As part of a project to document the 37th president s administration. This portion is about one hour. In this early. , what kind of access to the president did you have . I knew enough about how the white house worked from my dealings with the staff at the Justice Department. If the president calls you and you did not call the president when he wanted you to do something, typically, he was a president who liked particularly to work with paper. My memorable first assignment that i did not know was from the president initially was a memo that was waiting for me when i arrived from the staff secretary, john brown. It said cryptically it was an action memo archival people are familiar with. It has been noted that a magazine called scandals monthly has made an outrageous charge about spiro agnew, the Vice President , that he is planning to cancel the 1972 election and repeal the bill of rights. I said, well i knew spiro was a man of some rhetoric but i dont know how he would do that. It went on to say that it was recommended some action be taken against this magazine. I wasnt quite sure what kind of action you take against this. I thought it was pretty ludicrous. The magazine was a brandnew magazine. I checked it. This was maybe the second or third issue called scaanlons monthly. It was a total shoestring operation. I called some people to ask them what this magazine wasnt people what this magazine was and people i did not know what john brown was asking me this. I called him who was younger than i was who was younger than i was and still is. I called him and i asked what it was all about. He said let me explain you should know what this means. He said i collect the president s news summary every morning and the president writes remarks of the new summary where he gives action he wants staff to take. He has this one for you. Hes obviously been thinking about your arrival here. In essence, i translate that and we keep the residence papers separate and i translate and send out. In my immediate mind, give the president ability for these kind of actions. Thats obviously why it was set up that way. I figured a good counsel tells a client when not to do anything. This struck me as a perfect time to do nothing. This magazine had no circulation. The claim was absurd on its face. I thought just ignore it and let it go away so i wrote a memo saying that to the president. About a week passed and i can another memo that the staff secretary saying your memo does not quite deal with the problem. It then said it has been recommended that an irs tax audit be started against this magazine. I thought this is certainly escalating it and i would not have a clue how anybody starts a tax audit. I was fretting about this. This is my first assignment within days of arriving at the white house. Or weeks at this point, early weeks and i was working late and getting caught up on the paperwork of the white house as we processed a lot of documents. I went over to the mess and had dinner and a man who i had not met but introduced himself was murray chopner sat down beside me. He told me he was an attorney. He was going to be leaving the white house soon. It was because he was not somebody they wanted on the staff. He had an unsavory reputation but i did not know that at the time. I knew he had been around in a long time and did know how the white house worked. I started telling him about this problem, this memo, to start attacks on a tax audit. He said i dont need to know this. He said this works on i need to know basis. You should take information youre given from the president and keep it in the confines of your own office with as few people involved as possible. First of all, the problems you are raising about the president this is improper. The president is the chief executive. He has the power over all the executive ranch. If he wants to start a tax audit of any taxpayer thats within his powers to do so. I said i dont see in exception for the president as to the confidentiality of tax returns. He said, let me tell you this, you can write a memo back like that and i guarantee you they will find somebody who will do this for the president if you dont want to do it and you will be cut out quickly. I went back to my office thinking about how i like my new title of counselor to the president and was not quite sure what to do with the problem. A man who is being assigned to my staff from ehrlichmans staff when he had been counsel came to introduce himself, jack caulfie ld. He said he was on his way to the Treasury Department to work in Law Enforcement and had friends in treasury and knew how things work of other. I said look at this and tell me what you think about this situation the president has raised for it i have troubles with it. He said let me take that and i will get back to you. He came back two days later and said you can write a memo to the president that the tax audit is in the works. I thought, im pretty uncomfortable with that but i in essence had crossed the line of first time and i rationalize my way across it. You did not get your hands dirty in this. I dont know how to start a tax audit to this day. This was my first sign very early that they play hardball. My reaction was i said you are young, maybe you just dont understand how its played in the big leagues and you are playing in the big leagues and that way they