The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (45 page)

Ehrlichman began a lengthy discussion about how they might deal with
a Senate subpoena, but they needed to have the Justice Department prepare guidance for the White House about how to contest it in court. When Nixon made it clear he was more interested in attacking the Senate, Ehrlichman cautioned, “You’re in a situation now where I don’t think a counterattack would be credible or effective. It would escalate this thing.” The president wanted to speak out on Watergate, for he did not want to give the impression he did not care about the matter. “Now, the problem I see is that apparently [Dean and Moore] fear that if they put out that statement, it is going to open up a lot of other questions. But let’s suppose it does?” Nixon’s solution was simple: “It’s a PR exercise. The whole thing is a PR exercise. So you put that out, and then they attack. Is that necessarily bad? I mean, the point is, we can say that we are being forthcoming, but they are never going to let us off the hook by letting us submit our written interrogatories. My point is, why not give them the written interrogatories, give them the information, volunteer it, and say, ‘Alright, you’ve got it here.’ Now, what you’re doing is simply wanting to exploit the issue rather than get the information. What more information do you want?” And soon they were rehashing hypothetical scenarios.

As the conversation continued, Nixon told Ehrlichman he had to assist me with Watergate. He pointed out that as soon as one problem was resolved, a new one erupted. As Ehrlichman described the situation: “Well, it’s just the steady dripping on the stone, you know? Every day it’s something new, some other damn loose end comes loose. But,” Ehrlichman noted, “oh, well, I think the fact that you’ve been spending some time with him, whether it’s been productive for you, has been very good in buttressing him.” The president felt I could handle the situation for the time being, but he told Ehrlichman, “I think, when the time comes and there’s some decisions to be made, and some calls, some options and proposals, then that’s time enough for you to get into it.” Nonetheless, the president wanted to know how Ehrlichman was leaning about releasing a statement.

“I want to reserve my view until I see what Dick [Moore] comes up with, because I haven’t seen the draft, so I don’t know whether it has any hope or not. My inclination is to flush it if there’s a way to do it,” Ehrlichman said. “Flush what?” the president asked. “The whole, the whole scene,” Ehrlichman answered. “Oh,” the president replied, surprised, and then asked, “How?” Ehrlichman explained, “Somehow, I don’t know how, and that’s what I’m groping with. Get it over with, leave you standing aside looking at it, saying,
‘My God, I never had realized that that was what was going on over there, or here, or wherever it is.’ And then pick up and go forward. Now, maybe the flushing goes on in the Ervin committee, maybe it goes on in a statement, maybe it goes on in a grand jury. I don’t know how it goes on, but to my way of thinking, we’re not any longer in a situation where you can successfully trim your losses, as we’ve been for a year.” The president agreed, adding, “Well, we had to trim them before the election.” Ehrlichman concurred, “Why, sure. Of course.”

“That was the purpose. We knew that,” the president said, acknowledging the cover-up. “But afterwards, it seems to me that preferably sooner.” “Well, it’s a question of figuring out how to do it without it splashing on you, and in the tying up the corners of it,” Ehrlichman replied. “And I must say, I don’t know how to do that at the moment, but I’m satisfied that that’s a safer direction in the long haul than trying to contrive a defense for the hearing, or to counterattack the hearing, or somehow or another to hope that the hearings will go, you know, lightly, and so on. They won’t.” They discussed different ideas, but nothing appeared very realistic. “You know, there are all kinds of things you can think about. But I just don’t have any way to direct you at the moment,” Ehrlichman admitted. “I just don’t know how to handle it. There’s a little puzzle on it.” This conversation was not unlike most Watergate conversations that involved Ehrlichman and Haldeman, and increasingly me, which always became circular, because while telling the truth was not an acceptable approach, everything short of the truth raised serious problems.

