The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (58 page)

A few hours after Ehrlichman’s departure, the president called Colson in Boston, where he had given a speech.
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After agreeing that “madman” John Sirica was causing everyone to panic, the president asked Colson if he would “just sort of write your précis as to what the hell, how you see this thing unfolding and how we should handle it. I’m sure you’ve thought about it, because, you see, with everybody going off in his own direction, that’s not good.” The president said he was concerned that everyone was getting “so obsessed with it that we think it’s the only story in town.”

“My view is that we should decide on what the plan ought to be,” Colson said. “Everybody follow it, and whatever it is.” “I think there’s a tendency for everybody to get upset with Watergate as being, that this is the thing that’s going to destroy the presidency, you know,” Nixon said. “This is sort of the view of Ray Price, and that kind of group,” he said, referring to one of his top speechwriters. Although the president said this dismissively, he quickly added, “They may be right.” Colson, who was well aware that Nixon often sought sympathy, reassured the president that Watergate was not going to end his presidency. With that resolved the president wanted to know if Colson had left material in his files that could be used to attack the Democrats, a project he had assigned to Pat Buchanan; he believed it was “terribly
important” and of the “highest priority” to get out a “white paper” going after the Democrats and McGovern for their campaign tactics.

On this day Nixon had nine Watergate-related conversations: five just with Ehrlichman;
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one with Ehrlichman and Haldeman together;
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and three brief discussions with Haldeman alone.
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Ehrlichman updated Nixon on what was happening at the grand jury, based on reports from Kleindienst (Segretti took the Fifth; Dean hasn’t testified) and explained the principle of obstruction of justice, as he understood it, with an example given to him by Kleindienst: “If you gave a man money to plead guilty, that is not a crime if he’s guilty. If you give a man money not to testify, that’s a crime.” Kleindienst had also said, “This is a very tough offense to establish.”
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Nixon asked if Ehrlichman had told them not to testify, referring to the Watergate defendants. He said those making the payment had not, speaking broadly regarding his understanding. “They said they were going to plead guilty,” Ehrlichman explained, “and we felt sorry for them.” He was offering a hypothicial rationale for why the payment had been made. Both men had little doubt that McCord would claim “he was given money to shut up,” as the president stated it.

Nixon raised again my taking a leave of absence and who might replace me as White House counsel. He also wondered how I might testify without revealing everything. Ehrlichman replied that he was going to have a “heart-to-heart” talk with me. He said that, based on his understanding of its current direction, “nothing has stirred up this grand jury so far, so that he, Dean, will be the operating efficient cause of the change in direction in this thing.” Ehrlichman then said matter-of-factly, “Now I have to assume that that isn’t going to make any difference to Dean.” He continued, “He’s prepared to go down and just tell the truth. To tell what he knows. Not to reach out—” The president interrupted to clarify, “To tell them in a very, shall we say, limited way,” and they proceeded to surmise how I might answer some questions but dodge others.

After further discussion of the White House and Mitchell’s liabilities, the president mentioned to Ehrlichman that he had told Colson to get a white paper together on the Democrats, adding, “John, I want you to kick the asses around like they haven’t been kicked.” There was more discussion of both
Haldeman’s and my taking leaves of absence, with the conversation ending on a discussion of whether, in fact, Liddy had been talking, as the prosecutors had claimed. The president thought not, but Ehrlichman was not sure.

The Haldeman Oval Office conversation at 11:22
A.M.
was brief and repetitive, with Haldeman assuring the president that he had gone over Strachan’s testimony with him before he appeared before the grand jury.
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Ehrlichman returned to the Oval Office just before one o’clock for his second session, with troubling news from the first of his two meetings with Colson that day.
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Colson claimed he had a taped conversation of Magruder (apparently talking with a newsperson) in which Magruder claimed that both Colson and Haldeman had encouraged him to engage in electronic eavesdropping. Magruder had also now claimed that “Haldeman knew of the plan to bug the Watergate in advance,” and it was clear to Ehrlichman that he was trying to turn it “from Mitchell to the White House.” Ehrlichman reported that Colson was now recommending that “Dean ought to be fired, [because] Dean will be seriously implicated in the obstruction of justice thing, which [Colson] sees as probably the most serious exposure right now.”

