The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (97 page)

While I had testified in my opening statement about how Nixon had used a national security cover for intelligence gathering and political skullduggery like that carried out by the plumbers unit, I had only hearsay information about other matters in which I had not been directly involved. Only after the fact did I become aware of the Segretti operation. In fact, the Watergate break-in and cover-up section of Senator Ervin’s committee report runs 95 pages, while the section on campaign practices and finance, and the uses of incumbency, runs 456 pages.
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Watergate, as the overwhelming evidence revealed, was merely one particularly egregious expression of Nixon’s often ruthless abuses of power. Had Richard Nixon not encouraged his aides to collect political intelligence by any means fair or foul, or insisted from the moment of the arrests that there must be no cover-up, neither would have taken place. Nixon was not only responsible for all that went amiss during his presidency, he was in almost every instance the catalyst, when not the instigator.

When Nixon returned from California on July 10, John Mitchell was scheduled to begin his testimony before the Senate Watergate committee. He was the first of the line of witnesses that Nixon and his aides knew would dispute my testimony: Mitchell, Moore, Ehrlichman and Haldeman. Before leaving
for the Cabinet Room that morning for a discussion with Republican congressional leaders on his Phase IV economic controls, he asked Ziegler for “anything else of interest” on Watergate.
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Ziegler reported: “Mitchell looked very stoic on TV last night. I think he probably will do well today.” Nixon had a number of questions for Ziegler about my testimony, and when it fit with Nixon’s own view, he agreed it was true, and when it did not, he charged me with lying. Ziegler reported that Ehrlichman, who had given an interview to his hometown newspaper in Seattle, had stated that my testimony “was wrong on point after point after point, and he says it was one hundred and eighty degrees from the truth.” Ziegler added that several stories had indicated that Mitchell would not support my testimony. “Dean will be destroyed with these witnesses,” the president said confidently. Ziegler reviewed several press accounts, noting that even Nixon’s archenemy Jack Anderson had a column that made Nixon look “pretty good” regarding his meeting with Kleindienst and Petersen on April 15 (clearly leaked by Kleindienst).

After the congressional economic briefing, Steve Bull went to the Oval Office to clear with the president giving Haldeman the tape of our September 15, 1973, conversation, since that had become an issue with my testimony, and Haldeman had requested it.
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Nixon agreed that Haldeman should listen to it. Haldeman was staying at the Statler Hilton, but Bull said he would set the tape up for him at his own home. That afternoon Bull had another tape-related question for the president, with regard to clarifying who could listen to which tapes.
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More specifically, the following exchange occurred, which is especially interesting in that the April 15 conversation later vanished: Nixon explained, “The general rule on these is that I don’t want anybody [listening], except myself, unless I directly authorize it.” “Well, you directly authorized me on April 15, did you not, sir, when we were in California?” “Oh, yeah, sure,” Nixon said, and Bull reminded him, “That’s the only one Buzhardt has heard.” “No, no, no. I authorized that. I directed that, because I didn’t want that sent out there. Oh, shit. [I’d forgotten about that],” Nixon said. “And that is the only one,” Bull clarified. “That was on the day, just April 15,” Nixon repeated. “Just that one, yeah, that is correct,” Bull agreed. “Yeah, okay,” Nixon confirmed. “Other than that there is [none],” Bull added. “Okay, fine. We’ll check it out and see, okay, fine, fine,” Nixon said.
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When Bull departed, Nixon continued his conversation with Haig, who had been present during this discussion of the April 15 tape. Haig reported on his conversation with Elliot Richardson about the White House’s concern about Cox. Haig had told Richardson that the White House interpreted the Cox charter “in its narrowest sense here in the context of Watergate and campaign abuses.” Richardson protested, “Well, that’s not the way to do it,” to which Haig said he told Richardson, “That’s the way he is going to have to do it.” Haig reported that Cox, meanwhile, was investigating any number of matters that the White House felt were beyond his constitutional authority. Richardson gave Haig “his breakdown of things, and there is one in there that I said I just don’t accept. It’s not going to go anywhere, but that’s the De Carlo thing.” This was a reference to the pardon that had been sent to Nixon, via my office, in late 1972 commuting Angelo De Carlo’s sentence, which apparently arose because of an investigation of Spiro Agnew, who had recommended it. (Haig was correct; it went nowhere, and De Carlo himself died.) Haig explained that Cox was also investigating Vesco (although that was primarily being handled in the Southern District of New York), Watergate, Ellsberg and election law violations. Nixon was not happy but did not feel personally threatened, so his protests went no further than Haig.

