The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (38 page)

I shared with the president Gray’s theory, which was to cooperate right
down the line, to this point. “Today, when he goes up, draw the line. He’ll talk about, you know, he’s infringing upon the rights of individuals. He’s not going to open sensitive files that have not been groomed for public consumption, if they’re going to be put in the public forum, they’ll harm innocent people, and really close the store down today. That’s what he’s supposed to do. Now, he mentioned it to me, he said, ‘I know my nomination can be withdrawn.’” This caught Nixon by surprise, and I rephrased it: “Gray said to me, when I talked to him on Friday, ‘John,’ he said, ‘I appreciate the fact that my nomination can be withdrawn at any point in time if you all see what I’m doing as improper.’” The president seemed pleased that Gray had not forgotten this fact, and I continued with my report. “Kleindienst talked to Eastland this morning,” who had signaled he still had the votes, and that Senators Hart, Bayh, Kennedy and Tunney had indicated they did not plan to prolong the hearings until the Watergate investigation had been completed. I reported, “Now, Ervin gave an interview this morning with WTOP, the local station out here, saying that he would support the request of Tunney that I appear before they proceed with Gray,” although Ervin, also a member of the Judiciary Committee, did not say how far he would push this issue.

Senator Ervin had used the analogy of White House aide Peter Flanagan, who had been forced to testify during the Kleindienst confirmation hearings, and intimated that I might be the hostage for Gray as Flanagan had been for Kleindienst. “I’ve already answered that, though,” the president said, referring to his press conference statement. “We’re not going to give an inch on that. We’re not going to give an inch,” he repeated.

The conversation later turned to the
Post
story. It reported that people at the reelection committee had been mentioned in the FBI’s summary reported as complaining to the FBI that they had felt intimidated about talking to them with the committee’s lawyer present during the interviews, and it had caught the president’s attention. He wanted to know who. I explained, “It was a girl by the name of Penny Gleason,” the daughter of a Republican Montgomery County government official. The president asked, “So, so what happened? What does she know? Who’d she work for?” When I reported, “She worked for McCord,” Nixon asked, “She wanted to talk?” “She wanted to talk. Didn’t know anything, but she wanted to talk, and it was all hearsay. Her statements were her own impressions.” Nixon wanted to know why Gray had not addressed such matters in his opening statement to make them a nonissue. Before I could respond that Gray was refusing to take advice from
anyone, Nixon answered his question with “stupid ass.” We discussed how raw FBI reports were less than accurate, and how Gray’s continuing to drag me into his confirmation was also dragging the White House into Watergate. I made the point that we only wanted him to withhold information he should properly withhold, and Nixon said no nominee should be “confirmed at the expense of everybody here” in the White House, adding, “Oh, no. That can’t be done.” He felt the threat to call me to Gray’s hearings had not been fair, and boasted, “Well, you noticed the way I kicked the little bitch in the ass” at the press conference. As our discussion continued, the president said he wondered if “Gray’s smart enough. I’m just not sure. I hope he is.” I said we would know by week’s end, because Gray was scheduled to testify for two more days. He was making his second appearance today, March 6, and then he would appear again on March 7 and 8.

Gray’s testimony of the previous day—claiming that he had not been happy that I had sat in on FBI interviews of White House staff, although he also said that I had in no way hindered the FBI’s questioning
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—had once again landed me on the front page of
The
Washington Post
. The president called me to the Oval Office early that morning, and when I arrived, he was writing out questions.
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When he finished he asked me who was on our team supporting Gray on the Senate Judiciary Committee. I reported that the two Republicans being most helpful were Senators Roman Hruska (R-NE) and Edward Gurney (R-FL). The president said he wanted to have a question planted with a friendly senator, who would ask Gray if he had investigated whether or not presidential candidate Richard Nixon had been bugged in 1968. He wanted the sort of questions posed that would reflect on the material he had read to me about Kennedy’s White House mistakes and that I had gathered from Sullivan about Democratic presidents who had abused the FBI. “It does not make any difference whether this material is hearsay or not. The game is not played according to the rules. It’s played according to the headlines and the rest. You understand?” he asked.

