The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (54 page)

“And Howard?” the president asked. Haldeman answered, “Howard had knowledge because of conversations he had with [Magruder].” Nixon asked,
“Okay. And what about Strachan?” Haldeman replied, “Gordon Strachan, he knows that he had knowledge because he got copies of the reports Liddy had.” Nixon then inquired, “And you?” Haldeman answered, “And Haldeman, because Gordon Strachan told [Magruder] that I approved the plan. Now, Gordon Strachan says flatly and absolutely that he did not tell Magruder that, that I did approve the plan.” “And you didn’t approve the plan at the Watergate?” Nixon asked, to which Haldeman assured him, “No, sir. I did not.”

Magruder was going to stay with his false story, Haldeman continued, because he had to, yet he was worried that White House witnesses—namely, Colson, Strachan and me—would impeach him. Magruder implored Haldeman or Mitchell to speak to me to get me onboard. Magruder was worried about his family should all this fall apart, and Haldeman explained that Magruder was “very afraid of jail, but not physically afraid of it.” He was fearful for “a very interesting reason. He’s a good-looking guy. He’s afraid no one will talk to him.”

Haldeman continued, “[Hunt] knows that Colson was involved in Watergate. Colson told them to get going and get him the stuff on O’Brien,” although Colson “still claims he didn’t know about the Watergate.” And he added, “Now, that’s a big technicality, but what he was imparting was the objective, not the means.”

Haldeman departed and returned to speak with the president later that afternoon, following his session with Mitchell, Magruder and me. It was a brief conversation, as the president was working on a television speech he would deliver on March 29 on Vietnam and economic issues.
¹⁷
“They had their session,” Haldeman reported. “Dean recognizes the problem,” but he added that I had refused to lie for Mitchell and Magruder. Haldeman said he suggested to me that “the best solution appears to be a very strict calculation of privilege.” I would “only answer questions regarding [my] own participation in specific Watergate-related activities,” meaning the planning and break-in but not the aftermath, and not testify about Mitchell or Magruder. After Nixon protested the unfairness of the entire situation, and they rehashed their earlier conversations, Haldeman departed for Capitol Hill, where he was the featured guest at the Wednesday Club, an organization of Republican members of the House of Representatives.

That evening the president called Haldeman at home to find out how his session on the Hill had gone.
¹⁸
“You had a hell of a hard day,” Nixon said, and reported that daughters Tricia and Julie had come home, because “you
know, they’re low.” Watergate was getting to his family, so he told Haldeman what he shared with his daughters: “Well, this has been a hard day, but what the hell, we’ve had harder ones. Let’s face it, that December bombing [in Vietnam], what could have been harder than that, you know, really?” Later that night the president returned to his EOB office to work and called Haldeman for an update.
¹⁹
Haldeman reported that Hunt had spent four hours with the grand jury, and “according to the report, he created no problems with anything he said.” He continued, “Dean says he can’t do what Mitchell and Magruder want him to. So he’s trying to figure that one out.” Haldeman also mentioned to the president that I had hired a criminal lawyer, which Haldeman thought a good idea. Nixon said, “Well, yeah, I suppose so,” and then added, “Well, then, I guess the problem we’ve got there, Bob, is really, too, with Dean now, isn’t it?” Haldeman answered, “That’s one of them.” Nixon asked if I wanted to go “all the way, in other words, on all. I mean on the stuff afterwards and so forth and so on, which does involve the White House staff.” Haldeman said I was “trying to untangle that.”

When Haldeman added that I was trying to figure out how much trouble I might actually be in, Nixon responded that he hoped I was alright. He thought the Hunt problem was under control and McCord had only “a lot of hearsay.” As far as the differences with my potential testimony versus that of Mitchell and Magruder, Nixon thought the latter two each had to say they had made a mistake. Haldeman suggested just saying that there was a disagreement. “Do you think it’ll come out in any event?” the president asked. When Haldeman replied that it inevitably would, the president questioned how Mitchell and Magruder would handle it. Haldeman said he had talked to Mitchell after his meeting with me, and “[Mitchell] seemed to think [Dean] understood what his problem was, too, and that Dean could work something out.” Haldeman said he had asked me, and I said that I did not know how it could be resolved, but I was going to work on it. Nixon assured Haldeman, “We’ll stand by him all the way on that, just say that’s privileged and he can deny any knowledge himself. But, in effect, Mitchell and Magruder, they want Dean’s recollection to be the same as theirs?” Haldeman said they did. “That’s a problem. Oh, well, he can’t do that,” Nixon replied.

