Well, hi, everybody, and welcome to a special bonus episode of the RICOchet podcast.

It's Steve Hayward, sitting in James Lillick's host chair, joined today by Peter Robinson

with a very special guest that we are delighted to have with us.

Ken Kachigian is joining us for the whole hour of the show.

Ken has a wonderful new memoir out,

I highly recommend, called Behind Closed Doors in the Room with Reagan and Nixon. And Ken started

in politics way back in the 1960s. I'll get a couple of questions for him about how that went,

worked for Richard Nixon in the Nixon White House, and then followed Nixon

out to California after his resignation in 1974, whereupon Ken went on to develop his own

very successful law practice, which he kept going while being called back into service at

crucial moments by President Reagan, and therein lies a great story.

Ken, I want to say, welcome to the Rickshaw podcast, and I guess my opening question is this.

One of the things I love about your memoir is that after all this time, it gives us some

fresh perspective on some old questions, and in light of some recent events, it makes us

think differently about some aspects of the Nixon

years and the Reagan years. But I guess the first question is, what took you so long? I would have loved

to have seen this from you a long time ago. What made you finally decide that the time was now

for your memoir of things? Steve, I get asked that a lot, and it's a really easy answer, and that

is I had to make a living in the

meantime. I had my law practice and people forget that besides my law practice and writing

speeches in the interim for the presidents, I ran campaigns out here in California for Governor Duke

Magian and Wilson and Dan Lundgren and I did two school choice campaigns out here

...