Latest / BOB DOLE : 1995 Clinton's Comeback / "But is it fair?" ( Archibald Cox, the Foundation, and the Dean Defense) Special Edition

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"But is it fair?" ( Archibald Cox, the Foundation, and the Dean Defense) Special Edition · BOB DOLE : 1995 Clinton's Comeback

• 0:26
  SPEAKER_17: How could it have happened?
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_17: Who is to blame?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_03: What did the president know and when did he know it?
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: See, getting the president out on national television saying it's a hell of a crisis and so forth, I think has a tendency to overplay the urban areas, overplay me, overplay that I'm guilty and I'm gonna resign, all that bullshit, and goddammit, I'm not gonna do that.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_19: The fact that his lies uh were irrefutably demonstrated out of his own mouth on tape, uh, that he then lost any option of continuing his presence.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_04: What's your judgment as to what kind of what ought to be done now?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_04: You know, there's various discussions about uh whether uh should be a report made or something, you know, uh a uh report uh president or just coming down and take it or what it's oil and heavy and so forth and so on.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_04: Well, my feeling was uh frankly is all a Washington story skill and all this time and all this all the time.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_04: The problem I would see is not what has happened so far.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_04: I I think the uh the ministry of the water gate is I don't know whether somebody's uh somebody else higher than somebody for the re-elections are gonna get named in that to me that's very strange country of warrior is the possibility of somebody uh charging subject.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_04: Coordinate at all.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe this is that was all that one.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_04: You don't want the regular way of handling and uh point of man, which is just checkable uh credentials and no responsibility uh kind of probably what just stands where the professional advantage of getting all uh the people who are one way or another participating out of the same thing, so which is that a guy who uh micro can deal with uh anybody else to deal with the problem of what the church is gonna say is that the problem of uh is problems meaning uh that's right.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_04: I my own opinion of that is that he uh that he just will hang in where he is.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I think he and the moment I think that's uh in as good shape as it can be.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_04: Um you never know.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_04: A lot of pressures on him, right?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_04: But sure are.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_11: Welcome to the show.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_11: Um, I'm Randall Wallace, and uh this is an episode where we're gonna take a look at a couple of things that I think need to be pointed out.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_11: One of them is the central figure of Watergate, other than of course Richard Nixon, is John Dean.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_11: He is the counsel to the president.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_11: And the other is a figure that is leaving the scene in 1970, he prior to 1974.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_11: We went back and, as you could see in our earlier episodes, and looked at the Saturday night massacre again, and that's Archer Bald Cox because one feeling that I have had uh as I have studied this material and gone through it is that maybe it was a mistake for Archer Bald Cox to have been fired, despite uh obviously the uh facing down the president uh on that afternoon uh prior to his termination that night uh in that Mr.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_11: Cox, though a very serious partisan, uh was also uh uh you know college professor who wanted to be fair, and uh and therein lies what I think is we're gonna start to see, and that is as we called it throughout our series, the centers to force of Watergate.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_11: That is the staff of the uh special prosecutor's office and their ability to manipulate the situation.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_11: Also uh John Dean, who who is uh, you know, as I have told people, he's not the White House butler who just happens to overhear things.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_11: This is the counsel to the president.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_11: His job is to tell them when something illegal is going on and to stop it, and or to, you know, say, hey, Mr.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_11: President, you can't do that.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_11: And he did not do that.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_11: Not only that, he became a the central figure, the link between uh the the the president uh and the White House and the campaign and uh on our side of things, uh you know, uh I I want to keep you from being confused, and uh and that's one of the things we are gonna have a problem.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_11: In 1974, which is where our timeline is in this, there's a lot that you have to go back to 1973 to look at because uh that's the central period of time when and it's and it starts on March 21st.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_11: So the tape we just listened to with Chuck Colson is later in the day, the same day as as the cancer on the presidency speech uh uh conversation with John Dean and the president.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_11: And you can see now that Nixon's trying to figure out what to do.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_11: And you can see in that call that he trusts John Dean, his his lawyer.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_11: That will change as time goes on.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_11: And that's what I want to point out to you.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_11: This was uh John Dean's the central figure and uh in and and you know he he's who the president's relying on uh throughout uh Watergate as it unfolded up until the 21st of March.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_11: And then I think the more questionable uh uh tapes that you hear and the and the abuse of power, not really the abuse of power, but the involvement of Nixon or what appears to be his involvement is uh all that goes on after the 21st of March uh until maybe late May June time period, that is the crux of did Nixon do something wrong?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_11: Did he join the conspiracy?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_11: Is he trying to contain it?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_11: Um and and and that's the period of time when he gets himself in trouble.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_11: I would say looking at it that uh there's a series of events uh that happen and that you've got a president floundering around trying to figure out what the hell's going on.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_11: And and that is actually what you hear on these tapes.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_11: Uh-huh.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_11: And what I'm introducing to this is like a series within a series.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_11: We're looking at 1974 from the beginning of the year when Leon Jaworski gets there and the eighteen and a half minute gap happens to the indictments and how that unfolded.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_11: We're gonna be at times bouncing back to this period of time and listening to the tapes uh so that you um get a feel for what's happening.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_11: And just so you get a understanding the timeline, I'm gonna go back to one of our earlier shows that we did on Jeff Shepherd, where he talks about um when he lost his faith and when he got it back, but he also lays out the timeline of events.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: You were a bit frustrated with the Watergate scandal, and I'm curious when um the moment in time in your life, um, when did that change from when you know what was the revealing document or the revealing element that made you realize that the president um was being falsely accused?
