The Wars of Watergate (43 page)

Nixon and CBS correspondent Dan Rather in a heated exchange during a September 1973 press conference. (National Archives)

Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev on a Potomac cruise during a recess in the Senate hearings, June 1973. (National Archives)

September 15, 1972. Earlier that day, a federal grand jury had returned indictments against the five Watergate burglars as well as E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. A Justice Department spokesman described the investigation as “in a state of repose” and thought it “highly unlikely” that it would be extended. Following the President’s suggestion, Republican Party officials demanded that the Democrats apologize for their allegations of White House wrongdoing in the break-in; campaign marching orders still came from the Oval Office. On September 14 Nixon had been pleased to learn that the indictments would be confined to lower echelons, and he was confident that the indictments would “obviate whitewash,” as H. R. Haldeman noted. Meanwhile, the election campaign exhilarated Nixon. It was his tenth campaign—the last, he told Haldeman, so “make it the best.”

Nixon met with Haldeman in the late afternoon of September 15. Watergate was very much on their minds, as was the young lawyer in charge of damage control. Haldeman congratulated himself on having designated John Wesley Dean III for that task. While Dean would not “gain any ground for us,” Haldeman told the President, he would make “sure that you don’t fall through the holes.” Haldeman knew the way to Richard Nixon’s heart. Dean, he noted, was “moving ruthlessly on the investigation of McGovern people, Kennedy stuff, and all that too.” Altogether, Haldeman reported, Dean had turned out to be tougher than he had anticipated.

Such a performance apparently merited a presidential audience. It was
close to 5:30
P.M.
when the President summoned the White House Counsel. Nixon greeted Dean rather casually. “Hi, how are you?” “Yes sir,” Dean responded. The President wasted no time in coming to the point: “Well, you had quite a day today, didn’t you? You got, uh, Watergate, uh, on the way, huh?”
¹

September 15 was an important day for the President’s growing involvement in the cover-up of any White House connection to the break-in. For John Dean, especially, it was a red-letter day, for now he was about to receive official recognition, even blessing, for his direction of the cover-up campaign. He had worked hard for three months to keep the President from falling through the holes. Dean thought he was on his way to the top. From another perspective, at another time, he saw his life that day as “touching bottom.”

John Dean was thirty-two years old in May 1970 and working for John Mitchell in the Department of Justice when he met his friend Egil Krogh. Krogh, very much a White House insider, suggested that Dean join the presidential staff. The meeting and the invitation were probably not coincidental. Shortly before, Jeb Magruder had mentioned Dean’s name to Haldeman. Magruder remarked in a memo that Dean was “an example of a sophisticated, young guy we could use.” “
Absolutely
[.] Really work on this,” Haldeman scrawled in the margin.

Several months later, White House telephone operators located Dean in a Washington restaurant and told him that Haldeman wanted to see him at once in California. Telephone operators, planes to pick up and quickly deliver people from one coast to the other—the heady stuff of power. Dean promptly left Washington for San Clemente. There he met Haldeman, and after a short chat the Chief of Staff offered him the post of White House Counsel. For Haldeman, Dean had perfect credentials: like his sponsor, Magruder, he was pliant, reliable, obedient, and consumed by insatiable “blind ambition.” That same day Dean met the President, who formally offered him the position.
²
Despite the lofty title and its apparent responsibilities, however, Dean rarely saw Richard Nixon over the next two years.

Dean’s modest experience typified the Nixon White House; the essential qualifications for important positions consisted of loyalty and subordination. Young, ambitious men who knew those values seemed to fill the bill quite well. Dean’s résumé undoubtedly seemed just right to Haldeman. Born in Akron, Ohio, in 1938, Dean had graduated from Wooster College and the Georgetown Law School—no Ivy League taint to that pedigree. After he had applied unsuccessfully for a clerkship with District Judge John Sirica, Dean had worked in staff positions in Congress and the Justice Department. Richard
Kleindienst, his immediate superior, learned to dislike Dean, yet acknowledged that he had performed with “great distinction.” Kleindienst also claimed that he had warned Dean against moving to the White House, telling him that he would only be “a runner for Ehrlichman”; being “counsel to the President,” he said, was only an illusion. But John Dean—the WASP Sammy Glick—was an adaptable young man: he would move from being John Mitchell’s “boy” to become Haldeman’s, not Ehrlichman’s.

