The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (18 page)

“Is anybody listening to the lawyers over there?” the president asked, about the reelection committee. Haldeman said they were, and that the two lawyers, Paul O’Brien and Ken Parkinson, were “just superb.” He then explained to the president the conflict that had developed between Mitchell and Ehrlichman: “It’s fallen into a pattern we’ve got,” which he described as “the Ehrlichman and Mitchell controversy,” where Mitchell is of the “totally-stonewall-it-the-hell-with-everybody” approach versus “Ehrlichman’s complete-panic-cut-everything-off-and-sink-it-immediately,” which was soon called the “hang-it-all-out route”—or some variation of it. Haldeman added, “They’re both wrong.” “Yeah,” the president agreed. “Fortunately, we haven’t followed either of their leads,” Haldeman concluded.

During a conversation at Camp David, Haldeman gave the president an update on Magruder: “There were no problems. We don’t have the interrogation report, but the lawyer who sat in said he did extremely well.”
⁹
“And
is he going before the grand jury now?” the president asked. Haldeman reported, “Not as of yet.”

“Well, what the hell is the grand jury going to do, then? Are they going to keep, keep, keep, keep investigating? Is that the whole point of this thing?” Nixon pressed. Haldeman said, “It seems they will.” On reflection, the president felt that this was not all bad: “As far as I’m concerned, that’s the best of both worlds. Let it go.” Haldeman suggested, “Let it go until after the election.” But then Nixon simply dismissed them all, “Oh, they can, those pricks.” Haldeman continued, “Again, Ehrlichman urges to get them indicted now, get them out, but I’m not really sure that’s the best, if you accept as inevitable that you’re going to get indictments, and then you have to get them before the election. But better yet is to have nothing happen.” And Haldeman reported that there was still a reasonable chance that nothing would happen: “They’re just going to let it go.”

The president wanted to know who was talking with whom. “Dean is instructed to, talking to whom? Talking to you?” Haldeman answered, “He’s talking to us.” Nixon again wanted to be clear, “You and Ehrlichman?” Haldeman affirmed that that was the arrangement, and added the other people with whom I was talking: “On our side, Mitchell and two lawyers and Petersen at Justice and Gray at the Bureau.”

“You know, at the Bureau, we ought to put a Bureau man in there somewhere. We’ve got to. I don’t know [whom],” Nixon said. But Haldeman had a suggestion: “Well, this guy Feldman is pushing hard. Is that his name?” “Felt,” the president corrected. Haldeman said Felt was “pushing to try and be our boy,” noting, “he’s obviously looking to be more, I guess.” “He is our boy,” the president observed and added, “yeah, you know, I want one that’s
our
boy. I’m not going to screw around on that score.” Referring to his selection of a new FBI director, the president said, “But, you see, if you take him out of the Bureau, it’s very hard for anybody to piss on him,” meaning that if his new director was drawn from the FBI, he would be safe.

“We ought to throw some tests at Felt,” Haldeman suggested. “We could put some real sticky wickets to him and see how he bounces.” Then the conversation turned to a sticky wicket for the Secret Service. The president wanted to know if they had a line into McGovern’s Secret Service protection detail. Haldeman said that they did not. “We should, we can obviously try,” Nixon pressed. “Well, sure, ought to try, but I don’t know how to do it,” Haldeman admitted. Nixon surmised that his opponents had tried to get the
Secret Service to provide information about him, but Haldeman was not so sure and thought it very risky should they get caught. Nixon backed off and said that he did not want Haldeman to try, but instead he hoped that someone in the Secret Service might “sometimes volunteer information.” Haldeman thought some might like to do that, and the conversation drifted into vague talk and prospects about the potential of causing political problems for McGovern and DNC chairman Larry O’Brien.

With the president’s busy schedule and a slowdown in the investigation and reporting on it, I found no recorded conversations focusing on Watergate from July 23 through July 27. On the twenty-eighth, Haldeman mentioned relatively good news during that morning’s meeting, assuring the president that the investigation was progressing nicely, with nothing amiss.
¹⁰
“It’s on a reasonably good track, considering,” Haldeman said. “The grand jury is going through the 1701
*
people, but Petersen’s view to Dean is that, I think we’re going to be able to finish this grand jury thing up pretty quick, and they’ll bring indictments on the seven. And we can probably bring them the later part of August or wait around until mid-September. And Dean said he got the distinctive feeling that Petersen was asking for guidance as to which we wanted. But he was also telling me they were going to bring indictments on seven, and that’s very good news, because that means they’re indicting the Watergate five, plus Hunt and Liddy and, and then that’s all. John [Ehrlichman] says, if they—”

“Are they going to put out a statement about the others?” the president asked.

