Mitchell, grayer and thinner, left the grand-jury room shortly after three o’clock and met outside the federal courthouse with reporters. For the first time, he publicly acknowledged attending meetings at which plans to bug the Democrats were discussed when he was Attorney General. “I have heard discussion of such plans. They’ve always been cut off by me at all times, and I would like to know who it was that kept bringing them back and back. . . . The electronic surveillance was turned down, and turned down, and that was disposed of.” He had approved “an entire intelligence-gathering program” aimed at obtaining “every bit of information that you could about the opposing candidates and their operations.” Through wiretapping? he was asked again. “No, no, no, no. Wiretapping is illegal, as you know, and we certainly were not authorizing any illegal activities.”
Woodward called another Mitchell associate whom he knew to be reliable. The man said Mitchell had told the grand jury that he approved paying the seven original Watergate conspirators with CRP funds. But he had insisted under oath that the money was intended to pay the conspirators’ legal fees, not to buy their silence. He had testified that he vetoed the bugging proposal for the third and final time during a meeting with Magruder in Key Biscayne. He believed Magruder had gone over his head and obtained approval for the Watergate operation from somebody at the White House.
Who?
“He thinks it was Colson, but he didn’t mention any names to the grand jury. He’s got no hard evidence.”
Bernstein was still in pursuit of Dean. Dean’s associate said over the phone that Dean had squirreled away “documentary evidence” which would, among other things, establish the involvement of his superiors in both the bugging and the cover-up. “Up to now, John Dean has been a true-blue soldier for the White House, and now the White House has decided they can send him up the river for being a good soldier. Well, he’s going to take some lieutenants and captains with him.”
A lawyer involved in the case told Bernstein he had seen Chuck Colson in the U.S. Attorney’s office that afternoon, a Friday. Woodward was able to establish that Colson had turned over documents from his files implicating John Dean in the cover-up. Things were happening fast. Bernstein was handed Jack Anderson’s latest Sunday column. Anderson was getting grand-jury transcripts and printing excerpts verbatim. Gordon Strachan, Haldeman’s political aide, had testified that, immediately after the election, Haldeman had ordered him to turn over to Fred LaRue $350,000 in CRP funds—which had been kept in a Virginia bank safe deposit box since April.
Now Woodward found a LaRue “associate.” It was payoff money, the associate said, added to the original $80,000 which LaRue had received from Sloan and funneled to the conspirators. A Justice Department official confirmed to Bernstein that the grand jury was operating under the assumption that both the $350,000 and $80,000 bundles, in $100 bills, had been used to pay off the conspirators.
Haldeman had been cornered outside his house by ABC and asked to confirm or deny reports that he would resign.
“I can deny them,” he said.
Flatly?
“Yes, sir, uh-huh.”
Returning a phone call from the night before, a mid-level White House official described the situation there to Woodward—old loyalties shattered, little work getting done, confusion about who on the staff might be indicted, who ordered what and who ordered whom, who would resign and who would be saved. “It’s every man for himself—get a lawyer and blame everyone else.”
The President had met with his Cabinet. “We’ve had our Cambodias before,” he said. Then, accompanied only by Ziegler, he flew off to Key Biscayne.
• • •
Bernstein and Woodward wanted to catch up on some sleep, and on Sunday neither arrived at the office until early afternoon. The newsroom was quiet, with only a dozen or so reporters there. It was relaxing. They read the Sunday papers. Hersh, too, had the grand jury looking into the Haldeman-Strachan-LaRue transfer, as well as the possibility that Haldeman had received wiretap transcripts. They had written about the latest charge by Dean’s associate—that Ehrlichman was involved in the cover-up (“E was the action officer, not H,” he had said). Haldeman and Ehrlichman had hired the same lawyer, who was also meeting with the President. News that would have occasioned banner headlines a few weeks ago was now simply mentioned within a larger story: Gordon Strachan had testified that Haldeman had approved the hiring of Donald Segretti. They had written a single paragraph on it. The reporters began calling around town, looking for associates of the three principal characters as yet unheard from: Colson, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Woodward found a Colson surrogate who sounded eager to talk. He was worried. “John Dean got to Sam Ervin and the prosecutors on roller skates and tried to do a number on us. Among other things, he said he would deliver on Colson—if they come across with immunity.”
What did Dean tell them about Colson? asked Woodward.
“Who knows? I’m not so dumb that I think I’m going to convince you that Chuck Colson is a virgin. He’s no saint and that place isn’t the Sistine Chapel. But my man doesn’t break the law.”
Instead of covering up on Watergate, he insisted, Colson had tried to find the truth. Then he had sounded the alarm.
“Colson went right in to the President as early as December and laid it on the line—warned Richard Nixon that some of his people were part of Watergate in a big way and had an organized cover-up going. He warned Nixon about Dean and Mitchell. The President said, ‘The man [Mitchell] has denied it to me; give me some evidence.’ And there are two other people who went to Tricky and said, ‘Cut yourself off from Dean and Mitchell.’ Tricky wouldn’t budge. . . . It’s too fucking bad if it makes the President look bad. He was told that John Dean and John Mitchell were betraying him.”