When Nixon repeated that he would stand behind my claiming privilege, Haldeman pointed out that if I took the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify, Nixon would have to fire me. “Maybe that has to be done,” Nixon said, and asked, “Then the question is about the others, huh?” When Haldeman had second thoughts about undercutting me, Nixon said, “Oh, Christ,
I wouldn’t think of undercutting him. Never. He’s been a hero thus far, you know? Really. He’s been sturdy, like a giant. No, no, no, no, no. I mean, I’m just thinking out loud, if rather than take the Fifth, he says, I’m not guilty of anything, but I’m not going to get into that, because it’s such a fuzzy area, you know, the lawyer-client and so forth and so on, but I’m just not going to talk about it. It won’t look bad. But you’ll keep in touch with him with that situation tomorrow, will you?” Haldeman said he would. “Be sure that he knows that he’s backed to the hilt, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, yeah. He’s in good shape,” Haldeman reassured him. In fact, Haldeman was sending me opposite signals, which I had seen happen before in the Nixon White House, when others were about to be sacrificed. At my meeting with Magruder and Mitchell I had posed a question to Mitchell that I had never before directly asked him: Had he, in fact, approved Liddy’s plans? Mitchell admitted that, much to his chagrin, he had. I reported this exchange to Haldeman and later testified about it.
²⁰
Years later I discovered Haldeman’s diary entry for March 28: “Mitchell and Magruder both told [Dean] that they had both signed off on the [Liddy] project, which Mitchell told me, also. Dean feels it’s imperative that we get a criminal lawyer and suggested maybe he should hire one. Then he could consult with him on the whole thing, which is a good idea.”
²¹
That evening I called my civil attorney, Tom Hogan, and asked him if he could arrange a meeting with Charles Norman Shaffer, a former federal prosecutor and a skilled criminal defense attorney, whom I had met previously on a number of occasions.
*

In a meeting at the EOB office Haldeman reported that McCord’s closed-session testimony before the Senate had leaked out.
²²
“Senators have refused to tell us what was said,” Haldeman explained, but they wanted it to become public so some would rather leak than report. Howard Baker had called Vice President Agnew, who in turn called Haldeman to warn him that Baker felt the president’s “stand on executive privilege [was] very unwise in a public relations sense.” Other than more rehashing of events, nothing was resolved. Haldeman said he and Ehrlichman were available for further conversation, and they agreed to meet back at the EOB office later for what turned out to
be a less than productive session.
²³
Ehrlichman suggested releasing a statement through Ron Ziegler’s office regarding White House cooperation with the grand jury investigation and the Senate inquiry, and added, “Dean doesn’t care what it says as long as it indicates that he’s volunteered to do it.” Ziegler joined the conversation for about a half hour, and they began to draft the statement, placing calls to Mitchell, Howard Baker and me. They would work on it all day and in subsequent conversations.
²⁴
The final product mentioned no one by name but reassured the press that the White House was cooperating.

This conversation on March 29 included an odd note, with the president advising Ehrlichman, “Get your criminal lawyer. Remember, don’t get him because you like him.”
²⁵
Ehrlichman said, “Don’t worry,” and Nixon instructed, “I want the worst son of a bitch.” Ehrlichman said he understood. “You get him,” the president repeated, but Ehrlichman did nothing about it.

Following a busy morning schedule, Haldeman arrived in the Oval Office in the early afternoon.
²⁶
Nixon asked if he ought to meet with anyone before he headed to California for a week, and Haldeman suggested he might speak with me, as “it’s going to buck him up, not that he needs it.” Haldeman informed the president that, based on his latest information, it did not appear that anyone from the White House would be called to the grand jury.

