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

by John W. Dean

  Ehrlichman claims that they also spoke about Hunt and Liddy’s involvement in the break-in at Dr. Fielding’s office. He later claimed that Nixon also brought up the subject, albeit in vague terms, during their July 6 conversation, but there was nothing vague about their conversation on the beach on the eighth. They discussed what Howard Hunt had done and what he knew and “that included his California burglary, his attempts to prove that John Kennedy had caused the failure at the Bay of Pigs and his similar project involving the assassination of Diem.”10 Ehrlichman’s account in his memoir, however, conflicts with the records of both his own prior statements and that made by Nixon, not to mention the fact that, when I later gave this information about the Ellsberg break-in to Nixon during a conversation on March 17, 1973, he claimed it was the first he was aware of it.11

  July 9–18, 1972, the Western White House

  While Nixon was in California, George McGovern was nominated by the Democratic National Convention in Miami as the party’s presidential nominee, and McGovern, in turn, selected Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton as his running mate. The chaos of the convention pleased the president and his senior staff, for it only confirmed their assessment of the disorganization in their opponent’s campaign. But things were not going all that smoothly for the well-oiled Nixon organization either, as they learned upon returning to Washington on July 18.

  During the president’s stay in California the FBI had interviewed many of the key figures on the reelection committee: G. Gordon Liddy (pre-departure June 28), who was later dismissed in a staged firing for his refusal to cooperate with the FBI; John Mitchell (July 5); Maurice Stans (July 5 and 14); and several lower-level staffers. Based on leads from these conversations, the FBI scheduled an interview with Jeb Magruder on July 20, which was a disaster waiting to happen, as Magruder had been involved in the development and implementation of Liddy’s illegal plans, and he was generally not one to take responsibility for his mistakes.

  To bring Haldeman and Ehrlichman up to date on this pending situation, they requested I meet them on Air Force One when they landed at Andrews Air Force Base. We met in the president’s cabin on the empty plane on the evening of July 18, 1972. I reported what I knew of the FBI and grand jury investigations (which was much less than investigators and the public later assumed), as well as on Herb Kalmbach’s efforts. He was an attorney who did personal work for the president on his real estate holdings and a major CRP fund-raiser who was also raising money for and distributing it to the six men Liddy had involved in the Watergate fiasco. Haldeman and Ehrlichman had authorized me to speak with him after John Mitchell had requested I do so, and I informed them that he had paid for attorneys and living expenses for the so-called Watergate gang, as those involved in the break-in were occasionally called in the early days.

  Most of the concern was with Magruder’s forthcoming FBI interview. Earlier that afternoon I had learned that Magruder had found a witness to corroborate his false testimony that the money he had authorized be paid to Liddy—some $199,000*—was intended for legitimate campaign security purposes. I expressed serious concern about Magruder’s concocted story (which, four decades later, I have come to realize was the scenario Ehrlichman had developed with Mitchell and Haldeman on the morning of June 21), not to mention the fact that Magruder had enlisted his assistant, Bart Porter, to support his false story. I also reported to Haldeman and Ehrlichman that Hugh Sloan, who served as treasurer of the finance committee, had resisted Magruder’s efforts to enlist him in lying, and they were now at odds, with Magruder claiming Sloan had stolen money and Sloan charging that Magruder was trying to get him to commit perjury.

  Haldeman noted this meeting in his diary and the Magruder problem:

  As of now, Dean feels that they are going to move on Magruder and that the only thing we can do is to have him take the rap that they’ll hit him with. And he feels that I’ve got to talk to him and convince him that this is what he should do. I’m not at all sure that is the way to handle it, that I can do it. But Ehrlichman called me at home later and confirmed that he thought we should do that, although he’d adjourned the Dean meeting after it became clear that he couldn’t read exactly what my reaction was on it. This is a real powder keg, I guess, and John’s sitting on top of it. John Dean is trying to keep the lid on, but is not at all sanguine as to his ability to continue to do so.12

  In the days that followed both Ehrlichman and Haldeman would explain this situation to the president, as he increasingly requested updates on the status of the Watergate investigation. Until preparing this book—and discovering the conversations that follow—I was not aware that Nixon was deeply involved in the decision regarding Magruder’s perjured testimony, a deceit essential to the initial phase of the cover-up.13

