RICHARD NIXON Watergate 1973 (Part 7) The Week in Question March 13 - 23, 1973

The Richard Nixon Experience

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This is arguably the most important episode of the series and these events we will be revisiting through out the scandal of Watergate. Up to this week, Richard Nixon had never been dealt with completely by anyone who was intimately involved in the Watergate debacle now on the verge of consuming his Presidency. That includes his Counsel to the President, John Dean.
It is in the events of this week that a storyline would later develop implicating the President of the United States in a criminal act, which was the payment of hush money to E. Howard Hunt. The problem as we will learn as we go along is there is a gaping hole in the timeline of events and everything that could be done would be done to obscure that fact from the public, the President, the Grand Jury and House Judiciary Committee.
Here we will listen in on the taped conversations themselves as compiled by Historian Luke Nichter for his website Nixontapes.org. The article used was written 12 years ago and we read it verbatim and then play the tape for you. We would like to note that the tapes of conversations that are not on the phone are often hard to hear, especially President Nixon who was often sitting away from the microphone. We chose to follow the historians article script and play the corresponding tape so that everything is as clear as we can keep it for this podcasting format. We did not change any of his script. We begin at the March 13 dated conversation from http://nixontapes.org/passport.html
In the script Mr. Nichter uses the word "Falsified Document" and we read it in as written. Our understanding is that word choice was due to the impression from the tapes that Dean was being asked to write something comprehensive at Camp David. The President planned to take the report he asked his White House Counsel to write and then call on another review or investigation as to what had occurred. The President does ask that the report be vague as to protect the staff who have already been named or testified. But he states that he would be waiving executive privilege later. It is important to remember that this is , afterall, the first time Richard Nixon had had as full a picture of what had happened since the break in, some 9 months earlier, in June of 1972.
John Dean while working on the report realized at Camp David there was no way he could be fully truthful, and that all roads would lead to him, as he says "I was all over this thing like a blanket" , John Dean saw this request as being asked to write a falsified report. But that doesn’t at all mean the others were asking Dean to write something untruthful.
The point being that whatever Dean would have written could not have been the whole truth, if for no other reason because it would have been damaging to Dean. In the end, and after about five days of trying, he was recalled by Haldeman without producing a report at all – and decided instead to retain criminal defense counsel, who sought out the career prosecutors, offering testimony against his colleagues in pursuit of personal immunity (which they declined due to his leadership role throughout the scandal) and that is what our next episode will be about.