Watergate, page 37
II. As part of its recognition that it needed to compete more strongly on the story, the Times had deployed Hersh to D.C. and set him loose. The sneaker-wearing reporter fit so awkwardly into the literally buttoned-up Times team that the D.C. bureau chief, Clifton Daniel, gave him a box of Brooks Brothers shirts and sweaters.
III. That Monday morning, Hersh was surprised to receive a telephone call from Woodward, thanking him for the big story on the hush money; the Post had been feeling out on a limb, particularly after the sustained postelection attacks from the administration, and the newly aggressive coverage from the New York Times had helped to provide cover and solidarity.
IV. Dean’s version of this phone call, told in his memoir, is decidedly more innocent than the version recounted by Liddy.
V. One of these phone calls went to the Chilean embassy; there’s an odd thread of Watergate that seems, often, to return to Chile, across the burglars, ITT, and other parts of the scandal, perhaps hinting at some deeper connections or further, still-uncovered plots and geopolitical intrigue.
VI. “Watergate was kept alive in the early months because of the determination of Judge John Sirica to get to the truth,” the DNC’s Lawrence O’Brien recalled later.
VII. The Hermès notebook episode is an important, illustrative case study of how Dean reckoned with his own role. He went to great lengths to hide the notebooks—they were, as far as Hunt and Dean agree, the only items from Hunt’s safe that were neither turned over to the FBI routinely nor part of the special “sensitive” files handed directly to Gray (and ultimately destroyed by him). Presumably that means that Dean studied the notebooks carefully enough at the start to realize they were too sensitive to hand over even to Gray, but then he purported to forget about them in his safe until Hunt started about them—at which point he misled both Silbert and Petersen about their whereabouts and existence. Then he purported to forget about them again until he destroyed them post-trial—then forgot about that act of destruction weeks later when he began to cooperate with investigators. He only “remembered” destroying the notebooks in November 1973, after he had already settled his own criminal case, at which point he told prosecutors a far more innocent story than what was later published in his memoir—for instance, he said in the memoir that he “leafed through them” before destroying them, whereas he told prosecutors he “did not look at the contents and cannot recall what might have been in them.”
Chapter 25 The “Country Lawyer” Enters
U.S. senator Sam Ervin hadn’t been present when his Democratic colleagues launched the process that would transform him into a household name. Instead, he had been stuck at home in North Carolina, felled by a January storm, when his party’s caucus voted to appoint a special “select” committee on Watergate. They also decided that he would be the one to lead it.
Like Tip O’Neill on the House side, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield had resisted a formal congressional inquiry into the brewing presidential scandal. The summer before, he’d quickly dismissed the idea that the president was involved in the odd caper at the DNC offices, and “when Watergate jokes were going around, he wouldn’t listen to one, or repeat one, for love nor money,” his aide Peggy DeMichele later recalled. Gradually, though, he’d come around to the need, as reports grew more detailed, and more serious. The trial clearly hadn’t delivered the answers the American people wanted—and it seemed necessary for Congress to step in.
Like the House, the Senate had recently been experiencing its own political shift. For decades, the Democratic bloc in Congress had been split between the northern urban machines, like the Irish of Boston and Chicago, and the unapologetically segregationist southerners, until Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights push upended the status quo. The South was shifting Republican, but many of the Hill’s top committees were still ruled by Dixiecrat politicians like James Eastland and Sam Ervin, the two men who respectively led the committees that seemed most apt to investigate the burglary cover-up—Judiciary and Government Operations. Mansfield was resistant to his options: Each committee was both large, filled with unwieldy egos under the best of times, and populated by men who had been targeted by Nixon and his campaign’s “dirty tricks”: Ted Kennedy was a high-profile member of Judiciary, while “Scoop” Jackson and Ed Muskie sat on Government Operations.
