The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (15 page)

“In fact, the Bureau’s got the job of digging it out. The problem is, they’re a proud organization, they’re going to have to do their jobs, correct?” the president, being a realist, pointed out.
*
Haldeman agreed, but he was not pleased with this fact. Nixon continued, “It’s just such a ridiculous God damn thing, it really is.”

Haldeman turned the conversation to scheduling matters, a veto message, a meeting with Henry Kissinger before Henry traveled to California, and a call to Governor Ronald Reagan about Kissinger’s forthcoming trip (which the president called “a pure boondoggle”). Then, as this session was ending, Nixon returned to Mitchell. “We’re doing the right thing on John, don’t you agree?” Nixon asked. Haldeman noted, “[Mitchell] can’t carry the
kind of personal load he does and still run a campaign. It’s one of the reasons you got a mess in the campaign, because he couldn’t do it, and he knew it. And locking her up, or any of those other things—”

“Wouldn’t work,” Nixon said.

“Well, even if it would work, it doesn’t really solve the [Watergate] problem.”

When Haldeman departed at 6:15
P.M.
, the president talked with Rose Mary Woods and told her “in the greatest confidence” that Mitchell was resigning because of Martha. As Nixon was leaving the Oval Office to head up to the residence, he told Rose that Mitchell was “a good guy” for the way he was dealing with Martha. Rose agreed. “Poor man.” she said.

Before heading to California for eighteen days at his San Clemente home, which became the Western White House offices during such visits, the president held a ceremony in the Oval Office to commemorate the signing of the Twenty-sixth Amendment, giving eighteen-year-olds the right to vote, which had been adopted a year earlier, on July 1, 1971.

Two weeks had passed since the arrests at the DNC, and there was little new reporting in the news accounts.
The Washington Post
was rehashing earlier Watergate stories with new details about the arrests at the DNC’s Watergate complex, but the
New York Times
had stopped all coverage. (In fact, the
Times
would largely ignore the Watergate story until January 1973, when they hired investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
³⁰
)

Between Nixon and Colson, Watergate came up only in passing comments, when Nixon quizzed Colson further about Hunt, but Colson provided nothing new. Nonetheless, the president and Colson soon contrived a counterploy scheme to blame the Democrats for a staged break-in at the Republican National Committee (RNC), one that was never executed.
³¹

While preparing to travel to California Nixon dictated his reflections on the Watergate situation to his diary: “The major problem on the Watergate is simply to clean the thing up by having whoever was responsible admit what happened. Certainly I am satisfied that nobody in the White House had any knowledge or approved any such activity, and that Mitchell was not aware of it as well.”
³²
At that point he thought he had done nothing wrong. However, when writing his memoirs some six years later, the former president better understood his actions in the days following the arrests, noting
that he had taken “the first steps down the road that eventually led to the end of [his] presidency.”

In his memoir he acknowledged that he did nothing to discourage the various false stories being developed to explain the break-in, and that he had “approved efforts to encourage the CIA to intervene and limit the FBI investigation.”
³³
He said his decisions were prompted by what he perceived “as an annoying and strictly political problem,” so he “was looking for a way to deal with Watergate that would minimize the damage to me, my friends, and my campaign, while giving the least advantage to my political opposition.” In short, Nixon viewed Watergate in terms of “politics pure and simple,” and he played it “tough” because that’s how the Democrats and their sympathetic news media partners played it.
³⁴
But Nixon, trained in the law, surely recognized that a good motive did not justify criminal activities.

In fact, Nixon’s attitudes and motives were shared by others at the highest levels of his administration: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and myself. No one was considering the criminal implications of our actions, only the political consequences of inaction. No one doubted that breaking into and bugging the Democratic National Committee was against the law, yet no one, particularly Ehrlichman and myself, as lawyers, paused to examine the laws that come into force in a situation like that in which we now found ourselves. Offenses such as conspiracy and obstruction of justice are not bright-line crimes that are immediately and easily discernible to those not experienced in criminal law; they are ones in which the wrongful conduct can be less than conspicuous. A striking number of lawyers found themselves on the wrong side of the law during Watergate, and almost all of them did so out of ignorance of criminal law. But ignorance of the law has never been an acceptable justification, and good motives do not excuse criminal conduct, with the classic law school example being Jean Valjean of
Les Misérables
, who stole a loaf of bread for his sister’s starving children. He was still a thief.

