Watergate, page 48
Recruiting was rushed. Volner interviewed on Cox’s second day, and told Vorenberg she could start in a month, once she’d transitioned her other Justice Department cases. “We need you today,” he countered and made clear he had the power to make such an instant transition possible.
Vorenberg also recruited Philip Lacovara, a deputy solicitor general, who turned down leading a task force to instead appoint himself Cox’s counsel—figuring that the team would need someone focused on the legal theories and maneuvering of the whole office. “He was one of those people who finished everything—high school, college, exam papers, legal briefs—in half the time it took other people,” Doyle later recalled. Lacovara’s role put him right below Cox’s deputy, Ruth. “I am number two-and-a-half,” he would joke.
The team Cox assigned to the burglary case itself—Neal and a young, twenty-nine-year-old assistant prosecutor named George Frampton, Jr.—journeyed daily over to Silbert’s offices to review the overflowing file cabinets generated by the first year’s investigation, indictments, and trial. Each night, they then reported back to Cox on their progress and analysis. Once they felt up-to-speed in June, Cox informed the original D.C. prosecutors—Silbert, Glanzer, and Campbell—that he no longer needed them. In stiff but cordial letters, exchanged publicly, the trio formally requested to withdraw from the case and argued how well they’d performed in the Watergate investigation. Cox, in turn, thanked them for the work and “invaluable” help with the transition. From that point forward, Neal, Ben-Veniste, Volner, Frampton, and an appellate lawyer named Peter Reint would carry the Watergate burglary case; eventually two others would join too, creating an eight-person team to take on the president.
The Nashville litigator Neal was a stark exception to much of Cox’s Watergate Special Prosecution Force, most of which came from the toniest circles of the Eastern Establishment, had graduated from Ivy League law schools, and had been schooled in the tight confines and regimented process of federal procedure as prosecutors or Justice Department attorneys. Neal, by contrast, had little patience for legal theory. “He had a short attention span for anything he regarded as peripheral to the guts of the case—namely, that small core of evidence he could use to most effectively at trial convince a jury of the defendants’ guilt,” recalled Ben-Veniste and Frampton. Enduring Neal’s work sessions, during which he smoked enormous Jamaican cigars within an ever-thickening cloud of haze, came to be something of a test of human endurance for his task force attorneys.
From the start, security in the office was tight; the suites always had an odd, timeless twilight to them, as the blinds and drapes were always kept closed to prevent eavesdropping or spying. The prosecutors knew that any leaks could have major consequences, and so Doyle was confounded (and worried) when the Washington Post’s John Hanrahan somehow managed to put his hands on two internal memos in the office’s first weeks in operation. After the second memo appeared in the paper, Cox called Post editor Ben Bradlee. “If you ever tell anyone I told you this, I’ll deny it, but Archie, you’ve got a trash problem,” Bradlee said. Evidently, while the office had arranged for its trash to be incinerated, the actual process for disposing of their office waste was less secure: The building used transparent plastic bags and the contents were easily visible on the loading dock, awaiting pickup, to anyone walking by.
Soon thereafter, a massive shredder appeared in the office.
* * *
Nixon’s ranch in San Clemente had for some time been his escape, and as the scandals around him deepened, he spent longer and longer stretches out at the so-called Western White House. During an extended Fourth of July escape, the family walked on the beach and watched movies like The Railway Children and Rebel Without a Cause. Then, one morning, Nixon opened the Los Angeles Times to see that, in what he viewed as an egregious personal attack, Archibald Cox’s team was investigating the propriety of his vacation home.
Nixon erupted, angrier than he had been about almost any Watergate revelation so far; he had worried about Cox from the start (Jack Kennedy’s solicitor general?!?!), and the new reports seemed to indicate the worst. This wasn’t about finding the truth concerning the DNC break-in, this was about hunting the president—however, wherever, and whenever he could.III
Nixon ordered Haig to call Richardson and check on the report. The chief of staff and the attorney general spoke multiple times that morning, and Haig, huddled in San Clemente with Ziegler and the president, called Richardson back a second time at 1:05 p.m. ET. On a third telephone call, Nixon himself interjected to demand that Richardson get a retraction from Cox within half an hour or else he’d fire the special prosecutor.
