The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (62 page)

Ehrlichman thought he should speak with Kleindienst, with which the president agreed, and the call was recorded on the president’s telephone.
¹⁷
After rehearsing what he would say with the president, Ehrlichman told Kleindienst that Magruder had paid a visit to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, had changed his testimony, and had implicated Mitchell and others. “Christ almighty,” Kleindienst responded. Magruder’s attorneys had been alarmed that Charles Shaffer seemed to have obtained secret information from the grand jury, a concern Magruder had undoubtedly stoked because I had told him he would not be indicted after his first grand jury experience. I did have inside information from Henry Petersen, and Shaffer’s source was Sy Glanzer, so nothing was improper. But Ehrlichman and Kleindienst speculated about it, and Kleindienst warned Ehrlichman to be careful with the information he now possessed.

After Ehrlichman completed his call, Haldeman got down to very serious business: a discussion of his resignation. In earlier conversations the president had dismissed such an idea, but now he was willing to entertain it. Haldeman was not offering his resignation outright but was effectively forcing the president to ask for it. “You’ve got a really crunchy decision,” he told the president, “which is whether you want me to resign or whether you don’t. That’s one you’ve got to figure out. The problem with that is, if I go on the basis of the Segretti matter, you got to let Dean go on the basis of his
implication, which is far worse.” He noted that Strachan had left the White House, so he was not dealing with a member of his staff, which he felt relieved him of responsibility as well as liability. But, Haldeman added, “if they waited awhile, and Ehrlichman’s brought in, you then are going to have to let him go.” Nixon said nothing as he pondered these matters.

Ehrlichman returned to the conversation I had had with them earlier, when I told him that he and Haldeman were indictable. He told the president, without getting into details, that he was unconcerned about his dealings with Kalmbach (although my analysis would later prove correct, and Kalmbach would be a devastating witness against him). “Dean’s got sort of a hypothesis that he’s developing in our conversation that referring him to Kalmbach was almost, was actionable. As a matter of fact, I didn’t refer him to Kalmbach. He came to me and said, ‘May I go to Kalmbach?’” Haldeman jumped in and said, “He did the same thing to me.” Nixon posed a key question: “Go to Kalmbach for the purpose of?” “For the purpose of getting Herb to raise some money,” Ehrlichman replied. “For the purpose of paying the defendants. For the purpose of keeping them, quote, on the reservation, unquote.” The president repeated the concern I had raised with Ehrlichman and Haldeman: “With that they could try to tie you and Bob in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.” “That’s his theory,” Ehrlichman replied. But it was not a theory on my part, rather an effort to convince them that we had all unwittingly walked into a conspiracy to obstruct justice, and that the best way to deal with the situation was to be truthful. The president recognized that Ehrlichman had just effectively admitted that he and Haldeman were part of a conspiracy to obstruct justice.
¹⁸
But when it became clear to him that neither man was conceding this point, he asked Ehrlichman what he and Haldeman would say their motive was in the aftermath. “Well, as far as I can reconstruct it,” Ehrlichman began, and conceding that “I may be putting it favorably,” he said their concern was not what the defendants would testify to before the grand jury, which was secret, but whether they would go out and sell their stories to the
Saturday Evening Post
or
Life
magazine. “We weren’t protecting anybody,” Haldeman declared. The president added a footnote to this discussion, saying, “I wish we could keep Dean away from that.”

That evening, before heading to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the president dictated a long entry for his diary.
*
¹⁹
Because
of the events that followed, his April 14 diary entry was the last he would make for fourteen months, until June 1974, when his presidency was rapidly disintegrating. While Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Kleindienst were attending the dinner, at the U.S. Department of Justice the assistant U.S. attorneys running the Watergate investigation, based on what they had learned from Magruder the day before and me earlier, believed they had basically broken the case. They had been calling their boss, Henry Petersen, all day, and when they finally reached him that evening they told him it was urgent that they meet with him immediately.
²⁰
In his office that evening they shared the facts they had obtained from Magruder, and off-the-record—and inadmissible against anyone—from me. The reason I had insisted on confidentiality was to prevent this information from being used to further the cover-up at the White House, which is exactly what happened. That night Petersen, joined by Silbert and Titus, went to see Kleindienst at his home when he returned from the correspondents’ dinner to brief him on the fast-developing Watergate case.