  July 19 to August 16, 1972

  Concern over Magruder’s Testimony

  July 19, 1972, the White House

  John Ehrlichman arrived in the Oval Office at 12:44 P.M. In these early days of Watergate both Haldeman and Ehrlichman almost always waited for the president to ask before volunteering any information on this subject. Not long into a discussion about airline hijackings and making them a capital offense, Nixon asked for an update.1 “Well, I don’t know,” Ehrlichman began. “I talked to Dean this morning, and Bob talked to Mitchell. I don’t know what transpired there, but he sent Dean over to talk to Mitchell, and there’s something cooking this morning, and I haven’t been in on it. Dean came out to the airplane and briefed us after you all left, and my conclusion is that this whole scenario that they had dreamed up that was going to preserve Magruder is not going to work.”

  “Yeah,” the president snapped, clearly not happy with the news. Ehrlichman added, “And Magruder is probably going to have to take the slide.” Nixon asked, “How’s he going to slide?” Ehrlichman replied rather matter-of-factly, “Well, he’s just going to take whatever the lumps come. He’ll have to take responsibility for the thing, and they said they’re not going to be able to contrive a story that indicates that he didn’t know what was going on. But I think that’s what Dean’s working on this morning.” The president asked about Magruder, “Did he know?” Ehrlichman immediately confided, “Oh, yeah! Oh, Lord yes! He’s in it with both feet.”

  “If he can’t contrive a story, then, you know, I’d like to see this thing work out, but I’ve been through these. If he can’t tell the story, . . .” the president began, but then he had another thought. “But the worst thing a guy can do, there are two things, each is bad: One is to lie, and the other one is to cover up.” Ehrlichman agreed, and Nixon continued, “If you cover up, you’re going to get caught. And if you lie, you’re going to be guilty of perjury. Now, basically, that was the whole story of the Hiss case.” Ehrlichman agreed, and Nixon added, “It was the story of the five percenters and the rest.* It’s a hell of a God damn thing. I hate to see it, but let me say, we’ll take care of Magruder immediately afterwards.” The president reassured Ehrlichman that “[i]n his case it would be easy as pie, it’d be a case of [unclear], you could treat him like these Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and, I mean, you could just give amnesty to all of ’em.”

  “That’d do it. We’ll have to lay that foundation, but as I say, I think Bob and Dean will have a better feel for this a little later, after they talk to Mitchell, see where we are,” Ehrlichman said, and changed the subject to a morning lead story in The Washington Post about the lawyer who showed up to bail out the Watergate burglars without being called, Douglas Caddy. Caddy had refused to answer questions, because he claimed the information was privileged communications, but Judge John Sirica had cited him for contempt; Caddy’s appeal had been denied by the local court of appeals.2 Ehrlichman explained how this could draw in not only Hunt and Liddy but Colson as well, because Caddy was handling the divorce of Colson’s secretary. Both concluded that that was too remote to be a problem and returned to the Magruder situation.

  “[C]an’t [Magruder] plead the Fifth?” the president
inquired. “No, I don’t think so,” Ehrlichman said. “Never?” a surprised Nixon asked. “I don’t think so,” Ehrlichman replied, without offering an explanation. “But they’ll convict him?” the president added with disbelief. “Oh, they’ll convict him by somebody else’s testimony,” Ehrlichman said confidently. But this made no sense to Nixon, who asked, “Then what in the hell is he, what good does he do? Try pleading the Fifth?”

  “No, no. I think he has to go in and say, Well, I did this, and it was a bad thing to do, and I got carried away and I feel terrible about it,” Ehrlichman suggested.3 Nixon, taken with that proposal, asked, “Well, can’t he state it just a little different? He could say he did it, but say, I was just slightly into it?” Ehrlichman, acknowledging this was possible, replied, “Yeah, but it isn’t going to change his situation.” Nixon then clarified, “No, no, he’d still be [guilty], what I meant, I didn’t expect it to be this way, the way they handled it, and so forth and so on. I said, just get all the information you can, and I think I’ve just got to take the responsibility for it.” “Yep, yep, he could say that,” Ehrlichman agreed.

