The Wars of Watergate (70 page)

Maurice Stans’s testimony on June 12 was particularly dramatic because he was under indictment, along with John Mitchell, in a pending case in New York not related to the Watergate problem. He confirmed Sloan’s testimony yet maintained that he had no prior knowledge of the break-in. He vigorously argued that he had followed the new campaign laws as best as he could, and with the advice of his committee counsel, Liddy. He offered insights into his money-raising activities and protested that prominent contributors had suffered unfairly because of the Watergate affair. Stans vehemently denied that political contributions had any
quid pro quo
connotations. He had admittedly persuaded the president of McDonald’s, the fast-food chain, to give $250,000 to re-elect the President, but Stans had promised nothing in return; there was no connection, he insisted, between the contribution and legislation permitting the chain to pay below the minimum wage. No one challenged Stans. He pleaded for the committee to clear innocent individuals, such as Sloan and prominent contributors. For himself, he asked that the committee “give me back my good name.”
¹¹

The testimony by Sloan, Porter, and Stans set the stage for Jeb Stuart Magruder, CREEP’s deputy director and the designated go-between with the White House. Magruder’s aide, Robert Reisner, earlier had provided key details of Magruder’s work, including descriptions of planning meetings for questionable campaign activities that were held in the White House, the Justice Department, and Key Biscayne. Reisner testified that Magruder instructed him to inform Liddy of the final approval of his plans, including the plan for the Watergate break-in. Reisner described a wide range of clan-destine activities, such as Colson’s request for counterdemonstrations at J. Edgar Hoover’s funeral, planting a “mole” in Hubert Humphrey’s organization, and arranging for a woman to strip at the Democratic Convention. He acknowledged shredding documents for Magruder after the break-in. Reisner revealed that every Magruder document directed to Mitchell was duplicated for Haldeman and Strachan, testimony that both diminished Magruder and magnified the White House role in the campaign.
¹²

Magruder had a grant of immunity from Judge Sirica. When he testified, what had been rumor for weeks was publicly stated before the committee by a key principal, as Magruder implicated Mitchell, Dean, LaRue, and Strachan in the planning and cover-up of the Watergate break-in. Magruder resisted citing Haldeman, although he recognized that Strachan’s knowledge undoubtedly meant that Haldeman was aware of events. In his opening statement Magruder specifically asserted that the President had no knowledge of the cover-up attempts. When Inouye reminded him of his recent public declarations regarding the key roles of the President and Haldeman in campaign decision making, Magruder insisted that he had “no knowledge” of presidential participation in planning the burglary or in the subsequent decision to cover up any White House involvement.
¹³

Magruder sought vindication when he pursued a thesis that the illegal activities could be justified because antiwar leaders themselves repeatedly broke the law. He confessed that he had lost “respect for the legal process simply because I did not see it working as I had hoped.” Ervin contemptuously compared such attitudes to McCarthyism and took the occasion to condemn the Huston Plan and the various schemes for wiretapping and military surveillance of Administration opponents, charging that the same mentality fostered a preposterous notion that something might be gained by burglarizing the Democratic National Committee.

Republican senators and staff questioned Magruder at length, developing a line of attack that would make Dean the scapegoat for the whole affair. The Minority Counsel tried unsuccessfully to get Magruder to blame Dean for the hiring of Liddy. He then explored Dean’s role in ensuring Magruder’s perjury before the grand jury, particularly emphasizing Dean’s desire to avoid implicating himself. Gurney asked Magruder whether it was possible that someone in Dean’s position would meet alone and regularly with the President. “That would not have been in the normal pattern of events,” Magruder noted. But, for Montoya, Magruder conceded that Dean acted under authority from Haldeman or Ehrlichman, and not on his own.

