Watergate, page 47
During their first days organizing the Special Prosecution Force, Vorenberg for his part kept popping into the office of Glen Pommerening, the department’s acting administrator, to discuss hiring staff, locating offices, and purchasing equipment, sketching out a nearly $3 million budget and mission; they would need to set up five distinct task forces to investigate different groupings of allegations—the burglary and cover-up, the Plumbers and government abuse of powers, the finances of the Nixon reelection campaign, and the dirty tricks, as well as a team to run the ITT probe, which Richardson on June 8 announced he was also moving to Cox’s office. Vorenberg’s estimate was that Cox needed about forty lawyers—five senior task force leaders and a dozen solid, veteran mid-career lawyers, experienced in investigations and prosecutions, plus perhaps two dozen junior workhorses. Recruiting such a team, on the fly, was no small challenge, and the operation would eventually be larger than all but six of the nation’s ninety-three U.S. Attorneys’ Offices.
At one point, Vorenberg looked up at the walls of Pommerening’s office, decorated in standard government fare, with photos of the department’s leaders: There was Nixon, Mitchell, and Kleindienst. “This is the first case I’ve worked where the potential defendants’ personally autographed pictures are on the office walls,” he noted.
* * *
As Cox got to work, Washington’s headlines were dominated by the parade of witnesses making their way through Sam Ervin’s committee.III As the story unfolded, “it began to take on the characteristics of a Russian novel,” the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew wrote. “It became a major effort just to keep the names straight.” Under oath, Tony Ulasewicz displayed to investigators the busman’s coin changer he’d attached to his belt as he hustled around in the summer and fall of ’72 arranging hush money payments, while Howard Baker couldn’t get over the seeming caricature of an investigator before him. “Who thought you up?” Baker asked Ulasewicz. “I don’t know—but maybe my parents,” the president’s onetime private eye shot back. Everyone laughed.
While most of the scandal’s major players—like Haldeman and Ehrlichman—had decamped from Washington, Magruder and his wife had decided to stick it out in the capital, where their children were in school. Reporters often accosted the kids as they headed out in the morning. The onetime campaign leader had quietly taken up some part-time marketing consulting work around the heavy schedule of depositions, interrogations, hearings, and grand jury appearances required by prosecutors and congressional investigators, and finally appeared before the Ervin Committee on June 14 with a great deal of trepidation. “It was like going to church to make your confession—but in front of a hundred million people,” he recalled.
Dash was struck by the man’s hypocrisy and playacting. Behind closed doors in a prep session the day before his public testimony, the deputy campaign manager had cataloged his crimes and the broader conspiracy with relative disinterest (“He appeared totally insensitive to the nature of these offenses and to their impact on the country”), but now before the cameras, Magruder was suddenly contrite. His telling of the campaign’s scheme implicated virtually all of the White House’s major figures except the president himself, naming Mitchell as the head of the campaign espionage program and Dean as the architect of the cover-up. “No witness in my experience has affected me the way Magruder did,” prosecutor Jill Volner later recalled in her memoir. “I was stunned by the ease with which he dissembled, even as he tried to clear himself. He was a slippery confabulator, and I came to the conclusion, based on our many hours of conversation, that he had no moral center.”
* * *
While his former colleagues faced the spotlight, John Dean had spent weeks that spring honing a lengthy opening statement that would lay out for the committee the full arc of how the Nixon administration had lost its way. Dash quickly rejected the first draft. “This won’t do,” the investigator told the former White House aide. “You put your finger on everybody but yourself, John. When you told me the story before, it was very clear to me that you were as much a part of the cover-up as the others. In fact, you were directing a large part of it.” Charlie Shaffer agreed, confronting his client. “You’ve got to tell every last fucking thing you did, no matter how bad or lousy it sounds or how distasteful it is to you to admit it.”
Revelations about what Dean would say steadily leaked into the press; on June 3, dual stories in the Washington Post and New York Times headlined the depth of the collusion between the president and his counsel: “Dean Said to Tell of 40 Meetings with Nixon in ’73,” the latter declared on Sunday’s front page. Monday’s paper then headlined the CIA’s fears from the days after the burglary that it was being dragged into the cover-up, a “potential political bombshell.”
