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

by John W. Dean

  During the early evening of March 19, after I had gone home, the president called Colson, then the leading member of his yet-to-be-formed Kitchen Cabinet and someone with whom he could comfortably test his ideas.18 In this conversation neither man exchanged new information but merely provided support for each other’s thinking. When Colson spoke about “the battering” the media had given the Nixon White House over Watergate, the president said he thought “it’s rather good they’re making Dean the issue, because Dean is the one guy, you know, he’s not involved at all.” Colson added that I had “a double privilege,” referring to attorney-client as well as executive privilege. But Colson appropriately alerted the president to the fact of my “involvement in some of the subsequent activities, which are sensitive,” though he thought I was “totally covered, because he’s been acting in the capacity as counsel.” Colson added, “I just think that Dean, if they’re going to make a test case, he’s their weakest case.” When the president asked Colson if he should stand firm on me, he said, “Absolutely. I think it would be a terrible mistake now to back off on that issue, Mr. President.”

  When this conversation later turned to Pat Gray, who was in limbo, since the Judiciary Committee was refusing to act on his confirmation unless I testified, Nixon said he was just as happy having Gray “out there.” Both men thought Gray had botched his own confirmation, and Colson counseled, “I think letting him be hostage [is] fine.” Or as Ehrlichman infamously instructed me earlier on the Pat Gray situation, “Let him hang there; let him twist slowly, slowly in the wind.”19

  March 20, 1973, the White House

  While John Ehrlichman briefed the Republican leadership of Congress in the Cabinet Room on domestic policy issues, the president met with the Senate and House Republican minority leaders, Hugh Scott and Leslie Arends, in the Oval Office.20 The most significant matter discussed was a comment made by Scott about Watergate, which reinforced the president’s belief that he had to have a Watergate report. When he was discussing why my testifying at Pat Gray’s confirmation hearing was very different than President, when Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, testified before the Senate to address an accusation that he had accepted a bribe, Scott made the point that the Republicans in Congress did not feel the president was cooperating on the Watergate investigation, which troubled them. The president insisted he was cooperating, and reflexively brought up the Hiss case and the Truman administration as an example of noncooperation. But Scott’s remark stung. Scott reported that the Senate did not have the votes to subpoena me to appear at Gray’s confirmation proceedings, but there was serious “grumbling” among loyal Republicans about the president’s handling of Watergate. “See, this administration has nothing to conceal,” Nixon protested. “The White House has nothing to conceal. We are ready to cooperate fully, and we have cooperated, but it has to be cooperation on the basis that it does not violate the separation of powers.”

  When the meeting ended the president called me to ask, “Do you have that statement, or did you plan to make it what you think the—” The president did not finish his point, but I understood what he was asking.21 Dick Moore and I had been working on a follow-up statement to my March 14, 1973, letter declining the invitation to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in connection with Gray’s confirmation—a sort of short-form Dean report. I told the president we were “stomping and honing” the draft statement, and it was five to ten minutes away from completion. He requested I send it to him when it was completed.

  As he was ending his call with me, Haldeman entered the Oval Office, and Nixon turned to the issue Scott had raised.22 “I think what really should be done is, the leadership needs to be briefed on the Watergate thing. Just at least our own friends have got to have a feeling that everything is okay. Do you understand?” The president reported that Moore and I were working on the matter, and added, “You see, Bob, our own people have got to have some assurance they are not going to get out there on a God damn limb.” Haldeman felt that if the GOP leadership was to be briefed, so should the GOP members of the Ervin Committee be as well. The president agreed. When Ehrlichman joined the last half hour of the conversation, the president made it clear he wanted some kind of Watergate statement issued, and he did not much care what kind of statement it was. He then complained that nobody was in charge.

