Watergate, page 45
Soon after Buzhardt’s appointment, Haig and Nixon rounded out the new team with two more appointments: Melvin Laird, Nixon’s longtime congressional friend and onetime defense secretary, who would fill the role formerly played by Ehrlichman as a wide-ranging confidant and domestic political and policy advisor, and Bryce Harlow, who would serve as the White House’s liaison to Capitol Hill, a role that would prove ever more crucial as the executive and legislative branches neared a collision over Watergate.VI
On May 10, John Mitchell was indicted in New York, along with former commerce secretary and Nixon finance leader Maurice Stans. Both men were charged with obstruction of justice in the investigation into New Jersey financier Robert Vesco and his $200,000 donation to the Nixon campaign. In the entire history of the republic, only one former cabinet official had ever been indicted, convicted, and sent to prison: interior secretary Albert Fall, during the Harding administration and the Teapot Dome scandal. Now two former cabinet secretaries had been indicted in a single day. Mitchell’s law firm moved quickly to remove his name from its door. “They couldn’t wait to get rid of him,” Martha noted, darkly. The charge was a serious hit for the White House, adding to its legal and public jeopardy.
Nixon ranted in a conversation with his former chief of staff, Haldeman. “All this crap about the President should resign—”
“Don’t even listen,” Haldeman interjected.
“—Nobody should even raise such things,” Nixon continued. “If I walk out of this office, you know, on this chickenshit stuff, why it would leave a mark on the American political system. It’s unbelievable.… The other thing—if they ever want to get up to the impeachment thing—fine.… If they get to that—the President of the United States!—my view is then fight like hell.”
* * *
After nearly a yearlong high-wire act of Machiavellian manipulation, Mark Felt’s secondary career as a prodigious leaker would unravel in May, ironically thanks to a bombshell report for which he had not been the source. On the first anniversary of Pat Gray’s first day as acting FBI director, a Washington Post article by Woodward and Bernstein expanded on earlier reports about the Kissinger wiretaps, hinting that the panic over covering up the burglary stemmed in part from the fears that revelations would spill over into previous Nixon administration misdeeds.VII
A few days later, John Crewdson published in the New York Times the first deep, authoritative account of the Kissinger wiretaps, a story that given the deluge of Watergate news engulfing the capital was relegated to page 18, with the spillover jump of the Vesco indictments. Crewdson’s reporting was richly detailed, filling two columns and a quarter of the entire page, and—known to anyone familiar with the background—came directly from the most knowledgeable anonymous source possible: William Sullivan, the FBI official who had led the program.
In response, William Ruckelshaus kicked off a high-level inquiry with a special team of agents, dispatched to hunt down the truth about the wiretaps, as well as any remaining evidence from the program—evidence they eventually found in John Ehrlichman’s old office file cabinets, right where it had sat since Sullivan turned it over to Nixon himself in the fall of ’72. It was an effort to show Ruckelshaus’s determination to restore public trust, but Felt and the bureau remained dubious.
The onetime EPA administrator had not exactly been welcomed warmly by the bureau’s leadership; Felt labeled Ruckelshaus’s first day “Blue Monday,” realizing for the first time that the FBI would never have a leader promoted from within its own ranks. He had drafted and assembled a telegram to the president, supported by more than seventy other FBI officials, calling for a permanent selection of a “career professional.”
What he didn’t know was that Ruckelshaus had been warned not to trust the deputy he’d inherit at the bureau and, particularly, Felt’s propensity for leaks (“Yes, the president mentioned it to me when he asked me to become the director of the FBI,” Ruckelshaus told Watergate historian Max Holland in 2007), and so he was being watched carefully from the director’s suite, and the investigation of Crewdson’s sourcing would lead quickly to Felt’s denouement—a series of events Holland re-created in full for first time only in 2012. In fact, as Holland pieced together, Felt’s downfall began just hours after the Times story appeared.
