Well, it was lots of fun, first and foremost. It was very revealing and in some ways shocking. I spent nearly 20 years as a Washington reporter, and...

Well, Brian, unfortunately, I was due to go down to Georgia to meet with the senator on Saturday morning. There was a book party to celebrate the publication...

It could have been one of these situations where I could have been on board the plane with him because my business trip could very easily have left...

John Tower use to introduce me as "Roger Gittines, my writer." I would say, "Well, no, Senator, you're the writer. I'm just the typist. I'll just take...

In a way, it's a long story. We share literary agents, and John Tower had another literary collaborator at the early stages of this project. She dropped...

I did, I went down to Texas. He had an office both in Washington and Dallas. I spent nearly three hours with him in his Dallas office having a one-on-one...

Well, I've collaborated on several different projects. I had just finished one with Bob Berkowitz, a former "Today" show correspondent published by...

Well, basically -- I probably shouldn't say this because every Washington reporter in town will climb the wall. I've always thought that in some ways...

The first book was the Bob Berkowitz book.

This was the second. I'm now working on one. It's provisionally titled All the Right Moves, by a California therapist by the name of Peter Guske. He's...

I do. I like it a lot. You know, writing, as it has been said ad nauseam, is an intensely lonely occupation. When you collaborate with someone else,...

Back in the Ice Age.

I started right when I was at American University. I came to Washington to study political science and immediately picked up a job at WAVA, which was...

It was suggested at a kind of a typical literary luncheon between John Tower, his agent and Fredi Friedman, who was the senator's editor at Little Brown....

I believe so. Believe it or not, I never asked the senator what he was paid for an advance on this book. I just figured it was none of my business,...

Essentially, yes. I mean, when he gets an advance, that's designed to cover any kind of research or writer that would be necessary to complete the project.

We had a deadline. When I started on the project in October of 1989, we were to deliver in April of 1990, deliver the manuscript, which was an impossible...

Essentially, it was whatever you need, spend it. Tell me what you're going to do and go do it. It worked very well. I could go to California, go to...

We did discuss it. Almost at the outset of the discussion, this three-hour meeting that I related to you in Dallas, I said to him, "Well, Senator, this...

No, I didn't, as a matter of fact. The acknowledgements were written by Sen. Tower and almost the entire afterward of the book was written word for...

Very nice.

We did, but he called me one Saturday afternoon toward the end of the writing process and read that to me. I was really moved by it. He was still quite...

He had material for three or four books, and he had attempted right after leaving the Senate to do a serious study of the relationship between the executive...

In Dallas, he had an office off of Turtle Creek Boulevard there where he practiced his consulting business.

Well, no. I had lived through the confirmation hearings, as we all did, and I had formed some conclusions about what happened and what didn't. I thought...

At the end of it I basically gave him a stack of magazines, World Opinion magazine. I had been their U.S. political correspondent. He was leaving for...

It was about a week later. He had talked to the agent and told our agent that she had sent him the right guy. I think coming from Washington, having...

Well, as I say, I'm finishing this book.

What we did is whenever he would come into Washington, which was basically every three weeks, maybe every two weeks, we would spend the afternoon together...

I would say 30 times, 25 to 30 times, in restaurants, in hotel rooms, in his office in Dallas and in Washington, several times over the phone. He often...

The juice was really flowing most of the time because getting such an insider's perspective on this man's career and on the political process was something...

I did, and I would often use that as the senator's Achilles heel in writing this book because he was such a historian and political scientist and proud...

No, on the whole, it was John Tower's call. The things that got cut many times were just a matter of redundancies and space. He felt at one point that...

I think John Tower saw it as one of the keys to understanding the confirmation process and why things went wrong at the end. He felt that Sen. Warner...

I think it came as a real personal shock because he and I had become very close friends. As a friend of his at his funeral said to me and I heard what...

Basically Sen. Tower and I went over the Sam Nunn fingerprints on the confirmation process very closely, and we tried to figure out what Sam Nunn's...

