One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (39 page)

“How long did you keep Mr. McCord on the payroll after the Watergate bugging?”

“About one minute,” Odle answered.

The next thing he remembered was G. Gordon Liddy standing in the hallway at CREEP and asking where the paper shredder was. “I saw him with a pile of papers, perhaps a foot high,” Odle told Sen. Howard Baker. The stack went into the shredder.

Despite the gravity of the moment, Odle brought levity to the proceedings. “We tried from the beginning to save documents,” he testified, to show that CREEP was a “well-run, fairly thrifty campaign.” Senators, staff, and some reporters started to giggle. “That seems funny now, I know,” Odle said. “We wanted to save the documents because we thought it might be interesting for a scholar to go back in 100 years and…” At this point, the transcript shows, the hearings dissolved into laughter. Senator Baker complimented Odle by noting that when the committee broke for lunch, the television network covering the hearing had returned to its regular program, the popular game show
To Tell the Truth
.

After hearing detailed testimony from the police officers who had arrested James McCord and his Cuban American cohorts inside the Democratic National Committee, Ervin recessed the proceedings at 5:15 p.m. The next major witness on the following day, Friday, May 18, would be McCord himself.

*   *   *

Shortly before McCord arrived at the witness table, President Nixon convened a Cabinet meeting at the White House. Among those present was the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, George H. W. Bush.

After hearing reports on how the rest of the government was faring, Nixon turned to the continued American bombing in Cambodia, the upcoming summit visit of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in June, and Watergate’s effect on the American body politic.

“The problem in Southeast Asia is blown out of proportion because of Cambodia,” Nixon told his Cabinet. “The purpose of bombing is not to get into a war in Cambodia, but to enforce the peace in Vietnam.” There was no peace. At that moment, Kissinger was opening six days of talks in Paris with President Thieu of South Vietnam and his adversary Le Duc Tho of the Hanoi Politburo, trying to salvage the failed cease-fire. The negotiations were fruitless; even Kissinger called them a charade. The war went on.

The June summit with the Soviets would be “a watershed in world history,” Nixon predicted. “Either we move forward on a constructive basis as we began last year, or we stop. If it is the latter, the world will be a dangerous place.… A lot is riding on the visit.” Kissinger had spent May 4–9 with Brezhnev, trying to work out an agenda for the summit. But he found the Soviet leader agreeable to little beyond a grand pronouncement against nuclear war.

As for Watergate, “It is rough and will get rougher,” Nixon said. “The crap will fly, but don’t think we have to deny every charge.”

“Be proud,” Nixon urged them. “Just say you don’t believe the President is involved.”

*   *   *

James McCord, not yet fifty, had spent five years at the FBI and nineteen years as a security officer specializing in surveillance and counter-surveillance at the CIA. A trusted friend in law enforcement, Jack Caulfield, John Ehrlichman’s gumshoe, had recruited him as CREEP’s security director.

In his explosive letter to Judge Sirica, McCord had said, “There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent” at the Watergate burglars’ trial. McCord had not pleaded guilty or taken hush money. So what was that pressure? Watergate counsel Sam Dash asked.

McCord described three clandestine meetings with Caulfield held during the burglars’ trial, while he was free on bond, in January 1973. The two men talked twice at a parking area overlooking the Potomac River, and once during a two-hour car ride through the Virginia countryside. McCord said Caulfield told him he was delivering messages from “the very highest levels of the White House”: Plead guilty. Stay silent. You’ll go to jail for a year or less. There would be executive clemency to cut his sentence short, financial support for his family while he was behind bars, and a good job when he went free. McCord testified that Caulfield said that “the President’s ability to govern is at stake”; the government might fall if the cover-up failed.

McCord had told Caulfield that he knew the president had his problems, but “I had a problem with the massive injustice of the whole trial being a sham, and that I would fight it every way I know how.” In response to questions from Sam Ervin, McCord said that promises of executive clemency and clandestine caretaking also came from his codefendant Howard Hunt and Hunt’s lawyer; as the evidence would show, these assurances had been extracted from Hunt’s comrade and Nixon’s counselor Chuck Colson.

