Deep Politics Timeline

[Tracy Riddle]

• 1/1972 Britain: inflation is at double-digit levels and unemployment was at its highest since the 1930s.
  
• 1972: An unnamed criminal was quoted by Michael Dorman in his book, Payoff: The Role of Organized Crime in American Politics (1972): You know, the Federal government has been harassing Carlos (Marcello) for the last ten years, and it's all because of politics.... In 1960, when Bobby Kennedy was managing his brother's presidential campaign, he sent a guy down here to see Carlos. This was before the Democratic National Convention. He wanted Carlos to use his influence to swing the Louisiana delegation for Kennedy at the convention. Carlos said that he was sorry, but that he'd already promised his support at the convention to Lyndon Johnson. The Louisiana delegation went for Johnson. Even though Jack Kennedy got the nomination and picked Johnson for Vice President, Bobby was pissed off at Carlos and promised he'd get even. When he became attorney general, the first thing he did was start a campaign to put Jimmy Hoffa in the pen. The second thing he did was go after Carlos's ass... All the Feds have been harassing Carlos ever since... Once these things get started in Washington, it's hard to stop them no matter who's President.
  
• 1/3/1972 Pat Nixon attends the inauguration of Liberian President William Tolbert.
  
• 1/7/1972 Rehnquist Appointed to Supreme Court; Dodges Allegations of Racial Harassment Deputy Attorney General William Rehnquist is sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, replacing the retiring John Harlan. Rehnquist was active in the Arizona Republican Party, and became well-known in the state as a conservative activist who, among other things, opposed school integration. Rehnquist befriended fellow Phoenix attorney Richard Kleindienst, who, after becoming attorney general under Richard Nixon, brought Rehnquist into the Justice Department. Rehnquist faced little difficulty in his confirmation hearings in the Democratically-led Senate Judiciary Hearings. [Oyez (.org), 9/3/2005] Rehnquist may have perjured himself during those hearings. He was confronted with charges that, as a Republican Party attorney and poll watcher, he had harassed and challenged minority voters in Arizona during the 1962, 1964, and 1966 elections. Rehnquist swore in an affidavit that the charges were false, even though the evidence available to the Senate showed Rehnquist did take part in such activities, which were legal in Arizona at the time. (Rehnquist will again deny the charges in 1986, when he is nominated for chief justicesee September 26, 1986). Former Nixon White House counsel John Dean will observe: "After reading and rereading his testimony, it appears to me that what he was really saying to the Senate [in 1971] was that he was not quite sure himself of his behavior, but he could not bring himself to tell the truth. Thus, his blanket 1971 denial forced him to remain consistent to that denial in 1986, and since his blanket denial was a lie, he had to continue lying. His false statement to Congress in 1971 was a crime, but the statute of limitations had passed. His false statement to Congress in 1986, however, was pure perjury." [Dean, 2007, pp. 129-137]
  
• 1/7/1972 Dr. Lattimer examines JFK autopsy photos and X-rays (or 1/8)
  
• 1/7/1972 Donald Stewart and Fred Buzhardt (at Buzhardt's request) reinterviewed Welander; Welander again admitted that Radford had brought him White House documents. Buzhardt falsely used the President's name to drill Welander about a particular document concerning Haig's talk with South Vietnamese president Thieu. Welander said he had seen that document and shown it to Moorer.
  
• 1/31/1972 Arthur Bremer bought a new .38 revolver. He had also acquired a 9mm 14-shot semiautomatic Browning pistol at some point before the attempt on Wallace.
  
• 1/15/1972 Margrethe is proclaimed the new Queen of Denmark.
  
• 1/17/1972 CIA memo for the chief of Security Research Staff, Gen. Paul Gaynor, alleges that Jack Anderson was involved in a Mafia-Zionist-leftist conspiracy "to attack conservative organizations, Members of Congress and high public officials who want to crack down on Communists, rioters and assorted left-wingers." This conspiracy theory (which James McCord also advocated) originated with a 7/1/69 article in the right-wing Washington Observer Newsletter.
  
• 1/17/1972 Bangladesh: Mujibur Rahman orders Bengali rebels to throw down their arms.
  
• 1/18/1972 Brian Faulkner, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, banned all parades and marches in Northern Ireland until the end of the year.
  
• 1/19/1972 James McCord becomes full-time security coordinator for CREEP and for the Republican National Committee.
  
• 1/22/1972 European Common Market was enlarged to 10 nations, now including UK, Denmark, Ireland and Norway.
  
• 1/22/1972 Northern Ireland: An anti-internment march was held at Magilligan strand, County Derry, with several thousand people taking part. As the march neared the internment camp it was stopped by members of the Green Jackets and the Parachute Regiment of the British Army, who used barbed wire to close off the beach. When it appeared that the marchers were going to go around the wire, the army then fired rubber bullets and CS gas at close range into the crowd. A number of witnesses claimed that the paratroopers (who had been bused from Belfast to police the march) severely beat a number of protesters and had to be physically restrained by their own officers. John Hume accused the soldiers of "beating, brutalising and terrorising the demonstrators".
  
• 1/24/1972 Nixon submits to Congress a $246.3 billion budget for FY 1973 with a record deficit of $25.5 billion.
  
• 1/24/1972 NY Times reported, in a story by Wallace Turner, that in 1961 RFK had done an investigation into the Nixon-Hughes loan, and found that no laws had been violated, though the investigation did not deal with the IRS reversal on Hughes' Medical Institute. The results of this investigation were not publicized in 1961.
  
• 1/24/1972 Moscow recognizes the new nation of Bangladesh.
  
• 1/25/1972 Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) announces she will enter the presidential race.
  
• 1/25/1972 Nixon tells the nation that he has submitted to the Communists through secret channels an 8-point program to end the war. He also announces that Kissinger has been conducting secret peace negotiations in Paris since 8/1969.
  
• 1/26/1972 Anti-war leader Rev. Daniel Berrigan is paroled.
  
• 1/27/1972 According to John Dean and Jeb Magruder in sworn Senate testimony, this is the day "The Liddy Plan" (Gordon Liddy) is first unveiled in Attorney General John Mitchell's office. It involves not only break-ins and buggings, but also kidnappings and muggings. Magruder has since written of the proposed kidnappings: "As noted previously, the Senate Intelligence Committee established that Liddy accompanied E. Howard Hunt to a secret meeting with a former CIA physician, during Hunt's alleged plot to drug and/or murder columnist Jack Anderson." Meeting in Mitchell's office with Liddy, Mitchell, Magruder and Dean; Mitchell recalled Liddy presenting a complicated dirty-tricks plan (Operation Gemstone) that included "mugging squads, kidnapping teams, prostitutes to compromise the opposition and electronic surveillance." He used charts that had been made for him by the CIA's graphic studio. (Will p193) Mitchell told Liddy that this was "beyond the pale" and to come up with a more "realistic" plan. Magruder recalled that Liddy also "explained that the proposed kidnap squads would seize radicals, and inject them with some drug that would render them unconscious..." (An American Life) Gemstone included the following code-words and elements: Ruby: infiltration of the Democratic camp; Emerald: use of a chase plane' to eavesdrop on Democratic candidate's plane and buses when they were using radio telephones; Quartz: microwave interception of telephone traffic; Sapphire: use of prostitutes to compromise Democrats aboard a houseboat rigged for surveillance Crystal: electronic surveillance; Garnet: counter-demonstrations; Turquoise: operations making use of the air-conditioning system at the Democrat's convention hall Topaz: photographing Democrats' documents in the course of Crystal emplacements; Opal: four clandestine break-ins; targets would include Washington headquarters of Muskie and McGovern, the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, and a fourth unnamed target. Liddy also provided for a special action group to carry out kidnappings, drugging and forcible deportation of anti-war leaders. Liddy told Mitchell this group would be staffed by "professional killers who have accounted between them for 22 dead so far…" (Will 193-8) There was no mention of any plans to be taken against George Wallace. Mitchell later testified, "In hindsight, I not only should have thrown him out of the office, I should have thrown him out of the window."
  
• 1/27/1972 Maurice Stans resigned as Commerce Secretary to become chief fund raiser for the campaign.
  
• 1/28/1972 Meeting between Mitchell, Nixon and Haldeman to discuss campaign strategy; this was one of only three meetings between these three men on politics for the first six months of '72, according to White House logs.
  
• 1/29/1972 Liddy Proposes Operation Gemstone' to Gather Intelligence on Democrats "Plumber" G. Gordon Liddy lays out an elaborate $1 million proposal for a plan for political espionage and campaign "dirty tricks" he calls "Operation Gemstone" to Attorney General John Mitchell. Mitchell is preparing to leave his post to head the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEPsee March 1, 1972). "Gemstone" is a response to pressure from President Nixon to compile intelligence on Democratic candidates and party officials, particularly Democratic National Committee chairman Lawrence O'Brien. Liddy gives his presentation with one hand bandagedhe had recently charred it in a candle flame to demonstrate the pain he was willing to endure in the name of will and loyalty. Sub-operations such as "Diamond," "Ruby," and "Sapphire" engender the following, among other proposed activities: bullet disrupt antiwar demonstrators before television and press cameras can arrive on the scene, using "men who have worked successfully as street-fighting squads for the CIA" [Reeves, 2001, pp. 429-430] or what White House counsel John Dean, also at the meeting, will later testify to be "mugging squads;" [Time, 7/9/1973] bullet kidnap, or "surgically relocate," prominent antiwar and civil rights leaders by "drugging" them and taking them "across the border;" bullet use a pleasure yacht as a floating brothel to entice Democrats and other undesirables into compromising positions, where they can be tape-recorded and photographed with what Liddy calls "the finest call girls in the country… not dumb broads but girls who can be trained and photographed;" bullet deploy an array of electronic and physical surveillance, including chase planes to intercept messages from airplanes carrying prominent Democrats. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 429-430] Dean, as he later testifies, is horrified at the ideas. [Time, 7/9/1973] Mitchell seems more amused than anything else at Liddy's excesses, he merely says that "Gemstone" is "not quite what I had in mind." He tells Liddy and Liddy's boss, CREEP deputy director Jeb Stuart Magruder, to come back with a cheaper and more realistic proposal. [Reeves, 2001, pp. 429-430]
  
• 1/30/1972 Melvin Laird announces that no men will be called up for military duty until April.
  
• 1/30/1972 Northern Ireland: "Bloody Sunday" in Londonderry: 13 unarmed civilians killed by British troops; an Irish mob in Dublin stormed and burned the British Embassy. 'Bloody Sunday'. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march against internment was meant to start at 2.00pm from the Creggan. The march left, late (2.50pm approximately) , from Central Drive in the Creggan Estate and took an indirect route towards the Bogside area of the city. People joined the march along its entire route. At approximately 3.25pm The march passed the 'Bogside Inn' and turned up Westland Street before going down William Street. Estimates of the number of marchers at this point vary. Some observers put the number as high as 20,000 whereas the Widgery Report estimated the number at between 3,000 and 5,000. Around 3.45pm most of the marchers followed the organisers instructions and turned right into Rossville Street to hold a meeting at 'Free Derry Corner'. However a section of the crowd continued along William Street to the British Army barricade. A riot developed. (Confrontations between the Catholic youth of Derry and the British Army had become a common feature of life in the city and many observers reported that the rioting was not particularly intense. At approximately 3.55pm, away from the riot and also out of sight of the meeting, soldiers in a derelict building opened fire (shooting 5 rounds) and injured Damien Donaghy (15) and John Johnston (59). Both were treated for injuries and were taken to hospital. John Johnston died on 16 June 1972. Also around this time (about 3.55pm) as the riot in William Street was breaking up, Paratroopers requested permission to begin an arrest operation. By about 4.05pm most people had moved to 'Free Derry Corner' to attend the meeting. 4.07pm (approximately) An order was given for a 'sub unit' (Support Company) of the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment to move into William Street to begin an arrest operation directed at any remaining rioters. The order authorising the arrest operation specifically stated that the soldiers were "not to conduct running battle down Rossville Street" (Official Brigade Log). The soldiers of Support Company were under the command of Ted Loden, then a Major in the Parachute Regiment (and were the only soldiers to fire at the crowd from street level). At approximately 4.10pm soldiers of the Support Company of the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment began to open fire on the marchers in the Rossville Street area. By about 4.40pm the shooting ended with 13 people dead and a further 13 injured from gunshots. [Most of the basic facts are agreed, however what remains in dispute is whether or not the soldiers came under fire first. The soldiers claimed to have come under sustained attack by gunfire and nailbomb. None of the eyewitness accounts of those shot saw any gun or bomb being used. No soldiers were injured in the operation, no guns or bombs were recovered at the scene of the shooting.]
  
• 1/31/1972 Dean told Haldeman and Ehrlichman that Jack Anderson was pursuing the Hughes loan.
  
• 1/31/1972 Dean memo to Haldeman on "Potential Disruption" by leftist groups at the GOP convention in San Diego.
  
• 1/31/1972 Reginald Maudling, British Home Secretary, made a statement to the House of Commons on the events of 'Bloody Sunday': "The Army returned the fire directed at them with aimed shots and inflicted a number of casualties on those who were attacking them with firearms and with bombs". Maudling then went on to announce an inquiry into the circumstances of the march.
  
• 2/1972 Billy Graham met with Nixon to discuss ways he could be helpful during the campaign. Graham recommended that Nixon try to increase his appeal to religious conservatives, whom he felt were becoming more politically active. (With God on Our Side p146)
  
• 2/1/1972 Nixon and Mitchell met with Gov. Reagan.
  
• 2/1/1972 Edward Heath, British Prime Minister, announced the appointment of Lord Widgery, then Lord Chief Justice, to undertake an inquiry into the 13 deaths on 'Bloody Sunday'.
  
• 2/2/1972 The funerals of 11 of the dead took place in the Creggan in Derry. Tens of thousands attended the funeral including clergy, politicians from North and South, and thousands of friends and neighbours. Throughout the rest of Ireland prayer services were held to coincide with the time of the funerals. In Dublin over 90 per cent of workers stopped work in respect of those who had died, and approximately 100,000 people turned out to march to the British Embassy. They carried 13 coffins and black flags. Later a crowd attacked the Embassy with stones and bottles, then petrol bombs, and the building was burnt to the ground.
  
• 2/4/1972 The sixth round of the SALT talks adjourns in Vienna.
  
• 2/4/1972 Liddy discussed a scaled-down plan with Mitchell, Dean and Magruder. Magruder recalls that Liddy now wanted to deploy hookers in Washington to trap the Democrats. Everyone supposedly opposed this idea, though Liddy writes that in March prostitutes were retained as a component of the plan and that this was done with Magruder's approval. "Magruder didn't want to let the subject go. If he could justify a trip to Miami, could I fix him up with our girls? Jesus, I thought, the wimp can't even get laid with a hooker by himself." (Will p207) Mitchell still wasn't comfortable with Liddy's plans, and Dean suggested that this kind of discussion shouldn't be held in the Attorney General's office. Outside, waiting for the elevator, Dean told Liddy he didn't want to know any more about his plans; Liddy assumed this meant Dean only wanted plausible deniability. Of this meeting, only Magruder claims that Mitchell okayed targeting the DNC and Greenspun's safe in Las Vegas. Mitchell strongly denied saying any such thing, and Liddy agrees with him. (Secret Agenda p102-103)
  
• 2/5/1972 It is announced that the US has agreed to sell 42 F-4 Phantom jets to Israel.
  
• 2/7/1972 Nixon signed into law the Federal Election Campaign Act, requiring that all candidates report all campaign contributions received and spent. It also limited campaign spending for media advertising.
  
• 2/7/1972 James Earl Ray makes a failed escape attempt from Brushy Mountain Prison.
  
• 2/9/1972 Nixon delivers his third annual State-of-the-World address to Congress.
  
• 2/11/1972 Life cancels plans to publish Clifford Irving's "autobiography" of Howard Hughes.
  
• 2/11/1972 Rep. Wilbur Mills enters the presidential race.
  
• 2/11-13/1972 an anti-war rally in Versailles, France, denounces US policy in Indochina.
  
• 2/12/1972 Ted Kennedy advocates amnesty for draft resisters.
  
• 2/15/1972 16 CIA agents, using 8 cars, were dispatched to shadow Jack Anderson and three of his colleagues. Photographic equipment was installed in an "observation nest" across from his office. One of those involved was a Brit Hume; Jim Hougan does not say whether this is the same man as the future White House correspondent. (Secret Agenda p85) Project Mudhen was solely a CIA operation; it appears no one else in the government (including the White House) knew about it. The surveillance lasted until early April.
  
• 2/15/1972 White House announced that Mitchell would resign (effective 3/1) as attorney general to head the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Richard Kleindienst would replace him.
  
• 2/17/1972 Nixon departed on his historic trip to China.
  
• 2/17/1972 Hunt and Liddy were sent to Los Angeles by Magruder to plot the Greenspun break-in with a Howard Hughes operative.
  
• 2/18/1972 Delegates from 34 states attend the beginning of the 20th National Convention of the Communist Party, USA, in New York.
  
• 2/18/1972 California Supreme Court abolishes the death penalty in that state.
  
• 2/20/1972 Thomas Gregory was recruited to infiltrate the Muskie campaign.
  
• 2/20/1972 Nixon arrived for his visit in China.
  
• 2/20/1972 Billy James Hargis wrote in his Christian Crusade Weekly newsletter about Nixon's sins: "His enthusiastic support for unilateral disarmament; his suicidal Red China policy; his blundering mistake in supporting pro-Red Chinese Pakistan in the Indian-Pakistan War; his determination to send military aid to avowed enemies, such as Communist Yugoslavia and Communist Chile, prove that the man had something in mind besides what benefits the nation."
  
• 2/21/1972 Nixon visited Peking.
  
• 2/22-23/1972 Nixon met with PM Chou En-lai. On the 22nd he met with Mao for an hour.
  
• 2/23/1972 British embassy in Dublin was firebombed and destroyed in retaliation for "Bloody Sunday."
  
• 2/24/1972 Nixon stood on the Great Wall of China and hoped that "walls erected - whether like this physical wall or whether other walls, physiological and philosophical - will not divide peoples of the world...what is most important is that we have an open world."
  
• 2/25/1972 West Germany paid Arab hijackers of a jumbo jet $5 million for the release of the passengers.
  
• 2/27/1972 Nixon and Chou En-lai release a joint communique showing the results of their talks.
  
• 2/28/1972 Murder trial of Angela Davis begins in San Jose, California.
  
• 2/28/1972 Nixon ended his successful visit to China, the first ever by a US president. At the same time, the Taiwan foreign ministry issued a statement denouncing the US-Sino communique.
  
• 2/29/1972 Cesar Chavez signs Florida's first contract for migrant farm workers.
  
• 2/29/1972 Jack Anderson disclosed a memo from ITT's Washington lobbyist, Dita Beard, which connected the settlement of the anti-trust suit with the funding of the Republican Convention.
  
• 2/29/1972 Bangladesh PM Rahman flies to Moscow for a goodwill trip.
  
• 3/1972 this month's issue of Win magazine, an anti-war publication, prints a collection of documents on political surveillance stolen from the FBI's Pennsylvania office a year ago.
  
• 3/1972 Al Haig, age 47, was promoted by Nixon to major general.
  
• 3/1972 Shortly before the 3/30 meeting between Mitchell and Magruder, Eugenio Martinez met with his CIA case officer to raise the subject of his relationship with E. Howard Hunt. The case officer then arranged an interview between Martinez and CIA's chief of station in Miami, Jake Esterline. Martinez told Esterline that Hunt was employed by the White House, and asked Esterline if he was certain that he had been apprised of all CIA activities in the Miami area. Esterline immediately asked Langely about Hunt's status. Cord Meyer replied in a cryptic manner, the message arriving in Miami 3/27. Meyer told Esterline not to "concern himself with the travels of Hunt in Miami, that Hunt was on domestic White House business of an unknown nature and that the Chief of Station should cool it.' The tone of the letter infuriated the Chief of Station and left him uneasy about the matter…" (Baker report) The case officer then instructed Martinez to write a vague report about the manner, which was delivered to Esterline 4/5/72 and forgotten about. Right after this occurrence, Martinez's case officer was removed and sent abroad, and was replaced by Robert D. Ritchie, was sent down from Langley. Ritchie would later become an employee of Edwin P. Wilson. (Secret Agenda p110)
  
• Late 3/1972 James Hosty surreptitiously looked at his personnel file, and found that the answers he had given to FBI headquarters 12/1963 had been changed to imply that Hosty had had "full detailed knowledge of Oswald's contacts with the Soviets and Cubans, and therefore had been derelict in not interviewing him...I had been sold down the river." But Hosty had saved a copy of his original answers; he felt that his answers had been changed by Shanklin and Malley under pressure from Jim Gale. (Assignment Oswald 178)
  
• 3/1-2/1972 Paul E. Gilly is found guilty of first-degree murder for the killing of Joseph Yablonski, his wife and daughter.
  
• 3/1/1972 Thomas Gregory infiltrated the Muskie campaign team.
  
• 3/1/1972 Arthur Bremer attended an organizational meeting for George Wallace at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee.
  
• 3/1/1972 John Mitchell resigned as Attorney General to become chairman of CRP.
  
• 3/2/1972 J. Edgar Hoover made his last appearance before Congress; old friend Rep. John Rooney (D-NY), commented that many "left-wing foul balls" had been attacking the FBI director. Hoover responded, "You are honored by your friends and you are distinguished by your enemies. I have been very distinguished."
  
• 3/2/1972 Colson memo to Doug Hallett: "I need to talk to you about getting in touch with your friends in the McGovern camp for a secret suicide mission - theirs, not yours, that is."
  
• 3/2/1972 US space probe Pioneer 10, designed to go past Jupiter, is launched from Cape Kennedy.
  
• 3/3/1972 Black September Palestinian terrorists tried to assault the London quarters of Hussein I, king of Jordan.
  
• 3/7/1972 Haldeman "action memo" requesting someone to find out who is going to be financing the Democratic National Convention.
  
• 3/7/1972 Klaus Schulze, age 19, is shot while trying to escape the GDR.
  
• 3/7/1972 New Hampshire primary; Muskie got 46% to McGovern's 37.5%.
  
• 3/8/1972 Nixon signs an executive order to limit the practice of classifying government documents, and to speed up the process of declassification.
  
• 3/8/1972 Haldeman memo recommending that "perhaps...we should ask the Host Committee to give the money back to IT&T...We've got to find a way to turn around the PR on this." Memo from Colson to Noel Koch recommending that it be publicized that the Democratic Convention is being financed by AT&T.
  
• 3/8/1972 The Richmond News Leader editorialized: "In spite of his relatively strong performance [in New Hampshire], it would be wrong to take Senator McGovern seriously."
  
• 3/10-12/1972 the first National Black Political Convention is held in Gary, Indiana.
  
• 3/11/1972 Bob Dole released a statement jabbing at the Democrats for their financial ties to AT&T.
  
• 3/11/1972 Nixon memo to Kissinger, recommending that an announcement that the last US combat troops are out of Vietnam be made before the Democrats meet at their convention; he also believed that a negotiated settlement with Hanoi would probably not come until after the election.
  
• 3/11/1972 The Socialist Party and the Democratic Socialist Federation end a 35-year split and merge at a New York convention.
  
• 3/12/1972 The Arizona Republic editorialized: "McGovern has about as much chance as Pat Paulsen of getting the Democratic presidential nomination in Miami."
  
• 3/14/1972 Florida Democratic primary; Wallace 42%; Humphrey 18.5%; Muskie 9%; McGovern 6%; Shirley Chisholm 4%.
  
• 3/14/1972 Nixon memo to Haldeman: "I want you to get me a report today on how much IT&T grew during the three Kennedy years and the five Johnson years...[they] failed to bring action to stop the growth of IT&T whereas this administration did so."
  
• 3/15/1972 Project Mudhen memo stated that "at no time should the Director [Helms] be made aware of" the surveillance operation against Jack Anderson. It also stated that Helms' upcoming lunch with Anderson should be put under surveillance.
  
• 3/15/1972 Liddy memo to Mitchell on the "Democratic National Convention Finance Investigation." "Hunt advised further that the Spanish language (Cuban) radio in Miami is carrying a news item to the effect that the Republicans are 'looking around town' to 'get something on the Democrats' in connection with the convention."
  
• 3/15/1972 Hunt travelled to meet with Dita Beard.
  
• 3/17/1972 Nixon proposed to Congress a moratorium on busing to achieve racial balance.
  
• 3/17/1972 Richard Helms met with Jack Anderson for lunch at the Madison Hotel in Washington. Helms wanted to dissuade Anderson from publishing certain classified material in his next book.
  
• 3/20-30/1972 Nixon Confirms Plan to Bug Democrats According to the FBI's Watergate investigation, John Mitchell, the director of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), and his aide Jeb Stuart Magruder discuss the proposal made by G. Gordon Liddy to plant electronic surveillance devices on the phone of the chairman of the Democratic Party, Lawrence O'Brien (see March 20, 1971). Magruder telephones President Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, and Haldeman confirms that Nixon wants the operation carried out. [Spartacus Schoolnet, 8/2007] On March 30, in a meeting held in Key Biscayne, Florida, Mitchell, the former Attorney General (see March 1, 1972), approves the plan and its budget of approximately $250,000. [O.T. Jacobson, 7/5/1974 pdf file] Other sources list this decision as coming almost a year earlier (see March 20, 1971). In this case, the FBI timeline is almost certainly in error, since the "Plumbers" break-in of the offices of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist came well before this date (see Late June-July 1971 and September 9, 1971).
  
• 3/21/1972 A Mr. Bill Baranek called the White House, wishing to talk to John Dean about having overheard Mitchell, Dita Beard and John McLaren at the Watergate discussing the IT&T "deal." In return for his not going public with this information, he wanted his job at the Post Office back; he felt he had been fired for his political views.
  
• 3/22/1972 Senate ratified the Equal Rights Amendment by 84 to 8.
  
• 3/23/1972 Democratic newspaper publisher William Haddad wrote to Larry O'Brien to say that "sophisticated surveillance techniques" were being used against the Democrats. (Secret Agenda p79)
  
• 3/23/1972 US delegation to Paris peace talks announce an indefinite suspension until Vietcong and North Vietnam enter into "serious discussions."
  
• 3/23/1972 Arthur Bremer appeared at a Wallace benefit dinner and rally.
  
• 3/24/1972 Around this date, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy met with Dr. Edward Gunn at the Hay-Adams hotel near the White House, and discussed ways to murder Jack Anderson. Liddy remembered the meeting taking place in February. (Will p207-08) Hunt placed the meeting on or around 3/24 in his Senate testimony. Gunn was a "retired" CIA doctor known for using medical and chemical techniques to dispose of people. Liddy privately felt that Gunn was still in the CIA, and assumed that Hunt was acting on Colson's orders. Hunt claimed the idea of "neutralizing" Anderson was Colson's, which Colson denied. The conversation was carried out in a hypothetical manner, and Anderson's name was never mentioned in connection with the plot. But when discussing the feasibility of a vehicular "accident," Gunn suggested a site near Anderson's home and on his way to work. Liddy gave Gunn a $100 bill "to protect Dr. Gunn's image as retired.'" They also discussed the possibility of administering a massive dose of LSD to make him behave erratically in public; Gunn explained that drugs were too unpredictable. Liddy suggested murder; all agreed that this was easier to accomplish. They decided that it would be good to make Anderson look like the victim of a fatal mugging. Liddy said that if necessary he would take care of the job himself. (Will p209-10; Secret Agenda p92-93) Jim Hougan believes that Hunt's plans against Anderson came not from Colson but from the CIA's Office of Security. Hunt did not tell Liddy that Dr. Gunn was an associate of James McCord's. Hougan feels that Liddy came "within an ace of being a patsy" in a murder case.
  
• 3/24/1972 New York: the first Cuban Film Festival here was broken up by anti-Castro youths.
  
• 3/27/1972 Two of the Soledad Brothers, Fleeta Drumgo and John Cluchette, are found innocent of the 1970 slaying of a guard at Soledad prison.
  
• 3/27/1972 Nixon memo to Haldeman: "As the election approaches the media are going to step up their attempts to cut us down..."
  
• 3/28/1972 SALT negotiations begin a seventh round of talks.
  
• 3/29/1972 Buchanan memo to Nixon: "we should have Republicans cross over and vote for George McGovern."
  
• 3/30/1972 Kissinger briefed 36 conservative Protestant church leaders at the White House.
  
• 3/30/1972 Colson memo to Haldeman; he pointed out that Klein's memo of 6/30/71 had spelled out "the $400,000 arrangement with ITT" and a copy of that memo had been sent to Mitchell. "This put the AG on constructive notice at least of the ITT commitment at that time and before the settlement, facts which he has denied under oath. We don't know whether we have recovered all the copies."
  
• 3/30/1972 The third meeting about Operation Gemstone. At Key Biscayne, (according to Magruder) Mitchell gave Magruder the go-ahead for Gemstone. Also present was Fred LaRue; he and Mitchell both denied that Magruder was given approval for the $250,000 plan. Magruder claims it was agreed that Liddy's first task was to wiretap O'Brien's telephone at the Watergate. But it wasn't until a month later that Magruder told Liddy to bug O'Brien, and another month before it was actually done.
  
• 3/30/1972 Larry O'Brien memo to John Stewart telling him about Haddad's information and asking him to follow up on it.
  
• 3/31/1972 Nixon signs an executive order blocking for 60 days two impending rail strikes by the AFL-CIO.
  
• Spring 1972 Manuel Elizalde, Jr., a Philippine Cultural Minister, announced that he had discovered in the rain forest of Mindanao, on the southernmost island in the Philippines, a tribe of people who had never had contact with the outside world before and who still used stone-age tools. The tribe was called the Tasaday. CBS aired a documentary about the tribe titled "The Last Tribes of Mindanao" on Jan. 12, 1972. The tribe continued to receive intense media attention until 1974 when martial law was proclaimed in the Philippines. In April, 1986, shortly after Marcos was overthrown, a Swiss journalist named Oswald Iten travelled into the jungle to see the Tasaday. He found the caves deserted. Local Tboli and Manobo peoples living nearby admitted to him that they had participated in a hoax. They explained that Elizalde had manipulated them into posing as a Stone Age tribe. "We didnt live in caves, only near them, until we met Elizalde...Elizalde forced us to live in the caves so that we'd be better cavemen. Before he came, we lived in huts on the other side of the mountain and we farmed. We took off our clothes because Elizalde told us to do so and promised if we looked poor that we would get assistance. He gave us money to pose as Tasaday and promised us security from counter-insurgency and tribal fighting."
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 4/1972 New York legislature repealed the abortion rights law passed two year ago, but Rockefeller vetoed the repeal.
  
• 4/3/1972 Nixon signs into law a bill devaluing the dollar by raising the price of gold from $35 to $50 an ounce.
  
• 4/3/1972 Arthur Bremer showed up at a Humphrey rally.
  
• 4/4/1972 Wisconsin primary; McGovern won, followed by Wallace, Humphrey and Muskie; Lindsay got 7% and dropped out of the race.
  
• 4/4/1972 Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., former congressman and civil rights leader, dies in Miami, Florida at the age of 63.
  
