Nixon & Richardson on Watergate and Justice Department

Transcript (AI-generated)

This transcript was generated automatically by AI (WhisperX) and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Names and numbers are often wrong; speakers are not identified. Do not cite it as authoritative — verify against the audio and the finding aid.

Download transcript (.txt) · JSON data

But this will pass.

And also the Justice Department has a lot more to do than other things.

I hear we were into that fight already about customs.

Go ahead.

Now look, I want to tell you, George Schultz has been in the city.

George is a hard operator, and George is going to be in the city.

He says it's got to be go back into it.

for a number of reasons and so forth and so on.

I had tentatively decided before that I should go.

Now, I have not.

I want you to know I haven't made any decision.

Now that you're here, you can take a look.

You and George have a little fight.

You can come in and tell me.

Now, I've never, I don't know what the answer is, Elliot, but on things like this, you've got to give me the, I want to tell you what the relationship, Terry Tanner, I'd like to have with you.

After you are in the presence of your lawyer,

I didn't really have that much of a relationship with him.

I didn't have a relationship with all the services he was in, except that he was doing other things, even though he's a very close friend.

With John Mitchell, John was, because of the type of person he is, he basically, basically, you're in a position to, we'll have a counselor here, for example, who will be in close touch with you on all the crap, you know, when I send the clearances and all that sort of stuff.

But when we get into these things that do involve basic legal problems, in other words, the direction of where we're going, legal and law enforcement and so forth, then you've got to insert leadership there.

I want you to be a member of, I told you, the National Security Council.

And I'm going to have to invite George, too, because he'll go up the wall unless he's there.

But that's all right.

I think it's useful for you to be there.

If you have been in the state, and the fence will allow you to contribute.

My suggestion is you... Did Johnny Borrow go with you?

Yes.

Well, my suggestion is that you assign him or somebody else in there to work as a... or somebody permanent to work directly with one of Henry's staff and get the papers over.

Because one thing that John Mitchell did, he did help.

And he was very instructive in SC meetings.

He didn't say a hell of a lot, but he studied the papers and his judgment was good.

You know, I would like for you to go ahead and also, to tell you the truth, I think you'll find it more interesting.

I mean, you shouldn't just be over there, you know, doing the Justice Department stuff.

So, uh... Yeah, I really look forward to that.

Yeah.

And I think in some things, at least, like salt, for instance, I could... Well, you could trick it there, but also...

Frankly, we have to make some really tough calls.

Do we or do we not meet with the Russians at this event?

Do we or do we not get the hell out of Cambodia?

What we're interested in is your judgment.

I want you to feel that when you don't look at it, that you are there only for the purpose of expressing your views on, shall we say, the judicial aspects, etc.

In George's case, it will be more that I will call on him only when he's economic, because George does not have a stroke in this other area.

Would you have that experience?

I mean, you've been in the state, you've been in short-term defense.

Are you going to be useful?

Yeah, I've done quite a lot of defense, really, in a short time.

You know how it is?

You're learning.

You learn most rapidly at the beginning, and then the... Yeah, but it's basically a documentation program.

Yes, and there are a lot of great people there.

I know.

I like the department.

There's an institution.

I think he's a good professional, and he'll work his tail off.

I think that was a fine choice.

Well, we were putting a professional there, and we're also putting a professional over in CIA, which is good.

They say Colby is an outstanding man.

Now one current problem we've got, where I want you to talk to Kate about it, is the eye problem.

And we haven't got any candidates there.

I mean, that's the toughest son of a gun that we can find.

Yeah.

I currently would lean, first, you've got to let the whole place out.

Hoover elected, we can't say this, maybe we write it in three or four years from now, he left it in his chapel, that's all he had.

Unbelievable.

I guess he had to go and do other things, but basically, he was no good anyway.

But basically, like any strong man, now he leaves underneath just a group of warring factions, and the place is coming apart.

Now, there is nobody within the FBI that can do that job.

There is no former FBI agent.

They all come to deep deluge if he can't do that job, because he was part of the warring factions himself.

When you talk about a law school being under arrest, they need him alive, bureaucracy, in my opinion.

A judge, I don't know, they might need him alive.

One thing that did occur to me, which might be, at this period, what we need, is a very straight arrow, tough military guy.

You know, not with the purpose of bugging or anything that sort of thing, but just for the purpose of discipline, getting a discipline, pride, et cetera, and setback.

And so,

On this one, of course, the call is one that I haven't made.

I mean, it's always made, but it's one that's made always with the concurrence of advice from the Attorney General.

So, Hague has spent some time on it.

He's thought about it.

He would see to a channel.

And I've talked about it a couple of times, and I will.

And get it done.

It would be one of the key.

I would hope.

It would be one of the most urgent things to be dealt with.

Got to get it done.

We can't keep ourselves there.

But if you could come up with it.

