I left the March 21 meeting more disturbed than shocked; more anxious than alarmed. The practical effect of my failure to grasp the full import of what I had been told was that I doggedly persisted in the same course I was on before the conversation: I continued to concentrate on the question of who was vulnerable because of prior knowledge of the break-in, and to look for some way to change our public relations posture so that the White House did not look so defensive where Watergate was concerned.
On the afternoon of March 22, in a meeting in the EOB with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean, and me, John Mitchell urged that we waive executive privilege and allow all White House aides to testify before an executive session of the Ervin Committee. He said it was the only way to move the White House into a new public posture. When someone jokingly called this decision a “modified limited hang-out,” I said, “Well, it’s only the question of the thing hanging out publicly or privately.”
“If we’re in the posture of everything short of giving them a public session,” Dean himself said at one point, “you’re not hiding anything.”
We also decided that it was time to get some kind of report or statement from Dean. “I think it’s certainly something that should be done,” he concurred.
Everyone agreed a statement or report was needed, but everyone seemed to have a different idea about what it was needed for. I wanted it as proof of the truth of my public statements that there was no one in the White House involved in Watergate. I wanted a document that would show that I had said it because I had been told it and believed it. I did not want it to include all of Dean’s theories and conjectures—just answers to the broad charges. There was also talk of Dean’s report as a document that could be given to the Ervin Committee to define the degree of the involvement of different individuals and therefore help limit the number of witnesses subpoenaed. And there was talk about publicizing the document in order to preempt some of Ervin’s thunder by setting out some of the new facts about Watergate in a way that would make them old news before the hearings began. Ultimately, though, the use of the document would have to be defined by what was in it. “The proof is in the pudding,” Dean said at one point. Whatever it was, I thought we had to have it. “If it opens up doors, it opens up doors,” I said.
When the meeting ended I was relieved. The day before, I had posed two alternative courses: to yield nothing and fight back, or to try to position ourselves so the story would come out as much as possible on our own terms. Now, as of March 22, we had made the first move on the second course.
We had always thought that one important reason for avoiding public statements on Watergate or for volunteering any testimony would be to avoid putting increased pressure on John Mitchell. Therefore I worried about his reaction to this new strategy. I saw him alone after the others had gone. I did not want him to think that I was pushing him out on his own.
I said that I did not think Sherman Adams should have been sacked, even though he had made a mistake. That had been a cruel decision, and I was not going to react cruelly in this case. I was not going to turn against my friends. Then I thought of the beating everyone was going to take before the Ervin Committee. “I don’t give a shit what happens,” I said to Mitchell. As far as I was concerned they could “plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else, if it’ll save it—save it for them. That’s the whole point. On the other hand . . . I would prefer, as I said to you, that you do it the other way. And I would particularly prefer to do it that other way if it’s going to come out that way anyway. . . . The story they get out by leaks, charges and so forth, and innuendos, will be a hell of a lot worse than the story they’re going to get out by just letting it out there.”
I knew that Mitchell would understand that this was my oblique way of confronting the need to make a painful shift in our Watergate strategy, a strategy that so far had been a dismal and damaging failure. Now we had to take a chance and go the other way. It was a relief to know that Mitchell had already come to this conclusion.
The next morning, March 23, Judge John Sirica called an open court session for the purpose of announcing the Watergate sentences. Shortly before the session began, he was handed a letter from James McCord. In it McCord said that political pressure had been exerted to keep him silent; that perjury had been committed at the trial; and that offers of clemency had been made in return for silence. Sirica read the letter in open court.
I had gone to Florida for the weekend, and I was in my study in Key Biscayne when a call came from Ehrlichman. I dictated a diary note soon after: “I have just received a telephone call from John Ehrlichman with regard to McCord’s bombshell on the Watergate thing. I suppose this is something that had to be expected at some point and in my view it is just as well to get it over with now. Let’s find out where the bodies are buried and what he has to say.”
Sirica freed McCord on bond. He gave a provisional sentence of thirty-five years in jail to Hunt and forty years to each of the other four. Liddy, who had already been cited for contempt because of his refusal to talk, was given a final sentence: six years and eight months to twenty years in jail and a $40,000 fine. These sentences were an outrage. Murderers had received more lenient sentences in the District of Columbia. Sirica admitted severity and justified it as a tactic aimed at getting the defendants to talk. Later Gordon Liddy would wryly remark that he and Sirica were men of like minds because they both believed that the end justifies the means.
Diary
I rather gather that it may go more the Mitchell-Magruder route than the White House route. Whatever the case may be we are now forced to some sort of a position on Watergate. The main thing we have to get off our backs, of course, is the whole problem of political pressure.
As I told Ehrlichman, since the thing is going to come out, let’s prick the boil early and get it over with. I asked him whether or not he didn’t think we ought to have the President take the lead in calling for a grand jury and offer that everybody in the White House should be called upon to testify.