When the president returned to the White House after the dinner he changed from his formal attire and settled into the Lincoln Sitting Room. At 11:02
P.M.
he spoke with Haldeman, who praised his remarks at the event.
²¹
The president said he had told Bebe Rebozo about Mitchell, so he would not be surprised, then added, “One thing that occurs to me, Bob, is this, as I reflect a little on Magruder’s stuff. I’ll be damned if I don’t think that some of that could be, you know, exaggeration. But, I just don’t know. He’s obviously flailing around like a wild man at the present time.” They both doubted Magruder actually knew the truth and had speculated about others as well. This brief conversation ended with Nixon wrapping himself in his presidency for his loyal chief of staff. The White House correspondents had awarded him a silver globe as a “peace award” for his accomplishments as president. Nixon said, “Rather interesting to me tonight that, you know, when you really think of, what the hell, here we are, it’s really quite true, without being melodramatic. The hopes for peace in this damn world do depend on this office right now, in the next four years and, God damn it, we’ve got to be sure that that isn’t compromised by anything that indicates any lack of confidence in the president, isn’t that what it gets down to?”

Six minutes later the president called Ehrlichman to inquire about his plans for the following day.
²²
Ehrlichman said he had calls coming from Kalmbach’s attorney and wanted to “see Dean in the morning also.” He also
hoped to see Kleindienst, and Nixon told him to brief Colson on Magruder’s testimony. As the conversation progressed, the president said, “You know, I was just thinking tonight as I was making up my notes for this little talk,” referring again to the White House correspondents’ dinner. “You know, what the hell, I mean, it is a little melodramatic, but it’s totally true that what happens in this office in these next four years will probably determine whether there is a chance for some sort of uneasy peace for the next twenty-five years. And that’s my, whatever legacy we had, hell, it isn’t going to be in getting a cesspool for Winnetka. It’s going to be there.”

When the conversation turned back to Magruder, the president bluntly dismissed him as “a very facile liar.” Ehrlichman agreed, saying, “Believes his own stories” but pointed out, “He comes across very sincere, very earnest and very believable.” They speculated on how Magruder would impact Mitchell and whom Mitchell would hire to represent him. The president assured Ehrlichman that he was not going to allow the Congress or the country to force Haldeman out of his job if he was innocent.

“Well, John, you’ve had a hell of a week, two weeks and, of course, Bob is going through the tortures of the damned.” Ehrlichman agreed that Haldeman’s “family thing is rough.”
*
But that was not what the president meant. “Here’s a guy that, Christ, has just given his life, hours and hour and hours, you know, totally selfless and honest and decent. That’s another thing, God damn it to hell,” he began, and in a stuttering, emotional sentence said he could not fire someone just because charges were made. “Jesus Christ, I mean, you can’t do that, John. Or am I wrong? I don’t know.” Ehrlichman assured him his judgment was correct, but the president pushed him further. “But, how do you feel, honestly? I mean, apart from the personal feelings we both have for Bob. You know, I raised this myself. I said, well, one way out is, say, ‘Well, look, as long as all these guys have been charged, out they go, and then they can fight this battle, and they can return when they get cleared.’ Not good, is it?” Ehrlichman replied, “I don’t think that’s any way to run a railroad.”

The president said he was thinking of drawing a line and asked, “You’re going to talk to Dean. What are you going to say to him?” “Well, I’m going to try and get him around a bit, but it’s going to be delicate,” Ehrlichman
explained. Nixon questioned, “Get him around in what way?” “Well,” Ehrlichman answered, “to get off this passing-the-buck business. It’s a little touchy, and I don’t know how far I can go.” Nixon effectively wanted Ehrlichman to tell me that giving complete testimony was not going to help me, and he said: “Look, he’s got to look down the road to one point. But there’s only one man that could restore him to the ability to practice law in the case things still go wrong. Now he’s got to have that in the back of his mind. And he’s got to know that’ll happen,” the president said, but he instructed Ehrlichman not to make any such veiled offer of clemency to me. Not only did he want me to toe a line that would not cause him problems, he wanted Ehrlichman to make sure everyone had a consistent account. The president noted, “I think you thought I was sort of being facetious about saying, get everybody, all these people, and this includes LaRue, and Mardian, and of course, Kalmbach, they’ve got to have it, and Dean, too. They’ve got to have a straight damn line that of course we raised money. Be very honest about it. But we raised money for a purpose that we thought was perfectly proper. But we didn’t want to shut them up. These men were guilty. Right?” Again Ehrlichman agreed.

