Watergate, page 49
As Mitchell confirmed that he’d met frequently and repeatedly with Nixon, Ervin pressed him, “Did you at any time tell the President anything you knew about the White House horrors?”
“No sir, I did not,” Mitchell replied.
“Did the President at any time ask you what you knew about Watergate?” Ervin asked, and Mitchell again declined, leaving the senator to quip, “If the cat hadn’t any more curiosity than that it would still be enjoying its nine lives—all of them.”
“I hope the President enjoys eight more of them,” Mitchell shot back. The former attorney general again made clear he considered nothing more important than the president’s reelection. All other goals—including, it seemed, fully informing Nixon about the work of his own campaign—had taken a backseat.
After Mitchell’s first day of testimony, Baker, Thompson, and others were debriefing when a secretary interrupted them: Martha was on the phone. She’d been watching the proceedings while on a visit to Mississippi, drinking a steady stream of Bloody Marys as she did. When Thompson picked up, she told him to pass along her compliments to Baker about how well the first day had gone. “You tell Howard to get John so mad tomorrow that he will just blurt it out—just blurt the truth all out,” she told Thompson.
“Blurt out what Mrs. Mitchell?”
“You know—you know what I mean,” she said. “You know what he’s doing, you know who he’s protecting—just get him so mad he’ll tell the truth.”
Nearly everyone shared Martha’s observation: Mitchell clearly knew more than he would say. “No attempt was made to lend some minimal plausibility to his denials, to his repeated ‘I don’t recall’ concerning crucial incidents,” wrote essayist Mary McCarthy. “The weariness and boredom of his voice suggested that all this was ridiculous, preposterous, but also that he could not take the trouble to work up a lie that someone might conceivably believe.”
The Senate select committee gathered again on July 12 and confronted a letter from President Nixon refusing to provide the committee with any of the documents it had requested. “The way I see it,” Ervin said, “the President can’t use executive privilege to deny us these papers. They deal with political matters or criminal activities in the Watergate affair. Executive privilege is supposed to protect as confidential only those conversations between the President and his aides which assist the president in carrying out his statutory or Constitutional duties. None of the papers we want has anything to do with the President’s lawful duties.”
Weicker chimed in, adding, “The only language the President will understand is a subpoena from this committee.” The senators, though, were wary of so instantly provoking a showdown between the branches of government.
That afternoon, Nixon and Ervin spoke on the phone for sixteen minutes; Ervin’s office was crowded with staff and senators, all listening to his end of the conversation and eagerly interpreting the chairman’s bushy, twitching eyebrows. They could tell the conversation wasn’t going well long before Ervin curtly finished by saying, “I’m sorry we can’t work this out.”
On the other end of the line, Nixon was in a particularly foul mood, suffering that day with what his doctors would eventually diagnose as pneumonia. As he hung up with Ervin, he continued to rant in the Oval Office to Haig and Kissinger about Ervin’s request: “I’m glad I was so tough on him—hard—what he and Weicker asked is disgraceful.”
“Disgraceful,” Haig concurred.
As they spoke, Nixon dug in harder. “Ervin wants Dash to come down and look over the papers and determine which ones would come out. I said, ‘Not on your life. There ain’t gonna be no papers that come out,’ ” Nixon said. “Let him sue. Christ, they—If the Supreme Court wants to decide in its wisdom to help destroy the Presidency, the Supreme Court destroys it. I’m not gonna destroy it.”
Next, the president went off on Ervin directly: “I’m not going to allow this slick Southern asshole to pull that old crap on me. He pretends he’s gentle and he’s trying to work things out—bullshit!”
The seething continued through the afternoon; an hour later, on the phone with Haig, Nixon labeled Howard Baker a “simpering asshole” and said he intended to fire Archibald Cox: “I am so disgusted with Cox in the press that I’m about to let him go next—next week anyway. I don’t know if it’s right or if it’s wrong, but believe me here, we’re fighting a desperate battle.”