  “No, it’s got to be kept at the Liddy level, if possible,” Nixon affirmed, and when Ehrlichman again said he did not have detailed information about Magruder’s testimony, the president had another question: “What is the situation, though, with Petersen and Kleindienst and the rest? What are they doing?”

  “Petersen is pretty good, but Kleindienst is one step removed from it. Petersen’s been very good with Dean in trying to help to evaluate the thing as it goes along and in keeping Dean informed of the direction that things are going,” Ehrlichman reported. “What the U.S. attorney is up to and so forth?” Nixon asked. “Yep, and he’s managed to keep ahold of the U.S. attorney better. It’s a better situation than it was,” Ehrlichman explained, and again tried to change the subject, but Nixon was still focused on Watergate. “Well, the real problem here isn’t so tough. The important thing is to get the God damn thing done,” the president declared. “And now.”

  Ehrlichman assured the president, “We’re urging that. I was all over Dean on that last night: We’ve got to get it done soon as possible, so that people have a chance to forget. He agrees with that, and he says they’re not dragging their feet on this by any means. And, well, he’s enlisted on that.”

  “Just so we keep it all in one hat here, is Dean with you, or Dean with Bob, or both?” Nixon asked. Ehrlichman reported, “Both. The two of us have been talking to him, more or less together, right along, and we’ve been drawing on Bob’s political judgment on this. It’s been pretty good.” “It sure is,” Nixon agreed, and Ehrlichman added, “And Dean called us on the airplane and said he had to talk to us, so we stayed on the airplane after it landed. He came out and we sat and talked for about an hour and went through all the kinds of stuff he didn’t like to talk about on the phone. He had a long meeting with Petersen yesterday and—”

  “So, it really gets down to Magruder?” the president asked, recognizing that this would either close down the inquiry or open it anew. Ehrlichman advised, “Yeah, that’s about right.” “But what does Magruder say?” Nixon asked, eager for specifics. “Well, he says that he wanted to get a lot of information, that he felt he had to have that information for a lot of different reasons, they had kind of a dirty tricks department, that—”

  “Disrupting the convention?” Nixon said, raising a legitimate concern. “If he brings it up, we have these stories about Vietnam Veterans Against the War, mention that,” the president suggested. Ehrlichman continued with the scenario, “And, but he imposed on Liddy the responsibility for getting it—” The president interrupted to add his thoughts on how to embroider the story: “Also, we had our own security-protecting interests, against ourselves. Don’t you agree?”

  But Ehrlichman wanted the president to understand that the situation was not that simple. “The problem is that once he starts to talk, I don’t know what the limitations of the scope of the examination might be, and that sort of thing—” Nixon knew where he wanted it to stop, and said, “I suppose that the main thing is just whether he is the one where it stops. Whether he goes to Mitchell or Haldeman, is that it?”

  “That’s it. And this is one of the questions that we raised with Dean last night. Dean said he didn’t have any confidence really that Magruder was sufficiently tough and stable to be able to hold the line if he were pressed by adroit interrogators.” (In fact, I argued that Magruder should not, or could not, pull off his bogus account.) “Do you think Mitchell knew?” Nixon asked again. “Yeah, I assume so,” Ehrlichman replied. “I don’t know that he did. Yeah, I think so. See, did, did—” Nixon interrupted, “I can’t believe that!” quickly coming to Mitchell’s defense. “Well,” said Ehrlichman, “the fruits of this thing were around. There were memos of overheard conversations, for instance, and I just have a hunch that, and I don’t know this, so this may be unfair, but I just have a feeling that Mitchell, in his situation, saw those transcripts and had to have—”

  “Did Bob see them?” the president asked. “No, no. And I can’t find anybody in the White House, including Timmons, that ever did, or that ever knew about this operation,” Ehrlichman said. Alfred Baldwin had mentioned White House congressional relations staffer Bill Timmons as someone he thought might have delivered his reports to the reelection committee. In fact, Timmons had nothing to do with intelligence and denied ever seeing such material. “I do not think that Bob would have anything to do with it, because he’s too smart,” the president surmised.

