The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (28 page)

The secret tapes of Nixon’s meetings and telephone conversations about the Moorer-Radford affair, as the episode later came to be known, remained classified until October 2000, when they were released by the National Archives along with some four hundred hours of other Nixon recordings. Unpublished until now, these tapes, covering late December 1971 and early January 1972, rank among the most important of the Nixon presidency, for they offer insights into how a wartime commander-in-chief coped with an unprecedented crisis in American history. They also show how instrumental Attorney General Mitchell was in shaping the president’s response.
⁵⁵

In the nighttime session, his first briefing on the matter, Nixon wondered aloud whether Kissinger’s deputy, Alexander Haig, a Pentagon loyalist, had known about the spying; it was Haig, after all, who had selected Radford for the overseas trips. “I don’t know,” Ehrlichman said. “I suspect Haig may be aware, but by back-channel basis.” “Is Haig wiretapped?” Nixon asked, unmindful of the irony that it was Haig who had managed the wiretaps on Kissinger’s aides two years before. “Why not?” Haldeman replied. But Nixon never ordered a wiretap on Haig—for tactical reasons. “We are going to continue to handle the Chiefs…through Haig,” Nixon told Haldeman and Ehrlichman on December 23. “But we’ll let them know what they’re
supposed
to know.”

Only after Ehrlichman, the Plumbers’ overlord, finished recounting the facts during that first meeting did the attorney general weigh in. “Mr. President, I’d like to point out that this thing goes right into the Joint Chiefs of Staff…. The important thing in my way of thinking is to stop this Joint Chiefs of Staff operation, and to buck up the security over here.”

NIXON:
[Welander] had to know he was getting stuff from Kissinger’s and Haig’s briefcases. That is wrong! Understand? I’m just saying that’s wrong. Do you agree?

MITCHELL:
No question about it, that the whole concept of having this yeoman get into this affair and start to get this stuff back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff is just like coming in and robbing your desk.

NIXON:
Yes it is.

The president thirsted for revenge; prosecuting Moorer was “a possibility.” The attorney general agreed Moorer deserved punishment, but warned Nixon, without elaborating, about “what this would lead to if you pursued it by way of prosecution of Moorer.” The in-house deceptions and private back channels, the secret bombing of Cambodia—all this would likely become public if Nixon pressed charges against the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Mitchell proposed his own remedy, speaking quietly but with such authority and finality that to hear the surviving recording is to wonder who was giving the orders in the Oval Office that night and who was taking them; indeed, the president followed Mitchell’s prescription almost to the letter.

MITCHELL:
What has been done has been done. I think that the important thing is to paper this thing over.

NIXON:
Hmmph!

MITCHELL:
This way—first of all, get that liaison office the hell out of NSC and put it back at the Pentagon.

NIXON:
Correct.

MITCHELL:
Secondly, get a security officer into the NSC.

NIXON:
Correct. Well, what about Henry Kissinger?

MITCHELL:
Well, I think that whoever goes in there is going to have to ride herd not only on the rest of the [NSC] staff but on Henry…. With respect to the Joint Chiefs, you have to get, in my opinion, this guy Admiral Welander the hell out of there, by way of a signal. That way you can transfer him to Kokomo, or Indiana, or anywhere we want to have him, along, of course, with this yeoman. And I think the best thing to do is for me—and we’ll leave Laird aside for a moment—but for me to sit down with Tom Moorer, and point out what this scene is that’s been going on, and it’s the end of the road…. This ball game’s over with.

Mitchell’s remedy reflected his pragmatism (“What’s done is done”) and his toughness. He knew someone had to take on the Joint Chiefs. This daunting task the attorney general arrogated unto himself, first because he saw robbing the president’s desk as a criminal matter; second, because Mitchell had the nerve to confront Moorer and he knew Nixon, who flinched from direct confrontation, did not. “I think the strategy you suggested,” Nixon meekly told Mitchell, “is the one that I would pursue.” The next day, in an even softer voice, the president confessed to Haldeman: “I created this whole situation, this—this
lesion
. It’s just unbelievable. Unbelievable.”

“John Mitchell knew Tom
Moorer and liked him,” Ehrlichman recalled. “Our bad news distressed the attorney general greatly.”
⁵⁶
Perhaps for that reason, Mitchell, in interviews with writers and historians in later years, never fully disclosed what he knew—what the declassified tapes later
showed
he knew—about Moorer’s complicity in the espionage. “Moorer was totally uninvolved and blameless,” the former attorney general told a disbelieving Seymour Hersh in 1982. “I don’t believe Tom Moorer was spying to this day,” he repeated to author Robert Gettlin in 1985. To Len Colodny, Gettlin’s coauthor on
Silent Coup: The Removal of a President
, with whom Mitchell conducted some eighty hours of recorded telephone interviews in the last three years of his life, the former attorney general initially dissembled about the conclusions he and the president had reached in December 1971.

COLODNY:
Did Nixon ever discuss with you what he really thought?

