One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  Sirica gaveled the court into silence. Then he brought down the hammer on the other defendants: up to twenty years for Liddy, thirty-five for Hunt, and forty for the Cubans. He said the sentences would be reduced if the men cooperated by coming clean with the Senate committee.*

  Nixon and Haldeman spent four days in Key Biscayne consumed by the case. Dean holed up in Camp David laboring on a written Watergate report for the president. Haldeman called him there on March 24. Dean said, “The problem is we’ve been bailing out everybody else and it’s gotten out of hand and compounded the problem. Now we have to protect ourselves.” They spoke again the next day. “He’s back to his cancer theory, that we’ve got to cut the thing out,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. But where to make the first cut? He and Dean talked a third time on Monday, March 26.

  “He feels that Mitchell has a problem and Mitchell may not realize it,” Haldeman wrote. “Then he went into a great deal of detail on what he sees as the really serious problems now. The main one is the blackmail situation. He says he was aware that Mitchell and others were being blackmailed by those involved in the Watergate thing.”

  The two tried to tally how much already had been paid to the Watergate defendants and their lawyers through funds controlled by Mitchell, Haldeman, Kalmbach, and CREEP. It came to more than five hundred thousand dollars. “Dean feels he’s not in a position to fully evaluate the blackmail situation,” Haldeman wrote, “but it’s clear that all concerned felt there were dire threats to the White House, and when you’re being blackmailed you imagine the worst.”

  Haldeman spent six hours with the president that day, going in circles on the Watergate case, shrouded in misery as the sun shone on the Florida seashore: “It’s a beautiful day at Key Biscayne, which I spent inside, locked in the P’s villa. We’ll leave late tonight to go back to Washington.”

  The president faced the prospect of the Senate Watergate Committee hearings in seven weeks. On March 27 he mused, “A committee of Congress is a double weapon. It destroys a man’s reputation in public. And if it turns its files over to the Department of Justice for prosecution, they will prosecute the poor bastards.… I did it to Hiss.”

  Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean now began to contemplate hiring criminal lawyers. All realized that “it isn’t going to get any better on Watergate,” as Nixon told Haldeman in the Oval Office on March 30. “It’s going to get worse.… It’s going to go on and on and on and on.”

  Nixon decided to retreat to San Clemente for a week. Before he returned to Washington, on Sunday, April 8, John Dean held an informal off-the-record meeting with federal prosecutors. He had told Haldeman of his plans. Haldeman responded with a memorable admonition: “Just remember that once the toothpaste is out of the tube it’s going to be very tough to get back in.” By now, Dean wrote, he was halfway out: “One foot in the White House and one foot outside it.”

  On April 9, Nixon and Haldeman had a hushed and haunting conversation about “recording what is going on in this room,” as the president put it. “I feel uneasy about that.” The tapes could be of great value to Nixon. He could keep them for a presidential memoir that could make millions. They would protect him against the inevitability that Kissinger would write his own version of history.

  But if anyone else ever heard the tapes they could pose a great danger.

  “I think we should destroy them,” Nixon said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Vietnam had found its successor”

  THAT SPRING was a dark season for Richard Nixon. Each week brought deluges of bad news. The downpours turned to floods, and the rising torrents slowly eroded the stone wall surrounding the White House. The wars of Watergate consumed every waking moment.

  “Vietnam had found its successor,” Nixon wrote, underscoring every word.

  Friday, April 13: John Dean relayed inside information from federal prosecutors to the White House, and his news was dismal, befitting the day. Dean had served as a kind of human switchboard in the cover-up, conferring with every central participant. Now he was using his lawyers to winkle information out of federal investigators, even as he dangled a promise of becoming a witness for the prosecutors.

