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

by John W. Dean

  Haldeman did not, and the president moved on to address the intelligence-gathering operation at the reelection committee, softly scolding that it “was a very bad place to have it, Bob.” Haldeman explained, “Well, sure. Except this was something John was after, apparently.”

  “Mitchell?” Nixon asked. Haldeman gave an affirmative “hum, hmm,” then explained that Mitchell’s interest had been “on the finance thing.” But Nixon did not understand and asked, “He had the idea of getting their contributors?” Haldeman reported, “Well, he had some log on who it was, or where it was coming from, or something. He thought he had something. There probably is something on there, money sources or business or something.” Again Haldeman vaguely explained his understanding of the reason they had entered the DNC’s offices.*

  “Yeah,” the president curtly commented, and again fell into silent thought before continuing. “You got to give Dean a lot of credit, the lawyers know everything.” This observation led to a digression about a Justice Department investigation of an associate of former secretary of the treasury John Connally, in which the president felt Kleindienst had been less than helpful, as mentioned earlier by Haldeman. “I don’t think, Bob, that you can blame anything on Gray, in the sense that he is in a very difficult position.” “He doesn’t have any control. He doesn’t know how to do these things,” Haldeman said. “Very difficult position. He cannot, he just can’t do it,” the president acknowledged. “I don’t believe that we ought to have Gray in the job after this is over. I don’t think it’s the right thing. I think it’s too close to us. I think if you could get Felt, he’s a good man, and they’re watching him, I guess. Like this [George] Bush fellow I have, he’ll grow in the job.* You know, it just isn’t right to have the Bureau select him,” he said, referring to Felt.

  “You put him in, he’d be your guy,” Haldeman said. Following another brief discussion of Larry O’Brien’s tax returns, where Nixon hoped to find nefarious profiting (which did not exist), Haldeman said, “This Watergate thing was stupid, but again, nobody made anything out of it. It’s stupidity, but not personal venality or anything. Nobody’s done anything for his own gain.” This comment caused the president to raise again Magruder’s charge about Hugh Sloan’s taking money. Haldeman did not know Sloan’s current status with the reelection committee, but he was able to report that Sloan’s wife was still working at the White House. Haldeman assured the president that Sloan was not going to be indicted, although he did “know things.”

  August 2, 1972, the White House

  During a morning meeting, which ran some two hours, the president returned to his concerns about Magruder’s testimony.12 Nixon understood that if Magruder went down, Mitchell would follow, and maybe even Haldeman and Ehrlichman as well, not to mention his reelection bid. So once he understood the significance of Magruder’s role, given his attention to detail, he could not leave this detail unattended. It is a behavior pattern that plays out time and again, as Nixon moves from issues to issue. Thus, his question that morning: “Is the game plan still the same over there this morning? When will Magruder testify?” “I don’t know, soon,” Haldeman reported. “I’d like to get him in and out,” the president instructed, hopefully.

  Haldeman had some encouraging news on another front: “Kleindienst has now ordered Gray to end the investigation. He said that they’ve got all they need to wrap up their case.”

  “The problem is, do you think that’s correct?” Nixon asked. “Yes,” Haldeman answered with no hesitation. “I mean, if it really is,” Nixon began, then started again, “if it isn’t over, you can’t,” and then finally he hit on his point, “because otherwise it’s now just a fishing expedition. They’ve got enough without it. The Magruder thing is the only thing that concerns me,” the president said. “But, you know, I would think his case would be pretty good, Bob. I think he could just say, ‘Look, I was in charge of the damn thing. I approved money, and Liddy wanted this money, and I gave it to him, but I haven’t the slightest idea what the hell he was doing with it.’ Correct? Or was that a stand?”

