The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It

by John W. Dean

  “But he is tough. John Ehrlichman is all ambitious as hell,” Haldeman said. Nixon continued on Ehrlichman, “Also, he can call someone in and cut them off at the hip pockets, rather, you’re fired—” Nixon had a particular example in mind: “Like the [Walter] Hickel thing, he was delighted.”* The president qualified that admiration with: “He’s not the kind of man who will destroy another man.” Which prompted Haldeman to ask, “And Dean?” Nixon, with a speculative tone, said, “Yeah, I think Dean is.” Haldeman, liking this reading of me, added, “And he’s become more so. Dean has become harder in the job, because he is a guy, in spite of his playboy image, [who] is very deceptive. He is a playboy, he’s got a beautiful girl who lives with him, who’s not his wife. And he changes them every once in a while.”

  “That’s alright,” the president said. And Haldeman added, “And he loves rock music and discotheques. Hard stuff, hard. But—” He was cut off by the president’s observation: “You can see that he’s a good-looking guy. Christ, in Hollywood he’d be knocking ’em down. But that’s alright, that’s, I mean—” Haldeman said, “It might even be harmless,” and then, speaking over the president, reminded him, “Henry likes good-looking girls, too. But he’s damn useful in other ways.” The president, with a pained tone, agreed about Kissinger, and Haldeman continued, “But Dean, he’s a good judge of people.”

  “Really?” Nixon said. Haldeman explained, “He isn’t taken in by people. He tends to give the benefit, but he isn’t. Some people give people the un-benefit, I do—” Nixon interrupted to agree, “Yeah, I do too.” Haldeman elaborated, “Assume a guy’s no good until he proves he’s good.” “That’s right,” Nixon concurred. But Haldeman said, “Dean tends to assume he’s good, but he watches him. And when he proves he’s no good, he turns on him.” The president said he had liked what he had seen during our conversations, and explained to Haldeman, “What I mean is, I’m watching Dean, just as I’m watching [Frank] Carlucci,* and he’s enough of a hater, and he’s smart enough, you know, what you really need is somebody [not concerned] with screwing the other side.”

  “That’s right,” Haldeman agreed. Nixon continued, “Dean is obviously the kind of guy that likes to screw anything, that’s really what he is. And that’s what we need.” Haldeman burst out laughing at Nixon’s sexual double entendre, as the president repeated, “And that’s what we need. That’s what we need.”

  “That’s right,” Haldeman agreed.

  “And I was impressed with this conversation. I can tell a lot about him. I know this kind. What he’s like. He’s very erudite. He’s beautifully educated and articulate. The same kind of a guy that Bob Stripling* used to be,” the president said, adding that, although Stripling had a modest education, he was “shit, bright, a super guy” and, most important, he “hated with a passion. He got ’em, he’d go after people and he’d slaughter ’em. And he’d play every trick in the game. And that’s what Dean will do.”

  After the president indicated that Colson, Carlucci and I would be important for his second term, the conversation moved in other directions. Following a meeting with Henry Kissinger and some politicking via telephone with the president of the Utility Workers Union of America, the president was still thinking about our conversation, and he gave credit to Ehrlichman for having brought me into the White House. Haldeman corrected him, explaining that it was he who had brought me onto the staff. “This is one I’ll take credit for. We all knew Dean was a good man, but Ehrlichman didn’t want him to work for the White House.”

  Late September Through October 1972

  Segretti Merges with Watergate

  September 17–30, 1972, the White House

  Other than in Washington Post and occasional New York Times stories, Watergate largely dropped from the news after the grand jury’s indictments of the Watergate seven. Chuck Colson informed the president on September 17 that McGovern’s comments on the indictments had not made a front page anywhere, and, better yet, the latest Harris Poll showed only 11 percent of the public thought the president was somehow involved in Watergate.1 Nonetheless, Jeane Dixon, a newspaper-syndicated seer and psychic who had famously predicted JFK would “be assassinated or die in office” (while incorrectly predicting any number of other events), regularly shared her private prognostications with Rose Woods, who passed them on to an interested president. On September 19, Ms. Dixon sent word to the president, “the sooner you get rid of [Watergate], the better.”2

  On September 21 Colson reported that “McGovern has shut up on the Watergate; he hasn’t talked about that this week.”3 On September 24, Haldeman provided the latest internal polling numbers, which revealed that Watergate was a nonissue in the campaign: 68 percent said it would have no effect on how they voted, 83 percent of likely voters thought Nixon would win reelection, and 70 percent of voters were aware of Watergate.4 On September 26 Haldeman informed the president that Teddy Kennedy was backing off on holding hearings with his Senate subcommittee because “he’s worried about Chappaquiddick, among other things.”5 Haldeman said that the only thing not under control was Texas congressman Wright Patman’s Banking and Currency Committee, but he assured the president that that problem was being addressed.* “We’ve got everything else in good shape,” Haldeman advised. “The civil suit’s taken care of. The criminal suit’s taken care of. The issue [of Watergate] is basically going to go pretty much down the tubes, and they know it,” referring to The Washington Post.

