by John W. Dean
“Somebody next to Gray?” Nixon asked, and Haldeman minced no words: “Mark Felt.” Nixon, annoyed, wondered, “Now, why the hell would he do this?” Without attempting to account for Felt’s motive, Haldeman warned, “You can’t say anything about this, because it will screw up our source, and there’s a real concern. Mitchell is the only one that knows this, and he feels very strongly that we better not do anything, because if we move on him, then he’ll go out and unload everything. He knows everything that’s to be known in the FBI.” Nixon agreed, as Haldeman continued to insist, “Can’t do anything! Never!”
Haldeman again warned, “He has access to absolutely everything. Ehrlichman doesn’t know this yet. I just got this information. I was going to tell Ehrlichman without telling him the source.” Nixon agreed, “Don’t tell him, don’t tell him the source,” and they discussed whether or not to tell Pat Gray, thinking they should at least warn him, even if not revealing precisely what they knew. Haldeman said that the last bombshell that Felt might leak would be the information about Jeb Magruder and Bart Porter funding Liddy’s operation. As the conversation continued, he explained, although Time magazine already had some of this information, he believed the reelection committee could explain those few facts.
“What would you do with Felt, Bob?” the president asked. “Well, I asked Dean on that,” Haldeman replied. Nixon pressed, “What the hell would he do?” “He says you can’t prosecute him,” Haldeman reported, which Nixon did not understand, so Haldeman explained, “He hasn’t committed any [crime].” When the president suggested that they would have to “live with it,” Haldeman proposed having him transferred to “Ottumwa, Iowa,” but Nixon worried that he might then go out and write a book.
“You know what I’d do with him,” Nixon said: “Ambassador.” Both fell silent to consider this option (which Nixon would later use as a way to dispose of CIA director Richard Helms), until Haldeman quietly agreed, “Something like that, yeah.” The president asked how Haldeman had learned about Felt, and he explained that it had come to “a guy” at the Justice Department whom Haldeman did not name. “The guy at Justice told John Dean,” Haldeman continued. “And he has not told anybody else, including Kleindienst or Pat Gray, because he’s afraid that either of them might react in such a way as to do more harm than good.”36 Nixon concluded, “It’s better to say nothing.” A surprised Haldeman asked, “Say nothing?” “Absolutely,” Nixon instantly affirmed.
The following morning, October 20, the president told Haldeman that he had thought further about Felt and the potential dangers of removing him.37 While he had concluded that they should not inform Gray, he noted, “Now, the other thing that concerns me is Ehrlichman’s relationship with this fellow. He says that this fellow has handled a lot of problems for him. I don’t know what they are. Will you check with him and find out?” Haldeman said he would do so. Nixon continued, “Well, I think you better tell him what the situation is. But also, he’s got to see what kinds of games this fellow, what he knew, he may not. But I think Ehrlichman said that he is the man that did [things]; I’m not aware of anything.” Haldeman did not know either, but offered, “Ehrlichman said he had been involved in a lot of things with the FBI,” though he did not know specifically what those thing might have involved. “[Felt’s] his contact. See, that’s the thing I’m concerned with,” the president repeated, to make his point, and Haldeman assured him that he would speak with Ehrlichman but would not tell Gray anything.38
October 24, 1972, the White House
During an Oval Office conversation Haldeman advised the president that both Chuck Colson and John Ehrlichman were concerned about a CBS News story by Daniel Schorr that had been picked up by the Post.39 The paper reported that “President Nixon has ordered a reopening of a White House investigation into the June 17 Watergate bugging incident, CBS News said last night.” The report stated, “According to Schorr, the inquiry was resumed, ‘after President Nixon was cautioned by acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray that the agency had established more serious direct links to the White House than the President might know about.” The piece added that I, “who had conducted the original Watergate inquiry for President Nixon, was said by CBS to have interviewed Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti.” The Post wire-service story said that Schorr had not specified if I would be inquiring into “alleged sabotage and spying activities.”40
