Petersen came to see me again that afternoon, April 16. I told him that I had asked Dean for his resignation—not to announce it, but just to have it in hand. Petersen said he had no problem with that. I asked if he still felt that Haldeman and Ehrlichman should leave. “Mindful of the need for confidence in your office—yes,” he said. “That has nothing to do with guilt or innocence.” I wondered how he could expect me to live with myself if I deserted my friends simply for the sake of appearances. He gave me his written note of the allegations against them. In summary, the charges were:
Ehrlichman—the “deep-six” instruction and informing Liddy through Dean that Hunt should leave the country.
Haldeman—Magruder said that budget information on the Liddy plan had been given to Strachan, opening the possibility that it had gone to Haldeman. Dean had told Haldeman of the Liddy proposals after they were made and apparently no one had issued any instructions that the program be discontinued. Magruder said he had summaries of the bugging transcripts delivered to Strachan—again raising a possibility that they had been shown to Haldeman.
All our decisions and all our discussions in those days were taking place against a rising flood tide of pressure from the media and Congress. Watergate had acquired dominant status on the television news. Almost daily, every major newspaper had a story based on a leak about some aspect of the case.
I felt that some kind of statement had to be made from the White House, and on April 17 I walked into the press room and announced that we had reached an agreement with Senator Ervin by which all members of my staff would appear voluntarily to testify under oath when requested to do so by his committee. They would answer all relevant questions, unless executive privilege was warranted. Then I added:
On March 21, as a result of serious charges which came to my attention, some of which were publicly reported, I began intensive new inquiries into this whole matter. . . . There have been major developments in the case concerning which it would be improper to be more specific now, except to say that real progress has been made in finding the truth.
If any person in the executive branch or in the government is indicted by the grand jury, my policy will be to immediately suspend him. If he is convicted he will, of course, be automatically discharged.
At Ehrlichman’s request I also expressed my personal opposition to the granting of immunity in this case:
I have expressed to the appropriate authorities my view that no individual holding, in the past or at the present, a position of major importance in the administration should be given immunity from prosecution. The judicial process is moving ahead as it should. . . . I condemn any attempts to cover-up in this case, no matter who is involved.
I had formulated the language of this “no immunity” passage with Petersen. I indicated to him only that my concern was to avoid the appearance that would be created if high White House staff members, after acknowledging participation in crimes, were to get off without any penalty. But that was only part of the reason. Another part was Ehrlichman’s and Colson’s argument that if immunity were dangled before Dean it would be an incentive for him to lie about others, secure in the knowledge that he was protected from the consequences of his own testimony; the final part was my calculation that without immunity Dean might be less likely to turn against me in hope that I would grant him an eventual pardon.
Dean obviously understood what I had done. Len Garment sent word to me that the immunity passage of my statement had Dean “charging around the White House like a wild animal.”
Two days later the Washington Post reported that Jeb Magruder was telling everything to the prosecutors and that his story would bring down John Dean. The story said that he had accused Mitchell and Dean of helping plan the break-in. This report, coupled with my April 17 statement, triggered Dean. He called Ziegler and said threateningly that he was going to have to “start calling in some friendly reporters.” That afternoon he issued a statement: “Some may hope or think that I will become a scapegoat in the Watergate case. Anyone who believes this does not know me, know the true facts, nor understand our system of justice.”
I told Ziegler to respond by saying that we were not after scapegoats, but the truth.
It was already clear that there was not one truth about Watergate. There was the factual truth, which involved the literal description of what had occurred. But the factual truth could probably never be completely reconstructed, because each of us had become involved in different ways and no one’s knowledge at any given time exactly duplicated anyone else’s.
There was the legal truth, which, as we now understood, would involve judgments about motive. There was the moral truth, which would involve opinions about whether what had been done represented an indictment of the ethics of the White House. And there was the political truth, which would be the sum of the impact that all the other truths would have on the American people and on their opinion of me and of my administration.
I can see that long before I was willing to admit it to myself consciously, I knew instinctively that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were going to have to leave the White House. Even while I believed that they had a good chance of being vindicated on the charges of criminal conduct, I knew that the circumstantial facts were so damning that they would not be able to survive the political test. I recognized that if they stayed, they would damage the White House and damage me.
I told myself that I had not been involved in the things that gave them potential criminal vulnerability. I was sure that I had heard nothing about the break-in in advance; I had seen none of the reports based on the phone bug; I had known nothing about Ehrlichman’s alleged instruction to Dean to “deep-six” the material from Hunt’s safe; and I was sure that no one had asked me about bringing in Kalmbach to raise funds, or about using the $350,000 cash fund for the payments to the defendants.
But there were things that I had known. I had talked with Colson about clemency; I too had suspected Magruder was not telling the truth, but I had done nothing about my suspicions; I had been aware that support funds were going to the defendants; and on March 21 I had even contemplated paying blackmail. The difference was that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had become trapped by their circumstantial involvement; so far, I had not.
