And then for the remaining 20 minutes, he addressed those three points and ended up saying that he had let down the American people, that he had to live with that burden for the rest of his life, etc. By the end of it we were both drained but he had gone so far that his people, my people—everyone—applauded us both. It was very dramatic and exhausting, but incredibly worth doing.

•Monojit Majumdar: Did you expect him to emerge from the interviews in some way rehabilitated?

I think he had hoped that it would exonerate him in some way and of course it didn’t. If you had asked Nixon three months after the interviews whether he regretted having done them, he would have said, yes I do—because he had admitted so much more than he had planned to admit. On the other hand, it was a catharsis for the American people: they had to see Nixon account for himself. Later he may have thought that I dispelled some black clouds over him; he might have thought there was a long-term advantage to having faced his issues in the interviews.

•Charmy Harikrishnan: Did Nixon begin by demanding $600,000 as he did in the film?

No, I don’t think he demanded it, his people did. He had just got $2.3 million for his memoirs, so this was much less. What’s important is that Nixon had no editorial control over the interviews. He couldn’t see the edited programmes until they were broadcast.

... contd.