Curiously, Haldeman ordered no FBI check for Dean before elevating him to President’s Counsel. Had he done so, he might have learned of Dean’s dismissal from a Washington law firm for “unethical conduct.” Dean had managed to persuade his former employer to soften that charge for Civil Service Commission records—much to the employer’s later regret. But strange values dictated personnel matters in the Nixon White House. Haldeman once told Dean that the President liked Dean’s clothes because they made him look “hippie” and offered a counterpoint to the Administration’s conservative image. John Ehrlichman, however, had difficulty with Dean’s style: Dean had worked for John Mitchell, wore Gucci loafers, and drove a Porsche sports car.
³

Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, well acquainted with ambitious young lawyers from his days as Dean of the Harvard Law School, considered John Dean a “nice young man” but nevertheless “was astounded” when he heard of his appointment as White House Counsel. Griswold believed Dean un-qualified by either ability or experience. The position, Griswold said, “required a more mature person, with the fiber and strength to stand up to the President and to other people in the White House, and to do it gracefully so that you avoid head-on collisions.” Neither Nixon nor Haldeman included those qualities in their job description, however. Dean assumed some duties of former Nixon aide Clark Mollenhoff. Mollenhoff liked Dean, but he realized the new Counsel had not been installed as a “boat-rocker.” Dean was “ambitious,” Mollenhoff noted, but he quickly learned “that any daring acts should have the approval of the boss.” Dean suffered from a fatal combination, Mollenhoff thought, of “ambition and his willingness to perform any chore in order to survive.” Donald Santarelli, who worked with Dean on Capitol Hill and in the Justice Department, warned White House and Justice officials that Dean was self-serving and unprincipled but realized that Haldeman and Ehrlichman believed Dean to be ideal for he had no independent power or constituency.
⁴

Dean succeeded Ehrlichman as White House Counsel when Ehrlichman inaugurated and chaired the Domestic Council. Perhaps Dean’s most important early activities involved his work as a conduit for FBI and Secret Service reports to the White House regarding antiwar demonstrations. Essentially, however, Dean directed a small staff of lawyers to handle routine legal chores. He served as the White House checkpoint to guard against
internal conflicts of interest. For example, Charles Colson wrote the Counsel to ask whether he could keep a Smithfield ham a lobbyist had given him. Dean said he could but suggested that Colson tell the friend not to give such gifts in the future. He considered whether Pat Buchanan’s stock ownership in a Florida resort might constitute a conflict. He told Buchanan that he would appreciate “the opportunity to meet with you regarding your personal financial interests.” The tone was both solicitous and aggressive. The new Counsel shrewdly sensed that handling what seemed to be the dull, routine matter of interest conflicts offered a key to advancement. He realized that by knowing a man’s financial situation he could gain his confidence. And winning confidence, Dean knew, would bring more “business”—contacts and chores that would make Dean more visible and ever more valued.

A more amusing line of chores than tracking conflicts of interest required Dean to threaten action against any unauthorized uses of the presidential seal. Thus, he wrote to a book publisher demanding the removal of the seal from a novel that used the word “President” in its title. When the General Accounting Office requested White House records concerning flights involving officials and the President’s family for campaign purposes and inquired about the extent of reimbursement for such travel by the Committee to Re-elect the President, Dean replied for Haldeman: such information “has traditionally been considered personal to the President” and not a matter for congressional inquiry. Dean invoked executive privilege to seal the flight manifests and logs.
⁵

Dean ran his office as a private law firm, anxious and willing to accept business to build more business, even if some affairs were not official matters. Less than a month into his new position, he received instructions to rebut an attack by an obscure magazine on Vice President Spiro Agnew. Specifically, Dean was to recruit the IRS to make a tax inquiry. He also screened a pornographic movie entitled
Tricia’s Wedding
, to determine whether he could initiate legal action against the producers. He worked with Tom Huston on the plan to coordinate domestic intelligence activities within the White House. He advised other White House aides on divorce matters and Filipino mess stewards on their immigration status. The Counsel’s firm, and its founder, grew in stature. Dean was, Haldeman recalled, a “service facility” for White House employees.

