-- Terrible heat from TV lights turned back towards press and gallery. Barking (sounds of dog kennel) in press room as Haldeman comes on. Not on Nat TV, but audible in hallway.

“Nor did I ever suggest. . . [The Super Eagle Scout wounded tone of voice-- ] I had full confidence in Dean as did the President at that time. . .”

Haldeman's 1951 burr-cut seems as out of place -- even weird -- in this room as a bearded Senator would have seemed in 1951. Or a nigger in Beta Theta Phi fraternity in the late 1940s.

Haldeman's head on camera looks like he got bashed on the head with a rake.

Total tedium sets in as Haldeman statement drones on. . . his story is totally different than Dean's on crucial points. . . definite perjury here. . . which one lying?

“ If the recent speech [August 15th] does not produce the results the President wants, he will then do what he has already come to doing. He will use all the awe-inspiring resources of his office to 'come out swinging with both fists.' Divisive will be a mild way of describing the predictable results.”

-- Joe Alsop, Washington Post, 8/17/73

“The clear warning: Mr. Nixon will not do any more to clear himself of the taints of Watergate because he cannot: If the Democrats do not allow him to get back on the job of President, but continue what one high presidential aide called the 'vendetta' against him, his next move will be full retaliation.”

-- Evans & Novak, Washington Past, 8/17/73

“'When I am attacked,' Richard Nixon once remarked to this writer, 'it is my instinct to strike back.' The President is now clearly in a mood to obey his instinct. . . So on Wednesday, July 18th, at a White House meeting, it was agreed unanimously that the tapes should not be released. This decision, to use the sports cliches to which the President is addicted, meant an entirely new ball game, requiring a new game plan. The new game plan calls for a strategy of striking back, in accord with the presidential instincts, rather than a policy of attempted accommodation. . . ”

-- Stewart Alsop, Newsweek, 8/6/73

Cazart! It is hard to miss the message in those three shots. . . even out here in Woody Creek, at a distance of 2000 miles from the source, a joint-statement, as it were, from Evans & Novak and both Alsop brothers hits the nerves like a blast of summer lightning across the mountains. Especially when you read them all in the same afternoon, while sifting through the mail-heap that piled up in my box, for three weeks, while I was wasting all that time back in Washington, once again, trying to get a grip on the thing.