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

by John W. Dean

  “This is another point on not using the FBI for political purposes, either,” I explained, which in fact was one of the reasons Liddy had been given intelligence responsibilities (though it was not the only reason). The president liked that approach, observing, “You see, I’ve been thinking. I should say, for example, the matter was discussed as to whether or not that agents in the Bureau should be [involved], it was pointed out that in the 1964 elections, the Bureau was used. I said that [they] couldn’t be involved. Do you get my point? And then Haldeman said, under no circumstances, or Haldeman never mentioned it to any of the agents. It all had to be done privately, because the Bureau should not be involved in a partisan contest. We did not use the Bureau in this. We did use them against demonstrations, but when they’re political in character, the Bureau was never used. Which is true.” I acknowledged this, and the president added, “The Secret Service was used, but that’s their job.” The president then offered more vague examples, “Frankly, they’ve got to say, ‘I did this, this, this and this,’ and Chapin would have to tell them the truth. Agreed? And he would say I had this and da, da, da, da, da, but I had nothing to do with this or that other thing.”

  Our conversation was interrupted by Haldeman, who had scheduling and other issues the president needed to address, but as he worked Nixon continued to return to the proposed contents of the report. He liked the idea of everyone giving me sworn affidavits, as did I, for the document would then reflect what I had been told rather than what I had learned (often by accident), although I suspected no one was going to be willing to sign a sworn affidavit that accounted honestly for his role, or even a sworn flat denial. But the president understood the broader problems, and after Haldeman departed we went even deeper into these problems: “Now, you were saying, too, where this thing leads, I mean in terms of the vulnerabilities and so forth. It’s your view the vulnerables are basically Mitchell, Colson, Haldeman indirectly, possibly directly, and of course, the second level is, as far as the White House is concerned, Chapin. Right?” I added, “And I’d say Dean to a degree,” being as candid as possible. “You?” he asked with a tone of surprise. “Why?”

  “Well, because I’ve been all over this thing like a blanket,” I explained, referring to my activities in the cover-up. “I know, I know,” he said, “But you know all about it, but you didn’t, you were in it after the deed was done.” “That’s correct,” I assured him. “I had no foreknowledge.” It was there that Nixon remained focused: who knew what about the break-in, while totally ignoring the criminal implications of the cover-up. The president continued: “Here’s the whole point. My point is that your problem, I don’t think you do have a problem. All the others that have participated in the God damned thing, and therefore are potentially subject to criminal liability. You’re not. That’s the difference. And on that score, of course, we have to know where we are. Everybody that was in there. Magruder, as I understand, knows, told some people that Haldeman knows, and told other people that Colson knows,” Nixon noted, and I pointed out, “Oh, Jeb is a good man, but if Jeb ever sees himself sinking, he will reach out to grab everybody he can get hold of. I think the unfortunate thing is, in this whole thing, is [that] Jeb is the most responsible man for the whole incident.” “Really?” Nixon said, and by this point I knew when he was truly surprised.

  “Well, let me tell you, after it happened, and on Monday,” I began, referring to June 19, 1972, “it didn’t take me very long to put the pieces together, what had occurred. I got ahold of Liddy, and I said, ‘Gordon, I want to know who in the White House is involved in this.’ And he said, ‘John, nobody was involved or has knowledge, that I know of, that we were going in or the like, with one exception, and it was a lower-level person.”

  “Strachan,” the president injected, and I continued, “Strachan. He said, ‘I don’t really know how much he knew.’ And I said, ‘Well, why in the hell did this happen?’ And he said, ‘Magruder pushed me without mercy to go in there. Magruder said I had to go in there.’ He had to do this.”* Nixon, understanding the players and pecking order, asked, “Who pushed Magruder?” Then he asked, “Colson?” “That’s what Jeb—” I began to respond, when the president cut me off, asking, “Colson could, Colson push Magruder, though?” I answered giving the president both sides of what I had learned, explaining, “No, that’s why there’s two stories.” “That’s my point,” Nixon responded. “I don’t, I think Colson can push, but he didn’t know Magruder that well. And had very damn little confidence in him. So maybe that must have come from here. Is that the point? Did Haldeman push him?”

