RN

by Richard Nixon

Friday, June 16, began with a Cabinet meeting on the Republican platform proposals. Then I had an hour-long session with James Hodgson, Elliot Richardson, and members of my staff on welfare reform. My official schedule ended at 12:45 P.M. with a posthumous presentation ceremony of the Medal of Freedom for John Paul Vann, the courageous head of the Second Regional Assistance group in South Vietnam, who was killed in a helicopter crash.

  In the afternoon, I left for a weekend in Florida. I was on my own; Pat was making appearances on the West Coast, and the girls were with their husbands. In my briefcase I had a Buchanan campaign memorandum, the briefing materials on welfare reform, and my well-thumbed copy of Irving Kristol’s On the Democratic Idea in America. I also brought a copy of Triumph and Tragedy, the last volume of Churchill’s World War II series, because after the recent Soviet Summit I wanted to reread his analysis of the Yalta conference.

  THE WATERGATE BREAK-IN

  I spent Friday afternoon and all day Saturday on Grand Cay, a small island in the Bahamas owned by my old friend Bob Abplanalp. The weather was spotty, but I went for a swim and took a walk around the island. The caretaker’s wife gave me two brightly colored shirts she had made for me, and I talked with her twelve-year-old daughter, who showed me some of the turtles she had been raising.

  On Saturday, June 17, I called the mainland only once, to check in with Haldeman. We talked for four minutes. I asked him to find out where I could reach John Connally, who was on a thirty-five-day trip around the world. I also told him to be sure that we had a plank in the Republican platform supporting federal aid to parochial schools. In the afternoon I went boating with Rebozo and Abplanalp.

  On Sunday morning, June 18, Rebozo and I left for Key Biscayne. When I got to my house I could smell coffee brewing in the kitchen, and I went in to get a cup. There was a Miami Herald on the counter, and I glanced over the front page. The main headline was about the Vietnam withdrawals: Ground Combat Role Nears End for U.S.

  There was a small story in the middle of the page on the left-hand side, under the headline: Miamians Held in D.C. Try to Bug Demo Headquarters.

  I scanned the opening paragraphs. Five men, four of them from Miami, had been arrested in the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate, a fashionable hotel, office, and apartment complex in Washington. The story said that one of the five men had identified himself as a former employee of the CIA; three of the others were Cuban natives. They had all been wearing rubber surgical gloves. It sounded preposterous: Cubans in surgical gloves bugging the DNC! I dismissed it as some sort of prank. I looked at the feature story at the bottom of the page dealing with the campaign: How McGovern Camp Figures to Win. I left the paper on the counter and went to make some phone calls.

  I reached Haldeman at the Key Biscayne Hotel, where he was staying with the rest of the traveling staff. We briefly discussed whether to have a signing ceremony for the higher education bill. Then we turned to some intriguing news about George Meany—news that had the potential of becoming one of the most important developments of the 1972 campaign. Meany had told George Shultz that if Humphrey failed to get the Democratic nomination, he would not support McGovern. Meany’s—and that meant a large part of organized labor’s—benevolent neutrality would breach the traditional Democratic coalition and be a tremendous boost to my campaign.

  I called Tricia and Julie, who wished me a happy Father’s Day, and I talked to Pat, who was in Los Angeles on a three-day series of appearances that had begun in Texas and was scheduled to end in South Dakota. I talked with Al Haig and then with Kissinger, who had stopped over in Hawaii en route to Peking. In the afternoon I called Chuck Colson to discuss the Meany development with him. Then I went for a long swim in the ocean.

  Shortly after 6 P.M. I reached John Connally in Australia and received a glowing report on his trip. I called Colson again for a short talk about my concern that most of the media would be sympathetic to McGovern. Rebozo came over for dinner, and we watched a movie. Afterward I called Jack Nicklaus, who had just won the U.S. Open in Pebble Beach. I congratulated him on his victory and commiserated about the putts that had seemed to go in the hole and out.

  I decided to make an early night of it. Before I went to bed, I sat in my study reading the last chapters of Triumph and Tragedy.

