Being Nixon: A Man Divided (51 page)

At midnight on January 11, Kissinger arrived in Key Biscayne with, at long last, a peace deal. As Nixon walked Kissinger to his car at 2:30
A.M
., he noted, “I felt an odd tenderness towards him….We spoke to each other in nearly affectionate terms, like veterans of bitter battles at a last reunion, even though we both sensed somehow that too much had happened between us to make the rest of the journey together.”
⁶⁶

On January 15, the bombing stopped. Kissinger spoke to Pat Nixon on the phone and later reported to her husband that he had never heard the First Lady sound so elated. Julie checked in, “bubbly and upbeat,” Nixon wrote in his diary.
⁶⁷
But in her own diary, Julie noted, her father’s voice “sounded so tired and old when he said, ‘Well, we don’t know what will happen. We don’t know how it will work out.’ ”
⁶⁸

On the evening of January 23, Haldeman summoned the senior staff into the Roosevelt Room. Taking his customary seat in front of the fire, next to the Remington portrait of Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill, he explained that the president would address the nation at 10
P.M
. to declare “peace with honor.” A squabble broke out: Hardliner Pat Buchanan wanted a harsh attack on the president’s liberal critics, while other staffers did not want to play “the sore winner.” Haldeman, who knew that his boss’s preference would be to unload on his critics, found a Solomonic compromise: Let proxies do the bashing while keeping Nixon on the high road.

Nixon arrived acting “irritable,” Bill Safire recalled. The president made no effort to hide it. “He was not stepping up to a crisis, which required calm and the infectious quality of confidence, he was announcing a peace and felt he could let the strain of the past few weeks show in his face and voice.” Haldeman sighed to Safire, “The Boss is great in adversity, but he’s always had this problem handling success.”
⁶⁹

Finished with his broadcast, Nixon returned to the Solarium in the Residence. Pat came over and silently put her arms around her
husband. After a while, Nixon retreated to the Lincoln Sitting Room to sit by the fire and listen to records. He wrote a short, tender note to the newly widowed Lady Bird Johnson. “I know what abuse he took—particularly from members of his own party—in standing firm for peace with honor. Now that we have such a settlement, we shall do everything we can to make it last so that other brave men who sacrificed their lives for this cause have not died in vain.”
⁷⁰

Over eleven years, some fifty-eight thousand American soldiers had been killed in Vietnam. The final deal was about the same one the North Vietnamese had agreed to in October. All the American POWs would come home, but North Vietnam’s invading army would remain inside South Vietnam. Thieu had finally, grudgingly, bitterly signed the peace deal when he was given a secret guarantee by Nixon that the United States would “react strongly in the event the agreement is violated.”
⁷¹

That evening, standing outside the door to the Roosevelt Room, Kissinger and John Ehrlichman had a brief chat. “How long do you figure the South Vietnamese can survive under this agreement?” asked Ehrlichman. Kissinger, who may have sounded more pessimistic than he meant to, answered, “I think that if they’re lucky they can hold out for a year and a half.”
⁷²
In the event, South Vietnam held out for twenty-eight months.
*
⁵

The cease-fire went into effect at midnight on January 27. “I had always expected that I would feel an immense sense of relief and satisfaction when the war was finally ended,” Nixon wrote. “But I also felt a surprising sense of sadness, apprehension, and impatience.”
⁷³

Nixon was not
expecting trouble from the trial of the Watergate burglars, all of whom pleaded guilty or were convicted. But at a bail hearing on February 2, a federal district court judge, John Sirica, announced that he did not believe the testimony given by the government’s
witnesses, all of whom had denied any involvement by White House higher-ups. From the bench, Judge Sirica stated his hope that the coming Senate investigation would “get to the bottom” of Watergate.

Nixon was furious. “Here is the judge, and saying this,” Nixon protested to Colson the next morning. “His goddamn conduct is shocking, as a
judge
.” Colson tried to cool him down by saying that Sirica was a Republican law-and-order judge. “I know him pretty well,” said Colson, a little too breezily. “He’s a hot-headed Italian, and he blew on it.”
⁷⁴

At the courthouse, Judge Sirica was known as “Maximum John” for his sentences and his practice, of dubious constitutionality, of using the threat of prison time to pressure the accused to talk. In the Watergate case, Sirica was letting the defendants stew for a while before he pronounced sentence.
⁷⁵

