WATERGATE AND THE CAMPAIGN OF 1972
September 15, 1972. Earlier that day, a federal grand jury had returned indictments against the five Watergate burglars as well as E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. A Justice Department spokesman described the investigation as “in a state of repose” and thought it “highly unlikely” that it would be extended. Following the President’s suggestion, Republican Party officials demanded that the Democrats apologize for their allegations of White House wrongdoing in the break-in; campaign marching orders still came from the Oval Office. On September 14 Nixon had been pleased to learn that the indictments would be confined to lower echelons, and he was confident that the indictments would “obviate whitewash,” as H. R. Haldeman noted. Meanwhile, the election campaign exhilarated Nixon. It was his tenth campaign—the last, he told Haldeman, so “make it the best.”
Nixon met with Haldeman in the late afternoon of September 15. Watergate was very much on their minds, as was the young lawyer in charge of damage control. Haldeman congratulated himself on having designated John Wesley Dean III for that task. While Dean would not “gain any ground for us,” Haldeman told the President, he would make “sure that you don’t fall through the holes.” Haldeman knew the way to Richard Nixon’s heart. Dean, he noted, was “moving ruthlessly on the investigation of McGovern people, Kennedy stuff, and all that too.” Altogether, Haldeman reported, Dean had turned out to be tougher than he had anticipated.
Such a performance apparently merited a presidential audience. It was close to 5:30 P.M. when the President summoned the White House Counsel. Nixon greeted Dean rather casually. “Hi, how are you?” “Yes sir,” Dean responded. The President wasted no time in coming to the point: “Well, you had quite a day today, didn’t you? You got, uh, Watergate, uh, on the way, huh?”1
September 15 was an important day for the President’s growing involvement in the cover-up of any White House connection to the break-in. For John Dean, especially, it was a red-letter day, for now he was about to receive official recognition, even blessing, for his direction of the cover-up campaign. He had worked hard for three months to keep the President from falling through the holes. Dean thought he was on his way to the top. From another perspective, at another time, he saw his life that day as “touching bottom.”
John Dean was thirty-two years old in May 1970 and working for John Mitchell in the Department of Justice when he met his friend Egil Krogh. Krogh, very much a White House insider, suggested that Dean join the presidential staff. The meeting and the invitation were probably not coincidental. Shortly before, Jeb Magruder had mentioned Dean’s name to Haldeman. Magruder remarked in a memo that Dean was “an example of a sophisticated, young guy we could use.” “Absolutely[.] Really work on this,” Haldeman scrawled in the margin.
Several months later, White House telephone operators located Dean in a Washington restaurant and told him that Haldeman wanted to see him at once in California. Telephone operators, planes to pick up and quickly deliver people from one coast to the other—the heady stuff of power. Dean promptly left Washington for San Clemente. There he met Haldeman, and after a short chat the Chief of Staff offered him the post of White House Counsel. For Haldeman, Dean had perfect credentials: like his sponsor, Magruder, he was pliant, reliable, obedient, and consumed by insatiable “blind ambition.” That same day Dean met the President, who formally offered him the position.2 Despite the lofty title and its apparent responsibilities, however, Dean rarely saw Richard Nixon over the next two years.
Dean’s modest experience typified the Nixon White House; the essential qualifications for important positions consisted of loyalty and subordination. Young, ambitious men who knew those values seemed to fill the bill quite well. Dean’s résumé undoubtedly seemed just right to Haldeman. Born in Akron, Ohio, in 1938, Dean had graduated from Wooster College and the Georgetown Law School—no Ivy League taint to that pedigree. After he had applied unsuccessfully for a clerkship with District Judge John Sirica, Dean had worked in staff positions in Congress and the Justice Department. Richard Kleindienst, his immediate superior, learned to dislike Dean, yet acknowledged that he had performed with “great distinction.” Kleindienst also claimed that he had warned Dean against moving to the White House, telling him that he would only be “a runner for Ehrlichman”; being “counsel to the President,” he said, was only an illusion. But John Dean—the WASP Sammy Glick—was an adaptable young man: he would move from being John Mitchell’s “boy” to become Haldeman’s, not Ehrlichman’s.
