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

by John W. Dean

  They continued to discuss Mitchell’s performance, until at one point Nixon said to Haig, “Oh, one thing I understand, Ron told me that [the Senate committee] asked him about, well, ‘What about the meeting you had with the president on March twenty-second? What did you talk about? The—? You know?’ And he said he had never discussed [Watergate with the president]. Isn’t that interesting? Watergate was never discussed on March twenty-second. We were discussing executive privilege. That was the entire discussion that day.” The president repeated, “That was the entire discussion.” Because this was contrary to my testimony (and, of course, contrary to the recording of the March 22 conversation, which shows that conversation was not only about Watergate but that the president had privately told Mitchell to “cover up,” if necessary), Nixon observed, “I think Dean will be discredited.” After the president added that Colson and others would be taking me on, he said, “Damn it, they are going to show him to be a, a, a liar for immunity. That’s what he is, a liar for immunity.”

  At the end of the day, before telephoning to chat with his daughters and Bebe, the president called Ziegler for a rundown on the evening news coverage of Watergate. Ziegler said that while “Mitchell admitted involvement in some aspects of the cover-up,” he had testified that he had not told the president about them, and the president didn’t know. Ziegler said Mitchell admitted joining Haldeman and Ehrlichman in coving up “the White House horrors”—as he had described it to the Senate. When he had been asked by Talmadge why he had not informed the president, Mitchell had said that he was concerned “the president would have lowered the boom,” and it would have been “extremely detrimental to the campaign.” Ziegler reported that Mitchell said “in retrospect he was probably wrong” in not informing the president. “That’s good,” Nixon said. “Good. Well, it came out as well as we could expect.”

  On the morning of July 11 Mitchell was returning for his second day of testimony.106 Ziegler assured Nixon that Mitchell was “getting good reviews.” So, too, he reported, had the president’s daughter Julie and son-in-law, David Eisenhower, who had given an interview to the BBC in which Watergate had come up. Later on the morning of July 11, Rose Woods was in the Oval Office, and Watergate dominated their conversation. She offered that Mitchell “has handled himself beautifully” and stayed “calm and cool.” “I’m glad that good old John came through,” Nixon agreed. Since she had been watching the hearings, and he was not, he asked for more detail about Mitchell: “Was he able to put it to Dean at all?” “I think so,” she answered, twice. “The press simply didn’t say much about Dean. Oh, well.” The conversation about Mitchell continued, and Nixon noted, “Nobody got drowned in the Watergate”—an oblique reference to Teddy Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick problems, which she understood immediately.* “Rose, they ran the Dean stories for eight weeks. They put him on the cover for two weeks in a row,” he complained, referring to the national news magazines. “Right,” Rose agreed, and reported, “They put him on three networks. And they’re putting John Mitchell on one network.” “Oh, they are?” Nixon asked, and she explained the networks were rotating coverage. Rose was incensed that her name had come up in my testimony in response to a question about inquiries at the IRS, for she had called me repeatedly on one case. She told Nixon “the only thing I ever did was call him and ask him to talk to Dr. Riland to tell him what to do.” She was upset, because she said I knew “the doctor was indicted, and yet he refused to give the name, so it sounds like a boyfriend almost of mine, and I thought, oh, God.”.107 Nixon easily comforted her by trashing me. “He’s a very repulsive character. He really is.” Woods soon agreed, “Yeah, he’s just, he’s an evil man.” “Well, I think what has happened is, he’s become basically a degenerate, I’m afraid.”

  That afternoon Ziegler came to the Oval Office with an update: “Mitchell continues to hang in there strong.”108 He further reported, “I’ll tell you, people are writing good stuff about Mitchell. I think he is coming out of this alright.” Ziegler went over the news commentary at length, particularly that favorable to the president. He noted that one commentator had said, “It is possible that Dean believes his testimony, but there is no question that his perspective has been warped during his passage from pro-Nixon to the anti-Nixon phase of his personal odyssey.” This same commentator had also written that “in the president’s twenty-seven years in public life” he had “never been caught, as he points out, or accused of, lying in any public statements.” Ziegler gave him more information on what was happening before the Senate, and said that the next witness would likely be Dick Moore, possibly Kalmbach, followed by Ehrlichman and then Haldeman. Ziegler mentioned that he had seen John Connally after the cabinet meeting that morning. “I said, ‘How do you think things are going?’ and he said, ‘Watergate is over.’ Which is pretty well our judgment,” he advised Nixon. This prompted the president to look ahead to his trip to Europe that fall, and to winning back popular support. “Middle American,” as Nixon put it.