To give the president some good news (before relaying more bad), Haig said, “Incidentally, Mitchell has just been superb.” “People have told me that,” Nixon replied. “They said he stood up like a rock.” “Best witness that we’ve had, by far,” Haig noted. “And he handled that God damn creep Dash like a puppy dog.” Haig now turned to his unpleasant information: “I’ve got some bad news that I think you should be aware of. I don’t know the full details, but the vice president is in trouble.” Haig shared with the president what he knew: Someone who had handled Maryland state contracts for Agnew as governor had been given full immunity to testify about payoffs to Agnew. It surprised Nixon to learn that this witness was now working for Agnew, but Haig assured Nixon this problem did not occur during Agnew’s time as vice president. This conversation ended with Nixon telling Haig that things were looking very promising, even if they were keeping the “stinking Watergate” thing going. “Dean, that was their big bullet, and the big bullet didn’t hit.
Don’t you agree?” When Haig said nothing, Nixon added, “Don’t you think they’ve begun to realize it now?” but Haig remained noncommittal.

Late that afternoon the president asked Haig for an update and was told again that Mitchell had done a fine job.
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“He will never stand a day in prison if I have any power to solve it. Never. Never. Never. That would be a tragedy of mass proportions. If they would like to try impeachment on that, they can try,” Nixon said. He added, “Democrats are going to continue to harass us, of course they are, and that’s part of the game.”

They continued to discuss Mitchell’s performance, until at one point Nixon said to Haig, “Oh, one thing I understand, Ron told me that [the Senate committee] asked him about, well, ‘What about the meeting you had with the president on March twenty-second? What did you talk about? The—? You know?’ And he said he had never discussed [Watergate with the president]. Isn’t that interesting? Watergate was never discussed on March twenty-second. We were discussing executive privilege. That was the entire discussion that day.” The president repeated, “That was the entire discussion.” Because this was contrary to my testimony (and, of course, contrary to the recording of the March 22 conversation, which shows that conversation was not only about Watergate but that the president had privately told Mitchell to “cover up,” if necessary), Nixon observed, “I think Dean will be discredited.” After the president added that Colson and others would be taking me on, he said, “Damn it, they are going to show him to be a, a, a liar for immunity. That’s what he is, a liar for immunity.”

At the end of the day, before telephoning to chat with his daughters and Bebe, the president called Ziegler for a rundown on the evening news coverage of Watergate. Ziegler said that while “Mitchell admitted involvement in some aspects of the cover-up,” he had testified that he had not told the president about them, and the president didn’t know. Ziegler said Mitchell admitted joining Haldeman and Ehrlichman in coving up “the White House horrors”—as he had described it to the Senate. When he had been asked by Talmadge why he had not informed the president, Mitchell had said that he was concerned “the president would have lowered the boom,” and it would have been “extremely detrimental to the campaign.” Ziegler reported that Mitchell said “in retrospect he was probably wrong” in not informing the president. “That’s good,” Nixon said. “Good. Well, it came out as well as we could expect.”