“Apparently not. They’ll just have to indict those, and our view, I think, is to wait, because there’s a very good chance of it not going to trial until after the election.” The president, who was pleasantly surprised, added an “Oh, yeah?” before Haldeman continued, “It will be called on a special calendar, and the special calendar is fairly clear, so it could come up pretty soon. But even if it gets to court, there’s a set of pretrial motions they’ve got to go through, and all of that stuff. So, John [Ehrlichman] feels that we ought to go for a delay and hope nothing happens before the election, because we’re better off with that than we are with anything. My original feeling was, get
it out now, get it done in August, and get it over with. But that might hit it right in the middle of the Republican convention—”

“No, no, no, no,” the president interrupted, and Haldeman continued, “—where there’s a lot of TV attention, which would be a problem, too.” The president wanted to be sure he understood who was going to be indicted, so he asked, “If they indict seven, can we trust the ones they’re thinking about are Hunt and the other fellow,” he said, forgetting Liddy’s name. Haldeman assured him, “That’s almost an ideal scenario. If they would indict seven and then not get around to the trial until after the election, we’re in pretty good shape. Now, on the [Democrats’] civil suit, the judge took some time off. He’s out of chambers. So he’s coming back, and what they’re going to do there is, we have a motion, which they think the judge will probably uphold, to withhold any further steps on the civil suit pending the outcome of the criminal suit, that any action on the civil suit would damage or interfere with the rights of the defendants in the criminal suit, or something like that. They’ve got some legal matter, fiddling around with those, which they think they’ll get, and if we do that, then we’re home free.”

The president had an observation on the timing of the indictment: “The trial will never be finished before the election. Well, if the people plead not guilty. If they plead guilty, it would be [before the election].” Haldeman reported, “We know some of them are going to go not guilty. Hunt is going to go not guilty.”

“Hell yes. Fight it to the end,” the president said. “And you know, the problem that you could have on this is that some lower-echelon shit-ass at the Justice Department or the FBI will try to leak out stuff about this and that and force, in some way or other, force it to another direction. You know that can happen. Fortunately, we have not tried to cover up Mitchell. We’ve allowed them to cooperate with the investigation.”

“The record has to show us in pretty good shape,” Haldeman said.

Clearly, based on his conversations with Haldeman, the president understood that Magruder’s perjured testimony had saved John Mitchell, not to mention prevented the further unraveling of the Watergate cover-up. But he was thinking politically, not legally. He understood that Magruder had largely cooked this story up by himself. There is no evidence suggesting that it ever occurred to him that his knowledge and approval of Magruder’s actions effectively placed him at the top of a conspiracy to suborn perjury. But even Haldeman’s encouraging news did not mean he could relax, for
Magruder had yet to appear before the grand jury. Rather, for Nixon, it was time to start thinking seriously about getting even and dealing more effectively with his enemies now that his reelection was almost a certainty.

During 10:33
A.M.
to 11:50
A.M.
Oval Office conversations with Haldeman, following a brief discussion about obtaining information from Larry O’Brien’s taxes, the two men turned to the subject of news leaks about the Watergate investigation.
¹¹
Nixon said he had noticed the wire service story about the money.
*
“How will that affect us?” the president asked. Haldeman said, “I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’ll find out today.” They speculated that the information had come from the Justice Department. Haldeman said they had plugged one leak at Justice, “But apparently there’s another. They said that this is inevitable.”

“Well, that’s not true,” Nixon protested.

