RN

by Richard Nixon

  I saw John Dean’s testimony on Watergate as an artful blend of truth and untruth, of possible sincere misunderstandings and clearly conscious distortions. In an effort to mitigate his own role, he transplanted his own total knowledge of the cover-up and his own anxiety onto the words and actions of others. In an effort to seem just a subordinate actor, he took the many different levels of understanding, awareness, and concern of those around him and fused them into one.

  But as soon as Dean’s testimony was over, I once again made the mistake I had been making since the Watergate break-in: I worried about the wrong problem. I went off on a tangent, concentrating all our attention and resources on trying to refute Dean by pointing out his exaggerations, distortions, discrepancies. But even as we geared up to do this, the real issue had already changed. It no longer made any difference that not all of Dean’s testimony was accurate. It only mattered if any of his testimony was accurate. And Dean’s account of the crucial March 21 meeting was more accurate than my own had been. I did not see it then, but in the end it would make less difference that I was not as involved as Dean had alleged than that I was not as uninvolved as I had claimed.

  There was another respect in which Dean’s testimony caught us unprepared. According to news reports, the Ervin Committee’s Democratic members and staff had urged Dean to be sure to build up his opening statement with plenty of “atmospherics” about the White House. He readily obliged, and even more than what he had to say about Watergate, it was from this that we would never recover. This was what gave the political opposition the one thing that they could only have dreamed of: a way of metastasizing Watergate into the other areas of my administration. John Dean dredged up every political machination he could find and offered them as representative of everything we did. He forced the Nixon White House through the prism of his own defense—which was that he was largely the victim of the environment—and produced a portrait devoid of dreams, ideals, serious work, or important goals. He talked about my attempt to have the IRS do checks on our political opponents with no attempt to show how widespread the practice had been among the Democrats in previous years. The fact that we had hired a political investigator was treated as a sinister innovation, when in fact checking up on the political opposition has been part of politics since time out of mind. We paid our investigator with political funds; other administrations had even used the FBI. Dean produced an “enemies list,” which even he has since admitted was vastly overplayed by the media. Into all this he folded controversial national security activities—the seventeen wiretaps designed to find the source of foreign policy leaks, the Huston Plan, and the Plumbers—ascribed them to paranoia, and made no effort or attempt to re-create the valid concerns that had produced them.

  If the May 22 statement was the American public’s first introduction to covert activities undertaken by the government for national security, Dean’s testimony was a primer in the dark underside of White House politics. Thanks to the way he did it, everything was perfectly arranged for the Democrats to distance themselves from their own political past and proclaim that my administration had invented original sin.

  The Ervin Committee, formally the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, was a fascinating study in the weaknesses of human nature in general, and in particular of the partisanship and weaknesses of congressional human nature when exposed to massive publicity. The senators and their staffs soon made the heady discovery that whatever they said—or leaked—made news. The result was a steady hemorrhage of leaks usually aimed at undermining the defense of potential witnesses such as Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell.

  Mike Mansfield publicly chastised the committee. Archibald Cox later compared their tactics to McCarthy’s. Senator James Buckley suggested that Ervin interrogate the staff under oath to see who was doing it. Ervin’s reply was that that would injure morale. An occasion when a leaker was tracked down and punished exemplified the committee’s standard of fairness: Majority Counsel Samuel Dash suspended a staff member who leaked unfavorable comments about Samuel Dash.

  The Justice Department prosecutors complained that the committee’s leaks and hearings were shattering their cases, and Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox appealed to Ervin not to proceed with open hearings because the publicity would undermine the chance that a prospective defendant could receive a fair trial. Earl Warren had once called it “frontier justice” to haul prospective defendants up before public hearings. But Ervin said that everything had to be done to air the truth. It didn’t take long to discover that they had a very special truth in mind.

  For example, among the documents the Ervin Committee received from John Dean were two memoranda from Hoover’s assistant, William Sullivan. They outlined sensational political abuses of the FBI by earlier Democratic administrations. Ervin’s executive assistant announced that the committee would not go into these matters because the allegations were “far, far too personal” and unsubstantiated. “Personal cheap shots,” he called them, “rather distasteful.”

  The original draft of the committee’s final report was going to call an aspect of George McGovern’s postcampaign fund distribution an “apparent violation of the spirit of the law.” When McGovern objected, Ervin had the section removed.

  In 1964 Lyndon Johnson’s protégé and Senate aide Bobby Baker had been charged with having run a high-finance influence-peddling operation. Many felt that the scandal touched and possibly implicated several Senators and even Johnson, who by then was President. The Democratic majority in Congress voted to keep the Baker case out of public hearings and refused to call any White House aides to testify. Three members of the Ervin Committee—Ervin himself and Senators Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and Herman Talmadge of Georgia—had gone on record seven times to restrict any congressional investigation of the Bobby Baker case. They evidently felt that Watergate deserved a special exception.

