The Arrogance of Power (74 page)

Nixon met with Colson for more than an hour after lunch that day and—although the sound quality is poor—the audible portion of the recording is a curious mix of concern about Watergate, mutual back scratching, and insistence that political spying is routine. “A lot of people think you oughta wiretap . . .” said Nixon, and most people “knew why the hell we're doing it, and they probably figure they're doing it to us, which they are.”
⁶

If this discussion did not include an admission of involvement in Watergate, it involved none of the flat denials that Nixon was to spout in public and private for the rest of his life. After Colson departed, Nixon had another meeting with Haldeman, at which they spoke of the Democrats' reaction to the arrests: O'Brien had promptly brought a suit for wiretapping and invasion of privacy. The available transcript contains two deletions in quick succession for privacy reasons, one of them after a Nixon reference to the “bizarre” aspects of the story. Was this an allusion to the sex activity the CREEP bugging had picked up?

At another point Haldeman remarked that “this financial thing” may have justified the bugging of the DNC. CREEP's spies, he said, “thought they had something going on that.” Was the “financial thing” a reference to O'Brien and Howard Hughes's money? Or perhaps to illicit funding from the Greek colonels? Nixon's laconic response—“Yeah, I suppose”—certainly suggests that he knew exactly what his aide was talking about.

By now the game plan was clear. The president's “public line,” he told Haldeman, was going to be that the DNC was not worth the effort of bugging. Also, he had told Colson, “We are just going to leave this where it is, with the Cubans.” The Cubans had to plead guilty, he and Haldeman agreed, explaining that their espionage had been to expose “crazy” McGovern's “sellout to the Communists.” It was, Nixon thought, “a very nice touch.”

Early that evening Nixon spoke on the telephone with John Mitchell, the first-known contact between the two since the Watergate arrests. Nixon's lawyer would later explain that there had been no record made of the conversation because the call had been placed on a line from the president's private quarters, one that was not hooked into the recording system. Later still, it emerged that Nixon had made a note of the conversation on the Dictabelt machine on which he recorded his daily diary. While the transcript of this recording includes nothing of import, it is significant for another reason: There is a forty-two-second break in the dictation, followed by an unintelligible remark: “[T]he Dictabelt,” a Watergate Special Prosecution Force document states, “appears to have been tampered with.”
⁷

We have no tapes of four further calls Nixon received that evening from Haldeman and Colson, even though three of them were made from an office where recording was automatic.

During one of the evening calls, according to Haldeman, the president told him Watergate might now be “under control” because of the Cuban involvement. “A lot of people think the break-in was done by anti-Castro Cubans. . . . I'm going to talk to Bebe and have him round up some anti-Castro Cubans. . . . Those people who got caught are going to need money. . . . I'm going to have Bebe start a fund for them in Miami. Call it an anti-Castro Fund, and publicize the hell out of the Cuban angle. That way we kill two birds with one stone. Get money to the boys to help them, and maybe pick up some points against McGovern on the Cuban angle.”

Bebe Rebozo's name kept being mentioned on the tapes over the next few days, in a way that suggests Nixon was nervous about his friend's vulnerability. At one point, while discussing the fact that Howard Hunt's name had turned up in two of the burglars' contact books, he suddenly asked an odd question:

Here the released tape features another “privacy” deletion. Nixon was evidently concerned, and with reason: We now know that there was a degree of connection between two of the burglars, Bernard Barker and Rolando Martinez, and Rebozo. Martinez was vice president of a real estate firm with which Rebozo had extensive dealings, and one of the firm's directors was on the board of Rebozo's bank. The firm had also brokered the purchase of Nixon's house on Key Biscayne. Both Martinez and Barker, moreover, were leading lights in a second real estate company, Ameritas Inc., which had been used by the burglars as cover when they came to Washington to break into the Watergate.

On Thursday, June 22, in his first press conference since the arrests, Nixon made his first misleading public statement on Watergate. The White House, he insisted, “has had no involvement whatever in this particular incident.” He would not comment further, he said in tones of respect for due process, because the police and the FBI were investigating the matter. Yet, behind the scenes, he and his closest aides had already been puzzling how to get the FBI “turned off.”

Nixon's taped comments over the months about covering up and lying are confused and confusing. “You can't cover this thing up, Bob,” he would tell Haldeman two weeks after the arrests. “The worst thing a guy can do, the worst thing,” he would remark two weeks after that, “two things and each is bad. One is to lie and the other one is to cover up. . . . If you cover up, you're going to get caught. . . . And if you lie you're going to be guilty of perjury . . . basically, that was the whole store of the Hiss case.”

“The
cover-up
is what hurts you, not the issue,” he would assert several weeks later in a conversation with Colson. “It's the cover-up that hurts.” As the crisis deepened, he would comment, again to Colson: “A cover-up is, is the main ingredient.” When Colson agreed, he added: “My losses are to be cut. . . . The President's losses got to be cut on the cover-up deal.”