Curiously, Haldeman ordered no FBI check for Dean before elevating him to President’s Counsel. Had he done so, he might have learned of Dean’s dismissal from a Washington law firm for “unethical conduct.” Dean had managed to persuade his former employer to soften that charge for Civil Service Commission records—much to the employer’s later regret. But strange values dictated personnel matters in the Nixon White House. Haldeman once told Dean that the President liked Dean’s clothes because they made him look “hippie” and offered a counterpoint to the Administration’s conservative image. John Ehrlichman, however, had difficulty with Dean’s style: Dean had worked for John Mitchell, wore Gucci loafers, and drove a Porsche sports car.3
Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, well acquainted with ambitious young lawyers from his days as Dean of the Harvard Law School, considered John Dean a “nice young man” but nevertheless “was astounded” when he heard of his appointment as White House Counsel. Griswold believed Dean un-qualified by either ability or experience. The position, Griswold said, “required a more mature person, with the fiber and strength to stand up to the President and to other people in the White House, and to do it gracefully so that you avoid head-on collisions.” Neither Nixon nor Haldeman included those qualities in their job description, however. Dean assumed some duties of former Nixon aide Clark Mollenhoff. Mollenhoff liked Dean, but he realized the new Counsel had not been installed as a “boat-rocker.” Dean was “ambitious,” Mollenhoff noted, but he quickly learned “that any daring acts should have the approval of the boss.” Dean suffered from a fatal combination, Mollenhoff thought, of “ambition and his willingness to perform any chore in order to survive.” Donald Santarelli, who worked with Dean on Capitol Hill and in the Justice Department, warned White House and Justice officials that Dean was self-serving and unprincipled but realized that Haldeman and Ehrlichman believed Dean to be ideal for he had no independent power or constituency.4
Dean succeeded Ehrlichman as White House Counsel when Ehrlichman inaugurated and chaired the Domestic Council. Perhaps Dean’s most important early activities involved his work as a conduit for FBI and Secret Service reports to the White House regarding antiwar demonstrations. Essentially, however, Dean directed a small staff of lawyers to handle routine legal chores. He served as the White House checkpoint to guard against internal conflicts of interest. For example, Charles Colson wrote the Counsel to ask whether he could keep a Smithfield ham a lobbyist had given him. Dean said he could but suggested that Colson tell the friend not to give such gifts in the future. He considered whether Pat Buchanan’s stock ownership in a Florida resort might constitute a conflict. He told Buchanan that he would appreciate “the opportunity to meet with you regarding your personal financial interests.” The tone was both solicitous and aggressive. The new Counsel shrewdly sensed that handling what seemed to be the dull, routine matter of interest conflicts offered a key to advancement. He realized that by knowing a man’s financial situation he could gain his confidence. And winning confidence, Dean knew, would bring more “business”—contacts and chores that would make Dean more visible and ever more valued.
A more amusing line of chores than tracking conflicts of interest required Dean to threaten action against any unauthorized uses of the presidential seal. Thus, he wrote to a book publisher demanding the removal of the seal from a novel that used the word “President” in its title. When the General Accounting Office requested White House records concerning flights
involving officials and the President’s family for campaign purposes and inquired about the extent of reimbursement for such travel by the Committee to Re-elect the President, Dean replied for Haldeman: such information “has traditionally been considered personal to the President” and not a matter for congressional inquiry. Dean invoked executive privilege to seal the flight manifests and logs.5
Dean ran his office as a private law firm, anxious and willing to accept business to build more business, even if some affairs were not official matters. Less than a month into his new position, he received instructions to rebut an attack by an obscure magazine on Vice President Spiro Agnew. Specifically, Dean was to recruit the IRS to make a tax inquiry. He also screened a pornographic movie entitled Tricia’s Wedding, to determine whether he could initiate legal action against the producers. He worked with Tom Huston on the plan to coordinate domestic intelligence activities within the White House. He advised other White House aides on divorce matters and Filipino mess stewards on their immigration status. The Counsel’s firm, and its founder, grew in stature. Dean was, Haldeman recalled, a “service facility” for White House employees.
