The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (96 page)

The unrelenting White House attacks on me were beginning to have an impact. As Ziegler explained during this conversation, “The discrediting of Dean is taking place below the surface at this point, and I oftentimes think that is the best way.” The “kill the son of a bitch” attitude that Nixon and his team fostered, and shared with both friendly and unfriendly reporters, was soon picked up by Nixon supporters, who acted on it. Sam Dash began receiving a steady stream of threats against me, and the first one that appeared serious got his attention: a simple note printed in large block letters, sent anonymously, that read: “JOHN DEAN WILL NEVER BE A WITNESS. HE WILL BE DEAD.”
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Years later Dash told me that this was only the tip of the iceberg, for he received literally hundreds of such threats. After discussing the matter with Senator Ervin, who knew the Capitol Police did not have the capability to protect a witness, he called Cox, who was part of the Justice Department, which had such a program. After Cox conferred with his staff they strongly recommended that I enter the U.S. Marshals’ witness protection program: Two U.S. marshals would be posted at our home; others would keep it under surveillance; and two marshals would accompany me on all travels outside my home. After discussing it with Dash, Shaffer strongly urged me to take part in the program. I discussed the matter with my wife, we accepted the offer, and I would remain in the program for slightly more than a year and a half, as the death threats continued until Nixon departed the White House.

In an aside during a summit discussion on June 19 in the Oval Office, Kissinger told the president that he had known Cox at Harvard, and he warned Nixon that “Cox will come after you, I don’t doubt it.”
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Kissinger described Cox as “a fanatic liberal Democrat, and all his associates are fanatics.” He was critical of Richardson for selecting Cox when he could have found someone who had “a natural interest in us.” Cox was on the mind of everyone in the White House, because the front page of that morning’s
Washington Post
had reported, “Special prosecutor Archibald Cox said yesterday that he is studying whether President Nixon can be subpoenaed to testify before the Watergate grand jury here.”
⁹²
As the president told Haig and Buzhardt in his next Oval Office meeting, “One thing I noted this morning was that fucking, shocking statement by Cox.” Nixon said he was trying to get someone on the Hill to challenge Cox’s statement, and suggested to Buzhardt, “Maybe you can write a brief little rejoinder there.”
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Buzhardt replied (incorrectly, as time would tell) that Cox “knows he can’t subpoena the president. He knows he can’t indict the president. But he is going to play this game quite the opposite.” He also noted that Cox had said “he had made no decision on whether to get into the San Clemente property thing or the gifts,” and added, “I’m going to talk to Elliot Richardson.” “What does ‘the gifts’ mean?” Nixon asked, indicating he had not read the full story of the Cox press conference, in which Cox had said “he has not decided whether he will investigate the federal funding of improvements to President Nixon’s San Clemente, Calif., home, or the more than $200,000 in tax write-offs that Mr. Nixon built up in 1969 with a gift to the government of his pre-presidential papers.” When Buzhardt mentioned Nixon’s papers, the president knew exactly what he was talking about and reacted accordingly: “God Almighty.” While Buzhardt did not think Cox had jurisdiction, Nixon was complaining: “The San Clemente property, what the hell is he getting into that for? What’s Elliot done? What the hell has Elliot done here?” (All these matters would later be investigated by either the special prosecutor or the Congress.)

Buzhardt explained how the committee had voted 6 to 1 to postpone the hearings when it received a letter so requesting from Mansfield and Scott, and he assured the president he should not be concerned by the delay; they would use it to good purpose. Buzhardt was convinced I would be a weak witness, saying, “He is going to be in conflict with every witness practically that’s testified, that’s been involved,” and he added, “Mr. President, he can’t go through this whole place and tell a legitimate story and have it stand up under all circumstances. He doesn’t know enough, and he doesn’t remember enough. He can’t put it all together.”

Later on the morning of June 19, the president spoke with Haig about the growing problem with Elliot Richardson.
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Haig said that Richardson had himself grown concerned about Cox—Richardson had not liked the matter about a subpoena for the president to testify, which he thought Cox had
taken out of context—and was going to review his charter with him. Haig said that he, too, had also asked for an appointment with Cox to discuss all this with him. “Well, good enough,” Nixon said. “I guess we shouldn’t get our balls in an uproar about him.”