While Republicans concentrated on setting up John Dean, Ervin bore in on the President’s connections to his aides. Magruder acknowledged that he knew for a certainty that Haldeman had the full story by January 1973. Was it not Haldeman’s duty, then, to take that story to the President? Magruder never answered directly but he left the clear implication that Haldeman reported such things to the President. Magruder’s careful yet evasive answers contributed to a slowly, almost inexorably, evolving impression: Richard Nixon knew more than he had publicly acknowledged.
¹⁴

Two days after Magruder concluded his testimony, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev arrived in Washington for a summit meeting with Nixon. It was one day short of the anniversary of the Watergate break-in. Baker relayed to his colleagues a Soviet journalist’s remark to an American reporter that Brezhnev was “concerned.” Baker insisted that he was merely noting the fact and was not asking the committee to halt its proceedings—and then he did just that. Despite objections from Weicker, who thought that continuing the hearings might demonstrate the strength of the American system and the people’s confidence in it, the committee suspended the public hearings. But news continued to filter out, as witnesses such as Kalmbach, Strachan, and Dean testified to the staff behind closed doors. The Soviets reportedly were “bewildered” by the growing allegations against the President. Nixon worried about Democrats and liberals, convinced, as always, that they were his enemies. Soviet journalists, however, spoke of a “right-wing plot” designed
to discredit the President’s détente policy.
¹⁵
“Left” and “Right” had lost their meanings. Moscow’s rulers, of course, could not look kindly on any attempt to criticize or topple a leader.

John Dean began to provide some answers during a full week of intensive testimony. On Monday, June 25, with only a ninety-minute lunch recess, he read a 245-page statement over nearly seven hours, describing his role in the Watergate cover-up and his dealings with an extraordinary range of characters, headed, of course, by the President.

What the senators and the public saw was a young man accompanied by a striking blonde wife, himself handsome, impeccably dressed, articulate, dispassionate, seemingly self-effacing, and withal exhibiting a remarkable memory. Dean seemed the very model of a young man on the move. In fact, he was ruined, at least for the time being. His mind was not a tape recorder, as he told Gurney and Inouye, but he had an uncanny ability to recall whole passages of conversation, recollections eventually substantiated by tape recordings of Oval Office talks. Presidential aide Richard Moore had once suggested that Dean make a record of his meetings with the President. Why had he not done so? asked Inouye. “I thought they were very incriminating to the President of the United States,” Dean replied in his fast, unemotional manner.
¹⁶
When he had finished his statement, the reality of a corrupt
apparatchik
dissolved Dean’s surface images and, more important, the Nixon Administration’s long-cultivated law-and-order image.

Dean portrayed the climate of opinion in the White House that nurtured deep antagonism toward political foes in the years before the Watergate break-in. Watergate, he said at the outset, was “an inevitable outgrowth” of an environment marked by “an excessive concern” over the impact of demonstrators, “an excessive concern” over leaks, and “an insatiable appetite” for political intelligence—all linked with “a do-it-yourself White House staff, regardless of the law.” At the outset of his testimony, Dean depicted Nixon and staff as convinced, immediately following the arrest of the Watergate burglars, that they had been victimized by an elaborate Democratic-inspired conspiracy. He had been commissioned to “prove” this, but he testified that he “never found a scintilla of viable evidence indicating … a master plan.”

Nixon and Haldeman, however, remained unconvinced, and throughout the summer and fall of 1972, they pushed repeatedly for more intelligence on the Democratic campaign. This prompted, Dean related, a variety of questionable and illegal actions, such as the attempts by Caulfield to gain derogatory information on Senator Kennedy and the operations by Liddy and his associates at CREEP. Dean acknowledged that he had been present, some time before the break-in, when Liddy offered Mitchell his master plan
for damaging the opposition. Dean reported to Haldeman that he thought the whole scheme was “incredible, unnecessary, and unwise.” Liddy’s plans included bugging, mugging, kidnapings, and prostitutes. Dean informed Haldeman, and warned that the White House should not be involved. Haldeman agreed, Dean claimed.

The rest of Dean’s testimony described the cover-up and his role in it. He revealed with uncanny accuracy the crucial September 15, 1972 meeting with Nixon and Haldeman. Dean had left that meeting, he remembered, with “the impression that the President was well aware of what had been going on regarding the success of keeping the White House out of the Watergate scandal.” He then described his role in blocking the Patman investigation, the cash payments to the burglars and Hunt, the discussions of executive clemency, and the formulation of plans to perpetuate the cover-up throughout the Senate hearings. Finally, Dean recalled the extensive White House meetings throughout March and April 1973, again with surprising, intimate detail that magnified Nixon’s personal role in events.

