The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (44 page)

“Can’t be. It’s irrelevant,” Nixon the lawyer said. “It’s irrelevant. Right,” I agreed, thinking strictly in terms of the Watergate break-in. Nixon noted,
“That’s the point. That’s where Ervin’s rules of relevancy [have] got [to be enforced]. Now, what the hell has this got to do with it?” The president continued, “And, of course, Colson apparently was working with Hunt on that ITT, that silly woman out of there,” he said, referring to Dita Beard. “Hunt went out as a disguised doctor or something.” I added, “He had [a] red wig on, and funny glasses and went out and interviewed her.”

“Jesus Christ,” the president declared with disgust, then noted, “But that’s nothing. You know, there’s nothing illegal there.” I continued with other matters that could come up that related to Ehrlichman. “It’s not illegal,” I began. “In fact, it’s kind of interesting, if it ever occurred. Right after Chappaquiddick, John had a man dispatched up there, this New York City detective—” I said, repeating the Tony Ulasewicz story I had learned from Caulfield. “Oh, yeah, I heard about that,” the president said, for I had mentioned it obliquely, as had Ehrlichman when discussing Kalmbach’s bank accounts. I continued, “Two years he was on this thing, and he knows more about how Teddy Kennedy lied his way through that and closed that down than any living human being.” And we discussed how this information might be uncovered from Kalmbach’s bank records.

To wrap up the session, the president returned to the Dean report. “Now, I’d simply say, ‘Look, I required from every member of my staff a sworn statement, here’s one from here, here’s one from here, here, here.’ Now, so we know that’s the basis of my statement. Now go to it. If you’ve got something else you want to find out, get searching,” the president said. “That’s good. That’s great,” I responded. I had gone into the meeting feeling concerned that I would be carrying the load almost singlehandedly, but the fact that the president had clearly authorized me to get sworn statements that I could use as the basis for the report eased my mind considerably. The burden would be placed on those who made the statements to explain their knowledge. They would either provide the basis for a report or effectively kill the project. I had tried this approach earlier, but understandably, no one wanted to commit to sworn statements. Now, however, I had been given direction to do so by the president. The president liked this approach better, as he explained. “The sworn statement, John, is much better, rather than giving a statement by Dean,” he said, and went over a few hypothetical examples. “Run that by Moore, will you?” he asked, and then sent me on my way with a friendly, “See you later.”

On Sunday, March 18, Senator Sam Ervin appeared on CBS News’s
Face the Nation
, where he stated that if President Nixon’s aides refused to testify before his Watergate committee, he was going to have them arrested and jailed at the Capitol by the sergeant at arms. On Monday morning, March 19, Ervin’s remarks elicited waves of laughter at several White House staff meetings, and in the Oval Office, where Haldeman met with the president, and Ziegler stopped by for guidance before his press briefing.
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The president thought Ziegler should ignore Ervin’s remarks and stress the point that the president was cooperating. “Nothing excites the president’s staff more than everyone in the White House being shipped off to jail,” Haldeman cracked. “They’re totally enthused with that.”

Late that afternoon the president requested that Dick Moore and I join him in his EOB office for a progress update on a Dean report.
¹³
We had been at it for hours, and Moore explained, “At the moment, I don’t think we’re prepared to let it all hang out until we know much better where we’re going.” The president said, “I don’t want it to hang out.” I suggested, “Let part of it hang out in a way that doesn’t create more problems,” to which Nixon responded, “There are problems, but I’d like part of it to hang out.” In fact, this continued the impossible discussion, because no one wanted to acknowledge the need to arbitrarily draw lines releasing some but not all the information. Nixon was calling for half truths when only whole truths would solve the problems.

On March 19, in the afternoon, CRP lawyer Paul O’Brien appeared in my office, a visit that, as I later testified (and described in
Blind Ambition
¹⁴
), was a game-changing event.
¹⁵
Only years later would I understand that it was the impetus that provoked me to face the reality of the situation confronting the president and all of us in the White House engaged in the cover-up. Before the meeting with Paul O’Brien I had been hoping against hope that, because of the power of the presidency, the inherent influence of his high office and the inclination of most people to want to believe a president, we could survive. But O’Brien’s blunt message to me after his meeting with Howard Hunt changed all that. Here is how I wrote about it in 1976:

“And I’ve come with Howard Hunt’s message for you, John,” O’Brien continued. “He said, ‘You tell John Dean that I need seventy-two thousand dollars for support and fifty thousand for attorney’s fees—’”

“Why me?” I shouted as my head shot around toward O’Brien. “Why the hell did he send the goddamn message to
me
?”

