Watergate Affair

Under court order, the National Archives in Maryland will begin the arduous task Monday of slicing up 3,700 hours of secretly recorded tapes from President Richard Nixon's years in the White House. When the dicing is done, 820 hours of the original taped personal discussions will become the property of the Nixon estate, as demanded under a federal court ruling. The rest will be released publicly.

The National Archives on Tuesday burned 70,000 pages of notes about the contents of Richard Nixon's White House tapes. The archives said it had no choice since a court has ordered that the secrets contained in the notes were never to be made public. In the years after Nixon resigned in 1974 to avoid impeachment, the government seized Nixon's tapes. The former president--and later his estate--went to court to get them back.

"I ordered that they use any means necessary, including illegal means, to accomplish this goal," Richard Nixon confessed to his cronies in 1973 as the horrors of Watergate began to unfold. But then Nixon added: "The president of the United States can never admit that."

The day after White House counsel John W. Dean III started talking to Watergate prosecutors, President Nixon ordered his secret White House tapes destroyed, according to newly transcribed conversations from Nixon's term. It was Monday, April 9, 1973, months before the secret White House recording system would be disclosed at Senate hearings. Neither Nixon nor his top aide, White House Chief of Staff H.R.

Twenty-five years after that infamous break-in, Watergate was remembered Tuesday for the abuse of power it signified and for the nation's resilience in crisis--among those who could remember it at all. Early on June 17, 1972, burglars tied to Nixon's reelection campaign broke into Democratic offices at the Watergate office building in Washington. They were trying to replace a faulty telephone bugging device installed during an earlier break-in. They got caught.

A former senator called for the mystery figure known as "Deep Throat" to unmask himself and throw new light on the scandal that led to Richard Nixon's resignation as president. Howard Baker, who was vice chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee, said on NBC-TV's "Meet the Press" that it would be a shame to leave the secrets of "Deep Throat" untold. Deep Throat was a super-secret source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Washington Post reporting on Nixon's efforts to cover up the scandal.

The lock that brought down a president fetched a high bid of just $13,000 at an auction on Monday. Twenty-five years ago, burglars picked the four-pound brass lock to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex, starting the scandal that forced Richard Nixon to resign as president two years later.

Any time anything goes wrong in this city, the mother of all political scandals--Watergate--looms overhead. Just look at the names doled out to presidential flaps in recent years: Contragate, Travelgate, Filegate. And the overuse of the Watergate-period query: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

Lawyers for the estate of Richard M. Nixon would be paid close to $10 million under a proposed $26-million settlement with the government to compensate the late president's heirs for seizing his White House tapes and documents, according to sources familiar with the plan. About $4.3 million would pay for fees incurred in more than 20 years of litigation going back to 1974.

Old suspicions die hard. Amid reports that the federally controlled Nixon Watergate archives might be moved from Maryland to the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda, historians and former Nixon watchers are raising fresh concerns about an old fear. Can Richard Nixon, even in death, be trusted with his own records? "You have to go back to the fact that in 1974 he tried to hijack all those records," said Daniel Schorr, the veteran journalist and commentator for National Public Radio.