The Wars of Watergate (97 page)

During St. Clair’s presentation, Rodino conducted the proceedings with his customary calmness and evenhandedness; indeed, for many of the liberals he may have been too evenhanded. But Rodino perhaps sensed that St. Clair had done the President little good and might even have clinched the case against him. Following St. Clair’s appearance on June 27, Rodino said in the presence of reporters that all twenty-one Democrats would vote for impeachment. The remark touched the raw nerves of conservative Southern Democrats who were not yet ready to commit themselves, either in or out of the committee. Rodino took the floor to deny his statement. Interestingly, Hutchinson, sensitive to the courtesies of the House, promptly defended Rodino, while committee member Hogan, one of the most politically calculating of the Republicans, who had his eye on the Maryland gubernatorial race and who later voted for impeachment, denounced the entire inquiry as “biased” and “unfair.” Rodino, in predicting a partisan vote to impeach, also may have been guilty of simple inattention or of unwillingness to confront reality, for some of his Democratic colleagues, including Flowers, Jordan, Mann, and Thornton, complained that the case against Nixon had not been made and criticized Doar’s “slow movement.”
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After extended discussions with Doar and St. Clair, and among themselves, the committee members finally agreed in July to hear additional testimony from nine witnesses. Alexander Butterfield appeared to discuss the President’s
work habits. He portrayed Nixon as the man in charge; Haldeman and other aides did nothing without the President’s knowledge, and Haldeman himself was nothing more than “an implementer.” St. Clair tried to discredit Butterfield, but the testimony fit the image the President himself had fashioned in his various image-building efforts. Nixon’s lawyers had more success in insulating the President when Fred LaRue testified that John Mitchell knew money had been paid to the burglary defendants. St. Clair and several Republican congressmen focused on the President’s knowledge of events, something LaRue knew, or would admit to knowing, nothing of. The procedural limitations of the committee hearings were all too apparent. When Cohen questioned LaRue about raising money from Thomas Pappas, LaRue denied doing so but acknowledged that he had seen Pappas for other reasons. Cohen’s time for questioning then expired, and no one else pursued the question of why LaRue met with the shadowy Pappas—“the Greek bearing gifts,” as Dean and Mitchell had described him.
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Mitchell, then preparing for his own trial, appeared, but his lawyer warned the committee that Mitchell would have to be selective in his answers. Mitchell’s’ most important revelation involved a February 1973 visit from Richard Moore, then a White House special assistant, who was personally close to Mitchell. Moore had been deputized—by whom specifically was never revealed—to visit Mitchell, discuss the forthcoming Senate Select Committee hearings, and request his aid in raising money for the Watergate burglars. Mitchell refused, according to his own version of events.
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Once again, John Dean provided the most interest and generated the most heat. For more than a year Nixon’s defenders had argued that Dean was a loose cannon, that he had instigated and carried out the cover-up on his own, to protect himself and a few others—but not the President. Charles Colson later testified that Dean ran the cover-up, even exerting pressure on Colson to cooperate in the effort. Dean admitted to St. Clair that Nixon did not specifically instruct him in the cover-up, but the former aide insisted that his conversations with Haldeman and Ehrlichman demonstrated both “concern and instructions” regarding the cover-up; “it was not quite willy-nilly, as you have tried to portray,” Dean retorted to a hostile questioner. After he returned to the White House from a Far East trip just after the break-in, he investigated matters for Haldeman and determined that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Magruder, and Strachan all were “vulnerable and I felt that it was my responsibility to assist.” Congressman Butler had been trying to determine the moment of “conception” of the cover-up; for himself, Dean said that had he stayed in Manila, he might not have been “raped.”
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Dean’s appearance provided dramatic evidence pointing to the erosion of the President’s public standing. After Dean testified for the Ervin Committee in July 1973, opinion-poll respondents narrowly expressed a belief that Nixon
had been more truthful. A year later, by a 46–29 margin, they found Dean to be the more credible.

