All the President's Men (49 page)

Authors: Bob Woodward,Carl Bernstein

BOOK: All the President's Men

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• • •

“Okay,” Bradlee said the next morning. “It’s more than a B-plus.”

I
N THE FIRST WEEK
of November, Woodward moved the flower pot and traveled to the underground garage. Two weeks earlier, the President had fired special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had subpoenaed nine presidential tape recordings. Attorney General Eliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, his deputy, had resigned. In the shattered inner circle of the White House, the President’s aides were saying that the special prosecutor had been fired because the President feared that Cox was going to prosecute him. Then, with Cox gone, the President bowed to public opinion and a court order and surrendered seven of the tapes. Two had never existed, his lawyers said.

Deep Throat’s message was short and simple: one or more of the tapes contained deliberate erasures.

Bernstein began calling sources at the White House. Four of them said they had learned that the tapes were of poor quality, that there were “gaps” in some conversations. But they did not know whether these had been caused by erasures. Ron Ziegler told Bernstein there were no gaps or erasures in the tapes. A story that asserted the opposite would be “inaccurate.” Bernstein proposed that the story could be held if Ziegler would pledge, on his honor, that he was absolutely sure. “We deal in facts, not honor,” Ziegler replied.

The story quoted anonymously Deep Throat’s remark that there were gaps of “a suspicious nature” which “could lead someone to conclude that the tapes have been tampered with.”

On the afternoon of November 21, Ziegler phoned Bernstein back. The President’s lawyers had announced in Judge Sirica’s courtroom that one of the tapes contained an 18½-minute gap. “I’m giving you my word that I didn’t know about this when we had our other conversation.”

Bernstein and Woodward did not disbelieve him. They knew from a number of sources that the President had refused for months to let any of his White House aides listen to all the tapes—even while he was claiming that their full disclosure would vindicate him.

Richard Nixon, his subordinates were saying, had become a prisoner in his own house—secretive, distrustful even of those who were attempting to plead his cause, combative, sleepless. One of the men who had been closest to him throughout his presidency told Woodward helplessly, “The only people he will talk to candidly about Watergate are Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp”—the millionaire businessmen who were his long-time personal friends.

At Disneyworld in Florida, the President told an audience of editors on national TV, “I am not a crook.”

• • •

On December 28, General Alexander Haig, the White House Chief of Staff, reached Katharine Graham by telephone in a Washington restaurant. He was calling from San Clemente to discuss two of the reporters’ stories on the
Post’s,
front page that morning. The first said that Operation Candor, the name given the campaign by the President to defend himself, had been shut down, and that two of the President’s most trusted advisers, who had steadfastly maintained his innocence, were no longer convinced of it. The second story said that the President’s lawyers had been supplying attorneys for H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman with copies of documents and other evidence that the White House was submitting to the special prosecutor’s office.

Haig characterized the stories as “scurrilous,” accused the
Post
of “disservice” to the nation, and appealed to Mrs. Graham to stop publishing such accounts.

Haig himself, the reporters soon learned, had come to doubt the wisdom of the President’s course. For more than six months he and Henry Kissinger had been urging the President to cut his ties with the
three former aides who had been the closest to him and were now the primary targets of the special prosecutor’s investigation—Halde-man, Ehrlichman and Colson.

Instead, the President had built his legal defense in concert with the three, and had continued to meet with them and talk with them on the telephone. During the summer of 1973, Kissinger had tried to persuade the President to disavow his former aides publicly and to accept a measure of responsibility for Watergate. The suggestion had been angrily rejected by Ron Ziegler. “Contrition is bullshit,” he had responded to the presidential speechwriter who brought him Kissinger’s recommendation.

By late February 1974, the special Watergate prosecution force had obtained guilty pleas from Jeb Magruder, Bart Porter, Donald Segretti, Herbert Kalmbach, Fred LaRue, Egil Krogh and John Dean. Eight corporations and their officers had pleaded guilty to charges of making illegal contributions to CRP. In Washington, Dwight Chapin was under indictment for perjury. In New York, John Mitchell and Maurice Stans were on trial, charged with obstruction of justice and perjury.

On March 1, the Washington grand jury that had indicted the original conspirators and burglars of the Democratic National Headquarters in 1972 handed up its major indictments in the Watergate cover-up case. It charged seven of the President’s former White House and campaign aides with conspiracy to obstruct justice: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Mitchell, Strachan, Mardian and lawyer Kenneth Parkinson.

A week later, a second Washington grand jury handed up indictments in the conspiracy to burglarize the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Those charged were Ehrlichman, Colson, Liddy and three Cuban Americans, including Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez, who were among the original Watergate break-in defendants.

Acting for the full House, to which the Constitution gives the “sole power to impeach,” the House Judiciary Committee had begun the first investigation in more than one hundred years into such possible action against a President. The chief Watergate grand jury turned over to Judge Sirica, in addition to the seven indictments, a briefcase containing a report and the accompanying evidence of what Deep Throat, and others, assert to be a staggering case against the President.
Since the prosecutors had argued strongly that the Constitution precludes the possibility of indicting an incumbent President, the grand jurors recommended that both be turned over to the House committee.

On January 30, the President had delivered his annual State of the Union Message to a joint session of the House and Senate, the justices of the Supreme Court and the members of the Cabinet, as well as to other guests and a national TV audience. “One year of Watergate is enough,” he declared at the conclusion, and he implored the country and the Congress to turn to other, more urgent, matters.

• • •

To those who will decide if he should be tried for “high crimes and misdemeanors”—the House of Representatives—

And to those who would sit in judgment at such a trial if the House impeaches—the Senate—

And to the man who would preside at such an impeachment trial—the Chief Justice of the United States, Warren Burger—

And to the nation . . .

The President said, “I want you to know that I have no intention whatever of ever walking away from the job that the American people elected me to do for the people of the United States.”

THE PRESIDENT