All the President's Men (44 page)

Bernstein called back Dean’s associate. What he was going to ask was unusual, but it might be a good test of how straightforward the man was going to be. Bernstein asked him why he should trust him—who his friends were, whom he had worked with, his politics, how he had come to know John Dean, why he was convinced Dean was telling the truth, who didn’t like him, and even what he did in his spare time.

They talked for more than half an hour, and Bernstein found himself answering a few questions about himself. The man sounded like
somebody he would like. And, it developed, they had a mutual acquaintance, somebody whose judgment Bernstein respected.

He called the acquaintance. John Dean’s friend came very highly recommended, especially with regard to honesty and trustworthiness.

Behaving like a Scoutmaster had left Bernstein feeling a little preposterous, but relieved. If Woodward or he could now find someone else to whom Dean had made the same allegations, they could write the story.

Woodward called the man from CRP.

Not only had Dean told him all the same things, but he had firsthand knowledge of some of the allegations. “There never was any ‘investigation’ by the President until John Dean told him everything that day [March 21],” he said. Dean had been “just a runner” in the cover-up. There was virtually nothing about the cover-up, including the payments to the conspirators, which Haldeman hadn’t approved. And Dean wanted to tell everything to the grand jury if he could arrange a deal with the prosecutors.

Bernstein called the first friend of Dean’s he had talked to briefly earlier that afternoon. Dean had told him the same story.

Bradlee was uneasy about printing allegations that Dean wasn’t willing to make publicly or confirm personally. The reporters, with help from Rosenfeld and Sussman, tried to convince him that they were too important to ignore. Dean’s “scapegoat” statement made little sense otherwise. They recounted the precautions they had taken.

But Bradlee’s final decision was based primarily on something they had all forgotten about: Deep Throat’s call to Woodward. If Haldeman was out, said Bradlee, he had to be in so much trouble that the President could no longer afford to protect him.

“Okay,” he said.

•   •   •

The same morning the
Post
reported John Dean’s charges, the headline in the
New York Times
signaled that John Mitchell’s blithe dismissals of his own complicity had ended. Only a few days earlier, when Jeb Magruder’s allegations had appeared in the
Post,
Mitchell had said: “This gets a little sillier as it goes along, doesn’t it? I’ve had a good night’s sleep and haven’t heard any of this nonsense.” Now the
Times
reported, Mitchell had told “friends” that in three meetings
during 1972 he had listened to proposals to bug the Democrats and had rejected the plans on each occasion. Dean, too, had rejected the idea, Mitchell had told these “friends.” But he had his doubts about Jeb Magruder.

For reporters, the new game in town was to find an “associate” or “friend” of a Watergate player who would anonymously disclose his principal’s version of events. That morning, Bernstein reached a Mitchell “associate” who confirmed the
Times
account. Mitchell was due to appear before the Watergate grand jury at 12:30
P.M
. Bernstein asked about his state of mind.

“For a ruined man, he’s holding up very well,” the associate said. “He’s resigned to the likelihood that he’s going to jail. He can’t go out because of the press, that’s the main problem. He just sits in the apartment all day watching television or working on his defense. He hits the sauce every once in a while, but nothing serious. He’s still got all his marbles. Martha yells at him all day long that he ought to take every damn one of them down, including Nixon. Anything he knows about the President being involved, though, he’s keeping to himself. He says the answer is no. But that would be his answer regardless. He’s too proud to even call Nixon, much less ask him for help or advice. ‘That’s for Haldeman and Ehrlichman to do,’ he says. He’ll stay loyal, no matter what it costs him, or how much he hates the others.”

Which others?

“Ehrlichman more than anybody. Haldeman. And Colson, too, but that’s a little different. He thinks Colson’s crazy, all those insane schemes to booby-trap anybody that shows up on the six-o’clock news criticizing Nixon.

“Ehrlichman and Haldeman he hates for different reasons and a lot more. He thinks they ruined the President, poisoned his mind, especially Ehrlichman. A lot of it’s personal because they shut him off from Nixon. He maintains they were out to get him for months and that Watergate was just the excuse they were waiting for, plus Martha. Somehow Pat [Nixon] got in on the act, too, he says, back in January or so when she smelled liquor on his breath at a ceremony. Hans and Fritz [Haldeman and Ehrlichman] got wind of it, and all three were jumping on the poor guy’s back, telling the President he had to go.”