  Later Nixon telephoned Ziegler: “Ron, it occurred to me—just thought of this, but probably nothing could be done—but I just learned it, that they carried Dean on three networks for five days straight. And they carried Mitchell on one.”109 The president thought this was evidence that the networks were simply out to harm him, and he wanted that brought to their attention. “I’ve done that already,” Ziegler reported and had almost mentioned it to a columnist. Nixon wanted to put Colson’s successor in charge of attacking the networks on it: “This is one time when I would put [Ken] Clawson and the bomb throwers to work on the thing like that, let them [the networks] bitch a little.”

  At the end of the afternoon the president met with Haig in the Oval Office.110 Haig said that he had spoken with Morris Liebman, a senior partner at the Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin, the preceding evening. Haig undoubtedly knew Liebman from his role as a civilian aide-at-large to the secretary of the army, an advisory post in which he served from 1964 to 1979. The fact that the White House was not winning any legal battles had become conspicuous, and Haig said that Liebman recommended creating a strategy group, which he would be willing to chair, “with Chappie Rose and somebody else to just come in pretty regularly and make an assessment on Fred, and how he’s handling the issues.” “Not bad,” Nixon said. Liebman had also recommended Fred be given more lawyers to assist him, and had suggested names of lawyers in the bureaucracy who could be detailed to the White House. Haig had also spoken with Richardson and Cox. “I just don’t trust either of them,” he said. “We need to watch them like a hawk.”

  When Haig departed the president asked Ziegler to come to the Oval Office111 and repeated a conversation he had had earlier that afternoon with John Connally, one that he had also just shared with Haig. Connally had said, “There comes a time when people get tired, they get tired out of too much ice cream, too much champagne, they get tired of anything, too much sex, anything.” This was now happening with Watergate, and come September, Connally urged, Nixon should “go out and attack.” When Ziegler agreed, Nixon said he planned to “give them a kick in the ass now and then.” Ziegler proposed he start with Cox, since they already had a case on him, and suggested Nixon say: “‘Mr. Cox, I’m relieving you of your responsibilities.’ Period. And let him squeal. Archibald Cox will not be remembered.”

  July 12, 1973, the White House and Bethesda Naval Hospital

  The president had awakened at 5:30 A.M. with a stabbing pain in his chest, which he later said reminded him of when he had cracked a rib playing football in college.112 At 5:43 he called the White House physician, Walter Tkach, who arrived with his colleague William Lukash. After they examined him, Tkach thought it pneumonia, while Lukash diagnosed it as a digestive disorder. Both believed the president should undergo a complete battery of tests. Nixon resisted but remained in bed until early afternoon. At 1:30 P.M. Haig went to his bedroom to tell him that Senator Ervin was calling. As Nixon later reported, “We talked for sixteen minutes. My voi
ce was subdued, because every breath I took caused a sharp pain.” Ervin was calling about his request for documents, which had been a front-page story in The Washington Post even before the request had been formally made.113 Nixon accused Ervin’s committee of having leaked, and then said, “You want your staff to go through presidential files. The answer is no. We disagree on that.” But Nixon said he would think about the letter Ervin had sent to be polite. The conversation with Ervin seemed to have energized him, for he dressed and went to the Oval Office.

