I began my role in the cover-up as a fact-finder and worked my way up to idea man, and finally to desk officer. At the outset, I sensed no personal danger in what I was doing. In fact, I took considerable satisfaction from knowing that I had no criminal liability, and I consistently sought to keep it that way. I wanted to preserve my function as an “agent” of my superiors, taking no initiatives, always acting on orders. In the process, I often found myself searching for alternatives that would keep me from taking dangerous steps. When Ehrlichman suggested I “deep-six” the sensitive materials from Hunt’s safe by throwing them into the Potomac River, for instance, I delayed for several days, searching for an alternative. I did not want to disappoint Ehrlichman, but I did not want to take responsibility for destroying potential evidence. Finally I came up with what I thought was a clever idea—to give the documents directly to L. Patrick Gray III, the acting FBI director after Hoover’s death. By this ruse, we could say we had turned all evidence over to “the FBI,” and literally it would be true. At the same time, we felt we could count on Pat Gray to keep the Hunt material from becoming public, and he did not disappoint us.
On such half-truths I sustained the image of myself as a “counsel” rather than an active participant for as long as I could, but the line blurred and finally vanished. I was too central a figure, and there was too much hasty activity required as the cover-up proceeded speedily along its two main themes—containing the Justice Department investigation, and paying the hush money to the defendants. I am still not sure when I crossed the line into criminal culpability, when I failed in my efforts to protect myself, but I know that certain crucial events took place on park benches in meetings as covert as the microfilm exchanges in the spy movies.
Once, I met Pat Gray secretly at his home in southwest Washington. We were both apprehensive about the meeting as we walked to a park and sat down on a bench overlooking the Potomac, discussing my request to obtain the FBI 302s and AirTels on the Watergate investigation. I had remembered Liddy’s advice about the 302s and the AirTels, and I had raised the matter with Kleindienst, Petersen, Mardian and Ehrlichman before asking Gray himself. On the park bench, I told Gray I needed the materials to keep track of the investigation’s progress. He felt the pressure and asked for assurances that the President himself wanted the documents. I told him they would be used “for that purpose”—which was half true and half false, because I knew that the President would not take the time to sift through such documents. Gray gave in, consoling himself with the observation that the President is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and is therefore entitled to reports on all criminal investigations.
Making sure that the FBI did not surprise us was a key to protecting the White House. When I learned, for instance, that agents wanted to interview the vacationing Kathleen Chenow, secretary of the Plumbers’ Unit, about Howard Hunt’s activities in the White House, I dispatched Fielding to England to get her. Fred brought Ms. Chenow back within twenty-four hours. Thus we could say we were actively “cooperating” with the investigation by producing the witness at our own expense. But we were in fact afraid she might reveal damaging information if an FBI agent caught her by surprise. I got to her first and took advantage of the opportunity to advise her not to testify about “national security” matters, such as the Ellsberg break-in.
I met Herb Kalmbach on a park bench. He became the first of several fund raisers for the hush money which was the sustenance of the cover-up. The hush-money issue sharpened the divide between the White House forces, mainly Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and the Mitchell forces. No one wanted to handle this dirty work. Everyone avoided the problem like leprosy. Not surprisingly, the White House thought Mitchell should “take care of” the payments because he had approved the Liddy plan and because Liddy and McCord worked for Mitchell’s Re-election Committee. Mitchell, on the other hand, believed just as strongly that the White House had created his dilemma by sending him Liddy and pressuring him for intelligence. Moreover, Mitchell felt the hush money would serve to protect not only himself but also the President from the “White House horrors” that Liddy and Hunt had carried out while working at the White House. I was with Mitchell in his office, looking out the window on Seventeenth Street at the Tax Court building, when he asked me to enlist Herb Kalmbach to raise and pay the “commitments.” “John,” he said, “you go back over to the White House and check this out.” Then, in a low voice, “I think your people over there should be interested in having this problem solved, especially John Ehrlichman.” I had no doubt what he meant. Mitchell wanted no part of the hush money—nobody wanted any part of it—but if he were forced to get involved he was determined not to carry the burden alone. He suggested Kalmbach, Nixon’s attorney, as the fund raiser, knowing that Kalmbach would never accept the role without the explicit approval of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. I took Mitchell’s proposal to both Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Neither liked it, but both approved it. Then I called Kalmbach, and our clandestine meetings began.
Kalmbach gulped and made sour faces upon learning of his assignment, but he accepted it. He knew it was vital for the President’s reelection, and he was completely devoted to the President’s service. With surprising aplomb, Kalmbach adopted the mannerisms of an amateur spy. After raising the first batch of cash, he called me to arrange a tryst. “Meet me in Lafayette Park,” he said, and hung up. The President’s personal attorney and the President’s counsel met soon thereafter in the park and ambled casually to an unoccupied bench.
