The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (94 page)

Later on that afternoon, while meeting with Haig, the president mentioned that Buzhardt’s (erroneous) chronology indicated that payments to the defendants had ended in January, so Nixon now had doubts about my report to him in March that Hunt was demanding money.
⁶⁵
He also discussed the letter he had recently received from John Ehrlichman, who had written to warn him that Len Garment was leaking information to the news media. But more important to Nixon was his observation: “You can tell from the tone of Ehrlichman’s letter that he isn’t about to hurt me. He would die first.”

Just before six o’clock the president asked Rose Woods into the Oval Office.
⁶⁶
By now she had finally spoken with Pappas, but apparently on the telephone, so she said nothing about his fund-raising for Mitchell. “Pappas told me Martha called him over in Greece,” Woods reported. “Oh, boy,” Nixon commented. Woods said she was going to call him back tomorrow, apparently to find out when he was coming to Washington. “God, I hope they don’t get Pappas,” Nixon said, and then added, “Well, they can’t, all he did was raise money,” and then speaking over Woods as she was talking, “It wasn’t done for the purpose of hushing anybody up.” “I didn’t even mention it to him,” Rose reported. “The only reason I raised it,” Nixon said, “Dean mentioned his name
to me, you know, that he was helping Mitchell with money for Hunt’s lawyer, or something.” He was unable to resolve this nagging problem.
*

Later that night Nixon called Buzhardt, who had little new information.
⁶⁷
He said I had refused to testify before the grand jury, taking the Fifth Amendment, and he thought that Magruder would lie before the Senate, for he was trying to get a reduced sentence by implicating anyone and everyone he could, but that he would not be a problem for the president. Nixon said he felt for Magruder, “A hotshot kind of guy with a great future.” Nixon judged that Magruder and I were similar. Buzhardt (whom I had met only once, fleetingly, and spoken on the telephone with once or twice long before he came to the White Hous) disagreed: “Dean is not as aggressive as Magruder,” he said. Rather I was “bland, seemingly very objective. He’s not a flappable-type person.” “He was cool,” Nixon added. “His memory’s not that good,” Buzhardt reported (apparently based on my dealing with the prosecutors before I had made any effort to sort out dates and events). “He gets confused as to when things took place. And I think we’ll be able to do pretty well on him.” Buzhardt quickly added, “Maybe his memory will improve under oath. And maybe I’m misjudging him.” This conversation continued with speculation about my testimony and who on the committee would be most helpful to the White House. They hoped they might persuade Democratic senator Herman Talmadge (D-GA) to help them with me. “Oh boy, Herman will kill him,” Nixon noted, and asked, When would the White House “draw the sword on Dean?” Buzhardt said it would depend on the cross-examination: The plan was to have one or more columnists write about “my contradictions,” even though I had yet to give any testimony or make any testimonial-related statement. But the plan seemed to satisfy Nixon.

The president’s final Watergate conversation of June 12 was with Ziegler, who observed that the news media had built my Senate testimony to a crescendo, but what I could “say under oath is not much. I know that.”
⁶⁸
Ziegler noted, “He can’t go into the Oval Office in any legitimate way. And if he attempts to do it, he could end up with twenty years” in prison. Nixon gave Ziegler his take on my likely testimony: “Here is a man with an incentive to lie. Here is a man who has given five different stories on this. And here
is a man who is lying about the president. Here is a man who had the responsibility and never told the president for ten months.” Whatever my testimony turned out to be, Nixon instructed Ziegler: “It doesn’t make any difference. Deny it. Do you understand? Deny everything, because he is lying.”

During his Oval Office meeting that morning with Ziegler and Haig, Nixon asked where Ehrlichman could be getting his information that Garment was leaking heavily to the press.
⁶⁹
Ziegler replied that there was no evidence to support that accusation, and then defended Garment as one of the president’s staunchest defenders. Haig did not disagree. Rather than wait until Thursday, the president met with Buzhardt in his EOB office from 11:45
A.M.
until 1:29
P.M.
to go over his notes on his conversations with me.
⁷⁰

Buzhardt said he was going “day by day” through all the president’s meetings with me, gathering what information he could from Haldeman and Ehrlichman. This prompted the president to request his briefcase. “It’s over at the Oval Office,” he instructed a secretary on the telephone. “I’ve got some notes there,” he advised Buzhardt. But when the notes arrrived they did little to trigger the president’s memory of our meeting. Rather Nixon walked Buzhardt through his meetings with me, giving him a bare minimum of information. “I don’t think I should brief you on all my notes,” Nixon explained. “If you go down the wrong track, I should tell you.” In effect, the president wanted Buzhardt to tell him what had occurred in our meetings. When that proved unworkable, the president skimmed through the meetings, plucking out occasional statements by me that were consistent with his defense and dismissing matters or spinning them when they conflicted.