  The Post, however, did not see it that way. The paper had been featuring a front-page Watergate-related story almost every day since the June 17 arrests at the DNC, and as the presidential race was winding down it would publish as many as five Watergate-related stories each day. While it had not uncovered anything that surprised those of us in the White House following the investigation, nor was it affecting the campaign, the Post was often informing the president of activities about which he had little or no knowledge before reading about them in the newspaper. What troubled Nixon most was the fact that the Post appeared to have access to significant leaks, like one that was the basis for a September 29 article headlined MITCHELL CONTROLLED SECRET GOP FUND, which asserted that Mitchell, when serving as attorney general, “personally controlled a secret Republican fund that was used to gather information about the Democrats, according to sources involved in the Watergate investigation.” When Mitchell was reached by telephone in New York, he denied the story and attacked “Katie Graham,” publisher of the Post, with remarks that those of us who knew Mitchell understood were made when he had been drinking. While they had been edited, he clearly had told Woodward that Katie was going to “get her big fat tit in a wringer” if the newspaper continued with such stories.6

  The president asked Haldeman at the outset of their morning meeting on September 29 about the story: “Do they have some sort of informant or something in there, or [what]?”7 Haldeman thought (incorrectly) that the information might have come from Bernard Barker, while the president assumed (correctly) that it had come from the FBI. He was not troubled so much by the content of this story as by the fact that it had been leaked from the investigation, and that the Post continued to cover Watergate relentlessly. The following morning Nixon learned that his secretary of state, Bill Rogers, had accepted an invitation to participate in the dedication of the new building that would house The Washington Post, and he was livid. The president directed Haldeman to instruct his cabinet to not attend the ceremony,8 and that afternoon he again complained about the Post to Colson, telling him that anyone on the White House staff who did anything for the Post or New York Times would be fired. He ridiculed the Post for not even knowing Haldeman’s name, having sent his invitation for the dedication to “William Haldeman.”9

  October 3, 1972, the White House

  As the president was preparing for a preelection press conference, Haldeman assured him that he had “no Watergate problems.”10 At the time there was little new Watergate information, and the Post seemed confined to
rehashing old stories. Still, Nixon remained irate at the Post, and that afternoon asked Ehrlichman if he was aware of his order to the cabinet and staff to not attend the dedication event.11 Ehrlichman himself had received an invitation, and the president barked, “Just don’t respond. Don’t even respond. Don’t even say ‘I have another engagement.’” With the presidential pique at the Post still cresting, Henry Kissinger, who enjoyed bolstering Nixon’s darkest thoughts, told him that afternoon that he had been too generous with his media critics. “If you’ve shown one weakness,” Kissinger said, “it’s that you’ve been too gentle. It’s certainly not that you’ve been threatening.” To make the point, Kissinger reported that he had broken off “any social contact” with Post-owned Newsweek columnist Stewart Alsop, who had recently written several nasty columns on Watergate.12

  Not surprisingly, at the October 5 morning press conference in the Oval Office the first question directed to Nixon asked how he planned to defend his administration against the Post’s corruption charges, which the president addressed by ignoring the premise of the question and giving a nonresponsive answer.13 Watergate was not mentioned by name until the seventh question, which was so ineptly stated that it invited the dodge it received. Nixon again all but ignored it and instead made a couple of points he wanted to stress: “One thing that has always puzzled me about it is why anybody would have tried to get anything out of the Watergate. But be that as it may, that decision having been made at lower levels, with which I had no knowledge, and, as I pointed out—”

  “But, surely you know now, sir,” the reporter insisted.

  “Just a minute,” the president said sternly, putting the interruption back behind the decorum line. “I certainly feel that under the circumstances that we have got to look at what has happened and to put the matter into perspective. Now when we talk about a clean breast, let’s look at what has happened. The FBI assigned 133 agents to this investigation. It followed about eighteen hundred leads. It conducted fifteen hundred interviews.” He reminded the reporters that he personally understood such inquiries because he had once conducted the Hiss investigation, which was “basically a Sunday school exercise compared to the amount of effort that was put into this.” But he assured his audience that he had no problem with the resources that had been devoted to the Watergate investigation. “I wanted every lead carried out to the end, because I wanted to be sure that no member of the White House staff, and no man or woman in a position of major responsibility in the committee for the reelection, had anything to do with this kind of reprehensible activity.” He added that, because the grand jury had issued indictments, it was “time to have the judicial process go forward and for the evidence to be presented.” He reminded the reporters that he had once been lambasted by the news media for commenting on the Manson murder case when it was pending, so he would not comment on the Watergate case.

  Haldeman thought the session was one of the best press conferences the president had held in the Oval Office.14 However, the fact that Nixon kept repeating that no one at the White House had been involved—on this occasion, not invoking any authority for his knowledge, since there was none—was beginning to trouble him, a problem he would seek to address in the coming weeks to protect himself.

