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

by John W. Dean

  Ehrlichman and Haldeman discussed Mitchell’s tremor, which Ehrlichman thought worse than usual, and the president broke the silence that followed. “You’ve done your duty today. What’s the next question?” Haldeman responded that it was whether Ehrlichman should see Magruder at four o’clock. Ehrlichman thought there was no longer any purpose, and Haldeman remarked that Magruder would do as Mitchell wanted. But the president, thinking ahead, said he thought the purpose was to make a record, since Ehrlichman was secretly recording these sessions. “For that purpose, maybe I should,” Ehrlichman conceded. After discussing what they should and should not say to Magruder, the discussion turned again to me.

  “I think we owe it to ourselves,” the president said, “to find out about John Dean, for example, what he now understands, what he thinks.” Ehrlichman agreed, saying, “This is probably a golden opportunity, in a way.” The president was blunt. “[W]ell, let me put it this way: We’ve got to find out what the hell he’s going to say.” Not as anxious about this matter as the president, Ehrlichman and Haldeman let the conversation drift back to Magruder and Mitchell, until Ehrlichman injected a point I had made to him regarding those on my indictable list: “Dean argues that in a conspiracy, such as they are trying to build, they may not have to prove the same kind of animus as to some of the participants, but only that they were in [the conspiracy]. I would have to read the cases. I just don’t know what the law is.”

  Soon Ehrlichman brought up our earlier meeting, at which I had gone over the indictable list with him and Haldeman. After speculation about the possibility of Colson’s being indicted, Ehrlichman sighed and said, “Dean seems to think everybody in the place is going to get indicted,” which produced nervous laughter. “What Dean said is just looking at the worst possible side of the coin,” Haldeman offered. “That you could make a list of everybody who in some way is technically indictable in the cover-up operation. And that list includes, in addition to Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Dean, Strachan, Kalmbach, Kalmbach’s go-between, Kalmbach’s source, LaRue, Mardian, O’Brien, Parkinson, Hunt and, you know, just keep wandering through the impossible. He said maybe the route is for everybody on that list to take a guilty plea and get immediate, what do you call it, clemency,” he said after being prompted by Ehrlichman. “That shows you the somewhat unclear state,” he chuckled, “of John Dean’s analytical thinking.”13

  The president wanted to know if he had requested an independent investigation at the time McCord sent his letter. “I was ready to report to you my tentative conclusions, and you wanted it turned over to the Department of Justice,” Ehrlichman explained, as they concocted a new potential scenario. “If Mitchell is indicted, you think he’s going to be convicted?” the president asked. Ehrlichman did, particularly since Magruder had gone to the prosecutors. “But that’s only one man,” Nixon protested, and Ehrlichman assured him that that was sufficient. As Ehrlichman headed off to meet with Magruder, the president said, “Be sure you convey my warm sentiments.”

  Haldeman and the president sat silently for a minute, until Haldeman said, “I think I ought to get Strachan squared away,” adding, “The only sticky wicket on that is Dean. I can’t understand, because it’s in his interest too, as well as everyone else’s, to see the [money] motive for what it was”—that is, for purportedly humanitarian reasons. After several more lengthy pauses, with each man deep in his own thoughts, Haldeman departed.

  Late that afternonn, Ehrlichman and Haldeman went to the EOB office to report on the meeting with Magruder and his lawyers, who Ehrlichman reported had just come from an informal conference with the U.S. attorney.14 Haldeman, who had discussed the matter with Ehrlichman on the way, described it as the “same old sticky wickets, but no new one,” and noted that it was “much rougher on Dean.” Ehrlichman took the president through Magruder’s latest account.15 A few interesting details were featured, particularly that Colson was pushing for information on Larry O’Brien at the time he called Magruder to encourage approval of the Liddy projects.* Magruder said that only he received a copy of the results of Liddy’s bugging at the DNC, which he then showed to Mitchell, who “thought it was a lot of junk, too.” He described the pictures taken by Liddy’s team inside the DNC as being of the “the kind of papers you’d find lying around a campaign.” He also said that Mitchell had found this information so useless that “he picked up the phone and called Liddy and chewed him out.” (There can be little doubt that Liddy, embarrassed by this call, used it as a pretext for returning to the DNC on June 17, 1972, later telling McCord and Hunt that they were proceeding on direct orders from Mitchell.) Magruder said the June 17 scheme “was entirely on Liddy’s own motion [and that] neither Mitchell or Magruder knew that another break-in was contemplated.” (Based on Magruder’s consistent account of this second break-in, Liddy’s own later account appears invented after the fact.16)