On Tuesday, May 22, Caulfield followed McCord to the witness table, taking his oath to tell the truth. He confirmed every aspect of McCord’s testimony about their secret meetings, and then he added startling details. In early January 1973, at the start of the Watergate burglars’ trial, Caulfield, the acting assistant director for enforcement at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, was attending a drug conference in San Clemente when he received a telephone call in his hotel room from John Dean.

Dean asked him to leave the hotel and call him back from a public telephone. He told Caulfield that “he had a very important message which he wanted me to deliver to James McCord.” The message was: “1) A year is a long time; 2) Your wife and family will be taken care of; 3) You will be rehabilitated with employment when this is all over.” Point one was an implicit promise of executive clemency; the minimum sentence that “Maximum John” could impose under federal law would be at least one year. Points two and three were explicit offers of cash in exchange for silence.

“I immediately realized that I was being asked to do a very dangerous thing,” Caulfield testified. “I said to Mr. Dean that I did not think it was wise to send me on such a mission since Mr. McCord knew, as many others did, that I had worked closely with Mr. Dean and Mr. Ehrlichman at the White House.”

Despite his misgivings, he met again and again with McCord. “I specifically renewed the offer of executive clemency,” he testified. McCord said no. Dean instructed Caulfield before their third meeting to “impress upon him as fully as you can that this offer of executive clemency is a sincere offer which comes from the very highest levels of the White House.”

Chief counsel Sam Dash had questions on this point: “You do know, do you not, that the President is the only person in this country who can grant executive clemency in a federal criminal matter?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Did you understand when you were speaking with Mr. Dean that Mr. Dean wanted you to transmit the message to Mr. McCord that the offer of executive clemency was made with the proper authority?”

“Yes, sir.”

Millions of Americans were now glued to their television sets.

*   *   *

At about 4:00 p.m. on May 22, as Caulfield testified, the White House started handing out a four-thousand-word white paper, President Nixon’s longest and most detailed statement about Watergate to date. Nixon had painstakingly rewritten every word of the draft and issued it in the first person—and almost every word of the preamble was false.

I can and do state categorically:

1. I had no prior knowledge of the Watergate operation.

2. I took no part in, nor was I aware of, any subsequent efforts that may have been made to cover up Watergate.

3. At no time did I authorize any offer of executive clemency for the Watergate defendants, nor did I know of any such offer.

4. I did not know, until the time of my own investigation, of any effort to provide the Watergate defendants with funds.

5. At no time did I attempt, or did I authorize others to attempt, to implicate the CIA in the Watergate matter.

6. It was not until the time of my own investigation that I learned of the break-in at the office of Mr. Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, and I specifically authorized the furnishing of this information to Judge Byrne.

7. I neither authorized nor encouraged subordinates to engage in illegal or improper campaign tactics.

Point one was true. Points two through seven were lies.

Point two: Nixon began trying to cover up Watergate six days after the break-in. He lied to White House aides, high officials of the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, Congress, and federal prosecutors. Four times, on tape, he suborned perjury by CREEP’s second-in-command, Jeb Magruder. He withheld evidence by reflex.

Point three: Nixon twice authorized Colson to promise clemency to Howard Hunt and, as sworn testimony that very day suggested, promised clemency through John Dean to James McCord, the first man to blow the whistle on the Watergate cover-up.

Point four: Nixon, on tape, discussed hush money for Watergate defendants with Dean, Haldeman, Tom Pappas, and Rose Mary Woods.

Point five: Nixon tried to find a way to use the CIA connections of six of the seven Watergate burglars to pin blame for the break-in on the Agency. He authorized Haldeman and Ehrlichman to pressure the CIA into obstructing the FBI’s investigation.

Point six: Dean told Nixon, on tape, about the Plumbers’ burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Nixon did not look into the facts. Arguably it was a felony for Nixon to conceal his knowledge of the crime.

