I went home with all sorts of visions about the Colson-Bittman meeting. The next morning, Bud Krogh walked in. I had long since learned to spot the “Watergate look” on people’s faces, and Bud had a bad case.
“I’ve got a problem, John,” he said tersely. “Gordon Liddy called and wants to talk to me.”
“That’s great, Bud. Why don’t we just have a convention of all the goddam defendants over in the Roosevelt Room? We can clear the air. Have a nice lunch and a few toasts.” I stopped short, realizing that Bud and I were talking at the same time. This news was a turn of the screw. Hunt and McCord were bad enough, but I had never had any personal dealings with them. If Liddy cracked, he could hit straight at me. I wasn’t sure I could bear taking Bud on as a new client in the cover-up. The Ellsberg break-in had been safely buried a long time ago.
“Now, wait a minute,” Bud stammered. “I’m not sure it’s all that bad. Apparently the Senate Commerce Committee staff has been trying to question Liddy about his work with me. They want to talk to him before my confirmation hearings. I think that’s what Gordon wants to talk to me about, but I can’t be sure. The thing is, I want to be able to testify that I haven’t talked to Liddy since he left the White House a year ago. I think that’s important. But at the same time, I sure don’t want to piss Liddy off by refusing to talk to him. I don’t know what to do. What do you think?”
My spirits rose slightly at the thought that there was a benign explanation for Liddy’s call to Krogh. We decided that Bud’s secretary should call Liddy. She should be extremely cordial in explaining that Bud couldn’t speak personally with Liddy because of the upcoming hearings. At the same time, she should say that Bud hoped Liddy could avoid the Senate investigators altogether. Bud could be hurt by anything Liddy might say or refuse to say about him.
Colson called me in the afternoon for another meeting with Ehrlichman. I was astonished when I found him in almost a festive mood. He seemed pleased with himself and was carrying a stack of his normal work papers under his arm. “Well, I think things are coming out all right,” he reported confidently. “I had Bittman over to my office, and I’ve given him the assurances that I think’ll take care of Hunt. But I assure you, John, I didn’t give him any hard commitment. I don’t think this is going to cause any problem for anybody.”
Ehrlichman, as usual, was not taking Chuck’s enthusiasm at face value. “What exactly did you tell him?” he asked.
“I told him he could tell Hunt that he indeed had a good friend here at the White House. Me. And then I offered to take care of his children if he went off to prison. I said I would take them into my own home and take care of them like my own. Then I told Bittman I understood it was natural that no man wanted to go to jail. And while I couldn’t give any hard commitment, I looked at him square in the eye and said, ‘You know, a year is a long time. And clemency is something that’s generally considered around Christmas time here at the White House.’ Bittman was reading me.”
“That’s fine,” said Ehrlichman, who rarely offered compliments. Colson had conveyed the message clearly but indirectly. He had never mentioned the President’s name.
“You think Hunt’s going to plead now?” I asked Colson.
“Yep.” We shared a satisfied pause.
I turned to Ehrlichman. “John, there’s one other thing. I think we should assume the word will get out from Hunt to the other defendants that he has some sort of clemency. They’re going to want the same thing. McCord’s already making threatening noises. Even Liddy might be shaky. What are we going to do with the other guys?”
“Well, I think we should be fair about this,” Ehrlichman said. “We’ll give them the same assurances in the same way, if necessary.”
Colson and I walked together from the West Wing to our offices in the EOB. On the way he stopped me, looked around to make sure there was no one approaching, and confided, “John, I want to tell you something. Listen, Howard Hunt is a friend of mine. And I decided I couldn’t give him any assurances unless I thought I could back them up. This is too serious. So I felt this was something I had to take up with the President himself. To make sure I was on firm ground. And I did. I talked to him, despite what Ehrlichman said. I thought I had to.”
Chuck was fishing for approval. “I understand,” I said. He put his hand on my shoulder and leaned on it a little as he pivoted to head toward the EOB entrance. As we walked in I listened to the lawyer in me tell me that this act alone put the President directly into the cover-up.
