by John W. Dean
U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Richey (a Nixon appointee) had been assigned the DNC lawsuit and had scheduled a hearing for Monday, June 26, 1972.
Superior Court Judge James Belson was holding another bail-reduction hearing that morning for the four Miami men, whose bail was set at $50,000, and McCord, whose was set at $30,000.
From Bob Woodward, “Democrats, GOP Tighten Security After Watergate ‘Bugging’ Case,” The Washington Post, June 22, 1972, 1.
4 Jon Katz, “White House Aide Missing from Job,” The Washington Post, June 22, 1972, A-8; and William L. Claiborne and Alfred E. Lewis, “Four More Sought in Wiretap Case,” The Washington Post, June 22, 1972, A-8.
5 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Conversation No. 344-14.
6 The entire White House staff, as well as the cabinet departments, became involved in preparing the president’s briefing book under the direction of Pat Buchanan. A significant number of presidential and policy decisions were made at the Nixon White House in the process of preparing for his press conferences. White House staff would reach out to the departments and agencies to get their input on issues likely to arise at the press conference, add their own thoughts, and submit the material to the president through Haldeman’s office. When Ron Ziegler earlier said that he had sent the president a series of questions and answers regarding Watergate, the reason the document had not arrived on the president’s desk was that it needed to go first through Haldeman’s office. John Ehrlichman once suggested I send a memorandum to the president on a matter, and when he took it to Alex Butterfield to give to the president, Haldeman discovered it and sent it back to me, with instructions that it was to go to the president though his office. As the president worked his way through background material for his press conferences, he would make decisions, and when he announced his position at the press conference, it became the final decision. A similar process was followed for the release of presidential statements, and when they were released, they became final decisions and the president’s policy.
7 Conversation Nos. 740-2, 740-3. An edited transcript of this press conference appears in Public Papers of the Presidents: Richard Nixon 1972 at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3472.
June 23, 1972
1 Tad Szulc, “Cuban Veterans Group Linked to Raid on Democratic Office,” New York Times, June 23, 1972, 1.
2 Bob Woodward and Jim Mann, “Bond Cut for Bugging Suspects,” The Washington Post, June 23, 1972, C-1.
3 Peter Jay and Kirk Scharfenberg, “Exiles’ View of ‘Bugging,’” The Washington Post, June 23, 1972, C-5.
4 See Max Holland, Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010).
5 Dean Senate testimony, __ Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (SSC), __; Petersen Senate testimony, __ SSC __. [TKs]
6 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Conversation No. 741-2.
7 Dean testimony U.S. v. Mitchell et al. (October 16, 1974), 2697–728; Haldeman testimony U.S. v. Mitchell et al. (December 3, 1974), 8478–88, 8799–824.
8 When Haldeman later met with CIA director Richard Helms and deputy director Vernon Walters, he only addressed the Mexican money, not the entire FBI investigation. See testimony of Vernon Walters, U.S. v. Mitchell et al. (November 11, 1974), 6124.
9 See Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1962), 1–71.
10 June 23, 1972, Haldeman office log, NARA. Haldeman returned from the staff meeting with Colson and Mitchell. The log does not state when Colson departed, but it appears that Haldeman and Mitchell could well have discussed this between 9:00 A.M. and 9:30 A.M., when he went to the Oval Office.
