Barber Conable Quotes

The Russian leadership thought little of it and assumed that it had no consequences. An American Communist official in the Kremlin, Morris Childs, told them that Nixon might actually lose his job over Watergate. Childs was actually an FBI spy. See his quote.

CREEP in the Nixon Campaign. He was himself a convicted Watergate conspirator

Nixon had lied to Ford as well as the American people. Ford, having been selected by Nixon as VP, felt it was his obligation to defend Nixon until he was about to become President himself. At that point he would have destroyed his presidential credibility on top of Nixon if he kept on with the Nixon lies.

Nixon’s remark {583773} had been suppressed by the Nixon family and McGovern and the world first heard it 40 years after the fact.

He was the first to accuse Nixon

This passage from the Watergate tapes show how even after the Watergate scandal had started to unravel, Nixon and his staff were oblivious to what Nixon’s behavior had been and blamed critics for all the problems. It also shows the mindset that existed then in the White House that political opponents were enemies of the state and traitors. It was a throwback to monarchies were any opponent or critic of the King was by definition a traitor. This quotation is used by historians to not only show the Nixon paranoia about critics, but it shows the way Kissinger pandered to the President’s paranoia at the time. Whether Kissinger’s behavior was self-serving and hypocritical as his critics charge or a clever attempt to manage the President and Watergate crisis into a “soft landing” with Nixon’s resignation, as his supporters argue, it is hard to tell.

On the morning of August 4, 1974, hours before his resignation in disgrace, President Richard M. Nixon called the Senator to say good-bye.

After removing himself from Richard Nixon's defense team when Nixon refused to resign:

She had asked Woodward when all the details about Richard Nixon and Watergate would finally be known. Woodward replied, “Never.”

Hartman had drafted the Inauguration Speech for Ford to use the next day, when President Nixon would resign in disgrace. When Ford reviewed the speech to make his personal changes he questioned the use of “our long national nightmare is over” and thought that he should not use it. Hartman reacted very strongly as the quotation demonstrates. After much discussion, Ford decided to leave it in, and it became the most quoted line of that speech and perhaps his entire career. Years later he expressed his gratitude to Hartman for not only writing the line, but taking such a firm position to persuade Ford to use it. See {641353} for Ford’s inaugural address quotation that became so famous.