by John W. Dean
When Haldeman added that I was trying to figure out how much trouble I might actually be in, Nixon responded that he hoped I was alright. He thought the Hunt problem was under control and McCord had only “a lot of hearsay.” As far as the differences with my potential testimony versus that of Mitchell and Magruder, Nixon thought the latter two each had to say they had made a mistake. Haldeman suggested just saying that there was a disagreement. “Do you think it’ll come out in any event?” the president asked. When Haldeman replied that it inevitably would, the president questioned how Mitchell and Magruder would handle it. Haldeman said he had talked to Mitchell after his meeting with me, and “[Mitchell] seemed to think [Dean] understood what his problem was, too, and that Dean could work something out.” Haldeman said he had asked me, and I said that I did not know how it could be resolved, but I was going to work on it. Nixon assured Haldeman, “We’ll stand by him all the way on that, just say that’s privileged and he can deny any knowledge himself. But, in effect, Mitchell and Magruder, they want Dean’s recollection to be the same as theirs?” Haldeman said they did. “That’s a problem. Oh, well, he can’t do that,” Nixon replied.
When Nixon repeated that he would stand behind my claiming privilege, Haldeman pointed out that if I took the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify, Nixon would have to fire me. “Maybe that has to be done,” Nixon said, and asked, “Then the question is about the others, huh?” When Haldeman had second thoughts about undercutting me, Nixon said, “Oh, Christ, I wouldn’t think of undercutting him. Never. He’s been a hero thus far, you know? Really. He’s been sturdy, like a giant. No, no, no, no, no. I mean, I’m just thinking out loud, if rather than take the Fifth, he says, I’m not guilty of anything, but I’m not going to get into that, because it’s such a fuzzy area, you know, the lawyer-client and so forth and so on, but I’m just not going to talk about it. It won’t look bad. But you’ll keep in touch with him with that situation tomorrow, will you?” Haldeman said he would. “Be sure that he knows that he’s backed to the hilt, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s in good shape,” Haldeman reassured him. In fact, Haldeman was sending me opposite signals, which I had seen happen before in the Nixon White House, when others were about to be sacrificed. At my meeting with Magruder and Mitchell I had posed a question to Mitchell that I had never before directly asked him: Had he, in fact, approved Liddy’s plans? Mitchell admitted that, much to his chagrin, he had. I reported this exchange to Haldeman and later testified about it.20 Years later I discovered Haldeman’s diary entry for March 28: “Mitchell and Magruder both told [Dean] that they had both signed off on the [Liddy] project, which Mitchell told me, also. Dean feels it’s imperative that we get a criminal lawyer and suggested maybe he should hire one. Then he could consult with him on the whole thing, which is a good idea.”21 That evening I called my civil attorney, Tom Hogan, and asked him if he could arrange a meeting with Charles Norman Shaffer, a former federal prosecutor and a skilled criminal defense attorney, whom I had met previously on a number of occasions.*
March 29, 1973, the White House
In a meeting at the EOB office Haldeman reported that McCord’s closed-session testimony before the Senate had leaked out.22 “Senators have refused to tell us what was said,” Haldeman explained, but they wanted it to become public so some would rather leak than report. Howard Baker had called Vice President Agnew, who in turn called Haldeman to warn him that Baker felt the president’s “stand on executive privilege [was] very unwise in a public relations sense.” Other than more rehashing of events, nothing was resolved. Haldeman said he and Ehrlichman were available for further conversation, and they agreed to meet back at the EOB office later for what turned out to be a less than productive session.23 Ehrlichman suggested releasing a statement through Ron Ziegler’s office regarding White House cooperation with the grand jury investigation and the Senate inquiry, and added, “Dean doesn’t care what it says as long as it indicates that he’s volunteered to do it.” Ziegler joined the conversation for about a half hour, and they began to draft the statement, placing calls to Mitchell, Howard Baker and me. They would work on it all day and in subsequent conversations.24 The final product mentioned no one by name but reassured the press that the White House was cooperating.
