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

by John W. Dean

  According to Ehrlichman’s account, he had been “overwhelmed with self-pity [and] barely civil to Haldeman” on the trip up to Camp David. When he entered the Aspen study after Haldeman’s departure he found Nixon in a checked sport coat, his “eyes red-rimmed, and he looked small and drawn.” Nixon told Ehrlichman, too, that he had prayed he might die during the night. “It is like cutting off my arm,” Ehrlichman recounts the president beginning, but then he could not continue, and began crying uncontrollably. He reports Nixon making an admission of guilt similar to the one Haldeman recounted. Ehrlichman and Nixon both recall that Ehrlichman said, “You can do one thing for me, though, sometime. Just explain all this to my kids, will you? Tell them why you had to do this?” Nixon wrote that Ehrlichman said, “with controlled bitterness,” that the president had made a wrong decision that he would live to regret. Ehrlichman added, “I have no choice but to accept it, and I will. But I still feel I have done nothing that was without your implied or direct approval.” With that statement, reported by Nixon, Ehrlichman departed. Haldeman says that Nixon called him back to Aspen Lodge after Ehrlichman left and reviewed his meeting with Ehrlichman. Nixon told Haldeman he was concerned, because Ehrlichman wanted him to admit that he ordered illegal acts, which he refused to do.

  Haldeman and Ehrlichman remained at Camp David during the afternoon to complete their formal letters of resignation, discussing them with Ziegler and Rogers. Both had only one last request: That I be fired. Nixon also met with Elliot Richardson and Dick Kleindienst, as well as with Len Garment, who was taking my post. (I had no formal notification of the events taking place at Camp David, but friends connected to the White House grapevine kept me remarkably well informed.)174

  April 30, 1973, Camp David and the White House

  The president spent the day at Camp David working on the speech he would deliver at 9:00 P.M., gathering information and opinions in a series of telephone calls to complete it.

  10:22 A.M. telephone call with Ziegler: The only matter of substance Ziegler had to report was that Richardson could not be named “acting attorney general”: The president would have to submit his nomination to the Senate, so they should rephrase the announcement and Richardson could not take charge of the Justice Department until confirmed by the Senate. Ziegler also said he had received resignation letters from Kleindienst, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. When Nixon asked, “Now how are you handling Dean?” Ziegler told him that Jerry Jones, a Haldeman aide who handled personnel, would call and tell me that the president had asked for and accepted my resignation. Nixon said that if I wanted to submit a letter or speak with the president, Jones was to say, “No, John, it’s all done.” They talked about how hard this had to be for Haldeman and Ehrlichman, but Nixon had concluded, “I have a feeling that Dean did a favor in that respect, getting the son of a bitch going.”175

  10:42 A.M. telephone call with Ray Price: Nixon sounded out Price on his decision to appoint Richardson, which Price thought an excellent choice. Price had worked late into the preceding night on the draft speech, and when Nixon asked, “Was Rogers helpful?” Price said he had been and had “said he thought that the general tone was good, and it was just about the right amount of sackcloth, and not too much.” Nixon replied, “Oh, hell, as far as sackcloth, I’d be willing to go a lot further. I’m one of the few men in Washington that never blames the secretary when the poor damn secretary misspelled a word. I mean, sometimes the boss is always to blame. So the boss did it. Hell, I appointed Mitchell, I appointed Haldeman, I appointed Ehrlichman, I appointed Dean and Colson. These are all my people. If they did things, they did them because they felt that’s what we wanted. And so I’m responsible. The boss can never pass it on.” Nixon warned that if you “sackclothed too much, then you no longer can be president,” adding, “Well, I take all the blame, and I don’t blame these poor fellows, and all the rest. When all is said and done, you think, well, Christ, this poor damn dumb president, why doesn’t he resign?” Price laughed, and Nixon continued, “Which is not a bad idea. The only problem is, I mean, you get Agnew. You want Agnew?” Needless to say, Price did not, but he understood Nixon well enough to give him the sympathy he was seeking.176

  Nixon arrived back at the White House at 7:58 P.M. and first visited the barbershop in the basement of the West Wing. He then went to his EOB office, where he met with his “makeup consultant” before heading to the Oval Office, where he arrived at 8:58 P.M. for the broadcast. For the previous several hours the thermostat had been turned down to chill the office, which heated up quickly with the television lights, making it too easy for Nixon to perspire. At nine o’clock, the red light on the single pool camera went on, the director dropped his arm, and Nixon began his speech to the nation.

