•Kunal Pradhan: Was Nixon as strong an adversary as he is made out to be and did you really have to get him to admit his involvement in Watergate?

The actual clash on Watergate was over two days, long not one day as shown in the film. On the first day, as Nixon said, it was a prosecution and defence kind of situation: I was the prosecution and he was the defence. He also said he regarded himself as under oath, as though he was in court. His aides had said we could talk about Vietnam or Cambodia, about foreign policy, but Watergate was too personal. So on the first day he was absolutely defensive.He would not admit anything, he would not even admit mistakes. That was a disaster for him because I knew the Watergate tapes (which revealed Nixon’s role in the cover-up of the break into the Democratic Party offices in Watergate building) better than he did. He needed to come back from that. By the second day, he had that haunted look he had during the actual Watergate crisis. He was late by 17 minutes. I don’t know whether it was he who had relived Watergate between the two days or whether it was his staff who had finally dared to talk to him about it, but he came prepared to admit something. I pushed and pushed; eventually, he did admit to mistakes. Then, I asked him if he would go further than admit mistakes. He asked me how. It was a heart-stopping moment because I sensed he was more vulnerable then he’d ever be again in his life. So, I told him there were three things he had to say: there was wrongdoing on his part that verged on criminality, that he did not maintain his oath of office and that he had put the American people through two years of needless pain. I said he should apologise for that. I told him that this would be difficult for anyone but if he didn’t do it, he would regret it for the rest of his life.

... contd.