I didn’t even know that you worked for Nixon. For Nixon. That, to me, I was like, because you look really young. Okay, I’m just gonna say I did. You do look very. I’m really giving you a compliment right now. Look very young. I did not. When I read that, I was like, wow, Nixon. So I guess, you know, you were 22 years old when you started working for Nixon as a research assistant. Is that correct? Yeah. So let me really clarify of when I worked with former president Richard Nixon. I was not born when he was elected president.

Just to be clear, I did end up working with him during the last several years of his life. In the mid 1990s, because I was in college, I read one of his foreign policy books. It totally blew me away, David. So I sat down and I wrote him a letter. I mailed it, completely forgot about it. And about a month later, as I was getting ready to go back to college for my senior year, I went to my mom’s mailbox and took out a handwritten letter from Richard Nixon. So we maintained a correspondence until I graduated the following May.

And that’s when he offered me a job. So I worked with him during the last few years of his life. A handwritten letter? Yes. You have that framed. Surprise possession, David. I have it framed in my New York City apartment. It is my most prized possession. So he hired you. So what did you do exactly? So I worked with him. It was my first job out of college, and I was a foreign policy assistant and research assistant for him. But he kept a very small staff, so there were only four of us. He had a chief of staff, like a secretarial assistant.

He had security, and he had me, basically. And so I did all of his background work, his research for him. Four years with him. It was the most extraordinary job of my entire life, particularly because I was so young. So I worked with him on all of his speeches, the two books that he wrote. In that four year period before his death and traveled around the world with him and met with all of the heads of state with whom he met, including Yeltsin in Russia, Mitt Iran. And you traveled with him. You were actually traveled around the world with him.

So you saw him firsthand. This man, like he’s, to me, this is like a legend. I mean, I mean, I mean, an icon. And I mean, what kind of, what kind of man was he? What kind of temperament did this man have? You know, I have to say that is the question that I get most often, David, is what was Richard Nixon like? And I think for a couple of reasons, I think people find him endlessly fascinating, I think because now it’s been, what, 30 years since he passed away. So there’s a lot of time and distance now between us and him.

He belongs to history now. And I’m like this living link between Richard Nixon, his presidency, his political career and where we are today. And in fact, when he passed away, Bill Safire, who was one of his top speech writers and then went on to write twice weekly op eds for the New York Times, he called me down to Washington and he said to me, all right, kid, the great man is gone. What are you going to do next? And I said, well, gee, Mister Sapphire, I don’t know, but I, off the cuff, David said to him, well, you know, I kept a daily journal in which I reconstructed every single conversation I ever had with President Nixon, verbatim.

And I remember Safire looked at me and he goes, I’m sorry, what? And I said, yeah, I’ve got like a stack of journals. Because whether it was immediately after the conversation or later that night, no matter how tired I was, I would take the pen and to the best of my memory, and I was taking notes while I was in conversation with him, and I’d reconstruct every conversation. And Sapphire said to me, oh, kid, I know what you’re going to do next. You’re going to write a book. Absolutely. I said, well, I don’t know. You know, I kept these notes for myself because I realized what an extraordinary historic opportunity I had.

But I’m not so sure that it’s ethical for me to share all of that. And Safire looked at me and he said, monica, you had a yellow legal pad with you when you were sitting across from him every time you spoke. And I said, yeah. He said, monica, he was a very wise man. He knew exactly what you were doing. And one of the major reasons why you were there was because he was in his late seventies. At the time you were 21, he said he wants you to tell the rest of the world, tell posterity, tell future generations about the Richard Nixon you knew.

So I ended up writing two books about him that became bestsellers. I’m so proud of those books. And it answers your question, what was he like? Richard Nixon was brilliant, which even his detractors will concede. He was a true visionary. And you know, David, we have had, what, 46 presidents? We’re going to have a 47th pretty soon. We’ve had some good ones, some not so good ones. We’ve only had a handful of true visionaries as president. And by that I mean presidents who could see what the country and the world was going to look like 20, 30, 40 years down the road, and then as a leader, make policy in that role to anticipate that world that is a true visionary.

Richard Nixon was one. But he was also generous and kind and very funny, self effacing humor and a very warm, caring man. He was a great man. But more importantly, David, he was a good man. So this helped you segue into media, right? I mean, obviously having these books, that’s huge. I mean, that’s. Wow, that’s remarkable. So this segway did you into media? Is that how you started with media? Cause I’ve seen you on Fox as a contributor, stuff like that. So, I mean, is that how this, is that what kicked it off for you? Yes, yes, exactly.

So when he passed away, I was finishing up my PhD dissertation at Columbia University, and I wasn’t quite sure what I was gonna do next. And Bill Safire said, kid, you’re gonna write a book. And I ended up writing two volumes about my experiences with him because I had so much material. And when the first book came out, I had never done television before, radio before. When the first book was coming out, my publisher, Random House, said, monica, you know, this is such a hot book. Everybody is dying to know the truth about Richard Nixon, that we have all these requests.