The president absorbed this news with little reaction, but what did get his attention was Colson’s claim that the prosecutors “will attempt to prove a conspiracy to obstruct justice, which will involve a lot of people who were not direct actors, and, he said, will lead to the door of the Oval Office.” When the president asked whom Colson was talking about, Ehrlichman answered, “I can’t imagine what he means. I don’t know.” The president speculated that he might be referring to Haldeman, and Ehrlichman said he had asked Colson about that. Colson had replied, “I know that you and Bob were both talking to Dean about this,” but Ehrlichman had deflected that observation. Ehrlichman observed that Colson’s “obviously got his own fish to fry, and he has decided that Mitchell ought to be sunk.” He later added, “If Colson is out sowing the seeds of Magruder and Mitchell’s destruction, he’ll know how to do it very effectively. And I think that he is obviously not under control, Colson isn’t.” Ehrlichman surmised that Colson’s strategy was to keep the matter out of the White House and over at the reelection committee.

Nixon wanted Ehrlichman to pin Colson down on whom he was referring to that could take the obstruction of justice problem to the door of the Oval Office. “What the hell would we talk about? There has been no discussions of obstruction of justice in this office,” the president insisted. Ehrlichman, who had no knowledge of my conversations with Nixon, assured him,
“I haven’t any idea of what he is talking about. I didn’t ask him.” Ehrlichman said he had requested that Colson give him a written scenario and also told Nixon that he wanted Haldeman to listen to the tape Colson said he claimed to have.

“By all means, by all means,” the president agreed, and noted how everything was breaking fast. When Ehrlichman reported he would be meeting with me that afternoon, the president said, “I don’t think we should fire Dean” as Colson had suggested, and Ehrlichman agreed. Neither the president nor Ehrlichman had any doubt about why Colson was going after Mitchell, for, as Nixon pointed out, “Mitchell always hated Chuck, and Chuck has never liked Mitchell.” But neither could understand why Magruder might be talking to the press. Ehrlichman thought Mitchell might be manipulating Magruder, but he was not overly concerned about the matter, as Magruder could be shown to be a liar. They briefly discussed whether I had suborned Magruder’s perjury, but whether cross-examination could destroy Magruder was not clear. “I’m told he is an adroit witness and very credible,” Ehrlichman noted. “Well, if you want to destroy a witness, John, you have to have the cooperation of the press,” the president noted. “In this instance, the press will want to believe Magruder, just like they will want to believe McCord.”

Noting his concern about Haldeman and Colson, the president soon returned to the taped Magruder conversation. After confirming the latest Magruder charges, Ehrlichman said, the tape also had Colson forcing Magruder to hire Hunt at the reelection committee, “which Colson says is not the truth.”
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Magruder’s latest volley also caused the president to speculate that someone was leading him to think he might be granted immunity. Ehrlichman, however, said that could not happen. “Why can’t he?” the president asked. “Suppose he rats on people that are higher up, doesn’t that get him immunity?”

“I discussed this with Dick [Kleindienst],” Ehrlichman said, “and he says, well, if a little guy came in and delivered to the U.S. attorney ten big guys, yes. But if one of the ten big guys came in who had already testified and said, okay, now I’m going to change my testimony and come clean on five of my colleagues, he says we’d say, go jump in the lake, fellow.” Ehrlichman was
equating Magruder with a big guy who would be told to go jump in the lake. This conversation came to a close with the president again instructing Ehrlichman to “pin Colson down when he says this thing goes to the Oval Office.” Ehrlichman assured the president he would. Then, thinking that Colson was talking about clemency for Hunt, the president told Ehrlichman the only time that subject had ever come up was “the time you and I walked on the beach,” although the president did vaguely recall Colson’s talking about meeting with Hunt.

Haldeman met with the president in his EOB Office in the late afternoon, and they were joined by Ehrlichman for the latter part of what was another wide-ranging Watergate conversation.
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Haldeman and Ehrlichman had been busy collecting information, which they shared with each other and the president.

Haldeman had some information from Strachan, who claimed that he did not know that the documents he received from the reelection committee were Watergate bugging reports; Haldeman explained that there was no way to tell. He said that Magruder needed to be told by an authority figure what to do and where he now stood and he’d react properly; he was a lost soul. Magruder thought he was doing what he was supposed to do, and he was on his way to jail. Haldeman felt the president should not listen to the Higby tape of Magruder, which had been made earlier at Haldeman’s request to get as truthful an account of Magruder’s knowledge as possible.

