(4 of 8)
Summarizing his earlier position, Nixon insisted: "Because I trusted the agencies conducting the investigations, and because I believed the reports I was getting, I did not believe the newspaper accounts that suggested a coverup. I was convinced there was no cover-up because I was convinced that no one had anything to cover up." He did not explain how he and his Administration could have been misled for nine months by only one man, Dean; nor did he try to excuse the managerial ineptitude that this implies.
The President's other principal points:
ON THE WHITE HOUSE "PLUMBERS"
In the statement that accompanied his speech, the President alluded to efforts by Watergate Defendant E. Howard Hunt to demand $120,000 from the White House as his price for not talking about "other activities, unrelated to Watergate, in which he had engaged."
Referring to the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, directed by Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, Nixon said he had erred in his May 22 statement when he stated that he learned of the burglary at the time he launched his own Watergate investigation on March 21. Actually, said Nixon, he had been informed of it a few days earlier, on March 17. But he delayed in passing on the information about the break-in to the Ellsberg trial judge, Matthew Byrne, until April 25. He added that he had ordered Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen to stay out of the Ellsberg affair because he feared disclosures that could "seriously injure the national security."
ON THE WHITE HOUSE TAPES
Despite his proposal that the Watergate courts," the case be President "turned over to vigorously defended his refusal to surrender to the courts the evidence contained in the tapes of presidential conversations that the White House secretly recorded. Aware that his refusal has damaged his credibility, he apparently felt obliged to explain his position at length. "For very good reasons," he declared, "no branch of Government has ever compelled dis closure of confidential conversations between officers of other branches of Government and their advisers about Government business." Confidentiality and trust are absolutely essential to the conduct of the presidency, he maintained — though he did not address him self to the betrayal of trust involved in the secret recording of private conversations in the first place. Nor did he respond to suggestions that he might release the tapes to a select panel of judges without violating any trust. The conversations between the President and his advisers, Nixon contended, were as private and as legally privileged as those between "a lawyer and a client, between a priest and a penitent and between a husband and a wife."
ON THE WATERGATE "MENTALITY"
The President accepted "full re sponsibility" for the acts of his aides, adding: "No political campaign ever justifies obstructing justice, or harassing individuals, or compromising [the] great agencies of Government." In one of his most refreshing passages, he continued: