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St. Clair also tried to undermine a key claim in the grand jury's conspiracy indictment: that $75,000 in hush money had been paid on March 21, 1973, to William Bittman, the attorney for E. Howard Hunt, a Watergate wiretapper. Hunt had been demanding money from the White House, threatening to disclose some of his seamy work as a member of Nixon's squad of secret plumber investigators. The payment was alleged by the grand jury to have been made just a few hours after Dean and Haldeman had met with Nixon on that day. St. Clair pointed out, however, that a large chart used in the Senate Watergate hearings had listed no such payment on March 21. That was hardly a conclusive refutation.
Hush Money. Testimony at the Senate hearings was imprecise as to the time of this payment. But St. Clair had to be aware that the grand jury had strong evidence of the date before citing it as a culminating act in the chain of criminal conspiracy. Last week the Washington Post reported that Frederick LaRue, a former official of Nixon's re-election committee who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice, had recalled handling the payment after dinner on March 21. The date was verified by the travel records of one of La-Rue's out-of-town friends, who attended the dinner. Investigators have the credit-card records of his hotel and travel expenses. That is minimal documentation; the prosecutor has other evidence too.
The payment date challenges Nixon's repeated claim that, during the celebrated March 21 meeting with Dean and Haldeman in his office, he flatly rejected the idea of paying any hush money. The grand jury, which heard the tape of the meeting, cited Haldeman for perjury because of his testimony at the Senate hearings that Nixon had said such payments were wrong. This grand jury action suggested that Nixon must have been lying in his public claims that he told his aides the payments were wrong. If a payment was made after the talk, the President either did not discourage the payment of hush money, or he was misunderstood by his aides, or he was disobeyed.
Nixon conceded in a press conference two weeks ago that other persons who heard the tape might "reach different interpretations. But I know what I meant, and I know also what I did. I meant that the whole transaction was wrong, the transaction for the purpose of keeping this whole matter covered up." Nixon said that he told Dean, "It is wrong, that's for sure"—and that the remark was meant to apply to both the promise of Executive clemency and the payment of hush money to any defendant.
The President has refused to release the tape or a transcript of the conversation, but TIME has learned its gist.
Four important words spoken by the President come through clearly: "It would be wrong." But these words are spoken only within the context of a discussion about promising clemency. The subject of paying money to keep the burglars quiet comes once before the clemency discussion and two times after it. On none of those three occasions does Nixon say or suggest that such payments would be wrong.
Among the tapes most eagerly sought by both Prosecutor Jaworski and the