The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (40 page)

“Right, yeah,” the president said, indicating with his tone that this was old news, and he changed the subject. “How the hell does Liddy stand up so well?” the president asked. “He’s a strange man, Mr. President,” I answered. “Strange or strong, or both?” the president asked, seeming not to be clear on what I had said. “Strange and strong,” I responded. “Good,” Nixon said flatly. “His loyalty, I think, is just beyond the pale. He’s just—” I began. “He hates the other side, too,” the president observed. “Oh, absolutely, he’s strong. He really is,” I said, confident Liddy would not crack, if based on no other reason than my brief meeting with him on June 19, 1972, after the arrests of his men at the Watergate, when he demonstrated that he was humiliated by the disaster he had almost single-handedly created.

“Is it too late to, frankly, go the hang-out road? Yes, it is.” He answered his own question as quickly as he posed it. I agreed, but before I could get a word in, he continued, “The hang-out road’s going to have to be rejected. I
understand it was rejected by somebody.” I said it had been kicked around. Nixon was aware that Ehrlichman had been an early proponent of the hang-out route, but not that he wanted to hang out everyone except Ehrlichman.

“Well, I think I convinced him why he wouldn’t want to hang out either,” I told the president, inviting him to ask me why, but he did not. Not knowing what else I should tell Nixon, I was as vague as Haldeman and Ehrlichman when I explained, “There is a certain domino situation here. If some things start going, a lot of other things are going to start going, and there are going to be a lot of problems if everything starts falling. So there are dangers, Mr. President. I’d be less than candid if I didn’t tell you there are. There’s a reason for us not, not everyone, going up and testifying.”

“I see,” he noted, then protested, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I didn’t mean go up and have them testifying. I mean putting the story out to PR buddies somewhere. Here’s the story, the true story about Watergate.” In short, the president was talking about a PR story versus the real story of what had occurred. “They would never believe it,” I protested, which was not to say that a true—albeit incomplete—version of Watergate could not be prepared, which was implicit in my tone and the following exchange we had. I suggested, for example, that while it was in fact the truth, the news media would never accept that there was no direct White House involvement in the Watergate break-in, referring specifically to “that incident that occurred over in the Democratic National Committee headquarters.” I explained, “People, here, did not know that that was going to be done. I think there are some people who saw the fruits of it, but that’s another story. I am talking about the criminal conspiracy to go in there. The other thing is that the Segretti thing. You hang that out, they wouldn’t believe that. They wouldn’t believe that Chapin acted on his own to put his old friend Donald Segretti in to be a Dick Tuck on somebody else’s campaign. They would have to paint it into something more sinister, something more involved, a part of a general plan.”

“Shit, it’s not sinister. None of it is,” the president protested. “No,” I agreed, and suggested that some of Segretti’s actions were humorous. “As a matter of fact, it’s just a bunch of crap,” Nixon said. Nixon summed up his take on the entire Watergate-Segretti scandal as the last gasp of his partisan opponents: “They’ve just got to have something to squeal about.” He observed that they “got the hell kicked out of them in the election” and that “the Establishment” was dying. He felt they were using Watergate to smear his foreign policy and election successes. So he wondered if we could not find
some dirt on the Democratic presidents, and one in particular: “If you get Kennedy in it, too, I’d be a little more pleased.”

I explained that if, when investigating Segretti, the Senate went into Kalmbach’s bank records, it could backfire and surface the private investigation that Kalmbach had also funded of the events in the island town of Chappaquiddick, where Teddy Kennedy had been involved in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a passenger in his car.
⁴¹
The president feigned ignorance, but it is now clear from other conversations, with Haldeman, that he was fully aware of the investigation by Jack Caulfield and Tony Ulasewicz. I explained it to him in some detail in this conversation, although I had only hearsay information, since it had all taken place before I arrived at the White House. I only knew the first name of the private investigator: Tony.
⁴²
Caulfield also had made Tony Ulasewicz available to assist in paying the hush money then being provided to the Watergate defendants.

