The Wars of Watergate (45 page)

For Richard Nixon, Watergate at that time was a staff problem. The campaign and his opponent were subjects more to his liking, stirring his competitive juices. In a lengthy meeting with his aides on July 31, the President analyzed McGovern’s record at length and outlined how he thought the campaign should proceed against him. Four days later, he discussed the possibility of checking McGovern’s IRS files. But in September, the President allowed himself a rare moment of relaxation and believed the polls. He thought McGovern simply could not overcome the disaffection against him within traditional Democratic constituencies. Nixon instructed his staff to disregard McGovern, yet he solemnly criticized the Senator for having attacked J. Edgar Hoover after his death. A few days later, he was still expressing concern over McGovern’s tax proposals, conceding they were quite clever. The President wanted his surrogates to keep hitting McGovern on taxes, higher prices, and recession. The McGovern budget, he insisted, was a fraud. Nelson Rockefeller, the President’s old adversary, visited the White House on September 14, telling Nixon a sick joke about a Kennedy-Eagleton ticket: it would be “waterproofed and shockproofed.”
²¹

Richard Nixon claimed that his diary entry for September 15 only briefly alluded to the grand-jury indictment of the Watergate burglars. “We hope,” he wrote at the time, “to be able to ride the issue through in a successful way from now on.” For Nixon, this meant that the incident was of only minor concern to him and that the trial of the burglars would end the matter.
Earlier that day, he had talked confidently with Haldeman about the election, noting that “bugging isn’t hurting.” He seemed certain that the Democrats had overplayed the break-in as an issue and simply could not match the “Eis[enhower] father image” he had fostered. There was no one else for the electorate, Nixon told Haldeman.

The diary entry for September 15 also mentioned that the President had met John Dean that day, at Haldeman’s suggestion, to thank him for his work. Haldeman acknowledged that Dean was “keeping track of all the different Watergate problems for us.” Later, Haldeman told Senate investigators that he did not “congratulate” Dean “for the job he had done.”
²²
But the written and taped records of that meeting betray the President’s and Haldeman’s sure knowledge of the real nature of John Dean’s work on Watergate. Nixon hesitated not at all in speaking boldly and frankly in front of his young aide. Confidence on the part of all participants flowed through the conversation. Everything appeared well; indeed, the President seemed serene yet exhilarated.

Dean began the September 15 meeting by reporting that the press was playing the story just as expected. They had not exactly “whitewashed” the story, as Haldeman had thought; instead, they had reported it straight and seemed pleased that two White House aides had been indicted. Dean, Haldeman, and Nixon apparently believed that the indictment would end the affair. Clark MacGregor had demanded an apology from the Democrats who had been charging that the crime had been directed from high places in the Administration. The President knew they would not get one, but he had bigger plans. “[J]ust remember all the trouble they gave us on this,” Nixon said. “We’ll have a chance to get back at them one day.”

He raised the question of the second bug in the Watergate offices and seemed fascinated by Dean’s suggestion that the Democrats themselves had planted it. He wanted details of the FBI’s doings and questions at the Democratic National Committee’s offices. When told that Patrick Gray and his people were “pissed off” at O’Brien’s charges that the FBI had been negligent, Nixon thought that would make the Bureau work harder and perhaps find that the Democrats had bugged themselves. Maybe it was small talk, but Dean told the President that the FBI investigation had been “really incredible” and was more thorough than that done following the Kennedy assassination. (Nixon later publicly quoted this almost verbatim.)

Haldeman was disgusted by the expenditure of resources in the investigation. “Who the hell cares?” he remarked. The President quoted Barry Goldwater to the effect that “everybody bugs everybody else.” “Yeah,” Haldeman said. “I bugged—” and his words trailed off as the President contended that he had been bugged in previous campaigns. Dean seemed fascinated by the intimacy of the meeting. Nixon claimed that he had proof that his 1968 campaign had been bugged, but he did not want to embarrass
LBJ—who, Nixon added, had bugged Humphrey. Nixon also said he did not want to reflect unfavorably on the Bureau.

