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

by John W. Dean

  * In fact, I had a total of thirty-seven Watergate conversations with Nixon in the form of either meetings or telephone calls.

  * See here.

  * Nixon had mentioned resigning to Haldeman on previous occasions as the collapse of the Watergate cover-up made it increasingly difficult for the president to focus on government business. Haldeman dismissed Nixon’s threats to resign as moments of self-pity, but as April progressed there were times when Nixon sounded as if he were seriously considering this option. But then his mood shifts, and he is ready to fight to the bitter end.

  * Ziegler chose not to tell the president that the article implicated others as well: Colson, Mitchell, Magruder, Strachan, Chapin, Mardian and Stans. See Christopher Lydon, “Key Figures in Watergate Are Silent or Unavailable,” New York Times, April 19, 1973, 34.

  * This activity, along with the Ellsberg break-in, will become headlines in May 1973.

  * During his trial testimony, Haldeman acknowledged that he was aware the money was returned to the reelection committee to pay the defendants, but he believed it was for attorneys’ fees and support, or for humanitarian reasons. The jury rejected this defense. See testimony of H. R. Haldeman, U.S. v. Mitchell et al., November 25, 1974, 8500ff.

  * There was (and still is) no statute of the nature Ehrlichman describes. The CIA case to which he was referring was a situation in which CIA director Richard Helms requested the president’s support and assistance with the Justice Department in blocking the publication of a tell-all book by former CIA operative Victor Marchetti in the spring of 1972. The CIA wanted the Justice Department to prevent publication of the book by enforcing the confidentiality agreement Marchetti (and others) had signed when he joined the CIA. At the White House’s request, the Justice Department went to court and got a federal judge to enforce the contract. White House staff did not sign such confidentiality agreements.

  * While this judgment proved very wrong, in fairness to these attorneys, they were given less than all the facts by Haldeman and Ehrlichman, who at that time could not conceive of the possibility that much of the actual record of their conduct would become available in Nixon’s recordings, which would convict them with their own words.

  * Haldeman’s telephone log showed that he made the call to Mitchell at 12:30 P.M. on March 21, 1973, and he would later be forced to admit that he requested Mitchell come to Washington, where Mitchell would report that money had been paid to Hunt. Testimony of H. R. Haldeman, U.S. v. Mitchell et al., December 2, 1974, 8586–87.

  * Bud Krogh would put the lie to Ehrlichman’s seeming public indifference toward Hunt’s blackmail, for privately he was very concerned. Testimony of Egil Krogh, U.S. v. Mitchell et al. November 22, 1974, 7663–81.

  * The fact that apparently Haldeman halted here and did not mention that the Technical Security Division also operated Nixon’s secret taping systems suggests that Ehrlichman still had not been told of the recording operation. Notwithstanding my administrative responsibilities, I, too, was unaware of the system.

  * Howard K. Smith was wrong in his historical example of Harding. See John W. Dean, Warren G. Harding (New York: Times Books, 2004).

  * Some of these names are difficult to hear. This name sounds like Noel Cook, but there was no Noel Cook, rather a Noel Koch.

  * Needless to say, members of the U.S. Senate only have the power to convict, not the power to impeach, a president, which is left to a majority of the members of the U. S. House of Representatives.

  * See here.

  * In fact, Haldeman first reported paying the Watergate defendants on August 1, 1972 (see here), and Nixon expressed concern that the payments could be bribes during that conversation.

  * Bud Krogh negotiated a plea agreement with the Watergate special prosecutor regarding his false statements to a grand jury and pled guilty on November 30, 1973. He became a key witness against Ehrlichman regarding the Ellsberg break-in.

  * Ehrlichman was interviewed by the FBI in this matter on May 1, 1973, and later indicted for the false statements he gave the FBI during that interview. See U.S. v. Ehrlichman et al., 379 F. Supp. 291 (1974).

  * It was not so ridiculous, for within three months Agnew would discover that he was the subject of a federal investigation for extortion, bribery and tax evasion by the U.S. attorney in Maryland, a case that Henry Petersen was overseeing. On October 10, 1973, Agnew resigned as vice president and appeared in U.S. District Court in Baltimore to plead nolo contendere to a federal felony for failing to report $29,500 in taxable income he had received in 1967 while governor of Maryland, a plea bargain approved by Petersen. If Petersen had any knowledge of this during this April 27 conversation, he did not give any indication at that time.

  * On two separate occasions I was later asked—first by Jim Neal and later by Richard Ben-Veniste of the Watergate special prosecutor’s office—when I was in the U.S. Marshals’ witness protection program (at the urging of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox and Senate Watergate committee chief counsel Sam Dash) if I thought Nixon would or could put a hit out on my life. I thought it doubtful, but if he was in one of his dark moods, I said, he might ask Bebe Rebozo to arrange it.

  * Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski would later tell me that the March 21 conversation was the first Nixon tape he would listen to when it became available, and it removed all doubts for him that the president was deeply involved in the Watergate cover-up. Assistant Watergate Special Prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, who was with Jaworski when he listened to the March 21 recording, told me it had clearly shaken Jaworski, and as Ben-Veniste would later write, Jaworski understood after hearing it: “[H]e would be confronted with far more difficult decisions than he ever anticipated when he accepted the job as Nixon’s second Watergate Special Prosecutor.” Richard Ben-Veniste and George Frampton, Jr., Stonewall: The Real Story of the Watergate Prosecution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977), 209.

  * Haldeman was indicted and convicted for lying to the Senate Watergate committee about Nixon’s March 21, 1973, conversation when he testified on July 30–31, 1973. His testimony conflicted not only with what could be heard on the recording but also with the notes he made of what he had heard. Haldeman testified exactly as they had agreed: Nixon had told me that “it would be wrong” to raise money for the Watergate defendants, when, in fact, he had said the exact opposite. The overwhelming evidence of Haldeman’s perjury was assembled when he was prosecuted. See counts 8 and 9, Indictment, and closing statement of James Neal, U.S. v. Mitchell et al. (December 20, 1974) 11,695–11,699; see also, U.S. v. Haldeman et al., 559 F.2d 31 (1976).

  * When I arrived at the White House in July 1970, Tom Charles Huston was placed on my staff by Haldeman. I never really knew what Huston did until after he soon departed, and Haldeman explained that he had developed a plan for the president to remove restrictions of domestic intelligence gathering. Haldeman felt Huston might have offended FBI director J. Edgar Hoover when trying to implement his plan, which the president had approved, and wanted me to see what I could do. Soon the plan arrived in my office with its remarkable label: “Top Secret/Handle Via COMINT Channels Only”—a classification so high that the classification itself was classified. To make the story very short, I did not implement the plan. At the time I broke ranks over Watergate, there was no hard documentary evidence of Nixon’s belief that the law did not apply to presidents, a view I did not share. So after consultation with Shaffer, I placed this remarkable document in a safe-deposit box and Shaffer gave the keys to Judge John Sirica. See John W. Dean, Blind Ambition (New York: Simon & Schuster), 36–38, 254, 276, 278, and 293.

  * This meeting with Ehrlichman and a later one, as well as the president’s meetings with Haldeman, were not on the president’s schedule or the president’s daily diary on May 2, 1973, although a two-minute call between 10:02 and 10:04 A.M. with Haldeman was recorded by the White House operator, as was a six-minute call between 8:44 and 8:50 P.M., along with a one-minute telephone conversation wi
th Ehrlichaman between 8:51 and 8:52 P.M. The meeting times (and dates), however, were determined by NARA, because the meetings were recorded. Nixon undoubtedly instructed that they be kept off his schedule so the news media would be unaware of meetings that surely would have prompted questions. Because they were not on the president’s schedule, however, investigators were never aware of them either, and they certainly could have been of interest to prosecutors, not to mention to an impeachment inquiry.

  * During his trial in U.S. v. Ehrlichman et al., Ehrlichman would argue, unsuccessfully, that a “covert” operation did not mean an illegal one, merely a less than conspicuous activity as, say, when one looks for another job, they don’t tell their boss they are job hunting; rather, they covertly look for the new job. See, e.g., William Frates, closing argument, U.S. v. Ehrlichman et al. (July 11, 1974) 2403–5. However, as the government pointed out, everyone involved but Ehrlichman, it seemed, understood he had authorized an illegal operation.

  * See here.

  * Within months, however, Nixon would personally begin attacking me on national television in speeches to the nation, and in press conferences. See, e.g., his August 15, 1973, address to the nation and statement about the Watergate investigations, and hs presidential press conferences of September 5, 1973, November 12, 1973, March 6, 1974, and April 29, 1974.

  * Ehrlichman would commit perjury before the grand jury when he pretended his memory had totally failed him; he claimed he could not recall the answers to 125 questions, including whether I had told him of my conversation with Gordon Liddy on June 19, 1972, or during that week. Remarkably, when he was indicted for those false statements, and under cross-examination, he lost track of his false statements and admitted he had been told about Liddy that week, thus confessing his perjury. See counts 11 and 12, Indictment, and closing argument of James Neal, U.S. v. Mitchell et al. (December 20, 1974) 11,699–11,701.

  * The chairman of this committee was Senator John Stennis, who was not only fond of Richard Nixon but had been close to Fred Buzhardt for years. Stennis, however, had recently been shot and wounded in an attempted robbery on Capitol Hill and was recovering. The next ranking Democrat on the committee, Senator Stuart Symington (MO), was the temporary chairman when this question of the CIA connection to Watergate arose, which could not have been worse for Nixon, for Symington was a longtime anti-Nixon Democrat.

  * On June 30, 1971, Nixon issued the following order to Haldeman: “I want Brookings, I want them to just break in and take it out,” he said, referring to a purported copy of the Pentagon Papers at the Brookings Institution. “Do you understand?” “Yeah, but you have to have someone to do it.” Nixon added, “You talk to Hunt. I want the break-in, well, hell, they do that. You break in the place, rifle the files and bring ’em out.” Conversation No. 533-1.

  * See Nixon’s handwritten notes dated “8.29.72” and prepared for the press conference at here.