• 4/4/1972 Bremer attended a Wallace victory party; he began to keep a diary. Gore Vidal: "Bremer's diary is a fascinating work - of art? From what we know of the 22-year-old author he did not have a literary turn of mind (among his effects were comic books, some porno). He was a television baby, and a dull one. Politics had no interest for him. Yet suddenly - for reasons he never gives us - he decides to kill the President and starts to keep a diary on April 4 1972....For someone who is supposed to be nearly illiterate there are startling literary references and flourishes in the Bremer diary." Diary entry: "Hurray! Hurray! Great day for democracy and capitalism! A 50% voter turn out is expected! Now THAT'S confidence in America. Tired to bury pages 1-148 in Sheridan Park just south of Milw. on the lake front at 8-10 but the place was too crowded. Kids in parked cars & cars positioning for a good dark spot. The ground was too rocky. I was too near a land fill sight ( I'll never recover it after few weeks ) & a big 600 foot sheer cliff! Want to get rid of it in or near the big city. Oh Jesus! My birth was at 2:40 p.m. August 21, 1950 and that's the time my plane leaves. Ashes to Ashes. Copy of any birth certificate cost 2 bucks."
  
• 4/5/1972 Harrisburg 7 are acquitted of conspiring to kidnap Kissinger.
  
• 4/5/1972 $700,000 in Texas oil money is rushed to the Nixon campaign two days before the new disclosure law went into effect.
  
• 4/6/1972 Dean memo to Colson, stating the difficulties of trying to tie Larry O'Brien in with "some highly questionable leasing arrangements with the United States Government during the Johnson Administration."
  
• 4/7/1972 Lyndon Johnson suffered a heart attack.
  
• 4/7/1972 New federal election law takes effect, requiring full disclosure of all campaign contributions.
  
• 4/7/1972 Bremer stayed at the exclusive Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in NY, where Humphrey was.
  
• 4/7/1972 $83,000 was disbursed to Gordon Liddy by Magruder.
  
• 4/8/1972 Bob Dole taunted Ted Kennedy to get into the primary race: "I think what we want to see is a little less profile, and a little more courage..."
  
• 4/8/1972 Sheik Abeid Amani Karume, ruler of Zanzibar, was assassinated.
  
• 4/10/1972 Robert Vesco contributed $200,000 in cash to Maurice Stans.
  
• 4/12/1972 The CIA's Office of Security ordered the surveillance against Jack Anderson to be terminated.
  
• 4/12/1972 Nixon, Mitchell and Haldeman met in the EOB to discuss politics; it was decided that McGovern had to be portrayed as a "radical," especially since he had called Nixon a "fascist."
  
• 4/12/1972 McCord was given $65,000 and told to purchase electronic eavesdropping equipment.
  
• 4/13/1972 Nixon and Canadian PM Trudeau agree to a joint effort to fight pollution in the Great Lakes area.
  
• 4/15/1972 William Haddad wrote to Jack Anderson, informing him of plans to spy on the Democrats.
  
• 4/15-18/1972 Bremer stays at the Sheraton Motor Inn in New Carrolton, Maryland.
  
• 4/15-20/1972 widespread anti-war demonstrations across US; many are arrested.
  
• 4/16/1972 Launching of Apollo 16.
  
• 4/20-24/1972 Kissinger secretly visits the USSR to talk with Brezhnev.
  
• 4/20-23/1972 Navy Capt. John Watts Young and Air Force Lt. Col. Charles Moss Duke spend a record 71 hours 2 minutes on the moon; this expedition, Apollo 16, explored the mountains of the moon.
  
• 4/25/1972 "NIXON: See, the attack in the North that we have in mind, power plants, whatever's left - POL [petroleum], the docks. And, I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people? KISSINGER: About two hundred thousand people. NIXON: No, no, no, I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry? KISSINGER: That, I think, would just be too much. NIXON: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?...I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.
  
• 4/26/1972 John Stewart met with A.J. Woolston-Smith, William Haddad and others in New York. Wooly recalls that Haddad told of a plan to burglarize and bug the DNC and that McCord and Liddy were somehow involved, plus some Cuban exiles. It was believed that the operation would try to find evidence of Castro support for Democratic candidates. In a civil deposition, Stewart changed the date of this meeting to 6/20 to "conform to the facts." Such a late date (after the break-in) would have made Woolston-Smith's information worthless. Stewart later agreed that the meeting had taken place in April. (Secret Agenda p79,83)
  
• 4/27/1972 Muskie withdraws from the presidential race.
  
• 4/27/1972 Lucien Sarti is killed by Mexican police in Mexico City. According to Christian David, Sarti was the gunman on the Grassy Knoll. David said he was first offered a contract to kill JFK by a Mafioso chieftain in Marseilles who had been part of the Faustian bargain between U.S. intelligence and the Maria in W.W.II. David turned the contract down and it was passed along to Sarti - who accepted. David said that about two weeks before the assassination, Sarti flew from France to Mexico City, from where he drove or was driven to the U.S. border at Brownville, Texas. David believes it is the CIA who has Sarti killed in Mexico. David maintains that Sarti accepted the contract offer to assassinate JFK after he turned it down.
  
• 4/28/1972 William Haddad wrote to John Stewart: "I talked to Woolston-Smith. Yes, he does have good information; and yes, he did want to cover expenses for producing it in an acceptable way. He explains that he wasn't looking for payment for his services, but to cover what looked like necessary expenses to tie down his theory with factual presentations…I decided to see what a good investigative reporting operation could do with it now. So I went ahead along those lines. If they draw a blank, I'll be back to you on how to proceed, and I'll keep you informed. My own journalistic judgement is that the story is true and explosive. It would be nice for a third party to uncover it, but if they fail due to the type of inside work required, I would move back to Woolston-Smith." Haddad provided a copy of this letter to the Ervin Committee.
  
• 4/30/1972 Nixon memo to Haldeman: "It is vitally important you follow up on the Colson group to see that they continue...a strong assault on the press, on the Democratic candidates, and our opponents generally in the Congress and in the country on the Vietnam issue."
  
• 5/1/1972 At about 6:15pm McCord telephoned Alfred C. Baldwin III and offered him a job as bodyguard to Martha Mitchell. Baldwin was on a plane for Washington two hours later.
  
• 5/2/1972 After arriving in Washington, Alfred Baldwin headed for Chicago where Martha Mitchell was on a speaking tour. But they didn't get along, and he was soon reassigned 5/9.
  
• 5/2/1972 Indiana Democratic primary saw Hubert Humphrey beat George Wallace narrowly.
  
• 5/2/1972 This evening, Kissinger returned to Washington from Paris and found Nixon and Haig intent on renewed bombing of North Vietnam.
  
• 5/2/1972 8:30am (EST) J. Edgar Hoover's lifeless body is found in his bedroom by his housekeeper and chauffeur. "His housekeeper, Annie Fields, found his body beside his bed at about 8:30am. Dr James L. Luke, District of Columbia coroner, attributed death to 'hypertensive cardiovascular disease,' and said a heart attack might have been the direct cause. The location of the body indicated that Mr Hoover might have felt ill during the night and attempted to get up..." (Los Angeles Times 5/3) The DC coroner, Dr. James L. Luke, attributed death to "hypertensive cardiovascular disease," Hoover's personal doctor, Robert V. Choisser, denied that he had ever shown any sign of heart disease. Luke decided that an autopsy was "not warranted." (Washington Star 5/3) A year later, during the Watergate hearings, a witness matter-of-factly referred to "the murder of J. Edgar Hoover." (The Man and the Secrets 36) Haldeman told Nixon of Hoover's death; Nixon gasped and said, "Jesus Christ! That old cocksucker!" (The Man and the Secrets 28) Publicly, Nixon would treat his death with great reverence: "..a national symbol of courage, patriotism," etc. In the corridors of power, though, their was panic over what might be discovered in his files; Nixon's Chief of Staff scrawled on a note: "find out what's there, who controls it - where skeletons are." (Official and Confidential 1-4) Ehrlichman recalled that Nixon told Gray on this day to find Hoover's secret files. (Witness to Power) 11:40am: according to Kleindeinst's instructions, Mohr sealed Hoover's personal office. Kleindeinst had wanted to secure Hoover's secret files, but Mohr did not mention the fact that those files were not in Hoover's office; they were in the office of his secretary, Helen Gandy. (The Man and the Secrets 31
  
• 5/2/1972 11:45am Kleindeinst announced to the public that Hoover had died. Rumors were already circulating that Hoover had been murdered. Nixon then told the press that Hoover had been one of his "closest friends and advisers." The major media gave Hoover cautious praise, but in small-town newspapers he was given glowing praise. 12:15pm Hoover's body is removed from his home by the funeral home of Joseph Gawler's Sons. 2:15pm Nixon told Mohr that Hoover was to be given a full state funeral.
  
• 5/2/1972 This afternoon, L. Patrick Gray met with Mohr and demanded to know where the secret files were; Mohr assured him there were no secret files. Mohr would later explain that there had been a disagreement over the semantic definition of what a secret file was. Clyde Tolson moved into Hoover's home this afternoon. Nixon wrote in his diary, "He died at the right time; fortunately, he died in office. It would have killed him had he been forced out of office...I am particularly glad that I did not force him out at the end of last year." (RN)
  
• 5/2/1972 When the undertakers reach Hoover's house around 12:30 PM, there are men there - fifteen or eighteen of them - virtually taking the place apart - trying to find Hoover's secret files. Mark Frazier. a young reporter, picks up three leads that indicate that Hoover was the victim of assassination. Hoover had been the target of two break-in operations. A first break-in attempt, in "late winter of 1972", was designed to "retrieve documents that were thought to be used as potential blackmail against the White House." It failed but was followed by a second, successful break-in. "This time," reports Frazier, "whether through misunderstanding or design, a poison of the thiophosphate genre was placed on Hoover's personal toilet articles." Thiophosphate is a compound used in insecticides, highly toxic to human beings if taken orally, inhaled or absorbed through the pores of the skin. Ingestion can result in a fatal heart seizure and can be detected only if an autopsy is performed within hours of death.
  
• 5/3/1972 President Nixon appoints L. Patrick Gray III to be acting director of the FBI. This morning, Gray once again demanded Hoover's files from Mohr, who once again stonewalled. (The Man and the Secrets)
  
• 5/3/1972 A contingent of 10 Miami Cubans was brought to Washington on an emergency basis on orders of Liddy and Hunt. Led by Barker, they had been phoned by Hunt the previous night. The purpose of the trip was said to be guard Hoover's coffin from anti-war demonstrators, and to capture a Vietcong flag from those demonstrators who were planning to march at the Capitol. Many found this explanation unbelievable. The Cubans told conflicting stories about what they did in Washington. According to Mark C. Frazier in the Harvard Crimson (11/20/1973), the Cubans were brought in to burglarize Hoover's residence to get at his secret files. Felipe De Diego told the Crimson's reporter that he himself had made a successful entry into Hoover's house, though he later denied the story. (Secret Agenda p134) It was expensive to bring the Cubans in, since besides their room and board, they were also compensated for "lost income" when they were working for CRP. They were generally only brought in when they were going to be used immediately. (Secret Agenda p139)
  
• 5/3/1972 Hoover's 1000-pound lead casket (to protect the corpse from troublemakers) was brought to the Rotunda where he lay in state. Meanwhile, nearby, an antiwar demonstration was being infiltrated by the Hunt-Liddy crew, who tried to start fights with the protestors. Frank Sturgis and Reinaldo Pico were arrested by capitol police, but an unidentified man in a gray suit, flashing either FBI or CIA credentials, got the officers to let them go. (Nightmare 214; The Man and the Secrets)
  
• 5/3/1972 This afternoon, Gray was told by Kleindeinst that he was to be the new acting FBI director. After the announcement was made, Tolson decided to resign. Other FBI officials were also not happy that someone from outside the Bureau had been chosen. In his column, Jack Anderson criticized Hoover for misusing his power in his later years, but praised him for making the FBI an incorruptible and efficient organization. Coretta Scott King, widow of MLK, released a bitter statement criticizing Hoover. Communist Party leader Gus Hall called Hoover "a servant of racism, reaction and repression."
  
• 5/3/1972 Los Angeles Times: "Nixon praised Mr Hoover as a 'truly remarkable man' and 'one of my closest personal friends and advisers....because of his indomitable courage against sometimes vicious attacks, has made certain that the flag of the FBI will always fly high.' Acting Atty Gen. Richard G. Kleindienst said, 'The nation has lost a giant among its patriots....was from time to time the object of misplaced public attack...'" Spiro Agnew said that Hoover "stood steadfast against the political assaults and personal vilification that sought to undermine his stature..." John Mitchell, one of his staunchest supporters, said, "Anybody who would say anything against J Edgar Hoover would be maligning him. He didn't deserve it." Hubert Humphrey praised him as "a man of unquestioned ability, personal integrity and professional competence." Ted Kennedy: "Even those who differed with him always had the highest respect for his honesty, integrity, and his desire to do what he thought best for the country. He will be missed and remembered" The article also stated, "Gov. Reagan said in Sacramento that no other man has meant more to this country in the 20th century that Mr. Hoover." The article quoted Hoover as once having said that Ramsey Clark was "like a jellyfish, a softie. If there was a worse attorney general, it was Ramsey Clark. You never knew which way he was going to flop on an issue. He was worse than [RFK]. At least Kennedy stuck by his guns, even when he was wrong."
  
• 5/4/1972 Hoover's funeral was attended by numerous dignitaries. Tolson resigned as associate director of the FBI.
  
• 5/4/1972 Gray told the press, "None of you guys are going to believe this...but there are no dossiers or secret [FBI] files. There are just general files, and I took steps to keep their integrity." Meanwhile, Helen Gandy and Mark Felt were busy moving Hoover's files to his house, where Tolson would store them in the recreation room. Gandy would later say that the boxes she moved contained only Hoover's personal records. Gray soon received an anonymous letter warning him that Mohr had lied to him about there not being any secret files, and that Tolson had directed the files to be brought to Hoover's house immediately after the Director's death. (The Man and the Secrets)
  
• 5/5/1972 McCord associate rents room 419 at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge across the street from the Watergate.
  
• 5/8/1972 International Monetary Fund announces a reduction in the parity of the US dollar to gold.
  
• 5/10/1972 L. Patrick Gray announced he wished to form an advisory committee of experts from outside the FBI, and wanted to begin hiring women agents.
  
• 5/10/1972 Bremer attended a Wallace rally in Cadillac, Michigan, where he sat with a neatly dressed man about 40 years old.
  
• 5/11/1972 Interior Secretary Morton grants a permit for construction of the controversial trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
  
• 5/11/1972 Mohr told Gray again that there were no secret Hoover files.
  
• 5/11/1972 Alfred Baldwin started his new job for McCord, involving surveillance of anti-war activities. McCord sent him to the Howard Johnson's across from the Watergate complex. Records show that the room he took, #419, had been rented by McCord Associates 5/5, while Baldwin was still staying at the Roger Smith Hotel. Many find it odd that McCord would rent the room in his own name, and Baldwin received mail there using his real name. (Secret Agenda p137)
  
• 5/12/1972 The last of Hoover's files are moved to his house. (The Man and the Secrets)
  
• 5/12-13/1972 Bremer is seen at a Wallace rally at the Reid Hotel in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
  
• 5/15/1972 Nixon memo to Colson asking for a strategy to make the media doomsayers about the Haiphong mining "admit that they were wrong."
  
• 5/15/1972 George Wallace was shot down in the middle of a crowd at a Maryland shopping mall, apparently the victim of a "lone nut," Arthur Herman Bremer, age 21 of Milwaukee. Wallace survived, but was paralyzed from the waist down. CBS photographer Laurens Pierce caught part of the shooting on film. Wallace is seen with his right side exposed as Bremer reaches forward through the crowd, plants the gun near Wallace's stomach, and fires. Bremer continues firing four more shots, all in essentially the same forward direction, roughly parallel to the ground. Due largely to what was shown on the film, and to the apparent premeditation exhibited in his alleged diary, Bremer was arrested, tried and convicted. Gail Aiken, the sister of Arthur Bremer is a religious follower of Oliver Owen, a fundamentalist preacher and horse trader. Owen is the man who had told authorities that Sirhan Sirhan had wanted to buy a lead pony from him and had asked that the horse be delivered to the rear of the Ambassador Hotel on election night, (the night of RFK's assassination) when he would have the money. (Sirhan had four $100 dollar bills on his person when arrested.) What had made Owen's disclosure even more provocative was his description of the young couple accompanying Sirhan. Owen was dismissed as a publicity seeker -- even though he hid from the press.
  
• 5/15/1972 (AP 6/9/05) In a phone call between President Nixon and the man who would become "Deep Throat," the president instructed FBI official Mark Felt to aggressively pursue the case against the gunman who shot George Wallace. There must be no public suspicion of a cover-up, Nixon said, in the wounding of the Alabama governor who was then running for president. Nixon expressed satisfaction when Felt told him the suspect had some cuts and bruises. "I hope they worked him over a little bit more than that," Nixon said. "I think they did pretty well," Felt responded with a chuckle. Nixon talked to Felt hours after the shooting, saying "the main thing is to be sure that we don't go through the thing that we went through with the Kennedy assassination where we didn't really follow up adequately." "We'll take care of that," Felt assured the president. "You've got to remember that if we don't follow it adequately with this fellow, they're gonna think, `Well, my God if Kennedy is shot everybody goes to check everything, but with Wallace we sort of cover it up.' You understand?" "Yeah I sure do," Felt replied."
  
• 5/15/1972 (Reuters, 02-28-02) President Richard Nixon sought to paint the would-be assassin of White House hopeful George Wallace in 1972 as a backer of rival Democratic candidates, audio tapes made public on Thursday showed. "Look, can we play the game a little smart for a change?" he barked at aides on May 15, 1972, hours after the assassination attempt by loner Arthur Bremer left Wallace paralyzed below the waist. Wallace, who died in 1998, was a long-time Alabama governor and avowed segregationist who entered the 1972 Democratic presidential primaries. In the conversation with top aides, Nixon suggested that the Democrats had somehow smeared U.S. conservatives by pinning on the "right wing," as he put it, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A commission chaired by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who once defected to the Soviet Union, acted alone in killing Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. "And it was the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated," Nixon said without making clear why he considered the Warren Commision findings a sham. Turning back to the wounding of Wallace in Laurel, Maryland, he added: "And I respectfully suggest, can we pin this on one of theirs?" Nixon was speaking to H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, then his chief of staff, and Charles Colson, then a special counsel to the president. "Just say he (the shooter) was a supporter of McGovern and Kennedy," Nixon ordered, referring to Democrats George McGovern of South Dakota, who lost the 1972 election in a landslide to the incumbent, and Edward Kennedy of Massachussetts, who went on to make a brief White House run in 1980. "Now, just put that out!" Nixon said, his voice rising for emphasis. "Just say you have it on unmistakable evidence." Haldeman interrupts Nixon to say that the suspect had been arrested previously "so there ought to be a record on him." "Screw the record!" Nixon shot back. "Just say he was a supporter of that nut, and put it out." The president did not make clear whom he meant by that "nut."
  
• 5/16/1972 Colson memo on Wallace shooting; he urged FBI agent Mark Felt to find out "what was behind the attempted assassination because it might have other implications..." Colson had heard "rumors that there were political motivations in the killing, to wit: Bremer had ties with Kennedy or McGovern political operatives...the psychiatrist considered the man dangerous to himself as well as to others and possibly very disturbed...Gray further said the record revealed that he was a dues-paying member of the Young Democrats...I advised Gray that he should be aware of the need to determine the political motives as quickly as possible."
  
• 5/18/1972 Agnew returns from a six-day visit to Thailand, Japan and South Vietnam.
  
• 5/18/1972 Nixon memo to Haldeman and Fred Malek: "One department which particularly needs a housecleaning is the CIA. The problem in the CIA is muscle-bound bureaucracy...its personnel, just like the personnel in State, is primarily Ivy League and the Georgetown set rather than the type of people that we get into the services and the FBI. I want a study made immediately as to how many people in CIA could be removed by Presidential action...the reduction in force should be accomplished solely on the ground of its being necessary for budget reasons, but you will both know the real reason..."
  
• 5/18/1972 Gray received a letter from a former FBI agent telling him that there were indeed secret Hoover files, but Gray did not act on this. (The Man and the Secrets)
  
• 5/22-30/1972 Nixon summit with Brezhnev in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev. Nixon was the first US president to visit Moscow.
  
• 5/22/1972 Supreme Court rules that juries need not return unanimous verdicts to convict defendants in state criminal court cases.
  
• 5/22/1972 Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez, Virgilio Gonzalez, Felipe DeDiego, Reinaldo Pico and Frank Sturgis arrive in Washington, meet with Hunt, Liddy, McCord and Gregory to make plans for the break-in. The Cubans were put up in the Manger Hamilton Hotel. E. Howard Hunt assembles his "Miami team" in the Hamilton Manger Hotel in Washington under the guise of an Ameritas sales meeting. There are Barker, Martinez, Sturgis, and de Diego (who registers under the name Jose Piedra, a brother-in-law who has been shot down over the Bay of Pigs), as well as a new addition, Virgilio Gonzalez, a professional locksmith who is a loyal follower of Carlos Prio's. Hunt tells them that if they help the White House now, "it would be a decisive factor at a later date for obtaining help in the liberation of Cuba." He briefs them on the target: the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex. He says they will be looking for evidence that Fidel Castro has secretly contributed $1 million to George McGovern. Hunt feels certain that this challenge will pump up the Cubans for the upcoming mission.
  
• 5/25/1972 Nixon had dinner with Brezhnev in Moscow and saw a performance of Swan Lake at the Bolshoi.
  
• 5/25/1972 In Washington, Liddy shot out the floodlights at the rear door of McGovern's headquarters in preparation for an anticipated later entry.
  
• 5/26/1972 Nixon and Brezhnev sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), the first agreement to limit the number and type of nuclear weapons systems. (Nat Geographic Aug 05) Nixon hosted a dinner for the Soviet leadership at the residence of the US ambassador, and later signed the SALT Treaty in the Kremlin.
  
• 5/26/1972 The Cubans checked into the Watergate hotel, posing as representatives of a phony firm called Ameritas (or it was a real firm with with Bernard Barker was closely associated). They failed to penetrate the DNC that night via a banquet room. Across the street, McCord and Baldwin were in the Howard Johnsons monitoring the DNC, though from their vantage point they could only see a small part of the DNC offices. In addition, the DNC offices were on the sixth floor, while their room at Hojos was on the fourth. According to Hunt, the operation failed because a door alarm that McCord was supposed to have done something about was still working. Actually, researcher Bob Fink talked with the building's maintenance supervisor, Royce Lea, and found that there was never any alarm anywhere in the area Hunt claimed he saw one. Fink: "We crawled through the building, tracing the supposed movements of the burglars, and it was obvious that the break-ins couldn't have happened the way McCord and the others said. They'd have had to walk through concrete walls, and go through doors where there were no doors." (Secret Agenda p145) Hunt wrote later that McCord told him that the DNC offices were usually empty after 10pm, though the security logbooks show that the DNC was routinely occupied until after midnight. (Undercover p233)
  
• 5/27/1972 Nixon spent the day in Leningrad, then returned to Moscow.
  
• 5/27/1972 A second break-in attempt late tonight. There seven of them, including McCord, and all wore business suits. They signed into a security visitors log (these pages were later torn out), McCord explaining that they were going to the Federal Reserve Board on the eighth floor. The FRB had been burglarized recently, and security had been tightened. McCord knew that the FRB guard was due to make his rounds at about their time of entry. If the guard glanced at the visitors' log, and then saw no one in the Federal Reserve's offices, he would immediately become suspicious. Martinez recalled, "It all seemed funny to me. Eight men going to work at midnight…Then we went up to the eighth floor, walked down to the sixth and do you believe it, we couldn't open that door, and we had to cancel the operation…all the time while we were working on the door, McCord would be going to the eighth floor. It is still a mystery to me what he was doing there. At 2:00am I went up to tell him about our problems, and there I saw him talking to two guards. What happened? I thought. Have we been caught? No, he knew the guards. So I did not ask questions, but I thought maybe McCord was working there." Hunt's account of the second break-in in his memoirs is clearly wrong, or perhaps deliberately falsified. (Undercover p225) Gonzalez was unable to pick the lock to the DNC door, saying that he required special tools. Hearing about this, Liddy was concerned that Gonzalez had damaged the lock so as to make it obvious that a break-in had been attempted; Liddy came over to the Watergate at 2:55am to check it out personally. Liddy then told Gonzalez to fly to Miami immediately to pick up the necessary tools.
  
• 5/27-28/1972 A covert unit of President Nixon's "Plumbers" installs surveillance equipment in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington's Watergate hotel and office complex. The Washington police report an attempt to unscrew a lock on the door of the Committee's office between 11 p.m. and 8 a.m., but do not know as yet who tried to force the lock. Some of the five men caught burglarizing the same offices six weeks later (see 2:30 a.m.June 17, 1972) are currently registered at the Watergate Hotel, according to subsequent police investigations. [Washington Post, 6/18/1972; Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum, 7/3/2007] Change of Plans - According to one of the burglary team (see April-June 1972), Eugenio Martinez, the original plan centers on a fake "banquet" in the Watergate hotel for their fake company, the Ameritus Corporation, to be held in a private dining room that has access to the elevators. While team leader and White House aide E. Howard Hunt hosts the banquet, Martinez and the other burglars will use the elevator to go to the DNC offices and "complete the mission." Virgilio Gonzalez, a locksmith, will open the door; Frank Sturgis, Reinaldo Pico, and Felipe de Diego will act as lookouts; Bernard Barker will get the documents; Martinez will take photographs; and James McCord will "do his job," apparently involving electronics that Martinez does not understand. First Time Failure - Apparently they do not follow their plan. Instead, Hunt and the seven members of what Martinez calls "McCord's army" enter the Watergate complex at midnight, and they enter and sign in under the eye of a policeman. McCord explains that they are all going to work at the Federal Reserve offices on the eighth floor, an explanation Martinez feels is shaky. They are unable to get in through the doors of the sixth floor, and are forced to cancel the operation. Martinez recalls that while the others attempt to get in to the sixth floor, McCord is busy doing something else on the eighth floor; at 2 a.m., he sees McCord on the eighth floor talking to two guards. What McCord is doing, Martinez does not know. "I did not ask questions, but I thought maybe McCord was working there," he will later recall. "It was the only thing that made sense. He was the one who led us to the place and it would not have made sense for us to have rooms at the Watergate and go on this operation if there was not someone there on the inside." Hunt is furious at the failure to get into the DNC offices, and reschedules the operation for the next night. Gonzales flies to Miami and brings back his entire set of lockpicking tools. Martinez questions the laxity of the planthe lack of floor plans, information about the elevators, knowledge of the guards' schedules, and no contingency plans for failure. Hunt tells him, through Barker: "You are an operative. Your mission is to do what you are told and not to ask questions." Success - The second try is successful. Gonzalez and Sturgis get through the doors and usher everyone in, with one of them calling over their walkie-talkie, "The horse is in the house." Martinez recalls taking "thirty or forty" photographs of campaign contributor documents, and McCord plants three phone taps, telling the others that while the first two might be discovered, the third will not. They return to their hotel rooms about 5 a.m. [Harper's, 10/1974]
  
• 5/27/1972 Richard Nixon is nearing the end of the first-ever summit to be held between American and Soviet presidents. Nixon is preparing to make a television speech to the Soviet people. Five thousand miles away in Washington, the first of several illegal entries into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in the Watergate complex is taking place. On his way home from the Soviet Union, Nixon stopped to visit the Shah of Iran. The Shah wanted to arm the Iraqi Kurds to distract Baghdad's government during a border dispute. Nixon and Kissinger gave him the OK and in fact got the CIA to help arm the Kurds with Communist-origin weapons to establish "plausible deniability." (NYT, Safire 2/5/1976; Pike Report) The Kurds really only trusted the US, though they had sometimes allied themselves with Iraq's Communists and the Soviet Union. Kurdish leader Mustafa al-Barzani had spent a dozen years in the USSR and spoke Russian. Barzani said, however, that the Kurds were "ready to become the 51st state" of the US. (Pike Report, London Times 11/26-28/1974)
  
• 5/28/1972 Nixon made a live TV address to the people of the US and USSR: "Let our goal now be a world free of fear..."
  
• 5/28/1972 A third break-in attempt at the Watergate at about 11pm. Gonzalez returned from Miami with the tools he needed. This time they intended to tape open the locks to the doors leading from the underground garage to the basement stairwell. Shortly after 11pm, Hunt and four Cubans succeeded in getting inside, but an hour later Barker and his men left after photographing only a small amount of documents on Larry O'Brien's desk. Then McCord, after placing some bugs, ordered them to leave. Hunt was disappointed by the results (Undercover p227-28) but Liddy remembers that he and Hunt were "delighted" with how the operations had gone. (Will p233) The photos had been taken on O'Brien's desk, but after being in McCord's possession for several days, they appear to have changed. The man who developed them, Michael Richardson (of Rich's Photos in Miami), later told the FBI that the film he developed for Barker 6/10/1972 showed surgically-gloved hands holding down political documents against the background of a "shag-type rug." The FBI determined that no such rug was in the Watergate rooms, but Alfred Baldwin's room in the Hojo did have a shag rug. (Secret Agenda p156-7)
  
• 5/29/1972 Monitoring of phones in the DNC began as Alfred Baldwin moved to a room on a higher floor of the Hojo to improve reception. Baldwin was the only person assigned to monitor conversations, and he did it on an ad hoc basis. If the bug on O'Brien's phone had actually worked, then Baldwin would have been expected to monitor two bugs at once. Baldwin and McCord both claim that no tape recorders were used, despite the fact that two recorders were available in the room. Baldwin's hurriedly scribbled accounts of phone conversations were useless as evidence. Liddy wondered about this, but McCord gave him ridiculous reasons for not using recorders. (Will p235; Secret Agenda p162) Liddy told Jim Hougan: "It was the most ridiculous fucking electronic surveillance operation I've ever seen. With all the equipment we had, the money he spent…goddamn it, he could probably have gotten what he needed at the Radio Shack." McCord took Baldwin's scribblings and sent the summaries to Liddy; the summaries were the basis for the Gemstone File, which was destroyed by Magruder shortly after the Watergate arrests. McCord wasn't even able to effectively tune in to the one bug until around 6/1. The one in O'Brien's office didn't seem to be working. This bug, according to Liddy, was supposed to be a very sophisticated one that McCord paid $30,000 for.
  
• 5/29/1972 Watergate guard Leroy Brown notified the police that there had been an attempted break-in over the weekend. Police noted an attempt to unscrew the DNC's lock from its front door, and this effort had damaged the lock.
  
• 5/30/1972 Ehrlichman memo to Nixon about Victor Marchetti: "You will recall that Dick Helms asked you for help" in dealing with Marchetti. "We got Helms the necessary help to file an action against Marchetti and the District Court has entered a comprehensive injunction against Marchetti disclosing any secrets."
  
• 5/30/1972 Bremer's arraignment; his attorney entered a plea of not guilty due to insanity.
  

[Peter Lemkin]

Now, all you have to do, is to insert hyperlinks to all the citations - then you'll have the ULTIMATE Deep Political Universal Chrono-book! Only kidding....it would take you another lifetime. Approximately how much of the total have you now posted? Thanks again for all of this work. ::thumbsup:: One minor formatting question: In the beginning, when I copied and pasted each entry you had, it would paste in a box; now they no longer are in a box - did you change the way you are cutting and pasting? The box was a nice feature to find the beginning and end of an entry [for any needed re-arrangement or locating quickly a time period]. Very likely you have no idea what I'm talking about - if so, ignore. The boxes can be created on my version, but are difficult to do with such large entries.

[Tracy Riddle]

Peter, I'm not doing anything differently, but maybe there was a forum software upgrade in the last several months that changed the formatting? Anyway, I don't know what percentage remains to be posted - more than 50%. Other years are not quite as detailed because my focus was on the late 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s.

