Would Hillary Clinton Be a 'Dangerous' President?

This is a partial transcript of "The Big Story With John Gibson," July 14, 2005, that has been edited for clarity.

JOHN GIBSON, HOST: Senator Hillary Clinton (search) still hasn't said whether she's going to run for president in 2008, but many experts consider the New York Democrat the frontrunner for the party's nomination. According to my next guest, she has been eyeing the presidency a very long time.

It's called "The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, How She Knew It and How Far She'll Go to Become President." Author Ed Klein joins me now.

Fascinating chapter, No. 11, called "The Other Smoking Gun," about Hillary and the Watergate investigation and what she did — well, she acted to set the bar so high for impeachment practically nobody could ever be impeached again. What did she do?

ED KLEIN, AUTHOR, "THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY": She was a young kid, 26 years old, a year out of law school. And she became the protégé of John Doar (search), who was the special counsel for the House impeachment inquiry.

So in that position, Doar was very concerned about helping Teddy Kennedy run for president in 1976. This is now in the fall of '74, two years later. And he had two goals. One was to keep Nixon in power as long as possible, twisting in the wind, thereby discrediting...

GIBSON: Republicans.

KLEIN: ... Republicans and weakening them so Teddy could slide right in.

And the second was to prevent Nixon from launching a defense by saying what he did was no worse than what JFK did, which, would, of course, smear Kennedy.

So Doar turned to Hillary, this young, raw recruit, who was his protégé, and gave her two key jobs. The first job was to come up with regulations that the president and his lawyers could not cross-examine any witnesses, thereby stopping Nixon from proving that whatever abuses he did were no worse than JFK's.

And the second, he put her in charge of a historical group of — I should say a group of historians who were checking the past to see whether previous presidents had done anything worse than Nixon, and in fact, they found that they had. And Hillary was ordered to suppress that report.

GIBSON: OK. So this was the non-impeachment impeachment.

KLEIN: That's right.

GIBSON: They were actually working to get him out of office, but not impeach him. What did the report that she suppressed, that was put together by the historians, what did that show?

KLEIN: It showed that previous presidents, such as John F. Kennedy, had done even worse things than Nixon had done. For instance, Kennedy had used the assassination of foreign leaders as an instrument of foreign policy. Far worse than any of these things that Nixon was charged with in Watergate (search).

GIBSON: And how did she suppress it?

KLEIN: She was ordered by Doar to lock it in a safe and never show anybody, including the chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the House, who had no idea this report had ever been done. And Doar was supposed to be working for this guy.

And then Doar finally decided to lock up all the material that they had collected about this for 50 years so that historians wouldn't be able to get access to it.

GIBSON: Ed Klein. The book is called "The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It and How Far She'll Go to Become President." Chapter 11, "The Other Smoking Gun," about Watergate.

Mr. Klein, good to see you. Thanks a lot. Good luck with the book.

KLEIN: Thanks for having me.

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