  Although Nixon had never been seriously accused of having advance knowledge of the Watergate break-in, he began his talk by stating that he had learned of the June 17 Watergate break-in while in Florida and “was appalled at this senseless illegal act, and I was shocked to learn that employees of the reelection committee were apparently among those guilty.” He said that as the Watergate investigation progressed, he had asked repeatedly if members of his administration “were in any way involved,” and he “received repeated assurance that they were not.” He remained assured of that until, based on information he received on March 21, 1973, he became convinced that the charges regarding his staff might be true. So, he said, “I personally assumed the responsibility for coordinating intense new inquires into the matter,” which he outlined. He said he was cooperating with the Senate’s investigation, and then explained actions he would undertake at the White House: “Today, one of the most difficult decisions of my presidency, I accepted the resignations of two of my closest associates in the White House, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, two of the finest public servants. It has been my privilege to know them. I want to stress that in accepting these resignations I mean to leave no implication whatever of personal wrongdoing on their part, and I leave no implication tonight of implication on the part of others who have been charged in this matter.” Nixon reported that Attorney General Kleindienst was leaving, although he had “no personal involvement whatever in this matter.” Nixon disposed of me in ten words: “The counsel to the president, John Dean, has also resigned.” Next he announced the nomination of Elliot Richardson to be attorney general, adding that Richardson had the authority to name a Watergate special prosecutor. The rest of the speech, as I later read it, was window dressing.

  May 1 to 10, 1973

  New Team, Tough Tactics and Rough New Issues

  The departure of Haldeman and Ehrlichman in many ways marked the end of the Nixon presidency. All that was good and great during his term in office, and there was much that he had accomplished, was being overshadowed as all that was bad and petty was becoming more and more apparent, despite the president’s efforts to keep such information hidden. Richard Nixon seemed to sense this, and following his first Watergate speech he got very drunk. He made a series of telephone calls long into the night of April 30 that reveal him becoming progressively more intoxicated. To Haldeman, at 10:16 P.M.: “I’m never going to discuss the son-of-a-bitching Watergate thing again. Never, never, never, never.”1 To Elliot Richardson, a man he viewed as presidential timber, at 10:34 P.M.: “Do, d-, do your job, boy, and, ah, it may ta-, it may take you all the way.”2 And to Chuck Colson, at 11:24 P.M., he seriously slurred when declaring the plumbers’ illegal actions were totally justified.3

  Having undertaken a radical change in staff to isolate himself from Watergate, Nixon sought to prevent the problems from reaching his presidency. His strategy was very simple: March 21 became his Maginot Line, the firewall that would keep Watergate outside of the Oval Office, for it was the date he claimed he had first learned of a cover-up and before which he had no knowledge of such activity; after learning of it, he had personally taken decisive action. He had spent weeks building this defense, which was based on a fundamental falsehood he had simply c
oncocted.