  Following the president’s meeting with Soviet Union scientists, Haldeman returned to the Oval Office, and the president telephoned me again, asking a less than subtle, “Well, anything you want to take up?”23 I told him we had a draft statement that he was welcome to read, although Dick Moore was still working on it. He instructed us to wait until we had it ready, and requested we bring it to his office, which we did that afternoon, although the subsequent conversation reached no conclusion about the draft we submitted.24 By now the president had moved on from the sworn statement approach, preferring instead that the report be laced with broad, self-serving, unequivocal denials: “Never at any time were they any discussions that had anything to do with intelligence-gathering operations.” I warned the president that flat statements would not be accurate; the draft we had prepared in fact contained carefully worded responses to questions raised by Senator Sam Ervin on his March 18 Face the Nation appearance and by Senator Robert Byrd’s March 14 speech on the Senate floor.25 Clearly, this first effort by Moore and I was not what he had in mind, and I was not sure whether he was asking me to lie or simply refusing to acknowledge what had actually transpired.

  During his next Oval Office meeting, which included Governor William Cahill (R-NJ), Governor Linwood Holton (R-VA), and Republican National Committee chairman George Bush, the president received more information about the public’s reaction to Watergate.26 Bush reported that they were getting negative readings because the White House was viewed as not assisting in the Watergate inquires. Nixon suggested how they should answer the questions, and state that the White House was in fact fully cooperating.

  Ehrlichman arrived as this meeting was ending, and after the GOP officials had departed, he and Nixon got into a discussion of Watergate that occupied the next hour and a half. 27 When I first began to listen to this conversation, I wondered if Ehrlichman would notify the president of Hunt’s blackmail attempt involving him, since I had just informed Ehrlichman about it.* Notwithstanding direct questioning by the president about his potential vulnerabilities, Ehrlichman did not mention a word about Hunt’s demand.

  Nixon tested on Ehrlichman his idea of giving a confidential briefing to Republicans in Congress, and he suggested I should be the one to do it. When Ehrlichman responded that they needed to decide the content of any such a briefing, Nixon explained that his concern was that GOP leaders such as Hugh Scott did not want to “get caught with their pants down.” Ehrlichman advised, “You shouldn’t ever tell Scott anything you don’t want used against you,” and Nixon noted, “That is true not only for Scott, but true for all.” Nixon said he wanted the report Moore and I were working on to state that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were not involved; as for Chapin and Strachan, well, he “would try to ignore that as much a possible.” Where Colson was concerned, he would put out some facts, but not all. “You had nothing to do with Hunt in the campaign or Watergate?” Nixon asked Ehrlichman, who answered, “No.” While this was literally true, it was a remarkably incomplete statement from someone who was now the subject of an attempted blackmail by Hunt.28

  Ehrlichman began a lengthy discussion about how they might deal with a Senate subpoena, but they needed to have the Justice Department prepare guidance for the White House about how to contest it in court. When Nixon made it clear he was more interested in attacking the Senate, Ehrlichman cautioned, “You’re in a situation now where I don’t think a counterattack would be credible or effective. It would escalate this thing.” The president wanted to speak out on Watergate, for he did not want to give the impression he did not care about the matter. “Now, the problem I see is that apparently [Dean and Moore] fear
that if they put out that statement, it is going to open up a lot of other questions. But let’s suppose it does?” Nixon’s solution was simple: “It’s a PR exercise. The whole thing is a PR exercise. So you put that out, and then they attack. Is that necessarily bad? I mean, the point is, we can say that we are being forthcoming, but they are never going to let us off the hook by letting us submit our written interrogatories. My point is, why not give them the written interrogatories, give them the information, volunteer it, and say, ‘Alright, you’ve got it here.’ Now, what you’re doing is simply wanting to exploit the issue rather than get the information. What more information do you want?” And soon they were rehashing hypothetical scenarios.

  As the conversation continued, Nixon told Ehrlichman he had to assist me with Watergate. He pointed out that as soon as one problem was resolved, a new one erupted. As Ehrlichman described the situation: “Well, it’s just the steady dripping on the stone, you know? Every day it’s something new, some other damn loose end comes loose. But,” Ehrlichman noted, “oh, well, I think the fact that you’ve been spending some time with him, whether it’s been productive for you, has been very good in buttressing him.” The president felt I could handle the situation for the time being, but he told Ehrlichman, “I think, when the time comes and there’s some decisions to be made, and some calls, some options and proposals, then that’s time enough for you to get into it.” Nonetheless, the president wanted to know how Ehrlichman was leaning about releasing a statement.

