Watergate, page 40
Gasps of astonishment peppered the courtroom as Sirica read the letter aloud. McCord’s statement explained the dilemma he faced—torn between answering the court’s queries, potential further investigations by the Senate and others, and his and his family’s safety. And yet, he wrote, “Be that as it may, in the interests of justice, and in the interests of restoring faith in the criminal justice system, which faith has been severely damaged in this case, I will state the following to you at this time which I hope may be of help to you.”
What followed were six jaw-dropping revelations:
There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent.
Perjury occurred during the trial in matters highly material to the very structure, orientation, and impact of the government’s case, and to the motivation and intent of the defendants.
Others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified during the trial, when they could have been by those testifying.
The Watergate operation was not a CIA operation. The Cubans may have been misled by others into believing that it was a CIA operation. I know for a fact that it was not.
Some statements were unfortunately made by a witness which left the Court with the impression that he was stating untruths, or withholding facts of his knowledge, when in fact only honest errors of memory were involved.
My motivations were different than those of the others involved, but were not limited to, or simply those offered in my defense during the trial. This is no fault of my attorneys, but of the circumstances under which we had to prepare my defense.
As Sirica concluded reading, the room erupted into absolute chaos; reporters raced for the lobby telephones to call in the breaking news, while others simply sat in shock.
When the situation settled, Sirica stated that he was tabling McCord’s own sentencing in light of the letter, before perfunctorily sentencing Liddy to more than six years in prison and the other five burglary defendants to the maximum possible punishments. The Bureau of Prisons, he added, would study the prisoners and report back to him on their cooperation with other investigations. With that information, he would adjust their sentences accordingly.
Hearing and then reading a copy of the McCord letter back at the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee breathed his first true sigh of relief since the previous summer. “For the first time really, I felt in my guts that we were going to win,” he wrote later. “Winning would mean all the truth. Every bit. I had no idea still how it would all come out, but I no longer believed Watergate would end in a tie.”
* * *
By the time Sam Dash made it back to Capitol Hill, he already had a message from McCord asking to meet. He immediately went to the office of McCord’s lawyer, Bernard Fensterwald, bringing along his colleague and investigator Hal Lipset. (“I was too embarrassed to let McCord or Fensterwald know that I did not have any other investigators at the time,” he recalled later.)
Sitting in Fensterwald’s law library, McCord hardly seemed to Dash like some kind of rogue secret agent—more an ordinary, albeit determined, middle-aged businessman. McCord explained that he didn’t trust the FBI or the U.S. Attorney’s Office—both reported up a chain of command to the White House—and preferred to deal directly with the Senate committee. Then, he and Fensterwald asked for a copy of the Watergate trial transcript, so that the burglar could review it and accurately pinpoint the problematic testimony he’d outlined in his letter to Sirica. They promised to work that evening and the next day before meeting again to go over more specifics. “For the time being, I thought it best to let McCord disclose information at his own speed,” Dash recalled.
The next day, Saturday, the men gathered again and spoke at more length. McCord handed over a poorly written memo, which Dash read silently to himself. “I, in addition to my own sworn testimony, am prepared to give the Senate Watergate Committee supportive information and/or leads to convince them beyond a reasonable doubt that the statements I have made in the attached memorandum are true and correct,” it began. As it went on, McCord outlined specific allegations against Jeb Magruder, claiming he’d perjured himself by testifying on January 23 that he’d had no knowledge of the bugging operation at the Watergate prior to the June arrests: “Mr. Magruder knows the names of others knowledgeable of and involved in the Watergate operation sequence. One of such persons was John Dean of the White House staff. Had Magruder answered truthfully the question propounded above at page 1422 of the transcript and made full disclosure of the names of others involved, he would have named Dean.”
Dash absorbed the information—senior officials in the White House and the president’s reelection campaign had been involved in the break-in—and instinctively decided to keep it private, even from Lipset, who was sitting nearby.
