On April 9, 1973, President Richard M. Nixon, H. R. ("Bob") Haldeman, and Stephen B. Bull met in the Oval Office of the White House from 9:47 am to 11:49 am. The Oval Office taping system captured this recording, which is known as Conversation 891-001 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 Do not cite this transcript as authoritative.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.
Tell a bunch of people they were privately asked to say they were boys.
It's yesterday.
It doesn't sound good coming from a guy like you.
It's out of character.
Yeah.
And it's awful.
Well, we're going to spend a lot of money.
Like you said, we're going to spend a lot of money.
Well, anything else for the day?
He said, I'll send it in to you, and he figured it out, and we can read it.
But Carl Rowland blasted us in a column, Stan Scott, you know, our black guy now.
Asked for a guest column rebuttal, which Rowland let him have.
He wrote a column that I've got to find out if he really wrote it, but he did.
He has a real talent.
He just smashed the bejesus out of Rowland.
Just zacks him up one side and down the other ground.
and, you know, solid support of the president, but it's beautifully written.
Because, you know, he uses the...
Even the Karl Rawls of the black community must be fed up with the poverty professionals who help themselves to the end of poverty platter before it's passed on to the people for whom it was intended to crave.
I wonder if anyone ever explained to Rowan that the butchering of the Office of Economic Opportunity really began in the year of his birth, 1965.
His reports started trickling and then pouring in.
Widespread abuses, book-doggling, and miscellaneous rip-offs by the community action capos who are now howling loudly because the sacred cow is rapidly running out of kennel.
became not too sophisticated.
Or if he wrote that, he's got it all.
In terms of actual outlet for all the old programs, what Karl Rowland likes to call butchery is in reality a masterful job of slicing away the fat and serving up larger portions of protein.
He takes Rowland's words in terms of fact.
Well, it goes just around the other way.
What about the print?
Probably.
Too long.
Oh, it was printed, yeah.
It was, or it's going to be.
They were reading around it.
It's exactly the right one.
Pretty good stuff, though.
What is the name of the business company today?
43. 43.
No, but the interest has been, I can't believe, I don't know what's going on there, yeah.
I'm sorry.
POWs are hammering away, so I think it's just, oh, yeah.
Because they've got new swords all the time.
Each, every, you know, each guy comes out and he's got some different thing demonstrated on their torture.
And they take the occasion to say that Jane Fonda was what caused them to be tortured.
They hate these people, obviously.
Good.
Good.
Great.
You know, to a certain extent, the Congress people in Washington are out of country.
Oh, sure.
They're whamming around like a widow or something.
I really don't, really don't think there's that much interest in a lot of them.
And as of the present time, still not that much interest in monitoring.
Not as of the present time.
And we'll be, I think we can tell about that.
You know, since you've been talking now about things that would be probably bad or not good, not colorizing the line,
And then once you're talking about not carrying the law, sure, they'll tape it and then run a half hour report each evening or something on that.
So it's worse highlights of the hearings, which would be worse.
We have a bigger audience and we've got to do all our stuff.
They'll run the senators bad hearings, not the...
If they do that, we probably ought to...
In fact, maybe we ought to start now that if we're going to televise it at all, it should be televised live when that happens, not selectively by the network.
That tends to kill the story.
They were right.
I would insist on that.
Early on.
The big picture of him being sworn into the Senate for the first time by the Vice President of the United States.
I'll be mad if my money gets bogged down in this Washington.
It's a new strategy for summer, and so this might go.
This summer, the balance might be a good idea, because that would give you a feeling of the spread, because this is not the Watergate.
Watergate didn't post today.
Well, I look at the Times and the Post every morning, and I just look, and that's all.
They're actually in the worst.
Well, those just got a big lottery.
I mean, Nines has a big lottery.
I saw that.
They've got a court naming Mitchell.
Oh, maybe.
No, I thought it was a big lottery.
Parkinson's is the one I saw.
That's right.
That's the time, sir.
I'm sorry.
There's a big one.
You're right.
You're right.
He's naming Parkinson's, passing the money.
Usually he has the thing that he names Mitchell.
I was watching it.
to be improved in the, uh, one way or the other.
That's the usual McCourt stuff, isn't it?
Well, they're pretty clear in Cutter's time story.
The time story went to great lengths.
I don't know why they're doing this.
They must be afraid of libel.
I think they are.
Cutter's time story goes to great lengths to say it was hearsay.
Of course, it takes about four paragraphs before they say it, but they say it.
When Ervin came back on that thing, all the papers just stumbled all over, running big disclaimers of what they had done on it.
I'm explaining.
That's what everybody seems to be on that, and that's got me worried about the rest of it.
We've conclusively proven so many times
When we said that's hearsay and, you know, there's nothing to it, then they sneer at us and then it turns out that they were wrong.
They've got a problem.
There's no way we can handle them like this.
Well, sure there is.
There is a way, except for the fact that, uh,
The moment you get into the suit, as you know, the problem are depositions.
And depositions, of course, can just be great fishing expeditions and every goddamn thing.
And, uh, on the other hand, what I do read a chance, I mean, the statute of limitations of life was very, very short.
They impressed the way they protected themselves.
You know, I, you've got a life of suit without a question.
Uh, I'm sure that one of you, you know, I'm pretty sure, no, he's not.
I've got one against Weicker, because there is clearly a house there, and you can't argue that.
You mean he knew better?
Well, A, he knew better, and B, he was intending to do harm.
And he wasn't doing it to report news.
And he did it on television and at a press conference, not on the Senate floor.
He doesn't have a B in television.
God damn it, you know, if he were there, I bet you I would sue him.
You ought to be suing him.
I'm going to have to sue him for $65,000 and say, I know he's got it, and cash is what he gave me.
I'm going to have to sue him.
I'm going to have to sue him.
I'm going to have to sue him.
I'm going to have to sue him.
I'm going to have to sue him.
I'm going to have to sue him.
And I don't, and Colson just may have done it.
Searches and so forth.
Colson's a little John up there in a lighting detector.
So I just wanted to do that.
Now that's the worst acting he put in school.
Cheap.
Thank you, because what does that give everyone on this committee before you're willing to take a lie detector test?
Not only cheap, but it's also stupid, because he did it on these five loaded questions on Watergate.
Now let's say that time comes back, or somebody else, out of pure hearsay, says Colson was masterminding a plot to close Teddy Kennedy.
Now, is he going to go up and take a lie detector on that?
And if not, why not?
Why would he take it on one and not on another?
He hurts himself more than anybody, but he hurts everybody.
And it's a kind of an unbelievable thing, you know, phony thing, when you hire a private firm to do your own lie detector on you, and decide whether to release it after you know the results.
It's not exactly the sporting way to take a landing.
No, I've got to say, I'm going to take it.
Everybody who waves with me to craft, you've got to result.
He did it the other way.
But that was a very, very awesome flight.
I said, this business is not a business for yourself or anything like this.
Everybody in this building will be bummed right here.
Goddamn it.
This is what I made to Dean last night.
There's a real danger in what's happening now in that each of these people, except Mitchell and me, has retained his own attorney.
And that attorney, in each case, has, of course, a different interest than we have.
Colson's attorney's interest is in acquitting Colson.
And that's all.
And Magruder's attorney's interest is in acquitting Magruder.
And Dean's attorney's interest is in acquitting Dean.
None of them has any concern about the president, except just that they have some degree of ability.