  “Well, I think what happened is that, on sort of a tickler—” I began to explain how Haldeman’s staff often got an assignment in their suspension/tickler file and felt pushed to address it, assuming everything possible had be done if it had been requested. And they pushed in Haldeman’s name, so others on the staff never knew who really wanted the information, or how important it might be to the president. “I can’t believe Haldeman would push Magruder,” Nixon observed. Nor did I, in fact, but I wanted him to understand the way the tickler system worked. So I explained, “No, I think Strachan did. Because Strachan just had it on his tickler, he knew they were supposed to be gathering intelligence and talking to Jeb and saying, ‘Where is it?’ and ‘Why isn’t it coming in?’ ‘You haven’t produced it.’” (In fact, years later Strachan’s records suggest that was indeed the case.) Nixon asked, “Intelligence problems? What were they worried about?” Nixon continued, “They worried about, as I understand it, the San Diego demonstrations. I’m not too sure about this, but I guess everybody around here except me worried about it.” “Well, I don’t know,” I replied, for I personally thought much of the intelligence gathering was silly. “What else?” Nixon asked, but before I could answer, he said that he thought Mitchell was concerned about a secret ten-million-dollar fund the Democrats had, but then added, “What the hell difference did that make?”

  I gave the president my take: “I cannot understand why they decided to go in the DNC. That absolutely mystifies me as to what—Anybody who’s walked around a national committee knows that there’s nothing there.” The president, evidencing more knowledge than I had, explained, “Well, the point is, they’re trying to see what they could develop in terms of the—” he did not finish what appears to have been the description of a fishing expedition.* Instead he said, “And now Magruder puts the heat on somebody else. The point is, the way you see things could be, as I understand it, is that possibly [unclear], that Sloan starts pissing on Magruder, and then Magruder starts pissing on, who? Even Haldeman?”

  “No, no, if somebody out of here were to start saying, ‘Alright, Jeb, you’re going to take the heat on this one—’” I began to explain, when again the president cut me off with, “Nobody down here’s going to say that.” “We can’t do that.” I agreed. “I think what you’ve got to do, to the extent that you can, John,” Nixon said, “is to cut it off at the pass. And you cut off at the pass, and Liddy and his bunch just did this as part of their job.” This was a rather clear instruction to create a bogus report, and he then elaborated on how he wanted it written.

  The conversation turned to Segretti, and we both agreed that that was not a big problem to explain. I then turned to a more serious consideration: “The other potential problem is Ehrlichman’s, and that is his connection with Hunt and Liddy both.” “They worked for him?” the president asked, and I explained the issue as I saw it: “These fellows had to be some idiots, as we’ve learned after the fact. They went out and went into Dr. Ellsberg’s doctor’s office, and they were geared up with all this CIA equipment, cameras and the like. Well, they turned the stuff back in to the CIA at some point in time and left film in the camera. The CIA has not put this together, and they don’t know what it all means right now, but it wouldn’t take a very sharp investigator very long, because you’ve got pictures in the CIA files that they had to turn over to Justice.” “What in the world?” Nixon
asked. “What in the name of God would Ehrlichman have somebody get close to Ellsberg?”*

  “They were trying to—this was a part of an operation in connection with the Pentagon Papers. They wanted to get Ellsberg’s psychiatric records for some reason,” I reported. When Nixon asked, “Why?” at that time I could only answer, “I don’t know.” (Today we know they wanted to use that information to discredit Ellsberg.) Sounding surprised, Nixon said, “This is the first I ever heard of this. I [didn’t] care about, Ellsberg was not our problem. Jesus Christ.” Until this conversation I had figured the Ellsberg break-in had been a national security operation. While I did not know a lot about such operations, I did know they required personal presidential approval. I had advised Ehrlichman I learned of the break-in from Liddy on June 19, 1972, when he reported having used two of the same men at the Watergate to break into Ellsberg’s doctor’s office, and they were in jail. The two, Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez, who had pled guilty, were then awaiting sentencing for the Watergate break-in and bugging.

