by John W. Dean
29 Conversation No. 885-7.
30 And I only knew what I had picked up in casual conversations from Mitchell and Magruder regarding the Watergate break-in and from Liddy and Ehrlichman regarding the Ellsberg break-in; I did not know what, if anything, Haldeman had done after I reported to him that I had heard Liddy’s pitch for an illegal political intelligence gathering operation in Mitchell’s office in late January and early February 1972. I discovered when working on this book that, contrary to my testimony, I had reported to him twice about this, based on his office records. It had been when I reported to him the second time that I thought I had turned it off by pouring cold water on Liddy’s plans, literally ending the discussion by insulting Liddy and Magruder for raising the matter with Mitchell, then the attorney general.
31 Conversation Nos. 37-175, 37-176.
March 21 to 23, 1973
1 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Conversation No. 886-7.
2 As revealed by the recorded conversations, the president’s daily diary (PDD) is incorrect on the times and people with whom the president met on the morning of March 21, 1973.
3 Conversation No. 886-8.
4 I had conflated two meetings I had with Haldeman about Liddy’s plans. The two meetings in Mitchell’s office occurred on January 27 and February 4, 1972. While working on this book I discovered that Haldeman’s office diary schedule shows I met with him on February 1, 1972, where I first reported on Liddy’s plans, and Haldeman’s negative reaction is what had emboldened me to blow up the second meeting, when I heard more of the same. When speaking to the president, and later testifying, I recalled telling Haldeman that I had turned off the Liddy plans. Based on Haldeman’s office diary schedule, that appears to have occurred on February 8, 1972, either before or after a staff meeting in Haldeman’s office. Although he quibbled about the dates, Haldeman later testified that he recalled my reporting having turned off Liddy’s plans at the February 4 meeting. See Haldeman Senate testimony, 8 Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (SSC) 3034–35. However, during a March 27, 1973, conversation, Haldeman acknowledged that I warned him about Liddy’s plan and that it had been dropped.
5 Whether the White House received information from the DNC before June 17, 1972, will forever remain unclear, because Haldeman instructed Strachan to clean their files. But it appears no such information, in fact, was received. Magruder later testified that he showed Strachan the fruits of Liddy’s DNC wiretapping operation, but in his testimony Strachan denied he was shown such material. At the time I was reporting to Nixon, Strachan believed he had seen it because the reports he had been sent and destroyed at Haldeman’s instruction after the June 17, 1972, arrests read very much like wiretap reports; they used the language: “From a source believed to be reliable.” In the weeks ahead, Strachan and Haldeman would figure out what had been destroyed were reports from a source planted by Magruder rather than wiretap information. See Strachan Senate testimony, 6 Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (SSC) 2468–69.
6 When Strachan later testified before the Senate that he did not know in advance about the Watergate break-in, I had no reason to doubt that testimony. I think Liddy’s claim in his memoir, Will (which was written long after the fact), that he told Strachan shortly before the second break-in at the Watergate that they were going back in to fix a bug is a confused reconstruction of the meeting in mid-April; that was actually the meeting during which Strachan instructed Liddy to move his intelligence-gathering capabilities from Muskie to McGovern. Strachan Senate testimony, 6 SSC, 2476; G. Gordon Liddy, Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
7 When writing Blind Ambition, I described my limited knowledge as follows: “The Cuban Committee was a technical part of only one of our payment schemes. A committee had been set up to collect defense funds for the Cuban defendants, and we had planned it; the committee would be flooded with anonymous cash. As it turned out, Hunt had preferred to have the money delivered directly to him and his wife.” At that writing I was unaware of the June 20, 1972, conversation between the president and Haldeman, during which he explained his idea. Conversation No. 344-7; John W. Dean, Blind Ambition: The White House Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), 203.
