The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (21 page)

“Well, Maury, because of Sloan, they’ve not called Maury?” Nixon asked. Ehrlichman reported, sounding pleased with his actions, “No, they’re not. We’ve made sure they aren’t. Ah, they did, and we stopped it. I woodshedded Kleindienst.” “On what basis?” the president asked. “That it’s very embarrassing to you,” Ehrlichman explained. “That this guy’s not just some bohunk off the street, he’s a former cabinet officer. And he’d be subject to all kinds of notoriety. He hasn’t any way of protecting himself against the inferences. And that it just, it would raise hell with the campaign.”

“True,” the president said. “And he just couldn’t hack it,” Ehrlichman added. Nixon said, “Well, certainly, I hope that he’ll have the same view with regard to Mitchell.” Ehrlichman agreed, and reported, “And in fairness to Kleindienst, this took place while he was out of town, by one of his guys, who exercised some bad judgment and called him up and subpoenaed Maury. So we’re on top of that, and Maury is not going to be required to give a statement [to the grand jury, only to the Justice Department].”

“What’s Maury going to say?” the president asked. Ehrlichman was not concerned: “He’ll handle himself very well, I’m sure. At the same time, he is quite long in the mouth about the whole chilling effect this has on his ability to raise money.” The president said he understood, and Ehrlichman added, “I just saw him. He was down in the mess. He’s very happy because he doesn’t have to go see the grand jury.”

Ehrlichman then gave the president his view of the larger picture: “The best guess now is that nobody’s going to get indicted except the burglars and Liddy and Hunt.”

“And then Hunt fights like hell,” the president added. Ehrlichman said, “Well, they all plead not guilty, and there are no trials until after the election.” Haldeman was surprised, asking, “But are the burglars all going to plead not guilty?” Ehrlichman assured them, “The burglars are all going to plead not guilty,” which at the time was correct information. “What basis?”
the president asked, since they had all been arrested inside the DNC with bugging equipment and cameras. “I can’t imagine. I cannot imagine, but that’s what they’re going to do,” Ehrlichman said, with a chuckle. “Make ’em prove it,” Haldeman observed.

On Monday, during a late morning to early afternoon meeting in the Oval, Ehrlichman shared his view that American blacks should “all be stuck in boxcars [and] sent around to one in each town, distributed around” to work as domestics, as the way to enter society, rather than congregating in cities.
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Following his astonishing diatribe, he rhetorically asked the president, “You noticed that the Ellsberg case went over?”
*
Nixon asked, “That’s what we wanted?” “Yep,” Ehrlichman assured him, and the president asked, “Is this going to come up before the election?”

“It won’t come up before the election. Everybody’s planning out the victory for Ellsberg, and I just don’t give a damn. That’s fine. If they’d like to have this victory for Ellsberg, that’s fine. The point is that the payoff is for us.” When the president was not sure why this was good, Ehrlichman explained: “I talked to the chief justice, and he was kind of intrigued with the political aspects of it. He said, the natural inclination of the Court was not to be back for the summer anyway. You know, they don’t want to break up their vacation.” Ehrlichman added, “We can tolerate a little jubilation on Ellsberg’s side for a while, I think—”

“Sure,” the president said. Ehrlichman added, “Just ride along, and then after the election, I’d like a crack at Sheehan. Indict the hell out of him.” Neil Sheehan was the reporter from the
New York Times
to whom Ellsberg had leaked the Pentagon Papers. “How about Jack Anderson?” the president asked, since he had no objection to prosecuting journalists and particularly despised Anderson. “Jack Anderson on the other case,” Ehrlichman agreed, referring to their discovery that a Navy yeoman assigned by the Pentagon as a courier for the National Security Council had been spying for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, they believed, had also been leaking to Anderson.

