“Okay,” I said. “I’ll keep it.” I took out a brown envelope and wrote: “$15,200, from GS/RH.” I took the money from them. “I’ll keep it in my safe for you.” They thanked me and backed out the door.
This has nothing to do with Watergate, I thought after they left, but everybody is worried about everything. People are getting religion, I smiled to myself, and they’re bringing their sins to the counsel’s office.
“I guess we better go through this stuff from Hunt’s safe,” I told Fielding after Strachan and Howard departed.
We pulled up chairs, took a carton, extracted the contents, item by item, and examined them like archeologists. One box was filled with junk from Hunt’s drawers and shelves—pencils, stationery, paper clips, even a blanket. We plowed on into what Fred said was material from the safe.
“Wait a minute,” said Fred suddenly. “Wait a minute.” He went into deep concentration. “John, this stuff is sensitive. It could be evidence. Don’t you think we ought to be careful?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” It hadn’t occurred to me. I had been caught up by curiosity.
“I’ve got an idea,” said Fred, jumping up to leave. “Hold on. I’m going to see Doc Ward.”
“Doc Ward?” I called after him. “What are you doing that for?” He was already gone to the doctors’ offices across the hall, and I sat puzzling over what he was up to. Dr. Ward was one of the physicians attached to the White House by the Public Health Service. His boss, Dr. Walter Tkach, the President’s personal physician, was the butt of many jokes in the White House, where it was fervently believed he had been selected for his pliant personality—because the President did not want to be bothered by an aggressive doctor. Many aides told stories of how the doctor would listen to a complaint and then reach into his bag for little vials marked simply “Headache” or “Flu” or “Diarrhea” or “Congestion.”
Fred returned triumphantly with two pairs of transparent rubber gloves, the kind used for rectal examinations. “Here,” he said. “Put these on. We won’t leave any prints.”
I stretched the gloves over my hands. They were powdered on the inside to make it easy, but they were still so tight my hands turned white for lack of circulation. We returned to work. In a metal container resembling a fishing-tackle box we found a revolver, which I pinched between two gloved fingers and lifted carefully, as if holding a dead mouse by the tail.
“Kehrli handled this thing last night with his hands,” Fred said disapprovingly. “He was twirling it around like a damn cowboy to check it and unload it. Said he had been in the Marines.”
Next I lifted out a stack of documents nearly a foot high. They were classified State Department cables on the early years of the Vietnam War. Fred and I began scanning them. It was apparent that Hunt had been investigating the Pentagon Papers; there was a paperback edition of them under the cables.
The sorting continued with frequent interruptions. Jane walked in several times and looked at us in puzzled, scolding silence. Fred and I tried to ignore her as we sat there struggling with our rubber gloves, surrounded by papers, the gun, and a black suitcase full of bugging equipment and with antennae sticking out of the top. I took several phone calls and decided I could not operate with the gloves on, so I took them off. Fred joked that it was a breach of security.
By late afternoon, we had almost finished. I locked the possible Watergate evidence—the gun and the bugging equipment—in my closet and sent the State Department cables back to David Young to hold in his files. I left the harmless junk in the cartons on the floor and put several folders into my safe. Fred and I considered this last batch to be politically explosive. We had exchanged several low whistles of amazement. There was a psychological profile of Daniel Ellsberg, which I thought might lead to discovery of the Ellsberg break-in. And there was a phony State Department cable, whose obvious purpose was to convince the reader that President Kennedy had ordered the assassination of Vietnam’s President Diem. The phony cable was accompanied by several memos between Hunt and Colson on how to leak the contents to Bill Lambert of Life Magazine.
Jeb Magruder came by my office again in the afternoon, and I walked back with him to a meeting at the Re-election Committee. Nothing of substance was said until we got to the southwest corner of the Pennsylvania Avenue-Seventeenth Street intersection. We stepped off the curb, in the middle of a normal afternoon crowd.
“You know, John, Mitchell approved this thing down in Florida,” Jeb said casually.
“No, I didn’t know that,” I replied, glancing furtively at the people around us. We were stalled in the middle of the street by cars making left turns.