He said he would talk to Mitchell about that and also talk to Dean about it, but he is off to California for some church affair and will not be back until Sunday, so I will get ahold of Haldeman and Ziegler but I am going to have to make up my mind on this too. I am going to give Dean a call and get his judgment on it. Perhaps Kleindienst as well.
Of course, right at the moment, I guess we’re all a bit depressed. I have to be with the Watergate thing going, and not knowing what’s going to come out of it. But I think the most important thing now is to get the White House cleaned and cleaned fast on this matter. Now that the judge has moved, I think the more I lean to the idea that we should be calling for a grand jury.
The CPI figures came out—the worst in twenty years—the market continues to go down. So it’s just one of the those bad Marches which seem to be congenital as far as our administration is concerned. March is usually a very bad month and then April is a month for action. We shall see.
I told Haldeman to get in touch with Colson and find out exactly what he had said to Hunt about clemency, including whether or not he had mentioned my name. Colson said that when he had met with William Bittman, Hunt’s lawyer, Bittman had made references to the fact that Hunt hoped to be out of prison before the end of the year. In response Colson had told Bittman that he was Hunt’s friend and would try to do what he could. He said that he had not been specific and had not mentioned me. Colson conceded that what Bittman inferred from his comments might be different from what was actually said.
Haldeman asked Colson about Dean’s new disclosure that it had been Colson’s call to Magruder urging action on Hunt’s and Liddy’s intelligence-gathering plans that may have precipitated the Watergate break-in. Haldeman reported that Colson had seemed startled by this question. He said he had not realized that the fact of the call was generally known. He swore that he had not known what it was that Hunt and Liddy were actually proposing.
Haldeman contacted Mitchell about my
plan to request another grand jury to look into Watergate. He was against it. He said that at this point it would just give credibility to everything McCord had said and damage the rights of others. Dean agreed with Mitchell and said that we should not overreact. But at this point overreaction on our part was hardly the problem. McCord’s letter was explosive news, and I kept pushing for something I could say or do that would enable us to get control of the rush of events: if not another grand jury, then perhaps I should appoint a Special Prosecutor of some kind. But there was always resistance from someone. On March 25 I made a note about the preceding day.
Diary
Yesterday continued our soul-searching with regard to the Watergate matter. I had a long talk with Haldeman, and he told me about Dean’s plan of possibly going up to the grand jury, asking for immunity, and then telling all. I am not sure that this is in our interests because we would be giving in on our strongest case where executive privilege is concerned. I mentioned to Haldeman that everybody named by the grand jury, or particularly named in the letter on Thursday by McCord, would have to volunteer to go immediately before the grand jury and present everything that he knew.
Haldeman finally came down, and not reluctantly as a matter of fact, on my side that what we had to do was to have appearances before the grand jury.
Colson is the one that is dragging his feet the most here and I can understand why, but he is the one perhaps who is the most clever in terms of being able to handle himself before the grand jury.
My concern is that the Cubans may have talked freely to McCord about their hopes and promises for immunity and that this is going to look like an administration cover-up in massive proportions or an obstruction of justice.
Colson swears that anything he said to Bittman he had made a thorough memorandum on later, and that he had limited it to Hunt only on the basis of old friendship. He said that he would intercede for him and he had reason to think that his intercession would be listened to. This, of course, is itself bad enough, and Colson overstated it somewhat.
I talked to Haldeman about the difficulty of any kind of clemency. He agreed nothing could happen before the 1974 elections and whether it could happen then or right at the end remains to be seen. Hunt might be an exceptional case because of his longtime service, the fact that he was not involved as the others were, the fact, too, that he has this very serious personal problem with his wife dead and his children having no one really to care for them.
I talked to Haldeman about the necessity of getting this whole thing cleaned up. I said that we simply wouldn’t be able to govern, we couldn’t do the job we could do for the country if we allowed it to go on. I said that each man had to go up there and I said when a man was charged he probably had to take a leave of absence. I was thinking then of Magruder.
I said the problem is that, if we go that far, what happens if someone in the White House is charged? Haldeman immediately reacted and said, “Well, that’s exactly of course what they want. To drive somebody in the top command out of office and indicate that the whole White House is shot through with corruption.” And he’s right. We have to find a way to cut this thing off at the pass before it reaches that point, because there’s no question in my mind that neither Haldeman or Ehrlichman are guilty.
The Colson matter is something else again. What happens there troubles me a great deal and only time will tell whether he can dig himself out of what appears to be a pretty complex and difficult situation.
I made a note on the 24th, yesterday, that it was exactly sixty days after the Vietnam speech, March 23, our high point in the polls, that the whole Watergate thing came apart, or at least blew up into its rather massive proportions. I recall, too, Theodore Roosevelt coming back after his fantastically successful trip abroad and being received virtually with a ticker tape parade in New York City, and then a few months later being turned down by his own party for leadership and not even being made a delegate to the convention.