The president wanted to know if this was bad. Haldeman thought not, although, he noted, “the Schorr thing is a complete lie.” All this talk of my investigations resulted in Haldeman’s asking me to gather the facts relating to the Segretti-Strachan-Chapin situation. When Haldeman mentioned this to the president later that morning, Nixon observed, “I just don’t see how we can do anything but lose by trying to come out in a white paper.”41 Nonetheless, Haldeman wanted me to prepare one, “just because we ought to have one anyway” and to see “what it looks like.” In the early afternoon Colson told the president that the public thought the McGovern campaign was harassing Nixon with Watergate and Segretti, which was why it was having no impact on him in the polls.42
October 25–26, 1972, the White House
As Election Day approached the Post fired one last big volley, at Haldeman, which was as close to the president as they could get: an October 25 front-page story, along with a smiling albeit oversized picture of “H.R. (Bob) Haldeman,” with the banner headline: TESTIMONY TIES TOP NIXON AIDE TO SECRET FUND. This was the biggest Watergate story the Post had run, and its opening paragraph reported that the president’s chief of staff “was one of five high-ranking presidential associates authorized to approve payments from a secret Nixon campaign cash fund, according to federal investigators and accounts of sworn testimony before the Watergate grand jury.”43 The implication was obvious: The president’s top aide was connected to Watergate. There was, however, a fundamental problem with the account: It stated that Hugh Sloan had given this sworn testimony naming Haldeman, when, in fact, he had not, nor had Haldeman been interviewed by the FBI. Haldeman had denied the charges against him through White House deputy press secretary Gerald Warren when the Post sought a comment the preceding evening.
Not before this story, nor afterward, did Ron Ziegler so aggressively attack any news organization as he did the Post that morning—which itself became a front-page story the following day, quoting him denouncing the paper’s reporting as “political” and “the shoddiest type of journalism.” Even after learning that Sloan’s lawyer had informed the Post of its error, Ben Bradlee issued a statement saying, “We stand by our story.”44 Woodward and Bernstein later admitted that they “had assumed too much” and been persuaded “by their own deductions.” Even Mark Felt, meeting with Woodward at Deep Throat’s favorite underground garage, chastised them, calling their story “the worst possible setback,” because they had “people feeling sorry for Haldeman,” something Felt had not believed possible.45
In truth, and notwithstanding Ziegler’s highly staged furor, beyond the press room the story barely sent a ripple though the Nixon White House. A few wisecracks were made at the 8:15 A.M. staff meeting during the discussion of how to handle it, and all agreed it should be addressed aggressively, since the Post was oblivious to simple denials. The president, who was in a prescheduled appointment with Henry Kissinger regarding a prospective peace settlement in Vietnam, phoned Ziegler, who stepped out of the staff meeting, and in the course of their conversation mentioned the Haldeman story, which the president had not bothered to read.46 Ziegler told Nixon it was an opportunity to hit the Post, because the story was filled with errors, and that they were working on the response. The president, however, was more concerned about how they handled Vietnam.
This matter was not taken up with the president again until Haldeman met with him in the EOB office later that morning.47 “Anything about Watergate?” the president asked. Haldeman said the Post did not mention the Watergate break-in per se and proceeded to summarize the serious errors in the piece. Ther
e was a brief discussion of who would respond, and Haldeman was happy to have Ziegler handle it.
The story was still being discussed the next morning, October 26, only because it had made front-page news in a number of newspapers. During a morning meeting in the Oval Office with Ehrlichman, Nixon mentioned and asked for his view on the fact that the Post had done stories on both Colson and Haldeman, but said, “[T]his whole business about sabotage is ridiculous,” because it was part of the normal presidential election process.48 Citing Democratic demonstrations conspicuously planned to disrupt some of his appearances, Nixon was troubled by the hypocrisy of refusing to call those efforts sabotage while accusing his own campaign of engaging in it. “What I’ve always told the people here, for Christ sake, let’s find out what the other side is doing, so that we can have intelligence,” the president asserted, though he did worry that Chapin had gotten carried away with Segretti.
