Watergate, page 20
In early May, McCord located a former FBI special agent named Alfred Baldwin and asked him to come to D.C. to discuss working for CREEP as a bodyguard—the request was urgent; Baldwin, McCord said, should fly down that night.IX Baldwin was initially underwhelmed by the idea of guarding Martha Mitchell, but McCord explained it was the starting point for a higher-profile permanent role in the government after the election. The next day, McCord handed Baldwin a .38-caliber revolver, a holster, and $800 cash for expenses, and sent him along on a six-day trip with Martha to Detroit and New York. He was to receive a salary of $70 per day.
The bodyguard and protectee didn’t hit it off; it was his first and last trip with Martha Mitchell. “Al Baldwin is probably the most gauche character I have ever met in my whole life,” Martha complained, explaining he’d even taken off his shoes and socks in her suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, walking around barefoot “in front of everybody.” After flunking his test assignment with Martha, Baldwin was quickly reassigned by McCord; don’t worry, McCord promised, they had some other operations underway.
* * *
The same May Monday that McCord hired Baldwin, J. Edgar Hoover walked out of the FBI headquarters for the final time. On May 2, 1971, the emperor of American law enforcement died overnight at home alone. Mark Felt was at his desk around 9:45 a.m. when another FBI official called to simply announce, “He’s dead.” Felt assumed at first the announcement was about his boss, the ailing Clyde Tolson; then the official clarified, “Hoover’s dead.”
The body was readied immediately in a D.C. funeral home, so the director could lie in state the following day at the Capitol. In death, the controversial figure was lauded across Washington. “Mr. Hoover almost singlehandedly transformed the FBI into the superlative law enforcement agency it became,” Gerald Ford memorialized, while the New York Times’s full-page obituary decreed, “If there is such a thing as a cumulative total, [he was] the most powerful official in the long span of the American Government.”
Felt was relatively confident he would be named the FBI’s director—after all, he’d been effectively running things for nine months already—but Nixon saw a moment he had long wanted to construct a more malleable FBI, one where he could install the servant and partner he’d never had in Hoover. Unbeknownst to Felt, he was never a serious contender on that list.
Nixon settled instead on L. Patrick Gray III—a loyal candidate who had been in his mind for the role since at least the previous fall. Nixon decided he would not name Gray the permanent director of the bureau; instead, Gray would be announced as the “acting” director, to serve through the election. By skipping an immediate confirmation battle, Nixon hoped to avoid dredging up for congressional Democrats the bureau’s many recent controversies and sins. Besides, by May, as Nixon watched the Democrats begin to flounder on the other side of the presidential race, he felt more confident about a successful reelection. Gray’s nomination to be deputy attorney general still lingered in the Senate, held up amid the Kleindienst-ITT scandal, but the Senate seemed poised to confirm him as soon as the Kleindienst controversy died down, meaning that presumably they’d be happy to confirm him as FBI director too post-election.
Kleindienst announced the temporary pick just twenty-six hours after the news of Hoover’s death. Nixon wanted to “name a man in whom he has implicit personal confidence,” Ron Ziegler told reporters. “I think you will find that Patrick Gray is not a political man.”
Felt was stunned. How could Nixon do this to the FBI, betraying its agents by installing an outsider? Soon, his shock and surprise gave way to an even stronger set of emotions that flooded him: bitterness, disbelief, and a desire to right the wrong done to him. If Gray was going to be a temporary seat-warmer, then there was still time to sink him and win the top job.
The FBI’s first director had reigned for forty-eight years; Nixon’s choice would barely last forty-eight weeks.
* * *
As plans came together for Hoover’s elaborate funeral, Nixon’s team sought to provide a final strange service to the former director: An antiwar protest, led by figures like Daniel Ellsberg and Jane Fonda, had been scheduled outside the Capitol while Hoover was supposed to be lying in state. Based on instructions funneled to him from Colson to Magruder, Liddy asked Hunt to bring Barker and his team to D.C. to protect the casket.
