On June 12, 1973, President Richard M. Nixon and J. Fred Buzhardt, Jr. talked on the telephone from 1:24 pm to 1:41 pm. The White House Telephone taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 040-033 of the White House Tapes.
Transcript (AI-Generated)This transcript was generated automatically by AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Do not cite this transcript as authoritative. Consult the Finding Aid above for verified information.
yeah mister bizarre yes sir I have that with the questions but that was a line you you probably already thought of yourself but if I were my old investigator that could be the way I'd go after right that's a good way to approach it you know and right down the line he did you see well but the point is he was my counsel take for example on the matter of
whether he did or did not, whether he reported the break-in.
Now, he didn't report it to me until about March 13th or 17th, I don't know which.
Right.
And so somebody thinks, well, why didn't I report to the Attorney General?
My God, he is my counsel.
He's in contact with Peterson.
I don't talk to Peterson.
Right.
I assumed he had.
That's what he did, you know?
And all the way down the line, though, I think the fact that he didn't report these things to the President,
says, well, I reported Erlichman.
The point is, Erlichman was not in contact with Peterson either, right, except on one occasion.
My point is, Dean was in daily contact, as I understand, or at least every few days with Peterson, was he not?
And with Gray.
And with Gray.
And with Gray.
And put that in.
Did you report it to Gray?
Right.
Did you report it to Peterson?
Right.
See?
And I just nail him right to the cross on that.
We'll emphasize that in order to indicate that he has responsibility.
See?
Yes, that's true.
You see, the point, Fred, is this.
His defense will be, well, I didn't report it to the president because there was a wall around him, and I didn't.
I just told Erlingman or Haldeman, see.
Right.
He has no defense with regard to Gray and Peterson.
He was talking to them regularly.
Right.
So I'd ask, how many times do you see Gray?
How often times do you see him?
He hasn't checked his files on that, and that'll scare the hell out of him.
Not at all.
Huh?
I'm sure he hasn't.
Yeah.
And, incidentally, if you have any way to get the number of times Peterson must have a log and Gray has a log, I'd get that.
Do you understand?
Yes, sir.
Get the log of the times that he, in that period, saw him from June 17th on.
I imagine it was scores of times and calls.
And so I'll come on the telephone.
Right.
I would get that and the number of telephone calls.
Right.
I don't know whether his calls are not logged or they know.
What else?
Mine aren't logged.
Gray's undoubtedly are locked.
Peterson's are locked, I'm sure.
And you'll say, all right, you talked to him 60 times.
Did you, on any of these occasions, report that?
You know?
Right.
That's the way I think it ought to be handled.
That's a very good line of questioning.
Because basically it gets him away from the fact, well, I was just a little boy working around here, and I didn't report to the president because I just felt I should report to Ehrlichman.
little to heat off Ehrlichman, too.
God darn it.
He should have reported to the Gray or Peterson if he felt that.
Right.
It should be a very difficult line of questions for him.
Mm-hmm.
That's one line I certainly think we shouldn't use in the... Don't use anything on the hearings.
The preliminary hearings, the main thing is to nail him as much as you can on his charges against the president.
That's all I want.
Right.
I mean, did he know what you're doing so far?
Don't you think so?
Yes, sir.
very definitely and how far he's going to go remains i also told uh needed you were the fact that that friday meeting will leak is a very cursed brief brutal denial of his stuff and then in this case if he strikes which he will say that here is a man that has has been given an incentive to lie
that these are untruths.
What I'm getting at is, I think what I meant is we have to have a crisp denial without going into any specifics, without saying, well, I didn't see him on the 14th, or I did see him on the 21st, and I didn't call him on the 23rd, and I didn't say that.
If you get into that, you're dead.
Just a crisp, general denial is the only way to handle this.
Do you agree?
Absolutely.
But that should be prepared in advance, Fred.
We're working on that right now.
Regardless of what comes out, hit them whack.
Don't you agree?
Yes, sir, and we will work on that and have it all ready.
And let Ziegler look it over so he can.
Cox has just made an announcement.
I've learned of the fact of the announcement, but not what it says about the Dean's situation.
I should have that in a little while.
All we've got so far is that he's put out to the press he has an announcement that they can pick up.
So, shortly, we should know what it is.