play. I still is not comfortable with it. I did a little digging in some other files around the white house that were still in the central files. Im the kind of person who would introduce myself to people in the file rooms and the other parts of the building to get to know them because i think thats a good way to operate rather than Center Secretary to get that kind of information. Somebody down the file room came up and said yes, we have a situation on this word guy by the name of clark mulinhoff who was a reporter was going to irs to get tax audits started. I thought that a surprising because here is a pulitzer prizewinning, nononsense, mr. Ethics journalist. It wasnt until years later that i found out from clark that they leaned on him so hard and thats one of the reasons he left pretty early. My antenna was not fully activated but i was watching very early from this first assignment. Can you give us a work picture of murray chopner . What did he look like . He was a he had dark hair, a little swarthy looking, he had very prominent features. He was large nose, heavy eyebrows, black hair, very bright. Im told that murray quit school at 15 yes 15 but yet six years later had a law degree. He is clearly a very bright man. He had run into nixon in local california politics and was of the school of politics of playing pretty hardball. In other words, it was take no prisoners, negative campaigning and helped nixon get elected to congress the first time and worked on his senate race again. He was a man he was not a tall man, he was fairly short stocky, never saw him overweight in the years i knew him. If i had to put him in the neighborhood i dont know if this is correct i could put him somewhere in brooklyn. He may well be from brooklyn, i dont know. What other assignments it you have early on . That were noteworthy. Noteworthy one of the more interesting assignments was that when i got over there, there was no real manual from staff which surprised me. I had been around government enough to know from capitol hill to the department of justice that they were standard operating manuals. There is nothing but a memo from haldeman with some phone numbers and some very broad formats as to how letters and memos would be written and things of that nature but not really a staff manual. One of the problems that is live today in the Bush Administration is who can contact the regulatory agencies, who can contact the department of justice, particularly when you have criminal or administrative proceedings going on. As any washington lawyer will tell you thats something you dont do. There were other mechanical things about the way the white house operated, conflict of interest, what happened to the president ial papers . Who did they belong to and what kind of record should be kept and what should be sent to central files and what should be kept in your office and what have you. Haldeman in the course of a conversation said i would like you to prepare a general staff manual which i did and i think it was the first one. Another in a cemetery was clearing people for conflict of interest. There was no standard set of questions. So i developed we even refine them further later and fred healey would become Ronald Reagans and george bush iis white house counsel. Im told that fred is still using the same questioner we developed during the nixon years, refine some, but how do you flesh out how do you flesh out the nominee or appointees darkest secrets that could be an embarrassment to himself in the presidency and the administration . There were some pretty probing questions. They are still applicable so those were the sort of mechanical things. How did John Connolly handle your conflict of interest questionnaire question mark very nicely, i dealt with his attorney. He knew of those problems before he had gotten there. He put most everything in a blind trust before he arrived. He had his stuff in order. The one who was the disaster was bill casey nixon appointed to the sec. Reagan would later make them head of the cia. Casey was very entrepreneurial. He would invest in Small Businesses just across the board. He had some dubious business practices. Getting his affairs in order was a true mass. Mess. Casey had an interesting habit that only a few people did and eight meeting. He chewed on his necktie. He would take his necktie out and sit there and chew on it. At the end, it was all juicy and i thought this was amazing. That he would eat a tie a day. Anyway, one of the most memorable things that happened was casey was in my office on a saturday morning. I have moved into the eob and those are high ceilinged offices not to similar from this room. Years later that was a great old government building that had the state department and the War Department and what have you. They placed florescent lights across the top. They were so high that they were inconspicuous. An entire row of probably 15 feet of fluorescent lighting came crashing down the minute casey walked out my door. He was that close to maybe ending his life right there. It was an amazing fielding took pictures because he had a camera that day. When as you know from my files, we do a Broad Spectrum of business. It is across the board. One of the things that i told especially when i hired a deputy and got going, it was a hard job to be an activist law firm that went