The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (8 page)

As the president prepared for the June 22 press conference, his staff correctly anticipated that he would be questioned on this topic. The finance chairman of the reelection committee, former secretary of commerce Maurice Stans, was, like Mitchell, adamant that they honor their pledges to contributors, and felt that any donations should be returned rather than their
donors revealed, but this was not an option anyone at the campaign wanted to consider.

It was during the June 21 conversation that Haldeman explained this problem to Nixon, and that much of the money that had been raised for his reelection was in the form of cash. As they were considering how to deal with this situation, the conversation drifted back to Watergate, first with an odd prediction by Nixon: “You will undoubtedly find that there’s going to be another bugging incident, probably against us, before this is over. I’m sure.” After further discussion of the new campaign law, Nixon had a suggestion: “Thing to do, I’m sure it’s already occurred to you, but on the PR side, every time there’s a leak from the White House or campaign headquarters, [we should] charge that we’re being bugged. Don’t you agree?” When Haldeman concurred, the president pushed the concept even further, explaining that Haldeman should have someone “plant a device,” but cautioned, “Do it if there’s anybody you can trust. Although I think you can trust, apparently, these Cubans. I think they probably are, to Hunt’s credit, pretty reliable characters.” The president took note of “the way they do operate, you know. They swear on this and that, their own blood, and so forth.”

Then Nixon went silent for a moment, before his thoughts turned again to the PR aspects of Watergate. Referring to the overreaction of his staff to the ITT scandal, he warned Haldeman, all the while tapping a finger rhythmically on his desk, not to make the same error regarding Watergate.

At 2:15 Ron Ziegler joined them, which was the press secretary’s first visit with the president since the arrests at the DNC. After discussing the mechanics and frequency of Nixon’s press conferences, the president asked Ziegler, “What do you want me to say about the bugging incident, and so forth?”

Ziegler urged the president to say nothing, for, contrary to the impression in the news summary, television networks were not treating the incident as a major story. “My view is, if they ask you, and they will,” Ziegler noted, “would be simply to say, ‘I have nothing to say about that. The appropriate legal agencies, through the due processes of law, as Attorney General Mitchell has already pointed out, and we pointed out at the White House, obviously this has no place in the political system. Now what is the next question?’” He said the president should not take a hard tone but simply give it the “brush-off.” Nixon made notes as they rehearsed responses, and the conversation moved to other topics.

At 3:11
P.M.
the president departed the Oval Office with Haldeman and
Ziegler to walk over to his EOB office, and then at 4:00 met with Chuck Colson, with Watergate only a passing topic.
¹⁶
The president remained concerned about Hunt and what he might have done while working at the White House, and he asked Colson about Hunt’s work on ITT. Colson said he had sent Hunt out to Denver to interview Dita Beard, but it was not a matter he was worried about.

“He didn’t break any rules?” the president asked.

“He did do some stuff for me,” Colson responded, vaguely.

“But not for us?” the president asked, hopefully.

“Oh, all of it was for us,” Colson said, and repeated that he was not worried about Hunt’s other activities. He did offer the president an idea, however: “I think that we could develop a theory as to the CIA, if we wanted to. I’ve not thought that out. We know that Hunt has all these ties with these people.”

“He worked with them,” the president agreed, momentarily warming to the suggestion.

“Oh, he was their boss, and they were all CIA. And you take the cash, you go down to Latin America—”

Nixon, however, was headed in another direction. “I’ll tell you, I think that this has one plus to it, the Cubans thing works for us,” he said, more interested in his own cover story than any CIA proposal. When Nixon ran by Colson the idea of Liddy’s taking the rap and cutting their losses, Colson responded that he was for anything that got them out of it. But he added that he was deliberately staying out of the whole matter so that he could one day make an honest affidavit that he knew nothing about it.
¹⁷

T
he front-page headline of Thursday’s
New York Times
read
4
B
EING
H
UNTED
IN
I
NQUIRY
IN
R
A
ID
ON
D
EMOCRATS
. The story reported that, in addition to the five men who had been arrested, the investigators were looking for four more who had registered at the Watergate Hotel. (In fact, these were aliases of the Miami men who had been arrested.) It cited “Republican sources” as saying that Mitchell had ordered an investigation to determine the relationship of the CRP to the arrested parties, but that information was a ruse, for Mitchell never undertook such an investigation.
¹

By now it was clear, however, that
The Washington Post
was going to make a much larger issue out of Watergate. The city editor of the
Post
at the time of the arrests was Barry Sussman (who was soon to be appointed its special Watergate editor, and who would lead the paper to win a Pulitzer grand prize for its public service coverage). He was absolutely tantalized by the story as it unfolded, so he assigned two eager young reporters to it: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Sussman later explained that there was a collective mind-set at the
Post,
from executive editor Ben Bradlee on down, that Nixon & Company were somehow complicit in Watergate.
²