I had scarcely sat down at my desk when Bud Krogh arrived with a report of his secretary’s conversation with Liddy. He was distressed. Liddy had been rather abrupt with her and was upset that Bud had refused to talk to him. Bud asked me if I would call Liddy to soothe him. I said I would have to think that one over.
The next morning, Saturday, I paced about my kitchen, debating whether to make the call. Finally I did. “Gordon, I think you’ll recognize who this is when you hear the message I have to pass on to you,” I said guardedly. I was afraid there might be a tap on Liddy’s home phone. “I just wanted to tell you that Bud is very sorry he can’t talk to you right now. It’s the timing. He’s worried that any conversation now might cause him a problem in his confirmation hearings. I just wanted you to know that’s the only reason he didn’t return your call.”
“I understand perfectly, John,” Liddy replied. “That doesn’t bother me. But I want to say one thing, John, and I hope you don’t take it the wrong way. My attorney hasn’t been paid, and that’s unfair to him. I don’t want any money for myself. But I’ve got to be able to pay my lawyer.”
“I understand, Gordon. I’ll pass that along,” I said, anxious to get off the phone. I told him I wished him well at his trial. I felt small.
Two days later the Watergate trial began, with Judge Sirica presiding. I watched the papers, wondering whether this new public exposure could conceivably make the cover-up any more harrowing than it had been during the past two months. My reserves were running low. I felt ground down.
The trial went as we expected. Hunt pleaded guilty and assured the court he knew of no “higher-ups” involved in the break-in. The press and TV enthusiastically reported Judge Sirica’s open skepticism, but it didn’t lead to anything. We figured we could weather skepticism as long as no one got a hook into Magruder or Mitchell or any of a dozen “principals” who could rip the cover-up apart.
Then, one week into the trial, New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh wrote a front-page story alleging that at least four of the defendants were being paid for their silence. LaRue, O’Brien, Mitchell, Ehrlichman, Haldeman and I exchanged a blitz of phone calls to find out who had leaked this story. We settled on Henry Rothblatt, the attorney for the four Florida defendants. We knew Rothblatt was strongly resisting his clients’ desire to follow Hunt’s lead and plead guilty. We were relieved when they fired him and pleaded guilty anyway, assuring Judge Sirica in open court that they had been paid no money by anyone for anything.
The “hush money” story vanished, but it gave me a foretaste of the panic that would follow if any investigators ever touched this rawest nerve of the cover-up. If, in fact, they ever focused attention on what had happened after the break-in instead of before.
One weekend during the trial, I was alone in my office and I decided to search for those Hermes notebooks Silbert had inquired about with such assurance. I still couldn’t recall them, but I was troubled by the possibility that they might somehow turn up. In one of my safes, down under the President’s estate papers, I found them—two Hermes notebooks and a metal pop-up address book. I leafed through them. Paul O’Brien had told me they contained the names of people Hunt had recruited for the Ellsberg break-in and his “other” White House operations.
I went through a tumble of nervous calculations. These documents were no longer relevant to the trial after Hunt’s guilty plea, I rationalized. But they were certainly dangerous to the cover-up. I would have to get rid of the goddam things, as othe
rs had gotten rid of evidence. I put them into my new shredder. The machine tore through the pages but choked on the cardboard covers, and I was afraid it might break down. I felt a wave of paranoia. I glanced at the microphone-like devices attached to the ultrasonic alarm system on my walls. I had asked for the sensor system, as I had the shredder, after I had seen new ones in Ehrlichman’s office; they were part of the status race. At this moment I worried whether the sensors would “hear” the shredder choking. Finally it ate the last of the documents with a loud growl.
Destroying the notebooks was only a small addition to a whole string of criminal acts I had committed, but it seemed to me to be a moment of high symbolism. This direct, concrete and sweaty act had also shredded the last of my feeble rationalizations that I was an agent rather than a participant—a lawyer defending guilty clients, rather than a conspirator.
