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

by John W. Dean

  Buzhardt told the president he would get his longtime friend Senator John Stennis, a former judge and the “one man that rivals Senator Ervin, or outdoes him,” to speak to Ervin about “withholding these hearings,” which Buzhardt thought was the “best bet to pull it off.” Nixon encouraged him to get going as quickly as possible; they had to make a run at stopping them, but “if that fails, then we’ve got to attack the committee.” “We’ll have to,” Buzhardt agreed, who suspected they would have trouble with some of the Republicans on it, but he was not concerned with the chairman, as “Ervin’s gone a bit senile, quite frankly.” This conversation ended with a discussion of impeachment: “Impeach the president of the United States for, for why?” Nixon asked.

  The president called Haig at home several hours later, shortly after eleven o’clock, to instruct him that neither Garment nor Buzhardt was to have access to presidential papers, and he did not want anyone coming to him and saying public opinion calls it covering up. Or as Nixon bluntly stated it, “Alright, we will cover up until hell freezes over” and signed off with a warning to Haig: “If [Buzhardt] turns out to be a John Dean, we will fire your ass, too.” “I would deserve it,” Haig responded.44

  May 10, 1973, the White House

  At a nine o’clock meeting with his cabinet, Nixon discussed the staff changes and reassured his secretaries that these current problems would in “fifty years from now be just a paragraph, and a hundred years a footnote,” so everyone should get on with business.45 Nixon felt confident later that morning when he met with Ziegler in the Oval Office, for the New York Times was reporting that I had “no evidence at all” implicating the president, and neither did the Justice Department or Senate Watergate committee.46 Now all they needed to do was stop the Senate. Nixon asked Ziegler to speak with Bill Rogers, who was close to Warren Burger, to have the chief justice see if he could not straighten out this problem with Judge Sirica. Ziegler informed the president that I had issued a statement (which I did when I became aware of the concerted effort to block my testimony and totally discredit me47), but he did not have any details.

  That afternoon Nixon received word that two of his former cabinet officers, and the men who had headed his reelection campaign, John Mitchell and Maurice Stans, had been indicted by the U.S. attorney in New York City for perjury and obstruction in the Vesco case. When Ziegler told him that each man had been charged with six counts of perjury, Nixon was shocked.48 The only positive Ziegler could note in the news was that all the charges of illegal actions had become “so complex that people can’t even follow it anymore.” Nixon asked Rose Woods to call Mitchell and Stans to say that “the boss” was thinking of them and was “confident” that “in the end they’ll be vindicated.”49

  Nixon’s thinking on May 10, however, was still dominated by his hope to solidly reinforce his March 21 conversation defense, and to do so he needed the full support of Haldeman, who could claim he was present during the last part of the meeting and so was aware of what was or was not decided. Haldeman arrived in the Oval Office late that morning, eager to discuss his thoughts on how he and Ehrlichman could be hired immediately as consultants by the Nixon Foundation, since they both had income concerns and no longer had access to their papers.50 “The foundation has an overriding interest in having an accurate [record] on the Watergate matter, which is going to be a major factor in the history of it,” Haldeman noted, so they could work on that project as they prepared their defenses. Haldeman had already spoken with Leonard Firestone and Taft Schreiber, who headed the foundation, and they were “very interested.” Haldeman added that “Roy Ash [who headed Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget] is anxious to take care of the money.” “Do it today, immediately,” Nixon said, (This plan was soon rejected, however, when more bad news surfaced.)

  The conversation then turned to halting the Ervin hearings, with Nixon wanting Haldeman’s lawyers to “raise holy hell, mistrial, Jesus Christ.” But Haldeman was not so sure the hearings were all that bad a development. Of course, they would “cover all the facts of the Watergate blunders,” but that was old news, and Haldeman was not sure anyone would be interested. Haldeman preferred congressional hearings, which he felt allowed for much more freedom than a courtroom. Nixon turned to the September 15, 1972, meeting he had with me and asked if Haldeman had found his notes on it. He had not been able to, nor could he find the meeting in the president’s daily diary, so Haldeman figured I had somehow gotten the archivist to write me into a meeting that had never taken place on that date “In other words,” Haldeman explained, “he got the sheet from them and found out there wasn’t a meeting, decided this was a useful thing and got it written back in.” “My God, my God,” Nixon exclaimed.

