The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (101 page)

July 30
As Nixon continues to listen to tapes in the Lincoln Sitting Room, St. Clair arrives at Sirica’s courtroom shortly before four o’clock with the first group of twenty conversations for Jaworski. When Nixon completes his audit of eleven additional conversations, they are turned over to St. Clair to give to Jaworski. The House Judiciary Committee adopts a third article of impeachment by a vote of 21 to 17, addressing Nixon’s defiance of the committee’s subpoenas. That evening Nixon has Buzhardt listen to the two additional June 23 conversations with Haldeman, about the CIA’s blocking the FBI. Nixon believes they confirm that he was expressing a national security concern; Buzhardt disagrees and says they confirm they were using national security as a cover. Nixon insists again that he knew what he meant.

July 31
By this time both Buzhardt and St. Clair are convinced that the June 23 conversations reveal that the Nixon defense was a fabrication and that he had been involved in the cover-up from the onset. When they confront Haig with their conclusion, he does not disagree. It is now no longer a question of if Nixon will leave office, but rather how. Nixon’s aides overwhelmingly agree he should resign but do not want to force the issue lest they be accused of undertaking a coup d’état. Nixon resists Haig’s request to make a transcript of the June 23 conversations, but Haig finally prevails. Haig, Ziegler, Buzhardt and others take turns explaining to Nixon the seriousness of his situation so that he can make the decision that only he can make: resignation.
⁶

August 2
Nixon turns over thirteen more conversations, and Sirica sets an August 7 deadline for Nixon to produce the remaining thirty-one conversations due under the subpoena and ordered by the Supreme Court. California Republican congressman Charles Wiggins, Nixon’s strongest and most able defender on the House Judiciary Committee, is invited to Haig’s office and given a copy of the June 23 conversation with Haldeman to read. He immediately realizes its implications and asks both men when they had first learned of this new evidence. Both dissemble and tell him it was while transcribing the tapes for release, when, in fact, both had known about it before the impeachment voting had
started. Haig reports that the tapes will be provided to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday, August 5, thus becoming public. Wiggins, to the surprise of Haig and St. Clair, does not leak what he has learned.

August 5
Nixon publicly releases the “smoking gun” tapes of June 23, 1972. His loyal supporters, both on the White House staff and throughout government and the news media, discover they have been lied to by the president and can no longer support him. Nixon quickly loses all backing on Capitol Hill, making impeachment and conviction a certainty. The White House staff all but implodes.

August 8
The president decides he must resign. At 9:00
P.M.
he addresses the nation from the Oval Office, announcing, “I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.” Notwithstanding desperate pleas by Haldeman and Ehrlichman for pardons, he turns them down.

August 9
After an emotional farewell speech to his staff, Nixon departs for California. Gallup Poll: 79 percent to 13 percent believe Nixon did the “the best thing” by resigning.

September 8
President Gerald Ford pardons Nixon, precluding criminal prosecution for any of his activities as president.

October 14
U.S. v. Mitchell et al.
trial opens. The special prosecutor prepares between sixteen to twenty-two hours of the recorded conversations to play during the trial. For technical legal reasons, Gordon Strachan is dropped from the case, and later the charges against him were dropped as well. The defendants standing trial are John Mitchell, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Robert Mardian and Kenneth Parkinson.

December 19
Congress passes and President Ford signs into law the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974 (44 U.S.C. § 2111), placing all Nixon’s presidential papers and taped conversations in federal custody to prevent their destruction.

January 1
The jury returns a verdict: All defendants are guilty of conspiracy to obstruct justice except Parkinson, who was acquitted on all charges; Mitchell, Haldeman and Ehrlichman are also convicted of perjury. (Colson had negotiated a plea deal and was dropped from the case, and Strachan was separated from the case, and the charges were later dropped.)

February 21
Mitchell, Haldeman and Ehrlichman are sentenced to 2½ to 8 years for their crimes. They serve approximately 18 months in federal prisons.
⁷
(Mardian, sentenced to 10 months to 3 years, had his conviction reversed on appeal, because his lead attorney became ill during his trial. The Watergate special prosecutors decided not to retry him.)