You see, the one advantage of the so-called military follow-up is that it's, if you get the right way, it's very hard.

I mean, you don't have the whole problem.

You've never done anything that gets them in a conflict business.

You know what I mean?

They talk about putting a cop in.

I don't know.

There isn't a police chief in this country that can run the FBI.

There isn't one.

They aren't up to it.

You know police chiefs for God's sakes.

They just aren't up to it.

Now, the other thing that I want you to have is, you've got Dean Schneed over there to find Paul.

And I think it's very important on the, you know, all the appointments of judges, particularly, that we have a good list.

You never know when somebody's going to die.

You know?

Yeah.

By that, I mean, I'm speaking to the Supreme Court.

Another point I should make is this.

Have a very close relationship with

He will like it.

He doesn't have any problem with that.

He's a very true politician.

I would hope that you could spend some time with him.

I'd like to see you, for example, come up with something in the penal system.

That damn thing is a massive problem.

It's cost.

But I'd like to see something there.

In other words, let's try to, and also let's build on the enormous progress we've made in reducing the rate of crime.

Let's build on what we've done in drug dealing.

But also, let's get a little credit for it.

Now, I don't know where you go in terms of your, at the present time, you've got your

Watergate thing now, but you've got Cox in there.

Will he house the Justice Department or outside of the Justice Department?

I think he ought to be in, not in the main building, but he should be on a floor of some place where they're operating, share an office building.

I think there's some advantages in that.

I think he'll be good.

He's certainly...

fair, honorable, scrupulous, and so on.

You've got to get a fellow who's had some experience in prosecution, the kind of fellow you'd like to have.

I don't know if they could get him, but the kind of guy he's looking for is somebody like Whitney North Seymour, Jr., who was U.S. Attorney Subdictionary.

Yeah, one of the best.

Yeah.

The best of them.

I'd never heard of a goddamn outfit until this thing.

It was unbelievable.

We'd need the money.

My God, they had $4 billion in excess.

And to talk to these people, they told me they're terrible, shoddy bastards.

I mean, they had my...

I had a rather nut-headed nephew that they hired.

I learned about it.

God, I've never seen the kid for two years.

Isn't that a horrible thing?

That's part of our promise, that we will pass.

And on this thing, though, you've got, I want you to know, you've got a complete support here in total confidence.

One of the best things you've done, I think, was the decision communicated to the state at the end of the day that executive privilege would not be invoked, I think.

I don't think you've had enough.

That will be a very air-clearing thing, as people think about it.

I want to point that I think we should know that there is one area there that we will have to stand firm on, as far as executive privilege.

Executive privilege is revoked as far as any individual's oral testimony is concerned.

However, it cannot be revoked with regard to the president's papers.

In other words, like when you're sitting here making a note for me or running MemCom, that was made for me and not for anybody else, you know what I mean?

Even if we discuss whether or not we're going to burglarize a 10-cent store.

Now, here's what you can testify about.

Because you see, if you ever break into the president's papers, we have a hell of a problem here.

We need almost any president in the world.

God, I didn't want to put that out there.

But he would have been fine.

But on the other hand, to revocate a privilege or a testimony, is that it?

And any other thing they have, they're not.

But if they would have a conversation with the president, right?

For him, that's mine, not his.

It has to be that.

They regret their marriage in other ways.

Oh, yeah.

I missed a bet the other day.

It would have had to be smarter than I am, I think, to think of it in time.

But, you know, I was interrogated at length about my meeting with Krogh, who was telling me about the plumbing operation zone, worrying about how much he could disclose insofar as its genuine national security link function was concerned.

Right.

Well, very simply, the point is that they asked for a copy of my notes of the conversation, and I didn't want to make an issue of producing it, producing the notes, your notes, the conversation with Krogh.

So I did produce them, but I excised this truly sensitive reference.

And so it shows in the typed version as bracket omission, closed bracket.

Did anyone pay attention to that at all?

And of course the reason was obviously that they would rather not have identified any genuine national security interest as part of this.

If I had thought of it in time, I could have...

Well, I mentioned it all right, but I could have had a Republican.

That's the, uh... Why do you mention this?

Yeah.

Well, that's your piece.

As far as my papers are concerned, I will not allow anybody, if I ever allow them to start going through the memorandum of conversations made by, I mean, for me, I, we're... Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

We'd have a hell of a time.

But on the other hand, all of them are early, and they're all close to anybody.

Well, I thought in this case it would have been to draw an issue of whether I produced my own memorandum on a conversation that I was testifying to anyway.

That poses no problem.

No.

Well, you were not making that for me.

No, no.

You were making that for yourself, correct?

Right.

Sure.

No problem.

As a matter of fact, you didn't.

There would be no executive privilege in any of that if you were a cabinet officer.

That would only have been on the basis that it was national security material.

Yeah.

Which is a different kind of thing.