A man identifying himself as “John Crewdson” called Ruckelshaus and said that the anonymous source was none other than Felt. He told the FBI director that he didn’t normally out his sources, but that he was “just very concerned about the situation in the country.”VIII
Word spread; as Al Haig reported to the president that day, “Bad guy. Now last night he gave the whole thing… to the New York Times.”
“Felt did?” Nixon said.
“Yeah. Now he’s got to go. But we’ve got to be careful as to when to cut his nuts off,” Haig cautioned. “He’s bad.”
Moments later, he continued. “According to Elliot [Richardson], they’re sure. And as a matter of fact, I talked to Bill Sullivan yesterday, and what Felt is doing is trying to kill Bill Sullivan so he can be director of the FBI. These guys are just unbelievable,” Haig said, in wonder. “That place is riddled and rotten.”
The solution was simple: “Fire his ass.”
And Ruckelshaus did—quietly.
The following Monday, the interim FBI director announced the results of his probe of the Kissinger wiretaps, explaining that the bureau had uncovered seventeen such wiretaps between 1969 and 1971 and had located the logs in Ehrlichman’s office safe. That day too he confronted Felt. To underscore that his own information was impeccable, he made up a story that an old fraternity brother who was now a Times editor had called the previous week to double-check that Felt would be in a position to know the information in Crewdson’s story. The men argued; Felt named Sullivan as the likely source, but did admit that he’d spoken to Crewdson the previous week—though only to correct mistaken information the Times reporter already had. As the conversation wrapped up, Ruckelshaus asked Felt to turn in his keys to the office.
The next morning, Felt’s letter of resignation was waiting on Ruckelshaus’s desk. That same month, William Sullivan retired from the Justice Department, finally accepting that he’d never lead the bureau either. The cold war to succeed J. Edgar Hoover had ended with his most devoted soldiers’ mutually assured destruction, but not before they helped unleash the forces that would ensure Richard Nixon’s undoing.IX
* * *
One year after the original break-in, what had begun as a possible jewelry theft investigation now encompassed a whole host of public subplots—the Huston Plan, Sullivan, the Kissinger wiretaps, ITT, Donald Segretti and CREEP’s dirty tricks, and Vesco, among others. With their list of problems quickly growing, the Nixon team scrambled to prevent other scandals from spilling out—especially they wanted to avoid any public mention of the Pentagon spy ring that had been using Yeoman Radford to steal secrets from Kissinger’s National Security Council.
On May 16, the day before the public Senate Watergate hearings kicked off, Nixon huddled with Buzhardt and Haig to discuss Senator Stuart Symington’s Armed Services Committee investigation into the Huston Plan. “Don’t it seem like we always have problems?” Nixon lamented. The men had spent much of the day meeting and talking in various configurations, including five meetings of all three together. There was plenty of other drama amid the domestic and foreign challenges that spring and summer—inflation had doubled to nearly 9 percent over the course of 1973, challenging consumers and businesses and threatening the national economy—but for Nixon, inside the bubble of the White House, with a shrinking circle of advisors, there was only Watergate.
As the clock swept past 9 p.m., Nixon ranted to his lawyer and his chief of staff in the Oval Office. “We have to realize they’re not after Bob or John or Henry or Haig or Ziegler. They’re after the President. Shit! That’s what it’s all about. You know that—they want to destroy us.”
Haig nodded in agreement. “What they’re hung up on—they’re really in a dilemma up there. They want to get you and yet they don’t. And that’s tough for them too.”
“You know, it’s ridiculous that the President of the United States has to spend his time for the last almost two months worried about this horse’s ass crap. Unbelievable!” Nixon concluded.
