The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (43 page)

I started to fill him in on background: “Well, the interesting thing is, in the sequence of the way things occurred, and I don’t know if anyone has ever taken you through this, but the last involvement to my knowledge of the White House was when I came back from a meeting—” I began to describe the meetings in Mitchell’s office I had reported to Haldeman when Nixon cut me off. He wanted me to say I knew nothing about Watergate, but as I clearly did, I said, “Right, well, ah—” and began again, but he was still telling me how to respond. “‘I’ve stayed miles away from it, so I didn’t know even if there was a White House involvement,’” he said, seemingly speaking for me as well as himself.

“Well, but there was, you know, there was a preliminary discussion of setting up an intelligence operation, and the last—” at which point the president again interrupted, but I continued to give him information I believed he needed. “—and the last was when I came back from a meeting with Mitchell, Magruder and Liddy, and after telling them that they couldn’t discuss this in front of the attorney general of the United States, I came back and told Bob that if there’s something like that going on, we’ve got to stay ten miles away from it, because it just is not right, and we can’t have any part of it. Bob said, ‘I agree, and we’ll have no part of it.’”

“Hmm,” the president groaned softly, acknowledging this account, which I did not know whether Ehrlichman or Haldeman had actually ever imparted to him. I continued, “And that was where I thought it was turned off, and the next thing I heard was that was this break-in on June seventeenth, which was six months later.” While I was still talking the president asked, “You heard discussion of that, but you didn’t hear any discussion of bugging, did you, in that, your meetings? Or did you?”

“Yeah, I did. That’s what distressed me quite a bit,” I responded. “Oh, you did?” he asked, which I affirmed, and the president continued, “Who raised it? Liddy?” When I confirmed that fact he asked, “Liddy at that point said we ought to do some bugging?” “That’s right,” I said, “and Mitchell just sat there with his pipe and puffed and said nothing. He didn’t agree to it, and I, at the end of the meeting—”

“Well, you don’t need to say in your statement about the bugging,” the
president instructed, to which I agreed. “You could say that they were going to engage in intelligence operations, you said the main thing is that it must be totally legal, and that the laws and ethics and so forth and so on. And so you came back, and Bob says no, so you can answer. You know what I mean?” The president suggested I could “make some self-serving God damn affidavits.” When I pointed out that “the embarrassment point would be that the White House knew that there was an intelligence operation going,” the president countered, “Why should I get embarrassed?” He felt everybody knows that such operation are undertaken. The president also thought it could be explained, and we discussed a hypothetical justification that was not totally inaccurate: namely, that Liddy’s operation was believed, as the president stated it, to be “totally necessary because of the violence, the demonstrations, the kind of activities that we knew were threatened against us at our convention and in our campaign and in all of our appearances. We had to have intelligence and about what they were going to do that we could, in turn, issue instructions to our group to go around and find out what they’re doing, and, something like that.”

“This is another point on not using the FBI for political purposes, either,” I explained, which in fact was one of the reasons Liddy had been given intelligence responsibilities (though it was not the only reason). The president liked that approach, observing, “You see, I’ve been thinking. I should say, for example, the matter was discussed as to whether or not that agents in the Bureau should be [involved], it was pointed out that in the 1964 elections, the Bureau was used. I said that [they] couldn’t be involved. Do you get my point? And then Haldeman said, under no circumstances, or Haldeman never mentioned it to any of the agents. It all had to be done privately, because the Bureau should not be involved in a partisan contest. We did not use the Bureau in this. We did use them against demonstrations, but when they’re political in character, the Bureau was never used. Which is true.” I acknowledged this, and the president added, “The Secret Service was used, but that’s their job.” The president then offered more vague examples, “Frankly, they’ve got to say, ‘I did this, this, this and this,’ and Chapin would have to tell them the truth. Agreed? And he would say I had this and da, da, da, da, da, but I had nothing to do with this or that other thing.”