Everyone knows the difference between telling the truth and lying, and that lying, when done under oath, constitutes perjury. In the case of Watergate, the effort to keep the cover-up contained without lying to investigators became increasingly challenging as time passed. When the president left for California on July 1, the scenario that would place responsibility for the Watergate activities no higher than G. Gordon Liddy was the theory, and the hope. But in practice, it only raised new
complications.

July 1972 Through December 1972

O
n July 2, 1972,
The Washington Post
somewhat breathlessly reported that “a force of 150 FBI agents has begun a nationwide search for Howard E. [
sic
] Hunt, the former White House consultant” linked to the DNC bugging.
¹
The White House knew that Hunt could “undisappear,” as Haldeman told Nixon on June 20, and today it is clear that there was, in fact, no nationwide FBI search for Hunt; actually, as the
Post
reported a few days later, Hunt’s lawyer, William O. Bittman, a former assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice who had successfully prosecuted Jimmy Hoffa, had called the Watergate prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office and informed them that his client was available whenever they wanted to speak with him.

Apart from the
Post
, most Americans viewed the arrests at the Watergate as little more than politics as usual, as Nixon himself had earlier surmised. In its first post-Watergate poll, Gallup reported on Nixon’s standing versus both Democratic contenders: Against McGovern the president received 53 percent of the vote to McGovern’s 37 percent, with 10 percent undecided, and against Vice President Hubert Humphrey the president led 55 percent to 33 percent, with 12 percent undecided. When Governor George Wallace was added to the mix, Gallup still had Nixon victorious, although his percentage dropped, as did those of other candidates.
²

Although there wasn’t any secret recording equipment installed at the Western White House at San Clemente, the president’s diary, later testimony and others’ memoirs reveal that Watergate remained very much on his mind during his eighteen-day visit to his California home. Several key events took place and related decisions were made during this working
vacation.

O
n July 5 acting FBI director Pat Gray telephoned CIA deputy director Vernon Walters to ask for a formal written memorandum instructing the FBI to hold up interviewing the leads regarding the Mexican money that had passed through Bernard Barker’s bank account. (Walters had informally made such a request earlier.) Although CIA director Richard Helms had not changed his own mind on the matter, Walters was unaware of Helms’s thinking, and that he wanted to keep the FBI out of the CIA’s relationship with Hunt, so he informed Gray that the CIA had no interest in anything relating to the FBI’s Watergate investigation.
¹
The conversation with Walters prompted Gray to call Clark MacGregor later that day to warn the president that his staff was interfering with the FBI’s investigation.
²

Nixon reported in his diary that Pat Gray had called, “greatly concerned about the Watergate case and that Walters had come in to see him indicating that the CIA had no interest in the matter and that pursuing the investigation would not be an embarrassment to the CIA. He said that he and Walters both felt that some people either at the White House or the [reelection] committee were trying to cover up things which would be a mortal blow to me—rather than assisting in the investigation.” The president further noted that when “Ehrlichman came in he was astounded to find out that I had this conversation. He then told me that the problem was that the unraveling of the case would not be particularly embarrassing as far as this instant matter was concerned, but that it would involve perfectly legitimate activities that
would be hard to explain from other investigations, including “the Ellsberg case, the Bay of Pigs, and other matters where we had an imperative need to get the facts.”
³
Like Haldeman, Ehrlichman merely alluded to Liddy and Hunt’s earlier White House activities without explaining to Nixon that they had bungled another surreptitious burglary in September 1971.