“Well, yeah, after that second meeting, I felt I had to bring it up with Mitchell again because Colson was just pushing me like mad. He kept calling me and asking what’s going on. So I went to Mitchell and I told him. I said, ‘Listen, if we don’t take care of this, Colson’s going to take it over!’”
That explains it, I thought. Everything that had happened since the February 4 meeting was falling into place. Magruder had been pressured by Colson in addition to Haldeman’s tickler. He knew Mitchell was jealous and leery of Colson, so he had pushed Mitchell’s “Colson button.”
“So what happened, John, is we were afraid Colson would take it over. And do you believe this?” He turned to me, laughed, and tugged on my arm. “We were afraid Colson would screw it up! Can you believe that?”
I was lost in a fog. Mitchell, the President, Haldeman, Ehrlichman—everybody in the whole Administration was now snugly in the scandal. I was paying no attention to the traffic, and a turning Metro-bus almost ran over me. This narrow scrape brought me back to my senses.
When we arrived at the Committee, I ran into Mardian, gesturing wildly like a rug dealer who had just learned his wares were eaten by moths. “I can’t talk now,” he said, wheezing from his smoking habit, unconsciously lighting another cigarette. “But the shit has hit the fan.”
I walked on. There was no meeting, because Mitchell was tied up with something else. But the same cast was invited to his apartment again that night.
Again, everyone was guarded and uncomfortable. No one wanted to recognize, or talk about, the gravity of the situation. Long worried looks were exchanged, but little was said. Most of the discussion centered on public-relations techniques. Such questions took up the time, but the dominant mood was unspoken grief, like a wake.
The meeting soon broke up, and Mardian called me off to the side. He fidgeted. He could barely contain himself and suggested we go up to his apartment for a drink. Like Kleindienst, Mardian is an impulsive man who has great difficulty putting forth a show of composure. I had noticed his impatience during the meeting. He couldn’t sit still, and he seemed to be bursting with some urgent discovery.
We walked the few blocks from the Watergate to Mardian’s apartment on Virginia Avenue. His wife greeted us in the living room. Mardian muttered excuses to her and hustled me off to his den. He did not live in Mitchell’s luxurious style. In fact, the two dens were as different as Bloomingdale’s and Alexander’s. Mardian’s den was filled with photographs, in black frames, of himself with the President and other high officials. I had a smaller sampling of such photographs on the walls of my own home and office. Mitchell didn’t; neither did Haldeman or Ehrlichman. The men very close to the President did not need to display his face. If an observer worked down into the middle layers of the staff, where Mardian and I were, he would notice an increasing clutter of ego-boosting badges of intimacy.
I asked Mardian about the photographs of himself in baseball uniforms, and he warmed up with a speech about his semipro baseball career. Then he pulled his desk chair up in front of the sofa where I was sitting. He hunched over close to me, his arms resting on his thighs, his big hands rubbing together.
“Listen, John, we’ve got to talk about this. LaRue and I had a long meeting with Liddy today. It was incredible.”
I raised my eyebrows, trying to look su
rprised. I didn’t tell Mardian I had met with Liddy the day before. He went through Liddy’s story, with occasional exclamations of outrage. Then he broke new ground.
“… And then he told me he’s done other jobs for the White House. He said he and Hunt broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. And they took in the same damn Cubans who are in jail now! I couldn’t believe it. This stuff scares the shit out of me, John. Hell, I worked on the Ellsberg case. We had men all over it. But I didn’t know they were doing this junk over at the White House. No telling what else they’ve done! They could ruin the President. These guys are a disaster.”
“What do you think will happen, Bob?” I asked. “Liddy’s crazy, but he sounds pretty tight-lipped to me.”
“Well, that’s interesting,” Mardian went on, trying to calm himself. “Liddy kept calling his men ‘soldiers.’ Said they won’t talk if their fingernails are pulled out. But he said they expected certain ‘commitments’ to be honored. He said it was traditional to take care of captured spies, you know. Help out with the family and lawyers and stuff. He didn’t say exactly what he meant, but I didn’t like it.”