8 After learning of the president’s idea of creating a Cuban committee while working on this book, which he envisioned as open and publicly defending those involved in the Watergate break-in, I have discussed this matter with several former federal prosecutors, curious if they thought this would have been an obstruction of justice. While the answer would, of course, depend on how the committee was set up and funded, as a general rule an open and aboveboard defense fund is legal. Recently, former Bush II White House and Vice President Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby had a multimillion-dollar defense fund when he was indicted (and convicted) of perjury, with no less than former Senate Watergate committee minority counsel, later Tennessee senator Fred Thompson, on the advisory board. But most everyone agreed that using a Cuban committee cover to get hush money to the Watergate defendants would still have been obstruction of justice.
9 Actually, it was an even more detailed point to which Krogh plead guilty: Had he been aware of Hunt and Liddy’s travel while they were working for him in the plumbers unit? He testified that he had not been, when, in fact, he had known of it. On October 18, 1973, Krogh plead guilty to making two false statements to the grand jury in August 1972. United States v. Egil Krogh, Jr., Criminal Case 857-73, United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
10 Conversation No. 886-18.
11 Conversation No. 421-8. Note: While the audio on the conversation is of very poor quality, the gist of the conversation is discernible.
12 This was the way Ehrlichman consistently handled his personal jeopardy, from the moment I first mentioned it on June 19, 1972, after talking to Liddy through my relay of Hunt’s blackmail demand. Looking at how he later dealt with his criminal problems, Ehrlichman may have been remarkable naive about the criminal law, which would explain why he did not want me to bring a criminal lawyer on after Watergate, for he believed it unnecessary, or he was even more arrogant than I thought, for he felt, incorrectly, that he could bluff and dissemble his way through his problems. No one would ever successfully argue that he was stupid, although it could easily be asserted that he was foolish.
13 Conversation No. 421-18.
14 Conversation Nos. 37-204, 37-205.
15 Based on the transcript prepared by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF) of the president’s cassette recording of his recollections of his meeting with Dean and Haldeman on March 21, 1973. The entry continued, “As I examined him it seems that he feels even he would be guilty of some criminal liability due to the fact he participated in the actions which resulted in taking care of the defendants while they were under trial. As he pointed out, what is causing him concern is that every one of the various participants is now getting his own counsel and that this is going to cause considerable problems because it will be each man for himself, and one will not be afraid to rap on the other.” He noted that Haldeman had backed me up on this point, when he mentioned that Magruder would bring him down if he felt he himself was to go down. This caused the president again to tell his diary that Haldeman’s selection of Magruder was “still a very hard one for me to figure out. He’s made very few mistakes, but this is one case where Rose was right; he picked a rather weak man who had all the appearances of character, but who really lacks it when the chips are down.” WSPF files, NARA.
In his memoir, Nixon said, “[I]t was clear that on March 21 John Dean was trying to alert me to the fact that what I assumed for nine months was the major Watergate problem—the question of who had authorized the break-in—had been overtaken by the new and far more serious problem of the cover-up.” Nixon then takes the rather remarkable position that he did not really understand what I was saying, because I failed to s
ufficiently describe my own role in the cover-up, so he treated much of what I said as conjecture and deduction instead of as firsthand reporting on a situation that was “already out of hand.” Nixon wrote that my insistence that the payment of further money to the defendants was an obstruction of justice only seemed to him “more a reflection of his personal depression than a statement of a considered legal conclusion.” Nixon wrote that it took “three weeks” more for him to “understand what Dean had really been trying to tell me.” In fact, I was not depressed, as anyone who listens to this conversation vis-à-vis any other of my conversations will realize; rather, I was deeply frustrated that I could not persuade the president to end the cover-up, and a young White House aide does not tell the president of the United States everything he is really thinking, such as: “This man is either a fool or crook.” Within days I would decide it was the latter, and within three weeks I would break rank, explaining to my colleagues that I was going to the prosecutors, because the cover-up was over. It was that action, it seems, that enabled Nixon to understand what I was saying, for my actions spoke more clearly than my words of warning. Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 800–01, 817.
16 Conversation No. 422-20.
17 Five days later, on March 27, 1973, Ehrlichman would remove the memoranda from the White House files that included his handwritten authorization for the covert entry into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Had David Young not kept a copy of those documents, Ehrlichman might have succeeded in denying he had any knowledge of this operation, or it would have been his word against Krogh and Young, who admitted their roles in the undertaking, as did Howard Hunt and Chuck Colson; Colson had arranged for the funding to pay the expenses of Liddy and Hunt, and their Cuban operatives. U.S. v. Ehrlichman, 546 F.2d 910 (1975).
18 See Dean, Blind Ambition, 211.
19 Conversation No. 422-33.
20 The letter had been delivered three days earlier, and Sirica saw its potential immediately, telling his clerks, “This is going to break the case wide open.” Fred Emery, Watergate : The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Touchstone, 1994), 269–70.
21 See, e.g., Philip B. Kurland, “The Power and the Glory: Passing Thoughts on Reading Judge Sirica’s Watergate Exposé to Set the Record Straight: The Break-In, the Tapes, the Conspirators, the Pardon by John J. Sirica,” 32 Stanford Law Review (November 1979):217–28; and Anthony J. Gaughan, “Watergate, Judge Sirica, and the Rule of Law,” McGeorge Law. Review 42 (2010–2011): 343.
Part IV
1 Political crises have been described as breakdowns of governing systems and processes that create problems that might have been foreseen yet have developed into much more because an incipient situation was not addressed. See, e.g., Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, The Study of Crisis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
2 Richard Nixon, Six Crises (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), xv.
3 Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 817.
March 23 to April 13, 1973
1 H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1993), 594.
2 Ibid., 594.
3 Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 805.
4 Haldeman recorded in considerable detail the information, particularly from me, about what had transpired. I had minced no words about Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s criminal liability in raising money and paying the Watergate defendants after June 17, 1972. Haldeman’s notes could have provided solid corroboration for my later testimony, but this information remained buried until he published his diaries in 1994. While Haldeman recorded in his note that I explained his problems to him, as well as Ehrlichman’s, he never mentioned this information to Nixon, protecting himself and Ehrlichman to the end, and at Nixon’s expense. Haldeman, Diaries.
5 They did publish, but when McCord’s false statement about me fell apart for total lack of substance, and that fact was reported, I took no action.
6 Lou Cannon, “Nixon Denies Dean Knew of Bugging,” The Washington Post, March, 27, 1973, A-1.
7 Nixon White House Recorded Conversation, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Conversation No. 888-4.
8 Haldeman had urged me to record Magruder if I could, and I did so by holding the dictating machine microphone to the telephone while at Camp David. Secretly recording telephone calls was common at the Nixon White House, but other than Magruder, whose story seemed to change depending on whom he was speaking to, I did not record my phone calls. My Magruder recording of March 26, 1973, was turned over to the Senate Watergate committee. See Dean Senate testimony, 3 Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (SSC)1258.