  A steady sun and a light breeze made Monday a beautiful day. I did not bother to look at the morning paper but went straight to my study to make calls. The Watergate break-in was still the furthest thing from my mind as I talked with Julie, Tricia, Rose Woods, Al Haig, and Billy Graham. I also talked with Chuck Colson; the only note that I dictated in my diary about our conversation recounted our detailed analysis of a new set of poll figures covering everything from confidence in presidential leadership to the economy. I made two short calls to Haldeman concerning the day’s schedule, and then he came over and we met for an hour. We discussed the possibility that George Wallace would become a third-party candidate, the increase in food prices, the appointment of a new Chief of Protocol, and the schedule for the coming week. In the afternoon I went boating and took a long walk before dinner. At 7:48 P.M. I boarded Air Force One for the flight to Washington.

  Late that night, back at the White House, I brought my diary up to date. Buried amid observations on the weekend’s weather and reflections on the general benefits of relaxation was my first entry dealing with Watergate.

  Diary

  I almost decided to go back Sunday night, but a hurricane passed nearby, and the winds were so strong that we thought it would be a rather miserable ride although we probably could have gotten out without too much difficulty.

  The following day the winds had passed on, and it was the best of all the days. In fact, the best of the six days, including the three immediately after returning from Moscow two weeks ago, and these three. The extra day, with good long swims in the morning and the afternoon, gave me, it seemed to me, a much bigger lift than I had realized was possible. I must make it a point to try to get three full days in the future, and, of course, always try to get the situation developed where I can have peace of mind and good weather if possible.

  I am convinced that it is essential to get more exercise. I think one of the reasons that I feel tonight not only more rested but frankly more sharp and more eager to get work done is because I have had rest, and also have had the fresh air and the exercise. I am going to try a routine of bowling for a half hour at the end of each day before coming over to the Residence. This may have a good effect.

  On the way back, I got the disturbing news from Bob Haldeman that the break-in of the Democratic National Committee involved someone who is on the payroll of the Committee to Re-elect the President. Mitchell had told Bob on the phone enigmatically not to get involved in it, and I told Bob that I simply hoped that none of our people were involved for two reasons—one, because it was stupid in the way it was handled; and two, because I could see no reason whatever for trying to bug the national committee.

  Bob pointed [out] one of Chotiner’s operatives had said that a McGovern aide had told him that they had our committee rooms bugged. The problem here, of course, is to get somebody on the PR side who will get out some of the negatives on the other side like this, so that this story just doesn’t appear to be a clumsy attempt on our part to get information illegally from the Democrats.

  I also urged Bob to keep Colson and Ehrlichman from getting obsessed with the thing so that they were unable to spend their time on other jobs. Looking back, the fact that Colson got so deeply involved in the ITT was a mistake because it kept him from doing other things that in retrospect were more important to do. The best thing probably to have done with ITT was just to let it run its course without having our whole staff in constant uproar about it. I hope we can handle this one in that way.

  Pat was in a very good mood tonight, and had felt that her visit to South Dakota was a success. She said the governor had expressed concern that I had always done so well in South Dakota, that he had to
run this year as a Democrat and was worried about it. Of course, with McGovern on the ticket he may have a much better chance.

  The CRP employee who had been arrested at the Watergate was James McCord. A former CIA security officer, McCord was employed by both the Committee to Re-elect the President and the Republican National Committee as a consultant on security for buildings, documents, and personnel. One of his responsibilities was to protect the Republicans from exactly the kind of thing he had been caught doing to the Democrats. Haldeman had also heard that the money found on the arrested men—over $1,000 in $100 bills—had apparently come from the CRP.

  Because of McCord’s connection to the CRP, his arrest had turned the Watergate break-in into a hot news story. Larry O’Brien in hyperbolic terms claimed that “the bugging incident. . . raised the ugliest questions about the integrity of the political process that I have encountered in a quarter century of political activity.” John Mitchell, as chairman of the Committee to Re-elect, had issued a statement that the arrested men were not acting on behalf of or with the consent of the CRP, and that he himself was surprised and dismayed at the reports of McCord’s involvement.