Contrary to popular belief, the White House was not particularly well plugged into the FBI’s investigation, and much of what the public (including Nixon himself) learned about it was from coverage in the
Post
, which in addition to Woodward and Bernstein had a dozen more reporters busy digging. Typical of the comprehensive coverage in the paper was Woodward’s front-page story on the morning of June 22, D
EMOCRATS,
GOP
T
IGHTEN
S
ECURITY
A
FTER
W
ATERG
ATE “
B
UGGING”
C
ASE
, in which he reported that Larry O’Brien said that diagrams of his personal offices and living quarters
in Miami had been found in the belongings of the five arrested men.
³
The
Post
also had three additional Watergate features, including one about the disappearance of Howard Hunt.
⁴

After eating breakfast and scanning the morning newspapers, the president went directly to his EOB office, arriving at 9:20
A.M.
, where he planned to spend the day going through Pat Buchanan’s briefing books, in preparation for his press conference at 3:00
P.M.
, his first in months. At 9:40 he summoned Haldeman, and after a brief discussion about how politically effective the president’s family had become, he turned to Watergate.
⁵

He told Haldeman he would respond to any questions about the matter as he had been advised by Mitchell and Ziegler but was certain he would be asked if there was any White House involvement. Here he needed some further guidance and thought, for the responses drafted by Buchanan sounded too much as if they had been drafted by a lawyer. As he paraphrased them aloud—“Nothing has happened to reduce my confidence in members of the White House staff”—he complained, “Well, that [is] too much of an obvious [reply], in my opinion. I think I should state there’s no White House involvement.” But he wanted to be sure that that was not too broad a statement, since it had not been suggested by whoever had prepared the briefing material.
⁶

“I don’t know what, it may be that their concern is that there is some White House involvement?” the president asked.

“No,” Haldeman answered quickly. “The only question is whether that technically puts you in a—”

“—a position of commenting on it?” the president interrupted.

“Well, no, in a sense that, on a direct basis of White House involvement, I think you’re absolutely clean,” Haldeman replied hesitantly. Only days earlier, on June 20, he had reminded the president that a number of members of the staff—including the president and himself—were aware of the reelection committee’s intelligence operation: “We all knew that there were some,” he had said, a sentence the president had completed with “intelligence things.” Haldeman now rephrased the statement more prudently: “Some activities, and we were getting reports, or some input here and there.” When Haldeman responded to Nixon’s question on June 20, his choice of the words “on a direct basis” regarding the White House was a careful qualification of the potential involvement of the staff, including that of Colson and myself, but particularly his own.

“Hunt’s the only line to the White House,” Haldeman continued, but he
raised the concern that both Gordon Liddy and Jeb Magruder had once been members of the White House staff.

“But they aren’t White House now,” Nixon pointed out.

The president now took a call from Ziegler,
*
and after he hung up summarized for Haldeman the Watergate strategy they had agreed on.

“Well, I think I’ll just say Mr. Ziegler’s covered that, because he said he was asked about Hunt, and he said he left the White House three months ago. He said he was asked about Colson the first day, he checked with Colson, he was not involved. I’ll say Mr. Ziegler has covered that. It keeps me from getting into it, and then they bring up another story, the president says White House was not involved.”

Haldeman did have some good news to report: “We’re in pretty good shape. Today’s news is all good. In the first place, we got Judge Richey for the civil case. The civil case is kind of worrisome. The Democrats outsmarted themselves. They made a fatal legal error. They filed the suit on behalf of all Democrats, thereby disqualifying any Democratic judge from hearing it. And according to [former attorney general and current secretary of state] Bill Rogers, [Richey’s] programmable, and knows exactly what’s going on. Richey’s played it just beautifully.” Haldeman described how the Democrats had planned to “move immediately on depositions,” but Richey would “entertain all sorts of delaying motions.”

“He also knows he has a possibility of moving up in the world,” the president added, and then turned to the fact that security at the Republican National Committee and the CRP had been beefed up, and warned that they needed to be careful, because papers had been stolen from the White House.
*
Discussing security and leaks brought the president back to reporters who published stolen classified government documents. That morning’s
Post
editorial gloated over the fact that nothing had gone amiss, no national security calamity had occurred, when the classified Pentagon Papers had been published. Nixon instructed Haldeman to have a story written by at least one columnist critical of Pulitzers being awarded for such reporting. “We’ll get
that,” Haldeman assured him. “We’ve got another thing going that’s taken hold a little bit, which is, we’ve started moving on the Hill, letting things come out from there, which is that this whole Watergate thing is a Jack Anderson thing.” Haldeman reported about how members of Congress and their staffs had “started a rumor yesterday morning, and it’s starting to come back already. That Jack Anderson has put all this together. He was bugging the Democratic offices and, you know, because these Cubans are tied to him,” Haldeman explained (which, in fact, was correct with regard to Frank Sturgis). “These are agents he’s used.” Haldeman said the White House had planted the rumor that they had been working for Anderson at the DNC. “So, the great thing about it is, it is so totally fucked up, and so, so badly done, that nobody believes we could have done it. It’s just beyond comprehension.”

