i take it back to the white house, tell haldaman. he goes in and reports it to nixon. stanley cutler in making his transcripts spotted this conversation, and he is very arbitrary in his conversations. he just looktd at summaries and thought this would make an interesting one for a book, boil it down, and the next one wouldn't. so on and so forth. i'm actually following the thread. anyway, in this particular day when i went back and told this information, i read and chuckled that after i listened to the conversation to hear what i heard and there are a lot of elipsies in his transcript, but there's one point where it's just showing the kind of a different set of ears hears different set of things. at one point nixon says to haldman after hearing the report, he says, you know, bob, what i would do with mark felt. then cutler's transcript says he has nixon just dropping off and saying bastard, which is not unusual for nixon. when i heard it, i heard something totally different. he says you know what i would do with felt, bob? ambassadorship. ambassadorship. this is what h

how bob haldaman, as professor rotunda mentioned when he got up here, could review the tapes, listen to them. more than once he went through several of my conversations. he made notes on them. he got up and told the senate exactly the opposite of what those conversations said. i mean, that's hut sba h. he thought these people have to be awfully dumb. they'll never get this information, and i can get away with it this. it was extremely dangerous. i read a passage just the other day in nixon's memoir where he truly believed he was not going to be forced to turn over the tapes. he thought he could successfully win and would not be forced that issue. in fact, he -- interestingly, he writes on april 10th in his diary of 1973 before they had been revealed that he -- he has told haldaman, he thinks he should destroy everything but the national security information, so -- and then later after alex reveals them he remorses that they hadn't destroyed them. the reason he didn't destroy them, i think i have a more complete answer than alex does, is it got too late. there were multiple subpoenas

i tell haldaman that i need to lay it out that the stuff we're doing is an obstruction of justice. by then i had -- there's no doubt in my mind i can't wincethis is the sort of thing my colleague john ehrlichman and others -- my predecessor's counsel, he doesn't want to hear it. >> this is the kind of problem i'm dealing with. i earlier had a similar problem when this first broke saying, john, i don't understand. i'm not a criminal lawyer. i don't have any training. i wasn't in the prosecutor's office. we should bring somebody like one of the assistant u.s. attorneys over and have him detail to the white house to help us deal with these things so we don't make mistakes. didn't want to hear it. these people had very clear visions of what they wanted to do, and i -- the white house counsel is a middle level -- to this day remains a fairly middle level post. >> i did a program after he left the bench, the court of appeals and the district of columbia to come over and be bill clinton's white house counsel, and i don't think he thought he was taking a middle level post, but he was. he s

that would have been haldaman and ehrlichman, that he did talk to, and what the rule today gives him that he didn't have back then, and if warranted, if those guys don't do the right thing, which they didn't, all the way to the president then. then he gets to the president the first week after the break-in, and, you know, we're not trying to say this would have happened. counter factuals are always difficult. it's during that first week when, you know, positions are taken and the dye is cast. he needs to get all the way to nixon himself. not through a talking head, but himself and say, mr. president, what gordon liddy told me was they committed these past crimes. the elsberg break-in, which nixon will end up getting disbarred for. the watergate break-in. they want to pay hush money in the future to keep these guys quiet, and nixon then has the ability to deal with the situation directly rather than eight months later when he has to go in and say there's a cancer on your presidency. by then it is a cancer. it's not yet a cancer in that first week. he has the ability to get to him and