The Wars of Watergate (48 page)

The President was anxious to know whether he had beaten Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 margins—he had more electoral votes but a smaller popular percentage—and how he had done in the South. Unlike LBJ, Nixon failed to capture any working majority in Congress. Beguiled by the possibilities of winning all the states and surpassing LBJ’s votes, the Nixon campaign focused on the presidential race and made little effort to create any coattail effect for lesser Republicans. The Democrats remained in control of Congress by margins of 57–43 in the Senate (up two), and 243–192 in the House (down twelve). Personally, Nixon spoke bitterly of his party. He remembered that in 1970 “I broke my ass for the party at considerable cost.” As far as he was concerned, the Republican National Committee simply could be folded into the White House. He told Ehrlichman that he had never stood
higher in public esteem, while the Republican National Committee had never stood lower. The fact is that in order to gain personal support Nixon willingly sidestepped giving support to Republican candidates. A year earlier, he told Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Magruder that Democrats who had opposed the Mansfield Amendment, providing for a cutoff in support for the Vietnam war, were not to have “significant” Republican opposition. He told Senator George Smathers (D–FL) that he wanted leading congressional Democrats to support him or at least stay neutral while they concentrated on their own races.
⁴⁸

The President’s erstwhile campaign manager had no doubts as to the meaning of the 1972 election. John Mitchell told the President that voters saw Richard Nixon as “the personification” of what they wanted in the office. Those voters might not have understood the “brilliance” of the President’s foreign policy or all the “nuances of his economic policy,” but somehow, Mitchell said, “they can perceive the total accomplishment and accept it as in their interest and in the interest of the USA.” Nixon told Haldeman that this was a “brilliantly perceptive” thought. Mitchell also praised the President’s understanding of the political forces in the nation. Finally, he touched on that favorite sore—“our friends in the media.” They were wrong, Mitchell gloated: “Richard Nixon was the one” who really had hold of the national pulse. The President marked the passage and told Haldeman that it would be “good for a column.”
⁴⁹

As usual, Nixon had his own special post-election analysis. Before and after the election, he told his aides that they should prepare a monograph entitled, “Dirtiest Campaign in History Against a President.” Throughout the campaign he emphasized the need to expose and counterattack “smears”—a category in which he included any attacks regarding Watergate. He wanted the smears connected to similar attacks in the past to show that he had always been the victim, not the perpetrator. In his earlier campaigns, Nixon admitted, “RN hit hard on the issues, but never … rais[ed] questions about motives or patriotism, only about judgment.” The President remembered his campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas as “one of the cleanest” in history. Most important to Nixon, he wanted his aides, in publicizing the election, to emphasize that “RN Won It”—not that McGovern lost it or that the McGovern candidacy was tailor-made for an easy victory. He stressed the “overwhelming odds” he confronted—a hostile Congress and a Republican registration of only 25 percent of all voters, down from the 35 percent of the Eisenhower years. Then, too, he wanted “RN” praised for the “tough decisions” he had made, such as on Cambodia; the mining of Haiphong Harbor; the visit to China; his Supreme Court appointments; his Southern Strategy; his opposition to busing; his “standing firm on the patriotic theme”; his opposition to expanded welfare, marijuana, and amnesty—on the whole, “where RN took a strong position, he turned out to
be right and some of the staffers turned out to be wrong.” McGovern didn’t lose the election, the President repeatedly insisted; “it was the case of RN winning the election.”
⁵⁰

It was a triumphant moment for Nixon, Mitchell, and Haldeman. They savored it, and indulged themselves in flights of self-congratulation. For the President, it was the history he would write, and would want others to remember from the 1972 campaign. Nothing was said among the President and his men, however, of the dark secret that lingered between them.