Yeah, I couldn't think of anything.

Incidentally, today, I will present to you, just very briefly, because, you know, we used to deal with a little human around.

What was the day I came up for your dinner when Bobby Coffey presided to pay the benefits?

It would have been in May of 19...

It was the Lieutenant Governor.

I did one or lost?

No, I won.

I lost in the primary, the year in 62, to Brooke.

And I won for Lieutenant, that was the Lieutenant Governor.

And I won for Lieutenant Governor in 64, and you came up in the spring of 65, at the end of May or early June.

That was a very good event.

You made a fine 83 speech.

Well, the thing is, we've been through, as you can imagine, it's not even true with our experience here, but with this enormous attack on the presidency, the president must have known.

I'm not talking about the national security.

I'm killing on that.

They want to bring that up.

I'll start with now some of this stuff.

and we will kill them.

If you'd like to see some of the leaks on those, I haven't seen them myself, Henry has, on the newsstand.

That would not be a very pleasant re-piction, but we're not going to do it.

But my fight is, and the whole water game business and so forth and so on, you know, the entire camp, once I got up to it, finally in March, was to try to get to the bottom of the goddamn thing.

And to find out how the hell was covered up real.

And when you get down to the fact that you're, I'm not speaking for White House people, I don't judge those, but somebody, people outside the White House.

Well, you know, and actually the U.S. Attorney's have done a good job over there.

Peterson's done a good job.

He felt that he was, frankly, held in by Dean before that.

I think that's history now.

And he was concerned, of course, about the national security issue, one of the reasons we didn't send that.

And thank God we did it, and that he's finally recommended that we send that business about that assign, that crow, the break-in, or the Allsport break-in, we sent it out to the judge.

Terrible business, the case is the basis of that.

But he did it on the basis of that, and the basis of other things.

But the point is that

That was an area where Watergate impinged directly on the national security area.

Directly.

And we have a great obligation to these .

They did stop or lead us to controlling a lot of leaks if we had not controlled some of our negotiations could never succeed.

Hell, we wouldn't have been out here last night if we hadn't had secret negotiations.

Elliot, you know that.

We wouldn't have had to solve those secret negotiations.

And we're going to have one right now without us, too.

The linkage is to do another kind of damage that is not, I think, adequately recognized to the ability you have, and Henry, and to deal with the Department of People.

It was really just to kill Bill Rogers and me.

Well, let me tell you a different thing on that.

It was terrible.

Take the Chinese.

I didn't know the goals for that.

The only one that was informed was Bill, and he was informed to have light.

But I didn't inform him about a lair.

No, Bill, I told him, couldn't inform anybody else because the Chinese wouldn't have gone.

The Russians would have been up the wall.

We had to get it done, and we weren't sure that it would go without total secrecy.

Now, if we had a better responsibility than to rob or steal, we could talk with our people.

You see what I mean?

Yes, I know.

It's not down, it's just wrong.

I just think, to me, it's, to me, it's incomprehensible.

But the difficulty now is that it's become a rowing act to go out and leak something if it destroys the policy you're against.

Yeah.

Like Judge Bowles leaked out the beta base thing because he was against the beta base thing.

So...

Yeah, well, it's corrosive, no question.

So, but on this, when you're getting into the future, you can say, we are going to comply with the law, but we'll do everything that we can within the law.

You know what I mean?

So we've been through this, but I can tell you that we are, I'm going to put the burden on the Canada Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, to enforce this in their own places.

They can't go through bugging, because the law has to

They can't do it through their own, through other operations.

But by golly, you know darn well that it, with, with the, that, you know, pretty well, I think, I have almost done it, Mr. Dixon.

Mr. Dixon, would you recall whether there is a concern?

Sometimes.

I mean, you're on your own stand.

I mean, I don't need to know.

If I got something that comes right out of them, I can tell by the way it is.

It depends somewhat on how.

how closely it held it was to begin with.

Some things are fairly highly classified and yet also pretty widely disseminated.

Well, I tried a few times in the short time of the defense to run down leaks.

They were usually leaks of things that were, you know, pretty widely known all the way from...

The one thing that's very important about the leak is that the commission

Are you going to work with them?

Intelligence or information sources and means of acquiring information are one thing that clearly has to be secret, or else you destroy the source.

Negotiating positions, you know, anybody can understand it if you put it, point it out in terms of, you know, if you're trying to set your house and you're asking price 35,000, but then

One of the kids tells the buyer that you're willing to sell it for $25,000.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You better get over to them.

I'll see you there.

Thank you, sir.

Well, listen, I thought I would say go to the ears of your response.

Yeah, they want to hear you.

And I'll make minor remarks.

Thank you.

Nixon & Richardson on Watergate and Justice Department

AI Summary

Audio

Transcript (AI-generated)

NARA Description

Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on May 25, 1973

Cite this conversation