  My reaction to the Watergate break-in was completely pragmatic. If it was also cynical, it was a cynicism born of experience. I had been in politics too long, and seen everything from dirty tricks to vote fraud. I could not muster much moral outrage over a political bugging.

  Larry O’Brien might affect astonishment and horror, but he knew as well as I did that political bugging had been around nearly since the invention of the wiretap. As recently as 1970 a former member of Adlai Stevenson’s campaign staff had publicly stated that he had tapped the Kennedy organization’s phone lines at the 1960 Democratic convention. Lyndon Johnson felt that the Kennedys had had him tapped; Barry Goldwater said that his 1964 campaign had been bugged; and Edgar Hoover told me that in 1968 Johnson had ordered my campaign plane bugged. Nor was the practice confined to politicians. In 1969 an NBC producer was fined and given a suspended sentence for planting a concealed microphone at a closed meeting of the 1968 Democratic platform committee. Bugging experts told the Washington Post right after the Watergate break-in that the practice “has not been uncommon in elections past. . . it is particularly common for candidates of the same party to bug one another.”

  In fact, my confidence in the CRP was undermined more by the stupidity of the DNC bugging attempt than by its illegality. The whole thing made so little sense. Why? I wondered. Why then? Why in such a blundering way? And why, of all places, the Democratic National Committee? Anyone who knew anything about politics would know that a national committee headquarters was a useless place to go for inside information on a presidential campaign. The whole thing was so senseless and bungled that it almost looked like some kind of a setup. And yet the trail undeniably led back to the CRP. On Sunday morning the idea of Cubans in surgical gloves bugging the DNC had seemed totally ridiculous. By Monday night it had become a potential issue in the presidential campaign.

  On Tuesday morning, June 20, my first day back in Washington, there was a new twist.

  A front-page headline in the Washington Post proclaimed: White House Consultant Tied to Bugging Figure. The story, attributed to “federal sources close to the investigation,” said that the name Howard Hunt had been found in the address books of two of the men caught inside the DNC headquarters. It stated that until March 29, 1972, Hunt, a former CIA agent, had worked at the White House as a consultant to Chuck Colson. The mention of Colson’s name gave me a start. It was one thing if the CRP was involved, or even a former lower-level White House staff member like Hunt. But Colson was a member of my inner circle of aides and advisers, and if he was drawn in it was a whole new situation. I had always valued his hardball instincts. Now I wondered if he might have gone too far.

  The Democrats were already mounting an attack. The DNC filed a $1 million suit against the CRP for invasion of privacy and violation of civil rights. This suit would enable their lawyers to call as witnesses and depose under oath almost the entire CRP and White House staff. In this way, while ostensibly probing the DNC bugging, they could ask questions about any and every aspect of our campaign. As Time put it, the true aim of the Democrats’ suit was “to preoccupy Republicans in court during the fall, to keep the case in public view to subvert the seemingly unstoppable GOP campaign.” Publicly the Democrats were full of righteous indignation at the Watergate break-in. Privately they were rejoicing at this unexpected election-year dividend.

  Ken Clawson, our Deputy Director of Communications, received an insight into what we were going to be up against when he had lunch with Dick Harwood, an editor at the Washington Post. Before coming to the White House, Clawson had been a Post reporter, and after the lunch he visited with some of his former colleagues. He was told that Katharine Graham, the paper’s publisher, was personally going to direct an army of reporters assigned to delve into the Watergate story. “We’re in for a hell of a barrage,” Clawson warned members of the staff.

  At 2:20 Tuesday afternoon Colson came in to see me. We spent several minutes discussing the way the newspapers were stretching his connection with Hunt in order to draw him into the scandal and the question of who might be the source of the news leaks.

  Colson said that Haldeman was “pulling it all together,” and that, in Colson’s own opinion, so far we had handled it the right way.

  I thought that one problem we would have to deal with soon was what the arrested men were going to say. I thought we would be vulnerable to any charges or accusations—true or false—they might make. I said that I had been told they were all “pretty hard-line guys.” I told Colson that, as I understood it, we were going to have “this funny guy” take credit for the whole thing. I meant McCord, but Colson evidently thought I meant his friend Howard Hunt.

