Nixon had carried forty-nine states; Massachusetts and the District of Columbia went to McGovern. But that was not the full story. The voter turnout was the lowest in twenty-four years. Only 55 percent of the country’s registered voters went to the polls; the rest, presumably, rejected both candidates. And while the President had forged a historic electoral triumph, his party hadn’t done at all well. Democratic congressional candidates had held the GOP to a 12-seat gain in the House—rather than the 41 they needed for control—while gaining two Senate seats, making their margin there 57 to 43, and picking up one statehouse.
McGovern said he was not disheartened. His central issue had been the Vietnam War, and he believed he had done much to end it. In conceding defeat he told his workers, “I want every one of you to remember that if we pushed the day of peace just one day closer, then every minute and every hour and every bone-crushing effort in this campaign was worth the entire effort.” That was putting the best possible face on it. Not everyone agreed. Marquis Childs said it had been “one of the most unhappy campaigns in American history.” Understandably, Richard Nixon took a different view. Greeting his supporters in Washington’s Shoreham Hotel, he said, “I’ve never known a national election when I could go to bed earlier.” As he turned away to retire there, they set up a terrific din, chanting, “Four more years!” It was a top-drawer Republican crowd, well-barbered and expensively dressed. The television audience had no way of knowing that some of the most eminent chanters were felons.
***
In a reference to Watergate, McGovern had described the Nixon administration as “the most corrupt in history,” but Gallup had reported in October that barely half the voters had heard of the break-in. Of those, four out of every five did not see it as a reason to vote Democratic. Teeter had found that only 6 percent thought the President was involved. The others tended to blame CREEP—a tribute to the party leadership’s wisdom in establishing a reelection headquarters outside the White House. It was an illusion. The big campaign decisions were made at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The men around Nixon continued to be deeply involved in the Watergate cover-up, which, according to subsequent testimony before the Ervin committee, took the following course.
John Dean’s immediate problem, once he had seen the contents of Hunt’s safe, was how to get rid of it. He took the matter up with Ehrlichman, who suggested he “shred the documents and deep-six the briefcase.” Ehrlichman said, “You drive across the river on your way home at night, don’t you? Well, when you cross over the bridge, just toss the briefcase in the river.” Dean pointed out that it wasn’t that simple; too many White House employees, including his own assistant, had seen at least part of what had been in the safe. Ehrlichman’s solution was to summon to his office L. Patrick Gray, who had been acting director of the FBI since J. Edgar Hoover’s death in May. On June 28, eleven days after the Watergate burglary, Dean gave him the sensitive material there, calling it “political dynamite” which “should never see the light of day.” Gray kept it until the end of the year—possibly to blackmail the White House should the President fail to recommend him as permanent director—and then burned it with the Christmas trash, thereby assuring his eventual resignation in disgrace.
That same week the White House made an effort to cloak at least part of the Watergate incident with the mantle of “national security.” The President himself was involved in this; later he justified his intervention by saying, “I was advised that there was a possibility of CIA involvement in some way.” His concern included the possibility that Hunt’s role in the Plumbers might be revealed, exposing other sensitive “national security matters,” including, presumably, the burgling of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. CIA director Richard Helms and his new deputy, General Vernon Walters, were called to the White House, where Haldeman told him that the DNC break-in was embarrassing Nixon. He said it was “the President’s wish” that Walters suggest to Gray that the arrest of five housebreakers “should be sufficient,” and that it was not useful to press the investigation any farther, “especially in Mexico”—a reference to the route political contributions had followed in finding their way into Barker’s bank account.
At meetings on June 26 and June 28 Dean proposed to Walters that the CIA furnish bail and pay the salaries of the five prisoners. The general said he didn’t think that was a good idea, that it might hurt the “apolitical” reputation of the agency. Walters did approach Gray, but not to carry out White House suggestions; instead he warned him that presidential aides were trying to exploit both the agency and the bureau for questionable purposes. Gray already knew this. In addition to his own personal experience he was beginning to feel heat from below; FBI subordinates were telling him that a cover-up had begun and urging him to alert the President. On July 6 he did it with a phone call, cautioning Nixon that “people on your staff are trying to mortally wound you by using the CIA and the FBI and by confusing the question of CIA interest in, or not in, people the FBI wishes to interview.” After a pause the President said, “Pat, you just continue to conduct your aggressive and thorough investigation,” and hung up.
It was now nearly three weeks since the Watergate arrests, and efforts to conceal the trail of those behind the break-in were in full swing. Gray, having sent up his rocket and seen it sputter into nothing, allowed himself to be duped by Dean. The presidential counsel was permitted to kibitz at FBI interviews with eight White House aides and was given copies of some eighty FBI reports on Watergate. In addition he persuaded Petersen not to call five members of the staff—Colson, Young, Krogh, Strachan, and Dwight Chapin—before the federal grand jury that was looking into Watergate. Instead they testified in a separate room, where jurors could not question them. It was at this time that Kleindienst, Petersen’s superior, assured the public that the Justice Department’s pursuit of the truth about the break-in was “the most extensive, thorough, and comprehensive investigation since the assassination of President Kennedy.”