  Nixon had distorted our March 21 conversation to serve his own purposes, and only years later did he begrudgingly admit that he had been totally involved in the cover-up well before March 21:

  [W]ithout fully realizing the implication of my actions I had become deeply entangled in the complicated mesh of decisions, inactions, misunderstandings, and conflicting motivations that comprised the Watergate cover-up.4

  To deal with this problem he had relied on a deception, to which he also confessed:

  I gave the impression that I had known nothing at all about the cover-up until my March 21 meeting with Dean. I indicated that once I had learned about it I had acted with dispatch and dispassion to end it. In fact, I had known some of the details of the cover-up before March 21, and when I did become aware of their implications, instead of exerting presidential leadership aimed at uncovering the cover-up, I embarked upon an increasingly desperate search for ways to limit the damage to my friends, to my administration, and to myself.5

  Remarkably, Nixon devised his March 21 defense strategy without ever personally listening to the actual conversation, yet the recording itself puts the lie to his contentions.* Instead he relied largely on Haldeman’s cryptic descriptions (based on twenty pages of handwritten notes, which Nixon also chose to ignore). Haldeman had listened to this conversation twice: first to the part when he was not present, which ran about an hour, and then to the part when he had been present, which ran about forty minutes. It is possible to get the gist of this conversation in real time, which is largely what Haldeman tried to do and indicate in his abbreviated notes. It is not possible for someone who has not listened to the recording, however, to understand it based on a few summary notes made by someone who has listened to it.6 For example the tone of voice of the person speaking can be very telling. My voice was filled with warning, as I was trying to convey the seriousness of the problem. Nixon’s voice, not merely his words, kept showing that he heard the warning but that we still needed to pay Hunt, because he seemed to be a bigger problem than breaking the law. Yet Nixon was satisfied with this secondhand information and Haldeman’s conspicuous spinning of the facts when he reported them, because he and Haldeman had agreed that, if necessary, Haldeman would corroborate Nixon’s version of the conversation. Haldeman was good to his word and did indeed falsely testify about this conversation. If events had gone as planned, it would have been my word against theirs.*

  Nixon’s hope to gain some relief from Watergate with his decisive actions, however, was never fulfilled. To the contrary, as he assembled a new team to assist him in defending his presidency, the April 30 speech simply added more flammable material to this already combustible news story. Throughout April Watergate had escalated from being primarily a Washington story into a full-fledged national scandal. Matters that had only been smoldering suddenly flared into new headline news: The Ellsberg trial in Los Angeles, the earlier efforts to get the CIA to deflect the FBI’s Watergate investigation and “national security” documents I had placed in a safety-deposit box* became major stories, forcing Nixon to devote more and more time to refining and reinforcing his defense. And while there was a corresponding increase in the number of recorded Watergate conversations, most of them reveal the president simply treading water, plotting courses of action that were never pursued, talking tough but acting indecisively, often trying to recall precisely what had occurred during the first eight to nine months following the arrests at the DNC but getting it wrong, and educating his new team of defenders while reassuring them of his innocence, using selective and often erroneous information—selling his March 21 defense to whomever he thought might buy it.

  Accordingly, most of the conversations from this period add little to understanding Nixon’s defense, or the Watergate story, not to mention that his inclination to dwell on small-bore matters in a repetitive fashion became even more pronounced. As a result I have opted to include only material from these conversations that moves this account forward and toward its conclusion. (As I discovered new information, I have also filled in a few blanks in my own story, as appropriate.7) I have also noted the tactics that were used to implement the big-lie strategy with the March 21 conversation, which developed in the days and weeks following his April 30 speech.

  May 1, 1973, the White House

  Nixon arrived in the Oval Office in a foul mood, which would only grow worse as the day progressed. When he learned about congressional reaction to his speech—Republicans favorable; Democrats demanding a special prosecutor—he demanded that members of his party “get off their asses” and help, and he made it clear that he did not want his staff walking around with long faces.8 In a meeting with the bipartisan congressional leaders he mentioned neither his speech nor Watergate.9 He spent most of his morning with German chancellor Willy Brandt, as he would that evening at a state dinner. Nixon learned from Ziegler that FBI agents had been posted at Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s offices, as well as at mine, which Ziegler explained was to protect the president’s files, not to cast aspersions on the individuals concerned.10 (These files were soon packed up and moved to a central storage location in the EOB basement, where Haldeman and Ehrlichman could copy information by taking longhand notes. I was largely barred from my own files for almost a year.)

