The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (13 page)

“Well, they haven’t really tied Hunt to the group [that was arrested] yet, have they?” the president clarified.

“No, except that his name was in their [address] book.”

“Yeah. Or Colson, does he know about all this, so he’s told the story? What does he say?” the president asked.

“I haven’t talked to him, since the story just came this afternoon. But knowing Chuck, I’m sure he’s very disturbed.”

“Hmm. Well, there’s not much we can do about it, is there,” Nixon said. “No,” Haldeman agreed, but as they were speaking, Haldeman had another thought. “Well, if it’s Mitchell,” he said firmly, “I want him to call Kleindienst and Gray in and say, look, this happened. I used to sit on the National Security Council. You know, this happens to lead to some lines that don’t relate to the Watergate/Democratic National Committee caper. Your people are investigating stuff that must not be investigated. That’s the signal you’ve gotten from the CIA. For Christ’s sake, smarten up, smarten up and turn this off. Go ahead and toss your cards to the grand jury on the open-and-shut-case stuff and let it go at that.” When Nixon did not respond, Haldeman continued, “McCord is developing a case, talking to the attorneys over there. He is trying to get F. Lee Bailey to handle his case. So we may be getting into an F. Lee Bailey versus Edward Bennett Williams—” Haldeman said, savoring the idea.
*
 

Nixon observed, “I don’t know anything about that,” pointing out, “I thought it was all over in the reelection committee.” Haldeman replied, “Hunt is the only tie,” referring to the White House, and he assured Nixon that Colson had told the FBI he had nothing to do with it. “What did he tell them?” Nixon asked.

“He told them the straight truth. He told them he had nothing to do with Hunt as far as this thing was concerned, that he’d worked with Hunt on totally unrelated—see, Hunt was working for—”

“We know, in a sense, the fact that his gun and wiretapping equipment is still there and so forth, it would seem to me it would be an indication that he’s not afraid of anything. You get my point?” Nixon observed.

Haldeman, who was unhappy that Hunt had these things, explained that Hunt had returned to his EOB office after the arrests at the Watergate. “I can’t understand why he didn’t empty his safe. A lot of this just totally passes me by. I just can’t put it together and have it add up,” Haldeman declared. “It’s just a lot of very strange things in it.”

“Well, the committee contact was through Liddy. What was his job?” Nixon asked. Haldeman explained, “He was the counsel for the finance committee, this job for Stans. That was just a cover.” As Haldeman reported this information, Nixon can be heard tapping his fingers on his desk, contemplatively taking it all in. Haldeman added, “And he’s the guy—” and Nixon finished, “—that did this with apparently Mitchell’s knowledge?” Nixon then pressed, with a questioning and doubtful “Well?” Haldeman’s failure to respond caused Nixon to answer his own question, “We don’t know.”

“Not this, not specifically this, but—” Haldeman was carefully phrasing his response when Nixon interrupted, “—but he was getting information?” Still cautious, Haldeman answered, “Developing intelligence and so forth.”

“He was off on his own, though?” Nixon asked. Haldeman evaded the question and responded vaguely, “And some counteractivity, and that stuff.” “Which, as we know,” Nixon replied confidently, “is standard practice.”

After a long pause, Haldeman volunteered a bit more information. “See, Liddy used to work at the White House, too.” Nixon, surprised, had totally forgotten that in October 1971 he had read and praised a Liddy memorandum arguing for why FBI director Hoover, for whom Liddy had once written speeches, should be removed from his position.
²⁶
“He worked for Bud Krogh,” Haldeman explained. “So did Hunt.”

“Where was Krogh? What capacity?” Nixon asked.

“Narcotics,” Haldeman said. Controlling drugs and narcotics had been a major push by Nixon and his White House, but this was less than a full description of Hunt and Liddy’s work.

“Well, there’s nothing particularly wrong with that,” Nixon noted.