Barker hurried to Washington with his core Cuban team—Frank Sturgis, Eugenio Martinez, and Felipe De Diego—and met Hunt and Liddy at the Robert Mullen Company office. Liddy introduced himself using his George Leonard alias and showed Barker photographs of the leading antiwar figures, like Ellsberg, and asked the team to circulate through the crowd, heckle speakers, and seize any Viet Cong flags protesters displayed. Then, if there was any run at Hoover’s casket, they should attempt to slow or fight the crowd.X
Despite Liddy’s fears, no real trouble materialized and the protesters never tried to storm the Capitol; the only drama came when Frank Sturgis traded punches with one protester and was escorted from the scene by police. Their task complete, Liddy seized the opportunity to plan for his OPAL break-ins while the would-be burglary team was in town.
That night, Liddy, Hunt, and Barker’s team cased McGovern’s headquarters on Capitol Hill, studying the street lighting outside, and then Liddy took them to the new target Magruder had added to the OPAL list.
“That’s our next job, Macho,” he told Barker, pointing to the Watergate.
I. LaRue was sort of an odd duck around the campaign; he served as Mitchell’s alter ego and, as Dean would note, even looked like a younger, thinner Mitchell. Fabulously wealthy from oil money, he had been a dollar-a-year White House consultant before taking a pay cut to volunteer for the campaign. “He had been serving in the administration out of curiosity mingled with a sincere desire to be of help,” Dean would observe. “He had no ambitions that I could discern, nor any enemies.”
II. At another point, Liddy seized on an offhand comment from Magruder, complaining about Jack Anderson, and announced—perhaps facetiously—to Magruder’s aide as Liddy left the office that he was off to kill Anderson on Magruder’s orders. Flustered, Magruder backpedaled. Liddy replied, “Well, you’d better watch that—When you give me an order like that, I carry it out.”
III. The other piece of the puzzle is the approval of the planned burglary. The House Judiciary Committee would accept Magruder’s version that Mitchell ordered the Watergate break-in during the Key Biscayne meeting. LaRue, a Mitchell loyalist, would tell writers Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in later interviews that he vividly remembered the Key Biscayne conversation and that since Mitchell didn’t approve the Liddy plan in the first place, they definitely couldn’t have selected a wiretapping target. LaRue in 2003 told journalist James Rosen, “Basically, the guy that’s lying is Magruder.” Another primary reason to doubt Magruder’s timetable is that it took nearly a month until Magruder told Liddy to target the Watergate—an oddly long time to hold back a seemingly critical instruction, had it indeed been given that day in Florida.
IV. Later, Whitney’s nomination ran into trouble and Nixon withdrew it to avoid risking exposing the cash payment. Haldeman reported, “He’d have to reveal his financial support. He’d have to lie or reveal it. And that would be a mess, too.” Nixon offered Whitney a refund.
V. Chotiner, a consultant to Nixon since his first congressional campaign, had long been one of Nixon’s most loyal aides and one of the most notorious practitioners of the political dark arts. Nixon’s pre–White House hatchetman remained a valuable—if dwindling—figure in his presidential circles.
VI. The address for one turned out to be a nightclub, and there were overlapping committee executives. A September 1971 Washington Post article reported its suspicions: “[The] Organization of Involved Americans has its address at [D.C. attorney John Y.] Merrell’s office in Washington and another, Americans United for Political Awareness, at his home in Arlington. He heads one, he said, and his wife is chairman of the other. But he wasn’t sure which was which.” When contacted by a reporter, Merrell had asked, “I’m just curious—how many are there?” He laughed when the Post reporter said they’d uncovered more than sixty. Another D.C. consultant said he’d never heard of Americans for a Sensible Agriculture Policy, which was registered to his office address.
VII. Sloan’s account actually changes, subtly and importantly: Before a grand jury later, he first said Stans instructed him, “For the time being, list it under John Mitchell’s name,” but at trial he said the instruction was “John Mitchell wants it listed under the initials ‘JM’ for the time being.”
VIII. Later, after the scandal had broken wide open, Washington Post editor Barry Sussman interviewed Butterfield and listened to him describe the odd scene of counting the money; Sussman asked: Didn’t this whole episode feel peculiar, even wrong? Not at all, Butterfield explained: “When you work in the White House for the President of the United States, the last thing you think of is that you might be involved in wrongdoing.”
