the senate watergate committee, alex butterfield's testimony, disclosing the tapes. and, you know, you asked the question, which is a really good one. what don't we know? and because of the abundance of evidence, we know so much. but what i think is interesting -- try to step back a little bit. richard nixon did not understand what the presidency was, that there is this goodwill that flows to any president. and it is something he could not use, because he was driven by -- oh, so-and-so is an enemy. let's get the irs on him. we don't like the brookings institute. let's break into the office there and get something out of the files. and he never -- again, bud krogh was talking about serenity. he never really found it. you listen to those tapes and it is not only the illegality and abuse of power but the smallness of richard nixon. he didn't realize that as president he could really do big things. and -- >> some would argue that he did big things but had this character failure and this insecurity and all these other qualities that led him to do the bad things. >> i woul

. >> 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 am