Toward the end of January, the outward signs were still good. The Watergate trial ended without major mishap, all seven defendants convicted. The President negotiated a settlement in Vietnam; his popularity in the polls rose to a high of sixty-eight percent approval. These were bright spots that helped me hold together an optimistic front. Inside, I was dying.
I closed my office doors for long stretches during the day to escape in daydreams. I flashed through all the weak spots in the cover-up, projected an everlasting series of hurdles for the future. I reflected on my career and listed my talents: an organized mind, an ability to read the desires of my superiors, a capacity to anticipate. Deep down, I knew I was a meek, favor-currying staff man, not hardboiled enough to play the game I had watched Ehrlichman and Mitchell play. The same mental predilections that had propelled me to the White House and into a leading role in the cover-up now made it impossible for my mind to ignore the grave weaknesses of our position, I thought sourly. No one else was focused in on what had happened after the break-in. I pondered my criminal acts, pushing at them like an aching tooth. At times, I thought of myself as a contemporary Raskolnikov, paranoid, schizoid, wanting to get caught, and, for the first time, I thought seriously about the prospect of going to jail. I thought I was not as bothered by the prospect as I had been. Sometimes it actually seemed perhaps the only way to end the lies that had ruined my private life even as they had made me a superficial success. Still, there was no way I could think of to end the cover-up cleanly. One could not just walk out of it. It was ridiculous, I thought, to think about going to jail as I sat there in the White House. Round and round in circles, always the same ones. I drifted on.
February drove some new spikes into the tire. The Senate voted unanimously to establish a committee to investigate Watergate and we were staring at a new hurdle. We retreated to those strategies that had delayed the Patman hearings: strategies to emasculate the planned hearings; to keep key Administration witnesses from testifying. I began reworking the President’s position on executive privilege—the doctrine by which we hoped to keep White House aides out of Congressional hearings.
Late in February, Pat Gray went before the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation hearings on his nomination to become permanent director of the FBI. These hearings provided the first opportunity for the senators to question an Administration official on Watergate publicly, and they took full advantage. Gray, trying desperately to sound sufficiently candid to be confirmed, but not so candid as to destroy himself, got into immediate trouble as he testified that he had given Dean the FBI reports on the Watergate investigation, and that he and Dean had met repeatedly during the previous summer. I was in the headlines for the first time: “Dean Monitored FBI Watergate Probe”; “Dean Refuses Senate Testimony”; “Nixon Backs Dean.”
I became a public Watergate target. I directed the ugliest possible thoughts at Gray and kicked myself for not having protested his nomination more vigorously. It was an idle regret; we had no choice. We couldn’t afford an angry Pat Gray loose on the streets. It was just one more example of the Watergate tar baby: the only thing worse than nominating Gray would have been not nominating him.
Just as the hearings began, I had my first Watergate meeting with the President since the September 15 stroking session. Now, all of a sudden, I was meeting and talking with the President almost every day in my final quantum leap toward intimacy with him. There were complicated reasons behind this new relationship. For one thing, Haldeman and Ehrlichman were swamped with the new Presidential appointees and the reorganization. Both, particularly Ehrlichman, were less and less tolerant of the Watergate problems I kept bringing to them. They were happy to have someone else carry Watergate to the President. And, more importantly, we were all worried that my claim of executive privilege might not hold up in court because I had had negligible contact with the President. This had to be remedied.
On February 27, the first day of a series of private meetings with the President, he called me into the Oval Office and offered me a cup of coffee, which I declined. When he offered it again, I accepted. I was too timid to tell the President that I hate coffee and never drink it, it does terrible things to my body. So I drank black coffee with him as we launched into Watergate.
The President, dealing privately with me for the first time, quickly broke down restraints, confiding his feelings on countless subjects, ranging from the “assholes” in his Cabinet to the “boobs” on the Supreme Court. But the bulk of our conversations dealt inevitably with aspects of Watergate—the Ervin Committee,* the Gray hearings, executive privilege.
