Watergate, page 38
By February 1973, with the Senate inquiry looming, loyalty now seemed paramount. “[Gray] is a guy we can tell to do things and he will do them,” Ehrlichman said to the president. Plus, they figured Gray could help in his confirmation hearing by emphasizing what a thorough investigation into Watergate the bureau had conducted.I In that same February 14 conversation, Ehrlichman told Nixon for the first time about how he and Dean had turned over Hunt’s sensitive files to Gray for him to hide. “[Gray] has some guilty knowledge in connection with the Watergate,” Ehrlichman said, adding confidently, “That’ll never come out.”
On Friday, February 16, Nixon met with Gray and told him he would be officially nominated for the FBI’s top job, though the conversation’s primary topic ended up being the president railing about the scandals engulfing him. “This country, this bureaucracy—Pat, you know this, it’s crawling with, Pat, at best, at best unloyal people and at worst treasonable people,” Nixon said. “We have to get them, break them.”
Nixon made clear that the first target to break was Mark Felt, whom he suspected of fueling the Watergate press coverage with his polygamous leaking. In January, after seeing a Washington Post story that Nixon suspected came from the FBI deputy, he’d complained to Haldeman, “The point you ought to make about this… Gray’s got to—it seems to me—he’s got to get Felt off of this [case]”—and now, he lectured Gray directly. “The only problem you have on Felt is that the lines lead very directly to him, and I can’t believe it, but they lead right there,” the president said. “It would be very, very difficult to have Felt in that [number two] position without having that [leaking] charge cleared up. And, incidentally, let me say this—this is also a directive—you should take a lie detector test on him.”
Gray left the Oval Office meeting shaken; he had achieved his dream of leading the bureau, but in the process had seen an ugly side of a man he’d known and respected for more than a decade. “For thirty minutes, he lectured me on leaks, lie detector tests, cracking the whip, and developing a ruthless style of leadership,” he wrote later. “Nixon was not Nixon.”
To prepare for his confirmation hearing, Gray quickly convened the bureau’s top Watergate investigators on February 23 to review progress and ensure he could explain the status to inquisitive senators. The meeting turned sour fast when Gray confessed to his investigators that he’d been giving their reports directly to John Dean.
“You did what?!” Angelo Lano asked, sputtering in anger. The others in the room looked on, aghast. Gray tried to defend himself, explaining that Hoover had routinely passed information to the White House, but Lano objected. “When you’re investigating the people at the White House, you don’t tell them you’re investigating!”
Suddenly, for Lano, it all began to click—Dean had always seemed to be a few steps ahead of the investigators because he was, indeed, a few steps ahead. He left the meeting and went directly to Silbert. “We were screwed from the beginning, Earl,” Lano told his colleague. “Pat Gray had given John Dean everything.”
As the proceedings began at the end of February, it became clear the senators overseeing Gray’s confirmation felt similarly wary about the acting director. Many perceived (accurately) that he had been selected out of his loyalty to the president, and while Gray tried to highlight his active leadership of the bureau and pointed to the progressive policies he’d implemented—like starting to hire female agents—the inquiries from senators constantly veered back toward Watergate. Gray stumbled with almost every exchange.
Realizing the danger he faced, Gray made a desperate, wild offer to reassure the senators of his independence and strength: He would make available to any interested senator the same investigative files he had delivered to Dean. (“What’s the matter with him? For Christ’s sake, I mean, he must be out of his mind,” Nixon said, hearing of the gambit.) Two special agents brought the files to Capitol Hill to be examined as desired, prompting rare shared condemnation from both the Nixon Justice Department and the ACLU (the latter protested the airing of unproven rumors in the files regarding people who hadn’t been charged with a crime).
Back at FBI headquarters, Felt believed he stood a good chance of taking over the bureau if Gray’s nomination tanked; despite the punishment meted out to other suspected leakers inside the bureau, he’d managed to remain in Gray’s good graces. As part of a final push to secure his own ascendance, Felt gave TIME a tip about the Kissinger wiretaps, airing a scandal that Felt hoped would ensure his former rival William Sullivan couldn’t sneak his way back into the bureau. He badly miscalculated. As it turned out, Felt was effectively the only person who knew of the wiretaps outside of those directly involved; the revelation became just a blip at Gray’s hearing, but would metastasize through the spring into a larger scandal that would sink Felt himself.
Undistracted by the Kissinger wiretaps, the Senate settled on another target: John Dean. “Until February 28, 1973, Dean had lived publicly at the periphery of Watergate—a White House aide who had reportedly investigated the bugging incident for the President, never seen, seldom if ever in mind,” recalled the Post’s Barry Sussman. Within the first few hours of Gray’s hearing, Dean—and his activities with the acting director—became the focus of attention.
Under questioning, Gray admitted he had regularly sent investigative reports to the White House via Dean, allowing the president’s staff access to files that Hoover had previously guarded. Then came the admission that Dean had also sat in on FBI interviews. Senators were shocked by Gray’s apparent naïveté, and their suspicions grew as Dean also came up in questioning about the ITT matter, with Gray testifying that the White House counsel had been involved with the Dita Beard memo.
