also in a remarkable document in the room of the burglars next door at the hotel where hunt had written a check to a country club out in maryland for $6.36 for his out-of-state dues asking bernard barker to mail it from florida so he could contain -- or remain in out-of-state status. a pretty sure clue there was some trouble. and not only did the police and the fbi find this immediately, but so did the media. because the "washington post" had one of its better police reporters right there in the room, i've now learned all these years later, covering that particular activity. >> now, this is serious business, but there is a little bit of keystone cops about it because they also had stacks of money, didn't they? >> in their pocket. >> stacks of money which would later be important when you had to follow the money. >> well, they didn't actually follow the bills, but they quickly tracked bernard barker's

bank account, found that he had very large transactions. it's interesting, historically we know that litty could have cashed those checks at the riggs bank. instead he sends them to miami, to barker, to have them cashed, and it immediately raises the antenna of the fbi that this might be the source of the money. when they get hugh sloan, when earl brings them in, and i'm glad earl is here today, because he was certainly paramount in unraveling this. >> in september of '92, you meet with president nixon and he's happy. why is he happy? >> he's happy because there's only seven people that have been arrested. it stops at hunt and litty and the people who are actually in this building. >> richard, how many get arrested in the end? >> i've lost count. a lot. >> okay, so -- >> 30, 40. >> so the cover-up is working.

senator, john was about, what, 33 at this time, 34? >> which one, when the break-in occurred? >> when the break-in occurred. >> 30. >> you're 30 years old, working on howard baker's campaign. he calls you, and what does he ask you to do. >> he asked me to consider becoming counsel on the watergate committee. told about the formation of the urban committee. he was going to be the ranking member, and as the ranking republican, he had a right to choose the counsel for the republicans. i've got to say, as a republican, it's wonderful to be back at another watergate celebration. [ laughter ] >> our boys kind of left a mess, didn't they? >> what was the state of play, though? when you're asked to be minority counsel, and the white house, we know from the tapes, thought you

were quite young -- 30. what's the stage of play? how do you and the senator view this? is this a real investigation? are you concerned it's an attempt to get the president -- how partisan is it at that point? >> well, most of my concerns were practical ones. i just started practicing law, i had been on the campaign trail with senator baker. and i was trying to get my law practice reestablished. i had been assistant united states attorney there with john mitchell's certificate of appointment hanging over my wall. and so i had not kept up with it at all. i remember something about a break-in. and when i came up in february, it was just the most rudimentary of information, and i had most of it from the "washington post." and i think most of us thought that in typical campaign fashion that there were some young,

inexperienced, over-aggressive people who had done some things that were stupid that did notice that some of the people who got caught weren't that young, but maybe pulling the strings behind the scene. and that certainly never occurred to me, that the president of the united states, for example, or his key people would be involved in something so ridiculous both from a moral standpoint and from a practical standpoint. as you remember, it was a totally botched job from every way imaginable. they practically left a blueprint, you know, for the law enforcement authorities to follow and the whole thing. and these were supposed to be cia-experienced people. so it was bizarre, and it was clearly important because it had to do with the congress of the united states and the president. >> how important was this man's

testimony before your committee? >> well, it was all important. it was the key testimony before the committee. and without his -- i've always thought about how unique this situation was in that so many things came together to end results. you had to have a willing press that was aggressive, and of course we certainly had that. you had to have a deep throat in this case. you had to have a -- not necessarily a status, but you had, in this case, white house counsel, john here, who was testifying. he was willing to testify about conversations. the president gave him permission to do that. and then you had a taping

system. i don't think -- maybe if you didn't have either of those four, you would not have had the result that you had. certainly that pertains to john's testimony. >> senator, so you're in the congress, but we have another investigation going on, and it's the watergate special prosecution force. and richard over here was the head of the task force on the watergate issue. richard, how important was john dean's testimony? >> well, it was very, very important. but to fred's litany, i would add two other things. you had to have an opposing party controlling the senate, and you had to have a judge like john sericka, who was willing to follow the evidence and to be aggressive in in not allowing his courtroom to be used to

steal further cover. so i watched john dean's testimony before i was appointed to the special prosecutors' office. i saw this young man only four years older than i. i was an assistant u.s. attorney in the southern district of new york at the time. and i saw him drone on and on in that john dean monotone for hours and hours, and i listened to the content and i absolutely couldn't believe that richard nixon, the arch-strategist, whether or not i had other opinions about him, i certainly didn't think that he would be the type of person to allow a young man, inexperienced as john dean was, to have as much authority as john dean seemed to have, according to his testimony, and certainly not to

have richard nixon incriminate himself in the ways that john dean had suggested in his testimony rather explicitly that he had involved himself in a criminal cover-up. so it was not until much later after i was appointed, after we did our investigation, and most importantly, after we were able to hear richard nixon and his closest advisers on tape -- >> finish that thought, then we're going to get to -- >> -- that john dean testimony became solidified as unimpeachable. >> there are people in this audience who think of fred thompson as a dramatic performer in "law & order." for historians, fred thompson's greatest role was when he asked a particular question to alexander butterfield. would you please set that up? because that changes the whole

investigation. maybe also his life, i don't know, but certainly the whole investigation. so senator, tell us about asking alexander butterfield the big questions. >> this was a monday. the friday afternoon and said, we've just been interviewing a guy by the name of alexander butterfield. and there's a taping system in the white house. we immediately went to urban and baker and over the weekend they decided to -- that we needed to immediately, you know, get in before the cameras. so that happened monday. >> and were you surprised that president nixon had a taping 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 >>