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. doar 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 doar was sure either although articles have been written contrary to this, 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. doar and we all remember this, doar charged us all with never calling the president other than 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 he was -- and that's a very 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 doar'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 doar 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 president. >> tell us a little bit about how mr. doar took advice when you were having this discussion with him, and i'm sure it happened more than once. was joe woods also part of the discussion whether or not to continue the investigation started by the senate? >> yes, no.

joe woods was a very sensible person. doar 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 cates 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 interface, a word i don't like, to be a contact with the committee itself. so doar, 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 marshall who was also a key adviser. he had sort of a kitchen cabinet in effect who he looked to. burke marshall, owen fiss, bob owen, joe woods and dick cates. some were on the staff, some weren't on the staff. doar sort of 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 -- doar was always in contact with various people on his own. there was no 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 burke marshall. mike conway came in through burke marshall. 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 doar, and burke was a very sensible guy. he was a great assistant general judge of the civil rights division prior to doar having that position. i mets burke marshall 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 even when i worked at covington and burling for the summer. and he was a partner. that was during the year that kennedy was running for president. this was 1960. kennedy hadn'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 doar. i kept in touch. i met him from time to time over the years after the impeachment normally at doar'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 doar consulted him on a lot of things, virtually anything. the key person interview here is doar, 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 -- 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. joewoods might have been, but he didn't stay the whole time. i was there the whole time. dick cates. there's no 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 doar 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 labovitz, 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 charge is too strong a term as if i'm the only person, i'm not the only person, but i was one of the key people 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 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 doar 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 set up the impeachment process. there was a basis to try to impeach a president, that was a congressional prerogative. when congress started a legitimate impeachment inquiry, it was entitled to reach into 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 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 impeachment was the one we did in 1974. so one of my key roles was 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 drafting, and 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. in my 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 i believe. 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. president nixon then turned over the tapes and then the tapes were then sent to us by the special prosecutor. >> but if -- >> 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 the 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, then 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 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 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. that's an impeachment offense. 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 impeachment, 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 we realized that 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. 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 hadn'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 to impeach a president. 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 structure of government, 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. labovitz i think was one of the key people who wrote that 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 doar. this is an interesting problem. doar -- 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 18-minute gap and all those issues. doar was the one who decided that we're going to present this in a sort of low-key, 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 listing fact after fact after fact. statements of information. that's what they were called. i still have that books. statements of information. not even facts. it was interesting. we weren't even -- we didn't want -- shows how cautious john was. demonstrating where we came up with this statement of facts. what can we call a statement of facts. but establish -- if you say it's a fact, you're making a judgment that something happened. you say it's a statement of information, you just produced some data so that somebody else can make a judgment as to whether it's accurate or factual. . even shows have careful distinguished thought out. but i give all the credit here to john. this is not the normal way you

present to a grand jury or -- but he did it like that. as a trial lawyer, because i conducted grand jury investigations in my time, you sort of want to spice it up a little bit. on andrew, 18 this happened, on july 3, this happened, and then this document, this piece of grand jury system which we got or this tape will back that up. and he wanted it to have some sort of cumulative effect.

i think without the tapes, it would have fallen flat. but then we had the tapes. and also we did finally call witnesses. finally we did have witnesses testify. and i was actively involved in the witness preparation. i prepared john dean. whoever was in power, sort of i'll tell the dean story which was interesting. i sat with dean for four or five days preparing to testify before the house judiciary committee. an he's very intelligent, he's very smart and he was very knowledgeable about what happened. he was a key, key witness before the senate watergate committee. so i'm preparing him for his testimony. and of course there are gaps,

like with everybody, you try to sort of figure out. so i played the tapes with him. we would listen to the tapes and then i'm trying to figure out what happened between incident one, and incident two, day one and day two. and i normally would do, a witness sometimes, we could try to sort of logically figure out what would have happened, to sort of connect certain things, but i didn't know for sure. all of a sudden i start seeing dean agreeing with every logical hypothesis that i would put forward, because he wanted to go along with it. i knew he didn't want to go along. i just wanted to try to figure

out what happened. but i realized he wasn't going to go along with it. because i didn't want to put words in his mouth. some prosecutors do that, as i have learned over my career. dean was perfectly willing to sort of accept my hypothesis. so i became somewhat cautious. then i realized, listening to the tapes, listening to dean on the tapes with president nixon, that nixon would be doing the same thing with him. so he would start going along with president nixon. he would try to direct him in a way, and what i found when i was

talking to dean, the same 1-2-3 inni inning -- thing was happening again. i was in a position of power, i represented the house of representatives. so he was like going along with me, just like he was going along with president nixon. somewhat anti-climatic. james sin claire, the president's trial lawyer, who was a good lawyer, who i got to know during the hearings, cross-examined, but really the truth is, the witness is not a great impact. john dean's testimony didn't secure president nixon's impeachment and i remember john mitchell, he was a tough guy, he wouldn't talk.

he was a tough guy. mitchell, he wouldn't give an inch. i guess he testified before the committee too, dean testified, it's similar to the way he testified before the senate watergate committee. everybody was saying, we got to have witnesses, we got to have witnesses. it turned out it was the right instinct. we had witnesses, we had to satisfy the committee. if it was up to dole, we would haven't had witnesses. but the pressure of the committee was we had to have some witnesses, so doar said we had to have some witnesses, so it was my job to prepare these witnesses and the witnesses,

which i had hope would have great impact. was these statements of information, one after another, which were boring, plus the tapes. the tapes -- once you heard the tapes, then you could put the tapes together with documents and some of the testimony, that created this impetus for impeachment. >> tell us when you first heard about the tapes. >> i'll tell you when i first sheared about the tapes and i'll tell you hillary's connection with it. i heard the tapes by myself. i was one of the first people on the staff to hear the tapes. doar obviously heard the tapes at the same time. we were -- shocked is the wrong word. this was tremendous proof 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 doar, had a big impact on me that we really had a case here, which was reflected in the articles of impeachment that we ultimately drafted to the committee. and then, and we got them transcribed, and i have this investigative memory of them playing with the committee for the first time. and i remember sitting there, this was a private review of the tapes. everybody had their earphones on listening to the tapes, but i didn't have my earphones on, i heard the tapes. i have 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. and after we had the tapes, i knew we were going to recommend impeachment. they acted very disturbed when they were listening to the tapes, 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 his private session. and i remember the session ended and everybody taking off their earphones and they're walking out and i was really pleased to see that it had that impact. a day or two later, we had another meeting with the committee to discuss the tapes, to discuss what we heard and we were going to leave that discussion and engage with doar. and all of a sudden they came in and i started hearing rationalizations, he didn't really say that, he didn't really mean