RN

by Richard Nixon

  On Easter morning there were four different Watergate stories on the front page of the Washington Post. According to the major one, the grand jury was investigating whether Haldeman had a fund of $350,000 from which he ordered payments to defendants to keep quiet. The story was attributed to a “high-placed source in the executive branch.” Sources said that Dean had tried to stop the payments but was ordered to go ahead with them by higher-ups. A source also said that Dean was prepared to implicate Ehrlichman in Watergate.

  The Washington Star said that Haldeman and Ehrlichman both were targets. The Star also quoted “sources” as saying that Mitchell had personally approved the bugging plans, although “sources” close to Mitchell were quoted as saying that Mitchell believed it was the White House that had done so. Colson, in an alleged attempt to take care of himself, was reported to have given the prosecutors documentary evidence establishing a cover-up.

  Although not a single charge of any kind had been made against me directly, a Gallup poll reported that over 40 percent of the people thought I had known about the Watergate bugging in advance. In the same poll 53 percent thought that the bugging was nothing more than “just politics—the kind of thing both parties engage in.”

  It had been my habit for years to place phone calls to my staff on Easter Sunday. This troubled Easter morning I started with Chuck Colson. He heatedly denied “distorted stories” about him in the newspapers. He said that he wanted to tell me again that the phone call he had made to Magruder that was now being alleged to have precipitated the whole Watergate episode had been innocent. I said that I believed him completely. We wished each other well on Easter.

  Next I called Dean. “On Easter morning, I want you to know someone is thinking of you,” I began. “I want to wish you well—we’ll make it through. You said that this is a cancer that must be cut out, I want you to know I am following that advice.”

  Dean said that he was grateful for the call. His appreciation seemed real. He said that at some point he would like to discuss with me how he should plead. He said he didn’t know if he should take the Fifth Amendment. I told him that he should feel free to come see me.

  At one point Dean said rather coolly, “I know how that line got in the statement, the one about no immunity.” We talked about Gray’s destruction of documents and the sequence of events surrounding Hunt’s demand—the events that had led to our meeting of March 21.

  I told him I still considered it proper for us to meet about his plea because he had not yet been dismissed from the White House. “You’re still my counsel,” I said.

  At 9:45 I called Haldeman. “I don’t want this Easter to go by without reminding you how much tougher it was last Easter,” I said. He agreed that this was true.

  I called Ehrlichman next. He wished me a good Easter, but he warned, “Don’t move too fast and start picking up Carl Rowan’s and Joe Kraft’s lines that this entire government is corrupt because of all of this. Stay steady.”

  I went in to gather the family for the Easter church service. There is a kind of unspoken consensus that works in our family. During some crises they will be with me hourly, advising me on every change in mood they perceive and canvassing all the possible options. In this case, however, they had decided that my problem was that I had too many pressures coming in from every direction, and they tried to make it easier for me by talking about other things. Julie had sent me a note when we arrived in Florida. It said simply, “We love you. We stand with you.”

  When we had finally got the Vietnam peace agreement on January 23, I had told the family that one welcome personal benefit would be that we would no longer be harassed by sign-carrying hecklers as we had been during our first four years. The war was over, but now signs had reappeared. Now they were Watergate signs. Eventually they became even uglier and more personal than the antiwar signs had ever been.

  When Pat and I left the church that morning, several people in the crowd held up signs. One of them read: “Is the President honest?” A woman rushed over in front of it, holding up a crudely done sign of her own: “Yes, the President is honest.”

  Later in the day Ziegler told me that Dean had called him to say how much he had appreciated my call. Ziegler had asked him about the newspaper reports that “sources close to Dean” were saying that his “Dean Report” to which I had alluded in my press conference of August 29, had never actually been written. “If I had a chance to discuss that statement with the President before he made it, it certainly would have been phrased differently,” Dean told Ziegler. He added, “I wish someone had told me I was conducting an investigation, Ron—I just reported daily to John and Bob.”

  This exchange angered and depressed Ziegler. His office had kept the detailed notes from phone calls between Dean and Jerry Warren, the Deputy Press Secretary, when Warren had called Dean almost daily to ask him for guidance on responses to Watergate questions in the briefings. “No one in the White House involved” had been a staple of Dean’s response. He had also talked frequently about his “investigation,” which, he said, had begun on the day after the break-in. Dean had also given very clear instructions about how Ziegler should defend him when he was under attack: he should say that Dean had had no contact with Liddy on intelligence-gathering matters; that he had not shown FBI materials to anyone; and that he had not delayed turning over items from Hunt’s safe to the FBI. Now Dean was completely undercutting Ziegler, who wondered if he would be able to go before the press and brief again.

  On Monday morning, April 23, I had a three-hour session with Ziegler, Pat Buchanan, and Chappie Rose. I had asked Rose, a fine lawyer and personal friend from the Eisenhower days, to fly down to Florida to give me some outside counsel.

