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

by John W. Dean

  “Great sadness,” the president said. “As a matter of fact, there was some discussion over here with somebody about Hunt’s problems after his wife died, and I said, of course, commutation could be considered on the basis of his wife, and that is the only discussion I ever had in that light.” I affirmed that I was aware of those conversations and proceeded: “So that’s it. That’s the extent of the knowledge,” I said, referring to people outside the White House. “Now, where are the soft spots on this? Well, first of all, there’s the problem of the continued blackmail, which will not only go on now, it’ll go on when these people are in prison, and it will compound the obstruction of justice situation. It’ll cost money. It’s dangerous. And I think people around here are not pros at this sort of thing. And this is the sort of thing Mafia people can do—washing money, getting clean money and things like that. We just don’t know about those things, because we’re not used to, you know, we’re not criminals and not used to dealing in that business,” I said, with a uneasy chuckle. “It’s a tough thing to know how to do.”

  “That’s right,” the president said, adding, “Maybe we can’t even do that.” “That’s right,” I agreed, jumping on the president’s comment. Because I had gotten no response from him when I explained that this was an obstruction of justice, I decided to raise the practical difficulties involved: “It’s a real problem as to whether we could even do it. Plus, there’s a real problem in raising money. Mitchell has been working on raising some money, feeling, you know, he’s one of the ones with the most to lose. But there’s no denying the fact that the White House, and Ehrlichman, Haldeman and Dean, are involved in some of the early money decisions.” Then the president stunned me. “How much money do you need?” he asked, which was not a question I had expected, nor a matter to which I had given any serious thought. I paused for an instant and reached for what I thought would be a sizable number, making it all more difficult. “I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years.”

  “We could get that,” the president responded. I replied with an unenthusiastic “um, hmm,” which he ignored, saying, “You, on the money, if you need the money, I mean, you could get the money. Let’s say—” I tried to interrupt him, but he continued, “What I meant is, you could, you could get a million dollars, and you could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten. I mean, it’s not easy, but it could be done. But the question is, who the hell would handle it? Any ideas on that?”

  “Well, I would think that would be something that Mitchell ought to be charged with,” I said, trying to keep the White House away from it. “I would think so, too,” the president agreed. I further suggested, “And get pros to help him,” since Mitchell always seemed to come back to the White House for assistance. Nixon added, “Let me say, there shouldn’t be a lot of people running around getting money. We should set up a little—” the president started to explain, but I stopped him so I could describe how Mitchell was operating.

  “Well, he’s got one person doing it who I’m not sure is—” I began. “Who is that?” the president asked. “He’s got Fred LaRue doing it. Now, Fred started out going out trying to solicit money from all kinds of people. And I learned about that, and I said, ‘No.’” The president agreed. “He’s apparently talked to Tom Pappas,” I added. “I know,” the president said, which went by me so fast that it did not register. Instead, I reported, “And Pappas has agreed to come up with a sizable amount, I gather, from Mitchell.” I had no idea that Nixon had personally engaged in this fund-raising undertaking for the Watergate defendants when he asked, “Yeah. Well, what do you think? You don’t need a million right away, but you need a million, is that right?”

  “That’s right,” I said, a bit dismayed, since I had not brought this information to the president’s attention to raise money; rather, I had hoped telling him of Hunt’s demand would have the opposite effect, that he would direct this business be stopped. Instead, he continued: “You’ve got to do it in cash, I’m sure. If you want to put that through, would you put that through—” The president said he was “thinking out loud here for a moment,” and then asked, “—Would you put that through the Cuban committee?” Since I did not know about the Cuban committee, I said, “No.” Still thinking aloud, the president shared several half thoughts, with his bottom line being how this information would be handled if it ever became public. Specifically, he asked, “Is the Cuban committee an obstruction of justice if they want to help?” Because I was not certain such an entity even existed, and because I did not think we should be in this business, I could only stutter and sputter8 until the president finally clarified, “Would you like to put, I mean, would that, would that give a little bit of a cover, for example?”

  “That would give some for the Cubans, and possibly Hunt,” I responded meekly, then thought of a problem it would not solve. “Then you’ve got Liddy and McCord, [who are] not accepting any money.” Regarding McCord, I added, “So he’s not a bought man right now.” The president now urged me, “Continue a little bit here now.” Realizing I had not managed to convey the urgency of the situation, I decided to try to paint an even grimmer picture: “When I say this is a growing cancer, I say it for reasons like this. Bud Krogh, in his testimony before the grand jury, was forced to perjure himself. He is haunted by it. Bud said, ‘I haven’t had a pleasant day on the job.’ He said to me, ‘I told my wife all about this’; he said, ‘The curtain may ring down one of these days, and I may have to face the music, which I’m perfectly willing to do.’” Nixon asked, “What did he perjure himself on, John?” Bud and I had never really discussed it in any detail, but as best I could recall, he had said he had testified that he did not know the Cubans involved in Watergate, when, in fact, he did know two of them. The president wanted to know if Bud had denied knowing them, and I said, “That’s right. They didn’t press him hard on this.”9 The president made his point. “Perjury’s an awful hard rap to prove. He could say that I—Well, go ahead,” he instructed.

