investigators. he basically wanted to do it in a low key fashion, have the information collated from various sources especially the special prosecutor who ended up giving us sort of a report, some sort of road map so to speak although it wasn't -- so and then of course, we got the tapes. we didn't do a lot of original investigation. we did some but not very much. we interviewed the witnesses obviously before john dean and john mitchell and people like that, but we didn't go out to aggressively investigate the facts. which is something i wanted to do. i felt we had to do. this was my background both as a prosecutor and as a private lawyer. doer was much more cautious about doing it. knowing that we send people out, there will be newspaper stories. who knows what we'll get, how we'll be attacked. so he wanted to take it step by step. other people were gathering information or information was

coming. let's just put it together and we'll present it in a neutral fashion. that judgment which some of which i opposed at the time i realized after it was all over happened to be a correct judgment. and i think it was very helpful in at achieving what was the ultimate outcome. at the beginning, we weren't sure. i wasn't sure at least and i don't think doer was sure either although ars have been written contrary to in that we were going to recommend impeachment of the president. we didn't come in to -- and this is how i remember it and i truly believe this. we weren't coming to drive him out of office. we were going to see what the facts really were. obviously we were suspicious about the events that led to the '79 massacre and you know. and the president's conduct and the conduct of some of his chief aides but there was no real you

know -- no real animus, no real desire to say we're going to try to get nixon, president nixon out of office. look at what i just said. nixon i said but really it's president nixon. doer and we all remember this, doer charged us all with never calling the president other by the name than the president. not nixon and certainly not anything derogatory. he was the president. we called him the president. we were trained to call him the president you know. and that's a very interesting insight you know, he understood that. something i don't think i would have -- i might not have understood at the time, but of course, we understood. we called him nixon, we tried to treat him with respect and we wanted to aggressively find the facts but as i said before, we didn't really go out and investigate. also when we started collating the facts especially when the tapes came, then yes, then we

did make a determination that the proper recommendation to the committee would be to impeach the president but we didn't start off like that. people claimed we did and a friend of doer's wrote an article, adler sort of claims he always intended to do this. i never saw that and i don't think it's true. i think doer also sort of had an open mind till the facts sort of came in together and then at some point they gelled and we made the decision yeah, especially after the tapes came in that we have to go all out to try to convince the committee that the right thing to do would be to impeach the pr ez. >> tell us a little bit about how mr. doer took advice when you were having this discussion with lim and i'm sure it happened more than once. was joe woods also part of the discussion whether or not to the continue the investigation started by the senate? >> yes, no, joe woods was a very sensible person. doer surrounded himself with good people. you know, he used them different people in different ways.

and he consulted with them. he was you know, fairly close to the vest at times. he didn't really know me before and we as i said, we had a good relationship but a rocky relationship to begin with, but you know, it had ups and downs but over time i think it became pretty good and pretty close and which i think exists today. we were different personalities. he was more of a midwestern type. i was sort of an aggressive east coast prosecutor i guess. but he relied on other people, too. he relied on woods who is a good example who is a very common sense guy. also a cautious person. he relied on dick kates who was more of a trial lawyer. and i related to him very well, but you know, he liked cates a lot. he used cates a great deal to face a word i don't like, to be a contact with the committee itself. so doer, you know, and he was comfortable with the younger

people. he was comfortable with hillary, with evan davis who was about 30 years old at the time. beat had bob sack who came in. we had all sorts of good people, sensible people. he put together a good staff. partly through his burke marshal who was also a key adviser. he had sort of a kitchen cabinet in effect who he looked to, burke marshal owen fiss, bob owen, joe woods and dick cates. some were on the staff, some weren't on the stap staff. doer reached out. he knew he was in a very sensitive situation. when i think back, it was handled as well as anybody could handle it. >> would you and woods participate in discussions with the kitchen cabinet? >> sometimes yes, and sometimes no. not always. sometimes you know doer was always in contact with var people on his own. there was nols formal meetings a lot, but sometimes yeah, sometimes i would talk to marshall myself or owen who was really the key figure in the

kitchen cabinet. burke marshall was also a key figure in recruiting people for the staff. hillary i think came in through burt marshal. mike conway, various people came in through burke and the yale connection, bill and hillary clinton obviously went to yale. well, it wasn't hillary clinton then, she was hillary rodham then. so burke was a key figure both in recruiting people and advising doer, and burke was a very sensible guy. he was a great assistant general judge of the civil rights prior to doer having that position. i mets burke marshal actually, i worked in the summer of 1960, i graduated law school in '61. so i think i met burke marshall 14 years before when i was just a kid before i graduated law school when i worked at covington and berling for the summer. and he was a partner. that was during the year that kennedy was running for president. this was 1960. kennedy hasn't yet been elected. i worked the summer of 1960.

