American Experiment (375 page)

For Jeb Stuart Magruder, like many others caught in the Watergate web, this was a moment of truth, a point of passage. Magruder was no hard-boiled, cynical politico who had fought his way up from the precincts. A Staten Island high school and Williams College graduate, he had worked for IBM and other big corporations, run two small cosmetics companies in Chicago, managed southern California for Nixon in 1968 and accepted with alacrity a White House post as deputy director of communications the
next year. Considered the perfect PR man, he was to go through much of the same anguish, the same passage from arrogance to humiliation, in the following nightmarish months of exposure as others in the White House, but he later related his experience more reflectively and revealingly than his colleagues.

During the “siege” days of 1970, Magruder recalled, the White House existed in “a state of permanent crisis.” Now, after the Watergate break-in, the spacious mansion turned into a Hobbesian world of all against all, a Shakespearean stage of suspicious, frightened men shaken from their pinnacle and clawing for survival. To cover up the burglary White House chiefs and operatives destroyed their own documents, pried open and emptied the safes of others, pressured the CIA to pressure the FBI to limit its investigation. They arranged hush money for the burglars, though, as John Dean noted, “no one wanted to handle this dirty work. Everyone avoided the problem like leprosy.” The White House “thought Mitchell should ‘take care’ of the payments because he had approved the Liddy plan” to burglarize the DNC, while the former Attorney General blamed the White House for sending him Liddy and pressing him for intelligence. Finally a “fund-raiser” was found in the President’s personal attorney, Herbert Kalmbach, who over the next two months gathered $220,000 in $100 bills—soon to be known as CREEP calling cards. Now the frightened men in the White House began to jettison not only records but themselves and one another. Kalmbach quit while under FBI investigation.

In October 1972, Washington
Post
reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, after months of patient sleuthing and with the guidance of a well-informed source—“Deep Throat”—whose identity only Woodward knew, tied the Watergate break-in to “a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by” White House and CRP officials. During the January 1973 trial of the burglars, Judge John J. Sirica, dissatisfied with the efforts of Attorney General Richard Kleindienst’s prosecutors, questioned defense witnesses from the bench. Late in March, McCord, whom “the government” had failed to spring and who feared a severe sentence if he refused to cooperate, charged that others besides the burglars had been involved and that perjury had been committed at the trial. The President was following every move.

The Oval Office, February 28, 1973.
John Dean was once again reporting to the President. The two discussed ways to obstruct the select committee
the Senate had established under Democrat Sam Ervin of North Carolina and Dean assured Nixon that despite the setbacks, the cover-up was still viable:

DEAN
: We have come a long road on this thing now. I had thought it was an impossible task to hold together until after the election until things started falling out, but we have made it this far and I am convinced we are going to make it the whole road and put this thing in the funny pages of the history books rather than anything serious because actually—

NIXON
: It will be somewhat serious but the main thing, of course, is also the isolation of the President.

DEAN
: Absolutely! Totally true!

But by March 13, the scenario Dean presented to the President was less optimistic:

DEAN:
There is a certain domino situation here. If some things start going, a lot of other things are going to start going, and there can be a lot of problems if everything starts falling. So there are dangers, Mr. President.… There is a reason for not everyone going up and testifying.

And on March 21, against Nixon’s enthusiasm for continued hush-money payments—“You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten”—Dean warned:

DEAN:
I think that there is no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’ve got. We have a cancer within, close to the Presidency, that is growing. It is growing daily. It’s compounded, growing geometrically now, because it compounds itself.… Basically, it is because (1) we are being blackmailed; (2) People are going to start perjuring themselves very quickly that have not had to perjure themselves to protect other people in the line. And there is no assurance—

NIXON:
That that won’t bust?

DEAN:
That that won’t bust.

Dean by this time was wondering who “would have to fall on his sword for the President.” Himself? “Yes, I thought. Then, no. There had to be another way.” But if he refused to fall, he might be pushed. Dean’s other way was to beat his co-conspirators in the White House to the federal prosecutors and the Ervin committee and cut a deal.

