“Right,” I replied.
Ehrlichman said that Dean’s strong feeling was that this was the time when “you just have to let it flow.” I agreed with this totally.
On April 10 Ted Agnew asked Haldeman if he could come over to his office; he wanted help on a problem. He told Haldeman that someone who had once worked for him in Baltimore was being questioned in a probe of kickbacks and campaign contributions. Agnew assured Haldeman that he himself was innocent of any wrongdoing, but the man apparently had records of efforts to solicit campaign contributions from those who had benefited from his administration, and Agnew thought that there was a potential for embarrassment. He wondered if someone from the White House would see Maryland Senator J. Glenn Beall, Jr., the brother of the Baltimore prosecutor, and alert him that we didn’t want Agnew’s name to come up in an unnecessary or embarrassing way.
Haldeman gave me a report on the meeting. I was very concerned at the prospect of Agnew’s being dragged through the mud unfairly, but in view of all the other problems and our strained relations with Capitol Hill, I did not see how we could do anything to help him. In fact, the climate was such that anything we did to try to help might boomerang and be made to appear that we were trying to cover up for him.
On April 13 Dean told Haldeman and Ehrlichman that the White House was still not a target in the grand jury’s Watergate investigation, even though the prosecutors were beginning to develop material on the post-June period.
Magruder, however, seemed to sense that his days were numbered. Earlier he had sent word to Haldeman that if he went to the prosecutors his testimony would bring down John Mitchell. This could mean only one thing: Magruder was going to claim that Mitchell had authorized the bugging. He had asked for Haldeman’s advice, and Haldeman had responded that he should do what his lawyers told him to do—in other words, that he should come forward.
When Ehrlichman met with Colson and David Shapiro, Colson’s lawyer, Colson said that after Howard Hunt testified before the grand jury on the following Monday, both Mitchell and Magruder would be indicted.
It seemed as if our return to Washington had somehow been a catalyst, and charges and countercharges were now flying in every direction. I did my best to gather everyone in and control the finger-pointing, but a panic was setting in that was beyond anyone’s control. Colson said that Magruder was putting out the story that Haldeman, Mitchell, Colson, Dean, and I had all known about the Watergate break-in plans. Magruder, however, called one of Haldeman’s aides and said that his testimony would hurt Mitchell, Strachan, and Dean, but not Haldeman.
Haldeman reported that Colson was claiming that Ehrlichman and Dean had told him to promise clemency to Hunt in January, but that he was smarter than that and had not done so. Ehrlichman had a different version. By his account he had instructed Colson not to tell Hunt anything about a pardon and not to raise the matter with me.
Things were obviously about to happen very quickly. We could no longer avoid facing the unpleasant fact that the whole thing was completely out of hand, and that something had to be done to get the White House out in front. Now it was not just a question of knowledge of the Watergate break-in or a subsequent cover-up, but the possibility of having to respond to accusations that I had not acted promptly on the knowledge obtained during the past few weeks. Regarding this last point, Ehrlichman observed that the information Dean had been giving us over the past weeks and months had not been direct. Dean had only presented different theories of what might have happened and who might have known about it, based on secondhand knowledge—so we had had no clear-cut legal responsibility to act on it. But Magruder’s phone call to Haldeman’s aide the day before, when he had said explicitly that he would bring down John Mitchell, was firsthand “action knowledge,” and we could no longer afford to stand idly by.
About three weeks had now passed since John Dean had first told me that there was a cancer close to the presidency. Since then Watergate had been an almost constant preoccupation. I had tried to grapple with the facts only to find that they were not like the pieces of a puzzle that could be assembled into one true picture. They were more like the parts of a kaleidoscope: at one moment, arranged one way, they seemed to form a perfect design, complete in every detail. But the simple shift of one conjecture could unlock them all and they would move into a completely different pattern.
For example, on March 13 Dean told me that Gordon Strachan knew about the bugging and implied that Strachan had committed perjury. On March 17 he indicated it was possible Strachan had known about the break-in. On March 20, however, Haldeman said Strachan had not known about the break-in and had not lied—rather, “forgot” and had not been well questioned. On March 21 Dean said he thought Strachan knew about the break-in. On March 26 Dean told Haldeman that he did not know the full extent of Strachan’s knowledge but that Strachan had not perjured himself. On April 14 Strachan would deny to Ehrlichman any advance knowledge of the break-in. At the end of April, however, I was told that Magruder had passed a lie detector test concerning Strachan’s advance knowledge, and Strachan had taken the same test and failed. Years later Strachan told me that in fact he had passed that test. Strachan was never charged with knowledge of the Watergate wiretap.
There was also kaleidoscopic confusion surrounding the question of Colson’s involvement. From the very beginning Haldeman and Ehrlichman had told me that Colson was not involved in any way. Then on March 13 Dean said that Colson did not know the specifics of Watergate but, like others, “knew something was going on over there.” On March 21 Dean told me that a call from Colson may have triggered the bugging plan and that he “assumed” Colson had had “a damn good idea” what he was urging. On March 23 Colson completely denied any such knowledge. Five days later, however, both Magruder and Mitchell were speculating that Colson had known. An April 8 news report revealed Colson took a lie detector test on the question of prior knowledge and passed it. He was never charged with prior knowledge of the break-in.