Wright Patman was depressed. The Democrats seemed to be in disarray despite maintaining their hold on Congress. And George McGovern, their routed standard-bearer, was dismayed. Speaking at Oxford University two months after his defeat, McGovern remarked that he thought Congress would become ineffective and that Nixon was closer “to one-man rule than at any time in our history,” and this, McGovern said, “by a president who is not popular.” Petulant, paradoxical, and possibly correct. “After the disastrous reigns of three King Richards, England had been spared a King Richard IV,” McGovern observed, but “we seem to have him—for four more years.”
⁵¹

However muted in the fall of 1972, the sounds of Watergate were to resonate from the outset of the President’s new term. The talk of a “money trail,” a “cover-up,” and a “special prosecutor” barely played outside Washington during the campaign. They would soon become household words in America.

John Dean still had his tasks, busily trying to keep the ball of yarn tightly wrapped. His “firm” was esteemed in inner circles—and was ever more indispensable. “John Dean is handling the entire Watergate matter now,” Haldeman told Colson in March 1973, “and any questions or input you have should be directed to him and to no one else.” For the President, John Dean was “a superb young man.” Later, others would, with anger and bitterness, argue that Dean had “organized and directed” the resistance to the Patman hearings, miraculously absolving anyone else of responsibility and culpability—the incontrovertible evidence of the Oval Office tapes notwithstanding.
⁵²

Dean had so established himself that in December 1972 he boldly sent out a revised job description for the office of President’s Counsel. He listed approximately twenty routine tasks, including clearance of executive orders and proclamations; reviews of presidential appointees requiring Senate confirmation; “game planning” of confirmation hearings; recommending presidential pardons and clemency; solving military-justice problems; monitoring use of the presidential seal; overseeing the Nixon Foundation and Library; writing the President’s estate plan; and the disposal of the President’s papers. Then there were
ad hoc
assignments, such as preparing contracts for a film
of the President’s China trip, interviewing Supreme Court nominees, and conducting certain “special projects,” including the handling of Watergate and Donald Segretti. Dean found it all a “mixed bag,” but he boldly stated the unifying element in the Counsel’s many jobs: the objective was to keep “the President and his people out of trouble or, if we arrive too late on the scene, getting them out of trouble.”

Self-congratulations out of the way, Dean proposed a bold, wide-ranging reorganization of his office that would expand its functions and its staff. He wanted a mandate to handle and resolve questions of law, and he wanted to be charged with the formulation of all policies that affected the President or were incidental to the presidency. As Dean described it, his office would be inserted as an adjunct of Haldeman’s, touching the flow of work in and out and maintaining overall responsibility for ensuring that legal decisions in the executive branch conformed to the President’s policies and objectives.

Dean’s
démarche
effectively gave him access and influence for almost any function in the executive branch. Only bits and pieces of the plan were implemented; the most important steps in reorganization were not. The turn of events in the next months doomed Dean’s grandiose scheme. But it was a measure of his influence and standing that he proposed such an obvious reach for his own power—and apparently was in no way rebuked. Perhaps the young Counsel was a “service facility,” as Haldeman later characterized him, but he was a highly valuable one.
⁵³

Dean, it will be remembered, barely saw the President during his first two years in the White House Counsel’s office. His December 1972 memo redefining and expanding his duties was designed to give him a central role as the President’s man. Had he succeeded in his primary role as the linchpin of the cover-up, his gambit might well have been an offer that neither the President nor Haldeman could have lightly refused.

“We want the air cleared,” the President said at his August 29, 1972, press conference. “We want it cleared as soon as possible.” With John Dean as his primary instrument, and aided by loyal congressional and executive-branch lieutenants, the President cleared some important hurdles, but the clouds lingered. John Dean had made good on his promise that nothing would interfere with the election results. He planned and executed the design for thwarting any legislative inquiry into the Watergate affair and possible White House involvement. That was the bottom line. But Dean acted on the wishes of the President, as expressed in their September 15 meeting. They were only words, only fantasies in which Nixon indulged himself, Nixon’s defenders have argued. “At that time,” a former aide noted, Richard Nixon was only “guilty of being a pain in the ass.”
⁵⁴
But the President talked tough, and his counsel promised he would “play rough” to stop Patman’s
inquiry. Words had become actions, and a “third-rate burglary” had escalated to real political hardball.