Ultimately, he settled on building a new committee around Ervin. A former state associate supreme court justice, the North Carolina senator had judicial experience, a reputation for being nonpartisan, and—most importantly—harbored no apparent higher ambition. A self-proclaimed “country lawyer,” he held an intense interest in constitutional rights and civil liberties, as well as possessing a sharp legal intellect that he’d regularly deployed through the fifties and sixties to protect Jim Crow laws and segregation. Ervin had done battle with the Nixon administration already over issues like “impoundment,” an obscure but fraught separation-of-powers fight over the president refusing to spend monies appropriated and directed by Congress, but “I knew he’d be fair-minded,” Mansfield said later.
For the committee itself, Mansfield carefully selected members who would likely not use the perch for personal political gain. Formally known as the “Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities,” Ervin’s panel ultimately included three other Democrats—Hawaii’s Daniel Inouye, New Mexico’s Joseph Montoya, and Georgia’s Herman Talmadge—as well as three Republicans—Tennessee’s Howard Baker served as the ranking member, alongside Florida’s Edward Gurney and Connecticut’s Lowell Weicker. It was as close to an assemblage of honest brokers as one could likely find in the U.S. Senate. The group was approved in early February by a unanimous, bipartisan 77–0.I
The same afternoon Sirica debated bail for McCord and Liddy, Ervin began the work of assembling his team. First, he summoned Sam Dash, a criminal law professor from Georgetown Law School. Dash had written a well-respected treatise on eavesdropping and seemed a solid candidate to lead the committee staff. As the men met at the Capitol, Dash was immediately struck by the North Carolina senator—big and jovial, with a ruddy face, he played his background as a simple country lawyer to the hilt, but led from a solid core.
“This Watergate investigation is a mighty important assignment. It has to be the most thorough and objective inquiry ever made by the Senate,” Ervin explained. “It must be broad enough to cover everything that needs to be looked into, and the committee must be given all the powers necessary for such a broad investigation.” Together, Ervin, Dash, and assorted advisors reviewed the draft resolution Ervin planned to bring to his senate colleagues for authorization. He was impressed with Dash’s suggestions, which strengthened the committee’s mandate as well as its investigative powers, and on February 20, he offered him the role of chief counsel.
For the first month, Dash’s only workspace was a spare conference table in the office of Ervin staffer Rufus Edmisten, who had been recruited to serve as deputy chief counsel. The arrangement became untenable, as the committee staff juggled job interviews, media interviews, and document gathering, and soon they were given use of the Senate auditorium, to partition into the necessary offices.
On the Republican side, ranking member Howard Baker had chosen a Tennessee lawyer named Fred Thompson to be Dash’s counterpart. Thirty years old, he had spent three years as an assistant U.S. attorney before working on Baker’s campaign staff in 1972. Thompson was summoned to Washington with just a day’s notice and spent the intervening night at the Vanderbilt University library reading through news clips about the scandal. “The only names I could recall without prompting were Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, and my only reaction to the case had been a vague feeling that every political campaign has a few crack-pots who cause embarrassment,” he recalled. “Watergate may not have seemed like much of an event in Nashville, but I soon discovered that in Washington the scandal and the Watergate committee were the biggest action in town.”
As the two lawyers met for an initial lunch at the Monocle, a famed and favorite haunt close to the Senate side of Capitol Hill, Dash appraised Thompson and his thick drawl. “Physically, he seemed to dominate the room—he was tall, big-boned and husky. He had a broad, handsome face and a full head of thick brown hair that curled down to the back of his neck,” Dash recalled. Thompson explained he would commute back and forth to Nashville for the duration of the investigation. He then surprised Dash by saying that he expected them to be done by summer, even though the committee had until February 1974 to complete its work. “We’re not going to need a year,” he confidently told Dash.