  “As I listened to this the second time around, let me tell you what my concerns are,” Haldeman said of Magruder’s session with Ehrlichman. “I think when he got down to it, he told the truth. And when he is talking to us, at least, he is bringing us into it. He will, for instance, want to elaborate on Sandwedge and say I was involved in it. Now to the extent that I listened to a presentation, I was. But I, at the time, said, ‘This is something I don’t want to be involved in, and something that should not be handled in here. Don’t come to me any more with it,’ and they didn’t. And then they’ll say I was also involved in the meetings. But [Dean] came to me after that second meeting and said, ‘They came up with, you know, with the plans, a preposterous plan. And I told him that it can’t be done. They shouldn’t even be talking about it in the attorney general’s office.’ I said, ‘John, get out of it. You stay out of it, too.’ And he did. He said he would stay out of it from then on, and I suspect he did. But they’ll tie me in that way, by indirection. Maybe that sounds like everybody goes down with the ship, but when it comes to this cover-up business, expanding on the three fifty, I have not felt uncomfortable with that, but Dean is extremely uncomfortable with it.”

  Ehrlichman thought he should speak with Kleindienst, with which the president agreed, and the call was recorded on the president’s telephone.17 After rehearsing what he would say with the president, Ehrlichman told Kleindienst that Magruder had paid a visit to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, had changed his testimony, and had implicated Mitchell and others. “Christ almighty,” Kleindienst responded. Magruder’s attorneys had been alarmed that Charles Shaffer seemed to have obtained secret information from the grand jury, a concern Magruder had undoubtedly stoked because I had told him he would not be indicted after his first grand jury experience. I did have inside information from Henry Petersen, and Shaffer’s source was Sy Glanzer, so nothing was improper. But Ehrlichman and Kleindienst speculated about it, and Kleindienst warned Ehrlichman to be careful with the information he now possessed.

  After Ehrlichman completed his call, Haldeman got down to very serious business: a discussion of his resignation. In earlier conversations the president had dismissed such an idea, but now he was willing to entertain it. Haldeman was not offering his resignation outright but was effectively forcing the president to ask for it. “You’ve got a really crunchy decision,” he told the president, “which is whether you want me to resign or whether you don’t. That’s one you’ve got to figure out. The problem with that is, if I go on the basis of the Segretti matter, you got to let Dean go on the basis of his implication, which is far worse.” He noted that Strachan had left the White House, so he was not dealing with a member of his staff, which he felt relieved him of responsibility as well as liability. But, Haldeman added, “if they waited awhile, and Ehrlichman’s brought in, you then are going to have to let him go.” Nixon said nothing as he pondered these matters.

  Ehrlichman returned to the conversation I had had with them earlier, when I told him that he and Haldeman were indictable. He told the president, without getting into details, that he was unconce
rned about his dealings with Kalmbach (although my analysis would later prove correct, and Kalmbach would be a devastating witness against him). “Dean’s got sort of a hypothesis that he’s developing in our conversation that referring him to Kalmbach was almost, was actionable. As a matter of fact, I didn’t refer him to Kalmbach. He came to me and said, ‘May I go to Kalmbach?’” Haldeman jumped in and said, “He did the same thing to me.” Nixon posed a key question: “Go to Kalmbach for the purpose of?” “For the purpose of getting Herb to raise some money,” Ehrlichman replied. “For the purpose of paying the defendants. For the purpose of keeping them, quote, on the reservation, unquote.” The president repeated the concern I had raised with Ehrlichman and Haldeman: “With that they could try to tie you and Bob in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.” “That’s his theory,” Ehrlichman replied. But it was not a theory on my part, rather an effort to convince them that we had all unwittingly walked into a conspiracy to obstruct justice, and that the best way to deal with the situation was to be truthful. The president recognized that Ehrlichman had just effectively admitted that he and Haldeman were part of a conspiracy to obstruct justice.18 But when it became clear to him that neither man was conceding this point, he asked Ehrlichman what he and Haldeman would say their motive was in the aftermath. “Well, as far as I can reconstruct it,” Ehrlichman began, and conceding that “I may be putting it favorably,” he said their concern was not what the defendants would testify to before the grand jury, which was secret, but whether they would go out and sell their stories to the Saturday Evening Post or Life magazine. “We weren’t protecting anybody,” Haldeman declared. The president added a footnote to this discussion, saying, “I wish we could keep Dean away from that.”