At that point he wasn't really fond of Sam Nunn. That bridge had been burned, and he didn't mind lighting a few matches there. One of the things that...

No, not to make headlines at all. I think Sen. Tower was extremely angry with Sen. Exon for what he considered to be this unfair attack on him. If you...

Never had, as far as I know, a direct reaction from Exon. Sen. Tower went out and campaigned during the last senatorial election in Nebraska and said...

I think what he wanted to do -- he was very fond of Meg Greenfield's editorial that she wrote soon after the senator's nomination was defeated. She...

Yes, I do. In fact, I think writing a book like that is just another branch of being a reporter. You're reporting the news about John Tower or you're...

Oh, no, not at all.

Oh, I certainly do, and you probably do too, Brian, being an old reporter.

I was indeed, and it certainly is true. There still to this day is a lingering sense of inferiority. Broadcasters try to prove themselves and the print...

No, Sen. Tower observed it, and if you go and read the rest of that chapter, you'll see that it leads right into the news conference in which his nomination...

No, I think what it does is it brings Andrea Mitchell into the spotlight in a significant way -- that Andrea Mitchell herself had been the victim of...

I think he had known Sarah for a very long time because she does represent a huge string of little Texas newspapers, so she was in and out of his office....

As a reporter, I could really engage him in a dialog. I could play the devil's advocate and bring him out a little bit by just literally arguing with...

No, I think because he was a consummate politician, very skillful, he saw the press as a tool -- a tool to be used, not in a cynical way, to manipulate....

You say that "I wrote" -- that's word for word what he said to me in conversation in his office.

He had acknowledged, I think, prior to that in interviews that there had been infidelities during his first marriage, but he said there had no infidelities...

It was reviewed in all the major national publications, New York Times, Washington Post. It got fairly good reviews, seeing how controversial John Tower...

It surged in sales for a week to 10 days and then leveled back off again.

I think he was getting to the press coverage during his confirmation hearing which just dwelt on the rumors, the innuendos, the baseless charges that...

That's a good question. I think the competitive pressures were such that a lot of reporters probably did what they later came to regret. We report in...

He thinks a lot of it came out of the Democratic staff on the Senate Armed Services Committee. He points the finger specifically at Arnold Punaro, who...

The senator started in 1961 in the United States Senate. He came to the Senate as the youngest member of the Senate. He replaced Lyndon Johnson, a figure...

They just leak everywhere. I mean, it becomes a contest of who do you leak to and how much.

Your favorite leakees tend to be the New York Times, the Washington Post and the networks. They're the most highly visible national media outlets, so...

Yes. Well, sometimes it's a simple telephone call. Sometimes it's a note advising you to take a look at this document or that document. Sometimes it's...

I think he would blame Sam Nunn. I think he saw Sam Nunn as playing the pivotal role in shooting him down. He couldn't understand why Nunn had done...

Sen. Everett Dirksen would hold forth in the evening after 5 o'clock with many of the old Senate barons in attendance -- the Richard Russells and the...

I think it was about three months in, two-and-a-half to three months in. I had been roughing out outlines, trying my hand at some sample chapters just...

Yes, it was early '90, right after the first of the year, where I could really get into it, as I said, about 12 hours a day.

What we did is I developed an outline and submitted it to him and submitted it to Fredi Friedman, the editor at Little Brown, and we went from there....

We used to laugh about that. We used to laugh that Little Brown_ they wanted a best-seller, obviously. They were publishing it. They wanted it on top...

I probably personally in writing it would steer him into areas that I thought as a former journalist would provoke some headlines and tried to make...

No, not at all. In fact, I think the senator was right on the mark there. You cannot have a democracy if you don't have dialogue, if you don't have...

I would say to him, "What would you do differently, Senator, if you had it to do all over again?" He would think about it and he would say, "Basically...

I'd take two more years to do it.

I think that John Tower deserved two or three years of research and labor on his memoirs and we unfortunately didn't have enough time to do that. Two...

It's a historical document, I hope, of considerable value and importance and so did he. That's why he worked as hard as he did on it. It gives an inside...

Thank you, Brian.