The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (61 page)

Shortly after noon, with my list in hand, I went to Ehrlichman’s office. Just as I knew he was going to tell Mitchell that the time for resolution had
come, I was trying to do the same with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. I told them I had considered the exposure of everyone involved with my attorney, and we had prepared a list of who might be indicted for conspiracy to obstruct justice. More important, I told them that Shaffer had learned that they were now targets of the grand jury, just as was I. My new information momentarily startled both men, because it conflicted with reassurances Ehrlichman had received from Kleindienst only days earlier. Ehrlichman, however, dismissed my warning as pure speculation. While I had discussed the facts with them in a similar conversation on March 21, I reminded them that what I was sharing with them today were the opinions of a seasoned criminal attorney. Shaffer had counseled me to share only conclusions and not get into details. Given the fact that Ehrlichman was busy secretly taping his conversations, it was good advice.
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While the tone of the meeting was friendly, for they recognized that I was trying to help both the president and them, it was very clear that neither of them was going to acknowledge that he had done anything wrong. As Ehrlichman said to me, “I think something putrid has gotten into your drinking water over there in Old Town, where you live.”

Haldeman left the session in Ehrlichman’s office to meet with Magruder, and at 1:55
P.M.
returned to the Oval Office to report on that discussion. Meanwhile Mitchell had arrived and was still meeting with Ehrlichman.
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Haldeman told Nixon that Magruder had decided the night before to tell all, and “his lawyers met with Silbert today.” He was not requesting immunity, “because he didn’t feel entitled to it.” Magruder had made his decision after realizing that the matter had reached an endpoint: “They’ve got witnesses on witnesses now, and there’s no reason for [him] to be quiet,” Magruder had said, and related that the only thing Magruder hoped to get out of coming forward was a lighter sentence. He told Haldeman he was guilty “on six or eight counts of perjury, two counts of conspiracy and two counts of obstruction of justice [with possible] sentences of 135 to 160 years in jail,” though his lawyers had yet to make a deal. “He told me that whole thing in an unbroken voice and showed more strength than I thought he had, to be perfectly frank,” Haldeman said. Magruder also had advised Haldeman that others involved at the reelection committee—Fred LaRue and Bart Porter—were going to cooperate with the prosecutors, although Mitchell was not. Haldeman had had this conversation with Magruder just as Mitchell was arriving, so he was able to share the gist of it with Ehrlichman. The president
asked about “the aftermath,” but Haldeman did not believe Magruder knew anything about it. Haldeman surmised that Magruder’s testimony would hurt both Strachan and me.

Ehrlichman arrived in the Oval Office with Haldeman accompanying him at 2:24
P.M.
to report on his meeting with Mitchell.
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“He is an innocent man in his heart, and in his mind, and he does not intend to move off that position,” Ehrlichman said. When the president said he wanted “chapter and verse,” Ehrlichman proceeded to recount their exchange in greater detail, as best he could recall it. Mitchell’s position was “You know, these characters pulled this thing off without my knowledge.” He claimed, contrary to Magruder, “I never saw Liddy for months at a time. I didn’t know what they were up to. Nobody was more surprised than I was.” When Ehrlichman pointed out that Mitchell had “lobbed mud balls at the White House at every opportunity,” Mitchell claimed that “the origin, of course, was in the White House, where Bob Haldeman and [Mitchell] talked about something called the Operation Sandwedge. That was really the grandfather of this whole thing. And, of course, that was never put together because we couldn’t get the right people to do it. They were talking about Joe Woods and people of that kind, so it never happened.”

Ehrlichman said he played Mitchell “with kid gloves” and, more specifically, he explained, “In fact, I never asked him to tell me anything. He just came forward with all this stuff.” Ehrlichman said they speculated on my and Magruder’s testimony and that Mitchell’s “characterization of all this is that he was a very busy man, and he wasn’t keeping track of what was going on at the committee, that this was engendered as a result of Hunt and Liddy coming to Colson’s office and getting Colson to make a phone call to Magruder, and that he, Mitchell, was not aware that all that had happened until [a committee aide, Van Shumway] brought Liddy into Mitchell’s office sometime in June, and that’s the first knowledge he had of it.”

