The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (112 page)

32
Sifting through the information in the recorded conversations, along with other information now available, such as the Watergate special prosecutor’s interviews with Earl Silbert on August 30 and 31, 1973, has enabled me to pinpoint matters I could only address broadly in testimony and
Blind Ambition
and to recall others I had forgotten. See, e.g., Peter F. Rient and Judy Denny, September 6, 1973, “Interview of Earl Silbert on August 30–31, 1973,” Memorandum to the Files, Record Group 140, NARA. And while I have not sought to fill in all such detail, I have noted this information generally in my account.

33
Conversation No. 44-103.

34
Conversation No. 891-1. Note: This conversation was partially transcribed by NARA for the lawsuit filed by Haldeman when he was seeking damages from the government for not turning over his diary dictation recordings and notes in a sufficiently timely manner. The court ruled against Haldeman, since he had turned over ownership of this material to protect it from the Watergate special prosecutors under executive privilege in 1973, and then claimed ownership only later. Had the Watergate special prosecutor had Haldeman’s diary it would have resulted in multiple additional criminal charges against the president, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and others, not to mention made prosecution of the crimes with which they were charged much easier. See
Haldeman v. Freeman
(the administrator of the General Services Administration), 558 F. Supp. 514 (1983).

35
Conversation No. 425-44. (Extremely poor audio quality.)

36
Conversation No. 44-115.

37
Conversation No. 44-117.

38
Conversation No. 892-4.

39
Conversation No. 892-14.

40
E.g., Seymour M. Hersh, “Pressures to Plead Guilty Alleged in Watergate Case,”
New York Times
, January 15, 1973, 63 and “McCord Reported Linking Payoffs to a G.O.P. Lawyer: Says He Believes Parkinson Paid Defendants—Lawyer Denies It,”
New York Times
, April 9, 1973, 77.

41
Conversation No. 893-10.

42
Stans later wrote that he did not approve the settlement; rather, it had occurred in “early 1973” at the behest of “lawyers at the White House that we should close out this embarrassing litigation.” Stans reports that in 1976, Spencer Oliver, whose telephone had been wiretapped by Liddy et al., and who had filed a separate lawsuit, settled for $215,000. And in 1977 the four Cubans who had been arrested in the DNC, and who had sued the Nixon reelection committee for misleading them into undertaking what they believed was a “national security” operation, settled for $200,000. See Maurice H. Stans,
The Terrors of Justice
(New York: Everest House, 1978), 251.

43
Conversation No. 893-16.

44
Conversation No. 893-21.

45
Walter Rugaber, “Watergate Grand Jury Hears Two Former White House Aides and Segretti: None Will Comment,”
New York Times
, April 12, 1973, 41.

46
Conversation No. 894-2.

47
Conversation No. 894-4.

48
Conversation No. 894-7.

49
Conversation No. 428-12.

50
The point that Ehrlichman mentioned to the president—that Strachan had testified to $350,000 when, in fact, he returned $328,000—was not the most serious problem with his testimony. He was later indicted for perjury regarding that testimony on matters Ehrlichman did not raise with the president—namely, to whom he had delivered the money and why. See count thirteen of the March 1, 1974, indictment in
U.S. v. Mitchell et al
.

51
In Strachan’s testimony before the Senate he acknowledged destroying these documents. See 6
SSC
2490–91.

52
The question of what Gordon Strachan knew and when he knew it has remained an open question, and even years later Strachan hesitatingly responded to questions about his knowledge with “I don’t think so”–type answers, seemingly unsure himself. Strachan deposition, May 19, 1995,
Deans v. St. Martin’s et al.
It may be that Strachan never had copies of the wiretap synopses at the White House, because Magruder later testified he never allowed them to leave his office; he claims, rather, that Strachan saw them there. See Magruder, 2
SSC
797–98, 827. This claim is denied by Strachan. See Strachan, 6
SSC
2451–52. While Strachan denies knowledge of the Watergate bugging, he clearly admitted to Ehrlichman seeing what he believed to be the fruit, which is not easy to reconcile. Strachan also failed a polygraph examination administered by the FBI on his denial of advance knowledge of the break-in. See April 24, 1973, Silbert Memo, Watergate Special Prosecution Files, NARA. But this could also have been because of his uncertainty as to his knowledge.