  But as the president and Haig were talking, a fragment from the bullet Nixon was sure he had dodged was heading his way. As a part of the follow-up on my testimony, the staff of the Senate Watergate committee was informally talking with other potential witnesses, one of whom was Alex Butterfield, whom they were now interviewing in the basement of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.* Scott Armstrong, one of Dash’s investigators, was intrigued by the amount of detail in the Buzhardt information given to Fred Thompson about my conversations with the president, and he asked Butterfield, who had been a top administrative assistant to Nixon during his first term, if he knew how that information might have been assembled. Butterfield, who had been instructed by Haldeman to have the president’s secret recording system installed, immediately suspected that someone had listened to the recording of my conversations with Nixon. But rather than say anything, and because they had only asked him about Buzhardt’s memo, he set the document aside and said he’d like to think about it. Buzhardt had been concerned that the taping system might come up, and he did not know if the committee had or had not yet discovered it. Butterfield knew it was one of the best-kept secrets of the Nixon presidency, and had decided that only if he was asked a direct question would he answer. And Armstrong had not asked him a direct question.

  Donald Sanders, one of Fred Thompson’s deputy minority counsel, was also present at the Butterfield interview, and after listening to Armstrong’s three hours of questions about how presidential schedule logs were maintained and compiled, the procedures for preparing memoranda of staff conversations with the president and other details of the Nixon White House operations, he had his own question. While no stenographic record was made of the interview, all present recall that Sanders, whose task it was to find errors in my testimony, noted that I had testified that I believed I had been recorded. More specifically, Sanders said, I had testified that the president had asked me a question “in a very low voice concerning a presidential exchange with Colson about executive clemency. Do you know of any basis for the implication in Dean’s testimony that conversations in the Oval Office are recorded?”114 Needless to say, Butterfield did know of a basis for my feeling I had been recorded by the president, and he proceeded to explain the president’s secret system to Sanders and Armstrong.

  Back at the White House the president arrived at the Oval Office at 2:15, looked over his news summary, and then met with Kissinger and Haig. Sounding surprisingly invigorated, he told Kissinger how tough he had been on Sam Ervin when he had called. “Not on your life, there ain’t gonna be no papers come out,” Nixon quoted himself as telling Ervin. Kissinger reported that the president had a new admirer in Norman Mailer: “He thinks you’re going to come out of this eventually stronger. That the public is beginning to identify with you, and somebody gets kicked so much and endures and overcomes it. That is what a lot of people experience in their own lives.” Kissinger reported that Mailer wanted “to write that it’s all a CIA conspiracy against you because you were on détente.” This filled the room with laughter. Returning to his conversation with Ervin, Nixon boasted, “I’m not going to allow this slick Southern asshole to pull that old crap on me. He pretends he’s gentle and trying to work things out. Bullshit.” They discussed how rough it was going to be at the Senate for Haldeman and Colson, but Haig thought not. And soon Nixon was retailing his version of the March 21 conversation for everyone.

  Feeling well enough, the president proceeded with his afternoon schedule: a meeting with a German vice chancellor; a photo opportunity in the Rose Garden; a half-hour meeting in the Oval Office with a visiting dignitary; and a conversation with Bill Timmons about congressional affairs. Nixon complained that Howard Baker had been too easy on me during my testimony and for that would never forgive him: “Howard Baker will never be in the White House again, never, never, never. He will never be on a presidential plane again. I don’t care what he does, the softballs he threw up to Dean. But what he did to John Mitchell was unforgiveable.”115 Nixon said he found Baker’s actions “despicable,” noting, “He thinks he’s going to be president. He’s finished.” When Timmons departed, Nixon did another photo op, this one with a fire prevention group, and then called Rose Woods into the office. “Howard Baker will never be in the White House again, as long as I am in this office,” he ordered. “Never. Never. Never.”116 He soon repeated this, and said, “I mean it, Rose.” “I agree with that, too,” she said. “His name will not be on the Christmas list,” he added.

  Shortly after five o’clock Haig joined the president in the Oval Office. Nixon had received the results of his preliminary medical examination and said that the doctors wanted him to spend four to five days in the hospital. The doctors wanted him to have a chest X-ray at a nearby naval regional medical clinic (less than two miles and a five-minute drive away), but Nixon was more concerned with discussing protecting his papers from Ervin. He thought senators like Carl Curtis (R-NE) and Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) would support him. He reminded Haig that Harry Truman had made the tough decision to not testify before Congress. Haig observed that the senior White House staff was solid, with the possible exception of Mel Laird. Nixon said letting the Senate have his papers was a no-win situation: If they provided any, they would say that they wanted more, claiming that incriminating documents had not been included or destroyed. Nixon felt as strongly regarding the inevitable demands for documents from Cox.