The discussion turned to the Democrats’ pending civil suit and their lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams. Haldeman hoped that the FBI would start questioning “that son-of-a-bitch” Williams. Dean reported that the case had been assigned to Judge Charles Richey, a Nixon appointee. Dean observed that the judge was not known for his intellectual qualities, and the President began to say something about the judge’s “own stupid way.” But he heard that Richey had talked to Kleindienst about the case, and that the judge had suggested that Maurice Stans file a countersuit for libel. A phone call from Clark MacGregor interrupted the proceedings. Nixon told MacGregor about Richey and ended the conversation on a note of black humor as he instructed his campaign chief not to bug anyone without his consent.

The rare opportunity for such intimacy with the President inspired Dean to inject real confidence into his report. “I think that I can say that fifty-four days from now that, uh, not a thing will come crashing down to our, our surprise.” Nothing, he promised, would disturb the anticipated election results. Knowing that much more than the Watergate break-in might be at stake, Nixon remarked that the matter was a difficult “can of worms” and “awfully embarrassing.” Still, he took the moment to praise Dean for a “skillful” job. Dean gave the President even more, describing his “hawk’s eye” monitoring of the McGovern campaign for campaign violations. Dean knew how to ingratiate himself. “[T]his is war. We’re getting a few shots and it’ll be over,” the President responded. “I wouldn’t want to be in Edward Bennett Williams’… position after this election,” he added. “A bad man,” was Williams. Haldeman, too, played to the President: “That’s the guy we’ve got to ruin.” Nixon promptly agreed. “I think we are going to fix the son-of-a-bitch. Believe me. We are going to. We’ve got to, because he’s a bad man,” Nixon reiterated.

The mood was infectious. Dean was not there only to report on the cover-up. He, too, knew that the President loved to “rub sores.” He told the others that he had been keeping notes on people who were emerging “as less than our friends.” “Great,” Nixon interjected. Dean warmed to the task. The present crisis was going to be over someday, and enemies would not be forgotten. The President sounded almost ecstatic. He told Dean that he wanted “the most comprehensive notes on all of those that have tried to do us in.” Why was there so much opposition, he asked, when the election was not even close? The enemy, he concluded, was “doing this quite deliberately and they are asking for it and they are going to get it.… We, we have not used the power in this first four years, as you know.” Dean knew better; nevertheless, he dutifully agreed. The President was unstoppable. “We haven’t used the Bureau and we haven’t used the Justice Department, but things are going to change now.” It was Dean’s turn to be ecstatic:
“That’s an exciting prospect.” The President still had a full head of steam: “Oh, oh, well, we’ve just been, we’ve been just God damn fools.… It’s not going, going to be that way any more.” He regretted that his campaign people had not attacked Democratic senators more effectively—“they’re crooks, they’ve been stealing,” he complained.
²³

Haldeman thought it was the right moment to note the irony of the fact that the White House had tolerated Dean’s “damn regulations” about conflicts of interest. Dean could not resist a bit of oblique self-congratulation as he praised the White House staff for its careful compliance with his rules. Irony abounded.

Soon, Dean remembered his place and returned to the cover-up. He told the President and Haldeman that there might be a problem in coping with a pending investigation by the House Banking and Currency Committee, headed by Wright Patman (D–TX). Dean had arranged with the Cuban defendants’ lawyers to visit committee members to warn that public hearings would jeopardize their clients’ civil rights. Richard Nixon suddenly found himself on the other side from candidate Richard Nixon and the “peace forces.” He suggested that the government should dismiss the criminal charges against the Cubans because, in Haldeman’s words, of “the civil rights type stuff.” Dean was his usual accommodating self. His staff, he told the President, already had been in contact with the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the accused. Dean later recalled the move was “supremely cynical,” but he was primarily worried that Maurice Stans, Nixon’s campaign finance director, might have to face questions from Patman. What about using Connally to pressure Patman, he asked? Or making better use of House Minority Leader Gerald Ford? Dean had one more card: he was convinced that the Banking and Currency Committee members themselves had not always complied with campaign-financing laws; perhaps it was time for the White House to play rough.

The President warmed to the conversation. He expressed contempt for the ranking Republican member of the committee and thought Ford should exert pressure on him. “Jerry’s really got to lead on this,” he insisted. He wanted Ford to make a public case for the rights of the defendants; for the President it simply was, as he said, a public-relations problem.

