The Lectures and History podcast is taking a break this week, but C-SPAN has you covered with an episode from season two of presidential recordings.

This episode features secretly recorded phone calls between President Richard Nixon, FBI director Jay Edgar Hoover, and CIA Director Richard Helms.

Well, Congressman, I think crime is a very dangerous cancer.

It flourishes where it's ignored and where the community is not alert to it being a truly local problem.

It can't exist without a certain amount of apathy upon the part of the local citizens.

Local crime, I believe, can be brought within control by stern measures,

not only by the law enforcement officers, but by the courts that have to deal with the criminals

that are brought before them, and by the community at large.

No community receives

any better kind of law enforcement than it desires and insists upon.

I assured Mr. Gray that the CI had no involvement in the break-in, no involvement whatever.

And it was my preoccupation consistently from then to this time to make this point,

and to be sure that everybody understands it.

It doesn't seem to get across very well for some reason,

but the agency had nothing to do with the Watergate break-in.

I hope all the newspaper men in the room hear me clearly now.

That's FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover Edgar Hoover and CIA director Richard Helms.

When Richard Nixon took office, Jay Edgar Hoover was already one of the most powerful

figures in American history, having served as the nation's top cop going back to Calvin

Coolidge.

Richard Helms was the quintessential spy.

He had joined the CIA at its founding in 1947 and rose through its ranks to lead it.

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