The Wars of Watergate

by Stanley I. Kutler

  It was a triumphant moment for Nixon, Mitchell, and Haldeman. They savored it, and indulged themselves in flights of self-congratulation. For the President, it was the history he would write, and would want others to remember from the 1972 campaign. Nothing was said among the President and his men, however, of the dark secret that lingered between them.

  Wright Patman was depressed. The Democrats seemed to be in disarray despite maintaining their hold on Congress. And George McGovern, their routed standard-bearer, was dismayed. Speaking at Oxford University two months after his defeat, McGovern remarked that he thought Congress would become ineffective and that Nixon was closer “to one-man rule than at any time in our history,” and this, McGovern said, “by a president who is not popular.” Petulant, paradoxical, and possibly correct. “After the disastrous reigns of three King Richards, England had been spared a King Richard IV,” McGovern observed, but “we seem to have him—for four more years.”51

  However muted in the fall of 1972, the sounds of Watergate were to resonate from the outset of the President’s new term. The talk of a “money trail,” a “cover-up,” and a “special prosecutor” barely played outside Washington during the campaign. They would soon become household words in America.

  John Dean still had his tasks, busily trying to keep the ball of yarn tightly wrapped. His “firm” was esteemed in inner circles—and was ever more indispensable. “John Dean is handling the entire Watergate matter now,” Haldeman told Colson in March 1973, “and any questions or input you have should be directed to him and to no one else.” For the President, John Dean was “a superb young man.” Later, others would, with anger and bitterness, argue that Dean had “organized and directed” the resistance to the Patman hearings, miraculously absolving anyone else of responsibility and culpability—the incontrovertible evidence of the Oval Office tapes notwithstanding.52

  Dean had so established himself that in December 1972 he boldly sent out a revised job description for the office of President’s Counsel. He listed approximately twenty routine tasks, including clearance of executive orders and proclamations; reviews of presidential appointees requiring Senate confirmation; “game planning” of confirmation hearings; recommending presidential pardons and clemency; solving military-justice problems; monitoring use of the presidential seal; overseeing the Nixon Foundation and Library; writing the President’s estate plan; and the disposal of the President’s papers. Then there were ad hoc assignments, such as preparing contracts for a film of the President’s China trip, interviewing Supreme Court nominees, and conducting certain “special projects,” including the handling of Watergate and Donald Segretti. Dean found it all a “mixed bag,” but he boldly stated the unifying element in the Counsel’s many jobs: the objective was to keep “the President and his people out of trouble or, if we arrive too late on the scene, getting them out of trouble.”

  Self-congratulations out of the way, Dean proposed a bold, wide-ranging reorganization of his office that would expand its functions and its staff. He wanted a mandate to handle and resolve questions of law, and he wanted to be charged with the formulation of all policies that affected the President or were incidental to the presidency. As Dean described it, his office would be inserted as an adjunct of Haldeman’s, touching the flow of work in and out and maintaining overall responsibility for ensuring that legal decisions in the executive branch conformed to the President’s policies and objectives.

  Dean’s démarche effectively gave him access and influence for almost any function in the executive branch. Only bits and pieces of the plan were implemented; the most important steps in reorganization were not. The turn of events in the next months doomed Dean’s grandiose scheme. But it was a measure of his influence and standing that he proposed such an obvious reach for his own power—and apparently was in no way rebuked. Perhaps the young Counsel was a “service facility,” as Haldeman later characterized him, but he was a highly valuable one.53

  Dean, it will be remembered, barely saw the President during his first two years in the White House Counsel’s office. His December 1972 memo redefining and expanding his duties was designed to give him a central role as the President’s man. Had he succeeded in his primary role as the linchpin of the cover-up, his gambit might well have been an offer that neither the President nor Haldeman could have lightly refused.

  “We want the air cleared,” the President said at his August 29, 1972, press conference. “We want it cleared as soon as possible.” With John Dean as his primary instrument, and aided by loyal congressional and executive-branch lieutenants, the President cleared some important hurdles, but the clouds lingered. John Dean had made good on his promise that nothing would interfere with the election results. He planned and executed the design for thwarting any legislative inquiry into the Watergate affair and possible White House involvement. That was the bottom line. But Dean acted on the wishes of the President, as expressed in their September 15 meeting. They were only words, only fantasies in which Nixon indulged himself, Nixon’s defenders have argued. “At that time,” a former aide noted, Richard Nixon was only “guilty of being a pain in the ass.”54 But the President talked tough, and his counsel promised he would “play rough” to stop Patman’s inquiry. Words had become actions, and a “third-rate burglary” had escalated to real political hardball.

  In March 1973, Colson told the President that Dean had “done a spectacular job. I don’t think anybody could do as good a job as John has done.” From the other side of the fence, Dean also received lavish praise when FBI investigators later acknowledged “that the President’s most senior associates at the White House conspired for nine months to obstruct our investigation.”55 The President’s Counsel had not yet fallen from grace. On September 15, 1972, John Dean had promised the President fifty-four days; he had delivered more.

