“They put that under the cover of a Cuban Committee or something, didn’t they?”
The question stunned me. The Cuban Committee was a technical part of only one of our payment schemes. A committee had been set up to collect defense funds for the Cuban defendants, and we had planned it; the committee would be flooded with anonymous cash. As it turned out, Hunt had preferred to have the money delivered directly to him and his wife, and the committee had never been used. If the President knew about such monetary details, I could not be revealing much to him. I acknowledged the existence of the Cuban Committee, and told him about the payments to Hunt’s wife.
“Maybe it’s too late to do anything about it,” he replied, “but I would certainly keep that cover for what it’s worth.” He laughed nervously.
“I’ll—”
“Keep the committee,” he repeated.
“After, after—well, that, that …” I was sputtering. The President’s cognizance of the committee, and his wish to keep it alive, punctured any hope that he would recoil in shock from whatever I might tell him. I tried to recover; if I couldn’t impress him with details of the cover-up, I’d hammer in the implications. “And that’s the most troublesome post-thing,” I went on, “because: one, Bob is involved in that; John is involved in that; I am involved in that; Mitchell is involved in that”—I was counting on my fingers again—“and that is an obstruction of justice.”
The President sat back, as if I had breathed into his face. “In other words, the fact that, uh, you’re, you’re taking care of the witness.”
“That’s right,” I stated.
“How was Bob involved?” He was worried about Haldeman.
I described the transfer of the three-fifty fund and that Haldeman had approved the payments. Feeling that I was making progress, I mentioned the assurances of clemency that Caulfield had offered McCord. “As you know,” I said pointedly, “Colson has talked indirectly to Hunt about commutation.” I stopped to clear my throat. This was tough. I began to lose my nerve. “All these things are bad, in that they are problems. They are promises. They are commitments. They are the very sort of thing that the Senate is going to be looking most for. I don’t think they can find them, frankly.”
“Pretty hard,” the President said.
“Pretty hard,” I agreed. “Damn hard. It’s all cash.”
“Well, I mean, pretty hard as far as the witnesses are concerned.” Nixon was focusing on the issue of clemency, the single fact that only two or three witnesses, and they unlikely ones, could testify against him. I regretted that I had given him an opening to see the cover-up as solid and tried to regain momentum by getting back to Hunt’s money demands. “Now, the blackmail is continuing,” I said. I told him of the latest threats, including a threat directly to Ehrlichman. We rambled on about the Ellsberg break-in, until I intruded to tell the President that Hunt had been unstable since his wife’s death.
“Great sadness,” he said. He turned in his chair and looked off. “As a matter of fact, there was some discussion over there with somebody about Hunt’s problems after his wife died.” He cleared his throat. Both of us seemed to do so whenever we had to raise something particularly bothersome. “And I said, of course, commutation could be considered on the basis of his wife, and that’s the only discussion I ever had in that light.”
“Right,” I said. The President was confirming the Colson conversation to me and at the same time he was offering the humanitarian reasoning he would use in order to pardon Hunt.
I returned to the money. “Uh, Mitchell’s been working on raising some money, feeling he’s got, you know, he’s one of the ones with the most to lose. But there’s no denying the fact that the White House, and Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Dean are involved in some of the early money decisions.”
“How much money do you need?” the President asked suddenly, breaking off my recitation of criminal liability in the White House. He seemed impatient with that line.
I paused. I had no idea what kind of figure to put on the future blackmail, but I had to pick a number. “I would say these people are going to cost, uh, a million dollars over the next, uh, two years.”
“We could get that,” he declared firmly.
“Uh huh,” I mumbled. The President was moving in the opposite direction from the horror I badly wanted him to express, and I was softening.
“If you need the money,” he continued, “I mean you could get the money. Let’s say …”
“Well, I think that we’re going to—”
“What I mean is you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.”
“Uh huh.” I thought that the President was almost boasting about his ability to lay his hands on a million dollars of loose, untraceable cash.