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_15: Restore my faith.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_15: Not why did I lose faith, that's the smoking gun take.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_15: Restoration.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_15: I was on his defense team.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_15: We were gearing up to defend the president in the House, in a Senate trial.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_15: And we believed, we thought the prosecutors believed, everything turned on what Nixon did on Wednesday, March 21st, 1973, when John Dean came in and said, you know, there's a cancer on the presidency, it's growing, it's compounding.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_15: You're going to have to make some pretty important decisions very soon, and you don't know what's been going on.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_15: We're being blackmailed.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_15: Nixon and Dean have both maintained consistently that that's the first time he ever told Richard Nixon about any specifics of the cover-up.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_15: That's where the battle was going to be joined.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_15: But then out of nowhere, that's March 21st, 1973, out of nowhere came this smoking gun tape from June 23rd, 1972, right after the Watergate break-in.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_15: Nobody knew about it.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_15: There was nothing else having to do with it.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_15: It was a big surprise to the lawyers.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_15: Lawyers made a mistake.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_15: To my great shame, the lawyers misinterpreted the tape, demanded it be released.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_15: It was, it destroyed Nixon's credibility, and he resigned three days after its release.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_15: But that juxtaposition of we were all geared up to fight here, and this thing popped out.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_15: And what started it was doubt about that thing.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_15: And I started learning stuff from other authors and other uh uh analysts who said that that wasn't designed to cover up, that was designed to protect the identity of two major donors who happen to be Democrats.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_15: Uh and and I it took me a long time of research, and I was ready to make that case when John Dean published a book in 2014 called The Nixon Defense, uh and a footnote at page 55, if you care to look it up, he says, you know, funny thing, the smoking gun's been misunderstood all along.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_15: Uh his lawyers misinterpreted it.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_15: It was really to protect his donors.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_15: And if Nixon had known, he could have lived again to fight another day.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_15: I'm quoting.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_15: In short, the smoking gun was shooting blanks.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_15: So I went back.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_15: Forget that, forget the smoking gun.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_15: It was a mistake.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_15: I'm sorry, but it was a mistake.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_15: Come back forward to March 21st.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_15: Now, I transcribe the tapes.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_15: This is a long answer, Chris, but you asked.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_15: I transcribe the tapes.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_15: They are hard to transcribe.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_15: These are not easy conversations, the audio quality is uh terrible.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_15: So when you're transcribing them, you're reaching for the words.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_15: You're trying to get inside the head of the speaker.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_15: Where are they going with this conversation?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_15: Now, to be fair, the initial cut at those transcriptions was done by Rose Woods, uh, the president's secretary, and her assistant, Marge Acker.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_15: Uh, but Fred Bazark told me that we're turning these tapes over, and we've got to know what's on them.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_15: You can follow the conversation.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_15: They probably couldn't, but we can't be surprised if there's something on those tapes.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_15: So get every word you can.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_15: Well, that's hard work.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_15: And I believe there are very, very few people who have listened to the tapes, and there aren't very many who have really studied the transcript.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_15: But in my view, and I'll go up against anybody with this view, he's told about the blackmail on Wednesday, March 21st by John Dean.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_15: And the answer of that meeting is get John Mitchell down here from New York.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_15: Let's figure out what on earth to do.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_15: They meet again that evening, and they're still they don't know what to do.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_15: Mitchell's coming down the next day.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_15: They think Mitchell's guilty as he can be, uh, and the goal is get Mitchell to take a fall.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_15: That's how we're gonna get out from under this.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_15: But the next day, Mitchell's not interested in taking a fall.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_15: And what they come up with is we'll send John Dean to Camp David.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_15: It's right there on the tape.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_15: He will write a report.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_15: He'll write a report of what he told me the day before.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_15: And I will use that report to call for a new investigation, and I won't claim executive privilege.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_15: My staff will have to go back.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_15: Now, it's a little unclear on the tape whether they mean back to the Urban Committee where it will be public or back to a grand jury where it will be private.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_15: And there's no question they don't want that report to say too much.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_15: Okay, put it as favorably as you can, but there's no doubt on that tape, Nixon is going to call for a renewed investigation and not claim executive privilege.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_15: That's when it rebuilt my faith in the president.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_11: One of the things I want to do with the series is go, like I said, back and forth and look at some of these tapes because uh the prosecutors and the media have always made assumptions about what these tapes mean, uh what he meant.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_11: Especially when you listen to the tapes in their entirety.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_11: A lot of times it's uh very escul uh uh escculpatory what is actually happening.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_18: I had no idea, Dan that the taping mechanism was in place.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_18: Uh the people that knew that it was a very small uh group of people.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_18: Uh I immediately thought this is going to be interesting.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_18: I I I did not know what uh what what would come of it.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_18: Uh I will say this, and I cover this in my book, the tapes are going to end up perhaps being a blessing as time goes on, because the tapes, as we get into more and more of them, uh are are starting to give uh provide us material that is exculpatory for President Nixon.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_18: I mean, there what happened in with the prosecutors and when these tapes were put out, that they did these slices of the tapes, uh, all of which shows the abuse of power and and uh and so forth, but they don't show the complete story of what was going on within the presidency and how some of the comments fit into context.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_18: So uh I think there's a lot of road to travel here.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_18: Uh we're 50 years into it, but we're a long way from getting to all of the the bottom uh level of what this thing was all about.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_03: I just wanted to be sure to understand as far as the president is concerned, everybody in this case is not the truth.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_03: So those are your orders.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, sir.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, thank you, sir.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_11: The gentleman you just heard talking, Dwight Chapin, was uh President Nixon's uh appointment secretary who was dragged into Watergate and convicted for uh lying to a grand jury, uh unrelated to the actual break-in.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_11: But I thought it fascinating, too, to add that call that you heard.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_11: That's Henry Peterson, the assistant attorney general, who was over the criminal division and was over the case early on when the regular prosecutors that were for the Justice Department were investigating things.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_11: And you hear the president say something very clear, and I and you'll hear later some prosecutors say, Well, that's not what you heard.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_11: Uh well, that's exactly what you hear.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_11: Tell the truth.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_11: I want you to tell the truth.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_11: One of the other big issues about Watergate is, in my opinion, is it's two very separate things.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_11: And and all the the the things that do with Daniel Ellsberg breaking into his psychiatrist's office.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_11: You know, I don't want to condone that, but you were in wartime.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_11: You were having some issues with the FBI doing their job.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_11: And uh sounds familiar, doesn't it?
