Beyond that, if you gave them four tapes or nine--I guess the Watergate Committee has asked for four and Cox for nine--you know damn well that then they would say, 'Okay, now we've got these and we need another eight to clear up these four.' Then you give them the next eight, and they say, 'Okay, now we need another 16 to clear up these eight.' And any place along the way you stop, they're going to say you're stopping because you're guilty.

Q: What about the argument that Nixon should never have made the tapes in the first place?

A: Well, I think you'd probably find a lot of sympathy from him on this argument at this point.

Q: But is it sympathy born out of convenience or conviction at this point?

A: Well, it's a little bit of both. Remember, he dismantled the recording system when he took office because he didn't like that sort of thing. It was a system which existed under Johnson and Kennedy. They didn't tape everything automatically, the way he did. But I would make the argument that something like this is a much more benign system if it's triggered automatically than if it's triggered selectively, as they did.

They taped the things secretly that for their purposes they wanted tapes of, without taping anything that they might have reason not to want a tape made of. He just set it up as an automatic system which would be voice-activated, and he had no control over it.

He had dismantled it, and then he was persuaded, along about early '71, that there were compelling reasons why an accurate record should be kept: partly for historical reasons, and partly so that if questions arose on any critical matters, he would know exactly what had been said. There were a lot of obviously important negotiations going on, and so forth.

But I'm sure he wishes now he hadn't made them, and of course he discontinued them. I think a lot has been lost to history because he has had to discontinue them. It probably was a mistake to start it in the first place, though I must say we'd know an awful lot more about the country and the world if we had something like this from Lincoln and Jefferson.