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

by John W. Dean

  Ehrlichman said that Ziegler “wants to get out the fact that Dean disserved you, that the Dean report was inadequate, it didn’t go far enough, that several weeks ago you reinstituted an examination—” The president interrupted here, stating in a very formal tone, “I began my personal investigation of the case,” and they began laying out a scenario for the president’s personal investigation, although to give Ehrlichman part of the action, he added that he had delegated some of it to Ehrlichman. They agreed that they could not allow the Justice Department to take credit for cracking the case, but rather Nixon would say he had been assisted by Henry Petersen.

  “Ask him,” Ehrlichman said, referring to me, “what you should say publicly about the Dean report.” Nixon replied that I had told him the previous night that there was no Dean report (which, in fact, I had already told him on several occasions). “I think it was an oral report,” Nixon said, and he went through whether he had asked me if anyone in the White House was involved, and I had said that, as best I knew, nobody was involved.

  At 9:59 A.M. Haldeman and Ehrlichman exited as I entered the Oval Office, and I could hear them laughing as they departed from a doorway across the office. I met with the president for forty minutes, and he asked me if I recalled discussing my resignation the night before. I told him I did. He asked me for my “feeling on that.” Based on our prior conversation, I sought clarification: “Are we talking Dean or are we talking Dean, Ehrlichman and Haldeman?”41 He said Dean, for the moment. Then, indicating he had had letters prepared, slid them across his desk to me and asked my advice. I scanned the documents, which read like open-ended confessions, and told him my advice was that he should have Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s resignations as well. “Well,” he quickly replied, “as a matter of fact, they both suggested it for themselves. So I’ve already done that with them.”

  Nixon had never been a particularly good dissembler, and I sensed that this was not true, as he seemed embarrassed by it all. But as he elaborated that he did not want to press me, or anyone, I agreed that my leaving was a good idea, but if I did so, so should the others: “I think you have problems with the others, too, Mr. President.” Looking again at the documents he had given me, and thinking that Ehrlichman had no doubt drafted them, I said, “What I would like to do is to draft up for you an alternative letter, with both alternatives, just short and sweet.” This was acceptable to him, and he again made the point he had made the preceding evening: “Understand, I don’t want [the letter to] put anything out. Because I don’t want to jeopardize your position at all.” Then doing a bit of stroking, he said, “You’ve carried a hell of a load here,” but not wanting to continue down that road, he added, “and I just feel that, since what you said last night—” But this thought did not go anywhere. Instead he explained that he had to do the same with Haldeman and Ehrlichman: “I have leave of absences from them, which, however, I will not use until I get the word from Petersen on corroboration.”

  “Let me, let me summarize this specific point again, because I need to know—” he continued. He noted parenthetically, “We know there was no Dean report,” and added, “Ziegler has always said it was oral.” I agreed, thinking of our March conversations. But Nixon wanted to discover if I still thought that no one on the White House staff had been involved with Watergate, and I said, “I have no knowledge.” Then he turned to “the aftermath,” and the “obstruction of justice thing,” the difficulty of proving it in court, again going over the money for Hunt and his own situation. He reminded me, “The only time I ever heard any discussion of this supporting of the defendants,” he began, but recognizing his own dissembling, partially corrected himself, “and I must say I guess I should have assumed somebody was helping them, I must have assumed it, but, and I must say people were good in a way,” suggesting no one had ever told him. He wanted to know again how that had been handled, so I repeated how Paul O’Brien had brought me Hunt’s message for Ehrlichman, who asked if I had talked to Mitchell, who later said the problem was solved. “In other words, that was done at the Mitchell level?” the president asked, which I confirmed. “But you had knowledge. Haldeman had a lot of knowledge. And Ehrlichman had knowledge.” Again, I confirmed. “And I suppose I did,” he admitted. “I mean, I am planning to assume some culpability on that, right?” Before I could explain that I had not acted on anything he had said during that conversation on March 21, he interrupted, saying he was going to “be tough on myself” adding, “though I must say I didn’t really give it a thought at the time, because I didn’t know—”

  “No one gave it a thought,” I interrupted, reminding him that on March 21 I had told him that paying Hunt was an obstruction of justice. Again we both tried to remember what had and had not been said during that earlier conversation. When he again pressed me regarding telling him that no one in the White House had been involved, I told him I could not testify that I had reported that information at the time he maintained I had done so, although I had indirectly passed such information as I acquired through Haldeman and Ehrlichman. When the president tried to recall how many discussions we’d had regarding Watergate, he said, “We had three conversations, to my recollection.” “Oh, sir, I think we had more than that,” I corrected him, and I reminded him that the National Archives kept a record of his schedule. Then, thinking again about our March 21 conversation, he claimed a bit of an epiphany: “You see, I, that’s when I became, frankly, interested in the case, and I said, ‘Now, God damn it, I want to find out the score.’ And I set in motion Ehrlichman, Mitchell and a few of, not Mitchell, but others. Okay?” Clearly the president was starting to develop a new defense: He would say he first learned of the serious nature of the problems on March 21, which was true. (His later claim that he first learned of the cover-up on March 21, however, was not.)

