II should disclose, first of all, that I'm a big admirer of Nixon's, but also that my opinion of him wouldn't change much if it turned out that he ordered the break-in, so in no way am I bent on finding one way or the other. Anyway, I read your attached Observer column, and I really don't see any compelling evidence there that he ordered the break-in. First you point out the "that's my public line" comment. Doesn't really mean anything. It could mean that his private line, or the real line, differs greatly from his public line, and it could just mean that's the line I'm taking in public. He could have believed that the DNC was worth robbing, as you claim, without having been the one who ordered the break-in. That would make sense of his comment just as well as your interpretation. Then there's the "yes, I suppose," which, again, just speaks to whether he knew that there was stuff in the DNC worth stealing (and doesn't even strongly speak to that), not whether he ordered the break-in. So up to that point you really have nothing.

Then, you make some headway with Haldeman's comments on what Magruder might testify to. But if you look at in context it's much more ambiguous. What Haldeman actually says is that Magruder has gotten scared, thought that he could get immunity or even hush money payments, decided to place the blame on someone else, and has told a story to two committee lawyers in which Gordon Strachan, a Haldeman aide, called him and said that the President has ordered him to go ahead. Now, even if that really happened, there would still be the question of whether Strachan was mistaken. He could've misunderstood Haldeman, or Haldeman could've misunderstood Nixon (the claim doesn't appear to be that Nixon himself spoke to Strachan). But we don't know that Strahan ever said anything like that to Magruder in the first place. Haldeman frames it as a lie on Magruder's part to cover his ass, Nixon denies on the next page that he ever said anything like that to Haldeman or Strachan, and Haldeman suggests that Magruder could've misunderstood Strachan in several different ways, or that Magruder is simply lying. Then there's the Magruder comment on the PBS documentary. The problem with that is that it's a totally different story than the one described in the tapes. In the tapes, it appears that he told some lawyers that a Haldeman aide ordered him, personally, to go ahead with the break-in and said that it was an order from the President; in the PBS documentary, he says that he overheard Nixon speaking to Mitchell on the phone. Presumably the order would then have come down from Mitchell to Magruder. So which story are we to believe? You seem to suggest that we should somehow believe both. I don't see why. If the latter story occurred, and he was being honest, he should have told that to the committee lawyers; if Strahan gave him the order, why didn't he tell that to PBS? It's possible, I suppose, that the order could've been given twice, but it's not possible that, if he were being completely honest, he could've forgotten to tell the committee lawyers that he overheard Nixon giving such an order to Mitchell on the phone. I don't see how we can give much credence to either story.

Liddy testified that Watergate was about a call girl ring. That Dean had ordered the break in because the democrats had records that implicated Dean's fiancee (later wife) in a call girl ring.

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