Word: haldemans
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Nixon immediately proposed cover-up actions. His first suggestion to Haldeman, according to the transcripts, was that each campaign contributor whose check was traced to the burglary by the FBI should claim that the burglars had approached him independently for the money. Haldeman objected that this would involve "relying on more and more people all the time." Haldeman relayed a suggestion from Mitchell and Dean that the CIA should be asked to tell the FBI to "stay to hell out of this" because the FBI probe would expose unnamed-and actually nonexistent-secret CIA operations. Asked Haldeman about...
With those words, Nixon authorized the coverup, a criminal obstruction of justice that was eventually to destroy his presidency. The transcripts show that Nixon ordered Haldeman to call in CIA Director Richard Helms and Deputy CIA Director Vernon Walters and get them to tell Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray "to lay off' his investigation of the Watergate burglary money. Nixon suggested that Haldeman could claim that "the President believes" that such an investigation would "open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again" (as a CIA agent, Hunt had helped organize the disastrous 1961 invasion of Cuba...
...June 23 conversations hinted, moreover, that Nixon had been concerned even earlier about the FBI investigation touching the White House. "We're back in the problem area," Haldeman said early in the first meeting with Nixon that day, indicating a prior discussion. One such occasion almost certainly was on June 20, the day on which the two held an 18½-minute Watergate discussion-the tape of which was later manually erased by someone with access to the White House-held recordings...
...transcripts were finally released late in the afternoon in a mobbed White House pressroom, the words of the conversations were indeed damning. But the Nixon explanation glossed over the import with patronizingly mild language. Nixon implied that he had forgotten all about those June 23 conversations with Haldeman until he had reviewed his tapes in May. Only then, he suggested, had he "recognized that these presented potential problems." But he did not tell his counsel or the Judiciary Committee because, "I did not realize the extent of the implications which these conversations might now appear to have...
...explain how he could have forgotten those telltale cover-up talks with Haldeman in June of that distant year. "In my opinion and in the opinion of my counsel, I have not committed any impeachable offense," he said. Therefore, he insisted, "the constitutional process should be followed out to the end-wherever...