This conversation on March 29 included an odd note, with the president advising Ehrlichman, “Get your criminal lawyer. Remember, don’t get him because you like him.”25 Ehrlichman said, “Don’t worry,” and Nixon instructed, “I want the worst son of a bitch.” Ehrlichman said he understood. “You get him,” the president repeated, but Ehrlichman did nothing about it.
March 30, 1973, the White House
Following a busy morning schedule, Haldeman arrived in the Oval Office in the early afternoon.26 Nixon asked if he ought to meet with anyone before he headed to California for a week, and Haldeman suggested he might speak with me, as “it’s going to buck him up, not that he needs it.” Haldeman informed the president that, based on his latest information, it did not appear that anyone from the White House would be called to the grand jury.
Because Senator Lowell Weicker was attacking the White House, the president and Haldeman discussed him at some length, particularly how they might embarrass him for having accepted a hefty cash contribution to his last campaign that had been arranged by the White House. They believed he had not reported it and were trying to get confirmation from “the bagman” who was supposed to pass him the money that it happened. Public records would show if it had or had not been reported. Haldeman then reported the latest leaks from the Senate Watergate committee, which involved vague accusations about Haldeman that he characterized as “a prime example of the phony stuff.” McCord had purportedly written a memo to Haldeman regarding White House staff security precautions at the GOP’s Miami convention but had never spoken to or had any other communications with him. Yet the Baltimore Sun was running a headline MCCORD NAMES HALDEMAN.
Returning to the discussion of whether the president should meet with me before departing for California, Haldeman now said, “But I don’t know what you’d cover with Dean.” Nixon added, “We haven’t got a damn thing to cover, can we say that?” Before Haldeman answered, Nixon suggested, “We might get his views.”
“You get this funny, boy, this raw human stuff keeps [coming out] as you grind people against the wall,” Haldeman observed, explaining, “That’s why I was not so sure you ought to have Ehrlichman in with Dean. And I don’t know whether this is true, but Mitchell says that Dean doesn’t trust Ehrlichman, because Ehrlichman is maneuvering to sink him. And Dean thinks that Mitchell and Magruder [were] maneuvering to sink him, [but] I don’t think he does anymore.”
When Nixon protested, “I don’t think Ehrlichman’s maneuvering to sink anybody,” Haldeman agreed, “No, I think Ehrlichman will maneuver to keep himself clear,” and while they agreed he should, neither man thought he would “do it at the expense of somebody else.” When the president said everyone should protect himself, Haldeman chuckled and replied, “Dean’s moving hard in trying to protect himself on that damn meeting thing, which is still going to come up. Because he was just talking to me and reminding me that I knew about the meeting, and if I’m called I’m going to have to testify that there was a meeting. I knew about it. And that’s hearsay, because I wasn’t there, and I can’t prove there was [one], but I was told there was one.”
“Now, it isn’t going to get any better on Watergate,” the president told Haldeman after a brief interruption by Ziegler. “It’s going to get worse, you know what I mean? It’s going to go on and on and on and on.” While Haldeman was not as pessimistic, he agreed. The president expected the Senate Watergate committee hearings to go on every day “with Segretti and the plumbing operation.” As they contemplated this unpleasantness, the president added, “I guess we’ll just go on and do our job and take the heat and so on and so forth.”
Haldeman felt they needed to create some sort of “mechanism to dea
l with the Senate” to respond to the charges. “We can’t just let them throw whatever they’re pushing to throw at you.” They discussed this and felt it should be handled as if they were in campaign mode, but they were uncertain who should handle this operation. “I don’t see, when you add it all up, that you have anybody who can run the Watergate, except John [Ehrlichman].” When the president agreed Haldeman added, “The problem is, he’s a personal factor in it, and it’s bound to crunch him at some point,” and he was not sure how Ehrlichman could deal with it. “Well, you’re a factor, because you’ll be constantly named because of your positions, basically,” the president reminded Haldeman. The president closed this conversation by emphasizing he wanted Haldeman to follow up and get something on Lowell Weicker.
