RN

by Richard Nixon

  As Dean and I walked to the door at the end of that conversation, we speculated on all the people the Ervin Committee would hope to get up before them in hearings—they would like nothing better than to interrogate Haldeman, Colson or Ehrlichman.

  “Or possibly Dean,” Dean added.

  I was quick to reassure him, “In your case I think they realize you are the lawyer and they know you didn’t have a goddamned thing to do with . . . the campaign,” I said emphatically.

  “That’s right,” Dean stated.

  “That’s what I think,” I said.

  Dean and I continued to meet during the first weeks of March. We discussed Ervin Committee strategy and the statement that we issued on March 12, asserting our right to claim executive privilege on all present and former White House aides. We talked about Pat Gray’s confirmation hearings. We also discussed the information he was gathering on Democratic political abuses. And on March 13 we went over the questions he thought I was likely to be asked about Watergate in my press conference in two days.

  This press conference on March 15 was bound to be an even more heated one than usual. With equal measures of naïveté and stubbornness, Gray had allowed his hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee to become a disaster. He turned over raw FBI files to the committee for public release, thereby managing to outrage everyone from the American Civil Liberties Union to his subordinates in the FBI. In each successive appearance he had brought John Dean’s name further and further into the controversy; at one point he even implied that Dean might have illegally shown FBI reports to Donald Segretti. Dean had the White House press office deny that he had mishandled FBI reports, but the Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee saw that they were on to a live issue and they began to insist that Dean had to testify before Gray could be confirmed.

  I was fully prepared to defend Dean, and in our meeting on March 13 we agreed that if I were asked about the demands that he appear as a witness that I would say that he would respond to questions under oath in a letter. I said I would finesse other Watergate questions by reasserting our intention to cooperate with the Ervin Committee’s investigation. Dean added that I could say we had cooperated with the FBI in the past and would cooperate with a proper investigation by the Senate committee.

  “We will make statements,” I said.

  “And, indeed, we have nothing to hide,” Dean affirmed.

  “We have furnished information; we have nothing to hide,” I repeated.

  Then Dean and I began a review of the facts, first from the standpoint of my press conference and then from the standpoint of our potential vulnerabilities before the Ervin Committee. I thought that I knew them all. On Watergate I thought that our principal worries were Magruder and Mitchell, although I was sure the Ervin Committee would try to draw in Haldeman as well. I was still prepared to assert unequivocally and to defend unreservedly that there was no White House involvement in the Watergate break-in.

  Dean cautioned me that there would be new revelations during the Senate Watergate hearings, but he added that he did not think that it would “get out of hand.” I thought I knew what he meant: the Democrats on the committee, spurred on by the media, were going to try to increase the drama by drawing in a “higher-up.”

  “Let’s face it,” I said. “I think they are really after Haldeman.”

  “Haldeman and Mitchell,” Dean agreed.

  I said that Haldeman’s problem was Chapin. Haldeman had given Chapin and Gordon Strachan, another Haldeman aide, the approval to start the Segretti operation, and the press was continually trying to link Segretti to Watergate. But Dean reassured me that Chapin had not known anything about Watergate.

  “Did Strachan?” I asked, almost perfunctorily.

  “Yes,” Dean answered.

  I was startled. “He knew?”

  “Yes.”

  “About the Watergate?”

  “Yes,” he repeated.

  I was stunned. Until two months ago, Gordon Strachan had worked in the White House. If he had known about the break-in, that would be bad enough in itself, but I immediately saw the even deeper problem it would pose. It was well known that Haldeman’s staff acted as an extension of Haldeman; it would not seem likely that Strachan would have known about anything as important as the Watergate break-in plan without having informed Haldeman of it.

  “Well, then, Bob knew,” I said. “He probably told Bob then.” But in the same breath I added, “He may not have.”

  Dean was reassuring on this point. He said that Strachan was “judicious” in what he relayed to Haldeman. He described Strachan as “tough as nails.” He told me that Strachan had been questioned on two separate occasions and had said, “I don’t know anything about what you are talking about.” Dean seemed to be implying that Strachan had lied.

  “I suppose we can’t call that justice, can we?” I remarked. “The point is, how do you justify that?”

  “He didn’t have to be asked,” Dean said. “It just is something that he found is the way he wanted to handle the situation.”

  Strachan had been such a peripheral and minor figure in all our thinking about Watergate during the past few months that it was difficult to believe that he was suddenly a major problem.

  “But he knew? He knew about Watergate? Strachan did?” I asked again.

  “Uh huh,” Dean answered.

  “I’ll be damned. Well, that’s the problem in Bob’s case, isn’t it? It’s not Chapin, then, but Strachan, ’cause Strachan worked for him.”

  I still had difficulty accepting the fact that, according to Dean, Strachan had known about the Watergate bugging. If this was true, then nine months of denials of White House involvement were undermined. Later in the meeting Dean seemed to modify the problem presented by Strachan. He said that we could still truthfully say that there had been no White House involvement in that no one had known about the DNC break-in. Strachan had evidently known about the existence of the bug after the fact, but he had not been part of any criminal conspiracy. It was a lawyer’s distinction, but by that technicality at least, the White House was still not “involved.” In any case, my first instinct was not to accuse or even criticize, but to consolidate.

