The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (37 page)

Nixon closed by again placing me front and center. “But let me say that
I’m deliberately limiting my communication only with Dean, because you have confidence in him.” When Kleindienst agreed, the president added, “And he never opens his mouth.” Nixon then addressed my receipt of FBI files, which he suspected might surface in the Gray hearings. “I have ordered Dean to conduct an investigation. Good God, if Gray’s going to make the files available to Congress, can he do it for the president?” Kleindienst said that he and Gray had discussed that during their morning conversation.

Shortly after lunch the president called me back to the Oval Office once again, for another short visit, to tell me he had spoken with Kleindienst.
¹⁴
He had received the copy of his Hiss speech, the draft regarding executive privilege and the background material. While making notes on the draft, I assured him he was not withholding information, unlike Truman had in the Hiss case. The president said Kleindienst had a vested interest in the Watergate investigation, because he was “enormously indebted to Mitchell, and loves him like a father.” He wanted me to remind Kleindienst that Mitchell was “the most vulnerable” and added, “You talk about the White House staff. They might have known something. I don’t think they did. But in Mitchell’s case, my presumption is he did. Get my point?”

Ziegler arrived at the Oval Office late in the morning to usher the president to the press room for a press conference.
¹⁵
He alerted Nixon to growing interest in the false story that I had shown Segretti copies of his FBI interview, but the president assured him that he was up to speed on that matter if it arose. The president arrived in the press room shortly after 11
A.M.
, and after announcing his forthcoming meeting in California with South Vietnamese president Thieu, he took questions. In the ninth question former Nixon White House aide and longtime
Des Moines Register and Tribune
reporter Clark Mollenhoff asked if Gray had been recruited by the Nixon people to give political speeches during the 1972 campaign.
¹⁶
The question was weak, and the president had no information that anyone had recruited Gray for political purposes. Nixon said the FBI director should be nonpartisan, and the Senate had every right to question him about such matters. Mollenhoff followed up with an equally poor question from the Gray hearings, about the FBI’s not questioning Martha Mitchell, but Nixon said he would not comment on Gray’s testimony.

Six questions later he got two Watergate questions: “Mr. President, now that the Watergate case is over, the trial is over, could you give us your view on the verdict and what implications you see in the verdict on public confidence in the political system?” Nixon answered: “No, it would not be proper for me to comment on the case when it not only is not over, but particularly when it is also on appeal.” Then he mentioned my mythical investigation again, actually supplying a date for this supposed inquiry, to protect Gray on the matter of turning over the FBI reports to the White House: “I will simply say with regard to the Watergate case what I have said previously, that the investigation conducted by Mr. Dean, the White House counsel, in which, incidentally, he had access to the FBI records on this particular matter, because I directed him to conduct this investigation, indicates that no one on the White House staff, at the time he conducted the investigation—that was last July and August—was involved or had knowledge of the Watergate matter. And, as far as the balance of the case is concerned, it is now under investigation by a congressional committee, and that committee should go forward, conduct its investigation in an evenhanded way, going into charges made against both candidates, both political parties. And if it does, as Senator Ervin has indicated it will, we will, of course, cooperate with the committee just as we cooperated with the grand jury.”

“Mr. President, yesterday at the Gray hearings, Senator Tunney suggested he might ask the committee to ask for John Dean to appear before that hearing to talk about the Watergate case and the FBI–White House relationship. Would you object to that?” “Of course,” Nixon responded, but then he was asked why. This question had not been anticipated, so the president had to wing it, but it gave him the opportunity to bring up his position on executive privilege, just as he had wanted, without having to do so via a formal statement. “Well, because it is executive privilege. I mean you can’t, of course, no president could ever agree to allow the counsel to the president to go down and testify before a committee. On the other hand, as far as any committee of the Congress is concerned, where information is requested that a member of the White House staff may have, we will make arrangements to provide that information, but members of the White House staff, in that position at least, cannot be brought before a congressional committee in a formal hearing for testimony. I stand on the same position there that every president has stood on.”