out. Many people who follow the history of the counsels office say im the one who sort of first organized it as an independent, inhouse legal operation that just was not an appendage of the presidency. It was literally in operation were your comment and get legal of ice and opinions cranked out. We farmed out a lot of it to the Justice Department or the other agencies. They have more manpower than we did. I look back on the opinions we cranked out and i cannot say i am ashamed of any of it. They hold up well and i think we gave we got in difficult areas like my lai and how to do it those problems. We gave good and lasting advice of that time. To what extent is the counsel to the president his private lawyer . During the nixon administration, the president s council became his liaison to his private lawyer. In other words, he would come through our office theoretically protecting the Attorney Client privilege for things like Estate Planning that were not government business at all and sorting out where he had two firms vying to do the estate plan. He had one in california. It was a firm he dealt with out here. Then he had another one from his old firm in new york, his old partners, who wanted to do their thing. I had to sort out for those two competing entities and it ended up we used the new york firm basically because it was more sophisticated and a little bit better planned out. I think more consistent particularly with mrs. Nixons wishes. That was the sort of personal thing. I also was a conduit on a lot of the things to get herb combock to take care of things with san clemente and that property out there. There was some liaison with bebe that was Getting Press attention and the president was worried whether they would plow into something that would be a problem or an embarrassment for bibi or himself that was quite personal. I just flashed on something when Alex Butterfield left the white house, the secret service came under my office. It had been under his. One time they would come in constantly one day they came in because bibi had the habit of driving the president and the secret Service Really dislike this and they dislike this especially in california. He would get the president and they would jump in the car go to some restaurant for dinner and bibi would be going 80 Miles Per Hour down the freeway in the did not want an agent in the car. We had to resolve that. We had to get bibi to stop driving. Even though the president tells you, you have to say i cannot do it. In the course of the conversation, i said i read that the president and bibi had been out on bibis houseboat in biscayne bay . What did they do at their . Today fisher what ballgames . This was the head of the president ial detail. He said i was curious about the same thing. He said we used to be posted on the roof of the houseboat and he said i would take a chair up there so i could have a 360 and find out what was going on. I would hear bibi and the president talking and then it would stop and sometimes for a long time. I took my shoes off one time and went down the ladder and peaked in the window to see what they were doing. He said they were just sitting there not talking. He said i realized that one of the reasons and i noticed this from talking to other agents that bibi and the president seemed to get along so well that he lt did not have to talk to bibi and they would walk down the beach and the president would set would not say a word. This was part of his relationship with bibi, another body if he wanted to talk to but bibi was partly happy fate had no change at all. Were you involved in all in the purchase of san clemente . No, other than to see some of the papers and painfully aware of having seen but not being involved in that backdating of the deed and all that business. It was clear from the Estate Planning that the president had gotten into the san clemente robbery with the Hope Property with the hope that he would make a nice return for it and bibi was instrumental in facilitating the purchase and arrangement financing. The president had very little into it and the secret service i thought there was some illegitimate claims later when they accused him of using government moneys to put fences in and things like that and clear areas. This was really just essential for a present for protection and i thought that was misplaced criticism. Nixon was not a wealthy man. He envisioned using his postpresident ial writings. He was very adverse to sitting on boards. He made that very clear that he did not want to be one of those president rousseff on or its and collected toward fees. He thought that was demeaning to the president. He helped between his Property Values increasing and his writings that he could indeed, do quite well. One of the more intricate rings i got involved in in this area was, as a result of nixons Vice President ial papers, which i was somewhat involved with and had gone down to see them in the archives, downtown when they were there i think they were just being stored at the courtesy of the government for him but he was claiming them as his own papers. He was going to use those to have a very longterm tax advantage with his other papers. He had me working to help Congress Change the law because of what he had done as resident had done as Vice President , enormous tax breaks, to get that law which had