  As Buchanan summarized the options, there were four: we could do nothing, but the evidence was too strong for that; we could fire everyone, but the evidence was too weak for that; we could ask them to take leaves, but that would just postpone the injury. “The answer is their resignation,” he said. But Chappie Rose was less certain. He thought that it might be prejudicial to their rights to force them to resign. Ziegler played an effective devil’s advocate against both views.

  At the heart of the problem, as I had increasingly come to see it, was the White House itself. Haldeman and Ehrlichman had lost the confidence of the staff; no work was being done; everyone was tired, drained, and distracted.

  For hours we debated the question, and the longer we went over the charges, the more inevitable the outcome seemed. At one point Rose sadly quoted Gladstone: “The first essential for a Prime Minister is to be a good butcher.”

  “Ten years from now,” I said, as much for myself as the others, “this will be a few paragraphs. In fifty years it will be a footnote. But in the meantime I have got to run the office of President, and I can’t when they are under constant attack. The country can’t feel that the President is burdened and obsessed. The Mideast is boiling, and the international economic situation is in a crisis. There are too many things that need attention.”

  As the session drew to an emotional end, we all agreed that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had to resign.

  I asked Buchanan if he would call Haldeman and tell him that I had come to this conclusion. I said that he should let them know that I was not forcing it. I still wanted it to be their decision. But this was my opinion. The next step would be theirs.

  Buchanan said that he thought Ziegler should do it. The personal ties were closer there, and maybe that would make it less painful. Ziegler stared out the window. Haldeman had been responsible for bringing him on my staff; now he was being asked to pass on the word that Haldeman must resign. He said nothing.

  “There are no good choices,” I said for all of us.

  After making the call, Ziegler told me that Haldeman had been predictably stoic and fair. He had said that while he disagreed with the decision, he would accept it.

  Within a few hours, Haldeman called Ziegler back. Evidently he had talked to his lawyers, and also to
Ehrlichman, who had resisted strongly and had persuaded Haldeman to change his mind. Ehrlichman maintained that he was in a different situation and that even if Haldeman resigned, he should not. Ehrlichman thought the charges against him were much weaker and that therefore he was detachable. And there was no question that he wanted to be detached.

  Haldeman argued to Ziegler that I was overreacting. “In all the other important decisions the President has operated from strength,” he said, “and just because this is painful doesn’t mean it is strong.” He urged that I see his lawyers again. “This would be the first real victory of the establishment against Nixon,” he insisted. “This is what the media wants, and sooner or later they will see it as phony. It won’t help.”

  Even though I knew that the decision would have to be mine, I sought the advice of several men I particularly trusted and respected. I asked Ziegler to call Bill Rogers, who said that it appeared to him that Haldeman could not survive in his job and that that should be the determining consideration. He felt that Ehrlichman was a closer case. John Connally’s view was that if the allegations against them were untrue, then they should not have to go; but if they could not refute the allegations in a way that would demonstrate their untruth there was no alternative. “Someone has to walk the plank,” he said, repeating what he had told me when the whole thing first broke open in March.

  Bryce Harlow said, “If Haldeman, Dean, and Ehrlichman have undertaken actions which will not float in the public domain, they must leave quickly—they are like a big barnacle on the ship of state, and there is too much at stake to hang on for personal reasons.” Leaves of absence would be wrong, he said, because they would only postpone the inevitable and in the end would be less fair to the men themselves. Kissinger, too, had come to the view that something had to be done to break what he called the “miasma of uncertainty” that had come to surround the working of the entire administration.

  On Tuesday night, heading back to Washington from Key Biscayne, I thought about Haldeman’s argument that this decision should be made with the same toughness and disregard for the popular and easy course that had characterized the decisions on Cambodia, May 8, and December 18. But there was a difference. In those other decisions involving policy I always knew that if I were given a chance to present the whole case to the people they would be behind me. In those instances I had been acting on strong and recognizable principles. With Watergate there was no way to gain public support even on the principle of loyalty to one’s staff or friends because the circumstantial case against them was too strong to be ignored or easily explained away.

  Eisenhower had not saved me in the fund crisis; I was saved because I had been able to save myself. I did not believe Haldeman and Ehrlichman were guilty of criminal motives; but I did not know if they could ever prove their innocence. I told Ziegler, “What I am saying is that this, too, will not pass.”

  When Haldeman and Ehrlichman came in later that morning, they told me that they were not getting the same recommendations from Rogers and Connally as I seemed to think that Rogers and Connally were giving. I knew, however, that they were mistaking kindness for ambivalence. “Everyone,” I said, “agrees we must do something.”

  Ehrlichman seemed uneasy and restless during this conversation, and suddenly he said that he had been thinking and had decided that there ought to be a candid assessment of the threat in all this to the President. “Now let me . . . just spin something out for you,” he said, “probably a far out point.” He said that if Dean were “totally out of control,” it was “entirely conceivable” that I might be faced with a resolution of impeachment on the ground that I had committed a crime and no other legal process was available except impeachment. He knew in general of my conversation with Dean on March 21 about the break-in and the cover-up. He said that as far as he knew, what Dean had fell far short of any commission of a crime by me.