Nixon hated what he read. “Dean, I felt, was re-creating history in the image of his own defense,” Nixon wrote later in his memoirs. Trying to counter the counsel’s torrent of revelations, Nixon began to dive into his secret tape recordings himself with his aide Stephen Bull, listening, plotting, and fuming.
That week, as everyone waited for Dean’s testimony, Dash’s office received an anonymous threat printed in large block letters: JOHN DEAN WILL NEVER BE A WITNESS. HE WILL BE DEAD. After consulting with Cox, they decided that U.S. marshals would provide round-the-clock protection for the witness—transporting him to and from the Capitol and sitting behind him during his testimony.
Finally, on the morning of June 25, amid an especially packed Caucus Room, Ervin gaveled the committee to order. Thompson, in his seat, was fuming; he’d only been given Dean’s book-sized opening statement and fifty accompanying documents that morning—hardly enough time to digest and respond.
“Counsel will call the first witness,” the North Carolina senator instructed.
“Mr. John W. Dean, the third,” Dash responded.
Sucking on throat lozenges and refreshing himself with water, John Dean began reading from his carefully worded prepared statement. “The Watergate matter was an inevitable outgrowth of a climate of excessive concern over the political impact of demonstrators, excessive concern over leaks, an insatiable appetite for political intelligence—all coupled with a do-it-yourself White House staff, regardless of the law,” he began. “The fact that many of the elements of this climate culminated with the creation of a covert intelligence operation as part of the President’s re-election committee was not by conscious design [but] rather an accident of fate.” From there, he unfurled the wild tale, sweeping from the Huston Plan to the Brookings burglary plot to Operation SANDWEDGE and on through the Committee to Re-Elect the President.
It took the entire first day for Dean to get through all 245 pages of his opening remarks—his head down, peering through his tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and speaking directly into a phalanx of microphones, with his wife, Maureen, perched over his shoulder in a striking yellow outfit. “The effeminate Pretty-Boy image he projected in the news magazines is wrong,” observed essayist Mary McCarthy. “Horn-rimmed glasses, small face, small neatly set ears, hair growing thin at the crown, he appears more like a history or economics professor at a Middle Western university looking up from a carefully prepared lecture text.”
As part of the testimony, the committee also released a cornucopia of documents Dean had turned over; at one point, CBS reporter Daniel Schorr found himself reading for the first time, live, Dean’s August 16, 1971, memo on Nixon administration “priority enemies” list. In front of a national television audience, he reached “#17: Schorr, Daniel. Columbia Broadcasting System, Washington. A real media enemy.” He did his best to read onward without a pause. “I do not know how well I carried off my effort to appear oblivious,” Schorr recalled, “but I count this one of the most trying experiences in my television career.”
The scene captivated the nation. “The worst fears of most Americans, which had been building by speculation, were now realized,” Dash recalled. The Washington Post ran the next day six full pages of excerpts from Dean’s testimony, the most space Sussman had ever seen the newspaper devote to a single subject.
The prosecutors who had talked with Dean through the spring were equally stunned. He’d always been vague about specifics with them, but now to the Senate, he had given a precise, corroborated, and almost minute-by-minute rundown of the entire scheme. The four days of follow-up questions did little to shake confidence in Dean’s memory or his accounting of the events. Polls showed 70 percent of Americans believed the president’s former lawyer.IV
As he emerged at the public center of the scandal, however, Dean’s centrality to events raised fresh suspicions with former Hill colleagues. Jerome Zeifman, Rodino’s counsel on the Judiciary Committee, recalled working with Dean on the committee before he went to the administration and described him as cautious and ambitious by nature; he wasn’t one to act unilaterally, without authority and cover. “I know damn well that if Dean had his fingers in the cover-up, John’s mentality is such that he made goddamn certain that the president would know John Dean was covering [Nixon’s] ass,” Zeifman told his colleague Frank Polk. “John Dean is not loyal to anybody or anything other than his own career.”V
On Dean’s fourth day of testifying, Senator Weicker stated how disgusted he had been by what he heard from Dean and the behavior he’d seen from the president’s camp. “Conspiracy to obstruct justice, conspiracy to intercept wire or oral communications, subornation of perjury, conspiracy to obstruct a criminal investigation, conspiracy to destroy evidence, conspiracy to file false sworn statements, conspiracy to commit breaking and entering, conspiracy to commit burglary; misprision of a felony; filing of false sworn statements; perjury; breaking and entering; burglary; interception of wire and oral communications; obstruction of criminal investigation; attempted interference with administration of the Internal Revenue laws; and attempted unauthorized use of Internal Revenue information,” he summarized, seeming to even surprise himself with the sheer scope of perceived White House crimes.