  That evening, before heading to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the president dictated a long entry for his diary.*19 Because of the events that followed, his April 14 diary entry was the last he would make for fourteen months, until June 1974, when his presidency was rapidly disintegrating. While Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Kleindienst were attending the dinner, at the U.S. Department of Justice the assistant U.S. attorneys running the Watergate investigation, based on what they had learned from Magruder the day before and me earlier, believed they had basically broken the case. They had been calling their boss, Henry Petersen, all day, and when they finally reached him that evening they told him it was urgent that they meet with him immediately.20 In his office that evening they shared the facts they had obtained from Magruder, and off-the-record—and inadmissible against anyone—from me. The reason I had insisted on confidentiality was to prevent this information from being used to further the cover-up at the White House, which is exactly what happened. That night Petersen, joined by Silbert and Titus, went to see Kleindienst at his home when he returned from the correspondents’ dinner to brief him on the fast-developing Watergate case.

  When the president returned to the White House after the dinner he changed from his formal attire and settled into the Lincoln Sitting Room. At 11:02 P.M. he spoke with Haldeman, who praised his remarks at the event.21 The president said he had told Bebe Rebozo about Mitchell, so he would not be surprised, then added, “One thing that occurs to me, Bob, is this, as I reflect a little on Magruder’s stuff. I’ll be damned if I don’t think that some of that could be, you know, exaggeration. But, I just don’t know. He’s obviously flailing around like a wild man at the present time.” They both doubted Magruder actually knew the truth and had speculated about others as well. This brief conversation ended with Nixon wrapping himself in his presidency for his loyal chief of staff. The White House correspondents had awarded him a silver globe as a “peace award” for his accomplishments as president. Nixon said, “Rather interesting to me tonight that, you know, when you really think of, what the hell, here we are, it’s really quite true, without being melodramatic. The hopes for peace in this damn world do depend on this office right now, in the next four years and, God damn it, we’ve got to be sure that that isn’t compromised by anything that indicates any lack of confidence in the president, isn’t that what it gets down to?”

  Six minutes later the president called Ehrlichman to inquire about his plans for the following day.22 Ehrlichman said he had calls coming from Kalmbach’s attorney and wanted to “see Dean in the morning also.” He also hoped to see Kleindienst, and Nixon told him to brief Colson on Magruder’s testimony. As the conversation progressed, the president said, “You know, I was just thinking tonight as I was making up my notes for this little talk,” referring again to the White House correspondents’ dinner. “You know, what the hell, I mean, it is a little melodramatic, but it’s totally true that what happens in this office in these next four years will probably determine whether there is a chance for some sort of uneasy peace for the next twenty-five years. And that’s my, whatever legacy we had, hell, it isn’t going to be in getting a cesspool for Winnetka. It’s going to be there.”

  When the conversation turned back to Magruder, the president bluntly dismissed him as “a very facile liar.” Ehrlichman agreed, saying, “Believes his own stories” but pointed out, “He comes across very sincere, very earnest and very believable.” They speculated on how Magruder would impact Mitchell and whom Mitchell would hire to represent him. The president assured Ehrlichman that he was not going to allow the Congress or the country to force Haldeman out of his job if he was innocent.