“I don’t feel [we can resist],” the president said, and reported that he had spoken with Henry Kissinger about the Sheehan situation. As for Anderson, the president added, “[With that guy, I’m never] giving in. I don’t certainly intend to allow that son of a bitch to get away with that. I see no reason why we don’t get at him. Let the Joint Chiefs take the heat.”
*

Ehrlichman reported the Larry O’Brien tax audit was proceeding, and the president shared with Ehrlichman the news that former Lyndon Johnson Senate crony Bobby Baker had called Rose Woods, saying that he wanted to talk with her or Bebe, that he had the goods on the Democrats and wanted to share what he knew. The president said, “I instructed Bebe to call him back. Bobby Baker got on the phone with Bebe, and he said, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘This McGovern, I hate the son of a bitch.’ He said, ‘He’s a pure disaster for the country.’ And he said, ‘I’ll do anything to help.’ He said, ‘Now, I’ve got some information that involves Muskie. And I’ve got some also that involves O’Brien.’”

“This is good,” Ehrlichman said.

The president explained that Bebe, using good judgment, told Baker he was going back to Florida but would be happy to meet with him: “So I told Bebe to follow through at the earliest, with the idea of getting information on both Muskie and O’Brien.” Nixon said he wanted information on any senator except George Smathers. (Why Smathers was not of interest was not explained.) Nixon said that Bobby Baker was so close to Lyndon Johnson that “he never went to the can without talking to him.” The president believed that Baker was Johnson’s bagman, noting Baker “was about ten times the bagman than that poor fellow we had, Dave Johnson.” Ehrlichman laughed, and Nixon added that while Dave was able, he was just not in Baker’s league. The president said that if Baker had good information on Muskie, they should use it to “tear him to pieces.”

Both the White House staff and the president were increasingly focusing on the fast-approaching Republican National Convention, which would formally convene in Miami from August 21 to August 23. They planned on (and
succeeded in) taking the national political gathering to a new level of orchestrated media events. The convention would be a made-for-television extravaganza, planned to the smallest detail. Accordingly, the president wanted to focus on writing his acceptance speech, which would be delivered in prime time on August 23, and was spending as much time as possible at Camp David to draft it.

On Saturday, August 12, during a lengthy Camp David meeting with Ehrlichman and Haldeman at Laurel Lodge, where no recording equipment was installed, there was a review of Watergate—a topic that kept interrupting Nixon’s work, as he explained in his memoirs.
¹⁷
Haldeman reported on this meeting in his diary, noting that the president reminded them both that they should “understand that the O’Brien follow-up and the attack on high-level Democrats [was] much more important than the [GOP Convention’s] platform,” and that Nixon wanted “the Watergate thing” further discussed, because he liked Ehrlichman’s plan. “The thought there was that we would have MacGregor come out and give the full background story right at the time of the P[resident]’s meeting with [Japanese prime minister] Tanaka, so as to be overridden, and hope that settles our side of it prior to the issuing of indictments in mid-September.”
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Haldeman, Mitchell and Clark MacGregor got into “the Watergate thing” with the president in the Oval Office during a morning conversation.
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MacGregor explained that Stans was preparing a report about the twenty-five-thousand-dollar Dahlberg-Andreas check that ended up in Barker’s bank account. The president asked which lawyers were assisting the reelection committee, and Mitchell said they had hired Roger Robb’s onetime law partner, Ken Parkinson, and his firm, along with Paul O’Brien and his firm, and noted that Paul O’Brien was doing more of the investigating. Mitchell added, “I think they’ve done outstanding in a very difficult situation.” But neither Mitchell nor MacGregor told the president that they had conducted an investigation, as he soon claimed; rather, he would tell them they had done so.

This information, however, prompted an extended Nixon monologue suggesting, which was tantamount to directing, Mitchell and MacGregor on how they should handle Watergate: “The important thing to consider is, the real decision you have to face up to is, whether or not to wait until the grand jury indicts or whether you prepare the stage for it. The weakness that I see
in the present situation, of course, it’s a bad situation, we know, very embarrassing, and so forth and so on. The weakness I see at the present time is that we have people on the outside who will say, ‘Well, they’re going to need special investigators’ and ‘Oh, let’s have a special prosecutor,’ and all that sort of thing.” Nixon interrupted his analysis to ponder whether anyone had called for a special prosecutor during the Bobby Baker scandal. MacGregor thought there had been but did not have hard information.
*