he was elected november of 1960. i knew burke slightly. he was a partner, a young partner. i was a second year summer associate. but i had great respect for him and he was a wonderful assistant attorney general. i knew from my justice department days because i was in the justice department the same time he was. i was in the u.s. attorney's office in new york, he was in washington but i knew of him then. and he was a wonderful adviser i think to doer. i kept in touch. i met him from time to time over the years after the impeachment normally at doer's farm. he was just a good guy. he's also dead now. he just died a few years ago. a wonderful guy. >> can you remember some of the effects that his influence had? >> no, not specifically. i just thought he generally was cautious and he gave good advice. you know, i don't remember any particular issue at this point. i think doer consulted him on a lot of things virtually anything. the key person interview here is

doer, and he could tell you much more obviously because he's still i don't know if he's going strong but he's still -- but he will -- but he relied on burke a great deal in the end. and that was good. i was just -- i just wanted to do our job, i wanted to get the facts. i wanted to present the facts. my job on the impeachment, i was a very senior person on the impeachment obviously joe woods and i and a few. nobody was really sort of number two. there were a number of number twos in effect for different purposes. know woods might have been but he didn't stay the whole time. i was there the whole time. dick cates. there's know deputy chief counsel at least the way i remember it. my title was senior associate special counsel and i had the highest salary anybody could get, $36,000 a year at the time. that thing was a little less than i was making a lot less

than i was making as a partner in my law firm which i just resigned from with three children. so different people sort of had different tasks. and my basic task ultimately as a very senior aide to doer was to sort of oversee the factual investigations. we set up various task forces at the time as i remember. others who you've interviewed could be more specific. there's the watergate task force which evan i think worked on. there was the agency task force which bob sack worked on. we had people in charge of legal research and writings with john labowitz was sort of a leading figure there. and we divided people among these various task forces. i was sort of over all the task forces in effect. they didn't sort of directly report to me. it was not all that

hierarchical, you know, i was sort of in charge in my mind of it the factual investigation. i would work with each of the task forces to some extent and then when the tapes came in later on, i was sort of in overall charge as least as i remember it. other people can remember it differently but i do remember it. in dealing with the tapes in having the tapes transcribed, analyzing the tapes and deciding how we're going to use the tapes. so that was sort of my role. and then i was going to be in scharnlg too strong a term as if i'm the only person, i'm not the only person but i was a key person because there wasn't a lot of trial lawyers there. so then i was going to be in charge. again i use that word. i was going to have a very important role, let me put it like that, in planning the trial in the senate. you know, that's what i was really -- i was convinced that nixon, president nixon would

never resign even you know and that we would have to try this case in the senate. so i was always thinking how do i try -- as i do in private practice when i have a case or i did in the u.s. attorney's office when i was a prosecutor. how do we try this case? who are we going to call? who are our witnesses. >> what are our documents? what are our themes. this is the kind of thing we did. my other function in connection with that, i -- i was tasked to make a key presentation to the committee on the necessity for a third article in the article of impeachment which involved our inability to get tapes and documents directly from the white house. the tapes we got obviously were from the independent from the special prosecutor who received them as a result of litigation against the president in the supreme court. they refused to turn over many documents and tapes to us, and we under my leadership here, we

claimed that was in itself an impeachable offense not to cooperate with the committee and we had law going back to the mid 1800s to support that. that was a very important position. i took a very strong position which doer basically agreed with mostly that we're not going to go to court to try to get documents or tapes. that the courts had no role in this process, that the constitution said of the impeachment process. there was a basis to try to impeach a president, that was a congressional prerogative. when congress starred a legitimate impeachment inquiry, it was entitled to reach niche dark recesses of the administration to get whatever documents and tapes or whatever existed to help it formulate a decision with respect to impeachment and if the executive branch and the president refused to cooperate that in itself was contrary to the constitution that undermined the constitutional scheme. so we didn't go to court. we didn't bring a case in court. the recent clinton impeachment

proceeded differently but that was a phony impeachment. that was a political impeachment. this was a -- as hillary once said to me the only constitutional ip peachment was the one we did in 1974. so one of my key roles was to to be involved and in charge of to some extent with factual gathering and that meant trying to deal with the white house to get these things. when they didn't give us a lot of the stuff which i thought undermined our ability to present a proper case to the house judiciary committee, that in itself turned into an impeachable offense i thought. we drafted an article which was involved in draft agen i was also involved in making the presentation to the committee in support of voting out that article of impeachment. and it was voted on. there was a third article of impeachment. inmide mind i still think about it now. it's still a key historical precedent and constitutional precedent in the event of any future impeachments which i hope none really come up that the

