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 attack 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 caulfield. 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 presi