system? >> yes. to say the least. up to that point, it looked like it was going to play out like so many cases we're all familiar with is played out. it's a he said/she said. and john's testimony was very effective, but haldeman and ehrli ehrlichman, they had a quandary position, and you had mitchell and you had everything in between. and so the american people are not willing -- i don't care who the president s they're willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and they're very suspicious of his detractors. i think president clinton, for example, got the benefit of his enemies when he got in trouble. >> different trouble, though? >> a different kind of trouble. so when we found out about the taping system, you know, 100

things went through our mind at the same time. you know, is the old fox setting us up? was butterfield planted and sent over there? obviously not, because he didn't know he was going to be called as a witness or to be interviewed, i should say, to begin with. would they exonerate nixon? was he just waiting to spring this, you know. lots of different -- were they still present? were they still in existence? had they long since been destroyed? i think butterfield had not been there tofor four years, maybe. but anyway, they could have still gotten rid of him. so all those things came to mind. it was only when the heat got so hot and the president resisted for so long and took in so much

heat while still refusing to give up the tapes that it became obvious to me that there were much more serious problems than i had ever thought there was. >> richard, how did the tapes change the game? >> they were essential to proving a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice. here, you know, as jim lehrer said, the system worked, but the system would not have worked had the president not taped himself and had not we been able to obtain the tapes because the courts ruled in our favor saying that no man is above the law, and the grand jury was entitled to the evidence. in fact, the senate was denied the tapes. their attempt to get the tapes failed. the courts, however, said the watergate special prosecutors' office working with the grand jury was entitled to get the

tapes. >> did that drive the decision to name him as an unindicted co-conspirator? >> the decision was rather convoluted to name richard nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator. but the furor over the tapes, as fred said, i think began to change public opinion. and public opinion then shifted dramatically once richard nixon fired archibald cox, a special prosecutor, who was promised to have the security of doing an investigation unless he engaged in misconduct. quite clearly there was no misconduct. he was following the evidence, and yet he was fired in the saturday night massacre, one of the most dramatic, perhaps the most dramatic episode in all of watergate, when the president took the resignation of the

attorney general, elliott richardson, the deputy, and finally it fell to robert bourke to do the deed of firing archibald cox. but at that point you saw a tremendous shift in public opinion against richard nixon, now believing that the president of the united states was covering up something that he wasn't being honest with the american public, that he wasn't going to play by the rules. and then finally, the evidence on the tape, as we listened to the tapes for the first time and heard john dean provide in the cancer on the presidency's speech that he gave to richard nixon, chapter and verses giving richard nixon every benefit of the doubt that he didn't know all the things that had happenehappened that quite clearly he did know. and telling the president, look, you've got to stop it now,

you've got to quit now, it's untenable. you have to stop the cover-up, perjury has been committed, it's obstruction of justice. people will have to go to jail. you need to get beyond this. and richard nixon said, quite unequivocally, you've got to continue the cover-up. you've got to continue paying the hush money. you've got to keep the cap on it still longer. so listening to this, to me, and then to leon jaworsky, who had followed archibald cox as special prosecutor, became the most decisive part of the investigation. >> john, were you the happiest person when alexander butterfield confirmed that there was tapes? >> what alex and i have discussed over the years, one of the things that prompted the question was that don sanders, a minority counsel h raised the

question of whether my claim in my testimony that i believed i had been recorded, particularly on april 15th, was potentially accurate. could that have been true? and alex said -- >> that was the question they put to him. >> right. he said very likely he was recorded. quite ironically, it was just a couple sentences i had put in, and i had completed my testimony. my lovely wife had done all the typing, and then charlie schaefer, my lawyer's secretaries, cleaned it up. we put this in at the end. it was the only thing i put in that i speculated about, that i thought i had been recorded. it probably was the best speculation from my point of view that alex could confirm. >> i have to put a plug in for my former employers at the national archives. you can access these tapes. they're on the web. you can get them from the nixon library. they belong to the american people, thank goodness, and they

are an extraordinary record of presidential abuses of power and some good presidential things, too. in retrospect, to what extent does this experience of investigating a cover-up hold any lessons for us today? anything to learn from it today? >> oh, gosh, that's a broad one. a cover-up in general of any kind? i guess what keeps repeating itself, i suppose, in my private work in this magnified about 10 million times is the adages about human nature, the nature of power and how it does tend to corrupt, and so you're not really surprised at much you hear. if you've been in the courtroom

