Nixon Speechwriter: 'Hardliner' on Tapes

On Friday, the District of Columbia appeals court upheld a lower court upheld a lower court ruling that ordered President Nixon to submit the secret White House tapes concerning Watergate to Judge John Sirica for his inspection. Nixon has previously said he will refuse to do so, pending a "definitive" ruling of the Supreme Court.

It is generally believed by Constitutional experts that Nixon will have trouble defending his refusal before the Court--even though the Court is one which bears his firm imprint and has supported him on many previous occasions.

To better understand the arguments behind Nixon's position--not the legal arguments already heard in court, but the political and emotional considerations that stand behind the carefully-worded briefs--Crimson reporter Kevin A. Stafford recently interviewed Nixon speechwriter Raymond Price.

Price has written--or as he prefers to say, "collaborated" with Nixon on--the major White House Watergate messages. He is considered a moderate Republican, but his position on the tapes, he admits, is that of a "hardliner." Price was a Life reporter and later editor of the New York Herald Tribune's editorial page. When the Tribune folded in 1966, he began writing a novel about life in New York City--a project interrupted in 1967 by Richard Nixon's offer of a campaign job.

The interview was conducted in Price's suite at the San Clemente Inn during one of Nixon's recent California trips. The following are excerpts of that interview which deal with the subject of the tapes.

Q: Has there been a time during the whole Watergate affair that you've considered going back and finishing the novel?

A: No, there hasn't; partly because I believe very much in the President, in what he's trying to do, and in his innocence. I think I know as much about this as anybody in the White House, probably, at this point. And I wanted very much to do what I could to help clear it up.

Q: Have you heard the tapes?

A: No. No. They were not made for contemporary use, obviously, and very few people knew that they existed.

Q: I've heard the argument that if Nixon thinks conversations in the White House should be absolutely secret and that they should never come out, why did he make the tapes? Also, if he is afraid that people will have confidences revealed that they didn't want revealed, why doesn't he ask John Dean and other people for signed disclaimers before he releases those portions?

A: Well, I started out when I first learned about the tapes, as I think most people in the White House started out, feeling that, well, we ought to find some way to get them out, or get some of them out, at least. But I've come around to being quite a hardliner on this the more I've explored it and gone into it.

Taking your second one first, I think basically it would be quite irrelevant to simply get a signed disclaimer from a John Dean or someone, because part of the point of it is that there's an awful lot of non-Watergate stuff on these tapes, as I think anybody who has sat down and just kicked things around with the President for any period of time would sort of instinctively realize. He tends to jump from one subject to another, and ramble, and reminisce, and talk quite candidly about issues that may be current, about personalities. He makes comments on personalities, for example, that should never go outside that office.

Q: I've heard that there's also a lot of rough language on some of the tapes.

A: Yeah, I think there is. He can be fairly earthy in private, as most presidents are in private. And presidents have to be able to blow off steam in private, which they do--and he does. So there's a lot of stuff on these, I'm sure, that listened to in the whole context of that conversation, and of other conversations preceeding it and following it, and other things that were going on, are quite acceptable--but lifted out of context, could be used in all sorts of very grossly misleading ways damaging to him, damaging to a lot of other people, and very damaging to an understanding of what was going on. Also bear in mind that, fairly candidly, we are in a climate in which, if a way could be found to use it against him, it would be--whether honestly or not.

And I'm sure of two other things: one, the week after their existence was disclosed and before he gave his flat answer that he would not give them to the Committee, everybody and his brother began talking about how you couldn't trust the tapes because they could be so easily doctored--including Sam Dash [chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee], who started making a big point of this. It became quite clear that they would only be accepted as conclusive if they were incriminating. If they were exculpatory, they would not be, because then it would be said that the President had doctored them.

Beyond that, if you gave them four tapes or nine--I guess the Watergate Committee has asked for four and Cox for nine--you know damn well that then they would say, 'Okay, now we've got these and we need another eight to clear up these four.' Then you give them the next eight, and they say, 'Okay, now we need another 16 to clear up these eight.' And any place along the way you stop, they're going to say you're stopping because you're guilty.

Q: What about the argument that Nixon should never have made the tapes in the first place?

A: Well, I think you'd probably find a lot of sympathy from him on this argument at this point.

Q: But is it sympathy born out of convenience or conviction at this point?

A: Well, it's a little bit of both. Remember, he dismantled the recording system when he took office because he didn't like that sort of thing. It was a system which existed under Johnson and Kennedy. They didn't tape everything automatically, the way he did. But I would make the argument that something like this is a much more benign system if it's triggered automatically than if it's triggered selectively, as they did.

They taped the things secretly that for their purposes they wanted tapes of, without taping anything that they might have reason not to want a tape made of. He just set it up as an automatic system which would be voice-activated, and he had no control over it.

He had dismantled it, and then he was persuaded, along about early '71, that there were compelling reasons why an accurate record should be kept: partly for historical reasons, and partly so that if questions arose on any critical matters, he would know exactly what had been said. There were a lot of obviously important negotiations going on, and so forth.

But I'm sure he wishes now he hadn't made them, and of course he discontinued them. I think a lot has been lost to history because he has had to discontinue them. It probably was a mistake to start it in the first place, though I must say we'd know an awful lot more about the country and the world if we had something like this from Lincoln and Jefferson.