Avoiding naming names verbally, Fensterwald and McCord explained that McCord’s role and knowledge of the larger conspiracy was quite limited. “I’ve got one slice of it,” he said. “I think Mr. Hunt has the other slice you want—the biggest slice.”
“Will Hunt talk to us?” Dash asked.
“That depends on a lot of things in the next few days—what he’s thinking about, what he reads in the paper, what he sees. I suspect that will affect him greatly,” McCord replied.
Fensterwald pushed for Dash to make their conversations public, arguing that everyone should know McCord was cooperating and be worried. Afterward, as they headed back to Capitol Hill, Lipset told Dash he agreed. “The whole cover-up depended on a wall of silence,” he said. “If we let out that McCord is talking, there are going to be some pretty scared characters around town who may be able to make some bigger cracks in the wall.”
* * *
That Friday, March 23, had started out bad enough for John Dean. The morning newspaper headlines blared Gray’s accusation from the previous day’s Senate hearing, “DEAN PROBABLY LIED,” and reporters were camped out at his house. Then, mid-morning, came word of McCord’s letter and courtroom bombshell. At 12:44 p.m., the president called; they discussed and eventually agreed that Dean should hole up at Camp David for the weekend.I As he and his wife, Maureen, rode up into the Catoctin Mountains, Dean’s imagination wandered to the possibility of fleeing—surely John Mitchell and the president could arrange him a covert flight to a Latin American country, where some wealthy businessman would allow him to live in a grand villa in exile while he shouldered the blame back home for Watergate?
At 3:28 p.m., Nixon and Haldeman called again to discuss Dean’s weekend assignment, compiling the “Dean Report.” He started the next morning, following instructions that it would “incriminate no one other than Liddy.” He asked Fred Fielding to round up additional documents from his White House office and send them up to Camp David, along with Dean’s secretary, on Monday. By Sunday afternoon, though, he had reconsidered. The lies were too deep. Dean realized he should make an effort to come entirely clean with the president—“The truth might persuade him, once he saw it written down,” he later recalled thinking.
On Sunday afternoon, more bad news arrived: Ron Ziegler called to say the Los Angeles Times was about to publish a story that Magruder and Dean had had advance knowledge of the Watergate burglary.
The next morning, Sam Dash was stunned by a phone call from Carl Bernstein relaying the same news: “The LA Times reported this morning that McCord named Magruder and Dean to you as having advance knowledge of the Watergate bugging. Did McCord make that statement to you or was the LA Times just guessing?” Dash declined comment, but as he listened to the Washington Post reporter, his mind began to churn. Only four people had known the names McCord had given them—McCord, Fensterwald, Ervin, and himself. Who had leaked? He was certain it was McCord and his lawyer, hoping to force the investigators toward quick action.II
The Los Angeles Times article on March 26 was the start of a cascade of near-daily headlines, developments, scoops, and leaks that brought the story consistently to the front pages and opinion pages of the nation’s newspapers and magazines; that week, Watergate even occupied the cover of Newsweek. “News leaks of massive proportions occurred,” recalled Barry Sussman.
The White House, for the moment, decided to stand by Dean, but agreed Magruder was on his own. According to Dean’s memoir, Haldeman told him in a phone call that morning, “We’ve been protecting Mitchell and Magruder too long, and it got us into this mess,” and then reviewed in great detail what Dean knew and when. The conversation with the chief of staff was painful, but not hostile. Haldeman, Dean knew, was taking careful notes. Following the Los Angeles Times report, Dean issued a statement saying he was exploring suing the newspaper for libel, but he was less sure of his innocence behind the scenes and began to arrange his own criminal lawyer.
Fear spread. That Monday, Martha Mitchell called the New York Times: “I fear for my husband,” she said. “I’m really scared. I have a definite reason. I can’t tell you why. But they’re not going to pin anything on him; I won’t let them.”
