Timothy Naftali

I mean, he came from a poor family and he recognized

the importance of a safety net he's a complicated man one of the reasons we talk about him not simply because he resigned but he had these dark impulses and he was a bigot and he was an anti-semite and these dark past passions motivated policy at times and so that's why we we talk about he was a flawed character the difference however it was he was a smart man

and he was a man who read, and he was a man who understood history, and he cared about history, and he did not want to be an outlier.

He was not someone who believed, I am the beginning and the end of American history.

I have predecessors, and I have to be mindful of them.

So that's also a source of some constraint on his behavior.

And I will be passing on to them

a better country, I hope, than the one that I received.

But remember, he was thinking in terms of the country.

His self-dealing involved a $7,000, get this, a $7,000 shield around his pool in San Clemente.

That was the great corrupt bargain of his presidency.

Now, his crimes and his abuse of power are quite different, but when you talk about what did he steal, if anything,

What the Congress found was, yes, he found a way to get the Secret Service to say that it was in the interest of his protection that he have a screen around his pool.

By the way, that's not a crazy claim.

No, it's not a crazy claim.

No, he wasn't a grifter.

Keep in mind, Richard Nixon was not a grifter.

And it's important to keep that in mind.

Richard Nixon also...

believed in allies.