Word: haldeman
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...Haldeman is more credible when he abandons such unverifiable theorizing and focuses on the specific new evidence he can bring to the scandal. He does so in supporting his belief that Nixon was part of the cover-up "from day one"-even though no one in the-White House viewed it as a crime at first. The cover-up was not a "conspiracy" in the legal sense, Haldeman contends: It was "organic," growing "one step at a time" to limit political damage to the President...
...Haldeman claims that on June 20, three days after the arrests, he received a Nixon phone call that has remained "unknown to anyone but the President and me to this day." Already Nixon was thinking about raising money for the jailed burglars. "Those people who got caught are going to need money. I've been thinking about how to do it," Nixon told Haldeman. "I'm going to have Bebe [Nixon's friend, Bebe Rebozo] start a fund for them in Miami. Call it an anti-Castro fund...
...Haldeman also for the first time fills in that celebrated 18½ minute gap from the tape of a conversation he held that same June 20 with Nixon at the White House. In what looks like his lawyers' protective way of camouflaging what, in fact, Haldeman knew-possibly to preclude further legal charges against him-he writes, "I've reconstructed the way the conversation might have gone." And, if Haldeman is accurate, it becomes clear why the tape was erased. The key Nixon passages...
Once again, Haldeman claims no direct knowledge of who erased that 18/^ minutes from the tape, but he nonetheless accuses Nixon. "My own perception had always been that Nixon simply began to erase all of the Watergate material from the tapes when he started to worry that they may be exposed," Haldeman says. This was the first taped post-burglary conversation. Haldeman believes Nixon set out to censor it, but since he "was the least dexterous man I have ever known," he discovered that "it would take him ten years" to wipe out all the incriminating words. Indeed, court-appointed...
...smoking-gun tape from three days later, Haldeman adds some spectacular-but unverified-ramifications to the White House efforts to persuade top CIA officials to intercede with the FBI in order to impede the FBI's investigation of the money found on the arrested Watergate burglars. That tape, in which Nixon instructed Haldeman to ask the CIA to do this, put the lie to Nixon's repeated claim that he had not tried to block the criminal investigation into Watergate and had wanted only to protect any CIA secrets involving national security. It showed his real fear...