  “Well, so that’s one perjury. Now, Mitchell and Magruder are potential perjuries. There’s always the possibility of any one of these individuals blowing: Hunt, Liddy. Liddy’s in jail right now. He’s trying to get good time right now. I think Liddy is probably, in his own bizarre way, the strongest of all of them. So there’s that possibility,” I explained. The president noted, “Well, your major guy to keep under control is Hunt, I think. Because he knows about a lot of other things.” I agreed, “Right,” and added, “He could sink Chuck Colson. Apparently he is quite distressed with Colson. He thinks Colson’s abandoned him. Colson was to meet with him when he was out of here, now that he’s left the White House. He met with him through his lawyer. Hunt raised the question. He wanted money. Colson’s lawyer told him that Colson wasn’t doing anything with money, and Hunt took offense with that immediately, that Colson had abandoned him.”

  “Don’t you, just looking at the immediate problem, don’t you have to handle Hunt’s financial situation? Damn soon?” the president pressed, and I had to admit that that was an immediate problem, saying I had talked with Mitchell about it. “Might as well,” the president said. “May have [to do it], you’ve got to keep the cap on the bottle that much in order to have any options.” I could not disagree. Then the president raised the key question, “Either that or let it all blow right now.”

  “Well, that, you know, that’s the question,” I said, and the president requested I continue. I had presented what I viewed as the key issue, but there were other less serious ones to consider. I told him of the Kalmbach situation—that he had controlled almost two million dollars in cash, and that Herb felt it would be difficult to account for much of this money, because it would open up other White House activities. Unaware that Ehrlichman had discussed this very topic with Nixon, I was surprised to find the president did not feel this posed serious problems, and I assumed he knew much more than I did about these funds. I informed him that four hundred thous
and dollars had been sent somewhere in the South, which Nixon thought had been to Governor George Wallace. I continued: “He has maintained a man, who I only know by the name of ‘Tony,’ who is the fellow who did the Chappaquiddick study and other odd jobs like that. Nothing illegal” that I was then aware of. “I heard about that,” the president said. I added, “I don’t know of anything that Herb has done that is illegal, other than the fact that he doesn’t want to blow the whistle on a lot of people, and may find himself in a perjury situation.” I explained that this was a problem if Kalmbach was asked about the money, and about how he paid Segretti. That they would seek Kalmbach’s bank records. Nixon asked, “How would you handle that then, John? For example, would you just have him put the whole thing out?” The president said he was not bothered by any of Kalmbach’s earlier activities, and other than that Kalmbach himself was worried, I had no further information to impart.

  When the president asked me about other vulnerabilities unwinding because of Watergate, I reported what I knew about the grand jury in the Southern District of New York that was investigating Mitchell and Vesco. Then there was the Segretti matter, which Haldeman had told me he had discussed with the president but was not of great concern to anyone, although there was a very remote possibility the Justice Department might claim Segretti’s actions had violated a federal civil rights statute prohibiting interference with a candidate for national office, which was a felony. The president felt that the Segretti matter would be primarily a public relations problem, which could be made so confusing no one would understand it.

  I returned again to what troubled me most: possible criminal charges against Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Dean for our involvement in obstruction of justice. The only idea I had was that we should all meet and see if we could come up with a way to deal with the situation, since we had never attempted to do that, and also figure out how it could be “carved away” from the presidency. I explained that one of the reasons I was no longer effective in dealing with the problems was that Pat Gray had brought me into the public eye. In addition, everyone was now moving into a protective mode to save himself. I had earlier recommended to Ehrlichman, who liked the idea, that we all go to the grand jury. I now put this suggestion to Nixon, who also initially favored it, until I told him “some people are going to have to go to jail. That’s the long and short of it.” He wanted to know who, and I told him I could be one of those affected. While I had hinted at my legal vulnerability earlier, I now bluntly stated I was troubled by the obstruction of justice. “I don’t see it,” Nixon said, and I explained that the relevant issue was my role as a conduit of information in taking care of the defendants.

  “Oh, you mean like the blackmail?” the president asked. I acknowledged that was the problem, and he added, “Well, I wonder if that part of it doesn’t have to be continued. Let me put it this way: Let us suppose you could get the million bucks, and you get the proper way to handle it, and you could hold that side. It would seem to me that would be worthwhile.” I did not know a proper way to handle hush money, so I reminded the president that all those already convicted would want clemency. The president acknowledged that this was a problem where Hunt was concerned, and I told him it would be an issue with the others as well. When Nixon remarked that he did not think he could offer clemency until after the 1974 midterm elections, I advised him that he should not even consider it, for it would involve him in a way he should not be involved.

  “There’ve been some bad judgments made, there’ve been some necessary judgments made, before the election,” I explained, but he should not have this burden weighing on his second term. “It is not going to go away, sir.” The president agreed and wanted to know my other concerns, adding that he felt I “[might] be overplaying” my feelings about my role in obstructing justice. I told him that Ehrlichman had potential criminal liability for the conspiracy to burglarize the offices of Ellsberg’s doctor if Hunt made good on his threat. Then I recalled that I had not mentioned all the White House and reelection committee secretaries who had varying degrees of knowledge of illicit activities who could also be targeted by the Senate investigation. I told the president I did not have a plan to solve all these problems, but I knew that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had stopped talking to Mitchell about them, and suggested again that we should have “a real down and out with everyone” who had the most to lose.

