Watergate 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.

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.