Bebe Rebozo would later recall an old Cuban expression, “Sooner or later, everyone walks under the lanai.” It meant that you should treat people well because when you walk under the veranda they can wave to you—or push a flowerpot onto your head. In 1970, Judge Sirica had presided at the swearing-in of William Casey as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. After the ceremony, Sirica had said to the president, “I was the head of Italians for Eisenhower-Nixon in 1956 in New York City. I’d like to be on the court of appeals.” Nixon had brushed him off.
⁷⁶

A
s he entered his second term, Nixon’s approval rating stood at 68 percent.
¹
“I don’t think the country is all that stirred up” about Watergate, Nixon told Colson on February 3, 1973. “What do you think?” Colson answered, “No. Oh, God, no, the country is bored with it….The Watergate issue has
never
been a public issue. It’s a Washington issue. It’s a way to get at us. It’s the way Democrats think they can use to embarrass us.”
²

“That’s right,” said Nixon. “Well….” He wanted to believe that Colson was right. But as the Senate prepared to hold hearings, Nixon sensed that Watergate was “starting to snowball.” He also had a nagging feeling that Colson, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman were holding back, perhaps protecting themselves. He decided, as he put it in his memoirs, to give Watergate “my personal attention.”
³

That meant working directly with John Dean, the White House lawyer who had been managing the scandal day to day. On February 27, the president met with Dean, their first session alone together since the indictments of the Watergate burglars had been handed down on September 15. “The talk with John Dean was very worthwhile. He is an enormously capable man,” Nixon dictated to his diary that night. The next day he wrote, “I am very impressed by him. He has shown enormous strength, great intelligence, and great subtlety.”
⁴
To Haldeman, Nixon described Dean as “really a gem.” Haldeman replied, “He’s a real cool cookie, isn’t he?”
⁵
Nixon was
impressed that Dean had gone back to read not only
Six Crises
but also his congressional speeches during the Hiss case.

John Dean.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

Dean was more deeply caught up in Watergate than Nixon knew. Some Watergate scholars believe that Dean, who is regarded as a brilliant manipulator by his detractors, was aware of the original break-in, an allegation Dean denies.
⁶
In any case, he had been deeply engaged in the cover-up, arranging for bundles of cash, which were handled with rubber gloves and delivered in brown paper bags to the Watergate defendants—money lawfully and legitimately paid out for legal fees and living expenses but also, it was becomingly increasingly clear, intended to buy silence.
⁷

By mid-March, Dean’s role had become a little clearer to Nixon. Pat Gray, the earnest Nixon loyalist picked to run the FBI, had been talking loosely at his Senate confirmation hearings. The acting director told the panel that he had shared raw FBI files on Watergate with White House Counsel Dean. Gray offered to do the same with Congress. The president was appalled by Gray’s indiscretion. “What’s the matter with him?” Nixon exclaimed. “For Christ’s sake, I mean, he must be out of his mind.”
⁸
At his confirmation hearings, Gray continued to thrash about until he was finally forced to withdraw.
⁹
Nixon’s nominee should be left to “twist, slowly, slowly in the wind,” said the acerbic Ehrlichman, coining a phrase that would enter the national lexicon.
¹⁰
In addition to potentially exposing White House secrets to Congress, Gray’s testimony had dragged Dean—the president’s lawyer, but heretofore a nonentity—into the scandal.

Nixon had repeatedly declared that no White House staffer had been involved in Watergate. Now it appeared that the White House counsel, tipped off every step of the way, had been a little too cozy with FBI investigators.

Compromised or not, Dean was to be Nixon’s guide through the Watergate thicket. The superficially confident but deeply anxious young lawyer found the whole process unsettling. Nixon “continually asked questions I had already answered,” Dean recalled. “This disturbed me. He would have bursts of lucidity and logical thinking,
but mostly he was rambling and forgetful, and as I grew used to talking to him I nursed the heretical thought that the President didn’t seem very smart.”

Dean was unfamiliar with Nixon’s way of circling around problems, a process that the tart Ehrlichman had dubbed as “chewing his cud.”
¹¹
(Indeed, appearing disengaged is an old presidential trick, practiced by, among others, FDR, Eisenhower, and Reagan.) The thirty-four-year-old White House counsel was taken aback at Nixon’s clumsiness. Dean would later describe Nixon trying to take notes: First, the president would put on his dark-rimmed glasses (“To my surprise, I thought they made him look much better”). Then he would fish around in his suit’s inside pocket for a scrap of paper while reaching into the opposite inside pocket for a pen. When both objects eluded his grasp, he would struggle, with his arms crossed, until he finally secured a fountain pen, and bit off the top. (Nixon’s clumsiness might have been natural—or staged to buy time while Nixon thought what he wanted to think. It was sometimes hard to know, even for Nixon aides who had spent far more time with the president than Dean.)

