RN

by Richard Nixon

  It was in this period that Dean called from Camp David and told Haldeman’s assistant, Larry Higby, that while Dean’s report might not be a good defense as far as the rest of the White House staff were concerned, it was a very good defense of John Dean.

  Everything was growing more and more fluid on Watergate. I still sought some actions that would put the White House out in front of the controversy—some symbols to demonstrate that we, and not just the Ervin Committee, were on the side of right.

  For a while I considered an idea Dean had suggested of appointing a special presidential commission somewhat like the Warren Commission that had investigated President Kennedy’s assassination. Dean had said that he liked the idea because it would stretch things out beyond the 1974 elections. I could then consider granting clemency. But Bill Rogers, whom I had asked to give us advice about Watergate, was strongly opposed to the idea of such a commission. He warned that its members would all try to make names for themselves, and in the end it would be the main thing remembered about the Nixon administration. I finally came around to this view, and I told Haldeman and Ehrlichman, “The idea that a commission might get through the 1974 election. . . . I think the damn thing is going to come out anyway, and I just think you better cut the losses now and just better get it over with much sooner and, frankly, sharper.”

  I suggested another possibility: I would go to Judge Sirica and tell him to do whatever he thought was best—either call a new grand jury or appoint a Special Prosecutor. Rogers liked this idea. But Colson was against having a Special Prosecutor in any circumstances; he said bluntly that he thought nearly everybody in the White House except himself was involved in the post-June 17 activities, and therefore we should not deliberately increase our vulnerability. Dean also opposed the Sirica idea. He reminded Haldeman of the solution that he had proposed earlier whereby we would obtain immunity for him—that is, for Dean—and then send him to the grand jury. That way, he said, he would head off the possibility that Magruder would unfairly implicate everyone else.

  On March 27 Dean phoned Haldeman. He said that he and Paul O’Brien, one of the attorneys retained by the CRP to deal with its Watergate litigation, had concluded that Mitchell had in fact approved the Watergate bugging plan. Dean believed that Mitchell was now using the White House to protect himself; he said Mitchell and Magruder were mixing “apples and oranges” for their own protection. Magruder, for example, was apparently saying that the whole intelligence plan had first been cooked up by Dean on Haldeman’s instructions. Magruder even alleged that Strachan had once called him and told him that “the President wanted it done.”

  From a combination of hypersensitivity and a desire not to know the truth in case it turned out to be unpleasant, I had spent the last ten months putting off a confrontation with John Mitchell. Now it seemed impossible to avoid. I talked with Haldeman and Ehrlichman about having Mitchell come in to give us his personal account of what had actually happened regarding the bugging plan and the break-in.

  Before we were able even to reach any decision on this, we had to deal with another problem that had recently emerged. Dean was now saying that if he went before the grand jury, he would contradict Magruder’s—and possibly Mitchell’s—earlier testimony. For one thing, there had in fact been two meetings in Mitchell’s office at which the Liddy plan was discussed. Magruder had testified that there had been only one and that it had dealt with the new campaign spending laws. Dean was not sure how Mitchell had testified on this point. Dean and Magruder had both indicated that Mitchell was putting pressure on them to hold to the original version that there had been only one innocuous meeting. Haldeman said that he was going to advise Magruder to go to the court and say, “I lied,” and correct the record. I asked if Magruder could not still stick to his original story, but Ehrlichman said that he could not because there were too many crosscurrents. I agreed and wondered if we could help him get immunity.

  On March 28 Haldeman arranged for Mitchell, Magruder, and Dean to meet and see if they could settle the conflict over the number and subject of their meetings with Liddy.

  First, Mitchell came in alone to see Haldeman. He said that his first mistake had been not turning the thing off when Liddy first proposed it. But, he said, he just had not paid much attention to it at the time.

  Magruder told Haldeman that Liddy had been ordered to prepare a plan for campaign intelligence-gathering before he ever got to the CRP; he was not sure who had ordered it. Magruder was sure, however, that it had been John Dean’s idea to lie about the number of meetings with Liddy. Although Magruder’s version had to be regarded skeptically, we got a glimpse of how far Dean had gone to keep the Watergate situation under control. Magruder reported that Dean had not only suggested that Magruder say that there had only been one meeting but had urged Magruder to destroy his desk diary, in which there was a note of the two meetings. Magruder also said that it was Dean who had suggested that he lie about the purpose of the meetings and say that they were on the new campaign laws. In fact, Magruder said that he had testified the way he had only to protect Dean. He pointed out that he would not have hurt his own case by admitting that the meetings were on intelligence; but such an admission would have hurt Dean, by drawing him into the intelligence-planning network.

  So Jeb Magruder had perjured himself to protect John Dean—and now Dean was going to do Magruder in by exposing him as a perjurer.

  Haldeman said that Magruder had been pathetic and had asked about the possibility of clemency. Haldeman had tried to reassure him but made it clear he could make no commitments.

