The Presidential Transcripts

by The Washington Post

The complete transcripts of the Nixon tapes – the most extraordinary and revealing White House document ever made public, with commentary by the staff of The Washington Post.

Genres: Nonfiction

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

The Washington Post provides authoritative local, national and international news — with reporting on politics, technology, business and culture — offering readers and users entertainment and information they need to know, plus expert original commentary, insight and analysis, 365 days a year.

Reviews

[Tom Schulte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading these candid insights into presidential, (yet oddly
casual and even (expletive deleted) earthy, by a (characterization removed)
president is a rare insight Oval Office deliberations. To think that Nixon
thought this may make thinks look like anything other than a directed cover-up
and something far short of an earnest battle to root out close corruption
boggles the mind. To think that he is the only one in the conversation knowing
of the taping and then contriving unnaturally to “go on record” several times
past the dawning of the inevitable to say things like
I-never-knew-that-and-said-so-before seems to me that the POTUS “doth protest
too much, methinks.”

As is pointed out in the foreword from Woodward and Bernstein:
“The President and the White House have characterized Mr. Nixon's actions,
before March 21, 1973, as being designed to quiet a political problem and not
to obstruct justice. Unless there is uncontradicted evidence that the President
did obstruct or otherwise broke the law, Nixon and his advisers have contended,
he cannot be impeached.

The President's response to Dean's information about
Strachan on March 13 is consistent with other instances recorded in the
transcripts in which Nixon received or discussed the possible criminal
involvement of his aides.

At no time in the conversations before March 21--and rarely
in those after that critical date--did the President or his advisers even
discuss telling the whole truth to either the public or law enforcement
authorities.

Instead, the tapes reveal discussions of alternatives
ranging from public relations offensives to total silence to the possibility of
extending executive clemency to the Watergate burglars.”

That is, they delayed in their “let it all hang out option”:

(MARCH 13; 1973) DEAN: …Now the
other thing that we talked about in the past, and I, I still have the same
problem, is to have sort of a "Well, here it all is" approach. Uh, if
we do that -

PRESIDENT: And let it all hang
out.

DEAN: And let it all hang out,
uh,

PRESIDENT: Yeah.

DEAN: uh, let's say with the
Segretti situation --

PRESIDENT: I guess, I guess if
we were going to do that, we have passed that point.

DEAN: We have passed that point
plus the fact, they're not going to believe the truth. That's the incredible
thing.

Not taking the “hang-out road” proves pricey and hopeless,
as emerges in that March 21 meeting:

Instead, he returned to the theme of avoiding "criminal
liability" and -- far more often than any other alternative to achieving
that objective -- meeting the Watergate burglars' blackmail demands.

"Now let me tell you," the President told Dean and
Haldeman at one such juncture. "We could get the money. There is no
problem in that. We can't provide the clemency. Money could be provided.
Mitchell could provide the way to deliver it. That could be done. See what I
mean?"

 

At another point in the discussion the President asked Dean:

"What do you think"
You don't need a million right away, but you need a million? Is that
right?"

Dean: "That is right."

The President: "You need it
in cash don't you? I am just thinking out loud here for a moment. Would you put
that through the Cuban Committee (through which payments to the Watergate
conspirators had been funneled for months).

Dean: "No."

The President: "It is going
to be checks, cash money, etc. How if that ever comes out, are you going to
handle it? Is the Cuban Committee an obstruction of justice, if they want to
help?"

Dean: "Well they have
priests in it."

The President: "Would that
give a little bit of cover?"

The edited transcript shows the
following interchange near the end of the meeting:

President: "That's why for
your immediate thing you have no choice but to come up with the $120,000, or
whatever it is. Right?"

Dean: "That's right"

President: "Would you agree
that that's the prime thing that you damn well better get done?"

Dean: "Obviously he (Hunt)
ought to be given some signal anyway."

President: "(expletive
deleted), get it . . ."

This is a different approach than the stone wall erected the
previous day on March 20, 1973:

PRESIDENT: ...And so you are
coming up, then, with the idea of just a stone wall then? Is that –

DEAN: That's right.

PRESIDENT: Is that what you come
down with?

DEAN: Stonewall, with lots of
noises that we are always willing to cooperate, but no one is asking us for anything…”

….

PRESIDENT: You've got to have
something where it doesn't appear that I am doing this in, you know, just in a
-- saying to hell with the Congress and to hell with the people, we are not
going to tell you anything because of Executive Privilege. That, they don't
understand. But if you say, "No, we are willing to cooperate," and
you've made a complete statement, but make it very incomplete. See, that is
what I mean…

This book is largely unanalyzed transcripts, offering only a
few, short introductory remarks and a dramatis personae.

Some things that jumped out at me:

Nixon is not overly surprised to
hear his campaign staff earlier worked in the shadows on questionable if not
illegal things and reacts to broaching such skeletons from the closet as
another public image issue to do damage control on:



TRANSCRIPT OF MARCH 13, 1973 MEETING

PRESIDENT: Yeah.