Frank Cormier, the senior Associate Press reporter in the White House
press corps, thanked the president, signaling the end of the session, but Clark Mollenhoff, always something of a bull-in-a-china-shop sort with his booming voice, asked another question. The president could have walked out without responding, given that Cormier had formally ended the conference, but after hearing its gist, Nixon decided he wanted to take the question. Mollenhoff had shouted, “Mr. President, on that particular point, if the counsel was involved, if the counsel was involved in an illegal or improper act and the prima facie case came to light, then would you change the rules relative to the White House counsel?” Nixon answered: “I do not expect that to happen, and if it should happen, I would have to answer that question at that point,” and then, a bit annoyed with Mollenhoff, he continued. “Let me say, too, that I know that, since you are on your feet, Clark, that you had asked about the executive privilege statement, and we will have that available toward the end of next week or the first of the following week, for sure, because obviously, the Ervin committee is interested in that statement, and that will answer, I think, some of the questions with regard to how information can be obtained from a member of the White House staff, but consistent with executive privilege.”
*

Back in the Oval Office, Ziegler told the president he thought the Watergate material would be buried in any story about the press conference.
¹⁷
Ziegler was mostly correct, although the
Post
did feature a page-three story by its legal reporter, John MacKenzie, noting that the president would not permit me to testify at the Gray hearings. MacKenzie further reported that the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, James Eastland (D-MI), did not believe a majority of the committee would vote to call me during the Gray hearings.
¹⁸
But I was very uncomfortable at being thrust further into the limelight, for I was already certain that public attention regarding anyone connected with Watergate was not good, and Gray, in testifying he had given me FBI reports, had pulled me into the fray.
¹⁹

In the early afternoon of March 2 Haldeman told Nixon that he had been talking with John Mitchell, who brought up a delicate matter of some significance regarding the convicted Watergate defendants still awaiting
sentencing.
²⁰
“Mitchell raised, which I don’t think he raised with anybody else, I don’t know if John Dean’s filled you in on one of the major problems on the business John’s [referring to me] working on, is the question of continuing financial activity in order to keep those people on base. And the way he’s working on that is via Mitchell to Tom Pappas,” Haldeman reported. Pappas, a longtime Nixon supporter and fundraiser, was a wealthy Greek-American businessman.
²¹
The president indicated he understood, so Haldeman added, “Wh[o] is the best source we’ve got for that kind of a thing. Pappas is extremely anxious that [Ambassador] Tasca stay in Greece.” Nixon answered immediately, “Let him stay.” Haldeman continued, “And our plan, you know, was to move him and put someone else in Greece, but Mitchell says it would be a very useful thing to just not disrupt that.”

“Good. Let him stay. No problem. Pappas has raised the money thing for this other activity, or whatever it is? How does he do it?” Haldeman said that Pappas had sold his oil company and was now “just sort of one of the unknown John Paul Gettys of the world, or something.” Nixon replied, in a thoughtful manner, “I’m just glad for him.” More important, Haldeman explained, “and he’s able to deal in cash.” With that comment, this remarkable exchange ended, the conversation moving on to other matters before returning to Watergate, and me. Nixon told Haldeman, “Hell, I’m convinced that Dean is really a gem. I’ve talked to him two or three times about—” Talking over the president, Haldeman said, “He’s a real cool cookie, isn’t he?” Nixon continued, “He might be cool, but he’s awfully smart. God damn, there’s judgment there, you know. He thinks things through [and all that]. He’s really not cocky. You see, the trouble with a cocky guy who’ll come in and have a lot of bravado, but God damn it, he won’t check his facts.” Haldeman agreed, saying, “But not Dean. He’s just the other way. He hasn’t always checked his facts, but he never covers up if he hasn’t. He just says he doesn’t know. And God, he’s been through the wringer in trying to keep all this pieced together, you know, as everything’s straying out from under him in every direction. The great thing is, he’s been [great dealing with] Mitchell, in dealing with people. Because all this is a people game, trying to keep these people on an even keel and not having someone break and go rattling on. And all these God damn Watergate seven guys, he’s had to nursemaid all these months.”

