The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (90 page)

At 12:49
P.M.
Haldeman slipped into the president’s EOB office for a quick meeting.
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Nixon again greeted him with a friendly “Robert” and said, “Come in. It’s good to see your face.” They talked about the Walters memcons and what the June 23, 1973, meeting with Walters had been all about. Haldeman got down to the truth, and referring to the FBI’s Watergate investigation, told Nixon that the concern at the time had been “where this can lead outside the Watergate. We were not concerned about the investigation on Watergate.” Haldeman bluntly and accurately continued, “We were concerned about the investigation expanding beyond, for reasons that now we have no problem saying, because all that stuff is out.” “Is out,” Nixon echoed, “We’ll say that that’s exactly the reason.” “And it is exactly the reason, because we didn’t want the plumbers operation out.”

“In other words, you don’t think I should be impeached for that?” Nixon asked. “No. You were doing what you had to do to defend your own operations in here,” Haldeman answered. As the conversation continued, Haldeman said that Ehrlichman had very strong feelings that the White House should get out in front of the Congress in explaining “the CIA thing,” referring to the Walters memcons. Haldeman wanted to make it part of their offense rather than being forced into defending them. Nixon wanted Haldeman’s memory of his role in the Walters matter, but Haldeman (who had not checked his June 23 notes) did not recall if Nixon had directed they meet with Walters and Helms. What he did recall, however, was what he had said at the meeting with Walters and Helms: “I said it was the president’s wish that Walters call on Gray and suggest to him that since the five burglars had been arrested, this should be sufficient and was [
unclear
], especially in Mexico, et cetera.” Haldeman did not remember if it was he or Ehrlichman who had raised the CIA’s involvement. He reminded Nixon that Hunt, who they “knew was involved in the plumbers thing,” had not been arrested at the time, adding, “I think we’ve got to admit to that.” “Absolutely,” Nixon agreed. Haldeman had also remembered that I had spoken with the Justice Department about the scope of the investigation, although in his account he had me telling them what in fact they had told me. Haldeman reminded the president that they knew Hunt and several of the Cubans had been involved in the Bay of Pigs, which he had mentioned at the meeting, and to which Helms had reacted; Haldeman added that he had gotten the impression from Nixon “that the CIA did have some concern about the Bay of Pigs.” Finally, he raised the fact that they had raised the question about the Mexican money
and the CIA, and whether that got “into covert sources, because they did not know what the Mexican money involved.”

This conversation clarified in Nixon’s mind the possibility that he could take the national security wiretaps, the plumbers operation, the Walters memcon issues, and the Dean papers as a whole and issue a report on them: “I would put the whole God damn thing out and let the whole schmear sit there.” They would exclude, however, Watergate. Haldeman agreed: “My position is that what you’ve got to do is put all this out, and I think it should not be the president going on television. It’s not a television-type story. It should be a very careful document issued by the White House which puts the matters into perspective.” “That’s what they’re working on now,” Nixon reported. Haldeman did not like the idea of a test vote in the House on impeachment, for it was “overgrandstanding.” The American people wanted this cleaned up, “so we can watch the soap operas on television.”

Nixon again raised the issue that some were calling on him to resign on the basis that he could no longer do his job, and that a resignation would clear his name, but he admitted, “Shit, I can’t do it, Bob.” Haldeman agreed, explaining that that was the argument Ray Price had made to him as to why he should resign: “My resignation didn’t clear my name. My resigning proved to everybody in the world, except a few people that believe in me, that I’m guilty. And your resigning will prove it conclusively. It will prove that you’re guilty and that I’m guilty and that everybody else in here is guilty.”

Haldeman returned to the president’s EOB office for another meeting later that afternoon.
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He had spoken with Ehrlichman, about whom Nixon remained concerned since their Camp David conversation, when Ehrlichman had given Nixon the impression, “I’m to blame totally, and he’s to blame not at all,” as the president put it. Haldeman did not think Nixon would have a problem with Ehrlichman. Nixon was pleased with a statement being prepared, which he had been urging for days. The president reported that the plan was to have the white paper completed on Tuesday, May 22. Nixon said it was for the “assholes”—by which he meant the news media. With that clarified, Nixon began reviewing a number of topics along with more immediate questions: Was Ehrlichman talking about the president? Haldeman did not think he was volunteering anything, but the Democratic senators were “fishing on how to get you involved.”

