Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (66 page)

Liddy was confident that no investigator could trace him to the events at the DNC, or to Hunt. Yet it was quickly discovered that Liddy—as general counsel at the reelection committee—had laundered campaign money for the committee through the bank of Barnard Barker, who, after his arrest at the DNC, was in the District of Columbia jail. The address book of another of the men arrested at the DNC and put in jail included Howard Hunt’s White House phone number. As Nixon said at the time, if we did not know better, it would have all looked to us like it had been intentionally botched. When the FBI entered the case, its investigation quickly revealed that Liddy had left a trail all over the country when he had traveled and tried to recruit former CIA and FBI men to join his team, making it clear that he was planning illicit operations.

Personally, I felt that I had no criminal exposure from Liddy’s failed operations. While I had little knowledge of the criminal law, I knew just enough to convince myself that I had withdrawn from the conspiracy to burglarize and bug the DNC. I had thrown cold water on Liddy’s proposal during the second meeting in Mitchell’s office, and told Haldeman I wanted nothing to do with Liddy’s crazy schemes, to which Haldeman had concurred. And I’d had no further dealings with Liddy’s illegal activities, and was not aware that they had been approved.

In truth, I was deeply ignorant about the criminal law, and it had never occurred to me that the Counsel to the President needed to be (or have access to) a criminal lawyer. If I had been aware, I would have hired one for my staff. At the Nixon White House, the White House Counsel’s Office needed a highly-trained criminal lawyer. I had never heard of the crime of obstruction of justice until well into the cover-up, when I pulled out a copy of the federal criminal code to determine what, if any, laws we might be breaking. Had I better understood the criminal law, my antennae would have been fully extended. Instead, I learned about obstruction of justice the hard way and paid dearly for my stupidity. (Remarkably, over a dozen attorneys ended up on the wrong side of the law in the course of Watergate, a fact that I attribute to lack of knowledge of the criminal law and to the instinctive loyalty widely felt toward the office of the president, regardless of the occupant.)

There is no doubt in my mind that if Liddy, and Hunt, had not undertaken earlier illegal activities for the White House, then Haldeman and Ehrlichman would have urged the President to cut all ties with his friend, former law partner, and campaign manager John Mitchell. Mitchell might have agreed, and indeed urged that very action, had he not learned about Liddy’s activities at the White House, which he later described as “the White House horrors.” (At one point after the cover-up had collapsed, Mitchell made an offer to the Watergate Special Prosecutor that he would plead guilty if they would back off the investigation of Nixon, but by then, it was far too late.)

Mitchell learned about Liddy’s and Hunt’s activities at the Plumber’s Unit in great detail from Bob Mardian, who had become Mitchell’s aide at the reelection committee. Mardian and Fred LaRue debriefed Liddy shortly after the arrest of his men at the DNC, and Liddy shared all the ugly details. As a result, Mitchell was concerned that the Ellsberg break-in was potentially even more serious politically for Nixon than the bungled break-in at the DNC offices, for no one was sure if Nixon had been directly involved in the Ellsberg break-in. If Mitchell ever asked the President about the Ellsberg break-in, which there is no indication that he did, he would have learned that Nixon had not authorized it.

Liddy’s and Hunt’s activities at the Plumber’s Unit were called “national security” work (and at one point, Nixon forbade me to discuss these activities with prosecutors for this reason). But no one knew what that meant and whether it justified illegal conduct, not to mention covering up that conduct. These questions were never discussed. Rather they just loomed in the background, based upon indirect references. If, in fact, Nixon did not know about the Ellsberg break-in until I told him about it on March 17, 1973, which he claimed to be the case, then Ehrlichman and Haldeman were keeping information from Nixon that he needed in order to understand what was taking place. While I have not listened to enough of the Nixon tapes to know, I would be stunned to find that Nixon was not aware of this fundamental problem long before I told him about it.