been repealed. To this day, it has never been reinstated where a donor of papers can get a Tax Deduction other than for the value of residence for the value of papers. You can only get a tax break for the cost of copying, not the inherent value. This was something that nixon was very interested in doing as he was and where he would locate the nixon library. He had picked out a site that he and bibi had found down the coast toward san clemente which was phenomenal off of the marine base down there. He wanted the government to give him that property for the library. We were working on that as watergate was starting to disintegrate. That, of course, went either way with everything else. Thats where the facility would have been had he had his druthers and not have the disaster that occurred. That did not fully answer your question. I want to get back to the backdating of the deed. I read about that with the amazement everybody else did. I knew ed morgan who did the backdating of the deed. I had met with his guy, the appraiser from chicago who i was very suspicious of all along because he was appraising nixons ongoing president ial papers too, with astronomical numbers. In this tax scheme, it would have worked. He would be doing nothing other than what johnson and humphrey had done with their papers. It was a total shock to me that ed morgan did that. I knew Frank Demarco and herb comboach was also involved in that. Dimarco was never charged but he had a lot of investigation. I dont know whether they made a mistake and there were just recovering from their mistake or whether they realized that they somehow picked the wrong date and not gotten it in timely and were correcting it they said this is what the president s intention was. I have never talked to ed about it before he passed away and i cannot believe you did that. Im quite surprised. Its 1970. I want to ask you about when the houston plan crosses your desk. Tell me about that, please. I did not see the houston plan until tom houston was getting ready to leave the white house. They temporarily put him on my staff because he was a lawyer. He would have been floating over the executive Office Building doing ad hoc assignments for the president on intelligence gathering. I was unfamiliar with his work. I remember when they brought down the plan i had to put a safe in my office. You had to have a special clearance to have the document. Some agents from cia and the National Security agency came over to give my secretary and i clearance. I thought this was going to be some sort of great ritual initiation into some higherlevel of knowledge. It was basically, it dont travel to Foreign Countries and talk into lamps is what they told me. This has to stay locked up in your safe at nights. Basically, when i saw the document for the first time, i was stunned. I really went through it and it was kind of a drop jaw read. It was about removing all restraints on intelligence gathering unlike tronic, mail opening, mail covers, things i did not know anything about. You could not imagine our government was doing this. They were in this plan. You would see these footnotes at the bottom from the fbi saying that they disagreed with it. It was quite an incredible document. What happened is, haldeman came to me one morning and said come over to the office to talk. He thought that the reason the president wanted this is that tom huston was such an offensive personality to people like J Edgar Hoover is not John Mitchell that it had gone nowhere. Youre not of that ilk. I said i see problems with the plan and i can also see there is a real problem here. It seems to me that when i read through all of this and the backup memos it problem that the agencies are not talking. The cia does not talk to the fbi and they dont each know what they have. If you could just get that. He said you should talk to mitchell about this who was familiar with the plan and he said it is on call for. He agreed with me that if you could have some Interagency Committee where they could share information and develop some kind of digest backing up and saying the premise of the plan was that the president was convinced that communists were influencing the Antiwar Movement. He had been told this by Lyndon Johnson during the transition. I think he left office convinced of the same. Whenever found a scintilla of evidence that this was the case from either the fbi, the cia or anybody else that it was run by hanoi or moscow or anyplace else. It was sort of sui generis and it was people exercising their strong feelings about the vietnam war. I went to mitchell, mitchell said dont do anything with it and he said draft a memo that i will agree to, which i did and later went into the record to create an interagency Evaluation Committee. That is all that was ever created. To me, i have no knowledge of the huston plan ever becoming operational where the restraints were lifted. I read later that there is evidence in the cia that they were doing mail coverws but were not sharing that with the white house. The white house was not aware of it. The interagency Evaluation Committee was not particularly insightful and the information they developed. It was just another your craddick gathering to try to sort through what they were willing to share it was just another gathering to try to sort through what theyre willing to