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_11: And and uh Nixon they put this group together uh to do national security work because Daniel Ellsberg had top secret clearance.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_11: They did not know what all he had stolen.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_11: On top of the Pentagon Papers, uh what he had out he had access to everything.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_11: And there had been a series of events, whether it be the uh the Joint Chief of Staff spying on the on the President and Henry Kissinger.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_11: They were rifling through the briefcases and taking things.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_11: Uh things were getting leaked to the uh press uh as soon as they went out, even when things were being guarded to just give to the principals like the Secretary of the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of State.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_11: Uh and so th this was a national security operation.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_11: Maybe it wasn't handled perfectly, but there is a loophole in the law about what the president can do uh in a national security uh era because field.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_11: And as you know, I mean that's part of his oath, right?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_11: Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_11: That's part of the job.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_11: And and that is something that gets misconstrued later in an interview with David Frost, the famous when the President orders it means it's not illegal.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_11: Uh it had to do with national security, and that that that quote's been taken out of context many, many times.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_11: But one of the things was this broke break-in uh at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist office.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_11: It's always made to look, if you watch a documentary, which I'm going to show you a blurb from right here in a minute, as though the president hid this and that uh that this was the guarded secret of the White House.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_11: When in reality, when he was confronted by Henry Peterson, the Attorney General, he felt he he said, Yeah, that's a national security matter, and you don't need to go into that.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_13: Charlie Chaffer said, Oh, by the way, uh, there's something uh further that you might be uh interested in in knowing that my my client could tell you.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_13: And then he turned to uh uh Mr.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_13: Peter tell him.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_07: I explained to them that they had in their files information that was evidence of a break-in and a burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist office.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: We had this picture called uh parking spaces with the names of people on the parking.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't make any sense of that.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: And uh said, what in the world is that all about?
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_17: They were photocopies of snapshots that Howard Hunt had taken at the psychiatrist's office.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_17: The CIA, which had developed them for Hunt, had passed them on to the prosecutors with no explanation.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_17: Dean revealed what they were: evidence that Watergate was just one in a series of White House crimes.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: Earl Silbert immediately recognized the significance, and his mandible or jaw just dropped open.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: And he got right quiet.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_17: The next morning, Henry Peterson received a memo from Silbert.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_17: He went to the president with the news that two White House employees had burglarized a doctor.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_14: And the president said when I told him, I know about that.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_14: That's a national security matter.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_14: You stay out of it.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_17: Peterson did put the evidence of the Ellsberg break-in before the judge who made it public.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_17: Now, Ehrlichman, who had authorized the Ellsberg operation, faced prosecution.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_11: So as you can see here, President Nixon didn't deny or lie about any of that.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_11: I mean, this was a national security matter, and he said that's what it was.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_11: Peterson goes and gives it to the judge, and the judge puts it out there in the open, which goes against any time you're doing anything in actual security.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_11: You know, that you need the ability to be quiet about those kind of things.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_11: It's a debatable uh point, but frankly, I think it's a separate point than the rest of Watergate.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_11: The other thing uh is John Ehrlichman's involvement in that.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_11: He his defense always was that he he had approved a covert operation, not a break-in or a crime.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_11: And this was, again, should have been the tip-off about G.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_11: Gordon Liddy, uh, who went into the office and they ransacked the office and got him a police report uh that he might not have been the right man for the job.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_11: All of this, of course, uh puts President Nixon in this horrible light.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_11: And what I wanted to do was show you some tapes.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_11: You know, we talked about the exculpatory uh uh tapes that have come to light.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_11: And this is one coming up to Henry Kissinger.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_11: This is all this is coming down on him.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_11: Uh, and it's now at the point that this tape is done, John Dean has gone to the prosecutors, he's and and Nixon's had to fire uh or ask for the resignations of Bob Halderman and John Ehrlichman, fired John Dean and asked Richard Klein Dinks for no fault of his own.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_11: And you know, there are some people who will throw you off about the ITT scandal.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_11: Klein Dinks was never convicted of anything.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_11: He didn't do anything wrong, but uh he was tied to John Mitchell, so the president, seeing what had happened, asked him to resign as well.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_11: Uh and and he calls Henry Kissinger.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_11: And when you listen to this call, it is not the sound of a guilty man.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_11: It's a man struggling trying to figure out what to do, and loyal to his staff who have been loyal to him.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_04: Well rather hard for you, wasn't it?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_04: Rather was hard for you.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_04: And it would of course be personally unjust.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_11: Archie Cox was particularly firm in his personal determination that Dean be prosecuted no matter what.