  October 10, 1972, the White House

  The Washington Post broke one of its biggest Woodward and Bernstein Watergate-related stories on October 10 with a larger than usual front-page headline: FBI FINDS NIXON AIDES SABOTAGED DEMOCRATS. The report stated that “FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.”15 It was a game-changing story, because it reframed Watergate as more than a mere bungled burglary at the DNC. According to Bernstein and Woodward’s Watergate memoir, All the President’s Men, they received a telephone tip on September 28 that led them to the person purportedly running this massive spying and sabotage operation, Donald Segretti, a University of Southern California friend of Haldeman aides Dwight Chapin and Gordon Strachan, both of whom would soon be implicated in hiring him.16 The Post’s information about Segretti had come from attorneys he met while in the army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps and attempted to recruit for his operation.

  Donald Segretti originally had become entangled in the Watergate investigation some three months earlier, in late June, because his telephone number was in Howard Hunt’s telephone toll records, which had been subpoenaed by the FBI. Segretti’s connection came as a surprise at the White House, and it took several days to figure out its origins. In a nutshell, the relationship developed before Liddy’s illegal intelligence plans had been approved. Liddy had learned that there might be an agent provocateur in the field soliciting recruits for his political pranking from Nixon-Agnew offices throughout the country. He sent a memo to all the offices requesting assistance in identifying the person, and when Magruder learned that the always over-the-top Liddy was threatening to kill this individual, he investigated the matter and resolved it. He called Liddy into his office and explained that this rumored person (who was in fact Segretti) had been hired by Haldeman in 1971, at the suggestion of Chapin and Strachan, to perform pranks and dirty tricks against the Democrats during their primaries that appeared due to Democratic infighting. The goal was to make it more difficult for the Democrats to come together after they selected a nominee. Magruder had learned that Segretti had been paid by Herb Kalmbach from campaign funds left from the 1968 presidential race.17

  Magruder went to Mitchell and Strachan talked to Haldeman in early 1972 and obtained their agreement that Liddy should take charge of this operation. Liddy was given contact information for a Don Simmons, which was a false name Segretti was using. Liddy (who used the name George Leonard) was joined by Hunt (who used the name Ed Warren) at a meeting with Segretti in Miami in which Liddy told Segretti he was to take instructions from Hunt. Liddy also warned Segretti to be careful with Hunt, and to follow his orders, because he was dangerous: “He sometimes kills without orders. The least he might do would be breaking both your knees.”18 Thereafter Hunt would call Segretti from time to time to check on his activities, and it was these calls (some from the White House) that left the record the FBI discovered after the arrests at the DNC. Not only had Segretti been frightened by Liddy and Hunt, but when they tried to involve him in what he thought might be illegal activities at the Democratic convention in Miami (with the Cuban Americans who were later arrested at the DNC), he wanted nothing to do it.

  When the FBI contacted Segretti in June 1972, he called Chapin and Strachan, who requested I meet with him. As best I could tell in a brief meeting, he had no knowledge of or involvement in Watergate whatsoever, and had done nothing illegal, although his activities clearly would be politically embarrassing. I reported the situation to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, including the fact that I had advised Segretti to answer all the FBI’s questions honestly. I also recounted telling him that, given the serious potential for leaks, he did not need to volunteer potentially embarrassing information, such as the payments from Herb Kalmbach. Segretti’s activities became an issue again in August 1972, during the GOP convention in Miami, when he called Chapin because he had been summoned to testify before the Watergate grand jury. At that time I discussed the situation with Henry Petersen, who said the only information sought from Segretti was his connection to Hunt and Liddy and anything about the Watergate break-in. Petersen said it had been a long-standing policy of the Justice Department not to investigate campaign law violations during a campaign, and he knew of nothing that Segretti had done that called for investigation. Again I advised Segretti to answer all questions honestly before the grand jury. Segretti did, and while the prosecutors did not ask him who hired and paid him, one of the grand jurors did. This, in turn, led to further FBI inquiries of Chapin, Strachan and Kalmbach.19 In short, by late August
1972 the FBI had the entire story, which it soon began leaking to the Post and Time magazine, courtesy of Mark Felt.20 Bernstein and Woodward wrote in All the President’s Men that the information Bernstein developed from the attorneys Segretti had tried to recruit led Woodward to call for a meeting with his infamous source, Deep Throat, aka Mark Felt. As the seniormost person in charge of the FBI’s Watergate investigation he was privy to all the Segretti information. They met on October 8, 1972.21

  The Segretti story dominated the Watergate-related news from October 10 through the November 7 election, and it became a postelection concern of the president’s notwithstanding the decidedly tangential relationship of Segretti’s activities to the break-in. The Post, however, effectively made Segretti very much a part of the Watergate story, and soon, for both the public and Richard Nixon, any reference to Watergate included events beyond the actual activities related to the arrests at the DNC.

  Anticipating probing questions at his daily press briefing on the morning of October 10, given the Post’s lengthy Segretti story, Ron Ziegler sought the president’s guidance on how he should respond.22 “Oh, shit, I don’t know,” Nixon said. “That big story in the Post is something. Huge story, but it seems to be a different angle,” he noted. Haldeman, who was part of this meeting, agreed with Ziegler that he should just say nothing. “I can do that for an hour and a half,” Ziegler assured the president, who predicted “a lot more of this desperate kind” of journalism before Election Day.