share with the white house. My office got the raw data from all the intelligence agencies related to the Antiwar Movement. Nixon was very concerned about this. From political points, it was a negative when he was going to run again. It was also something he was concerned about with the ability to govern. If you have people rioting industries it will make it very difficult to keep the country settled and focused and doing what needs to be done. I never questioned that there was a need for the intelligence. I questioned that there was a need to block all of the rights and liberties of people and how you get that. I never got into sources and methods when i was there as to how they were getting what they were getting. The stuff was so lousy. Wherever they were going, it was not particularly fruitful. When i look at my papers and some of the interagency Evaluation Committees, they look as weak today as they did at the time i saw them. How did it reach you . It was haldeman. He told and happened with huston and he said that huston was able to not get this off the ground after the president pushed for it. He told me to see what i could do with it. We came out with an interagency Evaluation Committee. One of the reasons i took the plan with me when i left at that time, i was convinced that nobody would ever believe the kind of atmosphere that had developed within the white house. This was the best paper record of it that i knew of. I knew it was a Security Breach to do so, i solved that quickly by having my lawyer make arrangements to have judged sirica take it. We gave him a key to a lock box. He did not even look at it. There was no Security Breach not that there was any rubble because sam ervin put the whole thing into the Senate Watergate hearings. There are a few parts but they are not particularly sensitive. Whats interesting on that document it was so highly classified that even the classification was classified. Wow. Were you at all involved in the warrantless wiretapping question mark to that come through your office . No, the council to the president during my tenure and all through the nixon administration, until nixon left this is probably true because of the problems they had when he took over the office during the final groans of the watergate problems, i was closer. But still, nixon did not he was closest to mitchell. I was told i knew that from the department of justice that mitchell was very close and they had a personal relationship, one of the few personal relationships nixon had with anybody in his cabinet. A respected mitchell. He had them on the National Security council. He had him on the committee authority. He had him as the man who would develop judges and recommend Supreme Court nominees. He wanted to keep that in the department of justice. The Justice Department, given mitchells relationship, was very strong. When kleindienst became attorney general, it began to deflate. Next and did not have a relationship with kleindienst at all. He let them go it one point re quickly very quickly. The council itself always sort of deferred to justice and we try to use the Justice Department as the basis for legal opinions and what have you. On the issues like warrantless wiretapping, we were out of that loop totally. Questions like trying to enjoin the New York Times during the pentagon papers were tangentially involved. When the u. S. Attorney and the Southern District is pulling his hair because of having to deal with the Justice Department who was like a bull in a china shop, they called my office and asked to do something about this guy appear. Yes, i was able to buy calling the attorney general and dealing with that sort of thing. For time reasons, i often had to follow major Supreme Court decisions when i knew they were going to come down and get the slip opinion because my him because nixon would want to be able to respond even before the department of justice could crank the papers out and get a summary out. We would have to have it and get the slpip opinion on the court so we followed cases before the court. As far as heading into the areas like the plumbers. We were excluded totally from that operation. And for good reason. I will explain that. After the pentagon papers leaked , from the record, there is a major thrust by nixon to deal with ellsberg and make it a political and legal case against him. One afternoon Jack Caulfield the new york city detective who was not troubled by much of anything. He is a new york city detective who has seen just about anything. He came into my office wideeyed, literally. I had not seen jack that way. He said i just came from Chuck Colsons office. Colson wants me to break into the Brookings Institute and firebomb the Brookings Institute. He said the president is convinced there is a copy of the pentagon papers in the Brookings Institute and what we should do is send a team in there and explode the place and when the fire Company Comes we can send someone into crack the safe and get these papers out. I said this is insane. He said i am troubled by it, too. I said dont do anything. The president , John Ehrlichman bob haldeman are all in san clemente. I called john and i said i have something we should talk about eye to eye, person to person. I jumped on the next courier flight and flew to california. I met with him the next morning and he said, whats