Richardson weighed the best response and considered for a moment whether to resign—especially if Nixon moved ahead with a threat to fire Cox. He called the special prosecutor, who calmly explained that the San Clemente request was no more than a general gathering of old newspaper articles on the subject. As a matter of fact, the topic of the president’s estate had come up at Cox’s most recent press conference, and he hadn’t known enough to even answer the questions. Richardson argued the president’s San Clemente house didn’t fit within Cox’s purview. “I disagree,” Cox said, “but I’m at a disadvantage since I don’t know the allegations or the facts.” He assured Richardson there was no “investigation,” but also made clear he thought the attorney general’s intervention was troubling. “Elliot, do you really think it’s proper for you to call me up like this?” he said. “It will do neither of us any good if you advertise the fact that you called me the first time that something hostile to the president appeared in the press.”
Finally, Cox agreed to issue a brief statement confirming that all he was doing was reading about San Clemente. Speaking to reporters, Ron Ziegler labeled any allegations of financial improprieties “malicious, ill-founded and scurrilous.” In Washington, Sam Dash announced that the Watergate Committee would recall Dean to testify about Nixon’s personal finances and the San Clemente estate.
As the responses crisscrossed the country, Richardson wondered, just barely a month into his role, whether he could survive the pressure ahead. He had been perfectly happy—enthusiastic even—in his role as defense secretary, but now he found himself in an unprecedented, and obviously perilous, position, overseeing investigations of not only the president, but the vice president as well—as it turned out, federal prosecutors from Maryland were building a case against Spiro Agnew, who they believed had accepted bribes in the White House complex. They’d been in Richardson’s office that very day outlining their case, as Haig kept phone-banking him about the Los Angeles Times story.
The president’s behavior more broadly through the summer had simply confounded Richardson; loyalty ranked almost equal in his mind to integrity, and he felt deeply loyal to Nixon and wanted his president to succeed.IV He kept seeing opportunities for Nixon to take the offense—at one point, he wrote a lengthy memo suggesting a “Federal Code of Fair Campaign Practices” to make illegal many of the dirty tricks that Segretti, Dick Tuck, and others had carried out over the years, a move he thought would win favor with the country and show how seriously Nixon wanted to move past the scandal—but the suggestions, despite follow-up, went nowhere. “The President, it seemed, could not or would not take positive steps to restore confidence in his administration and himself,” Richardson wrote later. “I charged this off to an error in judgment. I should, of course, have realized that Richard Nixon was more likely to be guilty than stupid.”
The truth was that he had little insight into the case that would define his tenure as attorney general; the president had quickly cut him off from conversations about Watergate, as Richardson had made clear that he didn’t see his role as serving as a presidential defense attorney, and the freedom he’d granted Cox meant the special prosecutor didn’t share much with him. As he’d say later, “I never did know much about Watergate.”
* * *
Each day, as the Watergate Special Prosecution Force passed into their office, they walked by a government security poster in the hall that warned of leaks; with a picture of a telephone wired to dynamite, it announced “Loose talk is explosive… Anytime.” The regular warning seemed to have little impact. The same day Cox quashed the San Clemente eruption, CBS’s Daniel Schorr reported the outlines of an eighty-page status memo that Silbert had written upon his departure, including the recommendation that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean face indictment and that Gray and Strachan be offered plea deals. Their defense lawyers promptly protested the leak, saying it prejudiced any future jury, and Cox was equally outraged—seeing the move as undermining his leadership, a feeling that seemed to spread across Washington that summer. “Archie Cox is a bit of a softie,” journalist Teddy White warned Doyle as he started. “You’ll find that he gets pushed around by his staff.” A Democratic senator similarly complained to Newsweek, “He’s too quiet. He just doesn’t seem to be turned on to his job.”