  Since Nixon had volunteered and acknowledged Ehrlichman’s role, I confirmed it based on the information I had received: “Well, anyway, it was under an Ehrlichman structure. Maybe John didn’t ever know. I’ve never asked him if he knew. I didn’t want to know.” But this was no small fact, for it had been driving much of the cover-up. I had learned from Bud Krogh that after the failed effort to break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, Liddy and Hunt had requested permission to try again, but Ehrlichman and Krogh had refused. Inexplicably, although Liddy and Hunt had far exceeded their authority, they had never been reprimanded; and Liddy was then given a promotion and sent to the reelection committee with Ehrlichman’s approval and blessing. Mitchell, who had learned about Liddy’s White House activities in a post–DNC arrest debriefing, had used the fact that Ehrlichman had run this illicit operation not too subtly to keep Ehrlichman’s cooperation in the cover-up. (It is unclear, even from the recorded conversation, precisely how much Ehrlichman had told Haldeman, who had only made the vaguest references to this activity.)

  Nixon, clearly, did not want this matter addressed, “I can’t see that getting into this,” he insisted, but as I explained, that was easier said than done: “Well, look, here’s the way it can come up. In the CIA’s files, which the Senate Watergate committee is asking for, in the material they turned over to the Department of Justice, there are all the materials relating to Hunt. In there are these pictures which the CIA developed, and they’ve got Gordon Liddy standing proud as punch outside this doctor’s office with his name on it. And it’s not going to take very long for an investigator to go back and say, why would somebody be at the doctor’s office, and they’d find out that there was a break-in at that doctor’s office, and then you’d find Liddy on the [White House] staff, and then you’d start working it back. I don’t think they’ll ever reach that point,” I said, hopefully.

  “Can’t be. It’s irrelevant,” Nixon the lawyer said. “It’s irrelevant. Right,” I agreed, thinking strictly in terms of the Watergate break-in. Nixon noted, “That’s the point. That’s where Ervin’s rules of relevancy [have] got [to be enforced]. Now, what the hell has this got to do with it?” The president continued, “And, of course, Colson apparently was working with Hunt on that ITT, that silly woman out of there,” he said, referring to Dita Beard. “Hunt went out as a disguised doctor or something.” I added, “He had [a] red wig on, and funny glasses and went out and interviewed her.”

  “Jesus Christ,” the president declared with disgust, then noted, “But that’s nothing. You know, there’s nothing illegal there.” I continued with other matters that could come up that related to Ehrlichman. “It’s not illegal,” I began. “In fact, it’s kind of interesting, if it ever occurred. Right after Chappaquiddick, John had a man dispatched up there, this New York City detective—” I said, repeating the Tony Ulasewicz story I had learned from Caulfield. “Oh, yeah, I heard about that,” the president said, for I had mentioned it obliquely, as had Ehrlichman when discussing Kalmbach’s bank accounts. I continued, “Two years he was on this thing, and he knows more about how Teddy Kennedy lied his way through that and closed that down than any living human being.” And we discussed how this information might be uncovered from Kalmbach’s bank records.

  To wrap up the session, the president returned to the Dean report. “Now, I’d simply say, ‘Look, I required from every member of my staff a sworn statement, here’s one from here, here’s one from here, here, here.’ Now, so we know that’s the basis of my statement. Now go to it. If you’ve got something else you want to find out, get searching,” the president said. “That’s good. That’s great,” I responded. I had gone into the meeting feeling concerned that I would be carrying the load almost singlehandedly, but the fact that the president had clearly authorized me to get sworn statements that I could use as the basis for the report eased my mind considerably. The burden would be placed on those who made the statements to explain their knowledge. They would either provide the basis for a report or effectively kill the project. I had tried this approach earlier, but understandably, no one wanted to commit to sworn statements. Now, however, I had been given direction to do so by the president. The president liked this approach better, as he explained. “The sworn statement, John, is much better, rather than giving a statement by Dean,” he said, and went over a few hypothetical examples. “Run that by Moore, will you?” he asked, and then sent me on my way with a friendly, “See you later.”

