News stories from Saturday April 28, 1973
Summaries of the stories the major media outlets considered to be of particular importance on this date:
- President Nixon was reported to be in "virtual seclusion" at his mountaintop retreat at Camp David, Md., pondering his course of action amid the mounting Watergate bugging controversy. The President, who canceled a scheduled meeting with his economic advisers before leaving Washington, took with him only his personal aides. Both H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, and John Ehrlichman, his domestic affairs adviser, who usually accompany Mr. Nixon on such trips, stayed behind. In another development, a former Life magazine reporter who was "leaked" a document purported to be a State Department cable showing the complicity of the Kennedy administration in the murder of President Diem of South Vietnam said he had learned that the document was a forgery. [New York Times]
- Daniel Ellsberg says that the newly reported link between the Watergate conspirators and his trial has convinced him that the Pentagon papers prosecution was related to efforts to re-elect President Nixon. He spoke in the aftermath of the courtroom announcement Friday that G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt were suspected of burglarizing the office of Dr. Ellsberg's psychiatrist to get Dr. Ellsberg's medical records. [New York Times]
- Two ranking officials of the Justice Department eight weeks ago turned down an FBI request to continue electronic surveillance which had begun to penetrate Teamsters' union connections with the Mafia, according to government sources. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst and Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen reportedly made the decision after 40 days of wiretapping had begun to help strip the cover from a Mafia plan to reap millions of dollars in payoffs from the union's welfare funds, on the ground that the investigation had failed to show "probable cause" to continue eavesdropping, the sources said. [New York Times]
- Former Teamster president James R. Hoffa disclosed that he planned to run for president of his home local in Detroit next year. He explained that while he was barred from union activity until 1980 under the terms of his prison sentence commutation by President Nixon, he planned to file soon for a pardon and hoped to have all restrictions lifted. Mr. Hoffa said that he planned to run for president of Teamster Local 299 in Detroit, whose current president, Dave Johnson, has announced plans to retire. After that, Mr. Hoffa said, "I hope to work my way back up to the top." [New York Times]
- The Soviet Union announced the end of the flight of its orbital workshop Salyut 2, in effect conceding a serious a serious setback to its manned space program. A brief official statement announcing "completion of the flight program" of Salyut followed reports from United States tracking stations that Salyut had been tumbling in uncontrolled fashion through space after an unspecified accident had evidently caused heavy damage to the vehicle. The unmanned station was launched April 3. [New York Times]
- Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia's exiled head of state, said today that his forces were positioned all around Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, but had no intention of assaulting and capturing it. He said in an interview with newsmen that the plan was to isolate the city from the rest of the country, and then let it fall "like a ripe fruit." The Prince gave two main reasons for not making a final assault on the capital now. One was the possible all-out response to such an attack by the United States Air Force; the other that members of Prince Sihanouk's family, including the Queen Mother, were still in the capital under house arrest. [New York Times]
- Jews are still finding it difficult, if not impossible, to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel despite the recent removal of the widely opposed education fee. Soviet emigration policies are back where they were before last August, when the education fee was first imposed on prospective emigrants. Emigration from the Soviet Union continues to be regarded as a step approaching treason. [New York Times]