After the conversation took a tangent into Mitchell’s problems with Robert Vesco,
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the president returned again to the possibility of the White House issuing a Watergate statement. “Even if the statement does raise other questions, it is a statement,” the president began. “And they’ve all get it. And everybody says, ‘Well, my God, the president has got a statement, and so forth.’ And I think, let’s face it, as far as presidential liability for getting caught in terms of the White House staff, there’s no problem with you,” he said to Ehrlichman, fishing for a response. When none was forthcoming,
Nixon continued, “There’s no problem involving Haldeman, I mean, the people from here.” Nixon acknowledged that Magruder might “blow,” but he was not sure about the consequences should that happen. “Who knows what the hell he could do?” the president asked. Ehrlichman counseled, “Well, but you can’t clutch him to your bosom in any case.” The president said he was concerned about Magruder’s perjury, but Ehrlichman was not and explained that if McCord or someone else said he gave “all this stuff”—referring to the products of the bugging of the DNC—to Magruder, they could discredit McCord. Ehrlichman elaborated, “See, you’ve got a convicted felon, McCord, saying this, and Magruder probably goes out to the cameras and says, ‘That crazy man, I don’t know what he’s talking about.’ And so then you’ve got an ambiguous situation.”

“Magruder is not the brightest guy in the world,” the president noted, “but I think that he’s slick.” Ehrlichman added, “He must be quite an actor, from what they tell me,” alluding to Magruder’s performance before the grand jury and during the trial. “Yeah, I hear you,” the president said. Reassured about Magruder, the president moved on to Colson. “He can handle himself, I would think,” Ehrlichman said, and Nixon noted, “He’s certainly been involved in a lot of things, but he’s not at the present involved in this,” referring to Watergate. “As far as you know,” Ehrlichman added.

The president wanted to know whom the Democrats and their media supporters were really after. Ehrlichman thought himself and Haldeman, but Nixon saw it slightly differently. “Well, not so much you,” he said, but rather he thought they were after Haldeman, Colson and Mitchell. Ehrlichman broadened the targets to include anybody who could be tied to the president, not to mention smearing the White House itself by mere association. Nixon said, “We cannot let it harm you guys. That’s the whole point. We cannot let it.”

Nixon returned the White House taking action. “Have Dean brief the cabinet and the Republican leaders,” Nixon suggested, and added, “He’s quite persuasive, don’t you think?” Ehrlichman liked the idea but added, “I want to sit down and figure out what he would say, where it would take us, what kind of questions it would lead to, because once you start this, then he’s got to be very artful about turning away questions that he doesn’t want to answer.” Nixon offered, “Just say that I haven’t got any information,” an approach Ehrlichman liked. “He can get away with it with our own people,” Nixon said, pointing out, “You don’t have to be as artful before your own
people, John, as you do before the press.” Ehrlichman agreed, and together they rehearsed the kind of evasive answers I might give.

They began discussing how to explain why no one from the White House would testify about Watergate but had no good rationalization. Nixon wanted to examine the worst-case potential, which for the president meant to assume that Magruder would say, “Yes, Haldeman knew about this and told me to do it, and knew I was going to do it, and I furnished information to him.” “Alright,” Nixon asked, “what problem is that for Haldeman?” Ehrlichman, who had no real knowledge of or experience with criminal law, explained, “Well, he’s an accessory at that point,” broadly describing a person who aids or contributes to the commission of a crime. A more accurate description would have been “coconspirator,” but Ehrlichman would not learn about the crime of conspiracy until he was later charged. The analysis that Ehrlichman provided the president had no relationship to reality whatsoever, so the president had no accurate sense of Haldeman’s criminal exposure nor of anyone else’s. But it did bring the conversation to the fact that the Watergate seven were scheduled for sentencing that coming Friday, three days hence. “So, we’ll see how that goes,” Ehrlichman said, and he anticipated the judge would “undoubtedly be very hard on them [and] probably berate them.” Nixon asked if he would berate the prosecutors as well, by which he meant his administration. “Probably,” Ehrlichman replied, noting, “He’ll say a number of things from the bench about his own view of the evidence. He’ll sentence them to jail with no suspended sentences. He may revoke the bail of McCord, who’s on appeal, and jail him pending his appeal. And so it’ll be a rough deal. And then see how it goes through the weekend to see what happens to McCord, who has a hang-up about jail.”