Foul and ill-tempered, he shifted to the topic of selecting federal judges—saying he wanted to find the “toughest, meanest right-wing” nominees, and then delineating his second most important criteria: “No Jews. Is that clear? We’ve got enough Jews. Now if you find some Jew that I think is great, put him on there. Put a Black Jew? But you gotta do something in this damned office—what the hell are we here for?”
An hour later, he was once again ranting to Kissinger, “The hell with [Ervin’s committee]. I’ll sit on those papers. If I have to burn them, I’ll burn every goddamned paper in this house. You realize that? Every paper in this house before I’ll hand them over to that committee.… We’ll have a Constitutional crisis. If we do, it’ll be a goddamn, ding-dong battle and we might—if we lose, I’ll burn the papers.” And he concluded, “I would never turn these papers over to a court, never give them over to the committee.”
Kissinger concurred. “Ninety percent of this stuff they are talking about goes on all the time,” he told the president.
“Keep, keep fighting,” Nixon replied.
Then, his condition worsening, Nixon headed quietly to a nearby navy medical clinic for a chest X-ray, then returned to the White House to prepare to head to the Bethesda Naval Medical Center for a few days’ treatment and rest.
At 8:41 p.m. that night, Nixon called his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, to tell her he was heading into the hospital. “I told Ziegler to make the announcement because I said it’s the only time in his career he will hear the press corps clap,” Nixon grimly joked.
“Oh those bastards—they won’t clap,” Woods replied.
That exchange comprised the final words of some 3,700 hours of conversations and telephone calls that the White House taping system captured.
I. Cox’s first choices included a legendary Boston Republican attorney, James St. Clair, and a Justice Department veteran, John Doar. Both men would be drawn into the case in the months ahead anyway.
II. Volner’s presence, the only woman on the Watergate task force, caused wonder and confusion throughout the investigation. On her first day on the job, she and Neal met with Jeb Magruder. Not yet thirty herself, Volner was struck by how young the thirty-eight-year-old campaign aide looked; when Neal asked if anyone wanted coffee, Magruder turned to Volner and said, “I’ll take mine black.” Neal, chomping as usual on a cigar, drawled, “Not very smart, insulting a major player in deciding the terms of your plea agreement.” Instead, George Frampton, the junior prosecutor on the team, fetched everyone’s coffee.
III. “[Cox] seemed like a scholarly, calm objective professional, but he was in fact a fairly conventional Nixon hater,” Len Garment wrote later. “The organizing objective of these investigations was to bleed Nixon to death.”
IV. In fact, he’d moved ahead with appointing Cox in part out of just how loyal he felt to Nixon, knowing that absent an arm’s length investigation “the struggle to preserve my independence would be painful.”
V. A year later, Nixon’s effort to have the U.S. Air Force lie about its missions would be cited in a fourth article of impeachment by the House of Representative as an egregious abuse of power; that specific article, ultimately, was not adopted by the House.
Chapter 34 Butterfield’s Bombshell
Alexander Butterfield had spent nearly all of the first Nixon term watching the president up close as Haldeman’s chief assistant, his desk mere feet from the Oval Office itself, but in the second term he’d consumed the Ervin hearings from afar, watching from the tenth floor of the Orville Wright Federal Building at 800 Independence Avenue NW, the headquarters of the Federal Aviation Administration, where he’d been installed as the nation’s head aviation leader. It was a plum gig for a combat fighter pilot and recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross, one he’d been enjoying thoroughly, but he had a sinking feeling about the storm clouds on the horizon. As one of the only people in the capital—one of the only people in the world, really—who knew that there were tapes of every conversation in the Oval Office, Butterfield understood the implications of John Dean’s testimony. God, if they only knew, he thought.
Butterfield had been asked by Eugene Boyce of the Senate Watergate Committee staff to come in for what was expected to be a routine interview on Friday, July 13. The Senate investigators had been working through their “satellite charts,” the maps of the minor figures around the major ones—Dean, Mitchell, Ehrlichman, Magruder, and Haldeman—and Butterfield was next on their list.