Henry Petersen vigorously defended the early stage of the Watergate investigation by the Justice Department, and, for the record, noted the U.S. Attorneys’ role in exposing the cover-up. Petersen’s most devastating remarks centered on his trust in the President and his willingness to share privileged information with him. The tapes, of course, revealed that Nixon had improperly provided his aides with Petersen’s reports; the President’s own words, together with Petersen’s testimony, offered a substantial case for obstruction of justice.
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Under St. Clair’s prodding, Charles Colson said that the President had no advance knowledge of the break-in of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. He cited a tape transcript of his telephone conversation with John Ehrlichman in which he had recommended that executive privilege be waived and that the President appoint a Special Prosecutor, recommendations that Colson claimed Ehrlichman had not relayed to Nixon. He also claimed that Dean opposed a Special Prosecutor unless the new appointee reported directly to him.

Colson revived the finger-pointing that had characterized Oval Office discussions in early 1973. He claimed he told the President to urge Mitchell—“the guy who was responsible”—to come forward “and take the consequences.” At that point—mid-February 1973—Colson said, Nixon responded angrily, insisting that “I am not about to take an innocent person [Mitchell] and make him a scapegoat.”

Colson also raised what came to be another favorite White House explanation of events: the CIA had played a decisive role in the events of Watergate. By December 1973, Colson believed that the CIA and the Hughes Tool Company had “unexplained connections” to the affair. He discussed his theory with the President and then talked to Haig about it. As they concluded their conversation, Haig phoned Nixon and relayed the message to Colson that his chief would not harm the nation’s foreign policy, yet the President encouraged Colson to dig further and “be careful to get the facts first.” Colson concluded that the White House would do nothing. He remembered Haig saying, “Chuck, we may [g]o down and be impeached, but we simply can’t drag down the Government of the United States with us.” That remark apparently confirmed Colson’s faith in the CIA conspiracy theories, but he did not question Haig’s shadowy role. In later years, he described Haig as “loyal” to the President, but “never unmindful of his military background.”

Colson’s hints tantalized. He reminded the committee that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had spied on the President; why not then believe the CIA had undermined Nixon? (Colson eventually acknowledged that internal spying was widespread: Nixon had used both Haig and Colson to spy on Kissinger.) The President, furthermore, could not “crack down” on the military, “because
of what they knew and what they had taken”—a dark hint, never really pursued by the committee. It was not Colson’s last attempt to till revisionist soil.
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The House Judiciary Committee Democrats, supported by Hutchinson and Lott, two of the President’s most committed defenders, decided to hear the witnesses in executive session, ostensibly because their testimony might jeopardize pending cases. Most Republican members objected to closing the proceedings, with McClory reminding the Democrats that many people believed they could not impeach the President in the open.
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But the secret testimony proved rather tepid, except for that provided by Colson and Butterfield. Much of it reiterated what had been tendered to the Senate Select Committee the previous summer. Unlike the Select Committee’s senators, the House members had little opportunity to develop any line of inquiry in depth; moreover, the committee and its staff had no inclination for further investigation. A year earlier, Howard Baker had established the basic criteria for determining the meaning of events: what did the President know, and when did he know it? The answers—for some, at least—lay embedded in the tapes, and they had been dissected and analyzed in microscopic detail by the staff. By then, Richard Nixon was the most relevant witness.