They don't have any professional ability, because that's not their job.
They weren't hired to defend the president or the nation.
And as I understand the morality and ethics of a criminal lawyer, he has no obligation to defend anything but his client.
That's correct.
Including no obligation to defend the truth?
Absolutely not.
Not at all.
And I, which is fine, except in this case it's to a degree counterproductive because in the defense of any one of these guys, you can fumble the defense of all of them.
What did he say?
He agreed to tell us.
Somebody he'd be concerned about.
I mean, he's close to the jury.
He was actually talking about going home and taking the defendant out of the grand jury.
He can't take the victim.
It might be.
That's not an amenable position for the Council of the President to be in.
I suppose that for him, it's more accountable to the person in charge of these things.
Now, this is the deal of the people.
If I take the 50, he's protecting everybody.
I don't understand that.
He ruled without anyone.
It's not a way to put a teenager on the other side of the wire.
Well, he agreed to it.
He could have said, you know, he could have said that.
He produced some testimony on this job.
If you told everybody there are testifiers, and you couldn't have a guy under the protection of this, I'm sorry.
I don't think we were measured much here in Washington.
How do you feel?
I don't know.
We're gaining a lot of ground out there.
We're having trouble with some of the stuff.
The A story about this is the fleet story, and I'm lifting a vector.
I mean, great.
That's great.
In fact, I have a great story.
We started hitting, and we spent a few minutes in a staff meeting, and one phone call, and that does not hate me.
I do nothing.
I don't really talk to you or anything, so that was kind of a struggle.
But your point that you don't need a story at all is good, too.
Absolutely.
I don't think everything.
You say, well, this is a White House story, and so forth.
Well, that next story is out of the department.
I frankly think it's well to have a department that will start it.
We don't have to have this.
Ron, of course, has a necessary, I mean, loyalty to the proposition that the White House reporters get all the stories through the White House reporters.
They shouldn't get all the stories.
He gets better stories out of other places.
He gets better stories out of other places.
These people are poisonous, like, for the most part.
I know it's not a bad piece of the higher, higher, quite a few poisonous ones.
Now sir, I think also the country, the country needs not to, not to have a president out there leading every government.
This is entirely the opposite of the common theory.
In fact, the leadership of the country didn't do that.
Well maybe, maybe that was true for a while.
The country had to constantly have a leader.
I don't think so.
I think everything goes in cycles.
You can't keep everything at a deeper vision.
You can't keep constantly escalating.
You have to go up and then you have to go down.
Right.
So that you can go back up again.
Right.
And people's interest levels go up.
People don't want to.
They don't want to see it all the time.
And they aren't paying for a big news story every day.
We turn on our TV every night with those of us who watch the news.
We turn on to see what the administration is.
It's nobody else's.
No, they don't.
People don't turn on and say, what did next do today?
They turn on to find out what the baseball score is or what happened to the local firehouse.
And the local news gets
What happened at the firehouse?
Who raped somebody under the bridge?
That's right.
And what the weather should be.
Quite true.
What the weather should be.
Oh, we're not going to do it that way.
And from what you see on the water deep, an awful lot of them just say no.
Why do they keep talking about that?
They still also all say they ought to get that cleared up.
I think part of the reason they want it cleared up is so they quit talking about it as much as they care what the answer is.
Some guy's got a good letter in the Washington Post this morning that's just boiling mad at the miscarriage of justice.
It's all a stir about the water game.
It's clear that nobody did anything to harm society here.
All they did was go into a
committed an act that if the judge had given permission, it was only illegal because the judge's permission wasn't given.
In other words, it was the kind of act that you can't get permission to do, booking, because it wasn't that made it illegal.
So it was a technical violation of the law that didn't do any harm to anybody.
They said they can't for the life of them understand why the people that were guilty of it are convicted to longer, in a sense, to longer prison terms than murderers, rapists, and, you know, somebody else.
And three big criminals, you know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
And just to hear about all the attention given to it.
I mean, why would he?
I mean, why does the press make such a big fuss about it?
You know, I was thinking of one thing that... You know, with regard to recording what goes on here in the room, I feel uneasy about that.
That's uneasy in terms of anybody else seeing it.
We'll control it, but I'm uneasy in the fact that it's even done.
I just, just feel it.
And I have quite, I mean, I've received, or not received, I, at least, when did they start, when did this start being done?
I don't know if we have any cards to describe.
I've got to get a check of it.
A couple years, I would guess.
Well, I have a rather extensive memorandum of file.
I have at least over a year.
In terms of what this has done for about all that was served, would be to go back over, if there were a convention, in terms of the stuff, you know, you go back over, and if anybody really got a vote or something,
It's very tough stuff to use.
You have to go through a calendar and look for a specific thing.
That's right.
You could say, hey, what the hell are we talking about in that state and so forth.
The other thing, however you do it.
I just don't like the idea of, okay, look, I have a conversation in here with you earlier or anybody else you all know.
Right.
Right.
Those, yeah, I don't write them.
But you've got those, yeah, at a later time.
Some of the others, I guess, do.
But I can't make them after you're five.
On a meeting, I do.
On a conversation like this, I don't.
I keep these notes.
And I later write a book.
And I write a dictated thing.
It was covered during that day.
That's why it summarizes the developments in that.
That has to keep that available.
And that really covers an awful lot of, well, it doesn't cover like a meeting with Dr. Burns or something like that.
We try to get any meeting like that where there's a staff person here, they write it in the grant file.
But that's not, you see, we don't meet with people without those memoranda that have varied degrees of usefulness.
Some are good, some are not.
Some don't ever get done.
you have infinitely more stuff than anybody's going to be able to use.
Well, in terms of what can be used, in terms of what can be used, basically, what I've arrived at in two others here and in here from time to time is far more real questions than we can get at with something.
I don't remember exactly what, who said, and then you can go back and run it.
The problem, and I wondered about that, the problem is you've got, of course,
unbelievable hours of faith and they are not such because i don't have anybody else that you could let anybody else use them so that the problem with their usefulness is we will we will talk in here sometimes but i'm never going to want to read all that crap i never will that's right
Uh, you really can't go back this long, no.
There isn't anybody that you could go back to unless it's someone else.
Except perhaps Rose or perhaps Nate, but beyond that there's probably no one else.
Because you've talked to, and you wouldn't, well, you can't go back on Rose, and you probably can't go back on Nate because you've talked about Rose's problems with me and others, and you've talked about Rose's with me.
You would do it.
No, you would do it.
And you, I'd have no problem with you, but I couldn't do it with Rose anymore.
Because she said, you know, she couldn't use a kiss with your boy.
That's right.
You sure?
Now you can take seconds.
I or you can go through it and find a second that you want to enter into and have it worked out.
What I would like to do is this.
I think we should take all that we've done and destroy them.
Okay?
I just think we should.
I think we should stop.
Now who will you save?
Who knows what?
Where are they now?
This isn't a secret service man that keeps it.
What does he do?
He has everyday deliveries of tape to him.
I wanted to find out, because Alex said all the secrets picked up from there, and I just stayed away from them.
Because I didn't want any of the people to say, I heard the copies of the tapes have been made.
Oh, no.
No copies have been made.
They had never run them.
They were running through and the Secret Service had not made them.
Well, what I would like to do is, I thought about this.
And second, I think we should destroy them, because I just know that I've got so much material right now, my own files, and I'll never be able to digest it.
