Being Nixon: A Man Divided (47 page)

“Of course, this is Hunt. That’ll uncover a lot of [undecipherable],” said Nixon. Then he employed his familiar crude metaphor: “You open that scab, there’s a hell of a lot of things….It would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.”

Nixon might have stopped there, but, wound up by his old animus toward the CIA, he went on to use language suggesting that he wanted the CIA to shut down the entire FBI investigation into Watergate—not just the inquiry into the hundred-dollar bills that could be traced to the anonymous donors. As the secret Oval Office tapes silently turned on the morning of June 23, Nixon coached Haldeman on what to say to Helms and Deputy Director Walters:

When you get these people in, say: “Look, the problem is that this will open the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President feels that”—without going into the details—don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it. “The President’s belief is that this is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. And because these people are plugging for, for keeps, and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case,” period.

Don’t go any further into this case, period
. Nixon’s aides may have had a narrow intention, to keep the FBI from questioning and embarrassing anonymous campaign donors. But Nixon’s restless mind wandered off and focused on Hunt. Nixon seems to have thought they were getting the CIA to warn the FBI off of
anything
involving Hunt—including the break-in itself. By using cryptic euphemisms, Haldeman and Nixon talked past each other. In his 1978 memoir, Nixon wrote that when Haldeman reported back to say that Helms “got the picture,” Nixon was relieved because “this was the end of our worries about Watergate”—presumably meaning the entire case, not just the inquiry into the donors. A couple of days after that, Nixon was “surprised” to learn that the FBI was still going after Hunt. “I had thought they were going to keep away from him as a result of Haldeman’s meeting with Helms and Walters,” Nixon wrote. In other words, his aides may have thought they were simply protecting the donors, but Nixon apparently thought he was shutting down the whole investigation. Such misunderstandings were typical of Nixon’s handling of Watergate: He wanted to stay out of it but couldn’t resist meddling, in ways that were often ambiguous, confusing, and ultimately incriminating.

At the time, Nixon told Haldeman, “I’m not going to get that involved.” Haldeman responded, “No, sir. We don’t want you to.” But then Nixon added, “Play it tough. That’s the way they play it, and that’s the way we’re going to play it.”
⁴¹

After an initial
stir, the press—with the notable exception of
The Washington Post
and
Time
magazine—lost interest in what White House spokesman Ron Ziegler dismissed as a “third rate burglary.” The public seemed unmoved by “the Watergate caper,” as Haldeman somewhat jauntily referred to it. Nixon remained far ahead of George McGovern in the polls.

And yet, cracks in the cover-up began showing almost right away. The CIA went along with the White House request—but not for long.
Director Helms, who held no brief for the president, was irritated by the very mention of the Bay of Pigs. His deputy, Vernon Walters, was an old Nixon loyalist who had been installed at the CIA as a quasispy by the president (as a military translator, Walters had been with Nixon during the Caracas stoning in 1958). But Walters was also a man of considerable integrity, and he soon told Pat Gray at the FBI that the CIA had no interest in the FBI’s investigation. The Bureau was free to follow the money wherever it led.
⁴²

Nixon was trying to relax in San Clemente on July 6 when Gray telephoned him, sounding anxious. The acting FBI director had called to say that he was “greatly concerned about the Watergate case and that Walters had come in to see him indicating that the CIA had no interest in the matter and that pursuing the investigation would not be an embarrassment to the CIA,” Nixon wrote in his diary that night. “He said that he and Walters both felt that some people either at the White House or at the committee were trying to cover up things which would be a mortal blow to me—rather than assisting the investigation.”
⁴³

There was a slight pause, Pat Gray later recalled, then Nixon replied, “Pat, you just continue to conduct your aggressive and thorough investigation.”
⁴⁴

Nixon, as he never ceased to remind his aides, had been an expert on cover-ups ever since the Alger Hiss case. On July 19, he gave John Ehrlichman a short homily in the dos and don’ts of handling a sensitive investigation. Ehrlichman had come to talk to him about, among other matters, Jeb Magruder, who faced an FBI interview the next day for his role in the break-in. Nixon bluntly asked Ehrlichman to tell him about Magruder’s involvement. The conversation is revealing of Nixon’s almost schizophrenic approach to Watergate:

NIXON:
Did he know?

EHRLICHMAN:
Oh, yes. Oh Lord, yes. He’s in it with both feet.

NIXON:
He can’t contrive a story, then. You know, I’d like to see this
thing work out, but I’ve been through these. The worst thing a guy can do, the worst thing—there are two things and each is bad. One is to lie and the other one is to cover up.

EHRLICHMAN
: Yes.

NIXON:
If you cover up, you’re going to get caught.

EHRLICHMAN:
Yes.

NIXON:
And if you lie you’re going to be guilty of perjury. Now, basically, that was the whole story of the Hiss case.

EHRLICHMAN:
Yes.

NIXON:
It was the story of the five-percenters [officials taking graft in the Truman administration] and the rest. It’s a hell of a goddamn thing. I hate to see it, but let me say we’ll take care of Magruder immediately afterwards….
⁴⁵

Having emphatically laid out the high road, Nixon proceeded to veer off it.
⁴⁶
Not only did he promise to “take care” of Magruder—thus subtly sending a signal that Magruder would ultimately be rewarded—the president soon became involved, as a kind of too-interested bystander. Nixon could have stayed out of the Magruder case entirely. Or he could have inserted himself to make sure that Magruder told the truth. Instead, he hovered around the case, asking just enough questions to raise suspicions about his own involvement in the cover-up.

There was the awkward question of how Liddy had gotten the money to conduct his antics—where else, logically, but from his boss, Magruder, with the ultimate sign-off of
his
boss, Mitchell? In coaching Magruder’s testimony, the goal of Nixon’s advisers—endorsed by Nixon—was to keep the criminal responsibility “at the Liddy level,” as Nixon put it, and no higher.
⁴⁷
Magruder did not know all the particulars, but he knew enough to go to jail if caught. He would have to dissemble and say that he knew nothing about the break-in.
⁴⁸
As he persistently inquired into what Magruder might tell the FBI and the grand jury, Nixon was probably thinking, as he put it, in terms of political “containment,” not perjury or obstruction of justice. Still, in
his memoirs he acknowledged, albeit circumspectly, that he had been determined to protect Mitchell—even if that meant, implicitly, that Magruder had to hide or fuzz up the truth in his testimony. “Whatever the actual case, I told Haldeman, Magruder simply had to draw the line on anything that might involve Mitchell,” wrote Nixon.
⁴⁹
Whatever the actual case
.
*
²
Nixon worried with Ehrlichman that the “callow” Magruder would break under tough questioning. “There’s just too much riding on this thing, you cannot put John Mitchell in this thing,” Nixon told his subordinates.
⁵⁰

The next day, talking to Haldeman, Nixon said that he had experienced a troubling premonition about Watergate. “I had a strange [dream?] last night. It’s going to be a nasty issue for a few days. But I can’t believe that—we’re whistling in the dark, but I can’t believe they can tie the thing [to me].”
⁵¹

Landslide, 1972.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

I
n mid-July, Nixon invited John Connally to San Clemente to watch the last night of the Democratic National Convention on TV. After squabbling with the White House staff, Connally had quit as secretary of the Treasury that spring, but Nixon still saw “Big Jawn” as his successor in 1976, possibly to build a whole new political party around the Silent Majority.
¹
After dinner on the night of July 12, Nixon and Connally settled into the Casa Pacifica living room overlooking the darkening ocean and tuned in to the raucous scene at the convention hall in Miami, where the Democratic nominees were scheduled to give their acceptance speeches. Nixon and Connally wanted to see how George McGovern would look on a national stage.

Incredulous, they waited hour after hour while Senator Tom Eagleton of Missouri and then thirty-nine other vice-presidential candidates were nominated, including Mao Tse-tung and Martha Mitchell. To get away from rule by party bosses and “the smoke-filled room,” the Democrats had overcorrected. Every hitherto “underrepresented” group was allowed to have its moment. “The scene had the air of a college skit that had gotten carried away with itself and didn’t know how to stop,” Nixon recalled. Finally, Connally gave up and went to bed. Nixon and Pat held on until, at 2:48
A.M
., “prime time in Guam,” Senator McGovern at last appeared. Tricia also stayed up to watch. The president’s steely daughter tartly remarked of the Democratic
presidential nominee, “He’s a boring evangelist, and there’s nothing more boring than an evangelist who’s boring.”
²

On July 25, Haldeman handed the president a wire service bulletin that McGovern and Eagleton had just held a joint press conference to disclose that the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee had been hospitalized three times and had received electroshock therapy for mental depression. Columnist Jack Anderson piled on with an untrue report that Eagleton had been arrested several times for drunken and reckless driving.

Nixon was thinking of his ordeal in the 1952 Fund Scandal as he watched Eagleton appear on
Face the Nation
a week later, on Sunday, July 30. One of the reporters remarked on how much Eagleton was sweating, to which Eagleton pointed out that the lights were very hot. The reporter observed that no one else on the TV set was sweating and commented that Eagleton was fidgeting with his fingers.

Nixon was appalled and filled with empathy for Eagleton. “I perspire even though I may not be under any tension whatever!” he dictated into his diary that night. Inevitably, within a couple of days, Eagleton was forced off the ticket, replaced by a Kennedy, Sargent Shriver, who was married to JFK and RFK’s sister Eunice. The next day, thinking once more of his own and his family’s suffering in 1952 and again in 1960 and ’62, Nixon pulled out a pen and wrote a letter. It was addressed to Eagleton’s young son, Terry, who had visited the Oval Office with his father the year before. “Politics is a very hard game,” Nixon wrote the thirteen-year-old boy. After quoting Churchill (“Politics is even more difficult than war because in politics you die many times; in war you die only once”), Nixon wrote, feelingly, “What matters is not that your father fought a terribly difficult battle and lost. What matters is that in fighting the battle he won the admiration of foes and friends alike because of the courage, poise, and just plain guts he showed against overwhelming odds.”
^3
,
*
¹

Then Nixon returned to trying to savage his opponents. The next day, August 3, he hounded Haldeman and Ehrlichman to run an IRS audit on Larry O’Brien. O’Brien’s firm had taken a $190,000 retainer from secretive financier Howard Hughes; Nixon was still seething over press reports from a decade earlier that Hughes had given a sweetheart loan to his own brother Don (“that stupid brother,” Nixon called him; Nixon had ordered Don wiretapped “for his own protection”).
⁴
Now he wanted to expose that DNC chairman O’Brien—“a grand master in the art of political gamesmanship”—was somehow on the take from Hughes.
⁵

“The problem we have here is that all of our people are gun-shy as a result of the Watergate incident and don’t want to look into files that involve Democrats,” Nixon dictated to his diary that night. In the Oval Office earlier that day, Nixon had angrily denounced foot-dragging. “We have all this power and we aren’t using it,” he exploded. “Now, what the Christ is the matter?” Haldeman wearily protested, “We don’t have the bureaucracy with us and we don’t have the press with us. They do.” Nixon was not satisfied. The Democrats were down, and he wanted them out. “I mean, it’s like Dempsey going for the kill with Firpo,” he said, referencing the 1923 heavyweight boxing championship. “I mean you have to…keep whacking, whacking, and whacking.” Finally, Ehrlichman offered up, “Well, we’ve got a file a foot thick on [McGovern Finance Chairman] Henry Kimelman, and this is over in the Department of the Interior, where we have fewer problems. I do have some work going on that.”

