RN

by Richard Nixon

  As I told Bob, I thought that Henry was having a letdown now because he realized that he had participated in the three great events perhaps of the postwar era—the Soviet, the China, the Vietnam—and that everything else would pale by significance. The Mideast he just doesn’t want to bite, I am sure because of the enormous pressures he’s going to get from the Jewish groups in this country.

  Henry needs to have another great goal. Haig feels strongly that it should be Europe. Henry I noticed had picked up this theme in my last talk with him. I kept hammering, however, with Haig the necessity of doing something about the Mideast.

  I also needed some personal time to work on my own schedule. So far I had been keeping up a frenetic pace. In the two months since the second term had begun, I made ten major speeches, held three press conferences, submitted the 1974 budget with the proposed spending ceiling, and sent up new legislative proposals on the environment, health, education, manpower training, law enforcement, and transportation. Golda Meir, King Hussein of Jordan, and British Prime Minister Edward Heath had visited Washington. So far there had been little opportunity to make the public appearances that would be necessary to build support for my policies, and I needed to begin getting out into the country. In fact, I had planned to make a national tour after the end of the war to express my gratitude to the people for their steadfastness during that long ordeal. I was also thinking about making a trip to Latin America after Easter.

  Haldeman shared my frustration that the White House was doing and saying nothing on Watergate. He was especially eager to go public on Segretti, tell exactly what had happened, and clear up the mystery. When we met on Tuesday evening, March 20, he complained that others kept insisting that anything he might say on Segretti would hurt people involved “on the Watergate side.”

  “I still think I’m being had in a sense . . . being tarred in order to protect some other people,” Haldeman said; he added that Chapin, who was also ready to go public with a full explanation on Segretti, was being “far worse tarred in order to protect other people.” I said the problem was that the people who seemed to have Watergate vulnerabilities were our friends. Haldeman agreed. He observed that whereas Segretti might represent bad judgment, Watergate was a serious problem, and Dean kept insisting that the whole situation was linked: to break loose and tell everything on Segretti might jeopardize others.

  But this brought us back full circle to an unacceptable conclusion, because to follow Dean’s advice and to accept his cautious admonitions, was to stay stuck right where we were: making no public statements, fighting with Congress over executive privilege, and giving the impression of a White House cover-up—the worst possible situation for us to be in.

  “It isn’t really worse—it isn’t worse than John Mitchell going to jail for either perjury or complicity,” Haldeman countered. I had to agree. I said that I had also considered that. I had questioned, too, whether Magruder would have done such a thing on his own.

  Haldeman pointed out that whatever our own conjectures about Mitchell’s involvement might be, Dean seemed to think it was possible that Mitchell had not approved the break-in. And Magruder had claimed under oath that he himself had not, which was possible if you accepted the premise that Liddy was acting under a broad authority. But there was always the question of whether Liddy would take the heat or start throwing off onto others. In any event, Dean’s approach continued to be containment at Liddy. If no new factors—such as White House statements—were introduced, Dean seemed to think that there was a chance Mitchell would not be drawn in, Haldeman said.

  So it was now March 20 and we were back exactly where we had been four days after the break-in nine months earlier: no one was sure about Mitchell or—on a firsthand basis—even about Magruder, but the circumstantial involvements and vulnerabilities surrounding Watergate were so great that even false allegations made by a Liddy or a Magruder could be fatal.

  At the end of the meeting Haldeman and I again discussed the idea of putting out a public statement of a general kind. When I mentioned Dean’s argument that it would open too many doors, Haldeman said we should just make the statement and see. The doors were evidently going to open anyway, he said. That was exactly how I felt. If the facts were going to come out, I said, “I would rather have us get them out to the extent we can in a forthcoming way.” We agreed that the statement should not purport to be complete lest something come up later and undermine it. Rather it should indicate a willingness to answer further questions as they arose.

  Before our meeting ended, almost as an afterthought, Haldeman brought up one other problem that Dean had raised with him. He explained that $350,000 in cash had been transferred out of campaign funds in 1972 and brought to the White House to help pay for such political projects as private polling. The money had not been used, and after the election it had been transferred back to CRP. I asked what the problem was with that and he said that it would establish the existence of a “secret fund” which the papers would exploit. “Not that it worries me, not that it’s ever worried me,” he said. But he added, “Maybe there’s more to it than . . . I’ve found.”

  I phoned Dean shortly after Haldeman left my office. He seemed slightly agitated. He told me that he would like to meet with me to review the “broadest implications of this whole thing.” He said, “You know, maybe about thirty minutes of just my recitation to you of facts so that you operate from the same facts that everybody else has. . . . We have never really done that. It has been sort of bits and pieces.”