His staff, though, found such snap judgments mistaken. They never doubted their boss’s “diligence and judgment,” recalled Stephen Breyer, the future Supreme Court justice who worked on the ITT investigation task force, and Ben-Veniste and Frampton, in their joint memoir, concluded, “Cox’s predominant characteristic, one sometimes mistaken for arrogance, was his overwhelming sense of the importance of distinguishing right from wrong.” Twice the age of many of his prosecutors, Cox ran the office with the aplomb of a law professor, trusting his team and stoking debate, ultimately falling back on what he called “Lincoln’s Rule”: Everyone on staff got one vote, but his vote counted more than everyone else’s combined. This was to protect against an important generational and philosophical divide he had identified: his young, ambitious team had mostly come of age amid the turmoil of the 1960s, and were naturally more distrustful of power and institutions. They saw their investigation as a standard prosecution case—albeit one with particularly high-profile targets—while Cox, a child of the Great Depression and product of the upper ranks of the Justice Department, saw Watergate as an institutional problem, not just a legal one.
The Force came to intimately know the witnesses and headline-grabbing names who had found themselves in the eye of the storm. Hunt struck them less as a superspy and more the anti–James Bond, and Ben-Veniste took an intense disliking to him, finding his answers squishy and self-serving. The Cubans earned sympathy as pawns in the conspiracy, and Barker and Martinez were respected for their CIA service. But as the team heard from LaRue, Magruder, and Mitchell about the March 30, 1972, meeting in Key Biscayne where Mitchell was said to have approved the GEMSTONE plan, none of the accounts lined up. “Each of the three ‘witnesses’ claimed that the other two did all the talking at the meeting,” recalled Ben-Veniste and Frampton. “We reckoned that must have been one of the quietest campaign meetings in history.”
As they investigated, the prosecutors understood that the president merited a higher-than-usual standard of evidence; they knew, for instance, that Nixon might have technically committed a crime known as “misprision of a felony” when he failed to tell the Justice Department about the cover-up at the time that, according to his telling, he first learned about it in March and April, but no one expected such an obscure charge to be brought against a president. Instead, they knew they needed to find places where Nixon had taken affirmative actions to advance a conspiracy, initiate a felony, or obstruct justice.
And they had to work with hard evidence. “Guilt or innocence in the political-corruption case often hinges on very small differences in testimony, on fine interpretations of motive and intent,” Ben-Veniste and Frampton later explained. In fact, political corruption cases are almost by definition among the hardest prosecutors face, because they almost always involve a high-profile—and often well-liked—figure, respected and rooted in the community and able to advocate loudly for himself in the press. Nixon epitomized all those challenges and more—he was even still, technically, their boss as employees of the Justice Department.
Relatively late into the summer, it wasn’t clear that there would be any meaningful charge against or even investigation of Nixon himself. When Cox asked Jim Vorenberg to assemble a strategy memo outlining all the evidence prosecutors had uncovered against the president, the resulting document found little beyond circumstantial evidence, growing primarily out of Dean’s testimony. “More frustrating than the lack of hard evidence was the absence of any obvious line of investigation by which additional facts could be uncovered,” Ben-Veniste and Frampton recalled.
One morning Cox came in looking particularly tired. “I’m afraid I didn’t sleep much last night,” he said, when questioned by Doyle. “I was worrying about witness Nixon.”
“If you think you had a bad night, imagine what kind of nights he’s having,” Ben-Veniste replied.
