Word: coverups
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Price, like Nixon in the David Frost interviews last spring, emphasizes the "humanitarian" calculations that entered into the President's decision to embark on the coverup. In retrospect, he says, it becomes easy to think that immediately after the events of June 17, 1972, Nixon should have said "O.K., let's get the truth out, everybody walk the plank." "There wouldn't have been much damage," Price says, "even if John Mitchell were involved. On the other hand, in human terms, I doubt if he could have done that." Price adds that he feels certain that Nixon would have...
...outrage" when White House chief of staff Alexander Haig called him into his office one morning late in July 1974, and presented Price with a transcript of the soon-to-be released "smoking gun" tape of June 23, 1972, which demonstrated beyond doubt that Nixon had participated in the coverup from the start...
...knowledge about past events, about the exact content of the tapes, appears to be the best description of White House Watergate "dynamics," according to Price's view. Price's analysis seems to demonstrate that most Nixon aides--even those such as Price who were not involved in the coverup--were not motivated by a desire to get the truth...
...this is a hollow argument, one that does little to bolster Nixon's defense. It is all too easy to forget, in reading Price's attack, that the two years of national hysteria over Watergate misdeeds, real or imagined, would not have occurred if Nixon had not initiated the coverup in the days following the June 1972 break-in. Moreover it is certainly inadequate to argue that Nixon's actions of June 23, 1972 represented the president's sole obstruction of justice. His actions for more than two years following those June days constituted one ongoing obstruction of justice...
Lasky has a better case in charging that Jack Kennedy enjoyed a relatively uncritical press. Too many Washington reporters were charmed by him and wanted to bask in Camelot favors. Yet whether their failure to report his hyperactive sex life was a coverup, as Lasky charges, is doubtful. Rightly or wrongly, the sexual excesses of politicians had not been seen as newsworthy until the advent of post-Watergate morality. It was hardly a partisan matter; widely rumored dalliances by F.D.R. and Ike went unreported too at the time. The bedtime habits of a President, moreover, are scarcely...