[Tracy Riddle]

• 6/1/1972 Nixon addressed Congress on his recent visit to Moscow; he declared that "the foundation has been laid for a new relationship between the two most powerful nations in the world."
  
• 6/1/1972 The first phone logs prepared by Baldwin and McCord were handed to Liddy. There was nothing of value in terms of political intelligence, so Liddy didn't turn them over to Mitchell. (Will p235-6)
  
• 6/3/1972 Foreign ministers of the Four Powers sign the final protocol of the agreement that becomes the founding document for arrangements in Berlin until the reunification of Germany.
  
• 6/4/1972 Angela Davis is cleared by an all-white San Jose, California jury of charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy.
  
• 6/5/1972 After days of worthless results from the Watergate bugs, Liddy decided to deliver the logs to Magruder to give to Mitchell. But Magruder decided that the conversations about peoples' personal lives were of no interest, so he didn't forward them to Mitchell. (American Life p209)
  
• 6/6/1972 Nixon memo to Mitchell, urging that McGovern be linked in the public's mind to people like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
  
• 6/6/1972 McGovern victory over Humphrey in California primary.
  
• 6/7/1972 James Reston commented in his column, "The question now...is whether the American voters are ready for a radical change in US foreign and domestic policy." Reston almost seemed to endorse Nixon.
  
• 6/8/1972 Congress passed a bill for federal aid to college and university students. It includes a provision delaying court-ordered busing for up to 18 months and allocates $2 billion to help elementary and high schools desegregate.
  
• 6/8/1972 Kleindienst was confirmed as Attorney General.
  
• 6/8/1972 Lengthy Pat Buchanan memo on campaign strategy. He warned that as McGovern was trying to campaign as the "outsider" candidate, RN had to take that stance himself (attacking the elite Left in and out of government). "We need to shed the 'in bed with Big Business' image." Stand for less government and spending and lower taxes. "McGovern can be charged, among Democrats, with 'packing' caucuses, with 'stealing' the nomination from the more popular candidate, with not representing the average man in the Democratic party...we should also wait until his people take delegates from Wallace - and then charge him with 'stealing' delegates from a man in a hospital bed...To reverse the underdog image of Mr. McGovern - we should, upon his nomination, cease speaking of an easy win...We should leak polls showing us worse off than we are..." Also play up the economic devastation caused by McGovern's defense cuts: "scare the hell out of the public...Shultz and/or John Connally should give a hair-raising speech on what the McGovern proposals would mean to American society, and the American economy and the stock market...When McGovern backs off some of these Black radical schemes, as back off he must - we should continue to hang them around his neck - and then mail his recantation to the black media...speakers should argue against the McGovern integration proposals - and in favor of retaining the integrity and value of ethnic neighborhoods..." Warn Americans that a McGovern administration "would leave our prisoners in Hanoi." Use quotes against him from Democratic opponents in the primaries.
  
• 6/8/1972 Liddy later said this was the day he passed the first envelope of intelligence from the first DNC break-in to Magruder to be sent to Mitchell. (Will)
  
• 6/8/1972 Nixon spoke with Mitchell on the phone from 10:30 to 10:51am.
  
• 6/9-12/1972 Kissinger makes a private visit to Tokyo, and talks with Japanese leaders about security and economic issues.
  
• 6/9/1972 (Nine days prior to the Watergate break-in) A front-page article runs in the Washington Post stating that a prostitution ring has been uncovered by the FBI that is "headed by a Washington attorney and staffed by secretaries and office workers from Capital Hill and involved at least one White House secretary." Among evidence seized during this investigation are address books that name not only the hookers, but their clients.
  
• 6/9/1972 Washington Star published an article by Winston Groom and Woody West, "Capitol Hill Call-Girl Ring" "The FBI here has uncovered a high-priced call girl ring allegedly headed by a Washington attorney and staffed by secretaries and office workers from Capitol Hill and involving at least one White House secretary, sources said today. A 22-count indictment returned today by a federal grand jury names Phillip M. Bailley, 30, as head of the operation. Sources close to the investigation said that among the clients of the call girl operation were a number of local attorneys holding high positions in the Washington legal community and one lawyer at the White House. The clients were not named in the indictment, but sources at the US Attorney's Office said some of them will be called to testify at the trial. The indictment, handed down this morning before US District Court Chief Judge John J. Sirica, alleges that Bailley violated the Mann Act…" According to prosecutor John Rudy, within an hour of the Star's article being published, John Dean called Rudy to say that they were very concerned about White House personnel being involved, since it was an election year. Rudy brought over to the White House Bailley's address books to check the names involved. Dean's secretary copied all of the pages. People in both parties were prominently listed in it. (Secret Agenda p172-3)
  
• 6/9/1972 Magruder asked Liddy whether he could organize a second break-in; Liddy said he would. Magruder said he would have a decision for Liddy by the following Monday. Liddy writes that Magruder felt the results of the bugging were a waste of time and money, and asked if the defective bug on O'Brien's phone could be fixed. (Will p236-7)
  
• 6/9/1972 Magruder turned over transcripts to Mitchell, who was not satisfied with the information. Mitchell would later heatedly deny this allegation, calling it a "palpable, damnable lie."
  
• 6/9/1972 McCord rented office space at the Arlington Towers complex in Rossyln, Virginia. There he established a new firm, Security International Inc., headed by a former CIA officer named William Shea (whose wife, Theresa, had previously worked as McCord's secretary). The company had signed 25 to 30 (never identified) new clients in its first nine months of existence. (3/28/1973 McCord testimony) The high-security Arlington Towers was the domestic staging ground for CIA/military/State Dept pacification programs in Vietnam, including Phoenix. After the Watergate break-in, Lou Russell continued to work for McCord's company.
  
• 6/9/1972 Nixon phoned Mitchell twice today (10:34-10:47am and 4:55-5:07pm).
  
• 6/10/1972 (Saturday) Nixon memo to Buchanan; he charged that the media was trying to help McGovern get elected by portraying him in as favorable a light as possible. "It is very important in terms of the final campaign that the media be effectively discredited." Around this time, polls showed that if the election were held now, Nixon would get between 43% and 53% (depending on Wallace being in the race), with McGovern at 30% to 34%. 1
  
• 6/11/1972 (Sunday) Nixon called Mitchell from 10:41 to 10:54am.
  
• 6/12/1972 (Monday) Numerous memos circulating through the White House on political campaign strategy.
  
• 6/12/1972 Liddy claimed this was the day he received approval for the second break-in at the DNC; Magruder told him to photograph "everything" in the Democrats' files, specifically Larry O'Brien's desk. The bugging devices were a secondary objective. Magruder sounded like the matter was urgent, and Liddy believed that what Magruder meant was to find any scandalous, derogatory information O'Brien had about Nixon. Liddy also found out on this day that Gordon Strachan was aware of the break-in. (Will p237)
  
• 6/12/1972 The hardcore X-rated film Deep Throat, starring Linda Lovelace, premieres.
  
• 6/12/1972 McCord instructed Baldwin to visit the DNC's headquarters, using a pretext, to pinpoint the location of O'Brien's office. Baldwin pretended to be a friend of Spencer Oliver, who was out of town. He was then introduced to Oliver's secretary Maxie Wells, whose desk key was later found on Eugenio Martinez when he was arrested. But McCord already knew where O'Brien's office was, so Baldwin appears to have been sent to learn the location of her desk. Liddy told Jim Hougan he knew nothing about this matter. (Secret Agenda p178-9)
  
• 6/14/1972 (Wednesday) EPA announces a ban on the chemical pesticide DDT to take effect 12/31.
  
• 6/14/1972 Liddy told Hunt about the plans; Hunt was skeptical: "Looks like high risk, low gain to me."
  
• 6/14/1972 Actor Warren Beatty holds the fifth concert-fundraiser for McGovern at Madison Square Garden; this one features the re-united Simon & Garfunkel.
  
• 6/15/1972 (Thursday) Liddy, Magruder and others met with Mitchell. The meeting was not about the DNC bugging, and others were at the meeting who did not know about it. According to Liddy, he simply left a package of DNC transcripts on Mitchell's desk. Liddy told him that "the problem we have" would be fixed that weekend, and Mitchell nodded. Liddy began to tell him about some of the pranks he had planned for McGovern in Miami, but Mitchell told him to cease and desist. (Will) Mitchell denied every receiving an envelope from Liddy, and scarcely remembered meeting with him that day. This was the last time Liddy would speak with Mitchell.
  
• 6/16/1972 (Friday) Judge Charles Richey ordered that Phillip M. Bailley be committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital for a psychiatric examination.
  
• 6/16/1972 Mitchell, Magruder and other administration officials left for San Clemente.
  
• 6/16/1972 At the National Airport, Jack Anderson encounters Frank Sturgis, whom he has known since the early 60s. With him were two Cubans, including Bernard Barker. (The Anderson Papers) There was later some question whether Anderson had really gone to Cleveland as he said he had. But according to Jim Hougan, Anderson did speak that night in Cleveland, at the annual dinner meeting of the Sigma Delta Chi, a fraternity of professional journalists. (Willoughby [Ohio] News-Herald, 6/19/1972)
  
• 6:15 PM It was a hot, humid night in Washington. At 6:15pm, McCord left the CRP offices and drove to the Howard Johnson's. He went up to room 723, where Alfred Baldwin was waiting. McCord had Baldwin run out to get some batteries, and left McCord alone for some time. Meanwhile, Lou Russell had gone to Benedict, Maryland to establish an alibi among some neighbors of his daughter, and then drove to the Howard Johnson's motel.
  
• 8 PM McCord was seated in the ground-floor restaurant of the Hojo's. Peyton George, a former FBI agent, and his son, stopped at the Hojo's for an ice cream. George saw McCord, they chatted briefly, and then George left. Sturgis and Martinez entered the Hojo's restaurant to meet McCord. In the process, Sturgis literally bumped into actor Burt Lancaster. "He said he was in town to make a movie and, later, when I got out of jail, I went to see it. Burt Lancaster in Scorpio. It's funny the movie's about this CIA guy who's betrayed by the agency. Sorta like what happened to us, y'know? I mean, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that Watergate was a CIA setup. We were just pawns. Anyway, I met Burt Lancaster." (Secret Agenda p183) Three restaurant employees recalled seeing McCord, Sturgis, Martinez, and Gonzalez dine together at the Watergate Hotel, though Sturgis would deny that McCord and Gonzalez were there. Around this time, Lou Russell arrived at the Howard Johnson's. He would tell the FBI he dined there from 8:30 to 10:30pm, did not go there to see McCord, and only went in there by coincidence. Russell would tell conflicting stories about why he was there that night. McCord left the Watergate, saying he was going to the Hojo's. In fact he went to his office at CRP. He talked to security officer Millicent Penny' Gleason, and told her, "Penny, I want to thank you for what you've done for our office." Her impression was that his remarks seemed more like a "goodbye" than a "thank you." (7/1/1972 FBI interview) McCord returned to the Howard Johnson's. Baldwin returned to the room with the batteries, and then McCord left to buy some speaker wire. Apparently, McCord called Liddy and told him that the lights were still on in the DNC. Lou Russell left the restaurant around 10:15pm and drove again to his daughter's house in Benedict. McCord signed in at the Watergate office building at this time according to security logs. He took the elevator to the 8th floor and began to neutralize a series of locks on doors leading from the building's stairwell to corridors and reception areas on the 8th and other floors. One some doors, McCord wedged open the locking mechanisms with balls of paper, then placed strips of tape vertically along the edge of each door (not horizontally as Liddy had wanted, hoping to make it look like the work of a maintenance man), covering the latches and making sure that each lock was held in a permanently open position. It took McCord about 10 minutes to do this, and he put tape on many more doors than was necessary (including ones on the 8th floor, where the Federal Reserve was located). Then he went to the room in the Watergate that Hunt and Liddy had rented. He told them the doors were secured, and then returned to the Howard Johnson's. The DNC offices were still occupied. Security guard Frank Wills arrived at the Watergate to begin his midnight-to-8am shift. He discovered the doors stuffed with paper and tape, and assumed maintenance men had done it. He took the tape off the locks and reported the discovery in his log.
  
• 6/17/1972 (Saturday) DNC volunteer Bruce Givner, the last person in the DNC offices, left the building. Givner and Frank Wills went across the street for something to eat at Hojo's. He had turned off the lights before leaving. Hunt and Liddy came back to the Watergate hotel, though McCord falsely told them that the lights were still on in the DNC. Hunt shared the elevator with French film actor Alain Delon (Lancaster's co-star in Scorpio). After about 20 minutes, Wills brought his take-out order back to the Watergate.
  
• 6/17/1972 Wills talked with his supervisor, Bobby Jackson, on the phone; Jackson told Wills to check the other doors in the building for tape. Wills delayed in carrying out the order, nearly an hour.
  
• Around 1am, Lou Russell arrived back at the Howard Johnson's. Around this time, McCord left Baldwin in the hotel room. McCord claims he went to the Watergate's underground garage, made sure the doors were still open, then reported to Hunt, Liddy and the Cubans that all was well. But Wills had cleared the tape from those doors an hour earlier. McCord left Hojo's about 12:50, and arrived at Hunt's room at 1:05am. They had demanded an explanation for McCord's 15-minute delay, and he explained that he had checked the locks.
  
• 1:10 am The entry team arrived in the underground garage at the B-2 level of the Watergate office building. They found the door locked and the tape missing. McCord said that the tape must have just been removed in the last few minutes. Gonzalez picked the lock, Sturgis stood guard, and McCord, Barker and Martinez returned to talk to Hunt and Liddy about what to do. Hunt wanted to scrap the operation. (Undercover p240-1; Will p244) But McCord wanted to go ahead, according to Hunt and Liddy. Amazingly, McCord denies going back to talk to Hunt and Liddy, saying he instead returned to the Hojo's and rejoined Baldwin. McCord then called Liddy to tell him to proceed with the operation. (Piece of Tape p29-30) Baldwin says McCord did not return to the hotel room. Barker and Martinez agree with Hunt and Liddy. Meanwhile, Sturgis and Gonzalez had gotten past the first door (retaping it), and set to work on another door. Barker and Martinez rejoined them. Finally, the door to the DNC had to be removed from its hinges. McCord had disappeared by this time. Martinez: "He said he had to go someplace. We never knew where he was going."
  
• 1:40am (approx) McCord rejoined the burglary team. By this time, Frank Wills had finally checked the other doors. He also discovered that the basement door had been re-taped. He returned to the lobby to talk to Federal Reserve Board guard Walter Hellams, who insisted that the police be called. Wills hesistated, deciding to check with his superiors, Fletcher Pittman and Bobby Jackson.
  
• 1:47am Wills finally called the Washington Police Dept, reporting a possible burglary in the Watergate office building.
  
• 1:52am A police unit was requested to respond to the Watergate. Officer Carl Shoffler and two plainclothesmen, who were a block and a half away, picked up the call. Wills showed the cops the taped doors in the garage. They went upstairs, and Martinez heard them coming. McCord had falsely told Martinez that he had removed the tape from the garage door so as not to attract attention. He told Barker to turn off his walkie-talkie so the static wouldn't be heard.
  
• 2:30am Shoffler and his colleagues found McCord and crew hiding behind a desk in the secretarial cubical next to O'Brien's office. The cops were surprised to see the men wearing business suits and surgical gloves. Martinez tried but failed to dispose of the key to Maxie Wells' desk that he possessed. Baldwin, meanwhile, was watching the whole thing through the window from his room at Hojo's, and reporting it to Hunt and Liddy. As cops were coming into the building, Wills inadvertently let out of the lobby an "unidentified white male," whom the police were unable to locate. (Secret Agenda p203) Hunt and Liddy failed to santize their own room or the Cubans' room; Hunt had insisted that the Cubans register at the Watergate, collected their ID's before the burglary, and then placed them in a briefcase and left it in their hotel room. Hunt then told the Cubans to keep the keys to their room while going on the break-in. Martinez later said, "I don't know why. Even today, I don't know." The result was that the police very quickly traced them to the White House. At police headquarters, the arrested men had little to say; they were booked under aliases: "Frank Carter" (Barker), "Raoul Godoy" (Gonzalez), "Gene Valdez" (Martinez), "Frank Fiorini" (Sturgis) and "Edwin Martin" (McCord). They were carrying lock-picking equipment, surgical gloves, $2400 in sequentially numbered new $100 bills, blank keys and screwdrivers, 39 rolls of film, two Minolta cameras, a light stand for document photography, false ID, three bugs, an ARI smoke detector converted into a room bug, and a pop-up telephone desk directory belonging to Martinez that contained the listing "Howard Hunt W. House." Hunt headed for his old office at the EOB. He placed some materials in the safe and took out $10,000 in cash to be used for bail and legal fees. He then called Douglas Caddy to represent the arrested men; Caddy had ties to the Mullen company. (Secret Agenda p216) Hunt then went to the building that housed the Mullen company, phoned Clara Barker to tell her of her husband's arrest.
  
• 3:30am Baldwin drove the van full of McCord's electronic equipment to McCord's house and left it there. The FBI failed to search McCord's premises, which prompted McCord to ridicule the FBI in an article for the Armed Forces Journal ("What the FBI Almost Found," 8/1973).
  
• 4:00am By this time, the Washington Post had learned of the break-in. Carl Shoffler had called the paper since the suspects weren't talking. Within a few hours of the arrests, Liddy was shredding documents at CRP.
  
• 10:00am Police officer Gary Bittenbender, who had served as McCord's liaison between the CRP and police intelligence, recognized him and informed his superiors. Bittenbender would later tell the Senate that McCord said on the day of the arrests that the break-in was "a CIA operation." (Nedzi report p442-3)
  
• 2:30pm Police and FBI agents arrived at the Watergate Hotel and searched rooms 214 and 314, rented to the burglars. They found more surgical gloves, electronic equipment, $3200 in sequentially numbered $100 bills, an address book belonging to Bernard Barker that contained the entry "H.H. W.H." with Hunt's White House telephone number. Among's Barker's belongings was a check for $6.36 made out by Hunt to the Lakewood Country Club in Rockville, Maryland. FBI agents Dennis W. Fiene and Allen B. Gilbert conducted a "physical check" of the DNC's headquarters. They didn't find any surveillance equipment. The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Co. checked all the phones in the DNC and found no bugs.
  
• 6/17/1972 At the arraignment this afternoon, the judge asked McCord his occupation. "Security consultant," he replied. He admitted to having recently retired from the CIA. (All The President's Men p18)
  
• 6/17/1972 This afternoon, SS agent Michael Mastrovito made inquiries about McCord at the CIA, and was told that the agency was concerned about McCord's "stability" before he retired. Mastrovito agreed to downplay McCord's CIA ties. (Baker Report)
  
• 6/17/1972 Jeb Magruder phones John Dean in the Phillipines. John Dean takes the next available flight on Sunday, June 18 at 8:15am Phillipine Airlines flight 428 bound for Tokyo.
  
• 6/17/1972 Liddy receives a phone call at noon Washington time from Jeb Magruder. Magruder said that Mitchell wanted Liddy to find Dick Kleindienst and get McCord out of jail immediately. He was told to tell Kleindienst that "John sent you" and that it's a "personal request from John." (source: Will, recollections of Moore). Liddy and Moore went to Burning Tree Golf course at 12:30pm. Liddy told Kleindienst that the break-in, the publicly reported facts of which Kleindienst was already aware, was an intellige nce operation of the CRP and that Liddy, himself, had been in charge. Liddy then told him that he had a message from Mitchell to spring McCord and that it was a "personal request from John". Kleindienst's reaction, later reported to the Watergate committee, was "instantaneous and abrupt .... The relationship I had with Mr. Mitchell was such that I do not believe that he would have sent a person like Gordon Liddy to come out and talk to me about anything. He knew where he could find me twenty-four hours a day." Kleindienst flatly refused Liddy's request.
  
• Conversation between the President and Dean concerning June 17th. John Dean: The next point in time that I became aware of anything was on June 17th when I got the word that there had been this break in at the DNC and somebody from our Committee had been caught in the DNC. And I said, "Oh (expletive deleted)," you know, eventually putting the pieces together-- Richard Nixon: You knew who it was. John Dean: I knew it who it was. So I called Liddy on Monday morning ...
  
• 6/18/1972 (Sunday) At about 7am, McCord's deputy security chief, Robert Houston, arrived at CRP to remove certain files belonging to his boss. Two co-workers saw him "remove all of McCord's writings…accomplished this without any direction, as if the procedure were part of a prearranged plan." Houston told Penny Gleason that the papers were to be burned. Houston denied this at first, then he admitted he had taken a few things but returned them. (FBI interviews)
  
• 6/18/1972 Barker is identified as a wealthy real-estate man with ties to the GOP in Florida. McCord's ties to CRP and RNC are disclosed. Mitchell states that "this man and the other people involved were not operating either on our behalf or with our consent."
  
• 6/18/1972 CIA's chief of station in Miami sent to Langley a cable concerning Martinez, but did not mention his earlier reports about Hunt.
  
• 6/18/1972 G. Gordon Liddy goes to bed about 3 AM this morning and tells his wife: "There was trouble. Some people got caught. I'll probably be going to jail."
  
• 6/18/1972 Washington Post Story : 5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats' Office Here By Alfred E. Lewis
  
• 6/18/1972 Tony Ulasewicz in an interview with Colodny and Gettlin and later in his autobiography recalls that he received a telephone call on June 18th from Caulfield who was calling on behalf of John Dean. Ulasewicz was told to fly to Washington immediately.
  
• 6/18/1972 from The Haldeman Diaries: At Key Biscayne. The P is still over at Walker's this morning. I talked to him over the phone. I reported to him on Shultz's meeting with Meany yesterday, which came out to be pretty interesting. Meany had called him, wanting to meet with him, and so they had a game of golf during which Meany told him under no circumstances could he possibly support McGovern. That he was working to try and get Humphrey the nomination still, but if that failed he could not support McGovern. The big flap over the weekend has been news reported to me last night, then followed up with further information today, that a group of five people had been caught breaking into the Democratic headquarters (at the Watergate). Actually to plant bugs and photograph material. It turns out that there was a direct connection (with CRP), and Ehrlichman was very concerned about the whole thing. I talked to Magruder this morning, at Ehrlichman's suggestion, because he was afraid the statement that Mitchell was about to release was not a good one from our viewpoint. Magruder said that we plan to release the statement as soon as the fact that the Committee is involved is uncovered, which it now has been. It says that we've just learned that someone identified as an employee of the Committee was one of those arrested (James McCord, Jr., CRP's security coordinator). He runs a private security agency and was employed to install the system of security at the headquarters. He has a number of clients. He's not operating on our behalf or with our consent. We have our own security problems, not as dramatic as this but of a serious nature to us. We don't know if they're related but there's no place for this in a campaign. We would not permit or condone such a thing. The real problem here is whether anything is traceable to Gordon Liddy (formerly with the White House plumbers unit, and then with CRP). He (Liddy) says no, but Magruder is not too confident of that. They were thinking of getting Mardian back to Washington (Mitchell, Mardian, Magruder, and LaRue are out in California) to keep an eye on Liddy. (Mardian was formerly Assistant Attorney General in charge of internal security, now one of Mitchell's assistants at CRP. LaRue was CRP Deputy Director.) They think that McCord, our security guy, will be okay, but he's concerned about Liddy because of his lack of judgment and reliability. He's also concerned that two or three others are implicated. Apparently there's some cash and Magruder thought it was the DNC's, but it turns out it was ours. I talked to Ehrlichman after that and he thinks the statement is OK and we should get it out. I talked to Colson to tell him to keep quiet. It turned out that one of the people (implicated) was on our payroll until April 1. A guy named Howard Hunt, who was the guy Colson was using on some of his Pentagon Papers and other research type stuff. Colson agreed to stay out of it and I think maybe he really will. I don't think he is actually involved, so that helps. So far the P is not aware of all this, unless he read something in the paper, but he didn't mention it to me.
  
• 6/19/1972 (Monday) The Supreme Court rules that no domestic group or individual could be wiretapped without a warrant.
  
• 6/19/1972 Hunt's name is found in address books of Barker and Martinez. Clawson later says that Hunt's employment was terminated on this day, though the White House claimed it was 3/29.
  
• 6/19/1972 Joan Hall memo to Colson: "Approximately 6 or 8 weeks ago in a casual conversation, I asked Howard Hunt why he had not turned in any time sheets. He replied, 'That is being taken care of elsewhere.'"
  
• 6/19/1972 The CIA told the FBI that none of the arrested men were known to the Agency except for McCord. On or about this day, Martinez's case officer Robert Ritchie was ordered to return immediately from Miami and drive directly to headquarters without talking to anyone. (From Ritchie's testimony before a federal grand jury; Secret Agenda p221)
  
• 6/19/1972 Ziegler tells the press that he will not comment on this "third-rate burglary attempt" and predicts that "certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is."
  
• 6/19/1972 L. Patrick Gray memo laying out Sturgis' background in detail. It mentioned that he was "now associated with organized crime activities..."
  
• 6/19/1972 Helms met with other Agency officials to discuss the implications of the break-in. Angleton expressed fear that the press might blame the affair on the CIA. After looking at photos of Hunt, Angleton was relieved to find that "I'd never seen him before in my life." Helms said nothing of his ties to Hunt. (Secret Agenda p220)
  
• 6/19/1972 It is announced that McCord has been fired. Nixon and Haldeman return to Washington.
  
• 6/19/1972 This evening, Magruder (having returned from California) burned the Gemstone files in his home fireplace.
  
• 6/19/1972 Bob Woodward talked on the phone with a high government source known as "Deep Throat." This person was already an "old friend" of Woodward's.
  
• 6/20/1972 Washington Post story by Bob Woodward. "In it was the information that Howard Hunt's name appeared in the burglars' address books, that one of Hunt's signed checks had been found on the person of one of the Cubans, and that Hunt had been a consultant to White House Special Counsel Charles Colson."
  
• 6/20/1972 A White House conversation between Nixon and Haldeman; the tape of the conversation later contained an 18.5 minute "gap." Nixon recalled that Haldeman said "half-jokingly...that maybe it would be better if we just said that yes, we were spying on the Democrats...because we were scared to death that a crazy man was going to become President and sell the country out to the Communists!" (RN)
  
• 6/20/1972 Richard Nixon telephones H.R. Haldeman and tells him to tell John Ehrlichman that "this whole group of Cubans is tied to the Bay of Pigs." When asked what the Bay of Pigs has to do with Watergate, Nixon replies: "Ehrlichman will know what I mean."
  
• 6/20/1972 Haldeman calls a meeting for 10:00am. The Meeting is held in Ehrlichman's Office. In Attendance: Haldeman, Mitchell, Kleindienst, Dean. After the meeting, Dean accompanied Kleindienst to the Justice building where they were joined by Henry Peterson. Dean wanted to get a hold of the FBI 302s. In testimony, Kleindienst stated: "The representation that he [Dean] made to me and to Mr. Petersen throughout was that he was doing this for the President of the United States and that he was reporting directly to the President."
  
• 6/20/1972 Presidential meeting. 11:26am - 12:45pm The 18.5 Minute Gap. The tape was most probably electronically erased. According to Colodny and Gettlin, the most likely candidate for the gap was Alexander Haig. They site the following: "... The gap has usually been attributed to a mistake on the part of Nixon's personal secretary Rose Mary Woods, and/or to a deliberate attempt by a mechanically clumsy president to erase information detrimental to him. But there was a more sinister aspect to the affair than has previously been understood, and it involves Haig and Buzhardt and an especially well-timed and dramatic revelation by Deep Throat."[SC,371] They also quote a passage in All the President's Men where Woodward and Bernstein report that sometime in the first week of November: "Deep Throat's message was short and simple: One or more of the tapes contained deliberate erasures."[quoted in SC,376] Haig was one of four people who knew of the erasure. If Nixon made the erasure, it makes his announcements around the date of its revelation puzzling. Quote from Silent Coup regarding Deep Throat: It may be that the inconsistencies in Woodward's and Bernstein's characterization of Deep Throat as a source are only the result of Woodward's attempt to hide his source and to lend appropriate literary drama to his book. Despite Woodward's demurrer, Deep Throat may have been a composite of several sources, as some historians and journalists have concluded. Despite Woodward's other demurrer about the source still being alive, Deep Throat may have had more than a touch of Buzhardt in him. The identity of Deep Throat is a phantom that is no longer of any importance to chase. It was always a cover story designed to lead detectives in the wrong direction, and has now outlived its usefulness. What is apparent is that in November of 1973, Chief of Staff Alexander Haig played a key role in feeding damaging information about the White House tapes to his former Navy briefer, Bob Woodward, on the eve of Nixon's Operation Candor, on which the president had pinned such high hopes.
  

4:35pm - 5:25pm Executive Office Building
Nixon:
Haldeman: [McCord's] on a regular monthly retainer, a fee.
Nixon: Does he have other clients?
Haldeman: And he had a regular monthly fee at the National Committee also. ... Apparently he set up, installed some television closed circuit monitoring stuff, and then they have six guards and some supervisors.... McCord, I guess, will say that he was working with the Cubans, he wanted to put this in for their own political reasons. But Hunt disappeared or is in the process of disappearing. He can undisappear if we want him to. He can disappear to a Latin American country. But at least the original thought was that that would do it, that he might want to disappear, (unintelligible) on the basis that these guys, the Cubans -- see, he was in the Bay of Pigs thing. One of the Cubans, [Bernard] Barker, the guy with the American name, was his deputy in the Bay of Pigs operation and so they're kind of trying to tie it to the Cuban nationalists...
Nixon: We are?
Haldeman: Yes. Now of course they're trying to tie these guys to Colson, [and] the White House.... It's strange -- if Colson doesn't run out, it doesn't go anywhere. The closest they come, he [Hunt] was a consultant t o Colson. We have detailed somewhat the nature of his consulting fee and said it was basically (unintelligible). I don't know.
Nixon: You don't know what he did?
Haldeman: I think we all knew that there were some--
Nixon: Intelligence.
Haldeman: --some activities, and we were getting reports, or some input anyway. But I don't think -- I don't think Chuck knew specifically that this was under way. ...
Nixon: Well, if he did ... second-guess...
Haldeman: He seems to take all the blame himself.
Nixon: Did he? Good.
Haldeman:He was saying this morning that it was damn stupid for him to not learn about the details and know exactly what was going on. ... They sweep [for bugs] this office and your Oval Office twice a week ....
Nixon: This Oval Office business [i.e. that taping system] complicates things all over.
Haldeman: They say it's extremely good. I haven't listened to the tapes.
Nixon: They're kept for future purposes.
Haldeman: Nobody monitors those tapes, obviously. They are kept stacked up and locked up in a super-secure -- there are only three people that know [about the system] ... If they get all the circumstantial stuff tie d together, maybe it's better ... to plead guilty, saying we were spying on the Democrats. Just let the Cubans say, we , McCord ... figured it was safe for us to use.
Nixon: Well, they've got to plead guilty.
Haldeman: ...[A]nd we [the Cubans] went in there to get this because we're scared to death that this crazy man's going to become President and sell the U.S. out to the communists...
Nixon: How was he [Hunt] directly involved?
Haldeman: He was across the street in the Howard Johnson Motel with a direct line of sight room, observing across the street. And that was the room in which they have the receiving equipment for the bugs.
Nixon: Well, does Hunt work for us or what?
Haldeman: No. Oh, we don't know. I don't know. I don't know if that's one -- that's something I haven't gotten an answer to, how -- apparently McCord had Hunt working with him, or Hunt had McCord working with him, and with these Cubans. They're all tied together. Hunt when he ran the Bay of Pigs thing was working with this guy Barker, one of the Cubans who was arrested.
Nixon: How does the press know about this?
Haldeman: They don't. Oh, they know Hunt's involved because they found his name in the address book of two of the Cubans, Barker's book and one of the other guy's books. He's identified as "White House." And also beca use one of the Cubans had a check from Hunt, a check for $690 or something like that, which Hunt had given to this Cuban to take back to Miami with him and mail. It was to pay his country club bill...
Nixon: Hunt?
Haldeman: Hunt, yes. Probably so he can pay non-resident dues at the country club or something. But anyway, they had that check, so that was another tie.
Nixon: Well, in a sense, if the Cubans--the fact that Hunt's involved with the Cubans or McCord's involved with the Cubans, here are the Cuban people.... My God, the committee isn't worth bugging in my opinion. That's my public line.
Haldeman: Except for this financial thing. They thought they had something going on that.
Nixon: Yes, I suppose.
Haldeman: But I asked that question: If we were going to all that trouble, why in the world would we pick the Democratic National Committee to do it to? It's the least fruitful source--

• 6/20/1972 Colson memo: "The last time that I recall meeting with Howard Hunt was mid-March...I also talked to him on the telephone the night George Wallace was shot simply to ask him for his reactions on what he thought might have been the cause of the attempted assassination. (Hunt was known [as] something of an expert [on] psychological warfare and motivations when in the CIA.)....[In February] both he and Liddy said that they had some elaborate proposals prepared for security activities for the Committee, but they had been unable to get approval from the Attorney General."
  
