The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (23 page)

On September 2 Democrats tried to depose John Mitchell, but his lawyers instructed him not to give anything other than his name and address, because those arrested in the DNC had filed a motion objecting to the prejudicial pretrial publicity that the Democrats’ lawsuit was generating. Williams, now aware that he had a real case, demanded a Saturday session with Judge Richey, who issued an order for Mitchell to be deposed on Monday, September 5. Califano never forgot the scene. Williams sat directly across from Mitchell in his office conference room, and on the table between them he had placed three large notebooks labeled Mitchell I, Mitchell II and Mitchell III. Williams periodically thumbed through the notebooks as he questioned a nervous Mitchell about the DNC break-in and bugging, alluding to information they had from Baldwin. (When he first described this deposition to me years later, Califano roared with laughter, as those notebooks were filled with blank sheets of paper.) After the deposition, Williams confided to Califano that he believed they had “one helluva lawsuit,” explaining, “I may not know much about politics, but I know when someone is lying and when he’s scared. John Mitchell had to squeeze his thighs together to avoid wetting his pants.”
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The next morning, September 6,
The Washington Post
had a front-page story about the deposition and featured a photo of Mitchell surrounded by reporters and photographers as he emerged from the two-hour grilling. Mitchell told reporters: “Neither the President nor anyone at the White House or anyone in authority at the committee working for his reelection [had] any responsibility for the break-in and alleged bugging attempt.” The story further reported that the attorney for the five men arrested at the DNC,
who had been named as defendants in the Democrats’ lawsuit, had served notice to depose ten Democratic Party officials, including Larry O’Brien.
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The president, meanwhile, was eager to arrange for the Secret Service to infiltrate Teddy Kennedy’s world by providing protection that would at the same time supply the White House with inside information about the senator. During a morning meeting in the Oval Office with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Nixon ordered his aides to “plant one or plant two” guys on Kennedy.
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(The undertaking ultimately failed, because Kennedy refused the offer.) Ehrlichman then gave the president a piece of bad news: He had had his man at the IRS, Roger Barth, personally review Larry O’Brien’s returns, and his taxes were in proper order. “It’s a dry hole,” Ehrlichman explained. Bobby Baker’s information was proving largely useless.

With the FBI’s investigation and the grand jury’s work largely completed, Watergate came up less frequently in the president’s conversations, although he did continue to ask Haldeman and Ehrlichman if a date had been set when the indictments would be handed down by the grand jury.
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Mid-September remained the best estimate. The president also asked Ehrlichman if he had been deposed by the Democrats, which he said he had not; he explained that he had seen Hunt and Liddy on only one occasion at the White House, and he “would not know their work product” if he was asked.
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When meeting with his top campaign fund-raiser and former secretary of commerce, Maurice Stans, the president asked about the well-being of Hugh Sloan, who Stans reported was struggling. “Well, we’ll take good care of him,” the president instructed Stans, if his testimony did not cause any problems.
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Woodward and Bernstein broke a front-page
Post
story based on Baldwin’s information under the headline B
UGGING “
P
ARTICIPANT”
G
IVE
S
D
ETAILS
: “Democratic investigators” had learned that “the telephone conversations of Democratic Party leaders were monitored, transcribed and then sent in memorandum form to high-ranking officials of President Nixon’s reelection committee and to a presidential assistant.” The FBI, however, had been unable to locate any of these documents.
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Nixon asked Haldeman about the
story during a brief morning meeting, but Haldeman was wrong when said he did not think the unnamed participant had been Martha Mitchell’s bodyguard, and he was unable to answer the president’s question about whether the grand jury had copies of the memoranda in question.
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If, as the article claimed, such information had been delivered to a presidential assistant, had anyone on his staff been called before the grand jury? Nixon asked. Haldeman assured him they had not.

The
Post
story reminded the president that they still had not developed an appropriate PR response to Watergate other than his August 29 press conference statements, and he began peppering Haldeman with questions about their plans, to which Haldeman had few answers. Nixon, eager to take the offensive, told Haldeman, “I’m just trying to think of getting a line on developments. I thought Dean would be doing it, you know? I mean, is there somebody on our side working on this? Maybe you’ve got to give it to Colson? He’d work hard. Or is he the right one?”