When Dean first moved into the White House, he was assigned quarters next to the men’s room. The flushing sounds of the plumbing carried rather easily; moreover, Dean’s room had nondescript, military-issue furniture and badly needed painting. But Dean soon received important status symbols: copies of the President’s daily news summaries, a Signal Corps telephone service with twelve lines, and more newspaper and magazine subscriptions than he needed. Haldeman’s blessing had been secured; Dean was on his way.6
* * *
Dean’s desire for visibility reaped big dividends following the Watergate break-in. The White House Counsel had just returned from a trip to the Orient, but at Ehrlichman’s instructions he lost no time in talking to a variety of Administration principals regarding their knowledge of the burglary. Dean interviewed Colson, Magruder, Mitchell, Kleindienst, Liddy, and Gordon Strachan, a Haldeman aide. From Strachan, Dean learned that Haldeman had received logs from the wiretaps of the Democratic National Committee. If Haldeman were implicated, Dean realized, the President could not be far behind.
Dean’s role in Watergate began, in his words, as that of a fact-finder. From there, he worked his way up to idea man, and “finally to desk officer.” He met with involved officials, advised them, and made recommendations as to the disposition of evidence. He shuttled between the warring camps in the White House and the Committee to Re-elect the President. John Dean did not initiate the Watergate cover-up, but in time he came to be the orchestrator of the various disparate parties to the cover-up.
Others had roles to play as well. Jeb Magruder subsequently testified that “I do not think there was ever any discussion that there would not be a cover-up.” Magruder later claimed that on June 19, he talked to John Mitchell and urged him to “cut their losses” and admit culpability. According to Magruder’s version of events, Mitchell consulted Haldeman and Ehrlichman, who told him that things had to be kept under wraps. The implication here was that the White House feared exposure of “other things,” such as the Plumbers, if they owned up to the break-in.7
The first step in the cover-up belonged to Mitchell and was taken several hours after the news of the burglars’ arrest broke, when he denied any involvement by CREEP officials. On June 19 Colson urged that Howard Hunt’s White House safe be confiscated. Mitchell suggested to Magruder that he “have a little fire” at his house with the Gemstone files. The next day, Haldeman ordered Gordon Strachan to “make sure our files are clean.” Strachan promptly shredded numerous documents. Later that afternoon, Dean and his Associate Counsel, Fred Fielding, sifted the contents of Hunt’s safe, finding evidence of more “dirty tricks,” including an attempt to fabricate a direct link between President Kennedy and the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem. The safe also contained memos between Colson and Hunt regarding the Plumbers. Dean informed Ehrlichman about the materials, and Ehrlichman told him to “deep six” them. Dean instead gave them to FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray.
Haldeman later expressed surprise when he discovered on June 23 that Dean was the “ ‘project manager’ on the Watergate problem.” He thought Ehrlichman was in charge, but “my crafty friend,” as Haldeman characterized Ehrlichman, had managed to fade out of the picture for the current business. Ehrlichman hastily informed other relevant parties, such as Gray, that Dean had White House responsibility for an “inquiry” into the break-in. Ehrlichman scrambled for distance. In a telephone conversation with a reporter in August 1972, he claimed little knowledge about Liddy’s “work product,” yet a year earlier he had given Defense Secretary Melvin Laird a detailed report regarding Liddy’s work in the Pentagon Papers affair.
