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

by John W. Dean

  * The audio quality here is worse than usual, because they were seated for lunch at a small conference table a good distance from the microphones in the president’s desk. Although approximately thirty-five minutes of this seventy-five-minute meeting has been withdrawn by NARA, because of personal material, the gist of the conversation can be determined.

  * This NARA recording literally runs out here, resulting in a gap of unknown length. When the conversation resumes, Haldeman and Nixon are still addressing the same general topic

  * When we were meeting earlier, in Haldeman’s office, Mitchell had asked me to write out a bogus Liddy scenario, but I resisted, explaining that I did not have the time or knowledge. Haldeman saw what Mitchell was doing and backed me up.

  * A statement like this further confirms that Nixon did not believe he was closing down the FBI’s investigation of Watergate on June 23, 1972, in authorizing Haldeman to have the CIA intervene with the FBI’s investigation of the Mexican check and Hunt’s activities.

  * This would equal more than $1 million in today’s dollars.

  * During the Truman presidency the Senate investigated charges that presidential aide Harry H. Vaughan and others were charging a 5 percent commission for their influence in securing government contracts.

  * This is a reference to the reelection committee, whose office was at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue.

  * The wires were carrying the story from Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, “Bug Suspect Got Campaign Funds” (The Washington Post, August 1, 1972, A-1), about the twenty-five-thousand-dollar check from Kenneth Dahlberg (an official with CRP) found in the bank account of Bernard Barker.

  * On Monday, July 31, 1972, Ehrlichman requested I join him for lunch with Kleindienst. We met in the attorney general’s office suite and private dining room at the Justice Department from 11:30 A.M. until approximately 1:30 P.M. Ehrlichman had called for the meeting. It was at this time that Kleindienst brought Ehrlichman up to date on the likely outcome of the Watergate investigation. But Haldeman’s report to the president shows far more knowledge than Ehrlichman received from Kleindienst at that meeting; rather, it appears they had also spoken with Mitchell, who had information about Hunt’s plans. Also, tellingly, Ehrlichman’s calendar for the evening of July 31, 1972, shows that he attended a “Youth Reception” in the White House mess to which Jeb Magruder had been invited. Keeping Jeb happy was on everyone’s mind.

  * Judge Roger Robb was a good friend of Attorney General Kleindienst who, before going on the bench, had successfully handled a defamation lawsuit by Senator Barry Goldwater against fact magazine owner and editor Ralph Ginzburg following his 1964 bid for the presidency. On April 23, 1969, President Nixon nominated Robb to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and he was quickly confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Robb provided Kleindienst a direct private link into the closed chambers of the DC federal courts.

  * I spent several hours listening to the poor-quality audio of the next few sentences because of their obvious importance. My transcription is based upon hearing it played with several software programs on several computers using several speaker systems, as well as on listening to the material played at several speeds, and then using the most audible to reconstruct what was said. Given the tone in Nixon’s voice, he is clearly warning his chief of staff that they could be making a serious mistake in bribing Hunt, a warning that would be totally ignored.

  * See Appendix A.

  * Nixon, who had enjoyed a friendship with Prescott Bush, was trying to assist the career of Prescott’s son George H. W. Bush. When George Bush ran for Congress in Texas and lost, Nixon appointed him U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on March 1, 1971, where he remained until January 18, 1973, when Nixon asked him to become chairman of the Republican National Committee; he remained there until September 16, 1974, announcing his departure shortly before Nixon’s resignation as president.

  * A multiple of 5.5 can be used to get a rough estimate of 1972–73 dollars versus today’s value.

  * Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, “Audit Set on Nixon Fund: Possible Link to Bugging Incident Cited,” The Washington Post, August 2, 1972, A-1.

  * Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo had been indicted by Nixon’s Department of Justice for theft of government property and espionage in connection with the leak of the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg and Russo were on trial in Los Angeles federal court and wanted the government to produce any information obtained using a wiretap relating to their case, but the government was opposing the motion, falsely denying that such wiretaps existed. Ellsberg and Russo had appealed to Supreme Court justice William Douglas, the one with jurisdiction over the Ninth Circuit, where their case was being tried; on July 29, 1972, Douglas had stayed the opening of the trial. Initially the government had opposed the delay. But then it seems that Ehrlichman wanted the trial delayed until after the election, because he believed the government might lose the case, in no small part due to the fact that recordings of wiretaps relating to Ellsberg that should have been turned over by the government to Ellsberg and Russo were in his White House safe. So Ehrlichman was taking the extraordinary action of an ex parte meeting with the chief justice.

  * Roger Barth would later become G. Gordon Liddy’s personal tax attorney and helped him win a partial reduction of the taxes Liddy was charged with failing to pay on money he received from the Committee to Re-elect the President. See Liddy v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue (1986) at http://openjurist.org/808/f2d/312/liddy-v-commissioner-of-internal-revenue.

