Watergate, page 83
“There was no air of triumph”: Colson, Born Again, 1.
“He could show no charity”: Ibid., 5.
“Richard Milhous Nixon yesterday”: David S. Broder, “Nixon Wins Landslide Victory; Democrats Hold Senate, House,” Washington Post, November 8, 1972, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/articles/110872–1.htm.
“Nixon believed that second terms”: Strober and Strober, Nixon, 272.
“It was cruel”: Ibid.
“There’s one guy we can’t afford”: Dean, Blind Ambition, 149.
“This is the time to face up”: Strober and Strober, Nixon, 270.
“every goddamn Cabinet officer”: Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms & the CIA (New York: Knopf, 1979), 241.
“During the first term, we stopped”: Rather and Gates, The Palace Guard, 8.
“I think I’m going to switch”: Dean, Blind Ambition, 162
“Colson can be more valuable”: Sussman, The Great Cover-Up, 151.
“[Dean] said the important thing”: Kutler, Abuse of Power, 178.
“I took a sweaty tour”: Dean, Blind Ambition, 168.
“I left the telephone”: Hunt, Undercover, 277.
On November 11, just a week: Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men, 201.
“Everybody dried up”: Shepard, Woodward and Bernstein, 63.
“No beating anyone over the head”: Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men, 207.
When the paper promised: Ibid., 224.
“returned to more conventional sources”: Ibid., 212.
“checked w. grand jury list number”: Himmelman, Yours in Truth, 206.
In a five-hundred-word statement: Joel Achenbach, “Woodward and Bernstein Respond to Himmelman,” Washington Post, April 30, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/achenblog/post/woodward-and-bernstein-respond-to-himmelman/2012/04/30/gIQAt9irrT_blog.html.
Thirty pages after the Z mention: Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men, 248.
“Maybe the moral of the story”: Himmelman, Yours in Truth, 209.
“There ain’t going to be”: Kutler, Abuse of Power, 174.
“Tying it to us”: Ibid., 175.
“Please check for me”: Felsenthal, Power, Privilege, and the Post, 315.
Another plot, uncovered later: Graham, Personal History, 477.
“Ben, the kids have got to be right”: Thomas, The Man to See, 275.
“I was feeling beleaguered”: Graham, Personal History, 468.
“What appears in the Post”: Ibid., 473.
Graham actually ran into Bob Dole: Ibid., 475.
“She had bet the paper”: Himmelman, Yours in Truth, 147.
“I just want everyone in this room”: Liddy, Will, TK.
“Papa, in the car”: Hunt, Undercover, 279.
“We all know who should have handled this”: Kutler, Abuse of Power, 183–84.
“If Helms goes”: Dash, Chief Counsel, 33. The exact text of this letter has varied in various printings, but the gist of the letter and the key phrases have always been constant.
“The clear implication of the substance and tone”: “Excerpts from Testimony.”
“They told me something interesting”: Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor, 434.
Chapter 23 “Something Was Rotten”
“With the full blood of Cork City”: Breslin, How the Good Guys Finally Won, 50.
Then, just three weeks before the November election: Robin Barefield, “The Mysterious Disappearance of Cessna N1812H,” July 14, 2018, https://medium.com/@robinbarefield76/the-mysterious-disappearance-of-cessna-n1812h-8e19dd5cb3ee.
The House itself was also in flux: Albert, Little Giant, 315.
He had witnessed plenty of hardball politics: O’Neill, Man of the House, 241.
“I’m a Democrat, but I’ll give you”: Breslin, How the Good Guys Finally Won, 22.
“They had practically blackjacked”: O’Neill, Man of the House, 339.
“Tom didn’t reveal any dirty secret”: Ibid., 239.
“I was convinced that something was rotten”: Ibid., 235.
“The time is going to come”: Breslin, How the Good Guys Finally Won, 12.
The Republican House minority leader: Gerald R. Ford, “House Floor Speech: Impeach Justice Douglas,” April 15, 1970, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0054/4526271.pdf; Marjorie Hunter, “Ford Asks Douglas’s Ouster,” New York Times, April 16, 1970, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1970/04/16/78113887.html?pageNumber=1.
