Things grew more intriguing when Kleindienst--a longtime Arizona friend of William Rehnquist and a colleague of his at Justice--turned up in early 1972 as Richard Nixon's nominee for attorney general. He would replace John Mitchell, who'd resigned to spearhead Nixon's reelection campaign.
Kleindienst's original confirmation hearings elicited some opposition on the Committee, but not enough to prevent him from being reported out favorably. However, Kleindienst's troubles were just beginning. On February 29, and again on March 1, Jack Anderson published columns that called Kleindienst's integrity into question. His trial-balloon column had paid off: an informant, whom Anderson never named, appeared at the columnist's Washington offices and presented an internal ITT memo that amounted to the first "smoking gun" of the long Watergate affair. It explained why the administration had quietly dropped the antitrust investigations against ITT: the company had struck a secret deal with the administration to donate $400,000 to bankroll the San Diego convention. (The city itself had refused to finance the event.)
Why San Diego? Nixon was a Californian who loved the coastal stretches and the political climate below Los Angeles. He'd purchased his San Clemente estate, just an hour's drive up the highway from the city, in 1969. The region was a good deal more conservative than Los Angeles or San Francisco, and Nixon wanted a televised show of popular enthusiasm to contrast with that of his likely opponent, George McGovern.
The memo's author was an ITT lobbyist named Dita Beard. Beard asserted that Mitchell and Nixon not only knew about the company's donation, but had approved the terms under which it had been given. The go-between had been Kleindienst.
Kleindienst immediately demanded that the Senate reopen his hearings so that he could clear his name. In a hastily arranged private meeting with me in my Senate office on March 1, he insisted that he had never talked to Mitchell or anyone else at the White House about the ITT case, and that he certainly had never brokered any illegal agreements. He was lying.
He certainly got his wish about the hearings, and then some. Eastland agreed to reconvene the hearings. We started on March 2 and went on for twenty-two sessions. Eastland was, as always, very fair to me, and allowed me to call most of the witnesses I wanted and to use my Ad-Prac subcommittee staff to do the necessary investigatory work. Those hearings were the most intense I'd participated in since my arrival in the Senate, and I wanted them that way. (In certain respects, they formed a procedural template for the Watergate hearings themselves.) Often the sessions would last well into the evening, after which I'd convene my weary staff at the McLean house at around 10 p.m. to discuss the draft questions for the next day.
Kleindienst appeared five times, but we had plenty to talk about even in his absence. Just about every day brought new revelations: of meetings between ITT executives and Justice Department officials; of document shredding in the ITT offices; of skewed financial studies by the corporation for the White House. My fellow Democrats and I pressed the White House hard for documentation covering the antitrust settlements, and the White House, after strongly resisting us at first, complied. I asked Kleindienst for the record whether he had had any contact from the White House on the cases, and he replied, "No, sir"--a perjury, as it developed.
Dita Beard herself was a piece of work, as I discovered when five other senators and I visited her in Denver on March 26. I felt that as the author of the fateful memo, she should come and testify in the hearings, but when we learned that she was confined to an osteopathic hospital in Denver with a weak heart, Eastland authorized a bipartisan delegation to go and take her testimony there. We arrived at Rocky Mountain Osteopathic Hospital to find a crusty, fast-talking woman in her early fifties who sprayed jumbled thoughts in salty language at us as she alternately sucked on cigarettes and gulped from her oxygen mask.
It was not the most productive of testimonies I've witnessed, but it was among the most colorful. As we senators, a court reporter, Flug, and a lawyer for Eastland stood awkwardly around her bed, she smoked and coughed and denied having written the memo, which she'd earlier owned up to until the week before the hearing. She dropped administration names and called various people sons of bitches. When the Florida Republican Senator Edward Gurney asked her what she knew about Kleindienst, the arrows on her blood pressure machine went straight up, and she gasped and clutched at her throat until the doctor stopped the session and ushered us out of the room. I looked at Phil Hart, and saw that he was nearly as pale as Mrs. Beard herself. "That's it," Hart declared. He was not going to go back into that room, for fear that our witness might seize up and die.