  * Magruder later wrote that Higby told him they were keeping him away from the president, which he said made him angry, noting that at the time he thought, “Those bastards, they want me to perjure myself for them, but they won’t invite me on their lousy cruise.” (Original italicized.) Jeb Stuart Magruder, An American Life: One Man’s Road to Watergate (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 247.

  * The conversation ran only a little over one minute, and fifty seconds of the conversation has been withdrawn as personal material. This was a stroking call, in which he discussed personal matters and wanted to let Magruder know he was thinking about him, just days before his grand jury appearance. The substance is irrelevant, for Nixon would not have said anything to Magruder about his testimony. Rather, it was the gesture that counted.

  * Over the weekend it had been a front-page story: Sanford J. Ungar, “Ellsberg Trial Is Delayed Indefinitely,” The Washington Post, August 6, 1972, A-1. The story said that it was “a major setback to the Justice Department” when Chief Justice Burger announced that the high court would not call a special session to determine if Justice Douglas had been justified in staying the Los Angeles trial.

  *A Watergate-weakened president in his second term did not pursue this case against Sheehan, the yeoman or Anderson. Rather, Nixon explained in his memoirs, he had not prosecuted the yeoman in his first term because he felt “it would be too dangerous to prosecute” a person who had access to top secret information, “which, if disclosed, could have jeopardized our negotiations with China and North Vietnam.” Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 532.

  * In Bobby Baker’s memoir there is no mention of a special prosecutor. See Bobby Baker with Larry L. King, Wheeling and Dealing: Confessions of a Capitol Hill Operator (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978). William O. Bittman, who represented Howard Hunt during Watergate, prosecuted Baker for the Justice Department.

  * The president was referring to a commentary by Robert B. Semple, “Nixon and the Press: Why the Heat Is Off,” New York Times, August 13, 1972, E-3. At one point Semple wrote: “The persistent silence in the White House and in the re-election committee on various inquiries into the bugging episode at the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate office virtually guarantees that tough questions will continue.”

  * The ninety recorded conversations that I have drawn from that preceded this meeting clearly reveal this was not true; rather, it was merely another dis
cussion in the ongoing cover-up that the president was not only aware of but, through Haldeman and Ehrlichman, directing.

  * “Wally” Hickel, a former governor of Alaska, was fired on November 25, 1970, from his post in the Nixon cabinet as secretary of the interior after he wrote a public letter critical of the president’s Vietnam policies. Ehrlichman did the deed for the president.

  * When Donald Rumsfeld joined the Nixon administration in 1969, he arranged for his former Princeton roommate, Frank Carlucci, to be transferred from the State Department to help him run—or ruin, depending on one’s point of view—the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the agency created by President Johnson to fight poverty. Carlucci replaced Rumsfeld as director of OEO (1971–72) and later became undersecretary of health, education and welfare. Following Watergate, President Ford made Carlucci ambassador to Portugal (1974–77). Next he was deputy director of the CIA (1978–81), then deputy defense secretary (1981–83), then Reagan’s national security adviser (1986–87) and then his secretary of defense (1987–89). Most recently I’ve noticed that Carlucci has parlayed his government experience and contacts into an estimated $60 billion net worth. See www.dailyfinance.com/2013/05/31/frank-carlucci-plastic-into-oil-scam/.

  * Chief investigator, House Un-American Activities Committee.

  * As I explained in considerable detail in Chapter 8 of Lost Honor (New York: Stratford Press/Harper & Row, 1982), the combined involvement of House minority leader Gerry Ford (who later dissembled during his vice presidential confirmation proceedings about his activities) and the White House congressional relations staff successfully closed down the Patman hearings in early October 1972.

  * It took a few days to get this story sorted out. Clawson finally admitted that he had, in fact, falsely made the claim to Berger. The married Mr. Clawson was visiting the unmarried Ms. Berger at her apartment, and boasting to impress her as part of his effort to seduce her, a ploy that backfired on him and accounted for the circumstances that caused him to publicly deny he had told Berger otherwise. Notwithstanding Deep Throat/Mark Felt’s claim that this letter was written by someone in the Nixon White House, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support this, including information in the FBI’s extensive investigation. The true source of the letter has never been identified.

  * On November 5, 1972, Dwight Chapin would provide me (and John Ehrlichman) with much more detailed information about his interactions with Segretti, and they were more extensive than first outlined. See U.S. v. Chapin (trial transcript, Criminal Court, No. 990-73), April 3, 1974, 422–31.

  * The Watergate cover-up activity grew in intensity after the election, and there were countless conversations and meetings in which I exchanged information and received directions from Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mitchell. But either because Nixon was spending significant time out of the White House, or because Haldeman and Ehrlichman were not discussing the subject with him, there is relatively little activity recorded by Nixon in either his tapes or his diary during this period other than that noted through the end of the year.

  * It was extremely rare for Haldeman to speak so bluntly and honestly about the money going to the Watergate defendants, and he would later claim—unsuccessfully—that the money given to these men was not to pay them off.