That same Wednesday night, across the Potomac, Felt and Woodward met again in their designated parking garage. Woodward had no sense of the internal drama that had gone down at the FBI, nor that his inside source had delivered his resignation to Ruckelshaus Tuesday morning. He imagined that recent developments would have been a moment of great satisfaction and triumph for the FBI official—Nixon’s crookedest aides had been thrown, disgraced, from office, and penetrating congressional hearings were about to start—but instead, Felt seemed angry and worried, almost manic. He paced and spoke for only a few minutes before disappearing, warning of how Nixon had tried to enlist the CIA in obstructing Watergate and saying, almost out of nowhere, “Everyone’s life is in danger.”X
In shock, Woodward summoned Bernstein. Together, they went to Bradlee’s house at 2 a.m. for a parley. “What the hell do we do now?” Bradlee asked. No one knew what to make of Deep Throat’s bizarre performance.
That next morning, Bradlee picked up the New York Times only to discover on its front page that as he and his reporting duo had been caucusing on his lawn, Seymour Hersh had been finishing the next big scoop in the wiretap story. Apparently, after Ruckelshaus’s public announcement about the wiretaps that Monday, Sullivan had asked Hersh to lunch, after which Sullivan stood to leave, and told Hersh he had left something behind. On Sullivan’s seat, Hersh found a manila envelope filled with the original seventeen Nixon administration wiretap requests, sixteen of which the reporter was stunned to see had been signed by Kissinger himself. The requests included the names of the FBI technicians who had placed the wiretaps, and Hersh quickly began to call around to confirm his scoop. When he reached Kissinger, the national security advisor gasped when he heard what Hersh possessed. There was no doubt the documents were authentic.
As word of Hersh’s scoop spread within the Nixon White House, Al Haig called Hersh to plead for the Times story to be killed or held. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you, Seymour?” asked the White House chief of staff, who had overseen the wiretapping program himself in 1971 as Kissinger’s deputy. Haig grasped at one of the only straws he had left: “Do you honestly believe that Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Germany who lost thirteen members of his family to the Nazis, could engage in such police-state activities as wiretapping his own aides?”
* * *
That month, Symington’s hearings on the Huston Plan ultimately uncovered the “memorandums of conversations,” or “memcons,” that Vernon Walters had written in the days after the burglary, as Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean had tried to block the unfolding FBI investigation—the first hints that White House aides had tried to lever the CIA as part of a cover-up. Pat Gray, who was also beginning to speak with the Ervin Committee and sharing for the first time the pressure the FBI had been under to shut down its investigation, was among those shocked by the revelations in Walters’s memos; he’d never known that Walters had been dispatched directly from—and by—the White House to lean on him. “It was a bombshell,” the FBI director wrote later in his memoir. “I was incensed.”
The Walters revelations soon became the focus of even another set of congressional inquiries, this time by Representative Lucien Nedzi’s Special Intelligence Subcommittee. Nedzi’s hearings stretched through the summer, bringing forth as many questions about the administration’s scheming and plotting as they resolved. In the end, the committee was unconvinced that it had gotten to the bottom of the White House, CIA, and FBI subterfuges. “To be charitable, the best that can be said for [the CIA’s explanation] is that it is rather strange,” the committee concluded.XI Piece by piece, the outlines and full scope of the Watergate cover-up were coming into view.
Chapter 31 “A No-Win Job”
The Capitol bears few rooms more historic than the Caucus Room in the Russell Senate Office Building, where the Ervin Committee’s Watergate hearings convened publicly for the first time on May 17, 1973. The French-inspired room, with rich wood, dark black-veined marble, and gilded rosettes stretching across the ceiling, had hosted hearings on the sinking of the Titanic and on the Teapot Dome scandal, as well as Estes Kefauver’s historic 1950 inquiry into organized crime and Joseph McCarthy’s infamous hearings on Communism. But despite its legacy—or perhaps because of it—the room by the early 1970s looked somewhat shabby. “It had the appearance of a grand old downtown railroad terminal suddenly restored to use, mobbed with people, but unrenovated,” recalled the Post’s Watergate editor Barry Sussman, noting the chipped paint and tattered curtains as the latest historic hearings began.