Whether he will or will not appeal the, uh, Sirica's ruling or what he's going to do with respect to take him before the grand jury, I don't know what the subject is yet.
We should know shortly.
Whether he's going to give him, uh, transactional immunity.
All the indications are very clear he is not.
Is that true?
Yes, sir.
But what indications do you have from Peterson?
Well, the arguments made yesterday, this morning in court, and on Friday, the statements of the prosecutors, indicate clearly that they aren't about to give Dean transactional immunity.
I don't see why he would talk in the Senate then, Fred.
I don't see why he would.
Well, I guess he doesn't want to...
He's not going to get it, so he doesn't want to fight the contempt thing, and he'll try to give his broader testimony and contaminate the prosecution's case as much as possible.
I presume that's what he's doing.
It works to our advantage if we can get him on to oath.
The sooner we get him on to oath, I think the better advantage it is to us.
Get it over with.
That's right.
Well, he gets it over with.
And once he gets under oath, then we don't have to deal with all these innuendos and left-handed suggestions.
That's right.
Whatever he says under oath must be categorically denied.
You know what I mean?
Right.
Have you finished your survey of the news summaries and all that nonsense?
No, sir.
I'm still working on it.
It would be quite an exercise to pull all of this together.
I guess I'm about two-thirds of the way through with it, Mr. President.
Pulling it all together.
We're looking at the debriefing books, the news summaries, the chronology of events that was taking place at that time.
and have as good an overview as possible.
The news summaries cause you no particular problem at this point?
No, sir.
I've been through them.
There is no problem in the news summaries.
You can have every one of them and have absolutely nothing.
Well, you know, I wondered perhaps if I might have looked, for example, last year in the news summary, the scene they were going to call stands up and said, for God's sakes, no, or something like that.
I probably did.
You may have, but I don't think you wrote it down.
On some of these, you know, you would write a comment, and then you would put an X by it.
If you put an X by it, it never went any further than Bob Holden.
Was that right?
Yes, sir.
I don't know who put the X, either you or Bob.
Bob put it there.
But when the X was on it, it didn't go any further than his office.
No comment.
Well, actually, the news summaries are a pretty good indication of the fact, too, that I didn't know what the hell was going on, aren't they?
Yes, sir.
When you read them?
Well, there are comments that indicate you were very much in the darkest of what this was about.
Yeah.
You know, you have mostly questions who or what or that sort of thing.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
It's interesting to note, now, you know, one other line of questioning we'll use here.
one of the things I've been concentrating on is this question of paying money.
You know, how much you'd have to pay off to these people.
All of Dean's paying, we took out all the comments from the testimony that's been given, was, his main role was in January.
Long before he ever talked to you about this was when he was...
He was doing it then?
Oh, yes.
He, uh, both executive clemency and making the payments.
That's when he got into that.
That's when he was all into that.
And so this was all prior to his discussion with you.
And as we can tell, there was no more activity after the period when he was talking to you.
There's no activity, for example, the key thing that he might try to...
It is on this whether or not this fellow Hunt was paid off or Bittman or whatever it was.
Right.
What does he have to show on that?
That whole thing took place in January, Mr. President.
Oh.
You know, you know.
Oh, long before.
Yes, sir.
Colson saw Bittman, but it appears that was very early on.
And Dean... Oh, oh, oh, you mean Hunt's demand, or Bittman's demand for 120 took place in January?
It took place...
But Dean gave me the impression he just heard it.
That's the whole point, though.
You see, in digging this stuff out and going through all the material we have, everything I have so far indicates that this whole transaction took place in January.
Yet in the conversation we had that day, the 21st, why, Dean had some talk about Mitchell and Pappas working together to sort of raise money, you know, and did the Greek bring gifts, et cetera, and so forth.
I don't know what the hell it was about, looking back, because how does that add into this?
In other words, I don't know why in the world they'd be raising money in March, do you?