“I mean it’s not easy, but it could be done,” he stated. He was leaning forward, his hands folded on his desk. “But the question is, who the hell would handle it?”
“That’s right,” I said. I brightened at the prospect of running through another litany of troubles.
“Any ideas on that?” He was asking for positive ideas on how to deliver money, I realized, not evidence of how the task had broken both Kalmbach and LaRue.
“Well, I would think that would be something that Mitchell ought to be charged with,” I replied. The President had turned me around—it was the first of many reversals—and I was back on track, the standard White House cover-up line addressed negatively, hostilely toward Mitchell. I ran down some of the problems LaRue was having in raising money. “People are going to ask what the money is for,” I said. “He’s working, he’s apparently talked to Tom Pappas.”
The President nodded. “I know.”
This comment, like the one concerning the Cuban Committee, set me back. Only four people knew about the Pappas contact: LaRue, Mitchell, Ehrlichman and myself. I figured then that Ehrlichman had not been protecting Nixon from such details, since he seemed to know everything. The conversation sailed around the money issue before I brought myself to make another run at the President with still another weakness in the cover-up: Krogh was haunted because he’d perjured himself before the Senate committee that had confirmed him.
“What did he perjure himself on, John?”
I was in a bind. Krogh hadn’t told me exactly how he had testified. I faltered, then made a guess. “His … Did, uh, did he know the Cubans? He did.”
“He said he didn’t?”
“That’s right. They didn’t press him hard. Or that he …”
I was attempting to drum up another possible way Bud might have perjured himself, when the President interrupted me. “He might be able to—I am just trying to think. Perjury is an awful tough rap to prove. He could say, ‘I …’” He was beginning a perjury defense for Krogh. He stopped and waved the problem away as if it weren’t worth the effort. “Well, go ahead.”
I coughed several times to give myself a space to think. The President was returning each of my volleys like a backboard. Each time, I backed off before hitting again. “Well, so that’s, that’s the first, that’s one perjury,” I said, thinking maybe a whole list might have more impact. “Now Mitchell and Magruder are potential perjurers.” I went down the perjury list, but I thought I saw the President’s concentration drifting for the first time.
He shifted in his chair and looked straight at me. He was back now, and frowning. “Don’t you—just looking at the immediate problem—don’t you have to handle Hunt’s financial situation …”
“I think that’s …”
“… damn soon?”
“… that’s—I talked to Mitchell about that last night.”
“Mitchell.” The President nodded approvingly.
“And, uh, I told—” I was getting set to tell him about my problems when he interrupted.
“Might as well,” he said firmly. “May have to rule you’ve got to keep the cap on the bottle that much.”
He would not welcome any c
ontradiction, and I didn’t give him any. “That’s right. That’s right.”
“In order to have any options.”
“That’s right,” I said. I was turned around again. Maybe he is right, I began to think. After all, he’s an old pro at this sort of thing; maybe I’m just nervous. In any case, my acquiescence seemed to reduce the tension in the room.
My steam was down. I rambled about Kalmbach and lesser weak spots until he broke in to change direction.
“But what are your feelings yourself, John? You know pretty well what they all say. What are your feelings about the options?”
I twisted inside. Surely, the President must know what my feelings were after all this. I suspected that he was testing me now, taking his own reading on how reliably I’d stay on course. I didn’t want him to think I would be all that reliable. “I am not confident that, uh, we can ride through this,” I confessed. “I think there are, I think there are soft spots.” I felt as if I was one of them.
“You used to feel comfortable,” he said quietly. The remark hung in the air. It cut into my exposed emotions—guilt and loyalty. Guilt. He was drawing my attention to my loud enthusiasm about the cover-up, calling up memories of the September 15 meeting, making me feel that my tough demeanor had contributed to the dilemma. Loyalty. He was implying that I was abandoning ship. I felt beaten down. I felt I had lost his confidence by admitting to a certain weakness. My rise in the White House was over.