Mrs. Beard was tougher than Hart thought, however. The week before the hearing, she had received an undercover bedside visit by one of Nixon's "plumbers," E. Howard Hunt, who showed up under a bizarre red wig and equipped with a voice-alteration device, apparently to persuade her to renounce the memo. I'm still amazed by it all: the appearance of a stealthy figure, cloaked in disguise, trying to interrogate and intimidate a hacking, chain-smoking, oxygen-gulping, bedridden emphysemic with a foul mouth.
Despite the overwhelming indications of governmental cover-up and illegal agreements presented to the committee, Kleindienst sailed once again to confirmation, over the objections of me and three others, which we laid out in a long, detailed minority report. We could not know it at the time, but damning evidence against him existed, spooled within one of the notorious White House tapes that Nixon maintained. It did not surface for another year and a half, when special prosecutor Archibald Cox listened to it and related the following passage to me:
NIXON: I want something clearly understood, and, if it is not understood, McLaren's ass is to be out within one hour. The IT-and-T thing--stay the hell out of it. Is that clear? That's an order.
KLEINDIENST: Well, you mean the order is to--
NIXON: The order is to leave the goddamned thing alone. Now, I've said this, Dick, a number of times, and you fellows apparently don't get the message over there. I do not want McLaren to run around prosecuting people, raising hell about conglomerates, stirring things up at this point. Now, you keep him the hell out of that. Is that clear?
KLEINDIENST: Well, Mr. President--
NIXON: Or either he resigns. I'd rather have him out anyway. I don't like the son of a bitch.
KLEINDIENST: That brief has to be filed tomorrow.
NIXON: That's right. Don't file the brief.
KLEINDIENST: Your order is not to file a brief?
NIXON: My order is to drop the goddamn thing. Is that clear?
KLEINDIENST: Yeah, I understand that.
This episode, I believe, was the true beginning of Watergate. Nixon now felt the heat of curiosity from congressional Democrats and the party's leaders. His instinct was to dive more deeply into the murk. Five days after Kleindienst assumed office, on June 17, 1972, came the celebrated break-in at Democratic headquarters. Larry O'Brien, one of my brother Jack's closest and most valued aides, was now the chairman of the party, and it was his conversations the intruders were seeking to tap via an electronic "bug." Their arrests on the scene were the beginning of the end for Nixon's reign of secrecy and imperialism.
Kleindienst might have clamped down on the Watergate abuses before they metastasized, but he apparently lacked the nerve. The day after the break-in, "plumber" G. Gordon Liddy himself told the new attorney general that the scheme was traceable to the White House, and that he should act to get the five men released. To Kleindienst's credit, he refused. But he failed to report what amounted to a criminal confession. He resigned his office the following April, was convicted of a perjury misdemeanor for his false testimony to our committee, and given a suspended sentence and fine.
Now events began to quicken, as the Washington Post and other newspapers fastened onto the possibility of a massive political scandal. In late September, the Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported that John Mitchell controlled a secret fund of as much as $700,000 that financed equally secret intelligence-gathering and
sabotage operations. On October 10, FBI agents produced evidence that the break-in at O'Brien's office was part of this massive campaign.
