by Russ Baker
5. Gerald Ford was then House minority leader; in October 1973, Republican leaders would compel Nixon to make Ford his vice president with the resignation of Spiro Agnew over tax evasion and money-laundering charges. Bryce Harlow was a top Washington lobbyist and close friend of Ford’s who had advised every president of both parties since Eisenhower.
6. Weicker, Maverick, p. 63. Back in 1970, according to Gleason, when he had tried to deliver the cash to Weicker, he had not been able to make it all the way to Connecticut that day. Instead, he had made the delivery to Weicker’s campaign committee in Washington, D.C. As Weicker explained to me in a 2008 interview, “Jack didn’t have the time, and I didn’t have the time to meet him, to receive the money personally. And therefore, probably by luck, I escaped the violation of the law. Had I received it, instead of my campaign manager [who duly reported the donation], that would have been something different.”
7. See, for example, Dean’s post-Watergate books, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2004) and Conservatives Without Conscience (New York: Viking, 2008).
8. As noted in chapter 6, Kerr also was the staunchest congressional defender of the oil depletion allowance.
9. “How John Dean Came Center Stage,” Time, June 25, 1973.
10. Kleindienst was director of field operations for Goldwater in 1964.
11. Memorandum from Bud Krogh to Trudy Brown, March 2, 1970; memorandum from Bud Kroghto H. R. Haldeman, March 24, 1970. Both available through Nixon Project, National Archives.
12. Unpublished interview by Len Colodny of John Ehrlichman, April 29, 1986.
13. Unpublished letter from Charles W. Colson to Len Colodny, July 1, 1993.
14. Unpublished memorandum from Charles W. Colson to Len Colodny, June 23, 1993.
15. For more on Prosterman’s programs, see Mark Dowie, “Behind the Myth of Land Reform,” Mother Jones, June 1981.
16. For more on Krogh, Prosterman, and Vietnam, see, generally: Egil “Bud” Krogh with MatthewKrogh, Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices and Life Lessons from the White House (New York: public affairs, 2007).
17. Maureen Dean with Hays Gorey, “Mo”: A Woman’s View of Watergate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), p. 50.
18. Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 106.
19. Transcript of “cancer on the presidency” discussion, March 21, 1973, in Stanley I. Kutler, Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (New York: Free Press, 1997), pp. 247–57.
20. G. Gordon Liddy, Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy (New York: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 251–52.
21. Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (New York: Random House, 1984), pp. 106–7.
22. Caulfield worked for Dean throughout 1971, as “Dean’s appetite for political intelligence continuedto increase.” Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, p. 106.
23. Liddy, Will. E. Howard Hunt would later confirm Liddy’s version, reporting that Liddy explained, “Dean tells me there’s plenty of money available—half a million.” See Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, pp. 116–17. See also James Rosen, The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (New York: Doubleday, 2008), pp. 258–75.
24. G. Gordon Liddy, Will.
25. Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, pp. 124–25. Magruder has provided varying and inconsistent accounts over the years. For more on this, see Rosen, The Strong Man, pp. 293–95.
26. For an account of this from Robert Bennett, see the three-hour documentary John Ehrlichman: In the Eye of the Storm (American International Tele vision, 1997), hosted by the author Tom Clancy.
27. Meeting between President Nixon and H. R. Haldeman in the Oval Office, June 23, 1972, 10:04–11:39 A.M., Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, College Park, Maryland. (The main Nixon library is located in Yorba Linda, California.)
28. L. Patrick Gray III, with Ed Gray, In Nixon’s Web: A Year in the Crosshairs of Watergate (New York: Times Books, 2008), pp. 64–69.
29. J. Anthony Lukas, “Good Man’s Bad Book, Bad Man’s Good Book,” New York Times Book Review, October 31, 1976.
30. Weicker, Maverick, p. 65.
31. Ibid., p. x.
32. Jeff Gerth with Robert Pear, “Files Detail Aid to Bush by Nixon White House,” New York Times, June 11, 1992.
33. Bill Choyke, “Is Fensterwald a CIA Plant?” Washington Star, October 4, 1976.
34. Philip Agee and Louis Wolf, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1978), p. 133.
35. John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995), pp. 152–53.
36. Hays Gorey, “John Dean Warns: A Mile to Go,” Time, June 4, 1973.
37. John Dean, Blind Ambition: The White House Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), pp. 314–15.
38. Ibid., p. 317.
39. Gleason recalled the origin of Bush’s call this way: Some time in the early spring of 1973, he found some receipts related to the townhouse Operation and brought them over to Bush at the RNC. “I made a decision with my lawyer that I would take Bush a list of the guys who received the cash, just so somebody could alert the members—the few who had gotten elected,” Gleason told me. “Their names were going into the special prosecutor’s hopper. I went down and saw Bush and Tom Lias.”
