Watergate, page 24
In their own way, the two men represented the nation’s political drift and divide. Woodward was the son of an Illinois judge, a Yale graduate, and a registered Republican, a true product of the conservative establishment, while Bernstein had a full head of long, shaggy hair indicative of his general disregard for authority.XI Woodward had voted for Nixon in ’68 and there seemed no doubt that Bernstein didn’t.
Their distrust was immediately mutual. Woodward knew Bernstein’s reputation around the office as someone who weaseled his way onto others’ stories to score a big byline. Bernstein had heard Woodward’s writing was atrocious. The office joke was that English wasn’t even the Yale grad’s first language. (Bernstein said later, “I didn’t really think a lot about most Woodward stories. I thought they were from the wham-bam school of journalism, making a lot out of very little.”) Bernstein by comparison was a flowery, energetic writer, a hearty practitioner of the “new journalism” style then evolving in magazines like New York and Esquire.
Their first day reporting alongside each other that Sunday was tedious. They dug through the phone book and the so-called “criss-cross” directory, which listed telephone numbers by address, to find neighbors who might know McCord. One attorney they reached thought he knew a family who knew McCord—their name was something like Westall. After returning to the phone book and trying five similar names, Woodward reached Harlan Westrell, who, seemingly oblivious to the news, happily began filling in details about McCord’s background and provided other names for the reporters to try.
That night, Woodward drove out to Rockville and knocked on the door of McCord’s suburban home. Lights were on inside, but no one answered. As he thought through the information he’d collected that day, one fact stuck in his mind: Westrell and three others who knew McCord had all alluded to him being a “government man,” the type who followed orders and would never have carried out an action like the Watergate burglary without proper authorization from superiors. If so, whose orders might McCord be following?
* * *
Early Monday morning, around 3 a.m., the Post’s night cops reporter, Eugene Bachinski, was—incredibly—allowed a look at the burglars’ property himself. Writing down as many telephone numbers and names from the address books as he could, he spotted the odd notations for someone named Howard Hunt, labeled “W. House” and “W.H.” The inventory also listed four other items seemingly linked to Hunt, including “two pieces of yellow-lined paper, one addressed to ‘Dear Friend Mr. Howard,’ and another to ‘Dear Mr. H.H,’ ” as well as a bill from the Lakewood Country Club and an unmailed envelope from Hunt to the club with his check for the same amount, $6.36.
Following up on Bachinski’s leads later that morning, Woodward tried the White House switchboard and asked for Hunt. There was no answer at the first extension the operator tried, but then she helpfully suggested, “There is one other place he might be—in Mr. Colson’s office.” The secretary who answered in Colson’s office referred Woodward to Hunt’s office at the Mullen Company PR firm. Neither seemed the least bit wary of someone trying to contact Hunt at the White House—that, Woodward realized, meant they were used to him being there.
In fact, unbeknownst to Woodward, Hunt had actually shown up at work that day, stopping by Colson’s office with a warning. He told Colson’s secretary Joan Hall, “That safe of mine upstairs is loaded.”
“I sort of thought it might be,” Hall replied.
With that, Hunt left the White House complex for the last time and headed across the street to the Mullen Company office, where Woodward finally reached him and asked why Hunt’s name was in the address books of two Watergate burglars. “Good God!” Hunt exclaimed. “In view that the matter is under adjudication, I have no comment,” he hurriedly said before hanging up.XII
Over the rest of the afternoon, Woodward researched Hunt and McCord. He tracked down the latter’s military affiliation, calling different Pentagon offices until a personnel officer nonchalantly confirmed that the burglar was an air force reserve lieutenant colonel, attached to a special team that worked with the civilian Office of Emergency Preparedness—the forerunner agency of FEMA that dealt with the nation’s doomsday plans. He helpfully gave Woodward the names of fifteen people listed in McCord’s unit. When Woodward reached one, he learned their work involved compiling lists of domestic radicals and developing censorship plans in the event of a national emergency.
Woodward found equally strange information about Hunt; the White House confirmed he had worked on some projects, although it said Hunt hadn’t done anything since March. When Woodward called Robert Bennett, the head of the Mullen Company, Bennett volunteered, “I guess it’s no secret that Howard was with the CIA.” That was certainly news to Woodward. Now two people tied to the burglary had known CIA ties?
