people have forgotten that as a result of the materials you gave us, that led to the church committee and the investigation of the intelligence community, which was another mind-bending change in american policy, but put yourself back in that. you and your lawyers, your -- you regarded how good your memory was. had you to have precision. you had to hone it. you had to have some other thing in there that you were offering to us. what was the process -- particularly the process and logic that led you through this? >> the break occurred and, as i say, i tried initially to work out the arrangement with the assistant u.s. attorneys. i mean, they had granted me informal immunity to talk to them off the record. we went a step at a time. the counsel for my lawyer, charlie shafer, was just give them a little bit at a time. don't give them a lot of information. don't give them any of your conversations with the

president, and see what they do with it. the condition was that they not take the information i give them back to the department of justice. the reason i set that up as a stipulation was because i move if it went back to the department of justice, it would go back to the white house. as we learn from later, it's exactly when they did breach my agreement it would occur. it would go up to henry peterson. henry peterson takes it to peter and he would take it over to the white house. well, that was the same arrangement i had, and accordingly, after that those involved would drag the bushes over the tracks as best they could of anything i had said that they were involved in. they would call people and give them misleading, leading questions to try to tape them into things that were not true, and it was a further effort of the coverup. realizing that heats when i decided i had to talk to sam dash, that this was larger hand the prosecutors could handle, and it was not going to work. if everything i was telling the

prosecutors was going back to the white house. that was a calculation to go to the senate and just lay it out. because sam was concerned about the nature of my testimony and needed to convince sam irvin that i should be granted immunity, which incidentally i had told my lawyer and sam would later write in his book that i said, listen, i'll testify with or without immunity. i don't care. i'm at that stage. as your friend bob woodward would write in his book, i think, it's "shadow" the uniqueness of my testimony was that i clearly made a decision to go in and blow it up, including blowing myself up, and that was exactly the position i was in, and so was it going to prevail and was it calculated calibrated as to how it would be -- no. i just knew i would tell the truth and lay it out there and

my own knee naive belief that actually turned out to be true, something that i said at the time, i'm somebody that happens to believe that the truth has its own way of surfacing. that you just canterbury it when it is true indefinitely, and that's indeed what has largely happened. did i get some things wrong? yeah, i conflated of dates and got the gist of conversations. i know psychologists went through my testimonies comparing it to what was in the transcript and, oh, well, he put had in the wrong date. he didn't have this exactly verbatim, but the better judgment of most psychologists was i got the gist of all the conversations when i walked out of the oval office and i was able to remember that on a long-term basis. the trouble was that i was denied access to all my files before i testified. dates, any of my own calendars weren't available. i had to literally go through

all i did have were old clippings from the washington post. a book that had been prepared by the campaign committee and their pr office just happened -- some reason i had taken it home, and it was just this big folder of washington clip stories, and i used it to trigger my memory. i went in to see the president that morning at 10:00. just best estimates. it was a rather rough way to have to prepare it. my lawyer didn't have any hands in my testimony preparation at all. left it totally to my hand. i wrote it all out in long hand at first. my dear wife, maureen, was kind enough to do the first draft of the typing, and then we gave that to charlie shafer and my lawyer's attorneys and one of the more interesting things i did not put in the first draft of the testimony and was reading it and decided to put in the last draft was the question that i believed i had been taped.

some of the conversations and mitchell had been in them, so i put that in -- while i wasn't sure if all the conversations -- the one that was most likely i thought was the april 15th conversation, but i thought it's very possible the other ones were too that because there might not have been any -- there must have been an installed capacity rather than a general capacity. i mentioned that to sam dash early in our dealings. it just sort of rolls over him, and it's nothing he ever pursued, and it really isn't until it comes up m senate hearings later. it's not terribly calculated and happy to have immunity. when i am granted immunity, i later say, so what, my lawyer to this day, charlie shafer said, you had oliver north's case long before oliver north even knew he was going to need a case, which is if the government -- if the executive immunizes you under

the casagar case and some of the following law that was developed under that, that the government can't have it both ways. they can't turn around and prosecute you because there's just no way to keep that evidence from being tainted and particularly mine was even more complete than oliver north's. i also had the added problem that the -- i had informal immunity from the initial prosecutor, but i told charlie -- i said i didn't go up and confess to the country the mistakes i had made to beat the rap. that's pretty -- that just isn't what i think is the appropriate thing to do in this situation. charlie does agree with that, although he says i would have loved to have written the law that brandon sullivan later got to write.

