Nixon Tapes Quotes

Nixon sent some no-account underling to tell us that he had done more for the American Indian than any predecessor and that he saw no reason for our coming to Washington, that he had more important things to do than to talk with us—presumably surreptitiously taping his visitors and planning Watergate. We wondered what all these good things were that he had done for us.

I wouldn't want to be a Russian leader. You'd never know when you were being taped.

In response to suspected leaks to the press about Vietnam, Kissinger had ordered FBI wiretaps in 1969 on the telephones of 17 journalists and White House aides, without court approval. Many news stories based on the purported leaks questioned progress in the American war effort, further fueling the antiwar movement. In a tape from the Oval Office on February 22, 1971, Nixon said, “In the short run, it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, to run this war in a dictatorial way, kill all the reporters and carry on the war.” “The press is your enemy,” Nixon explained five days later in a meeting with Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to another tape. “Enemies. Understand that? . . . Now, never act that way . . . give them a drink, you know, treat them nice, you just love it, you’re trying to be helpful. But don’t help the bastards. Ever. Because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.

Bernstein nevertheless received Nixon’s highest accolade when, on the Watergate Tapes, the president is heard calling the composer a “son of a bitch.

The president and his aides, Ervin answered, had “a lust for political power.” That lust, he explained, “blinded them to ethical considerations and legal requirements; to Aristotle’s aphorism that the good of man must be the end of politics.” Nixon had lost his moral authority as president. His secret tapes—and what they reveal—will probably be his most lasting legacy. On them, he is heard talking almost endlessly about what would be good for him, his place in history, and, above all, his grudges, animosities, and schemes for revenge. The dog that never seems to bark is any discussion of what is good and necessary for the well-being of the nation.

The CIA is behind it all. That’s the conclusion of Mae Brussell—one of America’s foremost assassination experts—a researcher who has collected every pertinent newspaper story, every book, every document since the Watergate break-in four years ago on the night of June 17, 1972. Mae Brussell is the only person in America who perceived the gruesome string of deaths that stretches from Watergate to now. She believes that a faction within the Central Intelligence Agency is responsible not only for Watergate, but for the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. She believes, as President Nixon stated on the Watergate tapes, that everything horrible that’s happened in American politics is connected, starting with the Bay of Pigs.

In a tape from the Oval Office on Feb. 22, 1971, Nixon said, “In the short run, it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, to run this war in a dictatorial way, kill all the reporters and carry on the war.

If I had known that he [Nixon] was taping our conversations, I would have been a lot more profound.

I suppose if one takes into account the lack of an ethics committee to oversee my dad’s childrearing methodologies, the experiments started innocently enough. In the early part of the twentieth century, the behaviorists Watson and Rayner, in an attempt to prove that fear was a learned behavior, exposed nine-month-old “Little Albert” to neutral stimuli like white rats, monkeys, and sheaves of burned newsprint. Initially, the baby test subject was unperturbed by the series of simians, rodents, and flames, but after Watson repeatedly paired the rats with unconscionably loud noises, over time “Little Albert” developed a fear not only of white rats but of all things furry. When I was seven months, Pops placed objects like toy police cars, cold cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Richard Nixon campaign buttons, and a copy of The Economist in my bassinet, but instead of conditioning me with a deafening clang, I learned to be afraid of the presented stimuli because they were accompanied by him taking out the family .38 Special and firing several window-rattling rounds into the ceiling, while shouting, “Nigger, go back to Africa!” loud enough to make himself heard over the quadraphonic console stereo blasting “Sweet Home Alabama” in the living room. To this day I’ve never been able to sit through even the most mundane TV crime drama, I have a strange affinity for Neil Young, and whenever I have trouble sleeping, I don’t listen to recorded rainstorms or crashing waves but to the Watergate tapes.

Geneticists experienced a comparable shock when, contrary to their expectations of over 120,000 genes, they found that the entire human genome consists of approximately 25,000 genes. (Pennisi 2003a and 2003b; Pearson 2003; Goodman 2003) More than eighty percent of the presumed and required DNA does not exist! The missing genes are proving to be more troublesome than the missing eighteen minutes of the Nixon tapes. The one-gene, one-protein concept was a fundamental tenet of genetic determinism. Now that the Human Genome Project has toppled the one-gene for one-protein concept, our current theories of how life works have to be scrapped. No longer is it possible to believe that genetic engineers can, with relative ease, fix all our biological dilemmas. There are simply not enough genes to account for the complexity of human life or of human disease.

As Roger Stone revealed in his book Nixon’s Secrets, Hillary was fired from the 1974 House Impeachment Committee shortly after she took, and failed, the DC bar examination. Hillary authored memos demanding Nixon yield his tapes (a little irony there?) and that the president was not entitled to a lawyer in the impeachment proceeding. Asked why she was fired, Majority Staff Director Jerry Zeifman said, “Because she was a liar. She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.

President Richard Nixon resigned because there was circumstantial evidence, the Oval Office Tapes, indicating he conspired to cover-up the break-in at the Watergate Building Complex. Does the raiding of a doctor’s office, to seize medical files, constitute a crime? Is breaking and entering a separate crime from burglary?

The audio tape from their meeting, stored at Nixon’s presidential library in California, reveals that Nixon gave Rockefeller and Ronan a warm welcome but did not promise to support any additional funding. He did say that the Second Avenue subway would happen only “when the leaders of the city, the establishment if I may pardon the term, get off their butts.” He added that business leaders “can’t just bitch about everything, they’ve got to help run that city. They’ve really got to do it.” Referring to the city’s future, he said, “Unless what we call the business establishment in New York takes a hell of a lot greater interest in sound decent government for the city … it’s had it. It’s going to be finished.”9 Nixon

After Nixon resigned in August 1974 he spent much of the remaining 20 years of his life conducting a war on history, trying to diminish his role in Watergate and other crimes, while attempting to elevate his foreign policy and other accomplishments. But nearly each year since 1974 new tapes and documents have been released showing the depth of his criminality and abuse of power.

When Richard Nixon’s voluminous taped conversation transcripts from the Oval Office were declassified in October 1999, one recording caught the president saying, “The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time…is the most faggy goddamned

He started the damn thing!” Nixon said in a taped telephone conversation with his spiritual adviser, the Reverend Billy Graham. “He killed Diem!

have now spent more than three decades pursuing the shadowy details of Richard Nixon’s deeds, and the links to illicit activities keep coming, thanks to the extensive research I’ve done and the staggered release of Nixon’s White House tapes and documents.

The eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on the June 20, 1972, tape. Haldeman’s notes indicated that he and Nixon had discussed Watergate on this first working day back at the White House. The notes talked of a “PR offensive to top this” and “the need to be on the attack—for diversion.” The evidence indicated that only three people could have caused the erasure: Stephen Bull, the presidential assistant; Rose Mary Woods, the President’s secretary; or the President himself.

The tapes are the real man—mean, vindictive, panicky, striking first in anticipation of being struck, trying to lift his own friable self-esteem by shoving others down. Murray Kempton said he wanted to leave no fingerprints, but he went about it in such a way as to leave his fingerprints all over his story. Nixon’s real tragedy is that he never had the stature to be a tragic hero. He is the stuff of sad (almost heartbreaking) comedy.