11 As he later explained, Helms had rarely approached him personally for any kind of assistance or intervention but had done so less than a year earlier, regarding the possible publication of a book by two disaffected CIA agents. Helms wanted White House support for legal actions by the CIA, despite the fact that there would be cries of suppression. Nixon gave him that support. See Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 640. In March 1972, a security problem arose at the CIA when a former Russian language specialist, analyst and aide in the director’s office became disenchanted with the CIA and decided to write a book. Victor Marchetti was a security problem because he knew how the place worked. According to Helms’s biographer, Thomas Powers, on March 12, 1972, a CIA officer in New York learned that Marchetti had submitted his book proposal to nine publishing houses. The agency read it with alarm. Helms decided to go directly to Nixon, because the new attorney general, Dick Kleindienst, had not been confirmed, and he wanted White House backing to be sure the Justice Department aggressively pursued enforcing the confidentiality agreement Marchetti had signed—like all CIA officers. Following an unrelated meeting in the Cabinet Room with the president, on March 20, 1972, Helms asked the president if he could have a word in private with him. Together they went to the Oval Office and met from 4:48 P.M. to 5:15 P.M. Their discussion—Conversation No. 698-6—has been withdrawn for national security reasons. Powers reports that the president listened to Helms’s request, promised support and told him to take it up with John Ehrlichman, which he did. Ehrlichman called the Justice Department, which aggressively pursued the lawsuit, forcing Marchetti to remove some 168 passages from his book. See Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 244–45.
12 See testimony of Vernon Walters, U.S. v. Mitchell et al. (November 11, 1974), 6124.
13 Conversation No. 741-10. Note: The audio quality of this recording is very poor, but I found it possible to transcribe more of the digital edition than the WSPF was able to accomplish with the analog version of the conversation. And because of its historical importance, I tried to dig out as much as possible.
14 Nixon, RN, 642.
15 A close listen to the conversation reveals Haldeman was not called back, but rather had returned to meet with the president for totally unrelated reasons, namely to enable Ehrlichman to join him in meeting with Helms and Walters. Ehrlichman had planned to go over the president’s statement on the higher education bill at the only time that Helms and Walters could meet. The president’s statement could not be delayed, because the White House had announced it, and the TV networks were setting up for a live presidential statement at 3:00 P.M., which the president needed to rehearse. Haldeman had tried to call the president at 10:41 A.M. to explain the situation after their earlier meeting, because Ehrlichman had arranged for Helms and Walters to come to his office at 1 P.M., but given his tight schedule, it called for logistical changes. Rather than Ehrlichman, Haldeman would handle the signing statement for the higher education bill. The president understood that releasing a statement that afternoon, and preparing his remarks for the teleprompter, which was done on a larger font typewriter, required several hours lead time. Because Ehrlichman had attended the meeting the president held with his economic advisers in the Oval Office from 10:30 A.M. until 12:15 P.M., and then was scheduled to appear in the White House press room to do a background briefing on the higher education bill with then secretary of health, education and welfare Elliot Richardson, he would be busy right up to the time of the meeting with Helms and Walters. Thus, Haldeman took care of the statement for the higher education bill rather than Ehrlichman.
When Haldeman entered the Oval Office at 1:04 P.M. Haldeman asked whether the president would read his statement on busing from a draft or did he want to read it off the teleprompter. He decided to use the teleprompter, and Haldeman gave the president copies of the draft statements. With pen in hand, Nixon can be heard editing the statements. The sound of his pen scratching sentences and adding new material was easily picked up by the microphones planted in his desk, and the edited drafts are in the Nixon library. In addition, the recording equipment also picked up the sound of an electric typewriter, which was not unusual. This meant that
a door to the Oval Office remained open, so it is very likely, given the time pressures, that Haldeman was taking the president’s edited copy to one of the secretaries as he finished his editing. When the president finished editing, he added his comment about meeting with Helms and Walters.
16 Conversation No. 343-36.
June 24 to July 1, 1972
1 Helen Thomas, “Martha’s ‘Ultimatum,’” The Washington Post, June 24, 1972, B-3.
2 In addition to the conversations that follow, see Winzola McLendon, Martha: The Life of Martha Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1979), 63.
3 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Conversation No. 194-14.
