The Wars of Watergate (53 page)

The President and his closest White House aides had determined by then that John Mitchell must be a sacrificial lamb if the strategy of containing the revelations was to work. Such passiveness occasionally gave way to exhortation. “Stonewall it,” “plead the Fifth Amendment,” “cover up”—anything to “save the plan,” he said defiantly. But in the next breath, he talked about his preference for “the other way”—in which his good friend John Mitchell would take the blame.
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The Oval Office was infected with confusion and ambivalence, blended with feistiness and belligerence. The President himself ran the gamut of those moods; his aides, as usual, reflected him. Sometimes Nixon and his men underestimated their adversaries and the dangers confronting them. But at bottom, the President recognized the peril. He instructed Haldeman to keep Dean working on the case. From the moment Senator Mansfield proposed a congressional investigation, Nixon was concerned. Dean, he said, should “try to turn it off.”

The trickle of revelations about Administration wrongdoing rapidly had turned into a steady stream; “every day,” John Ehrlichman complained, “the news was freighted with new accusations.”
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The President’s “enemies” were massing. A bunker mentality soon pervaded the White House. Administration figures saw the situation in terms of a metaphor, if not a defense: several talked about circling the wagons around the White House. But the circle may have been closed too late. The enemies were already within; the defenses had been breached.

James McCord’s letter to Judge Sirica tugged at the tightly wrapped strands of John Dean’s improvised cover-up. Back on September 15, Dean had promised the President fifty-four days—until the election—free of trouble. He had delivered. But four months later, Howard Hunt was demanding more money; Senator Ervin’s investigators were at work, following leads already established by the FBI, the grand jury, and the U.S. Attorney’s office; more important, congressional hearings on Gray’s FBI nomination were coming closer to unveiling Dean’s involvement. And any questions about Dean, of course, eventually had to lead to his intimate dealings in the Oval Office.

At the beginning of March, Dean remained outwardly confident. When the White House insisted on sending Jeb Magruder to the Commerce Department with a new appointment, Dean told Secretary Frederick B. Dent that Magruder had no particular problems. He might have some “bad publicity” in the next few weeks, Dean wrote, but he did not believe it would last. Only two weeks later, on March 20, Dean told Richard Moore, the President’s special counsel, that the cover-up could not be maintained much longer. Moore thought the situation had become like a “tumor”; “it’s like a cancer,” he told Dean. The next day, Dean reported to the President.

“I have the impression that you don’t know everything I know,” John Dean told Nixon. “In other words, I have to know why you feel that we shouldn’t unravel something?” the President responded, as if knowing that his aide wished to release some of the pressure on the cover-up. The optimistic, even cocky, Dean of September 1972 had vanished; for him, the
outlook was terribly grim. “We have a cancer within, close to the Presidency, that is growing,” Dean reported. “It is growing daily. It’s compounded, growing geometrically now, because it compounds itself.” Dean thereupon launched into a long narrative of the origins of Watergate and the subsequent White House responses. But radical surgery lay in the distance. For now, the President and his aides launched a new cover-up, one to mask their earlier effort and also to find appropriate people “to take the heat.”
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Dean’s pronouncement of March 21 was no surprise to Richard Nixon; he already had prepared for that new stage.

The innuendoes and rumors that had floated through Washington since the break-in ripened into substantial revelations during Gray’s confirmation hearings in February and March. The situation was fluid, dictating even more defensive innovations by Dean, the cover-up ringmaster. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings began shortly after the President announced Gray’s nomination as FBI Director on February 17. By the end of the month, Gray had acknowledged his direct contacts with the White House during the Watergate investigation, and his ambitions lay shattered.

