I said that it would not be easy, but that I knew where we could get the money. In fact, I had no specific way in mind, but I assumed that, if it were sufficiently urgent, we could raise it from some of the people who had been large contributors in the past.
Dean went back to his account of the “growing cancer” on the presidency. He said that Bud Krogh was forced to perjure himself on the Ellsberg matter. This news about Krogh came as another blow to me. He was one of my favorites among the younger staff members; I knew he was a principled man. But apparently he had testified that he did not know the Cubans, when, in fact, he did—not from Watergate, of course, but from Ellsberg.
“Perjury is an awful hard rap to prove,” I said without much conviction.
We returned to the threat from Hunt. Out of all the new details and confusion one thing was clear: Howard Hunt was a time bomb, and his deadline was yesterday. In two days he would be sentenced, and he would be sure to make good on his threat.
“Just looking at the immediate problem, don’t you have to handle Hunt’s financial situation damn soon?” I asked. “You’ve got to keep the cap on the bottle that much in order to have any options—either that or let it all blow right now.”
“That’s right,” Dean said. I told him to go ahead with his discourse on the facts. After he had finished, he returned to what he called the growing situation. The problem would be if the Watergate case started breaking and there was a criminal case against Haldeman, Mitchell, Ehrlichman, and himself. He said he thought that he, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell should talk about the whole thing and about how to carve it away from the presidency.
“You’re not involved in it,” he said to me.
“That is true,” I replied.
“I know, sir, it is. Well, I can just tell from our conversations that these are things that you have no knowledge of.”
We had arrived at the real question and the real problem: what were the alternatives? I posed the hypothesis that when he met with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell, they might conclude that there was nothing that could be done to keep the whole matter from breaking open. I asked Dean what would be done then: “Are you going to put out a complete disclosure? Isn’t that the best plan? That’d be my view on it,” I said.
Dean hedged. He introduced the alternative of calling another grand jury with immunity for some witnesses. I thought he had Magruder in mind, but it became clear he was thinking of himself. He told me he thought he faced the possibility of a jail term.
“Oh, hell no,” I said, “I can’t see how you can.” By his own account, he had denounced Liddy’s bugging plan; he was not involved in the handling of the money; and he had not offered clemency or given any perjurious testimony. But he was obviously worried, so I asked him to explain to me again his own problems on obstruction of justice. I told him that I couldn’t see how a legal case could be made against him. He explained that he had been a “conduit for information” about the blackmail.
As he had talked I had been worrying about the blackmail and the risks of not paying it. I told him, “Let me put it frankly: I wonder if that doesn’t have to be continued,” and I started to work my way through that maze. At least if we had the million dollars and a way of delivering it, that would hold off everything for a while. Or would it? There was the problem of Hunt and his expectation of clemency: money would not satisfy him if he had been led to expect his freedom. Dean said that the others would be after clemency, too, and added, “I am not sure that you will ever be able to deliver on the clemency. It may be just too hot.”
“You can’t do it till after the ’74 elections, that’s for sure,” I said. “But even then your point is that even then you couldn’t do it.”
“That’s right,” he replied. “It may further involve you in a way you shouldn’t be involved in this.”
“No, it’s wrong; that’s for sure,” I said.
That was no answer; we were back at the starting point.
Dean was clearly depressed. He said almost apologetically that there had been some bad—as well as some necessary—judgments made before the election, but now it had become a burden in the second term that would not go away. I tried to reassure him; this was no time for recriminations. “We’re all in on it,” I said, and I told him again that I thought he was overplaying the possibility that he himself might have criminal liability.
Dean said that he did not have a solution to all these problems, but he thought we should think about cutting losses rather than compounding the matter with further payments. I agreed with him—with the exception of Hunt. We were already out of time on him, and if he started hurling charges at the White House there was no way of knowing what damage he could do to my closest aides—Colson, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Mitchell—and therefore to me.
“But at the moment, don’t you agree that you’d better get the Hunt thing?” I asked. “I mean, that’s worth it, at the moment.”
“That’s worth buying time on, right,” Dean replied.
We then agreed that Dean would meet right away with Mitchell, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman. “We’ve never had a real down-and-out with everybody that has the most to lose,” he said.
I buzzed for Haldeman to join us. In our conversation Dean had told me that he and Haldeman had talked that morning about the same things he and I were discussing, and at the time I assumed that Haldeman understood all the problems Dean had described to me. But when Haldeman joined us, he seemed to be learning for the first time about Hunt’s blackmail demand; about Colson’s phone call to Magruder, which may have triggered approval of the Watergate plan; and about Colson’s apparently flat promise of a Christmas pardon for Hunt.
When Haldeman was seated I told him that we were at the point of decision. As I saw it, in terms of our overall strategy, we had two options. If we decided that the potential criminal liabilities for everyone were too great, we could yield nothing, fight back, and refuse to testify before the Ervin Committee. “Hunker down,” Dean had called it earlier; “cover it up, is what we’re really talking about.” This was undeniably attractive—if it would work. “I don’t want any criminal liability,” I told Haldeman. “That’s the thing that I am concerned about for members of the White House staff, and I would trust for members of the committee.”