“By 1973, the history books”: Howard Fields, High Crimes and Misdemeanors (New York: Norton, 1978), xi.
“You’re not a lawyer”: O’Neill, Man of the House, 242.
Richard Nixon turned sixty on January 9: Associated Press, “Nixon, at 60, Gives Formula for Living: ‘Never Slow Down,’ ” New York Times, January 9, 1973, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1973/01/09/issue.html.
“the most anonymous Cabinet”: John Herbers, “Nixon’s Presidency: Centralized Control,” New York Times, March 6, 1973, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1973/03/06/90919819.html?pageNumber=1.
Gallup showed him with a national favorable rating: James Doyle, Not Above the Law: The Battles of Watergate Prosecutors Cox and Jaworski: A Behind-the-Scenes Account (New York: Morrow, 1977), 33.
“My instincts told me”: Sirica, To Set the Record Straight, 62.
“The indictment they had prepared”: Ibid., 57.
“Earl the Pearl” Silbert: “The Prosecutors: Good Guy, Bad Guy, Chief,” New York Times, May 3, 1973, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1973/05/03/90937873.html?pageNumber=32.
The forty-six-year-old Seymour Glanzer: Ibid.
Donald Campbell, whose bald head: Ibid.
“That really strengthened our case”: Silbert, interview.
“I mean, are we ever going to know”: Halberstam, The Powers That Be, 677.
Chapter 24 Guilty Pleas
Every seat in D.C.’s largest ceremonial courtroom: Walter Rugaber, “Jury Is Completed for Trial of 7 in the Watergate Case,” New York Times, January 10, 1973, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1973/01/10/90911931.html?pageNumber=20.
Everyone was in position: Sussman, The Great Cover-Up, 143.
“[It] signaled to me that Earl Silbert”: Sirica, To Set the Record Straight, 64.
“He was a pathetic figure”: Ibid., 68.
“Anything I may have done”: Hunt, Undercover, 291.
The story had formed after Hersh: Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 2018), 177.
“One of the defendants, Frank A. Sturgis”: Seymour M. Hersh, “4 Watergate Defendants Reported Still Being Paid,” New York Times, January 14, 1973, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1973/01/14/91429205.html?pageNumber=1.
“[It was] a newspaper that hated”: Hersh, Reporter, 178.
As part of its recognition: David Folkenflik, “Veteran Watergate Reporters Looking for Respect,” NPR, June 3, 2005, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4679745; Phelps, God and the Editor, 186.
“great pressure”: Seymour M. Hersh, “Pressures to Plead Guilty Alleged in Watergate Case,” New York Times, January 15, 1973, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1973/01/15/99110049.html?pageNumber=13.
That Monday morning, Hersh was surprised: Seymour M. Hersh, “If Watergate Happened Now, It Would Stay a Secret,” Literary Hub, July 13, 2018, https://lithub.com/if-watergate-happened-now-it-would-stay-a-secret/.
“I’m sorry”: Sirica, To Set the Record Straight, 71.
the cover-up was actually both still strong: Liddy, Will, 283.
“Gordon, I think you’ll recognize”: Ibid., 278.
Dean’s version of this phone call: Dean, Blind Ambition, 181.
“We’ll build that son of a bitch up”: “The Nation: Wagons Around the President,” TIME, December 2, 1974, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,945287,00.html.
“Jimmy was not prepared”: Strober and Strober, Nixon, 291.
“I have always followed the rule”: Caulfield, Caulfield, 91.
“highest level of the White House”: Ibid.
The reaction stemmed from a lunch: Charles Morgan, Jr., One Man, One Voice (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), 199–230.
the Washington Post’s twenty-two-page special section: Sussman, The Great Cover-Up, 147.
The trial produced almost nothing of drama: Ibid., 148.
“[Silbert] swallowed the perjury”: Liddy, Will, 284.
Unsatisfied by Silbert’s prosecutorial efforts: Sussman, The Great Cover-Up, 142.
“Watergate was kept alive”: O’Brien, No Final Victories, 339.
“Take it easy, kid”: Liddy, Will, 285.
“I am still not satisfied”: Sirica, To Set the Record Straight, 88.
