The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (3 page)

Haldeman and Ehrlichman discussed and approved the statement released by Mitchell on behalf of the CRP, which (falsely) denied any knowledge of or involvement with the illegal entry at the DNC. Ehrlichman later recalled that “we discussed the public statement that was going to be made on it.”
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Haldeman added in his diary that Ehrlichman thought “the
statement is OK and we should get it out.”
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Haldeman said he also talked with Colson and told him “to keep quiet.” He noted that Howard Hunt had been implicated, identifying Hunt as “the guy Colson was using on some of his Pentagon Papers and other research type stuff.” He further wrote, “Colson agreed to stay out of it and I think maybe he really will. I don’t think he is actually involved, so that helps.” Finally, he added that the president was “not aware of all this, unless he read something in the paper, but he didn’t mention it to me.”
²³

President Nixon returned to his Key Biscayne compound from Grand Cay by helicopter on Sunday morning, June 18, 1972, touching down at 11:51
A.M.
Rebozo returned with him, and they went to their nearby residences. In his memoir, Nixon recalled that when he arrived at his home he could smell coffee brewing in the kitchen, so he went to get a cup. There he noticed the
Miami Herald
front page, with a small story in the middle on the left side: M
IAMIANS
H
ELD IN
D
.
C
.
T
RY TO
B
UG
D
EMO
H
EADQUARTERS
. He scanned the opening paragraphs, which said that four of the five men arrested in the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate were from Miami. After reading that they had all been wearing surgical gloves, he “dismissed it as some sort of prank.”
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Absent from his memoir, however, is what appears to have been his delayed reaction to the Watergate story, which occurred a few hours later, when he learned more from Rebozo and then spoke with Colson. After an hour and a half of telephone calls on other business and lunch, Nixon strolled over to Rebozo’s house at 2:45
P.M.
But they visited for only fifteen minutes before returning to the president’s house to call Colson. Rebozo, who was very active with the Miami Cuban community, knew most, if not all, of the men arrested at the Watergate, for their names had been listed in the
Herald
story: Bernard L. Barker, a real-estate broker; Eugenio Martinez, one of Barker’s salesmen; Virgilio Gonzales, a locksmith; and Frank Sturgis, a soldier of fortune—all well-known anti-Castro activists who were respected in the Cuban community. After talking with Rebozo, Nixon understood that this was no prank.

Colson was later unable to recall either of his two conversations with Nixon on June 18, 1972, but he did testify that one of his assistants recalled what was said, because Colson had told him about it after he talked to Nixon. Nixon, he said, “was so furious that he had thrown an ashtray across the room at Key Biscayne and thought it was the dumbest thing he had ever
heard of and was just outraged over the fact that anybody even remotely connected with the campaign organization would have anything to do . . . with something like Watergate.”
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Colson was mistaken when he also testified he believed Nixon had learned of McCord’s role from the newspaper on June 18, 1972, for that information was not publicly reported until Monday, June 19, 1972. It is more likely that Colson, who learned from Ehrlichman, told the president about McCord and Nixon exploded. Although when Nixon later thought about his reaction, he walked it back to a nonreaction, so that he appeared unconcerned, as his later behavior showed. But in the larger picture, Nixon’s first reaction is not particularly important. No doubt he was trying to establish for doubters that he had no direct connection with the Watergate break-in, which I am confident was true.

Because of a passing hurricane late Sunday afternoon, the president decided to not return to Washington until Monday, June 19, 1972, but when the weather turned beautiful Monday morning, he decided to spend the day in Key Biscayne, for more boating and swimming, and to return to the White House that evening. Given the limited information the president had received, there was no reason he would have been particularly concerned about the events at the Watergate. So Nixon spent that Monday morning on the telephone with his personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, and his daughters, Tricia and Julie; he called Haldeman to advise him of his decision to spend the day in Key Biscayne; he talked with Kissinger’s assistant Al Haig, and then with Reverend Billy Graham—which was the longest of his calls—discussing efforts to keep Governor George Wallace from undertaking a third-party run for the presidency, which posed a threat to Nixon’s reelection, as it could split the conservative vote. Reverend Graham was close to Wallace’s wife and thought he could help out.
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At 11:50
A.M.
the president met with Haldeman for an hour and fifteen minutes to discuss campaign logistics and the need to place someone in the CRP to handle the administrative details for Mitchell, but there is no evidence that Watergate was discussed.

