The Wars of Watergate (50 page)

Charles Colson dealt with one of the stickier parts of the cover-up as he negotiated with his friend and retainer E. Howard Hunt over the payment of “hush money.” Hunt began calling Colson in October 1972, demanding that commitments be “honored,” but the two did not talk until November,
apparently just after the election, when Hunt boldly escalated his demands. The recorded call revealed the growing complexity of maintaining the cover-up. Colson’s discomfort was obvious, and he repeatedly insisted that he knew nothing of Watergate and wanted to keep things that way, fearing that if he had any knowledge, he might have to perjure himself. “Which I’m afraid John Mitchell has already done,” Hunt responded. Colson warily sought distance; “unknowing as I am,” he claimed, “right now I don’t know anything about the Goddamn Watergate.” But Colson could not avoid Hunt’s purpose in calling, as Hunt put it, “because of commitments, uh, that were made to all of us at the onset, [that] have not been kept.” Hunt reported a good deal of “unease and concern” among the defendants over their expenses; the money, he complained, had come in “minor dribs and drabs.” It was time, Hunt said, for the White House to “start to give, uh, some creative, uh, thinking to the affair.” After all, “we’re protecting the guys who, who were really responsible.” The pressure was direct: it was time for “moves” to be made; “your cheapest commodity available is money,” Hunt delphically said.

Colson desperately tried to avoid the issue of money. Instead, he wanted to talk about Watergate as plot. When he wrote his memoirs, Colson told Hunt, he would say that “Watergate was brilliantly conceived as an escapade that would, uh, divert the Democrats’ attention from the real issues, and therefore permit us to win a landslide that we probably wouldn’t have won.” The remarks made no sense and were beside the point. Hunt, frankly, was blackmailing the White House, because of his role in the break-in and because he was “protecting” those “really responsible.” Colson never replied to Hunt’s demand for money, skirting it with the irrelevant observation that he knew that Hunt “never had a goddamn thing to do with this.” The conversation concluded with maudlin commiseration over the suffering of their respective families because of the affair, and with a fanfare of patriotism. “Thank God,” Colson said, that the country had Nixon for another four years. Hunt joined in the salute to the flag: “I’ve had a lifetime of serving my country, and in a sense I’m still doing it.” “That’s right,” Colson replied. “Damn right.”
¹⁶

The Hunt-Colson conversation was elaborately reprised in a document sent to the White House shortly after the election, apparently by one or more Watergate defendants. The document threatened nothing less than blackmail. It stated fears on the part of the defendants that they had been abandoned and would be used as scapegoats. But the writer offered several items for consideration, including a reminder that the defendants had been involved in “highly illegal conspiracies … at the behest of senior White House officials.” The warning was blunt: the Administration had been “deficient” in living up to its commitments for financial support and pardons. “To end further misunderstandings,” the defendants set 5:00
P.M.
on November
27 as a deadline for the White House to meet financial requirements and offer “credible assurances” that other commitments would be honored. “Loyalty,” they said, “has always been a two-way street.” Liddy, meanwhile, told Dean that he needed money for his lawyer.
¹⁷

At times, the President seemed anxious for Colson to leave the Administration. He told Haldeman on November 15 that Colson “doesn’t really fit” into the reorganization schemes he had in mind. Haldeman called Colson that day (claiming he was doing so without the President’s knowledge) to say that Hunt’s forthcoming trial would bring inevitable problems and implications for Colson. When that occurred, the President would not want to have to force his aides out; therefore, “you’re needed outside
now
,” Haldeman said. He promised Colson that he would have a continuing relationship with the President, somewhat like that of Clark Clifford with Democratic presidents. Colson could set up a campaign firm within a law firm, and the President—determined as he was, according to Haldeman, to get politics out of the White House—would use Colson as the man for people to see on political issues. Haldeman suggested that Colson see Nixon and tell him this was what he wanted to do. “[B]e a big man,” Haldeman said. But Colson stayed on for several more months; he apparently provided comfort and confidence for the President. He satisfied Nixon’s “dark side,” as Mitchell and White House aides Richard Moore and Harry Dent testified. Herb Klein also knew that Colson enthusiastically supported Nixon’s “fantasies of vengeance.”
¹⁸

E. Howard Hunt’s wife was killed in a United Air Lines jetliner crash near Midway Airport in Chicago on December 8. Her purse was found to contain more than $10,000 in cash, and she had taken out $225,000 in flight insurance, with no stipulated beneficiary. Two days later, Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert asked the FBI to determine if the money could be traced. Silbert discovered that Howard Hunt had been to Chicago the day after the crash in an apparent attempt to retrieve the money. The Bureau learned from relatives that Dorothy Hunt had flown to Chicago to complete a business deal. They investigated handwriting on one of the bills but could not positively identify it as coming from any of the defendants in the break-in case. The FBI insisted that it was not looking for evidence that the plane had been sabotaged—but in fact it was.

