by Russ Baker
Actually, Poppy confided, he too was on the list. He seemed to be suggesting: We’re in this together.
Then the chairman of the Republican Party put an odd question to the freshman senator: “What should I do with the receipts?” Bush asked. “Burn them?”39
Now Weicker knew the game: the White House was setting him up. “Destroying potential evidence is a criminal offense,” Weicker would later write in his memoirs.40 Here, he felt sure, was the head of the Republican Party, calling for his boss, Richard Nixon, trying to knock out the man who represented the biggest threat to the president.
Outraged, Weicker told Bush that under no circumstances should he even think about burning any documents. Then Weicker got in touch with a federal prosecutor.
Bush denied the story, but Weicker stands by it to this day.
As head of the Republican Party, Bush should have taken the receipts to the party’s lawyer months earlier, when Gleason had turned them over, and asked for advice, thereby invoking lawyer-client privilege.
Though Weicker says he knew a trap when he saw one, and told Bush so, he saw a fake trap—the one he was supposed to see. And he did exactly what was expected. Had Weicker thought it through, he would have realized that this rash act by Bush hardly served Nixon’s interest. It was too obvious, too aggressive, and too certain to provoke ire. If Bush was looking out for Nixon, he was doing so in an awfully reckless fashion, especially for a man noted for his prudence. He was making Lowell Weicker mad, not just at him but also at the president. And what had been for Watergate investigator Weicker an opportunistic crusade with an edge of authentic outrage over Republican abuses in the White House was now becoming personal. Now Weicker’s own political survival was at stake.41 Now it was Nixon or him.
As the nation’s eyes fixed on the televised hearings, Lowell Weicker emerged as a veritable bulldog against Richard Nixon. In the course of two months, and with help from John Dean, he revealed that Nixon had an enemies’ list, that the White House was trying to embarrass the senator with false Townhouse fund allegations, that Nixon was connected to both the Watergate and Ellsberg break-ins, that Nixon was a participant in a cover-up.
Weicker made an emotional speech during one of the hearings about how the Nixon administration had “done its level best to subvert the [Watergate] committee hearings.”42 He stated that Republicans were appalled by “these illegal, unconstitutional and gross acts.” Republicans, he insisted, “do not cover up . . .”43 He received cheers and applause. Weicker was riding high.
It was one of the defining moments of his life. Indeed, when I called him in 2008 and tried to share with him what I had discovered about the true background of Watergate, he wouldn’t hear of it. “You are talking to somebody that, having spent a major portion of his political career and life on this investigation, I really don’t like to be told by other people what was going on,” Weicker told me.44
Butterfield: The Icing on the Cake
The man who actually came bearing the knife with which Richard Nixon would commit political hara-kiri was not Bush or Dean or Weicker or Hunt. It was an obscure figure named Alexander Butterfield, a Nixon aide who supervised White House internal security, which included working closely with the Secret Service and coordinating the installation of Nixon’s secret taping system.
At first Alexander Butterfield seemed hesitant when he sat down with staff members of the Watergate Committee on July 13. “I was hoping you fellows wouldn’t ask me about that,” he purportedly said when questioned about the possible existence of such a White House taping system. Then he proceeded to describe it in detail.
Nixon wanted to tape conversations for the historical record. Butterfield obliged and found technicians to install tiny voice-activated microphones.45 “Everything was taped,” he told his astonished listeners, “as long as the President was in attendance.”46
Within days of Butterfield’s revelations, this previously obscure White House security officer became another Watergate hero, a man who followed his conscience. As New York Times contributor A. Robert Smith wrote two years later, “It was Friday the 13th and Butterfield had put the Senate investigators on the trail of the ‘smoking pistol’—hard evidence of impeachable behavior, preserved on tape—that would force the President to resign.”
Why had Butterfield done it? In the Times, Smith wrote that “Butterfield’s testimony was . . . remarkable for a man who, in 20 years of military service, had been taught to follow orders rather than pursue higher ideals.”47
The thrust of the Times piece was that Butterfield had changed. But there were hints that there might be more to it—that Butterfield might still be following orders, just not ones from the commander in chief.
Buried toward the end of the article was brief mention of allegations that Butterfield had been in the CIA, followed by Butterfield’s denial. But-terfield said that his only contact with the CIA had been when he was in the Air Force. From 1964 to 1967, as military aide to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, he had been in charge of “rehabilitating” Cuban survivors of the Bay of Pigs invasion—the same work that various sources have said Hunt and McCord performed. Yet left unmentioned was the involvement of just such Cuban survivors in Watergate, and in Nixon’s downfall.
Years later, Butterfield admitted that immediately prior to joining the White House staff he had worked as the military’s “CIA liaison” in Australia.48 Moreover, while Butterfield claimed that Haldeman had offered him the White House job, Haldeman was quite emphatic in recalling that Butterfield had written to him asking for a position. If Haldeman was right about this too, then it adds to the list of people with CIA connections—notably Hunt, Dean, McCord, and Poppy Bush—who had pushed hard to get into Nixon’s inner sanctum.