Soon they were into another discussion attempting to attribute the blame to me, with Nixon declaring, “We must destroy John Dean. He is a bad, bad
man.” “He will destroy himself,” Haldeman replied. “Why?” Nixon asked. “Because,” Haldeman replied,” I don’t think he is telling the truth, and I think it’s all coming around.” This dicussion continued through the afternoon and ended with more a hopeful analysis by Haldeman: “I don’t see how Dean could hang us, anyway. He’s got no evidence.”

Nixon asked Haldeman, based on his closed session with the Senate Watergate committee, about the capability of its members. Haldeman thought Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) “comes out quite well,” and is “capable,” “sharp.” Senator Howard Baker (R-TN) “comes out very well” and “keeps quoting from
The Washington Post
” to give us the “chance to shoot down all those stories.” Senator Edward Gurney (R-FL) “is bad, very bad,” “just mean.” Senator Lowell Weicker (R-CT) “is a disaster” and “not effective”; his “questions don’t make sense,” “he is antagonistic,” and is “sort of a pain in the ass.” Haldeman ended the visit by encouraging Nixon to go out and get some sun. “This is a fight that can be won,” Haldeman assured him. Nixon was not so confident, but as he stated it, “The point is, you’ve got to try, because by God, as you suggested, I sit in this chair with the whole world in [my] hands.”

Haig checked in with the president in the late afternoon to assure him that everything was proceeding on schedule in the drafting of the white paper.
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A few hours later Haig phoned Nixon with some news.
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When Nixon anticipated the news that Richardson would soon have “his [special] prosecutor and all that horseshit,” Haig continued, “I see he got a humdinger.” “Who’d he get?” Nixon asked. “A fellow named [Archibald] Cox that used to be solicitor general for Kennedy,” Haig reported. “Oh, I know him,” Nixon said. “He’s not very bright, but he’s well respected,” and the president did not think the Senate Judiciary Committee could reject him. “Cox is not a mean man,” Nixon noted. “He’s a partisan, but not that mean,” and Haig added that he understood that Cox was “not a zealot.” “Believe me, if he’d take Cox, that would be great,” the president said.

Nixon stayed actively involved through the weekend of May 19 and 20, checking on the progress of the white paper and all Watergate-related matters. When he met with Haig on Saturday morning in the Oval Office he was thinking about how to roll out the new statement.
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He thought he would call in the congressional leaders and “take them all for an hour and a half to two hours. And I will lay it all out there, and I’ll say, here it is.” He would ask for their support and explain it involved “the national interest” and, of
course, remind them that he “was not involved in the God damn Watergate.” Late Saturday morning Nixon met with Ziegler and Haig and explained why he should not do a television speech with the white paper material: “You can’t use the big bullet too often and have it be effective.”
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He wanted to know who was working on it, and he was told Pat Buchanan and Ray Price, and Ziegler assured him they were in sync. Ziegler gave Nixon his reading on the first day of the Senate Watergate hearings: “The overall impact on the public, from a guy like McCord and his testimony yesterday, is zilch.”

After much rehashing the president left with the First Lady for Norfolk, Virginia, and then to the USS
Independence
off the Norfolk coast for Armed Forces Day ceremonies. They returned to Camp David around four o’clock. Shortly after seven o’clock the president telephoned Ziegler from Camp David, asking, “How we coming on the project?”
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Ziegler assured the president they could make the Monday morning deadline, and that in addition to himself, Haig, Price, Buchanan, Garment and Buzhardt were at work on the statement.

