February 17, 1978 – CBS World News Roundup – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
February 17, 1978 – A reasonably calm news day. Word that the 74 day old Mine Workers Strike was heading back to the bargaining table and the pressure was on to find a solution before the end of the day. Talks went on until 2 am the previous morning as the 16 1/2 hour session ended with no sign of any progress. But Labor Secretary Ray Marshall had made this day the deadline for talks before the government would step in to settle the strike. If no settlement was reached, President Carter was standing by to invoke the Taft-Hartley law to force labor and management’s hands to get this thing over with.
Meanwhile, the subject of former President Nixon and Watergate became the topic of conversation around Capitol Hill. With release of H.R. Haldeman’s book Ends Of Power earlier than scheduled and causing an uproar around publishing circles, revelations over the Nixon White House got more than casual attention as Haldeman’s assertions in the book didn’t appear in any testimony during the Watergate Hearings themselves. Haldeman claimed it was Nixon who instigated the Watergate Break-in and was also behind at least part of the missing 18 minute gap in the White House tapes, long thought to be the accidental erasure by Secretary Rosemary Woods. The claims, many realized, were distinctly opposite from what Haldeman’s testimony was. During the hearings, Haldeman was feigning innocence over the entire affair, but in book form, he was far from it. Not only was it Nixon who did the instigating of the break-in but was in on the coverup from the very first. Regarding the 18 minutes of missing conversation, Haldeman said not only was the erasure not accidental, Nixon himself was responsible for at least physically erasing part of it, the part many felt contained the most incriminating evidence. Because Haldeman was already in prison for perjury over his role in the coverup, he couldn’t be convicted of the same crime twice.
And Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan arrived back in Tel-Aviv after his visit to Washington and said in a Press Conference that Israel would no longer insist on its Military forces protecting those settlements in the Sinai to remain there after a peace agreement with Egypt, saying Israeli Civilian police could provide that kind of protection. The shift from Military to Civilian protection for the Israeli settlements was designed to ease Anwar Sadat’s problems. But it wasn’t clear at that point if the Egyptian leader would accept such a compromise.
And so went this February 17th in 1978 as reported by The CBS World News Roundup.
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