Watergate was by now "Watergate" in press coverage. But the American public had not yet focused its attention on these developments, or perhaps could not yet summon the belief that they were real. Political party leaders, though, were paying very close attention indeed. The presidential election was only weeks away. Nixon remained popular in key sectors of the electorate. McGovern, who'd been nominated at the "New Politics" Democratic convention in Miami Beach, was seeking a mandate to end the Vietnam War; but since April he'd found himself smeared as the candidate of "amnesty, abortion, and acid." He was further damaged by the revelations that his vice presidential choice, Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, a good and decent man, had been hospitalized in the past and treated for depression, including receiving electric shock therapy. In those days, receiving psychiatric treatment alone might be considered as a disqualifier for public office--there was still a lack of understanding and terrible stigma associated with mental health issues in general. Adding hospitalization and electric shock to the mix sadly compounded the problem. In 1972, unlike vice presidential selections since then, there was no extensive vetting process that would have turned up an issue that might not play well in public. In fact, McGovern had settled on Eagleton as his running mate only after rejecting--or being rejected by--several other candidates. I found myself in this field: McGovern had invited me to run on the ticket with him when I telephoned to congratulate him on his nomination. The vice presidency had never really interested me; certainly not as an alternative to the Senate, where I could directly affect public policy. But given the party's low standing in the polls and the urgency of electing a Democrat after the wreckage of Nixon's reign, I briefly considered it. In the end, I turned it down.
McGovern then sounded out Gaylord Nelson, the Wisconsin senator who'd been the principal founder of Earth Day in 1970. After Nelson said no, McGovern talked to Senator Abe Ribicoff of Connecticut, who'd placed his name in nomination, with similar results. His list of possibilities after that showed flashes of what we now call "thinking outside the box": Leonard Woodcock of the United Auto Workers, the CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, Father Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame, Mayor Kevin White of Boston, and the Texas Democrat Frances "Sissy" Farenthold.
Among McGovern's earliest choices was his eventual running mate, my brother-in-law Sargent Shriver. But Sarge, who was in Moscow at the time, initially demurred as well. And so the choice came down to Eagleton. After the Missourian left the ticket following the disclosures about his psychiatric history, McGovern first spoke to Hubert Humphrey and then to Ed Muskie about joining his ticket.
In early August 1972, I had a conversation with Hubert and told him that I would make the case to McGovern if he were interested. Humphrey said that first of all, he liked McGovern; second, he wanted to beat Nixon; but third, he'd taken quite a knocking around and felt that people would say, "There's good old Hubert. He comes out every time the bell rings." Humphrey ultimately turned it down.
I had a conversation with McGovern in the back of the Senate on Thursday afternoon, August 3. He told me that he was interested in Sarge, but that he wanted to approach Muskie first. The next evening, I went to the Cape for dinner at the Shrivers' and told Sarge that if Muskie turned it down I thought he would be offered the job.
McGovern called Sarge the next day and he came to see me before he accepted. Sarge said that he would not accept the offer if I objected. Some people were concerned that if Sarge were the successful vice presidential candidate in 1972, he would be making it more difficult for me to run for president in the future.
It is true that there was lingering unhappiness among some RFK supporters who thought that in 1968 Sarge should have resigned or taken leave from his post as ambassador to France and returned to America to help out with Bobby's presidential campaign. I personally had steered clear of this controversy. It just didn't bother me. I felt the same way about Sarge's being on the ticket in '72. I raised no objection.
I began to receive calls and visits from Democrats frantic to resurrect McGovern's campaign by a formal investigation of Watergate. They wanted me to convene hearings. I wanted to convene hearings as well. But the process was hardly as simple as it sounded.
Stewart Alsop laid out the difficulties in his Newsweek column of October 2, a week before the FBI report. He noted that two Senate bodies were tailor-made for such a probe: Sam Ervin's subcommittee on constitutional rights and John McClellan's Government Operations Committee. But given that both men represented southern, anti-McGovern states--North Carolina and Arkansas, respectively--this was unlikely.
Noting that "the Watergate affair is a snake that badly needs to be scotched," Alsop declared that the mandate for action lay with me: "It is a case of Kennedy or nothing." But obstacles lay in my own path as well. Alsop predicted that I would be attacked "all-out as a demagogue using his... chairmanship to play politics, compromising the rights of the accused in the process."