53
While this conversation is difficult to hear, there is no question for me regarding what was being discussed. Similarly, the archivists at NARA, when preparing the subject log for this conversation, clearly understood this part of the conversation related to what they categorized as the discussion “Delivery of G. Gordon Liddy reports.”

54
Conversation No. 44-158.

55
Conversation Nos. 895-8, 895-22, 895-23, 38-12 and 38-15.

56
Conversation No. 427-1.

57
Conversation Nos. 895-14, 38-9 and 38-14.

58
Conversation No. 895-8.

59
Conversation No. 895-14.

60
Conversation No. 895-22.

61
Conversation Nos. 427-1.

62
Conversation No. 38-9.

63
Conversation No. 38-12.

64
Liddy later reported that he had learned Greenspun had information in his safe that could defeat the presidential campaign of Senator Edmund Muskie, so they planned such an operation. But since his plans for the reelection committee had not been approved, he sought to do the undertaking with the Howard Hughes organization. Liddy and Hunt met with Hughes’s people but could not get the funding from them either, so the plan was abandoned. See G. Gordon Liddy,
Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 204–5.

65
Conversation No. 38-14.

66
Conversation No. 38-15.

April 14 to 30, 1973

1
National Archives amd Records Administration (NARA), Conversation No. 46-113.

2
Conversation No. 428-19.

3
The “Chicago Seven” were seven defendants—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines and Lee Weiner—who were charged with conspiracy, inciting a riot and related offenses arising out of their anti–Vietnam War protest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. In February 1970 five of the seven were found guilty of inciting a riot, but on appeal, all the convictions were overturned, and Nixon’s Department of Justice decided not to retry them.

4
The “Scottsboro Boys,” as they are typically called, were nine black teenage boys who were falsely accused of rape and tried and convicted by an all-white jury, with eight of them given death sentences, in Scottsboro, Alabama. The Communist Party tried to assist them in appealing the verdicts in a long and sordid travesty of justice. This sad story has been recounted in books, movies, documentaries and a Broadway musical. Only in November 2013 did Alabama grant a posthumous pardon to the last of these men, who had been framed and brutalized by Southern justice. Shadows and echoes of this horrific past still exist.

5
Ehrlichman provided a very surface analysis of the rift that actually started during the 1968 presidential campaign, when both were candidate Nixon’s senior advisers. In fact, Ehrlichman did not think Mitchell was very smart, and Mitchell thought Ehrlichman arrogant and full of himself, the kind of staff man who used his proximity to Nixon to undercut Mitchell’s recommendations to push his own ideas, particularly after he became attorney general in January 1969. Mitchell was far more politically conservative than Ehrlichman, who fell on the moderate to progressive side of many issues. By the time Watergate occurred in June 1972, they could barely speak to each. I attended countless meetings during which Mitchell refused to speak directly to Ehrlichman; rather, he would do so by asking Haldeman or me a question in Ehrlichman’s presence to convey information. Privately each man blamed the other for Watergate. Mitchell blamed Ehrlichman for sending a loose cannon like Liddy to the campaign operation without warning them he was a screwball, if not a psychopath. Ehrlichman blamed Mitchell for allowing Watergate to occur on his watch as head of the campaign. But dating it to Haynsworth and Carswell worked nicely for Ehrlichman, because Nixon too felt Mitchell had done a bad job in recommending these judges as candidates for the high Court, and the White House had taken charge of the Supreme Court selection process. This strained relationship was a key reason for my becoming the intermediary among all these parties as the cover-up unfolded, for I had never taken sides. See John W. Dean,
The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment that Redefined the Supreme Court
(New York: Free Press, 2001).

