Posted on 11/10/2011 10:36:59 AM PST by posterchild
WASHINGTON (AP) — Richard Nixon's grand jury testimony about the Watergate scandal that destroyed his presidency is finally coming to light.
Four months after a judge ordered the June 1975 records unsealed, the government's Nixon Presidential Library was making them available online and at the California facility Thursday. Historians dared hope that the testimony would form Nixon's most truthful and thorough account of the circumstances that led to his extraordinary resignation 10 months earlier under threat of impeachment.
"This is Nixon unplugged," said historian Stanley Kutler, a principal figure in the lawsuit that pried open the records. Still, he said, "I have no illusions. Richard Nixon knew how to dodge questions with the best of them. I am sure that he danced, skipped, around a number of things."
Nixon was interviewed near his California home for 11 hours over two days, when a pardon granted by his successor, Gerald Ford, protected him from prosecution for any past crimes. Despite that shield, he risked consequences for perjury if he lied under oath.
It was the first time an ex-president had testified before a grand jury and it is rare for any grand jury testimony to be made public. Historians won public access to the transcript over the objections of the Obama administration, which argued in part that too many officials from that era are still alive for secret testimony involving them to be made public.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
The release of these grand jury transcripts is long overdue and they should be quite interesting to read.
Nixon was a piker compared to Obama.
The big concern, at the time, was the missing ‘18 1/2’ minutes.
I suspect that the missing part of the tape is where Nixon and crew laid out exactly what the DEMS had already done, and why they wanted to ‘break in’ to that office.
If what was on there would have embarrassed Nixon and the Republicans, you can be sure it would have been shouted from the rooftops by every TV broadcaster.
Everyone mentions the ‘break in’ , but no one seems to ever ask WHY they were doing this. WHAT they were after. WHAT they found.
Everyone seems to think they were there to steal the family silverware.
That would make a funny bumper sticker,at least in my POV.
I loved it when Archie Bunker called Nixon “Richard E. Nixon”. What a dummy!
Did they have warrant to search the Democratic Party Headquarters?
Not as far as we, the public, know.
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