by James Rosen
But on this point, LaRue, for once, supported Magruder’s version of events, and Mitchell was accordingly convicted of ordering the destruction of evidence. The decision to testify against Mitchell was not one LaRue arrived at lightly; the strain of betrayal, of bearing false witness, pained him like none of Mitchell’s other protégés. “LaRue broke down and cried like a baby yesterday,” Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen reported to Nixon on April 17, 1973, as the tapes rolled, after LaRue’s first appearance before the grand jury. “He was not so bad on admitting the obstruction of justice and subornation. Resigned, said he’d probably plead…but when it came to testifying about John Mitchell he just broke down and started to cry. It is a terrible thing.”23
The day after that session at Mitchell’s Watergate apartment, Fred LaRue and Bob Mardian finally did what Dean had been smart enough to do a day earlier: Pick Gordon Liddy’s brain.24 The setting was LaRue’s apartment at Watergate West. “My recollection is pretty vivid,” Mardian later testified. “The first thing [Liddy] asked Mr. LaRue was whether or not he had a radio.” Liddy cranked up the volume and motioned Mardian to sit beside the radio. “It is not that I don’t trust you,” Liddy apologized over the din, “but this conversation cannot be recorded.” Next Liddy insisted Mardian agree they were covered by attorney-client privilege. Mardian agreed, but asserted a right to report everything to Mitchell, manager of the campaign that employed Mardian as counsel; Liddy consented.
Now Liddy unfurled his astounding story for the first time, telling the wide-eyed LaRue and Mardian all about his partnership with Howard Hunt: the hiring of the Cubans, with their CIA and Bay of Pigs backgrounds; the earlier break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist; Hunt’s bedside visit to Dita Beard, the ITT witness; and the three-week wiretapping operation at DNC. Since the arrests, Liddy said, he had shredded his files and believed the burglars themselves would keep mum; he also volunteered, as he had to Dean, to be told “what corner to stand on and he was ready to be assassinated.” That evening, LaRue and Mardian briefed Mitchell on the wild contents of their debriefing of Liddy. Asked Mitchell’s reaction, Mardian testified the former attorney general “appeared to be as sincerely shocked as I was when I got this information.”25
Here Mitchell approached a great fork in his life’s road. He knew now, for the first time, the full range of the Plumbers’ activities in the Nixon White House, the dark portfolio of cloak-and-dagger ventures he later pointedly dubbed “the White House horrors.” And it was here the former attorney general, absorbing this information, made his fateful decision to withhold what he knew from his client, the president of the United States. “To this day, I believe that I was right in not involving the president,” Mitchell told the Senate, calling the horrors “a great deal more damaging” than Watergate.
Watergate was already out. Watergate was the issue. It was the subject of a suit by the Democratic National Committee. It was constantly in the newspapers. The White House horror stories were not out. They were not under discussion. And these were the things that would have more impact upon the election, in my opinion, than the Watergate matter.
Duly informed, Nixon would have “lowered the boom” on the guilty, a move Mitchell argued would have cost the ’72 election. “I still believe that the most important thing to this country was the reelection of Richard Nixon,” Mitchell testified, “and I was not about to countenance anything that would stand in the way of that reelection.”26
Nixon, of course, knew far more about the Plumbers than Mitchell did. Nixon was also privately willing, as his tapes later made painfully clear, to entertain dark thoughts about his dear friend, Mitchell, and his role in Watergate. As his White House burned, Nixon returned frequently, both in his mind and aloud, to The Question—Did Mitchell do it?—and came, over time, to believe the worst. Nixon’s first known recorded conversation about Watergate was a late afternoon talk with Haldeman on June 20, 1972.
NIXON: Have you gotten any further word on that Mitchell operation?
HALDEMAN: No, I don’t think he did [know].