Mitchell, grayer and thinner, left the grand-jury room shortly after three o’clock and met outside the federal courthouse with reporters.
For the first time, he publicly acknowledged attending meetings at which plans to bug the Democrats were discussed when he was Attorney General. “I have heard discussion of such plans. They’ve always been cut off by me at all times, and I would like to know who it was that kept bringing them back and back. . . . The electronic surveillance was turned down, and turned down, and that was disposed of.” He had approved “an entire intelligence-gathering program” aimed at obtaining “every bit of information that you could about the opposing candidates and their operations.” Through wiretapping? he was asked again. “No, no, no, no. Wiretapping is illegal, as you know, and we certainly were not authorizing any illegal activities.”

Woodward called another Mitchell associate whom he knew to be reliable. The man said Mitchell had told the grand jury that he approved paying the seven original Watergate conspirators with CRP funds. But he had insisted under oath that the money was intended to pay the conspirators’ legal fees, not to buy their silence. He had testified that he vetoed the bugging proposal for the third and final time during a meeting with Magruder in Key Biscayne. He believed Magruder had gone over his head and obtained approval for the Watergate operation from somebody at the White House.

Who?

“He thinks it was Colson, but he didn’t mention any names to the grand jury. He’s got no hard evidence.”

Bernstein was still in pursuit of Dean. Dean’s associate said over the phone that Dean had squirreled away “documentary evidence” which would, among other things, establish the involvement of his superiors in both the bugging and the cover-up. “Up to now, John Dean has been a true-blue soldier for the White House, and now the White House has decided they can send him up the river for being a good soldier. Well, he’s going to take some lieutenants and captains with him.”

A lawyer involved in the case told Bernstein he had seen Chuck Colson in the U.S. Attorney’s office that afternoon, a Friday. Woodward was able to establish that Colson had turned over documents from his files implicating John Dean in the cover-up. Things were happening fast. Bernstein was handed Jack Anderson’s latest Sunday column. Anderson was getting grand-jury transcripts and printing excerpts verbatim. Gordon Strachan, Haldeman’s political aide, had
testified that, immediately after the election, Haldeman had ordered him to turn over to Fred LaRue $350,000 in CRP funds—which had been kept in a Virginia bank safe deposit box since April.

Now Woodward found a LaRue “associate.” It was payoff money, the associate said, added to the original $80,000 which LaRue had received from Sloan and funneled to the conspirators. A Justice Department official confirmed to Bernstein that the grand jury was operating under the assumption that both the $350,000 and $80,000 bundles, in $100 bills, had been used to pay off the conspirators.

Haldeman had been cornered outside his house by ABC and asked to confirm or deny reports that he would resign.

“I can deny them,” he said.

Flatly?

“Yes, sir, uh-huh.”

Returning a phone call from the night before, a mid-level White House official described the situation there to Woodward—old loyalties shattered, little work getting done, confusion about who on the staff might be indicted, who ordered what and who ordered whom, who would resign and who would be saved. “It’s every man for himself—get a lawyer and blame everyone else.”

The President had met with his Cabinet. “We’ve had our Cambodias before,” he said. Then, accompanied only by Ziegler, he flew off to Key Biscayne.

•   •   •

Bernstein and Woodward wanted to catch up on some sleep, and on Sunday neither arrived at the office until early afternoon. The newsroom was quiet, with only a dozen or so reporters there. It was relaxing. They read the Sunday papers. Hersh, too, had the grand jury looking into the Haldeman-Strachan-LaRue transfer, as well as the possibility that Haldeman had received wiretap transcripts. They had written about the latest charge by Dean’s associate—that Ehrlichman was involved in the cover-up (“E was the action officer, not H,” he had said). Haldeman and Ehrlichman had hired the same lawyer, who was also meeting with the President. News that would have occasioned banner headlines a few weeks ago was now simply mentioned within a larger story: Gordon Strachan had testified that Haldeman had approved the hiring of Donald Segretti. They had written a single paragraph on it.
The reporters began calling around town, looking for associates of the three principal characters as yet unheard from: Colson, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Woodward found a Colson surrogate who sounded eager to talk. He was worried. “John Dean got to Sam Ervin and the prosecutors on roller skates and tried to do a number on us. Among other things, he said he would deliver on Colson—if they come across with immunity.”

