White House Tapes Quotes

What did the President know and when did he know it?

What was Watergate? A little bugging!

I recently read some of the transcripts of Nixon's Watergate tapes, and they spent hours trying to figure out who was leaking and providing information to Carl and myself.

Come, come, come and play spy with me, Down at the old Watergate; Come, come, come live and lie with me, Down at the old Watergate. See the little German band, Ehrlichman and Haldeman; Don't Martha Mitchell look great? Come, come, come don't be shy with me; I'll have the whole FBI with me; Down at the old Water—we'll make the police blotter — Down at the old Watergate.

Even the most cynical can hardly be surprised by the antics of Nixon and his accomplices as they are gradually revealed. It matters little, at this point, where the exact truth lies in the maze of perjury, evasion, and of contempt for the normal - hardly inspiring - standards of political conduct.

It was accountability that Nixon feared.

Watergate is a sad and tragic incident in our history. They were wrong, dead wrong, those men at Watergate. Men abused power, but the system still works. Men abused money, but the system still works. Men lied and perjured themselves, but the system still .

The central question is simply put: What did the president know and when did he know it?

This drama between Dean and Ehrlichman took place while I was trying to give the contents to the FBI.

The facts of Watergate have been wildly exaggerated.

I can't stand that Richard Nixon fellow.

You roll back the stones, and you find slithering things. That is the world of Richard Nixon.

We will never know if any other president approached Nixon in paranoia, profanity or potential criminality, since only his conversations were captured, subpoenaed and ultimately released on the front pages of newspapers.

The White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence.

[Visiting Richard Nixon] useful only to me. The experience taught me that when people do something against you, that something always turns out in your favor.

An attempt is already underway to revise history - to leave the impression that the former president had nothing to do with Watergate. But there is no doubt about his obstruction of justice after the Watergate break-in.

Compared to Nixon.

We're not going to have another Watergate in our lifetime. I'm sure.

Watergate was a constitutional crisis of the highest order.

There were really funny characteristics about this guy [Richard Nixon], chief of which would be that he seemed to devote about 85 percent of his waking energy to suppressing any sign of his emotional response to anything that was going on around him, and the other 15 percent blurting out those authentic responses in the silliest and most inopportune ways. And he had these smiles that would come at the most inappropriate times - just flashes that there was an inner life screaming to get out.