When Buzhardt mentioned that Watergate special prosecutor Cox had again requested to hear “a tape of the conversation with Dean” on April 15, which Nixon had mentioned to Petersen, Nixon said that was “a misunderstanding,” and explained awkwardly, “what I’m referrng to is that I know I didn’t tape. What I’m referring to is that I didn’t dictate at the end of the day my recollection, but I was not going to turn that over.” Buzhardt reported Cox wanted an inventory of the White House files. “No, sir,” the president said without thought. Upon learning that Cox was also seeking tape recordings Ehrlichman made of his conversations, Nixon firmly braced his Watergate counsel: “Well, let me say this. I have no tapes of your very confidential
information. Apparently, there are some telephone tapes,” he noted vaguely, and added, “but all of them remain in the Oval Office.” Nixon declared there were no tapes, but whatever tapes had been made, “I didn’t ask for them myself, you understand that?” “Yes,” Buzhardt said, reassuringly. After finishing with Buzhardt, the president called Haig.
⁷¹
“Well, you know, it’s an interesting thing,” Nixon said. “At least this week, we’re talking about what we’re doing, rather than worrying about what they’re doing.” “Exactly,” Haig confirmed. “We’re worrying a bit, but not too much. Because what the dickens, they are going to crack us, and that’s that,” the president observed. Nixon reported that he had just told Buzhardt, “Now be sure that Dean’s lawyers [understand] that he better watch his step, because we are, ah, every meeting he was in, we have the record. That’s the important thing, that they know that.” (No such message was ever relayed to me or my attorneys.)

Nixon requested Ziegler come to his EOB office later that afternoon, and he was given an update on the Senate Watergate committee proceedings.
⁷²
Ziegler liked Senator Edward Gurney’s (R-FL) aggressive behavior. Nixon, who seemed to like his new counsel, also noted that “Buzhardt’s a real hothead.”

Following a sixteen-minute speech to the nation from the Oval Office on the sputtering economy, the president returned to the residence shortly before nine o’clock, where he had dinner in the Lincoln Sitting Room while taking a steady stream of congratulatory telephone calls. At 9:41
P.M.
Chuck Colson checked in to lavish praise on the speech and to report how delighted Colson’s clients—specifically, the Teamsters union—were with his remarks.
⁷³
Not surprisingly the conversation soon turned to Watergate, when the president said he understood that “Stans had been a good witness.” Colson said he had been “superb,” but Nixon hastened to add, “I don’t watch this crap.” Colson liked the fact that Gurney was “really tough” and noted that the
Evening Star
newspaper “had a big piece that Dean and I are now pitted against each other.” Nixon moved past this and noted that “apparently Cox has decided not to give him transactional immunity.” Colson confirmed that: “Remember, I mentioned to you Sunday, the prosecutors hate his guts.” Nixon counseled Colson that he probably did not want to be pitted against me, but Colson said it didn’t matter. Nixon assured Colson, “I’m not going to let this little pip-squeak knock you down.” “But you pass this way once in this world,” Colson said, “and my great satisfaction is seeing what you’re doing for the country, and that’s all I really care about. This thing with Dean, I’ve met him head-on.”

Concerned I would say “terrible things” when I went before the committee on Friday, Nixon reported, “We’ve got to be prepared. I’ve got Buzhardt and all prepared to put out a brief one-sentence disclaimer, but that’s about all we’re going to do. I don’t think the president ought to get in a fight with John Dean. What do you think?” “Absolutely, that’d be the worst thing you could do,” Colson agreed. He wanted me “out there all by himself” in making accusations about the president. “And when even
Newsweek
labels him as a turncoat, then you know he’s in trouble.” Colson said I was getting terrible press, with even the
Star
photo editor featuring a photo that made me “look a little deceitful” and
Newsweek
painting me with “the boy-from-prep-school routine.” They agreed this was appropriate. “But he deceived a lot of people,” Colson claimed, and Nixon echoed, “But he deceived all of us.”