Any shortcomings in this book are mine. If it accomplishes what I have set out to do—sift through and report on the entire recorded archive of Nixon’s Watergate conversations—it is because I had a lot of help from many people.

First there were those too often nameless people at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) responsible for the Nixon tapes. I have dedicated this book to their good work, which has been done with a relatively small and evolving staff. Few understand the difficulty of their undertaking. They deserve mention. Forty-two people have been involved in varying degrees over several decades in processing the Nixon tapes, with titles of director, supervisory archivists, archivists, archives specialists and archives technicians, and collectively they have assembled, catalogued, reviewed, developed subject logs, posted online and preserved this rare collection. They are (alphabetically): Daniel Kaplan, Ellen Knight, Maarja Krusten, David C. Lake, A. J. Lutz, Clarence Lyons, Charles Mayn, Sam McClure, Melissa McFee, Richard E. McNeill, Cary McStay, David Mengel, Daniel Milin, Timothy Naftali, Wanda Overstreet, Walton Owen, Sharman Powell, John Powers, Jonathan Roscoe, Amanda Ross, Rodney A. Ross, Lisa Rottenberg, Samuel W. Rushay, Mary Elizabeth Ruwell, Dave Sabo, Carol Sanford, Paul A. Schmidt, Mark Sgambettera, Margie Sherrif, James Shine, Emily Soapes, Ronald Sodano, Sue Ellen Stanley, Robert Storm, Michael Sullivan, Wayne Thompson, David S. Van Tassel, David Van Wagner, Karl Weissenbach, Paul Wormser and Leonard C. Yorke.

When I started this project, the Nixon recordings where located at the NARA facility in College Park, Maryland, where virtually everyone listed above worked on the processing of the tapes. To understand the information found in the tapes I have also drawn on documents from other NARA collections, particularly those created by the Watergate Special Prosecutor Force, which has been processed and maintained by David Paynter, in College Park, and who has been of assistance with several of my books.

When copies of the tapes and the original Nixon documents were moved to the NARA-operated Nixon library in Yorba Linda, California, the materials became even more accessible when Timothy Naftali became the first NARA director of this facility, and he and his staff could not have been more helpful to me in locating material, more specifically: Gregory Cumming, Ryan Pettigrew, Melissa Lew Heddon, Jason Schultz, Meghan Lee-Parker, Jon Fletcher, Carla Braswell, Dorissa Martinez, Craig Ellefson and Pamla Eisenberg.

Next I must acknowledge the terrific work of the graduate students who assisted by transcribing the bulk of the recorded conversations for me, preparing drafts from which I assembled this book. This evolving team was recruited and recommended by a friend who teaches history/archival science at California State University at San Bernardino, Professor Thomas Maxwell-Long. Here are the names of my able transcribers: Michelle Lorimer, Sarah Novak, Michelle Garcia-Ortiz, Aaron Beitzel, Sarah Promritz and Cherity Bacon. Collectively they prepared approximately 750 transcripts starting on the project in June 2010, and it ended in May 2014. Cherity Bacon, who I mention in the preface, alone transcribed over 500 of the conversations. While working on her master’s degree in archives and records administration, now working on a Ph. D. and raising a family, she found time for this project. With the exception of your author, she has listened to more Nixon Watergate conversations than anyone else in the world, a distinction and experience I have been reluctant to ask her about.

Finally, there have been those who have been vital to editing this hefty work, and then assembled this book, all very quickly to make the long-planned publication date shortly before the fortieth anniversary of Nixon’s resignation as president. Every page reflects the deft touch and insights of my editor extraordinaire, Rick Kot, a gifted professional with whom I have had the good fortunate of doing three books. Also Rick’s assistant, Nick Bromley, who works quietly and highly effectively, so he surely must lighten the load for Rick because he certainly does for authors. Copy editor Rachel Burd had questions sufficient to make a companion volume as she caught everything from unidentified characters wandering into this story to my syntax snags and typos, not to mention keeping the style consistent. The book’s elegant design was developed by Amy Hill, and for me it gives the material the feeling of importance it deserves. Production editor Sharon Gonzalez has kept the project on track. Rick calls Sharon “unflappable,” which has been essential for this project. Keeping an eye over it all, leading the entire Viking publishing ensemble, has been Clare Ferraro, Viking’s president, and her motto for this book has made it possible: “Give John the time he needs.” Now it is time for the media-savvy Bennett (Ben) Petrone, who has provided invaluable assistance with my prior Viking books, to launch another.