  “I think really the only way that I know to make a judgment on this,” Ehrlichman said, “is for you to listen to your tapes and see what actually was said then, or maybe for Bob to do it.” He suggested that before I took “any precipitous steps” I’d better know what my “hole card” was.

  I knew that what he was saying, both explicitly and implicitly, was true. Explicitly, he was saying that I should recognize how exposed I would be if he and Haldeman were forced to leave, and that before forcing them to, I should assess the worst possible consequences of that exposure. Implicitly, I believe, he was saying that if I decided I were equally as involved as they, I should consult my own conscience before forcing them to leave.

  In the last two weeks of April I began seriously facing the possibility that I would be Dean’s next target and that I had personally supplied him with the ammunition during our March 21 conversation. I became preoccupied with it and began bringing it up repeatedly. After reading the transcripts of these discussions, it is clear that I gave a number of different versions of it. In talks with Ehrlichman, Dick Moore, and Henry Petersen, I tried to make it sound more ambiguous than it really was, or even to pass it off as having been facetious.

  When I was honest with myself, however, I had to admit that I had genuinely contemplated paying blackmail to Hunt—not because of Watergate, but because of his threat against Ehrlichman on the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and against the administration in general. I had also talked with Dean about the possibility of continuing payments to the other defendants. Furthermore, in that conversation Dean had made me aware of payments to defendants that he said constituted an obstruction of justice.

  I told Haldeman and Ehrlichman at one point that we could not risk having Dean turn on me with this conversation, even if it meant having to give him immunity. Haldeman countered that I could not let Dean have the permanent handle of blackmail over me, either. I decided that Haldeman should listen to our tape so that we would know exactly what had actually been said and decided on that fateful afternoon.

  Before long a disturbing thought occurred to me; I couldn’t get it out of my mind: what if Dean had carried a tape recorder at our March 21 meeting, a small tape recorder, concealed in his jacket but capable of catching every word. He would be able to use parts of the conversation in a very damaging way.

  In the afternoon of April 25 Kleindienst called me with an urgent request for a meeting. He had a new problem: he felt that the Justice Department would have to turn over material on the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to the court that was hearing the government’s case against Ellsberg for having taken the Pentagon Papers. That had been the ruling within the department; besides, if they did not make their possession of the material known, Dean would undoubtedly hold it over their heads.

  On April 18, a week earlier, at Ehrlichman’s urging, I had talked on the phone with Henry Petersen about the break-in. I had told him to stay out of it. “Your charge is Watergate. This is national security,” I had said. Dean had told me that Krogh had felt that he was acting on a national security mandate, and there was no question in my mind that the Ellsberg investigation as a whole was part of a national security crisis of the highest order.

  When Petersen asked me if any evidence had been obtained during the break-in, anything that would have to be turned over to the court hearing Ellsberg’s trial, I said no. “It was a dry hole,” I told him.

  Now Kleindienst was saying that the Justice Department felt that the material had to be revealed. Without hesitation I said that he should go ahead. As I did so, I thought how everything was about to become even bleaker for John Ehrlichman.

  At 4:40 P.M. on April 25, Haldeman came back in to report on his first couple of hours of listening to the tape of my March 21 conversation with Dean. He said that it was interesting to learn that Dean had given me a different version of events from the one he had been telling Haldeman.

  Haldeman confirmed that I had said to Dean, “We could get the money.” But, he said, “You were drawing Dean out.”

  Haldeman was familia
r with my habit of getting other people’s ideas by indirection, by purposely not stating my own opinion until the end of a conversation lest it inhibit others, or alternatively, by stating an extreme position or proposition to see how others reacted. He also knew that in conversations I tend to think a problem through out loud, even considering totally unacceptable alternatives in the process of ruling them out—a lawyer’s typical mental exercise. In this case all these factors were partial—but only partial—explanations for some of the things I had said.

  I had only one other defense in the matter of the March 21 tape: no action had been taken as a result of that conversation. I had not finally ordered any payments be made to defendants, and I had ruled out clemency.

  I thought about Haldeman’s report during the afternoon and called him at home twice that night. I said that I had always wondered about the taping equipment, “but I’m damn glad we have it, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” he answered, adding that even the one section he had been through that day was “very helpful.”

  I said that despite the passages I would have preferred not to have said, there were also some good things on the tape that helped balance it out.

  By April 26 the prosecutors’ talks with Dean had broken down. Dean immediately began sending threatening new signals to the White House. He talked with Len Garment and told him that Watergate was just the tip of the iceberg. He said that there were things that had been done in 1970 that he could expose. And he kept saying that he had documentary evidence of the cover-up.

  That same day the New York Daily News had the story that Pat Gray had burned evidence from Hunt’s safe. The source who leaked the story placed the blame squarely on Dean and Ehrlichman, saying that they had ordered Gray to do it. When I learned about the story, I called Kleindienst and told him that I thought Gray should resign. First, however, I wanted Henry Petersen’s view of the situation.