You know what I mean?
There's just so much.
And our thing is, you've got it, and all the stuff leading to China, and all that.
You've got all that China stuff and all that, but I just didn't know that.
And I don't need that, and I don't need the... Everybody here has recollection, but to go back over this whole bad thing,
Another thing is looking to the future in terms of whatever happens here and then.
All of us will keep better individual files where we think it's important.
You aren't relying on this.
Right.
It's like a guy writing a story, a new story.
I mean, when Earl Mason used to always come up with a tape recorder, I knew he'd get a lot.
He never listened to the whoopee or something.
But also, he did so much, he never ran a decent story down.
He had a recorder that takes notes, and he writes a much better story.
Because if that reporter follows a guy who doesn't even take notes.
That's right.
A lot of them do that.
A lot of them sit back and talk with you and form something in his own mind, then go out and write it out of his mind.
That's right.
No one will take it either.
The tape recorder is the worst of all, because that's a crutch that you might have to be aiming on totally.
But note taking is bad too, I think.
Right.
Because if you take notes, it releases you from an obligation of
Concentration.
Concentration, memory, and also sorting out.
Yeah.
Sorting out.
Okay, I'm finished.
You get them all.
I don't know how easy it is.
I would.
I would.
I just don't want to be having to do some writing sometime or have somebody else do some writing.
And I just don't want those things.
I just don't want them to burn us down.
And they will arise, as long as they go a little cranky, because they haven't had a case.
And you're so right.
I may be the only one that could really start this underneath.
Why don't you just start them out then?
I'll be doing something more important than that.
You know, you're starting out on that crack.
My thought on that is just, another thing he could do,
If you wanted to make it a little easier, just put a little switch under there somewhere so that you can turn it on.
When you have the kinds of media, of course, you would like to have it, you have to turn it off.
The rest of the time, if you wanted to do that, when you have a foreign visitor in here or something like that, or a conversation with them,
Well, I wouldn't mind that Herman Collin or something.
I wouldn't mind that, so that if I didn't want to put my mind to it, I could just turn on a small tape so that I could have, I would not think anything else.
I wouldn't try to remember anything else.
See, it's voice activated now.
What happens is you take this, the noise of the voice in here starts the thing running.
It doesn't run except when someone's in here talking.
As soon as someone talks in here, that starts the thing going and records it.
And what you can do is take that off and just put it down here.
And before you want to record it, just put it right on.
Who cares about all that?
He has to switch in his office.
I don't mind that for the kind of meeting that we want to be part of.
But when I wrote this, I mean, the mayor's in there or something.
Obviously, the one we can take on.
I want you to go back and take all the previous ones.
Let's just get that out of the way.
Okay.
I'll have the same.
I'll have it.
I guess I won't set it up.
I'll have the guy who did it undo it so that he knows it's undone.
Yeah.
So that nobody is going to write it.
The right view exists.
Right.
I like that.
If you're going to destroy it, let's get the benefit of destroying it.
Right.
Just prove that we can have a law of destruction.
Yeah.
I think what they do...
with them is, uh, they can clean them up.
They can destroy them electronically.
They just run through a magnetic field and it destroys the container to be able to hold the pulses today.
Where do they store them?
I don't know.
I find them here somewhere in a vault.
This has to be dispensed with.
I don't know.
I don't want to worry about it.
So we should get rid of them.
And get me the little machine where I can put it here.
And also, I'd like one of the EOBs.
I think we added one thing.
You said, you know, a few months ago, I don't know, but I want one that I can put on.
I don't want it there all the time and say, okay.
Like sometimes when I get kissed or whatever, I may want something down.
Yeah, maybe you don't want one in the lane.
No.
No, I didn't have one.
The news had it on for that purpose.
But, you know, when I have people there, you know, we, or I think there won't be many.
But I can have it there or I can have it here.
That, I think, would be useful.
There are times when you don't want one of us, you don't want a staff person in.
Well, I don't.
I don't mind that.
There are times when I don't mind notes, too.
Yeah.
I don't want to throw any notes to this.
I don't want to throw any notes to this.
I don't want to throw any notes to this.
See?
And there, it's useful for you to do better, right?
The problem is that in this scenario, you have all this stuff.
There, it's useful at all.
That's not a conversation I don't want at all.
It's just too much.
And also, I suppose if we're all put up with somebody that you have to get in the future, it isn't a healthy thing to have.
The other dangerous thing is with all the protection from the ex-guys, you still got to listen up.
Just like the Mennonite Papers got out that some days, some of these boys, they just say the Secret Service name.
The direct guy that runs the thing, he runs the dude who takes his ex-con.
Goes out and sells him.
The guy gets something for $5 or $8 in front of him.
That's right.
And they could get so many damn tidbits out of context.
I want to try to see if you can drive to those states, if you can run a regular series with whatever we have.
Oh, you can run it.
You know, we swear in here.
You do a lot of things I don't do, certainly for public purposes.
But I want to destroy it, Mom.
I can't get at it right now.
Okay.
Show me where the progress coaches are.
I just want to hear how to be contingent with the cap.
That's worthwhile.
Now, a record of me.
That's a way to have a record of the cap.
Good enough.
Yep.
So that says, you know, as far as the past is concerned, there was usually anything that passed into it.
But I don't think we've got enough on already.
I've covered the years up to the two years before that.
I think everybody was covered up there.
I don't know if Cambodia saw that.
Cambodia.
And we remember a lot of that.
Yeah, you lose something that you've got.
But the real question is, how do you use it?
I'm afraid it's not useful in the jury.
Well, that's the point.
It's too much.
Because either you or I have got to sit and listen to it.
Neither of us is ever going to do it.
Well, either we sit and listen, or you have to have a girl-type goal.
And that's going to be one of the other being possible.
That's the point, though.
Now I have some, I have notes on what I know about any of those things, but what I know is not always, I don't know what, I don't tell you exactly what's covered in your conversation.
I'll tell you what you do.
If there's any way you can pick up the dates, in other words, take the period.
and one week prior to the Russian summit.
You could do that and actually keep certain dates.
They're supposed to be identified by date.
I'd say for two weeks before May and through the Russian summit.
No, no, no.
I mean, and one week thereafter.
You know what I mean?
Not through the summit.
I don't give a damn about the summit.
You see what I mean?
I just want to get the May and the afternoon.
I could also take...
My guess is that it was put in somewhere in the middle part of the 70s.
But I'm not sure.
Well, possibilities there that you might find useful sometimes.
I can go back on the basis of your books.
You see, we have a total log of every minute of what you've done since you've been president.
And you can go back through that log and look to the days where there were significant meetings in the Oval Office and keep those in.
I can do that fairly rapidly.
You can see what I mean.
I'd like to be, I want to be sure I can write the May 8th story out.
So if you could get the May 8th, I don't imagine we've got the, well, if we've got that, I don't know how long you have to rule over the other EOE office.
Not very long.
I don't know.
I think just a few weeks.
Yes, sir.
I think you said to put one in the May 8th thing.
I would take it.
As I said before, that's the other problem.
Most of the good stuff is over there.
What you've got in here, quite a lot of them.
A lot of them.
Well, you have your wine sessions.
A lot of stuff in here.
It's pretty good.
Yeah.
And it's pretty, I mean, it's already had a scary adventure in some kind or another, you know, but it's got all the heavy stuff.