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_11: Dean became a E day fix A for Cox.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_11: True as a witness, Dean would cement otherwise weak cases against Haldman and Ehrlichman, but Cox preferred, if forced to choose, to take the relatively sure shot at Dean rather than the long shot against Dean's superiors.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_11: When the Saturday night massacre loomed close, it might have been propitious for Cox to make a deal with Dean and secure Dean's testimony against President Nixon as another weapon to hold the president off.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_11: Even then, Cox's determination did not waver.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_11: With all the uncertainties of Watergate that swirled around him, the weakness of the evidence against Nixon's top age without Dean's testimony, the possibility of presidential culpability, the problem of obtaining White House evidence and of dealing with national security, Cox saw Dean's guilt as the one enduring constant.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_11: During a particularly difficult period, Archie remarked to us, quote, if everything else goes down the drain, the one thing I can cling to is Dean's venality.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_11: Lynchpin, John W.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_11: Dean III, page 107 of the book Stonewall, written by special prosecutors Richard Ben Vanisti and George Frampton, Jr.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_11: To me, that's a fascinating excerpt from the book Stonewall, written by Richard Ben Vanisti and George Frampton, two staff people in the special prosecutor's office and lawyers, and Ben Vanisti's a major player in all this, so it's Frampton.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_11: And they're talking about Archibald Cox, and this is sort of a crossroads where everything that well the points I want to make in this show come together, because in that, right up to the day Archibald Cox was fired, he wanted to see John Dean prosecuted for his role in Watergate.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_11: And that is something you don't hear all the time, and that's what's going to change when Cox is gone and Leon Jaworski comes in.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_11: And Cox uh who Nixon uh ended up loathing and because he felt Nixon felt like he was under siege by this prosecutor's office because of all the manipulation going on by the staff.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_11: And and and the Saturday night massacre and the Stennis Compromise is a perfect example of them wrangling about how to deal with the tapes because the president was guarding executive privilege.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_11: You know, there's a lot of embarrassing stuff on those tapes.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_11: That might have been why some of Nixon's not wanting to turn them over, but uh they're wrangling over that.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_11: And Cox comes up with this idea with Elliot Richardson, who's the attorney general, about uh, you know, uh a third-party verification, and Nixon wouldn't do it.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_11: If they end up in court and Nixon loses, then he comes back, and they have this whole negotiation to go ahead and do it where they come up with John Stennis and the Sam Irvin agrees to it, Senator Irvin agrees to it, Senator Baker agrees to it, John Stennis agrees to it, John James Eastland, all the major players, they think they've got to deal with Elliott Richardson, Elliott Richardson thinks he's got to deal with Cox, everything's fine, and then boom, he goes back to the staff, and things change, and that leads to the whole situation with that.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_11: But if you go back, like I said, you got some calls that make the president look uh like an innocent man or exculpatory.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_11: Well, here's a perfect example of now, Elliot uh Archibald Cox is a known Kennedy partisan.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_11: He was the Solicitor General under President Kennedy.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_11: But what you're getting ready to hear is not a savaging of Mr.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_11: Cox by Richard Nixon.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_11: It'll surprise you.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_11: He doesn't sound like a man worried about this case at all.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_03: Pick and shovel political dirt, which that's what it is.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_03: Really, all they have.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_04: And then we want them to know it.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_04: They're gonna take a lot of uh responsibility of taking this on.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly right.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_04: They're gonna bite some people, you know that.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, yes.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes, yes.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_03: I I don't think he's they have uh they have a story, yes, but he's uh he has cops to do this.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_03: Believe me.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_03: I don't see how the kids is not a mean man.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_04: He's a partisan, but not that mean.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_04: That's the way the description uh uh I got.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_04: He's not as zealous.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_04: Believe me, if he gets Cox, that'd be great.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_11: As you can see, President Nixon's not at all terrified about Archibald Cox.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_11: He thinks it's a good thing because he thinks Archibald Cox is going to be fair.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_11: And I would say that uh a lot of what you're gonna hear from staffers that work for him is that he was a fair-minded man.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_12: Archie was amazing.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_12: Um, he is one of the most um kind people.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_12: He cares about human qualities, um, and he cares about the law and justice.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_12: And he judges people if they act in a moral fashion.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_12: He's very committed to moral policies, and he lives lived those those beliefs.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_12: Um He was really someone who was inspiring during the event.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_12: Um, and as we watched, as I said, we had the 35th reunion uh of the prosecution team, and we listened to the press conference the day that became the Saturday night massacre.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_12: And if you listen to that, you know what kind of man he was and what he cared about.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_12: And he always talked about people's character.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_12: Uh that was very important to him.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_12: And it gave me sort of a set of values that I think I carry with me to this day in terms of how I evaluate people and how I only want to work for people I really respect and admire uh because that was a pretty great experience to work in that group.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_19: An extraordinary person to work for.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_19: And I'd say, Well about Archie, this is what prosecutors do.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_19: This is prosecutorial tradecraft.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_19: And Archie would say, Yes, but is it fair?
