The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (2 page)

I found the most efficient, if not most reliable, process was to have someone else prepare a first draft, because it takes far longer to prepare the initial one than to correct someone else’s. Accordingly, in 2010 I hired graduate students and created an evolving team to prepare them. Cherity Bacon, a former legal secretary working on her graduate degree in archival science, worked relentlessly and became the de facto team leader. It required almost four years to transcribe all the Watergate-related conversations, and the project continued when I started writing. And while writing this story, when the material was important I would listen to the conversation myself, for I am often able to hear words and phrases others do not because of my familiarity with the players and the subject matter.

There was far more Watergate material than I expected, for in addition to the Nixon tapes, I pulled over 150,000 pages of related documents from NARA. But had I known what I was getting into with the tapes, I might never have taken on the assignment of transcribing them all. Yet there was no other way to do the project and be sure I knew everything that could be known, so once I committed to it, there was no turning back. Actually, I am not sure which has been more challenging—transcribing about a thousand Watergate conversations or digesting and condensing the four million transcribed words into this story. Suffice it to say, neither could be done quickly.

The conversations fall into four general categories, which give form to this story. While not every conversation is quoted, they were all reviewed to write the following: Part I, Covering Up, is based on 35 conversations that occurred between June 20 and July 1, 1972; Part II, Containing, on 158 conversations held from July 2, 1972, through December 1972; Part III, Unraveling, on 110 conversations from January 1973 to March 23, 1973; and Part IV, The Nixon Defense, on 669 conversations from March 23, 1973, to July 16, 1973, when the recording system was dismantled. To give a full picture, other information relevant to the break-in is reported in the Prologue. The Epilogue summarizes events after the recording system was disconnected, on July 16, 1973, when Watergate became Nixon’s fight to prevent the disclosure of his tapes, among other battles. In telling this story,
which has much new information with which I certainly was never familiar, as a general rule I have not tried to highlight it as such; rather, I have allowed the story to unfold as it happened, only occasionally noting extraordinary new material.

These recordings also largely answer the questions regarding what was known by the White House about the reasons for the break-in and bugging at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, as well as what was erased during the infamous 18½-minute gap during the June 20, 1972, conversation and why. Because these questions have had enduring public interest, they are addressed in Appendices A and B. (Appendix C is a listing of Nixon’s Watergate-related recorded conversations, as well as other data. See www.penguin.com/thenixondefense.)

Finally, in assembling this story I have not, except in a few instances, recounted my own involvement in these events, as I already have, first in testimony (in 1973 and 1974) and later in my autobiographical account,
Blind Ambition: The White House Years
, which was published in 1976. However, when listening to these secretly recorded conversations, or in reading the transcripts, I have recalled countless facts and actions I had forgotten, for the recordings provide information that was not previously available to me. Accordingly, I have, from time to time, flushed out some autobiographical details, usually in endnotes or footnotes, but occasionally in the narrative as well. Other than a meeting on September 15, 1972, I had no Watergate conversations with the president until eight months after the scandal commenced. It was not until late February 1973 that the president started calling on me to discuss it. Alex Butterfield, who knew the workings of the Nixon White House intimately, accurately described where I fit in the pecking order early on to the House Judiciary Committee during its impeachment inquiry, which may add some perspective to the material that follows.

Now, Mr. Dean . . . was the counsel to the president, but I must say the president never did know this. The President may have heard his name, the President may possibly have seen him in one or two meetings prior to the summer or fall of 1972, but I would rather doubt it. Dean was young, he was very bright. I speak of him as though he were no longer with us, but he is. He is young, he is bright, affable, highly intelligent, gets along well with everyone, and was very effective. But he just could not, through no fault of his own, penetrate the system. He could not get close
to the President. I don’t think he tried. . . . And the President never stopped looking to John Ehrlichman as his counsel on legal matters, or on matters which bordered on or which involved legal matters or had some legal aspect. He called on John Ehrlichman. . . . John Dean . . . was put into a somewhat untenable situation at times, because he did have two masters; he was responding to both Haldeman and Ehrlichman.
³

While this is my account of what I found in Nixon’s recorded conversations, I have tried to stay out of the way and let that information speak for itself. These recordings certainly answer Senator Howard Baker’s question about what the president knew and when he knew it. Behind the closed doors of the president’s office we also learn most of the details of what happened, when it happened and how it happened, not to mention how I became the centerpiece of the Nixon defense. Fortunately for everyone, his defense
failed.