“I say before you and before the American people that I’m here as a Republican,” the Connecticut senator said before a packed room. “And I think I express the feelings of the 42 other Republican Senators and the Republicans of Connecticut and the feelings of the Republican party far better than those who committed illegal, unconstitutional and gross acts.”
He continued, his jaw firmly set, “Republicans do not cover up. Republicans do not go ahead and threaten. Republicans do not go ahead and commit illegal acts. And, God knows, Republicans don’t view their fellow Americans as enemies to be harassed.”VI
With Dean’s testimony complete, the hearings adjourned ahead of the July 4 congressional recess and were set to begin again in mid-July when Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman would take the stand. House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill was now sure of one thing: Nixon was done. “Tip realized he was going to have to act after he heard John Dean,” TIME magazine’s Neil MacNeil recalled later. The rest would just be process and politics.
With Rodino’s assent, his committee staffers Zeifman and Polk called to request a meeting with their Senate counterpart. “I want to impress upon you, Mr. Dash, that this meeting has to be kept very, very confidential,” Zeifman said, his voice barely above a whisper, as he closed the door when they convened. “What I’m about to say to you must be considered as a hypothetical matter. Our committee has taken no action whatsoever, not even a suggestion of an action. Only Chairman Rodino has talked to me. He wanted me to raise with you—hypothetically, mind you—the question of what help your committee can give our committee in an impeachment inquiry against the President of the United States?”
Dash, taken aback, plotted his response carefully, but assured the House staffers that Ervin would surely want to provide “the fullest cooperation possible.” That said, Dash reminded them, Senator Kennedy had specifically prohibited, with an amendment, the Senate committee from investigating the president. The next step, they agreed, would be for Rodino to write a formal letter to Ervin asking for cooperation and information.
It was a huge moment, one that had previously seemed unthinkable, but it was clear that the tide was turning, beginning with one of the proceedings’ most unmoveable men.
* * *
With Dean’s testimony still rippling through the American public, Cox’s team knew it needed to find a first domino to fall—one that would pressure conspirators and set the tone and scale for the punishments to come. Fred LaRue, they agreed, would be the easiest target. He’d first spoken to prosecutors that spring without an immunity deal, and his culpability in the hush money payments was clear. James Neal pressured LaRue and his lawyer to fold, and as Dean’s testimony wrapped up, LaRue pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to obstruct justice. As soon as the plea was before Judge Sirica, prosecutors knew who they’d go after next: Magruder, then Dean.
Watching from the White House, Fred Buzhardt had grown increasingly concerned as he rushed to formulate the best defense he could, closeting himself with some of Nixon’s recorded tapes. As he listened, he worried. His client sounded guilty. Buzhardt heard a lot that seemed to be obstruction of justice at a minimum—perhaps worse. Buzhardt, though, didn’t know who to tell or what to share; the strictures of attorney-client privilege precluded commiserating with most of his White House colleagues.
One night, after work, he stopped by the house of his former Pentagon boss and now White House colleague Melvin Laird. Buzhardt and Laird went into the basement, and Buzhardt opened up. “The president was involved in the cover-up,” he said. “I’ve listened to some of the tapes, and he was in the cover-up right up to his eyeballs from the beginning.”VII
There was only one legal strategy ahead: delay.