O’Brien gave me a helpless look. “I don’t know, John. I asked him the same question, and he just said, ‘You tell Dean I need the money by the close of business Wednesday. And if I don’t get it, I’m going to have to reconsider my options. And I’ll have some seamy things to say about what I did for John Ehrlichman while I was at the White House.’ And that’s the message.”
¹⁶

O’Brien, who was very aware of how difficult it was to raise money for the Watergate defendants, had asked me what I was going to do. When I said I was going to do nothing and I was out of the money business, he was taken aback. What O’Brien did not know was that it had been Hunt’s call to Colson after the election demanding money that had first led me to check the law, to understand that what we were doing was wrong. When Colson had involved Ehrlichman and me, not to mention the president, in Hunt’s demands for clemency, I had been terribly uncomfortable. I had agonized over Mitchell’s request that McCord be given the same clemency assurance Hunt had been given.
¹⁷
Now Hunt was in effect attempting to extort Ehrlichman, not to mention Bud Krogh and the president, through me to pay him more, and more, and more. I had become involved in the Watergate cover-up at the request of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, serving at first as something of a messenger between them and Mitchell. As time passed, however, after they set the policy during the first days following the arrests, more and more problems had been delegated to me to deal with, problems others had created and wanted to avoid. I had become as much a fool as I was a victim. And now the president was pushing me to write some sort of quick-fix, all-purpose document that would get him out from under it all, based on a purported investigation of Watergate that I had never conducted.

During the early evening of March 19, after I had gone home, the president called Colson, then the leading member of his yet-to-be-formed Kitchen Cabinet and someone with whom he could comfortably test his ideas.
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In this conversation neither man exchanged new information but merely provided support for each other’s thinking. When Colson spoke about “the battering” the media had given the Nixon White House over Watergate, the president said he thought “it’s rather good they’re making Dean the issue, because Dean is the one guy, you know, he’s not involved at all.” Colson
added that I had “a double privilege,” referring to attorney-client as well as executive privilege. But Colson appropriately alerted the president to the fact of my “involvement in some of the subsequent activities, which are sensitive,” though he thought I was “totally covered, because he’s been acting in the capacity as counsel.” Colson added, “I just think that Dean, if they’re going to make a test case, he’s their weakest case.” When the president asked Colson if he should stand firm on me, he said, “Absolutely. I think it would be a terrible mistake now to back off on that issue, Mr. President.”

When this conversation later turned to Pat Gray, who was in limbo, since the Judiciary Committee was refusing to act on his confirmation unless I testified, Nixon said he was just as happy having Gray “out there.” Both men thought Gray had botched his own confirmation, and Colson counseled, “I think letting him be hostage [is] fine.” Or as Ehrlichman infamously instructed me earlier on the Pat Gray situation, “Let him hang there; let him twist slowly, slowly in the wind.”
¹⁹

While John Ehrlichman briefed the Republican leadership of Congress in the Cabinet Room on domestic policy issues, the president met with the Senate and House Republican minority leaders, Hugh Scott and Leslie Arends, in the Oval Office.
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The most significant matter discussed was a comment made by Scott about Watergate, which reinforced the president’s belief that he had to have a Watergate report. When he was discussing why my testifying at Pat Gray’s confirmation hearing was very different than President, when Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, testified before the Senate to address an accusation that he had accepted a bribe, Scott made the point that the Republicans in Congress did not feel the president was cooperating on the Watergate investigation, which troubled them. The president insisted he was cooperating, and reflexively brought up the Hiss case and the Truman administration as an example of noncooperation. But Scott’s remark stung. Scott reported that the Senate did not have the votes to subpoena me to appear at Gray’s confirmation proceedings, but there was serious “grumbling” among loyal Republicans about the president’s handling of Watergate. “See, this administration has nothing to conceal,” Nixon protested. “The White House has nothing to conceal. We are ready to cooperate fully, and we have cooperated, but it has to be cooperation on the basis that it does not violate the separation of powers.”