“And we weren’t trying to shut them up; we just didn`t want them to talk to the press. That’s perfectly legitimate, isn’t it? Or is it?” “I think it is,” Ehrlichman hedged. “I don’t have a perfect understanding of the law on that,” he conceded.

“The president is calling the signals,” Nixon declared and told Ehrlichman, “You can say that the president, because of the charges that have been made, wanted an independent investigation made, and he ordered, directed you to make it. You’ve made an independent investigation of the situation, because the president wants, if there’s anybody who is guilty in this thing, he must, through the judicial process, be brought to the bar. Is that what you’d say?” They rehearsed it all, including how Ehrlichman would try to bring me around.

“Well, with Dean, I think you could talk to him in confidence about a thing like that, don’t you?” the president asked. “I’m not sure. I just don’t know how much to lean on that reed at the moment. But I’ll sound it out,” Ehrlichman assured the president. They further rehearsed what Ehrlichman would say to me and how far he could push. “Well, get a good night’s sleep,” Nixon finally said. “It’s painful, and I just feel better about getting the God damn thing done. And after all, it’s my job, and I don’t want the presidency tarnished, but also, I, I, I’m a law enforcement man.”

Meanwhile, a few miles away, Kleindienst was still meeting with Petersen, Titus and Silbert. They all agreed that Kleindienst should meet with the president alone, without Haldeman and Ehrlichman present—and that Kleindienst needed to get to the president without tipping off either man.

Because the president had stayed up late talking with Bebe, he slept in on Sunday morning. When Kleindienst tried to phone him at 8:41
A.M.
, Steve Bull took the call and the attorney general’s message that he needed to speak with the president. Bull relayed this information to Ehrlichman, who said he should go ahead and pass it on to the president, which he did while Nixon was having breakfast in at 9:45
A.M
.
The
Washington Post
had a glaring front-page headline—“N
EW
M
AJORITY”
G
ROWING
D
ISI
LLUSIONED WITH
N
IXON
—above a highly negative story by seasoned political reporters Haynes Johnson and Jules Witcover.
²³
At 10:13
A.M.
the president called Kleindienst from a residence telephone not connected to the recording system. Kleindienst requested an urgent meeting without either Haldeman or Ehrlichman present, and the president told him to come to the church service at the White House at eleven o’clock that morning, and they could then meet in his EOB office, after the services and reception.

At 10:35
A.M.
the president asked Ehrlichman to join him in the Oval Office, where they spoke for forty-five minutes, putting Ehrlichman’s in-progress meeting with Strachan on hold. Nixon informed Ehrlichman about the call from the attorney general and asked, “Kleindienst said he had been up most of the night with Titus. Who is Titus?” Ehrlichman told him Titus was the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. The president assumed they wanted to discuss “this special prosecutor thing” and asked what line he should take. Ehrlichman did not have a firm position, but the president did: The “problem with the special prosecutor, as I see it, it just puts another loose cannon right there rolling around the deck. Tear the hell out of the place. I think we’ve had enough of the damn thing myself, now I’ll have to hard-line it. Dick [Kleindienst] has not been, let’s face it, very helpful throughout this thing.”

Nixon said he had been “cogitating last night” about the situation and thought the main problem was “on the obstruction of justice thing.” They discussed who knew about that who might be a problem and came up with
the names of the attorneys: Rothblatt and Bittman. “Bittman was an instigator of the whole thing,” Ehrlichman explained. “He was concerned about his fees. So he was one of the active promoters of that, as near as I can tell.” The president asked him to spell it out on “the obstruction thing”: “What was involved? I mean just from our side, from our guys?”