I was never a fan of Richard Nixon. I paid no attention to him when he was a senator, and when he was vice president, I heard from Whit and Ann that President Eisenhower didn’t like him—and that rumor rubbed off on me. I did meet his secretary, Rosemary Woods, in the late fifties when she traveled to the tropics on one of our ships. She later became infamous for likely erasing the most damning eighteen minutes of the White House tapes. As I mentioned earlier, when Nixon ran for the presidency, my friend Dick Whelan became his chief speechwriter, but he quit the night Nixon announced that Spiro Agnew would be his running mate.

At first, I paid little attention to Watergate. I felt it was a failed attempt by amateur adventurists trying to help their man get reelected. They broke into the offices of former JFK adviser and then-chairman of the Democratic National Committee Larry O’Brien, who years later told me that it was the “best thing that ever happened” to his career. To my practiced eye, the break-in was merely a PR defense by the president’s team. ln fact, some of its participants saw it is just those terms. John Dean described it as “drawing the wagons around the White House.” After a while, however, I began to see it for what it was—a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

I fully realized its criminality when Nixon announced on national television that he was making available to the public transcripts of recorded conversations with his inner circle. Like millions of other Americans, I watched him address the nation with the transcript binders in the background. As I watched, I thought that there was probably some juicy dialogue in those tapes as well as matters of some importance, but I quickly dispelled that idea, assuming that Nixon would have sanitized the transcripts. Later that night, bits and pieces of the transcripts were quoted on the news. Hearing those words about hush money for the burglars and where it would need to come from convinced me that the transcripts were important documents—probably the most important in my lifetime.

I was also mindful of the old saying that America was not a nation of readers. Most people wouldn’t read these dense transcripts. I went to bed that night and didn’t sleep, thinking about how I could use my skills as a communicator to bring these transcripts to the American public. It became obvious that television was the answer. I decided I would hire actors who looked like Nixon’s staff, build an Oval Office set, and reenact the transcripts verbatim. I would have to be careful not to have the actors vary one iota from the text or overdramatize it in any way.

I had one small problem: I had never produced anything for television. I had produced commercials, company films, and training films, but never anything for TV. If I’d known what was involved and how it would change my life, chances are I never would have undertaken it. But the next morning, I dived right in. I made two phone calls: first to the brilliant Web Lithgow, my good friend who I knew would be an ideal collaborator. The second was to Jack Hoover, a retired Air Force pilot and friend who sold bonds at the First National Bank of Boston.

Web was all in immediately. He knew a good idea when he heard one. I asked Jack to give me the names of a few wealthy people I could approach to invest in a reenactment of the Nixon tapes. I needed somebody with a lot of money, but who also had a racetrack mentality—the kind of a person who would take a gamble and not mind losing. I also told Jack that the investor had to be a patriot. And not a Republican.

Jack gave me the names of five people. They were in alphabetical order, and the first one was Ronald Ansin of Leominster, Massachusetts. I immediately called Ansin and told him how I got his name and asked him not to be mad at Jack Hoover. I outlined my requirements. He told me he fit the bill and invited me to come out to his home that night. At eight p.m. Web and I pulled up to his house. At first, I thought I’d made a mistake. The house was a very ordinary suburban house, not what you would expect to be the home of a multimillionaire. I rang the bell and Ron Ansin opened the door. He was barefoot and wore a faded T-shirt and jeans.

He invited us in and gave us a can of soda, and we spent the next three hours describing the project. He told us that he wanted to wait until his wife, Betsy, came home from her League of Women Voters meeting so he could bounce the idea off her. He said she had a good feel for this kind of thing. I felt my eyes roll—was he the sort of a guy who had to ask his wife about investing in something? But we waited until eleven o’clock, when she came home. I’m glad we did. Betsy was wonderful—smart, positive, decisive. She loved the idea, and before we left that night, I had a check from Ron for $10,000 with a promise of twenty-five or thirty more if we needed it. All we had was a handshake. Ron didn’t even know how to spell my name on the check. He made it out to “Thom McAn”—the way the shoe company spells the name. (Ron was in the shoe business, among many other ventures.)

Web and I spent the next four weeks producing a thirty-minute quick and dirty pilot, which cost about $10,000. A New York casting agency sent us a commercial actor named Harry Spillman, who looked nothing like Nixon. He had blond hair, blue eyes, and what someone described as a cute pug nose. Web went to work on his face with a black magic marker, turning his hair, eyes, bags under the eyes, jowls, and even the nose into Nixon’s. We had our main character and soon found the other four principals.

