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a glaring 18-and-a-half minute gap, and a fierce legal struggled erupted over Nixon's remaining tapes. Nixon resisted legal orders requiring him to hand over the crucial evidence, and as his lawyers reviewed those tapes, they realized that they contained "smoking gun" evidence of Nixon's guilt.

"I should've burned the tapes," Nixon would say, a few years later.

The tapes didn't provide evidence of his guilt in the planning of the break-in. But they proved beyond any doubt that Nixon had authorized his men to mislead the investigators at the FBI.

"When you get these people in, say: 'Look, the problem is that this will open the Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels...' without going into the details... don't, don't lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it...."

Those words, revealed on the audiotape, forced Nixon to resign his Presidency rather than face an impeachment by the Congress that would have forced him out of office.

His aspirations destroyed, Nixon mulled the irony - that by seeking to challenge his critics in the fiercest possible way, he'd ultimately ended his own career. In a final farewell address to his staff at the White House, he announced "Always remember that those who hate you don't win unless you hate them back.

"Because then, you destroy yourself."

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