The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (24 page)

During a conversation earlier that afternoon Haldeman had reported that Clark MacGregor was proceeding as planned: He would announce that, since the indictments had now been handed down, it was time to “quit all this playing games” with Watergate and “hanging innocent people by innuendo.”
³²
After Haldeman gave the president the information I had received from the FBI about the new bug, he replied, “And Dean [has] been a real strong man in this, hasn’t he?” Haldeman confirmed this, adding, “It’s been interesting to watch. He’s, you know, very low-key and cool about things.” Nixon repeated, “He doesn’t get all excited.” Haldeman explained, “Well, he’s good at keeping other people calmed down, which has been important in this one. Probably the most key thing of all, because keeping the Hugh Sloans, and the Maurice Stanses, and the Mardians—who has been his big cross.” Nixon was horrified to learn that Mardian was still involved with Watergate, believing that he had been put out in the field to work. Haldeman explained that Mardian had “tiptoed back in.”

After the president talked on the telephone with Peter Dailey, who headed his campaign advertising group in New York City, and Ron Ziegler, who wanted guidance on how to address the Watergate indictments—the White House would not comment but would leave the matter to the Department of Justice—the president complained to Haldeman how impossible it was as president to simply drop in on his staff to say hello or be “buddy-buddy.” He then asked, “Is Dean here today?” Haldeman indicated that I was in my office. “Okay, why don’t you have him come down.”

“John’s on his way over,” Haldeman reported, after summoning me.
³³
The president can be heard writing as Haldeman continued. “Yeah, he is one of the quiet guys that gets a lot done. That was a good move, too, bringing Dean in,” he said, referring to Watergate. “He’ll never gain any ground for us. He’s
just not that kind of guy. But he’s the kind that enables other people to gain ground while he’s making sure that you don’t fall through the holes. Between times he’s moving ruthlessly on the investigation of McGovern people, Kennedy stuff, and all that, too. I just don’t know how much progress he’s making, because I—” Haldeman then turned the conversation in a direction he knew the president liked to hear, continuing, “—Chuck [Colson] has worked on the list, and Dean’s working the thing through IRS and some other things. He’s turned out to be tougher than I thought he would.”
³⁴

When I entered the Oval Office at 5:27
P.M.
, the president expressed his appreciation for my work on the Watergate situation. Although I had expected it would last five or ten minutes, the meeting lasted nearly fifty. I could sense at the time that my presence was something of a catalyst for Nixon, who was playing president just for me, as he began to discuss his thinking about his second term. What I thought at the time might be a bad-day mood was actually his norm, involving a lot of tough talk about what he was going to do to his enemies and how he was going to go about it. As the conversation proceeded, I could not resist giving him what I knew he wanted. While I could not play the sycophant, as Colson did, nor could I be a brittle and nasty son of a bitch, like Tom Huston, both of whom I knew Nixon admired, I could play the admiring staffer in my own way, which I did with a couple of appreciative remarks, such as “That’s an exciting prospect,” and later, “That’s an exciting concept,” when he talked about making government responsive to the White House.

When Nixon first released the transcript of our September 15 conversation, he claimed it showed that he was not participating in a cover-up.
*
It is true that I raised the cover-up rather elliptically, and he responded metaphorically, but we each understood exactly what was being said. There was no doubt in my mind about Nixon’s awareness of the cover-up after our exchange, relatively early in the conversation, when I told him, “Three months ago I would have had trouble predicting where we’d be today. I think that I can say that fifty-four days from now that not a thing will come crashing down to our surprise.” The president had not been listening, or had missed my “three months ago” reference to June 17, the date of the arrests at the DNC, and the fact that it was fifty-four days to Election Day. “Say what?”
he asked, in response to which I was a bit more direct, clarifying: “Nothing is going to come crashing down to our surprise, either—” rather conspicuously, I believed, referring to Watergate.

“Well, the whole thing is a can of worms. As you know, a lot of this stuff went on. And, and the people who worked in the thing are awfully embarrassing. The way you’ve handled it, it seems to me, has been very skillful, because you put your fingers in the dikes every time that leaks have sprung here and sprung there,” he said. I understood his metaphor perfectly.