* * *
Though Woodward and Bernstein had missed much of the spring and summer’s Cambrian Explosion of scandal revelations while racing to draft their book on the first year of Watergate—the manuscript that became All the President’s Men—other journalists more than picked up the slack. In July, Seymour Hersh began reporting in the New York Times about the fake Pentagon bookkeeping system that had obscured the fourteen months of illegal B-52 bombing of Cambodia. The matter quickly spurred new congressional hearings, which confirmed that the administration had concocted an elaborate double-entry system, known to only a small number of high-ranking officials, to enable a grand lie about the use of one of the military’s most prized assets.V The revelations touched off another congressional probe by Stuart Symington’s Senate Armed Services Committee, which had previously been digging into the Huston Plan. The illegal operation dating back to 1969 clearly implicated two of the newly arrived White House staff—Al Haig, who had been Kissinger’s deputy on the National Security Council during the Cambodia operation, and Melvin Laird, who had then been defense secretary—placing even Nixon’s newly arrived help under scrutiny.
Then another big scoop broke open: John Crewdson and fellow Times man Christopher Lydon flew to Indiana to interview Tom Charles Huston. As he talked to them at his quiet law office, a world away in many respects from the White House, they asked if he still had a copy of his 1970 “Huston Plan” to remake the U.S. intelligence world. He paused for a moment, shrugged, and pulled it out of his files, nonchalantly handing the reporters one of the most sensitive documents of the entire Nixon presidency. The blockbuster ran two days later.
The deeper into the scandal investigators and reporters got, the more CREEP’s financial tricks and shenanigans began to move to the center. Crewdson struck more journalistic gold when he convinced an FBI source to let him peruse thousands of pages of the bureau’s investigation on Segretti’s “dirty tricks”—he walked out of the Justice Department with his briefcase packed with sensitive files and returned them later to his source—and built his find into two stories neatly tying together Segretti, Magruder, CREEP, and the White House. Relying on “informed sources,” Crewdson explained on the front page of the paper on July 9 how “the Republican party’s effort to sabotage Democratic Presidential candidates in 1972 was a two-pronged operation approved by some of President Nixon’s most influential aides, directed in part by White House officials, and financed with more than $100,000 in unreported contributions to the Nixon campaign.”
Around the same time, Archibald Cox announced that American Airlines had come forward to admit the substantial, illegal contribution its CEO George Spater had orchestrated to CREEP as part of its attempt to win approval for a pending merger with Western Airlines. Spater explained in a statement how he’d felt pressured by Kalmbach to play ball. “I knew Mr. Kalmbach to be both the President’s personal counsel and counsel for our major competitor [United Airlines],” Mr. Spater said in a statement. “I concluded that a substantial response was called for.”
Cox encouraged other companies that had made similar illegal donations to come forward voluntarily, stating, “It is fair to say that when corporate officers come forward voluntarily and early to disclose illegal political contributions to candidates of either party, their voluntary acknowledgement will be considered as a mitigating circumstance in deciding what charges to bring.”
Across the country, dozens of corporate executives who had played ball with CREEP the year before gulped.
* * *
On July 10, John Mitchell finally returned to Washington to testify publicly before the Ervin Committee. Mitchell had made quite clear in press statements that he wasn’t going to take the blame for Watergate, nor would he allow Nixon to be blamed for it either. “Somebody has tried to make me the fall guy, but it’s not going to work,” he told UPI.
Behind closed doors with the committee staff, he had been clearly nervous—the toll of that spring, both professionally and personally, was weighing on him, particularly after Martha had engaged in an hours-long running battle with the press camped outside their New York apartment, throwing a doorman’s cap at one reporter and striking another twice. “You are part of the Communists,” she’d screamed—and in the committee room Ervin’s chief aide, Rufus Edmisten, watched as the former attorney general’s hands trembled when he tried to light his pipe. Edmisten finally leaned forward and offered to hold the lighter. “Young man, that was very kind,” Mitchell said.
When his time at the witness table arrived, Mitchell said virtually nothing at all. “Throughout his long testimony before the committee he sat placidly smoking his pipe, finding it difficult to recall the details of practically any event, and claiming a lack of knowledge of most relevant facts,” Dash recalled. Nothing the committee could throw at him rankled him. “He gave the impression that 15 years of hearings would not alter his story,” Thompson recalled.