  After these meetings with Mitchell and Magruder, Haldeman met with Dean, who said that he could not do what Mitchell and Magruder wanted him to do—to corroborate their accounts of no prior knowledge. He said the only way to avoid this problem would be for him not to testify at all. When Haldeman told me this, I debated whether we should use executive privilege to keep Dean from having to testify.

  Dean told Haldeman that he had decided that we all needed the advice of a criminal lawyer. He said that he was going to get one himself whom we could all use to advise us.

  The Ervin Committee continued to leak prejudicial stories, and big headlines now proclaimed that McCord had linked Mitchell to prior approval of the plan. At the same time a publicity-seeking Republican member of the committee, Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, began attacking Haldeman, accusing him of having been “fully aware” of the political espionage schemes. The senior Republican on the committee, Howard Baker of Tennessee, privately expressed dismay over Weicker’s “histrionics,” but there was nothing he or we could do as Weicker found in abundance the publicity he sought.

  Conservative Republican Senators James Buckley, John Tower, and Norris Cotton publicly called on me to allow White House aides and former aides to testify before the Ervin Committee. George Bush, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, privately pleaded for some action that would get us off the defensive.

  On the afternoon of March 29 I made the decision to waive executive privilege for Watergate testimony and send Dean to the grand jury. Ehrlichman wrote out a page of notes for the announcement, and we asked Ziegler to call a special press briefing.

  Ziegler, however, raised practical objections: most of the reporters had already left the White House for the day, and we were only a few hours away from the major television speech I was to make that night. I agreed to Ziegler’s suggestion that we wait until the next day to make the announcement. I have sometimes wondered what would have happened if the announcement had been made immediately, as I had intended. Since Dean himself had recently favored this idea, it had not occurred to me that he would have changed his mind in the matter of a few days. But when we talked with him about it, he strenuously objected and said that his lawyers now told him that he should not offer to go to the grand jury.

  So we had to cancel this announcement and scrap this plan, and another day went by and nothing was done.

  In my speech that
night I announced a temporary price freeze on meat and warned Hanoi about its breaches of the Indochina cease-fire. I also heralded the homecoming of the last group of POWs. “For the first time in twelve years,” I said, “no American military forces are in Vietnam.” In Washington, however, attention was already focused on Watergate. Scarcely anyone in the media seemed to care about Vietnam anymore—not now that the Vietnam news was good and the Watergate news was bad.

  At the end of the month there was a new volley of leaked Watergate stories. The Associated Press, in a story picked up by the networks, quoted sources who said McCord indicated Haldeman had to have known about the break-in scheme. In the New York Times “reliable sources” said that McCord had linked Haldeman only by hearsay but had flatly said that Colson knew. Other sources told the Washington Post that McCord had not implicated Haldeman at all.

  In my diary I noted, “I marvel on the strength of Haldeman. He is a really remarkable man and I only hope to God that we can find a way to keep him immunized from all this, although it’s going to be terribly difficult to do so with all the effort being made to get him.”

  Before we left for San Clemente on March 30, Ziegler announced that members of the White House staff would cooperate fully if they were called before the grand jury. He also revealed that negotiations were under way with the Ervin Committee for a relaxation of our stand on executive privilege.

  I asked Ehrlichman to take over Dean’s responsibility for handling the Watergate problem. Dean was under too much attack and was obviously going to be coming under still more. In order to establish a lawyer-client privilege, Ehrlichman drew up a letter for me to sign, officially charging him with these responsibilities.

  The night after our arrival in California I presented the Medal of Freedom to film director John Ford at a dinner in his honor in Los Angeles. He was seventy-eight years old and terminally ill, but he insisted on being helped to the microphone to acknowledge the award. He told the large audience of celebrities that he had cried when he watched the POWs returning home. “Then,” he said, “I reached for my rosary and said a few decades of the beads, and I uttered a short fervent prayer, not an original prayer, but one spoken in millions of American homes today. It is a simple prayer, simply ‘God bless Richard Nixon.’ ”

  On April 2 President Thieu arrived in San Clemente for a state visit. He was concerned about the blatant lack of good faith demonstrated by the Communists in their violations of the Paris peace accords. I fully shared his concern, and I reassured him that we would not tolerate any actions that actually threatened South Vietnam. He was grateful for my reassurances, but I knew that he must be concerned about the effect the domestic drain of Watergate would have on my ability to act forcefully abroad.

  Ehrlichman moved decisively into his new role as the White House’s Watergate man. He devised a negotiating strategy for dealing with the Ervin Committee and began a general fact-gathering inquiry.

  On April 5 the CRP’s lawyer, Paul O’Brien, came to San Clemente to give his assessment of the case. Ehrlichman found that O’Brien had still another version of the current facts and situation. According to O’Brien’s information, Magruder was now saying that Colson had phoned him not once but twice to urge action on the Hunt-Liddy plan. And while only the week before Dean had told us that O’Brien felt that Mitchell had approved the plan, now O’Brien told Ehrlichman that Mitchell had not known of the break-in in advance, but that there was no question that Magruder had.

