One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  And on that day, Richard Nixon learned, to his lifelong sorrow, that he had another war to fight.

  * * *

  The trial of the Watergate burglars would begin the next week. The White House counsel John Dean had been keeping a very close eye on the case.

  Nearly a year had passed since Dean heard G. Gordon Liddy present his plans for espionage and sabotage to John Mitchell and Jeb Stuart Magruder, Haldeman’s protégé and Mitchell’s deputy at CREEP, in the attorney general’s office at the Justice Department. Almost six months had gone by since the raid at the Watergate. The federal grand jury that indicted the seven burglars had heard testimony from Magruder, who had committed perjury, as Nixon knew, to protect himself and his superiors from prosecution.

  Magruder was the director of the president’s impending inaugural. He would have to decide whether to keep lying when called to testify at the trial. He was terrified. And he knew he was not the only false witness.

  On the morning of January 3, Haldeman had a gut-wrenching conversation with Magruder. At 11:00 a.m., Haldeman walked into the Oval Office. “Colson could be in some real soup,” he told Nixon. “Colson and Mitchell have both perjured themselves under oath,” as had Magruder, before the grand jury.

  “You mean Colson was aware of Watergate?” Nixon said.

  “Not only was he aware of it, he was pushing very hard for results,” Haldeman said bluntly.

  “Who was he pushing?” the president asked.

  “Magruder and Liddy,” Haldeman answered. Liddy would rather die than testify. But Magruder now was caught in a perjury trap. If he kept lying under oath at the trial, he might stay out of jail—or he might ensnare himself. And if he told the truth, he could bring down Mitchell, Colson, and others very close to Nixon.

  Nixon tried to absorb what he had just heard. “Does Mitchell know that Colson was involved?” he asked. “Does Colson know Mitchell was involved?”

  “I think the answer is yes to both of those,” Haldeman replied.

  At that hour, Howard Hunt’s criminal lawyer called John Dean and said that Hunt was about to crack at the prospect of prison. The federal judge in the case was John Sirica, a stalwart law-and-order conservative widely known in Washington as “Maximum John,” for the severity of his sentences. The Watergate defendants were looking at decades behind bars. As Nixon learned two days later, Hunt craved a promise of presidential clemency. Hunt’s wife had been killed in an airplane crash four weeks earlier; she was carrying ten thousand dollars in cash, a small part of the money that had been paid to Hunt and his coconspirators by some very senior members of the White House staff.

  Many tens of thousands of dollars, much of it campaign cash held in White House safes, already had gone to keep the Watergate defendants silent and their lawyers solvent.

  Winding up his conversation with the president, Haldeman said the key figures in the case would require care and feeding. “Liddy we’re taking care of in one way” (stacks of hundred-dollar bills) and “we’re taking care of Magruder the right way” (with a promise of a new job after the inauguration). But there would be problems galore in the days to come, during and after the trial.

  “It gets down to undeniable specifics,” Haldeman said. These specifics were, as the president knew within a matter of days, not merely perjury but also hush money, a multitude of felonies, and a chain of evidence reaching into the Oval Office. The strongest links in that chain were the reels of tape spinning beneath his feet.

  * * *

  White House staffers distant from the Oval Office saw strange things happening in the days between the election and the inauguration.

  Michael B. Smith, a staunch Republican and, later, President Reagan’s global ambassador for trade, was chief of presidential correspondence, in charge of 230 people who answered every letter addressed to Nixon, making each word seem convincing. “Gordon Strachan, who was one of Haldeman’s young assistants, came over to me” before the inauguration, Smith remembered; Strachan had been Haldeman’s liaison to CREEP. “He was carrying a black bag. He said, ‘The President wants to thank everybody for what they did in the election campaign.’ Strachan opened up the black bag and there was $300,000 in cash. Now, you tell me what a 28-year-old kid is carrying around $300,000 in cash for.”*

  “Watergate,” Smith concluded, “involved arrogance, rather than malevolence. These were ruthless people. They were not corrupt in the slightest. I believe that the Nixon White House staff was probably the most pristine or puritanical staff you could ever imagine. But some of them were zealots to an extreme.”