  Colson was quick to defend Hunt. He insisted that Hunt was just too smart and too sophisticated to have been involved in something as amateurish as the Watergate break-in. I agreed that if we didn’t know better we would have thought that the whole thing had been deliberately botched up.

  Colson said that after he heard about the break-in he figured it might have been something the Cubans had organized on their own. Everyone knew that the Cuban émigré community feared that McGovern would decide to resume diplomatic relations with Castro. Feelings ran sufficiently high that it was by no means impossible that anti-Castro Cubans would want to bug the Democrats to obtain information about such intentions.

  I thought for a moment about the double standard that was sure to be adopted by McGovern and by the New York Times and the Washington Post: they had tacitly sanctioned Ellsberg’s illegal release of top-secret government documents, but they were sure to register high moral dudgeon about something as comparatively minor as an unsuccessful break-in at a political party headquarters. I sardonically suggested that someone give a speech urging that the Watergate break-in crew be given a Pulitzer Prize like the one the New York Times had been given for publishing the Pentagon Papers.

  I told Colson that my understanding was that we were just going to leave the Watergate matter where it was, with the Cubans.

  Colson came back to Hunt. He said the fact that Hunt’s name was in the address books of the arrested men was the most logical thing in the world. The morning paper had pointed out that Hunt had been a CIA agent for more than twenty years, and that all the arrested men had CIA ties. But Colson told me that the connection was even stronger: Hunt had trained Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs operation. This information seemed to reinforce the whole Cuban connection.

  Colson said that the biggest hazard Watergate represented for us was the risk of our becoming preoccupied with it simply because the media and the Democrats were sure to be. He said that the whole thing was “something which normally wouldn’t amount to that much. They’re just going to blow their cool out because they haven’t got any other place they can lay a glove on us.”

  He then told me that the New
York Times had a problem of its own. During my Soviet Summit trip the paper had run an ad calling for my impeachment because of my policy on the Vietnam war. A formal complaint had been filed against the paper, charging that it had failed to require the necessary identifications from the people who paid for the ad and therefore violated the campaign fund disclosure law. I was pessimistic about our ability to get any political mileage out of that. The Times, I knew, would just stonewall it.

  Before Colson left my office, I tried to cheer him up. “Dumbest thing,” I said. “Nothing loses an election. Nothing changes it that much. . . . You look at this damn thing now and it’s gonna be forgotten after a while.”

  The main problem was that the Democrats would be able to keep the Watergate issue alive with their depositions. We were going to try to delay them until after the election, but there was no guarantee we could do so. Colson, however, was not at all worried about this. He said that he would love to have depositions taken from the White House staff, because “everybody’s completely out of it. . . . This is once when you’d like for people to testify.” He said it with complete conviction. I hoped that it was true.

  I met with Bob Haldeman twice on Tuesday, June 20: from 11:26 A.M. until 12:45 P.M., and again from 4:35 until 5:25 in the afternoon. What was said during the morning meeting will never be known completely because the tape of that conversation is the one with the 181/2-minute gap. Some of what we talked about during those 181/2 minutes can be reconstructed from the notes Haldeman took. According to them, one of my first reactions to the Watergate break-in was to instruct that my EOB office be checked regularly to make sure that I was not being bugged by anyone. They also indicate a concern about the political ramifications of the Watergate incident and a desire to divert its impact by mounting our own counterattack.

  The best indication of anything else that may have been said about the Watergate break-in in that morning conversation is our discussion of the same subject just a few hours later that afternoon. It has always been my habit to discuss problems a number of times, often in almost the same terms and usually with the same people. This is the way I try to elicit every possible piece of information and advice and examine every possible angle of a situation before making a decision. I am confident that our discussion about the break-in covered much the same points at 11:26 in the morning as it did just five hours later at 4:35 in the afternoon: that any of our own people, at any level, had embroiled us in such an embarrassing situation; and that the investigations and depositions, if they went too far in pursuing all the angles available, would hand the Democrats a major campaign issue.