  “I think that’s his stand,” Haldeman answered, reminding the president that Magruder had, in fact, been totally involved. Nixon continued, “But on the other hand, if somebody else testified that he received the copies of information and so forth—” The president was worrying whether there was a fundamental flaw in Magruder’s concocted testimony. Haldeman attempted to assuage Nixon’s concern, but ineffectively: “I don’t think so. Someone that’s testified, well, I don’t know.” Nixon raised it again, and Haldeman awkwardly assured the president that Magruder was not a target of the grand jury, explaining, “They’re using Magruder as a witness to convict the other people, not as a witness to involve him—”

  “Let me know when there’s something that’s a little bit more fundamental,” Nixon said before turning to a related topic. “As you know, I have been the most intolerant with Stans as anybody, with this penny pinching. But budget control in a campaign, Bob, is terribly important. And it’s because we didn’t have budget control, the campaign stuck out too fat and too damn big. And it’s because we didn’t have much control, this kind of thing happened, in my opinion,” he said, referring to Watergate. “I mean, if you can piss away two hundred thousand dollars, you know, on some cops-and-robbers thing, Jesus Christ, that’s a hell of a lot of money.* Who the hell is in charge of budget control over there? I wouldn’t leave this in the hands of Magruder, for example. I don’t think he’s that buttoned-down.” Haldeman assured the president that MacGregor had been spending a lot of time on budget matters and now had it under his control.

  “You know, we get so many assholes—” The president stopped, then corrected himself. “Christ, we’ve got less than others. But campaigns attract them, attracting them like flies, Bob. You know, they piss away the money.” The president recalled how, despite all his other faults, Murray Chotiner, his first campaign manager when he ran for the House and Senate, was excellent on the budget. “He didn’t waste one hell of a lot of money.” Nixon added, “Chotiner saw to the stuff,” meaning he played rough-and-tumble, “but he didn’t go into personnel about it. He really didn’t. God damn it, it went into things. It went into advertising. He worked the piss out of everybody, but I just have a feeling that maybe budget control was a weakness in this [current] operation. I may be wrong.”

  August 3, 1972, the White House

  During a morning meeting in the Oval Office with both Haldeman and Ehrlichman, the president sought an update on Ehrlichman’s efforts at obtaining Larry O’Brien’s tax returns.13 Nixon was in a bad mood, still annoyed over a nasty Washington Post headline from the day before that, in his mind, harkened back to his infamous slush fund when he was vice president.*

  Nixon continued, “But anyway, here we go. What in the name of God are we doing on this score? What are we doing about their financial contributors? Now they, those lists are made, they’re there. Are we looking over McGovern’s financial contributors? Are we looking over the financial contributors of the Democratic National Committee? Are we running their income tax returns? Is the Justice Department checking to see whether or not there are any antitrust suits? Do we have anything going on any of these things?”

  “Not as far as I know,” Ehrlichman answered, which only upped Nixon’s rant a few notches: “We’d better forget the God damn campaign right this minute, not tomorrow, but now. That’s what concerns me. We have all this power and we aren’t using it. Now, what the Christ is the matter? In other words, what I’m really saying is this: I think we’ve got to get it out. Now, I’m just thinking about, for example, if there’s information on Larry O’Brien. If there is, I wouldn’t wait. I’d worry the sons of bitches now, because after they select somebody else, it’s irrelevant, even though he’s still in the campaign. It’s much more relevant now, but then they drop him, because, see what I mean?”

  After Nixon repeated these questions, Ehrlichman admitted, “Ah, the short answer
to your question is, nothing.” “Boy, they’re doing it to us,” Nixon reminded them, and noted, “And it’s never happened that way before. Johnson screwed everybody, Kennedy.” He paused, then went back in time: “When we were out in ’52 the Truman people were kicking the hell out of me. In ’62 they kicked the hell out of me. In 1960 the bureaucracy mixed up my visit with Khrushchev, the Eisenhower bureaucracy,” he said with added disdain, and continued, “That’s part of the problem, the bureaucracy, and part of the problem’s our own God damned fault. There must be something that we can do.”

