Nixon Order to Destroy Tapes Surfaces

The day after White House counsel John W. Dean III started talking to Watergate prosecutors, President Nixon ordered his secret White House tapes destroyed, according to newly transcribed conversations from Nixon’s term.

It was Monday, April 9, 1973, months before the secret White House recording system would be disclosed at Senate hearings. Neither Nixon nor his top aide, White House Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, knew for certain that Dean had begun telling prosecutors what he knew about the burglary and subsequent efforts to thwart investigators. But the day before, Dean, who had coordinated the Watergate cover-up, had told Haldeman that he was considering some limited disclosures to authorities.

“Well, the hell with Dean,” Nixon told Haldeman that Monday morning in the Oval Office. “Frankly, I don’t want to have in the record discussions we’ve had in this room on Watergate.” In another conversation later in the day, the president agreed with Haldeman that they ought to “get rid” of the recordings.

These previously unpublished conversations, among hundreds transcribed for the Washington Post and Newsweek magazine, show Nixon quickly grasping the dangers his tapes contained. The tapes, which have been in the custody of the National Archives for two decades, also reveal new insights into the president as a manipulative, master politician overseeing every detail: approving a “shakedown” of the milk lobby for surreptitious campaign donations, fixing the price of ambassadorships, orchestrating “dirty tricks” against opponents, thanking the donor of hush money for the Watergate burglars.

As the Watergate crisis mounted in the spring of 1973, the tapes also show Nixon trying one ploy after another to keep the scandal from engulfing his presidency and, in the process, calculating how to handle the tapes. After deciding to get rid of them, he changed his mind. Alert to the hazard they posed, he nevertheless soon became forgetful again, even promising a “total pardon” for his implicated top aides as the recording machines continued to pick up his words.

Until now, it has been widely believed that Nixon did not consider destroying his tapes until after White House aide Alexander Butterfield publicly revealed their existence to the Senate Watergate Committee on July 16, 1973. Nixon asserted in his memoirs that he decided against it after long discussions with his aides in the wake of Butterfield’s testimony. He was persuaded, he wrote, that destroying them then would “create an indelible impression of guilt,” far more damaging than any revelations they contained.

Forced to resign in disgrace in August 1974, Nixon spent the rest of his life trying to put the tapes behind him, litigating against fresh disclosures and winning status as an elder statesman with a series of memoirs, foreign policy pronouncements and carefully scripted appearances.