Toward the end of the conversation I alerted the president that he might hear from George Shultz regarding the request I had passed on to Johnnie Walters, the head of the IRS. He suggested that he would fire Shultz if he did not follow up. When the conversation was over I figured the president probably viewed our exchange for what it was—a young aide trying to please the boss. But I was wrong: It had a very different impact on him, and it probably explains why, five months later, he called on me to deal directly with Watergate when the problems refused to go away.

The next morning, when meeting with Haldeman in the Oval Office, the president was still thinking about our conversation.
³⁵
There was a discussion about the CIA’s leak of information to CBS News and Nixon’s impulsive reaction to fire everyone on the CIA distribution list who received the documents containing that information. The president injected me into that conversation. “I’d also like you to know that I am damn impressed with John Dean. I was far more impressed with him than John Ehrlichman. As far as him being a playboy, he realizes that he’s good, despite being a playboy. But Dean is more steely than John [Ehrlichman],” the president declared. “More steely than John, no question with Dean, and Bob, I can’t tell you how strongly I feel you’ve got to be steely and mean. This handout [referring to the leak], I’m sure if I’d have given it to Dean, or that stuff on O’Brien, of course he’s not as busy as Ehrlichman. But something would have gotten out there,” meaning some sort White House reaction. Nixon is clearly using me as a bit of a foil to Ehrlichman, so Haldeman protested, “Well, it’s going to with John,” noting that Ehrlichman had “narrowed it down to—”

Nixon continued, “My point is, I find that if John is too busy, also John is damned honorable, he is an honorable man—” Haldeman again
protested—it was not good to be honorable in Nixon’s eyes—and said, “But not like that,” suggesting that Ehrlichman was not honorable when it was a matter of going after Nixon’s enemies. “And Dean is not honorable,” Nixon declared. “He’s a crook, he is a snake. But he is good, he’s good.” Haldeman responded, “The key difference, the critical difference between John Ehrlichman and John Dean in the context that you’re talking about is that Ehrlichman is not a hater.” Haldeman repeated, “Ehrlichman is tough, but he is not a hater.” Nixon then said of Ehrlichman, “He’s an executer, and a very good man, he’s decent.”

“But he is tough. John Ehrlichman is all ambitious as hell,” Haldeman said. Nixon continued on Ehrlichman, “Also, he can call someone in and cut them off at the hip pockets, rather, you’re fired—” Nixon had a particular example in mind: “Like the [Walter] Hickel thing, he was delighted.”
*
The president qualified that admiration with: “He’s not the kind of man who will destroy another man.” Which prompted Haldeman to ask, “And Dean?” Nixon, with a speculative tone, said, “Yeah, I think Dean is.” Haldeman, liking this reading of me, added, “And he’s become more so. Dean has become harder in the job, because he is a guy, in spite of his playboy image, [who] is very deceptive. He is a playboy, he’s got a beautiful girl who lives with him, who’s not his wife. And he changes them every once in a while.”

“That’s alright,” the president said. And Haldeman added, “And he loves rock music and discotheques. Hard stuff, hard. But—” He was cut off by the president’s observation: “You can see that he’s a good-looking guy. Christ, in Hollywood he’d be knocking ’em down. But that’s alright, that’s, I mean—” Haldeman said, “It might even be harmless,” and then, speaking over the president, reminded him, “Henry likes good-looking girls, too. But he’s damn useful in other ways.” The president, with a pained tone, agreed about Kissinger, and Haldeman continued, “But Dean, he’s a good judge of people.”

“Really?” Nixon said. Haldeman explained, “He isn’t taken in by people. He tends to give the benefit, but he isn’t. Some people give people the un-benefit, I do—” Nixon interrupted to agree, “Yeah, I do too.” Haldeman elaborated, “Assume a guy’s no good until he proves he’s good.” “That’s right,” Nixon concurred. But Haldeman said, “Dean tends to assume he’s good, but he watches him. And when he proves he’s no good, he turns on
him.” The president said he had liked what he had seen during our conversations, and explained to Haldeman, “What I mean is, I’m watching Dean, just as I’m watching [Frank] Carlucci,
*
and he’s enough of a hater, and he’s smart enough, you know, what you really need is somebody [not concerned] with screwing the other side.”

