The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (79 page)

After ending his conversation with Ehrlichman, Nixon was still worried about the possibility that I had recorded him, so he called Haldeman again at 7:46
P.M.
and asked, “Is there any way that, even surreptitiously or discreetly or otherwise, that you could determine whether Dean might have walked in there with a recorder on him?”
¹²⁹
“No, I don’t think there is any way,” Haldeman replied. “I think [it’s] so remote as to be almost beyond possibility.” They discussed this for several minutes, and Nixon asked if I made memoranda of conversations; Haldeman replied that, to the best of his knowledge, I did not. They agreed again that they would simply have to destroy me if we got into “a pissing match.”

At the end of the day Nixon again called Kleindienst to see if he had spoken with the Los Angeles–based Ellsberg prosecutor.
¹³⁰
Kleindienst reported that he had done exactly as instructed and described the Ellsberg information as sensitive national security material, and he told the president that they hoped they could persuade the judge to consider delaying examining if any improper evidence had been obtained and used until after the trial. “Okay, sleep well, boy,” Nixon said. Kleindienst chuckled, “Same to you.” Before calling it a night, however, Nixon called Ziegler at 9:07
P.M.
to see how his day had gone.
¹³¹
Ziegler reported that he was spending a lot of time with the press people, mending fences. Nixon wanted to be sure that he was stressing that “the president has been on top of this every minute of the day, and he’s trying to get to the bottom of this thing, and so forth.”

The president called Haldeman into the Oval Office at 8:55
A.M.
¹³²
Haldeman, who was in the process of assembling times and dates for his lawyers, remarked, “It’s amazing, when you go back and look through the papers, how little any of us, you or me or Ehrlichman, was involved in any of that stuff.”

In this conversation Nixon was again trying to determine what sort of “bomb” or “trump card” or “big play” I might be contemplating in what he perceived as my quest for immunity. In attempting to identify that bomb the president had Haldeman take him through the schedule of our meetings. Tellingly he told Haldeman that the schedule for March 22 was wrong, as it had me with the president when he was in fact meeting privately with Mitchell, following a group meeting that Haldeman, Ehrlichman and I had attended. (I had been at the meeting with Mitchell for only a few minutes and then departed.)

As they attempted to recall Nixon’s meetings with me, Nixon paused to instruct Haldeman on his taping system. “With regard to these tapes. I don’t know how you can reconstruct it, but I think that, for your information, the directive I’ve given you is,” he began, and then proceeded to what he wanted: “I don’t think it should ever get out that we taped this office, Bob. Have we got people that are trustworthy on that? I guess we have.” “I think so,” Haldeman responded, and Nixon continued that if it ever did become known he taped, then “we only taped the national security information. All other information is scrapped, never transcribed. Get the point? That’s what I want you to remember on these, if you will. See my point? That’s just a memorandum for your file, basically, that you make.” Nixon added, “I think that’s very important. You never want to be in a position to say the president taped it, you know. I mean taped somebody.”

Haldeman agreed that they would say the purpose was national security, and Nixon further instructed, “I don’t want you to disclose that to Ehrlichman or anybody else. I mean, that’s just something—I know what you can tell Ehrlichman. Just say you went over it, and it’s about the same as—” Haldeman interrupted. “I’ve already, what I said to him is that the tape, he knows I went over it, of course. Ah, I said, ‘It, it basically says what the president recalled.’” Informed that Ehrlichman was aware of the taping system (though Ehrlichman thought Nixon taped only select conversations
¹³³
), Nixon did not press the point further, and they returned to the March 21
conversation and Nixon’s concern that I had made a record of our talk. Haldeman was still not concerned: “That area is totally privileged until you come to an impeachment proceeding. There’s no way that that can be brought out, because there’s no forum for going into presidential guilt except an impeachment.” Nixon agreed, and Haldeman continued, “And they have got to impeach you first before the proceeding starts, and they aren’t going to impeach you.”