Although I still went home to Scotch each night, my new status with the President temporarily revived my confidence that I could endure as the ringmaster of the cover-up. I could go no higher: I had become the junior member of the select group that met almost daily with the President. Occasionally he would tell Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Ziegler or Kissinger to wait while he finished a meeting with me. I would pass them going in and out of the Oval Office, and we would exchange brotherly glances in tribute to our membership in the most select fraternity we could imagine. Kissinger joked in passing that he was happy to read my name in the gruesome Watergate headlines, instead of his own.
No one had given me pointers on how to conduct business with the President of the United States. I listened to his questions and responded, never volunteered sensitive information unless asked. I was determined not to tell the President anything that might draw him into an obstruction of justice. I had watched Ehrlichman protect him during the clemency discussions. From the beginning, however, the President asked me detailed and knowledgeable questions. Could Magruder’s testimony sink Colson? Could Hugh Sloan damage Magruder? His inquiries loosened me up somewhat, and at the end of the first meeting I was hinting to him that I myself had Watergate vulnerabilities. He dismissed my remarks abruptly on the ground that I had not known of the break-in in advance.
In subsequent meetings, the President continually asked questions I had already answered. This disturbed me. He would have bursts of lucidity and logical thinking, but mostly he was rambling and forgetful, and as I grew used to talking with him I nursed the heretical thought that the President didn’t seem very smart. Either that or he was carrying a mental overload. His desk was as neat and spotless as my own, but his thoughts and actions were far from organized. Whenever he wanted to make a note to himself, he would go through a long and awkward ritual. First he would put on his dark-rimmed glasses. (To my surprise, I thought they made him look much better.) Then he would reach into a vest pocket to fish for an envelope or a scrap of paper. Simultaneously, he would reach into the opposite vest pocket with his other hand to find his pen. The required objects would often elude his grasp, leaving the President struggling, his arms crossed in front of himself. Finally he would pull out the fountain pen, bite off the top, and hold it in his teeth as he scrawled with some difficulty on the scrap of paper he clutched in the palm of one hand. I would sit silently and watch the effort.
Such episodes, plus the obtuse conversations, gradually humanized Richard Nixon for me. The President still intimida
ted me, but I had lost a great deal of the romance. I also began to lose faith that the President could overcome the Watergate scandal by infinite power and wisdom. He seemed as enmeshed in it as the rest of us. I soon began to stop looking forward to these meetings; they no longer offered me confidence—about anything. The power fix, the high which I had pursued all my adult life, was wearing off. I was coming down.
Three themes dominated my conversations with the President until mid-March: his desire to launch a counterscandal against the Democrats, his reminiscence of the Hiss case, and his determination to find a strategy to handle the upcoming Ervin hearings. Each of these topics bothered me. The President was never satisfied with the evidence I brought him of buggings and surveillance by previous Administrations, even though I thought it was impressive in a grisly way. He kept sending me out for more, and I developed a feeling that he was grooming me as his new hatchetman, his new Colson. (Chuck had left the White House.)
The President was famous for reliving the Hiss case, but it unsettled me when he did so for my benefit. He would wax eloquent about how he and his investigators had overcome incredible odds and all sorts of government obstructions to catch Alger Hiss in a crime. Even the power of President Truman hadn’t stopped him, he would say. His constant analogies between the Hiss case and Watergate baffled me; I thought the President had everything backward. I identified with Hiss, not the investigators, and I winced whenever the President talked about how he had finally “nailed” him.
The President’s emerging strategy for the Ervin hearings was most troubling. He warmed to the idea of taking the steam out of the Senate investigation with a “comprehensive” Dean Report. He never gave me the feeling he was setting me up to take the blame for Watergate, but I began to suspect that Ehrlichman had simply not clued him in on what he had in mind. I squirmed, I raised all sorts of objections, but I couldn’t bring myself to say no.
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