Being Nixon: A Man Divided (46 page)

HALDEMAN:
Yes. As far as you can be convinced of anything. As far as I can determine, it is.

NIXON:
I’m just concerned about….I just want to be sure what the facts are.

“Well, I think that is a fact,” Haldeman responded. But then he began using fudge words. “The problem is that there are all kinds of other involvements, and if they start a fishing thing on this they’re going to start picking up tracks. That’s what appeals to me about trying to get one jump ahead of them and hopefully cut the whole thing off and sink all of it.”
²⁰

The “they” he was referring to were both the FBI, brought in by the local cops to investigate the break-in, and the Democratic National Committee, which had immediately filed a civil law suit alleging a White House and Republican plot to violate their civil liberties. Haldeman would later write and say that he was thinking of political “containment,” not breaking the law.
²¹
At the time, none of the president’s men were using terms like “obstruction of justice” or “suborning perjury” (coaching witnesses to lie) or even “cover up.” Although several of Nixon’s top men, including Ehrlichman and Mitchell, were lawyers, their command of criminal law was shaky at best. Eager to please his masters, White House counsel John Dean later claimed that he warned of criminal wrongdoing but was brushed off by Ehrlichman.
²²
Leaving the inexperienced Dean to handle the investigation was a fatal blunder; he quickly incriminated himself in a cover-up in a way that no careful criminal lawyer would ever countenance. Viewed with perfect hindsight, Dean looks like a poor choice to defend the office of the president. But at the time of the break-in and for many months thereafter, Nixon and his top aides regarded the White House counsel as a bright young man commendable for his willingness to step in and step up. In the experience of all these men,
campaign dirty tricks were a time-honored cliché of politics, the norm, on both sides. After the election, campaign shenanigans were expected to be swept under the rug, as it were, with no more than a wink and a nod.

Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Mitchell had met in Ehrlichman’s office early on the morning of June 20 to discuss what to do. Dean, sitting in on the meeting, was struck by their mutual wariness.
²³
The meeting was clearly not meant to get to the bottom of things. Ehrlichman and Mitchell disliked each other, and both men had something to hide. Ehrlichman had signed off on the Plumbers’ “covert operation” to break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. He had already told Dean to “deep six” the contents of Hunt’s safe at the White House.
²⁴
Mitchell had presided over two meetings at which Liddy outlined the appalling “Gemstone” plans to bug, blackmail, and kidnap. He may not have given a clear green light to Liddy, but he did not fire him either. Everyone—Mitchell, Haldeman, and, for that matter, possibly the president himself—knew that Magruder had been given a large budget for intelligence gathering. Liddy had done
something
with the money. Mitchell knew that the president risked exposure for what he later called “the White House horrors,” the various intrigues of Liddy and Hunt, as well as wiretapping and campaign donations of dubious legality.
²⁵

Haldeman was also at risk—at this stage, probably more of embarrassment than of going to jail. As the president’s all-controlling chief of staff, he was supposed to be on top of the projects and plans flowing from Nixon’s commands. Nixon wanted campaign intelligence and “dirty tricks”; Haldeman was expected to provide them. How much Haldeman actually knew remains uncertain, even to this day. Dean later noted that Haldeman, for all his vaunted “tickler system” to ensure compliance with presidential orders, was spread thin as well as wide.
²⁶
He could not know everything. Possibly, he did not wish to. Haldeman had instructed his aide Gordon Strachan to act as “liaison” to Jeb Magruder, the number two at CRP, handpicked by Haldeman for the job. Did Strachan report back everything
that Magruder was doing at CRP—including sending out Liddy and Hunt to break in to the DNC? Right after the break-in, Strachan cleaned out his files. Later testimony about who knew what and when was conflicting but suggests that Strachan, and hence Haldeman, did not know about the break-in before the fact.
^27
,
*
¹

Nixon’s diary shows that he was remarkably unconcerned after his first full day of dealing with Watergate. At 11:30 on the night of June 20, he closed his diary entry with the note, “I feel better today than I have really for months—relaxed yet able to do more work than even we usually do with far more enthusiasm.” Watergate at this stage was “an annoying problem,” he wrote in his memoir, “but it was still a minor one among many.”
³⁰
Dealing with the Russians, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and Henry Kissinger was far more consuming.