  Howard Hunt was set to appear Monday afternoon before the Watergate grand jury; he had blackmailed the White House by threatening to reveal “seamy stories,” and he knew several. Up next was Jeb Stuart Magruder, whose will to continue committing perjury was weakening. If Magruder testified truthfully, he could incriminate John Mitchell—the “Big Enchilada,” as Ehrlichman called him, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer from 1969 to 1972, and of late the president’s raiser of hush money. And if Mitchell were indicted, “that’s the ball game,” Nixon said.*

  Saturday, April 14: Nixon spent seven hours strategizing with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, talking until midnight. They started by speculating about what Hunt might say to the prosecutors. “Question: Is Hunt prepared to talk on other activities he engaged in?” Nixon asked. These included breaking into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, forging diplomatic cables implicating JFK in the assassination of South Vietnam’s president, and being paid for his silence at trial. The demands for money in exchange for silence had not ceased; Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman discussed how to smuggle more than $300,000 in cash out of the White House and into the hands of the convicted burglars. “Hunt’s testimony on hush money,” Nixon said, could lead prosecutors to the president’s doorstep. They wrestled with the implications of Magruder’s testimony. Ehrlichman composed an imaginary magazine story: “The White House’s main effort to cover up finally collapsed last week when the grand jury indicted John Mitchell and Jeb Magruder.… The White House press secretary, Ron Ziegler, said the White House would have no comment.” The president moaned like a wounded man.

  Magruder had just pointed a dagger close to the heart of the White House. “I’m going to plead guilty” and testify for the prosecution, he told Haldeman, who taped their telephone conversation. Magruder had implicated John Mitchell that day in an informal conversation with federal investigators. “I am in a terrible position because I committed perjury so many times” in the Watergate case and the cover-up. He couldn’t take it anymore, he said, and he had to seek absolution. Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman had arrived at a moment of truth—or falsehood. The Watergate break-in was one problem. The greater danger was the cover-up and the peril it posed to the president if it began coming apart.

  “There were eight or ten people around here who knew about this,” Ehrlichman said. “Bob knew. I knew.”

  Then Nixon said—as if unconscious of his rolling tapes—“Well, I knew.” He was acutely aware that he was doomed if Dean testified about the cancer on his presidency and the million-dollar cure.

  Haldeman: “If Dean testifies, it’s going to unscramble the whole omelet.”

  Ehrlichman: “Dean seems to think that everybody in the place is going to get indicted,” said—referring to himself as well as Mitchell, Haldeman, Colson, and ten more prominent presidential appointees—on charges including “paying the defendants for the purposes of keeping them, quote, on the reservation, unquote.”

  Nixon: “They could try to tie you and Bob into a conspiracy to obstruct justice.”

  As night fell, Dean returned from the Justice Department to deliver more startling news to the White House: that afternoon, Haldeman and Ehrlichman had become targets of the federal grand jury. Now no one could predict how far up the chain of command the criminal case could climb.

  Ehrlichman, who recently had started taping his own telephone conversations, called Mitchell’s successor, Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. He began by saying he had spent the day with the president and had made some phone calls on his behalf.

  EHRLICHMAN: The first one I talked to was your predecessor. Then I talked to Magruder.… He has decided to come clean.

  KLEINDIENST: No kidding?… Inconsistent with his testimony before the grand jury?

  EHRLICHMAN: D
ramatically inconsistent.

  KLEINDIENST: Holy shit!

  EHRLICHMAN: And he implicates everybody in all directions up and down the Committee to Re-Elect.

  KLEINDIENST: Mitchell?

  EHRLICHMAN: Yep, cold turkey.

  “John,” the attorney general said, giving truly gratuitous legal advice, “it seems to me that you are going to have to be very careful.”

  * * *

  The fates, so often cruel to Richard Nixon, now forced the president, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Kleindienst to don formal evening wear and attend the annual cavalcade of self-congratulation called the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The most prominent awards went to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post for their coverage of Watergate, a slap in the president’s face.

  Nixon, to his credit, turned the other cheek, making mildly amusing remarks from the dais at the Washington Hilton Hotel. “It is a privilege to be here at the White House Correspondents Dinner. I suppose I should say it is an executive privilege,” he began. The president praised a man with “the most difficult job in this country,” his press secretary, Ron Ziegler. “I must say you have really worked him over,” Nixon said. “This morning he came into the office a little early, and I said, ‘What time is it, Ron?’ He said, ‘Could I put that on background?’”