• 6/20/1972 FBI memo from agent Arnold L. Parham stated that Hunt was being used by the CIA on an ad hoc basis" at the same time he was employed by the White House.
  
• 6/21/1972 The FBI contacted James McCord at the DC jail, but he refused to cooperate and be interviewed. (FBI memo 8/3/73)
  
• 6/21/1972 FBI discovered two notebooks in Martinez's car at the Miami airport. An informant had told the CIA two days before that Martinez's car was there, but the Agency waited before telling the FBI. A parking stub showed that the car had been brought there after Martinez's arrest. One of the notebooks, written in Spanish, later disappeared without a trace. (Secret Agenda p226-7; Baker Report)
  
• 6/22 or 21/1972 A fire to destroy evidence occurred at McCord's home. Present was Lee R. Pennington, Jr, who claimed to have just "dropped in" and found McCord's wife, Pennington's secretary Donald Sweany and wife Lucille (McCord's secretary) burning every scrap of paper in the house belonging to McCord. McCord's wife claimed to have received a bomb threat via a telephone call from Houston, Texas on 6/19. The Ervin committee would fail to question McCord about the matter. Right after the fire, Pennington contacted his CIA case officer, Louis W. Vasaly, told him what had occurred, and Vasaly passed the information on to Paul Gaynor. (Nedzi report p973)
  
• 6/22/1972 Richmond News Leader editorialized that Democratic claims that Republicans were behind the Watergate break-in were "predictable election-year Mickey Mouse, of course, but surely the Democrats are pushing our sense of humor too far."
  
• 6/23/1972 Gov. Reagan announced that "espionage is not considered dishonorable" in political campaigns.
  
• 6/23/1972 At this time, Nixon's covert campaign to overthrow Salvador Allende's government is well under way.
  
• 6/23/1972 Nixon/Haldeman Oval Office meeting from 10:04 to 11:39am. The Smoking Gun Tape. President Nixon is recorded on his secret White House tapes talking to H.R. Haldeman about Howard Hunt. Nixon says: "... this Hunt, that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab, there's a hell of a lot of things ... This involves these Cubans, Hunt and a lot of hanky-panky ... just say (unintelligible) very bad to have this fellow Hunt, ah, he knows too damned much, if he was involved -- you happen to know that? If it gets out that this is all involved, the Cuba thing, it would be a fiasco. It would make the CIA look bad, it's going to make Hunt look bad, and it is likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing which we think would be very unfortunate -- both for the CIA and for the country ..."
  
• Haldeman wrote about the Watergate tapes: "In all of those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, [Nixon] was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination...After Kennedy was killed, the CIA launched a fantastic cover-up...The CIA literally erased any connection between Kennedy's assassination and the CIA...in fact, Counter Intelligence Chief James Angleton of the CIA called Bill Sullivan of the FBI and rehearsed the questions and answers they would give to the Warren Commission investigators." Haldeman seemed to be of the opinion that Castro was behind the assassination, and for some reason the CIA covered this up. (The Ends of Power 39) Syndicated columnist Christopher Matthews wrote 12/24/1995 that Haldeman "repeatedly denied ever writing the passage [about the Bay of Pigs]...Haldeman told me personally in the weeks just before his death that this particular passage in 'The Ends of Power,' was the creation of his ghost-writer." In Haldeman's book, Richard Nixon's former White House chief of staff describes a dramatic confrontation with CIA Director Richard Helms, after which Haldeman came to believe that Nixon knew that, somehow, the CIA was involved in the JFK assassination. After Stone used this information in his film, Matthews went to interview a dying Haldeman, who denied originating the passage and blamed it on his co-writer, Joseph DiMona. But Matthews overlooked the fact that in a paperback version of the book, Haldeman had written that the "writing style is DiMona's. The opinions and conclusions are essentially mine." (p. 422) Further, in an interview with Dr. Gary Aguilar in December of 1995, DiMona said the book went through five drafts. Haldeman made many changes, but none to that passage. In fact, on Feb. 15, 1978, DiMona made a similar comment to the Washington Post about Haldeman's editorial control, which Matthews either missed or ignored.
  

Haldeman: okay -that's fine. Now, on the investigation, you know, the Democratic break-in thing, we're back to the-in the, the problem area because the FBI is not under control, because Gray doesn't exactly know how to control them, and they have, their investigation is now leading into some productive areas, because they've been able to trace the money, not through the money itself, but through the bank, you know, sources - the banker himself. And, and it goes in some directions we don't want it to go. Ah, also there have been some things, like an informant came in off the street to the FBI in Miami, who was a photographer or has a friend who is a photographer who developed some films through this guy, Barker, and the films had pictures of Democratic National Committee letter head documents and things. So I guess, so it's things like that that are gonna, that are filtering in. Mitchell came up with yesterday, and John Dean analyzed very carefully last night and concludes, concurs now with Mitchell's recommendation that the only way to solve this, and we're set up beautifully to do it, ah, in that and that...the only network that paid any attention to it last night was NBC...they did a massive story on the Cuban...
Nixon: That's right.
Haldeman: thing.
Nixon: Right.
Haldeman: That the way to handle this now is for us to have Walters call Pat Gray and just say, "Stay the hell out of this...this is ah, business here we don't want you to go any further on it." That's not an unusual development,...
Nixon: Um huh.
Haldeman: ...and, uh, that would take care of it.
Nixon: What about Pat Gray, ah, you mean he doesn't want to?
Haldeman: Pat does want to. He doesn't know how to, and he doesn't have, he doesn't have any basis for doing it. Given this, he will then have the basis. He'll call Mark Felt in, and the two of them ...and Mark Felt wants to cooperate because...
Nixon: Yeah.
Haldeman: he's ambitious...
Nixon: Yeah.
Haldeman: Ah, he'll call him in and say, "We've got the signal from across the river to, to put the hold on this." And that will fit rather well because the FBI agents who are working the case, at this point, feel that's what it is. This is CIA.
Nixon: But they've traced the money to 'em.
Haldeman: Well they have, they've traced to a name, but they haven't gotten to the guy yet.
Nixon: Would it be somebody here?
Haldeman: Ken Dahlberg.
Nixon: Who the hell is Ken Dahlberg?
Haldeman: He's ah, he gave $25,000 in Minnesota and ah, the check went directly in to this, to this guy Barker.
Nixon: Maybe he's a ...bum.
Nixon: He didn't get this from the committee though, from Stans.
Haldeman: Yeah. It is. It is. It's directly traceable and there's some more through some Texas people in--that went to the Mexican bank which they can also trace to the Mexican bank...they'll get their names today. And pause)
Nixon: Well, I mean, ah, there's no way... I'm just thinking if they don't cooperate, what do they say? They they, they were approached by the Cubans. That's what Dahlberg has to say, the Texans too. Is that the idea?
Haldeman: Well, if they will. But then we're relying on more and more people all the time. That's the problem. And ah, they'll stop if we could, if we take this other step.
Nixon: All right. Fine.
Haldeman: And, and they seem to feel the thing to do is get them to stop?
Nixon: Right, fine.
Haldeman: They say the only way to do that is from White House instructions. And it's got to be to Helms and, ah, what's his name...? Walters.
Nixon: Walters.
Haldeman: And the proposal would be that Ehrlichman (coughs) and I call them in
Nixon: All right, fine.
Haldeman: and say, ah...
Nixon: How do you call him in, I mean you just, well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things.
Haldeman: That's what Ehrlichman says.
Nixon: Of course, this is a, this is a Hunt, you will-that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there's a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves. Well what the hell, did Mitchell know about this thing to any much of a degree?
Haldeman: I think so. I don 't think he knew the details, but I think he knew.
Nixon: He didn't know how it was going to be handled though, with Dahlberg and the Texans and so forth? Well who was the asshole that did? (Unintelligible) Is it Liddy? Is that the fellow? He must be a little nuts.
Haldeman: He is.
Nixon: I mean he just isn't well screwed on is he? Isn't that the problem?
Haldeman: No, but he was under pressure, apparently, to get more information, and as he got more pressure, he pushed the people harder to move harder on...
Nixon: Pressure from Mitchell?
Haldeman: Apparently.
Nixon: Oh, Mitchell, Mitchell was at the point that you made on this, that exactly what I need from you is on the--
Haldeman: Gemstone, yeah.
Nixon: All right, fine, I understand it all. We won't second-guess Mitchell and the rest. Thank God it wasn't Colson.
Haldeman: The FBI interviewed Colson yesterday. They determined that would be a good thing to do.
Nixon: Um hum.
Haldeman: Ah, to have him take a...
Nixon: Um hum.
Haldeman: An interrogation, which he did, and that, the FBI guys working the case had concluded that there were one or two possibilities, one, that this was a White House, they don't think that there is anything at the Election Committee, they think it was either a White House operation and they had some obscure reasons for it, non political,...
Nixon: Uh huh.
Haldeman: or it was a...
Nixon: Cuban thing-
Haldeman: Cubans and the CIA. And after their interrogation of, of...
Nixon: Colson.
Haldeman: Colson, yesterday, they concluded it was not the White House, but are now convinced it is a CIA thing, so the CIA turn off would...
Nixon: Well, not sure of their analysis, I'm not going to get that involved. I'm (unintelligible).
Haldeman: No, sir. We don't want you to.
Nixon: You call them in.
Nixon: Good. Good deal! Play it tough. That's the way they play it and that's the way we are going to play it.
Haldeman: O.K. We'll do it.
Nixon: Yeah, when I saw that news summary item, I of course knew it was a bunch of crap, but I thought ah, well it's good to have them off on this wild hair thing because when they start bugging us, which they have, we'll know our little boys will not know how to handle it. I hope they will though. You never know. Maybe, you think about it. Good!
**********
Nixon: When you get in these people when you...get these people in, say: "Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that" ah, without going into the details... don't, don't lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, "the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. And, ah because these people are plugging for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don't go any further into this case", period!
Haldeman: OK
Nixon: That's the way to put it, do it straight (Unintelligible)
Haldeman: Get more done for our cause by the opposition than by us at this point.
Nixon: You think so?
Haldeman: I think so, yeah.

• 6/23/1972 Nixon/Haldeman Oval Office meeting from 10:04 to 11:39am.
  

Haldeman: Now, on the investigation....we're back to the - in the, the problem area because the FBI is not under control, because Gray doesn't exactly know how to control them...their investigation is now leading into some productive areas, because they've been able to trace the money...through the bank...and it goes in some directions we don't want it to go...the way to handle this now is for us to have Walters call Pat Gray and just say, 'Stay the hell out of this...that is, ah, business here we don't want you to go any further on it.'...Mark Felt wants to cooperate because...he's ambitious...the FBI agents who are working the case, at this point, feel that's what it is. This is CIA.
Nixon: But they've traced the money to 'em.
Haldeman: Well, they have, they've traced to a name, but they haven't gotten to the guy yet...Ken Dahlberg...he gave $25,000 in Minnesota and...the check went directly in to this...guy Barker....and there's some more through some Texas people in - that went to the Mexican bank which they can also trace to the Mexican bank...
Nixon: ....well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things.
Haldeman: That's what Ehrlichman says.
Nixon: Of course, this is a, this Hunt, you will - that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab, there's a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves. Well, what the hell, did Mitchell know about this thing to any much of a degree?
Haldeman: I think so. I don't think he knew the details, but I think he knew.
Nixon: Well, who was the asshole that did? Is it Liddy? Is that the fellow? He must be a little nuts.
Haldeman: He is.
Nixon: Thank God it wasn't Colson.
Haldeman: The FBI interviewed Colson yesterday...they concluded it was not the White House, but are now convinced it is a CIA thing...
Nixon: Play it tough. That's the way they play it and that's the way we are going to play it...When you get in these people...say: 'Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that'...ah, without going into the details...don't, don't lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, 'the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing again. And, ah, because these people are plugging for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don't go any further into this case,' period!
Nixon/Haldeman meeting, Oval Office, 1:04-1:13pm: tape quality is often unintelligible.
Nixon: ...very bad, to have this fellow Hunt, ah, you know, ah, it's, he, he knows too damn much and he was involved, we happen to know that. And that it gets out that the whole, this is all involved in the Cuban thing, that it's a fiasco, and it's going to make the FB - ah, CIA look bad, it's going to make Hunt look bad, and it's likely to blow the whole, uh, Bay of Pigs thing which we think would be very unfortunate for CIA and for the country at this time, and for American foreign policy...I would just say, 'Look, it's because of the Hunt involvement...'
Nixon/Haldeman meeting, EOB office, 2:20-2:45pm
Haldeman: Gray had called Helms, which we knew, and said, uh, uh, I think we've run right into the middle of a CIA covert operation.
Nixon: Gray said that?
Haldeman: Yeah, and Helms said, 'Nothing, nothing we've got at this point'...well, the problem is that it tracks back to the Bay of Pigs...So at that point Helm's kind of got the picture...he said, 'We'll be very happy to be helpful to, ah, you know, and we'll handle everything you want'....One thing Helms did raise is he said that, that Gray, he asked Gray why he felt they're going into a CIA thing and Gray said, 'Well, because of the characters involved and the amount of money involved.'

• 6/24/1972 McCord called Lou Russell and urged him to remain silent. Baldwin said he was under a lot of pressure and might have to make a deal with authorities.
  
• 6/25/1972 Buchanan memo to Colson, urging that McGovern be pinned as the man who "personally urged Daniel Ellsburg [sic]...to fence those documents with the New York Times...McGovern is a hypocrite."
  
• 6/26/1972 The Air Force unveiled its new F-15 jet fighter.
  
• 6/26/1972 FBI interviewed Robert Swartburg, an employee of the architectural firm that designed the Miami Beach Convention Hall. He said that Bernard Barker, in late 1971 or early 1972 had tried to acquire the plans for the Democrats' convention center. (Interview obtained through FOIA; Secret Agenda p98)
  
• 6/28/1972 Helms instructed the FBI to "desist from expanding this investigation into other areas which may well, eventually, run afoul of our operations."
  
• 6/29/1972 Supreme Court voted 5-4 that the death penalty was cruel and unusual punishment.
  
• 6/29-30/1972 The FBI again searched the DNC for evidence of electronic surveillance, and found none.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 7/1972 Northern Ireland: British army conducted sweeps through Catholic areas of Belfast and Londonderry.
  
• 7/1/1972 Nixon signed a bill increasing Social Security benefits by 20%; from now on, the program was automatically set to rise with inflation.
  
• 7/1/1972 The Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division (ATFD) of the Internal Revenue Service was separated from the Internal Revenue Service and given full Bureau status in the Treasury Department. It is now called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF).
  
• 7/3-7/1972 NAACP holds its annual convention in Detroit.
  
• 7/3/1972 David Young told FBI agents that Howard Hunt had a secure phone line installed in the White House so he could talk secretly with various officials at the CIA.
  
• 7/5/1972 US Attorney's Office in Washington agreed not to prosecute Baldwin in return for his complete cooperation.
  
• 7/5/1972 For the third time, the FBI searched the DNC headquarters for signs of electronic surveillance, and found none.
  
• 7/6/1972 CIA memo from Gen. Vernon Walters says that a review of CIA files "provided no indication that [McCord] was involved in Cuban matters and that he was not assigned to the Bay of Pigs operation." The memo did qualify this by saying that McCord may have been involved in ways not reflected in any records. (Secret Agenda p10)
  
• 7/6-17/1972 US and Soviet space planners meet at the US Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.
  
• 7/7/1972 US and USSR sign an agreement detailing areas of science and technology in which scientists from both nations will cooperate.
  
• 7/8/1972 Nixon announces the sale of at least $750 million of US wheat, corn and grain to the Soviets.
  
• 7/10/1972 Alfred Baldwin gave two FBI agents a detailed account of his involvement in the Watergate break-in.
  
• 7/10/1972 CIA case officer Martin Lukoskie memo to Richard Helms: he had a meeting with Robert Bennett, president of the Robert R. Mullen Co. for lunch at the Hot Shoppes Cafeteria. "Mr. Bennett said that when E. Howard Hunt was connected with the incident, reporters from the Washington Post and he thought the Washington Star tried to establish a Seven Days in May' scenario with the Agency attempting to establish control over both the Republican and Democratic parties so as to be able to take over the country. Mr. Bennett said he was able to convince them that course was nonsense. He asked them why they should want to ruin himself, his Company and other innocent persons because the Company has innocently hired Hunt following his retirement from CIA. Mr. Bennett was aware that the original plan when Hunt was hired was for Hunt to become president of the Company after a few years. Instead, General Foods stated its wish to buy the Company whereupon Robert R. Mullen revealed that he had given an option for purchase to Mr. Bennett and that General Foods would need to negotiate with Mr. Bennett…Mr. Bennett said that the mission of the Watergate Five' was to rejuvenate the bugging apparatus in the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate. Hunt had told Bennett that they' had obtained such great stuff' from the bug before it failed to function that McCord et al were instructed to install new batteries, mikes, et cetera, to make it work again. Hunt never identified they' to Bennett…Mr. Bennett related that he has now established a back door entry' to the Edward Bennett Williams law firm which is representing the Democratic party in its suit…Mr. Bennett is prepared to go this route to kill off any revelation by Ed Williams of Agency association with the Mullen firm…" (Secret Agenda p330)
  
• 7/12/1972 George McGovern was nominated by the Democrats.
  
• 7/13/1972 McGovern chose Thomas Eagleton as his running-mate. McGovern said in his acceptance speech, "I think we learned from watching the Republicans four years ago as they selected their Vice-Presidential nominee that it pays to take a little more time."
  
• 7/14/1972 Jean Westwood is selected as the new chairman of the DNC.
  
• 7/14/1972 The NYT commented that the choice of Eagleton was "a casting director's ideal for a running mate."
  
• 7/16/1972 East Cost Mafia leader Thomas Eboli is shot and killed in NYC.
  
• 7/18/1972 Frank Sinatra gives evidence to a House commission investigating organized crime.
  
• 7/20/1972 Arsonists break into the empty Texas School Book Depository building in Dallas, Texas, spread gasoline on five floors and set it on fire. It is saved from destruction by the overhead sprinkler system as well as by a rapid response from the fire department. Damage from the blaze is minimal. "It was definitely arson," an assistant fire chief tells reporters, "we found gasoline cans on five floors and the smell of gasoline was all through the building."
  
• 7/22/1972 E. Howard Hunt visits CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia to meet with General Cushman. Hunt requests alias documentation, a fake driver's license and "pocket litter." Cushman secretly records this meeting.
  
• 7/23/1972 At the height of bloodletting in Northern Ireland, the British government considered trying to end the sectarian conflict by forcibly moving hundreds of thousands of Catholics to the Irish Republic. But the top secret contingency plan, dated today, was rejected out of concern the government would have had to be "completely ruthless" in carrying it out, and that it would have provoked outrage at home and abroad, especially in the United States. Signed by Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend, the plan called for a "massive reinforcement of troops" in the province accompanied by "searches, interrogation and possibly internment" against Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups. If that failed, another suggested solution involved either redrawing the border or a "compulsory transfer of population" affecting more than a fourth of the province's 1.5 million residents. More than 200,000 Catholics would be moved from Northern Ireland to the Irish Republic or "into homogenous enclaves within Northern Ireland." A similar number of Protestants living in lands ceded to the Irish Republic would be moved into what remained of Northern Ireland. (AP 1/1/03)
  
• 7/25/1972 The Tuskegee syphilis experiment story broke first in the Washington Star on July 25, 1972. It became front-page news in the New York Times the following day. Senator Edward Kennedy called Congressional hearings, at which Buxtun and HEW officials testified. As a result of public outcry the CDC and PHS appointed an ad hoc advisory panel to review the study. It determined the study was medically unjustified and ordered its termination. As part of the settlement of a class action lawsuit subsequently filed by the NAACP, the U.S. government paid $9 million (unadjusted for inflation) and agreed to provide free medical treatment to surviving participants and to surviving family members infected as a consequence of the study.
  
• 7/26/1972 McGovern said he was "1000% for Tom Eagleton…no intention of dropping him from the ticket."
  
• 7/31/1972 Bremer's trial began in Upper Marlboro, Maryland.
  
• 8/1/1972 Eagleton withdraws as McGovern's running-mate.
  
• 8/1/1972 Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported in the Washington Post that a check for $25,000, given to Maurice Stans by Kenneth Dahlberg, had later ended up in the Florida bank account of Bernard Barker.
  
• 8/3/1972 Senate votes 88-2 to approve the strategic arms treaty with the Soviets.
  
• 8/3/1972 (AP 8/8/04) - Three months before the 1972 presidential election, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger huddled together in the Oval Office to discuss when and how to get out of Vietnam. Despite a massive bombing campaign during the spring and summer in the north, the Republican president had concluded that U.S.-backed "South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway." "We also have to realize, Henry, that winning an election is terribly important," Nixon told his national security adviser. "It's terribly important this year, but can we have a viable foreign policy if a year from now or two years from now, North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam? That's the real question." The conversation, recorded by Nixon's voice-activated taping system, was transcribed by the University of Virginia Miller Center of Public Affairs to be released Sunday, the 30th anniversary of Nixon's resignation. Some historians, including biographer Jeffrey Kimball, consider it evidence that Nixon sacrificed American forces in his quest for a second term, keeping them engaged to ensure that the South Vietnamese government wouldn't collapse before the election...Kissinger, now a foreign policy consultant, said in an interview with The Associated Press that Kimball and other historians are focusing too much on an informal conversation that he said did not reflect Nixon's policies. "Every once in a while he got discouraged and said 'chuck the whole thing,' but that was never his policy," Kissinger said. Historians said the conversation reflected Nixon's "decent interval" exit strategy in Vietnam. By propping up Saigon, the theory goes, the government could survive at least a few years on its own and Nixon would be able to distance himself from any political fallout when it collapsed...The Aug. 3, 1972 conversation, which was released in December by the National Archives with other recorded conversations, shows that Nixon did worry about how his administration would be viewed if South Vietnam fell. Kissinger, who would share the Nobel Peace Prize the following year with North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho for brokering a peace agreement, advised the president that they could avoid being seen as failures as long as South Vietnam held on for a few years. "If a year or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam, we can have a viable foreign policy if it looks as if it's the result of South Vietnamese incompetence," Kissinger said. He added later in the tape: "But it will worry everybody. And domestically in the long run it won't help us all that much because our opponents will say we should've done it three years ago." "I know," Nixon said. "So we've got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater," Kissinger said. "If we settle it, say, this October, by January '74 no one will give a damn." Ken Hughes, who transcribed the tape for the Miller Center, considers the recording a "taped confession" by Nixon, who denied until his death in 1994 that the 1972 election affected his policies in Vietnam. Larry Berman, a Nixon scholar and director of the University of California Washington Center in Washington D.C., disagrees with Hughes: "It confirms that Kissinger certainly was an advocate for the decent interval, but my view was that there was always a difference between what Nixon and Kissinger thought. I believe Nixon was much more questioning of the decent interval than Kissinger." Kissinger told the AP that Nixon never seriously considered abandoning Saigon. "There are in my memoirs letters he wrote me while I was conducting the negotiations, which say the exact opposite of what's on this conversation, in which he says 'Go ahead and do what you need to do, but don't be affected by the election, and we want an agreement that lasts.'
  
• 8/4/1972 Arthur Bremer is found guilty of shooting Wallace and sentenced to 63 years in prison.
  
• 8/8/1972 R. Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law of JFK and RFK, is nominated by the DNC to become McGovern's running-mate.
  
• 8/8/1972 A proposal by Sen. Philip Hart of Michigan to prohibit the ownership of handguns except for military personnel, police and sportsmen's clubs was voted down 83 to 7. A proposal by Sen. Kennedy to require registration of all firearms and federal permits to own them was voted down 78 to 11. (Saturday Night Special, Robert Sherrill)
  
• 8/10/1972 Gore Vidal wrote in the New York Review of Books: "The not-so-poor do outnumber the poor but if the not-so-poor who are nicked heavily by taxes were to join with the poor they would outnumber the elite by 99 to 1. The politician who can forge that alliance will find himself, at best, the maker of a new society; at worst, in a hole at Arlington. To maintain its grip on the nation, the Property Party must keep actual issues out of political debate."
  
• 8/11/1972 John Evans memo on Nixon meeting with Don Johnson. Nixon complained that McGovern would make Ramsey Clark, "who has been giving aid and comfort to the enemy," FBI director if McGovern was president. Nixon expressed his absolute opposition to any amnesty for draft-dodgers.
  
• 8/18/1972 FBI agent Donald L. Parham asked the CIA to identify a "Mr. Pennington," who was believed to have connections with McCord. The CIA reacted nervously, and gave the FBI the name of a different Pennington Cecil H. instead of Lee R., Jr. Cecil Pennington had nothing to do with McCord or Watergate. (Secret Agenda p230)
  
• 8/21/1972 GOP convention in Miami Beach opens.
  
• 8/22/1972 Nixon is nominated for a second term by the GOP.
  
• 8/22/1972 Nixon San Clemente press conference: "But if he [Robert Kennedy] had had 10 more [wire taps] and as a result of wiretaps had been able to discover the Oswald plan it would have been worth it…Let me correct you, sir, I want to be sure that the assumption is correct. I said if 10 more wiretaps could have found the conspiracy, if it was a conspiracy, or the individual, then it would have been worth it. As far as I'm concerned, I'm no more of an expert on that assassination than anybody else, but my point is that wiretaps, in the national security area were very high in the Kennedy administration for a very good reason."
  
• 8/23/1972 Over 1000 anti-war protestors outside the GOP convention are arrested for trying to prevent delegates from entering.
  
• 8/23-24/1972 Cyril Wecht examines JFK autopsy photos and X-rays at the National Archives.
  
• 8/25/1972 Patman's investigators interviewed Maurice Stans at the GOP convention in Miami.
  
• 8/27/1972 New York Times' Fred Graham broke the story about JFK's brain missing from the National Archives.
  
• 8/28/1972 Colson memo to his staff: "let me point out that the statement in last week's UPI story that I was once reported to have said that "I would walk over my grandmother if necessary" [to get Nixon reelected] is absolute accurate."
  
• 8/29/1972 Nixon told the press that a special prosecutor was not needed, and that John Dean was coordinating all Watergate investigations for the White House.
  
• 8/30/1972 Patman's staff interviewed Maurice Stans about the money found on the burglars; at one point during the interview, Stans took a call from Nixon. GOP members on Patman's Committee advised Stans not to answer questions.
  
• 8/30/1972 The Louisville Courier-Journal quoted Richard Kleindienst commenting on a Justice Dept investigation which found no link between the Watergate burglary and the Nixon Administration: "No credible or fair-minded person is going to be able to say we dragged our feet on it."
  
• 8/31/1972 Ken Khachigian memo to Colson: "Have worked up a brief line on Shriver's Confederate ancestors, also included a note from Post story indicating that Shriver's family were slaveholders."
  
• 9/1/1972 Nixon and Japanese PM Tanaka met for two days in Hawaii for talks.
  
• 9/1/1972 Joanne Gordon memo to Colson: "if RN emerges from hiding, superiority of McGovern and Shriver will emerge...When Nixon appears, if he does, he will repeat his dramatic tendency to blow substantial leads in the polls."
  
• 9/5-6/1972 at the Summer Olympics in Munich, eleven Israeli athletes are killed by Arab terrorists.
  
• 9/6/1972 Democrats Joseph Califano and Larry O'Brien staged a news conference, and referred to an unnamed informant (Alfred Baldwin) in giving public details about the Watergate break-in and the conversations he had overheard through telephone bugs.
  
• 9/7/1972 Nixon promoted Al Haig over the heads of 240 senior officers to four-star general and to vice-chief of staff of the army.
  
• 9/7/1972 Ehrlichman told the press: "After the history of this first term is written and you look back, you're going to see that, compared to other Administrations or by any other standards you'd want to apply, that it has been an extraordinarily clean, corruption-free Administration, because the President insists on that."
  
• 9/8/1972 Rep. Garry Brown (R-Michigan) wrote a letter to Kleindienst suggesting that Stans not talk to the Patman Committee because he might prejudice future trials. Dean later testified that because of this letter "I began receiving increasing pressure from Mitchell, Stans, Parkinson and others to get the Justice Department to respond...as a vehicle that Congressman Brown could use in persuading others not to vote in favor of the subpoena."
  
• 9/8/1972 Israel responded to the killing of its athletes with air strikes on PLO bases in Lebanon and Syria.
  
• 9/12/1972 Patman Committee issued a report on the results of its investigation so far, and the need for formal hearings.
  
• 9/12/1972 Spencer Oliver's new secretary, Marie Elise Haldane, called the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company to report a malfunction on the phones in Oliver's office. A repairman was unable to find anything wrong; Haldane then asked him to check the phones for bugging devices. The repairman said he wasn't qualified to do so, and she called the telephone company's security office this afternoon.
  
• 9/13/1972 The DNC telephones were checked for bugging devices by two employees of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Co. They found a bug, but policy required that they inform their supervisor and the FBI before telling the customer. Secretary Marie Haldane seemed surprised that no bug was found. The FBI then came to the DNC and removed the bug, which looked cheap and homemade, not capable of transmitting outside the building. It also had a defective transmitter. Haldane was questioned by agents, and she giggled uncontrollably. The Bureau and experts who examined the bug suspected that it had been planted simply so that it would be found. Earl Silbert and the FBI began arguing about it, with Silbert claiming the FBI had just overlooked it in their previous searches.
  
• 9/14/1972 Senate approves pact with USSR, imposing freeze on offensive nuclear weapons.
  
• 9/14/1972 Stans tells Clark Mollenhoff that he is confident that Reps. Jerry Ford and Garry Brown could delay the Patman investigation until after the election. (The Man Who Pardoned Nixon 26)
  
• 9/15/1972 Meeting with Nixon, Haldeman and Dean in the Oval Office (5:27pm - 6:17pm) Before Dean joins the conversation, Haldeman tells Nixon that Dean is "moving ruthlessly on the investigation of McGovern people, Kennedy stuff, and all that too...through the IRS." Dean remarks that "the press is playing it just as we expected," concentrating on the fact that "two White House aides" were indicted. Nixon ordered them to "get Brown and Ford in and work something out...no use to let Patman have a free ride here."
  