Before he left the house that day, he and his wife, Charlotte, discussed how he would handle the delicate question of the tapes if it came up. He thought it unlikely—no more than a one-in-a-million chance—but he told her, “I think the best thing for me to do is wing it if I can, if the question is oblique or vague.” If the question was direct, though, he had to tell the truth. “I can’t get caught up in this thing,” he said. Charlotte suspected it was an easier decision than he let on—she was sure her husband was going to find a way to mention the tapes. Whatever loyalty or gratitude he had once had to the nation’s chief executive had long since evaporated. The man had abused him and too many other aides for too long.I
Butterfield’s interview in Room G-334 was considered so routine that no senators attended; Democratic investigator Sam Armstrong and deputy Republican counsel Donald Sanders led the questioning, joined by two other investigators and a stenographer. The interview was physically uncomfortable—it was oppressively hot inside the room—and the committee’s work space was a mess, as janitorial crews were prohibited for security purposes from cleaning it.
Armstrong, a longtime friend of Bob Woodward’s, had gotten the job on the committee after Dash had tried to recruit the Washington Post reporter and, rebuffed, asked instead for the smartest person Woodward knew. Now, as he started in on Butterfield, he was instantly impressed by the former aide’s military manner and steel-trap memory. “With his hands folded in front of him, he considered each question carefully,” Armstrong recalled later. “He looked directly at me; he spoke in calm and even tones.”
The committee staff had an agreement not to interrupt each other’s examinations, so Sanders sat for three hours in silence, listening intently and taking notes as Armstrong walked Butterfield through the operations and flow of the Oval Office. During the session, Sanders remained puzzled about the conversation summaries they kept reviewing, which seemed too detailed to be reconstructed from later recollections or notes. Was it possible they were reading actual verbatim transcripts? But from what? When it was his turn to question Butterfield, Sanders asked a blunt question: Why would the president take John Dean to a certain corner of the Oval Office to have a sensitive conversation?
“I was hoping you fellows wouldn’t ask me that. I’ve wondered what I would say. I’m concerned about the effect my answer will have on national security and international affairs,” Butterfield replied. “But I suppose I have to assume that this is a formal, official interview in the same vein as if I were being questioned by the committee under oath?”
“That’s right,” Sanders replied.
“Well, yes, there’s a recording system in the White House.”
The words hit like lightning—and for the next forty minutes, Butterfield laid out how the system worked, where the microphones had been installed, and who had access to the tapes.
By the time they were done, it was about 6:30 p.m. Everyone involved knew this was a game-changer. Sanders raced to track down Fred Thompson at a nearby Capitol Hill pub and found his boss having drinks with a reporter. As casually as he could, he joined the two and ordered a beer. Eventually, Sanders asked to speak to Thompson outside and filled him in. Thompson immediately called Baker.
Armstrong and his colleague Gene Boyce, who had also been in the Butterfield interview, meanwhile, went to find Dash, catching him just as he was leaving for home to celebrate Shabbat with friends. They pushed Dash back into his office: “Sam, Nixon taped all his conversations—apparently including those with Dean.” Dash stood frozen for a moment. “Let me call Sarah,” he then said. He was going to be late for dinner.
The team needed to get Butterfield’s revelation out in public testimony fast—he was set to leave the following Tuesday for an aviation treaty negotiation in the Soviet Union. They worked through the weekend to line up an appearance, but the aide was deeply reluctant to be the public source on the taping and repeatedly asked the committee to subpoena another person who would have knowledge of it.II The lawyers told him it was impossible.
On Sunday, while Nixon was still in the hospital, Butterfield called Len Garment at the White House and told him of what was about to befall the administration; Garment was as stunned as anyone to learn about the tapes. The White House had no strategy for this. Haig immediately ordered the taping system shut down.III
Monday, Butterfield was getting his hair cut at 11:15 a.m. when he was told he would be expected to testify that afternoon. If he wasn’t in Ervin’s office by 1 p.m., the Senate would send U.S. marshals looking for him.