40. Weicker, Maverick, p. 83.
41. “Lowell Weicker Gets Mad,” Time, July 9, 1973.
42. Ibid.
43. Weicker, Maverick, p. 76.
44. Author interview with Lowell Weicker, March 31, 2008.
45. Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, pp. 325–27.
46. Kutler, Abuse of Power, p. 638.
47. A. Robert Smith, “The Butterfield Exchange,” New York Times, July 20, 1975.
48. Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, p. 323.
49. As Sam Dash, chief counsel to the committee, put it, “The White House knew that Carmine Bellino, a wizard at reconstructing the receipts and expenditures of funds despite laundering techniques . . . was hot on the trail of Nixon’s closest money men, Herbert Kalmbach and Bebe Rebozo.” Samuel Dash, Chief Counsel: Inside the Ervin Committee—The Untold Story of Watergate (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 192.
50. Douglas E. Kneel, “Watergate Panel Begins an Inquiry into Charges Against Its Chief Investigator,” New York Times, August 4, 1973. Joseph Shimon, a retired investigator and former captain of the Washington, D.C., police, claimed in an affidavit that another investigator, Oliver Angelone, had asked him to help in bugging the hotel room of unidentified Republicans. Shimon said the other investigator had said the request originated with Bellino. Angelone called Shimon’s claim “absolutely untrue.”
51. Bellino had been close to the Kennedy family and admitted that he had sought to investigate the source of anti-Catholic literature in the 1960 campaign. But he would heatedly deny engaging in anything like illegal wiretapping or bugging.
52. Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992), p. 259.
53. See, generally, Ken Gormley and Elliot Richardson, Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation (Cambridge, MA: DaCapo Press, 1999); see also Colodny and Gettlin, Silent Coup, chapter 21.
54. Leon Jaworski with Mickey Herskowitz, Confession and Avoidance: A Memoir (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1979), p. 183. (Herskowitz would be George W. Bush’s temporary ghostwriter twenty years later. See chapter 20.)
55. Jaworski, Confession and Avoidance, pp. 183, 195.
56. See Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit, 1984).
57. Bernard A. Weisberger, Cold War, Cold Peace: The United States and Rus sia Since 1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), p. 295.
58. Joseph A. Califano Jr., Inside: A Public and Private Life (New York: Publi
cAffairs, 2004), pp. 216–17.
59. George Bush, All the Best: My Life in Letters and Other Writings (New York: Scribner, 1999), p. 186.
60. Ibid., p. 186.
61. “Reagan Seeks Leon Jaworski’s Backing,” Newsweek, September 29, 1980.
62. “Business Leaders Are Tied to CIA’s Covert Operations,” Washington Post, February 18, 1967.
63. Memorandum from Charles Ruff, Assistant Special Prosecutor, to Leon Jaworski, Special Prosecutor,August 19, 1974. National Archives.
64. Jaworski was not the only Texas Democrat who was cozy with Poppy in this period. Poppy would lunch weekly during his tenure as RNC chairman with his democratic National Committee counterpart, Robert Strauss of Dallas, a conservative oil-industry lawyer. In his book All the Best, Poppy calls him “a great friend to this day.” As president, Poppy appointed Strauss ambassador to the USSR. The relationship underlines a longtime fact about Texas politics whose significance cannot be underlined too strongly. There were two types of Democrats in that state: the populists and the royalists, with the latter being Democrats more for historical and tribal reasons than ideological ones.
65. Gray, In Nixon’s Web, p. 100.
66. The five Democrats on the committee who voted against investigating seem to have had arange of motives, not the least of which was they were not inclined to support a controversial action close to election day. “House Panel Bars Pre-Nov. 7 Inquiry into Bugging Case,” New York Times, October 4, 1972.
67. Richard Harwood, “CIA Reported Ending Aid to Some Groups,” Washington Post, February 22, 1967.
68. Philip Agee and Louis Wolf, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1978), p. 133.
69. Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Success of the President’s Men,” New York Times, June 13, 1986.
70. From 2000 to 2002, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter William Gaines and his journalism students at the University of Illinois attempted to uncover the identity of Deep Throat. At some point, according to the students’ Web site, John Dean “learned of the student project and helped with valuable first-person knowledge of the White House staff.” From an article about a Watergate documentary: “Dean says a younger generation has to be reminded of Watergate’s lessons—and that even those who remember the Watergate hearings need reminding exactly what happened. That’s why he was happy, he says, to be interviewed for ‘Watergate Plus 30.’ . . . In the documentary, Dean says, ‘Unfortunately, I think the lesson of Watergate is “Don’t get caught.” ’ ” Jonathan Curiel, “From Break-in to Murder: The Watergate Plot Thickens in ‘Plus 30,’ ” San Francisco Chronicle, July 30, 2003.