“Almost by osmosis,” Haldeman observed, Dean assumed command of the “project.” In fact such an assumption of power was unlikely in a Haldeman-managed enterprise. White House aide Richard Moore, who befriended Dean and who saw him as a “schemer” but a “very disarming gentleman,” refused to believed that Dean “initiated any activity that he thought unauthorized.” Haldeman needed someone to manage the cover-up, Moore remembered. He knew that Leonard Garment would never be a party to that enterprise, and neither would Moore himself. Nor could Haldeman pick Colson, because he “would run away with it or blow it up.” Dean was the “logical” man for the cover-up; “who else,” Moore thought, “would he have turned to?” John Mitchell, too, knew that “somebody gave Dean a charter.” Mitchell was bemused. “Who gave him the charter and put him on that course?” he asked, as he scoffed at Haldeman’s seeming confusion.8
Henry Petersen of the Justice Department met Dean at the outset of the cover-up and bluntly told him that the investigation could not be shut down. Earlier, according to Kleindienst and Gray, Ehrlichman had ordered Petersen to terminate the Watergate investigation within forty-eight hours. “Screw you,” Petersen reportedly replied. Petersen liked Dean and even confided in him, quite unsuspecting of Dean’s role. Petersen later bitterly recalled that Dean had become the “linch pin” (a term Dean himself used) of the conspiracy, acting through Haldeman and Ehrlichman. He grudgingly recognized that Dean was a splendid choice to direct the cover-up. Because Dean had worked in Congress on the committee to reform the criminal laws, and because he had been in the Justice Department, Petersen said, “we trusted him. We thought he was one of us. He had a degree of rapport with us that an ordinary counsel who just came in out of the political hinterlands never would have had with the Justice Department.” What we saw, Haldeman testified, summing up a commonly held view, “was a young man, unquestionably intelligent, unfailingly courteous, doing his job efficiently.”9
Haldeman’s characterization of Dean as the “project manager” of the Watergate cover-up was disingenuous and uncharacteristically modest. Dean perhaps managed details, but the mission had been determined by others. John Dean did not decide that there would be a cover-up: that was determined by the President of the United States and his Chief of Staff. “The President was involved in the cover-up from Day One,” Haldeman later revealed—thus conceding his own involvement. After Nixon returned to Washington following the break-in, he learned on June 20 about Hunt and Liddy and their connection to CREEP, but he did not order Haldeman or anyone else to inform the FBI. That night, Nixon talked to Haldeman about raising money for the burglars and for the first time suggested bringing CIA pressure on the FBI to limit the investigation. Surely he was anxious to avoid any links between the burglars and the White House; but Haldeman also knew that Nixon feared any exposé of “other things,” as the President often characterized certain White House activities and campaign “dirty tricks.”
One of the President’s June 20 meetings with Haldeman, according to the Chief of Staff, involved a public-relations treatment of Watergate to counterattack the criticism, as well as to deal with Nixon’s fear that Colson had initiated the break-in from his White House office
. How, the President asked, could his enemies “justify this [the break-in] less than stealing [the] Pentagon Papers?” That conversation, Haldeman claimed, was all or part of an 18½-minute tape segment subsequently erased—by the President himself, according to Haldeman.10
During the course of at least three meetings covering more than two hours on June 23, Nixon and Haldeman took steps to impose a blanket on the investigation and to cover up any links between the burglars, CREEP, and the White House. Their actions, in legal terms, constituted an obstruction of justice. In political terms, in the public’s perception, the cover-up projected an indelible impression that Nixon personally was involved in the crime.
The President and Haldeman met on the morning of the twenty-third to discuss the FBI’s widening investigation of the break-in. Haldeman reported that Dean had advised him and Ehrlichman that Gray could not restrain his agents. According to Haldeman, Mitchell had suggested that CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters (a recent Nixon appointee) call Gray and tell him to “stay the hell out of this.” Walters was to complain that FBI investigators were intruding into sensitive areas of CIA operations. Haldeman pushed the idea, confident it would work because the FBI was aware of the Cuban burglars’ CIA links and could recognize that the affair might have national-security implications. Haldeman knew the FBI had traced the source of the burglars’ money, and he realized that this would implicate the re-election committee. Nixon eagerly agreed on the need for containment. He ordered Haldeman to tell CIA Director Helms and Walters that the White House needed their cooperation. It was time to call in debts, Nixon said: “we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things.”
The President asked if Mitchell knew about the break-in. “I think so,” Haldeman replied. “I don’t think he knew the details, but I think he knew.” The President wanted to find out what “asshole” devised the plans. He thought it might be Liddy, whom he described as “a little nuts.” Interestingly, Haldeman thought that Mitchell had pressured Liddy for “more information” on the Democrats. The President’s response was quite knowing: “All right, fine, I understand it all. We won’t second-guess Mitchell and the rest.” He was enormously relieved on one point: “Thank God,” he declared, that Colson was not responsible.
The Wars of Watergate Page 32