As the witnesses testified, the committee released more than 4,000 pages of evidence, including St. Clair’s rebuttal. The staff also issued a separate document detailing its corrections and additions to the White House transcripts. In his June 27 presentation to the committee, St. Clair repeatedly remarked that different people would make different transcriptions, given the poor quality of the tapes. As if anticipating some difficulty, St. Clair stressed that transcribing the tapes had become “quite an art.” He also gave the impression that the White House had been overly severe in its rendition, as he noted that the committee’s transcripts “are more favorable to the President than our own.” But the committee found significant discrepancies in the Administration’s transcripts; the White House versions had not in fact been less favorable. For example, the committee found a clear indication in the March 13, 1973 tape that Nixon had rejected the “hang-out road”—that is, a full revelation of the truth—in a conversation with Dean. Again, in his March 22, 1973 talk with Mitchell, the President repudiated Eisenhower’s scrupulous standards for the conduct of subordinates; more important, in this exchange, he told Mitchell to “stonewall” and to take the Fifth Amendment. In other ways, it is true, the committee’s transcripts spared the President. Specifically, Rodino and Hutchinson agreed to delete some of the President’s racial and ethnic slurs, although leaks eventually made many of them public. The arbitrary omissions troubled members from different parts of the political spectrum.
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The release of the committee’s version of the tapes resulted in another publicity disaster for the White House. One staff member, who assisted Buzhardt in listening to the tapes, gave Haig a detailed rebuttal. He admitted that few of his changes had significance, but he contended that the committee’s decision to offer its own version was “terribly prejudicial” in itself. He also knew that the White House could not quibble with the transcripts so long as Nixon refused to release tapes and let the public itself judge. The President himself knew the meaning of his predicament: “this innocent discrepancy,” he realized, made him “look both sinister and foolish.”

One presidential speechwriter complained to Haig that the White House had permitted the public to believe that the committee’s transcripts amounted to “the King James version of the tapes—infallible and devinely [
sic
] inspired.” Altogether, he lamented, the White House had been playing “catchup ball, leading with our chin, and letting the opposition shape the news.” The President needed a more vigorous “political defense,” otherwise his legal defense was meaningless. The glory days of 1972 offered instruction: “we waxed McGovern,” by repeating over and over the attacks on the Democratic candidate’s vulnerabilities; the same was needed for Nixon’s enemies within the committee. The pliable “enemy,” as always, was the media: convince the public that coverage was excessive and that consequently any impeachment or trial would be unfair. A “ ‘sick and tired of Watergate’ ” theme, the aide believed, might be the most powerful weapon for the Administration. White House publicists and legislative-liaison staff played that message hard in the materials they transmitted to friendly members of the committee. But, above all, the speechwriter concluded, Nixon himself must lead the charge; only his personal leadership could provide the people with “a reason to believe in and trust the President.” He had to win both respect and sympathy. It was not to be: by now, Richard Nixon had abandoned the field to surrogates.
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Vice President Ford remained dutiful, despite warnings from his aides to maintain distance between himself and the President. On July 12, a day after the House committee made its evidence public, Ford stated that the “new evidence as well as the old evidence” exonerated Nixon. Ford may have been obtuse, as some critics charged, but he apparently had no knowledge of the extent to which the White House had played with the evidence. For example, the White House and the Special Prosecutor both furnished the committee with copies of Ehrlichman’s handwritten notes. But the White House compilation included nearly double the number of blank pages, including ones that in the other copies of the same notes described the conversations between Nixon and Ehrlichman respecting the Ellsberg prosecution.
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Whatever shackles had been imposed on St. Clair during the lengthy proceedings before the House Judiciary Committee, they dissolved on July 18 as he presented his closing defense of the President. He spoke for nearly one and a half hours, finally gaining an opportunity to display his reputed skills. St. Clair sensed the decisiveness and the solemnity of the occasion. His argument was impressive: organized, articulate, unyielding in behalf of his client, totally skeptical of the adversarial positions—and selective. At the outset, he called the committee members to account, insisting that they must hold evidence to a “clear and convincing” standard in order to impeach the President. “Inferences,” St. Clair said, would not do—a clear attack upon Butterfield’s testimony that Haldeman, like any aide, was an extension of the President and merely an “implementer.” What Ehrlichman did by way of the break-in at Dr. Fielding’s offices, and what he did in his approach to Judge Byrne in the Ellsberg trial, could not be traced to Nixon in a “clear and convincing” manner. How far, St. Clair in effect asked, must the President answer for his aides? After all, he had dismissed them when he realized they might be implicated.