  “Bob and John Dean had a meeting with Mitchell and Magruder and some people about a different operation that was proposed, which they disapproved. And they have the right to feel, as a result of that meeting, that nothing like this was going on.” Ehrlichman was giving the president a placid account of my two meetings in Mitchell’s office, while he was still attorney general, with Magruder and Liddy regarding campaign intelligence, and that I had told Haldeman I thought I had killed Liddy’s absurd plans. He continued, “But after that was disapproved, then they went ahead with this other operation without there ever being another meeting involving White House people.” “But,” Ehrlichman added, “the question of whether Magruder will hold and take the gaff and assume the responsibility and say Mitchell didn’t know anything about this is the tough question.”

  “Why wouldn’t he?” Nixon quizzed. “Well,” Ehrlichman said, “you know that when you’ve got a fairly callow guy on the stand, and you work on him properly, you can get him to say things that he doesn’t intend to say. I think it’s a risk.” “It’s a risk, I agree,” Nixon replied, “but I would think that Magruder on that would be just, it’s just that there’s so much riding on this thing. We cannot put John Mitchell in this thing.”

  “I appreciate that, and you can condition it for a thing of that kind, but I would be willing to bet you a new hat that a guy like Edward Bennett Williams could break Magruder down.” Ehrlichman offered an example of how he would cross-examine Magruder: He would establish that Magruder had obtained approval for even the smallest of items at the reelection committee, and that therefore he had undoubtedly obtained approval for Liddy’s Watergate operation.

  “Well, looking at the criminal case now, the Magruder side of it, what is the best tactic there?” the president asked. After some back and forth, Ehrlichman gathered his thoughts and said, “The best tactic, if we had our way on [it], would be [to] let Liddy and Hunt go. Hold it there. If Magruder is going to be involved through third-party testimony and so on, then the next best tactic would be the one that’s been proposed, which is to rationalize the story, which does, or it doesn’t, lead to his conviction. That’s the thing they’re checking out this morning. Dean’s very pessimistic, and Henry Petersen’s very pessimistic about that washing. Now [Petersen, through Dean] says there’s an internal problem. He says there are disloyal guys in the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Bureau who are just standing watching this thing, and wh
o are going to second-guess any story that you come up with. So, he said, whatever we come up with has got to be watertight.”

  “That’s why it was never a cover-up, a cover-up thing—” Nixon did not finish his thought but went silent for several seconds, and he can be heard slowly and gently pounding his clenched fist on his desk. Then he proceeded, hesitantly, still collecting thoughts, “I know, what, what we, I wonder, I wonder, I don’t think that, that I would, I would, don’t, I don’t think it would bother me so much in the cover-up, John, and, if they had confessions and convictions of some of them. That’s really what I think is the important thing.” This notion that it could not be considered a true cover-up if someone at a lower level could be held accountable became central to Nixon’s thinking and would recur in other conversations, if left unstated. To Nixon, a cover-up would involve letting the men arrested in the DNC’s Watergate office walk free. “Well, they’ll have not only the five burglars, but they would have the two mystery men, Liddy and Hunt,” Ehrlichman added encouragingly.

  “Both of them will confess?” Nixon asked and answered. “They’ll have to be convicted. I just don’t see any escape for that. And that’ll give the public a lot of blood and give the Democrats a lot to chew on. Liddy and Hunt doesn’t bother me too much.” Ehrlichman agreed, and they discussed how the two had already surfaced in press accounts as likely being involved in Watergate, although they agreed that their having worked at the White House was a negative.

  Ehrlichman steered the conversation back to the matter of Magruder’s perjury: “If we can, I’m still hopeful, though, that Dean and Mitchell will conclude that the Magruder scenario will work, and it’ll wash, that there are no extrinsic loose-end facts that will impeach him. So that the disloyal guys in the U.S. Attorney’s don’t have anything to get their teeth into. If all you’ve got is the testimony of Baldwin or somebody like that, who’s an outsider, it might do it, and maybe it would pull it off. But there’s no sense in starting it and then having it disproved, that would be doubly damaging. And we—”