Given the times, suspicions were aroused, and some linked the crash to the Watergate case. Dorothy Hunt had traveled with an unusual amount of money. Talk circulated that allegedly she had the same CIA links as her husband, and there was shadowy talk of “hush money.” In any event, the final report of the National Transportation Safety Board on August 29, 1973, found no evidence of “sabotage or foul play” in connection with the accident. Meanwhile, the White House was aware of Mrs. Hunt’s importance in the cover-up. Three months after her death, Dean told the President that she
“was the savviest woman in the world. She had the whole picture together,” he said.
¹⁹

On January 8, 1973, just days before the Watergate burglars’ trial was scheduled to begin, Nixon and Colson had a ninety-minute conversation in the President’s Executive Office Building hideaway. The two men had the burglars’ forthcoming trial uppermost in their minds. The futility of the entire adventure embittered Nixon: “We didn’t get a God-damn thing from any of it that I can see.” That was water over the dam. The problem now was to “save the plan,” as the cover-up often was called. Specifically, Nixon realized the necessity for Hunt’s continued cooperation. Colson told the President that he had urged Hunt to plead guilty: “I think it’s the right thing for him to do, Chuck,” the President replied. He then volunteered that clemency was a real possibility. Hunt’s wife was dead, he had a brain-damaged child, and he had given eighteen years of good service to the CIA. William Buckley, Hunt’s good friend, could be persuaded to publish a column in his behalf. When Nixon admitted that he might have difficulty providing clemency for the other defendants, Colson was not concerned; their “vulnerabilities” were different. Indeed, Hunt was different. He was a man with secrets—especially concerning the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office—and he could be a very “incriminating” witness. The others were expendable. Colson assured the President that Hunt and Liddy, “good healthy right-wing exuberants,” as he was fond of calling them, could be trusted. “This is the last damn fifty miles,” the President responded, rather cryptically.

Nixon knew that his aides had paid money to Hunt and the defendants, but he only worried about finding new donors for “hush money.” “Goddamn hush money,” the President complained, “uh, how are we going to [unintelligible] how do we get this stuff.…” In a February 14 conversation with Colson, he talked about maintaining the cover-up: “The cover-up is the main ingredient,” he told Colson. “That’s where we gotta cut our losses; my losses are to be cut. The President’s losses gotta be cut on the cover-up deal.” The day before, Nixon bluntly told Colson that the cover-up must be maintained: “When I’m speaking about Watergate,” the President said, “that’s the whole point of the election. This tremendous investigation rests, unless one of the seven begins to talk. That’s the problem.” But the President had confidence in his old friend John Mitchell, as he was pleased that Mitchell had “stonewalled it up to this point.” Colson and Mitchell were adversaries, but Colson admiringly told the President in response: “John has one of those marvelous, ah, memories.”

The cover-up had developed another layer, with new, determined efforts to thwart any possibilities of involving the White House and the President’s closest aides. Nixon had some concern that Congress, with “its God-damn cotton-pickin’ hands,” might make trouble. Typically, Nixon saw the subject
all in combat metaphor. He told Colson he knew it was “tough” for him, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and the rest. But, he promised, “[W]e’re just not gonna let it get us down. This is a battle, it’s a fight, it’s war and we just fight with a little, uh, you know, uh remember, uh, we’ll cut them down one of these days.” In March, both John Dean and Charles Colson advised the President to retain Colson as a consultant without pay in order to maintain a curtain of executive privilege around him.
²⁰

The President’s conversations with Colson reflected the growing concern within the White House. On January 6, Senator Mike Mansfield had called for a full investigation of Watergate, by a select committee armed with proper funds, staff, and subpoena powers. The time had come, Mansfield said, “to proceed to an inquiry into these matters in a dispassionate fashion.” The Senator thought that his North Carolina colleague, Sam Ervin, was the man to head such an investigation. Ervin’s conservative credentials and his well-known constitutional scruples, Mansfield said, would “defuse” charges that such an investigation was a “vendetta.” The question was not “political, it is constitutional,” Mansfield declared. “At stake is the continued vitality of the electoral process.”