NIXON: I think he was surprised.27
That night, Nixon and Mitchell held their only known talk about the substance of Watergate. Their brief telephone call, initiated by the president, was not taped; but into his beloved DictaBelt machine Nixon later recorded his recollection of the exchange. The president said he “tried to cheer [Mitchell] up a bit” he thought the former attorney general sounded “completely tired and worn out.” Mitchell said he was “terribly chagrined that the activities of anybody attached to his committee should have been handled in such a manner” and expressed regret he had “not policed all the people more effectively in his own organization.” There was no talk of complicity: Nixon couldn’t bring himself to ask, and Mitchell wrongly presumed his innocence was assumed.28
Three days later, on June 23, 1972, unbeknownst to Mitchell, the president, seated at his Oval Office desk, enthusiastically approved a proposal—spelled out by Haldeman but conceived by John Dean, along with the false claim that Mitchell “concurred” in it—calling for the White House to apply pressure to the CIA to compel the spy agency to block the FBI’s Watergate investigation on national security grounds. “All right, fine, I understand it all,” Nixon sighed after giving the order. “We won’t second-guess Mitchell and the rest.” Prosecutors later dubbed the tape of this damning conversation the “smoking gun” its disclosure, in August 1974, triggered Nixon’s resignation three days later.29
On Saturday, June 24, 1972, one week after the arrests, Mitchell arrived at his law office to find “a hell of a knock-down drag-out donnybrook” under way between Jeb Magruder and Hugh Sloan. At issue was the exact sum Sloan had disbursed to Gordon Liddy prior to June 17. Magruder wanted a figure he could feed the grand jury; Sloan wasn’t talking. “When the going gets tough,” Mitchell famously sneered, “the tough get going.” Mitchell later claimed he was not suborning perjury, only consoling Sloan, who seemed “pretty low.”30
Mardian wandered in and clapped Sloan on the back. Then, after Sloan and Magruder skulked out, Dean entered; later LaRue joined them. According to the special prosecutors, the first of several plans to raise “hush money” for the burglars was conceived at this meeting, with Mitchell and Mardian supposedly instructing Dean to petition the Central Intelligence Agency to provide the arrested men with “covert funds.” Of this, too, the seventh “overt act” in his indictment, Mitchell was convicted. On the hush-money charges, Mitchell’s chief accuser was not Magruder but the far smarter Dean, who cleverly portrayed himself to the prosecutors, the press, and the public as a mere messenger between two sets of amoral masters: Haldeman and Ehrlichman at the White House, and Mitchell, Mardian, and LaRue at CRP. In time the prosecutors, at least, saw through Dean’s ruse—but still built their case on his deeply flawed testimony.
The first time the idea of payments to the burglars had been broached with Mitchell was on June 21, when Mardian and LaRue briefed the former attorney general on their interrogation of Liddy. Mitchell had immediately rejected the idea of CRP providing any funds, Mardian said. Now, three days later, in Mitchell’s law office, Dean testified, Mitchell “suggested that the CIA might be of assistance because these people were obviously CIA operatives, or had been at some point in time, [and] might compromise the CIA.”
Both Mardian and Mitchell denied this. Dean, moreover, needed no nudging to view CIA as a potential savior. It had been Dean’s idea the day before, as captured on the “smoking gun” tape, to try to get CIA to run interference with the FBI, a bold gambit that Dean also knew had failed. If the Agency was unwilling to force an end to the FBI probe by applying political pressure from the top down, perhaps Langley would be more comfortable resolving the matter from the bottom up, silencing the burglars with untraceable cash? It was a logical progression of thought, but one for which Dean, naturally, never took credit, instead casting Mitchell and Mardian as its authors.31
That week the calc
ulating White House counsel met three times with a top CIA official to request covert cash, to no avail. All three times, the Agency’s deputy director, taken aback at how the young lawyer “kept pressing” the issue, turned him down cold. “He was almost pleadingly asking me for some theory, for something that would help him out in this,” the official, Vernon Walters, later told the House Armed Services Committee. Dean left “looking glum.” A House intelligence subcommittee that investigated the Dean-Walters meetings later concluded it was “not clear…whether other top White House aides were aware of Dean’s activities.”32