executive branch is obligated to cooperate if there really is a legitimate impeachment inquiry. >> but what happens to the -- so you believe that then the concept of executive privilege has to be completely waived then by the white house? >> in an impeachment inquiry yes, not in any other inquiry but not in a criminal case or not in any other case, but the executive privilege falls on an impeachment inquiry. that's the only place it falls. that's not the way it worked out in watergate and hasn't worked out since. in watergate, it so happens the supreme court as we discussed the supreme court decided that there is such a thing as executive privilege. but it can be overridden by the needs of the criminal case. that resulted in them ordering the tapes to be turned over. the president nixon then turned over the tapes and then the tapes were then sent to us by the special prosecutor. >> but -- >> that's a different. >> i was going to ask you, if the impeachment proceedings

involves a crime by the president, you are not then asking account president to waive his fifth or her fifth amendment rights? >> the impeachment proceeding is not a criminal proceeding. the impeachment doesn't send anybody to jail. the impeachment proceeding is to decide whether somebody is fit to stay in office. in that proceeding, the president takes the fifth amendment, or refuses to testify because they might be subject to a criminal proceeding, they be you can take that into consideration in effect in deciding he's not fit to stay in office. it's a whole different thing. and also, we will have big discussions about this and other people can discuss this as well or better than i, you know, to impeach a president you don't have to prove that he committed a crime. this was a major discussion. there doesn't have to be a felony. high, high crimes and misdemeanors has a different meaning under the constitution

we thought that the word crime or misdemeanor normally has. it had to be something that only a president can do that undermines our constitutional structure, that's an abuse of power whether it turns out to be criminal or not. that was a very interesting discussion at the time. and the misuse of the fbi to investigate your political opponents may or may not be a crime, but that's an impeachable offense. the misuse of the cia. you know, whether or not it turns out to be a crime is an impeachable offense. when you send the cia to you know, to act outside its proper parameters for your own political interests, that's a crime. that's rather an impeachable offense. it may not be a crime. those are the issues we tried to deal with at the time and that's what we tried to articulate at the time. >> when it's articulated in that

document, the grounds for. >> for ip peachment right. >> can you tell us what you remember? who was on which side in that debate? >> no, i don't think the others may have different memories and it's been a long time, obviously. i don't think we had different sides so much. but i think we all reached a conclusion, i know i reached our conclusion. there was not a lot of opposition. the more we looked into it, the more rerealized we really were investigating not whether the president committed a crime but whether there was an abuse of power by the executive branch and by the president. with respect to the watergate matter. and that's all we really needed to show ultimately. wlf we had to do that, and i don't think there's a lot of conflict on the staff. we took time to reach that position because this was all new. there hasn't been an impeachment of a president in 100 and some odd years. the last one was andrew johnson.

that was clearly a political thing over this act, you know, which congress passed saying he couldn't fire the secretary of war. it was much more confined, much more narrow thing and he almost was impeached over that. it's true congress can impeach a president for anything it wants. but the proper way of looking at it is to see whether or not there was a fundamental misuse of power by the executive branch contrary to our constitutional principles. and that's what we concluded. i don't think there were people on different sides of that. maybe some people at the beginning said no, we really have to prove some sort of crime, but i don't remember anybody pushing that hard. lab bowwitz i think was one of the key people who wrote that he memo, the grounds for impeachment memo. i think hillary helped on it too on that memo. but that's the conclusion we reached at the time. and i think that's the conclusion, that's still correct. >> since you oversaw as much as

a kibitzer as a supervisor of the task forces tell us how you came to conclude how to present the information to the committee. you had an enormous amount of information. >> yeah. well, this was -- here i give most of the credit not to myself because i don't deserve the credit but to doer. this is an interesting problem. doer, well, look, the thing really took off after we got the tapes. we realized the stuff on the tapes was very powerful. and, of course, you had the 1-minute gap and all those issues. doer was the one who decided that we're going to present this in a sort of low keel neutral fashion, she is sort of statements of facts, whatever we call them at the time. i haven't refreshed myself on this and these books that were given with listings fact after

fact after fact. statements of information. that's what they were called. i still have that book, stams of information. not even facts. it was interesting. we weren't even -- we didn't want s

and he's very intelligent and he was very smart. and he was very nonable about what happened. he was a key, key witness before the senate watergate complete.