for a good while, or if you've lived a good while, you know that people are capable of lots of things, even pretty good people are capable of bad things. especially if they have some kind of a justification for it. if they feel like there is a higher good. and what we see here, i think, and watergate is taken literally to the presidential level. and you see -- i was thinking about something the historian, daniel bourson, wrote about the time. he said the proliferation of the office of the presidency itself is a problem. it's gotten bigger and more people and less accountability, and i think one of the things you said earlier is true. nixon, it never occurred to him that anybody would ever see those tapes or hear those tapes. because that's what the

presidency had been to him. he had watched it over the years, and historically the president was too powerful to be dragged down by the likes of some politician, you know, over on capitol hill. >> you know that the kennedy and johnson and roosevelt tapes were unknown to the national archives until alexander butterfield revealed the nixon tapes, so that in that sense, tapes didn't belong to the american people. but all of that changed. >> the fact of the matter was there was a lot to cover up. it wasn't just who authorized this break-in. they had broken in before. they had made recordings and photographed documents. that material was within the white house, people knew about it, but the fact was that there were all these different things that john mitchell himself, president nixon's closest ally and attorney general, characterized them as the white house horrors.

so most significantly, the break-in to daniel ellsburg's psychiatry office, which was conducted by the same team that broke into the watergate building that we're sitting in this evening, so many things that had been done, any single one of which today would have been cause for screaming headlines. one goes back and looks over the kind of things that were done, the idea of firebombing the brookings institution to steal material from their safe, the idea of paying folks to rough up anti-war demonstrators, the list goes on, the enemies' list. >> we should ask the audience how many were on the enemies list. at the time it was a big deal. it was a badge of honor.

>> the fact is nixon had surrounded himself with people who vied for his attention and the way to get nixon's approval was to bring the dead mouse to his door to show that you were a tough guy, to show that you weren't bound by the rules, that you were going to play hard knuckle politics. and in the end, that did him in. >> again, for those who are watching who weren't alive then, watergate is more than just a bung gle bung bungled break-in in this building. as mr. woodward and mr. bernstein reminded us a few days ago, watergate were things that occurred in '71 and things that

occurred back to 1969. what are the lessons? >> one of the questions you posed to me was how i felt after archibald cox said he had been fired. my lawyer that's here tonight, carl chaffer, had told me, john, you have the case that we can now describe as the oliver norse case, and they can't touch you. but the lesson to me was, charlie, you may be right. he absolutely was right from a legal standpoint. still, for those who get involved, the lesson is to be accountable, to stand up, tell the truth, because the truth is really the only way these things get resolved. and while there are revisionists out there trying to rewrite that truth at this point, we basically have the best historical record we'll ever have, and it not only corroborates those of us who were involved in the unraveling, it corroborates what the "washington post" did and how

they did it. that's the lesson. the truth is the answer to solve these problems. >> i would say -- [ applause ] >> i would say as an historian, i wish the presidents would keep taping, because one of the things the tapes did is they removed called plausability. the tapes eliminate that and you see the president's role. >> can i elaborate on what we were talking about a minute ago? first of all, watergate is unique in american history. part of the reason that richard was talking about, because the cover-up in large part was because of things that had been done that really had nothing to do with watergate, in part. but by emphasizing the uniqueness of it so much, in a way, we're in danger of

minimizing it in that the traces of the elements of watergate are little pieces of it are strong throughout history and they're still with us. the tendencies i was talking about, the misuse of the fbi and taping people and getting -- the president's getting dirt on their opposition and using authorities to do certain things, using national security as a defense. every day we live with the question, today, of the real line -- when is national security not national security? and does a war matter? does an undeclared war matter? are all bets off? is it only foreign or can it be domestic? they were doing these things, the houston plan that was drawn up in 1970, i think. we need to keep in mind was in

the midst of a very unique time in american history. from 1969 to '72, we were having bombings, demonstrations and people killed, hundreds of thousands of people coming to washington, 17,000 troops circling the white house to protect it, congress was bombed, the capitol building was bombed. you had the kent state and the response from kent state and what was going on in all of these campuses and revolutionary talk and all that. that is the excuse that they came up with not just to properly respond to it, and i think a pretty dog gone tough, significant response was called for myself. but the plumbers, the houston plan and all these high school hairy, not thought out,

unethical, extra judicial measures were used to justify all that. >> but have in mind that nixon employed methods that j. edgar hoover refused to do. that may be the standard. >> and that is -- >> you know the reason for that, because hoover was a practical man, and he had sense enough to know that it was dangerous and wouldn't work. >> and with that, i want to welcome back mary jordan and thank our panelists for a great discussion. thank you. [ applause ] we continue with the watergate conference with a discussion on the legacy of watergate. panel lists include former house judiciary committee member william weld and the associate minority counsel for the committee. they're joined by former nixon administration deputy counsel eagle crow. this is half an hour.