The president was satisfied when Haldeman said that Ehrlichman was working on it, but he cautioned that they were not planning on going “too far on the offensive” because of the developing congressional investigation. When the president asked for more information on the
Post
story, Haldeman called me for an update, and then reported to Nixon that the unidentified participant in the
Post
story was Alfred Baldwin: “He was assigned to Martha at one point. But he knows nothing, and everything he has, everything he does know has been told to the grand jury and will come out in the indictment. And whatever he’s given the Democrats, he can’t go beyond that. He doesn’t know any more. And we think he may have made up some of that.” This last comment referred to the claim by Baldwin that he thought he had delivered memoranda of the overheard conversations on one occasion to a presidential aide, and the only name he recognized was Bill Timmons. But that had never happened.

“Why is he talking to them?” the president asked. When Haldeman answered that he didn’t know, Nixon wondered how Baldwin fit in the picture, since a guy who was now talking to the Democrats was “a hell of a guy” to have been involved in the operation. Nixon wanted to know if they were all “kooky,” and Haldeman could not deny that analysis. “They were all kooky,” Haldeman conceded. “The Cubans, in their own way, are kooky Cubans,” he noted.

When they met later that afternoon in the EOB office, Haldeman
reported that everything was still on track for the indictments to be issued on Friday, September 15.
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Only those arrested in the DNC, plus Hunt and Liddy, would be named. As planned, they would “ride” the indictments with a MacGregor statement.

The president recalled that during the Hiss affair nothing seemed to hurt Hiss and his supporters until he was actually indicted. “Now, in our case,” the president told Haldeman, “we’ve got to be very, very careful to lay the foundation for the trial.” Nixon remained concerned that they would be charged with a cover-up, but Haldeman countered that the public would be getting more than anticipated with Hunt and Liddy being included in the indictment. Haldeman was thankful the indictments did not reach “upper levels of the committee or in the White House,” and both men were satisfied that all who would be named had already been publicly tarnished by Watergate.

Haldeman reported that they had leaked O’Brien’s tax information to the
Las Vegas Review Journal
.
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Herb Kalmbach was doing a further follow-up with Bobby Baker, and the president hoped Baker would produce negative information on either O’Brien or Teddy Kennedy, preferably O’Brien. Both Nixon and Haldeman were disappointed that there was little press interest in Teddy Kennedy’s ongoing affair with socialite Amanda Burden, a story Colson had been spreading to anyone who would listen. Haldeman reported that whenever Teddy campaigned for McGovern someone in the audience always carried a sign asking: Where’s Amanda, Teddy?

Consistent with his effort to take the offensive on Watergate, the president had Attorney General Kleindienst brief his cabinet and Republican congressional leaders at a breakfast in the State Dining Room on September 12. (I was not invited, and when Ziegler’s assistant, Gerald Warren, called to ask me why, I told him that I was certain it was so I would not be asked about the investigation I had never conducted.) During the closed session Kleindienst told the GOP leaders that the Watergate indictments would be handed down on Friday, September 15, and that no one at a high level of the reelection committee or at the White House would be named. Kleindienst said he anticipated claims from the Democrats and the news media of a “whitewash,” so he had hard data to refute that charge (which he later used, following the indictments). He reported that the FBI’s Watergate investigation had
exceeded that of the Kennedy assassination inquiry, for it had involved 333 FBI agents in 51 field offices who had followed 1,879 leads and undertaken 1,551 interviews that required 14,098 man-hours.
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Following the breakfast the president met with Haldeman and Colson in the Oval Office and, with Watergate still on his mind, asked Haldeman, “Any more new thoughts regarding the lawsuit?”
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Haldeman asked whether he had gotten the memo I had prepared, and when Nixon answered, “Yeah, yeah,” Haldeman nonetheless walked him through a few key points: Mitchell, who had learned of O’Brien’s tax audit, had suggested areas the committee lawyers might explore when deposing O’Brien. Henry Rothblatt, who represented the Cuban Americans, had learned that the DNC surveillance had revealed that both married men and women at the committee were having office affairs; he wanted to leak this information to embarrass them over the lawsuit. After Haldeman reviewed these points, the president was doubtful much would come from this litigation.
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Still concerned that the indictments would lead to accusations of a cover-up, they discussed an idea of Colson’s to create a special commission headed by former chief justice Earl Warren to examine the FBI’s and Justice Department’s Watergate investigations and establish that there had been no concealment. When Colson later joined the conversation, they continued exploring this problem, but no solution emerged.