  “Well, John, you’ve had a hell of a week, two weeks and, of course, Bob is going through the tortures of the damned.” Ehrlichman agreed that Haldeman’s “family thing is rough.”* But that was not what the president meant. “Here’s a guy that, Christ, has just given his life, hours and hour and hours, you know, totally selfless and honest and decent. That’s another thing, God damn it to hell,” he began, and in a stuttering, emotional sentence said he could not fire someone just because charges were made. “Jesus Christ, I mean, you can’t do that, John. Or am I wrong? I don’t know.” Ehrlichman assured him his judgment was correct, but the president pushed him further. “But, how do you feel, honestly? I mean, apart from the personal feelings we both have for Bob. You know, I raised this myself. I said, well, one way out is, say, ‘Well, look, as long as all these guys have been charged, out they go, and then they can fight this battle, and they can return when they get cleared.’ Not good, is it?” Ehrlichman replied, “I don’t think that’s any way to run a railroad.”

  The president said he was thinking of drawing a line and asked, “You’re going to talk to Dean. What are you going to say to him?” “Well, I’m going to try and get him around a bit, but it’s going to be delicate,” Ehrlichman explained. Nixon questioned, “Get him around in what way?” “Well,” Ehrlichman answered, “to get off this passing-the-buck business. It’s a little touchy, and I don’t know how far I can go.” Nixon effectively wanted Ehrlichman to tell me that giving complete testimony was not going to help me, and he said: “Look, he’s got to look down the road to one point. But there’s only one man that could restore him to the ability to practice law in the case things still go wrong. Now he’s got to have that in the back of his mind. And he’s got to know that’ll happen,” the president said, but he instructed Ehrlichman not to make any such veiled offer of clemency to me. Not only did he want me to toe a line that would not cause him problems, he wanted Ehrlichman to make sure everyone had a consistent account. The president noted, “I think you thought I was sort of being facetious about saying, get everybody, all these people, and this includes LaRue, and Mardian, and of course, Kalmbach, they’ve got to have it, and Dean, too. They’ve got to have a straight damn line that of course we raised money. Be very honest about it. But we raised money for a purpose that we thought was perfectly proper. But we didn’t want to shut them up. These men were guilty. Right?” Again Ehrlichman agreed.

  “And we weren’t trying to shut them up; we just didn`t want them to talk to the press. That’s perfectly legitimate, isn’t it? Or is it?” “I think it is,” Eh
rlichman hedged. “I don’t have a perfect understanding of the law on that,” he conceded.

  “The president is calling the signals,” Nixon declared and told Ehrlichman, “You can say that the president, because of the charges that have been made, wanted an independent investigation made, and he ordered, directed you to make it. You’ve made an independent investigation of the situation, because the president wants, if there’s anybody who is guilty in this thing, he must, through the judicial process, be brought to the bar. Is that what you’d say?” They rehearsed it all, including how Ehrlichman would try to bring me around.

  “Well, with Dean, I think you could talk to him in confidence about a thing like that, don’t you?” the president asked. “I’m not sure. I just don’t know how much to lean on that reed at the moment. But I’ll sound it out,” Ehrlichman assured the president. They further rehearsed what Ehrlichman would say to me and how far he could push. “Well, get a good night’s sleep,” Nixon finally said. “It’s painful, and I just feel better about getting the God damn thing done. And after all, it’s my job, and I don’t want the presidency tarnished, but also, I, I, I’m a law enforcement man.”

  Meanwhile, a few miles away, Kleindienst was still meeting with Petersen, Titus and Silbert. They all agreed that Kleindienst should meet with the president alone, without Haldeman and Ehrlichman present—and that Kleindienst needed to get to the president without tipping off either man.

  April 15, 1973, the White House

  Because the president had stayed up late talking with Bebe, he slept in on Sunday morning. When Kleindienst tried to phone him at 8:41 A.M., Steve Bull took the call and the attorney general’s message that he needed to speak with the president. Bull relayed this information to Ehrlichman, who said he should go ahead and pass it on to the president, which he did while Nixon was having breakfast in at 9:45 A.M. The Washington Post had a glaring front-page headline—“NEW MAJORITY” GROWING DISILLUSIONED WITH NIXON—above a highly negative story by seasoned political reporters Haynes Johnson and Jules Witcover.23 At 10:13 A.M. the president called Kleindienst from a residence telephone not connected to the recording system. Kleindienst requested an urgent meeting without either Haldeman or Ehrlichman present, and the president told him to come to the church service at the White House at eleven o’clock that morning, and they could then meet in his EOB office, after the services and reception.