Dean vacillated between a rendition of events in which he described himself as a reluctant pawn of higher officials and a narrative that betrayed a determination and enthusiasm for doing an effective job of crisis management. His testimony clearly reflected his ambition, his desire to become an indispensable member of the “team,” as he later characterized his behavior. Unlike Porter, Dean did not seem at all skittish about responding to peer pressure; he was eager to be a loyal “team player.” His moment had arrived, and Dean described it with perhaps more pride than penitance.

Near the end of his grueling testimony, Dean described the President’s contention that he had a tape recording of a meeting in which Dean allegedly had sought immunity in exchange for testimony against Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Dean denied the charge but urged the Ervin Committee to secure the tape of the whole meeting. The conversation, he contended, would portray the larger dimensions of the case, including Nixon’s talk of hush-money payments and executive clemency. Dean did not know whether such a tape existed, but if it did he believed that it “would corroborate many of the things that this committee has asked me to testify about.”

As he concluded his testimony, Dean described a phone call he received from the President on April 22, wishing him a Happy Easter. He knew what the approach was, a “stroking call.” Eight days later, his secretary had told him that the wire services had reported that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were resigning and that Dean’s resignation also had been requested. The committee had heard other witnesses who contritely confessed to their own wrongdoing and implicated others in singular transgressions. But John Dean was different. He had challenged the integrity and image of the Administration; more important, he had portrayed the Nixon White House as deeply entwined in illegal activities and the obstruction of justice. Dean’s exposing
the falsity of Nixon’s sponsorship of any serious attempt to investigate Watergate was reminiscent of the remark of a critic of Freudian psycho-analysis who called it “the disease that presumes itself the cure.”

White House aides were furious at Dean’s testimony. Haldeman’s assistant, Larry Higby, told the committee staff in a private session that Dean was “trying to save his ass and screw everyone else.” Higby contended that people had talked to Dean believing that they were covered by lawyer-client confidentiality; now, Higby said, Dean used that information for his own advantage and to damage others. No one, however, understood the implications of Dean’s testimony better than the President. During Dean’s testimony, he listened to relevant tape recordings of his meetings with his former Counsel. According to Kissinger, Haig claimed that the White House found a tape that caught Dean in a misstatement. If that one tape were released, however, the President might have to release others, ones potentially damaging. Nixon knew that if even the least part of Dean’s testimony was accurate, he was in serious difficulty. And he had to realize that Dean had rendered a far more accurate account of their dealings than he had. In the end, he understood, “it would make less difference that I was not as involved as Dean had alleged than that I was not as uninvolved as I had claimed.”
¹⁷

Dean said he honestly believed that the President did not understand the implications of his own involvement in the break-in and cover-up. Perhaps gratuitously, he expressed the hope that the President would be “forgiven” once the facts emerged. Dean may have hoped for a similar absolution for himself. But Committee Counsel Dash immediately challenged his contention that—as a lawyer and a “sophisticated man in politics”—the President did not realize the meaning of his actions. After Dean’s detailed revelations of meetings such as that of September 15, he had no choice: the facts indicated that the President “would certainly have some appreciation of the legal problems involved; yes, indeed.”
¹⁸

Dean was fair game for the President’s loyalists on the committee. Ervin had no intention of inhibiting them, and never interfered with their allotted questioning time. At one point, Gurney promised to be brief (he was not), but Ervin, following the Senate’s stylized courtesies, told Gurney he was rendering “a real service to the committee and the country[,] and I don’t want you to feel rushed at all.” Dean, as Ervin well knew, would stay with his story; more time in the witness chair could only damage the Administration’s case. Gurney selectively cited Dean’s testimony to put the President in the most favorable light. But Ervin undid Gurney’s efforts with a few review questions of his own. The most dramatic came when he asked Dean if the President had tried to discover the facts at any time between the break-in
and the establishment of the Senate Select Committee. Dean recalled a moment after the election in which Haldeman asked him about the consequences for the White House if the President revealed all the facts. Indictments, Dean said—indictments for at least Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and himself. “That does not seem like a very viable option, does it?” Haldeman responded.
¹⁹