Watergate, page 25
Mitchell’s wife, still in California, was angry, confused, and agitated. Her husband’s ruse had worked and she hadn’t heard news of the burglary until reading the Monday papers, by which time John and the rest of the Nixon crew were safely back in D.C. “Jesus Christ—I jumped out of bed like a sheet of lightning,” she recounted later. From the published reports, she discovered her husband had evidently hidden from her that he’d released a statement about McCord’s involvement on Sunday before leaving town. Martha immediately saw the statement distancing CREEP from McCord for what it was: a lie. She knew McCord all too well—he’d been driving Marty to school just a few weeks earlier!—and knew how deeply he’d been engaged in the campaign. Neither her secretary nor her bodyguard Steve King would offer much more information, and when she started phone-banking CREEP officials, they brushed her off too. According to a later FBI report, King said that Martha was drinking straight gin through the day. “Those bastards left me out here without telling me anything,” she complained.
By the time she reached John back at their Watergate apartment, she was frantic. Upset after interrupting the plotting session with Dean, LaRue, Mardian, and Mitchell, she tried to light a cigarette, but the pack of matches exploded in flames in her right hand. The doctor who was summoned to treat her badly burned hand gave her a sleeping pill, and she drifted off to sleep in a haze.
Magruder had his own run-in with flames that evening in Washington. As the deputy campaign director later recalled, he asked Mitchell on his way out to meet Spiro Agnew for tennis what to do with the GEMSTONE files retrieved from the CRP office over the weekend. Mitchell, he said, told him, “Maybe you ought to have a little fire at your house tonight.”V After his tennis game, Magruder did just that; sitting in front of his fireplace around midnight, he fed document after document, photograph after photograph, into a roaring fire on a warm June night. He was surprised by how brightly the photographs flared; they looked like Christmas trees. “What in the world are you doing?” his wife interrupted him.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s just some papers I have to get rid of.”
I. Magruder had already run into Liddy at the CREEP offices Monday morning and told him, “Gordon, let’s face it—you and I can’t work together. Why don’t you talk to Dean? He’s going to help us on this problem.”
II. Many details differ slightly in their accounts between Dean and Liddy, right down to Liddy’s appearance: Dean says Liddy was unshaven and rumpled, where Liddy’s memoir makes a point of explaining he was wearing a fresh suit and had shaven that morning.
III. The conversation between Liddy and Dean stands out as an intriguing one; Dean starts the meeting by insisting he is the main point of contact going forward, then pumps Liddy for all the information he has to give, learns that Liddy has no suspicion that Dean himself is involved, and then ends the meeting seeming to wash his hands of the whole matter. If one’s goal was to quietly learn of the potholes and trouble spots ahead to avoid, all to mastermind the ongoing cover-up, it would be hard to better script the interaction.
IV. While Hunt’s memoir, published in 1974, includes a similar recounting of the exchange with Liddy, Dean’s memoir, published in 1976, tells a slightly different version—one that shifts the timetable to the afternoon and responsibility for the “get out of town” order to Ehrlichman. Dean says that later that afternoon, during a meeting in Ehrlichman’s office with Colson, the White House’s domestic policy advisor told Dean to tell Liddy to tell Hunt to flee. Dean’s account provided one of the reasons Ehrlichman would be later charged with obstruction of justice, but he would deny giving the order for Hunt to flee and the evidence is at least circumstantial that he never did.
V. Notes taken by prosecutors during a later debriefing of Magruder say the idea to destroy the documents was Magruder’s to begin with, another case of Magruder’s story seeming to change later to better indict Mitchell. He only apparently “remembered” that Mitchell gave the order on his fourth interview with prosecutors.
Chapter 15 “Stay the Hell Out of This”
By Tuesday, Nixon’s first day back at the White House post-burglary, the cover-up had already kicked into high gear. Distrust and disbelief inside the president’s orbit had spread, and anonymous sources speculated to reporters that the campaign was more involved than initially reported. “Bob Dole and I were talking on the day of the arrests and agreed it must be one of those twenty-five-cent generals hanging around the committee or the White House who was responsible,” one GOP source told Bernstein. “Chotiner or Colson. Those were the names thrown out.” Even Nixon himself didn’t seem clear who did what; in his first recorded White House conversation about Watergate, he asked Haldeman, “Have you gotten any further word on that Mitchell operation?”