4 H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1993), 475.
5 Joseph Kraft, “The Watergate Caper,” The Washington Post, June 25, 1972, B-7.
6 Ibid.
7 Helen Thomas, “Martha Is ‘Leaving’ Mitchell,” The Washington Post, June 26, 1972, A-1.
8 Haldeman, Diaries, 475.
9 Conversation No. 742-8.
10 Conversation No. 742-14.
11 Conversation No. 343-37.
12 John W. Dean, Blind Ambition: The White House Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), 126.
13 Haldeman, Diaries, 476–77.
14 June 28, 1972, Haldeman office log, NARA.
15 Conversation No. 346-8.
16 Conversation No. 345-10.
17 Haldeman, Diaries, 478.
18 Conversation No. 347-4.
19 Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 648–49.
20 See, e.g., John W. Dean, The Rehnquist Choice, The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment that Redefined the Supreme Court (New York: Free Press, 2001).
21 Conversation No. 744-21.
22 Conversation No. 744-22 and 745-1.
23 Ziegler news conference, June 30, 1972, 10–13.
24 The only substantive matters discussed were that the Justice Department would prepare a statement for the president on a recent Supreme Court ruling on the death penalty, and that they would stay out of law enforcement activities during the Democratic National Convention in Miami, so they would not be responsible if demonstrators caused problems.
25 Haldeman later added to his diary for June 30, 1972: “There’s some new problems on the Watergate caper. Leading us to a probable decision that the way to deal with this now is to put all of them together, tie it all into Liddy’s lap and let him take the heat for it, which is actually where it belongs anyway.” Haldeman, Diaries, 479.
26 G. Gordon Liddy, Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 173–80.
27 Conversation No. 745-2.
28 Strachan Senate testimony, 6 Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (SSC) 2455.
29 Sloan Senate testimony, 2 SSC 578–88, 617, 620.
30 The New York Times apparently felt that the arrests at the DNC were a local Washington police story. Famed Times reporter and columnist Scotty Reston had just relinquished the post of head of the Washington bureau to Max Frankel, and Reston’s biographer reports that both men had a disdain for muckraking. See John F. Stacks, Scotty: James B. Reston and the Rise and Fall of American Journalism (New York: Little, Brown, 2003), 223. As a result, the Times missed the biggest story in modern American journalism, not to mention that the Times is an institution.
31 Conversation No. 746-3.
32 Nixon, RN, 646.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
Part II
1 Carl Bernstein and Jim Mann, “FBI Seeks Man Linked to ‘Bug’ Case,” The Washington Post, July 2, 1972, A-1.
2 “Gallup Finds Nixon Continues to Lead Top 2 Democrats,” New York Times, July 3, 1972, 18.
July 6 to July 18, 1972
1 In an effort to hide the CIA’s earlier involvement with Hunt (at Ehrlichman’s request), and before departing on a three-week foreign trip, Helms drafted a memo for Walters on June 28, 1972, in which he told Walters, “We still adhere to the request that they [the FBI] confine themselves to the personalities alreadly arrested or directly under suspicion and that they desist from expanding this investigation into other areas which may well, eventually, run afoul of our operations.” Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 263–64. Walters told the Watergate special prosecutors that he never received the memo, which the CIA later produced. It worried the prosecutors that it provided corroboration for Nixon’s instructions on June 23, 1972. They never did get a satisfactory explanation of why it was written. Richard Ben-Veniste and George Frampton, Jr., Stonewall: The Real Story of the Watergate Prosecution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977), 76–77.
2 Gray later testified, “I spoke to Mr. MacGregor at San Clemente, California, via the White House switchboard, and I told him that Dick Walters and I were uneasy and concerned about the confusion that existed over the past two weeks in determining with certainty whether there was or was not CIA interest in the people that the FBI wished to interview in connection with the Watergate investigation.” While Gray could not repeat his precise conversation, he added, “I also conveyed to him the thought that I felt the people on the White House staff were careless and indifferent in their use of the CIA and FBI. I also expressed the thought that this activity was injurious to the CIA and FBI, and that these White House staff people were wounding the president.” Following Gray’s call to MacGregor, the president called Gray. He congratulated the FBI on their handling of a hijacking the previous day, and then Gray told the president what he had told MacGregor. Gray said that after a slight pause, the president said, “Pat, you just continue to conduct your aggressive and thorough investigation.” After this, Gray said, he never had any further concern with White House interference with the FBI investigation. Gray Senate testimony, 9 Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (SSC) 3462.