As with all my recent books, literary agent Lydia Wills has shepherded the business side of this book with wisdom and enthusiasm. I feel fortunate to have Lydia’s acumen and counsel in my book publishing projects. Last but not least is the most important acknowledgment of them all—for my partner in life, wife Maureen, who provides not merely the support system that enables me to take on such a project but is the editor in chief for everything I write, for it always crosses her desk before it goes anywhere.

Bottom line: Allow me to acknowledge I am a fortunate author.

John W. Dean

Los Angeles, California

May 2014

Although this book focuses on the Watergate cover-up, it contains many passing references to the reasons for the break-in at the Democratic National Committee that arose in a number of the president’s recorded conversations. For that reason, I made reference to Appendix A in a footnote whenever this topic arose during the narrative.

When listening to Nixon’s Watergate conversations I noticed Ron Ziegler’s description in two of them of a phenomenon that is often referred to as the Rashomon effect (although he did not specifically use this phrase). It is occasionally utilized by scholars and journalists to describe how individual eyewitnesses have differing recollections of the same event after the fact.
¹
From police lineups to accident investigations, it is well known that firsthand accounts are notoriously unreliable.
²
Yet those directly involved with the Watergate break-in—Magruder, Liddy, Hunt and the burglary team—have been fundamentally consistent and similar in their explanations of the reasons for the break-in, apart from a few minor variations. So, too, are the discussions in Nixon’s Watergate conversations.

White House Discussions

Although a powerful argument can be made that Nixon’s demands for information about the Democrats and Larry O’Brien were the catalysts for the Watergate operation, in fact, there is no evidence in all the Nixon-Watergate–related conversations that anyone in the White House had advance knowledge that Liddy was going into the Watergate, only speculation about Gordon Strachan.
*
Nonetheless Nixon did ask Haldeman, Ehrlichman and me for our understandings of why Liddy and his team had broken into and bugged the DNC. No one in Nixon’s circle had better information than Haldeman, and he and Ehrlichman shared what they knew; I had no information to offer. Because there have been lingering questions raised about the reason for the Watergate break-in, the conversations throughout this book when this subject was discussed can be reviewed to obtain the understandings of those involved as to what the burglars were looking for.

On June 20, 1972, just three days after the arrests at the Watergate and on his first day back in his office, Nixon told Haldeman, “My God, the [Democratic National] Committee, isn’t worth bugging, in my opinion. That’s my public line.” “Except for this financial thing,” Haldeman commented. “They thought they had something going on that.” “Yeah, I suppose,” Nixon agreed.
³
This exchange suggests that they had had a prior conversation on this subject, and it is clear that they discussed Watergate on the flight back to Washington on June 19. A little over a month later, when the president was gently chiding Haldeman for having an intelligence operation in the reelection committee, Haldeman explained that Mitchell had wanted it, and he vaguely mentioned his interest had been “on the finance thing.”
⁴
On December 10, when this subject arose in another conversation, Haldeman again mentioned that “Mitchell was pushing” regarding “[s]ecret papers, and financial data that O’Brien had, that he was going to get. I didn’t even know about that.”
⁵

During a January 3, 1973, conversation with Haldeman, shortly after Haldeman had had a long meeting with Magruder (which was really their first meeting since the arrests at the Watergate some six months earlier), Nixon said, “I can see Mitchell, but I can’t see Colson getting into the Democratic [Committee].” “What the Christ was he looking for?” Nixon asked, and Haldeman could now explain more fully: “They were looking for stuff on two things. One on financial, and the other on stuff that they thought they had on what they were going to do at Miami, to screw us up, which apparently was—a Democratic plot. That they thought they had uncovered. Colson was salivating with glee at the thought of what he might be able to do with it. And the investigator types were reluctant to go in there; they were put under tremendous pressure [that] they had to get this stuff. None of this, I don’t know any of this firsthand. I can’t prove any of it. Really, I don’t want to know. As I pointed out, because if I ever get involved in it, I want to be ignorant, which I am.”
⁶
This report to Nixon was clearly based on Haldeman’s conversation with Magruder, who would have told Haldeman everything he knew.