At the same time, this option only locked us into a vicious circle, which I described for Haldeman: the only way to stall off disclosures from the defendants would be to pay blackmail; it was possible to do that; but even if we decided that such a desperate measure was justifiable and worth the risk for now, we still had the problem of having to deal with eventual demands for clemency—and clemency was something we simply could not offer; so we ended up back where we began.
On the other hand, if we decided, as I said to them, that “in the end we are going to be bled to death and it’s all going to come out anyway, and then you get the worst of both worlds. . . . And we’re going to look like we covered up. So that we can’t do”—then we had to go with the second option: to get ourselves in the best possible position, whether by offering to go before the grand jury or the Ervin Committee, or by putting out a public statement, and then to let it all blow, take our chances, and just try to survive.
Haldeman was unequivocal about the course we should take. “I don’t see how there’s any way you can have the White House or anybody presently in the White House involved in trying to gin out this money,” he said. I asked Dean if our consensus then was not to say to the defendants, “I’m sorry, it is all off,” and let them talk. “That’s the way to do it, isn’t it? . . . If you want to do it clean?” I asked. Dean did not seem sure; but Haldeman was and said, “See, then when you do it, it’s a way you can live with.” He stated the problem with blackmail: paying the initial sum was one thing; “but what do you need tomorrow and next year and five years from now?” He pointed out that he had told Dean this during previous months when Dean had said there was a money problem.
As for the payment
s up to this time, I said that our cover story was going to be that the Cuban committee had taken care of the defendants through the election.
“Well, yeah. We can put that together,” Dean said. “That isn’t of course quite the way it happened, but—”
“I know, but it’s the way it’s going to have to happen,” I said.
I again asked Dean if his recommendation was to go “the clean way,” just letting it all go now.
This time he did not hedge. His answer was no. He again urged the desirability of having our people go before a grand jury, where, unlike the Senate Watergate Committee, there would be rules of evidence.
“You can say you forgot, too, can’t you?” Haldeman asked.
A lawyer always advises his client that it is better to say he doesn’t recall and err on the side of forgetfulness than hazard a guess or try to reconstruct a memory. Yet this would not help much in committee hearings where taking the Fifth Amendment, or claiming inability to recall, would mean automatic conviction in the eyes of the public. Dean reminded Haldeman that a grand jury also has its hazards—it was a high-risk perjury situation. The Hiss case demonstrated the dangers of a perjury charge. “That’s right,” I said, “just be damned sure you say I don’t remember; I can’t recall, I can’t give any honest answer to that that I can recall.”
I favored the grand jury idea. Ehrlichman had recommended as a solution that we request the Watergate grand jury be reconvened to hear testimony from the White House staff. That would provide an orderly way for us to present the facts. “It should be done through a grand jury, not up there in the klieg lights of the committee,” I said at a later point.
I came back one last time to the problem of Hunt. We agreed that no more payments should be made to all the defendants, but Hunt was still the time bomb. I told Haldeman that the reason the Hunt problem worried me was that “it had nothing to do with the campaign . . . it has to do with the Ellsberg thing.” Even the grand jury approach would be too late if, in two days’ time when the sentencing of the defendants took place, Hunt lashed out. It was Hunt who threatened to leave us with no options, not even the option to do in any orderly way what was responsible and right.
I turned to Dean. “That’s why for your immediate thing you’ve got no choice with Hunt but the 120 or whatever it is. Right? Would you agree that that’s a buy-time thing, you better damn well get that done, but fast?”
“I think he ought to be given some signal, anyway to—” Dean said.
“Well, for Christ’s sakes get it in a way that . . . . Who’s going to talk to him?” I interjected.
Dean reiterated that the problem was having no way to get the money, and we talked about the problems with delivering it. Once again we discussed the idea of recalling the grand jury. Then I came back to Hunt.
“Try to look around the track. We have no choice on Hunt but to try to keep him—” I began.
“Right now we have no choice,” Dean said.
“But my point is, do you ever have any choice on Hunt? That’s the point,” I said. We had arrived once again back at the beginning, the inescapable circle now complete. Even the extreme measure of paying blackmail was not a solution; it would only buy us a little time.
Then Dean came up with an alternative, another way of buying time for ourselves: we might get Judge Sirica to postpone his sentencing for two weeks. That would take the pressure off as far as Hunt was concerned and give us the time we needed to get everyone before the grand jury. I liked this idea immediately and told Dean to go ahead with it.
“I think it is good, frankly, to consider these various options,” I said as the meeting closed, “and then once you . . . decide on the plan—John—and you had the right plan . . . before the election. And you handled it just right. You contained it. Now after the election we’ve got to have another plan because we can’t have, for four years, we can’t have this thing—you’re going to be eaten away. We can’t do it.”
Haldeman agreed. We had to turn off any further involvement at the lowest possible cost but at whatever cost it took; because, as he pointed out, it was now beginning to get near me.