Our conversation was interrupted by Haldeman, who had scheduling and other issues the president needed to address, but as he worked Nixon continued to return to the proposed contents of the report. He liked the idea of
everyone giving me sworn affidavits, as did I, for the document would then reflect what I had been told rather than what I had learned (often by accident), although I suspected no one was going to be willing to sign a sworn affidavit that accounted honestly for his role, or even a sworn flat denial. But the president understood the broader problems, and after Haldeman departed we went even deeper into these problems: “Now, you were saying, too, where this thing leads, I mean in terms of the vulnerabilities and so forth. It’s your view the vulnerables are basically Mitchell, Colson, Haldeman indirectly, possibly directly, and of course, the second level is, as far as the White House is concerned, Chapin. Right?” I added, “And I’d say Dean to a degree,” being as candid as possible. “You?” he asked with a tone of surprise. “Why?”

“Well, because I’ve been all over this thing like a blanket,” I explained, referring to my activities in the cover-up. “I know, I know,” he said, “But you know all about it, but you didn’t, you were in it after the deed was done.” “That’s correct,” I assured him. “I had no foreknowledge.” It was there that Nixon remained focused: who knew what about the break-in, while totally ignoring the criminal implications of the cover-up. The president continued: “Here’s the whole point. My point is that your problem, I don’t think you do have a problem. All the others that have participated in the God damned thing, and therefore are potentially subject to criminal liability. You’re not. That’s the difference. And on that score, of course, we have to know where we are. Everybody that was in there. Magruder, as I understand, knows, told some people that Haldeman knows, and told other people that Colson knows,” Nixon noted, and I pointed out, “Oh, Jeb is a good man, but if Jeb ever sees himself sinking, he will reach out to grab everybody he can get hold of. I think the unfortunate thing is, in this whole thing, is [that] Jeb is the most responsible man for the whole incident.” “Really?” Nixon said, and by this point I knew when he was truly surprised.

“Well, let me tell you, after it happened, and on Monday,” I began, referring to June 19, 1972, “it didn’t take me very long to put the pieces together, what had occurred. I got ahold of Liddy, and I said, ‘Gordon, I want to know who in the White House is involved in this.’ And he said, ‘John, nobody was involved or has knowledge, that I know of, that we were going in or the like, with one exception, and it was a lower-level person.”

“Strachan,” the president injected, and I continued, “Strachan. He said, ‘I don’t really know how much he knew.’ And I said, ‘Well, why in the hell did this happen?’ And he said, ‘Magruder pushed me without mercy to go
in there. Magruder said I had to go in there.’ He had to do this.”
*
Nixon, understanding the players and pecking order, asked, “Who pushed Magruder?” Then he asked, “Colson?” “That’s what Jeb—” I began to respond, when the president cut me off, asking, “Colson could, Colson push Magruder, though?” I answered giving the president both sides of what I had learned, explaining, “No, that’s why there’s two stories.” “That’s my point,” Nixon responded. “I don’t, I think Colson can push, but he didn’t know Magruder that well. And had very damn little confidence in him. So maybe that must have come from here. Is that the point? Did Haldeman push him?”

“Well, I think what happened is that, on sort of a tickler—” I began to explain how Haldeman’s staff often got an assignment in their suspension/tickler file and felt pushed to address it, assuming everything possible had be done if it had been requested. And they pushed in Haldeman’s name, so others on the staff never knew who really wanted the information, or how important it might be to the president. “I can’t believe Haldeman would push Magruder,” Nixon observed. Nor did I, in fact, but I wanted him to understand the way the tickler system worked. So I explained, “No, I think Strachan did. Because Strachan just had it on his tickler, he knew they were supposed to be gathering intelligence and talking to Jeb and saying, ‘Where is it?’ and ‘Why isn’t it coming in?’ ‘You haven’t produced it.’” (In fact, years later Strachan’s records suggest that was indeed the case.) Nixon asked, “Intelligence problems? What were they worried about?” Nixon continued, “They worried about, as I understand it, the San Diego demonstrations. I’m not too sure about this, but I guess everybody around here except me worried about it.” “Well, I don’t know,” I replied, for I personally thought much of the intelligence gathering was silly. “What else?” Nixon asked, but before I could answer, he said that he thought Mitchell was concerned about a secret ten-million-dollar fund the Democrats had, but then added, “What the hell difference did that make?”

