Word: hunts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...speech, Nixon said: "I returned several times to the immediate problem posed by Mr. Hunt's blackmail threat, which to me was not a Watergate problem but one which I regarded, rightly or wrongly, as a potential national security problem of very serious proportions...
...course of considering it and of just thinking out loud, as I put it at one point, I several times suggested that meeting Hunt's demands might be necessary ... [but] my conclusion at the end of the meeting was clear. And my actions and reactions ... show clearly that I did not intend the further payment to Hunt or anyone else be made...
...evidence in the transcripts seems far less ambiguous than the President has suggested. The last time the President raises the Hunt money problem, he says: "That's why for your immediate things you have no choice but to come up with the $120,000, or whatever it is. Right?" Dean replies: "That's right." And Nixon says: "Would you agree that that's the prime thing that you damn well better get that done?" To which Dean says: "Obviously he ought to be given some signal anyway." And the President says: "[Expletive deleted...
That same night, according to a Watergate grand jury, Hunt was given $75,000, and in the subsequent discussions in the White House all anxiety about Hunt's blackmail vanished. The subject did not come up again until much later, when the cover-up was collapsing...
Indeed, so many notations of "unintelligible" occur at critical points on the transcripts that suspicions inevitably arose that some of the missing portions were intentionally left out. For example, in discussing the possibility of offering clemency to Howard Hunt, Nixon apparently had a precedent in mind, but the transcript for that meeting on March 21, 1973, quotes the President as telling Dean: "The only thing we could do with him would be to parole him like the [unintelligible] situation." Again, the transcript for an April 17, 1973, meeting has Nixon saying to Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Ronald Ziegler: "Damn...