  The zealot in chief was Chuck Colson. On Friday, January 5, Colson had a deep talk with Nixon about Howard Hunt, his friend of twenty years’ standing.

  The president wrote in his diary the next day, “Colson told me on Friday that he had tried to do everything he could to keep Hunt from turning state’s evidence. After what happened to Hunt’s wife, etc., I think we have a very good case for showing some clemency.” Colson continued, as Nixon wrote, that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were more deeply involved in Watergate than the president realized.

  On January 8, Nixon and Colson talked again in the president’s Executive Office Building hideaway. “I know it’s tough for all of you,” Nixon said, “for you, John, Bob, and all the rest. We’re just not going to let it get us down. This is a battle. It’s a fight.”

  Richard Nixon turned sixty the next day. How great a burden did he feel? He wrote in his diary that, ten years before, he’d felt that his life was “at an end.” Now it had “turned completely around.” But he knew a time bomb was already ticking for his second term, before the first one ended.

  Nixon was sworn in for four more years as the thirty-seventh president of the United States on January 20, 1973. He concluded his last inaugural by saying, “We shall answer to God, to history, and to our conscience for the way in which we use these years.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “You could get a million dollars”

  THE PRESIDENTIAL chalice was poisoned, drop by drop, days after the inaugural ball was over.

  The Vietnam Peace Accords were signed in Paris. “After the cease-fire there will be inevitable violations,” Nixon said on January 23, 1973, the day Kissinger initialed the pact. All sides broke the agreement. The war went on.* The armies of Hanoi and Saigon clashed. B-52 bombers pounded North Vietnamese troops in Cambodia and Laos. “Whack the hell out of them,” Nixon commanded.

  “We have a stick and a carrot to restrain Hanoi,” the president told South Vietnam’s foreign minister on January 30. The B-52s were a big stick.

  That same day, the Watergate jury returned verdicts after deliberating for ninety minutes. Liddy and McCord were convicted on all counts. Hunt and the Cubans had pleaded guilty. All were facing decades behind bars. Judge Sirica held a post-trial hearing February 3. He bluntly stated that justice had yet to be served. He strongly doubted the government’s witnesses, and he openly called on Congress to look into the case.

  Nixon was outraged. “Here’s the judge saying I did this,” he railed to Colson in the Oval Office. “His goddamn conduct is shocking.… He’s trying to prod the Senate into conducting a big investigation.”

  The Senate heard Sirica loud and clear. On February 7, it voted unanimously to create a select committee to investigate Watergate. Its chairman would be Senator Sam Ervin, a conservative Democrat from North Carolina given to country-boy maxims and constitutional admonitions. Ervin had a Harvard law degree to go with his down-home humor. His mandate was to investigate the Watergate break-in, any cover-ups, and “all other illegal, improper, or unethical conduct occurring during the Presidential campaign of 1972, including political espionage and campaign finance practices.” He would receive half a million dollars to hire investigators—and the power to subpoena anyone save Richard Nixon.

  The president flew to San Clemente the next day to spend a long weekend plotting to counter the Senate Watergate Committee. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, an
d Dean joined his strategy sessions. “We should play a hard game,” Nixon said. He had two goals. He would maintain “the outward appearance of cooperation.” But, in the meantime, “our objective internally should be maximum obstruction and containment, so as not to let this thing run away with us.”

  Back in Washington, Nixon spent much of the next week giving marching orders to his revamped national security team. The president’s new director of central intelligence, James Schlesinger, was a Nixon man to the core—“I mean one that really had R.N. tattooed on him,” his predecessor, Richard Helms, said—who had been an ax wielder at the Bureau of the Budget. Nixon told him to chop out the dead wood at the CIA, to purge as many people as possible, especially senior officers suspected of liberal sympathies.

  Over the course of nineteen weeks, Schlesinger fired five hundred CIA analysts and more than a thousand clandestine service officers. After he received death threats over the dismissals, he hired armed bodyguards. He lasted five months as director of central intelligence.

