The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It

by John W. Dean

  The president interrupted to probe for more information, but Haldeman was not inclined to share more bad news, though Haldeman remained in control of the conversation and tried to diminish the problem by quickly adding, “Hopefully, cut the whole thing off and sink all of it. See, Ehrlichman paints a rather attractive picture on that, in that that gives you the opportunity to cut off the civil suit. The civil suit is potentially the most damaging thing to us, in terms of those depositions.” Haldeman apparently believed the FBI could be controlled.

  “You mean you’d have Liddy confess and say he did it un-, or authorized?”

  “Unauthorized,” Haldeman clarified. “And then, on the civil suit, we’d plead whatever it is, and you get a summary judgment or something. I forget what the legal thing is. But Ehrlichman saw that as the way to cut it off, too, and then let it go to trial on the question of damages, and that would eliminate the need for the depositions.”

  The president went silent, digesting “other involvements” and the “unauthorized” Liddy, since he knew that Mitchell typically ran tight operations. When he finally spoke after a long pause he asked, “What do you think that they have to show as far as White House involvement is concerned? I am not too concerned about the committee.”

  “Well, we’re getting a bad shot to a degree, because it’s one hundred percent by innuendo. The only tie they’ve got to the White House is that this guy’s name was in their address books, Howard Hunt, and that Hunt used to be a consultant—”

  “And he worked for the CIA,” the president added. “He worked in the Bay of Pigs. I mean, he’s done a lot of things.” The president wanted to make Hunt’s activity an “isolated instance.”

  Again Haldeman sought vaguely to warn him, without volunteering any hard information. “You’ve got to be careful of pushing that very hard, because he was working on a lot of stuff.”

  “For Colson, you mean? Well, the declassification, then?” Nixon was using a code word—declassification—referring to a project that Hunt worked on to declassify national security documents embarrassing to the Democrats.

  “No. It was that among other things.”

  “Well, did he work on that ITT thing, too?” Nixon asked.

  “Yes, see, and if they track that down—”

  “He didn’t accomplish anything,” the president added, still apparently unclear about Hunt’s “other involvements” and “a lot of stuff.”

  “He’s the guy that went out and talked to Dita Beard, in Denver,” Haldeman offered, as an example of one of Howard Hunt’s less offensive but controversial activities.

  “I see, I see. Hunt is the Dita Beard contact,” the president said, acknowledging this problem might resurrect the ITT scandal.

  “Among other things. They’ve used him for a lot of stuff, apparently,” Haldeman added darkly. After a pause, though, Haldeman made it clear he was not telling Nixon everything. “It’s like all these other things, it’s all fringe bits and pieces that you don’t want to know, that’s why I’ve challenged this question of Hunt disappearing, and they say there is no question it’s better for Hunt to disappear than for Hunt to be available. And there’s no question that Hunt would be called in this.”

  As Nixon responded with a neutral “hmmm,” Haldeman continued, “But the effectiveness of the Ehrlichman scenario or something like it is that you establish the admission of guilt at a low level and get rid of it, rather than letting it imply guilt up to the highest levels, which is, of course, what they’re trying very hard to do. By ‘they,’ I mean the press and the Democrats.”

  “Well, sure, that’s the same thing,” Nixon added.

  “I think our people deluded themselves, and I have to a degree, in thinking this was a Washington story that would not be of much interest to the networks,” Haldeman said, explaining that, because there was not much news, the media was “investigating those Cubans, and they’re bound to find and follow some of these strings.” They discussed the Cubans’ activities, as they had been reported by the media, on behalf of the Nixon campaign before Watergate, which would help establish the break-in as a Cuban story. But they ultimately agreed that with Ehrlichman’s scenario—having Liddy confess—the Cuban angle was not needed. But losing the Cuban version also presented a problem. “That’s one argument against the Liddy scenario, because you can claim that Howard Hunt and all the other guys have ties to the Cubans,” Haldeman noted, adding that Liddy’s confession would not include everyone involved.