  “Did Dean pop off yet?” Nixon asked Ziegler, who said no, and that he did not think I would do so. Nixon wanted to make certain that Ziegler emphasized to the press that I had been fired, but also noted: “But, of course, everyone knows that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were fired, too.” “Dean came out of this alright, from his standpoint,” Ziegler pointed out. “He got what he wanted, which was right. He didn’t want to go down alone.”

  Nixon went to his EOB office for lunch, where he was soon threatening to fire the entire White House staff, beginning with Len Garment, for treating Haldeman and Ehrlichman like criminals by posting FBI agents at their offices: “I’m going to fire his ass out, believe me.”11 Ziegler tried to calm the president down, but when they walked back to the Oval Office and then to the Cabinet Room, which took them by Haldeman’s office in the West Wing, Nixon saw an FBI agent standing by Haldeman’s door and asked, “Who the hell are you?” The surprised agent mumbled, “FBI,” while an even more surprised bureau agent was grabbed by Nixon, shoved against the wall, and angrily ordered, “God damn it, I want you seated inside.”12 In the Cabinet Room, where his cabinet and senior staff had gathered, the president delivered an emotional and abbreviated edition of the speech he had given the night before, saying complimentary things about Haldeman and Ehrlichman and then mentioning, and rementioning, his displeasure at having FBI agents guarding their White House papers.13

  May 2, 1973, the White House

  In his morning update Ziegler reported that the Ellsberg break-in story was quickly gaining serious traction, and Nixon instructed him to not comment.14 Ziegler mentioned that he was thinking about apologizing to The Washington Post for criticizing their Watergate coverage, which was fine with Nixon. Ziegler also said that the press had picked up the story about Nixon’s shoving the FBI agent, and the president said to tell them he had simply become angry, as the agent had no business in the hallway. Nixon asked who had arranged for the agents—“It was the stupidest thing”—and Ziegler replied that he suspected it had been Garment, which he later confirmed.15

  Henry Kissinger dropped by and made a special effort to warn Nixon about his new attorney general: “Elliot worries me. He’s going to be very ambitious.” Kissinger did not think Richardson would protect the presidency: “I know it’s all very well to say he should have a free hand, but you should give a free hand only to somebody who is wise enough to use it.” Kissinger based his view on what he had seen of Richardson as secretary of defense, concluding that “Elliot is out for himself.” Nixon disagreed, saying, “Elliot is a team player, I think.”16

  In a later conversation with Rogers, Nixon asked, “How about making a suggestion to Elliot that he name Pat Brown as th
e special prosecutor?” A stunned Rogers listened as Nixon ran through his qualifications: “former governor, former district attorney, former attorney general of the state, and basically not a mean man,” the president said of the man who had defeated him in his bid to be governor of California in 1962. Rogers dismissed the idea with a simple “That’s not going to do it,” to which Nixon replied, “Well, [I’m] trying to think of a Democrat.”17

  In midafternoon Nixon had an off-the-record visit with Ehrlichman,* who had a pressing problem. After thanking Nixon for his kind words at the cabinet meeting, Ehrlichman reported that he had just spoken about the Ellsberg break-in situation with Bud Krogh, who had requested guidance. Krogh had refused to talk to the FBI because of their leaks, but he had spoken at length with Elliot Richardson the previous day and had “told Richardson a lot about the whole leak operation,” according to Ehrlichman. Krogh wanted to prepare an affidavit for Judge Byrne stating that nothing had been obtained in the break-in so that the Ellsberg trial could proceed. Ehrlichman said that both he and Krogh were troubled by Richardson, who “was asking questions, like, ‘Well, when the president heard about these remarks [about the Ellsberg break-in], why didn’t he do something? Why didn’t he stop the trial? Why didn’t he tell the judge? Why didn’t he do this or that? Why did he wait until this thing all came out from Dean in April?’”