Nixon soon added, “Incidentally, I have not been pleased with Richardson. Not at all,” and was particularly annoyed that Richardson had publicly said Nixon should get his own lawyer: “He either shapes up, he’s either the attorney general for the president of the United States or he’s out.” Nixon added, “And I’d put him out damn fast, too,” explaining, “We don’t owe him a damned thing.” When Colson, who knew Richardson from Massachusetts politics, said that he found him to be a “tough politician,” Nixon explained how Haig was having to raise hell with Richardson, and noted, “We really rolled him on one thing. You know he violently opposed the appointment of our FBI guy [Clarence Kelly]. Violently.” Nixon said Richardson wanted “a Harvard or some Ivy League dean or criminologist. And I turned him down, and so we got this nice cop.”

This call ended shortly before ten o’clock, but no sooner did they hang up than they were back on the line for more, for Nixon loved talking to Colson. “This business of attacking the president has got to stop,” he said. “As far as the press corps, they can go to hell.”
⁷⁴
Colson assured Nixon that “the great silent majority see right through them.” “We’ve been on the defensive for two months,” Nixon began, and then realized it was “because, basically, you see, they were right, in a sense. There was a cover-up, let’s face it. But on the other hand, they have built up the first crime and the cover-up to unbelievable things.” Citing the departures of Krogh, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Gray, Nixon did not like the media’s characterization of Watergate as “the greatest, you know, corruption in history. That’s baloney.”

Nixon rarely met with his vice president, Spiro Agnew, or included him in anything other than cabinet sessions, but Agnew did join the end of a meeting that morning in the Oval Office with Haig and Ziegler.
⁷⁵
When Agnew arrived, the conversation had turned to the latest Gallup public opinion poll, which indicated that 44 percent of the American people felt the Watergate matter was important. Ziegler recommended that when I was before the committee the following week, the White House should state that the president was “working on the Brezhnev thing” and would have no comments until I had completed all my testimony. The president solicited Agnew’s views, but the vice president soon moved on to another matter, a personal problem he was facing, noting, “What I’m going to tell you about now is something entirely different, to show you the lynch mob psychology that exits over there,” in Maryland, where he had served as governor before becoming vice president. Agnew continued, “Now this thing they’re calling another Watergate, and this, Mr. President, is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen.” Vaguely the vice president mentioned that “accusations” had been leveled against him, but “nothing that’ll stick.” And soon the conversation moved on.
*

When Agnew and Nixon were alone, Agnew expressed his concern: He had hired Chuck Colson’s law firm to represent him, so he wondered if Colson was going to be drawn into Watergate. Nixon thought not and counseled Agnew that if he was happy with the attorney in the firm he should stay with him. Agnew tried to convince Nixon that “what they’re really after, Mr. President, they’re trying to get both of us at the same time, and get [Speaker of the House] Carl Albert in as the president.” “Oh, God,” Nixon exclaimed, more in disbelief than concern, which provoked a nervous laugh from Agnew, who insisted, “That’s what they’re really after.”

Late that afternoon the president called Haldeman, from whom he felt he was getting a better read on developments than he could obtain from his staff, and given the information Haldeman was providing, that was undoubtedly true.
⁷⁶
Haldeman first mentioned that he had talked to Hobart Lewis, the CEO and editor in chief at
Reader’s Digest
, as well as a longtime Nixon friend. Nixon had suggested that Haldeman speak to Lewis about funding an undertaking that would allow Haldeman and Ehrlichman to
work for the Nixon Foundation, as well as develop material for publication by Lewis. But Lewis indicated that he had some problems and wanted to speak with Nixon, who said that he would be happy to meet with him after Brezhnev departed. Nixon was most interested in Magruder’s testimony that day before the Senate Watergate committee. Magruder had been “lobbing some very rough stuff,” Haldeman told him. “He’s totally wiped Mitchell out, and he’s totally wiped Gordon Strachan out, which is going to be tough to deal with. And it’s kind of interesting, because he’s covered stuff with Strachan, if it’s true, that I had absolutely no knowledge of.” Nixon was not surprised. Haldeman reported that Magruder testified that he had discussed the cover-up in January with Haldeman, who disputed that account, saying he had discussed a job for Magruder that month. (Needless to say, Haldeman’s conversations with the president reveal that Magruder and Haldeman discussed the cover-up, but unless the specific terms “cover-up” or “obstruction of justice” were used, Haldeman did not consider his actions to be part of a concealment effort.) Haldeman noted that Magruder had absolved me of “preknowledge” but did involve me in the cover-up and in his perjury. He had not involved the president or Ehrlichman, and only indirectly Haldeman. Nixon asked about Ervin, who Haldeman described as “a real jackass, just awful.” Nixon asked, “Preening himself?” “Preening himself,” Haldeman confirmed.