“It’s done,” Kalmbach said simply, sotto voce. We stared off at the feeding pigeons and he reached down to pat his briefcase softly. “I’ve got it right here.” I was distressed at the thought of being so near the actual cash in a public place and quickly adjourned the meeting.
Kalmbach called again a few days later from California to report success—after many initial difficulties—in delivering the money to the defendants. He was calling from a pay phone which was “secure,” and he had to interrupt the conversation several times to feed quarters to the operator. The paranoia had caught on.
“You can tell the Brush—” Kalmbach began mysteriously. “You know who I’m talking about?”
“Yes,” I said, deciphering the makeshift code. This could only mean Haldeman.
“And you can tell the Pipe. You know who that is?”
“Yes.” Obviously Mitchell.
“And you can also tell, let’s see, we can call him Brows. Will that do?”
“Yes,” I said. Ehrlichman’s distinctive furrows made this one easy.
“Well, you can tell them it’s all taken care of. The guy I’ll call ‘Mr. Rivers’ has finally made contact with the Writer’s Wife. And he is giving her the Script.” Translated, this meant that Caulfield’s man Tony had given the hush money to Howard Hunt’s wife.
“Right, I understand.”
“Okay,” Kalmbach said. “Goodbye.”
The cover-up churned on through hundreds of similar episodes, and did so quite successfully.
I carried messages back and forth between the Mitchell faction and the White House faction. There was no love lost between them in the first place, and the Watergate recriminations made things worse. Neither side wanted to budge. Each side waited for the other to confess and shoulder the cover-up alone. The war of leverage dragged on.
My sense of guilt was to deepen as I lost the few remaining rationalizations that I was acting as a low-level agent. Everyone betrayed a sense of guilt in meetings. I had managed for a while to evade it by contemplating the startling boost that Watergate had given me into the inner councils. My adult life had been calculated blindly and shrewdly, I had always thought. I was now reaching the pinnacle. I was not the source of authority for the cover-up, yet I became its linchpin. I was the only one with the knowledge and personal rapport to reconcile the pitched camps at the White House and the Re-election Committee. I could feel my power growing in every meeting and each conversation as I went back and forth�
�resolving disputes between the warring factions and unwittingly linking and knitting them together in conspiracy.
* John B. Connally, Jr., former governor of Texas, was first Secretary of the Treasury in the Nixon Administration, and subsequently head of Democrats for Nixon.
† Sherman Adams was White House chief of staff under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was pressured to resign for accepting gifts from a businessman.
Chapter Five
CONTAINMENT
Late in June 1972 I was summoned to Haldeman’s office and found Ehrlichman there as well. Ehrlichman asked my advice as to whether Mitchell and Magruder should be removed from the Re-election Committee. I felt a surge of self-importance—unnoticed, I hoped—at the thought of sitting in judgment on a man of such consequence as Mitchell.
“It would be presumptuous of me to pass judgment on John Mitchell, but …” I began, and I cited persuasive reasons for removing both men which rested on a feeling that they might both be indicted.
A few days later Mitchell was gone. I was overruled on Magruder; my superiors feared that if fired he might break and end any chance for a successful cover-up.
I became possessed of the toughness I imagined generals display when called upon to sacrifice divisions and battalions for the overall effort. It is part of the game at the higher levels, I thought. And it is part of the game not to take such decisions personally. I began to take privilege for granted. I began addressing Mitchell by his first name, he was no longer “Mr. Mitchell.” I started calling Haldeman regularly on his I.O. instead of going through the White House switchboard. Haldeman’s staff switched me into the citadel of the executive mess, where I ate with the select potentates. White House functionaries sensed the new stature of the counsel. They no longer questioned my requests for air-travel expenses or limousine service. I was above the bureaucratic hassles.
Visions of my new role, and the heights it might lead to, extended to my personal life. I broke off with Maureen Biener, the woman I had been living with for the past two years. Our relationship and my love for her had been a godsend to me, but she wanted to get married and I did not. Not now. I was enticed by my prospects as a bachelor; I wanted no hindrances to my career. Maureen went home to California, and I resolved to conquer as many new women as time and power would grant. Henry Kissinger once remarked on power’s properties as an aphrodisiac, and I found it true. At the time, it seemed like just compensation for the lonely burdens of state.
As the cover-up progressed through July and August, I was struck by its tremendous political success. Secret White House polls indicated that the Watergate break-in had not made the slightest dent in the President’s popularity. Most voters questioned did not know about it, and the few who did said they didn’t care. Public consciousness of the Watergate scandal was light-years removed from the reality I lived in the White House, and I conceived my efforts as having helped keep it that way. I was keeping Richard Nixon in office by keeping control of the Watergate investigations. We were way ahead of the FBI and the Justice Department, and, just as importantly, we had prevented their probes from uncovering any of the “other matters” on the fringes of Watergate. We were even further ahead of the press.
