Cavett: I was actually persona grata at the White House for a brief time. I went to an evening of Shakespeare there, and Nixon was in the receiving line. I never knew in that moment that some time later a guy out in California would find tapes of Nixon and his lickspittle H.R. Haldeman, where Nixon says, “Cavett — there must be some way we can screw him.”

Meyers: The specter of a Trump presidency is that he actively dislikes me.

Cavett: It’s the most interesting thing that this vile, no-class, ignorant man who brags that he doesn’t read and does great imitations of people with disabilities — and hates women and a few other things — is considered a presidential candidate. I was going to give Mrs. Clinton a line: “What if a great international crisis blew up in the Middle East? Don’t you want a president who knows Shiite from Shinola?”

Meyers: He’s built for late-night shows to talk about. More generally, it feels like we’re in a cycle of tragedies, and if you talk about the news every night, it can feel like you’re ignoring something if you don’t talk about it — like Dallas. But you can’t talk about it every time something happens, otherwise it stops being a comedy show.

Cavett: What about the subject of offending? I had John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the show, whose first appearance gave us some of our biggest ratings, and when they came back on, I was told that ABC was going to cut their performance of a song.

Image Credit... Marcelo Krasilcic

Meyers: What song was it?

Cavett: “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.”

Meyers: Well, yeah, there you go.

Cavett: ABC agreed to air it as long as I said something cautionary about it before they came on. It played, and there were about 420 complaints — none of them about the song, but about, as one woman said, “that mealy-mouthed speech you made Dick do, treating us like idiots.”