That evening, Haldeman recorded in his diary that Nixon was concerned now about “the damage to the presidency and his ability to govern and feels that we have to take action to clear this up because of that. He’s getting a lot of heat from the likes of Goldwater, etc., who have a real concern and are expressing it to him via letters, etc.” He also noted that Ehrlichman had met with Nixon about Watergate, and that Ehrlichman later told Haldeman that the president “comes down that the thing to do is put it to Magruder and try to draw the line there. There’s a question whether that’s possible.”27
April 1–8, 1973, the Western White House
The week in San Clemente brought no relief from Watergate despite Nixon’s attempts to detach himself, telling Haldeman he would have no further conversations on the topic with Mitchell, Moore, Colson, George Bush, Agnew or me.28 Instead Ehrlichman “must get the confidence of all [these] people and handle the matter for the president.” Nixon insisted that there was to be “no falling-out amongst our people” with everyone going off in “all different directions. No one’s going to flush anybody. and they must understand that.” These instructions, however, were never shared with anyone other than Haldeman and Ehrlichman, who were isolating themselves with the president.
Haldeman’s notes and diary for this period indicated that I was keeping him informed of my activities—namely, that I had hired a criminal defense attorney, who was talking with the assistant U.S. attorneys handling the Watergate investigation and had advised me not to discuss my testimony with either Mitchell or Magruder. It was during this period that Ehrlichman decided he would conduct his own investigation, and he began meeting with or telephoning (while secretly recording) people.* On April 5 and 7 I reported to Haldeman that my attorney had learned in conversations with prosecutors Earl Silbert, Seymour Glanzer and Don Campbell that Liddy had, as Haldeman later described it, “told them everything he knows,” although not even Liddy’s own lawyer was aware of his doing so. While witnesses could be sent to jail for lying to federal investigators, there were no restrictions on federal investigators’ lying, and this information about Liddy turned out to be totally false.
On Sunday, April 8, I had my first “off-the-record” meeting with the prosecutors. When I informed Haldeman beforehand of the meeting, he asked me to hold off, offering the memorable metaphor: “Just remember that once the toothpaste is out of the tube it’s going to be very tough to get back in.” But Shaffer had set up the meeting in his office, so it was too late to change it. One of the first things I said to Earl Silbert, whom I had known at the Justice Department, was that I was surprised but pleased that Liddy had talked to them. When I learned a few days later that the purported Liddy confession had not in fact taken place, it gave me pause in dealing with them. It was also one of the factors that soon caused me to stop dealing with them altogether: They then breached the agreement they had made with Shaffer that anything and everything I told them would go no further than their office, and particularly not to the Justice Department. I knew if what I said made its way to Henry Petersen, their superior, it would then go to Kleindienst, and from there to the White House—where Haldeman and Ehrlichman would start covering themselves. Based on Shaffer’s good advice, however, I did not give them very much information.29 After I met with the prosecutors, Ehrlichman requested I meet with him and Haldeman at the White House, which I did.30
During the first two weeks of April, I effectively had one foot in the White House and one foot outside it, trying to deal with problems far larger than my own while being fair to others. I had Shaffer call Jeb Magruder’s lawyer, James Bierbower, on April 7 to advise him to get Magruder to the prosecutors’ office quickly, because I was dealing with them, which would create a problem for Magruder.31 I likewise refused the entreaties of the prosecutor to wear a hidden device to record my colleagues. At this point I had not even discussed the president or many of the grim details of the cover-up with Shaffer.32 While events were moving quickly, and I was taking steps to encourage that movement, I still hoped that Haldeman and Mitchell would do the right thing: step forward and take responsibility for their actions. But it became increasingly clear that that was not likely to happen.
