Sunday reading - memories of another GOP cover-up with redactions

April 1974 - a time when another president was asked to reveal information about what he knew, when he knew it, and what he told others to do about it. This is from The Final Days , the Woodward and Bernstein book that picks up from All the President's Men, and goes to August 1974.

In late April 1974, former Attorney General John Mitchell and Nixon campaign executive Maurice Stans were acquitted of charges that claimed they blocked an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission in exchange for a $200,000 campaign donation from the person investigated.

That leads the Nixon Administration to think it has momentum, and they try to release their side of what was on the White House tapes.

The acquittals appeared to end the President's indecision about whether the transcripts should be released. He had fretted too long. It was time to act. He gave [Chief of Staff Alexander] Haig the go-ahead, but not before he had solved some of the last-minute editing problems by literally throwing several pages away....

Later in the afternoon, a dozen members of the speech-writing and communications staffs gathered in the office of Ken W. Clawson, White House director of communications. {White House lawyers] Buzhardt and St. Clair, who had arranged the meeting, were delayed, so Clawson passed out copies of the forty-page brief that St. Clair had prepared for submission to the [House] Judiciary Committee. The document quoted extensively from portions of the transcripts which tended to support the President's version of events. The brief was essentially a savage attack on Jihn Dean, taking what advantage it could of his rate memory lapses before the Watergate Committee.

Clawson was buoyant - partly because of the Mitchell-Stand verdict and partly as a result of what the President's lawyers ahd told him. The end of Watergate was finally at hand, he assured his colleagues. The transcripts would win the day. He referred to the president's speech "Watergate is going to go away tomorrow," he assured them.

That strategy of "we'll release redacted transcripts. Just trust us" sounds familiar today.

2 days after Nixon went on TV, the Dem-controlled House Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to say "This does not satisfy the subpoena", and proceeded further to try to get the tapes and the information they stored. And the special prosecutor in charge of Watergate saw through it as well.

The edited transcripts were wholly unacceptable evidence as far as Jaworski was concerned. He wanted the President's tapes, and he though he had a level to get them. In the first week of May, the special prosecutor had called a meeting of his most trusted assistants. For more than two months they had been sitting on probably the biggest secret in Washington - that the grand jury had voted to name the President as an unindicted co-conspirator in the plot to obstruct justice. Now, Jaworski said, the time had come to use whatever means were at their disposal to get the tapes they needed. When the White House moved to quash the prosecutor's subpoena, it had left them no alternative. Jaworski did not need to be more explicit. They were all lawyers. They knew the ultimate legal argument in favor of the subpoena was the secret action of the grand jury; the courts had firmly established the principle that an unindicted co-conspirator must provide subpoenaed evidence.

Jaworski outlined his strategy. The House Judiciary Committee was ready to begin formal hearings on impeachment, and disclosure of the grand jury's action would devastate Nixon's position. Twenty-three ordinary citizens had found probable cause to charge the President with participation in a crime. If that information were known, it would make it far easier for members of the Judiciary Committee, especially the Republicans and conservative Democrats, to support impeachment.

That same week, Nixon holds a rally in Arizona, filled with GOP loyalists that cheered him as he pledged to "stay on the job." 3 months later, he was no longer on the job.