  Running down the list of other potential vulnerabilities, Dean gave me his conclusions about each of them. He said that Magruder had known even more than Strachan; that Colson had not known specifically about Watergate; and that Mitchell had known about the overall intelligence-gathering but not about the actual details of the break-in. Dean observed that his own name had come up—he had been dragged in as the man who sent Liddy to the CRP. It was true, he said, but he had done so only because they had asked for a lawyer, and he had been told that Liddy was a good one. He had passed on that information to Magruder and Liddy had been hired.

  We were on the eve of a partisan Senate inquisition, suddenly facing serious new and undefined vulnerabilities. “Well, what about the hangout thing? . . . Is it too late to, frankly, go the hang-out road?” I asked and then answered my own question, “Yes, it is.”

  “I think it is,” Dean replied.

  “I know Ehrlichman always felt that it should be hang-out,” I said.

  Dean said that he thought he had convinced Ehrlichman that he would not really want to “hang out” either. “There is a certain domino situation here,” Dean said. “There are going to be a lot of problems if everything starts falling. So there are dangers, Mr. President. I’d be less than candid if I didn’t tell you . . . there are. There’s a reason for us not—not everyone going up and testifying.”

  I raised again the possibility of issuing some kind of White House statement. But Dean argued that regardless of the truth of our assertion that there had been no White House involvement in the Watergate break-in, the partisan Democrats and the media would never believe any statement we issued. He also warned that people would not believe or understand the true story of the Segretti case. “They would have to paint it into something more sinis
ter,” he said, “something more involved, a part of a general plan.”

  At my press conference on March 15 the first question was on Watergate and on John Dean’s role in the investigation.

  I defended Dean and said that it was unprecedented and unthinkable that the Counsel to the President would accept a summons to appear before a congressional committee. Dean was covered not only by executive privilege but also by the time-honored confidentiality of the lawyer-client relationship. I said that I was prepared to allow him to furnish information; this in itself was more cooperation than was required by the Constitution or by precedent. I reminded the reporters that other administrations had been less cooperative than we; I reminded them that I was cooperating in a way that Truman had refused to during the Hiss case.

  The questioning kept returning to Watergate with a relentlessness, almost a passion, that I had seen before only in the most emotional days of the Vietnam war. It was during this conference that for the first time I began to realize the dimensions of the problem we were facing with the media and with Congress regarding Watergate: Vietnam had found its successor.

  I also knew immediately—even while I was answering the questions in the way that Dean and I had discussed and agreed upon—that our current approach to Watergate was not going to work. We were already on the defensive. We were already behind. We already looked as if we had something to hide.

  With the doggedness of one who suddenly finds himself surrounded by a raging storm, I clung to my one landmark—even though it was now apparently anchored upon a technicality: that no one in the White House had been involved in the Watergate break-in. I had been told that Strachan had known about the bugging after the fact—but he had not been part of the decision to do it. Even if that was all we could say, I felt that we should at least be finding persuasive new ways in which to say it. Then we could start defending ourselves from there.

  After my press conference I decided to press more firmly than ever for a written statement from Dean that would repeat what he had been saying to us all these months: that there was no evidence against Colson, Chapin, or Haldeman on Watergate.

  When I saw Dean again on March 16, I suggested that he go to Camp David and concentrate exclusively on preparing this statement. I was pushing Dean for a statement again the next day, when he told me that he, Dean himself, had been present at meetings in John Mitchell’s office at the Justice Department at which Gordon Liddy’s intelligence-gathering plans had been discussed. Dean hastened to add that he had said that such things should not be talked about in front of the Attorney General. He said that he had reported to Haldeman and had told him that if something like that was going on, the White House had to stay “ten miles away from it—because it just is not right and we can’t have any part of it.” He said that Haldeman had agreed with him. “That was where I thought it was turned off,” he said.

  “But you didn’t hear any discussion of bugging, did you?” I asked. “Or did you?”

  “Yeah, I did,” he answered. “That’s what distressed me quite a bit.” He explained that Liddy had said at the meeting that they ought to do some bugging. Mitchell had not agreed to it but had simply sat puffing on his pipe, saying nothing. I could visualize the scene and Mitchell’s inscrutability—the manner he always adopted when having to tolerate amateurs.

  I told Dean that he would not have to mention the talk about bugging when he described this meeting in the statement he was going to prepare. I rationalized that, after all, he had tried to stop it, and Mitchell had not approved it. Dean said that it would be an embarrassment that the White House knew about the existence of an intelligence operation, even though we thought it was to be a legal one. I was not bothered by that and said that if we had to justify it we could, on the basis of all the violence and demonstrations against us. At least, unlike previous administrations, we hadn’t used the FBI.

  Later I came back to the problem of our vulnerabilities. I said that, as I understood it, in Dean’s view they were Mitchell, Colson, Haldeman indirectly and possibly directly; and, on the second level, Chapin. Dean said that he would add his own name. I asked why. He said it was because he had been “all over this thing like a blanket.” I said I knew that, but his activities had taken place after the bugging and I did not see the problem. I said that, unlike the others, he had no criminal liability. “That’s right,” Dean agreed.

