The Zero Defect System
Peters, Charles
The Zero Defect System by Charles Peters When I first heard about the White House tapes, my guess was that they would not be clearly incriminating. I supposed that when the President...
...Yet at the time the cover-up began, Jeb Magruder says, “It seemed inconceivable that with all our political power we could not erase this mistake we had made...
...But to believe without qualification that you can control reality here and now is frightening...
...Like you can give nuclear plants to Egypt and Israel and safeguard them from any military use...
...I also had to be deeply concerned with ensuring that neither the covert operations of the CIA nor the operations of the Special Investigations Unit should be compromised...
...I supposed that when the President had mischief in mind, he, like most of the bureaucratic commanders of history, would have couched his orders in terms that were defensibly inexplicit -clear enough to signal his real wishes to an astute subordinate, yet sufficiently vague and clothed in highmindedness to give the commander “deniability” in the unhappy event the subordinate is caught or the tapes are exposed...
...It seems clear then that if Nixon is speaking for history on one tape, he is relying on the erase button on the next...
...Yet a persistent impulse in man says we can do more than try to make things work, that we can in fact control reality and mold life into some ideal form...
...It’s a good impulse but only if we retain our ability to laugh at it...
...We got to stop them...
...The most popular comedy of the year, The Sting, says the perfect con, even an elaborate hustle involving scores of assistant con men and extensive sets, can be pulled off...
...Some of the taped conversations actually sound like that and would be suitable for playing at one of Mr...
...The kind of thing I expected to be on the tapes was contained in this paragraph from Nixon’s statement on May 22, 1973: I wanted justice done with regard to Watergate, but in the scale of national priorities with which I had to deal...
...P-That shithead...
...You call up General Walters and tell him to stop it or it’s his ass...
...the East Room...
...Therefore, I instructed Mr...
...Tell him to tell Gray that if the FBI doesn’t stop, it’s going to uncover a top-secret CIA operation...
...This means that he had to believe that he could control everyone who knew about the tapes-Haldeman, Higby, Butterfield, Butterfield’s secretary, the chief of the security division of the Secret Service, and at least two of his associates...
...P-But he always salutes the flag, so tell Walters to give him lots of national security jazz...
...Nixon’s Sunday morning services in Charles Peters is editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly...
...In his testimony before the Select Committee, Haldeman spoke of the “zero defect system” in the Nixon White House...
...Like Canada did with India...
...Haldeman and Mr...
...And within a year of the burglary, the cover-up had fallen apart and most of the truth was out...
...He’s too worried about his reputation with his establishment friends...
...It certainly was not my intent, no1 my wish, that the investigation of the Watergate break-in or of related acts be impeded in any way...
...At absolute minimum, according to Butterfield’s testimony before the Senate Select Committee, these seven people knew...
...Ehrlichman to ensure that the investigation of the break-in not expose either an unrelated covert operation of the CIA or the activities of the White House investigations unit-and to see that this was personally coordinated between General Walters, the deputy director of the CIA and Mr...
...You can believe in the glories of knighterrantry if you encompass Sancho Panza in your imagination...
...Jail is, of course, just where a good many of the Watergate conspirators are at this moment...
...But people who think they are, people who can believe that they are always cool in a crisis, that the tapes can be controlled, that leaks can be stopped-in other words, Kissinger and most of the national security bureaucrats as well as Nixon-can believe a lot of other things, too...
...They aren’t Robert Redford and Paul Newman...
...But other tapes sound like the minutes of a Mafia meeting...
...In a truer comedy, The Producers, what appeared to be a perfect con turns out to be a disaster...
...H-Why don’t we deal with Helms...
...H. R. Haldeman has given us a clue to the mentality that lies behind the assumption that one can share a.secret with seven people and see it remain a secret...
...But Butterfield did tell...
...E-He’ll really have to spell it out, Gray has solid muscle in his cranium...
...You can believe in romantic love if you can also say, with Rosalind in ‘ 2 s You Like It,” that “men have died from time to time and the worms have eaten them but not for love...
...Common sense and a sense of humor should combine to make us all aware of the frailty of man, of the mischance that plagues his affairs...
...But we put that son-of-a-bitch Walters in the deputy director’s job and he better deliver for us or he’ll be back swatting mosquitoes at Camp Lejeune...
...The March 21 Dean conversation would not survive, but the pious portions of the April 16 Dean tape could be used to prove the President’s innocence...
...Instead, the critics saw it as a put-on and gave it rave reviews, producing profits that exposed the triple investment to the backers and put the heroes in jail...
...Gray of the FBI...
...The Zero Defect System by Charles Peters When I first heard about the White House tapes, my guess was that they would not be clearly incriminating...
...We’re going to have to wrap ourselves in the goddam flag to get out of this one...
...The Woild War I1 term, SNAFU (situation normal, all fucked up), was sublime in the truth of its first two words...
...The reason must have been that he thought he could control the tapes, that the system could be kept secret, that he could decide which conversations would be erased and which preserved to be made public at a time of his choosing...
...And for Christsake, really move on this thing...
...In them, the instruction to Haldeman and Ehrlichman about the CIA and FBI would have been phrased something like this: P-Listen, the goddam FBI is going to blow the lid off if they keep after our Mexican Connection...
...And the belief is not confined to the Nixon White House...
...If you can believe in the possibility of zero defects in human affairs, you can believe that the seven would never tell...
...A pro-Nazi musical called Springtime for Hitler was produced in New York for the entertainment of the city’s two million Jews as a sure-fire way of convincing 300-percent worth of backers that their money was lost...
...No one is...
...Within two years of the installation of the tape system, the secret was out...
Vol. 6 • July 1974 • No. 5