Hush money remained a viable option; the cash just had to come from a source other than CIA. In his Senate and House testimony, Dean suggested that the Agency’s rebuffs had sent him scurrying back to Mitchell for a new plan of action, and that Mitchell obliged during a meeting in the former attorney general’s law office on Wednesday, June 28, with Mardian and LaRue also present. Dean’s executive session testimony before the Senate, previously unpublished, quoted Mitchell as saying: “I think we are going to have to get Kalmbach involved in this.”33
Herb Kalmbach was one of the greatest fund-raisers in American history. In Nixon’s ’68 campaign, he reportedly raised $6 million (more than $30 million in current figures). After turning down an offer to serve as undersecretary of commerce, Kalmbach returned to Newport Beach, California, where, on the strength of his White House connections, he quietly fattened his private law practice. But he never completely left Washington, and its underside, behind. Using leftover campaign funds, Kalmbach served in 1969–70 as the paymaster for Anthony Ulasewicz, a former NYPD detective whom Ehrlichman and Dean had assigned various unsavory chores, including a probe of Senator Edward Kennedy’s sex life. Mitchell’s dealings with Kalmbach were rare. They had met in ’68, but seen each other only seldom thereafter; it was only coincidence, born of geography and dire necessity, that the former attorney general had dialed Kalmbach when Martha Mitchell, crying and bleeding at the Newporter Inn, required immediate assistance.34
During the June 28 meeting, according to Dean, Mitchell again saw Kalmbach as his savior. Dean testified that Mitchell instructed him to enlist the fund-raising genius on behalf of the Watergate burglars. The Kalmbach gambit was the third scheme for obstructing the FBI probe that Dean attributed to his former mentor. When Dean appeared before the full Senate committee, nine days after his executive session, he introduced a number of new elements to strengthen his charge about Mitchell and Kalmbach. “After some discussion which I cannot recall with any specificity at this time,” Dean said, pressing an uncharacteristic claim of forgetfulness, Mitchell “asked me to get the approval of Haldeman and Ehrlichman to use Mr. Herbert Kalmbach to raise the necessary money.” Then the witness recalled, for the first time, that Mitchell’s damning instruction went unheard by the other men present, Mardian and LaRue:
Before I departed the meeting, I remembered [sic] that Mr. Mitchell, in an aside for my ears only, told me that the White House, in particular Ehrlichman, should be very interested and anxious to accommodate the needs of these men.35
A master manipulator, Dean made sure Haldeman and Ehrlichman believed the Kalmbach gambit was the brainchild of a very desperate John Mitchell. Ehrlichman recalled Dean telling him that Mitchell “felt very strongly” the arrested men needed competent attorneys, and that Dean added: “I am going to see if we can get Herb Kalmbach wound up to raise some attorneys’ fees for John Mitchell, who says we really have got to do it…. If [Kalmbach] checks with you, back me up on this.”36
That night, at Dean’s request, Kalmbach caught a red-eye flight to Washington. The next day Dean steered the older man away from a prearranged meeting at the Hay-Adams Hotel into outdoor Lafayette Park, in the shadow of the White House, and instructed him to gesture broadly as they talked—in case they were being watched. “We would like to have you raise funds for the legal defense of these defendants and for the support of their families,” Dean announced. He never explained who “we” were. Further instructions, Dean said, would come from himself and Fred LaRue. Kalmbach asked why a public defense fund couldn’t be established; not enough time, Dean said.37
That was all Kalmbach, hungry for “tough and dangerous” assignments, needed to hear. Over the next three months—taking his orders from Dean and LaRue, and employing the stealthy services of Tony Ulasewicz, who devised a system of phone contacts, code names, and blind drops at airports—Kalmbach steered some $220,000 to the burglars’ lawyers and Mrs. Howard Hunt. A month into the intrigue, however, Kalmbach grew queasy; he wondered if Dean actually had the authority to order such a dicey operation. The master fund-raiser demanded a meeting with John Ehrlichman, and got it July 26. Pressing for assurance his was a “proper” assignment, Kalmbach later recalled that Ehrlichman looked him straight in the eye and said: “Herb, John Dean does have the authority, it is proper, and you are to go forward.” But Kalmbach was not reassured for long; by mid-September 1972, he dropped out for good. Dean would have to find a new source for the burglars’ hush money.38
It didn’t take the special prosecutors long to spot the holes in Dean’s story of how Kalmbach got roped into the cover-up. For starters, Dean claimed that Mitchell proposed the idea during a meeting in his law office on June 28; but the former attorney general was out of town that day and totally incommunicado, consumed by the Martha Mitchell nightmare then reaching its dénouement at the Westchester Country Club.