  Maury Stans was lectured by Ervin for having used dummy committees for campaign funds. Senator Joseph Montoya of New Mexico later claimed that he was “shocked” by the discovery of forgeries on his own campaign finance report, and had no comment when it was reported that $100,000 had been put into dummy committees in Washington after the money had been laundered to prevent disclosure.

  The Democrats’ chief committee investigator was Carmine Bellino, whose prior political activity for the Kennedys had included tailing a former Republican Congressman during the 1960 campaign. Ervin praised him as a “faithful public servant of exemplary character.”

  As the first group of witnesses came before the committee, their treatment was in direct response to their willingness to grovel and to implicate others. If they stood up and defended themselves, they were badgered and humiliated. If they exhibited at least a modicum of self-abnegation, they were given first lectures and then commendations. Bernard Levin, the London Times’s political commentator, wrote:

  The conduct of the Chairman, Senator Sam Ervin, is so deplorable that the lack of any serious protest against his behavior is in itself a measure of the loss of nerve on the part of so many distinguished Americans, in the press, the academic world and politics itself, who would once, in similar circumstances, have been campaigning vigorously to bring him to heel. . . .

  Worse, however, than Senator Ervin’s yokum-hokum is the way in which he has clearly decided that some of those appearing before him under suspicion of various malpractices are heroes, and some villains. . . . The technique, of course, was exactly the one used by Senator Joseph McCarthy. . . .

  What is really wrong with this inquisition is that it appears to be a judicial process but is in fact a political one. . . . Men are having their reputations destroyed in full view of millions; worse, men who may shortly have to face a criminal trial are having their cases literally prejudged, without any of the safeguards of true legal proceedings.

  The Democrats on the committee were able to get away with such tactics because they were the majority and because the Republicans were unde
rstandably nervous about Watergate. The Republicans on the committee, with the exception of Weicker, worked diligently and seriously to follow up on leads they thought would provide balance. But they had neither the money, the manpower, nor an objective press to help promote and publicize their work.

  A fitting epitaph to the fairness and standards employed by the Ervin Committee was provided by Senator Ervin himself when, on March 10, 1974, UPI reported a conversation with him in which he said that an impeachable offense had to be a federal crime and that “no evidence was produced in the Senate Watergate hearings to support impeachment.” Another reporter present at the same interview at the same time had written the identical story, so clearly that was what he had said. Before long, Ervin was confronted with the political import of his statement and the adverse effect it might have on the Democratic impeachment move then under way. Finding himself trapped between political necessity and the dictates of principle, he made a quick and ironic choice: despite the documentation refuting him, he apparently chose to contain the damage by denying that he had ever made the statement.

  Most Americans are resigned to a modicum of hypocrisy in politics. I am convinced, however, the historians will eventually conclude that even the serious issues raised and abuses revealed by Watergate did not justify such abuses of power as were committed by members of the Ervin Committee. With their prejudicial leaks, their double standards, and their grandstanding behavior, they only confirmed my feeling that this was a partisan attack, a determined effort to turn something minor into something major, and we had to fight back.

  There was ample historical precedent for refusing to permit testimony by any White House aides before the Ervin Committee. But I recognized that with the emotional climate now surrounding Watergate, there would be little public tolerance or understanding if I did so. Therefore I waived all executive privilege and permitted members of the White House staff to submit to the Ervin panel’s questions. The result was an unprecedented degree of cooperation by the executive branch with a congressional inquiry: 118 hours of public testimony from present and former White House aides and hundreds of hours in informal or private sessions. Even so, the committee members were not satisfied. They still wanted open access to White House files.

  Under the Constitution the three branches of government operate like a three-part free-standing scale: each compensates, supplements, and checks the others. But no one branch has the right to dominate, by demanding and receiving the internal working documents of another. The precedent for this point of view goes back to George Washington, who as President refused to surrender executive branch documents to the House of Representatives.

  Sam Ervin himself had defended congressional immunity to subpoenas from another branch in 1972, after Democratic Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska read portions of the classified text of the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. The question that reached the Supreme Court was whether one of Gravel’s aides could legally be compelled to testify about the senator’s unauthorized reading of the papers, and Ervin was one of those who argued in a friend-of-the-court brief that one branch should not be allowed to compel testimony about the internal affairs of another branch. The brief insisted: “If an aide must feel that the advice he offers, the knowledge he has, and the assistance he gives to his senator may be called into question by the executive, then he is likely to refrain from acting on those very occasions when the issues are the most controversial and when the senator is most in need of assistance.”