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_19: And so we would rethink and uh to some extent reinvent the wheel.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_19: But uh it was quite an interesting procedure.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_11: It's an interesting thing to listen to them talk about what a fair man Archie Ballcox was.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_11: He put the staff together.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_11: The staff was full of partisans, former Kennedy Johnson people, uh, but that he was demanding some fairness, and he knew and thought of the central guilt of John Dean, and he stuck to that.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_11: It's interesting, though, to be a fair and good guy.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_11: Obviously, maybe they didn't like that about Archibald Cox.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_11: And the Saturday night massacre happens and boom, he's gone.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_11: And a new sheriff comes to town, and that's Leon Jaworski.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_11: And it was interesting to hear Ben Vanisti call it prosecutorial uh stagecraft.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_11: We might call that something else.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_11: But let's see what happens next.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_12: Saturday night massacre occurs, uh, you have a new boss.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_12: Tell us about uh the initial meeting with uh Leon Jaworski.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_12: Well, let me tell you by in retrospect that it actually wasn't a bad shift because you went from a philosophical professor who did a great job in setting up the office and in establishing the legal precedence that ended up guiding us.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_12: But in terms of trial, I mean Leanne was a trial lawyer, uh, and so it wasn't so terrible.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_12: But he came to us where we all thought he was not to be trusted, that would be putting it mildly.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_12: We thought he for sure was, you know, in the pocket of Richard Nixon, and that he was going to get in our way.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_11: And what will happen next is what leads to all the maneuvering uh with the staff and the new prosecutor and uh, as I call it the sinister force of Watergate, Archibald Cox out of the picture, then all this staff has to do is roll the Leon Jaworski, who is uh, you know, he comes to town with no staff and no anything.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_11: And we're gonna cover the problems between that staff and Leon Jaworski in our next episode.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_11: But in the meantime, uh you'll have a phone call here where you can see where President Nixon has had enough of dealing with this office, and it's very clear to him that they're out to get him, and I think he tended to blame Archibald Cox for that, and with good reason he's the boss, but uh I think as time has come uh has has shown, it may be a lot of manipulation uh underneath Cox that led to uh Nixon's rightful feeling that these folks had done, just as Robert Kennedy, because a lot of these were Robert Kennedy people, had set up in the Justice Department for a Hoffa, the Get Hoffa Squad, what had actually been set up here was the Get Nixon squad.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_11: And we'll be talking about that later, but what Robert Kennedy set up was a system of here's our target, let's go find the crime.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_04: I want you to say, quite candidly, I shouldn't make the cox all over the time.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_03: It's been written to say that you're up to get the president.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_04: If that is the case, we want you to know we're ready for the fight.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_04: I think you should stick to it.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_03: You and your staff, you're up to get the president.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_04: We can't believe that, but we we want you to know that it's some of the junior members of your staff so that they have been saying that, put it on them.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_04: Have been saying it, but that's it.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_11: We're ready for the fight.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_11: Now we're gonna fast forward up to uh the pardon, which is later in our story, uh, that Gerald Ford gave President Nixon, which was for any crimes he committed or may have committed after he left office.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_11: And there's some things that if you're not aware of, you need to be aware of.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_11: One of them is that the income tax charge where he had donated his vice presidential papers, he had had to repay about three hundred thousand dollars in taxes uh when that was going on.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_11: I think it was a terribly unfair thing because this law only applied to two or three people.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_11: Uh and Lyndon Johnson had taken the same deduction for the same thing in the donation of his vice presidential papers.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_11: Uh Nixon does it uh it's about the timeline.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_11: There's a little bit about whether he was late with the donation, but uh that left him broke.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_11: So by the time President Nixon ends up in California after resignation, uh, he is broke, he's unable to defend himself.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_11: They've seized all the papers and records of his presidency, and and so for him to mount any kind of defense would have been uh nearly impossible.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_11: And you should hear the stories about John Ehrlichman or Bob Halderman or uh the other defendants in this case having to go into a room, they weren't allowed to take papers out, they weren't allowed to make copies of anything, they couldn't take anything to write notes about, so they had to take from memory and go outside.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_11: I mean, they I if you want to know why Republicans are defensive to this day, uh it is because the deck could not have been more stacked against these defendants than what happened during Watergate.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_11: And you hear Mr.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_11: Uh Ben Vanisti uh pointing out that uh that the party should never have happened so that we could go ahead and run the railroad train over top of President Nixon because he couldn't defend himself.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_11: He's broke, he's sick by the time he gets to California, and the whole thing is is sickening.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_19: I assumed that we would have the time uh to then formulate a charge, uh bring a charge of now ex-President Nixon, and then the President could decide whether he wanted to pardon Richard Nixon, and Richard Nixon could decide whether he would accept the pardon, but the charges would be spelled out.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_19: Instead, uh President Ford uh reversed course and issued a pardon.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_19: Now I had no problem with the fact that uh Ford was within his constitutional power and authority to issue a pardon.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_19: I thought the timing was somewhat unfortunate because it left open the question uh of whether uh Richard Nixon accepted responsibility uh for his criminal activity.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_19: And that was not to be done except in a most half-hearted and still uh incomplete way until years later, during the David Frost interview of Richard Nixon, where he sort of acknowledged that, yes, uh he had been involved improperly uh in connection with the post-break-in activities.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_19: But had the matter been framed in all of these revisionist books uh and statements that uh were published in the immediate aftermath of Watergate, and I must say, continue and persist till this day, um, there would have been a greater clarity uh brought to bear on.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_19: exactly uh uh what the the various positions were, what the proof was against uh Nixon and uh uh a willingness to accept or not by going to trial uh responsibility for uh criminal activity.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_11: Uh it seems like a crystal ball to know that all of the Ms.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_11: Conduct alleged with his conduct material would one day surface.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_11: So you hear him in this interview uh making sure he's got a defense there.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_11: Oh, the pardon when we had Nixon broke unable to defend himself uh we could run the drain on him we should have had that opportunity but the President Ford gave him a pardon for any crimes he might have committed and that's allow people like well Randall Wallace and uh Nixon in Watergate on our podcast uh to make up all this stuff and you can't believe any of it because just a big conspiracy theory.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_15: I give it to you that's a brilliant defense it gets him ahead of the game but you know what as we say in the South that dog just don't hunt us to our third undeniable truth that President Nixon really did resign.