Though Gray kept citing the “presumption of regularity”—that as an agency head he had to operate as if his government colleagues were simply doing their jobs as expected—the senators were dumbfounded that the head of the FBI could so easily assume that Nixon’s staff couldn’t have possibly been involved in Watergate. As Senator Robert C. Byrd said, “Everything is accepted at face value, without question, without the slightest iota of suspicion.”II
The increasingly hostile exchanges made the White House realize Gray was a lost cause and stoked fears that his testimony might result in calls for Dean and Ehrlichman to testify too. “It makes me gag,” Dean said on the phone to Ehrlichman in early March. The silver lining, though, was that Gray’s disastrous hearings refocused Watergate attention away from the White House itself. Maybe there was value in just letting his nomination linger? “I think we ought to let him hang there,” Ehrlichman concluded. “Let him twist slowly, slowly in the wind.”III
Any potential benefit to the administration disappeared on March 7, when Gray nonchalantly confirmed that Kalmbach and Chapin had been involved with Segretti’s operation, and that it had been paid for by anonymous CREEP funds—revelations that cut against long-standing denials from the White House and unleashed a furor at the press briefing: “Ron, since both Mr. Kalmbach and Mr. Chapin either do or have worked for the President of the United States and you are the president’s spokesman, let me just ask you this direct question,” one reporter queried, “just this simple question: Which man is lying?”
* * *
Throughout that spring, Watergate steadily became a more substantial part of the president’s day and his world; through February, March, and April, Ehrlichman alone would recall participating in dozens of conversations on the subject. Dean too moved further into the president’s orbit; late February marked the first of what would ultimately be dozens of telephone calls and meetings between the two men—a notable change in tempo considering the counsel had, until then, met with the president precisely once.
More than ever, the Nixon operation found itself wound up in the lies and distrust of its key players. Few within the inner circle, least of all the president, really understood who was culpable for what. Nixon still seemed to think Watergate was a Mitchell operation, while Haldeman told him he suspected the blame fell to Colson. Colson, for his part, pointed the finger at Haldeman and Dean, warning Nixon, “This could stretch into the White House.”
“You mean Bob and John?” Nixon replied.
“Yes,” Colson said.
Layer upon layer, meeting upon meeting, lies compounded and questions spread. Nixon biographer Stephen Ambrose later studied the transcripts of that winter and spring and observed, “One of the things that stands out is the amount of dissembling that went on.” There was a giant psychology experiment underway, a high-stakes “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” where no one was willing to be honest or confront one another, even though the only real path they had out of the mess would have been a coordinated defense. Instead, they lurched forward, conversation to conversation, never really understanding each other’s guilt. As Mitchell’s biographer James Rosen would later write, “This was Watergate: an endless clash of memories over the substance of meetings and telephone calls featuring a revolving cast of self-interested men, most of them lawyers.”
While nearly everyone—including Nixon himself—was a lawyer, none of them was really an expert in criminal law, making it harder to assess their own vulnerabilities. At one point, they discussed calling in Henry Petersen, to “hypothetically” discuss the case. Dean loved the idea of presenting a “wild scenario” to the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, not dissimilar from a law school case study, but Haldeman offered another approach: ask for literary advice. “My friend is writing a play,” he suggested, and needs to depict an accurate scenario. In the end, they struggled to see how to speak candidly with the nation’s head criminal prosecutor without making themselves vulnerable. Not even swearing Petersen to secrecy on behalf of the president would work, because that would imply the president was in on the game.
On Saturday, March 17, Nixon and Dean met—Dean’s first time in the Oval Office without a necktie—and their conversation meandered through the early days of the GEMSTONE plan, Dean’s own role in the cover-up, and the president’s ongoing desire to launch a counter-scandal that would distract and dismay Democrats. Again, Nixon raised his favorite bugaboo—the tapping of his campaign plane in ’68 by Johnson that J. Edgar Hoover had warned him about as president-elect, an incident he continued to believe would show the world “everybody bugs” and that CREEP’s dirty tricks were no more than that which had been done to him.
“It’s your view the vulnerabilities are basically Mitchell, Colson, Haldeman—indirectly, possibly directly—and of course, the second level is as far as the White House is concerned, Chapin,” Nixon said, leaning back in his chair.
“And I’d say Dean, to a degree,” the counsel added.
“You? Why?”
“Well, because I’ve been all over this thing like a blanket,” Dean said.
“You were in it after the deed was done,” Nixon argued. “You have no problem. All the others have participated in the goddamned thing, and therefore are potentially subject to criminal liability.”
As they talked, it became clear that it would be impossible to single out a Magruder or other top official and lay all the blame at one doorstep. “Can’t do that,” Nixon lamented.
That night at dinner at the Kleindienst house, Marney—the attorney general’s wife—cracked a joke at the glum-looking Dean: “If they send you to prison, I’ll bake cookies for you and come visit you every week.” The look of terror that spread across Dean’s face made Marney, Richard, and Dean’s wife, Mo, suddenly realize it wasn’t funny.