Nixon responded, “No, I slept a little on that, and it’s good for John to look at it that way,” he said regarding Ehrlichman’s raising the possibility. But Nixon was not concerned either, asking, “My God, what the hell have we done to be impeached?” Haldeman reminded Nixon, “But John doesn’t believe you have either, and John doesn’t believe you can be impeached. What he believes is, that’s the game Dean is trying to play. Does not believe it’s a game of any potential.” And they returned yet again to analyzing the March 21 conversation, with Haldeman constantly reminding Nixon that he was merely “trying to smoke out” information from me throughout the conversation. Nixon explained to Haldeman that, when talking about money for the defendants, the reason he had mentioned the Cuban committee is that he “had read about the Cuban committee in the paper, that’s true.” (The piece apparently ran in a Miami newspaper, for no relevant story was published in either the
New York Times
or
The Washington Post
.)

In going through a drill about what the president did and did not know about the money before our March 21 conversation, Nixon explained: He did not know about the $350,000; he did not know about “the launching of Kalmbach”; and he added, generally, “I did not know, I had read stories to that effect, but I didn’t frankly look into them. But basically, I frankly said, ‘Well, it must be a bunch of Cubans, or something like that, and I thought of the Cuban committee.” “I didn’t know about La Costa,” he added, and the request that Moore tap Mitchell for money. “My point is, and I’m not trying to be selfish, but the point is, the story is very true that I didn’t know a thing. Now there’s only one weakness in that, the Pappas thing,” which Nixon acknowledged he spoke to me about on March 21. Nixon quizzed Haldeman about what he heard regarding Pappas on the March 21 recording: “Did I say, ‘I understand that Pappas is helping,’ or [did he say], ‘Pappas was helping’?” Haldeman reported, “[Dean] said, ‘Mitchell has talked to Pappas.’ You just quickly lobbed it in, ‘I know.’” Nixon resumed, “‘Yes, I know.’ Well, the point was, what I was referring to only was not that Mitchell had talked
to Pappas but that Pappas never mentioned that here in this office. Never mentioned that, I know. All he said is that, I’m helping, helping John’s [Mitchell’s] special project,’ and I said, ‘Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it very much.’ He didn’t tell me what it was about.” The president was correct regarding Pappas’s not knowing why he was providing cash, for he was happy to keep the ambassadorship for his friend that he wanted in exchange for his assistance. Haldeman had clearly explained to Nixon, however, why they needed cash from Pappas, which is reflected in their conversation.
*

When they moved on to other matters, Nixon recalled that I had sent him another very clear warning in our final conversation, four days earlier, on Easter Sunday, April 22: “Basically, Dean, it might be that he said he told the president that he was going to do this.” He recalled that I had again tried to caution him that he might be obstructing justice in colluding with Ehrlichman to block my testimony and influence my dealings with the prosecutors. “Dean told me when I called him on Sunday, I recollected this, he said, ‘You know, I know how that statement with regard to no immunity got into your statement.’ And he lobbed that out; this is a guess, of course.” Nixon asked Haldeman, “Remember the April seventeenth statement? But I’m just trying to look at things as he may look at them.”
¹³⁴
Haldeman reported that I had told Larry Higby the same thing regarding my scapegoat statement: “He put that statement out, he said, ‘That reached the right place.’” Haldeman clarified this for Nixon, “And he said, ‘The people that I was talking to got the signal,’ something to that effect.” He added that I had told Higby, “I’m not out to get anybody.” Haldeman thought the signal had gotten through, and Nixon agreed.

When Haldeman said he was not happy with this headline—N
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—Nixon denied he had made that statement (although Ziegler later corrected him, telling him he had been present when the president said it.) “You doing it privately to Dean is fine,” Haldeman said, but publicly he thought created a problem. Indeed, Haldeman wanted to know when they were going to take action on me. “I mean, they have to either indict him or give him immunity, and you’ve got to move on Dean either way.” Nixon said, “One thing you and John got to work on is the game plan on how you handle John Dean. Let’s face it: You remember, the only reason I put the immunity thing in there, Bob, was because John
insisted it go in there, do you recall?” Haldeman confirmed, “Yes, I sure do.” Nixon went on, “I think Colson did, too, as I recall. But John was the one. ‘Be sure that you say that nobody gets immunity and tell Petersen nobody’s to get immunity, that is it.’ Whether that was a good move or not, I do not know.” Haldeman explained that the only reason to grant immunity to any witness was to nail a more important defendant, and while they had plenty of witnesses to nail Mitchell, I was the witness who could nail Haldeman and Ehrlichman.