“He doesn’t want to go?” the president asked, unable to understand how McCord, who had participated in the Watergate burglary with its obvious risks, could be “overly” sensitive to the fact that he might have to go to jail. “He didn’t like it when he was in there at all. And then we’ll see what happens,” Ehrlichman reported. He thought that if Sirica sent McCord to jail, it would be a problem. When the president questioned what McCord might do, Ehrlichman, with remarkable prescience, saw what was coming: McCord would tell Judge Sirica he wanted to talk.

When Ehrlichman departed, after a few telephone calls and some paperwork, the president buzzed for Haldeman to come to the Oval Office.
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“I think John is pretty much out of touch, as I am now,” Haldeman said of
Ehrlichman when Nixon recounted their conversation, explaining, “We’ve kind of stayed away from it.” When Nixon mentioned McCord’s concern about going to jail, Haldeman offered that McCord would “have a lot on Mitchell.” This brought the president back to his concern. “You can’t, Bob, just sit here thinking everybody is shutting up,” he said. They discussed the problem of the seeming impossibility of writing a statement that would serve any useful purpose and not sink the White House further if it was wrong. The president said he was also thinking about my making an oral report to the cabinet, or, as he explained it (verbatim): “Lay a few things to rest. I didn’t do this, I didn’t do that, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, Haldeman didn’t do this, Ehrlichman didn’t do that, Colson didn’t do that. You get my point, see?” If Haldeman understood, he did not say so, as Nixon said the cabinet needed to be told what he had been told—although he had in fact been told only the gist of matters, that should have raised more questions.

When the subject turned to the Senate’s Watergate inquiry, the president fully anticipated, and Haldeman concurred, that it would be a “daily spectacle with television cameras and press.” What would make it a major story, the president noted, would be getting “a big fish up there,” as had been the case in the McCarthy hearings. Haldeman added, “And you never know what any of the big fish will do when they get up there, and then we all said we want to go up and all that, but if they lob one in you’re not expecting, you don’t know how good a witness he’ll be.” The president thought it was “a tough god damned thing” and was particularly worried about perjury. Haldeman, in turn, pointed out that the “people who are going to go for perjury already have and will do it again and are going to be up there anyway.”

“You mean like Magruder?” the president asked, whom he quickly denounced as “that son of a bitch.” This led to a discussion of who was and who was not covered by executive privilege: Chapin, Colson, Dean and Strachan, they agreed, were covered, while Magruder, Hunt and Liddy were not. Haldeman thought Strachan had no criminal exposure, because he did not direct anything. Haldeman described Strachan’s only job as being “to keep on top of everything” and to know what was going on. They speculated that Magruder might testify to what Strachan knew. “But only that he knew, not that he had any authority,” Haldeman clarified. “No participation. He was an observer.” They sat silently for a moment, and then Haldeman added, “The danger you got there is that he probably, and I possibly, got reports on some of that stuff.” Nixon said, “Sure. I’m aware of that.” Haldeman
continued, “And if I did, I didn’t know it. But Strachan did know, because he gave me stuff that thick,” as Haldeman undoubtedly gestured, and added, “And I never looked at it. On all campaigns, budgets, personnel things and everything else.” The president again warned, “The main thing is, don’t get anybody up there on perjury where they can prove [it].”

It was when listening to this conversation between Haldeman and the president, directly after hearing the one with Ehrlichman, that I realized how compartmentalized everything had become at the Nixon White House regarding Watergate. While Mitchell, Ehrlichman and Haldeman had once discussed the problem among themselves in the early days, they now communicated almost exclusively through me, although Ehrlichman and Haldeman did exchange some information.
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No one was sharing anything with anyone else, nor with the president, who even at this late date had no real idea of his exposure. What became conspicuous to me as I prepared this book was at the time something I only sensed, but sensed clearly enough to realize I had to take some form of action by being a bit more blunt with the president, now that I was getting comfortable dealing with him. So when the president called me at home the evening of March 20, I decided to make certain that he had the information I felt he needed to make realistic decisions about a report.

“You’re having rather long days these days, aren’t you?” the president asked, opening the conversation.
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Chuckling, I replied that I thought they would soon get even longer. He requested an update on the Gray confirmation proceedings, which I told him were being played politically, as if the president had already abandoned Gray. “What’s your feeling, though, John, about Gray? Are you just as comfortable to let him go down? Which do you want? I mean, we can put some pressures on, and I just wonder.”