  “An elaborate deal, wasn’t it?” Nixon finally noted. “Mum, hmm,” Haldeman agreed. The president added, “Apparently they said or they implied that they had some plans to bug McGovern headquarters, too?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. They found a plan of—” Haldeman wanted to correct the news media’s speculation, which was correct, however. “That’s a pretty shitty bit of journalism, incidentally, which they haven’t pointed out and we shouldn’t, but the reelection committee can. They had a plan that showed the layout of the ballroom area at the Doral Hotel, which is going to be McGovern’s headquarters. What the press didn’t point out is, the Doral Hotel is also going to be the Nixon headquarters. And we had a lot of plans of the Doral Hotel all over here, because it happens to be where we’re going on our room arrangements.”

  “But who’s over there at the committee that can do a little slam-banging on that sort of thing?” the president inquired. “I think that you ought to chip away at things of that sort that are so obvious.”

  “We should and we will. I’ve made a note of that one,” Haldeman responded, yet nobody was ever enlisted for that role. But this prompted further conversation about the press coverage of Watergate, and Haldeman continued to sort out the players; also, the president soon returned to the press coverage of Colson.

  “I was not of the opinion that it would just be a Washington story,” Nixon said, but he had had second thoughts. “I think the country doesn’t give much of a shit about it. You see, everybody around here is all mortified by it. It’s a horrible thing to rebut. And the answer, of course, is that most people around the country probably think this is routine, that everybody’s trying to bug everybody else, it’s politics. Now, the purists probably won’t agree with that, but I don’t think they’re going to see a great uproar in the country about the Republicans’ committee trying to bug the Democratic headquarters. At least, that’s my view.”

  “Well, that line of reasoning seems to me argues for following the Liddy scenario, saying, ‘Sure, some little lawyer who was trying to make a name for himself did a stupid thing,’” Haldeman suggested.

  “Is Liddy willing?” Nixon asked.

  “He says he is.* Apparently he is a little bit nuts. I have never met him, so it’s not fair to draw any judgment. But apparently he’s sort of a Tom Huston–type guy.” Haldeman’s reference to Tom Charles Huston, a right-wing zealot who had worked at the White House, was no doubt meant to characterize Liddy as a similar radical, a beat-the-bastards-any-way-and-every-way-possible character. “Well, he sort of likes the dramatic. He said: ‘If you want to put me before a firing squad and shoot me, that’s fine.’ Kind of like to be like Nathan Hale.”

  “The beauty of the Liddy scenario is that as far as anybody under him is concerned, he’s where it came from. Even if we can’t count on those guys,” Haldeman continued, referring to the Cubans and McCord, “if Liddy admits guilt, then those guys can think any way they want, and it won’t matter. Because it’ll all tie back to Liddy, and he says: ‘Yeah, I got the money and I paid them the money and I told them to bug the place and I was going to be a hero.’ And then, we ask for compassion: This is a poor misguided kid who read too many spy stories, a little bit nutty, and obviously we’ll have to get rid of him, we made a mistake in having him in there, and that’s too bad.”

  “Breaking and entering and so forth, without accomplishing it, is not a hell of a lot of crime,” the president observed. “If somebody was going to ask me whether I agree with Ziegl
er’s cut, calling it a third-rate burglary, I’d say, no, I disagree; it was a third-rate attempted burglary. That’s what it was. And it failed.” The president suggested checking the law, and based on his earlier conversations with Ehrlichman and Mitchell, Haldeman told him, “Well, they don’t think they can be hurt much on that. If they take a guilty plea, the lawyers all feel that they would get a fine and a suspended sentence, as long as they’re all first offenders.” And Haldeman added, “Which they apparently all are.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. So who’s going to talk to Mitchell today about this?”

  “We have,” Haldeman reported.

  “He’s thinking about the Liddy thing,” Nixon said, and then continued. “My inclination is, you have to do it, due to the fact that, if that’s the truth, the truth, you always figure, may come out, and you’re a hell of a lot better doing that than to build another tissue around the God damn thing. Let me say this: If it involved Mitchell, then I would think that you couldn’t do it, just because it would destroy him.”

  “Well, that’s what bothers Ehrlichman. He’s not sure it doesn’t,” Haldeman noted.

  “Does it involve Mitchell?” Nixon asked.

  “I put it almost directly to Mitchell this morning, and he didn’t answer, so I don’t know whether it does or not,” Haldeman answered.