I didn’t like it, either.
“And here’s the other thing, John. It’s incredible to me. Liddy doesn’t think he’ll ever get caught. He says his men certainly won’t finger him, and he says there’s no evidence he was there. He says he’s untraceable. So I started questioning him. I said, ‘Did you leave your fingerprints in that hotel room over there?’ And he said, ‘No, I wiped everything.’ See, Liddy and Hunt were in the hotel next door when the men got caught, and they scrambled and got out of there. But he says there are no prints. I couldn’t believe that.”
Mardian lit another cigarette and continued. “So I said, ‘Well, Gordon, did you open a window?’ And he says, ‘No, but if I did, I sure cleaned it.’ I asked, ‘How about bottles or glasses?’ He says, ‘I wiped all those.’ ‘Well, how about the toilet? Did you use the toilet?’ Then he says, ‘Oh, yeah, I did.’ And he gets all mad at himself. But he says, ‘I can’t believe they’d pick that up. You know, lots of people were using the toilet that night.’ He was a little shaken on that, though. I had him on that. Then I asked him about the money. I said, ‘Gordon, how about the money? Can’t they trace you with the money?’ And he says, ‘There’s no money on me. I made sure. I shredded it all in the office Sunday morning.’
“Now, John, I can’t swallow that about the money. This guy Liddy also tells me he took soap wrappers from the Watergate Hotel and destroyed them, too. He took the soap out of the fucking hotel on the night of the break-in! Can you believe that? And then he says he took the wrappers off the soap and shredded them, just like the money. I know the kind of guy who takes little soap bars from hotels. And I’m telling you a guy who takes those things, and then shreds the wrappers and keeps the soap, a guy who does that is not a guy who will shred hundred-dollar bills! It doesn’t make sense!”
Throughout Mardian’s discourse, I punctuated his monologue occasionally with terse comments, in the manner of Ehrlichman. We talked on into the night, agreeing that Liddy stood almost no chance of escaping clean. Mardian felt somewhat better for having shared his anxiety with me. I felt worse. The commitments to the men in jail sounded ominous. I drove home exhausted. June 20, the second day of the cover-up, was over, and I had no idea there would be over 250 more, all with the same torrid pace.
Although the White House press machine conveyed a media image of Olympian disdain for so piddling a matter as the break-in, the truth could hardly have been more different. The scramble was on. People were worried about fingerprints. High officials were already playing dumb, even to each other, shoveling guilt out of their own offices. A pallor hung over conversations. Cover-up personalities were emerging. Colson adopted an enthusiastic know-nothing posture, unabashedly declaring his innocence, discovering exculpatory memos right and left in his characteristic whirlwind fashion. Haldeman exuded confidence, almost as distant from the mess as the President himself. Mitchell brooded and stewed quietly. Ehrlichman, sensing danger, moved in shrewdly behind a screen of fact-finding agents whom he maneuvered like chess pieces.
I had begun as a foil and go-between, but my extensive knowledge qualified me for a major role. From the beginning, I knew that the vulnerability of the Watergate affair spread broadly across the whole Administration. The lesser aides came to the counsel with confessions; the higher aides commenced to behave in a stealthy manner. I simply assumed, both from the facts I knew and from my knowledge of procedures in the White House, that the vulnerability went right into the President’s office. Since I was still on the fringes of the inner circle, I did not know precisely how the President was reacting, but I worked from the premise that he needed protection.
On June 20, as Fielding and I were sorting Hunt’s papers with our rubber gloves on, the President had summoned Chuck Colson to his hideaway EOB office. “Now, I hope everybody is not going to get in a tizzy about the Democratic Committee thing,” the President had told Chuck before he even sat down.
“A little, it’s a little frustrating—disheartening I guess is the right word,” Chuck replied, and he commenced his standard speech about Howard Hunt. “Been off our payroll for three months,” he said. “Pick up the goddam Washington Post and see the guilt by association.”
The President commiserated with Chuck about the newspaper stories linking him to Hunt, and Chuck continued to protest his innocence. “Do they think I’m that dumb?”