“Now, how will Kalmbach explain that he’d hired this [fellow to investigate] Chappaquiddick? Out of what type of funds?” the president asked. “He had money left over from preconvention—” I started to explain, but the president understood. “Are they going to investigate those funds, too?” Nixon asked. “There’s nothing illegal with those funds,” I answered. “How can they investigate them?” he asked. “They can’t,” I said. “Huh,” the president grunted, pleased. I explained, “What could happen is, they could stumble into this in going back to, say, ’71, on Kalmbach’s bank records. They’ve already asked for a lot of his bank records in connection with Segretti, as to how he paid Segretti.” Nixon asked, “Are they going to go back as far as Chappaquiddick?” Referring to Tony’s investigation, I noted, “This fellow worked into ’71 on this. He was up there. He talked to everybody in that town. He’s the one who caused a lot of embarrassment for Kennedy already. He went up there as a newspaperman [and asked questions like], ‘So why aren’t you checking this? Why aren’t you looking there?’ And pointing the press’s attention to things. Gosh, the guy did a masterful job. [Although], I have never had the full report.”

Again I found myself on the front page of
The Washington Post
because the Senate Judiciary Committee had voted unanimously to invite me to testify in the Gray confirmation hearings. Gray had trapped himself by
unnecessarily drawing me into the matter, and Nixon had made it clear that “no president could ever agree to allow the counsel to the president to go down and testify before a committee.”
⁴³

When Nixon called me that morning he wanted to discuss the situation in preparation for a press conference.
⁴⁴
I told him I had received a formal invitation letter from the Senate Judiciary Committee and read my draft response, declining to appear pursuant to the president’s statement of March 12 but offering to assist and provide information to their questions about the Gray confirmation, consistent with the president’s statement (which effectively meant replying to any written questions). When the president asked if I should volunteer to provide sworn answers, I suggested we wait and have the committee call for such responses, thus keeping all our options open. The president wanted me to circulate my response among other members of the staff excluding Haldeman and Ehrlichman, as “I don’t want to get Haldeman or Ehrlichman in the thing, because they’re both parties in interest.” Nixon suggested Ziegler, and then offered that he himself could make “a rather cool decision about it” and what ought to be done. He instructed me to come over whenever I was ready.

Accordingly, Ziegler, Moore and I met in the president’s EOB office later that morning. The recording of this conversation is of particularly poor quality, although the gist of the conversation can be determined.
⁴⁵
We discussed written responses, and the president suggested, “Just give them a lot of gobblegoop, that’s all. Then let them squeal. They’re never going to be satisfied with any answers.” When the discussion turned to Segretti’s activities, Ziegler noted, “We’ve made it very clear that no one in the White House directed espionage and sabotage.” Nixon then explained to Ziegler, “Espionage and sabotage is not illegal. Do you understand? That’s the point that I’m making: Espionage and sabotage is illegal only if it’s against the government. Hell, you can espionage and sabotage all you want, unless you use illegal means.” The president did indicate, however, that he would, of course, say he did not condone such activity. In passing, he mentioned the report I was suppose to have prepared, noting that it related to Watergate, not the Segretti “crap.” I reminded the president that the FBI had never investigated Segretti’s activities, only Segretti’s relationship to Hunt and Liddy, which had been unrelated to the Watergate break-in. Although the president noted that Americans did not want their “president spending his time horsing around with all this crap,” we continued to discuss it, until he concluded that
nobody was going to say anything, because any answers that were provided would only led to more questions.

When our session ended, Ziegler went off to respond to the press and the president headed for the Oval Office, where he soon met with Haldeman.
⁴⁶
They speculated about media interest in a Senate Watergate investigation, and Haldeman suggested it would not last long. Nixon again expressed disgust with Pat Gray’s performance (“Gray is so cocky, and not the smartest guy in the world”), while Haldeman pointed out that FBI guys were now going after Gray, former Hoover supervisors whom Gray had removed. As this conversation was ending Nixon observed that he did not seem to have any real support on Capitol Hill for dealing with Watergate even from fellow Republicans.

