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The syndication editors chose to begin the first of seven installments with Nixon's account of first reading about the Watergate burglary in the Miami Herald on Sunday, June 18, 1972, as he relaxed at his vacation home in nearby Key Biscayne. Nixon's memory is keen: "I could smell coffee brewing in the kitchen." But as he takes the reader once again down what he calls "the road that eventually led to the end of my presidency," Nixon's story is the same defensive, superficial and unconvincing account that he has told so often in the past. He says that at first he dismissed the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters as "some sort of prank" conducted by "Cubans in surgical gloves." He again professes bewilderment at learning that officials of his 1972 re-election committee and former White House Gumshoes Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy were centrally involved. By June 20, he began to worry that "the investigations and depositions, if they went too far, would hand the Democrats a major campaign issue."
It was then that he became enmeshed in the coverup, working through his aide H.R. Haldeman and manipulating CIA Director Richard Helms and Deputy Director Vernon Walters. Nixon writes: "I told Haldeman to say that I believed this thing would open up the whole Bay of Pigs matter−and they should call the FBI in and say that for the sake of the country they should go no further into this case. When Haldeman came back from his meeting with Richard Helms and Walters, he said that Helms got the picture and would be happy to be helpful. As far as I was concerned, this was the end of our worries about Watergate."
Later Nixon sensed that "a cloud of suspicion still hung over the White House. Yet I felt sure that it was just a public relations problem that only needed a public relations solution."
Nixon does concede some culpability for the illegal acts of his aides and, ultimately, for the end to his presidency. In one telling passage, he refers to his discussions of granting presidential clemency to the Watergate burglars, and to his relations with his aides Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Charles Colson, and Jeb Magruder, operational head of Nixon's 1972 re-election committee. Writes Nixon: "I told myself that I had not been involved in the things that gave them potential criminal vulnerability. But there were things that I had known. I had talked with Colson about clemency; I too had suspected Jeb Magruder was not telling the truth, but I had done nothing about my suspicions; and I had been aware that attorneys' fees and family support funds were going to the defendants. The difference between us was that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had become trapped by their circumstantial involvement; so far, I was not.
"I was faced with having to fire my friends for things that I myself was a part of. I was selfish enough about my own survival to want them to leave; but I was not so ruthless as to be able to confront easily the idea of hurting people I cared about so deeply. I worried about the impact on them if they were forced to leave; but I worried more about the impact on me if they didn't."