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

by John W. Dean

  “That’s what you’ve got to, that’s the line you should take,” Nixon confirmed.

  “That’s what Mitchell is doing,” Haldeman added.

  “I know the White House had nothing to do with it,” the president reassured MacGregor. He said, “As far as the committee is concerned, I know Mitchell had nothing to do with it. As far as the Cubans are concerned, they certainly are Republicans, that’s the problem.”

  “There are some lines of interconnection,” Haldeman noted vaguely. “That’s our problem.”

  “They certainly were doing it to hurt McGovern and support Nixon. That’s the problem, and that’s what Mitchell basically is concerned about,” the president said. “But you can be sure that, as far as Mitchell is concerned, he, of course, had nothing to do with it. I mean, basically, the reason you can be sure, Clark, even if you figure that he was lying, which he would not do to us, is he’s not a stupid man.”

  “Oh, no,” MacGregor agreed.

  “[On] the White House thing, Hunt is a former CIA agent. He’s a supersleuth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,” the president explained with his favorite nonexplanation. “There’s some story today that they found some gun in his safe over here, or something like that, but I don’t know anything about it. But he hasn’t been in the White House since when?”

  “March, I guess,” Haldeman added.

  “March twenty-ninth, I think was the last day he was paid,” MacGregor added, which had been printed in the news accounts.

  Haldeman jumped back in. “See, when he was here he worked on a totally different thing. He was in the Bay of Pigs. He was working on the declassification thing, where we had an all-out unit going. He knew about that stuff.” In fact, Hunt never worked on the declassification project. Haldeman then said that Hunt had also worked on the narcotics effort, which was a stretch at best, and in a final bit of disinformation, stated, “Now, he’s also been involved, as this thing starts to develop, in other things we didn’t know anything about. And this is what you get when you start dealing with these underground characters, as you know as a lawyer.”

  The president repeated his points, occasionally backing off a bit, as he had with Mitchell, as the conversation proceeded. “All that I know is, the White House had nothing to do with it,” Nixon insisted. “I know Colson had nothing to do with it. I know Hunt was gone. So, as far as Mitchell is concerned, Mitchell is in a spot, I would have to admit, where we really don’t know. You have to worry a bit about it. Mitchell is in a spot where he hasn’t been watching the committee too closely, and you can’t be sure that these Cubans who were hanging around didn’t have some contacts in that committee. I don’t know who. If we did, we’d fire them.”

  “Well, they did,” Haldeman said, trumping the president. He added, “The Bureau has a line into one guy at the committee named Liddy.”

  “Liddy,” Nixon echoed.

  “Who was working over at the Finance Committee, not at the—”

  “For Stans,” Nixon interrupted.

  “He worked for Stans as a counsel,” Haldeman continued. “He is a guy that was in the White House office working with Krogh’s office on the drug stuff. He knew these people. And they have some lines that tie him into some of this. In their [FBI] interrogation of him, they weren’t satisfied with his answers, or he said he wanted to get a lawyer, and they said, well, the lawyer would tell you to shut up, and he said, well, I’ll do what the lawyer says. And they said, well then, there’s no point in talking to you. When the committee found out what had happened in his interrogation, they fired him. The word that they have fired him is not out yet, and we hope it doesn’t get out. But Liddy has been released from the committee, from his post.”

  “If he was involved, and I’m not sure that he was,” Nixon said, notwithstanding the fact that Haldeman had told him Liddy was responsible. (After MacGregor left Haldeman would elaborate on the latest approach: having the cover-up rise to, but stop at, Liddy.)

  “That’s right,” Haldeman said, backing up the president.

  “This whole thing is a strange bag,” the president explained.

  “Well, that runs to some, flies around directly into the CIA, what they’re concerned about,” Haldeman said. This vague reference to even more complex activities were an effort to tell MacGregor what he might need to know but not in a way that he could possibly understand what Haldeman was actually talking about.