Alsop was referring to my Ad-Prac subcommittee, and he was partly correct. I had indeed hesitated to advance my subcommittee, believing that an investigation would be more credible with the public if led by a chairman more conservative than myself. I too thought that either Ervin's or McClellan's bodies would be a good choice. Ervin in particular was known as a great civil libertarian aside from his views on civil rights. But I wanted in, and I had no doubt that Ad-Prac's mandate would take the investigation deeper than even my colleagues imagined. The ideal entree for Ad-Prac would be an invitation from one of these conservative southern Democrats to urge Ad-Prac to take the lead. I thought I knew a way of getting this to happen.
On October 3, I wrote to Ervin, exhorting him to get things going through his constitutional rights subcommittee. He replied in exactly the manner I'd hoped: "It seems to me appropriate for the Administrative Practices and Procedures subcommittee to investigate this matter and I want to assure you of my support should you decide to open an inquiry along these lines."
I moved quickly. Two days later, I notified my subcommittee members that we were going forward. On October 12, I ordered a "preliminary inquiry" into the matter, which included subpoena power. My plan, which had Ervin's support, was to bypass the Watergate burglars--who in any case were being prosecuted criminally--and train my sights on the Justice Department itself, sending out subpoenas to any official who might have known, participated in, or controlled the bugging and sabotage operations. And so it happened: we went after telephone and banking records of people under suspicion, and compelled testimony from several of the key figures. Among the first of these, whom we called to testify in November, was Donald Segretti, the young "dirty tricks" specialist from the Committee to Re-elect the President, who admitted that his source of funds for forging campaign literature was none other than Nixon's personal counsel (and bagman) Herbert Kalmbach.
Richard Nixon crushed George McGovern in the November election, winning more than 60 percent of the vote--and proving, incidentally, that none of the Watergate transgressions had even been relevant to his reelection. But as 1973 began, a steady cannonade of new revelations, convictions, resignations, and hearings erupted and dismantled his administration piece by piece. On April 30, 1973, the core of his brain trust--H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Kleindienst--resigned, and White House counsel John Dean was fired.
In the early spring, Mike Mansfield persuaded Sam Ervin to chair the hearings looking into Watergate. I was not a member of Ervin's special Senate committee, respecting Mansfield's view that my status as a possible candidate for the presidency in 1976 would have raised conflict-of-interest questions. On May 18, the Senate Watergate committee began its nationally televised hearings. White House tapes of February 1973 revealed Nixon and his counsel John Dean discussing the new Ervin committee and how they might spin it as merely a front for me and my own pernicious vendetta against the president. Ervin, Dean dec
lared, was only a puppet for me; in fact, I was "behind" the entire creation of the hearings. He assured Nixon, "The partisan cast of this will become more apparent."
I supplied Ervin's committee with the vast body of testimony and findings developed by my Ad-Prac subcommittee, and they used it to great effect. It included a complex chart that interconnected the many people and many groups implicated in the overlapping scandals.
Most Americans of a certain age recall the highlights of Watergate's long denouement: the bombshell remark by witness Alexander Butterfield on July 13 that Nixon had taped all conversations and phone calls in his office since 1973; the protracted struggle for possession of the tapes highlighted by the "Saturday Night Massacre" of October 20; the bizarre "eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap" on one of the key subpoenaed tapes on December 7; the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling on July 24, 1974, that Nixon must turn over the tapes of sixty-four previously unreleased conversations; and, finally, on August 8, 1974, Nixon's resignation as president and the swearing in of Gerald Ford.
I want to return briefly to the "Saturday Night Massacre," because I had some personal experience with its heroes.
The seeds of it lay in Nixon's appointment in May 1973 of Elliot Richardson, the distinguished war veteran, Harvard Law School graduate, and, at the time, secretary of defense, as his new attorney general, succeeding Kleindienst. I admired Richardson, a liberal Republican with a long record of achievement in several cabinet posts, but I'd made it clear to him that he would not be confirmed by the Judiciary Committee unless he agreed to appoint a special prosecutor. My committee colleagues and I were convinced by this time that only a strong prosecutor independent of party loyalties or control would be credible enough with the public and the press to demand the hardest truths from this administration. After a series of private conversations with me, Richardson promised he would make such an appointment.
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