Haldeman asked if that was before or after the arrests, and Ehrlichman did not know but said that it could be checked, because he had taped the conversation. Ehrlichman said he raised with Mitchell Magruder’s account of bringing him a memo with targets, and his checking off those he wanted pursued, but Mitchell denied it (although he had admitted it to Haldeman on March 28, which he had recorded in his diary). Haldeman interrupted to clarify that, while he had not checked off anything, Mitchell had approved Liddy’s operation.
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Mitchell also told Ehrlichman that a lot of his problems
with Liddy were that Liddy was a name-dropper. Mitchell indicated that he planned to defend himself every way he could, but he understood he could never get a fair trial in Washington, D.C. He regretted that so much was going to redound on the White House.

Ehrlichman reported that they discussed the money, particularly the $350,000 that had come from the White House. As he went through Mitchell’s recollections, Haldeman corroborated most of Mitchell’s account, and the president wanted Strachan informed so that he would get his own testimony correct. Mitchell said he was not aware of anyone’s going to the defendants and telling them not to testify, and Ehrlichman quoted him as saying, “I wasn’t really worried about what they testified to. I was worried about what they’d say to the press.” Haldeman noted, “That, somehow, Dean doesn’t see that, that way,” nor would anyone else when this claim was made to justify the payments. “Oh,” Ehrlichman remembered, “I told him that the only way that I knew that he was mentioned, insofar as the aftermath was concerned, was that from time to time he would send Dean over saying, ‘Hey, we need money for this,’ and [Mitchell] said, ‘Who told you that?’” Haldeman jumped in with “John Dean.” Ehrlichman, taking Haldeman’s statement as his own, continued, “And I said [to Mitchell], ‘John, that’s common knowledge. And Dean, among others, has told me that.’” Then, unaware that I had personally told Mitchell that I was talking to the prosecutors, Ehrlichman said that I had not been subpoenaed, which was true, nor had I testified, which was also true, but then said, “The way they are proceeding down there [at the U.S. Attorney’s Office], it looks like they are losing interest in [Dean].” When the president corrected him, Ehrlichman admitted that he had been spinning the facts, because he did not want Mitchell to think they were “jobbing him.” When Ehrlichman reported that Mitchell was claiming that it was the fault of the White House, because, in effect, Haldeman, Colson and Dean, working through Magruder, had frozen him out, Haldeman said, “He’s got an impossible problem with that.” To which Ehrlichman added, “The poor guy is punting.” (Ehrlichman failed to mention to the president—or had lumped it into “mud throwing by Mitchell”—a fact captured on Ehrlichman’s recording of their meeting: Namely, Mitchell thought the cover-up had been necessary because of Hunt’s and Liddy’s activities while they worked at the White House, which Mitchell had felt more serious threats to the president’s reelection than Watergate.
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)

Ehrlichman and Haldeman discussed Mitchell’s tremor, which
Ehrlichman thought worse than usual, and the president broke the silence that followed. “You’ve done your duty today. What’s the next question?” Haldeman responded that it was whether Ehrlichman should see Magruder at four o’clock. Ehrlichman thought there was no longer any purpose, and Haldeman remarked that Magruder would do as Mitchell wanted. But the president, thinking ahead, said he thought the purpose was to make a record, since Ehrlichman was secretly recording these sessions. “For that purpose, maybe I should,” Ehrlichman conceded. After discussing what they should and should not say to Magruder, the discussion turned again to me.

“I think we owe it to ourselves,” the president said, “to find out about John Dean, for example, what he now understands, what he thinks.” Ehrlichman agreed, saying, “This is probably a golden opportunity, in a way.” The president was blunt. “[W]ell, let me put it this way: We’ve got to find out what the hell he’s going to say.” Not as anxious about this matter as the president, Ehrlichman and Haldeman let the conversation drift back to Magruder and Mitchell, until Ehrlichman injected a point I had made to him regarding those on my indictable list: “Dean argues that in a conspiracy, such as they are trying to build, they may not have to prove the same kind of animus as to some of the participants, but only that they were in [the conspiracy]. I would have to read the cases. I just don’t know what the law is.”