  Nixon pushed the discussion forward, “But anyway, the Liddy thing, if he’s involved, Clark, it was an unauthorized involvement. That’s the point that you need to know. It was without the authority or without the knowledge of John Mitchell. That’s the way I’d put it. And as a matter of fact, this has nothing to do with John’s leaving, because he has to leave for other, personal reasons, but in a sense it’s a good thing, because at least you’re in and you know very well that you had nothing to do with anything. And if anything happens, I would assume John—”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think, I don’t know. We purposely don’t know a lot of what kind of thing was involved—” Haldeman noted, explaining their willful ignorance. And Nixon added almost simultaneously, “I don’t want to find out.”

  “Both on the governmental side or the committee,” Haldeman said, acknowledging that it was more than a CRP problem, that it was related to their government service at the White House as well.

  “To me, it’s such a crude God damn thing. You almost think it’s a bunch of double agents,” Nixon said.

  “It may very well be,” Haldeman added, with a tone of irony.

  “Double agents, that’s what I’m afraid of. It just looks to me like, almost like a fix,” Nixon said, clearly warming to this potential scenario. “Doesn’t it to you? How the hell, I said, why in the name of Christ did they want to bug the national committee? What in the name of God, if you’re going to bug, bug the McGovern committee,” the president said, apparently unaware that Liddy, Hunt and their team had planned to proceed from the DNC to the McGovern headquarters.

  Both Nixon and Haldeman continued to proclaim their outrage until MacGregor finally interrupted them, saying, “My fear is that the remarkable record that you’ve made is going to be besmirched by these extraneous things that you have no knowledge of.”

  “Sure,” the president commented appreciatively.

  Haldeman added, “The worst thing we can do, though, is let them do exactly what they want to, which is to get us so involved in that that we don’t keep shooting our guns.”

  Having established his innocence, and Haldeman having made his point, Nixon assumed a more philosophical and presidential posture, observing, “Well, you’re going to have this sort of thing more, I guess. People do stupid things. That long agonizing ITT business—we survived. It was very stupid.”

  “We did some stupid things. Our people did some stupid things,” Haldeman agreed. “There are a thousand stupid things like that that don’t get uncovered, that we do and that they do. It’s when they get uncovered that they look so stupid.”

  “There will be more. They’re going to have a few problems, too,” the president pointed out.

  Given the confessional tone the conversation had taken, MacGregor now offered, “I’ve been asking myself, Mr. President, if there’s anything in my background, political or otherwise—”

  “Forget it,” the president said.

  “—that would redound on you—”

  “Forget it.”

  “And I don’t think that there is,” MacGregor concluded.

  “Let me say this. Everybody’s got something in his background, everybody,” Nixon observed.

  Haldeman pointed out that if there was anything in MacGregor’s past, it likely would have come out when he ran against former vice president Hubert Humphrey for the U.S. Senate in 1970, assuring him that they would not find anything now, because the McGovern people were “a lot more confused than Hubert’s people.”

  “It’s a bizarre business, period,” Nixon said ag
ain. “I don’t know that you should comment on this Hunt fellow. Did you ever meet Hunt? I’ve never seen him.”

  “No, sir,” MacGregor responded.

  After a speculative exchange about Hunt, and his having a gun, the president said, “The main thing, frankly, that I was concerned about was Colson, because Colson did work with him on the Pentagon Papers, whatever the hell it was they were working on.” But the president said he was no longer worried, because Colson had been questioned by the FBI, and while a staffer might lie to him, it was not likely he would do so to the FBI.

  Haldeman added, “I honestly don’t think there is any guy in the White House” who was involved in Watergate. Rather, Haldeman explained, “I think there obviously were some contacts at the committee. There was a contact with McCord. I don’t know what the hell they were, and there’s nothing at any level of authority, and I don’t know whether there was any contact with us in that way.” Haldeman was effectively notifying MacGregor that while low-level people might have some involvement, no one of authority—meaning Mitchell, Stans, Ehrlichman, himself and the president—did.