Butterfield and the tapes had come to the committee’s attention courtesy of two people: Woodward of the Washington Post, who suggested they look into Butterfield; and Dean, who mentioned in his opening statement that he thought his conversations were being taped.
The person who first directed Congress’s attention to the smoking gun conversation, on May 14, 1973, was General Vernon Walters, CIA deputy director.
It looks a bit like a CIA layer cake, with Butterfield as the icing.
THE BEST LAID plans require contingencies. If a group was setting out to steer the Watergate affair in a particular direction, it would have been advisable to make sure that nothing went wrong.
One thing that could have gone wrong was that the Watergate Committee staff might figure out that a group of CIA-connected figures with ties to the Bay of Pigs and the events of November 22, 1963, was setting Nixon up.
The person who was most potentially problematic in that regard was Carmine Bellino, the Senate committee’s chief investigator. An old associate of the Kennedys, he had been around the block a few times—and if anything smelling of 1963 surfaced, he would be most likely to follow it up.49
So it is interesting to note that one of the few overt measures Poppy Bush took as RNC chairman during Watergate was to attack Carmine Bellino. In this, he relied on hearsay from others—much as he had in claiming that the Bull Elephants wanted Dean to testify—and years earlier in telephoning in the “threat” to President Kennedy supposedly represented by James Parrott in 1963.50
During this same eventful month of July 1973, George Bush issued a long statement demanding an investigation into whether Bellino had ordered electronic surveillance of the Republicans in 1960. “This matter,” Bush announced in a press conference on July 24, 1973, “is serious enough to concern the Senate Watergate Committee, and particularly since its chief investigator is the subject of the charges.”51
Three days after Bush’s press conference, twenty-two Republican senators signed a letter to Senator Sam Ervin, chair of the Senate Watergate Committee, urging that the committee investigate Bush’s charges and that Bellino be suspended. The Republicans had chosen their target well, and Ervin had no choice but to comply. The Bellino flap took up a lot o
f the Watergate Committee’s time. It also neutralized Bellino, who never had a chance to fully defend himself or to dig deeper.
Committee chairman Sam Ervin would later state, with a hint of bitterness, “One can but admire the zeal exhibited by the RNC and its journalistic allies in their desperate efforts to invent a red herring to drag across the trail which leads to the truth of Watergate.”52
In fact, it was Ervin himself who had snapped at the herring. He mistakenly assumed that Poppy’s mission was to ardently defend Richard Nixon. What he missed was what everybody missed: that Watergate was actually not a Nixon operation at all, but a deep, deep covert operation against Nixon— seeking to protect the prerogatives and secrets of a group accountable to no one.
The Little Man on the Cake
If Poppy was the blushing bride of this enterprise, his groom atop the cake would be a surprising figure: the tough, no-nonsense Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski.
Jaworski entered the Nixon chase in October 1973, after Haig helped persuade Nixon to force out the independent counsel Archibald Cox, yet another ill-advised act that turned public opinion against Nixon and suggested his guilt.53 A survey of books on Watergate shows that little attention was paid to Jaworski’s background, or, especially, to how he came to be prosecutor.
Jaworski was a conservative Texas Democrat who had actually backed Nixon in 1968. As a young man, he had served as legal counsel to some of Houston’s most powerful figures—oil and cotton kings so influential they had the ear of presidents like Franklin Roosevelt. Perhaps these connections helped him obtain an important post in World War II: prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. This activity earned him a top-secret clearance that for some reason was never relinquished after the end of the war. As will be discussed in chapter 16, prosecutions of war criminals both in Asia and in Europe were not simply lofty and symbolic pursuits of justice. They were intelligence exercises, in which powerful figures from the losing side could be made to reveal valuable information, ranging from the locations of billions of dollars of war loot to the country’s scientific and military technology advances.
After the war, Jaworski returned to his Houston law practice and became a close friend of, and lawyer for, Lyndon Johnson. Jaworski and Johnson’s professional and personal relationship would prove mutually beneficial. In his memoir, Jaworski said that his good friend LBJ “had a boundless capacity for hard work . . . Lyndon was a man of extra dimensions, who thought bigger, laughed louder, and got mad faster than most men. He had the ability . . . to make people move, jump, change their minds.”54
When JFK was assassinated, Jaworski, along with a friend, Southern Methodist University law school dean Robert Storey, another Nuremberg prosecutor, quickly launched a Texas-based investigation of the assassination under the auspices of Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr. When Earl Warren was asked to convene a national commission of inquiry, he told the Texans that no independent Texas-based investigation could be allowed, principally because it would be viewed with suspicion. He also said that the Texans could not work for the Warren Commission. But he agreed to a compromise: the Texans could handle the Texas end of the investigation for the commission, and could have one of their number present at every commission hearing. Thus, Jaworski and his friends were monitoring all proceedings, including those at which Bush’s old friend and Oswald’s mentor George de Mohrenschildt testified.
Jaworski’s own memoir, oddly titled Confession and Avoidance, is in itself an elaborate exercise in self-clearance. The book, published in 1979 during a period of renewed interest in the Kennedy assassination, belittles Oswald’s mother for asserting that she believes her son was framed—and portrays her as self-serving and money-grubbing, while excoriating anyone who does not accept that the Warren Commission did a stellar job.