(Positions at time of the story)

A
lthough President Richard Nixon was enjoying the best days of his presidency, he was looking forward to a few days of rest from his busy schedule as he departed from the South Grounds of the White House for the Bahamas on an early Friday afternoon, June 16, 1972.
¹
The president had reason to feel good about his accomplishments, both foreign and domestic, not to mention his prospects for reelection, since it had become increasingly clear that his opponent would likely be South Dakota senator George McGovern; he had all but locked down the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. McGovern was Nixon’s challenger of choice, given the senator’s hard-left positions on many issues, and the president did not want the Vietnam war any more than McGovern did, but Nixon wanted to resolve it with honor rather than merely quit, which the president felt would have long-term negative consequences for the nation.
²

When Air Force One landed at Grand Bahama Island the president was met by his close friend Charles G. “Bebe” Rebozo, owner and president of the Key Biscayne Bank and Trust Company, and together they climbed into the president’s awaiting helicopter for a brief flight over to the smaller Grand Cay Island. There they would stay with their mutual friend Robert “Bob” Abplanalp, founder of Precision Valve Corporation (inventor of the aerosol valve), who owned the 125-acre island and had refurbished a separate house just for the president’s use. It would be a relaxing stag weekend of walking, swimming, boating (Abplanalp’s fifty-five-foot yacht was docked there), good food and a few movies, courtesy of the motion picture industry. Other than the usual retinue of Secret Service agents and a White House physician, who always accompanied the traveling president, the only other aides on the trip were White House chief of staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, accompanied
by his wife and daughter, and the president’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler. The White House staff would take up residence for the extended weekend over on the mainland, at the Key Biscayne Hotel near the president’s Florida vacation home where both Rebozo and Abplanalp also had homes.

The White House Communications Agency (a special unit of the Army Signal Corps) had set up a secure telephone line from the president’s study in the Abplanalp house to the living room of his chief of staff’s villa at the Key Biscayne Hotel, but there had been no communication until the president called upon his return to his Key Biscayne home on Sunday morning, June 18, 1972, and even then they did not discuss the breaking news of the weekend. Haldeman called the story “the big flap” in his contemporaneous diary, a record that would not be published until some two decades later.
³
His diary entry for that Sunday evening noted that he had spoken briefly with the president that morning, but not about the news reported to him “last night [Saturday, June 17, 1972], then followed up with further information today, that a group of five people have been caught breaking into the Democratic headquarters (at the Watergate). Actually to plant bugs and photograph materials.”
⁴
Haldeman learned the details about what had transpired at the upscale Watergate hotel, office and apartment complex from John Ehrlichman, his longtime friend (Ehrlichman had been a classmate of Haldeman’s at UCLA, and both were veterans of two Nixon campaigns) and professional peer on the White House staff, where he served as assistant to the president for domestic affairs. Haldeman also spoke with Jeb Magruder, a former member of his staff at the White House, whom he had sent over to serve as the deputy director of the Committee to Re-elect the President (also known as “CRP,” “reelection committee” or, because the offices were located across the street from the White House at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, “1701”).

Ehrlichman, who had remained in Washington, had himself learned on Saturday evening, June 17, 1972, of the arrests of the five men shortly after midnight that day by the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police at the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the Watergate complex, first from Lilburn E. “Pat” Boggs, an assistant director of the U.S. Secret Service. Boggs reported that the men had electronic surveillance and photographic equipment in their possession. He also said that the FBI had found White House consultant E. Howard Hunt’s name with a White House telephone number in an address book, as well as a check drawn on Hunt’s bank account, on one of the burglars.
⁵
Ehrlichman asked Boggs if anybody from
the White House was involved, and Boggs responded that, as far as he knew, the only connection to the White House was the material relating to Hunt.
⁶

