Tonight's guests are Elisabeth Moss on The Daily Show and John Dean & Pat Buchanan on The Colbert Report.
Elisabeth Moss is an actress best known for her role on Mad Men as Peggy Olson but she is also known to political geeks as Zoey Bartlet from The West Wing. She is on tonight to discuss her movie The One I Love
Struggling with a marriage on the brink of falling apart, a couple escapes for a weekend in pursuit of their better selves, only to discover an unusual dilemma that awaits them.
It looks very interesting.
Tonight's Colbert seems to be a battle of Nixon biographers.
John Dean served as White House Counsel for United States President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973. In this position, he became deeply involved in events leading up to the Watergate burglaries and the subsequent Watergate scandal cover-up. He was referred to as the "master manipulator of the cover-up" by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He pleaded guilty to a single felony count, in exchange for becoming a key witness for the prosecution. This ultimately resulted in a reduced prison sentence, which he served at Fort Holabird outside Baltimore, Maryland.
His newest book is the Richard Nixon biography
The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
Based on Nixon’s overlooked recordings, New York Times bestselling author John W. Dean connects the dots between what we’ve come to believe about Watergate and what actually happened
Watergate forever changed American politics, and in light of the revelations about the NSA’s widespread surveillance program, the scandal has taken on new significance. Yet remarkably, four decades after Nixon was forced to resign, no one has told the full story of his involvement in Watergate.
In The Nixon Defense, former White House Counsel John W. Dean, one of the last major surviving figures of Watergate, draws on his own transcripts of almost a thousand conversations, a wealth of Nixon’s secretly recorded information, and more than 150,000 pages of documents in the National Archives and the Nixon Library to provide the definitive answer to the question: What did President
Nixon know and when did he know it?
Through narrative and contemporaneous dialogue, Dean connects dots that have never been connected, including revealing how and why the Watergate break-in occurred, what was on the mysterious 18 1/2 minute gap in Nixon’s recorded conversations, and more.
In what will stand as the most authoritative account of one of America’s worst political scandals, The Nixon Defense shows how the disastrous mistakes of Watergate could have been avoided and offers a cautionary tale for our own time.
Pat Buchanan is an American conservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician, and broadcaster. Buchanan was a senior advisor to American Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN's Crossfire. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996. He ran on the Reform Party ticket in the 2000 presidential election.
Buchanan traveled with Richard Nixon throughout the campaigns of 1966 and 1968. He made a tour of Western Europe, Africa, and, in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War, the Middle East. When Nixon took the Oval Office in 1969, Buchanan worked as a White House adviser and speechwriter for Nixon and vice president Spiro Agnew. Buchanan coined the phrase "Silent Majority" and helped shape the strategy that drew millions of Democrats to Nixon; in a 1972 memo he suggested the White House "should move to re-capture the anti-Establishment tradition or theme in American politics." His daily duties included developing political strategy, publishing the President's Daily News Summary, and preparing briefing books for news conferences. He accompanied Nixon on his trip to China in 1972 and the summit in Moscow, Yalta, and Minsk in 1974. He suggested that Nixon label Democratic opponent George McGovern an extremist and burn the White House tapes.
Buchanan remained as a special assistant to Nixon through the final days of the Watergate Scandal. He was not accused of wrongdoing, though some mistakenly suspected him of being Deep Throat. When the actual identity of the press leak was revealed as Federal Bureau of Investigation Associate Director Mark Felt in 2005, Buchanan called him "sneaky," "dishonest," and "criminal."
His Nixon Book is
The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority
After suffering stinging defeats in the 1960 presidential election against John F. Kennedy, and in the 1962 California gubernatorial election, Nixon's career was declared dead by Washington press and politicians alike. Yet on January 20, 1969, just six years after he had said his political life was over, Nixon would stand taking the oath of office as 37th President of the United States. How did Richard Nixon resurrect a ruined career and reunite a shattered and fractured Republican Party to capture the White House?
In The Greatest Comeback, Patrick J. Buchanan--who, beginning in January 1966, served as one of two staff members to Nixon, and would become a senior advisor in the White House after 1968--gives a firsthand account of those crucial years in which Nixon reversed his political fortunes during a decade marked by civil rights protests, social revolution, The Vietnam War, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, urban riots, campus anarchy, and the rise of the New Left. Using over 1,000 of his own personal memos to Nixon, with Nixon’s scribbled replies back, Buchanan gives readers an insider’s view as Nixon gathers the warring factions of the Republican party--from the conservative base of Barry Goldwater to the liberal wing of Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney, to the New Right legions of an ascendant Ronald Reagan--into the victorious coalition that won him the White House. How Richard Nixon united the party behind him may offer insights into how the Republican Party today can bring together its warring factions.
The Greatest Comeback is an intimate portrayal of the 37th President and a fascinating fly on-the-wall account of one of the most remarkable American political stories of the 20th century.
Dean is always worth listening to, Buchanan, not so much but it could be fun and hopefully it will be a double segment.
This Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
Tu 8/5: Helen Thorpe
We 8/6: Wu-Tang Clan
Th 8/7: Tracy Droz Tragos
THE COLBERT REPORT
Tu 8/5: James Cameron
We 8/6: Michael Fassbender
Th 8/7: Brian Chesky