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_15: Haunted by his Oval Office tape hounded by the special prosecutors he announced his resignation in an address to the nation on August 8 1974 he was then pardoned by President Ford but two dozen members of his administration were convicted and sent to prison in the break-in the cover up in the plumbers trials now this is interesting President Nixon was never brought in before an actual trial he wasn't tried in court and there was no actual Senate trial in either of those two instances his guilt had to would have had to have been proven under the rules of evidence by witnesses under oath subject to cross-examination but that was skipped so the formal presentation of what Nixon was accused of having done never got into court never got before the Senate he was convicted all right by the media he was convicted by the Senate Irv hearings and he was convicted in the court of public opinion but nothing formal and that gap leaves plenty of room for doubt and for discussion.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_15: In between the break-in arrests and President Nixon's resignation and then the conviction of his senior aides were two and a half years of Watergate stories as the scandal unfolded and all America was mesmerized by the Senate hearings by the prosecutions and by the impeachment inquiry in the House we're now in the midst of the 50th anniversary of that period.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_15: This past Labor Day marked the 50th year from the fielding break in that was the break in into the Beverly Hills offices of Daniel Ellsberg shrink looking to see what his plans might be for further leaks like the Pentagon Papers.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_15: It's not really connected to Watergate but the break-in was planned and executed by Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt who were connected so it planted the seeds that blossomed into the Watergate scandal right about this time right about Thanksgiving 50 years ago John Dean was recruiting Gordon Liddy to design a campaign intelligence plan.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_15: It's unfortunate that he picked Gordon it's unfortunate that Gordon got a little carried away with his plan it involved proposals for mugging, bugging kidnapping and prostitution so one of the fair things to say is that some of Nixon's people were hardly blameless in all this the question was how high up the rot went and that's where all the arguments exist even to today.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_11: And we're going to show you where some of these tapes are actually a sculpatory we listen to all of them and not just the snippets.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_11: But John W.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_11: Dean had a problem and that was he wasn't very credible.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_11: There was a trial that was held in New York one of the only ones that was not in Judges Erica's courtroom in which the jury found everybody innocent uh Mori stands at John Mitchell and so they decided that the best thing to do was just throw the book at John Dean.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_11: Then they put him up in a in a military holding facility that where they where they would uh put uh mafia people in the witness protection program uh while it's in confinement and he's on a military base with all the ease and comforts and he would go work in the office or and then after the trials were over he was uh time served and let go.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_11: So uh they did that to enhance his credibility and then they wrote about it in the book Star Wars moral balancing aside the real politic of the situation was that Dean would not be an effective witness at trial if he got a free ride.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_11: His credibility would be substantially diminished by his making a deal with the prosecutors to implicate others only if the prosecutors completely forgave his own deep involvement.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_11: The evident effect of Dean's prison sentence later on the jurors at the Watergate cover up trial confirmed our tactical judgment is a man who was already serving a long jail term for doing what he testified he had been instructed to do by Haldman and Erwin Dean made a measurably greater impression than if he had never been charged or punished for his acts against Stonewall or chapter on John W.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_11: Dean III page 107 So with that I thought we would leave tonight for uh doing the same thing we had done if you tuned into our podcast early on we started the Vietnam uh shows that covered the Lyndon Johnson presidency and uh President Nixon's time dealing with Vietnam you know a lot of the uh early parts of the war are uh are situations that were we were led into because of Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense and because our podcast did center on Mr.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_11: McNamara and some of the advice he gave especially around the Gulf of Tonkin I found an interview that he gave in 1994 and it was done by Ted Koppel and uh it was a chance for at least Mr McNamara's side of the story to be told uh in our narrative and I only think it fair to do the same for John Dean.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_11: And he did an appearance uh on Nightline uh with Ted Koppel so the same same program um right uh after the uh first of these takes were uh open to the public and so with that I thought we would close this show with the Dean Defense.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_11: Here's John Dean on Nightline uh giving his side of the story.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_16: This is a Nightline Friday night special.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_08: It was a stunning revelation are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President I was aware of listening devices yes sir the best O revoir more than a quarter century later the tapes that helped bring down a president can be broadcast for the first time there's within and a warning to the president we have a answer within the close the presidency is growing it's growing daily there's no insurance tonight the Nixon tapes listening in on the White House cover from ABC News this is Nightline reporting from Washington Ted Copeland Most of us who lived through the final days of the Nixon presidency will never forget how it all began.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_08: But probably more than half the people alive in America today either weren't born yet or were just too young to have any awareness of what was going on.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_08: So let's begin tonight with a thumbnail refresher course June 1972.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_08: The Watergate building here in Washington hotel, apartments and some offices among those the offices of the Democratic National Committee.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_08: Several men are arrested after breaking into that office and they turn out to have ties to both the CIA and the committee to reelect the president, Richard Nixon.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_08: The White House press secretary dismisses the whole affair as a third-rate burglary.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_08: It is the beginning of the cover-up enough damaging material emerges over the next several months that the U.S.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_08: Senate convenes what came to be known as the Watergate hearings.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_08: It is at one of those hearings that Minority Counsel Fred Thompson who would later be elected to the Senate himself Thompson asks an obscure deputy assistant to the president about a recording system in the White House.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_09: Mr.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_09: Butterfield as far as you know from your own personal knowledge from 1970 then until present time all of the president's conversations in the offices mentioned and on the telephones mentioned were recorded.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_08: As far as you know that's correct until I left it was a breathtaking revelation back in February of 1971 it turned out President Nixon had ordered his chief of staff Bob Haldeman to install a voice activated recording system in his various offices.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_08: Haldeman was also instructed to have the phones tapped.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_08: And while the quality as you'll hear shortly was sometimes terrible those 3700 hours of tape conversations shattered the cover up, led to the conviction of several of the president's closest aides and ultimately convinced Richard Nixon himself that he had to resign.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_08: Among the most damaging tapes were some of those released today.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_08: The transcripts have been out before but unless you went to the National Archives you will not have heard them before today.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_08: This first excerpt in which the president and his chief of staff Bob Haldeman discuss using the CIA to shut down an FBI investigation of the break-in this tape convinced many Republicans to abandon Nixon and five days later in fact Mr Nixon did resign.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_04: When Haldeman refers to Walters incidentally he's talking about deputy CIA director Vernon Walters Pat Gray was then the acting director of the FBI is for us to have Walters call Pat Gray and just say this is not at this point.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_08: This is joining me now the former White House counsel to President Nixon John Dean now an investment banker in California how did um how did they know to ask about the taping system?