Nixon’s July 6 diary note reveals that during his conversation with Haldeman on June 23, when Helms and Walters had been sent to the FBI, the president was acting on information from Haldeman that had led him to believe that Gray wanted help from Walters in controlling the investigation. Then, he added in his diary (while the subject was still fresh in his mind), on June 30 Haldeman had again explained that the FBI wanted to limit the investigation but was under pressure from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Based on these prior conversation with Haldeman, Nixon was understandably confused by Gray’s July 6 call informing him, rather bluntly, that it appeared the White House was trying to frustrate the FBI’s inquiry, which is exactly what the president was saying he did
not
want to do, as it might involve the White House in Watergate. Nixon closed this July 6 entry:

Certainly the best thing to do is to have the investigation pursued to its normal conclusion. In any event, we have to live with this one and hope to bring it to a conclusion without too much rubbing off on the presidency before the election. It is one of those cases where subordinates in a campaign, with the very best of motives, go off on some kick which inevitably embarrasses the top man. In this instance, however, how we handle it may make the difference as to how we come out. In any event, as I emphasized to Ehrlichman and Haldeman, we must do nothing to indicate to Pat Gray or to the CIA that the White House is trying to suppress the investigation. On the other hand, we must cooperate with the investigation all the way along the line.
⁴

Haldeman was a bit more to the point in describing the situation in a note he made after a long meeting in San Clemente with MacGregor about the campaign: “The P[resident] and I then met for a couple of hours with E[hrlichman] afterward. Got into the Watergate caper problem. Walters apparently has finked out and spilled the beans to Pat Gray, which complicates the issue substantially.”
⁵
Clearly Haldeman’s effort to manipulate the situation to trim the Watergate investigation had failed. He had distorted the recommendation from Mitchell that I had passed along on June 23, not to mention
created a ticking time bomb for the president, directly involving him in the cover-up six days after the arrests at the DNC.

Nixon’s July 6 meeting in San Clemente with Ehrlichman was their first conversation of any substance about the Watergate incident. Haldeman was taking a few days off with his family and some friends during this California trip, so Ehrlichman was spending substantial time with the president, during which he shared more bad news about Watergate.
⁶
Ehrlichman told him about Jeb Magruder’s possible involvement, and that Magruder was going to be questioned by the FBI. (Nixon, in turn, noted in his diary that “Magruder had been Liddy’s immediate superior and had been responsible for authorizing money for him.”) Ehrlichman explained that Magruder might have to take the Fifth Amendment, because even if the prosecutors had no evidence of “his involvement in the planning and execution of the bugging, his relationship to Liddy was such they might be able to draw him in as a part of a conspiracy.”
⁷

Gray’s call and his learning of Magruder’s role remained very much on the president’s mind the following day, according to Ehrlichman’s contemporaneous notes. More specifically Nixon was considering his direction to Haldeman to have the CIA cut off the FBI’s Watergate investigation into Mexico and Hunt. He told Ehrlichman of his concern that “the release of the Pentagon Papers has led to a demand for declassification of a lot of secret documents and may lead to grave consequences for the CIA and its former officials. They have to worry about the Bay of Pigs and Diem’s assassination and other things,” and he reported that Haldeman had a study by former White House aide Tom Huston on this matter. Nixon told Ehrlichman, “Howard Hunt was privy to most of the CIA’s problems, you know. It all will blow! We tried, but we can’t have this followed up. Gray and Walters must tell people that there is no effort to cover up either by the White House or the committee to reelect. The cover-up is the worst thing. Cover-up is how I nailed Truman. It can hurt deeply.”
⁸

On Saturday, the president and Ehrlichman spent four hours together walking and talking along California beaches, and swimming. Both men
later wrote in detail about their conversation, and their accounts largely correspond. The president again referred to Gray’s call and insisted that there could be no appearance of a cover-up, “Not a whiff of it.” He wanted Ehrlichman to get it out to the press that the president’s feeling was, Let the chips fall where they may. Then, spinning out what Ziegler might announce, Ehrlichman quotes Nixon as saying, “No one in the White House is involved. Our own investigation is completed, and that’s the finding.” Ehrlichman said he wondered “what investigation he was talking about, because I wasn’t aware of any that could be called ‘ours.’” Both of their accounts indicate that clemency for those involved in Watergate was discussed, and they agreed that no one should approach the president on the subject. Nixon, though, did not close the door to the potential of it after the election.
⁹

