Watergate, page 9
As his first assistant, Dean brought in another young lawyer, Fred Fielding, and the team began digging into the clemency petitions and conflict-of-interest questions that typically fell to their startup internal law firm, but they had bigger goals. “Word soon got around that the counsel’s office was eager to tackle anyone and everyone’s problems and do it discreetly,” Dean recalled. As Dean gained his colleagues’ and superiors’ trust, he was pulled away from bureaucratic paperwork and into an ever-widening set of what he termed “intelligence requests,” a motley assortment of questions about how best to counter or undermine critics of the White House. The cleanup tasks in the Nixon White House varied widely—ranging from digging for dirt on prominent antiwar protesters to investigating a comedian, “Richard M. Dixon,” who resembled the president. One day, in the White House bunker off the East Wing, Dean and a small group of aides gathered to watch a pornographic B movie, Tricia’s Wedding, about the first daughter’s wedding to Ed “Cox”—done by actors in drag—to weigh whether the White House could move to suppress it. (They didn’t have to—the movie was so bad, it disappeared on its own.)
The other staffer assigned to Dean, transferred from Ehrlichman, was Jack Caulfield, the former detective who handled an odd portfolio of discreet tasks for the White House. The Irish Bronx native Caulfield had worked with the NYPD’s prestigious Bureau of Special Services and Investigations (BOSSI) from 1955 to 1966, overseeing the police department’s protection of dignitaries and its intelligence operations against Communists, antiwar groups, feminist activists, civil rights agitators, and other perceived radicals and troublemakers. (The controversial unit was not known for respecting civil liberties or legal niceties as it conducted its surveillance, penetration, and intelligence-gathering.) After a strong performance as Nixon’s security chief during the ’68 campaign—no small feat in a year that saw Nixon campaign without incident across seventy-seven cities amid national riots and the dual assassinations of King and Bobby Kennedy—Caulfield had wanted to be the nation’s chief U.S. marshal.VI Instead, he ended up at the White House on Ehrlichman’s staff as part fixer, part opposition research man, and part liaison to federal law enforcement agencies like the Secret Service—the most notable of his tasks being keeping an eye on the doings of Ted Kennedy, Nixon’s possible rival for the ’72 reelection.
Early on, Caulfield recruited another former NYPD BOSSI colleague, Anthony T. Ulasewicz, to be the president’s personal private eye. Ulasewicz’s “job interview” with Ehrlichman, such as it was, occurred in May 1969 in the American Airlines lounge at LaGuardia. The conversation, at first, didn’t go well; the White House aide was put off by Ulasewicz’s demeanor, which he interpreted as arrogance. “Your silence bothers me,” Ehrlichman said. “I stay well-sealed, like a clam,” replied the first-generation Polish cop, whose large, dough-faced head usually maintained a particularly blank expression. Ulasewicz noticed in their conversation how fascinated Ehrlichman seemed with the derring-do of secret investigations, and he proceeded to dictate his employment terms: He wouldn’t do paperwork, refused to do any wiretaps, and payment had to come through a cutout. There should be no traceable ties between Ulasewicz and the White House.
Ehrlichman approved, and handed off the detective to Nixon’s personal attorney, Herbert Kalmbach. Later, after the scandals around Nixon began to break open, the New York Times would name Kalmbach “the most mysterious figure among the strangely assorted cast of characters in the Watergate affair,” but at the time he met up with Ulasewicz in D.C.’s Madison Hotel, he was all but unknown in Washington circles, except within an elite group who hoped to curry the president’s favor.
Kalmbach had risen in Republican circles alongside his USC law school friend Robert Finch, helping Finch win the lieutenant governership of California before he went onto Nixon’s cabinet as the secretary of health, education, and welfare. Kalmbach had been a prodigious fundraiser for Nixon’s ’68 campaign and served as deputy finance chair under Maurice Stans, but rather than join the Nixon administration after the election, he had chosen to remain in California to expand his law practice. After Nixon named him as his personal lawyer, Kalmbach’s Newport Beach firm exploded in growth, attracting blue-chip businesses, like Marriott Hotels, United Airlines, and Travelers Insurance, who suddenly thought it useful to have the president’s lawyer on retainer too. (As one local businessman said, “If you have business with Washington and you want a lawyer, you can get to Herb, but you can’t talk to him for less than $10,000.”) Kalmbach’s role for Nixon—part attorney, part fixer—existed entirely behind the scenes; the only photo that seemed to exist of him came from a golf tournament, and his ability to conduct deals with a minimal paper trail was both impressive and unsettling. As the New York Times later wrote, “He handled Mr. Nixon’s 1969 acquisition of his $1.4 million San Clemente estate so deftly that there exists no public record showing the President’s interest in the trust-held property.”