  * Surprisingly, Nixon never did invoke the “state’s secrets privilege,” which was established law. This common-law privilege empowers the president to refuse to turn over evidence he alone deems a state secret, and the president’s decision cannot be reviewed by the courts. See Reynolds v. United States, 345 U.S. 1 (1953).

  * Because the president told Bull he was not interested in the April 15, 1973, conversation with me between 9:17 P.M. and 10:12 P.M., it was not learned until much later that this conversation was missing, if in fact at that time it was missing.

  * Dictabelt recordings were made using an analog recording system. These belts were a thin vinyl plastic that fit over metal cylinders that rotated the belt with a stylus engraving the sound on the belt as it turned. See, e.g., www.dictabeltrerecord.com/about.htm.

  * Eventually Nixon, Buzhardt and associates would send Dick Moore to the Senate to impeach my testimony. Moore, accompanied by Jack Miller, appeared before the Senate Watergate committee on July 12, 13 and 14, 1973. After delivering his prepared statement, which really did not contest my facts but rather my interpretation of them, much of the cross-examination was handled by Terry Lenzner. Moore was such an awful witness—still suffering from the terrible memory problem Nixon had first noticed when he quizzed him—that Lenzner was accused in the press of taking unfair advantage of Moore, not to mention that Moore did make a poor showing, diluting his testimony. A Washington Post piece reported on Lenzner’s cross-examination: “Moore was unable to respond in detail and began stammering slightly as he answered. At one point, asked by Lenzner about an apparent contradiction between an answer he had just given and one he had given earlier that afternoon in a closed-door session with the committee staff, Moore replied that “I’ll let my answer stand—whichever it was.’” Peter A. Jay and John Hanrahan, “Moore: President Was Kept in Dark,” The Washington Post, July 13, 1973, A-1.

  * Buzhardt was correct on the fact that the special prosecutors would cast a doubting eye on the work of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in its initial investigation, but no formal investigation was ever undertaken, and Earl Silbert certainly made clear when he was later nominated to be U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia that they had done the best possible investigation under the situation with which they were confronted. See U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, “Nomination of Earl J. Silbert to be United States Attorney,” Hearings, April 23–24 and 30, and June 26, 1974. Silbert served as U.S. attorney from 1974 to 1979.

  * It appears he had by then forgotten that I had told Len Garment, after my April 15 meeting with the president, that recordings existed of one or more of my conversations with him. Years later Garment told me he had reported my comment to him to Haldeman and Nixon.

  * When I testified before the Senate Watergate committee, I had forgotten about Pappas, and indeed, his name was never mentioned during their inquiry. Ironically it was Nixon himself who surfaced Pappas, when he later produced the tape recording of our March 21, 1972, conversation. Pappas would be investigated by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and while they found he had violated the law, no prosecution was pursued. However, they did not have access to the information set forth in this book.

  * Only four months later, on October 10, 1973, Agnew resigned.

  * This was cash that had been given to me by Gordon Strachan and Colson’s aide Dick Howard. They did not know its owner, and they were concerned, because it was apparently left over from larger expenditures that had been made contrary to the campaign finance laws. It was all extremely vague. Indeed, it would take litigation to determine to whom the fund should be given, and it ultimately went to the CRP.

  * Buzhardt would not learn of the taping system until June 25, the first day of my testimony, when Nixon was in California and asked him to listen to one of our conversations. See Appendix B.

  * An average daily audience of some eighty million Americans.

  * Indeed, I had undertestified out of caution, and confused dates of a few events. I had taken pains to make it clear to the Senate that my memory was not a date-stamped tape recorder. See 4 Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (SSC) 1373, 1513.

  * Given the fact that this April 15, 1973, conversation later disappeared, the reel containing the conversation believed not to exist because the machine ran out of tape that day, makes this a fascinating conversation. It appears Buzhardt was given this conversation when the president was in California during my testimony. This is the conversation I told the Senate caused me to believe I was recorded (4 Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities [SSC] 1577). If there was any tape on which the president incriminated himself, and put the lie to his own defense, it was this conversation. And given this exchange with Steve Bull, it certainly appears that Fred Buzhardt solved that problem. (See Appendix B.)

  * Either Nixon shared this thought, or others had the same thought, for soon Nixon’s supporters had bumper stickers that read: Nobody Drowned At Watergate.

  * While working on this book, a perfect opportunity to discuss the discovery of
Nixon’s taping system arose at Chapman Law Review Symposium: “The 40th Anniversary of Watergate: A Commemoration of the Rule of Law,” Panel 1: “President Nixon’s Secret Tapes: Evidence that Politically, Legally and Historically Defined Watergate (and More),” Friday, January 27, 2012, Moderator: John W. Dean; Panelists: Scott Armstrong and Alexander Butterfield, reported in full at Chapman Law Review 16 (Spring 2012): 9.

  * 138 F. Supp. 812 (1956). Note: A highly respected federal trial judge had ruled that it was obstruction of justice under 18 USC 1503 to destroy four letters it was known a grand jury was interested in, even though the letters had not yet been subpoenaed.