  I said that we should meet at ten o’clock the next morning, March 21. Then I turned to my continuing request that he draw up some kind of general statement that we could release from the White House. I suggested that he might give an oral report to the Cabinet, just to reassure them of what he had told me: that no one in the White House was involved in the break-in. As usual when the idea of a statement arose, Dean’s reaction was cool. He repeated his suggestion that before issuing any kind of a statement he should meet personally with me. “No, I want to know. I want to know where all the bodies are first,” I replied. Thinking of my discussion with Haldeman about the need to avoid any statement that purported to be definitive, I said that I was thinking about a “complete statement but make it very incomplete”—by that I meant no chapter and verse, just general conclusions such as “Haldeman is not involved in this, that and the other thing; Mr. Colson did not do this. . . . Taking the most glaring things. If there are any further questions, please let me know.”

  Diary

  It was a rather hard day here because we began to get more and more involved in what was really at the bottom of the Watergate-Segretti business, and we seemed always to come up with answers that were basically dead ends as far as getting facts were concerned.

  I don’t mean to leave it that way actually. It isn’t getting at the facts but it’s really getting out our side of the story.

  I got Dean late in the day, about seven o’clock. He apparently, according to Ehrlichman, had been a little bit discouraged today, although I have been spending a lot of time with him and apparently it bucked him up considerably. He had been trying to keep all of these loose ends from coming apart and he said he would like to have a half hour with me at some point where he could just lay it all out so that I would know everything that he knew and would know all the hazards of whatever might be involved in having members of the White House staff either testify and make statements or what have you. I set it for tomorrow at ten o’clock in the morning.

  All in all, though, from what Dean said tonight, he and Moore have come down on the side of not putting out any statement at this point, simply stonewalling the thing.

  The point that I raised with both Haldeman and Ehrlichman was that if these questions are going to come out anyway, perhaps it is best just to let them come out on our own initiative rather than having them forced out.

  I had also learned that the district court judge was about to hand down sentences on Hunt, Li
ddy, McCord, and the other men arrested at the Watergate.

  Diary

  One of the major concerns is what will happen when the judge moves on Friday. He is apparently going to be extremely tough, which does not surprise me.

  They think that McCord in this instance might crack because he doesn’t want to go to jail and that he might say to the judge after a few days that he is willing to tell all. The question is how much he knows. Certainly he knows a hell of a lot about Mitchell. Mitchell is the one I am most concerned about.

  All in all, recalling the fact that a few years ago this would have been inauguration day—March 20—we have many problems that are residues of the campaign. Haldeman said ironically that it was just one of those breaks where if it hadn’t been for a night watchman who saw the tape on the door or something like that the Watergate thing would never have come out and none of the other things would have been involved. But that’s one of the costs of trying to run a campaign and of having some well-intentioned but rather stupid or at least people with very poor judgment working for you.

  Mitchell just didn’t keep his hand on the tiller at a time when he was having all the problems with Martha although I do not blame him for it. I know why it happened. No one could have a better friend or supporter than Mitchell and no man who is stronger in the crunch, but at the present time we are really caught here without really knowing how to handle it.

  THE MARCH 21 CONVERSATION

  It was just after ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, March 21, when John Dean came into the Oval Office.

  After some desultory remarks about the Gray hearings, he said he had thought that we should talk because in our earlier conversations about Watergate he had had the impression that I did not know everything he knew. And that, he said, made it difficult for me to make judgments that only I could make.

  “In other words, I’ve got to know why you feel that . . . we shouldn’t unravel something,” I said.

  “I think . . . there’s no doubt about the seriousness of the problem . . . we’ve got,” he began. “We have a cancer—within—close to the presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding—it grows geometrically now, because it compounds itself. That’ll be clear as I explain, you know, some of the details of why it is, and it basically is because, one, we’re being blackmailed; two, people are going to start perjuring themselves very quickly that have not had to perjure themselves to protect other people and the like. And that is just—and there is no assurance—”

  “That it won’t bust,” I supplied.

  “That won’t bust,” he repeated.

  He began reciting details. Some of them I had heard before. Some were variations of things I had heard before. And some were new.

  Haldeman, he began, had asked him to set up a “perfectly legitimate” intelligence operation at the CRP. Dean had asked one of his aides to draw up a plan for “normal infiltration . . . buying information from secretaries and all that sort of thing.” Dean said that Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and others reached a consensus that the aide he had selected was not the right person to handle the matter; they wanted a lawyer. It was at that point, he said, that he recommended Liddy to handle the intelligence functions. This was the first time Dean told me this: earlier he had said only that he had recommended Liddy to the CRP to act as a legal counsel.

  Dean repeated the story of his own indignation when Liddy had presented his incredibly outlandish intelligence plan to Mitchell in the Attorney General’s office, and of how he had told Liddy and Magruder, “You just can’t talk this way in this office and . . . you should re-examine your whole thinking.” He repeated his account of Haldeman’s subsequent agreement that Dean and the White House should stay away from such activities. “I thought, at that point, the thing was turned off,” he said.

  That, as I understood it, was the extent of his firsthand knowledge. He then turned to details he had learned only after the break-in, while he was trying to put together what had happened; these were his extrapolations and conjectures.

  It appeared that after the meeting in Mitchell’s office, Hunt and Liddy had appealed to Colson for help in getting the authorization for their plans. Colson had thereupon called Magruder, urging him to “fish or cut bait” on Hunt and Liddy. I asked if Colson had known just what Hunt and Liddy’s plan was. Dean said he assumed that Colson had had “a damn good idea what they were talking about.”