Though Dean dutifully paid homage to
Six Crises
as he tried to ingratiate himself with the president, he was privately “baffled” by Nixon’s constant analogies between the Hiss case and Watergate. “I thought the President had everything backward,” recalled Dean in his memoir,
Blind Ambition
. “I identified with Hiss, not the investigators, and I winced whenever the President talked about how he finally ‘nailed’ him.”
¹²

Slowly unspooling the complicated Watergate plot for Nixon, Dean brought progressively worse news to the president. On March 13, he told Nixon that Gordon Strachan, Haldeman’s liaison to Jeb Magruder at CRP, had known in advance about the break-in. Nixon was “stunned,” the president recalled in his memoirs. Strachan led straight to Haldeman: “It was well known that Haldeman’s staff acted as an extension of Haldeman; it would seem unlikely that Strachan would have known about anything as important as the Watergate
break-in plan without having informed Haldeman of it,” Nixon wrote. From across his desk in the Oval Office, Nixon asked incredulously, “He knew about Watergate, Strachan did?” Dean answered, “Uh-huh.” Nixon sighed, “I’ll be damned. Well, that’s the problem in Bob’s case, isn’t it?”
¹³

Nixon’s surprise may have been slightly feigned. In his gentle poking and prodding at Haldeman and Ehrlichman, he had earlier picked up suggestions that Strachan was somehow involved (the Haldeman aide’s role has long remained murky and may have been marginal; criminal charges against Strachan were dropped by the prosecutors).
¹⁴
But now Nixon was genuinely worried about the prospect of a congressional investigation and possible prosecution of his closest aides. Dean did not reassure him. “There are going to be a lot of problems if everything starts falling,” Dean said as their meeting ended. “So there are dangers, Mr. President. I’d be less than candid if I didn’t tell you…there are.”
¹⁵

Nixon’s apprehensions grew when Dean told the president about Ehrlichman’s possible exposure in another break-in—the Plumbers’ botched raid on the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in September 1971.

“What in the world….” Nixon said. “This is the first I ever heard of it.”
¹⁶
Again, Nixon may have been exaggerating his surprise. There are suggestions in earlier tape-recorded conversations that Nixon had already picked up some hint of the Ellsberg break-in.
¹⁷
But whatever his prior inklings, Nixon was beginning to get a better idea of what John Mitchell had dubbed “the White House horrors”—the crimes, seemingly unrelated but tied in by the malign presence of Hunt and Liddy—that might be exposed if the Watergate cover-up unraveled.

Day after day, Dean was becoming the bearer of bad tidings. On March 21, 1973, at just after ten o’clock in the morning on an early spring day, cloudy and windy, Dean walked into the Oval Office. “Sit down, sit down,” Nixon greeted him cheerfully. “Well, what is the Dean summary of the day about?”

DEAN:
Uh, the reason I thought we ought to talk this morning is because in, in, our conversations, uh, uh, I have, I have the impression that you don’t know everything I know—

NIXON:
That’s right.

DEAN: —
and it makes it very difficult for you to make judgments that, uh, that only you can make on so many things.

NIXON:
That’s right…

DEAN:
I think, I think that, uh, there’s no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’re, we’ve got. We have a cancer—within—close to the Presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding, it grows geometrically now, because it compounds itself. Uh, that’ll be clear as I explain, you know, some of the details, uh, of why it is, and basically it’s because (1) we’re being blackmailed; (2) uh, people are going to start perjuring themselves very quickly that have not had to perjure themselves to protect other people and the like. And…there’s no assurance—

NIXON:
That it won’t bust.

DEAN:
That, that won’t bust. So let me give you sort of the basic facts….
¹⁸

Dean began reciting the details. “Some of them I had heard before. Some were variations of things I had heard before. And some were new,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. He was disturbed to hear that Colson, in Dean’s opinion, had a “damn good idea” of what Hunt and Liddy were up to as they plotted to bug the Democrats. “Colson!” Nixon recalled thinking to himself. “My earliest fears returned.”
¹⁹
Dean explained how the hush money had been paid out—initially, and recklessly, through Nixon’s personal lawyer, Herb Kalmbach. Haldeman had let him use a $350,000 cash fund from the White House. Haldeman and Ehrlichman had decided, according to Dean, that there was “no price too high to pay to let this thing blow up in front of the election.”