The conversation drifted in other directions, but Dean quickly revived the Patman situation. He thought it might be tragic if they let Patman “have a field day up there.” He mentioned that one of the committee’s junior Republicans, Garry Brown (R–MI), had asked Kleindienst whether an investigation might jeopardize the criminal case against the burglars. The President was pleased: he considered Brown smart and aggressive. He wanted Ford and Brown called in to work with Ehrlichman—“they ought to get off their asses and push it. No use to let Patman have a free ride here.”

The President worried about Congressman Patman and his committee in
one corner of his mind. In another corner, he was concerned about the impact of the entire affair—“one of those unfortunate things”—on his campaign or, even more, on his security in the White House. He needed reassurance, and Dean artfully provided it. The events “had no effect on you,” he said. “That’s the … good thing.” Haldeman agreed, almost congratulating Dean for having prevented any linkage to the White House or to the President. Apparently satisfied, the President again shifted his concern to the civil rights of “these poor bastards”—the accused burglars. He decried the fact that the press already had convicted them. If the Watergate burglars had been communists or convicted multiple murderer Charles Manson, he said, the
Times
and the
Post
would have raised hell. Well, the
Post
was in for some rough times, Nixon exclaimed—“damnable problems,” he said, such as not getting their television-station licenses renewed. The President seemed to be in his element at the meeting with Haldeman and Dean.
²⁴
Dean left the Oval Office shortly after the remarks about the newspapers. He had his orders; he did not talk to the President again until February 28, 1973. The mood then would not be so confident.

Dean was certainly right when he told the President that Watergate had not affected the campaign. The information from the polls had been particularly striking on the day of his meeting with the President. Both the Gallup and Harris polls gave Nixon a 34 percent lead, with McGovern holding only 25 percent of the electorate. While some predicted that the Democratic Party would go the way of the dinosaur, McGovern campaign manager Gary Hart insisted that the prospects were improving and that the polls reflected a “cultural lag.” He believed that McGovern was only 20 points behind. Less than two weeks later, pollster Louis Harris reported a “significant” change: Nixon’s lead had “dropped” to only 28 percent. For Hart, that offered vivid proof of the electorate’s “tremendous volatility”; for the President, such volatility could only confirm his confidence.

Meanwhile, media interest in the Watergate affair was almost nonexistent. Of the three television networks, only NBC assigned one of its Washington reporters full time to the story. Fewer than 15 of the more than 430 reporters in Washington news bureaus for different newspapers and media outlets worked exclusively on Watergate. The
Chicago Tribune
did not feature a Watergate story on its front page until August 27 and displayed the affair on its lead page only thirteen times—compared to seventy-nine and thirty-three for the
Washington Post
and
New York Times
, respectively. More than 70 percent of the nation’s newspapers endorsed the President, while only 5 percent backed McGovern, further underlining the irony of Nixon’s complaints about media treatment.
²⁵

*  *  *

Speaker of the House Carl Albert believed that Nixon lived “in constant torture” about the Watergate cover-up from the moment Wright Patman’s Banking and Currency Committee began its investigation. Patman started something, Albert said, “that made Nixon’s life a living hell from then on. He knew that this thing had been done, he knew that … there had been a cover-up and he had not stopped it. He was afraid all the time that they might find that out. So he must have had a life of real misery.” House leaders knew that Patman was a formidable adversary; Albert and others had crossed swords with him many times. He was, Albert remembered, “about as tough as anybody in the House. He was fearless, absolutely fearless.”
²⁶

Patman had a reputation as a loner, yet his base as Chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee gave him a place in the House’s power structure. Crusty and cynical, Patman was one of the shrewdest of congressional barons. When Lyndon Johnson went to Washington, his father, Sam, had told him to watch and follow the Texas populist. Patman knew how to make waves. He arrived in Washington in 1931 and promptly challenged President Hoover with his support for the early payment of a bonus to World War I soldiers. Patman later led a revolt against some of FDR’s early measures when he thought they undermined the essential need to pump money into the economy. He ruthlessly fought corruption, whether in the banking system or the political process. Wall Street bankers and presidents—from Roosevelt through Eisenhower, Johnson, and Richard Nixon—all gained his implacable enmity. One of Patman’s aides remembered that “his attitudes were his own, and they weren’t delivered every Monday morning by whatever interest group was before the committee.” Although his unwillingness to compromise and “stroke” his colleagues underlined his reputation as a loner, others recognized that Patman had a “longer range view of things than some of us did.”
²⁷