Ehrlichman claims that they also spoke about Hunt and Liddy’s involvement in the break-in at Dr. Fielding’s office. He later claimed that Nixon also brought up the subject, albeit in vague terms, during their July 6 conversation, but there was nothing vague about their conversation on the beach on the eighth. They discussed what Howard Hunt had done and what he knew and “that included his California burglary, his attempts to prove that John Kennedy had caused the failure at the Bay of Pigs and his similar project involving the assassination of Diem.”
¹⁰
Ehrlichman’s account in his memoir, however, conflicts with the records of both his own prior statements and that made by Nixon, not to mention the fact that, when I later gave this information about the Ellsberg break-in to Nixon during a conversation on March 17, 1973, he claimed it was the first he was aware of it.
¹¹

While Nixon was in California, George McGovern was nominated by the Democratic National Convention in Miami as the party’s presidential nominee, and McGovern, in turn, selected Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton as his running mate. The chaos of the convention pleased the president and his senior staff, for it only confirmed their assessment of the disorganization in their opponent’s campaign. But things were not going all that smoothly for the well-oiled Nixon organization either, as they learned upon returning to Washington on July 18.

During the president’s stay in California the FBI had interviewed many
of the key figures on the reelection committee: G. Gordon Liddy (pre-departure June 28), who was later dismissed in a staged firing for his refusal to cooperate with the FBI; John Mitchell (July 5); Maurice Stans (July 5 and 14); and several lower-level staffers. Based on leads from these conversations, the FBI scheduled an interview with Jeb Magruder on July 20, which was a disaster waiting to happen, as Magruder had been involved in the development and implementation of Liddy’s illegal plans, and he was generally not one to take responsibility for his mistakes.

To bring Haldeman and Ehrlichman up to date on this pending situation, they requested I meet them on Air Force One when they landed at Andrews Air Force Base. We met in the president’s cabin on the empty plane on the evening of July 18, 1972. I reported what I knew of the FBI and grand jury investigations (which was much less than investigators and the public later assumed), as well as on Herb Kalmbach’s efforts. He was an attorney who did personal work for the president on his real estate holdings and a major CRP fund-raiser who was also raising money for and distributing it to the six men Liddy had involved in the Watergate fiasco. Haldeman and Ehrlichman had authorized me to speak with him after John Mitchell had requested I do so, and I informed them that he had paid for attorneys and living expenses for the so-called Watergate gang, as those involved in the break-in were occasionally called in the early days.

Most of the concern was with Magruder’s forthcoming FBI interview. Earlier that afternoon I had learned that Magruder had found a witness to corroborate his false testimony that the money he had authorized be paid to Liddy—some $199,000
*
—was intended for legitimate campaign security purposes. I expressed serious concern about Magruder’s concocted story (which, four decades later, I have come to realize was the scenario Ehrlichman had developed with Mitchell and Haldeman on the morning of June 21), not to mention the fact that Magruder had enlisted his assistant, Bart Porter, to support his false story. I also reported to Haldeman and Ehrlichman that Hugh Sloan, who served as treasurer of the finance committee, had resisted Magruder’s efforts to enlist him in lying, and they were now at odds, with Magruder claiming Sloan had stolen money and Sloan charging that Magruder was trying to get him to commit perjury.

Haldeman noted this meeting in his diary and the Magruder problem:

As of now, Dean feels that they are going to move on Magruder and that the only thing we can do is to have him take the rap that they’ll hit him with. And he feels that I’ve got to talk to him and convince him that this is what he should do. I’m not at all sure that is the way to handle it, that I can do it. But Ehrlichman called me at home later and confirmed that he thought we should do that, although he’d adjourned the Dean meeting after it became clear that he couldn’t read exactly what my reaction was on it. This is a real powder keg, I guess, and John’s sitting on top of it. John Dean is trying to keep the lid on, but is not at all sanguine as to his ability to continue to do so.
¹²

In the days that followed both Ehrlichman and Haldeman would explain this situation to the president, as he increasingly requested updates on the status of the Watergate investigation. Until preparing this book—and discovering the conversations that follow—I was not aware that Nixon was deeply involved in the decision regarding Magruder’s perjured testimony, a deceit essential to the initial phase of the cover-up.
¹³