On the morning of July 11 Mitchell was returning for his second day of
testimony.
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Ziegler assured Nixon that Mitchell was “getting good reviews.” So, too, he reported, had the president’s daughter Julie and son-in-law, David Eisenhower, who had given an interview to the BBC in which Watergate had come up. Later on the morning of July 11, Rose Woods was in the Oval Office, and Watergate dominated their conversation. She offered that Mitchell “has handled himself beautifully” and stayed “calm and cool.” “I’m glad that good old John came through,” Nixon agreed. Since she had been watching the hearings, and he was not, he asked for more detail about Mitchell: “Was he able to put it to Dean at all?” “I think so,” she answered, twice. “The press simply didn’t say much about Dean. Oh, well.” The conversation about Mitchell continued, and Nixon noted, “Nobody got drowned in the Watergate”—an oblique reference to Teddy Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick problems, which she understood immediately.
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“Rose, they ran the Dean stories for eight weeks. They put him on the cover for two weeks in a row,” he complained, referring to the national news magazines. “Right,” Rose agreed, and reported, “They put him on three networks. And they’re putting John Mitchell on one network.” “Oh, they are?” Nixon asked, and she explained the networks were rotating coverage. Rose was incensed that her name had come up in my testimony in response to a question about inquiries at the IRS, for she had called me repeatedly on one case. She told Nixon “the only thing I ever did was call him and ask him to talk to Dr. Riland to tell him what to do.” She was upset, because she said I knew “the doctor was indicted, and yet he refused to give the name, so it sounds like a boyfriend almost of mine, and I thought, oh, God.”.
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Nixon easily comforted her by trashing me. “He’s a very repulsive character. He really is.” Woods soon agreed, “Yeah, he’s just, he’s an evil man.” “Well, I think what has happened is, he’s become basically a degenerate, I’m afraid.”

That afternoon Ziegler came to the Oval Office with an update: “Mitchell continues to hang in there strong.”
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He further reported, “I’ll tell you, people are writing good stuff about Mitchell. I think he is coming out of this alright.” Ziegler went over the news commentary at length, particularly that favorable to the president. He noted that one commentator had said, “It is possible that Dean believes his testimony, but there is no question that his perspective has been warped during his passage from pro-Nixon to the
anti-Nixon phase of his personal odyssey.” This same commentator had also written that “in the president’s twenty-seven years in public life” he had “never been caught, as he points out, or accused of, lying in any public statements.” Ziegler gave him more information on what was happening before the Senate, and said that the next witness would likely be Dick Moore, possibly Kalmbach, followed by Ehrlichman and then Haldeman. Ziegler mentioned that he had seen John Connally after the cabinet meeting that morning. “I said, ‘How do you think things are going?’ and he said, ‘Watergate is over.’ Which is pretty well our judgment,” he advised Nixon. This prompted the president to look ahead to his trip to Europe that fall, and to winning back popular support. “Middle American,” as Nixon put it.

Later Nixon telephoned Ziegler: “Ron, it occurred to me—just thought of this, but probably nothing could be done—but I just learned it, that they carried Dean on three networks for five days straight. And they carried Mitchell on one.”
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The president thought this was evidence that the networks were simply out to harm him, and he wanted that brought to their attention. “I’ve done that already,” Ziegler reported and had almost mentioned it to a columnist. Nixon wanted to put Colson’s successor in charge of attacking the networks on it: “This is one time when I would put [Ken] Clawson and the bomb throwers to work on the thing like that, let them [the networks] bitch a little.”

At the end of the afternoon the president met with Haig in the Oval Office.
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Haig said that he had spoken with Morris Liebman, a senior partner at the Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin, the preceding evening. Haig undoubtedly knew Liebman from his role as a civilian aide-at-large to the secretary of the army, an advisory post in which he served from 1964 to 1979. The fact that the White House was not winning any legal battles had become conspicuous, and Haig said that Liebman recommended creating a strategy group, which he would be willing to chair, “with Chappie Rose and somebody else to just come in pretty regularly and make an assessment on Fred, and how he’s handling the issues.” “Not bad,” Nixon said. Liebman had also recommended Fred be given more lawyers to assist him, and had suggested names of lawyers in the bureaucracy who could be detailed to the White House. Haig had also spoken with Richardson and Cox. “I just don’t trust either of them,” he said. “We need to watch them like a hawk.”

When Haig departed the president asked Ziegler to come to the Oval Office
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and repeated a conversation he had had earlier that afternoon with John Connally, one that he had also just shared with Haig. Connally had said, “There comes a time when people get tired, they get tired out of too much ice cream, too much champagne, they get tired of anything, too much sex, anything.” This was now happening with Watergate, and come September, Connally urged, Nixon should “go out and attack.” When Ziegler agreed, Nixon said he planned to “give them a kick in the ass now and then.” Ziegler proposed he start with Cox, since they already had a case on him, and suggested Nixon say: “‘Mr. Cox, I’m relieving you of your responsibilities.’ Period. And let him squeal. Archibald Cox will not be remembered.”