watergate. the the los angeles times without disclosing its source said mccord named white house lawyer john dean and deputy campaign director jeff mcgruder as having advanced knowledge of the operation. the story in the l.a. times were defamiliar trip. i certainly hadn t, as mccord has suggested, ordered the watergate break, but after the arrest i had gotten increasingly involved, and i had become a target. while i m at camp david, it s really the first time that i m out of the daily line of fire, and i had mo with me. i m up there with my wife, and so we took long walks in the woods. i very clearly remember what dawned on me that i would have to live with the cover-up the rest of my life. that would have been frightening to me to try to pull that off.
had that maybe this thing went high up in both the campaign and perhaps the nixon administration. watergate was really a non-issue with the public. it wasn t a campaign issue. it was a big story in the washington post when they could find something but most of the rest of the national press was paying no attention up until mccord s letter. i mean, he didn t say nixon himself was involved. he just brought it into the white house. nixon called me and said what you predicted that somebody was going to blow certainly appears to have happened, and i said i m not surprised, but i said it s obviously not good. he said, well, why don t you go up to camp david and collect your thoughts about how we deal with it. you know, i said i ll talk to my wife. i think it s probably a good idea. but when i arrive up there, haldeman calls me and said,
who is going to blow up, i tell him mccord, for example. mccord was worried. mccord decides he s going to blow the whistle. this was supposed to be the finale for the seven watergate defenders the day of sentencing but instead the case broke wide open again. mccord wrote judge siricca a letter. he said other people not yet named were involved in the break-in in the democratic national headquarters. he said political pressure was brought on defendants to plead guilty and remain silent. he says there was perjury in the trial testimony. the letter he released in siricca s courtroom was his last-ditch effort after being convicted. he didn t know that much, but he knew enough to know that it went hour hand that the trial was a fiasco. the mccord letter was the first real indication that we