“No, I don’t think he did [know],” the chief of staff said.
“I think he was surprised,” Nixon agreed.
Mitchell indeed seemed as confused as anyone. As Mardian and LaRue filled him in on the various threads of Liddy’s operation, the campaign director seemed to be “sincerely shocked,” but decided not to share what they learned with the president. (“To this day, I believe that I was right in not involving the president,” Mitchell said the following year. “I still believe that the most important thing to this country was the reelection of Richard Nixon.”)
Amid the intrigue, few in the White House paid much attention to what would, with hindsight, turn out to be Tuesday’s most consequential political development: Far from Washington, in Brooklyn, a political newcomer named Elizabeth Holtzman shocked the establishment by defeating a fifty-year incumbent, Emanuel Celler, in the congressional primary for the state’s 16th District. The thirty-year-old Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Radcliffe—who had worked for Mayor John Lindsay’s Parks Department and installed the first rubber padding on the ground of the city’s playgrounds—eked out victory by just 610 votes among 31,000 ballots.I While the race attracted headlines—both because Celler was the most senior congressman ever to lose a primary and because Holtzman would become the youngest congresswoman ever elected—the biggest ramification of the upset would only become evident months later.
The defeat of the stubborn and arrogant eighty-four-year-old dean of the House freed up his slot as chair of the Judiciary Committee and opened the door to a new leader, Pete Rodino, whose name would a year later become all but synonymous with the burglary itself. “If the impeachment process had gone to the Judiciary Committee under Manny Celler, it would have died there,” Democratic leader Tip O’Neill wrote later. No one understood it that night, but as Jimmy Breslin wrote later, “The primary election between Holtzman and Celler could be considered one of the most meaningful elections the nation has had.”
* * *
Out of an abundance of caution, staff members began destroying any relevant documents that might solidify ties to the White House. “Make sure our files are clean,” Haldeman told Strachan. Strachan began shredding, while Colson had an aide chase down and destroy as many copies as he could find of the page in the White House telephone directory that listed Hunt as working for him. Liddy, meanwhile, scoured his life for further links to the break-in after he put on the suit he’d worn the night of the burglary and discovered a Watergate room key in the pocket; he even gathered up the hotel soaps he’d brought back from the Fielding burglary and other mischief-scouting trips to Miami and tossed them into the Anacostia River. At CREEP, he shredded the remaining sequentially numbered $100 bills, slipping them between other sheets of paper so passing colleagues wouldn’t think he’d gone mad.II
Around two-thirty that afternoon, Colson joined Nixon in the Oval Office for a rambling, roving conversation about possible political risk, controversy, and strategy that would stretch more than an hour. “Now I hope everybody is not going to get in a tizzy about the Democratic committee,” Nixon began.
“It’s a little frustrating—disheartening, I guess is the right word,” Colson replied. “Pick up that Goddamn Washington Post and see that guilt by association,” he added, referring to that morning’s article on Hunt. “They say, ‘Were you involved in this thing?’ ” Colson continued. “Do they think I’m that dumb?”
Nixon fell back on one of his firmest convictions: He was only doing to others what they were doing to him. “A lot of people think you oughta wiretap,” he said. “They probably figure they’re doing it to us, which they are.” A few moments later, he pointed to the irony of McCord, the CREEP expert hired to prevent bugging, getting caught bugging someone else. “That’s why, uh, they hired this guy in the first place, to sweep the rooms, didn’t they?”
Ultimately, Colson advised that the White House should minimize Watergate, if not ignore it entirely, unlike their response in the ITT controversy, which had rapidly escalated to Senate hearings. “Mistake would be to get all of them zeroed in on it,” he said. “Make a big case out of it.” As Colson saw it, “These fellas are just in there trying to win the Pulitzer Prize.”
“The hell with it,” Nixon said. “Let me say it flatly—we’re not going to reach to it that way.” His strategy would be clear: “At times, I just stonewall it.”