>> fred thompson has led us perfectly into our next panel, so up next we're going to talk about the legacy of watergate. and please join me in welcoming our next guest, former defense secretary bill cohen, a former retired senator from maine who, when this picture was taken, had just come from maine. he was a freshman congressman, and he landed on the hot seat of the judiciary committee. [ applause ] >> and former massachusetts governor bill wells. he's the young blond on the left of your screen. and when that photo was taken, he was the associate minority counsel on the house watergate committee. [ applause ] >> and eagle bud kroge. no, he's not the guy in the

middle. he's currently a senior fellow at the center for the study of the presidency and congress. and then when he was working in the white house for president nixon, he was the co-director of the special investigations unit that we know as the plumbers. welcome. [ applause [ applause ] so we're going to talk about the big issues, the impact on journalism and politics, but i thought we should start right off. all three of you have had remarkable careers. you were all about 30 when this happened. how did watergate affect you personally? bill cohen, did it change your career path in any way? >> it did, and i must say that i was almost an accidental participant in this entire affair. when i first was elected in 1972, they had a new program at harvard, the kennedy institute, and they were going to have an

experimental program to see whether or not freshmen congress men could have an impact on presidential policy. they selected four of us. bourke from california, alan steele from dallas, allison jordan and me. a young man by the name of mark althou talisman was the director of the program. the only thing i can recall of the entire harvard experience was the advice mark gave to me. he said, when you get to washington, they're going to ask you to make a list of the committees you want to be on. make sure the one you really want to be on, put it last. totally counter-intuitive to me, and i said, why? he said, because they don't know you and they won't trust you. you have to demonstrate your credibility to the party over a period of a couple terms and then you'll get the committee you want. against the feeling of my staff

who argued quite strongly, do not go on the judiciary committee. it doesn't do anything. it talks about abortion or prayer in public schools. it will kill you at home. over their objection, i put judiciary last, and that's >> great story. >> in a way it really impacted me to go from the freshman congress and be in the middle of the biggest scandal of the century. >> you were a republican -- how did that affect your career? >> well, it did two things. number one i think it pretty much terminated any future i had as far as a leadership position in the party. secondly -- >> because you were one of the first to vote for impeachment. >> right. secondly it was very liberating. once the ambition to do anything more within the party structure was eliminated it was pretty much free to do whatever i wanted. so ambition can be a highly motivating factor and it can consume one. it doesn't consume me for the reason i knew that there was really no opportunity within the

party structure. i was pretty much a free agent the rest of my career. >> you did all right. you did all right. bill weld, would your life have been different without watergate? >> it sure would have. it was the beginning of everything for me. i think of it as one of two events that electrified my generation, the other being the assassination of president kennedy and teddy white's book. but some people in my generation were disillusioned by watergate when gordon strong said -- one of the people who was convicted, what advice would he give to young people regarding public service, he said stay away, stay away. but for every one of those, there were ten who were very highly motivated. i shared an office with a young yale law graduate, hillary rodham. both of us went into public service. i came down there as a corporate lawyer and went back just championing to become a

litigator and criminal litigator. and within half a dozen years, i was u.s. attorney under president reagan for five years and then head of the criminal division down here for two years. and my stock and trade there was the idea that public corruption is not a victimless crime. and there's some sense in the past that it was and these cases were hard to prove. having lived through watergate, having listened to every minute of the tapes, it was simply impossible not to have a burning desire to uncover public corruption. and i became an ally of the press over the years in that we both wanted to knock down the same temple walls because we knew the rock that could repose within. and it was the watergate scandal that allowed me to take that tact. >> fantastic. and bud crow, we know that you spent four months as the --