After three weeks of working day and night, we emerged with a thirty-minute pilot, which I took to New York City to show to the three networks and PBS. I had connections at PBS, so I started there, showing it to Joan Ganz Cooney, the creator of Sesame Street. Joan invited former CBS vice president Michael Dann, who was then a consultant on Sesame Street, to view the pilot with us. Dann at that time was the best-known TV programmer in the world. A short, wiry man with a New York attitude bordering on rude, he was quite full of himself. He stormed into the room. When Joan tried to introduce us, he cut her short and announced that he only had five or maybe six minutes and that we should understand that he was a busy man and did not have a lot of time to waste.

Dann watched the entire thirty minutes of the pilot and didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes after it ended. Finally, he said it was the most compelling and most important piece of video he’d ever seen. It was history. “I can’t believe you guys from Boston did this,” he said. “I want a copy of this for my grandkids.” I thanked him and said we could certainly give him a copy, but what about getting it on network TV? Which network should we approach first? He said, “Are you nuts? You’re never going to get this on TV. Nixon is a sitting president.” I ignored his comment and persisted. How could this product be so good and not get aired? He lost patience and turned to Joan and said, “How can I make this dumb guy from Boston understand that he’s got a better chance of getting his dick on TV then that Dick?”

The next day Web and I went to the three networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—and got thrown out of one and turned down by two. At the end of the day we called WNET, the flagship station of PBS, and got turned down too. That night, in desperation, instead of going back to Boston we flew to Toronto, where we went to the office of the president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. We got as far as his outer office. I explained to his secretary that we were two desperate men who had invested our own money as well as an investor’s and we needed just fifteen minutes of her boss’s time. I told her we were staying at the Hyatt and weren’t leaving Toronto until we had a meeting. Our thinking was that was if CBC aired it, it would get viewed in border station cities like Buffalo, Detroit, Portland, and elsewhere and possibly get some US reviews. An hour later the secretary called our hotel room. She said that the president would give us fifteen minutes.

We went over to his office. Upset that we had strong-armed him, he didn’t shake our hands. I cleared my dry throat and asked him if I could put our three-quarter-inch video cassette on his machine. He told us we had ten minutes. Like Mike Dann, he watched the entire program. When it was over, he asked us what we wanted from CBC. I told him we wanted to do a sixty-minute slicker with an improved script, better rehearsed actors, and a better set. He called in his executive vice president. Before we left that day, we had a contract and an air date four weeks away—Sunday night in August in prime time. (They preempted their most popular shows—both Mike Dann productions.) We also received a down payment.

We got the revised show to them a day under the deadline. They aired it, and it did reach a number of border-city stations. Variety gave it a rave review. Other great reviews followed. We were launched. Mike Wallace helped. So did David Susskind and Ed Diamond of Newsweek. Gradually, other stations in Boston and New York aired the program. In the next few months several PBS stations paid good money for what they could have aired for free. The show won awards and launched us in the television business in a big way, including producing a show about the Watergate cover-up trial with Boston’s WGBH, which in turn led to an excellent relationship with the Dallas PBS station KERA.

Web Lithgow coined a word to describe what we had created: “docudrama.” The creators of The Missiles of October would later claim that their show was the first docudrama, but the calendar proved that our White House Transcripts production predated their show by several years.

This story has a few interesting postscripts. To mark the tenth anniversary of the Watergate break-in, I decided to recycle the original program. The plan was to cut it from ninety minutes to the most important sixty minutes of the transcripts. We would leave a few minutes of room for a narrator to bring it up to date. I thought it would add value and raise interest in the program if we got John Dean to appear on camera. After a certain amount of haggling over money with his Los Angeles agent, I terminated the discussions—a tactic that worked. Dean called me within the hour and blamed his agent for screwing up and said that he wanted to do it.

Despite that rocky beginning, he came to Boston with a good attitude, ready to work hard with us. Web and I spent two busy and interesting days with him. Together, we wrote a script and taped his part on the third day. He was an interesting guy. Smart and articulate but very cautious and measured. He was very serious and never once smiled in the two days he was with us. And he wasn’t great company. Meals were just meals. At one point the subject of Deep Throat came up and he told us he knew who it was. I pointed out that if he would reveal who it was on camera, it would be big news and boost the saleability of the recycled program and the prices we could get for it. He tap-danced around the subject for a few minutes and finally said that he was not ready to release the name—and when he did, he said, it would be in his next book to increase the size of his advance. 

I had the feeling that he didn’t know the identity of Deep Throat, but Dean did tell us the story of how he decided to speak to the special prosecutor. He said that when he realized the Nixon-Haldeman-Ehrlichman axis was planning to scapegoat him and John Mitchell for the break-in, he decided at that moment to tell everything he knew. He said he called Haldeman from Camp David where he had been sent by Nixon and Haldeman to work on his detailed report on the break-in and told Haldeman what he was going to do. Haldeman made his famous retort: “Remember, John, that once the toothpaste comes out of the tube you can never get it back in.” That was the last time he spoke to Bob Haldeman. As we know, it was Dean’s testimony and the smoking gun transcript that brought Nixon down.