“That’s right,” Haldeman agreed. Nixon continued, “Dean is obviously the kind of guy that likes to screw anything, that’s really what he is. And that’s what we need.” Haldeman burst out laughing at Nixon’s sexual double entendre, as the president repeated, “And that’s what we need. That’s what we need.”

“That’s right,” Haldeman agreed.

“And I was impressed with this conversation. I can tell a lot about him. I know this kind. What he’s like. He’s very erudite. He’s beautifully educated and articulate. The same kind of a guy that Bob Stripling
*
used to be,” the president said, adding that, although Stripling had a modest education, he was “shit, bright, a super guy” and, most important, he “hated with a passion. He got ’em, he’d go after people and he’d slaughter ’em. And he’d play every trick in the game. And that’s what Dean will do.”

After the president indicated that Colson, Carlucci and I would be important for his second term, the conversation moved in other directions. Following a meeting with Henry Kissinger and some politicking via telephone with the president of the Utility Workers Union of America, the president was still thinking about our conversation, and he gave credit to Ehrlichman for having brought me into the White House. Haldeman corrected him, explaining that it was he who had brought me onto the staff. “This is one I’ll take credit for. We all knew Dean was a good man, but Ehrlichman didn’t want him to work for the White House.”

O
ther than in
Washington Post
and occasional
New York Times
stories, Watergate largely dropped from the news after the grand jury’s indictments of the Watergate seven. Chuck Colson informed the president on September 17 that McGovern’s comments on the indictments had not made a front page anywhere, and, better yet, the latest Harris Poll showed only 11 percent of the public thought the president was somehow involved in Watergate.
¹
Nonetheless, Jeane Dixon, a newspaper-syndicated seer and psychic who had famously predicted JFK would “be assassinated or die in office” (while incorrectly predicting any number of other events), regularly shared her private prognostications with Rose Woods, who passed them on to an interested president. On September 19, Ms. Dixon sent word to the president, “the sooner you get rid of [Watergate], the better.”
²

On September 21 Colson reported that “McGovern has shut up on the Watergate; he hasn’t talked about that this week.”
³
On September 24, Haldeman provided the latest internal polling numbers, which revealed that Watergate was a nonissue in the campaign: 68 percent said it would have no effect on how they voted, 83 percent of likely voters thought Nixon would win reelection, and 70 percent of voters were aware of Watergate.
⁴
On September 26 Haldeman informed the president that Teddy Kennedy was backing off on holding hearings with his Senate subcommittee because “he’s worried about Chappaquiddick, among other things.”
⁵
Haldeman said that the only thing not under control was Texas congressman Wright Patman’s Banking and Currency Committee, but he assured the president that that
problem was being addressed.
*
“We’ve got everything else in good shape,” Haldeman advised. “The civil suit’s taken care of. The criminal suit’s taken care of. The issue [of Watergate] is basically going to go pretty much down the tubes, and they know it,” referring to
The Washington Post
.

The
Post,
however, did not see it that way. The paper had been featuring a front-page Watergate-related story almost every day since the June 17 arrests at the DNC, and as the presidential race was winding down it would publish as many as five Watergate-related stories each day. While it had not uncovered anything that surprised those of us in the White House following the investigation, nor was it affecting the campaign, the
Post
was often informing the president of activities about which he had little or no knowledge before reading about them in the newspaper. What troubled Nixon most was the fact that the
Post
appeared to have access to significant leaks, like one that was the basis for a September 29 article headlined M
ITCHELL
C
ONTROLLED
S
ECRE
T
GOP
F
UND
, which asserted that Mitchell, when serving as attorney general, “personally controlled a secret Republican fund that was used to gather information about the Democrats, according to sources involved in the Watergate investigation.” When Mitchell was reached by telephone in New York, he denied the story and attacked “Katie Graham,” publisher of the
Post
, with remarks that those of us who knew Mitchell understood were made when he had been drinking. While they had been edited, he clearly had told Woodward that Katie was going to “get her big fat tit in a wringer” if the newspaper continued with such stories.
⁶