I was faced with having to fire my friends for things that I myself was a part of, things that I could not accept as morally or legally wrong, no matter how much that opened me to charges of cynicism and amorality. There had been no thievery or venality. We had all simply wandered into a situation unthinkingly, trying to protect ourselves from what we saw as a political problem. Now, suddenly, it was like a Rorschach ink blot: others, looking at our actions, pointed out a pattern that we ourselves had not seen.
I was selfish enough about my own survival to want them to leave; but I was not so ruthless as to be able to confront easily the idea of hurting people I cared about so deeply. I worried about the impact on them if they were forced to leave; and I worried about the impact on me if they didn’t. So the next two weeks were governed by contradictory impulses: I tried to persuade them to go—while I insisted that I could not offer up my friends as sacrifices. I said that we had to do the right thing no matter how painful it was—while I cast about for any possible way to avert the damage, even if it took us to the edge of the law.
This put me in an increasingly difficult situation with respect to John Dean. Since Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s defense lay in discrediting Dean, as long as I kept him on the staff I would appear to be lending credence to his charges against them. I felt that I could not ignore Henry Petersen’s private request not to fire Dean, but I knew the detrimental impact that would have on the public perception of Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s guilt.
There was also a personal consideration I could not ignore. I had already alienated Dean by going along with the idea of preventing his obtaining immunity. Now I knew that if I seemed to turn on him, he would almost certainly turn on me. I wanted to handle John Dean very ging
erly.
I also had to recognize and admit a confusion and ambivalence about Dean’s role. He had been given the brief to contain the Watergate damage. If no one had known at the time all the lengths to which he was having to go to do so, was that his fault or ours? There was a legal difference, but how much of a real difference could we claim between the fact that he had coached Magruder’s grand jury testimony while knowing firsthand that Magruder was lying, and the fact that we had wanted him to help Magruder get through the grand jury while only suspecting Magruder was lying—but doing nothing to confirm or dispel our suspicions?
It had come down in the end to a question of Dean’s judgment: we had wanted Dean to do what had to be done to keep the matter under control—but with the unspoken assumption that he would stop short of getting us in trouble. Dean, however, had simply done what he thought had to be done while failing to project all the consequences.
It was too late to wonder whether someone else in that role—someone without Dean’s vulnerabilities from having been present at the Liddy meetings—would have recognized earlier the trap being set for himself and us. By the spring of 1973 it mattered little anymore whether Dean had in fact acted from a genuine belief that what he was doing was necessary to protect the White House, or primarily because he had wanted to protect himself, or whether, under the great pressures he faced, he was even able to make the distinction.
Whatever Dean’s motives before or after, I also believed that he was earnestly concerned about the presidency when he came to see me on March 21. Ulterior concern had partly been responsible for bringing him there—the press attention that resulted from Pat Gray’s confirmation hearings; my pressure on him to prepare a written statement on Watergate and to answer the charges against him by a letter signed under oath, an idea born of my ignorance about what such action would do to him; and Hunt’s direct demand for $122,000. When he walked into my office, however, I believe that he had genuinely hoped to save the presidency from an encroaching cancer. I am sure he hoped that I would react strongly and take charge of the situation. Instead I contemplated buying time with one more payment to Hunt and calmly analyzed the political problems involved in granting clemency to the defendants after the 1974 election.
As early as April 15 I had broached the idea that Haldeman and Ehrlichman possibly take leaves of absence by suggesting that they might find themselves being worn down by press leaks and press charges. On April 17 I did so again. They both disagreed. Ehrlichman said that Dean was the one who should leave. He asked if I felt that Dean’s charges were valid. I assured him that I did not, and that I saw that Dean’s involvement was on a much more serious level than his own. “Then that’s the way it ought to be put,” Ehrlichman said. “He brought in a lot of silly garbage about me which doesn’t add up to a nickel’s worth of a lawsuit.”
Ehrlichman said that, furthermore, there were indications that during the original Watergate investigation, Henry Petersen had passed grand jury information to Dean, who was then acting as White House Counsel. That night I called Petersen and told him not to give me any information from the grand jury unless he specifically thought I should have it.
Despite their initially tough front, it was not easy for Haldeman and Ehrlichman to sustain their optimism. That night they reported to me that while their lawyers did not think that the evidence against them was legally sufficient, they had advised them that there was a real chance that it would be a difficult case when so many fine points of motive and intention were involved. The law on obstruction of justice was very loose and broad. As Ehrlichman summed it up, it was possible for them to “beat the rap, but we’re damaged goods.”
I wanted to be reassuring, but I could think of nothing encouraging to say that any of us would believe. “I think we’ve just about had it,” Ehrlichman continued, “I think the odds are against it.”
The two of them joked mordantly about Ehrlichman’s making a living handling traffic cases. I made an offer to help pay their legal fees. They thanked me but declined the offer.
