When former President Richard Nixon agreed to televised interviews with David Frost in return for $1 million, he didn't know what he was in for. Three years after Nixon resigned the presidency, the British television personality would confront him on camera with previously unpublished transcripts from his first recorded conversation with White House political operative Charles W. "Chuck" Colson following the Watergate break-in. "The real significance" of the excerpts from the June 20, 1972, conversation, wrote Frost's researcher, James Reston, Jr., in The Conviction of Richard Nixon, "lay in the chemistry of the interview. Here was Frost at the very outset of the Watergate narrative with new and highly damaging material. What else did he have? How many new tapes would he spring? How sure could Nixon be that his old lines of defense would hold?" The confrontation is memorialized in a current Broadway play, "Frost/Nixon." In the conversation Frost quoted, Nixon and Colson minimized the importance of Watergate in comparison to another scandal which in the news at the time involving IT&T and expressed the hope that the break-in would soon be forgotten.

Please note that because this recordings suffers from particularly poor sound quality, we have been unable to confirm with confidence the transcript used by Frost. That original transcript is available here.

Date:  Jun 20, 1972
Participants:  Richard Nixon, Charles Colson
Conversation Number:  342-027