Dash was dubious; he saw at least three investigations looming, each of which seemed daunting and time-consuming: the break-in itself, the campaign of dirty tricks, and the broader questions around illegal campaign finance practices, and he had recruited associate counsels from across the country to lead those three task forces: James Hamilton, a trial lawyer at one of D.C.’s top firms, Covington and Burling, would head the break-in team; Terry Lenzner, a former Justice Department lawyer in the Civil Rights Division, would lead the dirty tricks task force; and Dave Dorsen, the deputy chief of investigations for New York City, would oversee the investigators examining campaign financing.II At Ervin’s suggestion, the committee had also named a forensic accountant and former FBI agent–turned–Kennedy family aide, Carmine Bellino, as its chief investigator. Bellino had worked for Jack Kennedy before helping his brother target Jimmy Hoffa during Bobby’s tenure as attorney general; more recently, he had worked with Ted in the early stages of his subcommittee’s own Watergate probe. “Bellino appeared easygoing and kindly in private conversations, but he gave me the impression that inside he was tough as a pine knot,” Thompson recalled. “He was seldom seen and he conducted his part of the investigation—accounting was his specialty—by himself.”
Despite the scope of the investigations ahead, expectations were modest. “I don’t believe any senator or staff member believed that this would end up implicating the president or his senior officials. At most it might lead to legislation to prohibit unfair campaign practices,” task force leader Terry Lenzner recalled later. At one of the early closed-door committee meetings, Republican member Lowell Weicker speculated responsibility for the burglary might trace back to Haldeman. The room was aghast. “Mind you, he wasn’t even accusing the president—but to think that he was virtually accusing the president’s right-hand man! Most of us were incredulous,” recalls Donald Sanders, a former FBI agent and veteran of the Hill who served as the Republican deputy counsel on the committee.
There was also not much of a track record at that time of congressional investigations; high-profile inquiries were more the exception than the norm, and they had little playbook to draw from.III To start, Lenzner had asked the staff to collect every employee list they could find from the White House, RNC, and CREEP and begin building “satellite charts,” to see who around the main investigative targets might have relevant information. In an age before Google and online databases, retrieving biographical information on potential witnesses and targets often involved poring over microfilm and newspapers. Investigators spent time cloistered in the Library of Congress, while Dash and Thompson often spent several hours a day at the Justice Department, reading the FBI’s investigative files.
Somewhat counterintuitively, the committee had decided that starting the investigation and congressional hearings by focusing on the break-in itself might not prove fruitful. The end of the public trial meant there wasn’t much more to immediately dig into. To maximize their opportunity and impact, the committee’s first subpoena went to Donald Segretti with the hope of jump-starting an inquiry into the Nixon campaign’s political dirty tricks.
As the committee staff began their targeted work, one of Dash’s first meetings was with Bob Woodward. He wanted to propose what he called an “unusual arrangement,” in which the reporter would share investigative leads with the committee with no expectation of receiving information in return. “Bob agreed to help,” Dash later recalled, but “this relationship never proved productive.” In fact, he added, “It wasn’t long before our knowledge of the facts far exceeded Woodward’s.”
* * *
In early February, John Ehrlichman summoned John Dean to California, where Nixon was spending the weekend and his inner circle wanted to privately discuss how to handle the impending Senate probe. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean, and a fourth White House aide, Robert Moore, convened at Haldeman’s villa at the La Costa Resort Hotel for more than twelve hours of discussion. Though the group had successfully navigated the FBI investigation so far, they understood that the Senate was a fundamentally different beast—the committee had broad jurisdiction and an uncertain set of members, none of whom was under the president’s control, and several of whom were relative unknowns. When he read through the congressional directory entry on Senator Inouye, Ehrlichman explained his name was pronounced “Ain’t no way,” then joked, “Ain’t no way he’s going to give us anything but problems.” Only Gurney, they decided, could be counted on to help the White House.
With time, they refined a strategy: Nothing but full cooperation in public, but behind the scenes the White House would box in the Senate inquiry and push the message in the press that the committee was a partisan sham. As their conversation wound down, Ehrlichman raised a big question: Would the original seven Watergate defendants remain silent? No one really knew, but Dean mentioned that the defendants were still asking for more money. In response, Ehrlichman issued clear instructions that Mitchell should be told it was his responsibility to raise the money to keep the defendants quiet.