Well, you get your meetings with Rogers and Lairds and things like that.
The Cambodian pickup, what would you say of the Cambodian pickup for about three weeks before?
Well, let me look at what you did.
Do I have to go back there?
I'll lock up and I'll move what we've got from wherever it is so that whoever had access to it doesn't anymore have access to it.
Whoever put it in can't get access to it, right?
I'll move it to another vault someplace, right?
That's why I don't physically know what's going on.
I have no idea.
Well, I don't physically, too, if you can.
That's the Sea of Contragion.
The Sea of Contragion.
I mean, you can't destroy it all.
But if you can, what might be interesting, if you can just select out, pick out for a couple of weeks.
I don't think you need more than a couple of weeks before it can go in.
And then for maybe a month thereafter, you know, you've got the can go in story.
Then you've got a couple of weeks before May.
uh maybe three weeks three weeks before and a weekend you got a period of work where i really get the feel of the whole thing the center stuff uh there isn't much here anymore it's all the floors later those are covered but i've got some pretty i've covered that my nose and that are very good and my nose on my hands are pretty good and you did take your tapes on the
Thanks for your private file.
That's what I meant.
Yeah.
That's my dictation.
The notes aren't worth a damn.
Oh, right.
You saved all those, too, didn't you?
Yes, but they don't mean much.
They basically are used mainly to...
They are really notes I write for myself to talk to people about.
Not a notice of memorandum.
They're not that way.
Everything I have, everything I have on this, I'm going to go to the machine.
Across the time.
That goes back through 1972.
See, I'm not...
I started the day you came in, January 20th.
I wrote it at first, every night I wrote it.
Which was taking a long time.
I finally realized I could do it on a tape.
So that's why I used that little cassette.
It's like
I sometimes get two or three days behind, but I've never been more than a week behind.
And I use these notes to reconstruct questions.
You know, when you get behind, I find that I get three or four days behind.
And I'll try to reconstruct.
And usually, it's going to dictate more to you than I would if I did it every day.
I don't know why that is.
It's a problem.
I'm trying to reconstruct.
I don't read it.
You waste it.
By doing it every day, I found out I put stuff in that doesn't mess it up.
Because I don't read it.
I think it may be, and it turns out not to be.
Good point.
But it's still better to do it every day.
The first one is you just don't just maintain the discipline of doing it every day.
You get lost on that.
Well, I'm sure you realize it's because of this kind of machine.
So whatever diarrhea may have started the first time you read it.
We'll be the best anybody's ever had.
No president's ever made one.
So you can take the Harvard top-tier songs.
They were all written out.
Now they're very good songs.
I indicated just raves of stuff.
And that's going to be priceless stuff.
I mean, I hope you share that.
And I find a way to do that in a certain way, too.
Because I've really covered an extreme level.
and also some of my own reactions to people and things and so forth and so on.
Which I've already started reading, but only I will ever read them.
I don't know if anybody else has ever read them.
That's, by God, everything I've just kind of destroyed.
I don't know.
I don't know if anybody else has read them.
Because you can't understand.
But on these days, Bob, I think you're right.
I don't do anything on the August 15th.
Or in my case, I'm on the August 15th.
That's the decision.
Well, there wasn't much of that in here.
The scientific stuff was all over the campus.
I do know the Cambodia thing was here.
The media thing was here.
Those are really the two that I want over everything else.
And let me say, a little was here around the first week after we returned, after the bombing, you know what I mean?
The January period, I think some of that's worthwhile, you know, because some of the things that Henry and I are talking about at that point.
To pick up a couple of weeks then, that'd be fascinating.
I'd kind of like to have enough, deep enough of those tapes just to keep track of them as well, but maybe someday you want to play a little bit back to Henry just to remind him, just to ensure that we've got it all.
That's right.
Well, that's my point, to cover those.
The other ones that you've packaged, I think we ought to cover that first.
I do agree.
have we determined that it is impossible to go out with that feeling at this point?
No, I don't think so.
My point is, sure.
They say, why didn't you do it earlier?
Well, we didn't have the evidence.
We weren't sure.
We broke the case.
Unlike the Senate, we decided to get the evidence.
That's right.
We broke the case.
My view is that, and I want you to say they still don't have the evidence.
That's the problem.
But my view is I think we ought to hold back.
But you see, it's a way to really get the gigantic thing out.
And I think we've got to play.
I've been trying to play a cover game on this on these things.
I mean, we can't just go under the shell over here, not do the, do our, I mean, the IRS, we already have the asshole confirmers.
These could just be sent out.
I'm not sure where.
Well, I'm not sure.
He's in the middle of somewhere, right?
Boy, I love that ball game.
What the hell do you think happened, Bob?
Is it because we weren't touching him or something?
Oh, not everybody can keep in touch.
No, no, no.
It's just, what's happened is he's got this Shapiro, this partner of his lawyer, and he's totally enamored of it as a, you know, he's done this with this criminal a long time stuff.
Chuck said, we ought to be using him too.
He said, Bob, this, Bob, this, Bob, make some questions and I can get answers for you from him.
How to do stuff.
And, uh... My view on that one, though, is the guy was just a little bit too smart.
He said, don't let that help, Chuck.
I think it hurts you.
Oh, God.
This looks like a cheat.
Also, uh...
I'm sorry, but some of you are lying.
That's it.
That's it.
It's kind of like taking the Fifth Amendment and sending it to the U.
And that's a great sacrifice.
It's a great sacrifice.
You know, we need some great sacrifice.
I used to go out there to bring in all these chambers.
I asked the chambers if we could take one, and they said yes.
I asked yes, and they said we didn't want to.
I didn't know whether they were well or not well.
He said, that's ridiculous.
He noticed.
Nobody thought it was a good idea.
But he never raised it seriously.
He never said, I'm going up to do one.
And he didn't, to be honest, didn't tell me about it.
and I could give the best of both worlds if I could have the greatest amount we can think of in the other instance.
Those are the only ones I can think of that I think we, we received that made, that made the big decisions.
November, you can't cover.
69.
Laos isn't worth it.
I mean, that's a, that's a jackass turnaround.
There isn't much to it.
Let me go through the calendars and look at,
look at what from the time we had it what were the major things that would have happened because i've already done that in that whole analysis just go back off on the major event stuff and then use that as a trigger to go back and look at your your book find out
You could do that.
I think I'd get a pretty good fix on it pretty fast.
I think, well, one thing I know I could do is I could determine a crease in which there's no interest.
And then you could tell the fellow to destroy all these.
I just like to have a lot of destroyed.
And that's a good thing for him to know that they're destroyed.
So we only have these for records.
And actually, just a couple of areas I want to mention.
They're only for national security areas of persons and things.
That's the only thing we've had before.
And the rest of this is just a lot of junk that we just want to push through.
And rather than, from now on, rather than trying to maintain a full record, we're just trying to do a triggered record that the President has triggered a good deal.
And I'll feel much more better about it if we do that.
Well, that mostly doesn't be just as long as we get out of there.
What the hell?
Even, frankly, I don't want to have in the record discussions we've had in this room with Watergate.
You know, we've discussed all those kinds of stuff.
I don't want to have in the record discussions that you and I have had about Henry.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
And Rogers.
Space.
Yeah.
You just don't want to.
Wouldn't you agree?
Well, those are super unequal in some ways.
I know, but you can't use them.
We can't do anything with it.