On Wednesday and Thursday, June 20 and 21, Nixon was preoccupied with the Soviet summit, entertaining Brezhnev, traveling from the White House to Blair House to the State Department to the
Sequoia
and on to Camp David, and he had only fleeting conversations about Watergate. During a morning call Haig reported that I was furious at the committee for having leaked information I had given them in the closed testimony session, and I was now refusing to talk to them.
⁹⁵
Haig said apparently the IRS investigationof Larry O’Brien had come up during my testimony, which Buzhardt had confirmed. “Don’t be concerned about it,” Nixon told him.

The weeklong postponement proved to be a significant opportunity for me. My written opening statement ran over sixty thousand words. I had never considered having to read the entire statement, and had I known I would be asked to do so, I would have written something closer to six thousand words. But I knew the committee was not aware of either the information I had or my understanding of what had occurred. Because this was not a criminal proceeding, but rather a legislative hearing, I assumed the committee would want to know how these abuses had occurred and why. Rather than simply testify about what had happened I thought I should place it in context. Contrary to Buzhardt’s assumption—and as the president and Haldeman were aware from my March 21 conversation—I had very good recall, but I also fully appreciated that it was my word against that of Magruder, Colson, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Haldeman and Nixon. Magruder was easy to refute, given that he was hopelessly confused, had told so many different versions of his accounts and was so clearly eager to drag others down. But by the time I was writing my testimony, I knew that the others were prepared to lie, if necessary.

In drafting my testimony I had scrupulously avoided speculating about what others knew and restricted myself to what they themselves had told me of their activity. For example, when Magruder told me that he went to Florida at the end of March 1972 to get Mitchell’s approval for Liddy’s plans, I did
not take this as confirmation of Mitchell’s actions, but only of Magruder’s. In short, I sought to avoid hearsay. I did, however, have a recurring temptation, when writing my testimony, to include one matter that I did not know for a fact but thought a highly reasonable assumption, based on what I had been told, as well as on firsthand experience: I had been recorded by Nixon in one if not more conversations. I had suggested as much to Len Garment in April to make them worry that “I knew,” even though it was actually “I suspected.” I decided, therefore, to add a small insert near the end of my testimony. My thinking was that, if I intimated that I believed at least one and perhaps more of my conversations had been recorded, it was unlikely I would opt to lie about the content of them. More important, if I had indeed been taped, the Senate would have no problem in determining the truth. So I had the following statement typed up and inserted, and when cross-examined on this matter I elaborated further about why I believed I had been recorded:

On Monday night, April 16, I had learned that the President had informed the Government that he allegedly had taped a conversation in which I had told him I was seeking immunity from the Government in exchange for testimony on Haldeman and Ehrlichman. I have no recollection of ever telling the President that I was so negotiating with the Government, and the President told me very specifically that he did not want to do anything to interfere with any negotiations I was having with the Government.

When I learned this from my attorney, I suggested that he request that the Government call for the tape and listen to the tape, because I told him it must be a reference to the meeting I had with the President on April 15, and if that conversation were taped, the Government would have a pretty good idea of the dimensions of the case they were dealing with. I was referring to the fact that the President had mentioned the million-dollar conversation and the fact that he had talked to Colson about clemency for Hunt. I do not in fact know if such a tape exists, but if it does exist, and has not been tampered with, and is a complete transcript of the entire conversation that took place in the President’s office, I think that this committee should have that tape, because I believe that it would corroborate many of the things that this committee has asked me to testify about.
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It was also during this period, Sam Dash later wrote, that Buzhardt sent to the Senate Watergate committee via Fred Thompson a typed copy of what he called “Fred Buzhardt’s reconstruction of Dean’s meeting with the President Nixon.”
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Buzhardt had walked Thompson through the information Nixon had given him, if not his notes, but since Buzhardt did not know that it had been drawn from recorded conversations, he merely told Thompson that he had obtained the information, without disclosing its source.
*
Since it had not come from me, it had obviously originated with Nixon. The White House, meanwhile, had also leaked this document to the press, claiming this “authentic” account of the meeting revealed that I had misled Nixon by never warning him of his culpability. Dash, based on his knowledge of my testimony from our secret meetings, knew this was false, and Dash’s staff was struck by how much this information corroborated my testimony. Dash noted that while the material was close to the content the tapes would later reveal, it was always falsely twisted to put me at fault, though that fact would not be established until much later. This document also caused several Dash staffers to wonder precisely how the information it contained had been reconstructed.