71. Anne E. Kornblut, “Mystery Solved: The Sleuths,” New York Times, June 2, 2005.
72. Ibid.
73. Daily Oklahoman, June 17, 1992 (also distributed by the Associated Press).
74. Gray, In Nixon’s Web, pp. 291–300. Woodward and Bernstein’s archival papers were purchased by the University of Texas for $5 million and are now housed at the university’s Austin campus.
75. Gerald S. Strober and Deborah Hart Strober, Nixon: An Oral History of His Presidency (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 528.
76. Ibid., 519.
77. H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), p. 472.
78. For McCord testimony on this, see U.S. Congress, Senate Select Committee on presidential Campaign Activities, Presidential Campaign Activities of 1972, Senate Resolution 60: Watergate and Related Activities: Hearings, 93rd Cong. 1st [2nd] sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1973), p. 205.
79. Herbert S. Parmet, George Bush, The Life of the Lone Star Yankee (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001), p. 166.
80. George Bush, All the Best, pp. 188–91.
81. “The Sun Is Shining Again,” Newsweek, August 26, 1974: “Behind the scenes, NEWSWEEK learned, Republican National Chairman George Bush, the other heavy favorite, had slipped badly because of alleged irregularities in the financing of his 1970 Senate race in Texas . . . Bush’s youthful, middle-ground image was clearly appealing. But White House sources told NEWSWEEK there was potential embarrassment and reports that the Nixon White House funneled about $100,000 from a secret fund called the ‘townhouse operation’ into Bush’s losing Senate campaign against Lloyd Bentsen four years ago. There were indications that $40,000 of the money may not have been properly reported as required by election law.”
82. Verbatim from a memorandum of conversation between Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush,declassified in 1992. Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
83. “He was an embarrassment,” recalled Sydney M. “Terry” Cone III, a member of the heavily Rockefeller-dominated Council on Foreign Relations. “The man knew nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was my opinion that he had no concept of the world; no understanding of foreign policy. He was obviously a political appointee that Nixon had to do something for . . . George was only a meeter and a greeter.” Kelley, The Family, p. 287.
84. Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward, “Presidential Posts and Dashed Hopes,” Washington Post, August 9, 1988.
85. George Bush with Victor Gold, Looking Forward (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 130.
12: IN FROM THE COLD
1. Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus, “CIA to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry,” Washington Post, June 22, 2007.
2. As a member of the Warren Commission, Gerald Ford made numerous handwritten edits to the draft report. The original text on page 5 read, “A bullet had entered his back at a point slightly above the shoulder to the right of the spine.” Ford changed that sentence to read, “A bullet had entered the back of his neck at a point slightly to the right of the spine.” That change suggested a different trajectory from the initial description of the bullet wound in Kennedy’s back to an entry point higher up in his body. See the document reproduced at JFK Lancer, www.jfklancer.com/docs.maps/ford1.gif.
3. Several weeks after the New York Times published Seymour Hersh’s expose of the “family jewels,” President Ford invited the Times’ editorial board to an “off the record” White House lunch to discuss CIA abuses. Ford broached the subject of the agency’s role in foreign assassinations and then attempted to retract his comment on the subject, which the Ford administration had not wanted the Rockefeller Commission to touch. Time magazine observed, the commission “final report pleads—not too convincingly—that there was not enough time to examine the subject fully.” See “Lunch with the President,” Time, June 23, 1975.
4. Author interview with William G. Ronan, June 12, 2007.
5. December 1954 to December 1955.
6. The full declassified report available at the National Security Archive, George Washington University,Web site, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/index.htm.
7. It was, in fact, the Senate Intelligence Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church that the Rockefeller Commission had been set up to preempt, if not to convince Congress that its own investigation was not needed.
8. Together, the Church Committee’s reports have been said to constitute the most extensive review of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. Much of the contents were classified, but more than fifty thousand pages have since been declassified under the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, and most are available online at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv.
9. Among the matters investigated were CIA attempts to assassinate foreign leaders in the Congo,the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and Chile, as well as the agency’s having withheld from the Warren Commission information on the CIA’s efforts to use the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro. The Church Committee also discovered a host of domestic programs aimed at American citizens: COINTELPRO, Operation Chaos, and other related domestic political operations. The committee found that the CIA, in tandem with the FBI, the NSA, and other military intelligence agencies, ran a clandestine and highly illegal su
rveillance operation called Project MINARET. Americans deemed “subversive” were placed on “watch lists” for electronic surveillance. The watch lists were populated by civil rights and antiwar leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and Joan Baez.