The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (32 page)

The president felt he could rely on the FBI’s “tremendous investigation,” at least “unless one of the seven [Watergate defendants] begins to talk. That’s the problem.” This thought prompted Nixon to ask, “as far as the seven” were concerned, as he understood it “the only ones that really know” what had happened and why would be Hunt and Liddy. But was McCord also knowledgeable? “Probably,” Colson surmised. He said that his future law partner, David Shapiro, who knew Sirica very well, thought Sirica would call in the seven Watergate defendants and offer them no jail if they told him everything. In short, “Make a deal with them, before he sentences them.” When Nixon asked if any would accept this, Colson repeated, “Would they accept it?” and drew a deep breath as he collected his thoughts. “I don’t think Hunt would. He’s too much of a believer. On the other hand, who knows?
He’s lost his wife, which was a great source of strength to him. He’s got four kids.”

Colson told the president he was not worried about the Senate’s investigation, as the only thing they might find would be “some technical violations of the statute, a few mailings that were done by different committees outside of here. Those were technical violations of the statute” that would be hard to make into “capital cases.” The problem would be “if they could get Ehrlichman, Haldeman or me to say under oath that we were aware of anything that was a violation of the statute, then they’ve got a circus on their hands.” To deal with that, Colson added, “either you have to have a John Mitchell–type memory,” which caused him to chuckle, “or not appear.”

That afternoon, when meeting in the EOB, the president told Haldeman that Colson “sure as hell doesn’t want to go down there and testify.”
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Yet the president thought Colson had made a good point in suggesting that whoever was involved needed to come forward now. Haldeman revealed that Colson had made the same argument to him, saying, “Mitchell was going to get hung on this anyway. Why doesn’t he come out now and say, ‘I’m tired of allowing this farce to go on.’” The president said Mitchell should say it without really saying it, and they discussed different ways he might do so. Nixon still had trouble accepting that Mitchell was involved: “This is an amazing damn thing. It’s hard for me to believe that, but it’s possible, I guess, that Mitchell could have approved these activities. What in the name of God? Mitchell is a lawyer. He knows about these things.” Haldeman offered some clarification, based on his conversation with Magruder. “But the one thing apparently Mitchell didn’t know was that McCord was involved in it, because it was all supposed to be getting done by only five people. I think it was kind of weird that McCord was in there, too.”

The president’s concern about Mitchell continued throughout the conversation, and toward the end they discussed the possibility that Mitchell could be disbarred, if not sent to jail, unless a judge suspended the sentence. Nixon sounded genuinely distressed at the prospect of potential jail sentences for those involved in Watergate. He told Haldeman that he certainly knew his campaign was gathering political intelligence. He said he knew they were getting “information from Chapman’s friend,” the reporters they had planted with their potential Democratic opponents, and that “Colson was trying to get stuff on Kennedy, and all that other shit.”

On a brief visit to the Oval Office to say farewell,
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Colson reported that during a long conversation with Haldeman the day before, and in a conversation with his new law partner David Shapiro, he had developed some additional thoughts on executive privilege: “The president cannot have immediate advisers and a confidential relationship unless he is assured that that confidentiality can be preserved, like a law clerk with a judge or congressional aide.” He was writing these ideas up and would send them to me to review with Shapiro while he was gone.

“Good, bring him over and get him to it,” replied the president, who was concerned about the charge of stonewalling. That would suggest a cover-up, which could be worse than waiving executive privilege and allowing testimony. “I always go back, of course, to my own experience in the Hiss case. The Hiss case, of course, the [Truman] administration was doubly guilty.” Not only was Hiss himself guilty, but “what really creamed them was the charge that the administration was trying to cover it up.” Nixon said the Justice Department had tried to drop the case against Hiss, but his congressional committee showed that Hiss was “the red herring,” so they killed the cover-up. “It was the cover-up that hurt, not the fact that Hiss was guilty. Get my point?” Colson’s concern was a Senate fishing expedition, with the Senate getting into other matters. The president agreed: “Today, for example, like the story in the
Post
this morning commented that Liddy had the FBI doing internal security taps. But I can’t believe that’s true. I mean, I don’t know what they’re talking about.”
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“That could have been true,” Colson advised. “They had that security unit set up in the basement of the EOB which Bud Krogh ran.” Feigning ignorance, Nixon said, “Oh, I see.” Colson continued, “And that was perfectly legitimate. That’s the kind of thing they were hired to do. Investigating the authenticity of the Dita Beard letter was a perfectly legitimate thing. And, I told the FBI about that. There wasn’t anything to hide.” Colson cleared this throat, and added, “The thing you can’t do is, you can’t get partway pregnant. You can’t start talking about one aspect of a relationship with a White House employee and not another.”