  * The audio is very difficult on this conversation and Haldeman may have been explaining, as he did in later conversations, that he urged the CRP intelligence-gathering operation to record public speeches with recording equipment. But I discount this potential explanation of this conversation because Haldeman knew that was not “bugging,” as did Nixon.

  * See Appendix A.

  * Hunt and Liddy had requested this nontraceable telephone to communicate with their operatives, one of whom was Bernard Barker. And, like all their activities, it left conspicuous tracks. When Ron Ziegler was asked about the telephone he pleaded ignorance but assured the press corps that John Ehrlichman had no knowledge of it. Ziegler news conference, briefing #1620, 11:10 A.M., December 12, 1972, Nixon library, National Archives and Records Administration.

  * Kissinger will initial an agreement with the North Vietnamese on Janury 23, 1973, and secretary of state William Rogers will sign the formal settlement agreement in Paris on January 27, 1973.

  * Because of Watergate, Colson never developed his plans to attack the Post with Scaife, who had given Richard Nixon $1 million for the 1972 campaign. Later, however, Scaife did become a financier of right-wing attacks on the Clinton presidency. See, e.g., Judy Keen, “First Critic: Richard Scaife IS THORN IN CLINTON’S SIDE,” USA Today, MAY 28, 1998, A-1.

  * I once had a similar conversation with Colson, in which he boasted to me that he had done things for which he could go to jail. That would never happen, he said, because there was no way anyone would ever discover them. He did take these secret activities to his grave, just as he promised.

  * See Appendix A.

  * Daniel had served as bureau chief for the Times in London and Moscow, and was married to Margaret Truman, the daughter of former president Harry Truman.

  * The kid to whom Ehrlichman was referring was a college student at Brigham Young University, Thomas Gregory, recruited by Howard Hunt, and who had taken a semester off to work for Hunt. Gregory had been referred by the nephew of Hunt’s boss Robert Bennett at Mullen & Company, the public relations firm Hunt worked for when not consulting at the White House or assisting Liddy with his nefarious undertakings. Ehrlichman obtained this information from Attorney General Dick Kleindienst, who was giving Ehrlichman periodic heads-up. Gregory did testify but this information did not become public until January 11, 1973, at the trial. Gregory, who had unwittingly gotten himself deep into the illegal operations of the Hunt/Liddy schemes, was given immunity by the prosecutors and became the key witness in the case against Liddy and McCord. Gregory was involved in the unsuccessful efforts to bug McGovern’s headquarters on May 15 and 28, 1972, but quit before June 17, 1972, the last planned but never executed entry and bugging of the McGovern headquarters. See testimony of Thomas Gregory, U.S. v. Liddy (Jan. 11, 1973) and Senate Watergate Committee, Final Report, 27-28, 196-197. Sam Dash, chief counsel of the Senate Watergate committee, told me he wanted to call Gregory as a witness, but Senator Wallace Bennett (father of Robert Bennett) intervened with Chairman Ervin, and blocked calling Gregory since they could get the information from others.

  * Colson appears to be referring to Seymour Glanzer, one of three assistant U.S. attorneys on the case, along with Don Campbell, and the lead assistant, Earl Silbert, who handled the Watergate break-in investigation and prosecutions.

  * The morning news had been filled with reports regarding former senator Daniel Brewster (D-MD). In 1969 he had been indicted by the Nixon Justice Department (although the investigation had started well before Nixon was elected) for solicitation and acceptance of bribes. The case arose from campaign contributions from a lobbyist for Spiegel, a mail-order firm that was seeking favorable mail rates. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia had dismissed the indictment against Brewster under the “speech and debate” clause of the Constitution (which immunizes members of Congress from liability for their legislative actions), but the Justice Department appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in June 1972 overturned the District Court by a 6 to 3 vote, explaining an illegal bribe was not protected by the Constitution’s speech and debate clause. The case was reinstated, Brewster had been convicted, and the February 3, 1973, front-page Washington Post headline reported: BREWSTER GETS 6-YEAR TERM, $30,000 FINE. (Note: Brewster’s conviction was later overturned because the judge had instructed the jury improperly. In 1975 Brewster pled no contest to a misdemeanor charge of accepting an illegal gratuity.)

  * The meeting was held later that morning in Ehrlichman’s office at ten, with Haldeman, Bryce Harlow (who had been in charge of congressional relations at the outset of the Nixon presidency), John Mitchell, Dick Moore, Bill Timmons and me.

  * A tickler
filing system results in an aide or secretary asking a designated person or persons to be reminded at a future date or dates how some matter in the file should be resolved or addressed.

  * See Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, “Data from Security Taps Reported Given Liddy, Hunt,” The Washington Post, February 14, 1973, A-1. (The White House press office had denied the story.)

  * This appears to be a reference to the Ellsberg break-in, which Ehrlichman claims he told the president about on July 8, 1972, when they took their long walk down Red Beach in California. Nixon would later deny in a sworn statement that he knew of the Ellsberg break-in before March 17, 1973, when I told him about it during a conversation.