Pres. Nixon: Just remember, all the trouble we're taking, we'll have a chance to get back one day.
John Dean: The resources that have been put against this whole investigation to date are really incredible. It is truly a larger investigation than was conducted against, uh, the after inquiry of the JFK assassination.
Pres. Nixon: We are all in it together. This is a war. We take a few shots and it will be over. We will give them a few shots and it will be over. Don't worry. I wouldn't want to be on the other side right now. Would you?
John Dean: Along that line, one of the things I've tried to do, I have begun to keep notes on a lot of people who are emerging as less than our friends because this will be over some day and we shouldn't forget the way some of them have treated us.
Pres. Nixon: I want the most comprehensive notes on all those who tried to do us in. They didn't have to do it. If we had had a very close election and they were playing the other side I would understand this. No - they were doing this quite deliberately and they are asking for it and they are going to get it. We have not used the power in this first four years as you know. We have never used it. We have not used the Bureau and we have not used the Justice Department but things are going to change now. And they are either going to do it right or go.
John Dean: What an exciting prospect.
Pres. Nixon: Thanks. It has to be done. We have been (adjective deleted) fools for us to come into this election campaign and not do anything with regard to the Democratic Senators who are running, et cetera. And who the hell are they after? They are after us. It is absolutely ridiculous. It is not going to be that way any more....The worst may happen, but it may not...basically the damn thing is just one of those unfortunate things, and we're trying to cut our losses.
John Dean: I learned today, incidentally, and have not confirmed it, that the GAO auditor who is down here is here at the Speaker of the House's request.
Pres. Nixon: That surprises me.
HR Haldeman: Well, (expletive deleted) the Speaker of the House. Maybe we better put a little heat on him.
Pres. Nixon: I think so too.
HR Haldeman: Because he has a lot worse problems than he is going to find down here.
John Dean: That's right.
HR Haldeman: That is the kind of thing that, you know, we really ought to do is call the Speaker and say, "I regret to say your calling the GAO down here because of what it is going to cause us to do to you."
John Dean: I understand too, or I have been told, that John Connally is close to Patman and if anyone could talk turkey to Patman, Connally could. Jerry Ford is not really taking an active interest in this matter that is developing so Stans is going to see Jerry Ford and try to brief him and explain to him the problems he has.
HR Haldeman: No, it has been kept away from the White House and of course completely from the President. The only tie to the White House is the Colson effort they keep trying to pull in.

• 9/15/1972 Barker pleads guilty in the Watergate break-in case. Federal grand jury in Washington returns an 8-count indictment against Liddy, Hunt and the five burglars. John W. Hushen, director of public information at the Justice Dept., announces that "We have absolutely no evidence to indicate that any others should be charged." Nixon critics charged that Hunt and Liddy were thrown to the wolves to make it look as though the White House was really getting to the bottom of Watergate.
  
• 9/16/1972 Woodward spoke on the phone with Deep Throat.
  
• 9/16/1972 Woodward and Bernstein reported that the money for the Watergate bugging operation came from a "secret fund" of more than $300,000 kept in the safe of Maurice Stans.
  
• 9/17/1972 Woodward spoke on the phone with Deep Throat.
  
• 9/17/1972 Woodward and Bernstein reported that Magruder and Herbert Porter had each withdrawn $50,000 from the secret fund.
  
• 9/18/1972 Time magazine gushed that Haig was "glamorous and politically sophisticated...just what the Army needed."
  
• 9/21/1972 Nixon signs into law a bill to improve the benefits program for widows, widowers and children of retired military personnel.
  
• 9/22/1972 The Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Spiro Agnew about Watergate: "Someone set up these people to have them get caught…to embarrass the Republican Party."
  
• 9/29/1972 Woodward and Bernstein reported that Mitchell had personally controlled the secret fund.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 10/1972 Issue #94 of "The Realist" featured an article by Jerry Policoff: "How All the News About Political Assassinations in the United States Has Not Been Fit to Print in The New York Times." "The political assassinations of the '60s seem to have given rise to a most peculiar policy at The New York Times, a policy that maintains that the "official" line is the only line. In the process the Times has subjected its readers to distortion, misrepresentation, and outright deception. . . .Only The New York Times can answer why they have for nine years maintained a consistent policy of literary assassination of literature and deliberate management of news suggesting that three of the greatest crimes of the 20th century may, despite "official" findings to the contrary, be yet unsolved. But the unassailable fact is that in the process they have acted as little less than an unofficial propaganda arm of the Government which has maintained so staunchlyand in the face of all evidence to the contrary, great and trivialthat assassinations in the United States are inevitably the work of lone demented madmen. Justice Hugo Black in his concurring opinion in the Supreme Court decision favoring The New York Times in the case of the Pentagon Papers said, "Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the Government from deceiving the people. . . ." Far from preventing deception in the case of political assassinations, the Times has practiced it, and in the process defrauded its readers and violated every ethic of professional and objective journalism."
  
• 10/1/1972 Sunday Star and Washington Daily News reported that Eugenio Gonzalez had allegedly boasted that GSS guards had been bribed to permit more than 40 illicit entries into the DNC.
  
• 10/2/1972 Colson memo to Clawson: "I thought you might be interested that the quote in the Washington Post attributed to John Mitchell, 'if you print that crap, Katherine Graham will find herself in a wringer,' was not exactly accurate. What Mitchell said was that she would find her tit in a wringer."
  
• 10/2/1972 Haldeman action memo: "We need a leaflet for Defense plants that should...say, for instance, if at McDonnell Douglas: 'Save the B-1; Save your job; vote for Nixon.'"
  
• early 10/1972 McCord was told by his attorney Gerald Alch that Walter Bittman, White House attorney was offering executive clemency, money while in prison and rehabilitation for those involved in the Watergate break-in. In return, none of them would take the stand. (A Piece of Tape 46)
  
• 10/3/1972 Nixon and Gromyko end two days of talks in Washington by signing documents that put into effect the two arms accords reached in Moscow in May.
  
• 10/3/1972 Patman's committee voted on whether to approve subpoena powers; after lobbying by Reps. Ford and Brown, four Southern Democrats joined with all the Republicans to reject such a move.
  
• 10/4/1972 Helms memo to Kissinger cited 73 Jack Anderson columns he had written that were based on secret intelligence documents, forty from the CIA. (The Man Who Kept the Secrets)
  
• 10/8/1972 Woodward spoke on the phone with Deep Throat.
  
• 10/9/1972 Woodward met with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage. Alexander Haig was known to have been in Paris this day.
  
• 10/10/1972 Woodward and Bernstein reported that Watergate was only part of a large-scale campaign of spying, bugging and sabotage that been going on since 1971; they charged that Ken Clawson had forged a letter to the Manchester Union Leader that had been made to look like it was written by Muskie and expressed a racial slur against French Americans. This had hurt him in the New Hampshire primary.
  
• 10/12/1972 Kissinger returns to Washington with speculation buzzing that an agreement may be near.
  
• 10/13/1972 UAW begin a series of 17 "ministrikes" against 10 General Motors plants; this lasts til 12/14.
  
• 10/15/1972 Woodward and Bernstein reported that Dwight Chapin had been Donald Segretti's contact in the White House.
  
• 10/16/1972 Colson memo to Dick Howard: "if pressed, the ITT people are prepared to say they have given nothing to the Nixon campaign, but have given to McGovern."
  
• 10/16/1972 Nixon gloated publicly that the press and "opinion leaders" were wrong when they predicted that his Vietnam policies would fail.
  
• 10/16/1972 Hale Bogg's twin-engine plane vanished during a flight from Anchorage to Juneau, Alaska. Despite a massive search, no trace of the airplane or Boggs has ever been found. A Freedom of Information Act Request by Roll Call Magazine in 1992 unearthed an FBI telex indicating that the plane that carried Congressman Nick Begich, Sr. and Majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, Hale Boggs, was actually located in Alaska but never retrieved. The plane crashed on October 16, 1972. Information obtained by a government verified source described the location of the plane and stated that there were two survivors shortly after the plane disappeared. The information indicated an undisclosed "firm" involved in testing advanced surveillance equipment had located the crash. The informant had a military background, according to the FBI document obtained by Roll Call. The FBI telex was sent to the Washington, D.C. FBI headquarters where it was presumably passed to the Acting Director, L. Patrick Gray. The previous director, J. Edgar Hoover, had been in a significant conflict with Boggs, who called for his resignation on the floor of the Congress. Boggs was one of the most powerful people in the country at a time when misuse of power was just beginning to be seen, culminating in the resignation of the President of the United States Richard Nixon. Incidently, Boggs was taken to the airport for the first leg of the trip (from Texas to Alaska) by a young Democrat named Bill Clinton who later, as President, appointed Congressman Boggs' wife Lindy to the position of US Ambassador to the Vatican after she served eighteen years in the Congress after her husband's disappearance. Congressman Boggs was also on the Warren Commission and had some interest in reopening the investigation.
  
• 10/17/1972 Peace talks begin in Laos.
  
• 10/18/1972 US and USSR sign a three-year trade pact.
  
• 10/18/1972 "I am saying that if anyone was involved in that type of activity which I referred to, they would not be working here." - Ron Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, defending the presidential aide Dwight Chapin on Oct. 18, 1972. Chapin was convicted in April 1974 of perjury in connection with his relationship to the political saboteur Donald Segretti.
  
• 10/19/1972 Colson memo to Buchanan: "Some of the press comments in recent days suggest to me that the establishment is going down for its last dying gasp...through their hand-picked candidate, McGovern...They are about to be soundly repudiated...I think it is terribly important to the President that in the second term it be made clear that he won on the issues...we may at long last have a chance to strip the establishment of the power that it has had for so long."
  
• 10/20/1972 Nixon signed the $30.2 billion revenue-sharing bill.
  
• 10/20/1972 Sen. Henry Jackson called for a bipartisan commission to investigate Watergate.
  
• 10/20/1972 Nixon met with army chief of staff Gen. Westmoreland, who objected to many of the provisions of the nearly-completed agreement on Vietnam.
  
• 10/21/1972 Woodward met Deep Throat in the underground parking garage.
  
• 10/24/1972 CIA gave the Justice Dept a package of material relating to the Fielding break-in, including photos of Hunt and Liddy.
  
• 10/25/1972 Woodward and Bernstein reported that Haldeman was one of five "high-ranking presidential associates" authorized to make payments from the secret fund.
  
• 10/25/1972 Charles Willoughby dies, at eighty, in Florida. Willoughby was a master of intrigue who established Richard Case Nagell's Field Operations Intelligence unit in the Far East and played a major part in forming the basis for the Asian People's Anti-Communist League. Willoughby was in regular correspondence with Allen Dulles -- before JFK fired Dulles -- and with ex(?)-Nazis who ran the CIA's European-based spy network. Willoughby's domestic associations extended from the Cuban exile community to the H.L. Hunt family. He and other of General Douglas Mac Arthur's former top generals undoubtedly retained a strong bond with right-wing elements of the Pentagon.
  
• 10/27/1972 Woodward met with Deep Throat in the underground parking garage.
  
• 10/28/1972 Nixon signed a bill to expand consumer protection.
  
• 10/30/1972 Nixon signs amendment to Social Security Act to increase benefits. It also extended Medicare benefits to disabled persons under 65.
  
• 11/1972 Egyptian president Sadat apparently decided this month to go to war with Israel based on readiness estimates supplied to him by Minister of War Gen. Ahmed Ismail Ali. Sadat felt that only a war would upset the status quo balance of power and pressure the great powers to intervene, making Israel give up its 1967 conquests. (Dupuy)
  
• 11/4/1972 Memo from FBI supervisor Milton Jones to Asst Director Thomas Bishop; "Gray has requested the infinite details concerning our programs of collecting background information on Congressional and gubernatorial candidates."
  
• 11/6/1972 A story in The Washington Post today reports on a book by Aristotle Onassis' ex-butler, Christian Cafarakis. According to Cafarakis, a couple of months after JFK's assassination, Onassis hired a team of detectives to find out what happened. After nineteen months they presented a report giving the names of the "real" murderers. "On receipt of the study, Jackie gathered friends one evening for consultation and then decided to send it to President Johnson. The next morning, an anonymous phone call warned her to leave the report unpublished if she feared for her own and her children's safety. Now, says Cafarakis, the report is locked away in Onassis' private safe at Glyfada and protected at all times by guards and burglar alarms."
  
• 11/7/1972 Nixon won in a landslide (60.7%) to McGovern's 37.5% (he carried only Massachusetts and District of Columbia); young people did not turn out in the numbers McGovern had hoped, but the Democrats picked up 2 Senate seats and the GOP won 13 House seats. Nixon got 47 million votes (520 electoral) to McGovern's 29 million (17 electoral); John G. Schmitz (Amer. Independent) 1 million votes; Benjamin Spock (People's) 78,751; Other 216,196. 55% voter turnout. In states that Nixon took by storm, Democratic candidates for Congress also did well. This ticket-splitting is now common. Nixon was not impressed by his landslide; he felt it was more important that Southerners and ethnic voters were shifting toward the GOP. "The election was decided the day McGovern was nominated," he observed. "The question after that was only how much. McGovern did to his party what Goldwater did." (The Making of the President 1972) Newcomers included Sens. Sam Nunn, Pete Domenici, Jesse Helms; Rep. Andrew Young became the first black congressman elected from the South since Reconstruction. Soon after the election, Barry Goldwater consoled McGovern: "After Dick Nixon lost to Jack Kennedy in 1960 by only 120,000 votes, he regretted for years spending the last weekend of the campaign in Alaska instead of Chicago. With you and me it didn't make any difference where we went the last weekend -- Chicago, Alaska or Timbuktu. So we have nothing to regret except the judgment of the voters!" The first thing Nixon does is to demand signed resignations of his entire government. "Eliminate everyone," he tells John Ehrlichman about reappointment, "except George Bush. Bush will do anything for our cause."
  
• 11/10/1972 Buchanan memo to Nixon on the second term, the "Nixon Counter-Revolution....Our primary objective in the second term should be making of the President, the Republican FDR, founder and first magistrate of a political dynasty, to dominate American politics long after the President has retired from office...the President should use the mandate to impose upon the nation his own political and social philosophy...Shall we acquiesce forever in left-wing control of communications media...the furtherance of the policies and ideas in which we believe demand that this monopoly, this ideological cartel, be broken up...cleaning out public television of that clique of Nixon-haters who have managed to nest there at taxpayer expense...we have to begin to make permanent the New Majority that returned the President to office...the Nixon South, the ethnic, blue collar, Catholic, working class Americans of the North, Midwest and West." He advocated eliminating as many of the Great Society programs as possible, as quickly as possible. "Beyond the purging of the disloyal and recalcitrant and the infusing of new blood, there is an over-riding need for this Nixon Administration to create a new 'cadre' of Republican governmental professionals who can survive this Administration and be prepared to take over future ones...The integrationist philosophy of the fifties is proving a prescription for social chaos in the seventies...the President should move to get political control of the IRS..."
  
• 11/14/1972 The Dow Jones closed above 1000 for the first time in US history.
  
• 11/17/1972 Colson memo on Jack Anderson, claiming that he had information that Anderson had been paid money to write favorable articles about Batista in 1958 and Castro in 1961. "After his incredibly sloppy and malicious reporting on Eagleton, his credibility has diminished. It now appears as if we have the opportunity to destroy it."
  
• 11/20/1972 President Nixon asks for the resignation of Richard Helms as Director of the CIA. James Schlesinger, a professor, will become the new director. William E. Colby takes charge of the Directorate of Plans -- which is the clandestine side of the CIA.
  
• 11/22/1972 Haldeman memo to Kissinger: "The President is very disappointed in the lack of progress in the negotiations to date...unless the other side shows the same willingness to be reasonable that we are showing, I am directing you to discontinue the talks and we shall then have to resume military activity..."
  
• 11/24/1972 NYT quoted Pat Buchanan complaining that "Mr. McGovern described the President personally as a blob out there' of not constant principle except opportunism and political manipulation, a man up to his ears in political sabotage,' who was afraid of the people' and regularly favored the powerful and greedy' over the public interest. The president's defense programs were madness'; he had degraded the Supreme Court' and on three occasions at least, Mr. McGovern drew parallels between the president and his government and Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Reich. As for the Nixon administration, it was the most morally bankrupt, the most morally corrupt, the trickiest, most deceitful…in our entire national history.'"
  
• 11/28/1972 Nixon begins a major cabinet change; Romney and Laird are out, with Elliott Richardson becoming Secretary of HEW and James T. Flynn becoming Sec. of Defense. White House staff changes are also made.
  
• 12/4/1972 US and USSR agree to build new embassies in each other's capitals.
  
• 12/6/1972 White House announced that Secretary of Commerce Peter G. Peterson would be replaced by Frederick Dent.
  
• 12/7/1972 Philippines: Imelda Marcos, wife of president Ferdinand Marcos, was stabbed and critically injured, but survived, an attack in Pasay City.
  
• 12/7/1972 In The New York Times today, the following letter by Augustin F. Fortuno states: "Statehood for Puerto Rico was defeated in the recent election. For the second time it was an issue and was turned down. No other United States territory, colony, dominion or possession, given the choice, had ever rejected statehood. Why then our decision? Political theorists may speculate for years about the multiplicity and complexity of our reasoning, but one reason that comes to mind when I think of unbreakable union with the people of the United States is this: Who is in command in the United States? The last three elections in this country have been decided by a bullet. John F. Kennedy's assassination made possible Richard Nixon's narrow victory in 1968. And George Wallace's maiming paved the way for the recent landslide. Yet no law has been or apparently will be passed in the near future regarding effective weapons or arms control. Why? Who or what are the United States legislators afraid of? Before the 1.2 million voters in Puerto Rico decide on statehood we are honestly interested in knowing: Who is really in command in the United States?"
  
• 12/8/1972 Mistrial is declared in the Los Angeles trial of Ellsberg and Russo.
  
• 12/8/1972 Plane crash kills Dorothy Hunt, wife of Howard Hunt. United Airlines flight 553 from Washington to Chicago crashes at Midway Airport. Chicagoan Lawrence O'Connor, who had used United Airlines Flight 553 or its equivalent to fly from Washington to Chicago on Friday nights for years was warned by a White House source not to take this flight; Among the deaths were: Dorothy Hunt (Wife of E. Howard Hunt) carrying $50,000 in Watergate payoff funds and close to $2 million that she was attempting to place in foreign banks; Michele Clark, CBS newswoman who was to interview Mrs. Hunt on a story that could allegedly destroy Nixon; at least four people alleged to have knowledge of a large labor union "donation" to the Committee to Reelect the President who were paid to stop the indictment of a Chicago Labor hoodlum; a group of gas pipeline lobbyists, attorneys and gas company officials (Robert Moreau, Nancy Parker, Ralph Blodgett, James Drueger, Lon Bayer, Wilbur Erickson) who had allegedly gathered evidence against former Attorney General John Mitchell in an anti-trust case involving El Paso Natural Gas Co; also aboard was a "hit-man" using the cover of Harold Metcalf, of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, who told the pilot, Captain Whitehouse, he was carrying a gun and was assigned a jump seat near the food galley and rear door. After the crash, Cpt. Whitehouse and six of the Watergate related passengers were found to have unexplainably high cyanide contents, although the other 35 passengers who were killed did not. Following the crash hit-man Metcalf, in a jump suit, walked out the cracked open fuselage. Up to 200 FBI and CIA agents took over the crash site immediately, beating the fire department to the scene, refusing to allow in a medical team, confiscating the control tower tapes, interviewing survivors and witnesses before the National Transportation Safety Board investigators had a chance to. CBS News requested immediate cremation of Michele Clark's body; evidence of sabotage includes possible tampering with altimeter and air data computer, malfunctioning of the runway visual range recorder and the Kedzie localizer which acted as the runway's outer marker, a series of misdirections from air traffic controllers and the failure of Flight 553's standby power system. An in-flight robbery gang known as the Joseph Sarelli Mob came into possession of some of the Hunt Money and Mitchell documents after the crash and sold them for $5 million. The day after the crash Nixon Aide Egil Krogh Jr is appointed Undersecretary of Transportation and is placed in charge of the two agencies investigating the crash (the FAA and the NTSB); ten days later Nixon assistant Alexander Butterfield, a CIA-Aviation liaison is appointed head of the FAA; a few weeks later Nixon Aide Dwight Chapin becomes a top aide with United Airlines.
  
• 12/8/1972 Mahmoud Hamshari, the primary official of Al Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Paris died when a bomb exploded at his Paris apartment. Mossad members were allegedly responsible.
  
• 12/9/1972 In the Los Angeles Times today, Chief Justice Earl Warren is quoted as saying he "had never seen any convincing evidence to disprove the Warren Commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for assassinating Mr. Kennedy."
  
• 12/11/1972 Robert Dole resigned as GOP National Committee chairman and Nixon replaced him with George Bush. Human Events reported that Republicans in Congress were "furious" with the "shabby" way the White House treated Dole after all his work for Nixon.
  
• 12/18/1972 Senator-elect Joseph Biden's family is involved in a car crash; wife and daughter killed
  
• 12/18/1972 Operation Linebacker II was a US Seventh Air Force and US Navy Task Force 77 aerial bombing campaign, conducted against targets in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) during the final period of US involvement in the Vietnam War. The operation was conducted from 1829 December 1972, leading to several of informal names such as "The December Raids" and "The Christmas Bombings". It saw the largest heavy bomber strikes launched by the US Air Force since the end of World War II. Linebacker II was a resumption of the Operation Linebacker bombings conducted from May to October, with the emphasis of the new campaign shifted to attacks by B-52 Stratofortress Heavy bombers rather than smaller tactical fighter aircraft.
  
• 12/20/1972 Nixon pardoned New Jersey Mafia boss Angelo "Gyp" DeCarlo. (Washington Post 4/2/1973). The Post reported that various Justice Dept lawyers found DeCarlo's clemency to be very mysterious. One remarked, "This is Gyp DeCarlo. He is a very bad guy, with a history of political connections...something or someone just had to give that thing a push...who?" Angelo was notorious for his ties to brutal ganglang executions.
  
• 12/21/1972 Rev Carl McIntire said, "The Ghost of Senator McCarthy needs to ride again."
  
• 12/21/1972 McCord wrote a letter to Jack Caulfield, promising that if Helms should be replaced as CIA director, "Every tree in the forest will fall." Today, McCord had met with his lawyer, Gerald Alch, who suggested that the CIA might somehow have been involved in Watergate. This suggestion greatly unsettled McCord, who began reporting secretly by letter to the CIA's Gen. Gaynor.
  
• 12/23/1972 Massive earthquake destroyed the center of Managua, Nicaragua. Somoza's National Guard went through the rubble looting whatever it could find, while taking US relief packages from the airport for later resale. Companies owned by the Somoza cornered the market in demolition, construction and real estate. Managua was rebuilt to look like an American suburb, complete with a McDonald's.
  
• 12/26/1972 Harry S. Truman dies at age 88.
  
• 12/29/1972 LIFE magazine ends publication as a weekly magazine.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• MKULTRA activities continued until 1973 when CIA director Richard Helms, fearing that they would be exposed to the public, ordered the project terminated, and all of the files destroyed. Fortunately, a clerical error had sent many of the documents to the wrong office, so when CIA workers were destroying the files, some of them remained, and were later released under a Freedom of Information Act request by investigative journalist John Marks. Many people in the American public were outraged when they learned of the experiments, and several congressional investigations took place including the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission.
  
• The Rosenhan experiment was a famous experiment into the validity of psychiatric diagnosis conducted by psychologist David Rosenhan in 1973. It was published in the journal Science under the title "On being sane in insane places." The study is considered an important and influential criticism of psychiatric diagnosis. Rosenhan's study was done in two parts. The first part involved the use of healthy associates or "pseudopatients" who briefly simulated auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 different psychiatric hospitals in five different states in various locations in the United States. All were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. After admission, the pseudopatients acted normally and told staff that they felt fine and had not experienced any more hallucinations. Hospital staff failed to detect a single pseudopatient, and instead believed that all of the pseudopatients exhibited symptoms of ongoing mental illness. Several were confined for months. All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and agree to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release. The second part involved asking staff at a psychiatric hospital to detect non-existent "fake" patients. The staff falsely identified large numbers of ordinary patients as impostors. The study concluded, "It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals" and also illustrated the dangers of dehumanization and labeling in psychiatric institutions. It suggested that the use of community mental health facilities which concentrated on specific problems and behaviors rather than psychiatric labels might be a solution and recommended education to make psychiatric workers more aware of the social psychology of their facilities.
  
• Operation Snow White: Some time during the 1970s, the Church of Scientology decided that they'd had enough.Apparently, the Church of Scientology managed to perform the largest infiltration of the United States government in history. Ever.5,000 of Scientology's crack commandos wiretapped and burglarized various agencies. They stole hundreds of documents, mainly from the IRS. No critic was spared, and in the end, 136 organizations, agencies and foreign embassies were infiltrated. As early as 1960, L. Ron Hubbard had proposed that Scientologists should infiltrate government departments by taking secretarial, bodyguard or other jobs. In the early 1970s, the Church of Scientology was increasingly scrutinized by US federal agencies, having already been raided by the Food and Drug Administration in 1963. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) claimed it owed millions of dollars in taxes and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sent agents into the organization. The Church's response involved a publicity campaign, extensive litigation against the IRS and a program of infiltration of agency offices. The specific branch of Scientology responsible for Operation Snow White was the Guardian's Office. Created in 1966 by L. Ron Hubbard himself, the Guardian's Office's purpose was to protect the interests of Scientology. At the time of Operation Snow White, the Guardian's Office had worldwide headquarters (Guardian's Office WW) located at Saint Hill Manor in England. Headquarters in the United States (Guardian's Office US) were in Los Angeles, California. A smaller office also existed in Washington, D.C. (Guardian's Office DC) and other cities throughout the United States. Each of the Guardian Offices had five bureaus including the Information Bureau which oversaw the infiltration of the government. L. Ron Hubbard oversaw the Guardian's Office, though it was Mary Sue Hubbard, his wife, who held the title Commodore Staff Guardian. Several years later, in 1973, the Guardian's Office began a massive infiltration of governments around the world, though the primary target of the operation was the United States. Worried about Scientology's long term reputation, the Guardian's Office decided to infiltrate Interpol in order to obtain documents relating to Scientology, as well as those connecting L. Ron Hubbard to criminal activity. This duty was handed by Jane Kember to Henning Heldt and his staff. Around this time L. Ron Hubbard himself wrote Guardian Order 732, which called for the removal and correction of "erroneous" Scientology files. It is here that Operation Snow White has its origins. Though the order called for this to be achieved by legal means, this would quickly change. Hubbard himself would later be named by federal prosecutors as an "unindicted co-conspirator" for his part in the operation. Though extensive records of his involvement exist, many Scientologists claim his directives were misinterpreted by his followers. Operation Snow White would be further refined by Guardian Order 1361. Addressed from Jane Kember to Heldt, Duke Snider, and Richard Weigand, GO 1361 called for, amongst other things, an infiltration of the Los Angeles and London offices of the IRS, and the Department of Justice. While the order was specific to the IRS, the Guardian's Office was soon recruiting their own field agents to infiltrate other governmental offices, including the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the U.S. Coast Guard intelligence service, and the National Institute of Mental Health, among others, as well as the American Medical Association. The program called for rewards to be given for successful missions carried out by Scientologists. Other planned elements of the operation included petitioning governments and the United Nations to charge government critics of Scientology with genocide, on the theory that official criticism of the group constituted "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction". One of the sentencing memoranda in the case also noted that, contrary to what the defendants claimed, the programs planned by the Guardian's Office were not restricted to trying to remove "false reports" but included plans to plant false informationfor instance, planting false records about "a cat with a pedigree name" into US security agency computers so that later "the creature holds a press conference and photographic story results." The purpose of this plan was "to hold up the American security to ridicule, as outlined in the GO by LRH."
  
• 'Clockwork Orange' is the name of the secret British security services project which was alleged to have involved a right-wing smear campaign against British politicians in the 1970s. The project was undertaken by members of the British intelligence services and the British Army press office in Northern Ireland, whose job also included routine public relations work and placing disinformation stories in the press, as part of a psychological warfare operation against paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland. One of the project's members, Colin Wallace, who was the press officer at the Army Headquarters in Northern Ireland, also claims that in 1973, after MI5 became the primary intelligence service in Northern Ireland, the project began giving briefings to foreign journalists against politicians. These briefings included distributing forged documents in an attempt to show that the victims were communists, or Irish Republican sympathisers or were taking bribes. Politicians alleged to have been smeared in this manner include Harold Wilson, Ian Paisley (Democratic Unionist Party), Merlyn Rees, Tony Benn and Edward Heath (Conservative). Airey Neave, the British Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) was alleged to have been involved with 'Clockwork Orange', and to have briefed Wallace on a number of occasions. Other than Wallace's testimony, the primary evidence for the existence of this plot consisted of a series of handwritten notes taken by Wallace in meetings with other members of the plot. Journalists investigating Wallace's story had these notes analysed by a forensic scientist, and the results were found to be consistent with the notes having been taken contemporaneously. In the House of Commons, on the 31 January 1990, junior defence minister Archie Hamilton, admitted the existence of a project called 'Clockwork Orange', although he claimed that there was no evidence that this project involved a smear campaign against politicians.
  
• "The most infamous male madam [throughout LA's sordid history] would have to be Billy Bryars, the wealthy son of an oil magnate, and part-time producer of gay porn. Bryars was said to have a stellar group of customers using his brothel' at the summit of Laurel Canyon. In fact, some have claimed that none other than J. Edgar Hoover, the founder and chief executive officer of the FBI, was one of his best clients … when Bryars fell under police scrutiny in 1973, allegedly for trafficking in child pornography, officers obtained a number of confessions from some of his hustlers, and some of them identified Hoover and [Clyde] Tolson as Mother John and Uncle Mike,' and claimed that they had serviced them on numerous occasions." (Paul Young's L.A. Exposed)
  
• President Nixon allegedly gives comedian Jackie Gleason access to dead alien bodies. Three separate people claim to have been told the story by Nixon (Bill Knell, Larry Warren and Beverly Gleason). The key witness of the three was Beverly Gleason, the second wife of the comedy superstar. She wrote a version of the story for the National Enquirer in 1983 four years before Gleason's death. It was a story that Beverly said made Jackie very angry. The gist of the story is that Gleason was friends with Nixon. He lived in Miami, Florida near Nixon's southern White House at Key Biscayne. Gleason saw the bodies late one night at Homestead Air Force Base, which was close to both men's homes. It was also the base where Nixon flew in on his 92 trips to the southern White House.
  