MITCHELL:
[Sigh] Um, trying to refresh my recollection…. Our discussions were to the point that, uh, these other characters attached to the JCS were doing all this without Moorer’s concurrence or, or, uh, cooperation.
⁵⁷

Colodny did not have the December 21 tape, but, building on the work of other scholars, he amassed enough evidence to force Mitchell to change his tune. By June 1986, the former attorney general effectively abandoned the pretense of Moorer’s innocence—but still stopped short of implicating his old friend by name. “It was not in the interest of the government to stir up a situation which would indicate that the military was acting contrary to the interests of the president,” Mitchell said, “and you probably put your finger on it: because of the back channel aspects of it.” Mitchell’s companion, Mary Gore Dean, proved far more forthcoming, telling Colodny in October 1987: “I asked John…. He said, ‘Admiral Moorer was up to his eyeballs in it.’”
⁵⁸

Why did Mitchell muddy the historical record? Perhaps he was confident the December 21 tape would never surface, at least during his lifetime, and he still regarded the Moorer-Radford affair as an explosive subject with real national security implications. Another possibility is that Mitchell, deep in debt after his stint in prison, despaired of angering Moorer, with whom he had business dealings.
⁵⁹

Questioned by historian Stanley Kutler in February and April 1988, Mitchell said he “interviewed” Moorer at the time and “got a flat, outright statement that he knew nothing about it…a complete denial.”
⁶⁰
Not until the twenty-first century, and the release of the relevant tapes, could the truth be known. On the afternoon of December 23, 1971, Ehrlichman briefed the president on Mitchell’s showdown with Moorer.

EHRLICHMAN:
[Mitchell] said that Moorer admits that he saw stuff, but that he operated on the assumption that his liaison man was working this all out with Henry…. I said, “Well, did you get a plea of guilty or a not guilty?” And [Mitchell] says, “I got a
nolo contendere
.”

NIXON:
[Did Mitchell] tell him about the briefcases and all that?

EHRLICHMAN:
Yup.

NIXON:
And?

EHRLICHMAN:
Moorer said, “Why, that’s shocking.” Told him, “Whoever did that should go to jail.”

Next, Haldeman briefed the president on Ehrlichman’s first attempt to break all of this to Henry Kissinger. Struggling to get a read on the various players, Nixon asked what Kissinger—the primary target of the spying—had said about the prospect of criminal prosecution. “What do you do on that?” Kissinger had asked. “Well,” Ehrlichman responded, “it’s in the hands of the attorney general…. Admiral Welander thinks that we should put the yeoman in jail; Admiral Moorer thinks we should put Welander in jail.” Kissinger thought Moorer should go to jail. “John and I both laughed,” Haldeman told the president. “As you go up the ladder, everybody’s going to crucify the guy under him, and nobody’ll take the blame himself.”

The following morning, Kissinger and Haig visited Ehrlichman’s office. There they heard the tape of the interrogation of Admiral Welander that Ehrlichman and the Plumbers’ David Young had conducted on the afternoon of December 22. The admiral had admitted knowing about Radford, and that he himself had funneled the stolen papers to Moorer. After the tape ended, Ehrlichman later wrote, Kissinger exploded in purple rage. “[Nixon] won’t fire Moorer!” he shouted. “They can spy on him and spy on me and betray us and he won’t fire them!…I assure you,” Kissinger intoned before stalking out, “all this tolerance will lead to very serious consequences for this administration!”
⁶¹

Kissinger was never more prescient. Though unnoticed at the time, Ehrlichman’s interrogation of Admiral Welander also confirmed Nixon’s early suspicions about the role in the affair played by Alexander Haig. “I think you have to talk to Al Haig on this,” the admiral told his questioners. “It’s been a two-way street.” At another point Welander stated flatly: “Al Haig has cut me in on what [the White House has] been thinking about…and given me a copy of game plans and so on.”
⁶²

Mitchell harbored few illusions about Haig, whom he came to consider “a power grabber…pleased to abandon Nixon to maintain his power base in Washington and the military.” Shown the transcript of the Ehrlichman-Welander interrogation many years later, the former attorney general declared that had Nixon seen it, he would never have appointed Haig to succeed Haldeman as chief of staff. Had that happened, of course, historians would never have had to grapple, as they have, with like questions about Haig’s conduct—and loyalties—in the latter stages of Watergate: the disclosure of Nixon’s taping system, the origins and discovery of the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap, the pardon. Asked if the failure to move on Haig in December 1971 marked “one of those crucial turning points that could have saved the Nixon presidency,” Mitchell answered affirmatively: “It would have taken and put Haig in a different light and probably…got [him] the hell out of there.”
⁶³

Thus by the time he died, Mitchell realized his burial of the Moorer-Radford scandal—undertaken to spare the nation a court-martial involving the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and to give Nixon a “whip hand” over them—effectively sealed the president’s own fate. By allowing men he distrusted, and who distrusted him, to remain in place in the White House and at the Pentagon, Nixon ensured that the culture of secrecy and paranoia that infused his first term persisted until the Watergate scandal aborted his presidency.

As Nixon’s knowledge of
the Moorer-Radford affair deepened, he faced the unpleasant task of addressing it with those involved. He chose the least confrontational manner—telephone calls—with the Christmas holiday as his pretext. The recipients of these phone calls got different messages, delivered with varying doses of subtlety. First came Haig, shortly after 5:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve, 1971. After lathering up the colonel with gossipy talk about Kissinger—Nixon was a master at playing the two off each other—the president got down to business, directing his words as much to Moorer as to Haig.

NIXON:
Incidentally, on the Moorer thing. That’s just—you just couldn’t even dream of having Moorer out of that thing. I mean, he’s part of a system. And the damn thing, I’m sure, started before he was there.

HAIG:
That’s right.

NIXON:
I think—I think it goes back over years, and it probably went further than he ever expected it was gonna go. That’s my guess.