Nixon says he’ll release Watergate transcripts, April 29, 1974

President Richard M. Nixon, belatedly responding to a subpoena that had been issued in July 1973, said on this day in 1974 that he would make public the transcripts of 46 White House conversations related to the Watergate affair.

In explaining why, up to that point, he had defied the subpoena, Nixon cited the need to protect state secrets under the doctrine of executive privilege. He reported that he had edited the 1,200 pages of transcripts to exclude material that was “irrelevant” to the Watergate investigation then being pursued in Democrat-controlled Congress.


“They include all the relevant portions of all of the subpoenaed conversations that were recorded — that is, all portions that relate to the question of what I knew about Watergate or the cover-up and what I did about it,” Nixon said in a 36-minute televised speech from the Oval Office.

The transcripts, Nixon predicted, would “provide some sensational” news stories. “Names are named,” he said. But he cautioned that the names were “no more than hearsay or speculation that took part in exchanges as I was trying to find out what really happened.”

The president said he would permit Rep. Peter Rodino Jr. (D-N.J.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and the panel’s ranking Republican, Rep. Edward Hutchinson of Michigan, to “come to the White House and listen to all the tapes” to verify the completeness and authenticity of the transcripts and to determine whether the transcripts omitted incriminating evidence. (Before Nixon spoke, Rodino said “we will accept nothing less” than the tapes.)

“I want there to be no question remaining about the fact that the president has nothing to hide in this matter,” Nixon said, adding that “I made clear there was to be no cover-up.”

In June 1972, five men indirectly hired by Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President, known as CREEP, had been arrested while breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex on Virginia Avenue. Nixon denied any involvement, either in the burglary or in the subsequent cover-up. “I am not a crook,” he declared.

In July 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Nixon’s claims of executive privilege and ordered him to turn over the actual tapes of all conversations — not just edited transcripts — that he had withheld in April. Nixon complied.

On one of the tapes, the president could be heard ordering the FBI to end its investigation of the Watergate break-in. This exchange soon came to be known as the “smoking gun” that underscored Nixon’s direct involvement in the cover-up.

On Aug. 9, 1974, Nixon avoided a near-certain Senate impeachment trial by becoming the first U.S. president to resign from office. He was subsequently pardoned by his successor, President Gerald Ford, “for all offenses against the United States which he committed ... or may have committed.”

SOURCE: “BREACH OF FAITH: THE FALL OF RICHARD NIXON,” BY THEODORE WHITE (1975)