Woodward called a White House source. On at least three different occasions that winter Colson had told the President that he should “get rid of some people” because they were involved in Watergate. So had others. Most of the warnings focused on Dean and Mitchell, the source said.
Woodward called Colson. He denied “warning” the President about Dean or Mitchell or about a cover-up.
What, then, had he told the President on the subject?
“I will not discuss private communications between myself and the President,” Colson said. “Not with anyone—you, the press in general, with the grand jury or the Senate committee.”
A few minutes later, Woodward received a call from a second Colson associate. “Don’t pay any attention to Chuck’s denial,” he advised. He, too, confirmed that Colson had explicitly told the President there was evidence that his men were involved in both the bugging and the cover-up. The associate said there were two reasons for Colson’s denial: to avoid acknowledging that the President was forewarned, and the fear that John Dean might “retaliate” by implicating Colson before the grand jury.
The White House had no comment on that Monday’s lead story in the Post: “Nixon Alerted to Cover-up in December.”
• • •
The next Thursday, April 26, Bernstein made his daily call to John Dean’s principal associate early in the afternoon. Bernstein again raised the question of what had happened between Dean’s meeting with the President on March 21 and the President’s announcement on April 17.
“I think we lost the highest-stakes poker game in the city’s history,” the associate said.
Bernstein guessed out loud that the President had thrown in his chips with Haldeman and Ehrlichman against John Dean.
“It looks that way now. But nobody will tell him anything for sure. He’s like a prisoner. . . . For a while, John was feeling very high because he felt they were all going to do the right thing. It was his understanding that an agreement had been reached. Then it collapsed because the German shepherds said they didn’t think they had to go to the doghouse with John Dean.”
Haldeman and Ehrlichman didn’t think . . .?
“ . . . that they had to be indicted to save
the situation.”
What exactly had Dean told the President on the 21st?
“John went in and said, ‘Mr. President, there is a cancer eating away at this office and it has to be removed. To save the Presidency, Haldeman and Ehrlichman and I are going to have to tell everything to the prosecutors and face the consequences of going to jail.’ That was the gist of it. The President sat down in his chair stunned, like somebody had hit him in the head with a rock.”
Then what happened?
“He told him everything—even gave him a list of who would probably have to go to jail. It was a very long list. John told him that the shepherds had known the whole story since the beginning, that he kept them informed of everything there was to know and carried out their orders, and that, from the beginning, they had told John not to discuss anything with the President, that they would handle that end of it.”
What was the President’s reaction?
“Mostly he listened. Then he told John that he must be under a lot of strain. So he sent him up to the Mountaintop to put his thoughts in order and get it all down on paper. . . . John came down from Camp David expecting that everybody would stand up and say, ‘Yes, we were responsible and the President knew nothing about this. We are prepared to accept the consequences and will cooperate with the grand jury investigation.’
“But when John got back to the White House, it became obvious that the President had been persuaded by the German shepherds to keep his losses to a minimum . . . to sacrifice John Dean while trying to discourage the indictment of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Instead of agreeing to cooperate, they are still telling the P that John should walk the plank for all of them. The P is ready to give John the final shove.”
Bernstein asked if Dean now believed the President was involved in the cover-up himself.
“See what other people say about this first,” he replied. “Then we can visit again.”
Woodward called his man from CRP. “Dean said in March he wanted to blow this up. Dean has attempted to be honest, but he was taking orders from Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Honesty and following orders were inconsistent, so Dean broke ranks.”
The reporters began another round of calls to the White House. Dean’s version of the events since March 21 was surprisingly easy to confirm. The grip of fear that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had once exercised seemed to have been broken. Haldeman and Ehrlichman had acknowledged to certain of their colleagues in the White House that they had authorized widespread undercover activities and knew of payments to the convicted conspirators but maintained that they had never specifically approved or ordered anything illegal.
About 7:45 that night, Woodward got a call from a Capitol Hill source with an even bigger story: The New York Daily News would be on the streets in a few minutes, he said, saying that Acting FBI Director Gray had destroyed documents taken from Howard Hunt’s White House safe. The documents reportedly destroyed had been in two folders. One contained bogus State Department cables fabricated by Hunt to implicate President John F. Kennedy in the 1963 assassination of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem. The second was a dossier stuffed with information collected by Hunt on Senator Edward Kennedy. The source said the News story was accurate.
Woodward called a Senate aide on the Watergate committee. He confirmed the News account. John Dean had told Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen about it 10 days before.
About 9:30, the phone at Woodward’s desk rang. “Give me a number to call you on,” Deep Throat said.
Woodward gave him the number of one of the main city-desk lines. The call came at once.