  Next he instructed me that I could not talk about “the electronic stuff” in “the leak area, national security area,” which he consider privileged. He asked, “Have you informed your lawyer about that?” I said I had not, and I agreed it was privileged. But still thinking of his defense, and given that the Justice Department and Henry Petersen were quickly unraveling Watergate, he said, “We triggered this whole thing. You know what I mean? Don’t you agree?” As I started to respond, he added, “You helped trigger it.” I told him, “When history is written, and you put the pieces back together, you’ll see why it happened. It’s because I triggered it. I put everybody’s feet to the fire, because it just had to stop. And I still continue to feel that—” The president interrupted and said, “That’s right. You put Magruder’s feet to the fire?” I responded, “Yes, I did.” Nixon asked, “What got Magruder to talk? I would like to take the credit.” As I explained how I had refused to agree to support Mitchell’s and Magruder’s false testimonies, the president backed off this idea of his assuming credit, but instead he told me to tell the truth, which I assured him I would do. He then recalled that Alger Hiss would not have gone to jail if he had not lied about his communist activities.

  “The truth always emerges,” I told the president, a sentiment with which he agreed. Before I headed off to rewrite my resignation letter, the president reminded me that I was still White House counsel, so he wanted my general advice on how to proceed, just as he did from Haldeman and Ehrlichman. I told him that there was still something of a mythical belief held by Haldeman and Ehrlichman “that they don’t have a problem, Mr. President. And I am not really sure that you are convinced they do. But I’m telling you, they do.” I was not accustomed to lecturing the president but was being as firm and certain as I could, for I knew how deeply both men were involved. “There’s no question about it,” Nixon said, assuring me that he understood. While we agreed that these were not easy cases to prove, he told me he had reached a conclusion: “Both Ehrlichman and Haldeman are in on the obstruction. And that’s the point.” “That’s right,” I said and added, “I think it’d be a very good idea if they had counsel.” Nixon said, “I told them l
ast night to get lawyers, so I’m one step ahead of you there. Is there anything else you think I should do?” And before I could respond, he said, “Shit, I’m not going to let the Justice Department break this case, John.”

  “I understand. You’ve got to break it. You are breaking it, in a sense,” I noted. We discussed in vague terms how he had been trying to get to the bottom of Watergate since I had spoken with him on March 21. In fact, I knew it was McCord’s letter, and the threat of Hunt’s and Magruder’s damning testimonies, that had forced his hand, but I wanted to encourage him to follow through with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, so I was still willing to agree with his version of events. There was a bit more rehashing regarding Colson, who I felt was clean, but like all of us who had been tainted by the cover-up, he had what at the time I called “technical problems.” I used this term because it struck me that, with the exception of Magruder’s perjuring himself, which Jeb had too enthusiastically volunteered to do to save himself and Mitchell, if not Nixon’s reelection, everyone else who had crossed the near-invisible lines onto the wrong side of the law had done so out of ignorance. But ignorance was not a defense.

  I had scarcely left the Oval Office before Haldeman and Ehrlichman returned.42 Haldeman asked if the scenario they had planned for me had worked out. “Yeah, it did. Let me fill you in briefly here,” Nixon said, and first explained that I would not testify about national security matters. He explained that when he raised the resignation/leave of absence letters with me, I had asked, “What about Haldeman and Ehrlichman?” Nixon told them he said to me that he already had theirs, a statement with which neither disagreed.

  They began rehashing the by now standard agenda of topics, with Nixon at one point noting, “Let me say this: I don’t think it’s gaining us anything by pissing on the Dean report as such.” Reluctantly Ehrlichman agreed, for he had another idea: “Remember, you had John Dean go to Camp David and write it up, and when he came down he said, ‘I can’t.’ That’s the tip-off, and right then you started to move.” “That’s right,” Nixon said. “He could not write it.” Haldeman added, “Then you realized there was more to this than you’d been led to believe.” But Nixon raised a concern: “Then how do I get credit for getting Magruder to the stand?” Ehrlichman suggested that the president could simply state that, because Dean himself had been involved in the case, he had been taken off it, and Nixon assigned it to Ehrlichman instead. Thoughts of how the president would defend himself were already forming, as were the first efforts at spinning recent events and reconfiguring the facts to suit their needs. Nixon was working with the two men whom he had only minutes earlier acknowledged were deeply involved in obstruction of justice, but he was placating Haldeman and Ehrlichman, just as he had me, while trying to obtain what information he could.

  When Haldeman returned to the Oval Office at noon Nixon asked, “You have any further thoughts about how we stage this damn thing, in the first stage?”43 In a typical rambling Watergate discussion, Haldeman reported that Ziegler had been working on a plan with a group of advisers: Len Garment, Dick Moore and Chappie Rose,an attorney in private practice whom Nixon had met when he was vice president, although Rose had limited criminal law experience. Haldeman read a sample of his own public relations press statement, which claimed that he had only acted on the advice of the White House counsel, John Dean. The president disliked that approach and suggested that Haldeman not take the position of trying to hang someone else—to which Haldeman countered that he would have already hung himself by the time he issued his statement.