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_07: Well they knew because they were actually following up on my testimony before the Senate when I testified that I believed that Richard Nixon had recorded me.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_07: And why did you believe that?
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_07: I believed it because of Nixon's uh conduct during very late in our dealings in one of the conversations, uh very sensitive conversation he asked me leading question after leading question then at one point he gets up and he goes over to the corner of his office and in a stage whisper he says something to me.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_07: And at that point I said John this man is recording you.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_07: And so I rather than you know I I wanted to make the clear to the Senate I believed there was a record of these.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_07: That's why they could test that and test the truth of what I was saying.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_07: And I put it in and they kept trying to discredit people or me and they finally asked Butterfield and he said yes I think Dean was recorded.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_08: Now that piece of tape that we just heard has come to be known as the smoking gun tape.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_08: Uh I need to remind our our viewers the tape was actually made five or six days after the break in wasn't revealed until five days before Mr.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_08: Nixon resigned so there was a two year gap there.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_08: Why do you take issue with that?
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_08: Why do you think it was not that damning a piece of tape?
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_07: Well when you hear the whole conversation he's actually following my advice I had been I was passing on what John Mitchell the former attorney general thought he should do and in doing so I was doing it based on my belief that the reason we were concerned at the White House was because of camp potential campaign act violations.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_07: Contributors were going to be uncovered as a result of the FBI investigation that we were particularly concerned about.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_07: This was something that I had an agreement with the Department of Justice several days earlier they would not investigate.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_08: But in suggesting that the the deputy director of the CIA call up the acting director of the FBI that's clearly using a one government agency to block the investigation of another a week later it would have been a misuse of an agency.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_07: At that time we were very confused as to what the CIA did know didn't know how involved or not involved we didn't have the answers.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_07: And in fact there is documentary evidence where uh uh that says that they're not even sure at some early stage like that.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_07: So I don't think it was an obstruction it was defensible by Nixon at that point.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_08: Clearly there would come a time as your lawyers like to say uh when indeed you no longer felt that things were so innocent and you made a warning uh uh that contained a a quote that uh maybe the most famous quote of that time in which you spoke to the president uh and said uh Mr.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_05: President I think there may be a cancer growing on the presidency let's listen to that by the reason I thought we ought to talk this morning is because in our conversations I have I have the impression that you don't know everything I know and it makes it very difficult for you to make judgments.
• 1:00:51
  unknown: People are going to start purging themselves very quickly and do not have to purchase themselves to protect other people in my and that is and there's no assurance that us at that one does.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_08: Now it sounds John as as I hear the president as though he is really eager to hear I mean almost pathetically eager to hear what these terrible things are that are going on.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_07: But you then proceeded to tell him what was his reaction as you talked yeah this is a very lengthy conversation it runs an over an hour and I raise one horrible after another uh I'm trying to really reach in and tell him the criminality that I think that he has to deal with at the White House.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_07: And every time I'd throw one up, uh he would bat it away.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_07: Uh it was if you go on and hear this conversation you'll hear pauses at time where I'm trying to I'm really somewhat surprised at the president's reaction and I'm not quite sure how to deal with it next so I just keep throwing one after another after another the first time I'd ever gathered all this information in my mind and and and try to tell it to somebody in summary form, thinking it was pretty devastating.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_07: And I had hoped the president would, you know, put his hand down on the desk and say, this has got to end.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_08: Did you really believe when you went in, when you sort of prepared yourself for this conversation that you were informing a man who knew nothing about it?
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_08: And and uh what do you think now?
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_07: Well I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_07: That's the way I set up the conversation with him.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_07: I now know, uh having read other transcripts of conversations that he knew a lot more than I thought.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_07: However I must say I don't think he knew everything and he has written himself that I'm the only one who tried to warn him.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_08: And as a as a consequence of those warnings did he give you any indication that he was going to do anything or was it just batting him all aside?