IX. How and why McCord chose Baldwin specifically has always been a bit of a puzzle and mystery: He said he chose Baldwin through the bureau’s Society of Former Special Agents, but despite no shortage of retired agents local to D.C., McCord selected Baldwin, who lived in Connecticut, meaning that CREEP constantly had to pay travel and lodging for him. Equally odd, Baldwin had seemingly no relevant surveillance experience.
X. Liddy’s explanation that the Cubans came to Washington to “protect Hoover’s casket” has always had doubters, who wonder if instead Liddy brought the Cuban team to D.C. on such short notice to launch an operation to retrieve and seize Hoover’s private, secret files, which were supposed to be hidden at his house. Nixon did appear to have immediate interest in securing the files: When he heard Hoover was dead, he asked the White House to locate Hoover’s former deputy Deke DeLoach immediately to help identify the location of the rumored files, which contained highly sensitive materials on top officials Hoover kept as both political protection and potential blackmail material. The files never surfaced, so perhaps the snatch-and-grab operation was aborted and the “casket protection” became a ruse.
Chapter 12 Third-Rate Burglars
Richard Nixon considered the chance to appoint an FBI director as consequential as that to pick a Supreme Court justice. Two of his court nominations had been debacles of their own—Nixon had been the first president in decades to have two nominees rejected back to back—but his choice of an FBI director proved an even worse decision than his failed court choices: He’d picked the wrong man, gambled on the wrong political strategy, and—without knowing it—angered the wrong alternate candidate.
Under different circumstances, L. Patrick Gray III might have jibed well with the culture created by the bureau’s legendary founder. Resourceful and service-minded, a Texan child of the Depression, he’d spent four years trying to win an appointment to the Naval Academy, and finally achieved it in 1936. Unable to afford the travel to Annapolis, he talked his way onto a tramp steamer as an apprentice, teaching the shipmaster math in trade for lessons on seamanship and navigation, landed in Philadelphia, and hitchhiked to the academy, where he later became the starting quarterback. He did six combat submarine patrols in World War II and three more in the Korean War, becoming a star of the navy, destined perhaps even to become the service’s chief of naval operations had he not retired to be Vice President Nixon’s military advisor.
It was a great résumé, but he still knew absolutely nothing about the FBI. As its acting director, he was all but destined to fail. Gray was an unknown to the bureau, unfamiliar with its ways, and a mystery to its leadership—a figure who commanded little respect or loyalty from the bureaucracy or the rank-and-file. “The plain truth of the matter was that I just did not know enough about the customs and traditions of the FBI, its inner workings, or the background and character of its senior executives,” he wrote in a posthumously published memoir.I
From the start, Gray mistakenly trusted Mark Felt, and he rapidly named him the acting associate director—the bureau’s number two—elevating him to a uniquely powerful and valuable role that involved translating the bureau to its new director and vice versa. Gray drowned in the volume and velocity of the bureau’s work—inheriting a massive paperwork machine that had long churned to keep J. Edgar personally up to speed on all aspects of the FBI’s work—and asked Felt to dial back the decisions that came to the director’s office. He quickly turned over the day-to-day operations almost entirely to Felt.
Within days of Gray’s arrival at the FBI in May, Felt began to play a dangerous, manipulative game—undermining his boss behind the scenes as he pledged loyalty to his face. With Gray just a temporary caretaker until the election, in either outcome Felt believed he might benefit: If Gray stayed postelection, the deputy seemed loyal enough to become the permanent number two; if Gray failed, Felt would again be best positioned to take over.
The bureau was in an especially delicate position in the wake of Hoover’s death; it had literally never existed without Hoover in charge, and everyone in Washington—and much of America beyond—wondered how and if it would remain up to the task without his careful eye.
Here too Felt found opportunity. In the first few weeks after Hoover’s death, he moved quickly—and cautiously—to deliver information to the press anonymously that helped preserve the FBI’s integrity and defuse criticisms of the bureau. In mid-May, Arthur Bremer shot and wounded fiery presidential candidate George Wallace at a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland, emptying a revolver at the Alabama governor, hitting him multiple times and leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Bremer was wrestled to the ground after and arrested.