  After further complaining from Nixon on this score, the extended discussion came to an end. Haldeman said he felt everybody had become especially gutless “with very good justification, because of this jackass operation at the Watergate. They are more sensitive than they would have been before, and they would have been very sensitive before.” He then added, “But we do have a knack for doing this stuff ineptly.”

  “That’s for sure,” the president agreed. Both Haldeman and Ehrlichman assured the president that after the election they would move with a “vengeance” against the president’s enemies, with Ehrlichman suggesting people like U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. “Do we have stuff on him?” the president wondered. “Well, we’re trying to get stuff. He hangs around with snakes,” Ehrlichman responded. And Haldeman added, “They’ve just got a hell of a lot more snakes than we do. And their snakes are a hell of a lot tougher than ours.”

  “They’re vicious, brutal,” the president complained.

  Having mentioned the Supreme Court, Ehrlichman added that he had scheduled a private visit with Nixon’s chief justice, Warren Burger. “I’m going to talk to Burger this week, and I would be inclined to indicate to him that it is to your advantage not to have the Ellsberg case tried until after the election. Unless you have any serious objection, I’m going to give him that signal.”* Nixon approved, and Ehrlichman explained, “Ah, he [Chief Justice Burger] has it literally within his control.” The president added, “And just say, I’d put it, in my opinion, I’d say that it really would raise hell with President Johnson and a lot of other things that would be very embarrassing to our foreign policy, and it’s just not a good thing right now, with the delicate negotiations on Vietnam. Put it in the basis that we had some other reason.”

  “Alright,” Ehrlichman said. Then he added: “They’ve got a chance to really rub Mr. Justice Douglas’s nose in it by reversing him and making the case go to trial. So they’ll have to pass that lovely opportunity.”

  “Temptation to screw Douglas?” the president asked. Ehrlichman said it could be, but Haldeman quickly added, “That’s a pyrrhic victory. Who the hell cares whether you screw Douglas, nobody, it won’t bother Douglas.” Ehrlichman told the president that Douglas’s stay to delay the trial was “the most dishonest opinion I have ever read,” although it actually created a favorable situation for them. Nonetheless, Ehrlichman added, “it may result in Ellsberg going free, and you’ve got double jeopardy, because they’ve already sworn in the jury. But I think that’s a small price to pay and kind of a nice out.” Haldeman reported that the Justice Department thought they would lose the case, but the president felt otherwise. There was more tough talk about Nixon’s enemies, even putting one—Carl Shipley, an anti-Nixon Republican who was active in District of Columbia politics—in jail.

  Later that afternoon Ehrlichman met with the president in his EOB office, and the conversation again turned to bending the IRS to the president’s will, and how they could place their people in the IRS after the election. As a parenthetical, Nixon explained that he would never have become president if he had not investigated Alger Hiss. Ehrlichman wanted to know if they should start thinking about cabinet officers for the second term, but the president wanted his staff to stay focused on the election.14 He felt Haldeman and others had become too “jumpy about the Watergate thing.” He acknowledged going after others was “hard,” but even so concluded, “I just think that they got to [do it], because basically they’re the ones fucking us.”

  When Ehrlichman raised the problem of Howard Hughes, whose loan years earlier to Nixon’s brother Don of over two hundred thousand dollars had become an issue in the 1960 presidential election, Nixon erupted: “If anybody brings up that God damn Hughes loan again, I’ll break this [IRS stuff] over O’Brien’s head,” referring to O’Brien’s quarter-million-dollar retainer with Hughes. Ehrlichman advised Nixon that he was meeting with Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz the next morning to request that the IRS dig out more information about the O’Brien-Hughes relationship. Ehrlichman assured the president his efforts would give O’Brien a few sleepless nights, which the president approved.