“Stonewall” would become the official playbook. Publicly deny, deny, deny—and quickly offer a lot of the money to the central players for their loyalty and silence.
The White House team could sense that each passing day worried Howard Hunt and his associates, who all genuinely expected the administration to sweep the incident under the rug. To their mind, they were covert operatives for the president, carrying out what they were told were national security missions for the White House, but the president seemed unable to save them or shut down the press coverage.
An early phone call between the burglary conspirators did little to assuage concerns. “It’s ballooning all over the place,” Liddy had said.
“Everything’s come apart,” Hunt agreed. “There hasn’t been any response at all.”
By the end of their conversation, Liddy was worried. Hunt sounded isolated and worried that he was being abandoned; he needed money and a lawyer. His fear endangered a successful cover-up.
On Wednesday, five days after the break-in, Liddy took matters into his own hands. He wrapped $5,000 around each leg, tucked into his socks, and flew to Los Angeles, purportedly on CREEP business. Instead, he visited Hunt at the home of a onetime CIA colleague, where Hunt was hiding, to hand over $1,000 to help Hunt line up a lawyer. Liddy promised that everyone would be taken care of “company-style,” a reference to the CIA, and asked Hunt to head to Miami to check in with Barker’s wife and reassure her similarly. “She’s going bananas,” Liddy said. As they parted, Liddy said, “This may be the last time I’ll see you for a while.”III
On Thursday, June 22, Richard Nixon made his first public statement on the Watergate issue: “The White House has had no involvement whatever in this particular incident.” The phrasing left reporters across Washington wondering: If not this “particular” incident, were there others that the White House had been involved in?
That suspicion, that there might be fire behind the smoke surrounding the burglary, lingered, but by mid-week, the still-unfolding story collided at the Washington Post with the vagaries of running a metro newspaper: City editor Barry Sussman explained to Bernstein that he had to go back to his regular Virginia beat—the paper needed him back covering the commonwealth. Bernstein pounded out on his typewriter a five-page memo about the strange unresolved questions around the break-in, pleading to be left on the case and speculating it might be directly tied into the reelection campaign’s leadership.IV Grudgingly, his editors kept him on the story. “As it happened, what often seemed like rash, early judgments by Bernstein proved almost invariably to be correct,” Sussman recalled.
While the news stories of Woodward and Bernstein would attract the nation’s attention and history’s spotlight, the reporting duo were hardly the only Washington Post staffers focused on the president. For years, Nixon had been tormented by the paper’s biting political cartoonist, known as Herblock, whose shadowy, long-jowled caricature of Nixon had done so much to ingrain the president’s dark side in the public’s mind. Just a few days after Watergate, Herblock turned his attention to the burglary too, penning a cartoon that showed a guard throwing a burglar out of the Democratic Party’s national headquarters as Nixon, Kleindienst, and Mitchell all looked on. The caption read: Who would think of doing such a thing? Publisher Katharine Graham said later, “He was well ahead of me and of the news side of the paper.”
* * *
Away from the public eye, the FBI investigation progressed rapidly. By June 21, agents had already had a big break, tracing the cash in the burglary to Bernard Barker and a series of bank transactions in Miami. Further investigation of Barker’s deposits uncovered that the money had appeared to come from Nixon campaign donors. By the end of the month, they’d interviewed a Minnesota Nixon finance leader named Kenneth Dahlberg, who had played a major role in both the ’68 and ’72 campaigns, as well as a Mexican corporate attorney who appeared to have been gathering cash for the campaign.
As Angelo Lano and his team dug, they correctly suspected that they weren’t getting the full story and total cooperation from the White House, but no one could figure out what was being hidden. Oddities proliferated. When he and Daniel Mahan interviewed Chuck Colson, with Dean sitting in to observe, Dean expressed surprise that Hunt had an office in the White House complex; later, when Dean turned over what he said were the contents of Hunt’s safe, Lano realized Dean had ordered the safe opened three days before the FBI interview. Lano accused Dean of lying, but it wasn’t clear to anyone why.