Senate caucus room, hearings before the Watergate Committee, testimony of John Dean, June 25-29, 1973.
Ponderously, inexorably, the two rival branches of the federal government were wheeling up their artillery against the abuse of presidential power. The judicial branch had demonstrated its power in Judge Sirica’s court; there was talk of impeachment in the House, though it had yet to initiate such proceedings; the Senate select committee hearings had opened on May 17.

The counter-tactic Dean, and fellow Nixon aides John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, in consultation with the President, had devised the White House taking “a public posture of full cooperation,” as Dean recalled, while privately trying to “restrain the investigation and make it as difficult as possible to get information and witnesses.” But with White House and CRP officials—Magruder and Dean himself among them—now jumping ship, the dark and criminal underside of the Nixon White House was being exposed to the Ervin committee and the full glare of television lights. On June 25, Dean began his testimony:

DEAN:
To one who was in the White House and became somewhat familiar with its interworkings, the Watergate matter was an inevitable outgrowth of a climate of excessive concern over the political impact of demonstrators, excessive concern over leaks, an insatiable appetite for political intelligence, all coupled with a do-it-yourself White House staff, regardless of the law.

Dean’s reading of his 245-page opening statement took up the entire first day of his testimony. The next day, Georgia Democrat Herman Talmadge questioned him:

TALMADGE:
Mr. Dean, you realize, of course, that you have made very strong charges against the President of the United States that involves him in criminal offenses, do you not?

DEAN:
Yes sir, I do.

But Dean kept his finger coolly pointed at the President. Later that day, Joseph Montoya, Democrat of New Mexico, questioned him:

MONTOYA:
Now
,
on April 17, 1973, the President said this: “I condemn any attempts to cover up in this case, no matter who is involved.” Do you believe he was telling the truth on that date?

DEAN:
No, Sir.

MONTOYA:
Will you state why?

DEAN:
Well, because by that time, he knew the full implications of the case and Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman were certainly still on the staff and there was considerable resistance to their departure from the staff.

And on July 28, Tennessee Republican Howard Baker asked Dean the question he asked almost every witness—the question of the summer:

BAKER:
What did the President know and when did he know it, about the cover-up?

DEAN:
I would have to start back from personal knowledge, and that would be when I had a meeting on Sept. 15 [1972] when we discussed what was very clear to me in terms of cover-up. We discussed in terms of delaying lawsuits, compliments to me on my efforts to that point. Discussed timing and trials, because we didn’t want them to occur before the election.

As the White House launched a massive counterattack—it was the word, it argued, of a self-acknowledged leader of the cover-up fighting and bargaining to save his skin against that of the President of the United States— John Dean’s credibility became a chief topic of discussion. During the former counsel’s testimony, a man just outside the caucus room assembled an impromptu jury of twelve fellow spectators to pass judgment on Dean’s veracity and, implicitly, on Nixon’s guilt. The vote was unanimous in Dean’s favor. Two other spectators called out, “Make it fourteen.”

Day after day that summer, the Ervin committee elicited the damning testimony: that the “enemies list” was designed for the harassment of its targets through the IRS and other means; that an attempt was made to forge State Department cables in order to implicate President Kennedy in the assassination of Vietnamese President Diem; that Nixon had tape-recorded his conversations in the White House and his hideaway office in the Executive Office Building; that Ehrlichman deemed the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist as within the constitutional powers of the President.

More charges and revelations emerged from the committee and other investigations: that the President had taken fraudulent income-tax deductions; that he had used sizable government funds to improve his estates in Key Biscayne, Florida, and at San Clemente, California; that the financier and manufacturer Howard Hughes had made large secret donations of cash, supposedly for campaign purposes but apparently spent on private expenses by Nixon, his family, and his friends. The plea-bargained
resignation in October 1973 of Spiro Agnew—charged with federal income-tax evasion for payoffs from construction company executives he had accepted while governor of Maryland and even as vice president—added to the portrait of a pervasive corruption surpassing even Grant’s and Harding’s Administrations.