The task of wisdom was to replace Gray; still, his nomination went forward. Gray was a disaster waiting to happen. His lack of any constituency, the hostility of old FBI hands, and his vulnerabilities as a witness given his early attempts to stall the Watergate investigation clearly foreshadowed difficulty for an Administration already besieged with troubles. Perhaps Gray’s Watergate ties gave the President no alternative. Dean observed that Gray offered “no choice”; the Administration, he said, could not “afford an angry Pat Gray loose on the streets.” The only thing worse than nominating Gray, Dean concluded, was not nominating him.
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The President’s incessant concern for finding a new, pliant FBI Director curiously yielded nothing except to bring him back to Gray. Was Nixon concerned about the danger of not nominating him? Perhaps; but equally likely, the President stubbornly remained fixated on appointing subordinates absolutely loyal and dedicated to Richard Nixon. Gray fit the mold perfectly.

He had substantial credentials. Fifty-seven years old, from a railway worker’s family, Pat Gray had attended Rice University on scholarship during the Depression. He then received another four-year grant to attend Annapolis and served as a submarine commander during World War II. The Navy selected Gray to attend George Washington University Law School, and he graduated with honors in 1949. As a legal officer, he served both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of the Navy. He had met Nixon in 1947, admired him greatly, and worked in the 1960 campaign. Shortly thereafter, Gray moved to Connecticut to join a law firm, but he left in 1968 to move into the new Nixon Administration as Executive Assistant to Robert Finch,
whom Gray had met in 1960. In 1970 Gray transferred to Justice, where he became Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division and later Deputy Attorney General. Most notably in this period, he directed efforts to prosecute antiwar protesters in Washington.

“The world’s original patriot, with a strong boy scout tendency,” a close friend and aide of Gray recalled. Nixon knew he would be loyal. Ex-submarine-commander Gray was a man trained to accept uncritically decisions of superior officers; those of the Commander-in-Chief, of course, were particularly beyond question. But Gray also had a conscience, a conscience that the Nixon people apparently never measured properly, if at all. He had been concerned over the propriety of the Justice Department’s mass arrests of antiwar demonstrators and repeatedly expressed worry to friends about the effects of prosecution on the young defendants. Gray may never have fully fathomed the motives and ambitions of such presidential aides as Ehrlichman and Dean. Although he realized that he had been used by them since the break-in had occurred, he naively asked his own aide, a man with longstanding ties to Nixon himself, if such men would knowingly violate any laws.
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John Mitchell had first suggested Gray’s name for the FBI post in the summer of 1971, amid the Administration’s growing disenchantment with J. Edgar Hoover. Mitchell thought that Gray should be sent from his Justice Department post to the FBI as Hoover’s deputy for about six months and then be nominated as Director. Ehrlichman and Nixon further discussed Gray at a meeting on October 25, 1971, both apparently believing that Hoover might agree to Gray as his successor.
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No doubt, Gray was the President’s man. Nixon wanted changes in the Bureau; it had grown too ossified, too rigid, and above all, too much into a personal fiefdom. He wanted a Director and a Bureau more responsible to his own wishes, a laudable goal given Hoover’s almost total unaccountability. Gray was the right man. Shortly after he became Acting Director, a White House operative suggested that Gray speak to the prestigious City Club in Cleveland during the forthcoming political campaign because of Ohio’s electoral importance. Neither Nixon nor any president would have approached J. Edgar Hoover with such a “request.” But there was a side to Gray that the President may not have anticipated; he opened the FBI’s windows for the winds of change. Women, blacks, and Hispanics were actively recruited; younger people received more rapid advancement as older hands were encouraged to retire early; family wishes became a consideration in what once had been a capricious transfer system for agents; and Gray even explored the possibility of an FBI oversight board.
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Gray’s positive achievements were quickly disregarded once the Judiciary Committee hearings disclosed that he had regularly submitted FBI investigative reports to Dean. He contended that Hoover had made a practice of
providing reports of ongoing investigations; further, he thought that he was merely supplementing Dean’s own investigation. In a conciliatory move, Gray offered to make the Watergate files available to the senators—an offer later vetoed by the White House. But more was to come. The committee learned that Dean took a week to turn over the contents of Howard Hunt’s White House safe to the FBI (Gray thought nothing was “irregular” about this: “the President’s got a rather substantial interest as to what might be in those papers,” he said on March 6). The Judiciary Committee also secured affidavits from CREEP employees who had cooperated with the investigation, stating that their superiors knew almost immediately about their statements to the FBI. By March 13 the committee had heard enough and voted unanimously to invite Dean to testify. The Democrats indicated that Gray’s nomination might be held hostage pending Dean’s appearance. The next day, however, Dean declined to appear, although he agreed to accept written interrogatories.
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The President invoked executive privilege and adamantly opposed any public testimony by his aides. Speaking at his March 2 press conference, Nixon insisted that “no President” could ever allow his Counsel to testify before a congressional committee. Ten days later, he found an enlarged sanctuary in the separation-of-powers doctrine. He transformed separation and independence into unbridled autonomy, maintaining that the manner of exercising assigned executive powers is not subject to questioning by other branches. The fig leaf of executive privilege carried with it high moral purpose. Any questioning of presidential aides in effect impaired the President’s “absolute confidence in the advice and assistance offered by the members of his staff.” At another press conference several days afterward, Nixon conjured up a whole new doctrine of “double privilege” for John Dean: executive privilege plus lawyer-client privilege. In typical contradiction, Nixon insisted that Dean would be “completely forthcoming,” unlike officials in “other Administrations.” Watergate itself, he maintained, was a trifle—merely “espionage by one political organization against another.” But in his memoirs, the President recalled that at that press conference, he suddenly realized:
“Vietnam had found its successor.”
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Gray kept in close touch with the White House throughout his nomination hearings. When he learned that the American Civil Liberties Union had submitted a statement to the Senate committee, protesting that the inquiry threatened the rights of potential defendants, the nominee was ecstatic. But he told John Ehrlichman in a taped March telephone conversation that “John Wesley”—Gray appropriated an almost reverential name for Dean—must “stand awful tight in the saddle and be very careful about what he says.” Dean must say that he delivered everything developed by the White House investigation of the break-in to the FBI, Gray warned. All this he put on a note of knowing conspiracy: “I’m being pushed awfully hard in certain
areas,” he reminded Ehrlichman, “and I’m not giving an inch and you know those areas.” In another conversation, Gray was bitter and sarcastic. He believed that Dean’s claims for privilege were protected by “your god damn constitution,” and then went on to complain because such protesters as the Berrigan brothers (Catholic priests active in the antiwar movement) had received kid-glove treatment. Finally, Gray assured Ehrlichman that he would tell the committee nothing more of their relationship than that they discussed “procedural” aspects of the investigation. Gray’s records show that the two had had five telephone calls and two meetings. Ehrlichman was relieved to hear that no one asked whether he had initiated the meetings.