We'll remember enough of it.
And there's been a lot of discussions along the campaign, you know, a lot of things we talked about in there.
All over the way.
We've never discussed it.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, we can prove it, but who are you going to prove it to?
What are you going to do?
What do you think of all the discussions?
Goddamn, they never came out.
They could also argue that this could be destroyed.
Well, we can discuss that.
Are you going to be obedient when you didn't have it?
I really agree.
As I told you on the phone, I asked him on the phone, I said, you know, it was terrible.
He got in the hall there and said, why?
I said, he was with me.
I said, he was with me in Florida.
I said, I agree.
And we thought the goddamn thing was a joke.
I said, people wear gloves.
And that's honestly not true.
And I said, what in the hell is this?
And you remember, we were struggling with our lawyer, and we got the word out of him, and said, no, it isn't.
He went down, sit there, went out, and called it a third-grade murder and murder.
Right.
So he must have thought it was a joke, right?
And then, we heard from him earlier, somebody said, no, there wasn't.
But over the period of time, we didn't know what the hell was going on.
John Dean's concern, I guess, if I understand correctly, is what he did afterwards, all this.
Back in his, what he did, basically, he coached the Whittlesons, that's what it is.
Yeah, this is that.
Well, he didn't, uh, help.
This is his potential technical violation in the, in the money, you know, the money going to them.
Yeah.
But how did he, which I still argue that Mitchell ought to step up in the House.
I mean, he had it, he had it in the back of his mind.
And it was for legal peace and, and family support for men who were going to jail and got, uh, having to hire more kids.
Not for the purpose of getting them out of the home.
That has to be, but John also feels that they have no interest in going into that.
Like John, the drinker.
I don't know.
No, that's obviously now...
That's the disservice of the court stuff, whether it's hearsay or not, is that it puts it on a, it puts all these, it lobs all these possibilities out, and then it gives them a basis for going into the score.
They can say, well, we have to run this out now.
It is only hearsay that we have to confirm it's not true.
They have all kinds of timing partners, and that's a hell of a damn thing to do, even though it's a fourth paragraph.
But it says hearsay, and Parkinson has totally denied contracting.
They had this stuff days ago, apparently, and the Parkinson's denial was so strong that they decided that it gave them pause to see what they were using, but apparently they decided it wasn't.
All they did was have another story, and that was all.
They don't look very good.
They're running stories in order to create doubts.
Oops, you're making the story alive.
They've got to have a story every day.
That's the whole purpose of this.
They probably don't think it's true.
Who was the man talking to Mitchell?
Should I take more and move on from that?
Well, you better check with John first.
All right.
The...
decision yesterday, what was funny was that Dean would call me this morning and tell him that he was going to have to go over because he wanted to be sure he knew that John was going to go over and all.
And I think
was that if we could, that Mitchell ought to come down.
And I think he was going to ask him to come down.
To talk to him?
To talk to John, Dean and John.
And bring him up to date on the banking.
That's right.
Then on Magruder, it was thought that because of the instability problems and all that, that the way to deal there was through Magruder's lawyer and to tell him.
what the plans were, and I'll have him handle that with Jeb and see if we can get him to try to keep Jeb on it.
Well, what really is involved here, I guess I'll have to say.
D. There isn't any way that you can probably avoid bullet-blood recruiter.
Unless the recruiter, according to John, or something, decided that he were to go for the Grand Courier and said, I regret my recollection, I was wrong.
That was a boy in a criminal liability for perjury.
Of course they were put in the soup on the other day.
Maybe.
Maybe.
Me, Blank, and Jonas, I think basically agrees is that they're not really interested in perjury anyway.
They just want to prove it.
They want to settle a case.
They don't want to.
They're not out to try and hang people for technical stuff.
I think that could be right.
In other words, the U.S. attorney wants to prove that they went after the case about who did it.
For them, McGruder would be my opponent.
Probably, although the editorial in Grumpy Town is building to say that throwing Dean and McGruder to the wolves is not such a good idea.
I think they're starting to see that that's a possibility.
I mean, they should even know that the container is going to be on the road.
Well, I think, see, we read that with a different knowledge than they write it.
I don't think they do.
Probably they anticipate that's one possible out.
I think what they're doing here is covering the water.
They sit down and say, now what might they do?
And then let's shoot that down.
And then say, now what else might they do?
And we'll shoot that down.
Because that's sort of what they've done.
They've
They moved to cover the, they tried to hang it directly on individuals, and then they moved to say, well, he wasn't directly involved in it, but what are you going to do about it?
I don't know.
They used the hearsay thing to get a guy in, and then they backed off with the hearsay thing, and then tried to tie him on some other, down with Magruder, down with Deed, down with Mitchell, down with Pate, but...
That's another reason he was so damn stupid to do the lie detector test.
As of now, unless it's an obsession to get back to the headlines, he's been out of everything.
Which is a pretty nice place to be.
Yeah, earlier he was in it.
Why do you think they haven't done it?
I don't know.
I can't understand why they haven't done it.
Because there's more ties to him than anybody else in this whole thing.
He's the guy that's supposed to hunt and live for that matter, not really the legend for that matter.
That's all right.
Well, that's what he says.
Nobody was supposed to let him.
What one thing Dean points out that I haven't known is that he hates the brooder by any compassion.
Uh, they didn't get along.
That's right.
Magruder fired him, fired him, fired him.
And, uh, Magruder's just a different type of guy than Liddy is.
Magruder's great.
And, uh, he and Liddy just didn't... And Liddy's view is that Magruder was flashing him all the time to do more, get more stuff, do more stuff, and all that.
And that's what led to...
to Liddy making mistakes.
Liddy never intended to use McCord or any personnel from the company while he was doing it, apparently.
But he was under some, and he intended to use more skillful operators.
He had to go, but he didn't want to give them enough money and all that, so he went with McCord.
less skillful, well Hunt was pretty skillful at that, he was supposed to, he was supposed to, but I think he was, I gave it to one of her partners, it wasn't her, I don't, I don't know who, whatever it was that, that's one of Liddy's lines, apparently, that he told Bean right, right at the very beginning, was that, that he had been lashed so hard to do stuff that he had done it too fast, and Bean didn't articulate it once, right after the water game, but we did it,
Who did Liddy tell him at that time as a response?
Did Liddy tell him?
He didn't mention that.
He didn't mention any higher-ups except Magruder.
He mentioned Magruder.
He didn't mention Mitchell.
I think that's right.
He didn't mention the White House, did he?
No.
No, Dean asked it directly.
The first question heard, you know, Liddy.
But what happened is Liddy
I don't want to tell a clear, specific story, but he called me.
He called me right afterwards, in the next couple of days.
And said, I've got to talk to you or something.
And he came over here, and he said, let's go for a walk.
And we went for a walk down 17th Street.
And he said, all of a sudden, he was trying to untangle it.
He said, all of a sudden, it just kind of went .
And his story was that he'd been under this enormous pressure to produce information and that he had bungled in a lot of ways in UCNF people.
He hadn't been given enough money to do the job right.
And the thing had screwed up and he went into this whole business of the, you know, the bug wasn't working right on the phone and they had to go back in and fix it and all that stuff.
And he said, is anybody at the White House involved in this?
And they said, no, no.
And he then said, no, he didn't ask, but the lady said that it was Magruder and then asked him to do this.
I don't think, I think he purposely didn't ask him.
