Submission of recorded Presidential conversations to the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives, by Richard Nixon
- Title
- Submission of recorded Presidential conversations to the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives, by Richard Nixon
- Full Document
-
John Dean, an attorney who served as White House Counsel under President Nixon, recruited Gordon Liddy to develop a campaign intelligence plan for President Nixon’s re-election committee. Liddy’s plan, called Operation Gemstone, was a series of illegal intelligence-gathering and sabotage operations. Its purpose was to undermine democratic opponents through spying, kidnapping of protesters, and use of sex-workers for blackmail, to ensure Nixon’s re-election. On June 17, 1972, operatives associated with Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign were caught burglarizing and planting listening devices in the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Washington, D.C.’s Watergate complex. Nixon attempted to cover-up the Watergate scandal through hush money, destruction of incriminating documents, and the instruction to stop the investigation under the guise of national security concerns.
When President Nixon came into office in 1968, he had the recording system that was used by previous president, Lyndon B. Johnson, removed from the Oval Office; though by 1971 he had the Secret Service install microphones at his desk to sufficiently preserve his presidency. From February 16, 1971 to July 12, 1973, this recording system recorded 3,432 hours of conversation. This recording system was the downfall of the Watergate cover-up as it recorded conversations, including what is referred to as the “smoking gun” tape, which recorded a conversation in which Nixon instructed the cover-up of the burglary.
On April 11, 1974, Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives of the Congress issued a subpoena to President Richard Nixon requesting the production of tapes of 42 presidential conversations surrounding the investigation into Watergate. All but three of these conversations were to be produced without regard to their subject matter. President Nixon viewed such a broad subpoena as unnecessary and stated that “wholesale public access to Executive deliberations and documents would cripple the Executive as a co-equal branch,” repeatedly stating that he would not participate in the destruction of the office of the Presidency of the United States by allowing unlimited access to Presidential conversations and documents. Instead on April 30, 1974, President Nixon released the Submission of recorded Presidential conversations to the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives, an over 1,200 page document of edited transcripts of the 42 subpoenaed conversations.