As this conversation continued, Haldeman admitted to Nixon, “I don’t think that we can pretend that we didn’t know there was an interest on Mitchell’s part in raising money for the defendants.” “But,” he protested, “I sure as hell don’t know what it was for,” as if unaware of Hunt’s demands. Nixon noted, “The staff protected me from it, [and] I just wasn’t getting involved.” “It wasn’t a matter of protection,” Haldeman explained. “It was not something that was necessary to get to you. It didn’t involve you.”

Reviewing the matters that had arisen during the March 21 conversation caused Nixon to wonder when he had first learned the defendants were being paid, when this “blackmail stuff” had first come up. Haldeman did not have a clear answer. “I never got any of this crap about defendants or attorneys’ fees or anything at all here that I remember, with you or anybody else,” Nixon said.
*
But he correctly suspected it had arisen before March 21, whether it was legal or not, so he wanted Haldeman to listen closely for that when he resumed with the March 21 conversation. Haldeman said he had discussed this matter with his lawyers, “Because they made the point that the support thing doesn’t hold up [when] the defendants were out on bail and able to earn their own support.”

Nixon wanted to know what their attorneys thought about any potential charge on “the conspiracy thing, on the support for defendants, in other words, the launching of Kalmbach and so forth.” “We didn’t have any motive, and we did not launch Kalmbach,” Haldeman replied. “We didn’t take initiative on any of this stuff.” It was an evasive answer, but Nixon clearly did not want to debate Haldeman’s conspicuous problems and said, “Okay, fine.” But Haldeman claimed their “thing” was “passive, nondisapproval”—which he did not understand still placed him solidly in a conspiratorial
agreement—“because Mitchell said there was a need.” Nixon reminded Haldeman that Ehrlichman had called Kalmbach, according to what he had been told by Petersen. When Haldeman said he thought Kalmbach had called Ehrlichman, Nixon responded, “All right, whatever it is, fine,” likely perceiving that Haldeman lacked knowledge of the law. Nixon still pressed as to what the attorneys had said about “subject A, the purpose of the so-called hush money. The obstruction of justice. You must have discussed this with them in some language, Bob?” Haldeman replied, “They’ve been researching the statutes on the question.” Nixon, of course, had already listened to them try to explain that they were searching for (nonexistent) case law to establish that their clients had not acted “corruptly” or “willfully” under the obstruction statute.

When not discussing the March 21 conversation, Nixon continued to question Haldeman on what might be my “big bomb,” so they went over my schedule and activities, which I had openly reported to Haldeman and he had recorded in great detail in his notes. I had made no secret of the fact that I had hired an attorney and that he had visited with the U.S. attorneys. While they merely began going through my day-by-day calendar during this morning conversation, that afternoon they would spend almost five hours examining this material, with Haldeman reading page after page of his notes of his conversations with me during March and April 1972.

As this analysis progressed, Nixon explained that Haldeman understood better than Ehrlichman “the human factor.” As the president reported, “Dean says, according to Petersen, he said, ‘He’s never going to be able to express anything but the greatest respect for and even affection for the president.’ Now I don’t know whether that is the case that is with others or not. But what was Higby’s report?” Haldeman replied, “Same thing.” Nixon asked, “What’s Ziegler say he said on that?” Haldeman again reported, “Same thing, that he was trying to give advice to the president,” and more recently, “Don’t let the president get caught in the obstruction of justice–type stuff and all that.” Nixon asked, “What do you think he meant by that?” Haldeman did not know but suggested, “I think that [he was] protecting his own ass, but not in the way of trying to hurt the president. I think he will use everything he’s got except that. I don’t think, unless he becomes a madman, that that is the danger, that I guess you do have to have to possibly contend with, but so the argument there is, you don’t want to do anything to drive him to becoming a madman, but you, in the same point, cannot let
a record be made of your protecting him.” “No, no,” Nixon insisted. “Oh, no, no. But Bob, I am in a totally defensible position,”