JOHN DEAN [Nixon’s counsel, the
first to confess criminal acts and one that has been labeled Nixon’s chief
accuser]: Well, now, let me tell you something that's – lurks at the bottom of
this whole thing.

DEAN: If, in going after
Segretti [pled guilty and served six months for ’72 Florida election “dirty
tricks”], I -- Segretti, right -- they go after Kalmbach's bank records, you'll
recall that sometime back -- maybe you, you perhaps didn't know about this,
it's very possible -- that right after Chappaquiddick somebody was put up there
to start observing.

Within six hours.

PRESIDENT: Did we?

DEAN: That’s right .

PRESIDENT: I didn't know that.

DEAN: That man watched that --
he was there for every second of Chappaquiddick, uh, for a year, and almost two
years he worked for, uh, he worked for Jack
Caulfield, who was originally on John -

PRESIDENT: Oh, I heard of Caulfield,
yeah.

DEAN: He worked for Caulfield
originally and then he worked for, when Caulfield worked for John, and then
when I came over here I inherited Caulfield and this guy was still on this same
thing.

PRESIDENT: Yeah.

DEAN: Well, if they get to
those bank records between, uh, it starts on July of '69 through June of '71,
and they say, "What are these about? Who is this fellow that's up in New
York that you paid?" There comes Chappaquiddick with a vengeance. This guy
is a, is a twenty year detective on the, uh, New York state, uh, New York City
Police Department.

PRESIDENT: In other words, we
--

DEAN: He is ready to disprove
and to show that, everything from --

PRESIDENT: [Unintelligible]
consider that wrong, do we?

DEAN: Well, if they get to it,
uh, it's going to come out and the whole thing is going to turn around on that
one. I mean, if Kennedy knew the bear trap he was walking into --

PRESIDENT: How do we know --
uh, why, why don't we get it out anyway?

DEAN: Well, we sort of saved
it. [Laughs]

PRESIDENT: Does he have any
record? Is it any good?

DEAN: Uh, he is probably the
most knowledgeable man in the country. He can't, you know, there are certain
things he runs up against walls when they closed the, when they closed the
records down, things he can't get, but he can ask all of the questions and get
some, many of the answers. As a, as a twenty year detective, but we don't want
to surface him right now. But if things ever surfaced, uh, this is what they'll
get.

PRESIDENT: Now, how will
Kalzbach explain that he'd hired this [unintelligible] Chappaquiddick? Did he
-- out of what type of funds?

DEAN: We'd have -- he had, he
had money left over from, uh, pre-convention --

PRESIDENT: Are they going to
investigate those funds too?

DEAN: They are funds that were
quite legal. There's nothing illegal with those funds.

PRESIDENT: How can they, how
can they investigate them?

DEAN: They can't .

PRESIDENT: Huh?

DEAN: They -- The only -- The
-- What they would -- happens -- what, what would occur, you see, is they would
stumble into this in going back to, say '71, on Kalabach's bank records. They've
already asked for' a lot of his bank records in connection with Segretti, as to
how he paid Segretti.

PRESIDENT: Are they going to go
back as far as Chappaquiddick?

DEAN: Well, yeah, but this,
this fellow worked into '71 on this. He was up there. He talked to everybody in
that town. He, you know, he, he's the one who caused a lot of embarrassment for
Kennedy already by saying - he went up there as a newspaperman. "So why
aren't you checking this? Why aren't you looking there?" And pointing the
press's attention to tonings. Gosh, the guy did a masterful job. I have never
been, had the full report.

….

OVAL OFFICE -- MARCH 17, 1973
-- PRESIDENT/DEAN

…

DEAN: The intent, when Segretti
was hired, was nothing evil nothing vicious, nothing bad, nothing. Not
espionage, not sabotage. It was pranksterism that got out of hand and eve know
that. And I think we can lay our story out there. I have no problem with the Segretti
thing. It's just not that serious. The other potential problem is Ehrlichman's
and this is -

PRESIDENT: In connection with
Hunt?

DEAN: In connection with Hunt
and Liddy both.

PRESIDENT: They worked for him?

DEAN: They -- these fellows had
to be some idiots as we've learned after the fact. They Went out and went into Dr.
Ellsberg's doctor's office and they had, they were geared up with all this CS
equipment -- cameras and the like. Well they turned the stuff back in to the
CIA some point in time and left film in the camera. CIA has not put this
together, and they don't know what it all means right now. But it wouldn't take
a very sharp investigator very long because you've got pictures in the CIA
files that they had to turn over to (unintelligible).

PRESIDENT: What in the world --
what in the name of God was Ehrlichman having something (unintelligible) in the
Ellsberg (unintelligible)?