  Nixon, having rid himself of Secretary of Defense Laird, introduced the Joint Chiefs to their new boss at a formal luncheon at the Pentagon. Elliot Richardson was a genial Boston Brahmin with no military expertise beyond leading a platoon at the Normandy invasion under General Eisenhower in June 1944. He had been secretary of health, education, and welfare in the first Nixon administration, in charge of issues that were his cup of tea, not Nixon’s.

  Nixon alluded to his preference at a February 15 luncheon with Richardson and the Joint Chiefs, weighing the value of the Department of Defense versus the costs of welfare. “We would like to be able to put the DOD budget into welfare,” the president said, “but if we did, the world would eventually fall under the Communist system.”

  Richardson lasted four months as secretary of defense.

  At 9:09 a.m. on February 16, L. Patrick Gray, the acting FBI director, entered the Oval Office for the second time in his life. After a nine-month delay, Nixon was submitting Gray for Senate hearings to confirm him as J. Edgar Hoover’s successor, as required by law. The president was taking a huge risk.

  Gray was a dutiful dullard deeply entangled in the web of Watergate. He had destroyed evidence on orders from John Dean. He was back-handing his agents’ reporting to Dean—which an FBI internal report later described as “the most serious blunder from an investigative standpoint.”

  Gray had made few friends at FBI headquarters, where he became known as “Three-day Gray” for the time he spent at his desk each week. He had let the FBI’s number-two man, Mark Felt, control the Watergate investigation. And Felt was the key source of the front-page Watergate stories in the Washington Post. Nixon was one of the few people in America who knew that.* The Post had been the first newspaper to report that Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy oversaw the Watergate break-in, that John Mitchell controlled a slush fund for political espionage, and that “political spying and sabotage” were at the heart of CREEP’s campaign.

  Nixon quickly asked Gray how he would handle the Senate’s questions about Watergate. “Would it hurt or help for you to go up there and be mashed about that?” Nixon asked.

  “Mr. President, I’m the man that’s in the best position to handle that,” Gray said. “I’ve consistently handled it from the outset.… I think the Administration has done a hell of a fine job in going after this thing.” This was bluster and bombast. “You haven’t been able to do anything—or have you?—up to this point, about the leaks,” Nixon asked. “The whole story, we’ve found, is coming out of the Bureau.… This stuff didn’t leak when Hoover was there. I’ve never known of a leak when Hoover was there. I could talk to him in this office about everything. And the reason is that—it wasn’t because they loved him, but they feared him. And they’ve got to fear the man at the top.… You’ve got to be brutal, tough and respected.… I understand leaking out of the CIA, those goddamned cookie-pushers. But if it leaks out of the Bureau, then the whole damn place ought to be fired.”

  Nixon’s fury rose. “You’ve got to do it like they did in the war,” the president said. “In World War Two, the Germans, if they went through these towns and then one of their soldiers, a sniper hit one of them, they’d line up the whole goddamned town and say until you talk you’re all getting shot. I really think that’s what has to be done. I mean, I don’t think you can be Mr. Nice Guy over there.”

  “I haven’t been,” Gray protested. “These guys know they can’t lie to me like they used to lie to Hoover.”

  Nixon was relentless. “I’ve got to have a relationship here where you go out and do something and deny on a stack of Bibles.”

  “Right,” said Gray. “I understand.”

  “I don’t have anybody else,” Nixon said. “I can’t hire some asshole from the outside.” He went on, his rage simmering. “There were times when I felt that the only person in this goddamned government who was standing with me was Edgar Hoover.… He would break his ass if he saw something that was wrong being done, if somebody was pissing on us.… What you’ve got to do is to do like Hoover.”

  “It’s going to be a bloody confirmation,” Nixon warned Gray. “You’ve got to be prepared to take the heat and get bloodied up. But if you do go through a bloody one, let’s remember that you’re probably going to be in for just four years. And then they’re gonna throw you out. So let’s get in there and do some good for the country.… This country, this bureaucracy—Pat, you know this—it’s crawling with, Pat, at best, at best, unloyal people and at worst treasonable people.”