  The after-dinner receptions were still going strong, the liquor still flowing, when, shortly after midnight, Henry Petersen, chief of the criminal division of the Justice Department, telephoned Kleindienst at the hotel in a state of high agitation. He said they had to meet at once.

  They gathered at Kleindienst’s home, along with the four top federal prosecutors in the Watergate case, as Petersen laid out a riveting summary of the case before them. John Dean and his lawyer had been talking to the prosecutors about a proffer, a provisional statement offered in hope of immunity from prosecution. Though the government had promised him nothing, Dean had delivered a devastating account of cover-ups and conspiracies conducted by Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and others. Dean had never showed his hole card—what he knew about Nixon’s conduct as coconspirator in chief—but the prosecutors were convinced Dean wasn’t bluffing.

  The meeting broke up at 5:00 a.m. “I didn’t sleep but I did weep,” Kleindienst remembered.

  * * *

  Sunday, April 15: Kleindienst called Nixon unbidden at 8:41 a.m. The president neither liked nor respected his attorney general. He saw Kleindienst as a weakling, incapable of controlling the criminal investigation threatening the White House. Kleindienst was on the verge of resigning, but Nixon was one step ahead; the president had resolved to replace him as soon as possible.

  Red-eyed, tear-stained, Kleindienst talked to Nixon for seventy minutes later that morning. The recording of their conversation was cut short at a crucial moment: an entire reel of tape went missing forever from the White House. But Kleindienst vividly remembered one crucial point. He asked Nixon if a special prosecutor should take over the Watergate case. Clearly Kleindienst could not preside in a case against his close friend Mitchell. But few legal precedents guided the special prosecutor question. The Constitution commands the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But in a criminal case where evidence might be locked away within the White House, the powers of a special prosecutor might have to be settled by Congress or the Supreme Court.

  Kleindienst returned at 4:00 p.m. with Petersen, who had been cleaning his boat and, as he entered the president’s elegant hideaway at the Executive Office Building, wore sneakers, dirty jeans, and a T-shirt smelling faintly of turpentine. Petersen was a strong-willed man who, like Richard Nixon, had gone to work in Washington in 1947, though Petersen had been an FBI clerk and Nixon a freshman member of Congress. Petersen tried to impress upon Nixon the seriousness of the fact that Haldeman and Ehrlichman faced criminal indictments. He was struck by the calm with which Nixon took the news. If was as if Nixon already knew—and he did.

  Petersen argued that Haldeman and Ehrlichman should resign forthwith. Nixon said he would defend them until they were proven guilty.

  “What you have said, Mr. President, speaks very well of you as a man,” Petersen replied. “It does not speak well of you as a president.”

  The president quickly left the White House. He spent two hours aboard the Sequoia, accompanied by Bebe Rebozo, who said he could raise two or three hundred thousand dollars to help Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Alcohol was involved in their colloquy. When John Dean came to the White House later that evening, at the president’s request, Nixon was still under the influence.

  “Clearly he had been drinking, and while not drunk, he seemed exhausted, slurring his words,” Dean wrote, and the way in which Nixon spoke to him—asking leading questions, giving misleading answers—“made me wonder (as I later testified) if he was recording me.” Upon taking his leave, Dean said, “I had to muster considerable fortitude to advise the president of the United States that if he did not handle this problem correctly it could result in his impeachment.”

  Ehrlichman, who seems to have taken perverse pleasure in bearing bad news by phone, called Pat Gray at around 11:00 p.m. He said Dean had told federal prosecutors that Gray had taken the bogus cables from Hunt’s safe—and Gray confessed that he had burned them. Gray already had perjured himself before the Judiciary Committee on this very question. Horrified at the disgrace he faced, Gray said, “What the hell am I going to do?” Ten days later, he confessed to lying and resigned as acting FBI director. In time, he considered suicide.

