the wiretapping of his political opponents. conspiracy, extortion, blackmail. high crimes against the very structure of our constitutional state. the nixon/agnew team receives an overwhelming mandate from the american voters, sweeping every state but one, massachusetts. as a result of the cover-up, richard nixon stayed in office a lot longer than he should have. but imagine if the american people had known in the summer of 1972 the extent to which richard nixon had participated in criminal enterprises. it s not just a desire for political power. it s a lust. i mean, that s what nixon said. i lust for power . the man in the middle in the watergate scandal is 34-year-old john wesley dean, iii. i thought the cover-up was going to end after the election. i was wrong. i have no prior knowledge of the watergate break-ins. it s going to get worse, much worse. seven men went on trial today in a washington federal court charged with the break-in and burglary of d
blackmail. high crimes against the very structure of our constitutional state. the nixon team receives an overwhelming mandate from the american voters sweeping every state but one, massachusetts. as a result of the cover-up, richard nixon stayed in office a lot longer than he should have, but imagine if the american people had known in the summer of 1972 the extent to which richard nixon had participated in criminal enterprises. it s not just a desire for political power. it s a lust. i mean, that s what nixon said. i lust for power. the man in the middle in the watergate scandal. it s 34-year-old john wesley dean iii. i thought the cover-up was going to end after the election. i was wrong. i had no prior knowledge of the watergate break-in. it s going to get worse, much worse. seven men went on trial today in a washington federal court charged with the break-in and burglary of democratic national headquarters in the water building last june. the white ho
neighbor who is an l.a. times reporter that i had somehow been involved in the planning of watergate. los angeles times, without disclosing its course says mccord named white house lawyer john dean and deputy campaign director jeb magruder as having advance notice of the watergate. i was shocked. the stories in the l.a. times were defamatory. i certainly hadn t, as mccord had suggested, ordered the watergate break-in. but after the arrests, i had gotten increasingly involved. and i had become a target. while i m at camp david, it s really the first time 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
was a fiasco. the mccord letter was the first real indication that we had that maybe this thing went high up in both the campaign and perhaps the nixon administration. watergate was really a nonissue 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 into it 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.
one of the things i suggest to the president is that it s very likely that the cover-up is going to blow. i said i don t know who s going to go, who is going to blow. 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 defendants the day of sentencing. but instead the case broke wide open again. mccord wrote judge sirica a letter. in it he says other people not yet named were involved in the break-in at democratic national headquarters. he says the 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 sirica s courtroom was clearly his last-ditch effort after he had been convicted. he did not know that much, but he knew enough to know it went higher and that the trial