troubling you . I told him what caulfield had done in by then i had pulled dc code and learned its a capital offense the District Of Columbia anybody dies as a result of arson. I said i cannot believe the white house would risk having involved in a capital offense or would get involved in this kind of insanity. I just went on and ticked up all the reasons this was absurd. Colson was still back in washington and ehrlichman picked up the phone. You would get the white house operator immediately when you picked up the phone. He told her to get chuck colson on the line. He came right on. Ehrlichman said to colson, Young Council the news out here and he does not think the brookings plan is a good one, turn it off. He put down the phone. Ehrlichman turned to me and said anything else i can do for you today, counselor . I said no, that will take care of it, thank you. Why did you go to ehrlichman and not haldeman question mark because he was a lawyer. He would understand when i laid out a a legal argument that this was absurd. He was sort of my immediate on legal issues. I could have gone to haldeman just as easily, i have a good rapport with both of them but that was my instinct was that he would do the right thing in that instance and he did. What happened after that i was telling you about the plumbers bud krogh stopped in san clemente on the way home and got the assignment to start the plumbers unit, the special investigation unit. When he came back to washington, he said i am doing something that im not allowed to tell you about. He said normally i suspect your office would be doing it but there are some people in california that youve got a little old lady in you. I knew what he was talking about and was not troubled by it in the slightest. I did not know what he was doing with the special investigation unit. I would not learn about that until after the watergate breakin. This little old lady comment was after or before the brookings . It was after i shut that off. Ive got to say the Brookings Institute, all these years, has never sent me a note thanking me for not having them firebombed in 1972. Or 1971. One of the things bud krogh told us he was told was that there were suspicions that ellsberg was sharing his material with the russian embassy. Did that material come through your Interagency Group . No, in fact, i did not hear that until i talked to bud long after the fact. Bud and i have talked about this. We had a report over the years. I have said National Security areas were such gray areas as to what was National Security. He agreed and i said if we had ever talked that out of the time, if i had been in the loop, i think you need at support for your own dealings but he took it based lu as the president said this was a National Security matter and this is a National Security matter. Theoretically, thats true. The president can say this is National Security. Why was later breaking rank with nixon, one of the things he and joined me is he said you cannot talk about any of those activities. They are National Security. Later he would lift that on that restriction would go away just by the absurdity of the claim because they were certainly it was dubious it was gray. Ehrlichman pleaded that defense and when he was prosecuted for his involvement in the breakin in ellsbergs psychiatry office and it did not work it was clearly beyond the limits of National Security. Caller let me ask you about the breakin. In blind ambition, you recant a conversation withbud krogh where he tells you how that was authorized. After the fact, after the infamous breakin in dr. Fieldings office i did not learn about that until after i learned from liddy that the same man had been in involved in the watergate breakin. That was traceable directly back to the white house. Krogh had told me that indeed ehrlichman at sign drop on that but at the time, this is when im telling bud that i have had it and some buddies got to stand up and stop this activity and sundays got to go in this was before i went in to tell the president how serious this matter was all of these matters were collectively bud set i agree totally. I said i dont want to cause a lot of reef for everybody but the president is not being well advised and the second tiffanys he said i believe my instruction came directly out of the oval office. Bud later did not support that memory that i so vividly remember when he gave it at the moment. Whether he was doing that to bolster my drive to get in there and get the president to get his feet on the ground or whether it was actual fact, i dont know. Maybe he doesnt remember to this day. As you piece together after the fact, the trials that occurred when ehrlichman was convicted for that, ehrlichman would later claim that he had a conversation ironically, on the beach outside of the taping devices in san clemente with the president about a lot of activities of that nature. Who knows . I dont know. I have found in my own historical inquiry from time to time into issues when i have used the tapes that makes an had a very steady practice of seldom mentioning on a single incident anything about anything. He repeats himself constantly. Something that comes up once particularly something troublesome, he will reraise. We dont have enough of the transcripts of all the conversations to electronically check that. It would be a massive