  “I think Bob has a potential criminal liability, frankly,” I added. The president then said, “Suppose the worst, that Bob is indicted and Ehrlichman is indicted. I must say, maybe we just better then try to tough it through. Do you get my point?” I did, and he continued, “If, for example, say we cut our losses and [pay] no more blackmail and all the rest, and the thing blows, and they indict Bob and the rest. Jesus, you’d never recover from that, John. It’s better to fight it out instead, and not let people testify, and so forth and so on. Now, on the other hand, we realize that we have these weaknesses in terms of blackmail.”

  I agreed that there were two alternatives: Either to figure out how to cut the losses and minimize the human impact in a manner that would not undermine the Nixon presidency or to “just hunker down,” fight all the way, not let people testify, keep it all buried and hope we could make the right decisions. After making that observation I was surprised when the president said, “I do want you to still consider my scheme of having you brief the cabinet, just in very general terms, and the leaders, in very general terms, and some general statement with regard to my investigation. Answer questions. Report Haldeman was not involved. Ehrlichman—”

  “Well, I can, you know, if we go that route, sir, I can give a show,” I began, but because I had just told him there had been no investigation, and that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were deeply and criminally involved, I could not resist adding a cynical comment: “We can sell it, you know, just like we were selling Wheaties.” The tone of my remark seemed to pull the president back to the seriousness of the situation, my mention of the “mine fields down the road,” the fact that “the guys are going to jail,” the fact that “we’re not going to be able to give them clemency.” Nixon was stunned when I informed him that the Watergate defendants conceivably could get as much as fifty-year sentences, given the comments that Judge Sirica had been making and that he had hiked their bails bonds up beyond their ability to pay while letting a man charged with shooting Senator John Stennis out on the street with virtually no bond.

  The president buzzed for Haldeman to come to his office so that a meeting could be set up with Mitchell, Ehrlichman, Haldeman and myself as soon as possible. When Haldeman arrived, the president summarized the high points of our meeting and said he wanted me to give the others the same information I had given him, including the potential criminal liabilities. In fact, over the preceding eight months I had already given them that information, and not unlike the president, they had paid little attention to it, addressing instead whatever was then the current problem. Haldeman, however, did not mention this, and I did not feel it my place to raise it. What was particularly striking about this meeting was that, when the president mentioned matters I had already discussed with Haldeman on repeated occasions, he reacted as if they were all news to him. For example, when the president remarked that Colson had called Magruder, which had triggered Magruder to get Liddy’s plans approved by Mitchell, Haldeman acted surprised, as if hearing it for the first time.* These were the types of games the president’s men were playing with one another, and with the president. From the distance of four decades it appears that while both men were occasionally conscious that their conversations were being recorded, Haldeman may have been more sensitive to this than Nixon, not to mention more cunning.

  When the president asked if I thought Colson should also attend the meeting with Mitchell, Ehrlichman, Haldeman and myself, I said no. I reported that Colson’s lawyer had become a chatterbox; he had discussed Hunt’s demands with members of my staff, a matter about which they had no knowledge. Haldeman asked,
“Who’s Colson’s lawyer? That Jew in his law firm?” I said it was David Shapiro. “That’s where your danger lies,” Haldeman told the president. “It is in all these stupid human errors developing.”

  The next forty minutes of conversation fell within what had already become the template for discussing this subject, both during the months that led to this juncture and those that would follow: Problems were raised, but solutions could not be found, because no one wanted to truly face the terrible reality: We had become something of a criminal cabal, weighing the risks of further criminal action to prevent the worst while hoping something might unexpectedly occur that would resolve the problems. Watergate conversations had become like the devil’s merry-go-round, with the same basic tune played over and over while various people climbed on and off. The lever controlling it all was in the hands of Richard Nixon, who from our March 21, 1973, conversation until the end of his presidency would engage in these increasingly protracted exchanges searching for less than truthful solutions to ever-growing problems.

  Two instructions emerged from this meeting, one to me and one to Haldeman. I had suggested we might gain some time to deal with Hunt’s demand if Kleindienst called Judge Sirica and said the government had new information that could influence his sentencing decision; might he delay sentencing for a week? The president wanted me to follow up on this (though when I discussed it hypothetically with Henry Petersen he advised against it). Haldeman was to convene a meeting with Mitchell, Ehrlichman and me as soon as possible to explore our options, which he did. Once we decided on the plan we would discuss it further. Nixon said to me, “You had the right plan, let me say, I have no doubts about it, the right plan before the election. And you handled it just right. You contained it. Now, after the election, we’ve got to have another plan, because we can’t have, for four years, we can’t have this thing” that would eat away at his presidency. I had gone from being the intermediary and communications link between and among all these people to the president’s designated fixer.