I gave the president my take: “I cannot understand why they decided to go in the DNC. That absolutely mystifies me as to what—Anybody who’s walked around a national committee knows that there’s nothing there.” The president, evidencing more knowledge than I had, explained, “Well, the point is, they’re trying to see what they could develop in terms of the—” he did not
finish what appears to have been the description of a fishing expedition.
*
Instead he said, “And now Magruder puts the heat on somebody else. The point is, the way you see things could be, as I understand it, is that possibly [
unclear
], that Sloan starts pissing on Magruder, and then Magruder starts pissing on, who? Even Haldeman?”

“No, no, if somebody out of here were to start saying, ‘Alright, Jeb, you’re going to take the heat on this one—’” I began to explain, when again the president cut me off with, “Nobody down here’s going to say that.” “We can’t do that.” I agreed. “I think what you’ve got to do, to the extent that you can, John,” Nixon said, “is to cut it off at the pass. And you cut off at the pass, and Liddy and his bunch just did this as part of their job.” This was a rather clear instruction to create a bogus report, and he then elaborated on how he wanted it written.

The conversation turned to Segretti, and we both agreed that that was not a big problem to explain. I then turned to a more serious consideration: “The other potential problem is Ehrlichman’s, and that is his connection with Hunt and Liddy both.” “They worked for him?” the president asked, and I explained the issue as I saw it: “These fellows had to be some idiots, as we’ve learned after the fact. They went out and went into Dr. Ellsberg’s doctor’s office, and they were geared up with all this CIA equipment, cameras and the like. Well, they turned the stuff back in to the CIA at some point in time and left film in the camera. The CIA has not put this together, and they don’t know what it all means right now, but it wouldn’t take a very sharp investigator very long, because you’ve got pictures in the CIA files that they had to turn over to Justice.” “What in the world?” Nixon asked. “What in the name of God would Ehrlichman have somebody get close to Ellsberg?”
*

“They were trying to—this was a part of an operation in connection with the Pentagon Papers. They wanted to get Ellsberg’s psychiatric records for some reason,” I reported. When Nixon asked, “Why?” at that time I could only answer, “I don’t know.” (Today we know they wanted to use that information to discredit Ellsberg.) Sounding surprised, Nixon said, “This is the first I ever heard of this. I [didn’t] care about, Ellsberg was not our problem. Jesus Christ.” Until this conversation I had figured the Ellsberg break-in had
been a national security operation. While I did not know a lot about such operations, I did know they required personal presidential approval. I had advised Ehrlichman I learned of the break-in from Liddy on June 19, 1972, when he reported having used two of the same men at the Watergate to break into Ellsberg’s doctor’s office, and they were in jail. The two, Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez, who had pled guilty, were then awaiting sentencing for the Watergate break-in and bugging.

Since Nixon had volunteered and acknowledged Ehrlichman’s role, I confirmed it based on the information I had received: “Well, anyway, it was under an Ehrlichman structure. Maybe John didn’t ever know. I’ve never asked him if he knew. I didn’t want to know.” But this was no small fact, for it had been driving much of the cover-up. I had learned from Bud Krogh that after the failed effort to break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, Liddy and Hunt had requested permission to try again, but Ehrlichman and Krogh had refused. Inexplicably, although Liddy and Hunt had far exceeded their authority, they had never been reprimanded; and Liddy was then given a promotion and sent to the reelection committee with Ehrlichman’s approval and blessing. Mitchell, who had learned about Liddy’s White House activities in a post–DNC arrest debriefing, had used the fact that Ehrlichman had run this illicit operation not too subtly to keep Ehrlichman’s cooperation in the cover-up. (It is unclear, even from the recorded conversation, precisely how much Ehrlichman had told Haldeman, who had only made the vaguest references to this activity.)

Nixon, clearly, did not want this matter addressed, “I can’t see that getting into this,” he insisted, but as I explained, that was easier said than done: “Well, look, here’s the way it can come up. In the CIA’s files, which the Senate Watergate committee is asking for, in the material they turned over to the Department of Justice, there are all the materials relating to Hunt. In there are these pictures which the CIA developed, and they’ve got Gordon Liddy standing proud as punch outside this doctor’s office with his name on it. And it’s not going to take very long for an investigator to go back and say, why would somebody be at the doctor’s office, and they’d find out that there was a break-in at that doctor’s office, and then you’d find Liddy on the [White House] staff, and then you’d start working it back. I don’t think they’ll ever reach that point,” I said, hopefully.