Word: nixons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...plans for the bugging in advance and let it happen to entrap the Republicans. Says Larry O'Brien: "That's baloney. That's a real crock." Haldeman further suggests that the CIA knew all along about the plans and may even have sabotaged them to discourage Nixon from developing any unofficial intelligence capability or seeking political control over the CIA. Former CIA Director Richard Helms said last week that his Senate Watergate testimony still stands. "The agency had nothing to do with the Watergate break...
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...
...quotes are accurate, Nixon is not only divulging his own culpability in initiating the bugging but is also expressing a clear intent to keep the FBI from learning about it. Thus the seeds of an obstruction of justice have been planted even before the celebrated June 23 "smoking gun" conversation, which ultimately triggered Nixon's resignation from office...