One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (34 page)

Back in Washington, Nixon spent much of the next week giving marching orders to his revamped national security team. The president’s new director of central intelligence, James Schlesinger, was a Nixon man to the core—“I mean one that really had R.N. tattooed on him,” his predecessor, Richard Helms, said—who had been an ax wielder at the Bureau of the Budget. Nixon told him to chop out the dead wood at the CIA, to purge as many people as possible, especially senior officers suspected of liberal sympathies.

Over the course of nineteen weeks, Schlesinger fired five hundred CIA analysts and more than a thousand clandestine service officers. After he received death threats over the dismissals, he hired armed bodyguards. He lasted five months as director of central intelligence.

Nixon, having rid himself of Secretary of Defense Laird, introduced the Joint Chiefs to their new boss at a formal luncheon at the Pentagon. Elliot Richardson was a genial Boston Brahmin with no military expertise beyond leading a platoon at the Normandy invasion under General Eisenhower in June 1944. He had been secretary of health, education, and welfare in the first Nixon administration, in charge of issues that were his cup of tea, not Nixon’s.

Nixon alluded to his preference at a February 15 luncheon with Richardson and the Joint Chiefs, weighing the value of the Department of Defense versus the costs of welfare. “We would like to be able to put the DOD budget into welfare,” the president said, “but if we did, the world would eventually fall under the Communist system.”

Richardson lasted four months as secretary of defense.

At 9:09 a.m. on February 16, L. Patrick Gray, the acting FBI director, entered the Oval Office for the second time in his life. After a nine-month delay, Nixon was submitting Gray for Senate hearings to confirm him as J. Edgar Hoover’s successor, as required by law. The president was taking a huge risk.

Gray was a dutiful dullard deeply entangled in the web of Watergate. He had destroyed evidence on orders from John Dean. He was back-handing his agents’ reporting to Dean—which an FBI internal report later described as “the most serious blunder from an investigative standpoint.”

Gray had made few friends at FBI headquarters, where he became known as “Three-day Gray” for the time he spent at his desk each week. He had let the FBI’s number-two man, Mark Felt, control the Watergate investigation. And Felt was the key source of the front-page Watergate stories in the
Washington Post
. Nixon was one of the few people in America who knew that.
*
The
Post
had been the first newspaper to report that Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy oversaw the Watergate break-in, that John Mitchell controlled a slush fund for political espionage, and that “political spying and sabotage” were at the heart of CREEP’s campaign.

Nixon quickly asked Gray how he would handle the Senate’s questions about Watergate. “Would it hurt or help for you to go up there and be mashed about that?” Nixon asked.

“Mr. President, I’m the man that’s in the best position to handle that,” Gray said. “I’ve consistently handled it from the outset.… I think the Administration has done a hell of a fine job in going after this thing.” This was bluster and bombast. “You haven’t been able to do anything—or have you?—up to this point, about the leaks,” Nixon asked. “The whole story, we’ve found, is coming out of the Bureau.… This stuff didn’t leak when Hoover was there. I’ve never known of a leak when Hoover was there. I could talk to him in this office about everything. And the reason is that—it wasn’t because they loved him, but they
feared
him. And they’ve got to
fear
the man at the top.… You’ve got to be brutal, tough and respected.… I understand leaking out of the CIA, those goddamned cookie-pushers. But if it leaks out of the Bureau, then the whole damn place ought to be fired.”

Nixon’s fury rose. “You’ve got to do it like they did in the war,” the president said. “In World War Two, the Germans, if they went through these towns and then one of their soldiers, a sniper hit one of them, they’d line up the whole goddamned town and say until you talk you’re all getting shot. I really think that’s what has to be done. I mean, I don’t think you can be Mr. Nice Guy over there.”

“I haven’t been,” Gray protested. “These guys know they can’t lie to me like they used to lie to Hoover.”

Nixon was relentless. “I’ve got to have a relationship here where you go out and do something and deny on a stack of Bibles.”

“Right,” said Gray. “I understand.”

“I don’t have anybody else,” Nixon said. “I can’t hire some asshole from the outside.” He went on, his rage simmering. “There were times when I felt that the only person in this goddamned government who was standing with me was Edgar Hoover.… He would break his ass if he saw something that was wrong being done, if somebody was pissing on us.… What you’ve got to do is to
do like Hoover
.”