“Well, it sounds like a comic opera, really,” the president added. Haldeman agreed, saying, “It really does, it would make a funny God damn movie.” The president responded, “I mean, you know, here’s these Cubans with their accents,” and Nixon began laughing as Haldeman continued the description: “Wearing these rubber gloves, standing there in their expensive, well-made business suits, wearing rubber gloves, and putting their hands up and shouting ‘Don’t shoot’ when the police come in. It really is like a comic opera.” Then, on a serious note, Haldeman added, “Also, they have no case on Hunt.”

“Why?” Nixon asked.

“They have not been able to make him. They can’t put him into the scene at all,” Haldeman explained. “We know where he was, though.”

“But they don’t. The FBI doesn’t?” the president asked.

“That’s right,” Haldeman assured him, and added, “They’ve pursued him and been unable to tie him in at all to the case.”

“What about the disappearance?” which had been reported in the
Post
. “So, he’ll come back?”

“Well, they’ve got no warrant for him, so they don’t care whether he disappeared,” Haldeman replied. “The legal people, the FBI, who are running the investigation, have no way to fix Hunt in the case. They have issued no warrant for him. They don’t care whether he disappears or not. The only thing there is, his name’s in the guy’s address book. But so is the hotel clerk’s name.”

“Is Rebozo’s name in anyone’s address book?” Nixon asked.

“No, I don’t think so. He told me he doesn’t know any of these guys,”
Haldeman said. The president thought Bebe did know Suarez, whose name had come up in Jack Anderson’s commentary on the Watergate break-in and arrests. “But, hell, Suarez is one of the biggest contractors in Florida,” the president noted.

Haldeman had further encouraging news: “Another good break is, they can’t trace the currency.”

“They traced it to a Miami bank,” the president pointed out, again reporting what he had read in the
Post
.

“They traced it to a Miami bank, which was easily done. But the bank cannot trace the thing beyond that. They’re not required to, and they don’t maintain any record of where, or who takes it, when it’s hundred-dollar bills. When it’s bigger denominations, they have to keep a record, but with hundred-dollar bills, they don’t. Even if there were [a way to trace the source of the funds], it wouldn’t be a very great problem, unless it can go two more steps, because the funds came from a money order from a South American country. They might be able to get to the South American country and find out where the money order came from, and that isn’t good. Up to that point we’re all right, and they can’t even go to the next place.”

Referring to the CRP, Haldeman added, “They’re going to continue to crank up the Cuban operation.”

“How high up?” Nixon interrupted.

“Well, the FBI’s investigation is beginning to look into other Cubans, and that kind of thing. These guys are allied in some other enterprises that we don’t care about.” Haldeman felt this was still a pretty encouraging story, as long as they didn’t dig too deep—though he did not explain what they might dig up, which he apparently felt the president need not consider. “See, the thing we forget is that we know too much, and therefore read too much into what we see that other people can’t read into it. I mean, what seems obvious to us because of what we know is not obvious to other people.”

After a brief discussion of how little attention the networks were paying to the Cuban connection, Haldeman continued, “One thing they are thinking about doing at the CRP, which we could do, and it would be easy to cover it with no problem, just for safety’s sake, is to get Liddy out of the country. They’ll just have him go over to Europe and be checking on some of our financial contributions, the fund-raising drive in Europe.”

“You mean, the idea being, they’re not after him?” Nixon asked.

“Not yet. But they figure, maybe if he’s moved around, it would be good.
They’ve sent him to L.A. He’s had some business there. And he can as a routine matter go to Europe, and it’s just as well if something does surface not to have him around, or have to move him after it does. And then they can wait and see; if we want him back, it’s easy to bring him back.

“How the hell can you question him, unless somebody talks?” Nixon asked.

“If somebody talks, which is still a potential,” Haldeman said. “Now, they’re leaving McCord in jail to keep an eye on the other guys and maintain contact with them.”

This situation surprised the president. “The guys there, they don’t want to get them out on bail?”

“Apparently they’d rather leave them in right now.”

“They probably don’t mind,” the president surmised.

“For a lot of reasons, they’re better off in jail,” Haldeman agreed.

The June 22, 1972, press conference was handled as an impromptu event in the Oval Office, where the White House press corps gathered around the president’s desk for an informal question-and-answer session, with no radio or television coverage. A White House stenographer prepared an official transcript of the event, which was also recorded. Ziegler had set the ground rules for the event, which was limited to domestic issues. At 3:04 the president entered, nodding his greetings. Frank Cormier, the senior wire service correspondent, began the session with a loaded Watergate question, just as had been anticipated.

“Mr. O’Brien has said that the people who bugged his headquarters had a direct link to the White House. Have you had any sort of investigation made to determine whether this is true?” Cormier asked.

“Mr. Ziegler, and also Mr. Mitchell, speaking for the campaign committee, have responded to questions on this in great detail,” the president began, then stepped closer to his desk and the gathered reporters. “They have stated my position and have also stated the facts accurately. This kind of activity, as Mr. Ziegler has indicated, has no place whatever in our electoral process, or in our governmental process. And, as Mr. Ziegler has stated, the White House has had no involvement whatever in this particular incident. As far as the matter now is concerned, it is under investigation, as it should be, by the proper legal authorities, by the District of Columbia police, and by the FBI. I will not comment on those matters, particularly since possible criminal charges are involved.”