“We’ve got people in there that are against us,” Haldeman said, referring to anti-Nixon attorneys, but he pointed out that they had pro-Nixon appointees as well. “They’re trying to keep it all bottled up, and they’ve done it,” he reminded the president. “Considering the explosive nature of what’s there, they’ve done a pretty good job.” After making that point, Haldeman turned to the latest information about the investigation, which he had obtained from John Ehrlichman after he’d met with Attorney General Kleindienst the day before.
*

Haldeman explained, “Now, the scenario on that, they all seem pretty well agreed on, is that the only danger is Magruder, who does have to go before the grand jury. But Dean has gone over and over it with him, and Jeb is going to stay with his story, and stay with it solid. They think there’s no problem if he does, and that he will not be indicted. They will come down
with seven indictments, the five plus Hunt and Liddy. That’ll be about September fifteenth that they’ll bring the indictments.” Haldeman explained why, with pretrial motions, the case would not be tried before the election. He noted, “We’ll have to ride out the very bad story. We’ll have to ride through the indictment story. But Liddy’s already tarnished, and Hunt’s already tarnished, so it’s no great new revelation. It’ll just be a confirmation of previous stuff, and it’ll be bad. It’ll hurt us, but not like the trial would. And Dean is not worried about that, and he also thinks that we’re in good shape on holding the civil case until after the criminal.”

“On the grounds it would be prejudicial,” the president added. Haldeman then turned to Judge Richey’s handling of the civil lawsuit. “Judge Richey is playing everything exactly right,” he reported. “The only concern I’ve got there is that Judge Richey is the dumbest judge in the entire business, apparently. Fortunately, he’s on our side, and his dumbness may help us, because he’s not encumbered by any”—Haldeman chuckled—“any intellectual need to do certain things. And Judge Robb, who is a little more perceptive—”

“Roger Robb,” the president injected, with a tone of surprise.
*

Haldeman continued “—has taken it upon himself to, ah—”

“Advising Richey,” Nixon injected anticipating Haldeman’s report.

“—sort of take a fatherly interest in guiding Richey’s hand. And Robb clearly sees all the implications.”

“Roger would,” Nixon confirmed, pleased with this information.

“So they think we’re in as good of shape as we could hope to be. Here it is, we’re sitting on a powder keg, and then the kind of thing, like the thing that came out this morning”—referring to the Woodward and Bernstein story—“there’s all sorts of possibilities of someone—Oh, they subpoenaed Stans before the grand jury, but we got that quashed, fortunately.” Haldeman overstated the case, for what actually happened was that arrangements had been made for Stans to give his grand jury testimony at the Department of Justice, given the leaks coming out of the courthouse. Stans had been outraged at being hauled before the grand jury, and while he was not involved in Watergate, Haldeman explained why Mitchell had Ehrlichman intervene:
“And they’re worried about Stans. And they don’t think he’s stable enough to handle the questioning very well. He gets indignant, and they just think he’s not such a good witness. They don’t want him under questioning. Magruder, they’re pretty straight on. Magruder’s scared. He asked Dean, ‘Might they indict me just to get an indictment for political reasons, or whatever?’ Dean said, ‘No, the court won’t do that, and the jury won’t do that.’ And Jeb said, ‘Well, I just want you to know, if, if they do, that I’m staying with my story all the way. I’ll go down with ’em, and there’s no question about that.’ And Dean said, ‘The one thing I’m worried about with you, I know you’ll do that. The thing I’m worried about with you is that, after you do that, if you don’t get indicted, that you’ll start running around blabbing about how, you know, you pulled yourself out of that. And let me explain to you that there’s a five-year statute of limitations on this case. And that you’re subject to being hauled in at any time in the next five years, and you keep your God damn mouth shut. Don’t talk to your wife, or your mother, your kids, or anybody else.’” Nixon approved. “Damn right,” he said softly. Haldeman continued with his version of my conversation with Magruder: “‘If you get out of this one, just remember, you’ve got this cloud hanging over you for five years. And you’re not out ’til that’s over, so don’t have a celebration when the indictments come through and you’re not on ’em.’”

“He feels they will not indict him?” Nixon asked.

“That’s right. They have not made a case against Magruder. A lot of lines lead to him, but they don’t tie—” The president interrupted to ask about the Sloan and Magruder conflict, and Haldeman reported that Magruder’s concocted account would impeach Sloan on a few details, but Sloan had done fine. “But inevitably some of what he had to say leads to Magruder. But Magruder’s just going to say, and honestly believes, that Sloan pocketed some of the money. There’s some discrepancy in how much money went where, and Magruder’s going to say he thinks Sloan pocketed it.”