  On April 5, the same day O’Brien met with Ehrlichman, we turned back to the problem of Pat Gray’s confirmation hearings as FBI Director. The Senate Judiciary Committee had been holding the nomination hostage until Dean appeared to testify before them. The chances of getting Gray confirmed were slim, and even if we managed to get enough votes, he was now so damaged that I did not think he could be an effective Director. I therefore asked Haldeman to call him and ask that he request to have his nomination withdrawn. Gray called me back immediately and in a manly way did as I had asked.

  Later that afternoon Ehrlichman met briefly with Judge Matthew Byrne, the man Attorney General Kleindienst and Henry Petersen had been enthusiastically recommending for weeks as a prospective FBI Director. Byrne was a Democrat and a respected member of the bench. The only drawback was that once Gray’s nomination was withdrawn, it would be important to propose someone else right away. If we decided to name Judge Byrne, we would have to wait until he finished presiding over Daniel Ellsberg’s trial for unauthorized possession of classified documents.

  Diary

  The call to Pat Gray was a difficult one. He has been really a great fellow. He said that he was always loyal to the President, and that the people on his staff he had already told were crushed. I said that nobody could feel worse about it than I do.

  I met Judge Byrne, briefly, walked out the office door and talked to him for a moment. I was impressed by his real steel-like handshake. He has good tough, cold eyes and is the right age, forty-two years. Unfortunately his case isn’t over for a month.

  I had a call from Connally. As I expected, Connally was greatly disturbed about Watergate and thought that somebody had to walk the plank. Connally had raised the point with George Bush that there are too many people around the President and that they isolate the President from what is really going on. Of course what we have to realize here is that some of these people overlook the fact that we have some major successes and that we must be doing something right.

  I received a rather astonishing message through Harlow from Agnew to the effect that he would speak up on Watergate, but only at a price and that was that he would have to see the President. I told Ehrlichman to pass the message to Harlow that I didn’t want under any circumstances to ask Agnew to do something that he was not convinced he ought to do on his own, that under the circumstances he should just chart his own course and of course I would chart my own course. I only hope that Bryce delivered this message in the rather meaningful way that I tried to convey it.

  I told Haldeman it was so fortunate that neither he nor I had been told about the Watergate thing before it broke. I am not sure what we would have said, although I think we would have turned it off because of its utter stupidity.

  Kissinger came in. Told me that he thought I should stick by Haldeman. I said, “Suppose there is appearance of guilt?” He said, “Even if he is guilty in part they are after him because they know he is the strong man in the administration. He is the most selfless, able person you’ve got, and you have got to have him.”

  We have had in four months more problems than most second term Presidents have in four years. In December we had the charge of isolation and the bombing. In January, after it seemed that the war was going to be over, the charge of heartlessness, congressional relations, impoundment, and so forth in the budget. In February, they began to go on the economy, and in March it’s Watergate. So every month there’s something and each of them has an eroding effect.

  One very perceptive point was made that Watergate would not hurt us in the event the other things held up reasonably well. But if, for example, the economy also goes to pot then Watergate accentuates other failures. That is why it is so important to get back to do the domestic things well and the economic things and so forth not just for the purpose of diverting attention, but so the people will not be thinking that the administration is coming apart at the seams, which is exactly what happened in the Truman years. It wasn’t just the 5 percenters, it was the fact that added to the 5 percenters, they thought the Truman administration was just no damn good. We must not allow that thing to set in with us.

  In early April Dean had advised us that his lawyers were going to meet with the U.S. Attorneys to feel them out on what would be involved if Dean went to the grand jury. Then on April 7 he told Haldeman, with whom he had been in frequent contact during the time we were in California, that he was going to have an off-the-record meeting with the U.S. Attorneys the next day. He said there was no interest in post-brea
k-in activities. In anticipation of being called before the grand jury, he asked to meet with Haldeman and Ehrlichman as soon as they got back to Washington. On April 8, the morning of our return to Washington, I made a note about the unfortunate way the whole situation seemed to be developing, but which still expressed optimism about our ability to survive it.

  Diary

  Colson has been calling to say he has evidence that Mitchell may be trying to set up Haldeman as a scapegoat. I am not going to allow any of this division business to hurt any of our people. Everyone is going into business for himself for understandable reasons, but we’re not going to let it go to the point that one destroys another.

  In retrospect as I look back over the past months since the Congress came back into session, I think I’ve tended to become too depressed, and actually obsessed would be a better word, with the problems of the moment. We have three problems now, the question of prices, the question of Watergate, and the question of the increased disturbances in Vietnam. But compared with the massive problem we had with regard to the war and what we have gone through over the past four years, these problems do not appear all that difficult. They are solvable and they will pass. With the war we simply didn’t know whether we were going to be able to see it through.

  Haldeman and Ehrlichman met with Dean as soon as we returned to Washington. He told them that he was going to appear before the grand jury.

  When I heard this I said that Mitchell would have to decide whether he was going to tell Dean to lie about the meetings with Liddy. I said of Dean, “John is not going to lie.” Ehrlichman said that the smartest thing Dean could do would be to go down to the prosecutors and appear to be cooperative.