe a book will come about but yes i have a couple that uh that that unfold in that part

[00:57:11] of the landscape i have a um i am someone who has more book ideas than i can live to write

[00:57:21] well garratt always such a pleasure um i learned so much anytime um we get to spend time with you

[00:57:27] thank you for joining us today thank you for um your reflections on putting together the only

[00:57:35] plane in the sky and um you are an american treasure we are grateful for you thank you so

[00:57:45] much