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page 18 MARCH 22, 1973, FROM 9:11 TO 10:35 A.M.29HALDEMAN:Well, that's right. Keep forgetting aboutStrachan. And Gord-uh, what's his name, Deansays he's going to (unintelligible).PRESIDENT:What we do with getting information in sort ofa-he may not have known about how we're-youknow what I mean. I think Strachan is, is notthat bad if his fish is gonna get fried. He'sat too low a level. -HALDEMAN:That's a good sign, I know it.PRESIDENT:(Unintelligible) he got a tremendous amount of-he just got information but he didn't issueorders or anything on what he wanted to do.HALDEMAN:Right. You look at Gordon Strachan. Here's alittle, young lawyer, who used to work for JohnMitchell in his law firm, and came- down toWashington to work in the government, and he'sworking under a campaign with Attorney Generalof the United States is in charge of it. Now,how the hell do you expect him to decidewhether something that's being done is right orwrong?PRESIDENT:That's right.HALDEMAN:I don't know, I don't think,- Gordon doesn't Idon't think, doesn't worry Dean much and hedoesn't worry, I don't, I would not beconcerned about Gordon. He is-PRESIDENT:A hell of a guy.
I edited this.

Thanks for that. I expect that this was a discussion netween HRH & RMN of Dean's assessment of Strachan's culpability, at a time when Dean was telling Nixon that virtually no one in his Administration was culpable. However, it soon developed that Dean was wrong and a great many proved to be culpable. I simply cannot see how Strachan was exonerated without punishment of any sort by the Sirica court unless he took some action that mitigated the fact that he knew in advance when a criminal break-in at the DNC was going to occur and did nothing to block it, and later, that he knowingly and deliberately shredded documents that deprived investigators of the evidence they needed in their prosecution, namely, transcripts of the wiretaps at the DNC. To this day, Strachan is more knowledgeable than anyone alive about what information was on those tapes, most of which were never vetted by HRH or RMN personally.

The sort of speculations that abound in books such as Silent Coup, which implicates Dean as the prime mover in the DNC break-in, would have been subject to more discerning tests if those transcripts still existed -- as would many other theories of why the DNC was chosen as a target. Mitchell went to his grave insisting he had never known the DNC was an intended target of Liddy's brigade, and Magruder later told the authors of Silent Coup that, indeed, Mitchell had not known the DNC was a target. Give LBJ credit: when he ordered the FBI to bug Nixon's 1968 election plane, it made some sense that he might obtain some useful political intelligence, but as HRH & RMN went to their graves wondering: who in the hell would think there would be anything of value to be had in bugging the DNC ?