The elementary fact that the break-in had been financed with campaign funds did not hit the newspapers until August, and by that time we were prepared with the explanation of “diverted” funds. Hunt and Liddy were not placed at the scene of the break-in until late August, by which time we were prepared to make the claim that they were the ones who had diverted campaign funds to illegitimate uses. Many reporters seemed privately skeptical of this implausible story, and the White House press corps roasted Ziegler with hostile questions each day. I was amazed at how small a part of the hostility that Ziegler absorbed made it into print; the press seemed reluctant to take on the power of a President. The papers had carved up Senator George McGovern, the Democratic nominee, because his running mate had undergone psychiatric treatment. The Democratic campaign had fallen into disarray. I was sitting in an Administration in which a dozen high officials were guilty of criminal violations that I knew of, and I watched the President’s lead in the polls climb steadily: roughly twenty points ahead in August and still rising.
On August 29, 1972, I was in San Clemente to report to Haldeman and Ehrlichman on cover-up matters. By then this seemed almost routine. The President was holding a news conference that day on the lawn of his Pacific estate. I was in my hotel room as it went on the networks, and I turned on my television set, listening with one ear as I worked. I remember hearing the President announce that he would not engage in televised campaign debates with Senator McGovern because such debates might be divisive to the nation in a time of delicate negotiations on the Vietnam War. This, I knew, was part of the “high profile” campaign strategy: he would ignore Senator McGovern, as he did Watergate, for as long as possible. The press conference dragged on through other matters of little concern to me. My attention snapped into focus, however, when a reporter asked a very polite question about Watergate: “Mr. President, wouldn’t it be a good idea for a special prosecutor, even from your standpoint, to be appointed to investigate the contribution situation and also the Watergate case?”
I shifted quickly to a bed in front of the television. The President explained that a special prosecutor was absolutely unnecessary, because there were no fewer than five investigations already under way. He referred to the FBI “full field investigation,” to inquiries under way by the Department of Justice, the grand jury and the General Accounting Office, and to an incipient investigation by the House Banking and Currency Committee under the chairmanship of Representative Wright Patman of Texas. All these investigations, he said, naming them once more, had received “at my direction” the “total cooperation … of not only the White House, but also all agencies of the government.” I was stunned that the President had not ducked the question but had instead plowed into it with such bold lies. These investigations, plus several others, were precisely the ones I was spending most of my waking hours juggling and deflecting, containing them with stories and delay tactics. For a moment, I wondered whether the President might not really know what I was doing. My desire to believe any President, especially my own, was strong. No, I thought, Haldeman and Ehrlichman would never let him make such a strong statement without detailed discussions of its impact. This was hardball, it would probably work.
I damn near fell off the bed at what I heard next. “In addition to that,” the President continued, “within our own staff, under my direction, the counsel to the President, Mr. Dean, has conducted a complete investigation of all leads which might involve any present members of the White House staff 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.”
How about that? The President was mentioning my name! On national television. That, I thought, was a real vote of confidence. He was saying I could pull off the cover-up. I was ecstatic to be so recognized by the President before the world. I had never been certain the President even remembered he had a fellow named Dean as his counsel, given the negligible contact I had with him. Obviously, he knew how I had been busting my ass to keep this mess from spilling all over everyone, including him.
In a daze, I listened to the President push coolly and brazenly on to bury the Watergate affair as a campaign issue. John Mitchell, he said, had launched his own intensive Watergate investigation before retiring as campaign chairman. Careful, I thought, that might be going too far. He added that Clark MacGregor, Mitchell’s successor, was continuing the probe. All these investigations were laudable, said the President, because “we want all the facts brought out.” Then he concluded, “What really hurts in matters of this sort is not the fact that they occur. What really hurts is if you try to cover it up.”
I turned off the television. What a performance. That
’s what it takes to be on the first team. I thought of the millions of viewers who must have been nodding in agreement. What a reality warp. I knew its epic dimensions. I also knew that this knowledge was the key to my present success.
The fact that I had never heard of a “Dean investigation,” much less conducted one, did not seem important then. I was basking in the glory of being publicly perceived as the man the President had turned to with a nasty problem like Watergate. The President’s move suited me fine. Damn shrewd politically too, I thought, particularly the carefully worded touch he had given it by referring to those “presently employed.” That was his fallback position in case former employees like Mitchell or Magruder should be indicted. We were trying desperately to prevent that.
The door to Ziegler’s office from the hallway to the Press Room was always locked. Atop his other door, the working entrance, he had installed two small lights, one red and one white, mounted on a little gray electrical box attached to the framing. Ron controlled his stoplight system with a switch on his desk, and anyone who trespassed through a red light could expect an outburst. I liked nothing better than to stick my head in his door when the red light was lit, wait for him to snarl and paw like a foul-humored lion, close the door and go on about my business after a good laugh.
Shortly after the President’s announcement of the “Dean investigation,” I was summoned by a Ziegler secretary and given a “white light” reception. I entered, sat down, and waited for the press secretary to finish his telephone call.
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