  Haldeman had further recast the March 21 conversation with even more new details. He was now telling Nixon that before March 21, Nixon had told me, “Look, I want the whole facts,” which was why I had reported to him—rather than my requesting the meeting. Then, during the conversation, Haldeman claimed, “You probed deeply in trying to draw out of him, and he was reluctant to put it out. You weren’t getting a full thing right at the outset from him. You kept saying, but what do you do? You know, raising money is no problem.” Haldeman was even more specific: “You were asking a lot of leading questions designed to draw Dean out, because it was apparent that Dean was sort of treading a thin line in how he was talking to you in that meeting. You had told him to give you all the facts. He was not giving you all the facts. He was giving you a selected few of the facts, and you were pushing to get more information.”

  As Haldeman continued with this reinvention of the conversation, and how he might testify about it, Nixon said little, but he did suggest at one point that Haldeman should not mention Tom Pappas. Haldeman continued and characterized Nixon as probing me “hard to find out what happened,” the upshot of which was to instruct me to meet with Mitchell, Ehrlichman and Haldeman; it was then that the president called Haldeman into the meeting. “See, at this point you didn’t know what Mitchell’s involvement in this was,” Haldeman added.

  They also discussed Ehrlichman’s growing problems with the plumbers and the recent public revelations about his dissembling over the instructions he had give the CIA to provide Hunt with “disguises and all that stuff.” (Ehrlichman alleged that I had made these arrangements, when I had never spoken with the person Ehrlichman instructed, not to mention the fact that I had no information about what Hunt was doing at the White House. Fortunately, deputy CIA director Robert Cushman had recorded his July 7, 1971, conversation with Ehrlichman.51) This Oval Office discussion ended with a consideration of whether Nixon should resign. His concern was that, if he walked “out of this office, you know, on this chicken-shit stuff, why, it would leave a mark on the American political system.” His view, accordingly, was to “fight like hell.”

  Although Haldeman departed at noon, Nixon continued to think about their conversation, and he called Haldeman that afternoon to ask about his meeting with his lawyers, which Haldeman said had gone well.52 Nixon told him of the Vesco-related indictments of Mitchell and Stans, saying he was disappointed that I had not been indicted as well. He talked with Haldeman again at 4:18 P.M., but the call was not recorded.53 At 4:50 Nixon again tried to reach Haldeman, but the call was not completed. While Nixon was having dinner in the residence, Haldeman returned the call, and the president asked if I had been involved with the IRS and Vesco, and Haldeman said no, although I was aware of the efforts to use IRS to get Larry O’Brien.54 Later that evening Nixon met again, but secretly, with Haldeman in the Lincoln Sitting Room.55 Neither man has written specifically about this meeting.56 (After his departure from the White House staff, seventeen of Haldeman’s conversations with Nixon were recorded, and it is unknown how many went unrecorded.) But it appears that it was at this meeting that Haldeman assured Nixon that he would testify as Nixon hoped regarding the March 21 conversation, with Haldeman claiming the president had said “it would be wrong” to rais
e money and pay the Watergate defendants. While they had discussed that topic—which was central to Nixon’s defense—earlier, it does not appear in any of the recorded conversations.

  May 11 to 22, 1973

  A Preemptive Defense Statement

  Nixon found no reprieve from negative news. By the spring of 1973 Watergate had come to represent much more than just a bungled burglary and bugging at the DNC; it was now symptomatic of any and all abuses of power by the Nixon presidency. Old stories were resurfacing, and reporters were digging for information about purported wiretapping of newsmen in 1969 and 1970. Then Deputy CIA director Vernon Walters was summoned back to Washington from the Far East to explain his dealings with the Nixon White House in late June and early July 1972, following the arrests at the Watergate. The Senate’s Armed Services Committee, which had jurisdiction over the CIA, had learned of a CIA connection with Watergate.* On the morning of May 11 Walters came to see Haig and Buzhardt to give them copies of memoranda of conversations—known as “memcons”—he had written after his meetings with Haldeman and Ehrlichman on June 23, 1972, along with his later meetings with me. Walters said he had been summoned to testify the following day before the Senate Armed Services Committee, and he wanted guidance as to whether any of his memcons contained classified information.1

