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THURSDAY. AUGUST 22, 2013
HISTORY
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
In this June 18,1973 file photo, Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, left, whispers in the ear of President Richard M. Nixon as the two leaders stand on a balcony at the White House. It was the only summit ever recorded on an American presidential facing point.
National Archives releases final 340-hour installment of recordings of Nixon's private phone calls and meetings
National Archives ASSOCIATED PRESS
TORBA LINDA, Calif. — President Richard Nixon had just delivered his first major national address on the Watergate scandal that ultimately cost him the White House when the calls of support began pouring in.
Audio tapes released Wednesday show that within hours of the speech on April 30,1973,the beleaguered 37th president heard from Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and evangelist Billy Graham.
The calls were captured on a secret recording system that Nixon
used to tape 3,700 hours of phone calls and private meetings in his executive offices between February 1971 and July 1973.
The final chronological installment of those tapes — 340 hours — were posted online by the National Archives and Records Administration as part of a release that also includes more than 140,000 pages of text documents. Another 700 hours of tapes remain sealed for national security and privacy reasons.
Since 2007, the National Archives has released hundreds of hours of the tapes, offering the public an unvarnished and sometimes shocking view of the inner workings of Nixon's administration and insight into the president's private musings on everything from Watergate to Vietnam.
Wednesday's release did not include significant new material on Watergate, but did show the incredible strain on Nixon in the summer of 1973 with the growing scandal stemming from the 1972 breakin at Democratic headquarters by burglar ties to the president's reelection committee.
The day Nixon gave his speech,
two top White House staffers, H.R.
Haldeman and John Ehrlichman.
had resigned, as well as Attorney
General Richard Kleindienst.
In the speech, Nixon said he was not aware of or connected to the Watergate break-in. He said he supported punishment for those involved in possible criminal actions and accepted responsibility for ceding the authority of his campaign to others whose "zeal exceeded their judgment and who may have done wrong in a cause they deeply believed to be right."
White House counsel John W. Dean III was also fired that day, a special Senate committee to probe Watergate was being formed and a
special Watergate prosecutor would be assigned within weeks.
Reagan, who called late that night, reassured a needy Nixon that the speech was the right one to make during such a crisis.
"I just want you to know, we watched and my heart was with you. I know what this must have been and what this must have been in all these days and what you've been through," Reagan said.
"You can count on us, we're still behind you out here and I wanted you to know that you're in our prayers."
At the end of the call, Reagan
told Nixon: "This too shall pass."
That evening, Bush, who had recently been appointed chairman of the Republican National Committee, called to say he had watched the speech with "great pride."
This time, however, an angry and exhausted-sounding Nixon complained to Bush about the reaction from TV commentators.
"The folks may understand," Nixon said, before adding later: "To hell with the commentators."
The following year, Bush would privately write Nixon a letter urging him to resign, which he did on Aug. 9, 1974.
ENVIRONMENT
Dolphin trainer investigates recent deaths
ASSOCIATED PRESS
BRIGANTINE, N.J. — Once upon a time, he was known as Capt. Bob, the man who trained the dolphins and seals to perform for crowds in Atlantic City.
But as he got to know the dolphins, Bob Schoelkopf renounced keeping them in captivity and devoted the rest of his life to rescuing stranded marine mammals.
Now the man who once prodred dolphins to wave their fins for crowds is part of a broad scientific effort to determine why dolphins are dying by the hundreds.
"It's worst when you get a female come ashore and she's lactating and you see the milk come out onto
the stretcher," said Schoolkopf, codirector of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center. "That means there's a baby out there swimming around without a mother. That baby is going to become shark bait."
So far this summer, there have been about 230 dolphin deaths along the East Coast, prompting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to declare an unusual mortality event. That clears the way for an intensive scientific inquiry into what is causing the deaths.
No definitive conclusions have been reached, but many suspect the morbilli virus. The naturally occurring virus was ultimately blamed for the last major dolphin die-off, in 1987, when 740 dolphins died.
This year, several of the dolphins that washed ashore in New Jersey have tested positive for the virus.
The waves of dead dolphins started appearing in New Jersey in early July, and it hasn't let up.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Jay Pagel, a staffer at the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine N.J., counts the teeth of a dead dolphin that washed ashore earlier in the day Wednesday in Spring Lake, N.J., before he brought it to the center for an examination. About 230 dolphins have died off the East Coast of the U.S. this summer.