• 1/1973 The Vietnam War POW/MIA issue concerns the fate of United States servicemen who were reported as missing in action during the Vietnam War and associated theaters of operation in Southeast Asia. Following the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, 591 U.S. prisoners of war were returned during Operation Homecoming. The U.S. listed about 1,350 Americans as prisoners of war or missing in action and roughly 1,200 Americans reported killed in action and body not recovered. Many of these were airmen who were shot down over North Vietnam or Laos. Investigations of these incidents have involved determining whether the men involved survived their shoot down, and if not efforts to recover their remains. POW/MIA activists played a role in pushing the U.S. government to improve its efforts in resolving the fates of the missing. Progress in doing so was slow until the mid-1980s, when relations between the U.S. and Vietnam began to improve and more cooperative efforts were undertaken. Normalization of U.S. relations with Vietnam in the mid-1990s was a culmination of this process. Considerable speculation and investigation has gone to a theory that a significant number of these men were captured as prisoners of war by Communist forces in the two countries and kept as live prisoners after the war's conclusion for the United States in 1973. A vocal group of POW/MIA activists maintains that there has been a concerted conspiracy by the Vietnamese government and every American government since then to hide the existence of these prisoners. The U.S. government has steadfastly denied that prisoners were left behind or that any effort has been made to cover up their existence. Popular culture has reflected the "live prisoners" theory, most notably in the 1985 film Rambo: First Blood Part II. Several congressional investigations have looked into the issue, culminating with the largest and most thorough, the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs of 19911993 led by Senators John Kerry, Bob Smith, and John McCain. It found "no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia."
  
• 1/3/1973 The 93rd Congress convenes. Andrew Young was sworn into office as Georgia's first black congressman since 1871. Young represented Georgia's 5th congressional district until 1977, when he was appointed as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
  
• 1/4/1973 Nixon awarded Alexander Haig a Distinguished Service Medal.
  
• 1/9/1973 McCord receives an anonymous phone call: "A year is a long time. Your wife and family will be taken care of. You will be rehabilitated with employment when this is over."
  
• 1/10/1973 Watergate criminal trial opens with Judge Sirica presiding.
  
• 1/11/1973 Nixon ends mandatory wage and price controls.
  
• 1/11/1973 E. Howard Hunt pleads guilty to all six charges against him relating to Watergate.
  
• 1/12/1973 Mark Jimmy' Essex, armed with a high powered rifle, killed six persons from the roof of the Howard Johnson's hotel in New Orleans before police shot him. Authorites found slogans written on the walls of his apartment: "The quest for freedom is death. Then by death I shall escape to freedom. Political power comes from the barrel of a gun. Kill pig Nixon and all his running dogs."
  
• 1/13/1973 The Orlando Sentinel editorialized: "As shameful as Watergate is, the case has a hopeful or reassuring aspect: nothing is being swept under the rug."
  
• 1/14/1973 Caulfield says to McCord: "The President's ability to govern is at stake, another teapot dome scandal is possible...everybody else is on the track but you."
  
• 1/15/1973 Barker, Gonzalez, Martinez and Sturgis plead guilty to all counts of the indictment.
  
• 1/16/1973 The four Watergate defendants who have pleaded guilty all deny that they have been paid by anyone.
  
• 1/18/1973 Sen. Mansfield sent a letter to government agencies (including the CIA), ordering all materials relating to Watergate be preserved. Very soon after, Richard Helms destroyed all records pertaining to the CIA's mind-control programs and drug experiments. Also, all tapes and transcripts recorded on the CIA's "central recording system" were destroyed. More than 4000 pages of recorded conversations were wiped out, obliterating the behind-the-scenes record of Helms years as DCI. Helms claimed he was only "tidying up" to prepare for his new post as US ambassador to Iran, and denied that any of it pertained to Watergate.
  
• 1/18/1973 The trial of Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers begins. [During the course of the trial the public learned that the CIA had massively underestimated enemy strength before the 1970 invasion of Cambodia. Upon learning that H .L. Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, already convicted for the Watergate break-in, had also burgled the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Judge Matthew Byrne, Jr. declared a mistrial and dismissed all charges against Ellsberg. Judge Byrne also accused the Nixon administration of "gross misconduct", revealing that mid-trial Nixon's special assistant for domestic affairs, John Ehrlichman, had offered him the job of director of the FBI.]
  
• 1/20/1973 Nixon's inaugural address; talks of reducing the size of the Federal Government, saying, "In our own lives, let each of us ask not just what will the government do for me, but what can I do for myself?"
  
• 1/20/1973 Amilcar Cabral, African independence leader, assassinated
  
• 1/22/1973 Supreme Court legalizes abortion in landmark Roe vs Wade ruling; opinion written by Nixon appointee Harry Blackmun, and he was joined in his ruling by Brennan, Burger, Douglas, Marshall, Stewart and Powell. The ruling suddenly gave the US the most lenient abortion laws in the non-communist Western world. In 1970 a pregnant, unmarried woman sought to have the Texas anti-abortion statute, first enacted in the 1850s, declared unconstitutional. To protect her anonymity she was given the fictitious name Jane Roe. The initial action was against Henry Wade, District Attorney of Dallas County. Roe claimed that the statute was unconstitutionally vague and violated her right of privacy as guaranteed by the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. The case was argued before the Supreme Court in December of 1971, reargued in October of 1972. A majority on the Court agreed that Roe had a right of privacy based on the 14th amendment and on earlier Supreme Court decisions. They also agreed that this right was "broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." However, they denied that this right was "absolute" (i.e., that "she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses.") There were compelling state interests in "safeguarding health" and "protecting potential life" that could justify regulation. The decision outlined a trimester framework as a way to sort and balance these varied interests. The framework limited state regulation as follows: 1.No interference during the first trimester of pregnancy. 2. Regulation allowed after the first trimester to protect the health of the mother. 3. Regulation allowed during the third trimester (i.e., after "viability") to protect "fetal life" except when abortion is "necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother." The opinion also stated that the judiciary is "not in a position to speculate" as to when "life begins" and that the Constitution does not use the word "person" in a way that indicates "with any assurance, that it has any possible pre-natal application." At the same time, the Court ruled in Doe vs. Bolton that abortion was legal right up until birth if the mother's health was at stake. Abortion opponents charged that because "health" was defined as everything from physical well-being to psychological and financial well-being, it effectively legalized abortion-on-demand.
  
• 1/22/1973 Lyndon Johnson died of heart failure in Texas . He is pronounced dead at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. He leaves an estimated fortune of $14,000,000.00 to $20,000,000.00. His mistress, Madeleine Brown says: "Lyndon Johnson did not die naturally." She thinks his Secret Service people killed him. "They hated him." she said. LBJ dies just a few days prior to the signing of the agreement to end the war in Vietnam. Later this year, the space center at Houston is renamed the Lyndon Baines Johnson Space Center in his memory. If he had been reelected in 1968, his second term would have ended two days ago. He had once predicted that "When [the Great Society] dies, I too will die." He passed away the day after Nixon announced that he wanted to eliminate most of the Great Society programs.
  
• 1/25/1973 Woodward met with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage.
  
• 1/27/1973 Nixon announced that the Paris Peace Accords - signed in Paris by North and South Vietnam, US, and the Vietcong - had ended US involvement in Vietnam (though bombing of Cambodia would continue until 8/14); the draft was also ended, placing the military on an all-volunteer footing for the first time in a quarter-century. Nixon's popularity jumps to 68%.
  
• 1/28/1973 Nixon talked about his $268 billion budget plan (with a $12 billion deficit) in a nationwide radio address.
  
• 1/30/1973 Liddy and McCord are found guilty by a jury on a total of 14 counts of attempting to spy on the Democrats.
  
• 2/1973 Time notified the White House that it was going to print a story about the 17 wiretaps.
  
• 2/2/1973 Richard Helms' last day as Director of the CIA. James Schlesinger becomes new head of the CIA, until July 2 1973.
  
• 2/5/1973 Roy Ash, director of OMB, announces that the administration has impounded $8.7 billion appropriated by Congress for federal programs.
  
• 2/7/1973 Richard Helms gives secret testimony during his confirmation hearings as ambassador to Iran.
  
• 2/7/1973 Senate votes 73-0 to set up a Select Committee of four Democrats and three Republicans to investigate Watergate. It will be chaired by Sam Ervin. Sen. Hugh Scott failed to have the investigation extended to include the 1964 and 1968 Democratic campaigns. The members of the Committee were: Ervin, Sens. Joseph Montoya (D-New Mexico), Herman Talmadge (D-Georgia), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), Edward Gurney (R-Florida), Lowell Weicker (R-Conn.). Nixon's popularity rating was 68%.
  
• 2/8/1973 Congress enacts legislation imposing a status quo in the Penn State Railroad labor stalemate, ending a one-day strike.
  
• 2/9/1973 US Circuit Court of Appeals for D.C. orders that a lower court prevent Interior Secretary Morton from issuing permits for construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
  
• 2/9-11/1973 the first convention of the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) is held in Houston.
  
• 2/9/1973 Hussein I, king of Jordan, was a likely target of Black September assassin suspects who were arrested.
  
• 2/12/1973 Treasury Sec. George Schultz announces that the dollar will be devalued by 10%.
  
• 2/15/1973 US and Cuba conclude a five-year extradition treaty.
  
• 2/19/1973 Congress' General Accounting Office estimated that the Saigon regime was logistically inept and not ready for an all-out communist attack. (Los Angeles Times)
  
• 2/21/1973 Laotian government and the Pathet Lao sign a cease-fire agreement.
  
• 2/25/1973 Woodward met with Deep Throat in a run-down bar.
  
• 2/26/1973 Two of the 15 counts against Ellsberg and Russo are dropped.
  
• 2/27/1973 the American Indian Movement occupied the trading post and church at Wounded Knee, South Dakota to protest against US government policies towards native Americans.
  
• 2/28/1973 Meeting between Nixon and Dean in the Oval Office (9:12am - 10:23am) There is a 1 min. 12 sec. gap on the tape.
  

Pres. Nixon: When you talk to Kleindienst - because I have raised this (inaudible) thing with him on the Hiss Case he has forgotten, I suppose. Go back and read the first chapter of Six Crises. But I know, as I said, that was espionage against the nation, not against the party. FBI, Hoover, himself, who's a friend of mine said "I am sorry I have been ordered not to cooperate with you" and they didn't give us one (adjective omitted) thing. I conducted that investigation with two (characterization omitted) committee investigators - that stupid - they were tenacious. We got it done. Then we worked that thing. We then got the evidence, we got the typewriter, we got the Pumpkin Papers. We got all of that ourselves. The FBI did not cooperate. The Justice Department did not cooperate. The administration would not answer questions except, of course, for Cabinet officers, I mean like Burling came down and some of the others.
John Dean: Funny, when the shoe is on the other foot how they look at things, isn't it?
Pres. Nixon: Well, as I said, the New York Times, the Washington Post and all the rest. They put it in terms of executive privilege because they were against the investigation.
John Dean: Well, you know Colson's threat of a law suit which was printed in Evans and Novak had a very sobering effect on several of the national magazines. They are now checking before printing a lot of this Watergate junk they print. They check the press office trying to get a confirmation or denial, or call the individuals involved. And they have said they are doing it because they are afraid a libel suit on them. So it did have a sobering effect. We will keep them honest if we can remind them that they can't print anything and get away with it.
Pres. Nixon: One amusing thing about the Gray thing, and I knew this would come. They say Gray is a political crony and a personal crony of the President's. Did you know that I have never seen him socially?
John Dean: Is that correct? No, I didn't.
Pres. Nixon: I think he has been to a couple White House events, but I have never seen him separately.
John Dean: The Press has got him meeting you at a social function. And, back in 1947, (inaudible) is something I have read.
Pres. Nixon: Maybe at a Radford party or something like that. That's all. I don't know. But Gray is somebody that I know only - He was Radford's Assistant, used to attend NSC meetings. He has never been a social friend. Edgar Hoover, on the other hand, I have seen socially at least a hundred times. He and I were very close friends.
John Dean: This is curious the way the press -
Pres. Nixon: (expletive deleted) - Hoover was my crony. He was closer to me than Johnson, actually although Johnson used him more. But as for Pat Gray, (expletive deleted) I never saw him.
John Dean: While it might have been a lot of blue chips to the late Director, I think we would have been a lot better off during this whole Watergate thing if he had been alive. Because he knew how to handle that Bureau - knew how to keep them in bounds.
Pres. Nixon: Well, Hoover performed. He would have fought. That was the point. He would have defied a few people. He would have scared them to death. He has a file on everybody.
Pres. Nixon: But now at the present time, the Bureau is leaking like a sieve to Baker, (inaudible). It isn't coming from Henry Petersen is it?
John Dean: No. I would just not believe that.
Pres. Nixon: Is isn't coming from that (unintelligible).
John Dean: No. Well, they are getting the raw data. They are getting what they call the 302 forms. Actually, the summaries of the interviews.
Pres. Nixon: You see this Vesco thing coming up burns my tail. I raised hell with Haldeman on this and he didn't do anything about. I guess he couldn't. What (expletive omitted) became of our investigation of their financial activities? (Expletive omitted) They cancelled debts, they borrowed money. What the hell is that?....Colson can be more valuable out than in, because, basically in, he has reached the point that he was too visible.
John Dean: A lightning rod.
Pres. Nixon: And outside he can start this and say that I am a private citizen and I can say what I (expletive omitted) please.
Pres. Nixon: I frankly say that I would rather they would be partisan - rather than for them to have a facade of fairness and all the rest. Ervin always talks about his being a great Constitutional lawyer. (expletive deleted) He's got Baker totally toppled over to him. Ervin works harder than most of our Southern gentlemen. They are great politicians. They are just more clever than the minority. Just more clever!
John Dean: I am convinced that he has shown that he is merely a puppet for Kennedy in this whole thing. The fine hand of the Kennedys is behind this whole hearing. There is no doubt about it. When they considered the resolution on the Floor of the Senate I got the record out to read it. Who asked special permission to have their Staff man on the floor? Kennedy brings this man - Flug out on the floor when they are debating a resolution. He is the only one who did this. It has been Kennedy's push quietly, his constant investigation. His committee did the (unintelligible) subpoenas to get at Kalmbach and all these people.
Pres. Nixon: Uh, huh.
John Dean: He has kept this quiet and constant pressure on this thing. I think this fellow Sam Dash, who has been selected Counsel, is a Kennedy choice. I think this is also something we will be able to quietly and slowly document. Leak this to the press, and the parts and cast become much more apparent.
Pres. Nixon: Yes, I guess the Kennedy crowd is just laying in the bushes waiting to make their move. I had forgotten, by the way, we talk about Johnson using the FBI. Did your friends tell you what Bobby did?
John Dean: I haven't heard but I wouldn't be -
Pres. Nixon: Johnson believed that Bobby bugged him.
John Dean: That wouldn't surprise me.
Pres. Nixon: Bobby was a ruthless (characterization omitted.) But the FBI does blatantly tell you that or Sullivan told you about the New Jersey thing. He did use a bug up there for intelligence work. (inaudible)
John Dean: Well, as I say, I haven't probed Sullivan to the depths on this thing because I want to treat him at arm's length until he is safe, because he has a world of information that may be available.
Pres. Nixon: But he says that what happened on the bugging thing. Who told what to whom again?
John Dean: On the '68 thing - I was trying to track down the leaks. He said that the only place he could figure it coming from would be one of a couple of sources he was bare of that had been somewhat discovered publicly. He aid that Hoover had told Patrick Coyne about the fact that this was done. Coyne had told Rockefeller - now Rockefeller had told Kissinger. I have never run it any step beyond what Mr. Sullivan said there. The other thing is that when the records were unavailable for Mr. Hoover all these logs, etc. Hoover tried to reconstruct them by going to the Washington Field Office and he made a pretty good stir about what he was doing when he was trying to get the record and reconstruct it. He said that at that time we probably hit the grapevine in the Bureau that this had occurred. But there is no evidence of it. The records show at the Department of Justice and the FBI that no such surveillance was ever conducted.
Pres. Nixon: Shocking to me!
John Dean: Kevin Phillips called Pat Buchanan the other day with a tidbit that Dick Whelan on the NSC staff has seen memoranda between the NSC and the FBI that the FBI had been instructed to put surveillance on Anna Chennault, the South Vietnamese Embassy and the Agnew plane. This note also said that Deke DeLoach was the operative FBI officer on this.
Pres. Nixon: Well, is this the year you are going to try to get out the '68 story?
John Dean: Well, I think the threat of the '68 story when Scott and others were arguing that the Committee up on the Hill broadened its mandate to include other elections. They were hinting around at something in 1968 and 1964 that should be looked at.
Pres. Nixon: Yeah, Goldwater claims he was bugged.
Pres. Nixon: You know when they talk about a 35 year sentence, here is something to think about. There were no weapons! Right? There were no injuries! Right? There was no success! Why does that sort of thing happen? It is just ridiculous! (Characterization deleted) Are they in jail?
John Dean: Well, all but one. Hunt made the bond - everybody else is in jail.
Pres. Nixon: You still think Sullivan is basically reliable?
John Dean: I have nothing to judge that on except that I have watched him for a number of years. I watched him when he was working with Tom Huston on domestic intelligence, and his desire to do the right thing. I tried to stay in touch with Bill, and find out what his moods are. Bill was forced on the outside for a long time. He didn't become bitter. He sat back and waited until he could come back in. He didn't try to force or blackmail his way around with knowledge he had. So I have no signs of anything but a reliable man who thinks a great deal of this Administration and of you.
Pres. Nixon: Well, it was a shocking thing. I was reading a book last night. A fascinating book, although fun book, by Malcolm Smith Jr. on Kennedy's Thirteen Mistakes, the great mistakes. And one of them was on the Bay of Pigs. And what had happened, there was Chester Bowles had learned about it, and he deliberately leaked it. Deliberately, because he wanted the operation to fail! And be admitted it! Admitted it!
John Dean: Interesting. Interesting
Pres. Nixon: This happens all the time. Well, you can follow these characters to their Gethsemane. I feel for those poor guys in jail, particularly for Hunt with his wife dead.
John Dean: Well there is every indication they are hanging in tough right now.
Pres. Nixon: What the hell do they expect though? Do they expect clemency in a reasonable time? What would you advise on that?
John Dean: I think it is one of those things we will have to watch very closely. For example, -
Pres. Nixon: You couldn't do it, say, in six months.
Pres. Nixon: My view though is to say nothing about them on the ground that the matter is still in the courts and on appeal. Second, my view is to say nothing about the hearings at this point, except that I trust they will be conducted the proper way and I will not comment on the hearings while they are in process. Of course if they break through - if they get muckraking - It is best not to cultivate that thing here at the White House. If it is done at the White House again they are going to drop the (adjective deleted) thing. Now there, of course, you say but you leave it all to them. We'll see as time goes on. Maybe we will have to change our policy. But the President should not become involved in any part of this case. Do you agree with that?
John Dean: I agree totally, sir. Absolutely. That doesn't mean that quietly we are not going to be working around the office. You can rest assured that we are not going to be sitting quietly.
Pres. Nixon: I don't know what we can do. The people who are most disturbed about this (unintelligible) are the (adjective deleted) Republicans. A lot of these Congressmen, financial contributors, et cetera, are highly moral. The Democrats are just sort of saying, "(expletive deleted) fun and games!"
John Dean: Well, hopefully we can give them Segretti.
Pres. Nixon: (Expletive deleted) He was such a dumb figure, I don't see how our boys could have gone for him. But nevertheless, they did. It was really juvenile! But, nevertheless, what the hell did he do? What in the (characterization deleted) did he do? Shouldn't we be trying to get intelligence? Weren't they trying to get intelligence from us?
John Dean: Absolutely!
Pres. Nixon: Don't you try to disrupt their meetings? Didn't they try to disrupt ours? (expletive deleted) They threw rocks, ran demonstrations, shouted, cut the sound system, and let the tear gas in at night. What the hell is that all about? Did we do that?
Pres. Nixon: What did Segretti do that came off?
John Dean: He did some humorous things. For example, there would be a fund-raising dinner, and he hired Wayne the Wizard to fly in from the Virgin Islands to perform a magic show. He sent invitations to all the black diplomats and sent limousines out to have them picked up, and they all showed up and they hadn't been invited. He had 400 pizzas sent to another -
Pres. Nixon: Sure! What the hell! Pranks! Tuck did all those things in 1960, and all the rest.
John Dean: The one I think they are going to go after with a vengeance - and I plan to spend a great deal of time with next week, as a matter of fact a couple of days getting this all in order - is Herb Kalmbach.
Pres. Nixon: Yes.
John Dean: Herb - they have subpoenaed his records, and he has records that run all over hell's acres on things.
Pres. Nixon: (expletive deleted) well, they are not going to but tell them that is the way Nixon ran the Hiss Case. As a matter of fact some innuendo came out, but there was (adjective deleted) little hearsay. We really just got the facts, and tore them to pieces. Say "no hearsay" and "no innuendo." Ervin should sit like a court there: that is hearsay, and the counsel for our people should get up and say, "I object to that, Mr. Chairman," on the basis that it is hearsay.
John Dean: Well, there are a lot of precedents. I have been involved in two Congressional investigations. One was the Adam Clayton Powell investigation when I was working over there as the Minority Counsel of the House Judiciary. We didn't take hearsay. We stuck to the facts on that. We did an investigation of the Oklahoma judges. Again, the same sort of thing. We went into executive session when necessary. I bet if we look around, respectable investigations that have been held up there that could be held up, and some of it should be coming forth to set the stage for these hearings. I am planning a number of brain sessions with some of the media people to -
Pres. Nixon: I know. It is very important, but it seems like a terrible waste of your time. But it is important in the sense that all this business is a battle and they are going to wage the battle. A lot of them have enormous frustrations about those elections, state of their party, etc.
John Dean: Well I was - we have come a long road on this thing now. I had thought it was an impossible task to hold together until after the election until things started falling out, but we have made it this far and I am convinced we are going to make it the whole road and put this thing in the funny pages of the history books rather than anything serious because actually -
Pres. Nixon: It will be somewhat serious but the main thing, of course, is also the isolation of the President.....(expletive deleted) Of course, I am not dumb and I will never forget when I heard about this (adjective deleted) forced entry and bugging. I thought, what in the hell is this? What is the matter with these people? Are they crazy? I thought they were nuts! A prank! But it wasn't! It wasn't very funny. I think that our Democratic friends know that, too. They know what the hell it was. They don't think we'd be involved in such.
John Dean: I think they do too.
Pres. Nixon: Maybe they don't. They don't think I would be involved in such stuff. They think I have people capable of it. And they are correct, in that Colson would do anything. But let's remember this was not done by the White House. This was done by the Committee to Re-Elect, and Mitchell was the Chairman, correct?
John Dean: That's correct!
Pres. Nixon: And Kleindienst owes Mitchell everything. Mitchell wanted him for Attorney General. Wanted him for Deputy, and here he is. Now, (expletive deleted). Baker's got to realize this, and that if he allows this thing to get out of hand he is going to potentially ruin John Mitchell. He won't. Mitchell won't allow himself to be ruined. He will put on his big stone face. But I hope he does and he will. There is no question what they are after. What the Committee is after is somebody at the White House. They would like to get Haldeman or Colson, Ehrlichman.
John Dean: Or possible Dean. - You know, I am a small fish.
Pres. Nixon: Anybody at the White House they would - but in your case I think they realize you are the lawyer and they know you didn't have a (adjective deleted) thing to do with the campaign.

• 2/29/1973 H. Rap Brown and three co-defendants are convicted in NY of robbery and assault.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

• 3/1973 Nixon considers appointing J. Lee Rankin (formerly of the Warren Commission) as Special Prosecutor.
  
• 3/1973 NY Times published a series of articles by historians and scholars who worried that Nixon was systematically usurping the authority of both Congress and the courts in both his domestic and foreign policies.
  
• 3/1/1973 Eric Eisenstadt memo for CIA's deputy director for plans: "Current Time Magazine Investigation of Robert R. Mullen and Company." Time reporter Sandy Smith had come to the Mullen office 2/27 and announced that a Justice Department source said the company was a CIA front. Mr. Mullen stoutly denied the allegation. "Smith had many questions concerning Howard Hunt, such as how he secured Mullen employment and his salary…Bob Bennett…said that he recently spent four hours in Los Angeles being interviewed by a Newsweek reporter and had convinced him that the Mullen Company was not involved with the Watergate affair. Mr. Bennett rather proudly related that he is responsible for the article Whispers about Colson' in the March 5 issue of Newsweek. Mr. Bennett does not believe the company will be bothered much more by the news media which is concluding that the company is clean and has gotten a real bum rap while the real culprits are getting scot free.' Mr. Bennett also said that he has been feeding stories to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post with the understanding that there would be no attribution to Bennett. Woodward is suitably grateful for the fine stories and by-lines which he gets and protects Bennett (and the Mullen Company)." (Secret Agenda appendix)
  
• 3/2/1973 A federal grand jury in Dallas returned indictments of illegal wiretapping against Nelson Bunker Hunt, William Herbert Hunt, Clyde Wilson and Morgan Watson.
  
• 3/2/1973 US ambassador Cleo A. Noel Jr., US Charge d'Affaires George C. Moore and Belgian Charge d'Affaires Guy Eid were killed by Palestinian guerillas in Khartoum, Sudan.
  
• 3/3/1973 Haig's envoy, Col. Volney Warner, arrived at the Wounded Knee standoff.
  
• 3/5/1973 The Los Angeles Times reported that "a notebook and an address book that...Hunt has said were left in his White House office have never been received by the FBI, according to federal investigators." John Dean was supposed to have turned all of Hunt's materials over to the FBI.
  
• 3/6/1973 Spiro Agnew insisted that draft dodgers must admit "it is they who have erred and not the country...Now that the anti-war movement has collapsed, all those idle protestors have to have something to shout about."
  
• 3/6/1973 Administration reimposed mandatory price controls on the oil industry to stem inflation.
  
• 3/6/1973 Samuel A. Adams, a CIA analyst who had specialized in analyzing Vietnamese communist motivation, morale and strength 1966-72, testified at the Pentagon Papers trial that political pressures in '67 and '68 caused the US military to purposely underestimate the strength of the communists in Vietnam. He specifically blamed Westmoreland and Wheeler. The CIA was estimating at the time that the communists had 500,000 men, while Westmoreland was saying to the press that "the enemy was running out of men." (Los Angeles Times 3/7/1973)
  
• 3/7/1973 John Dean is named Nixon's liaison on Watergate matters.
  
• 3/12/1973 Al Haig received a detailed contingency plan for attacking the Indians at Wounded Knee, using Army troops. (General's Progress 214)
  
• 3/13/1973 Oval Office meeting (12:42pm - 2:00pm) between Nixon and Dean, with Haldeman briefly present. John Dean made a remark about the accident at Chappaquidick, saying, "If Kennedy knew the bear trap he was walking into…"
  