Back at the White House, on the evening of April 8 Ehrlichman telephoned the president after our meeting, reporting that I would not appear before the grand jury until I had a chance to talk to Mitchell and to pass word to Magruder through his lawyer about my grand jury appearance.33 Ehrlichman added that I was speculating that Liddy had “pulled the plug on Magruder,” because there was “no love lost” between them. The president responded, “Mitchell has got to decide whether he is going to tell John Dean, ‘Look here, I don’t think you want to say a word, and you’ve got to go down and lie.’” “[Dean] says John Mitchell is sort of living in a dream world right now,” Ehrlichman replied. “He thinks this is all going to go away. For instance, he hasn’t bothered to obtain counsel. He hasn’t really done much about preparing himself or anything of that kind.” When Nixon asked what my take on the overall situation was, Ehrlichman reported, “Well, Dean says it isn’t going to go away. It’s right on top of us, and the smartest thing he, Dean, could do is go down there and appear cooperative.” When the president asked about Magruder, Ehrlichman said that he remained “highly volatile,” adding, “But Dean’s very strong feeling is that this is the time when you just have to let it flow.”
“I tend to agree with him, you know. Do you?” the president asked. Ehrlichman did agree, and he reported how out of fairness I was going to inform Mitchell and Magruder of what I was doing, just as I had Ehrlichman and Haldeman.
April 9, 1973, the White House
The morning conversation with Haldeman in the Oval Office rehashed familiar Watergate subjects, along with their disgust at Colson’s having passed a lie-detector test about the break-in.34 “Oh, God, it’s all such a tawdry damn thing,” Nixon said. Haldeman reported on the meeting he and Ehrlichman had with me the preceding evening, and that I had pointed out the danger for the president with everyone’s having his own lawyer: Those lawyers would have no interest in protecting the president or the presidency, because their responsibilities were to their clients. After a long silence, Nixon raised a matter that was seriously troubling him.
“You know, with regard to recording what goes on here in the room. I feel uneasy about that, not uneasy in terms of anybody else seeing it, because we’ll control it, but uneasy because of the fact it’s even done.” This concern provoked a twenty-minute discussion of the secret recording system and other record-keeping methods. When Nixon asked about how notes were made of his meetings, Haldeman explained, “I keep notes, and later I’ll write a book. [So] I dictate a thing each night that just covers what was covered during that day. It summarizes the developments.” He said it did not cover all meetings but “really covers an awful lot.” White House staff members attending other meetings also wrote memoranda of them for the president’s files. “Some are good, and some are lousy, and some don’t ever get done,” he added. Haldeman felt there was limited value in the taping system. “The only value of the tapes would be,” he suggested, “if you, in your notes, find something, you know, where you’re working on it and you say, I don�
�t remember that. You can get into exactly what, who said [what], and then you can go back and run it. The problem with them, and I’ve wondered about that, [is] you’ve got just an unbelievable [number] of hours of tape.”
The president said he could not allow “anybody else [to] look at them,” and Haldeman agreed that that was a problem limiting their usefulness. “I’m never going to want to read all that crap,” Nixon said of his tapes. “I never will.” They discussed who might listen to them, and the president said he did not want Rose Woods doing so, only he and Haldeman. “What I would like to do is this,” the president said. “I think we should take all that we’ve got and destroy them.” Making a note, Haldeman said, “Okay, I understand,” and the president continued. “We should, I think we should stop them.” Nixon then asked how the Secret Service handled them, and Haldeman explained that Alex Butterfield had set up the system, which was now being overseen by Steve Bull, who had taken over Butterfield’s responsibilities; Haldeman himself had “stayed away from” it. Nixon asked if there were copies, and Haldeman assured him that none had been made. “I thought about this in San Clemente, when we were there last week,” the president explained. “I’d like you to stop it now. And second, I think we should destroy them, because I have so much material right now in my own files that I’ll never be able to [get through it], you know what I mean? There’s just so much.”