In March 1973, Colson told the President that Dean had “done a spectacular job. I don’t think anybody could do as good a job as John has done.” From the other side of the fence, Dean also received lavish praise when FBI investigators later acknowledged “that the President’s most senior associates at the White House conspired for nine months to obstruct our investigation.”
⁵⁵
The President’s Counsel had not yet fallen from grace. On September 15, 1972, John Dean had promised the President fifty-four days; he had delivered more.

President Nixon’s anticipated policies and personnel shifts for his second term dominated the post-election news. Watergate remained a back-page item in the nation’s consciousness. Meanwhile, the new year stimulated Nixon’s self-confidence. Fresh from his electoral triumph, privately noting the milestone of his sixtieth birthday, he looked back at milestones of the previous decades, finding significance in all years ending with the number 3. For 1933, he noted his college prize in extemporaneous speaking; 1943, his service in the South Pacific; 1953, his election as Vice President; 1963, his defeat for governor of California; and for 1973, his re-election as President. His fudging of the last three dates—the significant years actually ended in a 2—apparently did not bother him.

Nixon also jotted down some Ben Franklin-style aphorisms: “No man is finished—until he quits,” he wrote. Blessed with his own good health, he listed older men he admired who had achieved much in their later years: Dwight Eisenhower, Charles de Gaulle, Yoshida Shigeru, Konrad Adenauer, Winston Churchill, and Zhou Enlai. Finally, he offered some stern injunctions to himself: “Live every day as if last—Never let a day go by w/out doing something useful—Think young.”
¹

Despite the President’s high spirits, within the inner circles of the Nixon White House Watergate slowly but perceptibly loomed larger. Pat Buchanan warned the President in early December 1972 that Watergate was not behind him. There was dissatisfaction “even among our staunchest friends,” Buchanan wrote, “and calls for the President to clean house.” Some of those
closest to the President were admittedly “concerned,” H. R. Haldeman recalled, about things that “we felt boded trouble.” Leonard Garment was optimistic about the second term yet also feared the cloud of Watergate. People were beginning to come to him wondering whether they might have some legal problems—“no one would come and say this was a real serious problem,” he recalled, “but there were different things.”
²

Mastery of the Watergate cover-up demanded ever-increasing time and resources. The cover-up begat more cover-up, enlarging so as to plant the seeds of its destruction. Meanwhile, the President’s familiar enemies—Congress, the government bureaucracy, and the media—began to look beyond the White House version of Watergate as a “third-rate burglary.” New wars seemed in the offing. For good reason, a channel of apprehension paralleled the confident course of the Nixon White House after the November election.

In the wake of his electoral triumph, Nixon was determined to seize the moment to reshape the government and bend it to his will. His dissatisfaction with personnel was not confined to his historic resentment toward the entrenched bureaucracy; it extended to the highest levels of government, including officials he himself had appointed. As the election approached and his victory seemed more assured, he speculated ceaselessly with his trusted aides on the days of reckoning that would follow the election. In this period, restructuring the government preoccupied the President more in his discussions with Haldeman and Ehrlichman than anything save the details of the campaign itself. He often quoted Benjamin Disraeli’s description of William Gladstone as an “exhausted volcano,” as if to ensure and underscore that such would not be his fate.

Richard Nixon persisted in thinking that everything would go well if he persuaded the nation of his positive achievements. It was, as always, “really a question of PR. Actually, we have done a number of things very well, but we have had an enormously difficult time getting it [
sic
] across.” He warmly praised his foreign-policy achievements and various “goodies” in the domestic area, such as the fight on drugs and crime, and the nation’s economic recovery. He told aides to seize three, at most four, major achievements “and put the PR emphasis on them virtually to the exclusion of others so that the Administration will be remembered for at least doing something
very
well rather than being forgotten because we did a number of things
pretty
well.” Perhaps, Nixon suggested, he might offer action in dormant areas, such as women’s rights (“just to take a way out example,” he said) or enhancing the legacy of the national parks.
³