The impact of John Kennedy’s death has been overshadowed now by the ghoulish industry that grew out of it. Over forty books have been published attacking the Warren Report, or introducing new theories. Some of these books have been described as “scholarly,” which means they contain footnotes . . . others are in the conspiracy game for financial gain, notoriety, excitement, or all of these.55
Because of Jaworski’s association with the effort to prove that there was no conspiracy in JFK’s death, his emergence as part of the group that drove Nixon from office cannot be automatically dismissed as unrelated. Nor can the background as to how he ended up as the Watergate prosecutor.
Jaworski, it turns out, was recommended by national security aide Alexander Haig. General Haig was a career military man and deeply enmeshed in the complicated intrigues and power struggles surrounding presidents Nixon and Ford. A White House survivor, Haig was first a top aide to Henry Kissinger, then became chief of staff after Haldeman resigned; later the military man helped persuade Nixon to resign, and retained power throughout Nixon’s fall, inserting himself into the process of determining which of the expresident’s tapes became public. As we now know, this was a crucial function, as certain tapes could be presented in a way that suggested Nixon’s guilt, while others would suggest the opposite.56
Haig’s rapid career rise, from the lowest third of his class at West Point to positions in a succession of Democratic and Republican administrations starting with JFK’s, benefited in part from sponsorship by Joseph Califano Jr., a powerful Washington attorney who served in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and was considered a close ally of LBJ’s.57 Washington Post chair and publisher Katharine Graham initially brought Califano and his law partner Edward Bennett Williams together and the two attorneys spoke of lunching frequently on Saturdays with managing editor Ben Bradlee or “other pals from the Post.”58 Complicating matters and illuminating these tangled alliances, Califano served as counsel for both the Post and the Democratic National Committee—the very entity purportedly victimized by the president’s men. As secretary of the Army under LBJ, Califano had been responsible for looking after veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion, along with two of his aides: Haig and Alexander Butterfield.
As noted earlier, Haig may have also had a past relationship with Bob Woodward when Woodward was in Naval Intelligence, prior to the latter becoming the reporter who broke the Watergate story. This raises the question of whether the “high White House official” who recommended Woodward to former Naval Intelligence officer Ben Bradlee and/or former Navy secretary Ignatius at the Post was not Haig himself. That Haig, who was working in the Pentagon’s Operations office in 1963, also had something to do with Jaworski’s becoming the Watergate prosecutor, poses intriguing questions— as does almost everything about this remarkable circle of friends.
Jaworski was also, by Poppy Bush’s own standards, “a close friend” to the Bushes. He certainly met with George H. W. Bush’s approval. In his book All the Best, Poppy praises Jaworski as “determined to do a thorough job” and labels him “a respected Houston lawyer and a longtime friend of ours.”59
The thorough job? Ordering Nixon to turn over a carefully considered group of sixty-four additional tapes—including the smoking gun tape that would implicate Nixon in a cover-up.60 Two years later, during the Senate confirmation hearings on Poppy’s appointment as director of the CIA, Jaworski would go out of his way to give Bush a clean bill of health on Townhouse. Poppy, citing Jaworski’s good seal of approval, paraphrased his friend: “clean, clean, clean.” Poppy later successfully courted Democrat Jaworski for an endorsement of the Reagan-Bush ticket in 1980.61
Jaworski was one of those mentioned briefly by the Washington Post in its lengthy 1967 series on CIA-connected foundations. As a trustee and attorney for one of those foundations, he had declined to answer the Post’s questions.62 This factor seemingly went unnoticed when he became Watergate prosecutor. It does not appear in any of the major accounts of that episode.
Also, one thing was clear about Jaworski’s Watergate inquiry: he was not interested in pursuing Poppy Bush. “We sat down with Jaworski’s staff and went over name after
name after name,” recalled Jack Gleason. “They were mainly after [Nixon’s close friend] Bebe Rebozo. I spent two days at a hundred dollars an hour with my lawyer listening to ‘have you ever heard of Jose Martinez’ and name after name. At one point we went over the list of the recipients of the six thousand dollars. And I said, . . . the only one I remember clearly is George Bush. And they just brushed right past it . . . It was a name they didn’t want to hear. I remember it so clearly because it was such a colossal screw-up.”
Assistant special prosecutor Charles Ruff sent Jaworski a memo concerning Poppy Bush. “George Bush received a total of approximately $112,000 from the townhouse Operation,” Ruff wrote. “Bush also received, probably through his campaign manager, $6,000 in cash.” Then, he concluded, “Bush is neither a target of our investigation nor a potential witness.”63
Poppy had the perfect cover. If he was one of the recipients, whether as beneficiary or victim of a setup, how could he be one of the authors of the scheme itself? And if that failed, he also had a perfect friend: Leon Jaworski.64
Getting the Tapes
What in the end brought Nixon down was the release of his tapes, in particular, one portion: the “smoking gun” conversation. Whittling down the materials of Watergate to the few select pieces that could be orchestrated to suggest Nixon’s culpability was the key.