John Dean: I have all of the information that we have collected. There is some there, and I have turned it over to Baroody. Baroody is having a speech drafted for Barry Goldwater. And there is enough material there to make a rather sensational speech just by: Why in the hell isn't somebody looking into what happened to President Nixon during his campaign? Look at these events! How do you explain these? Where are the answers to these questions? But, there is nothing but threads. I pulled all the information . . .
Pres. Nixon: Also, the Senator should then present it to the Ervin Committee and demand that that be included.
John Dean: What I am working on there for Barry is a letter to Senator Ervin that this has come to my attention, and why shouldn't this be a part of the inquiry? And he can spring out 1964 and quickly to '72. We've got a pretty good speech there, if we can get out
our materials.
John Dean: Well you are probably going to get more questions this week. And the tough questions. And some of them don't have easy answers. For example, did Haldeman know that there was a Don Segretti out there? That question is likely.
Pres. Nixon: Did he? I don't know.
John Dean: Yes, he had knowledge that there was somebody in the field doing prankster-type activities.
Pres. Nixon: Well, I don't know anything about that....I think the thing to say is, "this is a matter being considered by the Committee and I am not going to comment on it." I don't want to get into the business of taking each charge that comes up in the Committee and commenting on it: "It is being considered by the Committee. It is being investigated and I am not doing to comment on it."
John Dean: Well, the bottom line, on a draft that (unintelligible). But if you have nothing to hide, Mr. President, here at the White House, why aren't you willing to spread on the record everything you know about it? Why doesn't the Dean Report be made public? Why doesn't everything come out? Why does Ziegler stand up there and bob and weave, and no comment? That's the bottom line.
John Dean: Well, then you will get a barrage of questions probably, in will you supply - will Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman and Mr. Dean go up to the Committee and testify?
Pres. Nixon: No, absolutely not.
John Dean: Mr. Colson?
Pres. Nixon: No. Absolutely not. It isn't a question of not - Ziegler or somebody had said that we in our executive privilege statement it was interpreted as meaning that we would not furnish information and all that. We said we will furnish information, but we are not going to be called to testify. That is the position. Dean and all the rest will grant you information. Won't you?
John Dean: Yes. Indeed I will!...Now the other thing that we talked about in the past, and I still have the same problem, is to have a "here it all is" approach. If we do that.
Pres. Nixon: And let it all hang out.
John Dean: And let it all hang out. Let's with a Segretti - etc.
Pres. Nixon: We have passed that point.
John Dean: Plus the fact, they are not going to believe the truth! That is the incredible thing!
Pres. Nixon: They won't believe the truth, and they have committed seven people!
John Dean: That's right! They will continually try to say that there is (unintelligible)
Pres. Nixon: They hope one will say one day, "Haldeman did it," and one day, one will say I did it. When we get to that question - they might question his political savvy, but not mine! Not on a matter like that!
John Dean: I have a thing on Sullivan I would like to ask you. Sullivan, as I told you, had been talking with me and I said Bill I would like for my own use to have a list of some of the horribles that you are aware of. He hasn't responded back to me, but he sent me a note yesterday saying John I am willing at any time to testify to what I know if you want me to. What he has, as we already know, he has something that has a certain degree of a dynamite situation already - the '68 Presidency, surveillance of Goldwater.
Pres. Nixon: I thought he said he saw that the '68 bugging was ordered, but he doesn't know whether it was carried out.
John Dean: Now the other thing, if we were going to use a package like this: Let's say in the Gray hearings - where everything is cast that we are the political people and they are not - that Hoover was above reproach, which is just not accurate, total (expletive omitted). The person who would destroy Hoover's image is going to be this man Bill Sullivan. Also it is going to tarnish quite severely.
Pres. Nixon: Some of the FBI.
John Dean: . . . some of the FBI. And a former President. He is going to lay it out, and just all hell is going to break loose once he does it. It is going to change the atmosphere of the Gray hearings and it is going to change the atmosphere of the whole Watergate hearings. Now the risk ...
Pres. Nixon: How will it change?
John Dean: Because it will put them in context of where government institutes were used in the past for the most flagrant political purposes.
Pres. Nixon: How can that help us?
John Dean: How does it help us?
Pres. Nixon: I am being the devil's advocate.
John Dean: I appreciate what you are doing. It is a red herring. It is what the public already believes. I think the people would react: (expletive deleted), more of that stuff! They are all bad down there! Because it is a one way street right now.
Pres. Nixon: Why is Sullivan willing to do this?
John Dean: I think the quid pro quo with Sullivan is that he wants someday back in the Bureau very badly.
Pres. Nixon: That's easy....Do you think after he did this, the Bureau would want him back? Would they want him back?
John Dean: I think probably not. What Bill Sullivan's desire in life is, is to set up a domestic national security intelligence system, a White House program. He says we are deficient. He says we have never been efficient, because Hoover lost his guts several years ago. If you recall he and Tom Huston worked on it. Tom Huston had your instructions to go out and do it and the whole thing just crumbled....That's all Sullivan really wants. Even if we could put him out studying it for a couple of years, if you could put him out in the CIA or someplace where he felt - put him there.
Pres. Nixon: We will do it.
John Dean: I don't know if he has given me his best yet. I don't know whether he's got more ammunition than he has already told me. I will never forget a couple off-the-cuff remarks.
Pres. Nixon: Why do you think he is now telling you this? Why is he doing this now?
John Dean: Well, the way it came out when TIME Magazine broke on the fact that it charged that the White House had directed that newsmen and White House staff people be subjected to some sort of surveillance for national security reasons. I called, in tracking down what happened, I called Sullivan and I said, "don't you think you ought to come over and talk to me about it and tell me what you know." I was calling to really determine whether he was a leak. I was curious to know where this might have come from because he was the operative man at the Bureau at the time. He is the one who did it. He came over and he was shocked and distraught and (unintelligible). Then, after going through with his own explanation of all what had happened, he started volunteering this other thing. He said John this is the only thing I can think of during this Administration that has any taint of political use but it doesn't really bother me because it was for national security purposes. These people worked with sensitive material on Vietnam that was getting out to reporters.
Pres. Nixon: Of course, the stuff was involved with the (expletive deleted) Vietnam war.
John Dean: That's right. Then he told me about going to (location and name deleted) and all that, and he said, "John that doesn't bother me, but what does bother me is that you all have been portrayed as politically using"-
Pres. Nixon: And we never did.
John Dean: And we never have! And he said the Eisenhower Administration didn't either.
Pres. Nixon: Never.
John Dean: He said the only times that he can recall that there has been a real political use has been during Democratic tenure. I said for example, Bill, what are you talking about? Then he told me of the Walter Jenkins affair, when DeLoach and Fortas, etc. -
Pres. Nixon: The Kennedy's, let me say, used it politically in that steel thing. That was not national security was it?
Pres. Nixon: Does he know about the bugging in '68?
John Dean: Yep! I think he would tell everything. He knows!
Pres. Nixon: You do?
John Dean: Uh huh. That's what I am saying he is a bomb!...I just have a feeling that it would be bad for one Bill Sullivan to quietly appear on some Senator's doorstep, and say, "I have the information you ought to have." Well, "where did you get it?" "Why are you up here?" "Well the White House sent me." That would be bad! The other thing is, maybe this information could be brought to the attention of the White House, and the White House could say to Eastland, "I think you ought to call an executive session and hear his
testimony.
Pres. Nixon: Could we go after the Bureau? I don't know whether we could or not.
John Dean: Not quite after the Bureau. What they are doing is taking the testimony of somebody who is going after the Bureau.
Pres. Nixon: I know that. I am just thinking. They will look down the road and see what the result of what they are doing is, won't they? I would think so. Would they go after Johnson? Let's look at the future. How bad would it hurt the country, John, to have the FBI so terribly damaged?
John Dean: Do you mind if I take this back and kick it around with Dick Moore? These other questions. I think it would be damaging to the FBI, but maybe it is time to shake the FBI and rebuild it. I am not so sure the FBI is everything it is cracked up to be. I am convinced the FBI isn't everything the public think it is.
Pres. Nixon: No.
John Dean: I know quite well it isn't.
John Dean: Well if they say they have to hold up Gray's confirmation until the Watergate Hearings are completed -
Pres. Nixon: That's great!
John Dean: That's the vehicle.
Pres. Nixon: That's a vote really for us, because Gray, in my opinion, should not be the head of the FBI. After going through the hell of the hearings, he will not be a good Director, as far as we are concerned.
John Dean: I think that is true. I think he will be a very suspect Director. Not that I don't think Pat won't do what we want - I do look at him a little differently than Dick in that regard. Like he is still keeping in close touch with me. He is calling me. He has given me his hot line. We talk at night, how do you want me to handle this, et cetera? So he still stays in touch, and is still being involved, but he can't do it because he is going to be under such surveillance by his own people - very move he is making - that it would be a difficult thing for Pat. Not that Pat wouldn't want to play ball, but he may not be able to.
Pres. Nixon: The difficulty with the White House being involved is that if we are involved in this (expletive deleted), that Is why it ought to be that he just.
John Dean: We have a little bomb here that we might want to drop at one time down the road. Maybe the forum to do it in is something totally out of context between the Gray hearings and the Watergate hearings. Maybe we need to go to the US News, sir. Who knows what it would be, but we ought to consider every option, now that we've got it....That NBC thing last night, which is just a travesty as far and we're talking about shabby journalism, they took the worst edited clips out of context, with Strachan saying he was leaving. And then had a little of clip of Ron saying, "I deny that." And he was denying something other than what they were talking about in their charge. It was incredible. Someone is going through and putting that altogether right now and Ron ought to be able to (unintelligible) to that one on NBC. It was a very, very dishonest television reporting of sequence of events, but out of sequence...Well one thing, the saturation level of the American people on this story is cracking. The saturation level in this city is getting pretty high now, and they can't take too much more of this stuff.
Pres. Nixon: Think not?
John Dean: There is nothing really new coming out.
Pres. Nixon: I talked with some kid and he said I don't think that anybody incidentally would care about anybody infiltrating the peace movement that was demonstrating against the President, particularly on the War in Vietnam.
John Dean: What happened is that these Mexican checks came in. They were given to Gordon Liddy, and said, "why don't you get these cashed?" Gordy Liddy, in turn, put them down to this fellow Barker in Florida, who said he could cash these Mexican checks, and put them with your Barker's bank account back in here. They could have been just as easily cashed at the Riggs Bank. There was nothing wrong with the checks. Why all the rigamorole? It is just like a lot of other things that happened over there. God knows why it was all done. It was totally unnecessary, and it was money that was not directly involved in Watergate. It wasn't a wash operation to get money back to Liddy and the like.
Pres. Nixon: Who is going to be the first witness up there?
John Dean: Sloan....He's scared, he's weak. He has a compulsion to cleanse his soul by confession. We are giving him a lot of stroking.....Sloan will be the worst witness. I think Magruder will be a good witness. This fellow, Bart Porter, will be a good witness. They have already been through Grand Jury. They have been through trial. They did well. And then, of course, people around here.
Pres. Nixon: None will be witnesses.
John Dean: They won't be witnesses?
Pres. Nixon: Hell, no. They will make statements. That will be the line which I think we have to get across to Ziegler in all his briefings where he is constantly saying we will provide information. That is not the question. It is how it is to be furnished. We will not furnish it in a formal session. That would be a break down of the privilege. Period.
John Dean: No one knows what in the world Sirica is doing. It is getting to be a long time now. It frankly is, and no one really has a good estimation of how he will sentence. There is some feeling that he will sentence Liddy the heaviest. Liddy is already in jail, he is in Danbury. He wants to start serving so he can get good time going. Hunt, he will probably be very fair with.
Pres. Nixon: Why?
John Dean: He likes Hunt - he thought Hunt was being open with him and being candid, and Hunt gave a statement in open court that he didn't know of any higher ups involved and Hunt didn't put him through the rigors of trial. Hunt was a beaten man who had lost his wife, was ill, and still they tried to move to have him severed from the trial. And Hunt did not try to cause a lot of problems. Bittman was cooperative, whereas Liddy played the heavy in the trial. His lawyer raised all the objections and the like, and embarrassed the Judge for some in-chambers things he had said.
Pres. Nixon: But Liddy is going to appeal the sentence?
John Dean: Liddy is going to appeal the decision, the trial. He will appeal that.
Pres. Nixon: He will appeal the trial? He was convicted!
John Dean: There is an outside chance that this man, this Judge, has gone so far in his zeal to be a special prosecutor
Pres. Nixon: Well some of those statements from the Bench -
John Dean: Incredible statements!
Pres. Nixon: To me, incredible!
John Dean: Commenting on witnesses testimony before the Jury, was just incredible. Incredible! So there may be a mistrial. Or maybe reversible error.
Pres. Nixon: What about the Cubans?
John Dean: The Cubans will probably be thought of as hired hands, and receive nowhere near the sentence of Liddy, I would think. Not all of them. Barker, the lead Cuban, may get more than the others. It is hard to say. I just don't have any idea. Sirica is a strange man. He is known as a hanging judge.
Pres. Nixon: Public hearings the first of May. Well it must be a big show. Public hearings. I wouldn't think though, I know from experience, my guess is that I think they could get through about three weeks of those and then I think it would begin to peter out somewhat. Don't you agree?
John Dean: No, I -
Pres. Nixon: ITT went longer, but that was a different thing, and it seemed more important....Well, so be it. I noticed in the news summary Buchanan was viewing with alarm the grave crisis in the confidency of the Presidency, etc....How much of a crisis? It will be - I am thinking in terms of - the point is, everything is a crisis. (expletive deleted) it
is a terrible lousy thing - it will remain a crisis among the upper intellectual types, the soft heads, our own, too - Republicans - and the Democrats and the rest. Average people
won't think it is much of a crisis unless it affects them. (unintelligible)
John Dean: I think it will pass. I think after the Ervin hearings, they are going to find so much - there will be some new revelations. I don't think that the thing will get out of hind. I have no reason to believe it will.
Pres. Nixon: Oh, yes - there would be new revelations.
John Dean: They would be quick (inaudible) They would want to find out who
knew -
Pres. Nixon: Is there a higher up?
John Dean: Is there a higher up?
Pres. Nixon: Let's face it, I think they are really after Haldeman.
John Dean: Haldeman and Mitchell.
Pres. Nixon: Colson is not big enough name for them. He really isn't. He is, you know, he is on the government side, but Colson's name doesn't bother them so much. They are after Haldeman and after Mitchell.....I don't know, Bob didn't know any of those people like the Hunts and all that bunch. Colson did, but Bob didn't. OK?
John Dean: That's right.
Pres. Nixon: Now where the hell, or how much Chapin knew I will be (expletive deleted) if I know.
John Dean: Chapin didn't know anything about the Watergate.
Pres. Nixon: Don't you think so?
John Dean: Absolutely not.
Pres. Nixon: Strachan?
John Dean: Yes.
Pres. Nixon: He knew?
John Dean: Yes.
Pres. Nixon: About the Watergate?
John Dean: Yes.
Pres. Nixon: Well, then, he probably told Bob. He may not have.
John Dean: He was judicious in what he relayed, but Strachan is as tough as nails. He can go in and stonewall, and say, "I don't know anything about what you are talking about."
Pres. Nixon: But he knew? He knew about Watergate? Strachan did?
John Dean: Yes.
Pres. Nixon: I will be damned! Well that is the problem in Bob's case. Not Chapin then, but Strachan. Strachan worked for him, didn't he?
John Dean: Yes. They would have one hell of a time proving that Strachan had knowledge of it, though.
Pres. Nixon: Who knew better? Magruder?
John Dean: Magruder and Liddy.
Pres. Nixon: Oh, I see. The other weak link for Bob is Magruder. He hired him et cetera.
John Dean: That applies to Mitchell, too.
Pres. Nixon: Mitchell-Magruder. Where do you see Colson coming into it? Do you think he knew quite a bit and yet, he could know quite a great deal about a lot of other things and not know a lot about this. I don't know.
John Dean: Well I have never -
Pres. Nixon: He sure as hell knows Hunt. That we know. Was very close to him.
John Dean: Chuck has told me that he had no knowledge, specific knowledge, of the Watergate before it occurred....I think that Chuck had knowledge that something was going on over there, but he didn't have any knowledge of the details of the specifics of the whole
thing.
John Dean: No, Segretti wasn't involved in the intelligence gathering piece of it at all.
Pres. Nixon: Oh, he wasn't? Who the hell was gathering intelligence?
John Dean: That was Liddy and his outfit.
Pres. Nixon: Apart from Watergate?
John Dean: That's right. Well you see Watergate was part of intelligence gathering, and this was their first thing. What happened is -
Pres. Nixon: That was such a stupid thing!
John Dean: It was incredible - that's right. That was Hunt.
Pres. Nixon: To think of Mitchell and Bob would have allowed - would have allowed - this kind of operation to be in the campaign committee!
John Dean: I don't think he knew it was there.
Pres. Nixon: I don't think that Mitchell knew about this sort of thing.
John Dean: Oh, no, no! Don't misunderstand me. I don't think that he knew the people. I think he knew that Liddy was out intelligence gathering. I don't think he knew that Liddy would use a fellow like McCord, (expletive removed), who worked for the Committee.
I can't believe that.
Pres. Nixon: Hunt?
John Dean: I don't think Mitchell knew about Hunt either.
Pres. Nixon: Well Mitchell thought, well, gee, and I hired this fellow Fred Fielding who works for me. Look, he said, Magruder said to me, "will you find me a lawyer?" I said,
John Dean: Magruder says - as he did in the trial - well, of course, my name has been dragged in as the guy who sent Liddy over there, which is an interesting thing. Well what happened they said is that Magruder asked - he wanted to hire my deputy over there asDeputy Counsel and I said, "No way. I can't give him up."
Pres. Nixon: Was Liddy your deputy?
John Dean: No, Liddy never worked for me.
Pres. Nixon: How the hell does Liddy stand up so well?
John Dean: He's a strange man, Mr. President.
Pres. Nixon: Strange or strong?
John Dean: Strange and strong. His loyalty is - I think it is just beyond the pale. Nothing -
Pres. Nixon: He hates the other side too, doesn't he?
John Dean: Oh, absolutely! He is strong. He really is.
Pres. Nixon: Is it too late to go the hang-out road?
John Dean: Yes, I think it is. The hang out road -
Pres. Nixon: The hang-out road (inaudible).
John Dean: It was kicked around Bob and I and -
Pres. Nixon: Ehrlichman always felt it should be hang-out.
John Dean: Well, I think I convinced him why he would not want to hang-out either. There is a certain domino situation here. If some things start going, a lot of other things are going to start going, and there can be a lot of problems if everything starts falling. So there are dangers, Mr. President. I would be less than candid if I didn't tell you there are. There is a reason for not everyone going up and testifying.
John Dean: They would never believe it. The two things they are working on are Watergate
Pres. Nixon: Who is "they?"
John Dean: The press, (inaudible), the intellectuals, -
Pres. Nixon: The Packwoods?
John Dean: Right - They would never buy it as far as one White House involvement in Watergate which I think there is just none for that incident which occurred at the Democratic National Headquarters. People here we just did not know that was going to be done. I think there are some people who saw the fruits of it, but that is another story. I am talking about the criminal conspiracy to go in there. The other thing is that the Segretti thing. You hang that out, and they wouldn't believe that. They wouldn't believe that Chapin acted on his own to put his old friend Segretti to be a Dick Tuck on somebody else's campaign. They would have to paint it into something more sinister, more involved, part of a general plan.
Pres. Nixon: No, I tell you this it is the last gasp of our hardest opponents. They've just got to have something to squeal about it.
John Dean: It is the only thing they have to squeal -
Pres. Nixon: (Unintelligible) They are going to lie around and squeal. They are having a hard time now. They got the hell kicked out of them in the election. There is not a Watergate around in this town, not so much our opponents, even the media, but the basic thing is the establishment. The establishment is dying, and so they've got to show that despite the success we have had in foreign policy and in the election, they've got to show that it is just wrong just because of this. They are trying to use this as the whole thing.
John Dean: Well, that is why I keep coming back to this fellow Sullivan. It could change the picture.
Pres. Nixon: How could it change though? Saying here is another -
John Dean: Saying here is another and it happens to be Democrats. You know, I know I just -
Pres. Nixon: If he would get Kennedy into it, too, I would be a little bit more pleased.
John Dean: Let me tell you something that lurks at the bottom of this whole thing. If, in going after Segretti, they go after Kalmbach's bank records, you will recall sometime back - perhaps you did not know about this - I apologize. That right after Chappaquidick somebody was put up there to start observing and within six hours he was there for every second of Chappaquidick for a year, and for almost two years he worked for Jack Caulfield.
Pres. Nixon: Oh, I have heard of Caulfield.
John Dean: He worked for Caulfield when Caulfield worked for John, and then when I came over here I inherited Caulfield and this guy was still on this same thing. If they get to those bank records between the start of July of 1969 through June of 1971, they say what are these about? Who is this fellow up in New York that you paid? There comes Chappaquidick with a vengeance. This guy is a twenty year detective on the New York City Police Department.
Pres. Nixon: In other words we -
John Dean: He is ready to disprove and show that
Pres. Nixon: (unintelligible)
John Dean: If they get to it - that is going to come out and this whole thing can turn around on that. If Kennedy knew the bear trap he was walking into
Pres. Nixon: How do we know - why don't we get it out anyway?
John Dean: Well, we have sort of saved it.
Pres. Nixon: Does he have any records? Are they any good?
John Dean: He is probably the most knowledgeable man in the country. I think he ran up against walls and they closed the records down. There are things he can't get, but he can ask all of the questions and get many of the answers as a 20 year detective, but we don't want to surface him right now. But if he is ever surfaced, this is what they will get.
Pres. Nixon: How will Kalmbach explain that he hired this guy to do the job on Chappaquidick? Out of what type of funds?
John Dean: He had money left over from the pre-convention -
Pres. Nixon: Are they going to investigate those funds too?
John Dean: They are funds that are quite legal. There is nothing illegal about those funds. Regardless of what may happen, what may occur, they may stumble into this in going back to, say 1971, in Kalmbach's bank records. They have already asked for a lot of his bank records in connection with Segretti, as to how he paid Segretti.
Pres. Nixon: Are they going to go back as far as Chappaquidick?
John Dean: Well this fellow worked in 1971 on this. He was up there. He has talked to everybody in that town. He is the one who has caused a lot of embarrassment for Kennedy already by saying he went up there as a newspaperman, by saying; "Why aren't you checking this? Why aren't you looking there?" Calling the press people's attention to things. Gosh, the guy did a masterful job. I have never had the full report....Sullivan - if I have one liability in Sullivan here, it is his knowledge of the earlier (unintelligible) that occurred here.
Pres. Nixon: That we did?
John Dean: That we did.
Pres. Nixon: Well, why don't you just tell him - he could say, "I did no political work at all. My work in the Nixon Administration was solely in the national security." And that is thoroughly true!

• 3/17/1973 Oval Office meeting between Dean and Nixon (1:25pm - 2:10pm)
  

John Dean: The intent, when Segretti was hired, was nothing evil nothing vicious, nothing bad, nothing. Not espionage, not sabotage. It was pranksterism that got out of hand and we know that. And I think we can lay our story out there. I have no problem with the Segretti thing. It's just not that serious. The other potential problem is Ehrlichman's and this is -
Pres. Nixon: In connection with Hunt?
John Dean: In connection with Hunt and Liddy both.
Pres. Nixon: They worked for him?
John Dean: They - these fellows had to be some idiots as we've learned after the fact. They went out and went into Dr. Ellsberg's doctor's office and they had, they were geared up with all this CIA equipment - cameras and the like. Well they turned the stuff back in to the CIA some point in time and left film in the camera. CIA has not put this together, and they don't know what it all means right now. But it wouldn't take a very sharp investigator very long because you've got pictures in the CIA files that they had to turn over to (unintelligible).
Pres. Nixon: What in the world - what in the name of God was Ehrlichman having something (unintelligible) in the Ellsberg (unintelligible)?
John Dean: They were trying to - this was a part of an operation that - in connection with the Pentagon papers. They were - the whole thing - they wanted to get Ellsberg's psychiatric records for some reason. I don't know.
Pres. Nixon: This is the first I ever heard of this. I, I (unintelligible) care about Ellsberg was not our problem.
John Dean: That's right.
Pres. Nixon: (Expletive deleted)
John Dean: In the CIA's files which they - which the Committee is asking for - the material they turned over to the Department of Justice....There are all the materials relating to Hunt. In there are these pictures which the CIA developed and they've got Gordon Liddy standing proud as punch outside this doctor's office with his name on it. And (unintelligible) this material it's not going to take very long for an investigator to go back and say, well, why would this - somebody be at the doctor's office and they'd find out that there was a breakin at the doctor's office and then you'd find Liddy on the staff and then you'd start working it back. I don't think they'll ever reach that point.

• 3/19/1973 James McCord wrote Judge John Sirica, telling him that perjury had been committed at the trial because of pressure on the defendants to remain silent, and that high administration officials were involved in a cover-up.
  
• 3/20/1973 Phone conversation between Nixon and Dean (7:29pm - 7:43pm)
  

John Dean: The other witness they have now subpoenaed - there are two other witnesses - there is a Hoback girl from the Re-Election Committee - she was interrogated by Committee staff and counsel as a result of her confidential interviews with the FBI....John Dean: Alleging that that had been leaked by me to them and then, of course, that was not true.
Pres. Nixon: That's not true.
John Dean: And the other fellow they are calling is a fellow by the name if Thomas Lombard who is trying to establish a link between Dean on that one. Lombard did volunteer work for me in my office and did volunteer work for Liddy and at one time he saw Liddy in my office. Big deal. It was purely campaign, you know....The Hoback girl should be broken down. She should come out in tears as a result of the fact that she is virtually lying about one thing and our people will be on the
Pres. Nixon: You mean - to our people know what to ask her?
John Dean: Yes they do. Yes they do.
Pres. Nixon: Uh, huh. Why is she doing it? Do we know?
John Dean: Disgruntled. She has been fairly disgruntled all along. She is a Democrat that worked over there in the Finance Committee. She professes a personal loyalty to Maury Stans but that is about the extent of it, any, of her loyalty.
Pres. Nixon: They didn't bite the bullet with regard to subpoenaing you?
John Dean: No. I don't think there is any chance they are going to do that.
Pres. Nixon: You've got to have something where it doesn't appear that I am doing this in, you know, just in a - saying to hell with the Congress and to hell with the people, we are not going to tell you anything because of Executive Privilege. That, they don't understand. But if you say, "No, we are willing to cooperate," and you've made a complete statement, but make it very incomplete. See, that is what I mean. I don't want a, too much in chapter and verse as you did in your letter, I just want just a general -
John Dean: An all around statement.
Pres. Nixon: That's right. Try just something general. Like "I have checked into this matter; I can categorically, based on my investigation, the following: Haldeman is not involved in this, that and the other thing. Mr. Colson did not do this; Mr. so and so did not do this. Mr. Blank did not do this." Right down the line, taking the most glaring things. If there are any further questions, please let me know. See?

• 3/21/1973 Oval Office meeting between Nixon, Dean Haldeman (10:12am-11:55am) Chuck Colson told Barbara Walters 7/1974 that this was the day he had recommended hiring J. Lee Rankin as special Watergate counsel.
  
• 3/21/1973 Hunt's lawyer, William O. Bittman, gave him an envelope containing $75,000. Bittman testified 7/9/1974 that he thought it was only for legal fees, not to buy Hunt's silence.
  
• 3/21/1973 Crucial meeting between John Dean and President Nixon. Discussion focuses on ways to insure the continued silence of the Watergate burglars and those involved in the cover-up. "Hush-money" and offers of executive clemency discussed. Later this day, Howard Hunt's lawyer receives $75,000.00.
  