  Colson! My earliest fears returned. Up to now I had been told by everyone, including Dean, that Colson was not involved. “Colson then, do you think, was the person who pushed?” I asked. Dean said he thought Colson had helped to push. He also thought that Haldeman had pushed through Strachan, but Haldeman’s push for some intelligence-gathering had been based on the innocent assumption that nothing illegal was being planned. “I think that Bob was assuming that they had something proper over there,” Dean affirmed.

  Dean conjectured that Magruder had reported the Colson and Strachan “pushes” to Mitchell, and in the face of all this pressure Mitchell had puffed on his pipe and said, “Go ahead,” without really reflecting on what it was all about. That was Dean’s theory of how the DNC bugging got under way. I was finding it hard to keep my bearings: just twenty-four hours earlier Haldeman had implied that Dean thought Mitchell had not approved the break-in.

  Dean said that after the bug was installed, Strachan had received some of the information from it and passed the report on to Haldeman. Haldeman might not have known where the information came from, Dean said, but Strachan did.

  Magruder, Dean said, was “totally knowledgeable” and had perjured himself. Dean said that Magruder had set up a “scenario” that he ran by Dean, asking, “How about this?” Dean said that he had responded, “ ‘Well, I don’t know . . . if this is what you’re going to hang on, fine.’ ” Dean said that, despite Magruder’s testimony, Magruder had specifically instructed Liddy to go back into the DNC. Dean said, however, that he honestly believed that no one in the White House had known that; but he added, in apparent contradiction, that he thought Strachan had known.

  Turning to the post-break-in activities, Dean said that he himself was “under pretty clear instructions not to really investigate this,” that he had acted “on a theory of containment.” “Sure,” I said, remembering Haldeman’s comment the night before, that Dean hoped to contain the blame for the break-in at Liddy and not let it be pushed higher to Mitchell.

  Dean said that he had followed the FBI and the grand jury’s investigations at all times. He said that soon after the arrests at the Watergate the defendants had warned, “We’ve got to have attorneys’ fees . . . if you are asking us to take this through the election.” Dean said that arrangements were made for the payments at meetings where he and Mitchell were both present. “Kalmbach was brought in. Kalmbach raised some cash,” he added.

  I asked if this had been put under the cover of a Cuban committee. Dean said yes, and that Hunt’s lawyer had also been used. I added that “I would certainly keep that cover for whatever it’s worth. Keep the committee.”

  Then Dean delivered his punch line: “Bob is involved in that; John is involved in that; I’m involved in that; Mitchell is involved in that. And that’s an obstruction of justice.”

  I didn’t understand. I thought Dean had to be overdramatizing.

  “How was Bob involved?” I asked.

  Dean said that Haldeman had let him use a $350,000 cash fund, which had been held at the White House, to make payments to the defendants. Dean said that he, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman had decided that there was “no price too high to pay to let this thing blow up in front of the election.” This was a new twist. The night before, Haldeman had said that the money had been returned unused to the CRP and that the only problem it presented was that the media would call it a “secret fund.” “I think you should handle that one pretty fast,” I said. Dean agreed.

  Dean said that McCord had talked to someone in the White House about commutation of h
is sentence. “And as you know, Colson has talked to, indirectly to, Hunt about commutation,” he said. “All these things are bad . . . in that they are problems, they are promises, they are commitments. They are the very sort of thing that the Senate is going to be looking most for.”

  Now Dean arrived at the heart of what had precipitated his current state of concern. Five days earlier a lawyer for the CRP had received a message from Howard Hunt and had passed it directly to Dean: Hunt was demanding $122,000 for attorneys’ fees and personal expenses. Dean said that when he had received this message, he told the CRP lawyer, “I’m not involved in the money. I don’t know a thing about it, can’t help you.”

  Hunt’s message had been accompanied by a threat: “ ‘I will bring John Ehrlichman down to his knees and put him in jail. I have done enough seamy things for he and Krogh that they’ll never survive it.’ ” Hunt’s deadline, according to Dean, was “close of business yesterday.”

  “What’s that, on Ellsberg?” I asked. Dean replied, “Ellsberg, and apparently some other things. I don’t know the full extent of it.”

  “I don’t know about anything else,” I said, thinking back to January and Colson’s speculation that Hunt could draw in Haldeman or Ehrlichman and their simultaneous speculation about what Hunt would do to Colson. Dean said that he didn’t either, and then he told me about all the other people who knew about the Ellsberg break-in, among them the Cubans who had been arrested at the Watergate and their lawyers.

  Hunt’s threat was just the most urgent and dramatic example of the larger problem of the continuing blackmail possibilities for all the defendants. If we continued to pay it, that would compound the obstruction of justice. Beyond that, there was the question of how to raise the money, and even how to deliver it, without involving the White House. I asked how much money he would need. Dean estimated that payments for all the defendants would require a million dollars over the next two years.