Mitchell was involved.
I don't think Liddy's, I may be wrong, but I don't think Liddy specifically said it was Magruder.
Magruder's story was that he was asked for the White House.
And he wants to say that.
I don't know what good that does him, but that's what I mean.
And that would build the white narrative that
Okay, all of them didn't do it.
I didn't even know about it.
That was in the Washington Post story yesterday.
That's what the Woodward police had sent to.
Maybe all of them didn't know about it, but all of them had a bunch of these eager guys around who were busting their ass to try to please the higher-ups.
And were engaging in activities that
follow the theory where it was understood that the hierarchs would never know the means by which this information was gained, but that we went in favor with them by providing them with the information.
That's a pretty reasonable theory.
Well, that way, I also argue that's a theory that we can live with if we try to move down to the right level.
Right.
And then we can say, gee, if that's the case, then we sure did it.
We tried both to do that.
We tried to go on hard and so forth and so on.
Others didn't know that they were sorry that happened.
I mean, they didn't want their own committees versus a higher level.
But I have a governance that I say they didn't want as many of the New Yorkers, as many of the San Francisco's, as many of the Los Angeles's to engage in such activities.
They're all government committees.
And that had prepared a white paper
I was going to do it on a general basis of citing some generic type things.
to disrupt the kind of heckling that was clearly designed to disrupt and make it impossible for the .
Denial of the right .
Then violence that resulted in property damage and physical injuries and obstruction in the way of shouting obscenities and all things to embarrass and intimidate
members of the right and now i have a whole book here so here's your 68 such things that i turn over the thing to do is to get a number and the way to get that story across is to use another maybe it's 28.
68 violation charges 68 violations and asks uh and use the word this is canada this is southern college but gentlemen this is what's happening
You're right, we can't live without action.
We want to live with action.
Yeah.
You know, I was in a crash, they were kicking us every day about the $10 million, and I said, well, what the hell can't we find out?
Remember, they were trying to find out if there was a match, or if it was the Virgin Islands, that sort of thing.
But all of a sudden, I made an appearance who they were tied up with.
Perfect.
Get out of the way and cross the line, please.
I'd like to say that we had to exercise a little more diligence in the media because we didn't have all the Pulitzer Prize winners in the press for working on trying to dig up stuff on that.
This whole thing, see, you have doubts in your own mind.
I've wondered in my own mind whether maybe I did know something about the Watergate thing.
I have no conscious knowledge of it, but the whole Dean thing convinced me.
Because the only way I could have known was through Dean.
And I'm convinced Dean did know.
Or Dean, his reaction to this other thing, this substance.
What's that?
Dean's reaction to the leaves.
I'm talking about it.
The only thing that I was trying to reconstruct was like, you know, the discussions that we ever had in here was like, you would come in and say, don't ask about how we get this and stuff.
And I thought, my God, I thought back to that and it wasn't, this is the, I think this was, this had to do with the, you know,
I gave you some of that stuff, not a written life.
And that's the job strength I had no problem with at all.
I'm perfectly happy to describe that.
At least they asked about it to me.
The editorials now are howling for a while.
What are they?
They're basically after regular viewers.
That's what they think of the big picture.
Yeah, and right now, it depends on the movement.
There's now a tendency to mention more and more of these.
Yeah, but there's other areas where they're starting to say that, too.
Well, that's inevitable, I think.
Once Carter's been locked there, all of a sudden, too early and too weekly, and then got slapped in the face.
Your wife was told that he discredited himself, and he's got a problem.
I don't think he's given up on me.
I don't know him.
The New York Times has a big editorial.
It's a terrible thing.
They did to me all that, but then it was undecided all over me.
At the point that they have no evidence now to get involved in that in no way clear at all.
In other words, you're guilty until proven innocent?
No.
They said I'm innocent until proven guilty, and I haven't been proven guilty.
But they don't rule out the possibility that I still may be.
They're having a savage, and it's this, and everything else.
Gotta be finding excuses now and then for whatever's coming.
Basically, instead, the established press has to bite us, and that's all there is to it.
All the way.
They will.
If I don't miss the bite, it's something else.
All the way.
It's whatever they can.
That's the thing.
We've said other things like this before.
When we get this over with, that doesn't mean we can keep a sign and coast for four years.
No.
They'll get this done and turn on us and sign on us.
Because I told you, I went over the whole thing again.
Isolation in December.
Yeah.
Ruthlessness in December.
And isolation in late December to January.
And on comes the crisis of the Congress.
I told you.
The budget.
They moved the economy.
They moved the watergate and then the economy.
Well, they all bitch around about this.
Yep.
And other shit's come up.
I can't believe it's come up.
Hungry or probably not hungry or something.
Yeah.
Hungry?
Yeah.
Hungry for a while.
Starting days.
They tried to make me move to Dade, and I didn't.
Shit.
Nobody was a damn about moving to Dade, in my opinion.
Well, that was ridiculous, because that was the Indians against the Indians anyway.
That was a...tribal revolution.
Segregated, by the way.
I don't think so.
I don't know.
I don't even know if they're on any form.
Kennedy was on any form, apparently.
You know, Kennedy's people, you know, faster than ever.
I don't, I really don't know.
I don't know if he worshipped against the segregated.
I guess the best thing for him or his wife is not to get in the hell out of the country.
Right now, I don't know.
Providing one to live out of it, that's his problem.
But his coming in, pleading self-incrimination, is a hell of a thing.
Don't you agree?
Yeah.
But I don't know.
They may not be able to make a case against him if they can't
Maybe that's the best position for him to be in.
It proves he's guilty, publicly, and that puts out an impassable order.
It's like he has a bias, and he's sure to perjure himself, and if he can't save himself, he may get himself saved, I suppose.
And that leaves an aura on us, I suppose.
Did nobody else testify to what he did, Kevin?
I don't think so.
Jaden can't testify to it, can he?
You can't, of course.
Jaden probably can on some things, because he, you know, sent him newspaper clippings from time to time.
Well, just so Jaden can testify on the other things, they're legal.
Well, as I understand it, the only thing that the only lieutenant is concerned on is that one thing.
And that's a horrible damn thing to think about.
And I believe such a thing that Jackson had written on his dictionary because I had a son so dying.
Well, I may have the facts, but it may not have been.
It was that nature of the thing.
I have the nature of it, right?
I probably don't have specifics.
But the whole, that's the, you know, the whole fence of Anton.
In order not to be involved, we launch a guy independently and get a guy who's dumb enough to get carried away with what, I think, maybe, also the letter was done by one of his people, I don't think he did it himself.
You know, kind of got to extend it out.
And yet, when you try to put it in perspective, is that any worse than the violent disruption of our rallies?
We have to bring out thousands of police in San Francisco.
Which is not to condone the blood but that was a stupid idea.
Stupid or wrong.
Because I think they should count the other target and fix something.
I mean, I was on call before you said the most important thing was to go to the next one.
So I was like, go after the next one.
Yeah.
Well, it doesn't seem to help a lot of difference.
They've got to go after something.
They've got to keep moving.
As they fail to fix any one target, they've got to move to another one.
Keep working on it.
Don't think it's a big deal.
I think he probably is right that they're in a position, both the prosecutor, the grand jury, and the Senate committee, are in a position where they've got to appear to have solved the mystery.
And you've got a problem.