DEAN: They were trying to -- this
was a part of an operation that -- in connection with the Pentagon papers. They
were -- the whole thing -- they wanted to get Ellsberg's psychiatric records
for some reason. I don't know.

PRESIDENT: This is the first I
ever heard of this…         

And the meat of the matter on the pivotal href="http://genius.com/The-watergate-tapes...
of March meeting which covers the commonplace nature of these “dirty tricks”
and deciding about giving into blackmail (to the tune of a cool million, possibly
using clerical couriers) and foregoing clemency as politically inconvenient:

DEAN: So, let me give you the
sort of basic facts' talking first about the Watergate; and then about
Segretti; and then about some of the peripheral items that, uh, have come up.
First of all, on, on the Watergate: How did it all start, where did it start?
It started with an instruction to me from Bob Haldeman to see if we couldn't
set up a perfectly legitimate campaign intelligence operation over at the
Re-election Committee…

Well, once you are going to distribute cash to buy the
allegiance of witnesses in a federal investigation, how do you deliver it? It
is not as easy as it sounds (TRANSCRIPT OF MARCH 21, 1973 MEETING FROM 10:12 -
11:55)…

PRESIDENT: …I am, uh, unfamiliar
with the money situation.

DEAN: Well that, you know, it,
it sounds easy to do, apparently, until, uh, everyone is out there doing it and
that's where our breakdown has, has come every time.

PRESIDENT: Well, if you had it,
where would you, how would you get it to somebody?

DEAN: Well, I, uh, I gather
LaRue just leaves it in mail boxes and things like that, and tells Hunt to go
pick it up. Someone phones Hunt and tells him to pick it up. As I say, we're a
bunch of amateurs in that business.

HALDEMAN: That was the thing that
we thought Mitchell ought to be able to know how to find somebody who could do
all that sort of thing, because none of us know how to.

DEAN: That's right. You got to
wash money and all that sort, you know, if you get a hundred thousand out of a
bank, and it all comes in serialized bills, and --

PRESIDENT: Oh I understand.

HALDEMAN: Jesus.

DEAN: And that means you have to
go to Vegas with it or a bookmaker in New York City, and I've learned all these
things after the fact, it's -- [laughs] Great shape for the next time around.

[Laughter]

PRESIDENT: Well, the main point,
now, is the people who will need the money [unintelligible]. Well of course,
you've got the surplus from the campaign. That we have to account for.

But if there's any other money
hanging around…

On March 30, 1973 Nixon wants to go on record as having no
prior knowledge and a truth seeker, very protective of him.

PRESIDENT: Could we say--could
we add one thing here? Save this for the last. Every--I called for an investigation
which the White House staff conducted on Watergate. And uh, uh, every--and for
every--this is a statement of the President?

ZIEGLER: No. No. It, I would
almost...

PRESIDENT: Yeah. Yeah. The
President called for--fine. Every member of the White House staff who has been
mentioned prior (unintelligible) mentioned as a—has submitted a sworn
affidavit, to me, denying any knowledge of --any prior knowledge of, any
knowledge of or participation in the--.

Could we say this?

EHRLICHMAN: (Draws breath).
No--I wouldn't.

PRESIDENT: Why? Not true.

ZIEGLER: Too defensive.

EHRLICHMAN: Well, number one,
it’s defensive, it's self-serving. But number two, then that establishes the
existence of a piece of paper that becomes a focal point for a subpoena and all
that kind of thing.

PRESIDENT: (Unintelligible))
civil record, or something) (20 Second Pause) Members of the

White House, uh, would welcome
an opportunity to (unintelligible). (Pause).

Are we going too far? Urging the
Grand Jury to do it?

EHRLICHMAN: Well, that’s, we
were farther over and we've come back to welcome. I don't know. Maybe that's
still too strong.

Nixon actually blithely passed up an opportunity to personally
interview the principals in a March 27 meeting (page 186 of this edition), but
was still trying to document the efficacy and earnestness of his “investigation”
in mid-April (page 433). Well, his investigation still doesn’t make plain to me
why the burglary even happened. Must be national security, which along with executive
privilege is the ultimate cloak to Nixon, as he said on April 17, 1973: “…the
plumbing thing was national security, the ITT thing.” Gotta stop those leaks!
Nixon seems to feel slighted and unfairly examined on what he seems to feel are
electioneering techniques, aside from the fruits of bugging that are national
security. Nixon bemoans that Democrats do the same thing, and what about
Hiss-Chambers?

[Hilary · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a remarkable behind the scenes look at governmental hubris. My favorite lines

P[resident:]: (expletive removed) ! (unintelligible)

Steward: Yes, sir?
P[resident:]: I will have some consomme.

E[hirlichman:]: So, Colson called and says you've got an ass at your bosom over there, ...

[Tim Petersik · Rating 4 out of 5]

You certainly can't read this all at once, but it's interesting to page through it from time to time and see how paranoid Nixon really was...and how corrupt.