We meandered, but the dynamic did not change. I had been on the offensive, with the President battening down my cover-up woes. Now he was on the offensive, drawing me out, testing options. “All right,” he said, starting down a new path. “Now go on. So what you really come down to is, is what the hell will you do? Let’s suppose that you and Haldeman and Ehrlichman and Mitchell say, ‘We can’t hold this.’ What then are you going to say? Are you going to put out a complete disclosure? Isn’t that the best plan?”
I couldn’t rally to this idea any longer. I knew the President didn’t intend to disclose the rat’s nest we’d just clambered through. The question was insincere. He was probing, I thought, to see how far I might defect. But I figured I’d at least give him my best thinking on this option. “Well, one way to do it is to—”
“That’d be my view of it,” he interrupted.
“One way to do it is for you to tell the Attorney General that you finally, you know, really this is the first time you are getting all the pieces together.”
“Ask for another grand jury?”
“Ask for another grand jury,” I said. And I told him how best I thought it could be done. “But some people are going to have to go to jail. That’s the long and short of it, also,” I concluded.
“Who? Let’s talk about that.” The President was leaning toward me again, intent.
“All right. I think I could, for one.”
“You go to jail?” he asked in disbelief.
“That’s right.”
“Oh, hell, no,” said the President, shaking his head as if the idea were absurd. “I don’t see how you can.” Later, when I had explained to him that I was vulnerable for the obstruction of justice, he replied, “Well, I don’t know. I think [that] that, I feel, could be cut off at the pass. Maybe the obstruction of justice …”
“It could be a—you know how—one of the—that’s, that’s why …” I was sputtering again, I couldn’t bring myself to agree or disagree. I gave up in a sigh.
The President asked how I might be construed to be guilty of obstruction.
“Well,” I responded wearily, “I’ve been a conduit for information on taking care of people out there who are guilty of crimes.”
“Oh, you mean like the blackmail.”
“The blackmail. Right.”
“Well, I wonder if that part of it can’t be, I wonder if that doesn’t, let me put it frankly: I wonder if that doesn’t have to be continued?” The question was declarative.
Back to the Hunt demands. I cleared my throat to avoid having to say anything.
“Let me put it this way,” he continued. “Let us suppose that you get, you get the million bucks, and you get the proper way to handle it, and you could hold that side.”
“Uh huh.”
“It would seem to me that would be worthwhile.”
I cleared my throat and again said nothing. I looked at the floor to avoid the President’s eyes, which I knew would be seeking agreement.
He didn’t press. Instead, he went to other subjects. Then he asked who else might have to go to jail. I decided not to try out any more notions about perjuries or obstructions. I simply said Ehrlichman might have to go.
“Why Ehrlichman? What’d he do?”
I drew a breath. “Because of this conspiracy to burglarize the, uh, Ellsberg office.”
“You mean, that is, provided Hunt breaks,” the President said, qualifying the danger to Ehrlichman.
“Well, uh, let me say something interesting about that. Within the files—” I was getting ready to clue him in on yet another route of discovery.
He interrupted. “Oh, I saw that. The picture.”
Jesus Christ, I thought, the President knows as much about all this as I do. He not only knows about the Liddy picture, he’s seen it. If he knows all this, surely he can’t think this cover-up will hold. I laid out a few other ways the Ellsberg break-in might come out, and then I made one more run at my original thrust: “But what I am coming to you today with is: I don’t have a plan of how to solve it right now, but I think it’s at the juncture that we should begin to think in terms of, of how to cut the losses, how to minimize the further growth of this thing rather than further compound it by, you know, ultimately paying these guys forever.”
“Yeah.”
“I think we’ve got to look—”
“But at the moment,” the President intruded, leaning forward again, “don’t you agree that you’d better get the Hunt thing? I mean, that’s worth it, at the moment.”
“That’s worth buying time on, right.”