The reason for the DNC entry and bugging next arose in a conversation with me on March 13. “A lot of people around here had knowledge that something was going on over there,” at the reelection committee. I informed the president, “They didn’t have any knowledge of the details, of the specifics of the whole thing.” “You know,” Nixon began, “that must be an indication, though, of the fact that they had God damn poor pickings. Because naturally anybody, either Chuck or Bob, was always reporting to me about what was going on. If they ever got any information, they would certainly have told me that we got some information, but they never had a God damn [laughs] thing to report. What was the matter? Did they never get anything out of the damn thing?” “No. I don’t think they ever got anything,” I answered. “It was a dry hole, huh?” Nixon asked, which I confirmed, and then he volunteered, “But Bob one time said something about the fact we got some information about this or that or the other, but I think it was about the convention, what they were planning, I said they’re [
unclear
].”
⁷

When discussing Watergate with the president on March 16, Ehrlichman shared a well-informed theory of what had happened in considerable detail. He recalled that, about the time Liddy’s intelligence-gathering plans were being drawn up, “there was also that [rumor] that the Democrats had entered into an illegal alliance
with [Florida governor Reubin] Askew for financing of their convention in Florida,” which prompted Nixon to say in confirmation, “So, they were just trying to find that out.” Ehrlichman added, “And there were a lot of things floating around that particular job.” Nixon also noted, as this conversation proceeded, that the White House had been interested in learning “about the Democratic convention.”
⁸
The next day, on March 17, when I told the president, “I cannot understand why they decided to go in the DNC. That absolutely mystifies me as to what—” I began, but then interjected midsentence: “Anybody who’s walked around a national committee knows that there’s nothing there.” The president, evidencing more knowledge than I possessed, explained, “Well, the point is, they’re trying to see what they could develop in terms of the—” Nixon did not complete his thought but seemed to imply that it had been a fishing expedition.
⁹
During my conversation with the president on March 21, when we were discussing the fact that nothing was found in the DNC, Nixon made the following comment: “But Bob one time said something about the fact we got some information about this or that or the other, but I think it was about the convention, what they were planning, I said they’re [
unclear
].”
¹⁰
Here the president was repeating what he had told me on March 13.

Haldeman consistently reported that Liddy’s undertaking related to Larry O’Brien and the Democratic convention. During the March 28 conversation, Haldeman reported to the president about Magruder’s effort to involve the White House in the break-in based, in part, on Colson. He said that, according to Magruder: “Colson called [him] twice to tell him to get going on this thing, and he specifically referred to the Larry O’Brien information, was hard on that. And Jeb says Hunt and Liddy were in Colson’s office, and LaRue was in Jeb’s office on that phone call.” Nixon asked why Larry O’Brien, and Haldeman responded, he was told, “Well, that is what they’re bugging the Watergate for.” When Nixon pressed for more facts about why O’Brien had been targeted, Haldeman answered, “Information regarding the Florida convention stuff, down there.” Later in this conversation Nixon asked, “This stuff on O’Brien had to do with O’Brien’s activities at the convention?” Haldeman affirmed, “Apparently.” As they talked over each other, Nixon asked if they had gotten into “O’Brien’s business with [Howard] Hughes, did he get into that, or not?” Haldeman said, “No.” Nixon responded, “Okay, sounds good.”
¹¹
The last recorded Nixon conversation about this subject was on April 14, 1973, when Ehrlichman said that, based on his investigation (and conversation with Magruder), when Colson called to encourage him to get the Liddy plans approved by Mitchell, Colson had been pushing for information on Larry O’Brien.

If this obsession with O’Brien and the Democrats’ convention seems irrational, there was little about Watergate that was
otherwise.