President Nixon and chief of staff H. R. Haldeman discuss a suggestion by Nixon campaign chief John Mitchell regarding the Watergate burglary and bugging (see 2:30 a.m.June 17, 1972). Mitchell believes that burglar G. Gordon Liddy should take the entire blame for the burglary, and confess to being the operation’s “You mean you’d have Liddy confess and say he did it unauthorized?” Nixon asks. Haldeman affirms the question. After further discussion, Nixon says: “The reaction is going to be primarily Washington and not the country, because I think the country doesn’t give much of a sh_t about it other than the ones we’ve already bugged.… Everybody around here is all mortified by it. It’s a horrible thing to rebut [whereas] most people around the country think this is routine, that everybody’s trying to bug everybody else, it’s politics.” Nixon is struck with a new idea during the conversation—use every accusation of the Watergate bugging to claim that it only proves the Democrats were bugging the Nixon campaign. Maybe they should plant a bug on themselves and claim the Democrats planted it, Nixon suggests. Haldeman circles the conversation back to Liddy, and Nixon asks, “Is Liddy willing?” Haldeman replies: “He says he is. Apparently he is a little bit nuts… apparently he’s sort of a Tom Huston-type guy (see June 5, 1970).… He sort of likes the dramatic. He’s said, ‘If you want to put me before a firing squad and shoot me, that’s fine. I’d kind of like to be like Nathan Hale.’” [Reeves, 2001, pp. 505-506]