9 Conversation No. 423-3.
10 Conversation No. 44-21.
11 Conversation No. 423-11.
12 Conversation No. 423-13.
13 Conversation No. 44-30.
14 Conversation No. 424-10.
15 Conversation No. 421-22.
16 Dean testimony, 3 SSC 1005–6.
17 Conversation No. 425-23.
18 Conversation No. 44-58.
19 Conversation No. 44-61.
20 Dean testimony, 3 SSC 1006–7.
21 Haldeman, Diaries, 618.
22 Conversation No. 424-30.
23 Conversation No. 426-4.
24 Conversation Nos. 44-69, 44-71, 44-80, 426-5 and 426-16.
25 Conversation No. 426-4.
26 Conversation No. 890-33.
27 Haldeman, Diaries, 620.
28 Ibid., 622–24.
29 When writing Blind Ambition I thought that Liddy’s purportedly talking had first come up in my first meeting with the prosecutors on April 8, 1973. Based on the information in Haldeman’s diary it is clear that Charlie was given this information as early as April 5, 1973, and, in turn, I shared it with Haldeman on that date and again on April 7, 1973. As to the practice of prosecutors using false information during plea discussions, as I was exploring, today the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Standards, Standard 3-4.1 (c) states: “A prosecutor should not knowingly make false statements or representations as to fact or law in the course of plea discussions with defense counsel or the accused.” See http://www.americanbar.org/publications/criminal_justice_section_archive/crimjust_standards_pfunc_blk.html#4.1. As I wrote in Blind Ambition, I understood why they had to breach the agreement with Charlie, although they never seemed to understand why I felt I had to go to the Senate Watergate committee rather than deal with them. John W. Dean, Blind Ambition: The White House Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976).
30 Haldeman, Diaries, 629. Note: The day headings for Monday, April 8, 1973, Tuesday, April 9, 1973, and Wednesday, April 10, 1973, are incorrect and should have been Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.
31 Magruder would later write that my lawyer had spoken with Bierbower, who reported to Jeb that I said: “Well, of course John doesn’t have any legal problems, but Jeb has a very serious problem, and we don’t know if we can help him.” According to Magruder, who seems to have missed the message in the call to get to the prosecutor’s office sooner rather than later, wrote that he was furious. See Jeb Stuart Magruder, An American Life: One Man’s Road to Watergate (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 92. But the purpose of the call was not lost on Magruder’s lawyers, who indeed did get him to the U.S. Attorney’s Office quickly once Jeb gave up his fabricated story and told the truth, on April 12, 1973.
32 Sifting through the information in the recorded conversations, along with other information now available, such as the Watergate special prosecutor’s interviews with Earl Silbert on August 30 and 31, 1973, has enabled me to pinpoint matters I could only address broadly in testimony and Blind Ambition and to recall others I had forgotten. See, e.g., Peter F. Rient and Judy Denny, September 6, 1973, “Interview of Earl Silbert on Augu
st 30–31, 1973,” Memorandum to the Files, Record Group 140, NARA. And while I have not sought to fill in all such detail, I have noted this information generally in my account.
33 Conversation No. 44-103.
34 Conversation No. 891-1. Note: This conversation was partially transcribed by NARA for the lawsuit filed by Haldeman when he was seeking damages from the government for not turning over his diary dictation recordings and notes in a sufficiently timely manner. The court ruled against Haldeman, since he had turned over ownership of this material to protect it from the Watergate special prosecutors under executive privilege in 1973, and then claimed ownership only later. Had the Watergate special prosecutor had Haldeman’s diary it would have resulted in multiple additional criminal charges against the president, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and others, not to mention made prosecution of the crimes with which they were charged much easier. See Haldeman v. Freeman (the administrator of the General Services Administration), 558 F. Supp. 514 (1983).
35 Conversation No. 425-44. (Extremely poor audio quality.)
36 Conversation No. 44-115.
37 Conversation No. 44-117.
38 Conversation No. 892-4.
39 Conversation No. 892-14.
40 E.g., Seymour M. Hersh, “Pressures to Plead Guilty Alleged in Watergate Case,” New York Times, January 15, 1973, 63 and “McCord Reported Linking Payoffs to a G.O.P. Lawyer: Says He Believes Parkinson Paid Defendants—Lawyer Denies It,” New York Times, April 9, 1973, 77.
41 Conversation No. 893-10.
42 Stans later wrote that he did not approve the settlement; rather, it had occurred in “early 1973” at the behest of “lawyers at the White House that we should close out this embarrassing litigation.” Stans reports that in 1976, Spencer Oliver, whose telephone had been wiretapped by Liddy et al., and who had filed a separate lawsuit, settled for $215,000. And in 1977 the four Cubans who had been arrested in the DNC, and who had sued the Nixon reelection committee for misleading them into undertaking what they believed was a “national security” operation, settled for $200,000. See Maurice H. Stans, The Terrors of Justice (New York: Everest House, 1978), 251.
