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

i still to this day my lawyer who's here tonight charlie shafer had hold me, he said, john, you have the case that we now can describe as soldier north's case and they can't touch you. but the lesson to me was charlie you may be right. and he obviously was right from a legal standpoint, but 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 who are 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 many the unraveling it corroborates what the washington post did and how they did it. so 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 that presidents would keep taping. one of the things the tapes did was remove plausible deniablity which was developed in the cold war to separate presidents from controversial and in some cases illegal dec