Because Senator Lowell Weicker was attacking the White House, the president and Haldeman discussed him at some length, particularly how they might embarrass him for having accepted a hefty cash contribution to his last campaign that had been arranged by the White House. They believed he had not reported it and were trying to get confirmation from “the bagman” who was supposed to pass him the money that it happened. Public records would show if it had or had not been reported. Haldeman then reported the latest leaks from the Senate Watergate committee, which involved vague accusations about Haldeman that he characterized as “a prime example of the phony stuff.” McCord had purportedly written a memo to Haldeman regarding White House staff security precautions at the GOP’s Miami convention but had never spoken to or had any other communications with him. Yet the
Baltimore Sun
was running a headline M
C
C
ORD
N
AMES
H
ALDEMAN
.

Returning to the discussion of whether the president should meet with
me before departing for California, Haldeman now said, “But I don’t know what you’d cover with Dean.” Nixon added, “We haven’t got a damn thing to cover, can we say that?” Before Haldeman answered, Nixon suggested, “We might get his views.”

“You get this funny, boy, this raw human stuff keeps [coming out] as you grind people against the wall,” Haldeman observed, explaining, “That’s why I was not so sure you ought to have Ehrlichman in with Dean. And I don’t know whether this is true, but Mitchell says that Dean doesn’t trust Ehrlichman, because Ehrlichman is maneuvering to sink him. And Dean thinks that Mitchell and Magruder [were] maneuvering to sink him, [but] I don’t think he does anymore.”

When Nixon protested, “I don’t think Ehrlichman’s maneuvering to sink anybody,” Haldeman agreed, “No, I think Ehrlichman will maneuver to keep himself clear,” and while they agreed he should, neither man thought he would “do it at the expense of somebody else.” When the president said everyone should protect himself, Haldeman chuckled and replied, “Dean’s moving hard in trying to protect himself on that damn meeting thing, which is still going to come up. Because he was just talking to me and reminding me that I knew about the meeting, and if I’m called I’m going to have to testify that there was a meeting. I knew about it. And that’s hearsay, because I wasn’t there, and I can’t prove there was [one], but I was told there was one.”

“Now, it isn’t going to get any better on Watergate,” the president told Haldeman after a brief interruption by Ziegler. “It’s going to get worse, you know what I mean? It’s going to go on and on and on and on.” While Haldeman was not as pessimistic, he agreed. The president expected the Senate Watergate committee hearings to go on every day “with Segretti and the plumbing operation.” As they contemplated this unpleasantness, the president added, “I guess we’ll just go on and do our job and take the heat and so on and so forth.”

Haldeman felt they needed to create some sort of “mechanism to deal with the Senate” to respond to the charges. “We can’t just let them throw whatever they’re pushing to throw at you.” They discussed this and felt it should be handled as if they were in campaign mode, but they were uncertain who should handle this operation. “I don’t see, when you add it all up, that you have anybody who can run the Watergate, except John [Ehrlichman].” When the president agreed Haldeman added, “The problem is, he’s a
personal factor in it, and it’s bound to crunch him at some point,” and he was not sure how Ehrlichman could deal with it. “Well, you’re a factor, because you’ll be constantly named because of your positions, basically,” the president reminded Haldeman. The president closed this conversation by emphasizing he wanted Haldeman to follow up and get something on Lowell Weicker.

That evening, Haldeman recorded in his diary that Nixon was concerned now about “the damage to the presidency and his ability to govern and feels that we have to take action to clear this up because of that. He’s getting a lot of heat from the likes of Goldwater, etc., who have a real concern and are expressing it to him via letters, etc.” He also noted that Ehrlichman had met with Nixon about Watergate, and that Ehrlichman later told Haldeman that the president “comes down that the thing to do is put it to Magruder and try to draw the line there. There’s a question whether that’s possible.”
²⁷

The week in San Clemente brought no relief from Watergate despite Nixon’s attempts to detach himself, telling Haldeman he would have no further conversations on the topic with Mitchell, Moore, Colson, George Bush, Agnew or me.
²⁸
Instead Ehrlichman “must get the confidence of all [these] people and handle the matter for the president.” Nixon insisted that there was to be “no falling-out amongst our people” with everyone going off in “all different directions. No one’s going to flush anybody. and they must understand that.” These instructions, however, were never shared with anyone other than Haldeman and Ehrlichman, who were isolating themselves with the president.