  “Well, the real problem we deal with, though, from a governmental viewpoint,” Haldeman explained, “that has nothing to do with politics at all, is that the lines from these people lead to places we don’t want led to.”

  “The CIA understands,” the president said.

  Again, using equivocal terms rather than identifying the FBI investigation to which he was actually referring, Haldeman said, “And the investigatory people are on those lines and don’t know that they cut in, they don’t know where one thing crosses the other.”

  The president elaborated, “Trouble is, frankly, that Helms’s shop does not want to be involved in these things, we just won’t say anything further about it, it could very well involve some anti-Castro activities. The Cubans are frightened to death of McGovern, frightened to death, you know, because he made this statement that he’d get along with Allende—”

  After MacGregor’s departure, Nixon and Haldeman assessed their visit with him.

  “How did he react to the remarks?” the president wondered.

  “Damn prudent,” Haldeman repied.

  “He has every right to know what he’s getting into,” the president observed, “and he asked the right questions. In my mind, he should take this job without asking about Watergate.”

  “I told him about the Liddy thing,” Haldeman explained, “because he’s going to find it out right away anyway, and it was better to let him know there was a guy.” But Haldeman also had new information to tell Nixon dealing with Liddy’s involvement in Watergate. “What we’re talking about is, we’re going to write a scenario—in fact, we’re going to have Liddy write it—which brings all of the loose ends that might lead anywhere at all to him. He’s going to say that, yeah, he was doing this, he wasn’t authorized.” Haldeman, of course, had not only been told by Gordon Strachan, his aide and liaison to the reelection committee, that Liddy’s intelligence operation budget had been approved, but he had also given Strachan instructions in early April 1972 to have Liddy change his focus from Muskie to McGovern.28 It was still not clear from these conversations whether Haldeman knew if Mitchell had authorized an illegal break-in and bugging at the DNC, but he clearly suspected it. Haldeman was certainly aware, however, that Jeb Magruder would not have authorized such an action without Mitchell’s blessing, and that Magruder was directly involved in the Watergate operation.

  “Well, what else?” Nixon pressed for more of the scenario.

  Haldeman obliged by spinning out the story he had discussed with Mitchell. “He thought it was an honorable thing to do. He thought it was important. Obviously, it was wrong. He didn’t think he should ask for authorization, because he knew it was something that he didn’t want to put anybody else in a position of authorizing. How did he get the money? See, we’ve got that one problem, the check from Dahlberg. What happened is, and that works out nicely, because the check came in after the spending limit thing [on April 7]. So it was given to him with the instruction to return it to Dahlberg. Instead he subverted it to this other purpose, deposited it in the bank. That explains where the money came from. That explains everything. And they’re [Mitchell and his aides] working on writing out a scenario.* I think that’s the answer to this, and admit that, by God, there was some campaign involvement.”

  “But without Mitchell’s knowledge,” the president qualified, and Haldeman repeated, “But without Mitchell’s knowledge.”

  “Or authorization,” Nixon further confirmed. Haldeman echoed, “Or authorization.”

  “He’s fired.”

  “And he’s fired,” Haldeman assured the president.

  “What does he get out of it? What’s his penalty?” the president asked.

  “Oh, not too much. They don’t think it will be any big problem,” Haldeman said. Then he added, “Whatever it is, we’ll take care of him.”

  Nixon could not imagine this having taken place without Mitchell’s authority, but then, he told Haldeman, he was still not sure. Haldeman speculated, “I can’t imagine that he knew specifically that this is what they were doing. I think he said, for God’s sake, get out and get this God damn information, don’t pussyfoot around.”

  The president wanted to know about the money: “How’d he [Liddy] get the check?”