After discussing with whom the questions might be planted, and the questions themselves, he said he wanted to put it to Gray: “I’m going to make him lie, because I think Gray’s not handling himself well. What he said yesterday with regard to the fact that this ‘jolly well’ bullshit, and all that
sort of thing, that it was highly improper for you to be present [during the FBI interviews]. Now, God damn it, we’re not going to let him get away with that.” I explained that I was reading the daily transcripts of Gray’s hearings, and he had falsely claimed he had objected to my sitting in on the FBI’s interviews. I told the president that in fact Gray had had no objection whatsoever when Ehrlichman told him he wanted me present at White House interviews. At that time he had said it was not a problem.
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“Well, now we’re going to put it to him,” Nixon said. “He will know he’s lying, when he does, because he knows I told him that Hoover bugged us, that Hoover had told me. He knows that he’s been told that, because I told Gray specifically. I said, ‘I want you to go back and check it.’ He hasn’t done it.” The president then said, “Now, you see, what I’m trying to get at here is Gray, and mind you, it probably has come to the point, it’s probably not in our interest to let him get in,” so he was “looking for a way to disqualify Gray from the job, surreptitiously.” Nixon noted, “We thought yesterday was the day of truth. And now he turns out worse yesterday than the day before.”

“I want all communication with Gray cut off. That’s it,” Nixon ordered. “It doesn’t do any good to talk to him. Agree?” I reported, “He called here last night. He talked to Ehrlichman rather than me, because I have just been pulling him up short every time he talks to me.” Referring to our days together at Mitchell’s Justice Department, I said, “I have known Pat for a long time,” and the only time I had ever come down hard on the FBI was after the leaks started. “And then I insisted before they came over here that they tell me what they wanted, who they wanted it from, why they wanted it and what protection they would take on the information they were given.” The leaks had been excessive and unprecedented.
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Nixon returned to his scheme to disqualify Gray by planting questions he was sure that Gray would dissemble over. He would then summon Gray and confront him: “You didn’t tell the truth there,” the president would say, and he thought Gray would respond, “I agree. Now, I’ll withdraw.” Again Nixon asked me if I understood. I did, and I understood that his repeating this question effectively communicated that he felt it was very important.

When Haldeman arrived in the Oval Office, as I was leaving, the
president began by sharing his assessment of his nominee to head the FBI: “You know, Gray is a bit of a pompous ass, isn’t he?”
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Haldeman said, “Well, yeah. I know Dean’s on top of it, but the son of a bitch Gray said, you know, ‘This is all fine. We’re going to close the curtain down on Tuesday.’ Well, he didn’t close it down at all. He lifted it up a little higher.” Haldeman said he felt that the Gray nomination had been a mistake, and that while he and Ehrlichman had been against Gray from the outset, it had been Mitchell who had argued for him. “He’s trying to sell himself at the expense of everybody else, which is exactly what Kleindienst did,” Haldeman said of Gray.

The preceding evening (March 6) the president had held a private White House dinner for “business and community leaders,” which included the major contributors to Nixon’s 1972 campaign. During the evening he had mixed and mingled with his guests in the East Room, and then in the State Dining Room. At some point he chatted with Tom Pappas, who told Nixon he would like to visit with him. The president quickly scheduled him for the next morning. Five days earlier Haldeman had told the president that Pappas was cash rich, after having sold his oil company, and that he had been helping with the “continuing financial activity in order to keep those people”—referring to the Watergate defendants—“on base.” Haldeman had also informed Nixon that this was a quid pro quo understanding, for Pappas wanted to keep Henry Tasca, his friend, as ambassador to Greece. Nixon had agreed to do so. On the morning of March 7, when the president told Haldeman that Pappas was coming in, he began to refresh his recollection of exactly who had told him that Pappas was helping out, or as he said to Haldeman, “somebody said he’s financing people.” Haldeman confirmed that it had been he who had told the president this, and suggested, “You might as well get your chits out of him” by telling him that Tasca could remain in Greece.