“Actually, as near as I can tell, what Dean’s checking shows, Chapin never programmed this guy,” Ehrlichman reported. “He recruited him, he sent him over to do this kind of thing, to do disruption, but Dwight never programmed him. He never told him what to do, never told him where to go, only took reports from him a couple of times, and then in kind of a humorous offhand way, because Segretti just didn’t report to him.”*
The president’s takeaway from the Post attack on Haldeman remains difficult to understand, based on the recorded conversations, as his reactions appear to be buried in the personal material withdrawn by NARA from the public. When dictating to his diary on October 25, however, he noted, “Haldeman spoke rather darkly of the fact that there was a clique in the White House that were out to get him. I trust he is not getting a persecution complex.” The president added (although there is no record of the call in the president’s daily diary) that he phoned Haldeman from the residence to reassure him: “We were going to have to take some heat in the next two weeks, but that we would sail through and not be knocked off balance.”49
October 28, 1972, the White House
On October 27 CBS News televised a special Watergate report based largely on Washington Post coverage. The president, who had not watched it, read a detailed report about it in his news summary on October 28, which prompted him to ask Haldeman if he had viewed it as soon as he arrived in the Oval Office that morning.50 Haldeman said CBS had planned a one-hour special but had cut it back to only fifteen minutes. “Well, this is very damaging,” the president observed. Haldeman could see the president was reading the news summary’s report of the broadcast, so he explained that Mort Allin, Pat Buchanan’s assistant who had prepared it, had gotten very excited about it, but in fact there had been no new news in it. Haldeman also reported that Colson had called Frank Stanton, the president of the network, and learned that they were going to run more of it that night, programming that Haldeman dismissed as “despicable.” Colson was then summoned to the Oval Office and instructed to deal with CBS, to go “kick ’em in the ass.”
As the final week of the 1972 presidential campaign arrived, the president was preoccupied with his efforts to reach an acceptable peace accord with North Vietnam, and the record shows that neither Watergate nor his reelection campaign were given much consideration. Clearly he was already thinking ahead to his second term.
November 1 to December 30, 1972
Reelection, Reorganization, a Dean Report Considered, Chapin’s Departure and Dorothy Hunt’s Death
November 1–7, 1972, the White House and the Campaign Trail
Although Watergate had effectively become a nonissue as of the week before the 1972 presidential election, in an EOB office meeting during the early afternoon of November 1, Ehrlichman suggested that the president or the White House mention “a tentative investigation” on all the Chapin and other recent allegations. This, he said, would “set the stage for somebody, Dean or me, or somebody, to then make ourselves available, and say, Okay, here’s what we found out. Chapin did this and this, Segretti did this and this,” based on affidavits that would be gathered.1 Ehrlichman suggested an “investigative group in the White House [of] Dean, Dick Moore, who is an attorney and who has been in on this right from the beginning, and me.” The work would be completed “about the first of December, or sooner, if necessary.” The president approved of the idea.
In a rambling late-afternoon conversation on November 2 with Haldeman, in the EOB office, a frustrated Nixon pushed his chief of staff so he could better understand how the Segretti and Watergate debacles had come about. Haldeman had concluded that the core of all these problems was Liddy, which he summed up as “If you want to get right down to what went wrong.”2 The president added that he felt “Martha and John is what went wrong,” but Haldeman explained that it had all started even before Mitchell went over to the CRP: What had happened was that they had Jeb Magruder, who hadn’t known what he was doing, and it was now clear that Liddy hadn’t either. (It is unfortunate that this conversation is not more audible, for at one point Haldeman takes Nixon back to the origins of the plan to gather intelligence during the 1972 campaign—the idea of using Jack Caulfield—and that Mitchell had rejected that plan, called Operation Sandwedge.)