Back in Washington, Ehrlichman was further assessing the problem. He called me, requesting I speak with Chuck Colson to see what I could learn, and he asked me to talk with Attorney General Dick Kleindienst to see if he knew where all the Watergate investigation leaks in
The
Washington Post
had come from. I told Ehrlichman that Magruder had called me to tell me that the break-in was Liddy’s work and that Magruder had requested I meet with
Liddy, since they could barely communicate (Magruder claimed Liddy had threatened to kill him). Ehrlichman instructed me to do so and report back to him.

In a walk down Seventeenth Street NW (which is on the west side of the White House grounds), a shaken, slightly disheveled-looking Liddy apologized for his team’s arrest at the Watergate, explaining that they had gone back into the DNC to fix bugs that were not working properly, because Magruder had pushed him for more and better information. He also apologized for using McCord, since he had promised that none of his activities would ever be traceable. He said that with Howard Hunt’s assistance he had recruited the team in Miami, and he was concerned that they were now in jail, although he assured me they would not talk. Liddy said I needed to know that two of the men in jail had been used in an earlier effort—a “national security operation” at Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in California. I asked him if anyone from the White House was involved; he said that no one at the White House had knowledge of his activities, with the possible exception of Haldeman’s aide and liaison to the CRP, Gordon Strachan. As our walk ended, Liddy offered to have himself shot on any street corner if the White House wished to take him out. I told him I did not think that would be necessary.
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At noon I met with Ehrlichman to report all I had learned. Concerned with my own exposure, I also told Ehrlichman that I had been asked to attend two meetings in Mitchell’s office, while he was still attorney general, at which Liddy had presented absurd plans for campaign intelligence gathering that involved kidnapping, prostitutes, chase planes and electronic surveillance. I said Mitchell had turned him down at the first meeting. I arrived late to the second, and when I heard talk of illegal activities, I had thrown cold water on it all by saying I did not believe such matters should be discussed in the office of the attorney general.
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I told Ehrlichman I had reported this information to Haldeman, who had instructed me to have nothing further to do with these activities. I assured Ehrlichman that I believed Liddy’s scheme had been turned off but clearly that had not happened. It was at this time I mentioned in passing that maybe we should hire an experienced criminal law attorney for the staff, for I had no such experience and was unaware of anyone on the staff who did, but he completely dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand.

At 1:45
P.M.
Ehrlichman met with Attorney General Dick Kleindienst,
who was in a mild state of panic. On Sunday, June 18, 1972, after he played in a golf tournament at Burning Tree Country Club in Maryland, Liddy had interrupted his lunch. He caught Kleindienst’s eye, signaling that he needed to speak with him, and then told him he had a personal message from John Mitchell, and they needed privacy. They went to the men’s locker room, where Liddy asked if he’d heard about the arrests the night before at the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate. Kleindienst said that Henry Petersen, the head of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice, had called him about it that morning. Liddy then told Kleindienst that the break-in was an operation of the Nixon reelection committee and that the men arrested were people working under his direction. He said they would keep their mouths shut, but one of the men, James McCord, was an employee at the CRP. “Jesus Christ!” Kleindienst responded, and Liddy proceeded to explain that he wanted to get McCord out of jail right away, before he was identified. Kleindienst said that that would be impossible, that he had no such authority, and that it would be terrible for the president for him to even try. Kleindienst concluded the conversation by telling Liddy to tell Mitchell that if he wanted to call him, he knew where to reach him, and ended the visit. Neither Ehrlichman nor Kleindienst has ever testified about this June 19, 1972, meeting. I do not know if Kleindienst also told Ehrlichman what he told me about his meeting with Liddy and his reaction to what Liddy had told him: As long as he was attorney general he would never prosecute John Mitchell.