In the initial stages of the newspaper’s inquiries that weekend, Woodward also tried calling a source he’d relied on from time to time in reporting: Mark Felt. Woodward and Felt had met in the first year of the Nixon administration; Woodward, then a young navy officer, had run into the FBI leader while on a routine courier mission delivering documents from the Pentagon to the White House. Both men had been sitting, waiting, outside the Situation Room on the lower level of the West Wing. Woodward immediately noted Felt’s “command presence, the posture and calm of someone used to giving orders.” Woodward introduced himself; they were, Woodward would recall, “like two passengers sitting next to each other on a long airline flight with nowhere to go and nothing really to do but resign ourselves to the dead time.”
Despite Felt’s best efforts to remain disengaged—Woodward remembers how the agent’s trained eyes seemed to surveil around them every detail of the West Wing—the navy officer slowly drew him into conversation about his job and the world at large. “I peppered him with questions,” Woodward recalled. That chance, begrudging encounter led Woodward to consult Felt from time to time about his career; occasionally, he even visited Felt’s house in Virginia. As he’d started at the Post, he’d continued the relationship, though Felt insisted that he never appear in the paper as a source. Now, reached about the Watergate burglary, Felt held Woodward to their agreement; none of what he said could be used in the paper, but he could confirm that Woodward was on the right track: The FBI considered Hunt a key suspect.
The next piece fell into place when Sussman dug into Colson, who appeared tied to Hunt. One of the paper’s other editors recognized the name: He was a special counsel to Nixon and known, the editor explained, as a “hatchet man.” When Sussman pulled Colson’s file from the Post library—a folder filled with clippings that mentioned his name—he found a New York Times article from June 1970 entitled “Seldom Seen Aides Protect Nixon’s Political Flank” that described Colson as one of the “original back-room boys—the operators and the brokers, the guys who fix things when they break down and do the dirty work when necessary.”XIII Together, the reporters and editors pulled together the scarce details they had into a story that ran the next day, headlined, “White House Consultant Linked to Bugging Suspects.”
Chapter 14 “Boys Will Be Boys”
For Dean, Monday morning, June 19, was spent trying to assemble the pieces of the weekend disaster. First, he spoke with Ehrlichman, who asked him to start monitoring the case through the Justice Department and for a report to be forwarded to the presidential party in Key Biscayne. Ehrlichman added that Colson seemed to all but deny knowing Hunt. “Chuck sounded like he hardly knew the man, said he hadn’t seen him in months,” Ehrlichman said. “Why don’t you have a little chat with him and find out what you can?” Dean knew immediately Colson was dissembling—Hunt had been centrally involved in the ITT mess and been dispatched to Dita Beard’s bedside—and asked his associate Fred Fielding to pull Hunt’s White House personnel records. They had to answer a key question before moving further: Who was exposed to what?
Around 11 a.m., Dean summoned Liddy to the White House; when Liddy arrived, they went for a walk.I Both men were silent until they went outside and found a park bench by the Ellipse.II “Am I correct in assuming you’re the damage control action officer for this problem?” Liddy asked, ever the Walter Mitty operative. “If you’re the action officer, then you need to know it all.” Dean, exhausted already, nodded.
First, he asked who in the White House knew of the operations—Colson? “Fucking Magruder,” Liddy replied. He promised that McCord and the others wouldn’t talk, but as he began to fill Dean in on the full scope of their covert activities, including the Fielding burglary, Dean began to get nervous. Liddy added that the jailed men would expect “support,” as he put it, “the usual in this line of work—bail, attorney’s fees, families taken care of, and so forth.” While the White House counsel would deny saying it later, Liddy recalled Dean promptly confirming, “That goes without saying—everyone’ll be taken care of.”
As they walked back, Liddy suddenly turned to Dean: “Look, John, I said I was captain of the ship when she hit the reef, and I’m prepared to go down with it. If someone wants to shoot me, just tell me what corner to stand on, and I’ll be there, okay?”
Dean’s head snapped around. After a moment, realizing Liddy was serious, he stammered, “Well, uh, I don’t think we’ve gotten there yet, Gordon.”