As to whether it was a legitimate national security matter, two courts have examined the issue. When Ehrlichman, Liddy, Barker, and Martinez were on trial for the Ellsberg burglary, this issue arose. Ehrlichman claimed that Nixon had authorized the Ellsberg action; in particular, he said they had discussed it while walking on the beach in San Clemente. But Ehrlichman had no solid proof of this fact (because there was none) and Nixon was too ill at the time to testify (which helped Ehrlichman). Ehrlichman’s fallback argument was that regardless of whether or not the President specifically authorized the break-in itself, such authority had been delegated by the President to the Plumber’s Unit.
The trial judge ruled that even if the President had the authority to authorize such an act, he could not have delegated that authority to any of the defendants since they were not law enforcement officers and their claims for delegated authority were based on “vague, informal, inexact terms.” Accordingly, all were convicted following a jury trial. When their convictions were appealed, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was all over the lot. In affirming Ehrlichman’s conviction, the court held that there could be no “national security” exception without specific authorization by the “President or Attorney General.”

Nonetheless, this area of law is anything but easy, even for judges. In this split and internally-inconsistent decision, the Court of Appeals also reversed the convictions of burglars
Barker and Martinez, because
Hunt had described the operation at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office as a national security matter, when he asked Barker if he would become operational and help conduct a surreptitious entry to obtain national security information on “a traitor to this country who was passing...classified information to the Soviet Embassy.” At trial, the jury was instructed by the judge that “an individual cannot escape the criminal law simply because he sincerely but incorrectly believes that his acts are justified in the name of patriotism, or national security…or that his superiors had the authority without a warrant to suspend the Constitutional protections of the Fourth Amendment” (which requires a warrant). But the Court of Appeals found this to be a faulty instruction. They held that Barker and Martinez should have been given an opportunity to show that they believed Hunt, who was then working at the White House, and that they acted on his authority as a government official. After their convictions were set aside, the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office declined to pursue Barker and Martinez further.

Frankly, since the day Nixon told me I was the first to inform him about the Ellsberg break-in, I have not believed that it could have been a national security undertaking. I understood then, as I do today, that such actions require direct Presidential approval and if Nixon had not heard of it, he surely could not have authorized it. But I did not raise the Ellsberg break-in here in order to resolve this issue. Rather, I do so because I believe that, just as Bud Krogh observed, the efforts to cover up the Watergate break-ins cannot be understood without understanding its relationship to the Ellsberg break-in. This fact exacerbated the tension between those most at risk for authorizing Liddy’s illegal activities, John Ehrlichman (the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist office) and John Mitchell (the DNC break-in), who had been at odds long before the arrests at the DNC.

It had been fascinating to watch, as I did from my White House perch, as Ehrlichman slowly but steadily undercut Mitchell’s authority and standing with the President. Initially, no one had President Nixon’s ear and attention more than his attorney general, John Mitchell, who had not wanted the job and had accepted the post only as a favor to Nixon, who had pushed him hard. Neither Mitchell nor Ehrlichman were familiar with the ways of Washington. Mitchell had been a bond lawyer in New York; Ehrlichman, a real estate lawyer in Seattle. But Ehrlichman was a faster student than Mitchell, and he had closer proximity to Nixon, for he saw him daily, while Mitchell was running the Justice Department. Every time Mitchell made a mistake, and there were many (like his flawed Supreme Court nominees), Ehrlichman made sure the President understood it. By the time I arrived in the White House from Mitchell’s Justice Department, eighteen months into Nixon’s first term, Ehrlichman’s Domestic Council was increasingly making domestic policy decisions as to what the Department of Justice should or should not be doing. Observing Ehrlichman and Mitchell together at White House meetings, I noticed that there was always an edge, and both men seemed to force civility. Ehrlichman blamed Mitchell for the ITT scandal disaster, which had blunted the political pluses from the China trip, the centerpiece of Nixon’s reelection bid. After Mitchell departed the Justice Department in March 1972, and Dick Kleindienst took control, Ehrlichman was telling the new attorney general how to run his department. The cover-up cannot be fully understood without appreciating the personalities involved, principally those of Ehrlichman and Mitchell. At the time, they were two of the most powerful men in Washington.