“What does Shapiro think?” Nixon asked. “Shapiro believes that if Mitchell was indeed responsible that he should step forward now and take the heat, and—” Cutting Colson off, the president rhetorically rejected the consequences: “Not go to jail? He can’t go to jail.” Colson continued, “Well, his point is that he’s going to, anyway. Shapiro’s point is, if he was guilty, and if it’s going to come out in the hearings, then don’t let it come out in the hearings, take our own losses ourselves.” The president observed that that was easy to say but not so easy to do, and wondered how it could be handled. “It depends on what John knew,” Colson answered. “I don’t know what he knew firsthand.”

“Right.” In jumbled syntax Nixon asked if Mitchell was “aware about Hunt and all that sort of thing, is that correct? Is that what’s going to come out? That hasn’t yet.” Colson answered, “That’s right. But you see, John doesn’t have any privilege. John doesn’t have an immediate relationship to you. He was a cabinet officer, and he did have.” He continued, “Well, Shapiro’s only analysis is just as a cold-blooded analytical lawyer. If you’re going to have a big explosion on national television and let goddamn Magruder—”

“Magruder,” the president interrupted. “Those are the two, I guess, that are really a problem.” When Colson said to the president that he would have the same problem if Magruder knew about it, Nixon quickly added, “Oh, he did.” Colson concurred, “I’m sure he did,” knowledge Colson had based either on his own conversation with Magruder or on information Bittman had given him when the latter was pressing Hunt’s case. “How about Mitchell? Do you think he did?” Nixon asked. Colson could only say he admired Mitchell’s convenient memory. “Yeah, yeah,” Nixon remarked, and nothing more needed to be said on the subject, so he moved on. “But the point is, after you’re gone, you mean that this concern about Hunt cracking, which you expressed, is that incorrect? I suppose if the judge calls him in, do you think that Hunt might just say, ‘Well, I’ll tell my whole story.’ My view is that he won’t tell the whole story. My view is that he’d say, ‘Alright, I will tell what it is.’ But what he would do, frankly, is would be to tell about Mitchell. Do you think that’s what he would tell them? Or Magruder? My view is that he would limit the losses, but he wouldn’t go all the way.” Before he left Colson told the president that working for him during his first term was “really, the proudest thing I’ve ever done in my life, sir.” Nixon reminded him, “Well, you’re not leaving, you’re just going across the street.” “Half a block away,” Colson said. “I’m at your service for anything, anytime.”

Early that evening Nixon discussed Gray’s nomination with Ehrlichman
in the Oval Office.
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“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about it. I think we had better take a known quantity with weaknesses that we’re aware of in this particular area than to try to take somebody else. Gray is loyal. I realize he’s weak in some areas. I realize there’ll be some confirmation problem, but let’s look at that for just a moment. Maybe it’s just as well to have Gray get up there and have them beat him over the head about Watergate, and have him say what the hell he’s done.”

“Well, he’s prepared to do that. I’ve been over this today with John Dean to see what he says the problems will be. He says it will be a very long, very tough confirmation, and will be an opportunity for a different set of senators to get into the Watergate than the Ervin group.
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It’ll be the Tunneys and the Kennedys and the Bayhs, and so on,” Ehrlichman reported, mentioning some of the most aggressive Democrats in the U.S. Senate at the time: John Tunney of California, Teddy Kennedy of Massachusetts and Birch Bayh of Indiana—all lawyers and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Ehrlichman added, “But recognizing that, Gray tells a very good story.”

The president thought, incorrectly, that sending Gray up would close the door on cover-up charges: “You see, if you kick him upstairs to the circuit court, they’ll say that we’re afraid of something. There’s no way we’ll get around it. It’ll look like a cover-up. He does not get a different set [of senators]” for a judicial confirmation. Rather, “He gets Kennedy, and Tunney and the rest.” As the president saw it, they would go after Gray on any post requiring confirmation. “Gray, it seems to me, makes a rather good impression. I don’t know, I haven’t seen him on television. Does he?” Nixon asked. “He’s very earnest,” Ehrlichman replied. “He’s very square corners, you know, kind of the retired navy captain.” Then, sharing my assessment, Ehrlichman added, “He’s vulnerable, according to John’s analysis, on two counts. One is whether or not he handled Watergate adequately, and John says, ‘I think he’ll acquit himself very nicely there.’ The other is his stewardship of the Bureau over the period of the last eight months. There, John says, the established bureaucracy of the Bureau will be feeding all kinds of garbage to the committee, and Gray will be on the defensive. So, he says, we’re liable to be in for a few surprises, on the handling of other matters or things of that kind that are incalculable right now. But he said he doesn’t think that he is in serious jeopardy, and on balance, he thinks Gray is, as you say, is a known quantity,’” This was, in fact, a far stronger endorsement than I had given Ehrlichman.

“He is a guy we can tell to do things, and he will do them,” Ehrlichman concluded about Gray. The president protested that Gray had actually been “a little weak on that,” but Ehrlichman pointed out that that was because he hoped to face a confirmation. Ehrlichman had also discussed Gray with John Mitchell, who had said that, once confirmed, Gray would be compliant. Citing Mitchell as his authority, Ehrlichman proposed that the president call Gray in and explain: “Pat, I had an arrangement with J. Edgar Hoover that up until now I have not had with you, and I have missed it. Once you’re confirmed, I want it understood that we go back to a personal relationship.” Nixon added, “Without the attorney general,” to whom the Bureau director reports for management purposes, being directly involved. Ehrlichman continued, “‘That when I call, you respond, and that we have to have an absolutely tight relationship.’” The president did not wish to make such calls, however, but rather wanted Ehrlichman to do so. “Well, then you could delegate that and go from there,” Ehrlichman replied. He added, “As it is now, John [Mitchell] says we made a mistake in the inception in not tying him down tight enough. But we did it for a number of reasons. He was contingent, and we had this [Watergate] thing hanging up, and he’s tracked reasonably well. Now he has some guilty knowledge in connection with the Watergate, that only Dean and I know about, and that has to do with Hunt. We turned some stuff over to Gray to get it out of here. That’ll never come out. He’ll never testify to that, there isn’t any way that he could testify to that.” When the president wanted to know more, Ehrlichman explained, “Well, it just isn’t necessary. There’s no way for anybody to know. And that he understands that that set of circumstances never happened, and it’s never, never appeared, and never come out.”

“If Gray’s got them, where are the files?” Nixon asked. Ehrlichman answered, “I don’t know where he’s got them, but he’s got them. We felt that we wanted to be in a position to say we had turned everything over to the FBI, so I called him up to my office one day, and we said, ‘Pat, here’s a big fat envelope.’” Nixon asked, “What is this—stuff that Hunt did on that case in California?”
*

“Well, no, it’s other stuff, and Dean’s never told me what was in the
envelope,” Ehrlichman answered. Nixon said he did not know what Hunt dealt with at the White House, but speculated, “Well, he must have been in a hell of a lot of stuff. He did some things for Chuck, apparently, that he made record of.” The president wanted to know if that material was in the envelope, and Ehrlichman said it was: “Well, we opened [Hunt’s] safe. See, Dean took everything out of his safe, and we turned everything over to FBI agents who came for it, except this envelope full of stuff. And then I called Gray to my office. Dean came in. I said, ‘Pat, here’s an envelope. We want to be in a position to say we’ve turned everything over to the FBI, so we’re giving it to you. I don’t care what you do with it, as long as it never appears.’” The passing of Hunt’s file to Gray troubled the president, but Ehrlichman doubted that Gray had ever opened the envelope, and added, “If he was smart, he didn’t.”

Ehrlichman continued, “Bob or I or John Dean or somebody ought to give you the rundown on how this Ervin hearing is going to go, the kinds of things that are liable to come smoking up, so you’re not surprised. But, we think that there’s a reasonably good possibility of coming through it very much like we’ve come through the trial, with a certain amount of day-to-day flak and evening television stuff but no lasting results.” Ehrlichman’s report was, in fact, far more sanguine than our discussions had been. Nixon noted, “But really the problem is that if one of these guys could crack,” to which Ehrlichman agreed. The president continued, “The one that could crack that would really hurt would be Hunt.” Ehrlichman agreed again but noted, “Magruder could really hurt in a different direction.” “Well, Magruder, if he cracks, he goes to prison,” Nixon said, though Ehrlichman cautioned, “Well, unless he takes immunity.” Nixon wanted to know if he would do so. “Possibly, possibly,” Ehrlichman surmised. “There are several of those guys that we’re relying on. Sloan is not a problem,” Ehrlichman observed, and Nixon understood that Sloan really did not know anything. “But Magruder is a problem of, ah—” Ehrlichman acknowledged. Nixon interrupted, saying, “Magruder knows a hell of a lot,” and added rhetorically, “Let’s face it, didn’t Magruder perjure himself?”