NIXON:
Scare the shit out of them. Scare the shit out of them.
⁶

At the end
of August, Haldeman came into the Oval Office looking morose. “Bad news,” he said glumly. “I really mean it—it’s really bad.” He handed Nixon the latest Gallup poll. It showed Nixon ahead of McGovern by 34 points, the largest spread between presidential
candidates since Gallup started polling in the 1930s. Haldeman was grinning when Nixon looked up.

Nixon wanted to feel happy about everything he had seen and experienced on his royal progress to an historic landslide reelection: Youth for Nixon roaring “Four More Years! For More Years!” at his clockwork convention. The jumpers and squealers in Michigan and San Diego as his motorcade passed by (just like the Kennedys, “although it will, as usual, be difficult to get the press to write about it,” he recorded in his diary). The puzzled look of the face of peaceniks when Nixon flashed them the “V” sign (“this really knocks them for a loop, because they think it is their sign,” Nixon gloated). Even organized labor was abandoning McGovern, skillfully framed by the Nixon campaign as the candidate for “amnesty [for draft dodgers], abortion, and acid.” After a round of golf followed by cigars at the all-male Burning Tree Club, AFL-CIO President George Meany gruffly told Nixon, “Just so you don’t get a swelled head about my wife voting for you, I want to tell you why—she don’t like McGovern.”

So much to celebrate, but he would later recall that he felt oddly dissatisfied: “Against Kennedy or Muskie or Humphrey I would have had to fight a close-in, one-on-one battle. Against McGovern, however, it was clear that the less I did, the better I would do. This was a totally unaccustomed situation for me, and it was not one in which I felt particularly comfortable or even knew instinctively what was best to do.”
^7
,
*
²

In late August,
Leonard Garment, with little to do at the Republican Convention in Miami, lay in the sun on the deck at the Doral Hotel. “One afternoon at the pool,” he later recalled,

I noticed a sizeable group of administration stalwarts huddled together at the outdoor bar. The shifting assemblage included, as I recall, Gordon Strachan, Bob Mardian, Fred LaRue, John Dean, Jeb Magruder, and Dwight Chapin, joined from time to time by Commander-in-Chief Charles Colson, dressed in a polyester sport shirt, faded Bermuda shorts, street shoes, and short black socks. They were whispering worriedly, chain-smoking, chain-drinking, and obviously not having any convention fun. With Nixon sure to win, what were they so worried about?
⁹

A week earlier,
on August 17, Magruder and LaRue had gotten together for a more intimate drinking session at a famous Washington saloon. LaRue was the CRP official who handled the payments to the Watergate burglars (for lawyers fees and living expenses; the term “hush money” was not yet used).
¹⁰
Magruder had just learned that he would not be indicted. He had successfully misled the grand jury and persuaded the prosecutors that he—and, by extension, his boss John Mitchell—had not known about the Watergate break-in. “That night,” Magruder recalled,

Fred LaRue and I celebrated with dinner at Billy Martin’s Carriage House Restaurant in Georgetown. We laughed and joked and unwound, celebrating this apparent victory after two months of intense pressure. But there were times during our celebration when we lapsed into silence, when we found our depression returning, when we grimly asked each other if we could possibly get away with this incredible cover-up….
¹¹

On September 15,
the indictments handed down by a federal grand jury named only Hunt and Liddy and the five men arrested at the Watergate. Nixon shrugged in his diary: “This was the day of the Watergate indictment, and we hope to be able to ride the issue through in a successful way from now on.”
¹²

Late in the afternoon in the Oval Office, he had met with John
Dean to congratulate the White House lawyer on his ability to keep the lid on the investigation. “The way you’ve handled it, it seems to me, has been very skillful, because you—put your finger in the dike every time leaks have sprung here, sprung there…the Grand Jury is dismissed now?” the president asked hopefully. “That is correct,” answered Dean. The conversation soon turned to punishing the president’s enemies in the second term. “They are asking for it and they are going to get it,” said Nixon. “We have not used the power in this first four years, as you know.”