“It’s going to be a bloody confirmation,” Nixon warned Gray. “You’ve got to be prepared to take the heat and get bloodied up. But if you do go through a bloody one, let’s remember that you’re probably going to be in for just four years. And then they’re gonna throw you out. So let’s get in there and do some good for the country.… This country, this bureaucracy—Pat, you know this—it’s crawling with, Pat, at best, at best, unloyal people and at worst treasonable people.”

“Treasonable people,” Gray repeated.

“We have got to get them, break them,” Nixon said. “The way to get them is through you. See?”

*   *   *

On February 22, Nixon smuggled Sen. Howard Baker into the presidential hideaway at the Executive Office Building. It was extremely rare for any aspect of the president’s day to go unrecorded in the official White House logs. This was an exception. Senator Baker, a photogenic and politically ambitious Tennessee Republican, would be the ranking minority member of the Watergate Committee. He was eager to please the president. He laid out the committee’s plans, and the next day in the Oval Office Nixon gave Ehrlichman a full account of their conversation.

“I must have scared him to death,” Nixon said. “I put it very hard to Baker.”

Nixon said the senators planned first to take testimony from “a lot of pipsqueak witnesses, little shit-asses, over periods of weeks to build it up, the pressure.” But then, “you got to call Haldeman, you got to call Ehrlichman.” The president laid down the law—or his version of it. He said he would assert “executive privilege” to keep his White House staff from being dragged before the committee.

The Constitution is silent on the question of executive privilege, and the Supreme Court had never confronted it. But two prior presidents had invoked it. One was Dwight Eisenhower; the other, Harry Truman. Twenty-five years before, Truman asserted the privilege to protect government personnel records from congressmen—most notably, Richard Nixon—chasing Communists such as Alger Hiss. This confrontation was at the center of chapter one in Nixon’s 1962 memoir
Six Crises
. Back then, Nixon had fought against executive privilege. Now he had to fight for it.

But he could not invoke the privilege in order to keep the silence of people outside presidential command—such as John Mitchell, hunkered down at his New York law firm, trying to raise hush money for the Watergate defendants; Chuck Colson, who had left the White House days before; and Herb Kalmbach, the president’s private attorney, fund-raiser, and financier. Each was in legal peril.

“What are they going to say?” Nixon asked, dreading the answer, though he already knew it in part. “They raised the money?”

“There’s a hell of a lot of money, and it floated around, and there weren’t receipts, and there was funny bookkeeping, and money went to Mexico and back, and there were just a hell of a lot of odds and ends,” Ehrlichman replied.

“What’ll Mitchell say?” the president wondered.

“I don’t know,” Ehrlichman admitted. “He’s been puffing his pipe and looking at the ceiling and saying, ‘You guys got a problem.’”

After discussing four more present and former White House aides who might have problems testifying truthfully, they turned to Colson.

“He’ll perjure himself,” said the president.

If the president’s aides defied the Senate Watergate Committee when it subpoenaed witnesses, “in effect we take the Fifth Amendment,” Ehrlichman said. “Is that worse?”

“Yeah, it’s a cover-up,” Nixon said. “The cover-up is worse than whatever comes out. It really is—unless somebody is going to jail.” The president had a prescient vision of what lay ahead: a ceaseless procession of investigations, interrogations, and indictments.

“I’m not going to let anybody go to jail,” he vowed. “That I promise you.”

*   *   *

One week later, on February 27, the president summoned his thirty-three-year-old White House counsel, John Dean, for the first of thirty tape-recorded conversations they would have about Watergate over the next forty-nine days. Though Nixon droned on about the Hiss case and dreamed of a counterattack against Congress, these conversations centered on two conundrums: the cover-up and covering up the cover-up.

Nixon first asked about the sentencing of the seven Watergate defendants. Dean told him that Judge Sirica, “Maximum John,” was delaying judgment day until March, using presentencing interrogations by probation officers to conduct his own inquisition into the case—and trying to coerce confessions. “This judge may go off the deep end in his sentencing,” Dean warned.

