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The former President concedes too that he had misjudged the impact of charges leveled against him by his counsel, John Dean, whom he fired in the spring of 1973. The most serious was Dean's persuasive claim that Nixon had approved hush-money payments to the Watergate burglars in a White House meeting that March 21. "I went off on a tangent by concentrating all our attention and resources on trying to refute Dean. But it no longer made any difference that not all of Dean's testimony was accurate. It only mattered if any of his testimony was accurate. And Dean's account of the March 21 meeting was more accurate than my own." With obvious regret, Nixon sums up: "I did not see it then, but in the end it would make less difference that I was not as involved as Dean had alleged than that I was not as uninvolved as I had claimed."
Though Nixon makes no such dramatic admission of error as he had in his televised interviews with David Frost ("I let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life"), he does admit that all his public speeches about his Watergate role as he fought to stay in office "were not explanations of how a President of the United States could so incompetently allow himself to get in such a situation. That was what people really wanted to know."
What finally forced Nixon to quit was the hard evidence that only six days after the Watergate burglary, he was already deeply involved in the coverup. This became clear when he was forced to release the White House tape of a meeting that he had with Haldeman on June 23, 1972. The "smoking gun" revelation came out in the fateful summer of 1974, and Nixon writes of the events of Friday, August 2: "I decided instead of resigning on Monday night, I would release the June 23 tape and see the reaction to it. If it was as bad as I expected then we could resume the countdown toward resignation. If by some miracle the reaction was not so bad and there was any chance that I could actually govern during a six months' trial in the Senate, then we could examine the forlorn option one more time. In a subconscious way I knew that resignation was inevitable. But more than once over the next days I would yield to my desire to fight, and I would bridle as the inexorable end drew near." During those days, he writes, "an odd rhyme struck me. It's fight or flight by Monday night!"
On the crucial Monday night, he recalls, "We had passed through the first blast of the firestorm, but it was still raging. I knew that it would be following me for the rest of my life."
He also knew that he had to resign. Instead of breaking the news himself, he called in his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, and had her tell his family. When his sons-in-law, Edward Cox and David Eisenhower, argued the case for delaying his decision at least for a few days, Nixon recalls, "I said that this was just like a Greek tragedy: you could not end it in the middle of the second act or the crowd would throw chairs at the stage. In other words, the tragedy had to be seen through until the end as fate would have it."