On August 29 Nixon did some reassuring of his own. He told the country that besides giving all assistance required by the FBI, he had launched his own inquiry: “Within our own staff, under my direction, Counsel to the President, Mr. Dean, has conducted a complete investigation of all leads which might involve any present members of the White House or anybody in the government. I can say categorically that his investigation indicates that no one in the White House staff, no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.” Dean heard this on a newscast and was astonished. He had only been following orders from Haldeman and Ehrlichman. He had conducted no investigation, had written no report, and had not even seen the President. (A year later the White House acknowledged this, saying that Nixon’s confidence had been inspired by “assurances” from Ehrlichman.)
In that same statement the President said: “What really hurts in matters of this sort is not the fact that they occur, because over-zealous people in campaigns do things that are wrong. What hurts is if you try to cover it up.” This, of course, is precisely what was happening. John Mitchell was presiding over cover-up strategy sessions in his office, and, after July 1, when he resigned from CREEP at the importuning of Martha, in his apartment in the Watergate complex. Among those who attended were LaRue, Assistant Attorney General Mardian and Jeb Magruder. At one point Magruder volunteered to take the rap for all of them. This received serious consideration, but in the end it was decided that since he had lacked authority to approve the vast sums Liddy had spent, a guilty plea from him would merely lead to Mitchell and jeopardize Nixon’s reelection.
Instead it was decided to make Liddy the cutoff point. Though an eccentric, he was reliable; he wouldn’t talk, and they could build a plausible story around him, exaggerating the sums of money given to him for legitimate purposes and saying he had decided on his own to spend it on the burglary. Bart Porter, a Magruder aide, agreed to perjure himself. He would testify that he had given Liddy $100,000 to infiltrate organiza
tions of antiwar radicals. There was one difficulty. Hugh Sloan Jr., CREEP’s treasurer, was an honest man. In April he had asked Stans about Liddy’s huge budget. (“I don’t want to know,” Stans answered, “and you don’t want to know.”) Now, when Magruder told him they were going to alter the figures, saying that Liddy had received only $75,000 or $80,000, Sloan replied, “I have no intention of perjuring myself.” Magruder said, “You may have to.”
Sloan, under the mistaken impression that he was not the only scrupulous man in the leadership of the reelection campaign, tried to warn several presidential aides that something was terribly wrong at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue. He went to Chapin first and was advised to take a vacation. Chapin said that “the important thing is that the President must be protected.” Then Sloan went to Ehrlichman, recommending that an outsider investigate the committee. “Don’t tell me any details,” Ehrlichman said, and, like Stans, “I do not want to know.” Finally, with FBI agents waiting in his office to question him, Sloan appealed to Mitchell for guidance. The former attorney general said, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Sloan got going. He had no choice; Stans told the FBI that he had already resigned.
On September 15 the grand jury indicted Hunt, Liddy, the five men who had been captured in the DNC—and no others. The trail had stopped with them, and the President was greatly relieved. Late that afternoon Dean was summoned to the oval office, where Nixon and Haldeman greeted him warmly. As Dean later testified before the Ervin committee, Nixon said he hoped there would be no trial before the election and that he wanted Dean to keep a list of people giving the administration trouble, because he meant to make life difficult for them after the election. The principal thorn here continued to be the Washington Post, which on October 10 reported that the Watergate burglary was part of “a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage… directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Reelection of the President.” The reelection high command reacted swiftly and angrily. Clark MacGregor, Mitchell’s successor at CREEP, called the story “vicious and contemptible.” Another committee spokesman described it as “a collection of absurdities.” To Stans it was “a senseless pack of lies”; to Ron Ziegler, “the shoddiest type of journalism.” Their indignation was widely accepted as righteous. The Fourth Estate had fallen sharply in public esteem during the Nixon Presidency. Symbolically, that summer the Supreme Court had ruled 5 to 4—with the administration’s four appointees in the majority—that newspapermen could be required to reveal confidences by judges and grand juries. The American Civil Liberties Union declared that “in a relatively short time the press in the United States has moved from what many considered a position of extreme security to one of extreme vulnerability.” The men responsible for that were now threatened by vigorous reporting. They responded by stirring the suspicion of “the media” which they themselves had planted in the public mind. Their reward was a short-term success—at the expense of ultimate disgrace.
One plank of the scaffold which awaited them fell into place at 2:27 P.M. on the foggy afternoon of December 8, when United Airlines Flight 553, approaching Chicago’s Midway Airport, crashed a mile and a half short of the runway, killing thirty of its forty-five passengers. Among the dead was Mrs. E. Howard Hunt, in whose purse investigators of the accident found $10,000 in cash. A relative said she had been on her way to make a down payment on a Holiday Inn franchise. But where, the authorities wondered, did she get the money? The Hunts had always been strapped. He had wanted badly to buy a partnership in a Washington public relations firm but had been unable to round up the $2,000 required for a down payment. Now his wife’s body had been found with a small fortune in $100 notes—just like the Watergate Five.