“You’ve heard the Gray story?” Deep Throat asked. “Well it’s true. On June 28, in a meeting with Ehrlichman and Dean, Gray was told the files were—quote—’political dynamite’ and should—quote—’never see the light of day.’ He was told, quote, ‘they could do more damage than the Watergate bugging itself.’ In fact, Ehrlichman had told Dean earlier in the day, ‘You go across the river every day, John. Why don’t you drop the goddamn fucking things in the river?’ Gray kept the files for about a week and then he says he threw them in a burn bag in his office. He says that he was not exactly told to destroy the files, but understood it was absolutely clear what Dean and Ehrlichman wanted.”*
Bernstein reached Dean’s associate.
“You ever hear the expression ‘Deep Six’?” he asked. “That’s what Ehrlichman said he wanted done with those files.”
The story was solid. Howard Simons ordered the front page remade for the second edition.
Bernstein was more shaken by all this than by anything since June 17. It was the language and the context of Ehrlichman’s remark to Dean that troubled him. Just as if they were a couple of Mafiosi talking to each other in a restaurant, the President’s number-two assistant had said to the President’s consigliere: Hey, Joe, we gotta dump this stuff in the river before the boss gets hurt.
Howard Simons slouched in a chair, drawing deeply on a cigarette, the color gone from his face. “A director of the FBI destroying evidence? I never thought it could happen,” he said quietly.
• • •
In the late afternoon of April 27, Bernstein and Woodward were called over by one of the editors to look at a story that had just come across the Associated Press wire as a bulletin.
It was another Watergate. In Los Angeles, at the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, Judge Matthew Byrne had announced that he had learned from the Watergate prosecutors that Hunt and Liddy supervised the burglary of the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in 1971.
Bernstein reached John Dean’s associate for their daily conversation.
“Carl, how do you think they learned about that little bag job on the coast?” the associate asked.
Dean again?
“You ask the prosecutors who told them about that. . . . John’s got some stories to tell. Ask them about his credibility. Everything he’s told them has checked out . . . and there is still a lot more he hasn’t told them yet that they want to know about. Don’t forget: John Dean was over there at the White House a long time, and there were lots of projects. John has knowledge of illegal activities that go way back.”
How far back?
“Way back . . . to the beginning.”
More wiretapping?
“I wouldn’t challenge that assumption.”
Burglaries?
“Would you keep a squad of burglars around the house for years if you only wanted them for one or two jobs? . . . H and E are upset about what has come out so far. There are documents . . .”
About burglaries?
“About a lot of things. You might think about the story of Patrick Gray destroying those documents. There is only one way this whole story will ever come out. . . . You didn’t see E run down to the prosecutors and tell how he broke the law. Has H been down there? I don’t expect the P to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the court-house. That leaves one person. John Dean again. . . . We are laying a foundation to protect ourselves.
“Haldeman and Ehrlichman have been trying to get John to take a dive and convince the P that he should save their skins and blame it all on John. The P has agreed.”
Is Dean going to implicate the P?
“There were lots of meetings. . . . The P was there. The cover-up was being discussed.”
The next evening, Woodward went to the White House. He had asked a senior presidential aide for an interview to talk about John Dean. Woodward sat in one of the colorfully decorated offices in the old Executive Office Building and drank coffee out of a cup bearing the Presidential Seal.
Haldeman and Ehrlichman were finished, the man said.
And, yes, it was coming. John Dean was going to implicate the President in the cover-up. The aide had a pained expression on his face.
What did Dean have?
“I’m not sure. I’m not sure it is evidence. . . . The President’s former lawyer is going to say that the President is . . . well, a felon.” The man’s face trembled. He asked Wo
odward to leave.
16
AT THE OFFICE, Bernstein and Woodward discussed the statements of both men. They were convinced that Dean was going to implicate the President. Bradlee and Simons thought it would be premature to print that. They wanted specifics, a look at the documents Dean supposedly had, Dean’s recollections of conversations with the President himself—something that would enable them to evaluate whether Dean was telling the truth.
Instead of the Dean story on the President, the reporters put together a Sunday story which said that senior White House aides had concluded that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were involved in the cover-up.
The next morning, April 30, word came in slowly. There was a phone call from Capitol Hill. Then, a tentative confirmation from a reporter at the White House. Bradlee came out of his office to tell Woodward: It’s happening today. Four of them: Haldeman and Ehrlichman have resigned; Dean has been fired; Kleindienst has also resigned. Elliot Richardson is moving over from the Defense Department to become Attorney General. Bernstein came in a few minutes later and Simons told him the news. He went to his desk and sat down. James McCartney, a national correspondent for Knight Newspapers who happened to be in the office writing an article on the Post for the Columbia Journalism Review, came over and wanted to talk to Bernstein. Bernstein said he didn’t want to talk just then.
Just before noon, the White House made an announcement, and the resignation letters arrived in the office and were Xeroxed. That made it real. The Haldeman letter referred to “various allegations and innuendoes” and “the flood of stories” which made it “virtually impossible under these circumstances for me to carry on my regular responsibilities in the White House.” Ehrlichman said that “regardless of the actual facts, I have been a target of public attack . . . repeated rumor, unfounded charges or implications and whatever else the media carries.”
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