“I would frankly hope”: Dash, Chief Counsel, 5.
“Destroying the notebooks”: Dean, Blind Ambition, 182.
The Hermès notebook episode: Ibid.; Geoff Shepard, The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President: Inside the Real Watergate Conspiracy (New York: Sentinel, 2008), 237.
“There is something rancid”: John Ehrlichman to H. R. Haldeman, memorandum, January 25, 1973, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibrary/documents/jan10/075.pdf.
Chapter 25 The “Country Lawyer” Enters
“when Watergate jokes were going around”: Don Oberdorfer, Senator Mansfield: The Extraordinary Life of a Great Statesman and Diplomat (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian), 431.
A former state associate supreme court justice: Karl E. Campbell, Senator Sam Ervin, Last of the Founding Fathers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 279.
“I knew he’d be fair-minded”: Oberdorfer, Senator Mansfield, 432.
“Ervin works harder than most”: “Edited Transcripts of Conversations Taped in the White House,” New York Times, May 1, 1974, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1974/05/01/101021413.html?pageNumber=27.
“I suspected the committee might discover”: Sam J. Ervin, Jr., The Whole Truth: The Watergate Conspiracy (New York: Random House, 1980), xi.
“This Watergate investigation”: Dash, Chief Counsel, 6.
“The only names I could recall without prompting”: Fred Thompson, At That Point in Time: The Inside Story of the Senate Watergate Committee (New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1975), 5.
“Physically, he seemed to dominate”: Dash, Chief Counsel, 15.
“We’re not going to need a year”: Ibid., 16.
“Bellino appeared easygoing”: Thompson, At That Point in Time, 34.
Despite the scope of the investigations ahead: Lowell P. Weicker, Maverick: A Life in Politics (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 59.
“I don’t believe any senator”: Terry F. Lenzner, The Investigator: Fifty Years of Uncovering the Truth (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2013), 105.
“Mind you, he wasn’t even accusing”: David Thelen, “Remembering the Discovery of the Watergate Tapes,” Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (March 1989), https://www.jstor.org/stable/1908637.
To start, Lenzner had asked the staff: Thompson, At That Point in Time, 26.
“Bob agreed to help”: Dash, Chief Counsel, 24.
With time, they refined a strategy: Presidential Campaign Activities of 1972, Vols. 1–4, 3:982–83, https://books.google.com/books?id=4stFAQAAMAAJ.
“The coverup had become a way of life”: Ibid., 983.
Ehrlichman, who had long tried to avoid: Ervin, The Whole Truth, 26.
“I heard enough to trouble me”: Ehrlichman, Witness to Power, page 367.
“When I’m speaking of Watergate”: James M. Naughton and Anthony Marro, “New Tapes Link Nixon to Watergate Scheme 3 Days After Break-In,” New York Times, May 1, 1977, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1977/05/01/140460952.html?pageNumber=1.
“Jim, I have worked with these people”: Presidential Campaign Activities of 1972, 1:260.
Chapter 26 “Twist Slowly, Slowly in the Wind”
The catastrophic miscalculations: Holland, Leak, 108.
“It is a true story”: Nixon, RN, 778.
“[Gray] is a guy we can tell to do things”: Douglas Brinkley and Luke Nichter, The Nixon Tapes: 1973 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), 65.
“This country, this bureaucracy”: Gray, In Nixon’s Web, 173.
“The point you ought to make”: “Transcript of a Recording of a Conversation of February 16, 1973, between President Nixon, John Ehrlichman and L. Patrick Gray from approximately 9:08 to 9:39 a.m. in the Oval Office,” Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/forresearchers/find/tapes/watergate/wspf/858–003.pdf.
“For thirty minutes, he lectured me”: Gray, In Nixon’s Web, 176.
“You did what?!”: Graves, Nixon’s FBI, 191.
“What’s the matter with him?”: Thomas, Being Nixon, 433.
Back at FBI headquarters: Felt to Gebhardt, memorandum.
“Until February 28, 1973”: Sussman, The Great Cover-Up, 166.
Though Gray kept citing the “presumption of regularity”: Graves, Nixon’s FBI, 148.
