Word: conversationsâ
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...court did not, of course, involve impeachment directly. As debated in a historic three-hour oral argument last week, the basic dispute was constitutional: Does the President have the power to withhold from use in the September conspiracy trial of six former aides 64 tape recordings of White House conversations???merely on his assertion that it is not in the public interest to release them? That extravagant claim of absolute Executive privilege, applying even to conversations that may have been part of a criminal conspiracy, had never been made to the court before...
...sure, these 33 hours or so of recorded talks are a minuscule fraction of Richard Nixon's presidential conversations???and, one can only hope, the grubbiest fraction. The transcripts might not necessarily be representative of the way he always conducts business; the language and tone may be loftier and more dignified when he confers with, say, Henry Kissinger or other officials. Despite the indecipherable passages and inelegant language, however, the transcripts yield an absorbing insight into the inner workings of Nixon's White House and of the President's mind. Some noteworthy examples follow...
...concern of Nixon's?unmentioned here but evident in other conversations???is that a special prosecutor, who would coordinate the entire investigation, could not be counted on to keep the President from being involved. Later the President and Kleindienst muse on how things could have gone so awry...
...sure, the taped conversations, if they do become public, could turn out to be just as ambiguous as all of the conflicting testimony. It seems unlikely that a President who knew his words were being recorded would engage in any self-incriminating conversations???unless he felt certain that his words would not be revealed until years later, if at all. Even with the tapes, the answer to Senator Howard Baker's celebrated question, "What did the President know and when did he know it?," could center on semantic shadings, conversational contexts and inconclusive interpretations of what the participants...
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