  Ziegler came to the Oval Office shortly before one o’clock to encourage Nixon to visit with Garment, but the president wanted to wait until he had visited with Bill Rogers.44 Ziegler also had some gossip to share: At the White House correspondents’ dinner, Harry Rosenfeld, Woodward and Bernstein’s metropolitan editor at the Post, had spoken with Ray Price, who had once worked for Rosenfeld at the New York Herald-Tribune. Rosenfeld told Price that everything they had on Watergate was solidly documented, and that they were not printing everything they knew. They were now working on a story that “will hurt the presidency, the current president and the office.” Price told Ziegler that Rosenfeld was one of the few conscientious people at the Post. Speechwriter David Gergen, who had been at Yale with Woodward, had spoken with him at the same dinner and had learned from him as well that they had much more than they had reported so far. Gergen told Ziegler that he felt Woodward was into something bigger than he could handle. Ziegler observedthat the Post seemed to be “hovering on the outer fringes,” waiting to see what the White House did next.

  Ziegler then tried to outline the public relations issues the president would need to address: he had learned new information from the attorney general; the situation with me; and the accuracy of the Dean report. He said, “Well, the facts that the president has been told, as at least I understand it in terms of Dean, is that you were forced to make judgments based on only 32 percent of the information that he had available to him. I’m talking now about what will come out later.” (This appears to be based on my having told Ziegler that neither Ehrlichman nor Mitchell was providing the rest of the information about what had provoked the White House cover-up and its operation.) But the president was not concerned about the Dean report and told him that everything had been turned over to the attorney general, and the statement that nobody at the White House was involved in the break-in remained valid. Ziegler, who did not know about my conversations with the president, said his point was that because Nixon was now aware of posttrial information, “which has just now come to your attention,” he had to take “decisive action.” Nixon asked how he should do that, as “making Dean the scapegoat is only going to make things worse.” Before Ziegler departed, Nixon advised him of Petersen’s new role, and he highlighted what Petersen had been told so far.

  • • •

  Henry Petersen himself came to the president’s EOB office early that afternoon.” Over the next few weeks they would have a total of seven personal meetings and twenty telephone conversations,45 during which Nixon would shamelessly attempt to manipulate him, using insider prosecutorial information from Petersen to protect Haldeman, Ehrlichman and himself.46 In this session the president was intent on impressing upon Petersen that he had taken charge. After discussing whether John Mitchell could get a fair trial in Washington (neither thought he could, particular if the Senate proceeded), the president again emphasized his instructions to Petersen: “You understand now, you’re talking only to me, and there’s not going to be anyone else on the White House staff. In other words, I am acting counsel and everything else.”

  “I [need to deal with] Dean, what do we do about him?” the president asked, reporting that he had demanded my resignation that morning. Petersen said that this was a president decision; he did not want to be in a position in which the prosecutors were forcing my resignation, and explained that they were negotiating with Shaffer about what I would do. When Ziegler briefly joined them, the president asked, “How does Dean come out on this thing?” “The decision isn’t made,” Petersen reported. “His counsel says they want a deal. His man was an agent. This man didn’t do anything but what Haldeman—” Nixon finished the sentence: “—Haldeman and Ehrlichman told him to do.” Petersen added, “And Mitchell. And if you insist on trying him, in defense, we’re going to try Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Nixon and this administration. That’s going to be our defense.” With some alarm Nixon asked, “He’d try the president, too?” Petersen answered, “It’s a God damn poker game. Yes, sir.”

  After Ziegler departed, Nixon returned to the question of whether the negotiations with me were still open or if I was pleading guilty. Petersen said we were negotiating, and Nixon wanted to understand my argument of having been an agent of Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mitchell. Petersen explained that it was a tactical defense, that a jury would not convict a person they believed was “the fall guy.” When Nixon argued that the Cubans had been agents as well, Petersen
replied that my position was “much more sympathetic. Dean has performed neutral acts which, in the circumstances they were performed, take on the trace of criminality, and he excuses that with, one, he wasn’t fully informed; two, he was only an agent; and three, he didn’t have enough authority to countermand Mitchell, and Haldeman didn’t countermand. Dean was impotent in the circumstances. That will be his defense.”

  “Also he told you that unless you grant him immunity, he’s going to attack everybody, including the president. Is that right?” Nixon asked. Petersen confirmed that and cautioned Nixon: “But you can’t use that.” When the president asked why, Petersen said, “Because Dean didn’t tell us that. His lawyer said it in the course of negotiations. And he doesn’t say that as a threat. He says, this is what I am going to do. This is my defense. You’re taking unfair advantage of this man.” Nixon then claimed, “I [didn’t] see Dean until a month ago, never even saw him.” Later in the discussion Nixon, trying to ascertain that they had not made a deal with me yet, asked, “But you are trying to make a deal, aren’t you?” Petersen confirmed that they were trying. My negotiations came up several more times, and Nixon finally admitted, “I’m a little concerned about Dean’s or his lawyer’s, that he’s going to attack the president and so forth. Other than that, I mean, Dean above all else—”