  “Probably did,” the president surmised, quickly adding, “but don’t tell me about it. But you go ahead and do what you want. But if Liddy’ll take the rap on this, that’s fine.” Nixon would later tell others, and state in his memoir, that he never confronted Mitchell with the direct question of whether he had been involved in or had known about the planning of the Watergate break-in. As he explained, “[Mitchell] was one of my closest friends, and he had issued a public denial. I would never challenge what he had said; I felt that if there were something he thought I should know, he would’ve told me.” (Nixon once told Haldeman, suppose he did call Mitchell and confront him, and Mitchell said, “Yes, I did it.” What would Nixon say and do next?11)

  Now that he had more information, Nixon told Haldeman, “I wouldn’t try to shove it in Miami direction,” meaning the Cuban fund-raising approach, “but I think that if you’re going to have Hunt on the lam, that’s going to be quite a story, he’s disappeared and so forth.”

  “Except they’ve got no direct tie from Hunt, at least up until now,” Haldeman pointed out.

  “The fact that he’s missing bears out the fact that he’s associated with the arrested Cubans, for the man on the street,” the president observed.

  “That’s why it’s important to get to the FBI,” Haldeman explained. “There’s, as of now, nothing that puts Hunt into the case except his name in their notebooks, along with a lot of other things,” Haldeman claimed, oblivious to his conflicting conclusion.

  “Why did the FBI put out all of that stuff?” Nixon asked. “It seems to me a rather bad thing to do. I mean, when you’re investigating a case, you don’t put out the fact that you found this bit of evidence, you found names and notebooks and the rest.”

  “The Bureau didn’t. The DC police did,” Haldeman corrected him.

  “Oh, I see. Okay, that would add up. They’re sort of stupid. Some press man gets to them, you know.”

  Haldeman told the president that he thought the Democrats had control of the investigation, since Joseph “Califano’s got two men right in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.” Califano was a prominent Democratic attorney and former Lyndon Johnson White House aide. This information had come from John Mitchell, who only a few months earlier had been the attorney general of the United States, so he knew a great deal about all the U.S. Attorney’s Offices throughout the country. Throughout Watergate Mitchell expressed concern that the rank-and-file staff of both the District of Columbia’s U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI were filled with Democrats antagonistic to the Nixon administration. More specifically, Mitchell believed that two top assistant U.S. attorneys in the DC office, Earl Silbert and Seymour Glanzer, were hostile Democrats.12

  “Well, we’d do the same thing, wouldn’t we?” Nixon asked.

  “Sure. Oh, hell, they’re doing exactly what we’d do, and the lawsuit,” Haldeman said. He added admiringly, “It’s a damn good move. They’ve got Edward Bennett Williams into depositions. [He] is going to press to start immediately. And they’ve made no bones about it. They’ve said the reason they’re doing it is to get the depositions.”

  The conversation stopped briefly, and the sound of paper shuffling on the president’s desk can be heard. When the conversation resumed, Nixon, speaking softly, evenly and with no enthusiasm, said, “Well, what you need is, what you can do about it today is, for Ehrlichman to talk to Gray,” tacitly approving the move to curtail the FBI. He then added, “Got to find out what the law is on the depositions, and so forth.” More animatedly, he reminded Haldeman: “They’re going to have Colson, for example, on depositions. And they’d probably try to unravel his whole relationship with Hunt.”

  Haldeman suggested, “Which he could say is irrelevant, or his counsel could say is irrelevant, but that doesn’t matter in a deposition. That’s the problem. At least, that’s what Ehrlichman and Mitchell were explaining to me. The problem with a deposition process is that you don’t have the protection like you do in court. You can refuse to answer, but then they can go to the court and get an order for you to answer.”

  The president pondered that in silence before responding. “Well, you don’t have much of a choice there, looks like, if the Liddy guy will do this.”

  “Mitchell’s rightly, I think, a little afraid, ’cause of Liddy’s instability. Because, obviously, they’ll see that as a way for us to get out of it, and they’re not going to let Liddy off any easier than they have to.”

