Date: 1972-09-15
Time: 17:24 - 18:17
Participants: Richard M. Nixon, John W. Dean III, H. R. "Bob" Haldeman
Location: Oval Office
Tape: 779-002 A

President Richard M. Nixon believed that the FBI had bugged his airplane in the final weeks of the 1968 presidential campaign. He had pretty good reason to think this: FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had told Nixon that the Bureau had planted the bug at the direction of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Hoover, however, was not telling the truth. While LBJ had ordered several kinds of FBI surveillance in 1968 to find out whether Nixon was sabotaging his Vietnam peace negotiations, bugging the nominee’s campaign plane was not one of them. When the Watergate investigation revealed efforts to bug the offices of Democratic National Headquarters during the 1972 campaign, Nixon toyed with the idea of “revealing” that he had been the victim of a bugging operation in the previous campaign.