  “George has got a fantasy,” Nixon said of his treasury secretary. “What is George trying to do, say that you can’t play politics with the IRS?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know,” Ehrlichman said, and then explained, “The way it came out, it didn’t come up in this setting at all,” referring to his request for information on O’Brien. “It came up [when] he called me, because this young fellow Roger Barth is over there.”* Ehrlichman said they had been trying to put Barth in one of the few political positions within the IRS. “And we’ve been wanting him to be deputy general counsel of IRS, because he’d be in a position to do a lot more. George calls up and says, Jesus, I am really having trouble with this. My bureaucracy is really wild about this. This guy, who’s known to be a loyalist, and a hard-ass, and so on, so I’ve had a lot of flak. And I said, George, that’s the only guy we’ve got in the whole IRS.”

  An angry Nixon, wondering how many of those bureaucrats held secure jobs in the civil service versus political appointees, asked, “Aren’t there several?” Ehrlichman estimated, “Oh, sure, at the top, six or eight guys.” “Out with them!” Nixon demanded. “Every one of those bastards is out now! I think the whole bunch goes out just because of this. Don’t you agree?” At moments like this Ehrlichman would typically lift his chin and, with a smirk, agree, “Sure, it would be a great move. It would be a marvelous move.” The president, on reflection, decided that this was an action to be taken after the election. He would not only fire them but investigate them after they were gone. Ehrlichman would keep Roger Barth in place to get the names of who should be removed. With that subject resolved, they turned to domestic policy issues.

  August 4, 1972, the White House

  The president remained obsessively concerned about Magruder’s grand jury testimony, as he made clear during a conversation with Haldeman in the Oval Office.15 They also addressed the ongoing story in The Washington Post about the twenty-five-thousand-dollar campaign contribution check from Kenneth Dahlberg that had ended up in a Watergate burglar’s bank account; it had come up again in a General Accounting Office (GAO) audit of the contribution.

  After this discussion the president asked if the plan was still for the Watergate indictments to be handed down “about the middle of September.” Haldeman said that that was the case, so there would be no trial before the election. Meanwhile, the effort would be to try to control “these brush fires,” like “this stupid GAO thing.” But the GAO audit did not worry the president, and he was pleased that the Watergate break-in investigation did not appear to be attracting public attention. “I’m just not confident that it’s that interesting,” so he felt that it was not worth “brooding about it, it’s called a caper, it’s called all that crap. It doesn’t appear to be a serious attempt or a sinister this, that and the other thing,” the president observed.

  Nor was Haldeman concerned. “I think if it comes to its worst, if the whole thing gets out, I don’t think it’s all that bad.” For Nixon, however, a line had to be drawn. “Well, I just don’t want Magruder to be involved,” the president said. Haldeman emphasized, “I hope we can keep Magruder out, and we sure as hell got to keep Mitchell out. We can survive Magruder’s involvement. We would have a real problem with Mitchell’s involvement
.” Nixon agreed, for that was the only reason he was interested in Magruder. And on that front, Haldeman was encouraging: “And I think we’re, apparently, we’re home free on that.”

  “But Magruder hasn’t testified yet. You don’t know when?” the president asked. Haldeman did not know, but Nixon instructed, “Get him out of the way.” Haldeman was not worried about Magruder. “But he’ll do alright on testimony. I was just thinking, if you have another campaign group, it might not be a bad idea to let Magruder sit in.” Such visits with the president were known as stroking sessions, and in this instance, Haldeman had a good reason for making the suggestion. His personal aide, Larry Higby, had spoken with Magruder earlier that morning and found himself apologizing for his not being invited along with his former White House peers for an evening outing on the presidential yacht, Sequoia. Both Haldeman and the president agreed it would be wise to give Magruder a little special attention. Haldeman suggested making it safe by including him in a large group: “Well, if you had thirty people in here, he’d be one of them. Not to get his name out, but just to put him in a sense, so he doesn’t feel ostracized,” although Haldeman added that Magruder “knows that he is” ostracized.* “Well, he isn’t as far as I’m concerned,” the president countered. He instructed Haldeman to think about it. That afternoon, when working in his EOB office, Nixon himself called Magruder, which, as his records show, was highly unusual, for the president never telephoned him.*