I've got a problem when I go up there, and it's you've got a problem on an overall basis, which they are starting to pose in these things now, which is the point that undoubtedly President Nixon did not know anything about the Watergate, who did it, if that was being done or anything else.
But as people know, it was done.
But it is totally impossible to believe that President Nixon does not now know what was done, and by whom, and for what reason.
Because President Nixon is not so stupid as to have let this thing happen, and then not determine for himself what happened, and at whose instigation.
So therefore, while he didn't know, he obviously now knows.
And it's therefore incumbent upon him to come out and say what happened and who did wrong and get the thing cleared up.
Now, they say they put that at the highest level, and that's a plausible point.
But they can't get to you.
So they'll get to me, and they'll say it's inconceivable that you did not.
So you say nobody knows.
You didn't do anything or know anything.
We believe you.
You say that as far as you can determine, nobody in the White House did anything.
I'll start nailing it.
Somebody did something.
You believe us.
We all agree on that.
Now, who told them to do it?
Under whose authority was $250,000 given to this guy or whatever it was?
Under whose authority?
We thought this all by ourselves.
The answer is yes.
The answer is, as far as I know, yes.
I don't know anything about it, and I was not lax in not investigating it.
You didn't investigate it?
I didn't investigate it, but the Justice Department, the FBI, the President's Council, covered it in a civil suit.
It was covered in criminal action.
And it was not appropriate for me to launch a personal investigation of it, and I did not, of course.
But the White House Counsel did.
The White House Counsel did, as regarded White House involvement.
Why didn't the White House Counsel get the committee involved?
Because there was a legal proceeding here.
The responsibility of the White House Counsel was to determine whether anybody in the White House was in any way involved.
It was his determination that no one was so involved.
Uh, that's where I stand on it, too.
Now, when you talk about... Do you honestly need to say you don't know whether Jeffrey Booter, your former chief assistant, uh, was involved in this?
That's correct.
I just don't know.
I do not know.
I did not know, and we tried to find out.
He has said none.
And we don't have evidence to indicate that he was.
I mean, we can't... That's true.
No way.
I mean, personal knowledge is what I'm going to say.
No, I have no personal knowledge.
Are you going to try to, the reason I asked about the mortars, are you going to try to make some sort of statement?
I like to.
What if I read about a crime with mortars?
It's such a little word to me.
I wrote one out.
Give it to her.
Go ahead.
What does he want to do, John?
See, Mitchell's got a worse problem than I do with that one.
They get him up there and they say, Mr. Mitchell, you were chairman of this fund.
You were running the campaign.
Is it conceivable that a quarter of a million dollars of the money for which you were responsible could have been allocated to this without your knowledge?
And he's got a tougher time than I do.
And I can say absolutely.
I had no control or knowledge of allocation of money.
It had nothing to do with him, Charlie.
I wasn't on the budget committee.
Thank God.
I wasn't.
I know.
Do you remember?
I was talking about that I should have been going all this and so forth.
Thank God we didn't.
Thank God we stayed on.
But there we do have that still very big problem of who is running things.
through 71 up until, well, there was really a year from May of 71 to May of 72.
Right.
I guess you were.
No, sir, I was not.
The question is who was.
The answer is McGruder was.
The question is who did McGruder report to, and the answer is he reported to John Mitchell.
That he did.
And every bit of evidence
Steve was saying that almost the only contact he had with the computer, and which certainly was true with me, during that whole period, was when Jeff would call asking how to handle some problem with Mitchell.
He was calling to ask for guidance on how to deal with John and get something worked out.
But John has said, and I've checked this and he hasn't, he's said under oath again,
That until he moved over to run the campaign, he had nothing to do with the managing of the campaign.
That is just absolutely, totally, 100% true.
We can go, that's not true.
Because you talk to him about it.
He came in here from time to time.
Not very often.
Because, basically, we wanted to keep it under here.
We wanted him to put that together.
He set up Frank Dale.
Who got Frank Dale to take the chairmanship?
Frank Dale knows that.
Frank Dale knows who was running.
If they ever get, have the brains to call the head of this chairmanship committee, I assume Dale has never done a lot about anything.
I knew, despite the howls, the screams, the interviews, all the rest, I knew something had gone down in the back yard.
It was the same.
He would testify.
His testimony would put the murderer in a hell of a spot.
And the murderer then would have to choose.
They were dead.
They were grand.
And the genre was
He'll have to go to trial.
He goes to trial.
He goes to trial.
He has the real danger of Liddy being the witness.
Yes, Liddy will.
But he won't.
He says he won't.
Now, Liddy has, see, what he tells us, Liddy has told the entire story to the prosecutors.
At least that, well, earlier I didn't quite believe that.
That's what he believes in.
And Ervin has no more reason not to believe it than Dean has to believe it.
I agree with that.
And what Liddy is telling me, Ervin, I think you'll find today, believes in more than he did yesterday.
I have a problem with Dean, I think.
I think he's more... Well, I don't believe in it.
I talked earlier about it.
Go ahead.
I think he stays so that he believes it.
Because I had a feeling in the conversation with John... Not totally, but go ahead.
In the sense that, John said, why would Liddy do this?
He hates the murderer.
Well, why don't you get back to Dan Murray.
He hates the murderer.
The appeal of this main joint by the prosecutors was, we have, as you right now recognize, and the prosecutors have a very good relationship with Liddy.
And you've got to understand that.
They've treated him as a gentleman all the time, called him Mr. Liddy.
And they've dealt with him in a way that Gordon Lyons, apparently, used to have a rapport with the prosecutors.
And he is a kooky gun with strange motivations, as we know.
And the prosecutors came to him and said, Mr. Libby, now, as you see, we have to pursue this.
It can't end just with the trial.
So we're going further.
We're going back to the grand jury.
We're calling everybody back and all that.
And you can also see in the press that innocent people are being hauled into this now that are on a random basis.
The court is flailing about and using hearsay based on what you've told me primarily.
And we're going to have to pursue all those leads.
It would help us enormously to avoid doing undue damage to innocent persons if we knew what the truth was, even if we couldn't use that.
evidence served or prosecution.
And with that argument, he had a chance, maybe added to him a chance to get recruited.
But he figured it all out.
And he told them.
But he's also told them he will not testify to any of that under oath.
So all he's done is in confidence given them what he says is the facts.
They don't know they're the truth.
But they're assuming that they are, that we should give them the leads.
So that gives them all the leads, so they know which way to go, but more importantly, in a sense, they know which way is not to go.
Presumably, and he says that they confirm this with his audience, they have no interest in the lighthouse.
They, for instance, don't intend to call me, despite the way my name is said, right?
Because they have nothing, and Liddy confirms that I have nothing to do with it, apparently.
Closer.
time, apparently.
And the only reason they want Dean is to, to, uh, to confirm something.
Well, Dean is because Lydia has told him something about meetings, apparently.
I mean, he probably had to shout at them that, that, that would get the, he, he, Magruder relationship.
I mean, the Magruder relationship.
Dean thinks it's inevitable we're going to put her in almost inevitable with the eviction.
This is Secretary's administrative assistance.
Big folks.
I wish I could post that.
Well, for example, they've gotten Magruder's datebook.
Magruder's datebook has to show, that's what Brian said, an average of two weeks a day with Mitchell.
In the period that Mitchell said he had nothing to do with the campaign, what was he meeting with Magruder for?
To discuss Justice Department matters.
Magruder had no idea.