On Sunday morning, May 20, the president checked in by telephone with Ziegler, who said they had made good progress the night before.
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In addition to the congressional leaders, they discussed inviting members of the Armed Services Committee, because of their jurisdiction over the CIA, for the background briefing on the statement. Nixon next phoned Haig
⁶¹
and told him that Ziegler had mentioned that Buzhardt thought they could delay releasing the Walters memcons to the Senate until Wednesday, which Nixon thought was favorable, as they would have released the white paper by then. At 12:26
P.M.
Nixon called Haldeman to bring him up to date.
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Haldeman said he was being hounded by the press but telling them nothing other than “the president had no knowledge of or involvement in any kind of cover-up or anything else related to Watergate in any way, shape or form.” Most of this conversation involved Nixon once again trying to get Haldeman to tell him what he did and did not know, particularly regarding Ehrlichman and clemency, enlisting Kalmbach, keeping Hunt on after the Ellsberg break-in, and when he first learned of that break-in. Several hours later Nixon spoke again with Haldeman,
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who had been unable to reach Ehrlichman because he was in California for a new grand jury investigating the Ellsberg break-in. An hour later, however, Ehrlichman had called Haldeman, who then reported back to Nixon.
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Ehrlichman (who would later change his memory) told Haldeman on “the [Ellsberg] psychiatrist thing, that he doesn’t believe you
knew about that until February or March,” and that he thought that Nixon had learned of it from me. Ehrlichman passed the word via Haldeman that anything Nixon could say in his statement about the Ellsberg break-in situation “would be very helpful.” He was looking for “any substantiation” they could get, since it had been under wraps. Nixon responded, “Of course, I suppose that even under the plumbers thing, illegal activity is not,” he said with a nervous chuckle, “is not, not impressed with national security.”

On Sunday evening Nixon discussed the drafting of the white paper on the telephone with Haig.
⁶⁵
The president wanted to stress the “national security” angle but did not want to release any of the underlying documents (the memcons or the Dean papers). Nixon said he wanted all this talk about impeachment, particularly by Buzhardt, to cease: “We are fighting to the end. We’re going to beat the bastards.” A few hours later, at 10:17
P.M.
, after arriving back at the White House, Nixon talked with Ziegler and learned they were still working on the draft.
⁶⁶
Ziegler said they had discussed a rapid response team to deal with any charges that arose at the Watergate hearings. Nothing had been decided, nor had a recommendation been offered. Nixon repeated his mantra: “I think the whole thing right now is to play everything very tough, that everybody else is lying.”

Monday was devoted to editing, rewriting and more editing of the white paper, mixed in with discussions of how to best release it on the following day. The conversations are difficult to follow without copies of the drafts from which they were working during the conversation, but what is clear is that Nixon approved every word of the final draft, often providing his staff information that only he knew. No one was allowed to check Haldeman’s or Ehrlichman’s notes. Even though Nixon had dictated his contemporaneous thoughts about some of the meetings and issues involved for his diary, he chose not to use it to refresh his recollections. The editing and planning process for the white paper, which would be the most detailed statement Nixon would make of his defense, began when Ziegler entered the Oval Office at 8:40
A.M.
to report that Watergate had finally moved off the front pages of the newspapers.
⁶⁷

Ziegler explained that they could not have a meeting with congressional leaders to present the white paper, because the Republican leaders—Jerry
Ford in the House and Hugh Scott in the Senate—were “fearful” and did not want to attend a meeting in the White House, so they would be privately briefed in their offices. Ziegler said it had been suggested that Nixon invite the Democratic leaders—Carl Albert in the House and Mike Mansfield in the Senate—down for a glass of bourbon in the Lincoln Sitting Room for their briefing. While considering these and other ideas, Nixon said he had noted in a memo from Pat Buchanan that “he seems to think that it was a mistake for me to refer to Haldeman and Ehrlichman as two fine men. You think so?” Ziegler dodged the question, and Nixon explained that Buchanan did not understand “the problem we had. If I didn’t put that in the speech, you could have those two men bitter,” which he did not want. Nixon pointed out that fifteen people had left the administration because of Watergate, “And it’s a wrenching experience.”
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As this conversation progressed, Nixon shared his analysis of what had gone amiss with his presidency: “I would never say this to him, but it was Bob Haldeman giving Jeb Magruder the enormous responsibility he did over there at the campaign, and Magruder then taking the Liddys and Hunts and that bunch of jackasses over there.” (Absent from this analysis was Ehrlichman’s authorizing Krogh to send Liddy to the reelection committee.
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)