And because it appears that the money paying all was before that.
i see and uh you know when they had colesman dean instructed cole colson to go talk to uh about clemency hunt and colson said he wouldn't talk to hunt he would talk to bitman right oh he did and he did but all this took place long before your meetings with dean now my meeting with dean didn't begin until about the first of march february 27th and all this had gone before which is a very
a very important factor in this whole thing this is the kind of thing we're trying to pin down because he is in all of the statements he's making maybe that's the reason that he and his uh shotgun deal he and his attorneys last week tried to say from january on and you know he may have forgotten what do you think i don't think he's forgotten mr president i think he's stretching it to try to get clemency and if he ever gets these dates pinned down it's gonna
and get immunity he never gets these dates pinned down it's going to be apparent that you could not have been a party based on his conversations or rare because of his conversations what he was doing because he was doing it before you had the conversations with you and i think this is why the whole picture of him pushing it back to january occurred i think that's why he
You see, I might have asked him, I might have asked him, I'm just trying to recollect if I could have asked him on the phone from Florida as to what in the world had happened on this hunt thing, you know, because I, not because of Watergate, but because of my concern in the national security thing.
I'm confident I didn't, you know what I mean?
Well, it doesn't make any difference.
That was after we were investigating anyway.
Right.
And in any event,
It's only him and me, and that's that.
Well, at any rate, there are many things that we can approach here that we're developing from the chronologies of the way things happened that can be used in cross-examination very effectively to take his whole thesis apart.
It takes a lot of digging to put all this stuff together.
Now, on your questions, you'll be ready, you think, Thursday morning?
Yes, sir.
With the part with reference to your participation in the meetings with him, I will be ready Thursday morning.
Yeah, what you need to know there and how it's going across the family.
Oh.
You understand all I have are the fragmentary notes.
They're not bad.
They turn out to be more than I realized.
Yes, sir.
and I recall a lot, so I'll be glad to go over them with you.
It will be very helpful.
The more precision with which we can have in our knowledge of the events, the better job we're going to be able to do on him.
You've got to know everything.
You've got to know everything.
I know that.
So we're... Get every question you can think of, but be sure that you have run down with Ziegler and all the others.
I have raised a number of questions, you know, that appear to me from time to time, you know, that this fellow is not
didn't come clean with.
Let me just summarize it in a word.
On the 21st of March, when he came in and talked about the cancer in the heart of the White House, and throughout my conversations with him, Dean never talked about his own problem.
He said, well, maybe I got a problem.
He'd say that.
But he never said what it was.
He was always talking about, well, Ehrlichman's got a problem.
Haldeman's got a problem.
Grubb's got a problem.
But he never talked about, specifically,
See my point?
Yes.
He also must tell us something.
I don't know.
Well, I think that'll make very good cross-examination.
You know, well, you say you told the president all this.
And did you tell him about this?
Did you tell him about that?
Did you tell him about that?
Did you tell him, for example, that Liddy on June 19 told you everything?
He has told the prosecutors.
You see?
Yes, sir.
He didn't tell me anything about it.
I didn't even know he talked to Liddy on June 19th.
Well, I didn't.
Put that down.
Yes, sir.
I'm writing that down.
June 19th, he has said that Liddy had told him everything on June 19th.
And he has also said that he told that to Ehrlichman.
It later turns out that if he told it to Ehrlichman, he must have told it to him this year, not last year.
Right.
Yes, sir.
He sure didn't tell me.
Liddy told him everything.
We don't know what Liddy told him.
My guess is Liddy didn't tell him everything.
No, it's unlikely that Liddy would tell him everything.
He's just not that much of a gambler.
I suspect he did tell him about the Ellsberg psychiatrist thing on that date.
You think Dean knew about it all this time, then?
Why in the thickens didn't he tell somebody then?
Dean knew about the Ellsberg psychiatrist thing soon after the wake-in.
Because it turns out that that's why he sent fielding to Europe to pick up this girl, Chinook, to make sure she wouldn't tell the FBI about it.
Good.
I didn't know about that.
Yes, sir.
The FBI was looking for the secretary who had been secretary to... Hunt?
Well, to Hunt, Liddy, and really to Young.
And so they sent fielding...
on a rush trip to europe and it turns out we've been spending an awful lot of time with feeling that's what the purpose of it was to get to her and tell her nothing she could talk about anything else but nothing about the promise
Basically because of national security.
Well, that's all right.
I don't... Because of national security, but they specifically discussed with her the Ellsberg... Yeah, but my point is that was national security, and that's the line.
I don't blame Dean for that one bit, or Ehrlichman, or Young, or Krogh.
I'm not saying we blame him.
I'm just saying that he knew about it at that time, and it was shortly after the 19th, so that's probably where he got it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Helps explain what he was doing here.
Okay.
All right, sir.
Thank you.