Since Sanders had uncovered the taping system in questioning, Dash and Thompson agreed that the Republican committee members would get first crack at Butterfield. “This is going to be quite a blow to the administration, and I don’t want the minority on the committee to look like it got caught with its pants down, when in fact it played a key role in discovering the tapes,” Howard Baker explained to his Democratic colleagues.
When the committee convened at 2 p.m. that Monday the 16th, spectators were surprised to hear Butterfield’s name announced as the next witness. (As everyone gathered, Dash leaned over into the audience and whispered to his wife, “We’ve got a bombshell for you.”) Following a half-dozen opening questions, Thompson got to the meat: “Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?”
“I was aware of listening devices, yes sir,” Butterfield said. In subsequent exchanges, the two walked through each of the recording devices, its location and operation, and purpose. There were recording systems not only in the Oval Office, Butterfield revealed, but in the Executive Office Building, the Cabinet Room, and the president’s most used phones, including in the Lincoln Sitting Room in the residence and the president’s cabin at Camp David. “There was no doubt in my mind they were installed to record things for posterity, for the Nixon library,” the former aide explained. “The President was very conscious of that kind of thing.” Most of those in the president’s orbit, he added, didn’t know that the tapes existed.
Now it was Dean’s turn to watch Butterfield on TV. As he heard the aide’s testimony, Dean breathed a big sigh of relief. “I was no longer the sole accuser,” he recalled thinking.
* * *
From the start, Cox and his team had been more annoyed than anything by the televised spectacle of the hearings. The manipulation, the strategy, and the drama—not to mention the information spilling into public view—complicated their work, witness-wise and investigation-wise.
But Butterfield’s blockbuster—that was something else.
Activity in the office all but stopped as the special prosecutor’s team watched the day’s hearing. Cox’s executive assistant, a mustachioed, onetime Olympic speed skater named Peter Kreindler, stood watching the small TV kept on Doyle’s desk. As he tamped the tobacco in his pipe, he kept repeating, “Can you believe that? Can you believe that?” Minutes later, inside Cox’s sparse office, he and Lacovara absorbed the news that apparently a tape existed—or had existed at one point, at least—of every meaningful conversation in the Watergate conspiracy. It changed everything.
Until then, as convincing as Dean had been as a witness and as well as he had withstood cross-examination from the prosecutor, his impact had been muted because he had stood so alone. The president, Mitchell, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman had all maintained that the lawyer was lying when he said they’d known of the break-in or participated in any cover-up, and until now there’d been no way to resolve that dispute. “Suddenly, a debate that appeared to turn solely on the credibility of various conflicting witnesses—with Dean far outnumbered—could be resolved through uniquely probative evidence,” Lacovara recalled.
There was no way, Cox knew, that Nixon was going to hand over the tapes without a fight. Luckily, his team already had a leg up: Investigators had recently received the President’s Daily Diaries for June 15, 1972, through April 30, 1973, after a small battle with the White House: Buzhardt had been stalling the special prosecutor’s request for weeks, but had gotten spooked when he heard that Cox was calling a press conference (the event was only to introduce his latest hires) and sent over the files. Those documents, which listed the minute-by-minute log of the president’s movements, phone calls, and meetings, would now be key in reconstructing what conversations Cox’s office should fight for next. Cox, after talking it through, had a simple message for his aides: “Let’s get started.”
Cox immediately requested the White House disclose the precise location of the tapes and identify their custodian. Buzhardt responded that they were being held by the Secret Service, but were under the president’s sole custody. Cox grasped immediately the meaning of Buzhardt’s wording: There was no way to get the tapes without fighting over executive privilege. For its part, the Ervin Committee officially issued two subpoenas, one for tapes and one for records—the first congressional subpoenas for presidential materials ever—and met with a similar response from Buzhardt. Any attempt to access the tapes would have to go through the president, and the power and privileges of the presidency.