  “He was processing the checks. It was an illegal check,” Haldeman concluded, incorrectly placing a worst-case potential on it by blending fact with the fiction of the scenario; when all the facts were gathered, it turned out to be a legal contribution. Haldeman guessed, “You know, he was going to run it down to Mexico and put it into cash or something.”

  “Then what did we do, return the money to the guy? What, what happened?” the president asked, confused about what was the true story and the bogus scenario.

  In fact, the check was never given to Liddy to return to the donor; instead, Liddy offered to get it cashed, and ultimately he returned the cash to the reelection committee.29 But Haldeman explained how the scenario would handle it: “That’s what they’re going to say he was supposed to do. But he didn’t. He on his own initiative decided this was a good source of funds for this covert operation he was running. So he took the check, processed it through this Mexican bank, and ran it up here, which is what he did do.”

  The president asked, “When would he do this?”

  “Quickly, and hopefully, I think the thing to do is do it during the Democratic convention. The way to do it, they know [the FBI has] some lines into him, and Dean says, they’ve identified him as a suspect in the case, and they’re on this. Before he was just a source of information that didn’t pan out, so if you let them follow their routine investigation, he doesn’t offer up anything, they just catch him, but he works out his whole plan beforehand, so what they catch him at—” This plotting seemed to bring it to an end. Yet Haldeman noted there were problems: “But there may be some flaw in this, and that’s what they are going to kind of work out. It has the great advantage of being—”

  “He thought it up?” the president asked. Haldeman did not know. “’Cause he’s going to have to lie about that, you see,” the president noted.

  “Well, maybe we can turn it off on that basis. They know there are other lines involved. We can get them not to ask about that, maybe,” Haldeman opined.

  Nixon was thinking about Hunt’s role and talked over Haldeman, stating, “But then, on the basis of the CIA, but the Hunt outfit was involved for other reasons?”

  Haldeman suggested, “Maybe he [Liddy] ties Hunt in. Maybe that’s the better way. They’ve got to work that out.” Nixon suggested another approach: “He found this group of people that were very amenable—” Haldeman picked up Nixon’s train of thought and offered his own, which was closer to the truth: “—[Liddy] met them over here when he was working on this other project, and he used them on the side, for this project.” The president and Haldeman exchanged ideas about how to b
ring the Cubans into the scenario, until Haldeman changed the direction of the conversation with a question: “You know who Dahlberg is?”

  “No,” Nixon said.

  “He’s [Dwayne] Andreas’s bagman.” Andreas, a wealthy industrialist and Democratic backer of Hubert Humphrey in Minnesota politics, had contributed a portion of the money that Liddy had converted to cash for the CRP. The president was mildly surprised, but Haldeman saw other potentials for the scenario he was developing that could include the Democrats as well. “So it, all of a sudden, starts running over to the other side, too. It’s kind of intriguing,” Haldeman mused.

  “Well,” the president began, and after pausing for a bit, announced, “I agree. I think the best thing to do is to cut your losses in such things, get the damn thing down. It’s just one of those things, and they were involved.”

  “Otherwise they’re going to keep pursuing these things that lead into the wrong directions,” Haldeman said, and began again to explain the entangling connections of the White House to the men arrested at the Watergate. More people than Colson were involved, he said, because there were other projects. “Hunt’s tied to Krogh, Liddy’s tied to Krogh. They’re all tied to Ehrlichman,” Haldeman reported.

  “You mean they worked here?” the president asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Well, what the hell’s wrong with that?” Nixon asked dismissively.

  “They’re tied in to Dave Young,” Haldeman added, before responding, “Nothing any more than there is with Colson.” But he did not point out that they all—Hunt, Liddy, Krogh, Young, Colson and Ehrlichman—had been involved in the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office some nine months earlier.

  Again, Nixon pressed, “Yeah, that’s what I mean. No, but not in any hanky-panky. The only thing that you mean is the Pentagon Papers? What the hell is the matter with that?” This question was posed with a tone of alarm and concern in the president’s voice.