“And that’s worth buying time on, I agree.” He had agreed quickly, as if it were my idea. I was turned around again and I had very little spirit left. Ehrlichman must have whispered in his ear about Hunt’s demands.
Soon the President buzzed for Haldeman and summarized our meeting for him accurately and succinctly: we had to buy time by meeting Hunt’s immediate money demands; he listed almost all the “soft spots” in the cover-up that I had identified.
“The point is,” said the President, turning to me, “your feeling is that we just can’t continue to pay the blackmail of these guys?”
“I think that’s our greatest jeopardy,” I agreed.
“Yeah,” said Haldeman.
“Now, let me tell you, it’s no problem,” said the President. “We could get the money. There is no problem in that. We can’t provide the clemency. The money can be provided. Mitchell could provide the way to deliver it. That could be done. See what I mean?”
“But Mitchell says he can’t, doesn’t he?” Haldeman asked me.
“Mitchell says that—Well, that’s an interesting thing. That’s been an interesting phenomenon all the way along on this. It’s that there have been a lot of people having to pull oars, and not everybody pulls them at the same time, the same way, because they all develop self-interests.”
“What John is saying,” Haldeman told the President, “is that everybody smiles at Dean and says, ‘Well, you better get something done about it.’”
“That’s right,” I said, grateful to him for stating it far more bluntly than I dared.
“And Mitchell is leaving Dean hanging out on a … None of us …” Haldeman paused. “Well, maybe we’re doing the same thing to you,” he confessed.
“That’s right,” I agreed.
The meeting went on through the same points over and over, although I was not much of an advocate for my position any longer. Haldeman wound up by saying that the Watergate erosion was now hi
tting directly at the President and had to be stopped at any cost.
It finally ended, after nearly two hours. I went back to my office feeling as if I had been squeezed in a vise, experiencing all the unpleasant emotions pressure can bring to bear. My head ached from the mental effort of trying to keep up with all the nuances going on behind the dialogue with the President. There was some relief, however, in having unburdened myself of my doubts about the cover-up. Those above me were now fully aware. Maybe the cover-up was in more capable hands. And I had the solace of having gone through an entire meeting without hearing the Dean Report mentioned.
But even that comfort vanished the same afternoon. Ehrlichman joined Haldeman, Nixon and Dean, and he lost no time in advocating the Dean Report as the needed solution. Ehrlichman was clever and blunt. He came out directly and said that the Dean Report would give the President a public alibi if the cover-up were to collapse. As always, I wondered how much he was motivated by devotion to the President as opposed to his own protection. I figured—perhaps generously—about fifty-fifty. This meeting accomplished nothing; we simply went round and round. I mentioned the cancer again, Ehrlichman countered with the Dean Report. The only new development was a consensus that Mitchell should be summoned to Washington; he would be cajoled to step forward, own up, walk the plank.
When I went home on the evening of March 21, I avoided Mo’s questions. The day seemed to have lasted forever, and I tried to stretch out the night’s reprieve with alcohol. I found myself searching for something to look forward to—anything. The search was fruitless, until I began meditating sardonically about the Mitchell meeting which was set for the next day. It would be a real Armageddon. Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mitchell in a shootout. Lives and empires at stake. I visualized it as something like the Napoleonic Wars—bluffs, frontal attacks and mass slaughter—and drifted off to sleep with such thoughts.
The four of us gathered the next morning in Haldeman’s office, and I waited for the first missile to blast off. It didn’t happen. Once Mitchell said, in code, that Hunt’s immediate blackmail threat had been “taken care of,” the drums stopped beating. The communication reached new heights of internal stonewalling. I was astonished. It was dominated by nervous pleasantries and indirect ribbing, but with no confrontation, not even an acknowledgment that a cover-up, a Presidency and criminal prosecutions might be hanging in the balance. It was as if four men were discussing adultery: each knew the others were cheating, each was reluctant to admit it first.
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