A similarly confused and crucial question involved Haldeman. Both Dean and Magruder said that Haldeman and Strachan had received copies of the Watergate bugging reports and that Haldeman may have known what the information in them represented and where it had come from. Haldeman told me that while he may in fact have received these reports, he had not known anything about their source. As it later turned out, he and Strachan had not received any of them and had, when these charges were made against them, assumed that innocent intelligence reports they had received might have been the Watergate bugging transcripts.
The most basic and the most sensitive question of all involved John Mitchell’s role. For ten months everyone had speculated about whether Mitchell knew in advance. On March 21 Dean told me that he did not know the answer. But on March 27 he told Haldeman that both he and Paul O’Brien had decided that Mitchell had approved the break-in. On April 5, however, O’Brien told Ehrlichman he had concluded that Mitchell had not approved it. On April 14 Mitchell would tell Ehrlichman he had not. No such charge has ever been brought against him.
We kept thinking that if we could only establish all the facts, then we could construct a way out of the situation that would minimize if not foreclose any possible criminal liability for the people involved. But we never felt confident of the facts, and every alternative course of action, from wholesale appearances before the grand jury to Special Prosecutors to presidential commissions, met with objections from one or the other of my aides and friends who suddenly found himself in a vulnerable position.
As a result, in the three weeks after March 21, when Dean had officially put me on notice about the implications of the cover-up, we did nothing more than stew and worry about the shifting facts and continue to look for any way to prevent damage. By April 14, when everything began to fall apart, all that was left to me was to try to get myself into a position to be able to claim that I had cracked the case, trying to garner some credit for leadership that I had failed to exert.
I decided that the step needed to show some action would be to ask John Mitchell to come down to Washington. That would also alert him to the fact that we were in a position where we had to act. Rather than simply turn over the information to the prosecutors, I wanted Mitchell to have the chance to go in on his own.
Ehrlichman said that he would tell Mitchell that “the President strongly feels that the only way this thing can end up being even a little net plus for the administration . . . is for you to . . . make a statement that basically says, ‘I am both morally and legally responsible.’ ” Ehrlichman said that if both Mitchell and Magruder stonewalled, we would have no choice but to tell them that I was in possession of a body of knowledge that forced me to act.
For the first time I was in the position of having to face and force a confrontation about Watergate with John Mitchell.
Haldeman still did not believe Mitchell was guilty. “I don’t think Mitchell did order the Watergate bugging, and I don’t think he was specifically aware of the Watergate bugging at the time it was instituted. I honestly don’t,” he insisted. I agreed that the evidence was not enough to convince me that Mitchell was guilty. But it was almost certainly going to be enough to ensure that he would have to go before a grand jury. Haldeman suggested that perhaps if Mitchell went in and took the blame, the investigators and the press might not care about the cover-up anymore. I said pessimistically that they shouldn’t, but they would.
“The Mitchell thing is goddamn painful,” I said, and I told Ehrlichman to tell Mitchell that this was the toughest decision I had ever made—tougher than Cambodia, May 8, and December 18 put together. I said he should tell Mitchell that I simply could not bring myself to talk to him personally about it. I said to Ehrlichman, “Frankly, what I’m doing, John, is putting you in the same position as President Eisenhower put me in with Adams. But John Mitchell, let me say, will never go to prison. I agree with that assumption. I think what will happen is that he will put on the goddamnedest defense.”
When we turned to the subject of John Dean, who was about to be called before the grand jury, Ehrlichman argued against making Dean leave. He felt that Dean’s role in the post-June activities had not been at such a serious level that his departure was necessary. He also thought that Dean would get better and more respectful treatment from the grand jury if he still worked at the White House. Furthermore, as we all recognized, putting Dean outside the White House walls might make him turn against us.
“Dean only tried to do what he could to pick up the goddamn pieces, and everybody else around here knew it had to be done,” I said.
“What Dean did was all proper,” Haldeman added, “in terms of the higher good.”
I picked up a theme that had first been introduced by Ehrlichman: if Dean was guilty, he was no more so than was half the staff—“and, frankly, than I have been since a week ago, two weeks ago,” I added.
As far as Magruder was concerned, I asked Ehrlichman to talk to him and tell him that he was wrong if he thought that by keeping silent he was serving my interests. I told Ehrlichman to put in the personal “grace notes” that could help to ease the pain of the situation. I suggested that he tell Magruder of my affection for him and for his family. In fact, I had been thinking the night before about Magruder’s young children in school, and about his wife. “It breaks your heart,” I said. I thought back to Haldeman’s comment two weeks before on how pathetic Magruder had been with his plea for clemency. I told Ehrlichman to tell Magruder that this was a painful message for me. “I’d just put that in so that he knows that I have personal affection,” I said. “That’s the way the so-called clemency’s got to be handled.”
Ehrlichman met with Mitchell at 1:40 P.M. on April 14. After their meeting he reported to me that Mitchell was an innocent man in heart and mind, but that he had not missed an opportunity to lob “mudballs” at the White House. He had refused to admit any responsibility for the break-in.