Indeed, “pinning” Mitchell was exactly what the White House was planning to do. On March 27, Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman discussed how to force the former campaign director to admit to authorizing the whole thing—and that the buck stopped with him. “What is Mitchell’s option?” Nixon asked aloud during the morning meeting in the Oval Office. “Does Mitchell come in and say, ‘My fault.… My memory was faulty. I lied’?”
“No, he can’t say that,” Ehrlichman replied.
“ ‘Without intending to, I may have been responsible for this, and I regret it very much, but I did not intend that—I did not realize what they were up to’?” Nixon continued brainstorming. “ ‘They were talking—we were talking—about apples and oranges.’ That’s what I think he would say. Don’t you agree?”
“He authorized apples and they bought oranges, yeah,” Haldeman agreed.
“Mitchell is never going to go in and admit perjury. You can talk about immunity and all the rest, but he’s never going to do that,” Nixon said.
“They won’t give him immunity anyway—I wouldn’t think—unless they figure they could get you. He is as high up as they’ve been,” Haldeman said.
“He’s the big enchilada,” Ehrlichman seconded.
* * *
In the wake of the Los Angeles Times leak, McCord and his lawyer feigned fierce outrage, telling Dash that McCord now would only speak under oath directly to the committee itself. Much to Dash’s chagrin, the senators loved that idea. “They were sitting on the hottest committee in the Congress and a sensational witness like McCord was irresistible,” he recalled. Thompson immediately sensed the change among the committee members after the Los Angeles Times story too. “It was the first solid indication that Watergate indeed might turn out to be something more than a ‘third-rate burglary,’ ” the Republican counsel explained.
The resulting private meeting between the Senate committee members, McCord, Fensterwald, Thompson, and Dash quickly turned into what Dash called a “disaster.” Ervin’s office was packed, as a score of senators, staff, and lawyers lined a long table with McCord and filled in along the walls behind. Both sides—investigators and conspirator—were unprepared, and neither trusted the other. “His testimony was damaging, but the parts of it that incriminated Mitchell, Magruder, and Dean were all hearsay from Liddy,” Thompson recalled. Expecting a friendly conversation as a willing witness, McCord found himself under skeptical cross-examination from a committee unwilling to offer the immunity he wanted.
Inquiries were now unfolding in parallel; after his messy private testimony to the Senate, McCord went back to Sirica and the U.S. attorney to ask for immunity and the chance to testify to a grand jury. He was still concerned about whether to trust the Justice Department, but he was eager to get on the record somewhere. For weeks, Dash was relegated to reading leaks of McCord’s grand jury testimony in the newspapers. Still, with its new structure in place and its investigative staff finally expanding, the Senate committee began making real progress. It had followed up on McCord’s suggested witnesses, summoning, to corroborate certain meetings and conversations, aides and secretaries to Magruder and Liddy, some of whom had never been questioned by the FBI or spoken to the grand jury.
An important lead emerged when one CRP secretary located a duplicate copy she’d kept of Magruder’s appointments calendar from the campaign and presented it to the committee. Scanning through the green diary, Senate investigator Jim Hamilton zeroed in on two entries documenting meetings between “A.G.,” Liddy, and Dean, on January 27 and February 4, 1972, potentially the conversations McCord had referenced during which the campaign intelligence and dirty tricks operation had been presented. Further testimony from campaign aides seemed to back up the theory; some remembered Liddy walking around sometime in January 1972 with an awkward, oversized wrapped package of what appeared to be charts, and another Magruder aide, Robert Reisner, recalled a scramble—probably in February 1972—to find Liddy an easel for a meeting in Mitchell’s office. He then told the Senate investigators that Magruder had warned him about cooperating with the committee, saying, “People’s lives and futures are at stake,” and complaining that Reisner was going to reveal the story about asking for an easel. “How come you remember an easel? There wasn’t an easel,” he said Magruder told him.