After we had discussed the charges at great length, Ehrlichman said, “I’m just not willing to believe the process will result in an indictment . . . I just can’t accept that.”
“You’ve gotta have faith that the system works,” Haldeman agreed.
I said that we would celebrate their acquittal together. “We’ll have the goddamnedest party at Camp David,” I promised. But it was just bravado. Deep inside I knew that none of us was confident of the outcome.
At Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s request I met with their lawyers. They told me that they did not think the cases against their clients were indictable, but they realistically admitted that the prosecutors were zealots and therefore anything could happen. They urged me not to force Haldeman and Ehrlichman to leave, because to do so would be taken as an admission of their guilt. They requested instead that I make a public statement of faith and support for both of them. They said that Henry Petersen was a man I should not trust, and they urged me to stay away from his advice. Later, when Haldeman reminded me of this, I could only say, “He’s all I’ve got, Bob.”
It was 7:40 on the night of April 19 that we received word of the first press leaks that Dean and his lawyers had designed as a way of bolstering his case for immunity. Each leak would go a little further: “upping the ante,” I called it. In what soon became a grim pattern, we would receive a call, usually from the Washington Post or the New York Times, just a few minutes before the first-edition deadlines, asking for immediate comment on a complicated Watergate story. If we could not meet the deadlines, the stories would be printed without our response.
On this first night the Washington Post called to alert us that they were planning to publish a report that an associate of Dean’s said he was “not going to go down in flames,” and that he would implicate people “above and below himself.” They said that Dean would charge Haldeman with having engineered the cover-up in order to hide the involvement of presidential aides in the DNC bugging, and that the so-called “Dean report” attesting to “no White House involvement” in Watergate had been more or less made up out of whole cloth.
The next morning the Post ran the story on the front page.
That same day, April 20, the New York Times reported without attribution John Mitchell’s first alleged public acknowledgment that he had ever heard of the buggings in advance. According to the Times, Mitchell had told “friends” that he had heard of the bugging plot but rejected it and did not know who had ordered that it go ahead.
Throughout this whole period I had tried to keep up a fully active schedule. On Wednesday, April 18, for example, I spent nearly two hours in a congressional leadership meeting on energy policy and then proceeded into another meeting with congressmen on Soviet emigration policy. Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti of Italy was in Washington for a state visit and Rainer Barzel, the chairman of West Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, came in for an informal talk. I met with John Volpe, our ambassador to Italy, and then attended a two-hour session on the economy. On April 19 I met with American Jewish leaders on the issue of the emigration of Soviet Jews. On April 20 I held a Cabinet meeting for two hours on energy and the economy and then flew to Florida for the Easter weekend.
Originally, Haldeman and Ehrlichman had planned to come with me to Key Biscayne so that there would be no interruption of their normal duties. But as the weekend neared I felt that I needed time to think, and they felt the same way. They decided, therefore, to go to Camp David instead.
On the evening of April 20 Ron Ziegler came to my house. “Bob will accept the fact that they should leave if the inevitable happens,” I told him as we watched the sun setting into Biscayne Bay, “but he won’t accept that it is inevitable.”
“I know the kind of thing we’re going to be up against,” Ziegler answered. “I saw Mitchell on television tonight. They were juxtaposing the public statements he made earlier with what he is saying now, trying to humiliate him. You
can’t have your Chief of Staff and your major domestic adviser going through that kind of thing every day.” Ziegler said that in three days alone he had been asked over 300 questions on Watergate in his daily briefings. I asked him to call Haldeman and tell him this, as his own personal feeling about the situation. Before I had left for Florida for the weekend, Haldeman had urged that I not get just one-sided “panicky” advice about what I should do. He had asked me to check with Pat Buchanan and find out how he felt. I had done so, and I wanted Ziegler to read to Haldeman what Buchanan had written to me:
Anyone who is not guilty should not be put overboard . . . however, presidential aides who cannot maintain their viability should step forward voluntarily . . . if done sooner it will be a selfless act. . . if it is dragged out, the result will be that they were forced . . .
Howard K. Smith questioned on television: Will Nixon be the Eisenhower who cleans his house himself, or the Harding who covered up for his people? This in ruthless candor is the question.
If Haldeman leaves without Ehrlichman, it is still a cover-up: they can’t be separated. If there is any chance Ehrlichman’s name is going to come up in the grand jury, he should go.
There is a Titanic mentality around the White House staff these days. We’ve got to put out the life rafts and hope to pull the presidency through.
Later I phoned Ziegler to find out what had been said when he had delivered his message. He told me that Haldeman had been “thoughtful.”
The next morning, April 21, the Miami Herald quoted “associates” of Mitchell who claimed that Magruder had gone over Mitchell’s head to the White House to obtain approval of the bugging plan. The Washington Post said that Dean had documentary evidence to support his charges about the bugging and the cover-up. And the New York Times reported that Dean had supervised payoffs of more than $175,000 to defendants, a charge Dean denied.
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