The president said, “The main point that I want to make is this: I think that the case that has got to be made that the reelection committee [acted] with the total cooperation on this [matter], full cooperation by us. [And it] has conducted its own investigation, and this is the guy [Paul O’Brien] has done the investigation of this matter.” Then, referring to the news media and the public, he added, “I think that’s very important that they know [this fact].” The president said that if the committee merely takes the position that it is a matter for the courts, and “we don’t give a shit,” that it will have negative consequences. “Everybody knows that the people from the reelection committee are involved at lower levels,” he continued, “so it seems to me that it’s imperative that we would want to see this thing worked out, [having an] investigation and so forth. Then, having in mind the fact that when the grand jury indicts, and we get indictments on the people that obviously have gotten caught with their hands in the cookie jar, and does not indict others, like Magruder, Sloan, and so forth,” the president felt there would be an immediate reaction: “‘Well, what are the facts regarding others? What are they covering up?’”

Rather than allowing that to happen, the president was urging Mitchell and MacGregor to take the initiative. First, he would have MacGregor leak the fact that the committee had conducted its own investigation, and it was undertaken by a top law firm. Second, MacGregor would make a statement during the president’s meeting with the Japanese during his forthcoming trip to Hawaii. The statement would explain “the limitation of the reelection committee’s involvement” without getting into specific details. “So, do you see, your choices, it seems to me, are very, very limited. The choice is either to go down in that sort of fall, and then have a hell of a bitch, and then have an investigation demanded of everything and everybody else. Or, having in mind that this has nothing to do with law, forget the law, I mean, except for
the poor guys that are going to go to jail and be fined. But this [statement] has to do with public relations.” The statement would be issued before the grand jury indictments, and “then when the grand jury indictment comes it would be sort of an afterthought.”

“How do you feel about that, John?” he asked Mitchell, who liked the proposal. As far as the president was concerned, Mitchell had now approved the fact that they had conducted an investigation that had never actually occurred. The CRP attorneys did try to find out what had taken place, until they were halted—when they were at the point of discovering the truth. Only with time did they figure out what had transpired and, like me, learn much of it by accident.

Nixon then turned to his ongoing concern, Magruder and the grand jury: “Is Magruder going before them tomorrow?” Haldeman and Mitchell answered yes simultaneously, with Haldeman adding, “It’s anticipated he’ll be in tomorrow and Wednesday.” Nixon noted, “Well, his questioning will indicate to me, to a certain extent, what is going to come out.” Speaking as a former attorney general, Mitchell was not concerned: “Well, at least the grand jury proceedings will be controlled in the Justice Department.” He also added, “They’re not going to go off on their own over in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. And that’s where we’ve got to know what they’re going to recommend to the grand jury. And once we know that, then you can stage the timing of the indictments and the timing of your statement.” When the president raised the possibility of a runaway grand jury, Mitchell dismissed it.

Nixon still wanted the CRP to have a public relations plan and to release a statement about its own investigation. Mitchell reported that it had already made such statements, but they had been “washed over.” But Mitchell had never requested a real investigation. To the contrary, when Jeb Magruder did start to tell Ken Parkinson the truth in mid-July, Mitchell had pulled him up short and told Parkinson that Magruder’s information was not correct.
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The president explained that he had been reading the
New York Times
, which he described as reporting, “The White House and the rest, that they’re completely oblivious” to Watergate.
*
More discussion of public relations planning or statements followed, but no firm decisions were made.

The president telephoned Haldeman shortly before four o’clock to inquire about Magruder, who was still at the U.S. courthouse before the grand jury. There is no recorded telephone call of Haldeman giving Nixon a report on Magruder’s appearance, although I telephoned Haldeman late that afternoon to tell him that I had called Henry Petersen at the Justice Department, who said that Magruder had gotten through “by the skin of his teeth.”
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Clearly Haldeman passed along this information to Nixon, who stopped asking about Magruder in subsequent conversations. Undoubtedly the gist of what Haldeman told him was very close to what he wrote in his diary: