The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (33 page)

“Yep,” Ehrlichman quickly answered, at which Nixon feigned surprise, asking, “Or did he? I don’t know.” Ehrlichman flatly reassured him: “Sure did.” Nixon admitted that he thought that had been the case, and added, “From what I’ve heard, he must have,” and then pretended to speculate about Magruder, asking: “He said he was not involved, he didn’t have the
knowledge, and he did. Is that right?” “Basically, that’s it, yeah,” Ehrlichman confirmed, though Nixon had more questions. “But beyond that, I mean, beyond Magruder, who the hell else perjured himself? Did Mitchell?” Ehrlichman said, without actually knowing, that he assumed that was the case.

After exploring potential vulnerabilities, the president returned to the selection of an FBI director. Ehrlichman mentioned that another “prime candidate is Henry Petersen,” but he added that, as the man who had handled the Watergate investigation, he had problems similar to those of Gray. “Oh, Christ, yes,” Nixon agreed, plus, he felt, “he wouldn’t care what happened to us.” Ehrlichman raised and Nixon dismissed other candidates: Bill Ruckelshaus and Vernon Acree, the head of Customs, who Ehrlichman noted was Jack Caulfield’s friend and suggestion. The president, unhappy that there was not “a strong man, a loyalist” available for the post, began warming to the idea that Gray could sell the Senate on the completeness of the investigation they had conducted on Watergate. “Well, for example, they’ll ask, ‘Did you investigate, did you get it straight from Haldeman?’ He didn’t,” the president said, answering his own question, and then asked Ehrlichman, “But did they get one [a statement] from you?”

“Oh, they got two from me,” Ehrlichman said,
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and reported that the FBI also had taken a statement from Colson, but because no leads pointed to Haldeman, he was never questioned. The assurance that there had been no links to the White House gave the president the comfort he needed with Gray, so he told Ehrlichman, “I think I’d send him up. Okay?”

With that decision made, the conversation turned to the Woodward and Bernstein article in the
Post
that morning about the plumbers unit, which Hunt and Liddy were part of, and the president expressed surprise that national security wiretaps had become available to Howard Hunt. “They didn’t,” Ehrlichman said, explaining that they had been available only to David Young in his leak investigations. Although Hunt had worked with the plumbers unit, Ehrlichman rather significantly downplayed his involvement in the Ellsberg break-in. “He was taking all those leaks and matching them up to see where the commonality among them was to try and determine which documents they came from.” Ehrlichman then clarified, “Oh, Dave Young never got any of this domestic tap stuff,” referring to the wiretaps on
newsmen and White House staff authorized by the president in the spring of 1969. “Who the hell did?” Nixon asked. “Well,” Ehrlichman said, “I got some of it, Bob got a lot of it. Bob got most of it, I think. I’m not aware that anybody else ever did.” (The National Archives has redacted the material about who was wiretapped and what was reported.) Later in the conversation, the president was instructing Ehrlichman to express “outrage” if asked about these wiretaps, since the Nixon administration had cut back on the intelligence operations of its predecessors and taken the U.S. Army out of domestic spying. Returning to Pat Gray, the president confirmed, “I’m inclined to think that we just better go with Gray, because I think at the present time we have the worst of both worlds. We can’t leave it uncertain.” Ehrlichman said he would arrange for Nixon to meet with Gray, but they would not put it on the president’s publicly announced schedule, and Nixon could tell Gray that he wanted a back channel if he was nominated for the post.

The president met with Gray and Ehrlichman in the Oval Office.
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While they had never been close, Nixon had known Gray since his freshman term in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1947, when Gray was a career navy officer studying law at George Washington University. After working on Nixon’s unsuccessful 1960 campaign, Gray had gone into private law practice in Connecticut, returning to the government when Nixon was elected in 1968.

Nixon told Gray he had talked with John Mitchell about his nomination, and it was obvious it was going to open up the Watergate investigation before a committee other than Sam Ervin’s. “Now the question is whether you feel that you can handle it, whether that’s a good thing, bad thing and so forth,” Nixon said, and he expressed his concern that the person nominated for FBI director would be badgered, and whether it was good for us to have the Watergate investigation under the scrutiny of two committees.

They speculated about the kinds of questions Gray might be asked and answers he might give. And the president warned Gray not to make Mark Felt his deputy, given his leaks, which Gray did not want to believe.
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“But what
I’ve got to do is, and which I’m in the process of doing, is come up with an overall plan to submit to you,” Gray said. “And you and I should discuss that plan.” Nixon was not ready to drop Felt from the discussion, and he warned Gray, “The only problem you have on Felt is that the lines [for leaks] lead very directly to him.” When Gray disputed this, Ehrlichman chimed in, “Well, you know we’ve tried to trap him. The trap is set to see if we can turn something up.” Nixon suggested, “Well, why don’t you get in the fellow that’s made the charge, then?” Ehrlichman thought that a good idea, and the president reported, “Of course he’s not a newsman; on the other hand. He’s a lawyer for
Time
.” Gray said he knew who had made the charge, and noted “I must say it to you, those people over there are like little old ladies in tennis shoes, and they’ve got some of the most vicious vendettas going on in their gossip mill.”

“It would be very, very difficult to have a Felt in that position without having that charge cleared up,” Nixon affirmed, which Gray acknowledged, and then the president added, “And, incidentally, let me say this, and this is also a directive, you should take a lie detector test on him. It leads right to him now.”

Nixon said that he had never known of a leak occurring when Hoover was running the FBI, and added, “I could talk to him in this office about everything” without its leaking. Nixon said it was not because FBI agents loved Hoover; rather, it was because “they feared him.” Hoover had given lie detector tests to everyone, even his loyalists. “You’ve got to play it exactly that way. You’ve got to be brutal, tough and respected, because we can’t have any kind of a relationship with the Bureau, which is necessary, unless we can trust it. I used to have, and I would expect, with the director in the future, to have a relationship. With Hoover, he’d come in about every month. He’d be here at breakfast or he’d come in here. He’d come in alone, not with the attorney general. I’d talk about things.” Nixon said Hoover might raise hell about other parts of the government, but “it was extremely valuable, and it never leaked out of here; you know that he was giving me the stuff that he had. And he talked with Ehrlichman, he was my contact. Ehrlichman will be yours in the future, you’ve got to have one man that will not talk. I could
use Dean, but he’s too busy on other things.” Nixon proceeded to explain to Gray that the relationship between the FBI director and the president was like the relationship of the president and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Now, having said that, though, we can’t do it unless there’s total communication security and total discipline in the Bureau. I think you’ve got to do it like they did in World War II: [If] the Germans went through these towns, and then a sniper hit one of [their soldiers], they’d line up the whole goddamned town and say, unless you talk, you’re all getting shot. I really think that’s what has to be done. I mean, I don’t think you can be Mr. Nice Guy over there.” Gray assured Nixon he had not been.

Nixon then told Gray that the media would be against him, as would academics, and even Congress, for “it’s a hard damn fight.” He wanted a director who would “tail people, you know, from time to time,” such as “some jackass in the State Department, some assistant to the secretary” who the president thought might be “a little off.” Gray again assured the president he would be up to the job. “I’d say, as far as the Watergate, I’d rather put it all out there and not be defensive,” the president concluded, and if the Ervin committee called Gray, he and Ehrlichman should work that out. With that, Nixon told Gray he had the job.

In their midday Oval Office meetings, Haldeman reported he had learned that Sam Ervin was trying “a slick move” to get former Republican senator Ken Keating—a Harvard
Law School graduate who represented New York from 1959 to 1964 and became a New York Court of Appeals judge before Nixon appointed him ambassador to Israel—to serve as chief counsel to his Watergate committee.
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Keating turned down the offer. As Haldeman was relaying this the Senate was announcing that Sam Ervin would chair the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (SSC, or Senate Watergate committee) to investigate Watergate, and that Howard Baker would serve as vice chairman. It was also announced that Ervin had selected the Georgetown University Law Center’s top criminal law professor, Samuel Dash, a former Philadelphia prosecutor, to serve as chief counsel. John Ehrlichman, unaware of these developments, was making belated suggestions to the president about who should serve as Ervin’s chief counsel, not that the White House could have influenced the selection in any event.
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Only minutes into a long afternoon session with Haldeman in the EOB office,
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the president asked, “Anything new from Dean and his outfit that you heard,” adding, regarding the selection of Sam Dash, “I see they got the Jew for the lawyer, huh?” When Haldeman did not have a good response, the president continued, “Why didn’t our boys fight?” Haldeman did not think they could do so, given that the Democrats controlled the Senate, so the discussion turned to who Howard Baker would select as the minority counsel. Haldeman reported that Baker was talking about hiring a thirty-year-old former assistant U.S. attorney from Tennessee, news that was greeted with a long sigh by the president. Bill Timmons, who was from Tennessee, had talked to this potential candidate, Fred Thompson, and thought he “would be so totally dazzled by being brought into Washington that he’d be completely lost,” Haldeman said. “Howard Baker has asked to meet privately with you on an unannounced basis on the Watergate thing. He wants guidance. And Timmons passes it along, saying it’s our call, and he can’t even make a recommendation.” Haldeman reported that Ehrlichman and I thought the president should meet with Baker, who he assured the president would be discreet.

Haldeman then mentioned the “next” problem on his list, Jeb Magruder, which led to another sigh from Nixon. “We’ve got a problem there in that we’ve got to keep him on an even keel,” Haldeman explained, “but he is just totally determined to get back into government work somewhere. He thinks he’s completely cleared himself, which he did. He did a hell of a job at the thing,” referring to Magruder’s perjured testimony at the Liddy and McCord trial. “And,” Haldeman added, “he’s going to do a hell of a job at the Senate hearings. But Dean is very concerned about keeping him on balance.” Magruder wanted a top staff post at the Bicentennial Commission and Haldeman said, “What we’ve come up with as an idea is to make him a consultant of the bicentennial project on an interim basis.” He would not be on the White House staff, and it was “a fairly natural transition from [his job at the inaugural committee].” Nixon immediately said to hire him, and then asked, “Could Magruder hang Mitchell on his testimony?” Haldeman replied obliquely, “I don’t think he would.”

“The question is the perjury charge,” Nixon said. “That’s what I’m concerned about Magruder.” Haldeman explained that the bicentennial job was “a way to keep him happy.”

The discussion turned to the Senate’s Watergate investigation and consideration of whether Pat Buchanan or Ken Clawson should be an “observer spokesman” for any Watergate hearings. The president did not want Buchanan but he had no reaction to Clawson.

Haldeman continued through his agenda: “Then the other question which Dean feels is very serious, and Mitchell does also, is getting Attorney General Kleindienst back on the reservation. The problem is that Kleindienst, as I think I’ve mentioned to you, is biding his time looking for a job, getting ready to go out. But he has total loyalty to you. And [the thought is that] you asked him to stay in office one full year. In other words, until the hearings are past. [He shouldn’t leave] before, because the hearings may well result in a request for additional action by the Justice Department, and there shouldn’t be a new attorney general in there. And you can get Henry Petersen to handle the sensitive problems, because Petersen has total loyalty to Kleindienst, and has done a superb job and knows all this stuff. We can’t afford bitterness in the Justice Department. We can’t just get a new attorney general trying to get into these problems; rather, we need to keep him on a while.” Nixon agreed but wondered if Kleindienst would remain. To help deal with the problem, the president thought he should tell Kleindienst he had total confidence in me. Kleindienst typically dealt with Ehrlichman, the senior staff man, and rather than lowering the attorney general’s status with a switch to a middle-level staffer like me, he was giving me more authority to take some of the load off Ehrlichman. They would bring Kleindienst in for a chat.

“Actually, Bob, the hearing thing, I think the Watergate thing will become extremely tiresome,” the president said. He also thought the committee would have a problem, given that the Watergate defendants were appealing their convictions. The president thought maybe “the Segretti thing” would become the focus. “Oddly enough, they’re not doing any investigation of Segretti,” Haldeman reported. “That means no one is working the Segretti thing at this point, which Dean can’t figure out, because we all had the same feeling that that’s what they were going to play on.” With concern in his voice, Nixon asked, “You mean they’re just sticking to Watergate?”