3 Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 650.
4 Ibid., 651.
5 July 6, 1972, H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1993), 481.
6 See Ehrlichman office logs, NARA, John Ehrlichman, Witness to Power: The Nixon Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 353–55; and July 8–9, 1972, Haldeman, Diaries, 481.
7 Nixon, RN, 651.
8 Ehrlichman, Witness, 354.
9 Ibid., 354–55; Nixon, RN, 651–53.
10 Ehrlichman, Witness, 356.
11 For his memoir, Nixon did not transcribe all the relevant recorded conversations to discover when, in fact, he learned of Hunt and Liddy’s White House activities. Nonetheless, he wrote, “Ehrlichman says he did not know of it in advance [of the Liddy/Hunt break-in at Dr. Fielding’s Beverly Hills offices], but that he told me about it after the fact in 1972. I do not recall this, and the tapes of June–July 1972 indicate that I was not conscious of it then, but I cannot rule it out.” Nixon, RN, 514. However, Nixon expressed genuine surprise when I told him of this activity eight months later. (It will be noted that between July 8, 1972, when Ehrlichman later claimed he told Nixon about the Liddy/Hunt break-in at Fielding’s offices, and March 17, 1973, when I told the president about it, there is absolutely no mention of it on any other recorded conversations, other than the vague types of references made earlier by Haldeman.) In fact, what Ehrlichman told Nixon some ten months earlier, on September 8, 1971, right after the Liddy/Hunt break-in at Fielding’s offices, shows his disposition to withhold this information from the president: “We had one little operation. It’s been aborted out in Los Angeles which, I think, is better that you don’t know about.” Stanley I. Kutler, Abuse of Power (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 28. When testifying before the Senate Watergate committee in 1973, Ehrlichman said he had not told the president about the Fielding break-in. Ehrlichman Senate testimony, 7 SSC 2804. When Ehrlichm
an was later charged for criminal activity and tried for his role in the Fielding break-in, the president (still in office) submitted a sworn answer to an interrogatory asking: “On what date were you first informed of the Fielding break-in?” Answer: “March 17, 1973.” U.S. v. Ehrlichman (July 10, 1974), 2304. That, of course, was the date I told him, when we starting having our first discussions about Watergate.
12 July 18, 1972, Haldeman, Diaries, 483.
13 A few of Stanley Kutler’s transcripts allude to this activity but do not report the depth of Nixon’s involvement in the suborning of Magruder’s false testimony.
July 19 to August 16, 1972
1 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Conversation No. 747-14.
2 Jim Mann, “Lawyer in ‘Bug Case’ Loses Bid to Keep Mum,” The Washington Post, July 19, 1972, C-1.
3 Haldeman later explained to the president that Ehrlichman, at this stage, wanted everyone to fall on their sword—except Ehrlichman. He was pushing to get the Watergate investigation completed quickly so the Hunt and Liddy contagion did not cause him any problems. Magruder, in fact, could have pleaded the Fifth Amendment, and had he done so, the only immediate consequence would have been that he would have had to leave the campaign. Mitchell, however, had rejected this approach, because Magruder was a buffer against the investigation reaching him. If neither Liddy nor Mitchell testified, no one else had anything other than suspicion or hearsay knowledge about Magruder’s role in Watergate.
4 Conversation No. 348-10.
5 July 19, 1972, H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1993), 484.
6 July 20, 1972, Ibid.
7 Conversation No. 748-7.
8 Conversation No. 349-12.
9 Conversation No. 197-17.
10 Conversation No. 756-3.
11 Conversation No. 758-11.
12 Conversation No. 759-2.
13 Conversation No. 760-9.
14 Conversation No. 353-24.
15 Conversation No. 761-7.
16 Conversation No. 763-15.