Soon Ehrlichman brought up our earlier meeting, at which I had gone over the indictable list with him and Haldeman. After speculation about the possibility of Colson’s being indicted, Ehrlichman sighed and said, “Dean seems to think everybody in the place is going to get indicted,” which produced nervous laughter. “What Dean said is just looking at the worst possible side of the coin,” Haldeman offered. “That you could make a list of everybody who in some way is technically indictable in the cover-up operation. And that list includes, in addition to Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Dean, Strachan, Kalmbach, Kalmbach’s go-between, Kalmbach’s source, LaRue, Mardian, O’Brien, Parkinson, Hunt and, you know, just keep wandering through the impossible. He said maybe the route is for everybody on that list to take a guilty plea and get immediate, what do you call it, clemency,” he said after being prompted by Ehrlichman. “That shows you the somewhat unclear state,” he chuckled, “of John Dean’s analytical thinking.”
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The president wanted to know if he had requested an independent investigation at the time McCord sent his letter. “I was ready to report to you my tentative conclusions, and you wanted it turned over to the Department of
Justice,” Ehrlichman explained, as they concocted a new potential scenario. “If Mitchell is indicted, you think he’s going to be convicted?” the president asked. Ehrlichman did, particularly since Magruder had gone to the prosecutors. “But that’s only one man,” Nixon protested, and Ehrlichman assured him that that was sufficient. As Ehrlichman headed off to meet with Magruder, the president said, “Be sure you convey my warm sentiments.”

Haldeman and the president sat silently for a minute, until Haldeman said, “I think I ought to get Strachan squared away,” adding, “The only sticky wicket on that is Dean. I can’t understand, because it’s in his interest too, as well as everyone else’s, to see the [money] motive for what it was”—that is, for purportedly humanitarian reasons. After several more lengthy pauses, with each man deep in his own thoughts, Haldeman departed.

Late that afternonn, Ehrlichman and Haldeman went to the EOB office to report on the meeting with Magruder and his lawyers, who Ehrlichman reported had just come from an informal conference with the U.S. attorney.
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Haldeman, who had discussed the matter with Ehrlichman on the way, described it as the “same old sticky wickets, but no new one,” and noted that it was “much rougher on Dean.” Ehrlichman took the president through Magruder’s latest account.
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A few interesting details were featured, particularly that Colson was pushing for information on Larry O’Brien at the time he called Magruder to encourage approval of the Liddy projects.
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Magruder said that only he received a copy of the results of Liddy’s bugging at the DNC, which he then showed to Mitchell, who “thought it was a lot of junk, too.” He described the pictures taken by Liddy’s team inside the DNC as being of the “the kind of papers you’d find lying around a campaign.” He also said that Mitchell had found this information so useless that “he picked up the phone and called Liddy and chewed him out.” (There can be little doubt that Liddy, embarrassed by this call, used it as a pretext for returning to the DNC on June 17, 1972, later telling McCord and Hunt that they were proceeding on direct orders from Mitchell.) Magruder said the June 17 scheme “was entirely on Liddy’s own motion [and that] neither Mitchell or Magruder knew that another break-in was contemplated.” (Based on Magruder’s consistent account of this second break-in, Liddy’s own later account appears invented after the fact.
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)

“As I listened to this the second time around, let me tell you what my
concerns are,” Haldeman said of Magruder’s session with Ehrlichman. “I think when he got down to it, he told the truth. And when he is talking to us, at least, he is bringing us into it. He will, for instance, want to elaborate on Sandwedge and say I was involved in it. Now to the extent that I listened to a presentation, I was. But I, at the time, said, ‘This is something I don’t want to be involved in, and something that should not be handled in here. Don’t come to me any more with it,’ and they didn’t. And then they’ll say I was also involved in the meetings. But [Dean] came to me after that second meeting and said, ‘They came up with, you know, with the plans, a preposterous plan. And I told him that it can’t be done. They shouldn’t even be talking about it in the attorney general’s office.’ I said, ‘John, get out of it. You stay out of it, too.’ And he did. He said he would stay out of it from then on, and I suspect he did. But they’ll tie me in that way, by indirection. Maybe that sounds like everybody goes down with the ship, but when it comes to this cover-up business, expanding on the three fifty, I have not felt uncomfortable with that, but Dean is extremely uncomfortable with it.”