  “I want to reserve my view until I see what Dick [Moore] comes up with, because I haven’t seen the draft, so I don’t know whether it has any hope or not. My inclination is to flush it if there’s a way to do it,” Ehrlichman said. “Flush what?” the president asked. “The whole, the whole scene,” Ehrlichman answered. “Oh,” the president replied, surprised, and then asked, “How?” Ehrlichman explained, “Somehow, I don’t know how, and that’s what I’m groping with. Get it over with, leave you standing aside looking at it, saying, ‘My God, I never had realized that that was what was going on over there, or here, or wherever it is.’ And then pick up and go forward. Now, maybe the flushing goes on in the Ervin committee, maybe it goes on in a statement, maybe it goes on in a grand jury. I don’t know how it goes on, but to my way of thinking, we’re not any longer in a situation where you can successfully trim your losses, as we’ve been for a year.” The president agreed, adding, “Well, we had to trim them before the election.” Ehrlichman concurred, “Why, sure. Of course.”

  “That was the purpose. We knew that,” the president said, acknowledging the cover-up. “But afterwards, it seems to me that preferably sooner.” “Well, it’s a question of figuring out how to do it without it splashing on you, and in the tying up the corners of it,” Ehrlichman replied. “And I must say, I don’t know how to do that at the moment, but I’m satisfied that that’s a safer direction in the long haul than trying to contrive a defense for the hearing, or to counterattack the hearing, or somehow or another to hope that the hearings will go, you know, lightly, and so on. They won’t.” They discussed different ideas, but nothing appeared very realistic. “You know, there are all kinds of things you can think about. But I just don’t have any way to direct you at the moment,” Ehrlichman admitted. “I just don’t know how to handle it. There’s a little puzzle on it.” This conversation was not unlike most Watergate conversations that involved Ehrlichman and Haldeman, and increasingly me, which always became circular, because while telling the truth was not an acceptable approach, everything short of the truth raised serious problems.

  After the conversation took a tangent into Mitchell’s problems with Robert Vesco,* the president returned again to the possibility of the White House issuing a Watergate statement. “Even if the statement does raise other questions, it is a statement,” the president began. “And they’ve all get it. And everybody says, ‘Well, my God, the president has got a statement, and so forth.’ And I think, let’s face it, as far as presidential liability for getting caught in terms of the White House staff, there’s no problem with you,” he said to Ehrlichman, fishing for a response. When none was forthcoming, Nixon continued, “There’s no problem involving Haldeman, I mean, the people from here.” Nixon acknowledged that Magruder might “blow,” but he was not sure about the consequences should that happen. “Who knows what the hell he could do?” the president asked. Ehrlichman counseled, “Well, but you can’t clutch him to your bosom in any case.” The president said he was concerned about Magruder’s perjury, but Ehrlichman was not and explained that if McCord or someone else said he gave “all this stuff”—referring to the products of the bugging of the DNC—to Magruder, they could discredit McCord. Ehrlichman elaborated, “See, you’ve got a convicted felon, McCord, saying this, and Magruder probably goes out to the cameras and says, ‘That crazy man, I don’t know what he’s talking about.’ And so then you’ve got an ambiguous situation.”

  “Magruder is not the brightest guy in the world,” the president noted, “but I think that he’s slick.” Ehrlichman added, “He must be quite an actor, from what they tell me,” alluding to Magruder’s performance before the grand jury and during the trial. “Yeah, I hear you,” the president said. Reassured about Magruder, the president moved on to Colson. “He can handle himself, I would think,” Ehrlichman said, and Nixon noted, “He’s certainly been involved in a lot of things, but he’s not at the present involved in this,” referring to Watergate. “As far as you know,” Ehrlichman added.