Many wondered if more sinister forces were behind Bremer’s shooting. “Felt sensed that the incident could blow into a violent political storm, fanned by conspiracy theories on both the left and the right,” wrote his co-biographer John O’Connor decades later. (At the White House, Colson actually tried to enlist Hunt to snoop in Bremer’s apartment and determine his political leanings—or perhaps even plant some pro-McGovern materials that would undermine the Democrats.) The FBI, though, moved fast on its investigation and while it found that Bremer had also stalked Nixon that winter, unsuccessfully attempting to shoot him before settling on Wallace instead, the bureau didn’t believe Bremer was part of any larger plot. He just wanted fame.
Felt leaked details about the thoroughness of the FBI investigation to a young Washington Post reporter he knew named Bob Woodward, enabling the cub reporter to write a series of authoritative stories about how the bureau had concluded that Bremer was a strange, crazed loner.
For Woodward, the series was a critical scoop, bolstering his career and profile inside the paper. For the FBI, the leaks helped rebut a conspiracy theory and trumpet the bureau’s ongoing effectiveness post-Hoover.
Everybody won. And Felt realized he had a powerful new tool to wield in his covert fight for the bureau’s top job.
Now he just needed Pat Gray to screw something up.
* * *
All through the spring of 1972, CREEP security director James McCord had stockpiled electronic equipment under Liddy’s guidance—advanced eavesdropping tools, walkie-talkie radios, tape recorders, and more. Now, as they planned their first missions in the OPAL covert-entry program, the cache of spy toys would finally be put to use, and he had just the guy to help monitor the bugs: Al Baldwin, the onetime Martha Mitchell bodyguard, was enlisted to help surveil the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate. He moved Baldwin into a room at the Howard Johnson Motor Inn across the street, rented in the name of McCord’s consulting firm, McCord Associates.
When the DNC had moved into the sixth floor of the Watergate, some objected because it was too fancy for the workingman’s party. The six-building complex consisted of a hotel, two condo co-ops, and two office buildings and had become the capital’s priciest address as its buildings opened in the 1960s and early 1970s. An underground parking garage offered space for twelve hundred cars, and the shopping center boasted a post office, a bank, and a supermarket, as well as a florist, a salon, and other amenities. Mrs. Herbert Salzman, the neighbor of Senator Abe Ribicoff and his wife, bragged, “If it only had a tennis court and a movie theatre, I don’t think I’d ever have occasion to leave the place.”
The ambitious, grand complex, originally envisioned as D.C.’s answer to Rockefeller Center, had taken years to wind through the District’s planning and zoning approvals, evolving and shrinking as it sought to make the best use of an awkward ten-acre site squeezed between Rock Creek Parkway and the new John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The design, its Italian backers explained, was meant to embody “the sophistication and dedication of the ‘new Washington,’ ” marking the postwar growth of the capital as it had transformed from a sleepy southern city, largely abandoned during the humid summers, into a world capital as strategically and historically relevant as Paris, London, or Rome. Prices ranged from $17,500 for a studio up to over $200,000 for one of the seven penthouses; bidets came standard in most condos.II
After the ’68 election, the residential complex became a who’s who of the Nixon administration: The Mitchells, RNC head Bob Dole, Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans, Transportation Secretary John Volpe, the chair of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns, and even Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, all moved in, joined over time by the postmaster general and his deputy, Nixon’s chief of protocol, the head of the U.S. Information Agency, the director of the U.S. Mint, and all manner of other administration aides. The concentration of power became known as the “Republican Bastille.”
The day-to-day reality, however, proved less glamorous than advertised: Many residents complained their condos had been furnished with faulty appliances, and Martha Mitchell lamented how “this place was built like low-income housing—it’s the cheapest equipment you ever saw.” The marketing materials had also played up the sophisticated surveillance and security system (the Washington Star reported, “Intruders will have difficulty getting onto the grounds undetected.”), but Rose Mary Woods had returned home from an early 1969 international trip with the president to find her condo burglarized and a suitcase of jewelry stolen. “It’s really tragic,” Ron Ziegler said. She took to storing her remaining jewelry in her safe at the White House.