And I said, great, book me on everything. Even though I’d never done tv before. So my very first tv interview was on Larry King Live. No way. Larry King Live. And I saw the rundown of the media appearances that they were booking me. And I said, larry King Live? I’ve never been on tv before. I said, guys, can you book me on like local Channel nine so I can. You were nervous. Yes, I was so nervous. I was like, you kidding me? Larry King life. It’s like my debut. But they were like, no, Larry King Live.

Wants you exclusively first. And I was like, oh, my God. And you know, I have to tell you, as soon as the. He could not have been nicer. His staff was so nice. And he really, like, kind of calmed me down. And as soon as that light went on that we were live on CNN, I was like a duck to water. And I was like, well, I’m really going to make a career out of this because I’m a huge ham. So I love being. Anyway, and now you’re on the nino show. No, just kidding. I mean, I love being on camera, and the Lord bless me with a good brain and a big mouth.

So I said, this is going to be my career. But at the time, when that first book came out, it came out, like, in the spring of 1996. And I got a call after doing Larry King and Good Morning America and the Today Show, I got a call from Roger Ailes, and he said, kid, everybody call me kid. Come in and see me. I want to talk to you about something. And he told me at that time that Rupert Murdoch had given him a check for a billion dollars to launch a competitor to CNN. And he said, we’re going to launch this October.

And he said, I have no idea what this network is going to be. He said, it could be a huge success or a massive failure. We could be closed in a year. I don’t know. But we’re gonna do, we’re gonna give it the old college try. And I need a group of people who can come on tv and talk about if you were one of the beginners at Fox. Day one, get out of here. Day one, I was on the air, day one when all of Fox News was like, one camera, one camera guy, and like a metal pull out chair as the set.

I swear, it was just, it was like, yeah, you saw the very conception of Fox. Yeah, yeah, that’s incredible. Roger Ailes did, and I know he had long difficulties, but he knew television, and he knew how to build television from a segment to a show to a network. And in record time, he built something that gave half of America, more than half of America a voice. And they never had one before. They never heard their conservative viewpoints reflected back to them. Certainly not by the big three networks, not by CNN, which existed at the time. We didn’t have social media.

We didn’t have that kind of amplification. And he and Rupert Murdoch saw an opening and they took it. And I started on television from there. All right, folks, if you’re watching this on YouTube right now, it’s going to be edited. Okay, so sorry it has to be that way. If you want to watch the meat, the real meat and bones of this, go on ninoscorn tv, or I’ll put it on rumble later. But I’m going to ask you now. So that kind of segment segues into this is, have you seen, you have seen since you’ve been around, since the conception, you’ve seen the shift of how news is delivered with an agenda now, right? I mean, you can, you’ve watched it just kind of, like, morph into what it is today.

Has it always been this, like this, such an obvious propaganda machine, or did you, have you just watched it turn into this? I mean, is it just, has it always been this way? Or is it, did you watch it just morph into what it is now? Great question, David, because, you know, when you go back to the beginning of the republic, we had newspapers, we had pamphlets, and so the founding fathers would put out, you know, the federalist papers, et cetera. It would go out by pamphlet and be carried on horse from town to town and so on.

From the very beginning, opinion would always seep into what we now call, like, straight news, which doesn’t even exist anymore. But all the way back to founding fathers and the start of the republic, we had competing viewpoints and things, arguments, debates being thought out in the pages of our publications. I will say, like, throughout the 20th century, news had more of a fair. Not that it was balanced fair, because you know, that that’s impossible because everybody brings a bias. But it was more balanced. Yeah, it was more balanced. But now, and I would say, if I were to put a modern moment on it, I would say Vietnam was the moment.

And then certainly Watergate was the moment when it really kind of changed. And you had the rise of investigative journalists, and then you had the rise of perhaps some more outlets on the scene. But Vietnam really made a lot of people in the media snap. And you know the old phrase, once you’ve lost Cronkite, you’ve lost America. When Walter Cronkite began to editorialize on the Vietnam war going south, saying, we should no longer be there, we need a peace deal, this thing is over. That kind of flipped the script and allowed more people to become more overt with their opinions on the air and in the pages of the newspapers.

And then I would say Donald Trump was the other critical tipping point, because now, you know, the rise of Trump, an existential threat to all of them, brought the level of intensity and activism on the left in the media. To a whole other level. So whereas Richard, I mean, he was blatant about the way he did it was just no bar. So, I mean, it was always biased on the left. And certainly presidents Nixon and Reagan and George W. Bush had to deal with all of that. But Trump’s appearance on the political scene put it into the stratosphere, reshaped the whole landscape level.

Yeah. Where they’re activists now, they’re not reporters. So would you. Okay, yeah. So, like, would you say the media is, has been compromised? All right, folks, I decided to cut it right there. The rest is on Nino’s corner tv. We go into some really deep water. So please go to Nino’s corner tv. You’re going to want to hear what she has to say about who’s really in control, who’s really in control right now, what’s really going on? What can we expect going into 2024, November this year? What can we really expect? Where does she see this all going? And it’s fascinating to hear from Monica Crowley herself.

It’s interesting, folks, you don’t want to minute, you don’t want to miss it. I’ll see you at Nino’s corner dot tv. Sorry to do this to you, but I got to do what I got to do. I got to color within the lines on the fluff tube. All right, folks, later..

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