Point seven: Nixon, using Chuck Colson as his point man, spied on the campaigns and campaign contributors of his 1972 opponents, including George McGovern and Ed Muskie. He misused the IRS and the Secret Service in acts of political espionage.

The white paper could have been a chance for absolution. Nixon admitted that he’d authorized the White House wiretaps—but he omitted the fact that the taps never identified a leak. He promised that “executive privilege will not be invoked as to any testimony” at the Watergate hearings—but he reserved the privilege to withhold documents. He admitted the existence of the Huston Plan—but he never said, “I approved it.” In that passage, he had edited out the first person singular.

The first draft had said: “‘I ordered that they use any means necessary, including illegal means,’” Nixon told Haig. “The President of the United States can
never
admit that.”

The cover-up of the cover-up was the penultimate act in his downfall, an approaching darkness at the end of the tunnel. The white paper would become a template for the first article of the impeachment of the president.

*   *   *

Yet the flickering genius of Richard Nixon flared two days later, when he gave a fiery speech to the American prisoners of war returned from Vietnam.

Nixon always spoke triumphantly of ending the war. Soldiers with boots on the ground knew better. “There’s going to be a full-blown war starting up after we leave,” said Col. Einar Himma, one of the last American combat officers to take off from the Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon. “The fighting has never stopped anyway.”

After years of secret negotiating to end the war, and the gradual replacement of American divisions by Saigon’s forces under Vietnamization, what Nixon had accomplished in the end was a straight swap: the complete withdrawal of American combat forces in exchange for the release of 591 American prisoners of war. And on May 24, 1973, he invited every one of those POWs and their wives for a briefing and a reception at the State Department and supper on the White House Lawn. With 1,300 guests, it was said to be the biggest formal dinner ever held at the Executive Mansion.

When delivering his speech for the POWs, with members of the press present, Nixon was steely as a drill sergeant. “There was no plan to end the war” when he first came to office, he said. “Many of you were already prisoners of war. You had no hope.”

Nixon said he had won their release through his strength—and through his secrecy. “I want to be quite blunt,” he said. “Had we not had secrecy, had we not had secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese … you men would still be in Hanoi rather than Washington today. And let me say, I think it is time in this country to quit making national heroes out of those who steal secrets and publish them in the newspapers.”

“I am going to meet my responsibility to protect the national security of the United States of America insofar as our secrets are concerned … so we can continue these enormously important initiatives for peace” with the Soviets and the Chinese, Nixon said. “The strength to be the peacemaker in the world—it is all right here. It is in America. It is in that Oval Office.…”

“Those first four years in that office were not easy ones for me,” he said. “But looking toward the balance of the second four years, let me say I feel better, because out in this room, I think I have got some allies, and I will appreciate your help.”

That day marked the last time that Nixon talked at length about the war during his presidency. It was striking that he spoke to such an extent about the secrecy and the solitude of his office to hundreds of men who had suffered in silence and isolation for so long.

*   *   *

After midnight, in the wee hours of May 25, Nixon unburdened himself to Haig on the telephone. He sounded exhausted, drunk, or both. The steel was gone. He talked bluntly about resigning: “Wouldn’t it be better for the country, you know, to just check out?” Haig laughed. “No, no, seriously,” Nixon said. “You see, I’m not at my best. I’ve got to be at my best, and that means fighting this damn battle, fighting it all-out. And I can’t fight the damn battle,” not with bad news hammering him hour after hour. “The goddamn thing has gotten to me.… And you get to the point that, well, if you can’t do the goddamn job you better put somebody in there that can.”

But no one could at that moment—and no one saw that fact more clearly than Nixon.

He knew (as very few did) that Vice President Agnew might soon face a federal indictment.
*
Next in the legal line of succession were two Democrats: the Speaker of the House, Carl Albert of Oklahoma, an alcoholic who spent two months in rehab later that year; and the president pro tempore of the Senate, James Eastland of Mississippi, a doddering plantation master and notorious racist. Neither was fit to serve. Fifth in line was the secretary of state. Nixon was about to nominate Kissinger—born in Germany and thus disqualified under the Constitution.