When the meeting ended the president called me to ask, “Do you have that statement, or did you plan to make it what you think the—” The president did not finish his point, but I understood what he was asking.
²¹
Dick Moore and I had been working on a follow-up statement to my March 14, 1973, letter declining the invitation to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in connection with Gray’s confirmation—a sort of short-form Dean report. I told the president we were “stomping and honing” the draft statement, and it was five to ten minutes away from completion. He requested I send it to him when it was completed.

As he was ending his call with me, Haldeman entered the Oval Office, and Nixon turned to the issue Scott had raised.
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“I think what really should be done is, the leadership needs to be briefed on the Watergate thing. Just at least our own friends have got to have a feeling that everything is okay. Do you understand?” The president reported that Moore and I were working on the matter, and added, “You see, Bob, our own people have got to have some assurance they are not going to get out there on a God damn limb.” Haldeman felt that if the GOP leadership was to be briefed, so should the GOP members of the Ervin Committee be as well. The president agreed. When Ehrlichman joined the last half hour of the conversation, the president made it clear he wanted some kind of Watergate statement issued, and he did not much care what kind of statement it was. He then complained that nobody was in charge.

Following the president’s meeting with Soviet Union scientists, Haldeman returned to the Oval Office, and the president telephoned me again, asking a less than subtle, “Well, anything you want to take up?”
²³
I told him we had a draft statement that he was welcome to read, although Dick Moore was still working on it. He instructed us to wait until we had it ready, and requested we bring it to his office, which we did that afternoon, although the subsequent conversation reached no conclusion about the draft we submitted.
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By now the president had moved on from the sworn statement approach, preferring instead that the report be laced with broad, self-serving, unequivocal denials: “Never at any time were they any discussions that had anything to do with intelligence-gathering operations.” I warned the president that flat statements would not be accurate; the draft we had prepared in fact contained carefully worded responses to questions raised by Senator Sam Ervin on his March 18
Face the Nation
appearance and by Senator Robert Byrd’s March 14 speech on the Senate floor.
²⁵
Clearly, this first effort
by Moore and I was not what he had in mind, and I was not sure whether he was asking me to lie or simply refusing to acknowledge what had actually transpired.

During his next Oval Office meeting, which included Governor William Cahill (R-NJ), Governor Linwood Holton (R-VA), and Republican National Committee chairman George Bush, the president received more information about the public’s reaction to Watergate.
²⁶
Bush reported that they were getting negative readings because the White House was viewed as not assisting in the Watergate inquires. Nixon suggested how they should answer the questions, and state that the White House was in fact fully cooperating.

Ehrlichman arrived as this meeting was ending, and after the GOP officials had departed, he and Nixon got into a discussion of Watergate that occupied the next hour and a half.
²⁷
When I first began to listen to this conversation, I wondered if Ehrlichman would notify the president of Hunt’s blackmail attempt involving him, since I had just informed Ehrlichman about it.
*
Notwithstanding direct questioning by the president about his potential vulnerabilities, Ehrlichman did not mention a word about Hunt’s demand.

Nixon tested on Ehrlichman his idea of giving a confidential briefing to Republicans in Congress, and he suggested I should be the one to do it. When Ehrlichman responded that they needed to decide the content of any such a briefing, Nixon explained that his concern was that GOP leaders such as Hugh Scott did not want to “get caught with their pants down.” Ehrlichman advised, “You shouldn’t ever tell Scott anything you don’t want used against you,” and Nixon noted, “That is true not only for Scott, but true for all.” Nixon said he wanted the report Moore and I were working on to state that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were not involved; as for Chapin and Strachan, well, he “would try to ignore that as much a possible.” Where Colson was concerned, he would put out some facts, but not all. “You had nothing to do with Hunt in the campaign or Watergate?” Nixon asked Ehrlichman, who answered, “No.” While this was literally true, it was a remarkably incomplete statement from someone who was now the subject of an attempted blackmail by Hunt.
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