6
Nixon’s memory was wrong, as Adams’s memoir clearly establishes. Note: Adams writes that the decision was left to him, and made by him. See Sherman Adams,
First Hand Report: The Story of the Eisenhower Administration
(Charleston, SC: reprint, BiblioBazaar, 2011), 447–48.

7
See Dean Senate testimony, 3 Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (SSC) 1013, 1312.

8
As his numbering system indicates, Ehrlichman recorded hundreds of telephone calls, but less than one hundred survived with his departure from the White House. He had some sort of special setup to record both Magruder and Mitchell when he met with them on April 14, 1973. While there has never been a transcript prepared on these meetings, I am told that the cassette with the recorded conversations has survived and resides either in the Watergate special prosecutor’s files at NARA, in College Park, MD, or at the Nixon library.

9
Conversation No. 896-4(a).

10
Conversation No. 896-5.

11
Haldeman wrote in his diary for March 28, 1973, when I told him that Mitchell had finally admitted to me that he had signed off on Liddy’s plans, he noted: “Mitchell and Magruder both told him [Dean] that they had both signed off on the project, which Mitchell told me,
also.” H. R. Haldeman,
The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1993), 618.

12
Mitchell makes very clear, as set forth in the transcript of Ehrlichman’s secretly recorded session with him, why yours truly and others became involved in the Watergate cover-up after the arrests at the DNC. When discussing my motive, they had the following exchange, which addressed not only my motives but Mitchell’s:

MITCHELL
: Well, certainly there wasn’t any corrupt motive.

EHRLICHMAN
: [
Unintelligible
].

MITCHELL
: Poor John [Dean] is the guy that just got caught in the middle of this thing.

EHRLICHMAN
: Sure, and that’s what I said.

MITCHELL
: Like, ah, like so many others that were first of all trying to keep the lid on it until after the election.

EHRLICHMAN
: Yeah.

MITCHELL
: And, in addition to that, to keep the lid on all the other things that, uh, were going on over here, uh, that—

EHRLICHMAN
: Well, the, ah—

MITCHELL
: —would have been worse, I think, than the Watergate business.

Ehrlichman transcript of April 14, 1973, meeting, Statement of Information, Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, Book IV Part 2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1974), 729.

13
Almost everyone on the list that Charlie Shaffer and I drew up was named either as an indicted or unindicted coconspirator in violation of the statutes cited on the list. By the time both Haldeman and Ehrlichman started testifying before the Senate Watergate committee they were unable to recall having ever seen my list or its contents. Haldeman, for example, was asked by Sam Dash: “By the way, did Mr. Dean ever show you, in April, a list of persons who would be involved in the Watergate which included your name on it?” Haldeman responded, “I certainly do not recall that at all.” 8
SSC
3058. Ehrlichman similarly denied having seen the list. 7 SSC 2857.

I note this because it is representative of the amnesia that overcame these men soon after departing the White House, and it was typical of the fact that no point of my testimony, however minor, would be too inconsequential for them to either deny or not recall. While I have ignored countless similar examples, this was the kind of petty lying that caused me to lose all respect for these former colleagues, who went way beyond any call of duty in their efforts to destroy me. But I have intentionally resisted gathering their later false statements in my recounting of what occurred, and as it in fact unfolded.

14
Conversation No. 428-28.

15
Jeb appears to have gone to some length to exaggerate my role in response to Charlie’s telephone call, but as often happened with Magruder’s testimony, when he placed his interpretation or spin on events, it was far from accurate. With time this all got sorted out, however. For example, Jeb was unaware of the fact that, after hearing of Liddy’s plans, I had tried to turn them off at the White House rather than, as he thought, promote them. In fact, Liddy was being pushed out of the White House by Bud Krogh and John Ehrlichman, because they thought (incorrectly) he would not cause problems at the reelection committee. When Jeb created his bogus testimony, it was a finished product when he enlisted me to support it, which I had never agreed to do. He did have—but was unaware of—the support of Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and the president for it, of which they were well aware, as the July and August 1972 conversations reveal. Jeb’s perception of the truth and the hard reality of a situation were often at odds.