When Pappas arrived, the funding of the Watergate defendants was handled discreetly and obliquely in a little over a minute of their eight-minute conversation. They spoke briefly and generally about Ambassador Tasca, then about a coming state visit by Greek prime minister George Papadopoulos and Nixon’s family friend Frank Birch, who had once run a gas station in Whittier, before the president turned to the darker business of Watergate.
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“Let me say one other thing,” the president began, lowering his tone. “I want you to know what I was mentioning last night, I am aware of what you’re doing to help out on some of these things that Maury’s people and others are
involved in. I won’t say anything further, but it’s very seldom that you find a friend like that. Believe me. And frankly, let me say, Maury is innocent—”

Speaking in a raspy whisper, Pappas injected softly, “I know.” And Nixon continued, “Mitchell is innocent,” and then added, “A few pipsqueaks down the line did some silly things—” which Pappas understood, saying reassuringly, “Sure, sure” “But it’s down the line they’re all guilty, you know that,” Nixon added, without indicating that these were in fact the people to whom Pappas’s money was being directed. “But nobody in the White House is involved,” Nixon asserted. “It’s just stupid, it’s just stupid,” Pappas said. Nixon agreed that bugging the Democratic National Committee was useless, adding, “I always thought it was the most stupid thing. But you know, a lot of them are amateurs.” The president declared, “That’s what it is. Amateurs, believe me.” After a bit of idle chatting, the conversation ended with everyone happy: Tasca would stay, and Mitchell had a solution to his cash needs for the Watergate defendants.
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I was called to the Oval Office for a midmorning visit,
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and it was clear Nixon was in a hurry, as he asked, “I was curious about the big play that the Segretti thing got in the
Post
this morning,” he began, wondering if this was a new story. It was a large headline, accompanied by oversized pictures of Dwight Chapin, Herb Kalmbach and Donald Segretti, that caught the president’s attention.
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I told him it was not, but rather a matter of Gray’s testimony adding to the record. I suspected the real reason he wanted to see me was that he wanted to know if I had planted his questions with a friendly senator, as instructed, and I assured him that that had been done. (To make certain the questions were not attributed to the White House I had given them to Senator Hruska’s daughter to pass along to her father, with the permission of John Ehrlichman, for whom she worked as a private secretary, along with careful instructions. Senator Hruska, however, never posed the questions, maybe because it was already clear that Gray was not going to be confirmed.)

By now Gray’s confirmation hearing had effectively morphed into a mini-Watergate hearing, with the Democrats using select items plucked
from the raw FBI material and other information offered by Gray. What Gray had provided was being used not only to discredit him as a potential FBI director but to drag others who were defenseless into the fray. Remarkably. Gray just kept digging himself a deeper hole, and by thrusting me into his hearings, he provided the Democrats with sufficient leverage to kill his nomination: They asserted that if I did not appear as a witness, they would not confirm him. By the time I spoke with the president for twenty minutes, on Saturday, March 10, in a nonrecorded telephone call from Camp David, I had become totally disenchanted with Pat Gray. So had Nixon. When the president spoke with Pat Buchanan on Sunday afternoon, March 11, he told Buchanan he was not going to give Gray a lifeline by responding to any press questions about either Gray or Watergate.
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He would not defend his nominee. A few hours later, when talking with Colson, they commiserated over what a lousy witness Gray had been proven himself and the damage he had done to the FBI.
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On March 13 Haldeman observed when meeting with the president shortly before noon, “It is almost like we have a death wish and never learn” in sending a nominee like Gray up to the Senate, for he had proven even more a nightmare that Kleindienst had been in early 1972.
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Haldeman noted, “Gray, just like Kleindienst, would not listen to anyone,” insisting on screwing it up his own way. By then Gray had pulled me so deeply into his hearing that Haldeman advised the president that even a Nixon loyalist like Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Eastland was “going to vote for calling Dean up.”

That afternoon I was asked to join the president and Haldeman in the Oval Office. Haldeman soon departed and I spent over an hour discussing Watergate-related matters with Nixon.
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While we principally considered procedural and process matters, we briefly wandered into who was and was not involved. The conversation touched on a range of matters: having Colson serve as a White House consultant, to give him executive privilege protection; the drafting of a speech for Senator Barry Goldwater, to raise the fact that Congress was ignoring all of the things that had been done to the Nixon reelection campaign; my advising the president to expect a lot of Watergate questions at a press conference he was considering, because of Gray’s hearings; and matters relating to Chapin, Kalmbach, Segretti and myself. We also ran through the kinds of questions he was likely to be asked, and he tested responses; I updated him on what Bill Sullivan had and had not reported;
whether Sullivan could or could not change the direction of the Gray hearings by opening old FBI misdeeds; and Sullivan’s motives. Nixon wondered if Sullivan knew about the bugging of Martin Luther King, which I reported he did, and that he would testify about it if called upon.