The conversation drifted. Then the President faced the issue squarely. “A lot of people think you ought to wiretap,” he said.
“Well, they, I’m, I’m sure most people …” Chuck trailed off, not knowing how to respond to the President’s blunt remark.
“Know why the hell we’re doing it,” the President picked up. “And they probably figure they’re doing it to us, which they are.” The President strongly believed this rationale for the hardball tactics—that he was fighting back against ruthless opponents.
“That’s why they hired this guy [McCord] in the first place, to sweep the rooms, didn’t they?” asked Nixon, aware that the Re-election Committee had taken precautions against being bugged.
“Yes, sir,” Chuck answered, and he again insisted on his ignorance. “Frankly, sir, I haven’t got into the ultimate details that we want on this, but I assume he was hired to protect our own offices.”
The President, displaying more knowledge of the facts than Colson, pursued the matter. He was worried about leaks. “You’ve got a goddam person over there that’s ratting on us. What do you think?”
Chuck speculated that Larry O’Brien had a clandestine pipeline into the Re-election Committee. The President wondered whether Committee secretaries might be the source. He then turned to “the real question,” which he identified as the silence of the suspects in the case.
“Basically, they are all pretty hard-line guys?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” said Colson.
“If we are going to have this funny guy take credit for that …”
“You mean the one with the—Hunt?” Chuck interrupted. The President had been referring to Liddy, but Chuck was worried about Hunt. “I, I can’t believe he’s involved. He’s, he’s too smart to do it this way. He’s just too damn shrewd, too much sophisticated techniques …”
“It doesn’t sound like a skillful job,” agreed the President. “If we didn’t know better, you would have thought it was deliberately butchered.” The clownish aspects of the Watergate “caper” were being ridiculed in the press, but the President was revealing his opinion that a double-agent theory would not work.
Colson, still anxious about Hunt, offered his theory that the men in jail pulled off the break-in without Hunt’s knowledge. “… Then I figured maybe it’s the Cubans that did it. Organizing it on their own.”
The President warmed to this notion and backed off his choice of Liddy, who had not yet surfaced in the press, as the culprit. A discussion
of Cubans followed, in which Chuck and the President agreed that they are violence-prone and might do anything. “That’s great, great,” the President concluded. “Well, and then too, of course, we are just going to leave this where it is, with the Cubans.”
Colson, having rescued Hunt, turned to matters of strategy and warned the President against “the ITT mistake.” He said it would be a great error to fight the Watergate charges head on, as we had done in the ITT scandal, because doing so would only feed the Watergate coverage in the press. He recommended ignoring Watergate.
“Mistake would be what?” the President asked.
“Mistake would be to get all of them zeroed in on it.”
“Oh.”
“Make a big case out of it.”
“Oh, shit. I couldn’t agree more.”
“Go after it day in and day out.”
“Yeah,” said the President.
“Follow the every, uh, I’d say the hell with it, believe me.”
The President concurred with the strategy. He endorsed it emphatically to the end of the conversation. “I’m not going to worry about it. The hell with it.… At times, uh, I just stonewall it.”
The “stonewall” strategy functioned from the very first episodes of the cover-up. It was instinctive, from the very top of the Administration to the bottom. It was also ad hoc, developed in small reactions to the flurry of each day’s events. There was not time to take stock of the whole case or to plan a careful defense in the meticulous fashion of trial lawyers. Instead, we found ourselves trying to hold a line where we could. But the line could not be held at the Cubans and McCord; there was too much evidence implicating Hunt and Liddy. Almost immediately, we knew that the money used to pay for the break-in would be traced by the FBI to the Re-election Committee. We conceded that and worked toward two goals: to explain the use of the money by claiming that Hunt and Liddy had diverted the funds on their own for illegitimate purposes, and to keep the FBI from tracing the money backward from the Re-election Committee to its donors. Such a backward trace, we knew, could lead the FBI into what we called “other problems”—Campaign Act violations, unreported contributions, corporate contributions, secret contributions by nominal Democrats, and the like.
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