Boggs also informed him that one of the men arrested was James McCord, the chief of security at the reelection committee and the Republican National Committee. Boggs had earlier shared this information with Ehrlichman’s former White House aide John “Jack” Caulfield, a retired New York Police Department detective, who had undertaken countless clandestine investigations for Ehrlichman, including several wiretappings, while working at the Nixon White House.
⁷
(Caulfield had wanted to be in charge of the 1972 campaign’s political intelligence operation, but he was passed over for the job.
⁸
) It was Caulfield who suggested that Boggs call Ehrlichman to report this “fucking disaster.”
⁹
Caulfield himself later called Ehrlichman to assure him, as he did others, that the Watergate matter was not his operation, although he had, in fact, recruited McCord for his position as head of security not only for the CRP but also for the Republican National Committee. He was also planning on going into business with McCord after the election.
¹⁰
Notwithstanding later statements to the contrary by McCord, Caulfield claimed he had no knowledge of McCord’s involvement in the bungled break-in.

While Ehrlichman was doubtless relieved that Caulfield was not implicated, and that to Caulfield’s knowledge no one in the White House had any relationship with McCord, Howard Hunt was another story. Hunt’s involvement raised serious potential problems for the White House and Ehrlichman. Both Ehrlichman and Haldeman had been directly involved in Hunt’s coming to the White House, at the urging of Charles W. “Chuck” Colson, the latter’s friend and fellow Brown alumni. Colson, a special counsel to the president (a title that enabled lawyers to keep their law licenses active when not practicing at the White House), was actually the president’s special political handyman; he worked at building good relationships with friends while trying to destroy the president’s perceived political enemies. It was Ehrlichman who had assigned Hunt to the Special Investigations Unit, which was created in July 1971 to investigate sensitive information leaks in general and that of the so-called Pentagon Papers (a top secret study of the origins of the Vietnam War prepared for the Johnson administration) in particular. Leaks had long plagued the Nixon presidency, and the disclosure of the Pentagon Papers in June 1971 had pushed the president to take action. When the FBI failed to investigate the matter aggressively, the president
created his own clandestine unit within the White House, which later became known as “the plumbers.”
¹¹
Ehrlichman had once called the deputy director of the CIA to request that the agency “assist” Hunt (who wanted false identification and disguises as part of his work for Colson and the plumbers), notwithstanding the fact that such domestic activity was a violation of the CIA’s charter.

But Ehrlichman had a far more troubling potential problem involving Hunt: Ehrlichman had approved—for reasons of “national security,” he later claimed—a botched and illegal operation undertaken by Hunt with another White House plumber, G. Gordon Liddy, to obtain information from a psychiatrist (who had turned down the FBI’s inquiries) who had treated the man who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg. This supposedly covert operation, which took place on September 3, 1971, had been a debacle, a conspicuously overt and unusually sloppy break-in at the offices of Dr. Lewis Fielding in Beverly Hills, California, that had produced nothing while putting the White House at considerable risk. After this fiasco Ehrlichman closed down the plumbers’ covert operations and quietly found propitious ways to move both Hunt and Liddy out of the White House.
¹²

After his conversations with Pat Boggs and Jack Caulfield, Ehrlichman called Chuck Colson, because he considered Hunt to be Colson’s man. Or, more specifically, as he later explained, Hunt was a fellow who would do dirty deeds for Colson, and since Colson did dirty deeds for the president, Ehrlichman could not rule out the possibility of Nixon’s involvement.
¹³
But Colson protested innocence regarding Hunt and the Watergate break-in, claiming that Hunt had departed the White House in April, although he could not explain why Hunt still had a White House telephone number and an office in the Executive Office Building (EOB), which was part of the White House complex.