It was also on Friday, March 23, that James McCord had a private interview with Samuel Dash, the chief counsel of the Ervin Committee. On March 25 Dash held a press conference and proclaimed McCord’s account “full and honest.” Even some of the reporters present were perplexed at such a blatantly prejudicial move; some of them speculated that Dash deliberately intended to heighten pressure on them to find leaks. As they soon found out, the search for leaks was not to be that difficult. As would become typical of the Committee’s “fairness,” the substance of McCord’s secret session with Dash immediately leaked.
It turned out that one of McCord’s particular targets was John Dean. On the night of March 25 we learned that the next morning’s Los Angeles Times was going to report that McCord had “told Senate investigators” that Magruder and Dean had had prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in. Dean told Ziegler that the story was libelous and that his attorney was going to inform the paper to that effect. The story appeared regardless, under the headline: McCord Says Dean, Magruder Knew in Advance of Bugging. Haldeman called Dean again and received another flat denial. At first I thought about simply announcing that Dean would volunteer to go before the grand jury, but I decided to wait. When Ziegler came to see me before his regular morning press briefing, I told him to express confidence in Dean but to avoid statements on Magruder.
This story in the Los Angeles Times marked a major new stage in my perception of the seriousness of the Watergate issue.
Diary
We have tended to sort of live in the idea that while the Watergate wasn’t all that big an issue in the country, that it was primarily a Washington-New York story, but now it is far more than that and with the media giving it an enormous assist, it will become worse, particularly as the defendants, if they do, begin to crack and put out various episodes of recollections which may or may not be true but which leave a terrible stigma of possible guilt on the part of the White House staff. Rogers told us that Roger Mudd had positively gloated while reporting the McCord letter.
The other side of the coin is that most of our friends in the press, including Dick Wilson, Bill White, Roscoe Drummond, Vermont Royster, are now pointing out that what was a caper in June now appears to be like a massive cover-up and one that could leave a serious mark on the President and the administration for the balance of the four years unless we take action frontally to clear the thing up.
I think this is correct.
The day has been a hard one, but all in all the day must be a terribly hard one for others. I think of the men who are in prison, I think of course of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, naturally, Mitchell who must be concerned. Needless to say, Magruder who knows he must have committed perjury before the court and Dean who is really the one who deserves the most consideration because he was acting always as a counsel, giving his best advice and always avoiding anything which would smack of illegal or improper activities.
Haldeman had talked with Dean during the day. Dean had said, “The more I look at it, the more I am convinced that if we try to fight it we’re going to lose eventually, and the longer we take to lose, the worse we are going to look.” Dean told Haldeman that we should revive the idea of going before a grand jury to talk about everything, without invoking executive privilege. I still wasn’t sure this was the right course. Dean also told Haldeman that earlier Mitchell had suggested someone be sent to “take McCord’s pulse.” Dean said that out of this somehow there seemed to be a view floating around that a one-year clemency commitment had been made. Dean also indicated concern because he himself had called Liddy at one point and reassured him not to worry. My diary continued:
Diary
There’s also the question as to how much promises were made on the clemency side. Of course Dean puts it on the basis that they were blackmailing us, but on the other hand, as I told Haldeman, that while there might not be any legal basis for prosecution for people paying blackmail, on the other hand, in terms of the President keeping such people on his staff, there just wouldn’t be any way to do
so. I didn’t put it quite so bluntly as that to him, but that is my considered judgment.
According to Haldeman, Dean’s concern in testifying before the grand jury was that he told Haldeman he really didn’t know how to answer insofar as Mitchell’s involvement was concerned because he did not have what he considered to be totally substantiated evidence with regard to Mitchell’s role.
Dean also told Haldeman that he didn’t have any knowledge beyond a certain point on Magruder because Magruder had not confided in him. He told Haldeman that the only involvement he had with Magruder was that before Magruder went to the grand jury he came to see Dean and asked Dean to question him on the basis that Dean thought the grand jury would raise so that we could get a dry run, and that he, Dean, did that. He said that Magruder had acquitted himself well on the answers, but he said, “I have not gone on an off-the-record type thing in any way with Jeb to get the truth out of him, so I don’t know what the truth is from Jeb.”
Dean has also raised with Haldeman the point that he did not know the full extent of Gordon Strachan’s knowledge.
Haldeman said he asked Dean if Strachan had perjured himself, and Dean said, “No, he hasn’t.” I pointed out to Haldeman that if Dean went before the grand jury that the grand jury would then call Haldeman, Mitchell, Colson, Ehrlichman, and possibly others that would come out in Dean’s questioning and that under those circumstances they would have to go before the grand jury too. Haldeman said again that Colson is very reluctant to expose himself to a grand jury. Dean told Haldeman that he purposely had not questioned Colson on activities other than Watergate which Colson seemed to be worried about because Dean really didn’t want to know about those things. I told Haldeman that I didn’t know of anything that Colson had done that was illegal unless he had the Cubans doing some damn thing in some other area. Haldeman answered, “He may have.” I said, “Do you think he did?” Haldeman answered, “I don’t know—I really don’t know.”
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