  * * *

  Monday, April 16: Dean had decided to bear witness against his White House colleagues. He went to see the president at 10:00 a.m. with a draft of a letter of resignation in his pocket. Dean said he would not lie to protect John Mitchell or anyone else conspiring in the cover-up.

  Henry Petersen returned that afternoon to confront the president with fresh news from inside the Watergate investigation—all devastating for Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Haldeman had known about the plans to bug the DNC’s headquarters; then he’d kept copies of transcripts from the wiretaps. Ehrlichman had demanded that Dean “deep-six” the documents from Hunt’s safe (the papers Pat Gray had burned) and had then commanded Hunt to leave the country.

  Finally, that evening, Nixon and Dean reconstructed from memory Liddy’s original proposal to Mitchell—the buggings, the muggings, the kidnappers, the hookers—and considered whether any hard evidence, not hearsay, could hang the break-in on Mitchell.*

  “Everyone’s in the middle of this, John,” Nixon said.

  Dean handed the president a revised letter requesting a leave of absence. On that grim note, the two men parted for the last time.

  * * *

  Tuesday, April 17: Watergate investigators commanded by Mark Felt knocked at the doors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “The FBI has just served a subpoena on our White House police,” Ehrlichman told the president. It sought the names of the people who had been cleared to enter the White House on June 18, 1972.

  NIXON: Jesus Christ.

  EHRLICHMAN: Now what in the hell?

  NIXON: Where were we then?

  HALDEMAN: What date?

  NIXON: Ah, June 18.

  HALDEMAN: June 18.

  EHRLICHMAN: The day of the bugging.… I bet it’s the Hunt safe thing.

  NIXON: I need somebody around here as counsel.

  HALDEMAN: And Attorney General.

  NIXON: I need a Director of the FBI.

  Shortly before 5:00 p.m., Nixon gave a formal statement on Watergate to the White House press corps. He said that on March 21—immediately after John Dean’s dire warning of a cancer on the presidency, a diagnosis that Nixon did not disclose—he had initiated “intensive new inquiries” into Watergate. “Last Sunday afternoon, the Attorney General, Assistant Attorney General Petersen, and I met at length in the EOB to review the facts which had come to me in my investigation.”

  “Real progress has been made in finding the truth
,” Nixon declared—a bit of truth, perhaps, but not the whole truth.

  At 11:45 p.m., after a state dinner for the prime minister of Italy and a scintillating concert by Frank Sinatra, the president called Henry Kissinger from the White House. Their conversation went on past midnight and into the wee hours of April 18.

  Nixon was slightly inebriated and deeply despondent. He spoke of “throwing myself on the sword.” The idea appalled Kissinger. “You have saved this country, Mr. President. The history books will show that, when no one will know what Watergate means.” But Nixon would not be consoled. “It’s a human tragedy,” Kissinger conceded.

  Thursday, April 19: Nixon went up to the mountaintop at Camp David. After a brief White House Cabinet meeting the next morning, in which Watergate went unmentioned, he flew down to Key Biscayne, where he remained until April 24. He spent much of his four-day Easter weekend boating with Rebozo. Nixon deleted the names of his visitors from that weekend’s White House logs. But one of them was Horace Chapman Rose, known as Chappie, Ike’s treasury undersecretary and Nixon’s occasional confidant for two decades. Toward the close of a bleak three-hour talk, Chappie Rose quoted William Gladstone, whose first term as British prime minister began in 1868, a century before Nixon was elected president. The aphorism—which may have been apocryphal—was that the first essential for a prime minister was to be a good butcher.

  The president prepared his knives.

  Wednesday, April 25: Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman had a harsh three-hour talk in the Executive Office Building. Ehrlichman had just learned about the White House tapes. “If matters are not handled adroitly, you could get a resolution of impeachment,” Ehrlichman said, “on the ground that you committed a crime.” He argued that the president should listen to the tapes and assess the threat they represented. Nixon handed this immense task to Haldeman.