“No, there isn’t,” Haldeman confirmed. “And he worked, at the same time, on the Pentagon Papers.” Haldeman then quickly changed the subject back to Mitchell’s resignation and his proposed brief announcement, which would be accompanied by a longer letter to the president drafted by Moore. Haldeman had a copy of that letter, and after quickly scanning it, said, “Hey, this is pretty good” and read it aloud:

Dear Mr. President,

Your words of friendship and understanding when we met today meant more to me than I can possibly convey in this letter. I have long believed, and often said, nothing is more important to the future of our country than your reelection as president. I had looked forward to devoting all my time and energy to that result. I have found, however, I can no longer do so on a full-time basis and still meet the one obligation which must come first: the happiness and welfare of my wife and daughter. They have patiently put up with my long absence for some four years. The moment has come when I must devote more time to them. Relatively few men have the privilege of serving the president of the United States. In my service, it has been special indeed, because of the strength of your leadership. As I said today, I shall continue to work for your reelection as well as to be grateful for your unfailing friendship and confidence.

“It’s an excellent letter, it couldn’t be better. It’s very subtle,” Nixon observed, and Haldeman agreed, “Very personal, and all that.” Haldeman said the letter would be released with a straight announcement: “John Mitchell announced today he’s resigned as campaign director for the Committee to Re-elect the President in order to devote more time to his wife and family. He will continue to serve the committee in an advisory capacity.” The president was so taken with Moore’s draft for Mitchell that he decided to have Moore work up a draft response for him as well, which he outlined for Haldeman.

At 4:30
P.M.
Nixon asked Clark MacGregor to join him in the Oval Office
and explained to him why Mitchell was leaving, citing ITT (though clearly meaning Watergate) and Martha’s health.
²⁷
Then, speaking more candidly, Nixon added, “But due to that, John has been unable to watch the committee, it is not as well organized as we would like, but he must never know that we think that.”

Haldeman joined the conversation at 4:48
P.M.
, and after a discussion of how to operate the congressional relations staff after MacGregor’s departure, the conversation turned to Watergate. Nixon and Haldeman proceeded to assert the innocence of all the key figures, and while much of this conversation has been redacted, it is clear that MacGregor, a savvy lawyer, did not ask any questions but simply told the president, “I don’t need to know anything about the past, but I need to, I guess, know something about the future. I have said to people absolutely flat-out, I’ve talked to congressmen and senators, that the Committee to Re-elect the President and the White House had absolutely nothing to do with the recently disclosed incident.”

“That’s what you’ve got to, that’s the line you should take,” Nixon confirmed.

“That’s what Mitchell is doing,” Haldeman added.

“I know the White House had nothing to do with it,” the president reassured MacGregor. He said, “As far as the committee is concerned, I know Mitchell had nothing to do with it. As far as the Cubans are concerned, they certainly are Republicans, that’s the problem.”

“There are some lines of interconnection,” Haldeman noted vaguely. “That’s our problem.”

“They certainly were doing it to hurt McGovern and support Nixon. That’s the problem, and that’s what Mitchell basically is concerned about,” the president said. “But you can be sure that, as far as Mitchell is concerned, he, of course, had nothing to do with it. I mean, basically, the reason you can be sure, Clark, even if you figure that he was lying, which he would not do to us, is he’s not a stupid man.”

“Oh, no,” MacGregor agreed.

“[On] the White House thing, Hunt is a former CIA agent. He’s a supersleuth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,” the president explained with his favorite nonexplanation. “There’s some story today that they found some gun in his safe over here, or something like that, but I don’t know anything about it. But he hasn’t been in the White House since when?”

“March, I guess,” Haldeman added.

“March twenty-ninth, I think was the last day he was paid,” MacGregor added, which had been printed in the news accounts.

Haldeman jumped back in. “See, when he was here he worked on a totally different thing. He was in the Bay of Pigs. He was working on the declassification thing, where we had an all-out unit going. He knew about that stuff.” In fact, Hunt never worked on the declassification project. Haldeman then said that Hunt had also worked on the narcotics effort, which was a stretch at best, and in a final bit of disinformation, stated, “Now, he’s also been involved, as this thing starts to develop, in other things we didn’t know anything about. And this is what you get when you start dealing with these underground characters, as you know as a lawyer.”