>> considering that most people associate nixon only with watergate and none of his positive accomplishments and also taking into consideration the role of politics, his personal likability and the media at the time, looking back, how would you compare the seriousness of watergate with other unethical or secretive presidential activities, whether they were known or unknown, and regardless of what their consequences were, whether they were worse or the same? >> well, in some ways the iran-contra was more serious than watergate because it follows in the aftermath of watergate under the reagan presidency and what was that do it yourself attitude that was shown so fatal in the white house under liddy and hunt and the elsburg break-many is repeated in a much grander scale in the selling of arms to it's a

more blat abbot violation directly out of the white house, and with -- if not more serious, then equal serious. what happens with water gate, it morphs into so much more than a bungled burglary by gordon lid where i. liddy, the level of incompetent is striking. gordon thinks at that period that his life is james bond. i view him and most who have looked at his work see him just a little bit worse and a little bit not quite up to the level of mark -- excuse me -- maximum maxwell smart. this is just really amateur hour stuff. it's not very sophisticated, but what happens is watergate morphs into much more. it morphs into the abuse of high office by nixon during the nixon

presidency. it's the abuse of the campaign laws. it's the abuse of the power of the irs to use it to attack your enemies. these are something -- actually, these are the things that trouble me in many regards more than what has some color of national security which is the elssberg break-in. while i think they were doing it largely to discredit ellsberg, one of the explanations that bud crow has given to me over the years who was in charge of getting the approval was we were really worried from a national security basis what more ellsberg might have that he would leak. ellsberg, as it happens, was very sensitive that he not leak anything and he is an experienced intelligence offer that, he not leak anything that would show sources and methods, which are, of course, the most important things to protect for the intelligence community.

what was very worrying to me are the amounts of money that are pouring back in through citizens united because one of the reasons you have the kind of foolishness that happens during watergate is the amount of money these guys have. as jill talked last night, not only is it a weakness in character, it's an awful lot of money to spend on foolish projects. if you have tight money, you don't involve in these kinds of fishing expeditions. i have written at some length in blind ambition a revised copy what they were looking for, and it is a pure fishing expedition to see what they can find. it's not a particularly well or sophisticated plot to go in there and look. they don't even find the target they're looking for until a couple hours before the second break-in. just happened to send their lookout man from across the street, al baldwin, over to see where the chairman of the dnc actually resides.

they didn't find it the first time they're in the office. they didn't even get close to his suites of offices. i mean, this is really weak, amateur stuff. so i think that you can look at some of the things that have followed in the past. for example, i don't think richard nixon in his darkest hour would authorize torture to violate our treaties. i think more serious things have happened. >> one of the things that strikes me about the comments you've made here and then on the morning panel is the sense that there were two different president nixons. the one who seems to be masterminding a lot of this and then the one that seems almost maybe bumbling is too strong of a word, but in the morning panel

in particular there was this sense that he needed help to understand all of these things, and it's the explanation that there's a cancer on the presidency that you're going to him. i mean, in one sense, of course, he is the mastermind of this, and in the other there's this part of him that's very realistically seeming not to understand this. can you talk a little bit about that dichotomy of the nixon -- >> i'm sure that is something that's going to surface in this work i'm on. in fact there are interesting takes tapes where nixon called haldman, and nixon is saying things like i didn't realize, bob, that the payment of money to these guys was obstruction of justice. one of the questions he asked me that would trigger the exchange with howard baker before the senate committee is this hushed conversation i have with him in his eob office where he goes over to the corner and says i was foolish to talk to coleson about clemency for hunt, and my

answer is, yes, it's probably obstruction of justice. so he doesn't get it. >> under today's rules i have asked all my predecessors do they have prosecutors on the staff. yes, they understood obstruction of justice. there were people in 1972 and 1973 outside of the prosecutors office who never even heard of the crime of obstruction of justice. you wouldn't believe how widespread that was amongst lawyers. and as i point out many our cle, 21 lawyers get on the wrong side of the law. only one of them really understands obstruction of justice. why howard hunt's defense lawyer gets himself many trouble. he does. there's a whole set of explanations and problems, but a