What did Dean tell them about Colson? asked Woodward.

“Who knows? I’m not so dumb that I think I’m going to convince you that Chuck Colson is a virgin. He’s no saint and that place isn’t the Sistine Chapel. But my man doesn’t break the law.”

Instead of covering up on Watergate, he insisted, Colson had tried to find the truth. Then he had sounded the alarm.

“Colson went right in to the President as early as December and laid it on the line—warned Richard Nixon that some of his people were part of Watergate in a big way and had an organized cover-up going. He warned Nixon about Dean and Mitchell. The President said, ‘The man [Mitchell] has denied it to me; give me some evidence.’ And there are two other people who went to Tricky and said, ‘Cut yourself off from Dean and Mitchell.’ Tricky wouldn’t budge. . . . It’s too fucking bad if it makes the President look bad. He was told that John Dean and John Mitchell were betraying him.”

Woodward called a White House source. On at least three different occasions that winter Colson had told the President that he should “get rid of some people” because they were involved in Watergate. So had others. Most of the warnings focused on Dean and Mitchell, the source said.

Woodward called Colson. He denied “warning” the President about Dean or Mitchell or about a cover-up.

What, then, had he told the President on the subject?

“I will not discuss private communications between myself and the President,” Colson said. “Not with anyone—you, the press in general, with the grand jury or the Senate committee.”

A few minutes later, Woodward received a call from a second Colson associate. “Don’t pay any attention to Chuck’s denial,” he advised. He, too, confirmed that Colson had explicitly told the President there was evidence that his men were involved in both the bugging and the cover-up. The associate said there were two reasons for Colson’s denial:
to avoid acknowledging that the President was forewarned, and the fear that John Dean might “retaliate” by implicating Colson before the grand jury.

The White House had no comment on that Monday’s lead story in the
Post:
“Nixon Alerted to Cover-up in December.”

•   •   •

The next Thursday, April 26, Bernstein made his daily call to John Dean’s principal associate early in the afternoon. Bernstein again raised the question of what had happened between Dean’s meeting with the President on March 21 and the President’s announcement on April 17.

“I think we lost the highest-stakes poker game in the city’s history,” the associate said.

Bernstein guessed out loud that the President had thrown in his chips with Haldeman and Ehrlichman against John Dean.

“It looks that way now. But nobody will tell him anything for sure. He’s like a prisoner. . . . For a while, John was feeling very high because he felt they were all going to do the right thing. It was his understanding that an agreement had been reached. Then it collapsed because the German shepherds said they didn’t think they had to go to the doghouse with John Dean.”

Haldeman and Ehrlichman didn’t think  . . .?

“ . . . that they had to be indicted to save the situation.”

What exactly had Dean told the President on the 21st?

“John went in and said, ‘Mr. President, there is a cancer eating away at this office and it has to be removed. To save the Presidency, Haldeman and Ehrlichman and I are going to have to tell everything to the prosecutors and face the consequences of going to jail.’ That was the gist of it. The President sat down in his chair stunned, like somebody had hit him in the head with a rock.”

Then what happened?

“He told him everything—even gave him a list of who would probably have to go to jail. It was a very long list. John told him that the shepherds had known the whole story since the beginning, that he kept them informed of everything there was to know and carried out their orders, and that, from the beginning, they had told John not
to discuss anything with the President, that they would handle that end of it.”

What was the President’s reaction?

“Mostly he listened. Then he told John that he must be under a lot of strain. So he sent him up to the Mountaintop to put his thoughts in order and get it all down on paper. . . . John came down from Camp David expecting that everybody would stand up and say, ‘Yes, we were responsible and the President knew nothing about this. We are prepared to accept the consequences and will cooperate with the grand jury investigation.’