After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  Instead of looking separately at those whys, there are two explanations people like to give for all of them: that Nixon was insane; that it was not his nature, as revealed by the whole history of his life, to yield an inch in anything. One problem with these answers is that, even if true, there is really nothing they explain. To account for apparent lapses in the conduct of a man who rose to great power at least twice, and fell from it, by claiming he was just intransigent or mad is to disregard the particular meaning of any of them. Whatever the state of his sanity or his nature, Nixon was doing all right with them until mid-1974. If there needs to be a single abstraction, or at least a sweeping word, to cover the detail of the mistakes made by and for him, I do not think that a word exists, for a middle way that is not only wrong; it is the only way that is wrong, a kind of dark side of the Golden Mean. Anything—more, less, everything, nothing—is sometimes better than that way. With the medium lie, the partial erasure, the half stonewall, the President and his lawyers were always finding their way into it.

  But there doesn’t need to be an abstraction, a policy or state of character, to explain those whys. Looking again, in terms of the substance of the tapes themselves, at just that initial question of the pardons, specific explanations do suggest themselves. It has always been an anomaly that whatever we know, from tapes or other sources, about the offenses that led to Nixon’s departure from office is based, in one way or another, on what was known to John Dean. Although Dean knew a lot (the Huston plan, the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, the seventeen wiretaps, certain events that preceded the Watergate break-in, the essentials of the cover-up), he was, after all, a minor White House lawyer, who did not even have a conversation of substance with the President until September 15, 1972—when Nixon needed to have talked with Dean as a basis for covering him with a claim of executive, and for good measure, attorney-client, privilege. How little Dean was in the President’s confidence is clear from the now-famous conversation of March 21, 1973, in which he “informed” Nixon of what Nixon already so well knew. And because that conversation subsequently acquired such importance (in terms of Dean’s credibility, of Watergate, and of choices Nixon subsequently made), almost all subpoenas of presidential conversations were addressed to the matter of confirming or failing to confirm what John Dean knew—which, as far as the President was concerned, was confined almost entirely to conversations in the spring of 1973, about Watergate.

  Except for September 15, 1972. And looking again at the transcript of that conversation, it becomes obvious why the President could not safely grant Hunt and the other burglars pardons: the House Committee on Banking and Currency, the Patman Committee. The problem was never the burglary of the Watergate. The problem was the source of the cash. As soon as hundred-dollar bills in the possession of the burglars had been traced via Bernard Barker’s bank account to Mexico (i.e., within five days of the burglary), the course of events was set. The same account had cleared $89,000 in checks endorsed by a Mexican lawyer, Manuel Ogarrio. And the problem, from the moment the cash was traced to a Mexican bank account, was that the Patman Committee started to look into it—and that committee, unlike any subsequent investigative body, would have known how and where to look. In late 1969 and early 1970, the Patman Committee had held hearings about secret, numbered foreign bank accounts (in Switzerland, the Bahamas, and elsewhere) mainly with a view to the use of such accounts by organized crime. It had not considered their use in a political campaign. By September 1972, it was beginning to look into exactly that. When it was stopped.

  Chairman Wright Patman had a list of witnesses concerning cash transactions related to the Watergate. On September 14, 1972, the first of the important witnesses declined to appear. Chairman Patman scheduled another meeting, for October 3, 1972, to proceed with the subpoena power. On October 2, 1972, Assistant Attorney General Henry E. Petersen wrote Patman a letter, hand-delivered, warning that the committee hearings might “not only jeopardize the prosecution” of the Watergate case but also “seriously prejudice” the defendants’ rights. If Nixon had granted pardons, that argument would, of course, have fallen apart; hearings can hardly prejudice the rights of defendants when the President has already pardoned them. The Patman investigation could have gone ahead. In his conversation of September 15, 1972, the President wanted to ensure that it would not. He issued instructions that a number of people be sent to contact the committee with that argument from defendants’ rights. He considered sending Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. Then he thought of John Connally. He finally settled on sending Congressman Gerald Ford. (President: “What about Ford? . . . This is, this is, big, big play . . . they can all work out something. But they ought to get off their asses and push it. No use to let Patman have a free ride . . . .”)

  The Patman hearings were suspended. By October 31, 1972, the committee’s staff had made a little headway all the same. Even without subpoena power, the staff had found enormous irregularities in the bookkeeping of, among others, the treasurer of the Finance Committee to Re-Elect the President, Hugh Sloan. And in the records of several banks where CREEP had its accounts. And in statements, written and oral, made to investigators about the sources of the cash, by the chairman of the Finance Committee to Re-Elect, Maurice Stans. The staff had also, almost incidentally, discovered a campaign contribution to CREEP via the Banque Internationale à Luxembourg. There was so much cash and so much irregularity, though, that without the power to subpoena records or to take testimony under oath, the committee lost the trail.