Goddamn, he's an excellent lawyer.
I can't imagine who he's talking to.
Do you have any, uh, still going to do a film?
Yes, sir.
We got this.
I mean, I just feel like, you know, for your convenience, we can do this at 2.30.
I know what it is about this time.
I just know it's just about the content and stuff.
Did you have anything else you wanted to ask about?
Schedule on it.
I don't have it.
It's hard this weekend.
Yes, sir.
You have it.
I understand you have an NSC and you have that money.
You have your standard.
It's not going to be kept loose this week.
The NSC order is important.
You got that on?
Did you get that on?
Yes, sir.
Thursday, I'm going to resolve the problem on the secretary of the race and more.
I'm going to testify on the Hill.
All right.
I'll be there today.
I'm sorry.
I don't care.
All right.
Thursday afternoon or Saturday morning.
Probably a pretty Saturday morning.
You don't have anything else that people are pushing for?
Well, we've got to keep a bunch of time open for the animals.
I have a white house correspondence to serve you to go after the day after tonight.
So Don, John Dean, they're getting into this kind of cross bridge, this kind of range of view connection with us.
He thinks it's possible that it won't work.
But he's a pretty cool guy.
I don't think he even feels it's possible that it won't work.
No matter what.
Whether they can make a case against a looter or something else.
He shares my case because they don't really want to make a case against Mitchell.
They're probably like, that's why I think the Mitchell statement might be the way out for the Justice Department, too.
If Mitchell would say, well, I didn't know about it.
It was done under my thing.
That's a terrible thing to have happen.
I'm sorry about it.
And I wanted to get it straightened out of the pipeline.
I did authorize the money, and I did authorize the intelligence operation, but I'm sure some of them authorized both the Democratic National Committee on that stupid level of dishonor.
I rejected that there was some discussion of this kind of activity, not the water heat, but of the idea of doing this kind of surveillance and so forth, which I rejected.
I think these were at a meeting that John Dean and Jeff Gruder attended, so both John Dean and Jeff Gruder and I rejected that idea, which is true.
Now, how they could possibly have gotten so confused as to decide to do it anyway is beyond me.
It indicates...
At the worst, it's an evidence of not the best management, on my part, and I must confess to that.
You've got to be responsible, I have to say.
You've got to say that.
How can you do anything else but do it?
But she just went out there with a great self-impatience, saying, I have nothing about it.
Well, legally, that's probably best.
Legally, legally, but also, the general is less legal than his other ones.
He maybe doesn't, he's out of government now, so he doesn't much give a damn, you know what I mean?
So it's all, he gets out legally.
I think that's maybe his attitude here.
He wants to help these boys and these boys.
And he may be convinced that they can't make a case on him, and so that's it.
He either got it in the victim or they held him in it.
Or he might have just, uh, it was the only thing that really concerned his case.
In his case, something's been preserved.
You can well see that the finger pointing to somebody else being responsible.
In other words, if it won't stop him from murder, he's got the same alliance with me.
somebody else has told somebody that she killed him.
Wow.
It seems to his advantage to have it run from Magruder to someone else so that it clearly doesn't run from Magruder to him.
Exactly.
So that's why you're bothered with service.
It did stop Magruder.
It would implicitly lead to him.
And it's his advantage to have it clearly lead to someone else.
or else they won't stop the return, or they don't want to go to somebody else, so therefore he would say, well let it go to Holland, or Colston.
That's all I have to agree to.
And I suppose all he's concerned about is his own assets, the money he might take, but the problem he's got with that is he knows, he knows it isn't true.
That, I think, would be very hard to pull off.
I mean, he's, you know, an operator.
Yep.
Well, I'm glad you're not here.
I'm glad that some arrangement will be made to be in touch with him.
But, you know, I'll talk to you more when it feels like shit at some point.
To get Mitchell... Mitchell's got to know nobody's trying to get him.
You know what I mean?
That's the whole thing that I see here.
I mean, everybody's got to realize everybody else is trying to get another.
The only guy that's playing...
publicly alone game, is now posted.
Is it?
Yes, it sure did.
It did mine.
Well, anyway, I wondered if you might give George Bush a call, and I'll tell him to leave an arm.
Yep.
Watch the day.
I really think we can work that one out.
Don't you think so?
Yep.
A little yardage for history.
Yes, Dave, it might be very important yardage.
You know, he might be around soon.
He's around.
He gets to be around soon.
Very much.
And he'll get to the Congress.
You know, he'll get to the Congress and he makes the move.
And they just, I just said, the House thing, I just say, the humanity.
And if you come back, Bob, I'll say, look, everybody said it.
It's the blues and so forth.
L.P.D.
and he's no problem.
He'll go rent it to somebody else.
He'll do that.
And the salt of the year, too.
Because it's a damn good deal for him.
But it just doesn't make sense.
They then have to either move to the White House, which I think is worse, or rent an apartment somewhere.
Isn't the White House worse?
I guess about that right out of hand.
Oh, yeah.
Well, it's worse two ways.
One, it just isn't right for them to live here in the White House.
From their own personal viewpoint, it's just not a right way to live.
And A and B is that it doesn't look good.
It looks like he's trying to run a campaign for Congress under the White House.
Yeah.
That's a little- He's gotta be on his own.
Yeah.
That looks like he's staying under your shadow.
He should not pretend he's anybody but who he is.
They should be ashamed of him.
They shouldn't let them.
Trying to make you ashamed of it.
And that's weird.
The Kennedy business, or the Rockefeller, or Jerry Rockefeller, or any of those people, I mean, they beat you.
Play what you got.
No, it's not Jerry Rockefeller.
He's much involved.
No, he got down here, got elected governor of West Virginia.
And at least by the end of the last week, you know, it's versus its own.
Congressional and other people and the rest of it.
Not that it's very good.
The white people kind of jarred a little, and also got some of our people a little pissed off.
Yeah, that's right.
I was thinking he's going to have a tough night.
Oh.
But I'm not saying maybe he's not concerned about the thing.
I said, look, I said, he's insistent on publicizing,
And I said, we can never do that.
I said, of course, I can't be on the team.
I said, I might ask the counselors.
I said, no.
As far as all of them, the secretary said that he just straightened the bed.
He wants to get down there to deny this guy that stuff.
And I said, right away, we'd make any kind of appeal.
I said, well, here's what I said.
I said, well, you know, I put all that stuff up.
I figured he might talk to her.
And without ever telling her, I said, I don't know.
But at least I planted all the seeds in there.
And I also get it off, because I told you, it's awfully hard.
In fact, the hair, it should be held.
They've got a little, I don't understand, dragged out through the summer and the fall.
And I said, that could be a mistake.
And I said, if it's a mistake, I'm going to have to take it on.
And I will.
It's going to be on some political section.
So that's the way it's aimed.
I guess what our people want, or they might have, they just want to find somebody whose head rolls.
That's kind of the conflict of minds.
Somebody's got to walk the line.
Well, yeah.
We've got to come to a believable position.
That's what happens.
And we don't have that now.
We don't.
Basically, it's an unbelievable story about it.
the truth is probably certainly up to his ass and second the truth is probably that Mitchell maybe would not have felt how willing that they were going to actually do that even despite what you said to him he didn't sign off on it he said well go ahead go ahead excuse me you have $250,000
I don't think he did.
Don't jump in.
Don't get caught.
I can just agree with what I'm saying.