  Nixon called for Ziegler to join the conversation, and when he arrived, the president said, “I’ve not missed a day in four and a half years. Not a day. Not an appointment, nothing.” And then he informed Ziegler that the doctors wanted him hospitalized. Never missing a political opportunity, Nixon told his aides that he could take advantage of the situation, and might even give a speech. President Suffers Viral Pneumonia. Reads Radio Address to Nation, Nixon said, framing the headline. The conversation returned to protecting his papers, and then Nixon mentioned he wanted to send George Bush on a trip: “Best thing with George, he doesn’t stand up well.” Returning again to the papers, he complained, “They struck out on Dean,” so now they wanted documents.

  Dr. Tkach arrived in the Oval Office and said he had arranged for an X-ray at the naval clinic at 6:30 P.M. Tkach explained that the X-ray would indicate how serious his condition was, but for “even a mild case,” he was recommending the president stay at the hospital that night. He further explained that the risks involved with viral pneumonia were heart attack or stroke or both. Tkach said that Lyndon Johnson, when president, would go to the hospital even with a bad cold. Nixon admitted that he did not feel well, and that he had a 101-degree temperature, which he had taken himself. But again, he was considering the PR aspects: “People don’t go to the hospital for a virus.” Tkach, not concerned with PR, corrected him. Shortly before six o’clock the president departed for the naval clinic, ordering Ziegler to make no announcement until he decided what he was going to do after he got the X-ray results. He said he was unconcerned about the press, and as he headed out the door, remarked: “The only time the press will be happy is when they write my obituary.”

  The X-rays were not good, and after his dinner at the residence, the president was driven to the Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he was admitted at 9:15 P.M. on July 12. He remained in the hospital until the morning of July 20, when he returned to the White House. While he was hospitalized, the entire dynamics of Watergate shifted with the revelation of his taping system. On Monday, July 16, at just after 2:00 P
.M., Alex Butterfield appeared as a surprise witness before the Senate Watergate committee, where he told the world of the system, until then known only to Butterfield, Haldeman, Bull, Higby, the Secret Service technicians who installed and maintained the system and the president. Haig and Buzhardt were aware that select conversations of mine had been recorded, but as Haig later said, he thought the system could be switched on and off: “It never occurred to me that anyone in his right mind would install anything so Orwellian as a system that never shut off, that preserved every word, every joke, every curse, every tantrum, every flight of presidential paranoia, every bit of flattery and bad advice and tattling by his advisers.”117 Butterfield’s revelation confronted Nixon with the decision of whether he should or could destroy the tapes, and since they had not yet been subpoenaed, it was a choice he would have to make quickly, if it was not already too late.

  There are three first-person accounts of Nixon’s decision to keep the tapes: Garment’s, Haig’s and Nixon’s own. Woodward and Bernstein also prepared an account based on off-the-record interviews with sources that cannot be evaluated. While there are minor differences in these accounts, their gist is consistent. With time seemingly of the essence if the president was going to have any options, the White House appears not to have learned about Butterfield’s Thursday, July 12, disclosure, until three days later:

  Fred Thompson said he informed Fred Buzhardt of Butterfield’s disclosure on Sunday, July 15, when he telephoned him to advise him of it, and Buzhardt did not seem particularly troubled by the information.118

  Len Garment reported that he first learned of the taping system from Larry Higby on July 10, when Higby was heading for a staff interview with the Senate Watergate committee. Higby wanted to know what to say if asked about the system. Garment counseled him not to volunteer anything, but if asked, he should answer honestly. Garment was informed of Butterfield’s disclosure to the Senate when he returned from out of town on Sunday, July 15, and was asked to come to his White House office on Sunday evening, where he met with Buzhardt.119