  X

  “THE COVER-UP IS THE MAIN INGREDIENT.”

  A BLACKMAILER, A SENATOR, AND A JUDGE NOVEMBER 1972–MARCH 1973

  President Nixon’s anticipated policies and personnel shifts for his second term dominated the post-election news. Watergate remained a back-page item in the nation’s consciousness. Meanwhile, the new year stimulated Nixon’s self-confidence. Fresh from his electoral triumph, privately noting the milestone of his sixtieth birthday, he looked back at milestones of the previous decades, finding significance in all years ending with the number 3. For 1933, he noted his college prize in extemporaneous speaking; 1943, his service in the South Pacific; 1953, his election as Vice President; 1963, his defeat for governor of California; and for 1973, his re-election as President. His fudging of the last three dates—the significant years actually ended in a 2—apparently did not bother him.

  Nixon also jotted down some Ben Franklin-style aphorisms: “No man is finished—until he quits,” he wrote. Blessed with his own good health, he listed older men he admired who had achieved much in their later years: Dwight Eisenhower, Charles de Gaulle, Yoshida Shigeru, Konrad Adenauer, Winston Churchill, and Zhou Enlai. Finally, he offered some stern injunctions to himself: “Live every day as if last—Never let a day go by w/out doing something useful—Think young.”1

  Despite the President’s high spirits, within the inner circles of the Nixon White House Watergate slowly but perceptibly loomed larger. Pat Buchanan warned the President in early December 1972 that Watergate was not behind him. There was dissatisfaction “even among our staunchest friends,” Buchanan wrote, “and calls for the President to clean house.” Some of those closest to the President were admittedly “concerned,” H. R. Haldeman recalled, about things that “we felt boded trouble.” Leonard Garment was optimistic about the second term yet also feared the cloud of Watergate. People were beginning to come to him wondering whether they might have some legal problems—“no one would come and say this was a real serious problem,” he recalled, “but there were different things.”2

  Mastery of the Watergate cover-up demanded ever-increasing time and resources. The cover-up begat
more cover-up, enlarging so as to plant the seeds of its destruction. Meanwhile, the President’s familiar enemies—Congress, the government bureaucracy, and the media—began to look beyond the White House version of Watergate as a “third-rate burglary.” New wars seemed in the offing. For good reason, a channel of apprehension paralleled the confident course of the Nixon White House after the November election.

  In the wake of his electoral triumph, Nixon was determined to seize the moment to reshape the government and bend it to his will. His dissatisfaction with personnel was not confined to his historic resentment toward the entrenched bureaucracy; it extended to the highest levels of government, including officials he himself had appointed. As the election approached and his victory seemed more assured, he speculated ceaselessly with his trusted aides on the days of reckoning that would follow the election. In this period, restructuring the government preoccupied the President more in his discussions with Haldeman and Ehrlichman than anything save the details of the campaign itself. He often quoted Benjamin Disraeli’s description of William Gladstone as an “exhausted volcano,” as if to ensure and underscore that such would not be his fate.

  Richard Nixon persisted in thinking that everything would go well if he persuaded the nation of his positive achievements. It was, as always, “really a question of PR. Actually, we have done a number of things very well, but we have had an enormously difficult time getting it [sic] across.” He warmly praised his foreign-policy achievements and various “goodies” in the domestic area, such as the fight on drugs and crime, and the nation’s economic recovery. He told aides to seize three, at most four, major achievements “and put the PR emphasis on them virtually to the exclusion of others so that the Administration will be remembered for at least doing something very well rather than being forgotten because we did a number of things pretty well.” Perhaps, Nixon suggested, he might offer action in dormant areas, such as women’s rights (“just to take a way out example,” he said) or enhancing the legacy of the national parks.3

  “There are no sacred cows,” the President remarked in an interview published just after his re-election. “We will tear up the pea patch.” On November 8, one day after the election, the President assembled the White House staff and Cabinet, thanked them for their efforts, said (again) “there would be no sacred cows,” and talked vaguely about new directions and goals for a second term—reiterating that his government would not consist of “exhausted volcanoes.” Thereupon, he left the room, turning the meeting over to Haldeman, who promptly demanded everyone’s resignation. The intention was clear: there would be new directions and new managers, ones who would swear fealty to Richard Nixon. The program was summed up by a White House adviser active in what he called the “plot” to advance the administrative presidency and the President’s power: the new team was “to take on the Congress and take over the bureaucracy.”

