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One concern of Nixon's—unmentioned here but evident in other conversations—is that a special prosecutor, who would coordinate the entire investigation, could not be counted on to keep the President from being involved. Later the President and Kleindienst muse on how things could have gone so awry.
P: They thought there was an election—you know —let's face it ... But after the election, I couldn't think what in the name of [expletive removed] reason did they play around then? Do you?
K: No.
P: You didn't know that they were doing this? I didn't know.
K: No sir—I didn't know.
P: I didn't—you know—as I was—one of the problems here—I have always run my campaigns. I didn't run this one I must say. I was pretty busy. Or—maybe —handling the Russian Summit. And you know, after the election—we were right in the middle of the Dec. 8th bombing—and holding meetings ...
At the end of this 70-minute dialogue the two agreed, in Kleindienst's words, "to delegate the responsibility for the entire matter to [Henry] Petersen, Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division."
APRIL 15, 1973, 3:27 P.M.
Telephone conversation between the President and Haldeman. The White House claims that its taping system broke down toward the end of the Nixon-Kleindienst meeting. As a result, 4 hours and 35 minutes of talks variously involving the President, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Dean, Kleindienst and Petersen—all on that crucial Sunday in April—are lost. But the telephone recorders remain intact, and in this exchange, after telling Haldeman, "We are so low now we can't go any lower," Nixon says he favors the idea of a special prosecutor after all.
P: He is just in there for the purpose of examining all this to see that the indictments cover everybody.
H: Uh, huh. Well that does protect you a lot, because if they don't indict some of us then you have a cover-up problem ...
P: Then he goes out and says, "I have examined all of this, and now let's stop all this. These men are not guilty and these men are not indictable and these are."
Nixon returns to the notion that John Mitchell might serve well as a sacrificial lamb.
P: Look, if they get a hell of a big fish, that is going to take a lot of the fire out of this thing on the cover-up and all that sort. If they get the President's former law partner and Attorney General, you know ...
H: Yeah. What I feel is people want something to be done to explain what to them is now a phony-looking thing. This will explain it.
∎
H: It seems to me that ... public reaction is going to be, well, thank God that is settled; now let's get away from it. Rather than the reaction of, "Ho, ho, ho, here is something pretty bad; let's spend a lot more time looking into it."
P: That's right.
APRIL 15, 1973, 11:45 P.M.
Telephone conversation between the President and Petersen (HP). There are four short calls from the President to Petersen between 8:14 p.m. and 11:45 p.m. After discussing