“Well, the erosion is inevitably going to come here apart from anything, you know, people saying that the Watergate isn’t a major concern. It isn’t,” I said, “but it will be. It’s bound to be.”
“We cannot let you be tarnished by that situation,” Dean said earnestly. I was grateful for his concern—and fully in agreement with it.
“I say that the White House can’t do it. Right?” I said, and the meeting ended.
Only two decisions had emerged: Haldeman was to have Mitchell come down from New York immediately for a talk with Dean and Ehrlichman; and Dean was to try to get the sentencing postponed.
I went directly from this meeting to greet the young Russian Olympic gymnast Olga Korbut and some of her teammates, who were visiting the United States. After that there was a session on our efforts to hold down federal spending. But all the time Howard Hunt and his threats and demands for money were weighing on my mind.
As soon as these meetings were over I called in Rose Woods and asked her if we had any unused campaign funds. She told me that we did—she would have to see how much. It turned out to be $100,000, and when Haldeman came in a little later I mentioned it to him. Once again he flatly rejected the idea of our involvement in paying more money. “You should stay out of this,” he said.
Later that afternoon Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean came over to the EOB office for a long talk about Watergate. Looking back on it now, I can see that we were all operating from different bases of knowledge and with different perceptions of our own personal vulnerabilities. Haldeman seemed primarily concerned about the danger that Magruder might falsely accuse him of having known about the break-in beforehand, rather than about his knowledge of the payments to the defendants, which Dean had indicated was the real danger. In fact, as late as the following morning Haldeman would still seem unaware of the severity of Dean’s conclusion: I mentioned the fact that Dean was concerned about his own knowledge of payments to defendants, and Haldeman mused that he and Ehrlichman had worked on that with Dean. “Perhaps he thinks I’m tied into that, too,” Haldeman commented.
On the afternoon of March 21 Ehrlichman seemed even less briefed than Haldeman on the details of the situation: he indicated that he still thought that Gordon Strachan’s problem involved his failure to report disbursements of campaign funds. Ehrlichman appeared unaware that Strachan may have had knowledge of the bugging. These differing perceptions, and the chasms they created in our overall understanding, are apparent now. At the time, however, the problem only seemed very complicated, and our strategy sessions were just frustrating and inefficient minuets around the problem.
That night I dictated a long diary note about a day that was later to be seen as a disastrous turning point in my presidency. In it I noted:
Diary
As far as the day was concerned it was relatively uneventful except for the talk with Dean. Dean really in effect let it all hang out when he said there was a cancerous growth around the President that simply was going to continue to grow and that we had probably to cut it out rather than let it grow and destroy us later. He obviously is very depressed and doesn’t really see anything—other course of action open, but to move to let the facts out.
As I examined him it seems that he feels even he would be guilty of some criminal liability, due to the fact that he participated in the actions which resulted in taking care of the defendants while they were under trial. As he pointed out, what is causing him concern is that every one of the various participants is now getting his own counsel and that this is going to cause considerable problems, because it will be each man for himself, and one will not be afraid to rat on the other.
The next day, March 22, Haldeman and I again reviewed the increasingly volatile situation regarding Watergate. When our conversation turned to Liddy and the widespread rumors that he and the other defenda
nts were going to be slapped with thirty-five-year sentences, I said that I thought it had been only right to raise money for them. “I don’t mean to be blackmailed by Hunt, that goes too far,” I told Haldeman, “but we’re taking care of these that are in jail . . . we’re sorry for them. We do it out of compassion.” Haldeman agreed, saying that was why it seemed to him that there was no need for Dean to be concerned about an obstruction of justice. After all, the defendants had pleaded guilty, Haldeman said: “When a guy goes and pleads guilty, are you obstructing justice?”
I said I couldn’t understand Dean’s concern about his own involvement in an obstruction of justice—after all, by his own account he hadn’t delivered the money to the defendants. I said that I thought that was why Hunt’s direct demand to him for money had set him off in such a way. “You understand, that that would have constituted goddamn blackmail if Dean had gotten the money,” I said. But since Dean had not done it, I could not see that he had any problem.
In retrospect it is clear that on March 21 John Dean was trying to alert me to the fact that what I had assumed for nine months was the major Watergate problem—the question of who had authorized the break-in—had been overtaken by the new and far more serious problem of the cover-up. I left the meeting only troubled by the new dimensions of what he had described rather than galvanized into action by the urgency and peril of our situation. Dean did not tell me the extent of his own active and conscious role in the cover-up, and so I treated much of what he said as conjecture and deduction, instead of as a firsthand report on an explosive situation that was already out of hand. I responded accordingly, by openly running through every available option. Even Dean’s insistence that the authorization of payments to the defendants was an obstruction of justice seemed to me more a reflection of his personal depression than a statement of a considered legal conclusion. Only three weeks later, when I finally saw the whole cover-up mosaic in perspective and realized the position the payments to the defendants played in it, would I understand what Dean had really been trying to tell me.
RN Page 108