  The taste of triumph quickly soured for the Administration’s celebrants and stalwarts as they contemplated the President’s wholesale demands for resignation. The record showed one significant area of resistance. Richard Helms told his CIA deputy, Vernon Walters, that they would not submit the usual post-election courtesy resignations. Alexander Haig had assured Helms that he could continue for another year, until he reached retirement age. But Helms was forced to resign in late November and received the dubious prize of the ambassadorship to Iran. It was a time of revenge for the victorious President.4

  The President’s desire for loyal subordinates reflected his conviction that executive officers in each agency must respond to his focused policy concerns rather than conforming to the agency’s inertia or its interest in aggrandizing its own power. As the second term approached, Nixon sensed that after four years, the more things had changed, the more they had remained the same. Congress, the bureaucracy, and the media, as always, “worked in concert to maintain the ideas and ideology of the traditional Eastern liberal establishment” that had animated the New Deal and the Kennedy-Johnson years. Just as he had in his 1968 campaign, he ignored or sought to bypass Congress to forge an alliance between himself and the New American Majority—his new label for the hitherto Silent Majority. Nixon was prepared to reform, replace, or circumvent institutions that had become “paralyzed by self-doubt.” Government, like so much of American life, he believed, had become infected with a “fashionable negativism” and “underlying loss of will.” Now, he would lead; he would “provide America with a positive and … inspirational example of leadership that would be … an impetus for a new rebirth of optimism.” He told Haldeman that he was “going to wear the flag, come hell or high water.”5

  Charles Colson knew exactly what the President wanted. Just after the election, he forwarded private correspondence of Solicitor General Erwin Griswold to Ehrlichman to prove that Griswold “belongs in his overdue retirement.” Colson also recruited New York labor leader Peter Brennan for the post of Secretary of Labor. In a three-hour meeting he “clarified” matters for Brennan. Colson warned him that he might have to defend Administration policies, in opposition to organized labor. Brennan assured Colson he would be a “team player” and would abide by Administration decisions. Colson “explained” the “pre-eminent” role of Teamsters’ Union President Frank Fitzsimmons, implying that “Fitz” was not to have any trouble. Colson then told Brennan just who was in charge of the Labor Department: the President would appoint the Under Secretary and Assistant Secretary, and Brennan would clean out “holdovers, enemy bureaucrats and deadwood, replacing them with loyalists.” Colson reported that Brennan, a Bronx Democrat, wanted to help the Republicans gain labor’s “permanent allegiance.”6

  Ehrlichman’s office offered some shrewd advice early in 1973 for reducing confrontational politics with Congress, quite in contrast to the long-prevailing style of the Nixon Administration. The basic strategy, it was argued, should be to “deinstitutionalize” conflicts and instead present them as confrontations between the President—elected as he was by over 60 percent of those voting—and the New Minority, deeply entrenched in Congress, the media, and the academic world. This so-called New Minority represented interests quite alien to those of Richard Nixon’s New Majority and easily could be identified with those who served unlikable special interests—such as Senator Edward Kennedy on labor policies; Senator William Proxmire on banking affairs; Senators J. William Fulbright and Frank Church on dovish peace and defense policies; the broadcast networks and their personalities, including Walter Cronkite, Roger Mudd, Dan Rather, and John Chancellor; the New York Times and the Washington Post; the liberal foundations; and those with no “fixed address,” such as Ramsey Clark.

  The document marked a significant maturation from the reflexive anti-congressional statements of the 1970 campaign and the crude, even boorish concept of “enemies lists.” What it also represented was a recognition that the Administration had to respect and bargain with Congress. The Democrats remained in solid control; Republicans, meanwhile, were none too happy with Nixon’s preoccupation with swelling his 1972 vote totals while failing to seriously contest more congressional races.7

  Nixon told Haldeman shortly after the election that Congress would be “mean and testy,” but he would keep it “off balance” by shifting personnel in and out of the White House and the executive agencies. The President later rationalized his action in poker terms, a metaphor much to his liking. He thought that the Democrats had “all four aces” in Washington: Congress, the bureaucracy, the media, and the lawyers and lobbyists. He was determined to keep the “fifth ace” for himself in the form of a vigorous opposition party.8

  In an August 3, 1972, meeting with John Ehrlichman, the President talked of gaining control with new appointments in such areas as the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, and Federal Bureau of Investigation. Nixon wanted all appointed Treasury officials, including the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, dismissed after the election and a Nixon loyalist installed as deputy to Treasury Secretary George Shultz.

 
; The IRS post particularly interested Nixon. It was another “sore” he rubbed because he believed that the agency had harassed his family and friends. Repeatedly, he insisted to his aides that he wanted a Commissioner to faithfully do his bidding. In a “talking paper” prepared for the President’s meeting with George Webster, a prospective IRS Commissioner, Nixon indicated that the post was “one of the most sensitive” jobs in government, and he expected Webster “to track” with Shultz on day-to-day matters and with Ehrlichman “on matters of political significance and sensitivity.” The President also was to tell Webster to clean out entrenched “deadwood,” and that he was to work with White House aides on this matter. At the last moment, however, Nixon chose not to tender the position.9