After a signing ceremony for the agreement reached with Brezhnev, the president took his guest to California, giving him a tour of the plane before retreating to his office to work, but visiting again with him as they flew over the Grand Canyon en route. With no recording equipment at the San Clemente offices, nor a Haldeman or Ehrlichman taking notes (Haig took few, and Ziegler less), we have only Nixon’s later report of these nineteen days on the West Coast, during which I testified publicly.

The daily briefing of the press office provided no information about Nixon’s reaction to my testimony. Ziegler told the press while I was testifying on Monday, June 25, before the Senate Watergate committee: “We do not plan to have any comment on the Ervin Committee hearings as the week proceeds from the White House.”
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Ziegler further explained that the president was following the hearings “much as he did in the past. He will receive a report from his staff,” principally Ziegler and Haig.

Much to my surprise, the committee insisted I read my entire written statement, which I had planned merely to submit for the record and then answer their specific questions. My account, which began with a description of the atmosphere out of which Watergate had grown, would take an entire day to read, from shortly after 10:00
A.M.
until a lunch break at 12:30
P.M.
, resuming at 2:00
P.M.
until shortly after 6:00
P.M.
, with three brief recesses while members of the committee went to the Senate floor to vote (approximately twenty-five minutes total). I was even more surprised when the committee spent four days cross-examining me while all three television networks—ABC, CBS and NBC—carried my entire appearance live (approximately thirty hours) and PBS rebroadcast the hearings every night.
*

In his memoir Nixon noted that it took me a day to read my opening statement which, the president stated, “contained most of [the] charges against me.” Nixon said that, while he had not watched the hearings, the reports of my testimony filled him “with frustration and anger. Dean, I felt, was re-creating history in the image of his own defense.”
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Because even when writing his memoir Nixon decided to use only a select few of the recordings of his Watergate conversations, he effectively remembered Watergate as he wished, rather than as it had actually occurred. For my part, at the time I had no idea of the true depth of his involvement in the cover-up as would later be revealed by his recorded conversations. Nixon would later write that his ongoing attacks on me (which continued long after my testimony) were a miscalculation, for he had set “off on a tangent.” His efforts to smear me were no longer the point, or as he put it:

It no longer made any difference that not all of Dean’s testimony was accurate.
*
It only mattered if
any
of his testimony was accurate. And Dean’s account of the crucial March 21 meeting was more accurate than my own had been. I did not see it then, but in the end it would make less difference that I was not as involved as Dean had alleged than I was not as uninvolved as I had claimed.
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Nixon also noted that my testimony “caught us unprepared.” He claimed based on “news reports” that I was asked by the “Ervin Committee’s
Democratic members and staff” to include in my opening statement “plenty of ‘atmospherics’ about the White House,” and that I had “readily obliged.” That was untrue, for no one on the committee made any suggestion whatsoever about my testimony. But Nixon wrote that “even more than what [I] had to say about Watergate, it was from this that we would never recover.” He was referring to the world of the White House in which I found myself, fixated on political intelligence and using government resources to attack the president’s countless enemies. Nixon noted that I later said I was surprised how the press overplayed the “enemies list,” which was true, for many on the list had not been targets of Nixon’s wrath but had merely been designated as enemies by Colson’s office. Yet because many on the list had been attacked by the Nixon White House, in response to a question from Senator Lowell Weicker, I produced these lists, believing it appropriate that this underbelly of the Nixon White House be seen for what it was—something that should not be part of the executive branch of the government.