The president asked Haldeman at the outset of their morning meeting on September 29 about the story: “Do they have some sort of informant or something in there, or [what]?”
⁷
Haldeman thought (incorrectly) that the information might have come from Bernard Barker, while the president assumed (correctly) that it had come from the FBI. He was not troubled so much by the content of this story as by the fact that it had been leaked from the investigation, and that the
Post
continued to cover Watergate relentlessly. The following morning Nixon learned that his secretary of state, Bill Rogers, had accepted an invitation to participate in the dedication of the new building that would house
The Washington Post
, and he was livid. The president
directed Haldeman to instruct his cabinet to not attend the ceremony,
⁸
and that afternoon he again complained about the
Post
to Colson, telling him that anyone on the White House staff who did anything for the
Post
or
New York Times
would be fired. He ridiculed the
Post
for not even knowing Haldeman’s name, having sent his invitation for the dedication to “William Haldeman.”
⁹

As the president was preparing for a preelection press conference, Haldeman assured him that he had “no Watergate problems.”
¹⁰
At the time there was little new Watergate information, and the
Post
seemed confined to rehashing old stories. Still, Nixon remained irate at the
Post
, and that afternoon asked Ehrlichman if he was aware of his order to the cabinet and staff to not attend the dedication event.
¹¹
Ehrlichman himself had received an invitation, and the president barked, “Just don’t respond. Don’t even respond. Don’t even say ‘I have another engagement.’” With the presidential pique at the
Post
still cresting, Henry Kissinger, who enjoyed bolstering Nixon’s darkest thoughts, told him that afternoon that he had been too generous with his media critics. “If you’ve shown one weakness,” Kissinger said, “it’s that you’ve been too gentle. It’s certainly not that you’ve been threatening.” To make the point, Kissinger reported that he had broken off “any social contact” with
Post-
owned
Newsweek
columnist Stewart Alsop, who had recently written several nasty columns on Watergate.
¹²

Not surprisingly, at the October 5 morning press conference in the Oval Office the first question directed to Nixon asked how he planned to defend his administration against the
Post
’s corruption charges, which the president addressed by ignoring the premise of the question and giving a nonresponsive answer.
¹³
Watergate was not mentioned by name until the seventh question, which was so ineptly stated that it invited the dodge it received. Nixon again all but ignored it and instead made a couple of points he wanted to stress: “One thing that has always puzzled me about it is why anybody would have tried to get anything out of the Watergate. But be that as it may, that decision having been made at lower levels, with which I had no knowledge, and, as I pointed out—”

“But, surely you know now, sir,” the reporter insisted.

“Just a minute,” the president said sternly, putting the interruption back
behind the decorum line. “I certainly feel that under the circumstances that we have got to look at what has happened and to put the matter into perspective. Now when we talk about a clean breast, let’s look at what has happened. The FBI assigned 133 agents to this investigation. It followed about eighteen hundred leads. It conducted fifteen hundred interviews.” He reminded the reporters that he personally understood such inquiries because he had once conducted the Hiss investigation, which was “basically a Sunday school exercise compared to the amount of effort that was put into this.” But he assured his audience that he had no problem with the resources that had been devoted to the Watergate investigation. “I wanted every lead carried out to the end, because I wanted to be sure that no member of the White House staff, and no man or woman in a position of major responsibility in the committee for the reelection, had anything to do with this kind of reprehensible activity.” He added that, because the grand jury had issued indictments, it was “time to have the judicial process go forward and for the evidence to be presented.” He reminded the reporters that he had once been lambasted by the news media for commenting on the Manson murder case when it was pending, so he would not comment on the Watergate case.

Haldeman thought the session was one of the best press conferences the president had held in the Oval Office.
¹⁴
However, the fact that Nixon kept repeating that no one at the White House had been involved—on this occasion, not invoking any authority for his knowledge, since there was none—was beginning to trouble him, a problem he would seek to address in the coming weeks to protect himself.