The president sighed, and asked, “What are we going to do?” Rather than respond, Haldeman continued offering his assessment of how I handled
problems, as with a chuckle in his voice he said, “Because he is a character. I think he takes out all his frustrations in just pure, raw, animal, unadulterated sex.” “Is that right? Is he quite a—” the president began to ask, as he and Haldeman talked over each other. Haldeman continued, “I guess he just solves all of his hang-ups that way. And then he can nail all the rest of this with real finesse.” Nixon asked, “He just got married pretty early, didn’t he?” Haldeman thought not, saying, “I think he was living with her for two years before he married her.” That was fine with Nixon, who said, “Fair enough, he knew who was he was getting.” Haldeman added, “He’s completely in love with her, makes no bones about it.”

“Well, I must say, I’m impressed by him,” the president added, instructing Haldeman to have Colson speak to me about any Watergate-related matter in the future rather than with Haldeman, Ehrlichman or him. “I think it’s very important we get to Chuck funneled into Dean’s shop, don’t you agree?” Haldeman said that was already occurring. Then the president added, “It’s just better, Bob, that, for example, I have not talked to anybody but Dean. Do you agree on this? He’s a lawyer, and all that.” Haldeman agreed, because he felt that the president would keep getting all the information from a centralized place instead of in bits and pieces.

On Saturday morning, when meeting with Haldeman in the Oval Office, Gray was still on the president’s mind: “So what’s your judgment as to how Gray is handling himself?”
²²
Haldeman instead gave the president my take, “Dean said he’s not doing well. He’s letting too much out. Gray’s line is that this is all a tactic, that he’s doing it on purpose. For instance, his offer to let them look at the raw files, he’s doing it because he’s convinced that [Sam] Ervin won’t allow that to happen, and that this is all a clever thing, and that Gray then turns it all off on Tuesday [March 6, , when the Gray confirmation hearing was scheduled to end].” Haldeman reported that while Chairman Eastland was sure he had the votes to move Gray’s nomination to the Senate floor, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WVA) was taking such a strong anti-Gray position that Haldeman himself was less certain. Haldeman also noted, “And Eastland’s advice to us on tactics has been almost as wrong as Mitchell’s, and Mitchell’s has, of course, always been based on Eastland.” Neither Haldeman nor the president had confidence in Kleindienst, Mitchell or Eastland, for they had been consistently wrong on confirmation proceedings in
Eastland’s Judiciary Committee, from Supreme Court nominations to those of attorneys general.

That afternoon Ron Ziegler dropped by the Oval Office and announced that “the Dean-Watergate thing” had come up in a press inquiry, with follow-up questions about the president’s position of not allowing his counsel to testify. Ziegler wanted to know if he could say that, if it was appropriate, I would cooperate. Nixon reminded Ziegler that Harry Truman had cut him off from the Justice Department and FBI during the Hiss investigation. “We are doing exactly the opposite,” Nixon stressed. “We’re saying we will cooperate with them. The FBI will cooperate, and the White House staff will cooperate. We’ll furnish any information,” he said, when it was relevant, “But we will not agree to the appearance of White House staff members before a congressional committee’s informal sessions.” Nixon then clarified, “Basically, what we want to do here is to keep the position, but we’re not covering up. We should constantly say, ‘We’re ready to cooperate, but we cannot cooperate on their terms. And we’re not withholding. We’re not covering up. We’re ready to [assist]. If they want to ask anything, ask it.” The president said this was “a great departure” from the policies of his predecessors.
²³

Back from two days at Camp David, the president scanned the front-page of
The Washington Post
while eating breakfast
,
and he read that Pat Gray had provided the Senate Judiciary Committee with a July 21, 1972, letter to me summarizing the FBI’s investigation, which included the fact that Nixon’s reelection committee had been less than cooperative.
²⁴
I was not surprised when I was summoned to the Oval Office later that morning and asked by the president how we were doing with Pat Gray.
²⁵
I had not yet received a report from Capitol Hill, where Gray was in his second day of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, but I did report that I had spoken with him maybe four or five times since his first day of testimony, on March 1: “His policy had been one to cooperate all the way with the committee up to this point. He’s turned over for the record everything that was requested, including the things that hit the papers this morning, which I think he should have deferred on. Kleindienst told me that Gray isn’t touching base with him, despite his efforts to get him to explain the timing on when he’s turned things over.”