  Secret foreign accounts as a source of laundered campaign contributions would not, in and of themselves, be enough to impeach a President, either. To turn then, for a while, to the questions raised by Nixon’s treatment of the tapes. There can hardly be any doubt, in the logic of events, that Alexander Butterfield, who disclosed the existence of the taping system to the minority staff of the Ervin Committee and then to the full committee on national television, was a plant. The only question for a time was whose. Ever since he testified, Butterfield has managed to imply that he spoke reluctantly, that a question was put to him in such a way that he had to tell, or perjure himself, or compromise his honor, or whatever. This version—the reluctant witness, the clever investigator—has understandably not been disputed by the Ervin Committee staff. But the record, the only record that staff made of that interview at the time, simply does not bear that out. Butterfield volunteered. “I feel it is something you ought to know about,” he said, “in your investigations.” Having added, in that initial interview, “This is something I know the President did not want revealed,” Butterfield went on to tell the full committee, on national television, that the tapes “are precisely the substance on which the President plans to present his defense.” He went to considerable lengths then to emphasize—utterly misleadingly, as it turned out—the particular clarity of the tapes, and the care with which they were checked, both in the Executive Office Building and in the Oval Office. The EOB tapes were, in reality, so bad that the President himself (in his tape of June 4, 1973) complained of how hard it was to understand them; the group that produced the inquiry transcripts spent approximately one man-hour per minute trying to decipher them. I leave aside the question of whether Butterfield was an agent of the CIA—a rumor reported in The New York Times and elsewhere, and denied by him. Although his testimony ultimately backfired, it seems certain that Haldeman (and by extension, Nixon) sent him in.

  As a character in all these events, Butterfield has never made much sense. Like Hugh Sloan, Earl Silbert, Henry Petersen, Alexander Haig, Fred Buzhardt, and even James St. Clair, he was one of what became an unlikely herd of self-styled victims of deceit, and then self-serving and improbable heroes of Watergate. Butterfield’s wife had been Haldeman’s wife’s best friend at college. The Butterfields and Haldemans were friends. Butterfield’s office was placed to control all access, by persons or documents, to President Nixon’s office—surely a sign of an earned trust. When Haldema
n needed somebody to hide the $350,000 secret White House fund of cash, the man he used was Butterfield. Butterfield subsequently became an informer, the informer, for the impeachment inquiry. But, apart from homey speculations about the Nixon marriage (he was, in every interview, the source of the story that the Nixons were not close), he never really said anything. His initial disclosure of the existence of the tapes was, after all, in the President’s interest. Everyone who had spoken to the President was put on notice: No one could feel safe. With the misleading emphasis on clarity, people were warned all the more clearly. It is probable that, in three years of only normally sycophantic conversation with the President, there was not a major figure in government, from all three branches, the military, all the various bureaus, agencies, and departments (not to mention minor White House officials who might, like John Dean, have felt under pressure to testify), who did not feel compromised, or even implicated in a felony, on those tapes. The President had them, and had at the time no reason to think he must disclose any more of them than he cared to. The message in Butterfield’s testimony was a perfect threat, at the very least, to every Nixon confidant and appointee.

  To take just one domestic constellation: the Department of Justice (in the person of Attorney General Richard Kleindienst) and the two major investigative agencies (in the persons of Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray and CIA Director Richard Helms) were intimately involved with the obstruction of justice on which the case for impeachment came to rest. When Senator Lowell Weicker, of the Ervin Committee, first suggested that the President might have been guilty of “misprision of a felony” in not reporting to any properly constituted authority what John Dean had told him, and when the House Judiciary Committee considered, as part of its argument for impeachment, the same failure to pass the information on, Nixon may have thought his accusers were not sane. There could scarcely be any legal or constitutional obligation to report a crime to people who were in on it—and for whose complicity he thought he had, among other evidence, the tapes.

  If the tapes as a veiled and planted threat did not entirely work, the reason may apply to most adversary situations, in public and in private life, in which both parties are lying and at fault. When people lie in concert, a single, simple truth can be impossible to prove—as in the case of finding, among only three suspects, the individual who produced the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap. But when they lie in conflict, each liar, in indignation about the other, may begin to feel innocent. People who feel wronged, in particular, are likely to forget what regrettable thing it is they themselves did or said. It could be that, in their outrage, those people who were compromised on the tapes simply forgot. Or maybe the threat did work, and they did not forget. History, after all, is left with the remarkable fact that, to this day, nobody except John Dean has come out with testimony, borne out by the tapes or otherwise, that implicates President Nixon in any crimes. And here is the status of the tapes themselves: Although Congress has, by special legislation, impounded them (thereby foreclosing Nixon’s access to the main weapon he thought he had against others and, simultaneously, precluding access to the best evidence against the man himself), the tapes remain, while the matter is appealed to the Supreme Court, in the EOB. Dr. James Rhodes, the national archivist, has written to Nixon’s lawyers and to the White House to request permission to rewind the tapes—which he says are deteriorating because they are loosely wound. Dr. Rhodes has also asked to check which tapes, of what may be as many as five thousand hours of conversation, actually do contain a “signal,” i.e., voices—a matter that can be very quickly checked. He has received no reply. It is possible that, among all the parties of interest in the tapes, only the national archivist is concerned with preserving them.