  “Treasonable people,” Gray repeated.

  “We have got to get them, break them,” Nixon said. “The way to get them is through you. See?”

  * * *

  On February 22, Nixon smuggled Sen. Howard Baker into the presidential hideaway at the Executive Office Building. It was extremely rare for any aspect of the president’s day to go unrecorded in the official White House logs. This was an exception. Senator Baker, a photogenic and politically ambitious Tennessee Republican, would be the ranking minority member of the Watergate Committee. He was eager to please the president. He laid out the committee’s plans, and the next day in the Oval Office Nixon gave Ehrlichman a full account of their conversation.

  “I must have scared him to death,” Nixon said. “I put it very hard to Baker.”

  Nixon said the senators planned first to take testimony from “a lot of pipsqueak witnesses, little shit-asses, over periods of weeks to build it up, the pressure.” But then, “you got to call Haldeman, you got to call Ehrlichman.” The president laid down the law—or his version of it. He said he would assert “executive privilege” to keep his White House staff from being dragged before the committee.

  The Constitution is silent on the question of executive privilege, and the Supreme Court had never confronted it. But two prior presidents had invoked it. One was Dwight Eisenhower; the other, Harry Truman. Twenty-five years before, Truman asserted the privilege to protect government personnel records from congressmen—most notably, Richard Nixon—chasing Communists such as Alger Hiss. This confrontation was at the center of chapter one in Nixon’s 1962 memoir Six Crises. Back then, Nixon had fought against executive privilege. Now he had to fight for it.

  But he could not invoke the privilege in order to keep the silence of people outside presidential command—such as John Mitchell, hunkered down at his New York law firm, trying to raise hush money for the Watergate defendants; Chuck Colson, who had left the White House days before; and Herb Kalmbach, the president’s private attorney, fund-raiser, and financier. Each was in legal peril.

  “What are they going to say?” Nixon asked, dreading the answer, though he already knew it in part. “They raised the money?”

  “There’s a hell of a lot of money, and it floated around, and there weren’t receipts, and there was funny bookkeeping, and money went to Mexico and back, and there were just a hell of a lot of odds and ends,” Ehrlichman replied.

  “What’ll Mitchell say?
” the president wondered.

  “I don’t know,” Ehrlichman admitted. “He’s been puffing his pipe and looking at the ceiling and saying, ‘You guys got a problem.’”

  After discussing four more present and former White House aides who might have problems testifying truthfully, they turned to Colson.

  “He’ll perjure himself,” said the president.

  If the president’s aides defied the Senate Watergate Committee when it subpoenaed witnesses, “in effect we take the Fifth Amendment,” Ehrlichman said. “Is that worse?”

  “Yeah, it’s a cover-up,” Nixon said. “The cover-up is worse than whatever comes out. It really is—unless somebody is going to jail.” The president had a prescient vision of what lay ahead: a ceaseless procession of investigations, interrogations, and indictments.

  “I’m not going to let anybody go to jail,” he vowed. “That I promise you.”

  * * *

  One week later, on February 27, the president summoned his thirty-three-year-old White House counsel, John Dean, for the first of thirty tape-recorded conversations they would have about Watergate over the next forty-nine days. Though Nixon droned on about the Hiss case and dreamed of a counterattack against Congress, these conversations centered on two conundrums: the cover-up and covering up the cover-up.

  Nixon first asked about the sentencing of the seven Watergate defendants. Dean told him that Judge Sirica, “Maximum John,” was delaying judgment day until March, using presentencing interrogations by probation officers to conduct his own inquisition into the case—and trying to coerce confessions. “This judge may go off the deep end in his sentencing,” Dean warned.

  Then there would be the Senate Watergate Committee to face in May. The president said he had told Senator Baker to run things just as Nixon had run the Hiss case. “But the committee is after someone in the White House,” Nixon said. “They’d like to get Haldeman, Colson, or Ehrlichman.”