Inch by inch Nixon fell back, fighting all the way, making public explanations that were soon proven false or declared “inoperative” by the White House itself, throwing his closest associates out of his careening sleigh as the wolves relentlessly closed in. Shortly before the Ervin committee began its hearings he shoved Haldeman and Ehrlichman out of the White House with garlands of praise and replaced Kleindienst as Attorney General with Elliot L. Richardson, who chose his old Harvard law professor, Archibald Cox, as special prosecutor. The struggle now was over presidential tapes that were believed relevant to the investigation. When Nixon balked at releasing the tapes either to Cox or to the Ervin committee, both subpoenaed him for this crucial evidence. Ordered by Judge Sirica to turn the tapes over to the court, the President proposed a compromise arrangement so egregiously self-protective that Cox turned it down.

Then the “Saturday Night Massacre”—Nixon commanded Richardson and then Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus to sack Cox for defying a presidential order to give up his pursuit of the tapes through the courts. Both refused—Richardson resigned, Ruckelshaus was dismissed. Solicitor General Robert H. Bork, of the Yale law faculty, was hurriedly driven to the White House and designated Acting Attorney General, and promptly fired Cox. The outburst of public outrage once again drove Nixon back on the defensive. He agreed to hand the tapes over to Sirica, then reversed his “abolition” of the special prosecutor’s office and chose for Cox’s replacement a man whom Nixon expected to be more pliable, a conservative Texas Democrat, corporate lawyer, and reputed law-and-order man named Leon Jaworski. Nixon aroused more public suspicion when he handed over to Sirica a crucial tape with an eighteen-minute gap, which the court’s panel of experts found had been caused by repeated, probably deliberate erasures.

Leon Jaworski did indeed turn out to be a law-and-order man. When the President, citing the doctrine of executive privilege, refused to turn over to him additional tapes involving conversations with his aides, Jaworski argued first before Judge Sirica, who upheld him, and then, when Nixon took the case to the Court of Appeals, went to the Supreme Court for “immediate settlement.” On July 24, 1974, the Court rendered its decision in
United States of America
v.
Richard Nixon, President of the United States.
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, after reading a brief tribute to his recently
deceased predecessor, Earl Warren, summarized the Court’s unanimous finding. The President’s claim to executive privilege, the opinion held, “to withhold evidence that is demonstrably relevant in a criminal trial would cut deeply into the guarantee of due process of law and gravely impair the basic function of the courts.” The privilege could not “prevail over the fundamental demands of due process of law in the fair administration of justice.” When the news reached Nixon at San Clemente, according to Anthony Lukas, “the President exploded, cursing the man he had named chief justice,” and reserving a few choice expletives for Harry A. Blackmun and Lewis F. Powell, Jr., his other appointees. At first Nixon seriously considered challenging the Court, but he feared adding to the likely impeachment charges, and the Court’s unanimity made it impossible to claim that the decision was insufficiently definitive. In all the months of slow Chinese torture that Nixon suffered, it was probably the news from the High Bench that gave him the most sudden, piercing pain.

The Judiciary Committee, Room 2141, Rayburn House Office Building,
7:45
p.m., July 24, 1974.
Over a hundred reporters looked on and about 40 million Americans watched on television as Chairman Peter Rodino rapped his gavel on the table. Solemnly he reminded the members of their responsibilities. “Make no mistake about it. This is a turning point, whatever we decide. Our judgment is not concerned with an individual but with a system of constitutional government. It has been the history and the good fortune of the United States, ever since the Founding Fathers, that each generation of citizens and their officials have been, within tolerable limits, faithful custodians of the Constitution and the rule of law.” But the minds of his fellow committee members were very much on one individual—the President of the United States. There had been doubts that this unwieldy committee of thirty-eight members, many of them highly partisan, and polarized between “Democratic Firebrands” and “Republican Diehards,” could handle the tough, risky task of impeachment.