The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (106 page)

19
Richard Nixon,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 648–49.

20
See, e.g., John W. Dean,
The Rehnquist Choice, The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment that Redefined the Supreme Court
(New York: Free Press, 2001).

21
Conversation No. 744-21.

22
Conversation No. 744-22 and 745-1.

23
Ziegler news conference, June 30, 1972, 10–13.

24
The only substantive matters discussed were that the Justice Department would prepare a statement for the president on a recent Supreme Court ruling on the death penalty, and that they would stay out of law enforcement activities during the Democratic National Convention in Miami, so they would not be responsible if demonstrators caused problems.

25
Haldeman later added to his diary for June 30, 1972: “There’s some new problems on the Watergate caper. Leading us to a probable decision that the way to deal with this now is to put all of them together, tie it all into Liddy’s lap and let him take the heat for it, which is actually where it belongs anyway.” Haldeman,
Diaries
, 479.

26
G. Gordon Liddy,
Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 173–80.

27
Conversation No. 745-2.

28
Strachan Senate testimony, 6 Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (SSC) 2455.

29
Sloan Senate testimony, 2 SSC 578–88, 617, 620.

30
The
New York Times
apparently felt that the arrests at the DNC were a local Washington police story. Famed
Times
reporter and columnist Scotty Reston had just relinquished the post of head of the Washington bureau to Max Frankel, and Reston’s biographer reports that both men had a disdain for muckraking. See John F. Stacks,
Scotty: James B. Reston and the Rise and Fall of American Journalism
(New York: Little, Brown, 2003), 223. As a result, the
Times
missed the biggest story in modern American journalism, not to mention that the
Times
is an institution.

31
Conversation No. 746-3.

32
Nixon,
RN
, 646.

33
Ibid.

34
Ibid.

Part II

1
Carl Bernstein and Jim Mann, “FBI Seeks Man Linked to ‘Bug’ Case,”
The Washington Post
, July 2, 1972, A-1.

2
“Gallup Finds Nixon Continues to Lead Top 2 Democrats,”
New York Times
, July 3, 1972, 18.

July 6 to July 18, 1972

1
In an effort to hide the CIA’s earlier involvement with Hunt (at Ehrlichman’s request), and before departing on a three-week foreign trip, Helms drafted a memo for Walters on June 28, 1972, in which he told Walters, “We still adhere to the request that they [the FBI] confine themselves to the personalities alreadly arrested or directly under suspicion and that they desist from expanding this investigation into other areas which may well, eventually, run afoul of our operations.” Thomas Powers,
The Man Who Kept Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 263–64. Walters told the Watergate special prosecutors that he never received the memo, which the CIA later produced. It worried the prosecutors that it provided corroboration for Nixon’s instructions on June 23, 1972. They never did get a satisfactory explanation of why it was written. Richard Ben-Veniste and George Frampton, Jr.,
Stonewall: The Real Story of the Watergate Prosecution
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977), 76–77.

2
Gray later testified, “I spoke to Mr. MacGregor at San Clemente, California, via the White House switchboard, and I told him that Dick Walters and I were uneasy and concerned about the confusion that existed over the past two weeks in determining with certainty whether there was or was not CIA interest in the people that the FBI wished to interview in connection with the Watergate investigation.” While Gray could not repeat his precise conversation, he added, “I also conveyed to him the thought that I felt the people on the White House staff were careless and indifferent in their use of the CIA and FBI. I also expressed the thought that this activity was injurious to the CIA and FBI, and that these White House staff people were wounding the president.” Following Gray’s call to MacGregor, the president called Gray. He congratulated the FBI on their handling of a hijacking the previous day, and then Gray told the president what he had told MacGregor. Gray said that after a slight pause, the
president said, “Pat, you just continue to conduct your aggressive and thorough investigation.” After this, Gray said, he never had any further concern with White House interference with the FBI investigation. Gray Senate testimony, 9 Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities
(SSC) 3462.

