Now I've Heard Everything

Fifty years ago this week, a botched burglary at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, DC touched off a criminal conspiracy that eventually brought down the president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon.

It's the scandal that to this day is simply known by the name of the office complex where the burglary occurred: Watergate.

All this week on Now I've Heard Everything we're featuring interviews I've done with figures connected to Watergate. Our last episode featured former Washington Post editor Ben Bradley. On Friday, my conversation with the mastermind of the burglary, G. Gordon Liddy.

One of Nixon's loyalists at the center of everything was his White House counsel, a young lawyer named John Dean.

The Watergate burglary was 50 years ago this week.

Iconic renowned Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee played a central role in covering Watergate.  

He took over at the Post in 1965, in the thick of Vietnam, the civil Rights movement and a changing journalism landscape.

And although Watergate may be the thing he is best remembered for now, it was not the only major story he was involved in.

I met Ben Bradlee in 1995, when he wrote his autobiography, a book called A Good Life.

Father's Day is coming up in about a week, and today. I wanted to share with you an interview I did a few years ago about a Hollywood father-son story.

For the better part of four decades, one of America's favorite actors was Jack Lemmon.

He made some 60 movies. He was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and won the Oscar twice,for Mr. Roberts, and for Save The Tiger.

Younger audiences may remember him best for his roles in the comedies Grumpy, Old Men and Grumpier Old Men.

And starting in the 1970s, Jack Lemmon's son Chris also established himself as a performer.  The younger lemon is a talented actor, screenwriter, and musician.

And in 2006, he published a book, a tribute to his dad, called A Twist of Lemmon. 

She is one of the most visible faces in television news. For 15 years she has co-hosted MSNBC's Morning Joe program.

But before that, Mika Brzezinski ;s future in television news was anything but certain. In fact, she wasn't sure she had a future.

Through a little bit of luck, a lot of hard work, and a persistence that just wouldn't give up, Brzezinski earned her way back into TV news, and eventually the Morning Joe co-host slot.

I met her in 2010 when she wrote a memoir that was also a motivational book for women called All Things at Once.

It was an electrifying finish to the 2006, Kentucky Derby, as the undefeated 3-year-old Barbaro won the race by the largest margin of victory in over six decades.

The jockey who guided Barbaro to victory that day was one of the world's best, the 38-year-old veteran Edgar Prado.

But two weeks later tragedy struck. In the opening seconds of the Preakness, Barbaro went down with a catastrophic leg injury.

Barbaro struggled for months, before finally having to be put down.

Two years later, Prado wrote a love story, a book called M Guy Barbaro.  That's when I met him and his co-author, sports writer John Eisenberg. 

Can the guy who just barely graduated from high school become one of the world's 100 most influential people?

Well, it doesn't very often, to be sure. But that is the short version of the story of Dr. J. Craig Venter, who led the first draft sequence of the human genome some 20 years ago,

Venter founded the company Celera Genomics, which found itself in a very publicized race with the international Human Genome Project to produce that map.

And by summer 2000, Venter was a VIP guest at a White House announcement featuring President Clinton, British prime minister Tony Blair, and a host of other high-level dignitaries. 

Venter was widely hailed around the world as a leading figure in the scientific community .

In 2007, Venter wrote his autobiography, a book called A Life Decoded. And that's what I met him. 

We're kicking off the start of LGBTQ Pride Month with a conversation with one of the leading literary figures in the gay rights movement of the late 20th century.

Armistead Maupin started writing stories in 1974 that were published in a small newspaper in the San Francisco area. Those serialized stories were known as tales of the City.

Finally, in 1978, Maupin published the first Tales of The City book, the 1st of several in the series.

Drawing on his own experience as a gay man, Mupin’s books feature a broad community of diverse characters and backgrounds.

Importantly, Armistead Maupin was one of the first writers to directly address the AIDS crisis.

I first met him in 1987, but the conversation you're about to hear is from 13 years later, when we talked about his novel The Night Listener.

Memorial Day is the day America honors the men and women who have sacrificed their lives in military service.

But not all of those lives were lost on the battlefield.

U.S. Air Force fighter pilot Michael Donnelly flew 44 combat missions during the Persian Gulf war, Operation Desert Storm, in the early 1990s.

But in 1996, Donnelly was medically discharged from the Air Force, after being diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

His subsequent fight with the U.S. government to get medical treatment proved to be the most difficult battle he had ever fought.

In 1998, Donnelly and his sister Denise co-wrote Falcon’s Cry: A Desert Storm Memoir.

One of the world's most iconic auto races, the Indianapolis 500, will be run this Sunday.

In the 111-year history of the Indy 500 only a handful of drivers have won the race three times or more

And only two drivers have won the race in three different decades.

One of them Bobby, Unser, who's part of the storied Unser auto racing family.  He won the Indy 500 in 1968, 1975, and 1981.

He and his brother Al are the only set of brothers ever to win the Indy 500.

I met Bobby Unser in the spring of 2003, when he wrote a motivational book called Winners Are Driven.

Catherine Crier had a remarkable legal career. By age 30, she had become the youngest elected judge ever in the state of Texas.

But the number of years and Crier became a journalist and television personality, eventually hosting her own show on Court TV.

And along the way, she developed some strong opinions about the profession that she began her career in, the law.

Her 2002 book The Case Against Lawyers became a New York Times bestseller. And that's when I first met her.