amount of reading. Its early 1972. Why were you included in meetings about Campaign Political espionage . You are talking about the meetings with mitchell . Yes. Good question. When Jeff Mcgruder jeb mcgruder went to run the Reelection Committee, he has no general counsel. One of the things i felt we were responsible for was that nixon got filed properly everywhere in every state and jurisdiction. My office gathered all the state election laws. So we knew what they were because no one was covering this. If anyone was going to make a mistake, it was going to be our office. At one point in his management style, haldeman would constantly send out memos as to what we are working on. I kept saying how much time we were spending on the legal work of the Reelection Committee. When mcgruder he was intimidated by John Mitchell. He knew i was close to mitchell not on a friendship basis but on a working relationship. I can pick up a phone and talk to him anytime i needed to. It was comfortable dealing with him. Jeb, this was early when this question of Campaign Intelligence all came up. For reasons unbeknownst to me, when jeb is going over, he said i think you should come over and hear what gordon liddy in sending over about the Reelection Committee. What had happened is that haldeman had told me your office has to pull back from all that legal work youre doing for the Reelection Committee. Youre taking away from other work in putting too much on yourself and we were. We were stretched then all the time. It was a busy office. He said find somebody you can work with over there. I had just been out traveling around the country vetting potential Supreme Court nominees and because ehrlichman wanted something from his staff there he had david young join me. I had never known him and had a nice rp with him nice rapport with him. I thought he would be a good person to be general counsel of the Reelection Committee. I said to krogh who was his partner running the special investigations unit, i said bud how about sending david young over. He said no, the president still needs and here, i have the perfect guy for you, gordon liddy. I did not know him from adam. Bud told me years later that we were trying to getliddy out of the white house after the bungled burglary of ellsberg psychiatrist office. We were trying to put them someplace safe. I never dreamed he would get over there and do the things he did. Clearly, one of the jobs from the general counsel was to keep an eye on antiwar intelligence and where it could affect and disrupt campaign. They wanted our office to supply that information. I said i cannot do that, thats classified information and it cannot go out of the government. You will have to develop your own capacity. L;iddy might think hes james bond and create a new Intelligence Army within his operation. Jeb i suspect said you should come over to hear what liddy will present to mitchell about intelligence gathering. I went to that first meeting where liddy makes his pitch. Its an incredible session and liddy has charts and everything in codenames. He starts talking about things like chase claims to intercept groundair communications. I cannot believe mitchell is taking this seriously and i do believe mitchell is taking this seriously. What about the houseboat . I was going to get to that. This is the one time i inject myself. I am listening to this amazing pitch. Liddy says, general he called mitchell general he said weve got an innovative intelligence operating data gathering operation to crack the democratic party. We have least a houseboat on one of the canals in miami near the convention center. He said we have a squad of prostitutes who will lure officials into this houseboat that has a two way mirror operation and can take victors and get these guys confessing intimate secrets of the democratic party. At that point, i said youve got to be kidding. This is not even james bond stuff. I made some crack that offended liddy at the time and he snapped. He looked at mitchell and said general, i can assure you this is a good operation and these are the finest girls from baltimore. It was that kind of conversation. I never believed mitchell would approve that. I was surprised when a second meeting i did not inject myself any further. Liddy put a milliondollar price tag on this and mitchell said that was high and we are interested in the Antiwar Movement. His plan for the antiwar demonstration was quite incredible. He said we will kidnap the leaders of the antiwar demonstration. We will take them below the Mexican Border and keep them out of commission during the campaign. I later talked to a lawyer for the Antiwar Movement and he said what liddy did not realize about that plan is a number of those guys would love to be drugged and taken below the border. That was theilk of this plan he envisioned that included everything from using prostitutes to gather information to wiretapping. It was a whole legal plan. I did not think mitchell would give it a second look. Liddy did revise it down to i think a quarter of a million dollars. It was a half a million the next time. I went back and i was not planning to attend any more meetings. I have now realized that i went to haldeman. I was able to document from haldemans calendar years after the fact and long after this was available i went to haldeman twice on