“After nine months, the hot torch of skepticism had finally burned through our story that Liddy had done it on his own,” Dean recalled. “Even the President could no longer lie about it convincingly.” Through repeated conversations in the subsequent days—both private ones in the White House and public exchanges with the press—Nixon felt the pressure building on his administration for an accounting of its role in and knowledge of the bugging scandal. Too many people now seemed to know too much. Dean at one point was warning a colleague, who he figured was in the dark, about the trouble ahead, and his colleague volunteered he knew about the “Ellsberg thing.” The exchange made Dean worry even more.
The president understood that the best way to defeat the Ervin Committee would be to ensure that it never got up a head of steam in the first place, and so his team settled, with time, on two layered defenses: first, a broad claim of “executive privilege” that would shutter the committee’s ability to conduct an independent inquiry or compel the White House to participate, and, second, publishing the mythic “Dean Report,” which would cleanse the administration and defuse any public interest. “I wanted to talk with you about what kind of a line to take,” Nixon told Dean on February 28. “I think we ought to cooperate in finding an area of cooperation.”
The doctrine and operation of “executive privilege,” the idea that under the constitutional separation of powers presidents could prevent disclosure to Congress or the court of confidential communications and presidential advice, remained ill-defined at the time.IV While more than a dozen presidents had blocked a variety of congressional requests over the years, Eisenhower had been the first to explicitly lay out the idea that a commander in chief needed to receive confidential advice without fear of later subpoena or inquiry. “There is no business that could be run if there would be exposed every single thought that an adviser might have, because in the process of reaching an agreed position, there are many, many conflicting opinions to be brought together,” he had argued. “If any commander is going to get the free, unprejudiced opinions of his subordinates, he had better protect what they have to say to him on a confidential basis.” Nixon had already begun exploring the tactic as a shield in January amid a minor kerfuffle about the firing of a Pentagon analyst who had complained about cost overruns of the C-5A transport plane. Behind closed doors, he had ordered Ehrlichman to “have the most godawful gobbledygook answer [about executive privilege] prepared… something that will allow us to do everything that we want.” In March, Nixon explained publicly why he saw it as okay for agency and department heads to testify before Congress but needed to resist calls for testimony from White House aides.
“In the performance of their duties for the President, those staff members must not be inhibited by the possibility that their advice and assistance will ever become a matter of public debate, either during their tenure in government or at a later date,” he said in a statement. Otherwise, the candor with which advice is rendered and the quality of such assistance will inevitably be compromised and weakened. What is at stake, therefore, is not simply a question of confidentiality but the integrity of the decision-making process at the very highest levels of our government.”
Nixon promised too that “executive privilege will not be used as a shield to prevent embarrassing information from being made available but will be exercised only in those particular instances in which disclosure would harm the public interest.”
Absent such testimony, he knew reassuring the public required coming clean about Watergate—hence the need, in his mind, for a “Dean Report” absolving the White House of any responsibility.
The only problem was it didn’t exist; his White House counsel had not only never conducted an investigation of the White House’s role in Watergate, but even worse Dean—more than almost anyone around the president—knew that the White House was decidedly not innocent when it came to the bugging scandal.
Nixon didn’t see why that inconvenient truth should prevent Dean from releasing just such a “thorough investigation” now. He desperately wanted to go on the offensive and still believed that the administration could successfully muddy the waters around its wiretapping debacle by publicizing the allegations that Johnson had spied on Nixon’s campaign in ’68. Dean funneled the information to Senator Barry Goldwater’s staff and hoped for controversy as the Ervin Committee started, but to no avail.V
* * *
On Tuesday morning, March 20, Dean met with Ehrlichman and relayed the latest demands from Hunt: $75,000 to support his family, plus another $50,000 to cover his legal fees. Finding money to pay off the burglars was proving challenging; it was a lot of cash and the campaign had quickly used up the untraceable money left in its various secret safes.
In early March, Mitchell and the Nixon team had ultimately arranged to get funds from the Republican fundraiser and Greek grocery magnate Thomas Pappas—“sort of one of the unknown J. Paul Gettys of the world right now,” Haldeman had called him—the same Boston businessman whose comments had helped spark Tip O’Neill’s sense that something was off in Nixon’s fundraising.
In return for providing the needed cash, Haldeman told Nixon that Pappas had requested that the Nixon administration leave in place the current ambassador to Greece, rather than shuffling him onto another post. “No problem,” Nixon said. “I’m just delighted.”
A few nights later, Pappas had attended a White House reception that included top Nixon fundraisers, and he and the president spoke briefly. The next day, Nixon had him into the Oval Office. “I want you to know that… I’m aware of what you’re doing to help out in some of these things that Maury’s people and others are involved in,” Nixon told Pappas, referring to CREEP’s top fundraiser, Maurice Stans. “I won’t say anything further, but it’s very seldom you find a friend like that, believe me.”VI