3
Richard Nixon,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 650.

4
Ibid., 651.

5
July 6, 1972, H. R. Haldeman,
The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1993), 481.

6
See Ehrlichman office logs, NARA, John Ehrlichman,
Witness to Power: The Nixon Years
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 353–55; and July 8–9, 1972, Haldeman,
Diaries,
481.

7
Nixon,
RN
, 651.

8
Ehrlichman,
Witness
, 354.

9
Ibid., 354–55; Nixon,
RN
, 651–53.

10
Ehrlichman,
Witness
, 356.

11
For his memoir, Nixon did not transcribe all the relevant recorded conversations to discover when, in fact, he learned of Hunt and Liddy’s White House activities. Nonetheless, he wrote, “Ehrlichman says he did not know of it in advance [of the Liddy/Hunt break-in at Dr. Fielding’s Beverly Hills offices], but that he told me about it after the fact in 1972. I do not recall this, and the tapes of June–July 1972 indicate that I was not conscious of it then, but I cannot rule it out.” Nixon,
RN
, 514. However, Nixon expressed genuine surprise when I told him of this activity eight months later. (It will be noted that between July 8, 1972, when Ehrlichman later claimed he told Nixon about the Liddy/Hunt break-in at Fielding’s offices, and March 17, 1973, when I told the president about it, there is absolutely no mention of it on any other recorded conversations, other than the vague types of references made earlier by Haldeman.) In fact, what Ehrlichman told Nixon some ten months earlier, on September 8, 1971, right after the Liddy/Hunt break-in at Fielding’s offices, shows his disposition to withhold this information from the president: “We had one little operation. It’s been aborted out in Los Angeles which, I think, is better that you don’t know about.” Stanley I. Kutler,
Abuse of Power
(New York: The Free Press, 1997), 28. When testifying before the Senate Watergate committee in 1973, Ehrlichman said he had not told the president about the Fielding break-in. Ehrlichman Senate testimony, 7 SSC 2804. When Ehrlichman was later charged for criminal activity and tried for his role in the Fielding break-in, the president (still in office) submitted a sworn answer to an interrogatory asking: “On what date were you first informed of the Fielding break-in?” Answer: “March 17, 1973.”
U.S. v. Ehrlichman
(July 10, 1974), 2304. That, of course, was the date I told him, when we starting having our first discussions about Watergate.

12
July 18, 1972, Haldeman,
Diaries,
483.

13
A few of Stanley Kutler’s transcripts allude to this activity but do not report the depth of Nixon’s involvement in the suborning of Magruder’s false testimony.

July 19 to August 16, 1972

1
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Conversation No. 747-14.

2
Jim Mann, “Lawyer in ‘Bug Case’ Loses Bid to Keep Mum,”
The Washington Post
, July 19, 1972, C-1.

3
Haldeman later explained to the president that Ehrlichman, at this stage, wanted everyone to fall on their sword—except Ehrlichman. He was pushing to get the Watergate investigation completed quickly so the Hunt and Liddy contagion did not cause him any problems. Magruder, in fact, could have pleaded the Fifth Amendment, and had he done so, the only immediate consequence would have been that he would have had to leave the campaign. Mitchell, however, had rejected this approach, because Magruder was a buffer against the investigation reaching him. If neither Liddy nor Mitchell testified, no one else had anything other than suspicion or hearsay knowledge about Magruder’s role in Watergate.

4
Conversation No. 348-10.

5
July 19, 1972, H. R. Haldeman,
The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1993), 484.

6
July 20, 1972, Ibid.

7
Conversation No. 748-7.

8
Conversation No. 349-12.

9
Conversation No. 197-17.

10
Conversation No. 756-3.

11
Conversation No. 758-11.

12
Conversation No. 759-2.

13
Conversation No. 760-9.

14
Conversation No. 353-24.

15
Conversation No. 761-7.

16
Conversation No. 763-15.

17
By August 16, 1972, based on a diary entry, Nixon wrote in his memoirs that he found it “particularly nettling” that “McGovern [was] striking out more wildly now, trying to say that I was indirectly responsible for the bugging of the Democratic headquarters.” Richard Nixon,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 675.

18
August 13, 1972, Haldeman,
Diaries,
492.

19
Conversation No. 768-4. Note: The audio on this conversation is good for Mitchell and Haldeman but poor for MacGregor, and at times awful for Nixon. But after repeatedly listening to the key statements of the president, what he is says is very clear. To hear his statements I played the recording using several software programs at several speeds, which enabled me to assemble the gist of his remarks.

20
When Bob Mardian brought Ken Parkinson to Jeb Magruder’s office and instructed Magruder to tell “
the
truth,” he did so for several hours. Mardian was horrified. So, later, was Mitchell. As Magruder wrote in his autobiography, he was soon called to Mitchell’s office: “‘Jeb,’ Mitchell said gravely, ‘I gather that you told Ken Parkinson the true story.’ I was astounded [Magruder wrote]. ‘Mardian told me that you wanted me to tell him the true story,’ I said. ‘No, we should discuss it with our lawyers,’ Mitchell said. ‘We have to protect the lawyers.’” Jeb Stuart Magruder,
An American Life: One Man’s Road to Watergate
(New York: Atheneum, 1974), 241–42. Magruder also testified under oath to these facts during
U.S. v. Mitchell et al
. (October 30, 1974), 4571. Apparently Mitchell and company did leak the claim that they had conducted “an investigation,” which was picked up by no less than Bob Woodward; his source, Deep Throat/Mark Felt, told him on October 8, 1972: “Mitchell conducted his own—he called it an investigation—for about ten days after June 17 [the date of the arrests at the DNC]. And he was going crazy. He found all sorts of new things which astounded even him. At some point, Howard Hunt, of all the ironies, was assigned to help Mitchell get some information.” Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward,
All the President’s Men
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), 132.

21
Petersen did not remember making that comment, but I repeated it to Haldeman, Mitchell and Magruder, and so testified before the Senate. See Petersen Senate testimony, 9 Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities
(SSC) 3651.

22
August 16, 1972, Haldeman,
Diaries,
494.

August 17 to September 15, 1972

1
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, “GOP Aide Says Funds Used to Study Radicals,”
The Washington Post
, August 18, 1972, A-6.

2
August 18, 1972, H. R. Haldeman,
The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1993), 495–96.

3
UPI, “Watergate Break-In to Be Probed,”
The Washington Post
, August 20, 1972, A-7.

4
Martin Weil, “Watergate Bug ‘Ears’ Linked to Motel,”
The Washington Post
, August 21, 1972, A-1.

5
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, “Violations by Nixon Fund Cited,”
The Washington Post
, August 22, 1972, A-1.

6
Jim Mann and Bob Woodward, “Judge Seals Watergate Testimony,”
The Washington Post
, August 23, 1972, A-1.

7
Jim Mann, “Indictments in ‘Bug’ Case May Be Tried After Election,”
The Washington Post
, August 24. 1972, A-17.

8
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, “Judge Wants to Start Watergate Trial,”
The Washington Post
, August. 25, 1972, A-1.

9
Sanford J. Ungar, “Kleindienst Vows Tough Watergate Case Probe,”
The Washington Post
, August 29, 1972, A-1.

10
Public Papers of the Presidents: Richard Nixon 1972
at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3548.

11
On October 11, 1972, Ziegler was publicly pressed for a copy of my report during a morning briefing:

Q: Ron, the Dean report on the Watergate, were you able to find out whether it was in writing or an oral report to the president?

Ziegler: No, I didn’t ask.

Q: Why didn’t you ask?

Ziegler: Are there any other questions?

Q: Do you plan to ask?

Ziegler: No, I have all the information I need on the subject.

Q: Do you plan to inform us whether this was a written or an oral report?