  Nixon groaned, to which Haldeman responded, “For sure, that,” and then reminded the president, “John [Ehrlichman] just developed this scenario as we were talking this morning. And he and Mitchell and I all thought we ought not to move too fast on it. On first blush it looked like it had some possibilities, but we ought to work on what’s wrong with it.”

  After another long silence, Nixon said his intuition told him he should not yet hold a press conference, reminding Haldeman that McGovern’s winning another primary would be the big story. The president thought he should learn more about Watergate, and what tactics should be used for dealing with it, before getting out before the press and commenting on it. Haldeman thought that he should not comment on it at all, to which Nixon agreed, but added, “Well, I know, but just no-commenting is hard to do, too.” On this note, the conversation turned to the president’s schedule, and then the decision was made to invite Colson into the conversation, to lift his spirits.

  Colson arrived at the Oval Office at 10:13 A.M., and for the next twenty-five minutes, Nixon and Haldeman attempted to boost Colson’s morale and get a sense of his thinking, and then sent him back to battle. “So anyway, don’t let the bastards get you down, Chuck,” the president said, as Colson departed, with Haldeman leaving soon thereafter.

  Bob Haldeman returned to the Oval Office at 1:24 P.M. for a conversation that would last an hour and forty-five minutes. Because Watergate had been covered in detail earlier, it came up only tangentially,13 but a discussion on the topic of anonymous campaign contributions foreshadowed the handling of Watergate two days later, during a so-called smoking-gun conversation on June 23 that would eventually prove fatal to the Nixon presidency.

  In February 1972 the Congress had passed and the president had signed a new campaign finance law that called for the increased disclosure of campaign contributors. Congress provided a sixty-day grace period before the law went into effect, on April 7, 1972. Both Republican and Democratic presidential hopefuls used this grace period to raise unlimited amounts of new money from contributors who still wanted to remain anonymous, as did Nixon’s own reelection finance committee. George McGovern, however, seeing a political opportunity in what his primary opponents and
the president were doing, publicly declared that he would reveal all of his contributors, even before the effective date, and challenged all other candidates to do likewise. Although McGovern actually had few truly large contributors, the news media made his proposal an issue. A few other candidates from both parties agreed to disclose their contributors, but the Nixon campaign, which had raised some $10 million, declined to do so. While this was perfectly legal, the president was being criticized by the news media, which suggested that his donors were special interests who were receiving benefits from his administration.14

  On March 13 the president had requested that Haldeman consult with Mitchell about whether there would be “a substantial problem” if they disclosed names of contributors. Mitchell said it would, as they had raised funds from many Democrats on the promise that their contributions to Nixon would not be disclosed. Since they were following the letter of the law, Mitchell told Haldeman, they should “straight-arm” the news media by announcing that “the president’s not involved,” and that this was the work of his reelection committee. He believed that after the grace period expired the issue would go away,15 but instead the pressure had continued to grow, with virtually all the focus on the Nixon campaign.

  As the president prepared for the June 22 press conference, his staff correctly anticipated that he would be questioned on this topic. The finance chairman of the reelection committee, former secretary of commerce Maurice Stans, was, like Mitchell, adamant that they honor their pledges to contributors, and felt that any donations should be returned rather than their donors revealed, but this was not an option anyone at the campaign wanted to consider.

  It was during the June 21 conversation that Haldeman explained this problem to Nixon, and that much of the money that had been raised for his reelection was in the form of cash. As they were considering how to deal with this situation, the conversation drifted back to Watergate, first with an odd prediction by Nixon: “You will undoubtedly find that there’s going to be another bugging incident, probably against us, before this is over. I’m sure.” After further discussion of the new campaign law, Nixon had a suggestion: “Thing to do, I’m sure it’s already occurred to you, but on the PR side, every time there’s a leak from the White House or campaign headquarters, [we should] charge that we’re being bugged. Don’t you agree?” When Haldeman concurred, the president pushed the concept even further, explaining that Haldeman should have someone “plant a device,” but cautioned, “Do it if there’s anybody you can trust. Although I think you can trust, apparently, these Cubans. I think they probably are, to Hunt’s credit, pretty reliable characters.” The president took note of “the way they do operate, you know. They swear on this and that, their own blood, and so forth.”