What they didn’t know was that Ehrlichman had called FBI Acting Director Gray on Wednesday morning and said, “John Dean is going to be handling an inquiry into this thing for the White House. From now on, you’re to deal directly with him.” By eleven-thirty, Dean was in Gray’s office, explaining that he intended to sit in on all FBI interviews of White House staff. Gray thought it a reasonable request—after all, the only staffer the FBI had interest in at that point was Chuck Colson, who had hired Hunt. “None of us in the FBI had any inkling that the Watergate conspiracy ran anywhere near the senior people in the White House,” Gray later recalled.
For his part, Henry Petersen had also promised the White House counsel that there would be “no fishing expedition”; Dean remembered him offering an assurance that Silbert and the federal prosecutors would not stray into the president’s campaign and the dirty laundry of the Republican Party. “He’s investigating a break-in,” the assistant attorney general said, according to Dean. “He knows better than to wander off beyond his authority into other things.”
In multiple meetings on the 21st and 22nd, Dean and Gray discussed how to handle the case, though Dean already had privately settled on a two-part strategy: The White House and CREEP would have Hunt and Liddy take the fall, arguing that the two men had been rogue, redirecting funds meant for other purposes to criminal activity, and then CREEP would stop the FBI from tracing the burglars’ funds back through to campaign donors, a thread that could very easily lead to all manner of other scandals and campaign-related crimes.
The first part seemed easy enough to pull off, and the germ of the second came together as Gray filled Dean in on how the FBI had traced the money that had ended up in Barker’s wallet. The FBI director laid out the various theories the bureau was exploring: (1) a legitimate or illegitimate CIA operation; (2) a political espionage and intelligence scheme by people associated with the Republican Party or the president’s reelection campaign; (3) a Cuban right-wing mission; or (4) some kind of setup by a double agent. All seemed likely and unlikely in their own ways. “We just could not see any clear reason for this burglary,” Gray recalled later.
Dean warned the FBI director that if he started tracing that money too closely, he might find himself upsetting the CIA. Gray doubted that; agents had raised the suspicion and he had already called CIA Director Richard Helms to ask if the D.C. police had stumbled into an agency operation.V Helms expressed equal confusion and said that as far as anyone would admit there was no known CIA role. Gray explained to Dean that until there was a clear CIA link, the FBI was going to pursue all leads aggressively, albeit sensitively. He suggested that going forward, Dean communicate directly with Mark Felt, who would be kept up to date on all aspects of the probe.
Debriefing the Gray-Dean conversation later that night with Mitchell, the Nixon team spotted the outlines of a new plan: The cloak of “national security” could bury the investigation.
The White House strategy came together Friday morning, June 23, during a 10:04 conversation between President Nixon and Haldeman in the Oval Office. The two men saw opportunity in the avenue suggested by the FBI: If they could get the CIA—perhaps the deputy director, Vernon Walters—to wave Pat Gray off, they might be able to block the whole thing. “The way to handle this now is for us to have Walters call Pat Gray and just say, ‘Stay the hell out of this—this is business here we don’t want you to go any further on it,’ ” Haldeman said. “That would take care of it.” The chief of staff further added that Gray would comply and even happily enlist his own deputy in shutting the case down.
“He’ll call Mark Felt in, and the two of them—Mark Felt wants to cooperate because he’s ambitious—he’ll call him in and say, ‘We’ve got the signal from across the river to put the hold on this.’ And that will fit rather well because the FBI agents who are working the case, at this point, feel that’s what it is—this is CIA.” Through Haldeman’s comments, Nixon grunted his usual assents. What they said in that recorded conversation would soon become the central mystery and hinge of the entire Watergate scandal. The comments left little doubt of the intent; Nixon’s team intended to use the organs of government to cover up their own rogue operation, mislead investigators, and throw the cloak of national security over what was really a political mission. “The scheme… relied on Nixon’s cherished powers; not only was it a clever move, it was a power move—the kind Nixon preferred,” journalist Tom Wicker observed later. Whatever else had transpired until that moment—from the Chennault Affair to the Huston Plan to the Fielding burglary to the Brookings plan—a new Rubicon had been crossed and a fatal wound for the administration now created, left to fester.VI
