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Yet whatever his aides did, Nixon seemed to understand. They were men, he said, "whose zeal exceeded their judgment, and who may have done wrong in a cause they deeply believed to be right"—meaning his reelection. He implied that they may have acted in response to "the ugly mob violence" and "the excesses or expected excesses of the other side." He claimed that "it can be very easy under the intensive pressures of a campaign for even well-intentioned people to fall into shady tactics . . . and both of our great parties have been guilty of such tactics."
This was an offensive attempt to portray the Democratic campaigners—and indeed all U.S. politicians—as being guilty of the same kind of improper and criminal activity as that of his adherents. No "mob violence" was evident when the Watergate bugging was planned or carried out, nor was there much reason to expect any as a result of Democratic tactics; even if there had been such an expectation, it would hardly have justified the Watergate or related enterprises. While there obviously is plenty of political corruption on all sides, there is no evidence that Democrats—or other Republicans—burglarized offices, tapped telephones, kept huge caches of secret campaign funds to finance the disruption of opponents' campaigns, or tried to obstruct the judicial system's attempts to punish the offenders.
The President never did say flatly that he had not heard of plans in his Administration to bug the Democratic headquarters. He said that he first learned that such a break-in had occurred at the Watergate apartment and office complex when he read news reports. "I was appalled at this senseless, illegal action" and was "shocked" to learn that members of the re-election committee "were apparently among those guilty." That does not explain why he authorized Press Secretary Ziegler, just two days after the June 17 breakin, to dismiss it as "a third-rate burglary attempt."
Nixon said he received repeated assurances from his aides that no one in his Administration had been involved. He contended that it was not until March that he began to suspect "that there had been an effort to conceal the facts both from the public—from you—and from me." Now, he vowed, "I will do everything in my power to ensure that the guilty are brought to justice. We must maintain the integrity of the White House. There can be no whitewash at the White House." Nixon urged both parties to join in seeking "a new set of standards, new rules and procedures to ensure that future elections will be as nearly free of such abuses as they possibly can be made."
Deadline. In fact, there are a number of laws against all the practices that Nixon's men fell into. There is obvious need for the reform of campaign funding, but the Nixon officials flagrantly violated the fund-disclosure and reporting laws already on the books. Nixon's chief fund raiser, former Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans, in fact, had furiously tried to beat the deadline before a