this, once after the first meeting and said it was absurd and went to him the second meeting and that this thing has to be cut off. I only testified to going to him the second time because that was the only one clear in my mind. Haldeman knew i had been in there twice to talk about this plan. I was invited back by mcgruder the second time went up the elevator. I knew how to get up the back elevator into mitchells office in the meeting was in progress i heard them talking about wiretapping and targets and all that. I threw pretty cold water on the whole thing print i said these things should not be discussed in the office of the attorney general which mitchell later said in that ended the meeting. I was dumbfounded to later find that a month or so later magruder and mitchell meet in florida and approve the liddy plan. It did not take me long to put the pieces together that they had gone forward. I had gone to haldeman after both meetings. After the second one which i testified at out, every member haldeman said to me that you should not involved in this at all. Haldeman had a representative at these meetings, didnt he . It was mac router he was magruder. It was not in the meetings with mitchell but strong was the liaison with the Reelection Committee and talked to magruder many times a day. And looking at some of usof stroms notes, his Political Action memos, he was aware that liddy got hired and got an intelligent plan up and going. Staun has testified a number of times in a civil lawsuit i brought that he is not clear and has no distinct memory of it ever being approved to have the illegal activities in what he has told me. He said i just did not focus on it. We should probably spend more time talking about this. The whole haldeman staff and the way they operated, it was very efficient but it also was not very thorough. It made sure that the trains were running on time but not careful about which direction they were going. That is a whole other explanation. You could have the impression that straun mightve known more than i thought he knew. He knew about intelligence gathering and he knew he was a wacko but he had also probably knew i had been taken out of it and told not to be involved. To jump ahead, after the breakin, the second one,straun comes to you like on the 20th of june but what does he say . He said he has cleaned his files. He said at haldemans request. Obviously, what this means you can read it as well as i can. I try not to get too much into supposition because i dont know what was in their. This is where i come from on this its difficult for me to believe that haldeman and nixon did not know there was somebody over there with that capacity. I have never found any evidence they knew someone was going to break into the watergate. I dont have any evidence he knew they got in there the first time and screwed it up and were going back in a second time. The fact that somebody was over there doing that would not have surprised anybody when it surfaced. Watch part two of this interview next saturday, march 21 at 4 30 p. M. Eastern time. John dean talks about the fallout from the watergate breakin and how it became, in his words, a cancer on the presidency. He also discusses what he cooperated with federal investigators and his eventual sentencing after pleading guilty to a charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Each week, American History tvs reel america brings archival films that tell the story of the 20th century. On march 8, 1955, 3500 marines were deployed to vietnam marking the beginning of the u. S. Ground war. By the end of 19 safety five almost 200,000 americans were in the country. When the war ended in 1975 nearly 3 million americans had served in the conflict and more than 58,000 lost their lives. Up next, the screaming eagles in vietnam, documenting the activities of the 101st Airborne Division from its arrival in the spring of 1965 through january of 19 safety seven. Each time the shelling starts the enemy withdraws its attacking forces to escape the punishing fires. When it is lifted, he regroups and again tries to take cap. Despite weeklong airstrikes, the viet on have shown no signs of withdrawing. The artillery fire directed by those defending the outpost is having a telling effect. [explosions] [artillery fire] the screaming eagles are under fire. The enemy has come to silence the guns. Commonest fire comes from everywhere. Communist fire comes from everywhere. Out there, the enemy is creeping in. He will try to overrun the american positions. Awaiting his agony. They waiting of the waiting the waiting is agony. The enemy makes his move. This is it, live or die. [gunfire] [gunfire] the vietcong have had enough. They are nowhere to be found 11 the enemies are found however, in a Viet Congress in cap. They have apparently received no medical attention while in the hands of the communist. S. Help for several months, their ailments range from open source and Skin Infections to malnutrition. As well as deformities caused by onset broken bones unset broken bones. This man who defected to the republican was captured by the youre watching American History tv, 48 hours of programming on American History every weekend on cspan3. Follow us for information about upcoming programs and keeping up with the latest news. 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