One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (30 page)

The burglars, under the command of CREEP counsel Gordon Liddy, had rented rooms at the Watergate hotel and office complex and at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge across the street. Liddy and Hunt had a clear line of sight out their windows at the Howard Johnson to the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate office. They had bugged the DNC’s telephones three weeks earlier; one of the bugs malfunctioned, and the information gathered from the other was all but worthless.

Their objective on June 17 was to enhance the electronic surveillance and to photograph or steal as many files as possible at the DNC. Had all gone smoothly, their second target that night would have been George McGovern’s campaign headquarters.

Shortly after 2:00 a.m., a squad of plainclothes police officers, alerted by a Watergate security guard, entered the DNC with guns drawn and arrested McCord and the Cubans, all neatly dressed in business suits and wearing thin rubber gloves. Hunt and Liddy, hearing urgent walkie-talkie warnings from McCord that the jig was up, fled as fast as they could.

McCord was carrying electronic eavesdropping gear. Wiretapping was a federal crime; the police called in the FBI. Special Agent Angelo J. Lano was on the case at 8:00 a.m. Together, armed with search warrants, the police and the FBI started collecting evidence. They found $5,900 in $100 bills and, in Macho Barker’s pocket, the keys to the Howard Johnson hotel rooms. Barker’s and Martinez’s address books were at the Howard Johnson, and inside both books were Howard Hunt’s telephone number at his White House office.

McCord and the break-in crew were arraigned that afternoon. The five men had given false names—all belied by FBI fingerprint files. The risk that they would flee if released was high; so, thus, was their bail. The judge asked their occupations. Anticommunist, said one of the Cubans. Retired, said McCord. From where? asked the judge. CIA, McCord mumbled.

*   *   *

On Monday, June 19, John Dean had a very unpleasant talk with Gordon Liddy. They met by prearrangement as Liddy skulked past the western edge of the White House grounds, across the street from CREEP headquarters, where he had spent the weekend shredding files.

Liddy confessed that he had recruited McCord for the Watergate burglary, linking the crime to CREEP. Worse yet, he and Hunt had used two of the Miami Cubans now jailed for the Watergate break-in to ransack Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office—which connected the Ellsberg job to Watergate
and
the White House. Liddy had violated an essential element of espionage by entwining two separate covert operations. Any close investigation of one could uncover the other.

Dean reported all this to Ehrlichman—who relayed the bad news to Haldeman in Key Biscayne—and he strongly suggested, not for the last time, that the White House hire an experienced criminal lawyer.

Nixon delayed his return to the White House until after Hurricane Agnes was well past Florida. Late on Monday evening, June 19, flying north on Air Force One, Haldeman told Nixon the disturbing news about McCord’s arrest—and McCord’s connection to Liddy and CREEP. The next day, Nixon and Haldeman had an eighty-minute talk—the tape with the infamous “eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap,” deliberately erased, a destruction of evidence only the president or a close aide could have committed. Haldeman’s diary for Tuesday, June 20, fills in part of the gap: “We got back into the Democratic break-in again. I told the P about it on the plane last night.… The more he thought about it, it obviously bothered him more, because he raised it in considerable detail today. I had a long meeting with Ehrlichman and Mitchell. We added Kleindienst for a little while and John Dean for quite a while. The conclusion was that we’ve got to hope the FBI doesn’t go beyond what’s necessary in developing evidence and that we can keep a lid on that, as well as keeping all the characters involved from getting carried away with any unnecessary testimony.”

Haldeman walked into the Oval Office at 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, June 21. The president did not say good morning. “What’s the dope on the Watergate incident?” Nixon asked. Haldeman had learned a great deal of inside dope in the past hour: Liddy had talked to Mitchell’s lieutenant Fred LaRue, at LaRue’s apartment at the Watergate Hotel, and added alarming details to what he had told Dean. The gist was that if anyone ever looked inside the campaign’s ledgers, they would see that the Watergate money trail went to the top of CREEP. And Liddy had hinted at blackmail. He said CREEP had an obligation to pay for the bail, the legal expenses, and (by implication) the burglars’ silence.