  Those documents were immediately recognized by Haig and Buzhardt as the next Watergate-related disaster for the Nixon presidency, even as Nixon’s team was still bracing for further negative reverberations from the unfolding reports from the Ellsberg break-in being addressed by Judge Matt Byrne. On May 11 Byrne personally delivered a stinging rebuke of the Nixon administration’s investigation and prosecution of the case, assailing the government for “improper conduct [in] an unprecedented series of actions” carried out by the plumbers unit, which had broken into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office with CIA assistance “beyond its statutory authority” in providing “disguises, photographic equipment and other paraphernalia for covert operations.” The government had also “requested and received from the CIA two psychological profiles” of Ellsberg. The court was offended by the failure of the government to produce records of these White House undertakings, along with the telephone surveillance records of Ellsberg, which it had belatedly admitted existed yet had failed to produce. Judge Byrne dismissed the government’s case, freeing Ellsberg and his codefendant Anthony Russo in a manner insuring that neither defendant could be later retried by the government. Needless to say, this rebuke and dismissal, and the accompanying front-page and network news stories, were devastating.2 But the Walters memcons had the potential of being worse.

  May 11–13, 1973, the White House and Camp David

  When Haig visited the Oval Office shortly after noon on May 11, he was clearly upset as he reported that Walters had been sent to the White House by recently appointed and confirmed (February 2, 1973) CIA director James Schlesinger: “Walters came in to me and gave me eight memcons of meetings here with Haldeman and Ehrlichman in July [sic] of last year, and a series of subsequent meetings with Gray and Dean. When I read them I thought they were quite damaging to us.”3 After Haig explained that he had been shown them to determine if they were classified, and that Walters was also being sent by Director Schlesinger to Elliot Richardson with the documents, he continued, “So I immediately called Buzhardt in, and we both read them. And we said, these papers can’t go anywhere. We sent him back to the agency, told him not to take any telephone calls, return here with every copy. And these are vital national security matters and cannot go anywhere.”

  Haig, who did not have a good understanding of the memcons, did his best to describe them. They revealed that on June 23, 1972, Haldeman and Ehrlichman had directed Walters to see acting FBI director Gray to “tell him that this [Watergate investigation] involved national security matters and that he should quiet down about the investigation. And that it had gone far enough and it was getting wider. It was beginning to get into CIA business, Mexican money.” But “Walters refused.” And he reported that Gray had called the president to say that Watergate “involved people high up in the White House and he should clean house. This is July.” Haig reported that the later conversations with me involved the CIA’s providing assistance to the burglars. Haig added that that was not all that was going on, for they had had “some very fast actions here this morning,” so he moved on to the next.

  Haig had not yet learned that Judge Byrne was dismissing the Ellsberg case although he had been assured that there would be “a mistrial.” He told Nixon that Ruckelshaus had been trying to get permission to send the Ellsberg wiretaps, which had been found in Ehrlichman’s files the day before, to Judge Byrne. (Failure to produce these wiretaps had been the final straw for Judge Byrne, yet the White House was still not releasing them.) Haig was avoiding Ruckelshaus “until we’ve got a strategy lined up.” They needed a strategy, because by now the Nixon White House’s 1969 to 1970 wiretaps of newsmen had also broken in the news, which was also being actively investigated by the FBI. During his earlier stint at the White House, Haig had carried the messages from Kissinger to then assistant FBI director Bill Sullivan as to which newsmen and National Security Council staffers they wanted to wiretap. This would be another major negative story, although the wiretapping had been carried out under the authority of and with the approval of Attorney General John Mitchell. Haig reported that the story had been leaked by Mark Felt, who “was spilling his guts all over the West Coast newspapers” and identifying the newsmen who had been wiretapped. In fact, it was not Felt who was leaking. The leaks were, rather, part of a byzantine plot being undertaken by Bill Sullivan to set up his archenemy Felt, knowing Felt would be blamed and fired.4 And indeed, Nixon told Haig, “Blame it on Felt,” and have Ruckelshaus fire him.

