Word: dictabelts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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According to Woodward and Bernstein, Kissinger's monitoring of telephone calls was not confined to Nixon. Beginning in 1970, a Dictabelt machine began automatically taping nearly all his calls. Even some of his personal chats with his present wife, Nancy Maginnes, were monitored by secretaries, who would remind him of any social engagement he might have made...
...kept insisting, right to the end. At one point, at the request of the special prosecutor, Federal Judge John J. Sirica had ordered the White House to produce a Dictabelt that Nixon claimed to have made to summarize a meeting with his estranged counsel, John Dean, on April 15, 1973. Nixon, who apparently had never made the recording, asked one of his lawyers: "Why can't we make a new Dictabelt?" The lawyer was understandably appalled that Nixon, himself an attorney, would consider concocting evidence for the court...
...evidence also amplifies the record of the events of the fateful March 21. A statement made by the President on his Dictabelt machine just after his meeting with Dean and transcribed by the Judiciary Committee shows that he admired those of his aides who lied to investigating groups and had contempt for those who told the truth. He praised Gordon Strachan- who at the time was stonewalling FBI investigators and Government prosecutors with denials that led later to his indictment for perjury. In Nixon's words, Strachan was "a real . . . courageous fellow through all this." By contrast, Nixon talked...
Strangely, Nixon began the Dictabelt by saying that March 21 was "relatively uneventful." But he went on to recount his long conversation with Dean and made a possible damaging statement about one of the most crucial parts of the Watergate case, E. Howard Hunt's demand for money. Lawyer St. Clair has argued that, in his March 21 discussion of a payment to Hunt from campaign funds, Nixon meant only legal-support payments. But the President's Dictabelt indicates that this was not so. "Hunt," said the President, "needed a hundred and-thousand [sic] dollars...
...Dictabelt, Nixon placed much of the blame for the whole Watergate imbroglio on Charles Colson, who had recently resigned as White House special counsel. "Apparently what happened is that Colson, with Liddy and Hunt in his office, called Magruder and told him in February to get off his ass and start doing something about, uh, setting up some kind of an operation . . . Colson was always pushing terribly hard for action, and in this instance, uh, pushed so hard that, uh, Liddy et al following their natural inclinations, uh, went, uh, the extra step which got them into serious trouble...