so i'm preparing him for his testimony. of course, there were gaps. so we listened to the tapes and then i'm trying to figure what happened between let's say incident one and incident two, day one and day two. and like i normally would do with a witness sometimes, i would try to -- we would try to sort of lonlcally figure out what would have happened to sort of connect certain things but i didn't know for sure. and sometimes i would start making suggestions. well isn't the most logical thing that happened this since this happened this and this is the logical thing that happened between this. all of a sudden i start seeing dean starting agreeing with every logical -- logical hypothesis that i would put forward because he wanted to go along with me. i really didn't want him to go along. i just wanted to try to figure

out what happened but i realized he was going to go along. so i got very cautious because i didn't want to put words in his mouth and i didn't want to make things up but i didn't want to create facts that weren't facts. some prosecutors do that as i've learned over my career. but doer was -- not doer, dean was sort of -- he's a perfectly willing to sort of accept my hypothesis. so i became you know, somewhat cautious about it. and then i realized listening to the tapes, listening to dean on the tapes with president nixon that nixon had been doing the same thing with him. so he would start going along with president nixon and nixon would go oh, that didn't happen and sure enough dean would start folding on the tape. he was sort of being directed by nixon. nixon was trying at this stage to sort of direct him to thinking in a certain way and to going to a certain fashion. then i found what i found when i

was talking to dean that the same thing was happening again except i was, i was sort of caught in the position of power. i represented the house of representatives, not me personally. so he was like going along with me just like he was going along with president nixon. having said that, i'm not saying is he lied or he -- i think he was just willing to bend very, so we were careful. anyway, he testified before the committee. but the committee testimony turned out to be somewhat ant anti-climactic. i mean, james sinclair, the president's trial lawyer who was a good lawyer who i got to know during the hearing cross-examined, but really the truth is, the witnesses didn't have a great impact. john dean's testimony didn't secure president nixon's impeachment or john mitchell. i met with john mitchell. john mitchell was a tough guy. he wouldn't talk. he was -- i tried to break him

down. dean was easy. mitchell, he was tough. he was -- friends of mine in new york had represented him in the criminal case, guys notice u.s. attorney's office ended up as defense lawyers and they ended up representing him. he was a tough guy. mitchell, he wouldn't give an inch in effect. you know, i guess he testified before the committee, too. but he didn't -- dean testified similar to the way he testified obviously before the senate watergate committee. but the testimony, everybody said we have witnesses. we've got to have a witnesses. i said it in the early stages. it turned out joe's instinct as i remember was the right instinct. we had witnesses. we had to satisfy the committee. if it was up to doer, we won't have witnesses. he didn't want witnesses. the pressure of the committee was we had to have some witnesses. it was my job then to prepare these witnesses to be -- me and others to prepare these

witnesses and the witnesses, willy had great hopes would be have a great impact really didn't have the great impact. what have had great impact was these statements of information one after another which were boring plus the tapes. the tapes were, you know, once you heard the tapes, and you could put the tapes together with documents and with some of the testimony, that created this tremendous imme tus for impeachment. >> tell us about please, the first time you heard the tapes if you can remember. >> i'll tell you a story about how i heard the tapes and i'll tell you a hillary story in connection with this. the first time -- well, i heard the tapes by myself. it was -- i was one of the first people on the staff to hear the tapes. doer obviously heard the tapes at the same time and we were you know, we were shocked is the wrong word. this was tremendous proof that to us that really there was a

significant abuse of power by the white house which went to the very top of the white house. so it had a big impact on doer, it had a big impact on me that we really had a case here, which reflected in the articles of impeachment that we ultimately drafted to the committee. and then and we had them transcribed and then we will -- i had have vivid memory of then playing it for the committee for the first time. and i remember sitting there, this was a private session obviously when we played the tapes for the committee just the senior members of the staff and the committee were there. and everybody on the committee had their ear phones on listening to tapes but i didn't have my ear phones on. i heard the tapes a number of -- i wanted to just watch the committee. i've never forgotten this. i saw this committee, i saw especially the republicans, the people -- we were desperately

trying to make this nonpartisan to reach over to the other side if we recommended impeachment. after we had the tapes, we knew we were going to recommend impeachment. i saw the faces of the members like flush, get red, the republicans. they were -- they acted very disturbed when they were listening to the tapes and i sat there, see, i said they realize that this is something we have to do. i said to myself. as i was sitting there just watching the committee in the committee room in this private session and i remember the session ended and everybody taking off their ear phones and they're just walking out and i was really pleased to see that it had that impact. a day or two later we have another meeting with the committee to discuss the tapes. to discuss what we heard. and we were going to lead the discussion you know, engage with them. doer and all of a sudden they came in and i started hearing rationallizations. oh, well, he really didn't mean that. he didn't really say that.