A big part of Kalmbach’s role was safeguarding the Nixon campaign’s cash kitty that paid for people like Ulasewicz. When the Nixon administration took office in 1969 and Stans started his role in the cabinet (as secretary of commerce), he turned over to Kalmbach the $1,668,000 remaining in the campaign’s bank accounts—more than a million of which was stored in cash in safe-deposit boxes at the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York and the Riggs National Bank in D.C.; over the next two years, Kalmbach moved most of the cash west. From there, tens of thousands of dollars in cash moved from a bank in one tower of Kalmbach’s office complex to another bank in a different tower, until the money was all but untraceable. Add in another $300,000 cash that had flowed to Nixon’s coffers in his years in the White House, and by the time the ’72 campaign kicked off, Kalmbach was the trustee of close to $2 million that could be used at the discretion of a small number of Nixon aides for what they deemed “political purposes.”VII
At their Madison Hotel meeting, Kalmbach arranged to pay Ulasewicz out of those laundered and untraceable ’68 campaign funds. Ulasewicz promptly created an alias, Edward T. Stanley, and explained how Nixon’s team could contact him: Every day at 4 p.m., he would call a New York answering service, and if there was a message for Stanley, he would call Kalmbach. Then “Edward T. Stanley” got to work; all his tasks had one thing in common—getting even with Nixon’s enemies and helping to wage the war that Hoover wouldn’t.
One day in July 1969, Caulfield dispatched him to Martha’s Vineyard within hours of learning that Ted Kennedy had been involved in an accident there on Chappaquiddick Island resulting in the death of a former aide, Mary Jo Kopechne. “Stanley,” posing as a newspaper reporter, was standing on the island’s Dike Bridge less than twenty-four hours after Senator Kennedy’s car went off of it and was the first to speak with several relevant accident witnesses, but he didn’t manage to uncover any key details. For months afterward, he regularly returned to the island, digging and searching, and in subsequent months, he traveled to dozens of states snooping on all manner of other Nixon irritants; he counted ninety-three distinct assignments, from antiwar protesters, to a Florida schoolteacher who harassed the president’s daughter, to the drinking habits of House Speaker Carl Albert.
“It doesn’t matter who you were or what ideological positions you took,” one Nixon aide explained. “You were either for us or against us, and if you were against us, we were against you. It was real confrontational politics and there were a number of men around the White House who clearly relished that sort of thing.”
* * *
The deeper into the first term Nixon got, the less he seemed to trust anyone around him—unsure even who his adversaries might be inside the White House. Even those he trusted the most, he didn’t really trust that much, and by February 1971, he had decided he needed to take more aggressive action to secure his own historical legacy.
Alexander P. Butterfield was one of the nation’s most accomplished air force pilots—ninety-eight combat recon missions in Vietnam—and looked the part. Strikingly handsome and personable, Colonel Butterfield had years before been UCLA’s “Most Collegiate Looking Male,” and had joined Nixon’s White House after reading in a newspaper that his old college acquaintance, Haldeman would be a top White House aide. Through some sneaky networking, he managed to reconnect with the incoming chief of staff, who excitedly recruited Butterfield to his own staff based on the colonel’s experience navigating Washington, and he had been in the White House since the start, attending Haldeman’s very first staff meeting of the new administration at 8 a.m. on January 21, 1969.