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_07: It was batting him aside and as we know from later tapes he actually went to visit Rosemary Woods when he left me to see if she had some money because that's one of the problems that I was raising.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_07: That there that hush money would be required.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_07: That's right.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_08: And that in fact is going to be one of the things we talk about when we come back wiretapping the Democrats and hush money this is ABC News Night Live between January and April 1973 Richard Nixon's popularity drops 14 points.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_08: He's a president under siege.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_08: Front page stories especially in the Washington Post chronicle the allegations against administration officials.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_08: On April 12th 1973 the Post reports that former Attorney General John Mitchell who ran the president's reelection campaign had allegedly ordered wiretaps against the Democrats and transcripts of those conversations had been delivered to Mitchell.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_08: Two days later the president discusses the matter with his two top aides Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman the bugs were to have been placed in three locations later that night after attending the White House correspondence dinner, the president calls Chief of Staff Haldeman concerned that the White House plan to pay the Watergate burglars hush money is unraveling.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_04: I just don't know how it's gonna come out though that's the whole point and I just don't know when I was serious when I said to John at the end there I said God damn it all these guys that participated in raising the money and so forth have got to stick to that line that they did not raise this money to obstruct justice.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah we shall see and it's the word of the of the felons against the word of the men to raise the money if that's right.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_08: And I'm back once again with John Dean.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_07: Um he sure doesn't sound like an innocent in that in that second conversation does he no he doesn't uh at this point uh the cover up is clearly falling apart uh I have stepped forward I had told him I was going to go to the prosecutors I had gone to the prosecutors and obstruction of justice was quickly becoming the issue not we you we divided it between pre and post.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_07: In other words pre-break-in post-break-in and the post-problems after the break in were now becoming the serious problem which had always troubled me the most what surprised me a little bit is is how quickly he is prepared to discard his old friend and he really was his old friend John Mitchell.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_08: I mean publicly Nixon always seemed to agonize about these things.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_08: Here privately seems easy.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_07: Well um as the later tapes show Uh, I was the next to go and would become enemy number one.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_07: As uh the prosecutors once said, I went from good John Dean to mean John Dean.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_07: On one level, his instincts are right.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_08: Uh I mean he just wasn't prepared to go far enough, and that is let's get this thing out.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_07: Let's let's really burst the canker.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_07: That being my belief, and my advice to him was that not only did I have to resign, Haldeman and Ehrlichman had to resign, everybody had to go.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_07: It was the only way to give him a chance to get out in front of it.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_07: And I think if he'd done that, he might have survived.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_08: I was gonna say very quickly, because eventually all of he, I mean, he dumped every one of you, threw you all overboard.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_08: If he'd done it quickly, immediately, would he have saved his presidency?
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_07: I think he could have certainly gone a long way to doing that.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, I thought when I started forward, the others would follow me.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, I learned just the opposite was the course.
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_07: I'd picked a fight now that rather than find a solution.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_08: When we come back, President Nixon summons John Dean and, as John has suggested, asks him to resign.
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_08: A day after John Dean informs President Nixon that he's cooperating with federal prosecutors, and amid eroding support from Congressional Republicans and from inside the White House, Nixon calls John Dean to the Oval Office and asks for his resignation.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_08: Nixon wants Dean to sign both a letter of resignation and one requesting a leave of absence.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_08: Dean refuses and instead drafts an alternative letter asking for a leave of absence.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_08: It was a tense 45-minute conversation where Nixon, perhaps mindful that the conversation was being recorded, reminds Dean of the virtues of truth telling.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_08: But getting back to that original point, if you had not mentioned your suspicion that you were being recorded, the tapes never would have emerged, or probably would not have emerged, and if you had not cooperated with the federal prosecutors, those two things might have changed the course of history.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_07: There is no there is no question in my mind that there was a point where if I had stayed and played, if you will, as opposed to coming forward and breaking rank, that there's no question Richard Nixon would have survived.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_07: Uh I might not have been indicted even because all there was was hearsay at that point as to above the men who'd been arrested at the at the Watergate.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_07: So who knows what would have happened.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_07: But I just wasn't prepared to live my life that way.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_08: You you really became famous for having a steel trap memory.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_08: I mean, it turns out that the tapes, in fact, confirmed almost verbatim sometimes, what had been said in those conversations.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_08: Um when the president was talking about you gotta tell the truth, as he was at the end of that last conversation, what was he about there?
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_08: Was he just being very conscious of the fact that there were microphones all over the place?
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_07: I think so.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_07: The night before is when I had become convinced he was recording me on the 15th.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_07: This was on a Monday morning where he was asking for my resignation, and I thought very much that whole conversation, that again it was filled with leading questions, was really to make a record.
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_07: And so there was little question in my mind that that indeed is what he was doing.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_08: You were a young man at the time.
• 1:11:04
  SPEAKER_08: What gave you the spine to say to the president of the United States, no, I'm not gonna resign.
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_07: Well, because I thought the the right thing to do was not just for me to resign, but for those from whom I'd taken my instruction, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, to go too, and that would solve his problem.
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_08: Explain to me.
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_08: I mean, people have always put it in terms of why didn't he burn the tapes?
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_08: My question is, why did he leave those microphones in place?
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_08: Why didn't he just tell the Secret Service, tear them all out?
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_07: Well, he put them back in, actually.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_07: Uh there were there some different ones during Johnson, but he put them back in and turned them on.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_07: And I think he wanted a historical record and just never ever believed that he would have to give it up.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_08: But uh, I mean, even if he'd been able to finish his presidency, can he have really wanted historians, even a hundred years from now, long after his presidency was over, to have listened to those tapes and to have listened to those machinations, manipulations, evasions?
• 1:12:02
  SPEAKER_07: Why?
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, I don't think he ever thought that would happen.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_07: In other words, he would preserve what he thought was worthy of preservation.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_07: The remainder, where he is taking cheap shots at people or attacking women, blacks, Jews, what have you, as he was wont to do, uh would never have surfaced.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_07: So I think it was controlled.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_08: If he'd if he'd been able to finish his term, he might have spent his retirement going through 3,700 hours and boiling it down to the essential hundred.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_08: He might have had somebody do it for him.
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_08: John Dean, thank you.
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_08: That's our report for tonight.
• 1:12:33
  SPEAKER_08: I'm Ted Coppel in Washington.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_08: For all of us here at ABC News, good night.