  Ervin had demonstrated the same approach to the separation of powers in an earlier case involving another of his Democratic friends. During the hearings after Johnson nominated Abe Fortas as Chief Justice, Ervin asked Fortas about a discussion he had had with the President but immediately and genially added, “I will not insist upon your answer because it is a prerogative of communications in the executive branch of the government.” He was not to be so genial when given a partisan advantage against a Republican President during Watergate.

  On July 7 I sent a letter to Ervin anticipating a formal request for presidential papers. I noted that when historical precedent was examined, our cooperation with the investigation was already extraordinary. There were rumors that they were going to subpoena me personally, so I reminded them that when Harry Truman had been subpoenaed to appear before a committee of Congress in 1953, he had refused.

  I told the members of the committee that, like Truman, I would not appear, nor would I provide documents:

  No President could function if the private papers of his office, prepared by his personal staff, were open to public scrutiny. Formulation of sound public policy requires that the President and his personal staff be able to communicate among themselves in complete candor, and that their tentative judgments, their exploration of alternatives, and their frank comments on issues and personalities at home and abroad remain confidential.

  Ervin, despite his erstwhile defense of the virtues of separation of powers and the concept of privileged communications, now denounced my “abstruse arguments about separation of powers and executive privilege.” On July 12 he sent a letter to the White House saying that he feared our two positions “presented the very grave possibility of a fundamental constitutional confrontation.” He requested a meeting to try to avoid such a conflict. It was typical that Ervin’s letter to me was leaked to reporters even before it had been delivered to the White House, and that we first learned about it from the reports on the news wires.

  THE WHITE HOUSE TAPES REVEALED

  I awakened at 5:30 A.M. on July 12 with a stabbing pain in my chest. It had begun before I went to bed; now it was nearly unbearable. It reminded me of the pain I experienced when I had cracked a rib playing football at Whittier. I switched on the light and tried to read, but I was too uncomfortable to be able to concentrate, so I turned the light out again and lay awake until morning.

  The White House physicians gave me a brief examination and arrived at different diagnoses: Dr. Tkach thought it was pneumonia; Dr. William Lukash thought it might be simply a digestive disorder. They agreed that I should have a complete battery of tests.

  I was lying restlessly in bed about midday when Haig came in and told me that Senator Ervin was on the phone and wanted to speak with me. He was calling about his letter. We talked for sixteen minutes. My voice was subdued because every breath I took caused a sharp pain.

  Ervin began by saying that his committee had sent me “a little note.”

  “I read about your letter,” I answered. “Your committee leaks, you know.”

  He said he did not know how his letter had gotten into the papers and that while they did not want to have a confrontation, they took the view that executive privilege did not cover criminal or political acts. “You want your staff to go through presidential files,” I said. “The answer is no. We disagree on that. But I’ll think over your letter.”

  Even this short exchange had fatigued me, but I went on. “What is it you specifically want? I am not going to have anyone going through all my files. We should start, if we have this meeting, by your telling me the areas you think you want.”

  He said he thought that staff members could work out specifics, but he repeated the totally unacceptable formulation in his letter that had requested presidential papers “relevant to any matters the committee is authorized to investigate.” Taken literally, this would mean that his staff would have to go through all the papers just to be able to know which ones they wanted to request.

  Despite the pain I raised my voice slightly. “Your attitude in the hearings was clear. There’s no question who you’re out to get,” I said.

  “We are not out to get anything, Mr. President,” he said, “except the truth.”

  I settled back onto the bed and told him that no one from his staff was going to go through any White House files. I said I was willing to consider a meeting—but just between him and me. “A man-to-man talk might be useful,” I said. “I’m cooperating in every way poss
ible, but I have the responsibility to defend the office of the President—just as you thought you had to defend the concept of separation of powers before the Supreme Court. If you have the same objective you had in Gravel’s case, we’ll get along just fine.”

  He seemed a bit nonplussed and indicated that he was not optimistic about our being able to work things out. He said he would report to the committee and insisted again that it was not out to get anybody.

  I looked up at Haig and Ziegler, who had been in the room during the call. I told them it must have been the fever that had kept me from giving Ervin the cool answers that undoubtedly would have been more effective for our cause. “But,” I added, “I said what I believe.”

  I got up and dressed, and despite the fact that I had a 102-degree temperature, I decided to keep my scheduled appointments for that day. There is a national commotion every time a President is even the slightest bit ill, so I wanted to postpone any indication that I was not feeling well until the last possible moment. I had a half-hour meeting with West German Foreign Minister Walter Scheel, and then Bill Timmons came in to discuss legislative problems. After that I received a report from the members of a commission I had appointed to study the question of fire prevention.