  The president wanted to know whom the Democrats and their media supporters were really after. Ehrlichman thought himself and Haldeman, but Nixon saw it slightly differently. “Well, not so much you,” he said, but rather he thought they were after Haldeman, Colson and Mitchell. Ehrlichman broadened the targets to include anybody who could be tied to the president, not to mention smearing the White House itself by mere association. Nixon said, “We cannot let it harm you guys. That’s the whole point. We cannot let it.”

  Nixon returned the White House taking action. “Have Dean brief the cabinet and the Republican leaders,” Nixon suggested, and added, “He’s quite persuasive, don’t you think?” Ehrlichman liked the idea but added, “I want to sit down and figure out what he would say, where it would take us, what kind of questions it would lead to, because once you start this, then he’s got to be very artful about turning away questions that he doesn’t want to answer.” Nixon offered, “Just say that I haven’t got any information,” an approach Ehrlichman liked. “He can get away with it with our own people,” Nixon said, pointing out, “You don’t have to be as artful before your own people, John, as you do before the press.” Ehrlichman agreed, and together they rehearsed the kind of evasive answers I might give.

  They began discussing how to explain why no one from the White House would testify about Watergate but had no good rationalization. Nixon wanted to examine the worst-case potential, which for the president meant to assume that Magruder would say, “Yes, Haldeman knew about this and told me to do it, and knew I was going to do it, and I furnished information to him.” “Alright,” Nixon asked, “what problem is that for Haldeman?” Ehrlichman, who had no real knowledge of or experience with criminal law, explained, “Well, he’s an accessory at that point,” broadly describing a person who aids or contributes to the commission of a crime. A more accurate description would have been “coconspirator,” but Ehrlichman would not learn about the crime of conspiracy until he was later charged. The analysis that Ehrlichman provided the president had no relationship to reality whatsoever, so the president had no accurate sense of Haldeman’s criminal exposure nor of anyone else’s. But it did bring the conversation to the fact that the Watergate seven were scheduled for sentencing that coming Friday, three days hence. “So, we’ll see how that goes,” Ehrlichman said, and he anticipated the judge would “undoubtedly be very hard on them [and] probably berate them.” Nixon asked if he would berate the prosecutors as well, by which he meant his administr
ation. “Probably,” Ehrlichman replied, noting, “He’ll say a number of things from the bench about his own view of the evidence. He’ll sentence them to jail with no suspended sentences. He may revoke the bail of McCord, who’s on appeal, and jail him pending his appeal. And so it’ll be a rough deal. And then see how it goes through the weekend to see what happens to McCord, who has a hang-up about jail.”

  “He doesn’t want to go?” the president asked, unable to understand how McCord, who had participated in the Watergate burglary with its obvious risks, could be “overly” sensitive to the fact that he might have to go to jail. “He didn’t like it when he was in there at all. And then we’ll see what happens,” Ehrlichman reported. He thought that if Sirica sent McCord to jail, it would be a problem. When the president questioned what McCord might do, Ehrlichman, with remarkable prescience, saw what was coming: McCord would tell Judge Sirica he wanted to talk.

  When Ehrlichman departed, after a few telephone calls and some paperwork, the president buzzed for Haldeman to come to the Oval Office.29 “I think John is pretty much out of touch, as I am now,” Haldeman said of Ehrlichman when Nixon recounted their conversation, explaining, “We’ve kind of stayed away from it.” When Nixon mentioned McCord’s concern about going to jail, Haldeman offered that McCord would “have a lot on Mitchell.” This brought the president back to his concern. “You can’t, Bob, just sit here thinking everybody is shutting up,” he said. They discussed the problem of the seeming impossibility of writing a statement that would serve any useful purpose and not sink the White House further if it was wrong. The president said he was also thinking about my making an oral report to the cabinet, or, as he explained it (verbatim): “Lay a few things to rest. I didn’t do this, I didn’t do that, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, Haldeman didn’t do this, Ehrlichman didn’t do that, Colson didn’t do that. You get my point, see?” If Haldeman understood, he did not say so, as Nixon said the cabinet needed to be told what he had been told—although he had in fact been told only the gist of matters, that should have raised more questions.