The money was hush money, and there was a lot more of it. Eleven days after the Watergate arrests the council of war over which Mitchell was presiding had decided, in Dean’s words, to raise funds “in exchange for the silence of the men in jail.” Herbert Kalmbach was the first to be given the assignment, though apparently he wasn’t told the full story. He had arrived the next morning on a night flight from Los Angeles, and after being sketchily briefed by Dean at a rendezvous in Lafayette Park he phoned Stans, who produced $75,100 in campaign funds, all of it in the ubiquitous $100 bills. Over the next two months Kalmbach rounded up between $210,000 and $230,000, of which $154,000 went to Dorothy Hunt. The Californian had qualms over the propriety of this, and on July 26 he went to Ehrlichman with them. “John,” he began, “I am looking right into your eyes.” He said he wanted to know whether Dean had the authority to give him these instructions, and whether it was right. According to him, Ehrlichman answered, “Herb, John Dean does have the authority, it is proper, and you are to go forward.”
At the end of August Kalmbach quit anyway and LaRue became the new paymaster. Altogether between $423,000 and $548,000 was paid to the Watergate defendants, most of it channeled through Mrs. Hunt. Tony Ulasewicz, who actually delivered the cash, or “the laundry,” as he called it, said he came to the conclusion that “something here is not kosher.” Not to put too fine a point on it, CREEP was being blackmailed. Shortly after the arrests Hunt had sent Dean a dark message: “The writer has a manuscript of a play to sell.” Later, according to McCord, Hunt said that unless his wife’s demands were met he would “blow the White House out of the water” and produce “information which could impeach the President.” Not only did he want money; he insisted on pledges of presidential clemency. Colson sent him a “general assurance” of this through Hunt’s lawyer. In exchange, Hunt agreed to plead guilty and tell the press he knew of no involvement of “higher-ups.”
The cover-up strategy seemed to be working. Actually it was about to unravel. The key to the imminent exposure was McCord, who felt a continuing loyalty to his old organization, the CIA, or, as he and other insiders called it, “the company.” On June 30, the week presidential aides began trying to involve the agency in the toils of the cover-up, McCord sent Helms an unsigned letter promising to keep him informed and ending: “From time to time I will send along things you may be interested in.” It was the first of seven anonymous letters he mailed to the director, and was followed, on December 22, by a warning to an old friend in the agency’s security office: “There is tremendous pressure to put the operation off on the company.” That same week he wrote John J. Caulfield:
Dear Jack,
I am sorry to have to tell you this but the White House is bent on having the CIA take the blame for the Watergate. If they continue to pursue this course, every tree in the forest will fall and it will be scorched earth. The whole matter is at the precipice right now. Pass the message that if they want it to blow, they are on exactly the right course. I am sorry that you will get hurt in the fallout.
There was no signature, but none was necessary. Caulfield spread the word that McCord was planning to confess everything, and frantic efforts were made to change his mind—pledges of financial support for his family, executive clemency, rehabilitation and a job when he got out; even what McCord construed as a threat on his life from Caulfield: “You know that if the administration gets its back to the wall, it will have to take steps to defend itself.” McCord answered, “I have already thought through the risks and will take them when I’m ready. I have had a good life and my will is made out.” Caulfield said, “Everybody is on track but you. You are not following the game plan. Keep silent.” But the old spy didn’t want any part of this game plan. His mind was made up. In a letter to Judge John J. Sirica, which was read from the bench at the end of the court proceedings, he said that “Others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified during the trial,” that “perjury occurred during the trial,” and that “there was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent.” It was a sensational moment, and one of the most fateful in the history of American jurisprudence. With it, the collapse of the Nixon Presidency began.
***
The President�
��s reelection campaign had been enormously enhanced in its last days by electrifying news from Henry Kissinger: he and Le Duc Tho, Hanoi’s chief negotiator, had achieved a breakthrough in their Paris talks. On October 8 the North Vietnamese had dropped their insistence that Thieu be ejected and a coalition government installed in Saigon. Eighteen days later Kissinger told a televised press conference that a final accord could be reached in one more meeting. “Peace,” he said, “is at hand.”
But it wasn’t. On October 23 the White House announced that the signing of the cease-fire agreement was being postponed pending new sessions needed to “clarify” some matters. At least part of the difficulty seemed to lie in Saigon. South Vietnamese Foreign Minister Tran Van Lam attacked the imminent agreement as “unacceptable,” and Thieu said it would amount to “a surrender of the South Vietnamese people to the Communists.” If necessary, Thieu vowed, his nation would continue the war alone.
When Kissinger tried to reopen certain sensitive topics, Hanoi accused Washington of bad faith and demanded that the settlement be signed as negotiated. The Americans refused, and Le Duc Tho, furious, began advancing counterproposals on such matters as the size of the international truce supervision team and—the most vital subject for the United States—the return of U.S. prisoners of war. Kissinger announced that the other side was raising “one frivolous issue after another,” that the team from Hanoi was trying to make substantive alterations “in the guise of linguistic changes.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 194