The Washington Post
broke one of its biggest Woodward and Bernstein Watergate-related stories on October 10 with a larger than usual front-page headline: FBI
F
INDS
N
IXON
A
IDES
S
ABOTAGED
D
EMOCRATS
. The report stated that “FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.”
¹⁵
It was a game-changing story, because it reframed Watergate as more than a mere bungled burglary at the DNC. According to Bernstein and Woodward’s Watergate memoir,
All the President’s Men
, they received a telephone tip on
September 28 that led them to the person purportedly running this massive spying and sabotage operation, Donald Segretti, a University of Southern California friend of Haldeman aides Dwight Chapin and Gordon Strachan, both of whom would soon be implicated in hiring him.
¹⁶
The
Post
’s information about Segretti had come from attorneys he met while in the army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps and attempted to recruit for his operation.

Donald Segretti originally had become entangled in the Watergate investigation some three months earlier, in late June, because his telephone number was in Howard Hunt’s telephone toll records, which had been subpoenaed by the FBI. Segretti’s connection came as a surprise at the White House, and it took several days to figure out its origins. In a nutshell, the relationship developed before Liddy’s illegal intelligence plans had been approved. Liddy had learned that there might be an agent provocateur in the field soliciting recruits for his political pranking from Nixon-Agnew offices throughout the country. He sent a memo to all the offices requesting assistance in identifying the person, and when Magruder learned that the always over-the-top Liddy was threatening to kill this individual, he investigated the matter and resolved it. He called Liddy into his office and explained that this rumored person (who was in fact Segretti) had been hired by Haldeman in 1971, at the suggestion of Chapin and Strachan, to perform pranks and dirty tricks against the Democrats during their primaries that appeared due to Democratic infighting. The goal was to make it more difficult for the Democrats to come together after they selected a nominee. Magruder had learned that Segretti had been paid by Herb Kalmbach from campaign funds left from the 1968 presidential race.
¹⁷

Magruder went to Mitchell and Strachan talked to Haldeman in early 1972 and obtained their agreement that Liddy should take charge of this operation. Liddy was given contact information for a Don Simmons, which was a false name Segretti was using. Liddy (who used the name George Leonard) was joined by Hunt (who used the name Ed Warren) at a meeting with Segretti in Miami in which Liddy told Segretti he was to take instructions from Hunt. Liddy also warned Segretti to be careful with Hunt, and to follow his orders, because he was dangerous: “He sometimes kills without orders. The least he might do would be breaking both your knees.”
¹⁸
Thereafter Hunt would call Segretti from time to time to check on his activities, and it was these calls (some from the White House) that left the record the FBI discovered after the arrests at the DNC. Not only had Segretti been frightened by Liddy and Hunt, but when they tried to involve him in what
he thought might be illegal activities at the Democratic convention in Miami (with the Cuban Americans who were later arrested at the DNC), he wanted nothing to do it.

When the FBI contacted Segretti in June 1972, he called Chapin and Strachan, who requested I meet with him. As best I could tell in a brief meeting, he had no knowledge of or involvement in Watergate whatsoever, and had done nothing illegal, although his activities clearly would be politically embarrassing. I reported the situation to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, including the fact that I had advised Segretti to answer all the FBI’s questions honestly. I also recounted telling him that, given the serious potential for leaks, he did not need to volunteer potentially embarrassing information, such as the payments from Herb Kalmbach. Segretti’s activities became an issue again in August 1972, during the GOP convention in Miami, when he called Chapin because he had been summoned to testify before the Watergate grand jury. At that time I discussed the situation with Henry Petersen, who said the only information sought from Segretti was his connection to Hunt and Liddy and anything about the Watergate break-in. Petersen said it had been a long-standing policy of the Justice Department not to investigate campaign law violations during a campaign, and he knew of nothing that Segretti had done that called for investigation. Again I advised Segretti to answer all questions honestly before the grand jury. Segretti did, and while the prosecutors did not ask him who hired and paid him, one of the grand jurors did. This, in turn, led to further FBI inquiries of Chapin, Strachan and Kalmbach.
¹⁹
In short, by late August 1972 the FBI had the entire story, which it soon began leaking to the
Post
and
Time
magazine, courtesy of Mark Felt.
²⁰
Bernstein and Woodward wrote in
All the President’s Men
that the information Bernstein developed from the attorneys Segretti had tried to recruit led Woodward to call for a meeting with his infamous source, Deep Throat, aka Mark Felt. As the seniormost person in charge of the FBI’s Watergate investigation he was privy to all the Segretti information. They met on October 8, 1972.
²¹