could easily win a national election. he had left the 1960 election which he lost narrowly to john f. kennedy with bitterness. and a sense the election had been stolen from him. this allowed the demon that is he always had within him to play during elections. it is about lust for power and absence of morality. it was all about holding on to power. no one can find out about this. whatever it takes. when the president does it it means that it is not illegal. i told the american people i did not trade hostages for arms. there will not be an abuse of power in this office. he develops weapons of mass destruction. we are in trouble. i just want to find 11,780 votes. and that s really when you reach a tipping point in a democracy. that s how dictators come to power. within hours of the arrests at the watergate, the nixon white house started covering up. i was the desk officer of the cover-up. i get the information and gather it and i share it and they were maki
i was keeping a eye generally on where the investigation was going and sending it up to the president. we learned very quickly that secret service had a report from metropolitan police. howard hunt s name was in the address book they found in the possession of the burglar. howard hunt was involved with the plumbers trying to track down leaks. hunt is the reason why the white house has to go into full cover-up mode immediately. hunt leads back to the plumbers. hunt leads back to the break-in. hunt leads back to coleson. this was really explosive stuff. i was in a meeting in ehrlichman s office.
to keep the investigators the hell away from the white house. don t let that investigation going on out there about the break-in and that sort of thing get into the white house. nixon understood that if people found out that the campaign staff was breaking in to the democratic national committee it would be a disaster for his re-election so he had to stop it. johner lickman called pat gray who i would be in charge of monitoring the fbi investigation. but i was also getting information above pat gray from the head of the criminal division of the department of justice henry peterson. we had been at the department of justice together. he knows not only everything the fbi knows but the grand jury and the u.s. attorneys know.
reach a tipping point in a democracy. that s how dictators come to power. within hours of the arrests at the watergate, the nixon white house started covering up. i was the desk officer of the cover-up. i get the information and gather it and i share it and they were making decisions based on it as to how they can contain this problem. after the break-in, the fbi started an intense investigation to find out who in fact was responsible for sending these people in and how high up the orders came. john dean s primary job was
attempt to thwart an investigation. you can tell someone to lie on your behalf, you can lie in order to divert investigators and prosecutors away from yourself, you can destroy documents. i think john dean was realistic because he saw that the criminal laws applied to the president and everybody else, and that sooner or later, this was going to come out. i thought to myself, you know, you re in a heap of trouble. why this was difficult is because i had just gotten married, just weeks earlier. i have to make this cover-up work. i really have just sort of been, yeah, well, okay, if i got to pass that information on, fine. you do the dirty work. now the dirty work had to be done by me. why did you think you had to make it work? because i was going go to jail otherwise. and i would have never subjected the woman who is the love of my life to that kind of agony