Fred F. Fielding Quotes

I’ve studied Nixon since the Kennedy campaign. I’ve no doubt that the trail will lead to the Oval Office.

The French were mystified about the Watergate scandal.

There were no dead bodies in Watergate.

Had matters gone as planned—and the [Watergate] tapes trickled out posthumously—[Richard] Nixon would have managed the extraordinary feat of committing suicide after his own death.

You roll back the stones and you find the slithering things of the world of Richard Nixon.

I’m positive that the President is innocent of any involvement in Watergate

Watergate was a third-rate burglary. It was purely domestic in nature.

The underlying crime in Watergate was a clumsy, third-rate burglary in an election campaign that turned out to be a landslide.

Without the tape-recorded evidence demonstrating irrefutably, in Nixon's own voice, his knowledge of and active involvement in obstruction of justice, it is likely that Nixon would have escaped impeachment and removal from office.

The White House tapes, recording Nixon's nefarious doings from Watergate to the bombing of Vietnam, made frightening reading once made public on the orders of Congress.

When Richard M. Nixon resigned and Ford became the 38th president of the United States, the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office, of which I was a member, was preparing for the criminal trials of Nixon's top aides - H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell.

Bill Clinton was impeached primarily for criminal conduct: lying under oath and misleading a federal grand jury about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Nixon would have been impeached for a wide array of criminal acts, as well as abuses of power.

You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I'm innocent. You've got to believe I'm innocent. If you don't, take my job.

The central question is simply put: What did the president know and when did he know it?

Voters who disregarded Richard Nixon's involvement in the questionable ethics issue that led to his Checkers speech should not have been surprised when he orchestrated the Watergate cover-up as president.

Watergate is an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel.

We're not going to have another Watergate in our lifetime. I'm sure.

Nixon's attempts to order subversion of various departments was bound to come out in some form.

I recently read some of the transcripts of Nixon's Watergate tapes, and they spent hours trying to figure out who was leaking and providing information to Carl and myself.

Nixon had some large achievements in foreign affairs. They will be remembered. But a president probably gets remembered for one thing, and Watergate will head the Nixon list, I suspect.

I don’t know what he was so angry about. He won…. If I had won, he would have been much better off. He would have been spared getting disgraced by Watergate.

What did the President know and when did he know it?

I don't believe Richard Nixon ... ever shall be totally exonerated. While it's true he's been pardoned for any Federal crimes he may have committed as President, he can't escape the judgement of history.

We can be lied to only so many times. The best thing that he [President Nixon] can do for the country is to get the hell out of the White House and get out this afternoon.

Come, come, come and play spy with me, Down at the old Watergate; Come, come, come live and lie with me, Down at the old Watergate. See the little German band, Ehrlichman and Haldeman; Don't Martha Mitchell look great? Come, come, come don't be shy with me; I'll have the whole FBI with me; Down at the old Water—we'll make the police blotter — Down at the old Watergate.