  When we came back to Strachan, Dean appeared to be altering what he had told me four days earlier when he said that Strachan had not known about the break-in. He said that Liddy had told him that he was not really sure how much Strachan knew.

  Dean told me that Liddy had named Magruder as the man who had pressured him to go ahead with the break-in. I asked who had pressured Magruder, and Dean theorized that Strachan had probably urged in general terms that people get moving on gathering intelligence. Once again I asked what kind of intelligence they were after. But now, nine months after the break-in, even Dean still had no answer to why, of all places, they had gone into the DNC. “That absolutely mystifies me,” he said.

  Things seemed to grow more complicated every day. There was a rumor that Magruder was saying in private that Colson and Haldeman had known about the break-in. I did not believe the accusation, but I thought that, as Dean observed, if Magruder ever saw himself sinking he would reach out to grab anyone he could get hold of. Now there were all these other circumstantial associations and involvements. I told Dean I could see no alternative to trying to “cut her off at the pass” by saying simply that Liddy and his bunch had done the break-in as a part of their job. Then we would put everything out on Segretti. “It isn’t nearly as bad as people think it was,” I said.

  Then Dean said that there was one other potential difficulty: Ehrlichman had a problem with both Hunt and Liddy. “They worked for him?” I ventured, thinking that some kind of circumstantial mud might be slung because of that. Dean then told me that Hunt and Liddy, laden with CIA equipment, had broken into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.

  “What in the world—” I said.

  Dean told me that they had done it in an effort to get Ellsberg’s psychiatric records in connection with the Pentagon Papers. But he didn’t know why. “This is the first I ever heard of this,” I responded.

  Dean added that it was possible that Ehrlichman had not known beforehand that this break-in was going to take place. As I noted in my diary, “I had my talk with Dean. He mentioned the vulnerability that would be involved with Ehrlichman apparently with something that had to do with an investigation in the Ellsberg case which seemed to me to be somewhat ridiculous. Apparently they were trying to get some information on him from Ellsberg’s doctor about his psychiatric conditions.”

  The ground had shifted once again. Just four days earlier Dean told me that Strachan had had knowledge of the Watergate bug. And now this.

  Still, I was convinced that nothing to do with Ellsberg would ever come up during the Ervin hearings, and that meant that we had more important problems than Ellsberg now.

  The old pattern of delay and inactivity continued to plague our handling of Watergate. At one point Dean proposed sending a letter to the Gray hearings saying that he had recommended Liddy to the Re-election Committee solely as a legal counsel and that the White House had fully cooperated with the FBI. I urged that he sign it under oath, and the idea lapsed and died.

  I needed desperately to get my mind on other things. We were faced with the possibility of having to resume bombing in Laos as retaliation for the failure of the North Vietnamese to abide by the cease-fire provision of the Paris peace agreement. The domestic economy was disturbingly volatile, and George Shultz was about to concede that the relaxation of controls in Phase III of the economic policy had been premature.

  I was also thinking about the need to set new foreign policy goals for the second term. Now that the Vietnam war had ended, we could turn our attention to the other area of the world where war was always imminent and where th
e danger of a great-power nuclear confrontation was far greater than in Southeast Asia. On February 3 I had made the first of several similar notes.

  Diary

  I hit Henry hard on the Mideast thing. He now wants to push it past the Israeli elections in October, but I told him unless we did it this year we wouldn’t get it done at all in the four-year term.

  The Egyptian [Hafez Ismail, adviser to President Sadat] is coming over. What he works out I don’t know, but I feel that some way we have got to get the Israelis moved off of their intransigent position. Needless to say, we can’t move to the all-out Egyptian or Arab position either, but there is some place in between there where we can move. The interim settlement is, of course, the only thing we can talk about—that’s the only thing the Israelis will ever go for—and the Egyptians are just simply going to have to take a settlement of that sort—or the Arabs are—with the assurance that we will do the best we can to get a total settlement later.

  I spoke to Henry about the need to get going on the Mideast. I am pressing him hard here because I don’t want him to get off the hook with regard to the need to make a settlement this year because we won’t be able to make it next year and, of course, not thereafter with ’76 coming up. He brought that up himself so apparently the message is getting through. What he’s afraid is that Rogers, et al. will get ahold of the issue and will try to make a big public play on it and that it will break down. This is the point that I had made to Heath—that we couldn’t go to the summit here and fail and, of course, the British understand this totally.

  On the other hand, Henry has constantly put off moving on it each time, suggesting that the political problems were too difficult. This is a matter which I, of course, will have to judge. He agreed that the problem with the Israelis in Israel was not nearly as difficult as the Jewish community here, but I am determined to bite this bullet and do it now because we just can’t let the thing ride and have a hundred million Arabs hating us and providing a fishing ground not only for radicals but, of course, for the Soviets. I think actually the radicals are our greater danger because the Soviets will have their people be somewhat responsible whereas the radicals are likely to act in totally unmanageable ways.