After the president completed his meeting with Haldeman on June 19, he headed out for a relaxing afternoon in the sun, starting with a cruise on the
Coco Lobo III
, Rebozo’s houseboat. Nixon found it pleasurable to simply motor around Biscayne Bay reading or simply thinking.
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This excursion was followed by a swim at their favorite beach, to which a crew of strong Secret Service swimmers drove them and then watched over them as lifeguards. After dinner with Rebozo, the president took a short helicopter ride from his compound to Homestead Air Force Base, and got on Air Force One for the trip back to Washington. During the last half hour of the flight the president met with Haldeman, which, Nixon later noted in his diary (contradicting Colson’s testimony), was when he first received “the disturbing news from Bob Haldeman that the break-in of the Democratic National Committee involved someone who is on the payroll of the committee to reelect the president.”
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More important, during this June 19, 1972, meeting on Air Force One the president agreed with the feelings of Ehrlichman and Haldeman, and
the advice of John Mitchell, that the White House, if possible, must stay away from Watergate. Nixon wrote in his diary: “Mitchell had told Bob on the phone enigmatically not to get involved in it, and I told Bob that I simply hoped that none of our people were involved for two reasons—one, because it was stupid in the way it was handled; and two, because I could see no reason whatever for trying to bug the national committee.” Nixon added, “I also urged Bob to keep Colson and Ehrlichman from getting obsessed with the thing so they were unable to spend their time on other jobs. Looking back, the fact that Colson got so deeply involved in the ITT was a mistake because it kept him from doing other things that in retrospect were more important to do. The best thing probably to have done with ITT was just to let it run its course without having the whole staff in constant uproar about it. I hope we can handle this one in that way.”
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The International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT) scandal had erupted in March 1972 and gone on for months. It was triggered by a story on leap-year day, February 29, 1972, by syndicated columnist Jack Anderson claiming that ITT, a multinational conglomerate, had settled a major antitrust lawsuit filed by Nixon’s Department of Justice in exchange for a four-hundred-thousand-dollar, quid pro quo pledge to the city of San Diego, where the 1972 GOP convention was scheduled although later moved to Miami. More specifically, Anderson claimed that ITT’s Washington lobbyist, the “crusty, capable Dita Beard, [had] acknowledged the secret deal after we obtained a highly incriminating memo, written by her, from ITT’s files.” Anderson’s column detailed how Dita Beard and Attorney General John Mitchell had negotiated the terms of the settlement during a lengthy conversation at a dinner party following the Kentucky Derby, given by Kentucky governor Louie Nunn, in May 1971.
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Democrats had jumped on the charge, led by DNC chairman Larry O’Brien and Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), who made the ITT settlement central to the Senate’s approval of the pending confirmation of Richard Kleindienst to be attorney general. Although Kleindienst’s nomination had cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee, he insisted the hearings be reopened so he could clear his name. It proved a disaster, for he lied when he said the White House had no input into the decision to settle the ITT case, as did John Mitchell on the same matter. Nixon had personally called Kleindienst on April 19, 1971, to tell him to settle the case because the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department was taking a position contrary to his
philosophy on antitrust law, not to mention contrary to the positions candidate Nixon had taken during his 1968 presidential campaign. He certainly had no knowledge of ITT’s pledge to San Diego (it was actually only one hundred thousand dollars), for it was made after the president’s call, as was Dita Beard’s purported deal with Mitchell.
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Dita Beard told many different stories about why, or if, she had written her infamous memo.
³⁴
In fact, it appears that she did, but she was trying to take credit for something she had not actually accomplished, and when her faux boasting became public, she disowned it, but lost her job anyway, and then lied about it all.