The president repeated his points, occasionally backing off a bit, as he had with Mitchell, as the conversation proceeded. “All that I know is, the White House had nothing to do with it,” Nixon insisted. “I know Colson had nothing to do with it. I know Hunt was gone. So, as far as Mitchell is concerned, Mitchell is in a spot, I would have to admit, where we really don’t know. You have to worry a bit about it. Mitchell is in a spot where he hasn’t been watching the committee too closely, and you can’t be sure that these Cubans who were hanging around didn’t have some contacts in that committee. I don’t know who. If we did, we’d fire them.”

“Well, they did,” Haldeman said, trumping the president. He added, “The Bureau has a line into one guy at the committee named Liddy.”

“Liddy,” Nixon echoed.

“Who was working over at the Finance Committee, not at the—”

“For Stans,” Nixon interrupted.

“He worked for Stans as a counsel,” Haldeman continued. “He is a guy that was in the White House office working with Krogh’s office on the drug stuff. He knew these people. And they have some lines that tie him into some of this. In their [FBI] interrogation of him, they weren’t satisfied with his answers, or he said he wanted to get a lawyer, and they said, well, the lawyer would tell you to shut up, and he said, well, I’ll do what the lawyer says. And they said, well then, there’s no point in talking to you. When the committee found out what had happened in his interrogation, they fired him. The word that they have fired him is not out yet, and we hope it doesn’t get out. But Liddy has been released from the committee, from his post.”

“If he was involved, and I’m not sure that he was,” Nixon said, notwithstanding the fact that Haldeman had told him Liddy was responsible. (After
MacGregor left Haldeman would elaborate on the latest approach: having the cover-up rise to, but stop at, Liddy.)

“That’s right,” Haldeman said, backing up the president.

“This whole thing is a strange bag,” the president explained.

“Well, that runs to some, flies around directly into the CIA, what they’re concerned about,” Haldeman said. This vague reference to even more complex activities were an effort to tell MacGregor what he might need to know but not in a way that he could possibly understand what Haldeman was actually talking about.

Nixon pushed the discussion forward, “But anyway, the Liddy thing, if he’s involved, Clark, it was an unauthorized involvement. That’s the point that you need to know. It was without the authority or without the knowledge of John Mitchell. That’s the way I’d put it. And as a matter of fact, this has nothing to do with John’s leaving, because he has to leave for other, personal reasons, but in a sense it’s a good thing, because at least you’re in and you know very well that you had nothing to do with anything. And if anything happens, I would assume John—”

“Yeah, but I don’t think, I don’t know. We purposely don’t know a lot of what kind of thing was involved—” Haldeman noted, explaining their willful ignorance. And Nixon added almost simultaneously, “I don’t want to find out.”

“Both on the governmental side or the committee,” Haldeman said, acknowledging that it was more than a CRP problem, that it was related to their government service at the White House as well.

“To me, it’s such a crude God damn thing. You almost think it’s a bunch of double agents,” Nixon said.

“It may very well be,” Haldeman added, with a tone of irony.

“Double agents, that’s what I’m afraid of. It just looks to me like, almost like a fix,” Nixon said, clearly warming to this potential scenario. “Doesn’t it to you? How the hell, I said, why in the name of Christ did they want to bug the national committee? What in the name of God, if you’re going to bug, bug the McGovern committee,” the president said, apparently unaware that Liddy, Hunt and their team had planned to proceed from the DNC to the McGovern headquarters.

Both Nixon and Haldeman continued to proclaim their outrage until MacGregor finally interrupted them, saying, “My fear is that the remarkable record that you’ve made is going to be besmirched by these extraneous things that you have no knowledge of.”

“Sure,” the president commented appreciatively.

Haldeman added, “The worst thing we can do, though, is let them do exactly what they want to, which is to get us so involved in that that we don’t keep shooting our guns.”

Having established his innocence, and Haldeman having made his point, Nixon assumed a more philosophical and presidential posture, observing, “Well, you’re going to have this sort of thing more, I guess. People do stupid things. That long agonizing ITT business—we survived. It was very stupid.”

“We did some stupid things. Our people did some stupid things,” Haldeman agreed. “There are a thousand stupid things like that that don’t get uncovered, that we do and that they do. It’s when they get uncovered that they look so stupid.”

“There will be more. They’re going to have a few problems, too,” the president pointed out.