It was days, though, before Haldeman would even introduce Butterfield to Nixon, and weeks before they achieved any sort of productive working relationship. Yet over time, Butterfield became a key functionary, the person Nixon could trust with the most delicate of tasks, and he was promoted to handle the minutiae of the daily Oval Office operations, privy to the president’s biggest secrets. “Alex is the perfect buffer,” Nixon told Haldeman one night.VIII
Butterfield studiously learned the rhythms of the presidential day; he was one of the few who understood that Nixon took an hour-long nap at 1 p.m. nearly every day in a cubbyhole room off the Oval Office and how the president would retreat at suppertime to his hideaway in the Executive Office Building next door, writing quietly on his ubiquitous yellow legal pads while he drank a glass of wine or Scotch and his butler served dinner. The room had been decorated in “politician casual,” its soaring ceilings offset by a favorite lounge chair, brought down from the Nixons’ New York apartment, and bookshelves packed with presidential biographies, multitudes of miniature elephants, and even a golf card showing a Nixon hole in one. Around 10:30 p.m., he’d take off his tie.
As his administration advanced, Nixon worried that his brilliant strategy and decisive leadership weren’t being adequately captured for posterity; the notes that Haldeman, Butterfield, and others took in their meetings didn’t record the full picture of what was happening in great moments. Considering his options, he found a solution that would help him write the most accurate and thorough memoir ever of his administration. “The president wants a taping system installed,” Higby told Butterfield. “And Bob wants you to take care of it.”
The move was a remarkable turnabout for Nixon; in the days after his election in 1968, he’d been shown on a transition-focused tour of the White House the private taping system used by Lyndon Johnson and squirmed. He’d ordered the Army Signal Corps to rip it out once he arrived in office.
The equipment’s existence was to be of the utmost secrecy, Haldeman decreed—and that meant the military and the White House Communications Agency couldn’t be relied on to handle it. Instead, Butterfield contacted the Secret Service’s Al Wong, who headed its Technical Security Division, and talked through the parameters. The following weekend, while the president was off to Key Biscayne, Secret Service technicians carefully drilled five microphones up through the president’s Oval Office desk and covered them in a thin layer of varnish. Other microphones were hidden in the lights atop the fireplace mantel. Everything fed into Sony 800B tape recorders hidden in a sealed compartment in the White House basement—and all of it, Wong explained, was voice-activated.
When Butterfield and Haldeman filled Nixon in on the new Oval Office accoutrement, Nixon said, “Who knows about that incidentally?”
“Just you, Alex, and I and Higby and that’s it,” Haldeman answered.
“Rose doesn’t know about it?” Nixon asked, referring to his longtime secretary, Rose Mary Woods.
“No.”
“Don’t want Henry to know about it,” Nixon added. “Ehrlichman?”
“No, absolutely not.”
“This has got to be a well-kept secret,” Nixon said. “Mum’s the word.”
Nixon’s comment about not wanting Henry Kissinger to know about the taping system struck Haldeman as particularly notable, a sign that the president was afraid he wasn’t going to get credit for his administration’s successes. The Washington establishment was falling in love with Kissinger and seemed to be giving “their Henry” all the credit for things that went right with the Nixon policies, while laying the failures squarely on “that bastard” Nixon’s shoulders. “We knew Henry as the ‘hawk of hawks’ in the Oval Office,” Haldeman recalled dryly years later, “but in the evenings, a magical transformation took place. Touching glasses at a party with his liberal friends, the belligerent Kissinger would suddenly become a dove—according to the reports that reached Nixon.”
The staffers agreed that no one else would know, beyond the small team of Secret Service techs who maintained the system, and Haldeman suggested that if they ever had to rely on the tape record to clarify or publicize a conversation, they could just pretend it came from notes. “Anytime that anything gets used from it, it’s on the basis of ‘your notes’ or ‘the president’s notes,’ ” he said.
From February 16, 1971, until July 12, 1973, the recording system would capture 3,432 hours of conversation, providing, as demanded, a look at Nixon’s mind and decision-making that was the most thorough and intimate view America has had of any of its presidents. It also would be the root cause of his downfall.