DEAN:
That’s true.

NIXON:
We have never used it. We haven’t used the Bureau, we haven’t used the Justice Department, but things are going to change now. And they’re going to change, and they’re going to get it right.

DEAN:
That’s an exciting prospect.

NIXON:
It’s got to be done. It’s the only thing to do.

HALDEMAN:
We’ve got to.
¹³

The enemy Nixon most wanted to get was, more than ever,
The Washington Post
. The war between Nixon and the
Post
was escalating, on both sides. Back in June, Kissinger, playing the role of meddlesome double agent, told Nixon that Katharine Graham had said of the president: “I hate him and I’m going to do everything I can to beat him.”
¹⁴
In his mounting vexation with the
Post
, Nixon had gone from petty punishment—ordering that Mrs. Graham be seated as far away as possible from the guest of honor at a White House dinner—to trying to wreck her business. On September 14, he discussed with Colson ways to cancel the broadcasting licenses of TV stations owned by the Washington Post Company.
¹⁵

While the rest of the press had largely backed off Watergate, the
Post
continued to hammer away with daily page one stories. On September 28, Carl Bernstein of the reporting duo of Woodward and Bernstein awakened John Mitchell to get his comment on a story running
the next day: that Mitchell controlled a secret fund of $350,000 to $700,000 to gather information about the Democrats. “Jeeeeesus!” Mitchell gasped. “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.” The story was exaggerated, but the
Post
was on a roll, fed by a mysterious source known in the newsroom, and later to history, as “Deep Throat.”
¹⁶

Deep Throat was in real life Mark Felt, the deputy director of the FBI.
*
³
His motive was not so much to save the Republic from Richard Nixon as it was to secure the top job at the Bureau for Mark Felt. He hoped to accomplish this by leaking so much information that the White House would see that Acting Director L. Patrick Gray was incapable of controlling the Bureau and choose an insider—the number two man—instead. Felt’s strategy failed. The White House discovered that Felt was the leaker and held off from firing him only because, as Haldeman pointed out, he knew too much.
¹⁸

Meeting Woodward in a garage late at night after a series of prearranged signals, “Deep Throat” told the
Post
reporter much that was true about the FBI’s investigation into Watergate, but on a couple of occasions he hinted at more than he knew. On October 12, the
Post
ran with a larger-than-usual headline, “FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats.” The article revealed a “massive campaign of political spying and sabotage” and claimed that the FBI had uncovered “at least 50 undercover Nixon operatives.” The report was hyped, but the
Post
did surface the Nixonites’ answer to Dick Tuck: Donald Segretti, a USC pal of Dwight Chapin who conducted “black advance operations.” Some of them were silly, like sending pizza, collect, to a Muskie fundraiser, but some were sordid, like distributing a flyer on Muskie stationery accusing his opponents Hubert Humphrey and Henry “Scoop” Jackson of illicit sexual activity.
¹⁹
Like other White House dirty tricksters, Segretti was not so much wicked as in over his head. Indeed, Chapin had recommended Segretti partly because
he figured that his college chum, a recent USC Law grad, would know how far to go without breaking the law.
²⁰

In his diary, Nixon dismissed
The Washington Post
article as “the last burp of the Eastern Establishment,” but in a later diary entry, he noted something unusual and, to him, disturbing. A
Post
story on October 25 reported that the CRP treasurer Hugh Sloan had told the grand jury that Haldeman controlled a secret fund for political espionage. The story was inaccurate—Sloan had not so testified, and Haldeman’s actual involvement was unclear—but it seemed to jolt the normally imperturbable chief of staff. “Haldeman spoke rather darkly of the fact that there was a clique in the White House that were out to get him. I trust he is not getting a persecution complex,” Nixon dictated to his diary.
²¹