>> four months and two weeks. >> four months and two weeks in jail. how did it change your life? >> i would first like to say to my former colleagues that it's a lot easier to come into this building with valet parking than to come in -- it just works for me, you know. well, obviously watergate changed it profoundly. i was involved in one of the horrors, the break-in of the office of a psychiatrist. we were motivated by what we thought was a national security imperative. that's what i was told by the president. i authorized a convert operation in july of 1971. it was carried out. nothing was found. but what that constituted at that time -- and i've looked back on this a lot over of the

last few years, was a major breakdown in integrity. my personal integrity and that of the unit for which i worked. we asked a lot of questions about who can do this, when can they do it, how much will it cost? but we didn't ask the critical questions like, is it legal? three of the four of us were lawyers. you would have thought that might have been relevant. and, basically, is it the right thing to do? is it consistent with basic values that we had? respect, responsibility, fairness, honesty. we didn't ask those questions. but when nothing was found, they did take pictures of a damaged office. and i remember asking, is there something about the word covert that was unclear? and then they said shut it down, which we did. some gentlemen that worked for me went on to the committee to work to re-elect the president. you can't get into trouble. i remember june 17th or 18th, i was at st. louis in a meeting. i came out and saw the news kiosk the story about the watergate break-in and read who was involved and i thought, this is going to change everything.

wasn't sure just then what it would be. then i think i had maybe two or three days when i got back to demonstrate the moral courage, which i wish i had at the time, to go in and tell the president what happened the year before. >> right. >> i think what richard bendenista and others have said, the cover-up was key -- not exclusively but primarily to cover up what happened in 1971. >> right. let me ask you about this national security. we asked people in the audience and online to ask questions. what you and fred thompson keep talking about keeps coming up. in post 9/11, is there more going on down at pennsylvania

avenue in the name of national security that we should know? and would that taping system -- maybe we don't know. you study the presidency now. >> yes, i have. i don't know what's going on. i know that a president, if the country is attacked, has a responsibility to respond to that. he will put things into motion that he thinks will be responsive. whether it's outside the law, i have no way of knowing. i do know president obama brought in someone to run his conflicts and ethics office. the question of national security, these threats are with us all the time. every president is going to respond to them in some way. the problem is that when national security is used to justify political activity, and i think that's what happened to me. at least that's what i bought into, in 1971. it was wrong then. it's wrong today. >> what do you think, the institutions, legacy of watergate, enough checks and balances that that kind of thing can't happen again? >> i think we have a potential

repetition of watergate because we're looking at watergate. you saw power, money and secrecy. and today, you're seeing money and secrecy. i think the political system is being overwhelmed with money and a lack of accountability. the fact that you can have millions -- [ applause ] millions of dollars funneled into a particular campaign and the public will never know, certainly may not know until after the election. i think there are lessons that are still relevant. much of it has been swept aday. all of the so-called watergate reforms have pretty much gone by the wayside. >> the campaign financing? >> campaign finance. trying to have full disclosure, limit how much can be contributed. money will always play a major role in our political process and tends to limit are doom to failure. one thing you can insist is full accountability immediately so that the public at least knows by the way of internet or other opportunities who is getting what, how much and what's the accountability for -- people contributing, what are they seeking to get out of this particular candidate or this

particular party? i think it's very dangerous what we're doing right now. i would like to see more accountability and more disclosure and less secrecy. >> you want to weigh in on this, bill? >> well, i tend to agree. human nature, being what it is, if you don't have a vigilant press and vigilant public prosecutors, both state and federal, you're absolutely going to have danger of repetition here. plus, as the secretary and senator says, the dollar signs are so large these day that one super pac can move the needle. that didn't use to be true in the old days. i would subscribe to what my esteemed colleague said. >> you studied the presidency. what impact on the presidency did it have with the hindsight of 40 years and given the fact that it ebbed and flowed. >> i don't think they set up a taping system. that's something they probably have not done.

i think they brought people on to the white house staff that are students of what happened in the past. i know that the center for the study of the presidency, we have the ability to make contact with people on the current staff and convey to them some of the lessons that we learned about abuse of power. we've been able to -- >> what's the number one rule? >> the number one rule is adhere to your highest standards of integrity, the constitution and the rule of law at all costs. that's the rule. i mean, that's fundamental. and i did not understand that fully when i was there. it gets to loyalties. when i was sentenced to prison, judge gerhard gazel looked down and said what you did, you did