“Everything is accepted at face value”: Louis Patrick Gray III: Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary, 93rd Congr. 669 (1974), https://books.google.com/books?id=lgYcApPO6CcC.
“stand awful tight in the saddle”: Sussman, The Great Cover-Up, 169.
“It makes me gag”: Gray, In Nixon’s Web, 213.
“After going through the hell”: Ibid., 220.
“Ron, since both Mr. Kalmbach”: Sussman, The Great Cover-Up, 173.
through February, March, and April: Ehrlichman, Witness to Power, 343.
Dean too moved further: Sussman, The Great Cover-Up, 152.
“This could stretch into the White House”: Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973–1990 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 48.
“One of the things that stands out”: Ibid., 81.
“This was Watergate: an endless clash”: Rosen, The Strong Man, 298.
At one point, they discussed calling in: Statement of Information, 3:1179, https://books.google.com/books?id=sH1qDFYOIG8C.
“It’s your view the vulnerabilities”: Dean, Blind Ambition, 189.
“If they send you to prison”: Ibid., 191.
“After nine months, the hot torch”: Ibid., 194.
“I wanted to talk with you”: “Edited Transcripts of Conversations Taped in the White House.”
“There is no business that could be run”: Archibald Cox, “Executive Privilege,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 122, no. 6 (June 1974), https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5725&context=penn_law_review.
In March, he explained publicly: Kenneth Bredemeier, “Tapes Show Nixon Role in Firing of Ernest Fitzgerald,” Washington Post, March 7, 1979, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/03/07/tapes-show-nixon-role-in-firing-of-ernest-fitzgerald/048cd88e-60e5–498d-a8e2-e3b39461356b/.
“In the performance of their duties”: Richard Nixon, “Statement About Executive Privilege,” March 12, 1973, American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-about-executive-privilege.
“executive privilege will not be used”: Ibid.
“sort of one of the unknown”: “Excerpts from New Transcripts of 201 Hours of Secret Nixon Tapes,” New York Times, October 31, 1997, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1997/10/31/890731.html?pageNumber=18.
“No problem”: Ibid.
“I want you to know that… I’m aware”: George Lardner, Jr., and Walter Pincus, “Nixon’s Fateful Reversal,” Washington Post, October 30, 1997, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/10/30/nixons-fateful-reversal/91e1ce61-e7e4–4c66-a76a-af2c55f1327e/.
“a few pipsqueaks down the line”: Kutler, Abuse of Power, 226.
“Can I report”: Dean, Blind Ambition, 197.
“We could probably do it”: Ibid., 200.
“The reason I thought we ought to talk”: Brinkley and Nichter, The Nixon Tapes: 1973, 277–310.
As Nixon stood up from his desk: President Richard Nixon Standing in the Oval Office with Members of the Russian Soviet Women’s Gymnastics Team, 1973, photograph, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7268206.
“I watched the Olympics on television”: Memorandum of Conversation: March 21, 1973, Nixon, Soviet Women’s Gymnastics Team,” Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0314/1552571.pdf.
“What the hell is he going to disclose”: “The ‘Cancer on the Presidency’ Conversation,” Conversation 886–8, Watergate CLE II, http://www.watergatecle.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/March-211973-Cancer-on-the-presidency-transcript.pdf.
“We may have a need for substantial”: Kutler, Abuse of Power, 287–88.
“I could count on no further assistance”: Hunt, Undercover, 297.
“He lied to the agents”: Statement of Information, 2:336.
“Gray is dead”: Gray, In Nixon’s Web, 229.
“What words of wisdom”: Brinkley and Nichter, The Nixon Tapes, 341.
“I don’t give a shit what happens”: Summary of Information, 87.
“You think we want to go this route”: Dean, Blind Ambition, 212; Transcripts of Eight Recorded Presidential Conversations: Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary Pursuant to H. Res. 803, 93rd Congr. 179 (1974), https://books.google.com/books?id=r2RFAQAAMAAJ.
Chapter 27 “Perjury Occurred”
“I think you should be present”: Dash, Chief Counsel, 27.
“Prior to the beginning”: Ibid., 28.
“Be that as it may”: Ibid., 29.
“For the first time really”: Himmelman, Yours in Truth, 236.