As White House Counsel, I was a second-level staffer in the Nixon White House who reported to Haldeman, the chief of staff. I had no access to the President, other than through Haldeman, or if the President called me. The reason I quickly found myself in an increasingly significant role in dealing with the dire problems that instantly arose after the arrests of Liddy’s team at the DNC headquarters was because of the strained, if not toxic, relationship between Ehrlichman and Mitchell. While Mitchell could talk with Haldeman, for whom he had great respect, he found Ehrlichman arrogant and insufferable, so he had nothing to say to the man unless absolutely necessary. In meetings, rather than address each other directly, they would talk to anyone else attending in order to make their point or communicate information that the President needed. Having worked for Mitchell, I knew he trusted me. By June 1972, when Liddy’s disaster arrived at the backdoor of the White House, I had been there long enough to have earned Ehrlichman’s trust. So the two communicated with each other, regarding the subject of dealing with the problems Liddy had created, through me. I could feel the leverage each was placing on the other.

Again, Ehrlichman blamed Mitchell for approving Liddy’s harebrained scheme, which had resulted in the arrests at the DNC, notwithstanding the fact that Ehrlichman himself had failed to warn anyone about Liddy’s foolish behavior at the White House before going to the reelection committee. Mitchell blamed Ehrlichman for Liddy’s “White House horrors.” Ehrlichman, with Haldeman’s concurrence, was directing the White House response to Liddy’s disaster; Mitchell was directing the reelection committee’s response (even after he quickly resigned from his post as Nixon’s campaign manager). Because both Ehrlichman and Mitchell had potential criminal liability for authorizing Liddy’s illegal actions, they seemed to convince themselves that by protecting themselves, they were protecting the President. As the cover-up progressed and as Liddy’s men were demanding more money, not to mention Hunt and, soon, McCord demanding a promise of clemency, Ehrlichman instinctively sought to keep the White House out of it all, while Mitchell needed the assistance of the White House not only in raising money, but also because only the President could grant clemency. It fell to me to communicate between these two camps, and I effectively became the desk officer for the cover-up or, as I said earlier, the linchpin in the conspiracy to obstruct justice (an investigation that might uncover the Ellsberg related break-in).

The fact that Ehrlichman and Mitchell had each other over a barrel in the end hurt Nixon. Neither man was interested in accounting for his behavior, by owning up to approving the disasters Liddy had delivered. This, in turn, created a situation where there was no intelligent discussion and analysis of the problem, for I do not doubt that both men sincerely believed (and went to their Maker believing) that they had undertaken the illegal action only because they were doing what Nixon had wanted. In the end, no one benefited from the disdain with which each of these important Nixon aides viewed the other.

So what can we see at this distance, so many years later, about the Watergate break-ins and cover-up? Most clearly, for anyone who looks, is the fact that the atmosphere that Nixon created in his White House was bound to result in trouble, given the attitude that anything the President did was considered legal and the fact that the President was willing to do anything, more or less. It was almost inevitable that something like the amateurish Ellsberg and Watergate break-ins would have occurred with someone as lacking in judgment as Gordon Liddy in charge. Although the orders for Liddy’s illegal activities did not come from Nixon, both operations sought to obtain information Nixon wanted (in both instances, information to discredit his perceived enemies). Moreover, Nixon never considered anything other than an effort to cover up the illegal activities, and it was as amateurish as the illegal activities that were being hidden. In hindsight, it appears that Nixon had only one real option after the arrests at the Watergate, which was to come clean immediately and completely. Had he done so, he might have had a few weeks of ugly publicity, although probably not much worse than the kind he suffered from the ITT scandal, which was baseless. Since America was not about to elect Senator George McGovern, the American people would likely have appreciated Nixon’s candor had he exercised it. Sadly, however, neither Nixon’s character nor his politics were capable of such sorely needed public truthfulness.