Shortly before noon on Friday, November 3, the president, joined by the First Lady, headed on a last campaign swing, flying to Chicago, Tulsa and Providence and calling supporters in the U.S. Senate from Air Force One as he moved about the country. On November 4, before leaving for another campaign flight, he met with Haldeman, and at one point in their EOB office conversation the president announced, “I have done some thinking in terms of Watergate.”3 That thinking concerned how he was going to keep himself above the fray and defend himself, namely by repeating the following: He had been “shocked to learn of the break-in”; he had “read the riot act to everybody in the White House”; he had made “Dean responsible”; and he had “told Clark MacGregor he was responsible to investigate.” None of this happened to be true, as the record shows, but Nixon was constantly refining his defense.
After that meeting the president headed for his helicopter on the South Grounds of the White House, and then to Andrews Air Force Base and his final campaign trip, to Winston-Salem, Albuquerque and on to Ontario, California, which was followed by a short helicopter trip to his San Clemente compound. He continued campaigning via telephone and recorded television messages until he voted in San Clemente at 7:00 A.M. on Tuesday, November 7, before flying back to the nation’s capital at ten that morning.
Nixon’s reelection victory was a massive landslide in which he carried every state but Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia, by significant margins. When the votes were all tallied he had received 60.67 percent of the popular vote and 538 electoral votes, or 96.65 percent of the Electoral College, placing him just behind Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson in historic wins. Nixon, however, failed to carry Congress, which was the only hope—a quiet but not unspoken White House staff hope—to bring an end to Watergate. Nixon had not bothered to campaign for congressional candidates or to make any real effort to win GOP control, and he did not have sufficient coattails to give the Republicans control of either the Senate or the House of Representatives, which meant that Watergate would not end with the trial of the Watergate seven.
To most all who saw Nixon on election night it was clear that his victory had not really boosted his spirits. He was in a terrible mood, depressed and barely able to even pretend he was a winner, later writing that he was “at a loss to explain the melancholy that settled over [him] on that victorious night.” He did suggest in his memoirs that to “some extent the marring effects of Watergate” weighed on him. He clearly understood that his failure to win Congress meant Watergate would loom large in the coming days and months.4*
November 8, 1972, the White House
To the absolute surprise of nearly every member of the White House staff, the cabinet and the subcabinet, they were all fired. After the president attended the morning staff meeting to thank the group for its h
elp in his reelection, and to request their assistance in reorganizing the executive branch for the second term, Haldeman took over the meeting and asked for everyone’s resignation. From there the president went to a cabinet meeting in which he gave a similar talk, and was again followed by Haldeman requesting everyone’s resignation, along with instructions to obtain the resignations of all the presidential appointees within their departments or agencies as well. The process was handled brutally, and everyone was confused, if not angry. During my meeting with the president on September 15 I had become privy to these plans, and Haldeman had told me that, because of Watergate, I would be asked to remain on staff. He had also requested that I check on several legal issues before the mass resignation requests were issued. (Haldeman also submitted his resignation, along with Ehrlichman’s, when flying back to Washington from San Clemente on Election Day, but the president rejected both.5)
By midmorning on November 8 it occurred to me that the White House would not want to upset Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen, who was in charge of the Watergate investigation, so I called Haldeman to get his approval to assure Petersen he would not lose his job as the head of the Criminal Division. Both Haldeman and Petersen appreciated that I had taken care of this detail before I flew off to California to meet with Donald Segretti to pull together a quick investigation of what, in fact, he had done for and with people in the Nixon White House. The president, meanwhile, accompanied by Haldeman and Ehrlichman, headed to Florida to focus in earnest on the task of reorganizing the executive branch with new personnel (including shifting some tested people to new jobs) as he sought to reinvigorate his administration. In the coming weeks it was clear that Nixon and his senior staff had created a remarkable amount of ill will in Washington with their postelection ingratitude, a problem that would soon return to haunt his presidency.