When Dean first moved into the White House, he was assigned quarters next to the men’s room. The flushing sounds of the plumbing carried rather easily; moreover, Dean’s room had nondescript, military-issue furniture and badly needed painting. But Dean soon received important status symbols: copies of the President’s daily news summaries, a Signal Corps telephone service with twelve lines, and more newspaper and magazine subscriptions than he needed. Haldeman’s blessing had been secured; Dean was on his way.
⁶

*  *  *

Dean’s desire for visibility reaped big dividends following the Watergate break-in. The White House Counsel had just returned from a trip to the Orient, but at Ehrlichman’s instructions he lost no time in talking to a variety of Administration principals regarding their knowledge of the burglary. Dean interviewed Colson, Magruder, Mitchell, Kleindienst, Liddy, and Gordon Strachan, a Haldeman aide. From Strachan, Dean learned that Haldeman had received logs from the wiretaps of the Democratic National Committee. If Haldeman were implicated, Dean realized, the President could not be far behind.

Dean’s role in Watergate began, in his words, as that of a fact-finder. From there, he worked his way up to idea man, and “finally to desk officer.” He met with involved officials, advised them, and made recommendations as to the disposition of evidence. He shuttled between the warring camps in the White House and the Committee to Re-elect the President. John Dean did not initiate the Watergate cover-up, but in time he came to be the orchestrator of the various disparate parties to the cover-up.

Others had roles to play as well. Jeb Magruder subsequently testified that “I do not think there was ever any discussion that there would not be a cover-up.” Magruder later claimed that on June 19, he talked to John Mitchell and urged him to “cut their losses” and admit culpability. According to Magruder’s version of events, Mitchell consulted Haldeman and Ehrlichman, who told him that things had to be kept under wraps. The implication here was that the White House feared exposure of “other things,” such as the Plumbers, if they owned up to the break-in.
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The first step in the cover-up belonged to Mitchell and was taken several hours after the news of the burglars’ arrest broke, when he denied any involvement by CREEP officials. On June 19 Colson urged that Howard Hunt’s White House safe be confiscated. Mitchell suggested to Magruder that he “have a little fire” at his house with the Gemstone files. The next day, Haldeman ordered Gordon Strachan to “make sure our files are clean.” Strachan promptly shredded numerous documents. Later that afternoon, Dean and his Associate Counsel, Fred Fielding, sifted the contents of Hunt’s safe, finding evidence of more “dirty tricks,” including an attempt to fabricate a direct link between President Kennedy and the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem. The safe also contained memos between Colson and Hunt regarding the Plumbers. Dean informed Ehrlichman about the materials, and Ehrlichman told him to “deep six” them. Dean instead gave them to FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray.

Haldeman later expressed surprise when he discovered on June 23 that Dean was the “ ‘project manager’ on the Watergate problem.” He thought Ehrlichman was in charge, but “my crafty friend,” as Haldeman characterized Ehrlichman, had managed to fade out of the picture for the current
business. Ehrlichman hastily informed other relevant parties, such as Gray, that Dean had White House responsibility for an “inquiry” into the break-in. Ehrlichman scrambled for distance. In a telephone conversation with a reporter in August 1972, he claimed little knowledge about Liddy’s “work product,” yet a year earlier he had given Defense Secretary Melvin Laird a detailed report regarding Liddy’s work in the Pentagon Papers affair.