Nixon Debated Paying Blackmail, Clemency

'Keep Cap on Bottle'

President Nixon, during a lengthy meeting in the Oval Office on March 21, 1973, told White House counsel John W. Dean III that "you have no choice but to come up with the $120,000" demanded as blackmail payment by one of the Watergate burglars, according to an edited transcript of the meeting.

The transcript reveals that Mr. Nixon, on his own initiative, discussed accommodating blackmail demands on at least a half-dozen occasions during the meeting without once suggesting that paying the men for their silence would be wrong.

Instead, the transcript reveals, Mr. Nixon repeatedly discussed different methods by which as much as $1 million could be paid to the burglars without the payments being traced to the White House. The purpose of such payments, in the President's own words, would be "to keep the cap on the bottle," to "buy time," to "tough it through."

"How much money do you need?" the President asked Dean early in the March 21 conversation, according to the transcript.

"I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years," Dean replied.

"We could get that," the President continued. "On the money, if you need the money you could get that. You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten. It is not easy, but it could be done. But the question is who the hell would handle it? Any ideas on that?"

In the ensuing discussion, the President went on to suggest that his personal attorney. Herbert W. Kalmbach, could be relied on to raise the money, that payments to the burglars could be made under the cover of a Cuban defense committee and that the facts could be concealed from a grand jury.

The transcript of the March 21, 1973, meeting is part of 1,254 pages of edited transcripts of 46 presidential conversations about the Watergate affair released yesterday by the White House. Mr. Nixon repeatedly has said that he first learned of the Watergate cover-up and hush money payments at the March 21, 1973, meeting and that he believed payment of hush money would be wrong.

Throughout the conversation as recorded, however, the President returned repeatedly to the joint theme of avoiding "criminal liability" to members of the White House staff at all costs: the desirability of meeting the blackmail demands immediately and the necessity of expediting another meeting at which his top aides -- Dean, John Mitchell, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman -- could "get a decision on it."

Within 12 hours of the Oval office discussion, Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt Jr. received $75,000 cash -- a key element in the conspiracy to obstruct justice indictment returned against seven of the president's men on March 1, 1974.

What transpired at the morning March 21, 1973, meeting of Dean, the president and Haldeman is considered crucial by both Mr. Nixon and his critics to answering whether Mr. Nixon himself was a participant in the alleged conspiracy.

The White House released transcript of the March 21 meeting reveals that the President considered the following basic options for dealing with a deteriorating situation described by Dean as a growing cancer on the presidency: