The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (111 page)

5
Whether the White House received information from the DNC before June 17, 1972, will forever remain unclear, because Haldeman instructed Strachan to clean their files. But it appears no such information, in fact, was received. Magruder later testified that he showed Strachan the fruits of Liddy’s DNC wiretapping operation, but in his testimony Strachan denied he was shown such material. At the time I was reporting to Nixon, Strachan believed he had seen it because the reports he had been sent and destroyed at Haldeman’s instruction after the June 17, 1972, arrests read very much like wiretap reports; they used the language: “From a source believed to be reliable.” In the weeks ahead, Strachan and Haldeman would figure out what had been destroyed were reports from a source planted by Magruder rather than wiretap information. See Strachan Senate testimony, 6 Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (SSC) 2468–69.

6
When Strachan later testified before the Senate that he did not know in advance about the Watergate break-in, I had no reason to doubt that testimony. I think Liddy’s claim in his memoir,
Will
(which was written long after the fact), that he told Strachan shortly before the second break-in at the Watergate that they were going back in to fix a bug is a confused reconstruction of the meeting in mid-April; that was actually the meeting during which Strachan instructed Liddy to move his intelligence-gathering capabilities from Muskie to
McGovern. Strachan Senate testimony, 6 SSC, 2476; G. Gordon Liddy,
Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).

7
When writing
Blind Ambition
, I described my limited knowledge as follows: “The Cuban Committee was a technical part of only one of our payment schemes. A committee had been set up to collect defense funds for the Cuban defendants, and we had planned it; the committee would be flooded with anonymous cash. As it turned out, Hunt had preferred to have the money delivered directly to him and his wife.” At that writing I was unaware of the June 20, 1972, conversation between the president and Haldeman, during which he explained his idea. Conversation No. 344-7; John W. Dean,
Blind Ambition: The White House Years
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), 203.

8
After learning of the president’s idea of creating a Cuban committee while working on this book, which he envisioned as open and publicly defending those involved in the Watergate break-in, I have discussed this matter with several former federal prosecutors, curious if they thought this would have been an obstruction of justice. While the answer would, of course, depend on how the committee was set up and funded, as a general rule an open and aboveboard defense fund is legal. Recently, former Bush II White House and Vice President Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby had a multimillion-dollar defense fund when he was indicted (and convicted) of perjury, with no less than former Senate Watergate committee minority counsel, later Tennessee senator Fred Thompson, on the advisory board. But most everyone agreed that using a Cuban committee cover to get hush money to the Watergate defendants would still have been obstruction of justice.

9
Actually, it was an even more detailed point to which Krogh plead guilty: Had he been aware of Hunt and Liddy’s travel while they were working for him in the plumbers unit? He testified that he had not been, when, in fact, he had known of it. On October 18, 1973, Krogh plead guilty to making two false statements to the grand jury in August 1972.
United States v. Egil Krogh, Jr.,
Criminal Case 857-73, United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

10
Conversation No. 886-18.

11
Conversation No. 421-8. Note: While the audio on the conversation is of very poor quality, the gist of the conversation is discernible.

12
This was the way Ehrlichman consistently handled his personal jeopardy, from the moment I first mentioned it on June 19, 1972, after talking to Liddy through my relay of Hunt’s blackmail demand. Looking at how he later dealt with his criminal problems, Ehrlichman may have been remarkable naive about the criminal law, which would explain why he did not want me to bring a criminal lawyer on after Watergate, for he believed it unnecessary, or he was even more arrogant than I thought, for he felt, incorrectly, that he could bluff and dissemble his way through his problems. No one would ever successfully argue that he was stupid, although it could easily be asserted that he was foolish.

13
Conversation No. 421-18.

14
Conversation Nos. 37-204, 37-205.

15
Based on the transcript prepared by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF) of the president’s cassette recording of his recollections of his meeting with Dean and Haldeman on March 21, 1973. The entry continued, “As I examined him it seems that he feels even he would be guilty of some criminal liability due to the fact he participated in the actions which resulted in taking care of the defendants while they were under trial. As he pointed out, what is causing him concern is that every one of the various participants is now getting his own counsel and that this is going to cause considerable problems because it will be each man for himself, and one will not be afraid to rap on the other.” He noted that Haldeman had backed me up on this point, when he mentioned that Magruder would bring him down if he felt he himself was to go down. This caused the president again to tell his diary that Haldeman’s selection of Magruder was “still a very hard one for me to figure out. He’s made very few mistakes, but this is one case where Rose was right; he picked a rather weak man who had all the appearances of character, but who really lacks it when the chips are down.” WSPF files, NARA.

In his memoir, Nixon said, “[I]t was clear that on March 21 John Dean was trying to alert me to the fact that what I assumed for nine months was the major Watergate problem—the question of who had authorized the break-in—had been overtaken by the new and far more serious problem of the cover-up.” Nixon then takes the rather remarkable position that he did not really understand what I was saying, because I failed to sufficiently describe my own role in the cover-up, so he treated much of what I said as conjecture and deduction instead of as firsthand reporting on a situation that was “already out of hand.” Nixon wrote that my insistence that the payment of further money to the defendants was an obstruction of justice only seemed to him “more a reflection of his personal depression than a statement of a considered legal conclusion.” Nixon wrote that it took “three weeks” more for him to “understand what Dean had really been trying to tell me.” In fact, I was not depressed, as anyone who listens to this conversation vis-à-vis any other of my conversations will realize; rather, I was deeply frustrated that I could not persuade the president to end the cover-up, and a young White House aide does not tell the president of the United States everything he is really thinking, such as: “This man is either a fool or crook.” Within days I would decide it was the latter, and within three weeks I would break rank, explaining to my colleagues that I was going to the prosecutors, because the cover-up was over. It was that action, it seems, that enabled Nixon to understand what I was saying, for my actions spoke more clearly than my words of warning. Richard Nixon,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 800–01, 817.

16
Conversation No. 422-20.

17
Five days later, on March 27, 1973, Ehrlichman would remove the memoranda from the White House files that included his handwritten authorization for the covert entry into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Had David Young not kept a copy of those documents, Ehrlichman might have succeeded in denying he had any knowledge of this operation, or it would have been his word against Krogh and Young, who admitted their roles in the undertaking, as did Howard Hunt and Chuck Colson; Colson had arranged for the funding to pay the expenses of Liddy and Hunt, and their Cuban operatives.
U.S. v. Ehrlichman
, 546 F.2d 910 (1975).

18
See Dean,
Blind Ambition
, 211.

19
Conversation No. 422-33.

20
The letter had been delivered three days earlier, and Sirica saw its potential immediately, telling his clerks, “This is going to break the case wide open.” Fred Emery,
Watergate : The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon
(New York: Touchstone, 1994), 269–70.

21
See, e.g., Philip B. Kurland, “The Power and the Glory: Passing Thoughts on Reading Judge Sirica’s Watergate Exposé to Set the Record Straight: The Break-In, the Tapes, the Conspirators, the Pardon by John J. Sirica,” 32
Stanford Law Review
(November 1979):217–28; and Anthony J. Gaughan, “Watergate, Judge Sirica, and the Rule of Law,”
McGeorge Law. Review
42 (2010–2011): 343.

Part IV

1
Political crises have been described as breakdowns of governing systems and processes that create problems that might have been foreseen yet have developed into much more because an incipient situation was not addressed. See, e.g., Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld,
The Study of Crisis
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

2
Richard Nixon,
Six Crises
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), xv.

3
Richard Nixon,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 817.

March 23 to April 13, 1973

1
H. R. Haldeman,
The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1993), 594.

2
Ibid., 594.

3
Richard Nixon,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 805.

4
Haldeman recorded in considerable detail the information, particularly from me, about what had transpired. I had minced no words about Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s criminal liability in raising money and paying the Watergate defendants after June 17, 1972. Haldeman’s notes could have provided solid corroboration for my later testimony, but this information remained buried until he published his diaries in 1994. While Haldeman recorded in his note that I explained his problems to him, as well as Ehrlichman’s, he never mentioned this information to Nixon, protecting himself and Ehrlichman to the end, and at Nixon’s expense. Haldeman,
Diaries
.

5
They did publish, but when McCord’s false statement about me fell apart for total lack of substance, and that fact was reported, I took no action.

6
Lou Cannon, “Nixon Denies Dean Knew of Bugging,”
The Washington Post
, March, 27, 1973, A-1.

7
Nixon White House Recorded Conversation, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Conversation No. 888-4.

8
Haldeman had urged me to record Magruder if I could, and I did so by holding the dictating machine microphone to the telephone while at Camp David. Secretly recording telephone calls was common at the Nixon White House, but other than Magruder, whose story seemed to change depending on whom he was speaking to, I did not record my phone calls. My Magruder recording of March 26, 1973, was turned over to the Senate Watergate committee. See Dean Senate testimony, 3 Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (SSC)1258.

9
Conversation No. 423-3.

10
Conversation No. 44-21.

11
Conversation No. 423-11.

12
Conversation No. 423-13.

13
Conversation No. 44-30.

14
Conversation No. 424-10.

15
Conversation No. 421-22.

16
Dean testimony, 3 SSC 1005–6.

17
Conversation No. 425-23.

18
Conversation No. 44-58.

19
Conversation No. 44-61.

20
Dean testimony, 3 SSC 1006–7.

21
Haldeman,
Diaries
, 618.

22
Conversation No. 424-30.

23
Conversation No. 426-4.

24
Conversation Nos. 44-69, 44-71, 44-80, 426-5 and 426-16.

25
Conversation No. 426-4.

26
Conversation No. 890-33.

27
Haldeman,
Diaries
, 620.

28
Ibid., 622–24.

29
When writing
Blind Ambition
I thought that Liddy’s purportedly talking had first come up in my first meeting with the prosecutors on April 8, 1973. Based on the information in Haldeman’s diary it is clear that Charlie was given this information as early as April 5, 1973, and, in turn, I shared it with Haldeman on that date and again on April 7, 1973. As to the practice of prosecutors using false information during plea discussions, as I was exploring, today the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Standards, Standard 3-4.1 (c) states:
“A prosecutor should not knowingly make false statements or representations as to fact or law in the course of plea discussions with defense counsel or the accused.” See http://www.americanbar.org/publications/criminal_justice_section_archive/crimjust_standards_pfunc_blk.html#4.1. As I wrote in
Blind Ambition
, I understood why they had to breach the agreement with Charlie, although they never seemed to understand why I felt I had to go to the Senate Watergate committee rather than deal with them. John W. Dean,
Blind Ambition: The White House Years
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976).

30
Haldeman,
Diaries
, 629. Note: The day headings for Monday, April 8, 1973, Tuesday, April 9, 1973, and Wednesday, April 10, 1973, are incorrect and should have been Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.

31
Magruder would later write that my lawyer had spoken with Bierbower, who reported to Jeb that I said: “Well, of course John doesn’t have any legal problems, but Jeb has a very serious problem, and we don’t know if we can help him.” According to Magruder, who seems to have missed the message in the call to get to the prosecutor’s office sooner rather than later, wrote that he was furious. See Jeb Stuart Magruder,
An American Life: One Man’s Road to Watergate
(New York: Atheneum, 1974), 92. But the purpose of the call was not lost on Magruder’s lawyers, who indeed did get him to the U.S. Attorney’s Office quickly once Jeb gave up his fabricated story and told the truth, on April 12, 1973.