Trying to protect Nixon from the worst of it, Haldeman simply explained that Liddy and Hunt had masterminded the Watergate break-in. “Does it involve Mitchell?” the president asked. He answered his own question. “Probably did. But don’t tell me about it.… If Liddy’ll take the rap on this, that’s fine.” Haldeman thought Liddy would take the fall but that scapegoating him might not suffice.

If Mitchell, as campaign manager, was implicated in the crime, the consequences could be incalculable. Mitchell wanted the FBI’s acting director, Pat Gray, to force the Bureau to back off the case. Nixon concurred.

That afternoon, Gray convened his first Watergate meeting at FBI headquarters. Mark Felt, his number-two man, was at the table, along with the special agent in charge of the Washington field office and the chief of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. Gray instructed his men to go slow on interrogating White House personnel. He also said he had agreed to John Dean’s demand that Dean sit in on the FBI’s interviews.

Gray did not inform his top officers that he would secretly feed Dean dozens of daily summaries of the FBI’s Watergate investigations and interrogations.

On Thursday, June 22, FBI agents questioned Charles W. Colson, special counsel to the president, with Dean sitting by his side. Colson mentioned that Howard Hunt had an office safe in the White House. Dean denied knowledge of it. Safe? What safe? He had lied to the FBI, a felony punishable by five years in prison. In fact, Dean had already ordered a team of government locksmiths to open the safe. He knew what was inside: a bagful of McCord’s wiretapping equipment, psychological profiles of Ellsberg prepared by the CIA at Hunt’s request, phony cables Hunt fabricated on the 1963 killing of President Diem, and a loaded .25-caliber revolver.

That evening, Gray told Dean that some FBI agents, looking at the CIA connections of five of the six burglars, suspected they had stumbled on a covert Agency operation. Dean shared this information with Mitchell, who had a flash of inspiration: suppose the White House could convince Gray that Watergate was indeed the CIA’s work? Then the Bureau, under protocols designed to keep it from tripping over the Agency, would have to back off.

Since this supposition was false, using the CIA to block an investigation by the FBI constituted a criminal obstruction of justice.

Dean relayed Mitchell’s brainstorm to Haldeman, who passed it on to the president shortly after 10:00 a.m. on Friday, June 23. Nixon thought it sounded like a great idea. The newly appointed deputy director of central intelligence, Lt. Gen. Vernon Walters, a Nixon crony of long standing, would tell Gray to stand down the FBI investigation in the name of national security.

“Good deal!” Nixon said.

Walters was in Gray’s office by 2:30 p.m. brandishing the shield of secrecy. Gray agonized for days, a roiling battle raging in him between his loyalties and his respect for the law. Then, on June 28, he answered a call from the White House.

John Dean handed Gray two white manila envelopes: documents taken from Hunt’s safe. “These should never see the light of day,” he told Gray. “They are such political dynamite their existence can’t even be acknowledged. I need to be able to say that I gave all Hunt’s files to the FBI. That’s what I’m doing.” Gray chose his course: he eventually destroyed the evidence.

That same day, June 28, Nixon arrived at his desk exhausted; he had been unable to fall asleep until dawn. He had resolved overnight that John Mitchell would have to resign. He hated to do it, but he had to keep the taint of a third-rate burglary from touching his campaign. Mitchell officially stepped down three days later, pleading the pressures of caring for his increasingly deranged wife. The story was that he did it for love.

Under the delusion that he had contained the political consequences of Watergate, Nixon returned to his great passion: destroying his enemies at home and abroad.

*   *   *

The tone and tenor of Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign was reflected in a written report that Al Haig submitted to the president on June 28. The day before, at Nixon’s direction, Haig had visited former president Lyndon B. Johnson at his Texas ranch.

“President Johnson told me that he considered a McGovern Presidency a disaster,” Haig recorded. “He noted that McGovern supporters had totally devastated the Democratic party machine in Texas by employing the most irresponsible and revolutionary campaign tactics.” Expanding on what LBJ had said during their seven-hour conversation, Haig wrote to the president:

I think we must be very, very wary of the strong possibility that Hanoi has been in close touch with McGovern or McGovern elements.… I have never for a moment doubted the total and complete collaboration between Hanoi and the McGovern camp and especially those individuals around McGovern. If we proceed under any other assumptions, we are totally naive.