The next day, June 21, Haldeman came to Nixon with a plan: Liddy would take the rap. “Liddy?” asked Nixon. “Who’s he? He’s the guy with the detective agency?” Nixon asked, confusing Liddy with McCord. “No, Liddy is the general counsel for the Re-Election Finance Committee, and he is the guy who did this,” said Haldeman.

“Oooh,” the president groaned softly. Though Liddy’s job as counsel to the Re-Election Finance Committee was largely a cover, it seemed to remind Nixon that Liddy ultimately reported to John Mitchell, who was the chairman of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. This apparently prompted Nixon’s mind to wander into dangerous territory: Had Mitchell known about the break-in before the arrests?

“Mitchell?” said Haldeman, guardedly. “I’m not sure how
much—he obviously knew something. I’m not sure how much. He clearly didn’t know any details.” Nixon agreed, or wanted to.

Yet Nixon would come back to Mitchell again and again, probing warily, speculating gingerly, changing his mind back and forth. Haldeman and Ehrlichman wanted to hang the break-in on Liddy. “Apparently, he is a little bit nuts,” Haldeman told Nixon. “He sort of likes the dramatic. He’s said, ‘If you want to put me before a firing squad and shoot me, that’s fine. I’d like to be like Nathan Hale.’ ” But Nixon was worried that the investigators’ path would lead through Liddy to Mitchell. “If it involved Mitchell, then I would think that you couldn’t do it, just because it would destroy him,” said Nixon. Haldeman responded, “Well, that’s what bothers Ehrlichman. He’s not sure it doesn’t.”

NIXON:
Doesn’t involve Mitchell?

HALDEMAN:
Yes. I put it almost directly to Mitchell this morning, and he didn’t answer, so I don’t know whether it does or not.

NIXON:
Probably did, but don’t tell me about it. But you go ahead. If Liddy takes the rap on this, that’s fine.
³¹

Nixon continued to wonder about Mitchell’s involvement. But he never asked Mitchell directly. He told Haldeman that he had called Mitchell the night before—not to find out what had really happened behind the scenes but to buck up an old friend. “I gave Mitchell a call,” Nixon told Haldeman. “Cheered him up a little bit. I told him not to worry. He’s obviously quite chagrined.”
³²

Mitchell was worn out, eager to quit and get back to his New York law practice. At lunch with Nixon at the White House a few days later, his hands shook so much that he had trouble holding his soup spoon.
³³
Martha was acting up again. In a drunken rage, she had loudly declared that her husband had ordered the bugging of every Democrat in Washington and threatened to call a reporter. A doctor had to subdue her with a shot in her rear end, Haldeman reported in his diary. Mitchell was afraid his wife was suicidal and
would throw herself off a balcony at the Watergate, where, coincidentally, the Mitchells lived.
³⁴

Nixon could not bear to raise awkward issues with the depressed Mitchell. In his memoirs, the president explained:

I never personally confronted Mitchell with the direct question of whether he had been involved in or had known about the planning of the Watergate break-in. He was one of my closest friends, and he had issued a public denial. I would never challenge what he had said; I felt that if there was something he thought I should know, he would have told me. And I suppose there was something else, too, something I expressed rhetorically months later: “Suppose you call Mitchell…and Mitchell says, ‘Yes, I did it,’ ” I said to Haldeman. “Then what do we say?”
³⁵

In his post-presidential interview with David Frost, Nixon was colorfully emphatic about the high cost of Mitchell’s distraction in the months leading up to Watergate:

If it hadn’t been for Martha, there’d have been no Watergate. Because John wasn’t mindin’ that store. He was practically
out of his mind
about Martha in the spring of 1972! He was letting Magruder and all these boys, these
kids
, these
nuts
run this thing! The point of the matter is that if John had been watchin’ that store, Watergate would have never happened.
³⁶