As Sam Dash entered the room that Thursday, it was packed with nearly four hundred observers—including celebrities like Norman Mailer and Dick Cavett. The press settled in as cameramen fine-tuned the lighting and angles, while the committee counsel immediately felt a mix of awe and inadequacy, worried that the first five days of scheduled proceedings—during which time they expected to hear about the structure and operations of the Committee to Re-Elect the President and from both the arresting police officers and burglars about the Watergate break-in itself—might not live up to expectations. Fred Thompson, for his part, couldn’t get over how blinding the TV lights were for those sitting on the dais; the room’s acoustics were quite poor too, and it would hard for many people to hear the unprecedented admissions about to be made.
To begin, each senator framed the hearings in grand terms, both positive and negative. “If the many allegations to this date are true, then the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate were, in effect, breaking into the home of every citizen of the United States,” Ervin said in his introduction. “And if these allegations prove true, what they were seeking to steal were not the jewels, money, or other property of American citizens, but something more valuable—their most precious heritage: the right to vote in a free election.”
Gurney, for his turn, struck his own distinctly partisan note, warning that the inquiry’s “rocking of the boat by Watergate” risked a “catastrophic effect upon the institution of the presidency.” Weicker, full of the moral indignation he’d displayed throughout, wondered aloud whether the committee would have the stomach to follow the path wherever it led. “The gut question for the committee and country alike is and was how much truth do we want?” he asked. “The story to come has its significance not in the acts of men breaking, entering and bugging the Watergate but in the acts of men who almost—who almost stole.” It was a slow and esoteric way for the proceedings to begin—Jules Witcover, writing in the Washington Post, declared the next day, “If you like to watch grass grow, you would have loved the opening yesterday of the Senate select committee’s hearings on the Watergate and related campaign misdeeds”—but the drama began in no time.
On the second day of testimony, McCord himself took the stand and spoke about how he’d been offered clemency for his silence, recounting the surreal series of meetings with Caulfield at the George Washington Parkway overlooks.I The story astounded the committee, and helped the investigators begin to piece together what Tony Ulasewicz, Kalmbach, and others had also said about the hush money, but it also underscored the challenge ahead: Every one of the players seemed to be involved in so many shady activities that it was hard to keep a narrative straight—it would be hard to confine witness testimony to just one line of questioning at a time. The committee agreed to recall witnesses multiple times to tell different slices of their story at the appropriate moment.
When McCord’s story was corroborated by Caulfield and Ulasewicz, the whole tenor of the hearings shifted. “Presidential involvement in Watergate could be inferred,” Dash recalled. Whereas just weeks earlier it had appeared that the campaign finance questions and dirty tricks of the reelection might be the centerpiece of the hearings, now everyone understood: The burglary and its cover-up were the main event.
Perhaps even more surprising was the apparent shifting perspective on Sam Ervin. From the start, Fred Buzhardt, citing the constitutional watchdog’s history of running boring, impenetrable hearings, had been certain that the committee chair would bungle his moment in the spotlight. “He’s our biggest asset, Ervin,” Buzhardt had promised Nixon—and yet as the first days unfolded, it became clear they had misjudged their new opponent.
In the wake of McCord and his colleagues’ disclosures, Ervin yielded to the instincts of Dash, who conducted much of the meaty questioning himself—rather than the traditional congressional approach of allowing members to lob unrelated questions at witnesses one by one. It was equal parts horrifying and fascinating, showing the excavation of facts in real time. In a profile of the Georgetown professor–turned–Senate investigator the week the hearings began, Dash’s wife, Sara, had explained that her husband loved archaeology, telling the New York Times, “If he ever retired, I think he’d go dig.”
* * *
While Ervin’s hearings continued on Capitol Hill, the Nixon administration faced the bizarre challenge of presenting a nominee for a cabinet office currently under investigation. Elliot Richardson’s Senate confirmation as attorney general had not been as smooth as he’d imagined—especially since the job was not one he particularly wanted. Leading the Justice Department was, by almost every measure, a step down from his current role heading the Pentagon, and from the first moments of Senator James Eastland’s opening statement at his hearing, Richardson found himself off-balance.