* * *
As that spring of 1971 unfolded, John Dean had overseen the White House command post during the May Day Tribe protests, an action during which hundreds of thousands of protesters descended on the capital and paralyzed the city’s business; some 14,517 were arrested during the rest of the two weeks of running battles across the city from April 22 to May 6—including 7,000 in just a single day at their peak—all pushed and prodded into makeshift outdoor camps at RFK Stadium on the outskirts of Capitol Hill by police and federal agencies overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the demonstrations. These had been some of the darkest, scariest moments of the administration yet; Julie Nixon, a visiting Mamie Eisenhower, and others were sent screaming from a lunch in the White House family dining room when a tear gas canister was actually set off by security and filled the presidential residence with choking gas. Inside John Mitchell’s Justice Department, army infantry set up machine gun nests to secure the building’s long corridors in the event protesters managed to overwhelm the guards outside. Nixon decried the militants “who in the name of demonstrating for peace abroad presume that they have the right to break the peace at home.”IX
Dean monitored the federal response from the White House, submitting twice-hourly reports to the president from his war room as he collected dispatches from police and military units around the capital. (“Live bomb found suspended underneath Taft Street Bridge; deactivated by military bomb squad,” Dean wrote at 1:30 p.m. on May 4. At 7 p.m., he reported: “Chief Jerry Wilson feels that the demonstrators have been broken in strength and spirit.”) Dean and Ehrlichman had also flown over the city in a military helicopter, watching cars burn in Georgetown and fights break out between police and rock-throwing protesters.
As the White House team monitored the goings-on, Chuck Colson fluttered in and out. At one point Dean’s colleague Fred Fielding joked that they should send oranges to the arrested protesters, mimicking Democrat Edmund Muskie, who often sent oranges to his campaign volunteers as a thank-you. “I’ll do it,” Colson said, running out the door. When he came back, Colson reported, “I sent the oranges and tipped off the press.” The orange crate, dispatched to RFK Stadium, where the protesters awaited their fate in steel pens, read, “Best of luck, Senator Edmund Muskie.”X
Running the May Day command post had been a heady experience for Dean, who had been the White House counsel for a year by the time of the protests and the subsequent Pentagon Papers scandal a month later. To him, it was the surest sign yet that he’d made himself useful and was on his way to being indispensable.
Now, two months later, the oddball team who worked in Dean’s office—the White House detective and the off-the-books private eye—seemed perfect to tackle the plot germinating in Chuck Colson’s mind to follow through on the president’s order to burglarize the Brookings Institution and ensure Nixon’s darkest secrets remained buried.
All they needed, Colson realized, was a little help from the CIA’s most prolific novelist.
I. Alexander Butterfield, Haldeman’s top deputy, once wrote a lengthy after-action memo to account for every decision and elapsed minute to explain how he’d waited nineteen minutes to inform Haldeman and Nixon of the shooting of presidential candidate George Wallace on May 15, 1972. “You’re really working a crisis center all the time,” John Dean said.
II. In a surprisingly short time frame, Mitchell’s Justice Department made a real impact: His anti-crime initiatives in D.C., which as a federal jurisdiction Mitchell exerted control over and where Nixon had ordered, “[Push] hard on law and order,” led to a decrease in crime in 1970, the first in fourteen years. The Nixon administration pushed nearly thirty pieces of anti-crime legislation through Congress, led prosecutions against top organized crime leaders, and made inroads on narcotics. In 1972, the FBI reported the first national drop in crime rates since the 1950s. The department’s efforts were both macro and micro; his Justice Department, working with a young aide named John Dean, even narrowed the circumstances where government witnesses could escape criminal prosecution through seeking immunity, a policy change that would ironically later be used against both of them.
III. Later, Hoover always brushed aside the rejected application, saying the bureau hadn’t been hiring then, but actually the recruiter who interviewed Nixon thought he was “lacking in aggression.”
IV. Warrantless government wiretaps, including of domestic radicals, were allowed for national security purposes until a June 1972 Supreme Court decision found them unconstitutional. In an 8–0 decision, the court rejected the administration claims that surveillance of political dissidents was allowed without court approval for intelligence and national security purposes. “History abundantly documents the tendency of government—however benevolent and benign in its motives—to view with suspicion those who most fervently dispute its policies,” Justice Lewis Powell wrote. “The price of lawful public dissent must not be a dread of subjection to an unchecked surveillance power.” The decision was seen as a stunning setback for Nixon’s Justice Department since by that point Nixon had appointed four of the justices.