The Senate and an invigorated press threatened the Administration’s containment strategy. On February 25, the President told Haldeman and Ehrlichman to stay out of Watergate affairs and leave the field to Dean and Kleindienst. Three days later, Nixon talked to Dean about both senior aides’ cooperating with the forthcoming Senate investigation, and yet he raised the 1968 bugging issue for the first line of counterattack. Interestingly, the President stressed the importance of appearing to cooperate with the investigation, anxious to avoid being perceived as recalcitrant, as Truman was in the Alger Hiss affair. Nixon was defensive once more about the press, complaining that L. Patrick Gray was often described as his “political crony.” They had never met in a social situation, Nixon insisted. But the talk of Gray made the President nostalgic for J. Edgar Hoover. “[H]e’d have scared them to death. He’s got [
sic
] files on everybody, God damn it,” meaning, it seems, that Hoover would have called off the dogs for Nixon.

Dean’s efforts earned him some time for extensive conversations with the President, beginning in February 1973. Ever ingratiating and accommodating, he suggested that Senator Edward Kennedy had pressured Mansfield to create the new Senate Select Committee. Surprisingly, Nixon rejected this line, although less than three weeks earlier he had told Haldeman that the whole affair was a Kennedy plot against him. Talking with Dean, the President reserved his greatest invective for the Republican senators who thought the Senate inquiry should be an objective, bipartisan affair. He considered Ervin a sham, scoffing at his reputed authoritativeness as a constitutional lawyer. He thought Ervin had totally “buffaloed” the designated committee Vice Chairman, Howard Baker; Ervin, he said, “is as partisan as most of
our Southern gentlemen are. They, they, they are great politicians. They’re just more clever than the minority [
sic
]. Just more clever!”

Nixon clearly was worried when Dean reported that Nixon’s lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, was being questioned by the U.S. Attorney. Dean earlier had told Haldeman that the prosecutors had subpoenaed Kalmbach’s phone records. The President seemed particularly pleased that questions regarding “San Clemente and the like” had been covered by lawyer-client privilege and were out of bounds. But the landscape was strewn with mines. Nixon raised the question of clemency, asking whether Hunt and the others expected it within “a reasonable time.” Dean thought so, yet he advised the President to tread cautiously because things could become quite “political” in the next six months. Nixon agreed.

He emphasized that Dean must get through to Kleindienst—he was the “man who can make the difference,” Nixon said; moreover, Kleindienst “owes Mitchell” for his position. Finally, Nixon again raised the Hiss case and applied it in an odd, almost perverse way. He told Dean that Whittaker Chambers, Hiss’s accuser, suffered greatly because he was an informer. Chambers, he thought, was one of the great men and writers of his time. Still, “they finished him.… [T]he informer is not wanted in our society. Either way, that’s the one thing people do sort of line up against.”
²¹
Was that pointed advice for John Dean?

The trial of Hunt, Liddy, and the Watergate burglars began on January 10 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert depicted the break-in as part of a well-financed, many-layered espionage and “special intelligence” operation against the Democratic Party, organized by the Committee to Re-elect the President. Silbert promised to offer evidence on the recruitment of spies, earlier attempts to bug McGovern’s offices, the monitoring of telephone calls from the tap in the Democrats’ Watergate headquarters, and, of course, the facts relating to the capture of the burglars and the activities of Hunt and Liddy. The defendants had been indicted on multiple counts of burglary, conspiracy, and interception of wire and oral communications. Silbert and his assistants had prepared their case carefully and confined it narrowly. The prosecutor realized that in other matters the liberal Circuit Court of Appeals had reversed decisions of presiding judge “Maximum John” Sirica to an unusual degree. Accordingly, Silbert framed his indictment with “shrewd parsimony,” restricting himself to those offenses that appeared beyond dispute. “There was nothing to try,” a former federal attorney later wrote.
²²