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With some literary license, plenty of overblown prose but considerable underlying accuracy, Breslin relates how Dear's staff compiled all the details of Nixon's activities after the Watergate break-in on index cards—an original and six copies. The cards were then organized into various files and shuffled about on desks until patterns began to emerge. Every time Nixon inhaled, Breslin writes, "somewhere in the file cabinets, seven cards would breathe with him." It was the cards, for instance, that convinced Dear's staff that Nixon was lying as early as June 20, 1973—three days after the Watergate burglary and arrests. The presidential staff had assembled that day for the first time since the scandal broke—yet Nixon publicly insisted he had never asked his aides about it. No way. Moreover, 18% minutes of a Nixon talk were erased. Breslin concludes: "Anybody with any sense in the White House knew who had erased the tape. Nixon had." Breslin quotes a diehard Nixon aide, Dean Burch, as being in total agreement.
Fatally Honest. Breslin also turned up a previously undisclosed—and disheartening—Nixon taped conversation. Rodino had heard it with dismay, and got his committee's ranking Republican, Edward Hutchinson, to agree to its suppression. It was too inflammatory and too divisive. "The Italians," Nixon told John Ehrlichman, "they're not like us . . . They smell different, they look different, act different . . . The trouble is, you can't find one who is honest." To his sorrow, the President ran into not one Italian, Rodino, but a second, John Sirica, who from Nixon's point of view was fatally honest.
How the Good Guys Finally Won also provides new examples of the tenacity that Nixon's people displayed in fighting to avoid impeachment—in this case a desperate White House effort to link Rodino with New Jersey racketeers. First, White House aides tried to peddle this claim to Washington newsmen. Worse yet, Jeb Stuart Magruder, the Nixon sycophant who had already gone to prison piously repenting his Watergate lies, tried to curry pardonable favor behind bars. Magruder emphatically denies the story, but according to Breslin, Magruder approached former New Jersey Congressman Cornelius Gallagher, who was serving time for income tax evasion, when both were in the Allenwood, Pa., prison farm. "Peter Rodino is going to be wiped out," Magruder is quoted as telling Gallagher. "If you could help, that's all we need. And then you would be out of here clean with a pardon." Gallagher apparently gave no information on Rodino, but passed the word to friends in Washington about Nixon's tactics.