The subject of the commission came up again the following morning at Camp David.
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“I talked to Kleindienst about it, and he just burst out laughing,” Haldeman explained. “And I said, ‘What’s so funny?’ And he said, ‘That’s been my idea for three weeks, but John Mitchell pisses on me every time I start to raise it. And he won’t even listen to it.’ And he said, ‘I didn’t have a commission in mind. What I had in mind was one man, and the one man I had in mind was—” “Earl Warren?” the president injected. Haldeman said that Kleindienst was suggesting former associate justice Tom Clark. Kleindienst felt that, rather than getting a commission, which would require staff and funding, they just appoint Clark, as an individual. When the president said he would feel better about these ideas if Mitchell supported them, Haldeman reported that he had already spoken to Mitchell, who was not opposed. Neither the president nor Haldeman was sure of Ehrlichman’s opinion of these proposals. “When it comes to making the judgment as to what you do or don’t do, Ehrlichman’s advice is often coy,” the president observed.

The president’s morning news summary reported that on the preceding evening the television networks had given Nixon a 63 percent to 29 percent lead over McGovern. All had reported that Maurice Stans had filed a five-million-dollar libel lawsuit against Larry O’Brien. Both the networks and
The Washington Post
reported that the Democrats had found another electronic bug in the telephone of Spence Oliver, the executive director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen and whose office McCord had bugged, at the DNC, and showed photographs of it. (Earl Silbert, the original Watergate lead prosecutor, correctly believed that the FBI had simply failed to discover the bug during its initial investigation. The FBI rejected this idea, however, and opened a new investigation of Oliver and the DNC, a gesture the committee found nothing short of harassment, believing the Nixon White House was behind it. Years later James McCord acknowledged that it was his bug, which the FBI had missed; he revealed yet another bug to prosecutors in April 1973.
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)

As anticipated, on September 15 the Department of Justice released the grand jury’s indictment, naming the five men arrested in the DNC and two former Nixon White House aides. The five were James W. McCord, former security coordinator for the reelection committee; Bernard L. Barker, president of a Miami real-estate business; Frank Sturgis, an anti-Castro activist; Eugenio Martinez, a real-estate broker in the Barker firm; and Virgilio R. Gonzales, a Miami locksmith. The former White House aides were G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt. The indictment charged the seven defendants with conspiracy, interception of oral and wire communications, second-degree burglary and unlawful possession of intercepting devices.
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While the public was generally indifferent to this development, Larry O’Brien stated, “We can only assume that the investigation will continue, since the indictments handed down today reflect only the most narrow construction of the crime that was committed.” O’Brien added, “We will continue to press for a far more thorough explanation of the funding of the crime that led to those indictments” and for the appointment of a special prosecutor. Although no one at the reelection committee celebrated the limited scope of the indictments, Magruder was extremely relieved.

Haldeman briefed the president during their morning meeting before the indictments were publicly announced and provided him with what
information was known about the alleged new electronic eavesdropping bug found at the DNC. The White House had been assured by Pat Gray that they had not missed it the first time and that the FBI was opening a new investigation.
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September 15 was a slow schedule day for the president, who spent much of the afternoon in the Oval Office discussing his reelection campaign; then he had an unusual conversation with me in the late afternoon. Notwithstanding the fact that I had been at the White House for over two years, I really did not know the president, nor did he know me, apart from ceremonial encounters. In hindsight it is clear that we both were misjudging each other.