  As for why Nixon would submit to the Judiciary Committee doctored transcripts of tapes the staff already had, that nearly worked. The White House released its thick book of doctored transcripts on April 30, 1974. The regular staff, at the time, was in such a daze of fairness that it simply could not find systematic discrepancies between the White House version and the true version of eight conversations that overlapped. When the EOB tapes turned out to be mostly garble, interrupted by hissing, buzzing, and tapping noises, Doar considered abandoning this form of evidence. The lore-manufacturing apparatus, at this point, introduces a blind lady, with miraculously sensitive ears. There was no blind lady. A blind man who listened to the EOB tapes couldn’t understand them either. A member of Doar’s small group insisted, threatening to resign over the question, that Doar permit him and a tape expert to re-record from originals at the White House, and later (when White House Attorney Fred Buzhardt withdrew access to originals) from the tapes in Judge Sirica’s chambers. The tape expert and the member of the group who had threatened to resign found two others to “go into the mud,” as they put it, for hundreds of hours, filling out each transcript, word by word. The rest of the small group initiated work on the discrepancies—weeks after the White House transcripts were released.

  The grand jury had based its presentment, mainly, on the tape of the March 21, 1973, conversation in the Oval Office between the President and John Dean. St. Clair directed his whole case, such as it was, toward showing that the President had not unequivocally authorized the payment of hush money on that day. But the “I don’t give a shit . . . I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else . . . save the plan” conversation, which persuaded Republican congressmen Thomas Railsback and Robert McClory to vote for impeachment, took place on March 22, 1973, in the EOB. It was deleted from the White House transcripts and unintelligible on the Special Prosecutor’s. The grand jury never heard it. It is even possible that nobody at the White House ever heard it, that it was always mud. Barely possible. The recopying had just reached the tape of March 22, 1973, when Buzhardt cut off access to the tapes.

  In this context, too, there is a particular point about the transcript of June 23, 1972—the tape that was supposed so profoundly to have shocked the President’s defenders that it obliged them to persuade him to resign. The few, very few, Nixon associates who have not tried since his resignation to save themselves at his expense claim that both Buzhardt and St. Clair had read in May this transcript which so astounded them in July. Buzhardt has said that he knew all was lost when, in late July 1973, he listened for the first time to the tape of June 23, 1972, and heard the incriminating word “Gemstone.” The inquiry’s tape expert says it took months for him to be able to decipher that word. In any case, it is certain that both Buzhardt and St. Clair were familiar with the contents of the tape before the Judiciary Committee voted, and did not trouble to let any of the President’s defenders on the committee know. Months later, during the trial of U.S. v. Mitchell, et al., it became clear that this transcript also had been doctored; neither of Nixon’s lawyers had called attention to those excisions in July when they had listened to the tape. When one recalls that the President, in the statement with which he released the transcript, made a special point of admitting that he had concealed it from his attorneys—when one realizes that the worst strangler, dope-pusher, child-molester, finds it unnecessary in adversity to apologize to his own counsel—it seems possible that in this little episode the President was framed. St. Clair felt that, before the case reached the floor of the House, he ought to show Congressman Wiggins, the President’s major defender on the committee, that transcript of June 23, 1972. Having received what must have been a considerable shock when Wiggins, enraged, told him the transcript meant the case was lost (and that if the White House did not at once make the transcript public, he, Wiggins, would), St. Clair must have returned to his client with an assurance that the problem was not insuperable—as long as the President’s counsel did not resign. St. Clair, however, would feel obliged to resign unless the President stated publicly that he had withheld from his attorneys the knowledge of this tape. The President believed, and did as he was told. And St. Clair was able to tell the press that he was n
ot, after all, the first lawyer whose client had lied to him.

  As for not having found and turned over a single tape the President looked good on, it is fairly clear, from the tape of June 4, 1973, that Nixon, with the concurrence of Ziegler and earlier Haldeman (and Haig, with his loving assurance, “Only you. Only you”), was under the impression that he sounded pretty good on most of them. On June 26, 1973, Nixon again listened to himself on tape. Within days, the Ervin Committee heard from Butterfield. And St. Clair, who liked to insist that he was defending the presidency, when he was actually using the presidency to protect a criminal defendant and then using the President himself to protect the President’s lawyer’s name, never did give a straightforward reply when members of the committee asked whether he had listened to any tapes at all. He could presumably have asked Buzhardt to find a good tape, but neither of the lawyers seems to have felt a necessity for finding one, they were so preoccupied with the minuscule questions posed by the tape of March 21, 1973. Finally, why not have flooded the committee, as is often done in antitrust cases, with unassimilable evidence? As well ask why the White House lawyers were remiss in almost everything. There was every reason, however, for President Nixon not to want to do it. And the inescapable inference, I think, consists in the explanation why.