After lunch the president had Dick Moore and me back in his EOB office to rehash events,
⁴⁷
and he called me later that afternoon to ask if I knew of “any other instance where raw files of the FBI had been turned over to committees of Congress.”
⁴⁸
I did not but said I would check to make certain. “You call the FBI and tell them I want [an answer] in three minutes,” Nixon instructed sternly and said if they did not have an answer by then, “I’ll fire the whole God damn Bureau.” I burst out with a spontaneous laugh, but the president did not join me. “I mean that,” he said. “You get right ahold of them.” While I was getting an answer, Nixon conferred with Ziegler, until he realized that he had not heard back from me and phoned again.
⁴⁹

While the operator was placing the call, the recording captures the president telling Ziegler, “You get action around here if you kick ’em in the ass. These agencies taking two or three days to get a response to a simple little question like that,” he complained. When the president came on the line, I told him, “Unless I get counterinformation upon further checking, the answer is no—there had been no formal submissions of FBI material like this ever before.” However, I explained, there had been informal situations in which Hoover had provided raw FBI files, e.g., to Senate committees investigating organized crime and for the Harry Dexter White case, with which Nixon was very familiar.
*
“What I’m going to say is that it was always Mr. Hoover’s practice never to turn over [raw files] formally to a committee,” Nixon declared, and Hoover only did it “on a basis of total security for the
purpose of conducting investigations and so forth and so on. And there’s never been a leak of those of those things before.” I confirmed the response, and the president, satisfied, said, “Okay. Well, keep ’em scared over there.”

The president, sensing correctly that in the wake of Pat Gray’s Senate testimony his press conference would be dominated by Watergate, started the day in his EOB office going over additional press conference questions and responses with Ziegler. Nixon called me with a series of process questions, including whether White House aides (namely, Colson) had given civil depositions, in the DNC’s Watergate lawsuit.
⁵⁰
At 11:22
A.M.
he and Ziegler headed for the White House press room.

The first question of the conference set the tone: “Mr. President, do you plan to stick by your decision not to allow Mr. Dean to testify before the Congress, even if it means the defeat of Mr. Gray’s nomination?”
⁵¹
The president’s answer was one of the longest of any press conference during his entire presidency, summarized here. He did not believe any “responsible” senator would hold Gray hostage to my testifying, and he had it made very clear at his last press conference that “Mr. Dean is counsel to the White House. He is also one who was counsel to a number of people on the White House staff. He has, in effect, what I would call a double privilege, the lawyer-client relationship as well as the presidential privilege.” Nixon then compared his cooperation in Watergate to Truman’s noncooperation during his Hiss inquiry. He closed his lengthy response by announcing that “Mr. Dean will furnish information when any of it is requested, provided it is pertinent to the investigation.”

The follow-up question pressed the point further: “Mr. President, would you then be willing to have Mr. Dean sit down informally and let some of the senators question him, as they have with Dr. Kissinger?” “No, that is quite a different thing,” Nixon replied, which he proceeded to explain. When asked if he thought the FBI’s Watergate investigation had in any way been compromised by Pat Gray’s giving information to me or talking with John Ehrlichman or others, the president answered with an emphatic, “No, I am not concerned about that” and then flipped the question to declare that he was far more concerned about FBI leaks. He also said that Hoover had regularly showed him raw FBI files, and he informally did the same for some members of Congress, such as Chairman Eastland.

When asked about Gray’s revelation that Kalmbach had paid Segretti forty thousand dollars, Nixon dodged the question, saying he would not comment on such individual situations being investigated by the Senate but gave a lengthy response about how the White House would cooperate with them. He also elaborated on his executive privilege statement, explaining, “Members of the White House staff will not appear before a committee of Congress in any formal session. We will furnish information under the proper circumstances. We will consider each matter on a case-by-case basis.” He invited the U.S. Senate to take him to court if they disagreed: “We would welcome it. Perhaps this is the time to have the highest court of this land make a definitive decision with regard to this matter. I am not suggesting that we are asking for it. But I would suggest that if the members of the Senate, in their wisdom, decide that they want to test this matter in the courts, we will, of course, present our side of the case. And we think that the Supreme Court will uphold, as it always usually has, the great constitutional principle of separation of powers rather than to uphold the Senate.”