Mitchell confirmed Magruder’s story that it was Dean who had talked Magruder into lying to the grand jury about the number and content of the meetings with Liddy. I was shocked, first by the report that Mitchell had been present at such meetings, and second by this apparent confirmation that Dean had talked Magruder into lying.
“What does Dean say about it?” I asked.
“Dean says it was Mitchell and Magruder,” Ehrlichman replied. With a wry smile he added, “It must have been the quietest meeting in history, because everybody’s version is that the other two guys talked.”
Ehrlichman also had a disturbing report of his most recent talk with Dean, who was now saying that “everyone in the place” was going to be indicted. Dean had pointedly hinted to Ehrlichman that the prosecutors were after bigger targets than John Dean—they were aiming at targets like John Ehrlichman.
The problem was apparently the money—the fact that Dean had asked Haldeman and Ehrlichman for money for the Watergate defendants. Dean’s “hypothesis,” as Ehrlichman called it, was that Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s approval of the use of Kalmbach to obtain funds had been as damaging as action. I said that I still could not believe that the prosecutors could charge Haldeman and Ehrlichman with conspiracy simply because they had been asked whether it was all right to raise the money in the first place. “Technically, I’m sure they could. Practically, it just seems awfully remote,” Haldeman said, “but maybe that’s wishful thinking.”
In the early evening of April 14 I dictated a long diary entry about the day.
Diary
I have just had bacon and eggs and waiting to go over to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It’s rather ironic that the winners of the awards are from the Washington Post. While their stories for the most part were libelous, on the other hand it is significant that yesterday and today for the first time the Watergate case really broke apart and I learned the facts on it.
In meeting on Friday, I mentioned to Ehrlichman for the first time the idea of Haldeman and Dean taking a leave of absence. He came back and said it wouldn’t work with Haldeman and I don’t think he thinks it would work with Dean, because as it turns out Dean has ways that he could implicate both Haldeman and Ehrlichman, not in a way that they couldn’t defend, but in a way that might be embarrassing. In any event, there is a solid reason for Dean not having a leave of absence because it would be in effect admitting his guilt before the ax fell on him.
Interestingly enough, Haldeman said that when Magruder came in to see him and say, “Goodbye, I’m going to jail,” he said he was like a man with a terrible load lifted off him, a totally different man. He has resigned himself to what is going to happen and is going to live with his fate.
It seems that Colson is going to be a major target, according to Magruder, of the U.S. Attorney. If Dean cracks, Colson will have had it apparently. Colson is probably telling the literal truth when he says that he did not know that the Watergate was going to be bugged. On the other hand he seems to be deeply implicated in urging action on the Liddy project and so forth, and to get the material on O’Brien, whatever he meant by that I don’t know, but Mitchell also had talked about getting material on O’Brien.
It is also quite clear that Dean was more of an actor in this whole thing than he led us to believe—or it may be that Magruder is shading it a bit this way too. Dean tells the story a very different way, particularly with regard to the question as to whether or not he advised Magruder how to testify. In this respect, Mitchell knocks Dean, because he indicates that Dean told Magruder how to testify in the meeting that Mitchell sat in with them. Dean seems to have been quite active in that.
I have a note here saying, “the loose cannon has finally gone off,” that’s probably what could be said because that’s what Magruder did when he went in and talked to the U.S. Attorney. I am glad that he did so, however; it is time to get the whole damn thing out and cleaned up.
It’s really a terrible thing what is happening to all these men. They all did it with the best of intentions, with
great devotion and dedication, but they just went one step too far and then compounded the whole thing through this program of trying to cover it up. It’s too bad we were unable to do something about it. I suppose during the election campaign there was a feeling we couldn’t do anything for fear of risking the election. Yet that was a mistake, as it turned out, because we were just postponing the day that we would have to face up to it. Immediately after the election, of course, would have been the time to move on it frontally, and yet we did not move then for reasons that I probably will understand later. I just wasn’t watching it that closely then and nobody was really minding the store. We were leaving too much to Dean, Mitchell, et al.
At the end of our conversation today, Haldeman brought up the subject himself of resignation. He said quite bluntly he didn’t want to do it and didn’t feel he should but that he might have to come to that. I didn’t commit on it because I think we might have to consider it sometime, although my present inclination, as I indicated to Ehrlichman yesterday and to Kissinger this morning, is that we really had to draw the wagons up around Haldeman and protect him due to the fact, first, that he was really innocent, despite some tangential relationships with the whole affair, and also since it would be such a massive admission of guilt upon the part of the administration that it would really be hard to indicate that we had any character at all in the future.
It will be difficult enough to have Mitchell and most of the campaign people implicated, with Dean possibly a candidate, but to have Haldeman go I think would be the extra blow.
Here what we have to do of course is to enlist some of the Republicans to stand with us. And yet the very thing I predicted is beginning to happen when you see people like John Anderson, Johnny Rhodes, George Aiken, Mathias, of course, as would be expected, and Saxbe popping off, this is the kind of thing that could escalate and get into a general situation as happened in the case of Sherman Adams when Bridges stirred it all up.
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