I. The night after Cox’s hearing before the Senate, Silbert had dictated to his diary, “I have had [it] with the case. I think this case is nothing but problems and we have compromised on integrity, been questioned, we have no supporters, we have no credibility.”
II. Cox doubted Buzhardt’s version in the moment, and it would later be clear that Buzhardt certainly misled, if not outright lied, in the exchange at the Special Prosecutor’s Office that day.
III. At one point amid the hearings, Haldeman crossed paths in the Dirksen Senate Office Building with the Democratic prankster Dick Tuck, the longtime Nixon campaign trail nemesis who had inspired CREEP’s efforts to set up its own dirty tricks operation. “You S.O.B., you started this!” Haldeman muttered. “Yeah, Bob, but you guys ran it into the ground,” Tuck shot back.
IV. As Dean testified, far from the hearing room, Lyndon Johnson’s national security advisor Walt Rostow handed the head of the LBJ Library a sealed envelope marked with a big “X.” It was labeled “Eyes Only.” He asked that it be sealed for fifty years; inside, it turned out later, were the files, wiretaps, and memos relating to the Chennault Affair. Rostow understood in that moment as Dean began testifying how the Chennault Affair tied into the mentality of the scandal he was watching unfold on television, and he clearly knew the important relevance of the Chennault Affair to Nixon’s conduct as president, but rather than raise it in the allegations in a moment when they would have altered the trajectory of the ensuing scandal, he chose instead to bury the evidence for decades. “He left us no explanation,” wrote historian Ken Hughes, who authored a 2014 book on the subject.
V. Committee staff were surprised too by how the press lionized Dean as a noble man of conscience. “I never saw him that way,” investigator Terry Lenzner recalled later. “His main motive, understandably, was self-preservation.”
VI. The next morning, Weicker found Chuck Colson at his office door, there to defend himself and Nixon, in an exchange that grew heated. When Colson said he was proud of his work for the president, Weicker blasted: “How could you be proud after the disservice you’ve done him?”
VII. In the sole biography of Laird, Dale Van Atta’s With Honor, Laird recounts how “the morning after” Buzhardt’s confession, he confronted Nixon in person about the president’s culpability. However, as historian Ray Locker traced, the timing of such a confrontation, if it ever happened, must have come later than Laird remembers, as Nixon was away from Washington in San Clemente from June 23 to July 9.
PART IV Firestorm
July–December 1973
Chapter 33 “We Need You Today”
At the dawn of the summer, the special prosecutor’s team moved into two floors of a private office building downtown at 1425 K Street—it was important optics-wise to Cox to be outside the offices of the Justice Department—and began filling the space with its growing staff.
Cox found the hardest role to fill was his deputy; none of his top five choices either wanted the role or seemed to match the profile needed.I Finally, they settled on Hank Ruth, a veteran of New York City mayor John Lindsay’s administration. Cox and Ruth met for lunch downtown and noted right away how different they were. “Cox tends to be all optimism and dogma in his conversation. Ruth, who has a penchant for irreverent one-liners, spices his idealism with a dose of cynicism,” recalled Jim Doyle. “The two men shared one bond: Both thought the job was a loser, and both thought it had to be done.”
Beyond the deputy, the rest of the team leadership came together rather quickly: James Neal headed the Watergate cover-up team himself, joined by two young, talented, and ambitious lawyers, Richard Ben-Veniste and Jill Volner, a Columbia Law School grad who had been the first female attorney to work in the Justice Department’s organized crime and racketeering section, where she’d helped prosecute a teamster boss and a boxing promoter who was fixing fights.II William Merrill, a veteran of Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, led the Plumbers team; Tom McBride, a veteran organized crime prosecutor, took over the campaign finances team; Richard Davis, a federal prosecutor from New York, oversaw the dirty tricks task force; Joseph Connolly, a rare devout Republican on the team, was named the fifth task force leader, charged with the ITT investigation that was merged into the special prosecutor’s work.