Nixon’s explanation to Frost was self-serving. It deflected blame away from where it belonged—at Richard Nixon’s doorstep. It was Nixon who created the toxic environment in which his lieutenants felt pressure to spy on the president’s perceived enemies. And Nixon was being generous to Mitchell by excusing his malfeasance to weariness and domestic distraction. Nonetheless, Nixon was touching on a
central cause of his own downfall. The president could not bring himself to have an honest and direct conversation with his former attorney general, and tragically, Mitchell could not, or did not, see fit to bring his troubles into the Oval Office. Mitchell was one of the few men—perhaps the only man—who could proverbially tell truth to power in the administration of Richard Nixon. Had he not been depressed and increasingly withdrawn, he might have cut off Liddy and Hunt before they began buying burglars’ tools, and he might have warned Nixon to not overindulge his hunger for campaign intelligence. Nixon’s sympathy for his friend Mitchell—his sensitivity to Mitchell’s troubled marriage—was tender. But it is also true that in the summer of 1972, Nixon’s deep-seated dislike of personal confrontation served him very poorly.

J. Edgar Hoover
had died on May 2. Nixon had tried to fire Hoover six months earlier but characteristically shied away in a face-to-face meeting. With Hoover finally gone, Nixon set about finding his own man to take over as FBI director. “I want one that’s our boy,” he instructed.
³⁷
He settled—on an “acting” basis—on a Justice Department official and former navy submarine commander named L. Patrick Gray III. Gray was a hard-line Nixon loyalist, but he was regarded by the hidebound FBI as an interloper.
³⁸

On the morning of June 23, Haldeman reported to Nixon that “we’re back to the problem area” on the Watergate investigation. “The FBI is not under control, because Gray doesn’t exactly know how to control them, and…their investigation is now leading in some productive areas.” The Bureau had been able to trace the hundred-dollar bills found on the burglars. The money trail would lead straight to some Nixon campaign donors who did not wish to be identified because some of them were Democrats hedging their bets. The donors were being sucked into the case because Liddy, in his double role as counsel to the Republican Finance Committee, had carelessly used the cash from their donations to finance the burglary.
Nixon’s advisers came up with the idea of enlisting the CIA to head off the FBI’s investigation into the account of one of the burglars, Bernard Barker.

Haldeman made their recommendation to the president: “The only way to solve this is for us to have [CIA Deputy Director Vernon] Walters call Pat Gray and just say, ‘Stay the hell out of this…we don’t want you to go any further on it.’ ” After some back and forth, Nixon approved. “All right, fine,” he said.
³⁹

The recording of this exchange in the Oval Office was to become known as “the smoking gun tape.” When it was finally turned over to prosecutors during the feverish impeachment summer of 1974, it was immediately seized on as proof that the president had obstructed justice by trying to use the CIA to cut off the FBI investigation. Nixon was forced to resign shortly thereafter.

In fact, like so much in Watergate, the “smoking gun” is subject to different interpretations. Some Watergate scholars now argue, as John Dean later wrote in his 2014 book,
The Nixon Defense
, that “the smoking gun was only firing blanks.”
⁴⁰
It is clear from the context surrounding the conversation that Haldeman, supposedly at the instigation of Mitchell and Dean, was trying to head off some awkward questions for some fat cat contributors who wanted to stay in the shadows. There was no crime involved in these donations; they were perfectly legal. (One of the donors was Dwayne Andreas, a close friend and financial backer of Hubert Humphrey; others were Texas oilmen who had supported LBJ.) It is at least possible that Haldeman and the others were not trying to shut down the entire Watergate investigation (with FBI agents in the field it was already too late for that) but trying only to protect the identity of the donors. Nonetheless, as was often the case, Nixon’s language became hyperbolic and suggests that whatever others may have intended, Nixon meant to shut down the whole investigation. As he delved into old conspiracies, the president fixed on CIA operative E. Howard Hunt. Talking to Haldeman on the morning of June 23, Nixon seized on one of his
pet theories—that the CIA had covered up for some shady activity, including plots to kill Castro, after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba during the early days of the Kennedy administration. An implicit threat to expose these secrets might work to pressure CIA Director Richard Helms into going along with the White House request to turn off the FBI as it followed the money trail. The key was Hunt. Nixon grabbed on to the fact that Hunt had been deeply involved with the Bay of Pigs; indeed, some of the Cubans hired by the Plumbers had worked for Hunt on the failed CIA-backed invasion.