This wide-ranging conversation included more speculation about my testimony and when I might appear before the grand jury. The president asked why Colson wanted me fired, and Ehrlichman thought it was because he saw me aligned with Mitchell. Nixon wanted to know who was going to talk to Magruder, but no one volunteered. Ehrlichman said, incorrectly, that federal rules of criminal procedure precluded discussion of testimony with any other witness before the grand jury. Nixon instructed: “Dean is to go to the grand jury under the strictest rules. And the most limited testimony he can possibly give, John. Now that has just got to be.” The president added emphatically, “And he’s not to talk to anybody, no PR, and so forth.” After a discussion of the Ervin committee the president instructed, “It’s best for the people in the White House not to say a God damn word.” They explored other approaches during the conversation until Ehrlichman grounded it by saying, if he were Mitchell, he would deny everything, take the Fifth Amendment, and make it difficult every step of the way. Haldeman said that the
worst thing they could do would be to hang Mitchell and added, “The worst thing we can do is keep getting ourselves in the middle of it. I think we’ve ruined the career of John Dean, probably.” The president agreed. They reminisced about perceived missed opportunities to have put an end to Watergate, although all were wishful-thinking scenarios that would have involved half truths, and on close analysis, ended with all but Ehrlichman’s falling on their swords for the president.

The day the Watergate review was not yet over, however. After appearing at a reception, the president called Haldeman late in the afternoon to ask about Ehrlichman’s meeting with Colson and his partner, David Shapiro. Ehrlichman was still in that meeting, so they discussed Magruder, as he had just listened to Higby’s secret recording of him, and reporting that Magruder now felt he might be facing 100 to 125 years of jail time for his perjury.
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While Nixon was eating dinner alone in the Lincoln Sitting Room, Ehrlichman called with a brief report on his meeting with Colson and Shapiro.
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“Well, they have quite a tale of horrors to tell,” Ehrlichman began, starting with what undoubtedly struck him as the most important detail: Colson had learned—Hunt’s lawyer, Bill Bittman, had told his lawyer, David Shapiro—that “Hunt has decided to tell all to the grand jury Monday at two o’clock.” Ehrlichman surmised that “Bittman made a deal with the government so that Bittman does not get caught in this obstruction of justice business.” He said that Hunt would implicate CRP lawyers Paul O’Brien and Ken Parkinson “as the bagmen and the transmitters of money through Hunt to the Cubans and to Hunt for Mrs. Hunt for other people, and so on and so forth.”

Nixon asked, “Why will Hunt do this, do they say?” “They think simply because he has no incentive to stand mute now,” Ehrlichman explained. “He sees the whole thing going up in smoke, and he just doesn’t want to be the only guy holding the bag. I think Bittman is the guy who’s getting something out of it. Of course, Hunt purges himself of contempt when he does this. So he gets a little something out of it.” Ehrlichman characterized his session with Colson and Shapiro as a “‘sink Mitchell’ operation,” to which Nixon took offense, saying, “Well I hope you laid into them a little, John.” Ehrlichman assured him that he had and added, “For what it’s worth, I have Colson’s commitment that he will do nothing, say nothing, make no move, without prior approval at this point.” Ehrlichman reported that Colson and Shapiro had learned there were two other grand juries at work on cases that involved Mitchell: the Vesco grand jury in New York City and one in Washington,
DC, looking at a tax evasion matter regarding someone’s getting government contracts in exchange for campaign contributions. “Jesus Christ, I can’t fathom that,” the president said; neither could Ehrlichman.

Based on his meeting with Colson and Shapiro, Ehrlichman also reported that Hunt had thought Liddy’s Watergate plans were a “screwball operation,” and that Hunt had not wanted to go forward, but Liddy insisted that Mitchell had specifically instructed him to proceed; that Liddy was sitting silently in jail because he had “a blood oath from Mitchell” that he would be pardoned; that Hunt had testified I had ordered him to leave town (though Ehrlichman did not know if I actually had); and Colson and Shapiro recommended Nixon beat everyone to the punch by getting Liddy to talk and unravel Watergate. Ehrlichman reported that Shapiro thought Mitchell should plead insanity, based on his life with Martha, as his criminal defense, but this was dismisssed out of hand by Nixon.