The two men continued on, discussing the unfolding FBI investigation; Liddy offered tips about what to ask the bureau for in order to closely monitor their unfolding case. Then Dean brought up Hunt. “I think he’d be better off out of the country. Does he have someplace to go?” he asked. “The sooner the better.”
As they parted ways outside the Executive Office Building, Dean said, “Gordon, I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to be talking with you anymore.”
“Sorry about the way things turned out, John,” Liddy said, extending his hand.
“It sure is a mess,” Dean replied, taking Liddy’s hand listlessly.III
Afterward, Liddy called Hunt, introducing himself on the phone by his alias in case anyone was listening, and gave instructions to walk outside and turn left. Once he was confident Hunt wasn’t being tailed, Liddy intercepted him. They walked south, down toward the National Mall. He told Hunt that there were orders from “across the street” that he should head overseas. Hunt didn’t like it, saying it made him look like a fugitive. “Let’s get a lawyer for me, Gordon,” he countered, but ultimately agreed that he would use the $1,500 left in GEMSTONE funds to depart immediately. “Go as far as you can on that, and I’ll get more money to you somehow,” Liddy promised.
Within forty minutes, Dean called Liddy: Ehrlichman said to cancel Hunt’s move. Liddy caught an annoyed Hunt at home and relayed the news. “A 180 on a thing like leaving the country in 45 minutes doesn’t exactly inspire confidence we’re dealing with people who know what the hell they’re doing,” Hunt said.IV Unsettled from the conversation and tired of reporters hounding his family at home, Hunt left town anyway, first to New York City and then to California to stay with an old CIA colleague.
* * *
In press reports, security professionals scoffed at the seemingly amateur nature of the odd break-in, labeling it a “Mickey Mouse operation”—but the deeper reporters dug, the less the burglars appeared to be random thieves. One New York Times journalist, Tad Szulc, even knew the arrested Cuban exiles. Szulc dug into Hunt’s history, tying him publicly to the Bay of Pigs invasion, and quickly reported how Miami Realtor Bernard Barker was a Cuban CIA agent known by the code name “Macho.” In fact, Szulc wrote, “A reconstruction of the backgrounds of those allegedly involved in the raid on the Democratic headquarters suggested that all at different times had had links with the C.I.A. and anti-Cuban operations.”
As the political intrigue of the break-in became clear, DNC Chair O’Brien called for a full FBI investigation to answer “the ugliest questions about the integrity of the political process that I have encountered in a quarter-century of political activity.” He swiftly filed a million-dollar civil suit against CREEP for compensatory and punitive damages. Speaking in California during a visit to the San Francisco field office, Acting Director Patrick Gray brushed aside worries, saying the FBI had all the jurisdiction it needed to launch an investigation, and adding, “I foresee no difficulty in conducting an objective investigation.”
At first, it seemed like the FBI’s main problem would be too many leads. When the burglars’ photographs appeared in papers across the country that weekend, tips flooded in and the number of agents assigned to the case swelled from five to twenty-six by week’s end to manage them. One tip proved useful immediately: The manager of the Howard Johnson Motor Inn across from the Watergate had recognized the photo of James McCord and told agents he’d rented a room to the suspect that spring; McCord stuck out because after a few days, he’d switched rooms to a higher floor; there had also, the manager explained, appeared to be a second man staying in McCord’s room. It didn’t take the FBI long to connect the dots back to Al Baldwin, who evidently had spent a lot of the time calling his mother back in New Haven.
As suspicions and questions mounted, Mitchell and Republican National Committee Chair Bob Dole both released statements denying having anything to do with what the press was calling the “Watergate caper.” Ron Ziegler continued to dismiss not only any presidential tie, but even any presidential interest in the case, saying Nixon hadn’t even discussed the burglary with anyone like Mitchell. “I’m not going to comment from the White House on a third-rate burglary attempt,” he said, in a line that would prove to be one of the most famous—and infamous—in the entire scandal.