The Ehrlichman conversations confirmed Gray’s instinct that he was in an adversarial position with the White House. What he did not believe then, and had great difficulty believing later, was that his good friend and patron, Richard Nixon, had ordered that relationship. But he did remember that John Dean had told him twice on June 21, 1972, at the outset of the investigation, that he, Dean, was reporting directly to the President. Dean, of course, exaggerated, but he was keeping Haldeman informed.
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The devious Ehrlichman quickly called Dean, and the two snickered about Gray’s alleged toughness. His testimony, Dean said, “makes me gag.” Ehrlichman wondered if Gray had called to “cover his tracks.” He contemptuously dismissed Gray. Ehrlichman wanted Gray to just hang there; “let him twist slowly[,] slowly in the wind.” Dean responded that those were exactly the sentiments of “the boss.” The President, he claimed, had questioned Gray’s ability to lead the Bureau, given the way he had conducted himself before the committee. The President himself decided that Gray was useless and expendable. Nixon told Dean on March 13 that Gray “should not be head of the FBI”; because of the hearings, Nixon added, “he will not be a good Director, as far as we are concerned.”
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The low opinion of Gray within the President’s immediate circle reflected frustration with his unwillingness to follow blindly White House directives. Dean complained to Nixon that too often Gray made “decisions on his own as to how to handle his hearings. He has been unwilling all along to take any guidance, any instruction.” The President seemed mournful that not even Gray would give him the blind obedience he so desperately wanted. “He’s stubborn,” the President said, and “also he isn’t very smart.” In the next breath, however, Nixon allowed, “he’s smart in his own way.”
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