Then there would be the Senate Watergate Committee to face in May. The president said he had told Senator Baker to run things just as Nixon had run the Hiss case. “But the committee is after someone in the White House,” Nixon said. “They’d like to get Haldeman, Colson, or Ehrlichman.”

“Or possibly Dean,” said Dean.

March 1 brought a tremor of fear at the White House. On the first day of his confirmation hearings, Pat Gray testified and, trying to ingratiate himself with the senators on the Judiciary Committee, volunteered to let them see the FBI’s raw and unedited investigative reports on Watergate. Handing over the Watergate files would be giving an enemy a sword. The files showed that key figures in the case had lied to the FBI. And they showed that Dean had sat in on FBI agents’ interviews with every key figure in the case—to the agents’ deep displeasure. If the senators saw that fact, then Dean could be called to testify under oath. Gray had put the White House one subpoena away from a potentially calamitous confrontation.

“For Christ’s sake,” the president said with a groan, “he must be out of his mind.”

The next day, at a White House press conference, a reporter asked if the president would object to Dean’s testifying about Watergate, the FBI, and the White House. “Of course,” said the president. “It is executive privilege.… No President could ever agree to allow the Counsel to the President to go down and testify before a committee.”

On March 7, Gray’s increasingly contentious confirmation hearings landed John Dean on page one of the
Washington Post
. The president called Dean into the Oval Office at 8:53 a.m. They commiserated. The hearings had “morphed into a mini-Watergate hearing, with the Democrats using selected items plucked from the raw FBI material … to discredit him as a potential FBI director,” Dean later wrote. “Remarkably, Gray just kept digging himself a deeper hole, and by thrusting me into his hearings, he provided the Democrats with sufficient leverage to kill his nomination: They asserted that if I did not appear as a witness, they would not confirm him.” The president had become “totally disenchanted” with Gray. He charged Dean with subtly scuttling the nomination.

*   *   *

Two hours later, Nixon spoke privately in the Oval Office with Thomas Pappas, the oil company executive who had channeled more than half a million dollars to Nixon’s 1968 campaign from the colonels who ran the military junta in Greece. Pappas had been instrumental in the selection of Spiro Agnew as Nixon’s running mate in 1968, and he had personally contributed at least one hundred thousand dollars to Nixon’s 1972 reelection. The week before his meeting with the president, he had met with the campaign’s manager, John Mitchell, in New York and pledged six-figure sums to the Watergate defendants’ hush-money fund.

Haldeman already had told the president that Pappas was contributing heavily to “the continuing financial activity in order to keep those people on base … and he’s able to deal in cash.” In exchange, all Pappas wanted was an assurance that his close friend Henry Tasca would be reappointed as the American ambassador to Greece. “Good. I understand. No problem,” Nixon had replied.

Pappas entered the Oval Office at 10:54 a.m. Nixon gave his word on the ambassadorship and thanked Pappas profusely. “I am aware of what you’re doing to help out,” he said. “I won’t say anything further, but it’s very seldom that you find a friend like that.”
*

*   *   *

One week before, Pat Gray had turned over the FBI’s Watergate files—twenty-six thick books, along with summaries and analyses—to the Senate Judiciary Committee. On March 14 the president ordered Dean to call the FBI to see if this procedure had any precedent. He said he wanted an answer in three minutes, and if he did not get it, “I’ll fire the whole goddamn Bureau.”

As Nixon knew perfectly well, J. Edgar Hoover had fed the House Un-American Activities Committee, where Nixon served, reams of raw FBI reports on suspected Communists and Communist sympathizers from 1948 onward. But that was different, Nixon said. Hoover had done it under the table; it was a secret transaction; it never leaked.

Dean reminded Nixon of this history after conferring with the Bureau. (It took longer than three minutes; no one was fired. That was simply the way Nixon barked commands.)

“Well,” Nixon told Dean, “keep ’em scared over there.”

On March 14 the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to summon John Dean. The president had precluded that; at his March 2 press conference, he’d proclaimed that the White House counsel could not be compelled to testify before Congress. Nixon, Dean, and the president’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler—whose prior job before joining the Nixon team in 1962 was as a Jungle Cruise skipper at Disneyland—huddled to prepare for a news conference Nixon had set for the next day, March 15. They knew that any answers they provided on Watergate would only provoke more questions.