It was one of many indications that the Watergate conspirators were growing concerned—Magruder, especially. Magruder went to the White House on March 28 to ask Dean and Mitchell whether they’d stick with their established narrative about the GEMSTONE meetings from the previous summer. Haldeman gathered the men together, only to reiterate, “I don’t want to get involved with this,” before leaving them alone in Dwight Chapin’s empty office.III When Mitchell and Magruder finally pressed Dean on what he would say, the lawyer said that if called to testify before the Senate or the grand jury, he would tell the truth. Magruder pleaded with his former colleague; it was Dean, after all, who had counseled Magruder through perjuring himself before the grand jury the previous summer—was he really now going to hang Magruder out to dry? As Magruder later observed, “The chronology of the affair proves that he was about ten days smarter than I was.”
Paranoia grew among all the co-conspirators; Dean, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman were by then covertly taping their own conversations with each other and with others, hoping to capture self-exonerating statements and incriminating admissions. The conversations and tapings, though, sometimes proved more complicating than clarifying. During a meeting with Ehrlichman, unaware he was being taped, Mitchell explained he had nothing to hide. “I really don’t have a guilty conscience. I didn’t authorize these bastards.” Ehrlichman was flummoxed. If Mitchell hadn’t, who had?
* * *
When McCord finished with the grand jury, he returned to Capitol Hill to work with Dash and Thompson’s investigation. During long sessions in their makeshift Senate interrogation room, G-334, McCord laid out everything he knew. Dash was impressed, noticing “a sense of stoic dignity,” and observing, “I developed a genuine affection for Jim McCord.” It gradually became clear McCord’s misguided patriotism had led him into the Watergate the previous June and that he had actually believed he was on a mission on behalf of the attorney general. When Dash asked whether he would have participated in the break-in had he known he was only working for Liddy, McCord replied sharply and indignantly: “Never!”
As Dash and his staff continued to make progress, Ervin’s committee agitated for public hearings. At a mid-April meeting, Dash said he expected it would take another month to be ready, and so hearings were set to begin May 15. There was already a fear among the committee that Nixon would use executive privilege to block his aides from testifying. “Frankly, under the regular rules of evidence we have the right to draw negative inferences from the president’s withholding of information,” Ervin said in one meeting. “If the president won’t let his aides testify under oath, I think the public can conclude that he is unwilling for the people to get the truth about Watergate.”
To try to curb the committee’s investigative attempts, the White House floated submitting written answers to questions, and Nixon advisor Leonard Garment suggested that Nixon’s aides would simply refuse to answer questions that touched on executive privilege or national security. “Nonsense,” Dash replied. Thompson echoed the objection: “If the members of the committee ask a White House aide, before a nationwide television audience, if he and the president discussed plans to break into the Watergate and you claim executive privilege for that answer because it’s a private communication with the president, you’re ruined.”
In early April, Attorney General Kleindienst appeared before an all-but unprecedented joint session of three House and Senate committees to debate the question of executive privilege. “Executive privilege is a constitutionally founded, historically accepted, and vital principle of American government,” the attorney general argued. According to his argument, the shield could protect the president from having any executive branch employee testify if he didn’t want them to do so. Senators balked. It was clear each side was drawing its lines for battle.
* * *
On the morning of April 3, Dean finished laying out the situation for his new criminal lawyer, Charles Shaffer. “What do you think?” the White House aide asked. He didn’t get the warm, consoling answer he’d hoped.
“John, you’re in big trouble. Serious trouble,” Shaffer said. “I’m not worried about pre–June 17, but post–? There, as far as I’m concerned, you’re guilty as hell of conspiring to obstruct justice.”
They agreed that Shaffer would go meet with prosecutors Silbert and Glanzer, both of whom he knew from previous cases, and see what the investigators had planned, a move he made subtly but did not entirely keep a secret. In fact, Dean told Haldeman, who was in San Clemente with the president, that he’d begun talking to a lawyer, couching the move as a way to assess the liability for all the co-conspirators. (“I think Shaffer can help us find out how good a case the prosecutors have against Mitchell and Magruder,” he said.)