Haig’s accusation of treason resounded throughout the Nixon White House. “This arrogant son of a bitch is a traitor,” Colson wrote of McGovern. “Instead of running for President, he should be running from the gallows.” Pat Buchanan, one of Nixon’s favorite speechwriters, put together what he called an “Assault Book,” containing “enough McGovern statements, positions, votes, not only to defeat the South Dakota Radical—but to have him indicted by a Grand Jury.”

Senator McGovern was no radical, though he had been steadfast against the war. He pledged to withdraw all American forces from Vietnam within ninety days of his inauguration. But the chance of his being inaugurated evaporated shortly after he won his party’s Democratic nomination on July 12, 1972.

The Democratic convention in Miami was the most disorganized event of its kind in modern times. McGovern gave his acceptance speech at 2:48 a.m.—prime time on Guam, as Nixon noted—after a political circus in which thirty-nine people were nominated for vice president, including Chairman Mao. “It was a nightmare for me,” McGovern said years later; “it was one of the most costly mistakes of the campaign that we frittered away that prime time when the country, for the first time, could have seen me on my turf, in control.”

McGovern, without much forethought, chose Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri as his running mate. It was soon revealed that Eagleton’s medical history included twenty years of manic depression and extensive bouts of electroshock therapy. First McGovern said he stood behind Eagleton “one thousand percent.” Then he forced him off the ticket.

Even without these fiascoes, McGovern’s campaign was doomed before it began. On May 15, a lunatic with a handgun had shot and nearly killed George C. Wallace, the right-wing racist who, running as a Democrat, had won the Maryland and Michigan primaries that same day. Now Wallace was in a wheelchair; he could not run for president. Nixon had won 43.4 percent of the vote in 1968, Wallace had won 13.5 percent, and every Wallace voter then was a likely Nixon voter now. Presidential polls in August reflected those numbers almost exactly. Nixon was heading for a landslide in November—unless the Watergate story came out.

*   *   *

“We’re sitting on a powder keg,” Haldeman told the president in the Oval Office on August 1, and “it’s worth a lot of work to keep it from blowing.” But the damage was being controlled. Liddy had sworn a blood oath of silence. The Cubans were out on bail. Hush money had started flowing.

“Hunt’s happy,” Haldeman said.

“At considerable cost, I guess?” said the president.

“Yes,” said Haldeman.

“It’s worth it,” Richard Nixon replied.

Kissinger told Nixon on August 2 that Hanoi might settle the Vietnam War before the election—“if you stay ten points ahead.” Both men wanted to believe that North Vietnam would rather sign a peace deal than face the wrath of a reelected president.

“Frankly, I’d like to trick them,” Nixon said. “I’d like to do it in a way that we make a settlement, and then screw them in the implementation, to be quite candid.”

“Well, that we can do, too,” Kissinger said.

“We could promise something, and then, right after the election, say Thieu wouldn’t do it,” Nixon said. “Just keep the pressure on.”

The president was unsure South Vietnam could survive until November. If the war was still on, he would destroy Hanoi and Haiphong after the election, he vowed. But “the advantage, Henry, of trying to settle now, even if you’re ten points ahead, is that then you assure a hell of a landslide,” he said. “You’d have a mandate.”

“And you have the goddamned nightmare off your back,” Kissinger replied.

“It
is
a nightmare. It’s a nightmare being there,” Nixon said. “This war is over by the end of this year,” no matter what it took. “Vietnam poisons our relations with the Soviets, and it poisons our relations with the Chinese. We have suffered long and hard—and God knows how do we get out of it?”

“They are bastards,” Kissinger said. “They would love it best if you got defeated.”

“Sure,” Nixon said. “Or shot.”

“They hate you, and they hate me,” Kissinger said. “But the question is now: how can we maneuver it … so that it can look like a settlement by Election Day?”

For the next three months, under Nixon’s direction, Kissinger worked nonstop to find something that would “look like a settlement” before the election. That, Kissinger promised, would “finish the destruction of McGovern” and give Nixon the mandate he desired. The destruction of McGovern was uppermost in Nixon’s mind the next morning, August 3. “What in the name of God are we doing on this score?” he yelled at Haldeman and Ehrlichman in the Oval Office. “What are we doing about their financial contributors?” he asked. “Are we running their tax returns?”