“I never tried to get Mr. Kalmbach into raising money,” Mitchell testified at his trial, a position he reasserted in 1988: “I didn’t have anything to do with Kalmbach…. Why would I fish Kalmbach out of all of the people that were around Stans raising money?” Conversely, Mitchell suggested, it would have been quite natural for Dean—who admitted he “often” worked with Kalmbach in Nixon’s first term—to look to him for fund-raising assistance. Mitchell’s claim of estrangement from the hush-money business was no last-minute confection manufactured for a jury’s consumption. Kalmbach himself confirmed as much. In April 1988—in the only interviews he ever gave—Kalmbach told author Len Colodny: “I never met with John Mitchell at all. Mitchell never asked me to raise money.”39
Mitchell’s absence from Washington during the week of June 26 created serious problems for the WSPF prosecutors, even beyond the question—important as it was—of who enlisted Kalmbach. For example, Dean had also claimed, in testimony before the grand jury, to have “kept Mitchell informed” about the three meetings with General Walters of CIA; yet Dean’s logs showed no calls to or from Mitchell, in New York or anywhere else, on any of the days on which Dean met with Walters. These discrepancies between Dean’s testimony and the evidence embodied in Mitchell’s logs were material and glaring. The special prosecutors couldn’t just throw Dean on the stand and expect the defense lawyers at U.S. v. Mitchell to ignore them; they had to be ironed out—eliminated. In a previously unpublished draft memorandum prepared in July 1974, WSPF lawyer George Frampton—the same man who helped Magruder rework his testimony—summarized the difficulty he faced with Dean.40
Dean’s Senate and grand jury testimony leaves the impression (which is explicit in the Senate) that his approach to Mitchell about using Kalmbach came only after it became clear CIA would not cooperate. However, Mitchell’s logs and schedule suggest that the two possibilities—use of Kalmbach and use of CIA—were probably discussed at the same time, and that Dean exercised somewhat more discretion himself to forge ahead with getting Kalmbach into the picture than he has admitted…. Our case will probably have to be based on the theory that Mitchell asked Dean on Saturday, June 24, to explore both the CIA and Kalmbach possibilities; or that Mitchell’s logs are incomplete.41
The Frampton memo is a “smoking gun” in its own right: irrefutable evidence of what the Watergate special prosecutors knew, and when they knew it, about their star witness, Dean, and his false testimony against the prosecution’s prime target, Mitchell. The changes to Dean’s story that emerged during
his testimony at U.S. v. Mitchell reflected the prosecutors’ handiwork. Now Mitchell’s muttered remark about Haldeman and Ehrlichman having a special interest in the payment of hush money, the “aside” meant solely for Dean’s ears, came not on June 28, as Dean originally asserted, but on Saturday, June 24, in the meeting at which Mitchell and Mardian had supposedly encouraged Dean to try the CIA route. In this latest iteration, Mitchell’s “aside” was aimed at getting Haldeman and Ehrlichman to consider both the Kalmbach and CIA options. To disguise this testimonial sleight of hand, Dean now remembered, for the first time, that when he brought Mitchell’s idea to Ehrlichman—mere messenger!—the latter had instructed Dean to “hold on it with Kalmbach” and “explore [further] with CIA.”
While prepared to discard previous testimony, amend dates, and change the substance of alleged conversations with his colleagues, Dean was unwilling to abandon his twin claims to have “kept Mitchell informed” about the trio of meetings with Walters and to have received from Mitchell the final order to set Kalmbach in motion. To acknowledge that he kept Mitchell in the dark about the Walters meetings, or that he enjoyed no communication with Mitchell prior to Kalmbach’s red-eye flight, would have amounted to a public concession by Dean of that which the Frampton memo, privately, made plain: that the witness exercised “more discretion” in the hush money business “than he has admitted.”