  Nixon returned to the memcons, and told Haig, “I’m clean on this thing. I didn’t do anything about this CIA thing. That was a Dean plot, period. He cooked the thing up and apparently talked to Haldeman and Ehrlichman about it, and I’ll bet you that they didn’t approve the God damn thing.” Based on his reading of the memcons, Haig agreed that “Dean was operating on his own,” though Nixon instructed, “But Walter’s memcons should not get out.” As they spoke, however, Nixon reconsidered and had a further question: “Do his memcons indicate that Bob and John cooked up the scheme and told Dean to carry it out? Was that the deal?” Nixon understood how his White House actually operated and realized that I would have been fired for undertaking such a plan on my own. Haig looked at the documents again and responded, “Yes. If you read these papers you would get that impression, because of the way the sequence, the timing”: Haldeman and Ehrlichman first met with Walters, and “he was told to go over and get Gray to tone down the investigation.” “Because of the CIA?” Nixon asked. “Yes,” Haig replied.

  They would also soon discover that when I had called Walters on June 26, three days after his meetings with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, he had noted exactly what I had told him: “He [Dean] said he wished to see me about the matter that John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman had discussed with me on the 23d of June. I could check this out with them if I wished.” Walters did call Ehrlichman, who confirmed I had been following up at his request. But even more troubling was the statement in Walters’s memcon for June 23, 1972, in which he stated: “Haldeman said the whole affair was getting embarrassing and it was the president’s wish that Walters call on Acting Director L. Patrick Gray and suggest to him that, since the five suspects have been arrested, this should be sufficient and that it was not advantageous to have the inquiry pushed, especially in Mexico, etc.”

  Haig indicated that he was concerned how Ehrlichman, who was increasingly considered more likely to protect himself rather than Nixon, might come out as a result of the information in the Walters memcons. He told the president that Buzhardt had advised, “For God’s sake, don’t talk to him,” warning that if Haig did speak with Ehrlichman, he would soon end up a witness. Nixon said, “Well, maybe I better
talk to Bob. Not John, I don’t want to talk to John.” Haig agreed, suggesting, “Well, to get a feel for how they’re going to play that. The FBI is going to see Bob and John, Bob at five tonight.” “About this thing?” Nixon asked. “No, not about this but about those [NSC staff/newsmen] taps, and we’ve got to know how to play that one, too. So we’ve got to coordinate it all. They’re all linked together.” After Haig explained that Larry Higby was his connection to Haldeman, Nixon said, “I just think I better get Bob and have a frank talk with him. I know that could be off-the-record.” Nixon instructed Haig to have Haldeman “slip into” his EOB office at one o’clock. But Haig, who agreed that Nixon should not be seen talking to Haldeman, felt he could more likely arrive unnoticed in the Oval Office. “Well, one crisis every hour,” Nixon said, as the conversation came to an end.

  At 12:53 P.M. Haldeman appeared, and Nixon’s greeting his aide—whose full name was Harry Robbins Haldeman—with, “Robert, how are you, boy?” must have made Haldeman cringe slightly, given their long association.5 The president said that he was keeping Haig away from some issues, and reported to Haldeman about the Walters memcons. The main thing he wanted to talk about, though, was how Haldeman and Ehrlichman would testify, for he wanted them “on track in terms of what the story really is.” Nixon then explained, based on Hunt’s CIA ties, “Our story is that he had done some national security work”—referring to the plumbers operation. But Nixon wanted it made clear that at no time had they tried to “put out a cover story that it was CIA business.” Nixon spent most of this meeting trying to reconstruct what Walters had written in the memcons while ignoring Haldeman’s request to see the documents. The rest of the conversation involved attempting to recall what had happened on June 23, 1972, when they had summoned Walters and Helms and then sent Walters to see Gray. When Haig joined the meeting, Nixon announced that he would never release the Walters memcons but would hold them “until hell freezes over.” As the conversation was winding down, Haldeman shared with Nixon what it had been like to appear before the grand jury: “It’s a terrible thing. You’re in a big, dark room, with these hostile people, and these merciless prosecutors tearing you up, and you have no lawyer. You’re all alone and feel like the bull in a bullfight.”