Later, Haldeman handed Dean several memos that all but explicitly laid out how the White House would continue to block the truth about the burglary and the campaign’s activities.IV “The coverup had become a way of life at the White House, and having made it to this point, those involved were becoming careless and more open about it,” Dean recalled. Ehrlichman, who had long tried to avoid the Watergate fallout, walked out of the meetings worried; their situation seemed precarious. As he recalled, “I heard enough to trouble me deeply.”
Inside the Oval Office, the president was also beginning to express more explicit concern. On February 13, Nixon told Colson, “When I’m speaking of Watergate… this tremendous investigation rests unless one of the seven [defendants] begins to talk. That’s the problem.” The conversation picked up again the next day: “We gotta cut our losses. My losses are to be cut. The President’s losses got to be cut on the cover-up deal.”
“This is a tough one—because there’s so many players, and so God damn sad I think of those seven guys—” he said.
“So do I,” Colson interrupted.
“—who are involved, you know, Jesus Christ, they did it with good intentions,” Nixon continued. “I guess they must have known that they had to take this kind of risk.”
* * *
James McCord, who indeed believed he’d only ever had good intentions, was vacillating about whether to fold. He hadn’t given up hope that the White House would intervene in his case, even with the guilty verdicts in hand.
McCord and Caulfield met a third and final time at their chosen George Washington Parkway overlook, before driving off together through rural Virginia. They talked, as friends, for an hour or two, expressing regret about the situation McCord now found himself in, about their families, and about Caulfield’s new law enforcement role at the Treasury Department. From time to time, they cycled back to Watergate. It gradually became clear to Caulfield that McCord was going to break his silence. He didn’t know when or where or how, but as he’d promised, McCord wasn’t going to take the fall for the burglary.
As their conversation ended, Caulfield offered his friend advice. “Jim, I have worked with these people, and I know them to be as tough-minded as you and I. When you make your statement, don’t underestimate them,” he said. Then, he paused, and offered his own counsel: “If I were in your shoes, I would probably do the same thing.”
I. Nixon, for his part, was wary of Ervin from the start. He told Dean in a February 28, 1973, meeting, “Ervin works harder than most of our Southern gentlemen. They are great politicians. They are just more clever than the minority—just more clever!” Ervin, though, had low expectations going into the whole project. “I suspected the committee might discover by its investigation that some overzealous aides of President Nixon had overstepped the bounds of political decency,” he recalled later. “It was inconceivable to me at that time, however, that President Nixon was personally involved.”
II. Hamilton passed for the diversity hire: Unlike Dash, Dorsen, and Lenzner, all Harvard Law grads, Hamilton had gone to Yale.
III. One member of the Ervin Committee, James Hamilton, would actually go on to write the definitive history of congressional investigations, The Power to Probe, a book that underscored how few real analogues there were to the work Ervin set forth to accomplish. Hamilton cites, for instance, previous examples about Congress’s attempt to investigate the debacle at Bull Run at the opening of the Civil War.
IV. In the days ahead, Haldeman even twice contacted local GOP officials in North Carolina in an attempt to uncover dirt on Ervin that could be used to discredit the Senate inquiry.
Chapter 26 “Twist Slowly, Slowly in the Wind”
The catastrophic miscalculations that would finally crack Watergate wide open began in February 1973 with Nixon’s decision to nominate Patrick Gray as permanent director of the FBI. Gray had narrowly avoided being replaced in Nixon’s victory-tour purge of “spent volcanoes.” Nixon had intended to send him to a non-Senate-confirmed role in the Office of Emergency Preparedness or the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and replace him at the bureau with D.C. police chief Jerry Wilson. But before they could implement the moves, Gray was suddenly hospitalized for more than six weeks with a recurring gastrointestinal problem, leaving Mark Felt in charge of the bureau. By the time Gray recuperated and returned to work in January, Nixon’s calculus had changed and the Wilson plan was shelved.