lot of it is incompetent. one of the basic things that you represent your client. i recognized early i didn't have the background in the criminal law and couldn't sell anybody on the problem. no one thought it was criminal. in fact, it's a long time before we're across the line before i'm down letting my fingers do the walking through title 18 trying to figure out what in the hell we had done, and then realizing it, and it's not pretty. so there is that. there is that terrific element of bungling into this. one of the things i noticed in looking at some of the material in scott's book, the bretheren is i was telling jill this last night how prepared and able the lawyers in the special prosecutors office are, how

knowledgeable they are about, one, the criminal law, about how to take their tapes case to the supreme court. >> nixon people just blunder ahead and do all kinds of things that annoy the court going in. any questions on this side. over here. yes. >> i'm also very fascinated by the bipartisan experience. the fact that republicans were well represented on the prosecution team and the fact that you broke ranks. >> it's unanimous setting up the senate watergate committee. there are only a couple republicans who are absent, but, you know, it's -- it's an overwhelming vote to set that

investigation afoot. >> yep. and then, you know, the 8-0 decision. fast forward four decades. very different country. very polarized experience here m government. very difficult to get laws passed now. >> there's no fox news back then. >> so let's fast forward, and what do you think the result would be if we put the tape question before the current supreme court knowing what we know? i guess i'm asking would things be different today? >> i think watergate would be different. i think, first of all, scandals are much more accelerated buzz we're in a 24-7 news cycle. i mean, news is constant. things move faster. the -- there is a true conservative side of the news media today, which didn't really exist terribly well in the nixon -- his efforts to have his defenders have a forum to make his kiss is very limited.

considered out of the mainstream, and it's not easy to do. i think it would be different. we see it in the bush-cheney administration with some of the extremely controversial moves they make where they find an argument on both sides and that seems to pacify and deal with the broader public, so i think, yes, i think it was -- it was partisan. it was what the young people ms -- it was. people thrived on their television. they looked at the newspaper. what could happen next. i have reporter friends who went through withdrawal and never recovered from watergate in

washington. >> this may not really be a question so much as i have a slightly different take and some inconsistent conclusions to a question you were asked earlier about the two richard nixons. when you listen to the tapes you hear a man who is being manipulated a large extent by haldeman and ehrlichman who is perfectly able to, yeah, that's a lot of money, but i know where we could get it. he was quite willing to do it.

>> at times no, question. >> it wasn't when he only said i didn't really know. i think he really knew, and he said he didn't know so that it would be on the record. do you share that? >> yeah, i do share that. there are times he clearly forgets that it's a voice-activated system. there are clearly times he knows the machinery is on and he particularly -- they've talked about the taping system after the break-in. this is something that's on their mind, but they think it will be more good will come from it than bad will come from it. so, yes, i don't think there are two nixons. i think there are probably four or five nixons. he is different. he is truly a very different personality than, say, coleson and haldeman who seem to bring

out his worst side than he is with ehrlichman as he is with his speech writers as ray price, as he is with rose, when the conversations they had together as i mentioned with his daughters and his wife and another personality. i'm sure that the family was horrified when they heard some of those tapes. whendy the rehnquist choice, he is funny too. his take on women in his presidency was really -- he wanted to put a woman on the supreme court. he has these conversation with mitchell who martha his wife is pushing to get him a woman on the court, and they have these conversations together saying, you know, mitchell -- or nixon saying, you know, john, i got -- i don't have any women in my cabinet, thank god, but then my cabinet is so awful, it couldn't get any worse, you but can you imagine putting a woman on a court? you know how small those chambers are up there? i mean, it would be like putting

women in a capsule in a spaceship with men, but then again, on the other hand, warren burger gets wind that he is thinking about a woman, sends a note down through mitchell that if he puts a woman on the court, burger will resign. what's nixon's reaction? tell him to send his resignation down. so he is on both sides of these issues. >> all this month on american history tv, we're featuring programs on the 40th anniversary of the watergate break-in. including panel discussions and oral history interviews recently released by the richard nixon presidential library. for more information on these programs and to see our complete schedule, go to c-span.org/history. this is american history tv. all weekend, every weekend on c-span 3. >> coming up next, university of chicago law professor dennis