  March 18–19, 1973, the White House

  On Sunday, March 18, Senator Sam Ervin appeared on CBS News’s Face the Nation, where he stated that if President Nixon’s aides refused to testify before his Watergate committee, he was going to have them arrested and jailed at the Capitol by the sergeant at arms. On Monday morning, March 19, Ervin’s remarks elicited waves of laughter at several White House staff meetings, and in the Oval Office, where Haldeman met with the president, and Ziegler stopped by for guidance before his press briefing.12 The president thought Ziegler should ignore Ervin’s remarks and stress the point that the president was cooperating. “Nothing excites the president’s staff more than everyone in the White House being shipped off to jail,” Haldeman cracked. “They’re totally enthused with that.”

  Late that afternoon the president requested that Dick Moore and I join him in his EOB office for a progress update on a Dean report.13 We had been at it for hours, and Moore explained, “At the moment, I don’t think we’re prepared to let it all hang out until we know much better where we’re going.” The president said, “I don’t want it to hang out.” I suggested, “Let part of it hang out in a way that doesn’t create more problems,” to which Nixon responded, “There are problems, but I’d like part of it to hang out.” In fact, this continued the impossible discussion, because no one wanted to acknowledge the need to arbitrarily draw lines releasing some but not all the information. Nixon was calling for half truths when only whole truths would solve the problems.

  On March 19, in the afternoon, CRP lawyer Paul O’Brien appeared in my office, a visit that, as I later testified (and described in Blind Ambition14), was a game-changing event.15 Only years later would I understand that it was the impetus that provoked me to face the reality of the situation confronting the president and all of us in the White House engaged in the cover-up. Before the meeting with Paul O’Brien I had been hoping against hope that, because of the power of the presidency, the inherent influence of his high office and the inclination of most people to want to believe a president, we could survive. But O’Brien’s blunt message to me after his meeting with Howard Hunt changed all that. Here is how I wrote about it in 1976:

  “And I’ve come with Howard Hunt’s message for you, John,” O’Brien continued. “He said, ‘You tell John Dean that I need seventy-two thousand dollars for support and fifty thousand for attorney’s fees—’”

  “Why me?” I shouted as my head shot around toward O’Brien. “Why the hell
did he send the goddamn message to me?”

  O’Brien gave me a helpless look. “I don’t know, John. I asked him the same question, and he just said, ‘You tell Dean I need the money by the close of business Wednesday. And if I don’t get it, I’m going to have to reconsider my options. And I’ll have some seamy things to say about what I did for John Ehrlichman while I was at the White House.’ And that’s the message.”16

  O’Brien, who was very aware of how difficult it was to raise money for the Watergate defendants, had asked me what I was going to do. When I said I was going to do nothing and I was out of the money business, he was taken aback. What O’Brien did not know was that it had been Hunt’s call to Colson after the election demanding money that had first led me to check the law, to understand that what we were doing was wrong. When Colson had involved Ehrlichman and me, not to mention the president, in Hunt’s demands for clemency, I had been terribly uncomfortable. I had agonized over Mitchell’s request that McCord be given the same clemency assurance Hunt had been given.17 Now Hunt was in effect attempting to extort Ehrlichman, not to mention Bud Krogh and the president, through me to pay him more, and more, and more. I had become involved in the Watergate cover-up at the request of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, serving at first as something of a messenger between them and Mitchell. As time passed, however, after they set the policy during the first days following the arrests, more and more problems had been delegated to me to deal with, problems others had created and wanted to avoid. I had become as much a fool as I was a victim. And now the president was pushing me to write some sort of quick-fix, all-purpose document that would get him out from under it all, based on a purported investigation of Watergate that I had never conducted.