Later on that Saturday evening of June 17, Ehrlichman telephoned Haldeman in Florida to share the facts he had gathered. But Haldeman was out, so he gave Ron Ziegler a bare-bones report so the president’s press secretary would be prepared to handle any news media inquiries.
*
¹⁴

Alex Butterfield, a deputy assistant to the president and Haldeman aide
who handled administrative and management matters, such as liaising with the Secret Service, also learned of the arrests on Saturday, June 17, 1972. He was first notified by Secret Service Agent Al Wong, who was in charge of the service’s Technical Security Division, which comprised the electronics experts who made certain no one was bugging the White House or wiretapping its telephone system, and who installed and maintained Nixon’s secret recording system. As it happened, it was Al Wong who had recommended James McCord to Jack Caulfield as someone who could provide security for the CRP and the Republican National Committee, because McCord had held a job similar to Wong’s at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, before his recent retirement. Wong, understandably, was troubled that McCord had been arrested in the DNC and was now in jail.

As the day progressed, Butterfield learned more. Late Saturday afternoon the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia obtained a subpoena to search the Watergate Hotel rooms occupied by the burglary team, and it was there they found the address book with Hunt’s name and White House telephone number, as well as a sealed envelope addressed to the Lakewood Country Club, Rockville, Maryland, with a $6.36 check drawn by Hunt (to pay far less costly his out-of-state dues; because he lived in-state he had given one of the burglars the check to mail from Miami). The FBI’s Washington Field Office (WFO) quickly found Hunt’s name in their indices, signaling that they had recently completed a background check on him for a staff position at the White House. This prompted the FBI WFO supervisor to contact Butterfield at 7:11
P.M.
, according to the FBI’s records, to advise him of Hunt’s possible connection to one of the men arrested at the DNC. Butterfield, who was home by this hour, knew that Hunt had been a consultant but thought he no longer worked at the White House.
¹⁵

On Sunday morning, June 18, 1972,
The
Washington Post
front-page headline reported
5
H
ELD IN
P
LOT TO
B
UG
D
EMOCR
ATS’
O
FFICE
H
ERE
. The
Post
story had the names of the men arrested and said that they had all been wearing rubber surgical gloves and were carrying lock-picking equipment, a walkie-talkie, forty rolls of unexposed film, two 35 millimeter cameras and twenty-three hundred dollars in cash, most in sequentially numbered one-hundred-dollar bills. The story further reported that four of
the men arrested had rented rooms 214 and 314 at the Watergate Hotel around noon on Friday using fictitious names. They had all dined on lobster at the Watergate Restaurant on Friday night, and after the U.S. Attorney’s Office obtained search warrants, the FBI “found another $4,200 in $100 bills of the same serial number sequence as the money taken from the suspects, [and] more burglary tools and electronic bugging equipment stashed in six suitcases.”
¹⁶
At the end of the account, inside the
Post
on page 23, another headline read I
NTRUDERS
F
OILED BY
S
ECU
RITY
G
UARD
. This second story reported that Frank Wills, a security guard, noticed two doors had been taped so the latches would not lock. He removed the tape. When he rechecked ten minutes later, new tape had been placed on the doors, so he went to the lobby and telephoned the police, who arrived fifteen minutes later.
¹⁷

Ehrlichman read the
Post
’s accounts, and after church, he called Haldeman.
¹⁸
According to Haldeman’s diary, “Ehrlichman was very concerned about the whole thing.” At Ehrlichman’s suggestion, Haldeman spoke with Magruder, who was in California for a CRP event with its director, former attorney general John Mitchell, and other CRP officials, including First Lady Pat Nixon. Haldeman learned from Magruder that an Associated Press (AP) reporter had told the CRP’s press man that McCord had been identified as their chief of security, so a public statement was being prepared by Mitchell. Magruder said it “was not a good one,” although it would distance the CRP from McCord and condemn such illegal behavior as having “no place” in a campaign. Jeb said the “real problem” was the fact that the break-in and bugging operation was the work of the CRP’s finance committee general counsel, G. Gordon Liddy (a former White House plumber), and they were worried that it was “traceable to Liddy.” Liddy claimed it was not, but “Magruder is not too confident,” Haldeman noted. Magruder said their plan was for former assistant attorney general Robert Mardian, a Mitchell campaign assistant with them in California, to return to Washington to keep an eye on Liddy.
¹⁹
Haldeman, not a Mardian fan, instructed Magruder to get back to Washington immediately to deal with the problem.
²⁰