Dean delivered his punch line: “Bob is involved in that; John is involved in that; I’m involved in that; Mitchell is involved in that. And that’s an obstruction of justice.”

Dean returned to the problem of Hunt, who was due to be sentenced in two days—and who was demanding $122,000 in hush money. Hunt’s threat had been explicit: “I will bring John Ehrlichman down to his knees and put him in jail. I have done enough seamy things for he and Krogh that they’ll never survive it.” Hunt’s deadline, Dean told Nixon, was “close of business yesterday.”
²⁰

Nixon felt that Dean was being “melodramatic.” He failed to see that he had arrived at a moment of truth. Here was the chance to finally “prick the boil,” to use a Nixon term, to get Watergate behind him, at great cost and amid inevitable tumult, but in a way that would save his presidency. It was too late to spare his top advisers from criminal investigations or to spare himself from serious embarrassment. But had Nixon called in an outside lawyer and run a truly open investigation, his presidency would have endured—weakened, badly shaken, but also purified. Nixon did, for a brief instant, consider the possibility of coming clean. He wanted Dean to write a report, and he asked, “Are you going to put out a complete disclosure? Isn’t that the best plan? That’d be my view on it,” Nixon said.

Dean began talking about trying to get immunity for witnesses to testify before the grand jury.
²¹
In these few seconds—as he had before and would again—Nixon missed a chance to do the proverbial right thing, to take the step that would have saved him and preserved his legacy. The president had already pondered ways to buy Hunt’s continued silence.

“How much money do you need?” Nixon asked Dean.

DEAN:
I would say these people are going to cost, uh, a million dollars over the next, uh, two years.

There was a long silence.

NIXON:
We could get that….If you need the money…you could get the money….What I mean is, you could, you could get a
million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.

DEAN:
Uh-huh.

NIXON:
I mean, it’s not easy, but it could be done. But the question is, who the hell would handle it?

The conversation wandered off with Nixon floating hypotheticals. Clemency for Hunt? “No, it’s wrong, that’s for sure,” said Nixon. But as Haldeman joined the conversation, Nixon clarified, “We could get the money. There is no problem in that. We can’t provide the clemency. The money can be provided.” Nixon concluded, “You’ve got to keep the cap on the bottle….Either that or let it all be blown right now.”
²²

After the meeting, Nixon greeted Olga Korbut, the Russian Olympic gymnast, and ran a session on efforts to hold down government spending. “But all the time Howard Hunt and his threats and demands for money were weighing on my mind,” Nixon recalled. His memoir continued: “As soon as these meetings were over I called Rose Woods and asked her if we had any unused campaign funds. She told me that we did—she would have to see how much. It turned out to be $100,000.”
²³

Later that evening, Hunt was paid $75,000 out of a different fund (the $350,000 approved by Haldeman) by one of John Mitchell’s former aides, Fred LaRue, who had spoken to Dean that morning. It does not appear that Nixon knew about the payoff, or that he had actually, formally, authorized paying Hunt.
²⁴
But he had signaled—and not in a vacillating way—that he was willing to meet Hunt’s demands in order to at least buy time. That morning, he had told Dean, “You’ve got no choice with Hunt, with the 120 or whatever it is. You’ve got to damn well get that done.”
^25
,
*
¹

Late on the night of March 21, Nixon dictated a long note in his diary “about a day,” he wrote in his memoir, “that was later to be seen as a disastrous turning point in my presidency.” The entry began, “As far as the day was concerned, it was relatively uneventful except for the talk with Dean. Dean really in effect let it all hang out when he said there was a cancerous growth around the President….” The tone of the note is stunningly detached. The president appears more worried about Dean—“he is obviously depressed”—than about himself. In his diary entry, Nixon seems to have regarded Dean as a despondent young man rather than the harbinger of doom that he was. In his memoir, Nixon wrote that he had left his meeting with Dean “more disturbed than shocked; more anxious than alarmed.” Only in retrospect, he wrote, did he understand the full import of what Dean was telling him. (Dean told the author he was not depressed but “flabbergasted” at the president’s almost eerie nonchalance.)
²⁷