Pres. Nixon: Well what is the Dean summary of the day about?
John Dean: John caught me on the way out and asked me about why Gray was holding back on information, if that was under instructions from us. And it was and it wasn't. It was instructions proposed by the Attorney General, consistent with your press conference statement that no further raw data was to be turned over to the full committee. And that was the extent of it. And then Gray, himself, who reached the conclusion that no more information should be turned over, that he had turned over enough. So this again is Pat Gray making decisions on his own on how to handle his hearings. He has been totally - (unintelligible) to take any guidance, any instruction. We don't know what he is going to do. He is not going to talk about it. He won't review it, and I don't think he does it to harm you in any way, sir.
Pres. Nixon: No, he is just quite stubborn and also he isn't very smart. You know -
John Dean: He is bullheaded.
Pres. Nixon: He is smart in his own way but he's got that typical (expletive deleted) this is right and I am going to do it.
John Dean: That's why he thinks he is going to be confirmed. He is being his own man. He is being forthright and honest. He feels he has turned over too much and so it is conscious decision that he is harming the Bureau by doing this and so he is not going to.
Pres. Nixon: We have to get the boys off the line that this is because the White House told him to do this and everything. And also, as I told Ehrlichman, I don't see why our little boys can't make something out of the fact that (expletive deleted) this is the only responsible position that could possibly be made. The FBI cannot turn over raw files. Has anybody made that point? I have tried to several times.
John Dean: Sam Ervin has made that point himself. In fact, in reading the transcript of Gray's hearings, Ervin tried to hold Gray back from doing what he was doing at the time he did it. I thought it was very unwise. I don't think that anyone is criticizing your position on it
Pres. Nixon: Let's make a point that raw files, I mean that point should be made that we are standing for the rights of innocent individuals. The American Civil Liberties Union is against it. We are against it. Hoover had the tradition, and it will continue to be the tradition. All files are confidential. See if we can't get someone inspired to put that out. Let them see what is in one.
John Dean: The reason that I thought we ought to talk this morning is because in our conversations, I have the impression that you don't know everything I know and it makes it very difficult for you to make judgments that only you can make on some of these things and I thought that -
Pres. Nixon: In other words, I have to know why you feel that we shouldn't unravel something?
John Dean: Let me give you my overall first.
Pres. Nixon: In other words, your judgment as to where it stands, and where we will go.
John Dean: I think that there is no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we've got. We have a cancer within, close to the Presidency, that is growing. It is growing daily. It's compounded, growing geometrically now, because it compounds itself. That will be clear if I, you know, explain some of the details of why it is. Basically, it is because (1) we are being blackmailed; (2) People are going to start perjuring themselves very quickly that have not had to perjure themselves to protect other people in the line. And there is no assurance
Pres. Nixon: That that won't bust?
John Dean: That that won't bust. So let me give you the sort of basic facts, talking first about the Watergate; and then about Segretti: and then about some of the peripheral items that have come up. First of all on the Watergate: how did it all start, where did it start? O.K! It started with an instruction to me from Bob Haldeman to see if we couldn't set up a perfectly legitimate campaign intelligence operation over at the Re-Election Committee. Not being in this business, I turned to somebody who had been in this business, Jack Caulfield. I don't remember whether you remember Jack or not. He was your original bodyguard before they had the candidate protection, an old city policeman.
Pres. Nixon: Yes, I know him.
John Dean: Jack worked for John and then was transferred to my office. I said Jack come up with a plan that, you know - a normal infiltration, buying information from secretaries and all that sort of thing. He did, he put together a plan. It was kicked around. I went to Ehrlichman with it. I went to Mitchell with it, and the consensus was that Caulfield was not the man to do this. In retrospect, that might have been a bad call because he is an incredibly cautious person and wouldn't have put the situation where it is today. After rejecting that, they said we still need something so I was told to look around for someone who could go over to 1701 and do this. That is when I came up with Gordon Liddy. They needed a lawyer. Gordon had an intelligence background from his FBI service. I was aware of the fact that he had done some extremely sensitive things for the White House while he had been at the White House and he had apparently done them well. Going out into Ellsberg's doctor's office
Pres. Nixon: Oh, yeah.
John Dean: And things like this. He worked with leaks. He tracked these things down. So the report that I got from Krogh was that he was a hell of a good man and not only that a good lawyer and could set up a proper operation. So we talked to Liddy. He was interested in doing it. I took Liddy over to meet Mitchell. Mitchell thought highly of him because Mitchell was partly involved in his coming to the White House to work for Krogh. Liddy had been at Treasury before that. Then Liddy was told to put together his plan, you know, how he would run an intelligence operation. This was after he was hired over there at the Committee. Magruder called me in January and said I would like to have you come over and see Liddy's plan.
Pres. Nixon: January of '72?
John Dean: January of '72.
John Dean: "You come over to Mitchell's office and sit in a meeting where Liddy is going to lay his plan out." I said I don't really know if I am the man, but if you want me there I will be happy to. So I came over and Liddy laid out a million dollar plan that was the most incredible thing I have ever laid my eyes on: all in codes, and involved black bag operations, kidnapping, providing prostitutes to weaken the opposition, bugging, mugging teams. It was just an incredible thing.
Pres. Nixon: Tell me this: Did Mitchell go along -?
John Dean: No, no, not at all, Mitchell just sat there puffing and laughing. I could tell from - after Liddy left the office I said that is the most incredible thing I have ever seen. He said I agree. And so Liddy was told to go back to the drawing board and come up with something realistic. So there was a second meeting. They asked me to come over to that. I came into the tail end of the meeting. I wasn't there for the first part. I don't know how long the meeting lasted. At this point, they were discussing again bugging, kidnapping and the like. At this point I said right in front of everybody, very clearly, I said, "These are not the sort of things (1) that are ever to be discussed in the office of the Attorney General of the United States - that was where he still was - and I am personally incensed." And I am trying to get Mitchell off the hook. He is a nice person and doesn't like to have to say no when he is talking with people he is going to have to work with.
Pres. Nixon: That's right.
John Dean: So I let it be known. I said "You all pack that stuff up and get it the hell out of here. You just can't talk this way in this office and you should re-examine your whole thinking."
Pres. Nixon: Who all was present?
John Dean: It was Magruder, Mitchell, Liddy and myself. I came back right after the meeting and told Bob, "Bob, we have a growing disaster on our hands if they are thinking this way," and I said, "The White House has got to stay out of this and I, frankly, am not going to be involved in it." He said, "I agree John." I thought at that point that the thing was turned off. That is the last I heard of it and I thought it was turned off because it was an absurd proposal....Liddy sat over there and tried to come up with another plan that he could sell. (1) They were talking to him, telling him that he was putting too much money in it. I don't think they were discounting the illegal points. Jeb is not a lawyer. He did not know whether this is the way the game was played and what it was all about. They came up, apparently, with another plan, but they couldn't get it approved by anybody over there. So Liddy and Hunt apparently came to see Chuck Colson, and Chuck Colson picked up the telephone and called Magruder and said, "You all either fish or cut bait. This is absurd to have these guys over there and not using them. If you are not going to use them, I may use them." Things of this nature.
Pres. Nixon: When was this?
John Dean: This was apparently in February of '72.
Pres. Nixon: Did Colson know what they were talking about?
John Dean: I can only assume, because of his close relationship - with Hunt, that he had a damn good idea what they were talking about, a damn good idea. He would probably deny it today and probably get away with denying it. But I still - unless Hunt blows on him -
Pres. Nixon: But then Hunt isn't enough. It takes two doesn't it?
John Dean: Probably. Probably. But Liddy was there also and if Liddy were to blow -
Pres. Nixon: Then you have a problem - I was saying as to the criminal liability in the White House.
John Dean: I will go back over that, and take out any of the soft spots.
Pres. Nixon: Colson, you think was the person who pushed?
John Dean: I think he helped to get the thing off the dime....I think Bob was assuming, that they had something that was proper over there, some intelligence gathering operation that Liddy was operating. And through Strachan, who was his tickler, he started pushing them to get some information and they - Magruder - took that as a signal to probably go to Mitchell and to say, "They are pushing us like crazy for this from the White House. And so Mitchell probably puffed on his pipe and said, "Go ahead," and never really reflected on what it was all about. So they had some plan that obviously had, I gather, different targets they were going to go after. They were going to infiltrate, and bug, and do all this sort of thing to a lot of these targets. This is knowledge I have after the fact. Apparently after they had initially broken in and bugged the DNC they were getting information. The information was coming over here to Strachan and some of it was given to Haldeman, there is no doubt about it.
John Dean: Strachan was aware of receiving information, reporting to Bob. At one point Bob even gave instructions to change their capabilities from Muskie to McGovern, and passed this back through Strachan to Magruder and apparently to Liddy. And Liddy was starting to make arrangements to go in and bug the McGovern operation.
Pres. Nixon: They had never bugged Muskie, though, did they?
John Dean: No, they hadn't, but they had infiltrated it by a secretary.
Pres. Nixon: By a secretary?
John Dean: By a secretary and a chauffeur....The next point in time that I became aware of anything was on June 17th when I got the word that there had been this break in at the DNC and somebody from our Committee had been caught in the DNC. And I said, "Oh, (expletive deleted)." You know, eventually putting the pieces together -
Pres. Nixon: You knew what it was.
John Dean: I knew who it was. So I called Liddy on Monday morning and said, "First, Gordon, I want to know whether anybody in the White House was involved in this." And he said, "No, they weren't." I said, "Well I want to know how in (adjective deleted) name this happened." He said, "Well, I was pushed without mercy by Magruder to get in there and to get more information. That the information was not satisfactory. That Magruder said, 'The White House is not happy with what we are getting.'"
Pres. Nixon: The White House?
John Dean: The White House. Yeah!
Pres. Nixon: Who do you think was pushing him?
John Dean: Well, I think it was probably Strachan thinking that Bob wanted things, because I have seen that happen on other occasions where things have said to have been of very prime importance when they really weren't.
Pres. Nixon: Why at that point in time I wonder? I am just trying to think. We had just finished the Moscow trip. The Democrats had just nominated McGovern. I mean, (expletive deleted), what in the hell were these people doing? I can see their doing it earlier. I can see the pressures, but I don't see why all the pressure was on then.
John Dean: I don't know, other than the fact that they might have been looking for information about the conventions.
Pres. Nixon: That's right.
John Dean: Because, I understand that after the fact that there was a plan to bug Larry O'Brien's suite down in Florida. So Liddy told me that this is what had happened and this is why it had happened.
Pres. Nixon: Where did he learn that there were plans to bug Larry O'Brien's suite?
John Dean: From Magruder, long after the fact.
Pres. Nixon: Magruder is (unintelligible)
John Dean: Yeah. Magruder is totally knowledgeable on the whole thing.
Pres. Nixon: Yeah.
John Dean: Alright now, we have gone through the trial. I don't know if Mitchell has perjured himself in the Grand Jury or not.
Pres. Nixon: Who?
John Dean: Mitchell. I don't know how much knowledge he actually had. I know that Magruder has perjured himself in the Grand Jury. I know that Porter has perjured himself in the Grand Jury.
Pres. Nixon: Who is Porter? (unintelligible)
John Dean: He is one of Magruder's deputies. They set up this scenario which they ran by me. They said, "How about this?" I said, "I don't know. If this is what you are - doing to hang on, fine."
Pres. Nixon: What did they say in the Grand Jury?
John Dean: They said, as they said before the trial in the Grand Jury, that Liddy had come over as Counsel and we knew he had these capacities to do legitimate intelligence. We had no idea what he was doing. He was given an authorization of $250,000 to collect information, because our surrogates were out on the road. They had no protection, and we had information that there were going to be demonstrations against them, and that we had to have a plan as to what liabilities they were going to be confronted with and Liddy was charged with doing this. We had no knowledge that he was going to bug the DNC.
Pres. Nixon: The point is, that is not true?
John Dean: That's right.
Pres. Nixon: Magruder did know it was going to take place?
John Dean: Magruder gave the instructions to be back in the DNC.
Pres. Nixon: He did?
John Dean: Yes.
Pres. Nixon: You know that?
John Dean: Yes.
Pres. Nixon: I see. O.K.
John Dean: I honestly believe that no one over here knew that. I know that as God is my maker, I had no knowledge that they were going to do this.
Pres. Nixon: Mitchell has given a sworn statement, hasn't he?
John Dean: Yes, Sir.
Pres. Nixon: To the Jury?
John Dean: To the Grand Jury. -
Pres. Nixon: You mean the Goldberg arrangement?
John Dean: We had an arrangement whereby he went down with several of them, because of the heat of this thing and the implications on the election, we made an arrangement where they could quietly go into the Department of Justice and have one of the assistant U.S. Attorneys take their testimony and then read it before the Grand Jury.
Pres. Nixon: I thought Mitchell went.
John Dean: That's right, Mitchell was actually called before the Grand Jury. The Grand Jury would not settle for less, because the jurors wanted him.
Pres. Nixon: And he went?
John Dean: And he went.
Pres. Nixon: Good!
John Dean: I don't know what he said. I have never seen a transcript of the Grand Jury. Now what has happened post June 17? I was under pretty clear instructions not to investigate this, but this could have been disastrous on the electorate if all hell had broken loose. I worked on a theory of containment....There is no doubt that I was totally aware of what the Bureau was doing at all times. I was totally aware of what the Grand Jury was doing. I knew what witnesses were going to be called. I knew what they were asked, and I had to.
Pres. Nixon: Why did Petersen play the game so straight with us?
John Dean: Because Petersen is a soldier. He kept me informed. He told me when we had problems, where we had problems and the like. He believes in you and he believes in this Administration. This Administration has made him. I don't think he has done anything improper, but he did make sure that the investigation was narrowed down to the very, very fine criminal thing which was a break for us. There is no doubt about it....Colson said, "I have no knowledge of this" to the FBI. Strachan said, "I have no knowledge." They didn't ask Strachan any questions about Watergate. They asked him about Segretti. They said, "what is your connection with Liddy?" Strachan just said, "Well, I met him over there." They never really pressed him. Strachan appeared, as a result of some coaching, to be the dumbest paper pusher in the bowels of the White House.
Pres. Nixon: I understand.
John Dean: Alright. Now post June 17th: These guys immediately - It is very interesting. (Dean sort of chuckled) Liddy, for example, on the Friday before - I guess it was on the 15th, no, the 16th of June - had been in Henry Petersen's office with another member of my staff on campaign compliance problems. After the incident, he ran Kleindienst down at Burning Tree Country Club and told him "you've got to get my men out of jail." Kleindienst said, "You get the hell out of here, kid. Whatever you have to say, just say to somebody else. Don't bother me." But this has never come up. Liddy said if they all got counsel instantly and said we will ride this thing out. Alright, then they started making demands. "We have to have attorneys fees. We don't have any money ourselves, and you are asking us to take this through the election." Alright, so arrangements were made through Mitchell, initiating it. And I was present in discussions where these guys had to be taken care of. The attorneys fees had to be done. Kalmbach was brought in. Kalmbach raised some cash.
Pres. Nixon: They put that under the cover of a Cuban Committee, I suppose?
John Dean: Well, they had a Cuban Committee and they had - some of it was given to Hunt's lawyer, who in turn passed it out. You know, when Hunt's wife was flying to Chicago with $10,000 she was actually, I understand after the fact now, was going to pass that money to one of the Cubans - to meet him in Chicago and pass it to somebody there.
Pres. Nixon: (unintelligible) but I would certainly keep that cover for whatever it is worth.
John Dean: Well, they ran out of money over there. Bob bad $350,000 in a safe over here that was really set aside for polling purposes. And there was no other source of money, so they came over and said you all have got to give us some money. I had to go to Bob and say, "Bob, they need some money over there." He said "What for." So I had to tell him what it was for because he wasn't just about to send money over there willy-nilly. And John was involved in those discussions. And then we decided there was no price too high to pay to let this thing blow up in front of the election.
Pres. Nixon: I think we should be able to handle that issue pretty well. May be some lawsuits.
John Dean: I think we can too. Here is what is happening right now. What sort of brings matters to the (unintelligible). One, this is going to be a continual blackmail operation by Hunt and Liddy and the Cubans. No doubt about it. And McCord, who is another one involved. McCord has asked for nothing. McCord did ask to meet with somebody, with Jack Caulfield who is his old friend who had written him hired over there. And when Caulfield had him hired, he was a perfectly legitimate security man. And he wanted to talk about commutation, and things like that. And as you know Colson has talked indirectly to Hunt about commutation. All of these things are bad, in that they are problems, they are promises, they are commitments. They are the very sort of thing that the Senate is going to be looking most for. I don't think they can find them, frankly.
Pres. Nixon: Pretty hard.
John Dean: Pretty hard. Damn hard. It's all cash.
Pres. Nixon: Pretty hard I mean as far as the witnesses are concerned.
John Dean: Alright, now, the blackmail is continuing. Hunt called one of the lawyers from the Re-Election Committee on last Friday to leave it with him over the weekend. The guy came in to see me to give a message directly to me. From Hunt to me.
Pres. Nixon: Is Hunt out on bail?
John Dean: Hunt is on bail. Correct. Hunt now is demanding another $72,000 for his own personal expenses; another $50,000 to pay attorneys fees; $120,000. Some (1) he wanted it as of the close of business yesterday. He said, "I am going to be sentenced on Friday, and I've got to get my financial affairs in order." I told this fellow O'Brien, "If you want money, you came to the wrong man, fellow. I am not involved in the money. I don't know a thing about it. I can't help you. You better scramble about elsewhere." O'Brien is a ball player. He carried tremendous water for us.
Pres. Nixon: He isn't Hunt's lawyer?
John Dean: No he is our lawyer at the Re-Election Committee.
Pres. Nixon: I see.
John Dean: So he is safe. There is no problem there. So it raises the whole question. Hunt has now made a direct threat against Ehrlichman. As a result of this, this is his blackmail. He says, "I will bring John Ehrlichman down to his knees and put him in jail. I have done enough seamy things for he and Krogh, they'll never survive it."
Pres. Nixon: Was he talking about Ellsberg?
John Dean: Ellsberg, and apparently some other things. I don't know the full extent of it.
Pres. Nixon: I don't know about anything else.
John Dean: I don't know either, and I hate to learn some of these things. So that is that situation. Now, where are at the soft points? How many people know about this? Well, let me go one step further in this whole thing. The Cubans that were used in the Watergate were also the same Cubans that Hunt and Liddy used for this California Ellsberg thing, for the break in out there. So they are aware of that. How high their knowledge is, is something else. Hunt and Liddy, of course, are totally aware of it, of the fact that it is right out of the White House.
Pres. Nixon: I don't know what the hell we did that for!
John Dean: I don't know either.
Pres. Nixon: What in the (expletive deleted) caused this? (unintelligible)
John Dean: Mr. President, there have been a couple of things around here that I have gotten wind of. At one time there was a desire to do a second story job on the Brookings Institute where they had the Pentagon papers. Now I flew to California because I was told that John had instructed it and he said, "I really hadn't. It is a misimpression, but for (expletive deleted), turn it off." So I did. I came back and turned it off. The risk is minimal and the pain is fantastic. It is something with a (unintelligible) risk and no gain. It is just not worth it. But - who knows about all this now? You've got the Cubans' lawyer, a man by the name of Rothblatt, who is a no good, publicity seeking (characterization deleted), to be very frank with you. He has had to be pruned down and tuned off. He was canned by his own people because they didn't trust him. He didn't want them to plead guilty. He wants to represent them before the Senate. So F. Lee Bailey, who was a partner of one of the men representing McCord, got in and cooled Rothblatt down. So that means that F. Lee Bailey has knowledge. Hunt's lawyer, a man by the name of Bittmann, who is an excellent criminal lawyer from the Democratic era of Bobby Kennedy, he's got knowledge....Some people's wives know. Mrs. Hunt was the savviest woman in the world. She had the whole picture together.
Pres. Nixon: Did she?
John Dean: Yes. Apparently, she was the pillar of strength in that family before the death...So that is it. That is the extent of the knowledge. So where are the soft spots on this? Well, first of all, there is the problem of the continued blackmail which will not only go on now, but it will go on while these people are in prison, and it will compound the obstruction of justice situation. It will cost money. It is dangerous. People around here are not pros at this sort of thing. This is the sort of thing Mafia people can do: washing money, getting clean money, and things like that. We just don't know about those things, because we are not criminals and not used to dealing in that business.
Pres. Nixon: That's right.
John Dean: It is a tough thing to know how to do.
Pres. Nixon: Maybe it takes a gang to do that....How much money do you need?
John Dean: I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years.
Pres. Nixon: We could get that. On the money, if you need the money you could get that. You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten. It is not easy, but it could be done. But the question is who the hell would handle it? Any ideas on that?
John Dean: That's right. Well, I think that is something that Mitchell ought to be charged with.
Pres. Nixon: I would think so too.
John Dean: And get some pros to help him.
Pres. Nixon: What do you think? You don't need a million right away, but you need a million? Is that right?
John Dean: That is right.
Pres. Nixon: You need it in cash don't you? I am just thinking out loud here for a moment. Would you put that through the Cuban Committee:
John Dean: No.
Pres. Nixon: It is going to be checks, cash money, etc. How if that ever comes out, are you going to handle it?
John Dean: When I say this is a growing cancer, I say it for reasons like this. Bud Krogh, in his testimony before the Grand Jury, was forced to perjure himself. He is haunted by it. Bud said, "I have not had a pleasant day on my job." He said, "I told my wife all about this. The curtain may ring down one of these days, and I may have to face the music, which I am perfectly willing to do."
Pres. Nixon: What did he perjure himself on, John?
John Dean: Did he know the Cubans. He did.
Pres. Nixon: He said he didn't?
John Dean: That is right. They didn't press him hard.
Pres. Nixon: He might be able to - I am just trying to think. Perjury is an awful hard rap to prove. If he could just say that I - Well, go ahead.
John Dean: Well, so that is one perjury. Mitchell and Magruder are potential perjurers. There is always the possibility of any one of these individuals blowing. Hunt. Liddy. L...

[Tracy Riddle]

• 4/1973 Ehrlichman chose former Warren Commission staffer Joseph Ball to be his lawyer in the Ellsberg robbery case.
  
• 4/1973 John Dean chose former WC staffer Charles Shaffer as his lawyer shortly before he turned state's evidence against Nixon.
  
• 4/1973 Jack Anderson began a series of columns that included a verbatim account of Watergate grand jury transcripts he had obtained.
  
• 4/1973 The registration requirement for the draft was suspended.
  
• 4/1/1973 Ziyad Al Hilu, a member of the Black September Organization who allegedly helped kill Prime Minister Wasfi Tal of Jordan, was the target of Jordan intelligence assassins in a bombing, according to the BSO.
  
• 4/3/1973 For reasons unknown, George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt obtained a divorce in Dallas, Texas on April 3, 1973, after nearly fourteen years of marriage. It was not reported in the local newspapers, and the couple continued to present themselves as husband and wife. (Ancestry.com. Texas Divorce Index, 1968-2002 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2005. Original data: Texas Department of State Health Services. Texas Divorce Index, 19682002. Texas, USA: Texas Department of State Health Services. For example, from the death investigation report by Thomas Neighbors of the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office: At 2315 hours, on 29 March, 1977, this writer made contact with the victim's wife, MRS. JEANNE deMOHRENSCHILDT, in California … and advised her of her husband's demise; a fact which she had already been made aware of by several newsmen who had telephoned her seeking a story. She stated that she has been married to the victim for the past twenty-one years and noted that over the past several years he has been acting in an "insane manner".)
  
• 4/4/1973 Martha Mitchell told UPI's Helen Thomas: "My first thought was that McCord had been a double agent. In all faith, I never trusted McCord." But she didn't know who he was working for. (Boston Globe)
  
• 4/5/1973 Pioneer 11 is launched toward a December rendezvous with Jupiter.
  
• 4/9/1973 James McCord appeared before the Watergate grand jury.
  
• 4/9/1973 Kamal Adwan, head of Al Fatah, was slain in Beirut by Israelis.
  
• 4/10/1973 Kleindienst shocked Congress by stating that military force could implement the exercise of executive privilege. He said that the President could bar Congress or the courts from any document in the executive branch and direct any administration official not to testify even if criminal acts were involved. He claimed this power could be invoked even during an impeachment hearing, and implied that the military might at the disposal of the President dwarfed the Capitol police and US marshals. Sen. Goldwater was among those who was shocked by this statement. The next day, Rep. John Anderson said that "the Attorney General has thrown down the gauntlet."
  
• 4/12/1973 McCord appeared before the Watergate grand jury.
  
• 4/12/1973 Jeb Magruder pleaded guilty to perjury in the Watergate case.
  
• 4/14/1973 Nixon met with Haig and Kissinger about Cambodia and Vietnam, though officially Haig was no longer in the White House.
  
• 4/16/1973 Woodward talked with Deep Throat by phone.
  
• 4/17/1973 Dean later claims that today Nixon told him he was issuing a statement on Watergate; Dean felt he was being set up and decided to issue a "scapegoat" statement. Nixon told the public that after "serious charges" were brought to his attention 3/21 he had ordered new investigations that had produced "major developments" and "real progress...in finding the truth" about the break-in. Ron Ziegler told the press that all previous administration statements on Watergate were "inoperative." That evening, Nixon concludes that Haldeman and Ehrlichman must resign. SS agent Denny McCarthy recalled that after his television speech, Nixon walked away to be alone and then broke down and cried. (Protecting the President 24)
  
• 4/18/1973 Nixon-Haldeman phone conversation 12:05 to 12:20am; later the White House would state that there were no tapes of this conversation.
  
• 4/27/1973 FBI director Gray resigns after admitting he destroyed Watergate evidence on the advice of Nixon aides.
  
• 4/23/1973 Kissinger said at a luncheon of the American Newspaper Publishers Association: "I have no question that the President will insist on the full disclosure of the facts" relating to Watergate.
  
• 4/25/1973 Haig testified in Los Angeles at the Ellsberg trial; he attacked the credentials of Mort Halperin. Though the court had requested any existing wiretaps on Ellsberg, Haig brought none of them to the court's attention.
  
• 4/25/1973 The Burlington (Vermont) Free Press editorialized: "If the press continues its zealous overkill on this affair [Watergate], it is not likely to destroy either President Nixon or the Nixon Administration but it will gravely injure something more important - the faith of the people in...freedom of the press."
  
• 4/26/1973 Woodward talked with Deep Throat by phone.
  
• 4/29/1973 Nixon suggested that John McCloy (former Warren Commission member) be appointed as Special Prosecutor for Watergate, according to Elliot Richardson in The Atlantic (3/1976)
  
• 4/30/1973 Forced resignations of Haldeman, Erlichman, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. Dean was fired. Gerald Ford proclaimed that this was "a first step to clearing the air" and getting beyond Watergate.
  
• 4/30/1973 In his first full-scale TV address on Watergate, Nixon explained that he had always been in direct control of his political campaigns, but in 1972 he was so tied up with foreign policy concerns and other matters that he had to turn the campaign over to others. But the Watergate tapes would later reveal that Nixon was intimately involved in running the '72 campaign. Rep. Gerald Ford (R-Michigan) showed his support for Nixon by saying he was "absolutely positive he had nothing to do with this mess."
  
• 5/1973 After being named CIA chief by President Richard Nixon, William Colby elects to cooperate with lawmakers investigating such misdeeds as assassination plots against foreign leaders, illegal domestic spying and oddball drug experiments. Colby turns over to Congress the so called "family jewels" -- a 693-page, single-spaced list of skeletons in the CIA's closet. His cooperation with Congress infuriates come CIA loyalists who hold that he has betrayed his colleagues. (President Gerald Ford will eventually nudge Colby out of office for refusing to "stonewall" congressional investigators probing CIA wrongdoing.)
  
• 5/1/1973 Nixon meets with Willy Brandt in Washington.
  
• 5/1/1973 White House conversation: Nixon asked Ford to rally support among Republicans to battle against Watergate. Ford replied, "Any time you want me to do anything, under any circumstances, you give me a call." (Los Angeles Times 11/19/1996)
  
• 5/1/1973 Colson wrote to Nixon urging him to appoint Haig as chief of staff. (Born Again)
  
• 5/1/1973 David Atlee Phillips is selected by Director William Colby for chief of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, the highest rank not requiring congressional approval. (Fonzi chronology)
  
• 5/2/1973 John Connally switches to the Republican Party.
  
• 5/2/1973 Haldeman quietly slipped into the White House to meet with Nixon and urged him to appoint Haig as chief of staff.
  
• 5/4/1973 Alexander Haig appointed Nixon's new chief of staff.
  
• 5/4/1973 Dean reveals that he locked Watergate-related documents in a safe-deposit box in Alexandria, Virginia, before leaving the White House. He turned the key to the box over to Sirica.
  
• 5/4/1973 New acting FBI director Ruckelshaus began searching for records of the 1969-71 wiretaps and soon found evidence of them.
  
• 5/5/1973 Martha Mitchell publicly called for Nixon's resignation as the only way to "give credibility to the Republican Party and credibility to the United States." John Mitchell told reporters that it was "ridiculous" for anyone to take her comments seriously."
  
• 5/5/1973 Julie Nixon Eisenhower later says that on this day the President suggested to his family that perhaps he should resign as an act of patriotism.
  
• 5/6/1973 Ervin says he will call the president before his committee if it is necessary.'
  
• 5/7/1973 Sirica grants Hunt immunity from further prosecution. Sen. McClellan announces that his appropriations subcommittee on intelligence operations will probe CIA involvement in Watergate.
  
• 5/8/1973 The 120 Indians at Wounded Knee gave themselves up to federal agents; the area had been surrounded by marshals, FBI agents and border police.
  
• 5/9/1973 Kissinger completes four days of talks with Soviet leaders at Brezhnev's estate.
  
• 5/9/1973 The Ervin committee placed Lou Russell under subpoena. They sought his phone records, work diaries, bank statements, and other materials.
  
• 5/9/1973 The Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger, infuriated by the recent press disclosures of CIA misconduct of which he had been unaware, orders his covert chief, William Colby, to compile a list of any "questionable activities" by the CIA, past and present. [The resulting 693-page report described Operation Chaos (the domestic spying program), drug experiments, assassination plots, illegal mail-openings, the surveillance and wiretapping of selected American journalists, contacts with Watergate figures, etc., a list that Agency operatives called "the Skeletons" and the press later dubbed "the family jewels".] Bill Colby very clearly emphasises that the CIA had never plotted assassinations domestically. Colby's admission is a brilliant tactical stroke that is not appreciated until much later. First, it puts the focus on the plots against foreign leaders that could be explained as excesses of anti-communist zealotry (which is precisely what the drafters of Church's report did). Second, all probes into the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK are therefore off-limits. The Church Committee will now concentrate on the performance of the intelligence community in investigating the death of JFK; not complicity in the assassination itself. This distinction is crucial. As Colby must certainly understand, the Agency and its allies can ride out exposure of plots against Marxists and villains like Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. The exposure of domestic plots against political leaders might have been lethal.
  
• 5/10/1973 Mardian told the FBI that in 7/1971 William Sullivan had come to him to tell him about the wiretapping program; Sullivan was afraid that Hoover would blackmail Nixon as he had previous presidents. (The Director 257)
  
• 5/11/1973 Judge Matthew Byrne dismissed all charges against Ellsberg and Russo in the Pentagon Papers case because of government misconduct (the Liddy-Hunt break-in of his psychiatrist's office).
  
• 5/11/1973 Lou Russell wrote to the Ervin Committee saying he could be of no help to them.
  
• 5/14/1973 NATO begins talks on the reduction of military forces in Central Europe.
  
• 5/14/1973 Supreme Court rules that women in the military were entitled to the same benefits for their spouses as those given to male servicemen.
  
• 5/14/1973 Skylab, the first US space station, was launched into orbit.
  
• 5/16/1973 Woodward met with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage. He warned the reporter that "Everyone's life is in danger."
  
• 5/16/1973 interview with former Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry. He said it was possible that there could have been a Grassy Knoll gunman: "I don't have a strong feeling that there was someone there, but, on the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me at some time, at some point in history, that more proof will show that there was somebody up there." (Assassination Tapes 7)
  
• 5/16/1973 Army Intelligence declassifies an extraordinary army telegram today. Concerning Lee Harvey Oswald, the telegram had been dispatched late in the evening of November 22, 1963. The cable, from the Fourth Army command in Texas to the U.S. Strike Command at McDill Air Force Base in Florida, links Oswald to Cuba via Cuba's alleged Communist "propaganda vehicle," the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. It also transmits two statements about Oswald, both false, which have come via army intelligence from the Dallas police: "Assistant Chief Don Strongfellow, Intelligence Section, Dallas Police Department, notified 112th Intelligence Group, this Headquarters, that information obtained from Oswald revealed he had defected to Cuba in 1959 and is a card-carrying member of communist Party." Strongfellow was a member of the police intelligence unit headed by Jack Revill, while the Fourth Army's 112th Intelligence Group (with offices in Dallas and New Orleans) was the unit of James Powell (the agent who happened to be taking pictures in Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963 and was subsequently caught inside the TSBD when it was sealed off by the police soon after the assassination.) The U.S. Strike Command, USSTRICOM, is an extraordinary two-service command (army and air force) set up in 1961 in response to the "Lebanon crisis" of 1958. Designed to provide a swift strike force on short notice, its location in Florida made it singularly appropriate for a surprise attack on Cuba. Since mid-1963 its commander had been General William D. Rosson, a CIA-related general who in 1954 had formed part of General Lansdale's team in Vietnam. Fletcher Prouty, in his book The Secret Team, lists him as one of the six who "made rapid promotions to the grade of brigadier general and higher as a result of the CIA, Special Forces, and Vietnam."
  
• 5/17/1973 Senate Watergate televised hearings, chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC), began with the intention "to provide full and open public testimony in order that the nation can proceed toward the healing of the wounds that now afflict the body politic."
  
• 5/17/1973 Also this month, David Atlee Phillips is selected by Director William Colby to become chief of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, the highest rank not requiring Congressional approval.
  
• 5/18/1973 Archibald Cox is named Special Prosecutor.
  
• 5/18/1973 UPI quoted Mitchell: "Somebody has tried to make me the fall guy, but it isn't going to work...The only thing I did was try to get the President reelected. I never did anything mentally or morally wrong."
  
• 5/18/1973 McCord began his first day of public testimony before the Ervin committee.
  
• 5/18/1973 One week after declining a committee subpoena for his records, Lou Russell - a former FBI agent who helped Richard Nixon with the Hiss case - suffers his first massive heart attack. He was hospitalized until 6/20.
  
• 5/20/1973 McCord told the Ervin committee of an abandoned 1972 White House plot to steal documents from the safe of Hank Greenspun's Las Vegas Sun. Greenspun was connected to Robert Maheu. McCord testified that he and E.H. Hunt and Liddy were to carry out the operation, and then Howard Hughes' people would fly them to a hideout in Central America. He testified: "Liddy said that Attorney General John Mitchell had told him that Greenspun had in his possession blackmail type information involving a Democratic candidate for President, that Mitchell wanted that material, and Liddy said that this information was in some way racketeer- related, indicating that if this candidate became President, the racketeers or national crime syndicate could have a control or influence over him as President. My inclination at this point in time, speaking as of today, is to disbelieve the allegation against the Democratic candidate referred to above and to believe that there was in reality some other motive for wanting to get into Greenspun's safe."
  
• 5/21/1973 Elliot Richardson promised the Senate Judiciary that Cox would have full authority to investigate Watergate.
  
• 5/22/1973 White House press release admitted to wiretapping, domestic surveillance, attempts to locate press leaks, and obstruction of FBI probe into Watergate, but defended these on the grounds of "national security." Nixon also denied any use of the CIA for political purposes. Buzhardt and Haig helped prepare this statement. The public and congressional response was mild at first.
  
• 5/23/1973 Haig called William Simon to ask about the status of the IRS investigation into the Hughes campaign loan.
  
• 5/24/1973 William Oswald Mills, a Republican Maryland congressman, was found shot to death the day after it was revealed by the Washington Post that he had received $25,000 from Nixon's reelection committee. He had an alleged suicide note pinned to his body. (Nightmare 196, Lukas) Two of his political aides, James Glover and James Webster were killed in a car wreck 2/1972. On the morning of May 24, 1973, Mills was found dead at a stable near his home in Easton, Maryland at the age of 48. There was an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the left side of his chest, and a 12-gauge shotgun and spent casing were found by his side. It was reported that he had been depressed following the death of three of his Congressional aides in a 1972 car accident, and by the fact that his mentor and predecessor, Rogers Morton, was suffering from cancer. However, five days before his death, it was revealed that Mills had received an undisclosed $25,000 gift from the finance committee of President Richard Nixon's re-election campaign during the 1971 special election. Overall, it was part of $900,000 in unaccounted donations made by the committee, according to the Government Accountability Office. If Mills were convicted of conducting illegal activity, he could have faced a $1,000 fine and one year in prison. While Mills initially stated that he had done nothing wrong, he began worrying that the campaign contribution would destroy his political career. In one of his suicide notes, Mills stated that he could not prove his innocence and saw suicide as the only solution. Overall, Mills produced at least seven notes, including one to his son warning him to be honest and another to his constituents. Despite his concern, Maryland authorities claimed soon after his death that he may not have broken the new state campaign finance law, which did not come into full effect until July 1971, two months after his special election. In fact, there were no indications that state authorities were even going to pursue an investigation.
  
• 5/24/1973 Nixon said in a speech that secrecy was necessary for conducting foreign policy, and urged the media to stop "making heroes" out of people who publicized government secrets.
  
• 5/25/1973 Archibald Cox was sworn in as special Watergate prosecutor.
  
• 5/25/1973 Phone call between Nixon and Haig; Nixon asked, "Wouldn't it be better to just check out?" Haig was shocked, and Nixon said, "No, no, seriously, because you see, I'm not at my best. I've got to be at my best and that means fighting this damned battle, fighting it all out." (Los Angeles Times 11/19/1996)
  
• 5/25/1973 Skylab 2 carried three astronauts to rendezvous with Skylab and repair some solar panels.
  
• 5/26/1973 Supreme Court ruled that TV and radio stations were not obligated to sell equal air time for political or controversial issues.
  
• 5/27/1973 Dem. National Chairman Robert Strauss accused Nixon of trying to cover up Watergate using the pretext of 'national security.' Sen. Stuart Symington agreed, but said he said that "based on the evidence I've seen, I certainly would not vote for [impeachment]." Strauss also encouraged Democrats to be responsible in investigating Watergate.
  
• 5/27/1973 Robert Vesco and associate Norman P. LeBlanc offered to talk with Archibald Cox about the "missing link" in the Watergate case; they offered no details, but LeBlanc claimed that the CIA was working secretly in Costa Rica to "get rid of" Vesco and his associates. (Los Angeles Times 5/28/1973)
  
• 5/27/1973 The nonpartisan Fair Campaign Practices Committee found that the 1972 presidential campaign was the sleaziest ever, and called Watergate "not simply more of the same tactics which have made 'politics' a dirty word. It is a conscious conspiracy to violate laws, to manipulate laws, and to make a mockery of the democratic system..."
  
• 5/27/1973 Dean was quoted as saying that if he was indicted he would not testify, implying that he wanted immunity from prosecution; he also said that when all of the facts were revealed there would be grand jury investigations into political espionage beyond Watergate. (Los Angeles Times)
  
• 5/28/1973 Martha Mitchell told a press conference that she was convinced her husband was protecting Nixon. She also said Nixon must bear "all the blame" for Watergate, and should either resign or be impeached.
  
• 5/28/1973 US ambassador to Costa Rica denied charge that US agents were harassing Vesco. Press reported that Nixon's San Clemente estate had received improvements paid for with $100,000 in federal funds. The property was owned by Nixon and NY industrialist Robert M. Apblanalp. Nixon had claimed that the figure was only $39,000, and the improvements were made for security purposes. But some of the renovations appeared to have little to do with security. It was also reported that federal authorities had been impeding D.A. Joseph Busch's investigation into the Ellsberg break-in: "FBI agents have instructed some key witnesses not to discuss the case with Busch's men." (Los Angeles Times 5/29/1973)
  
• 5/29/1973 In a run-off election, Thomas Bradley becomes Los Angeles' first black mayor.
  
• 5/29/1973 Nixon refuses to give oral or written testimony to the grand jury or the Senate select committee investigating Watergate.
  
• 5/29/1973 Joseph Kraft wrote in the Washington Post that Haig "has been spending quite a lot of time recently justifying to newsmen the wiretapping...in the process he has been blackening reputations and disclosing the contents of wiretaps...in the name of national security."