hitchinson discusses the life justice byron white. byron white served as an associate justice on the system for 31 years, about the before his appointment in 1962 he was a college and professional football player earning a great deal of marshall media attention in the early 20th century. mr. hutchinson looks at how buy yon white's early celebrity shaped his career on the court. this is about 40 minutes. >> thank you for that roupd of applause. it's good to be home. i grew up in colorado and had been in exile for the last 35 years. a few days after john f. kennedy was inaugurated president of the united states in january of 1961 byron white slipped out of the building for a quick lunch at a

nearby restaurant. after the sandwiches, his coffee was poured the waitress looked carefully and said aren't you whizzer white. white took a sip of coffee, measured her slowly, and replied in a soft voice, i was. for his entire public career, white was constantly framed in the public eye by his headline making first act, an act so to speak that made him a nationwide household name while he was still a teenager. a shy young man with expectations he could not foresee, did not wish, and sometimes could not meet.

we're already ahead of the game. summary of act one. byron raymond white was born june 17, 1918 in colorado, but he grew up 11 miles away in wilmington. population 500 at the time. his father managed a lumberyard. the economy was dominated by sugar. a crop demanding attention constantly and back-breaking work. both white and his older brother clayton s. sam white worked beet fields from the tichl that they could wield a hoe. winters were harsh. spring brought strong winds off the front rains, and summers were hot and dry. character was shaped in the relentless competition between the land and the elements. self-reliance was not an ab strakz. by graduating first in his class

like his brother before him, byron white earned a full tuition scholarship to the university of colorado. there he was a star in three sports. football, basketball, and baseball. president of the student body, phi beta kappa, and like his brother before him, a roads scholar. his performance during his senior year is still statistically one of the most impressive in the history of intercollegiate football. it was capped by all american honors and bril yand plays. so great of the press interest in the young student athlete that the new york basketball writers association had a showcase for white and his teammates. white delayed his mat rick las vegas to accept the highest salary ever offered to a player in the national football league.

$15,800. this was pre-tv, pre- -- following the 1938 season he spept two terms in oxford studying law, but he returned home when world war ii broke out in europe in september 1939. he spent a year at yale law school, won the prize for highest grades in the first year and then took a leave of absence each of the two succeeding fall terms to continue to play professional football. he was able to -- provide a retirement nest egg for his parents. m onset of world war ii he tried to enlist in the marine corps to become a fighter pilot and had to settle for naval intelligence because he failed the color test. he was allowed drop out of the headlines. for a half decade from the spring of 1936 he was a

household name regionally, and from the fall of 1937 nationally in an era where sportswriters created dramatic athletic heroes, white was almost too good to be true. small town boy, three sport star, student body president, valedictorian and eventually a roads scholar. his only handicap was his location. football was still a college sport focused on the east coast. all the media there viewed trans-alleghany competition as suspect with the possible exception of a small college in indiana. one of the prominent sportswriters of the day, henry of the united press, ventured to watch white play and memorialized him with a gripping account of the memorable play in a bitter rivalry. white returned to punt 97 yards for a touchdown zig and zagging

the field and leaving spectator dshz colorado won 17-7, although one newspaper headline accurately stated white, 17, utah, 7. white's national fame was secured by the column published in more than 400 newspapers. the recipe for an all-american backfield man is by the leading press box reads something like this. "take equal parts of speed, power, and savvy. mix well with ability to kick and pass. add a generous pinch of endurance. serve on any field. if that's right, then byron whizzer white of colorado deserves the gold watch, the parch meant scroll, the double-breasted sweater and all the other items that a man on an

all-american team comes in for." within days newspapers from chicago to new york were heralding the new galloping ghost of the roblgys, the whizzing man. white's instant national fame in colorado's record yielded a berth in the second cotton bowl, but eastern writers wanted more, so the n.i.t. was established in madison square garden to showcase byron white basketball star. colorado was outhatched. deeper wounds. sportswriters treated white like a rural chicken to be plucked. they made up and even broke into his hotel room to interview his roommate without identifying themselves. the experience left white who was never comfortable speaking in public or dealing with the press bitter. years later when a friend