Contrary to Ziegler’s confident dismissal of the caper, aides at the White House were deeply concerned and desperate to figure out who knew what and when. Nixon’s inner circle was among the most baffled. (“McCord, Hunt, Liddy—none of these names meant diddly to me. I had never met—and still have never met—McCord, Hunt, and Liddy,” Haldeman recalled years later.) On Monday afternoon, Dean updated Ehrlichman on some of what he knew, including the GEMSTONE meetings with Mitchell, and Dean noticed Ehrlichman seemed to perk up when he heard the former attorney general was involved. Maybe, Ehrlichman seemed to think, Mitchell could be made the fall guy for the break-in.
When they brought in Colson to discuss Hunt in depth, Ehrlichman and Colson each seemed to outperform the other about their ignorance of Hunt’s White House work. “He’s not been working for me for months,” Colson said, as nonchalantly as possible; later, as Colson explained that Hunt had a safe in his office that someone should check out, Ehrlichman was shocked: “You mean to tell me he even had an office here?!” The group ultimately decided that Dean should take custody of the safe’s contents. After the meeting broke up, Dean’s secretary handed him a note: “Meeting. 6 p.m. Mitchell’s Watergate Apartment.” It was the first time he’d even been invited to the inner sanctum of “Mr. Mitchell,” and the inclusion made his chest swell; he was on his way to being a trusted insider.
At the end of the day, Ehrlichman finally filled in Haldeman. “It’s CRP all the way,” Ehrlichman reported. “Believe it or not, according to Mr. Dean, on this one Colson is clean.” Haldeman marveled. Colson, the White House chief of dirty tricks, had by a miracle managed to miss the one trick that exploded, he thought. To Haldeman, based on Dean and Ehrlichman’s reports, the task ahead was clear: Contain the break-in to CREEP, don’t let it slop over to the White House. Hold it to as low a level as possible. Furnish as little political ammunition to the Democrats as we can. “To me, it sounded very simple at the time,” he reflected later.
That scheme, though, quickly grew more complex. As Haldeman and Nixon discussed the fallout, the chief of staff explained that it wouldn’t be easy to hang the burglars out to dry entirely. (“The problem is that there are all kinds of other involvements,” he said, nodding presumably to the Fielding burglary and other Plumbers operations.) Instead, containing the fallout meant the White House needed to go to the source and shut down the investigation itself.
According to Haldeman’s memoir, Nixon first raised in a phone call that Monday night what would end up being the two keys to the cover-up and the administration’s eventual downfall: hush money and the CIA. “These people who got caught are going to need money,” the president explained. “I’ve been thinking about how to do it,” and he had found a solution: Play up the anti-Castro angle. That would help them raise money from defense funds for the Cubans in and around Miami, as well as encourage the CIA to help block further investigation because of their ties to the agency’s shadowy operations. “Tell Ehrlichman this whole group of Cubans is tied to the Bay of Pigs,” Nixon added.
Later, when Haldeman passed along the president’s message, Ehrlichman refused. “I want to stay out of this one,” he told the chief of staff, separating himself from an environment he had played a significant role in creating. From that moment, “almost by osmosis, it seemed, John Dean took over,” Haldeman recalled. It was exactly what the young counsel wanted. As Haldeman wrote in his memoir, “Dean was for a long time, as he admits, having fun.”
* * *
That same night, across town at the Watergate condos, Fred LaRue greeted Dean at Mitchell’s door and led him into the second-floor den to meet with Mitchell, Magruder, and Mardian, all freshly back from California. (Mitchell grumbled about how cramped their jet had been.) LaRue, whose primary function appeared to be serving as Mitchell’s professional, full-time friend, melted away to smoke his pipe in silent observation. Before long, Magruder left for an evening tennis game with the vice president, saying breezily, “I’ll leave the crisis to you gentlemen.”
The remaining group took stock of developments. Mardian had been golfing over the weekend in California when he found out about the burglary from Magruder, instantly recognizing trouble: “Burglary is bad enough—you might get away with it—boys will be boys, but bugging is disastrous.” Dean, though, still saw little peril. In fact, he loved the feeling that seemingly every power center of Nixon’s world—Ehrlichman, Colson, Mitchell, presumably even Haldeman—was relying on him to fix this. “I was learning what the job really meant,” he remembers thinking. “I was a refuge, a shoulder, a brain, a counsel. I was about to arrive.” The conversation that night, however, didn’t go much further; it kept being interrupted by phone calls about Martha.