Nixon was well aware that involvement in a cover-up could bring him down. Yet it is utterly clear, with the advantage of access to the tapes released since his death, that he connived in such a deception from the very beginning. He is implicated in page after page of the transcripts, sometimes directly and sometimes by nuance. Even without the new tapes, however, that conclusion is unavoidable from the recording of a meeting with Haldeman just over a week after the Watergate arrests.

On that day, Friday, June 23, Haldeman learned the FBI was only a short step away from discovering that CREEP was the source of the cash that had been found on the burglars and in their hotel rooms. It was now indeed urgent to turn off the FBI investigation.

In his discussion with Nixon that morning, Haldeman offered a solution. Because it had established that some of the money involved had been laundered through a Mexican bank, the FBI was wondering if it had stumbled across a CIA covert operation. The bureau could almost certainly be persuaded to stop pursuing the Mexico angle, or at least change course, if the CIA so requested. He and Ehrlichman, Haldeman suggested, could call in CIA Director Richard Helms and Deputy Director Vernon Walters, an old Nixon associate, and get them to make the request.

“All right, fine,” Nixon responded to this proposal to obstruct the course of justice. He again said, “Right, fine,” and then yet again, “All right, fine.” Then: “You call them in. Good. Good deal. Play it tough. . . .” Then, in two other conversations that day, he proceeded to offer his own ideas on the best way to pressure the CIA.

It was at this juncture, as reported earlier, that the president urged his aides to warn the CIA chiefs that further inquiry would expose their own former agent Howard Hunt. It would also likely “blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing, which we think would be very unfortunate for the CIA and for the country.”
⁸
Any exposure of early anti-Castro operations, of course, would also likely have been unfortunate for Nixon himself, and a study of that day's taped conversations may reflect that. One tape, examined repeatedly on the author's behalf, appears to contain at least six unexplained erasures.
⁹

Helms and Walters were summoned that afternoon, and for the time being the ploy worked. The agency did intervene with the FBI, and key interviews were stalled.
¹⁰
“No problem,” Haldeman was soon reporting to Nixon. The president and his men had bought a delay, but at immeasurable cost.

“The thing that bothers me about this thing,” Haldeman observed days later, “is that it's a time bomb.” It was indeed, and one of Nixon's own making in more than one respect. On his first day in the office after the arrests at
the Watergate, the president had worried briefly about the hidden microphones and the recorders whirring away in a nearby closet. The recording system, he had told Haldeman thoughtfully, “complicates things all over.” Haldeman assured Nixon the tapes were “locked up . . . super-secure—there are only three people that know.” The moment of disquiet ended, and the talk moved on to other things.

Twenty-five months were to pass before Nixon would confront the cost of having said, “That's fine” to Bob Haldeman. With the existence of the recording system exposed and with the Supreme Court ordering him to surrender key tapes, those two words alone would become the bullet in the “smoking gun.” They were proof that the president was guilty of criminal obstruction, evidentially lethal.

The months ahead would be a time of not only political crisis, but also personal collapse.

_____

The president was to recall that when the news of the arrests reached him in Florida, he had been “trying to get a few days' rest” after his visit to Moscow. He had returned from Russia, though, more than two weeks earlier and for nearly a week of that time he had been at Key Biscayne or Camp David. In July, when Nixon spent three weeks at San Clemente, aides blamed his fatigue on the China trip of four
months
earlier.

“According to associates who see him in his private moments,” a senior correspondent reported carefully, Nixon had for some time shown increasing signs of needing rest. The recollections of two Secret Service agents suggest this was an understatement. One evening either just before or after the fateful break-in, in a rerun of his bizarre 1970 nocturnal adventure, the president suddenly decided he wanted to visit the Capitol.

The senior man on duty, Agent Dennis McCarthy, recalled how Nixon emerged through the White House's diplomatic entrance, then “stood staring out toward the Washington Monument. Finally, I opened the door and said, ‘We're ready anytime you are, sir' . . . he seemed to have forgotten why he was waiting. . . .” Nixon was waiting, as it turned out, for his dog, an Irish setter named King Timahoe. The dog was loaded into the limousine alongside him, and off they headed to Capitol Hill.

As in 1970, both houses of Congress were locked and barred, and the Secret Service had to get a policeman to open the building. Nixon then walked in, past the marble statues of statesmen long gone, through the dimly lit hallways, to the office he had used when vice president. No one could find a key so, silent and apparently lost in thought, he returned to the White House.

A former officer with the uniformed branch of the Secret Service, the Executive Protection Service, also observed odd behavior in that period. “I used to see the president outside the Oval Office or outside the Executive Office Building,” said Lou Campbell,” and he would just sit there and stare off into
space, for thirty to forty-five minutes at a time. You could cut the tension with a knife.”

Often genial with those who guarded him, Nixon could also be irrationally unpleasant. “Right after Watergate,” Campbell recalled, “he was coming from the Oval Office to the steps to go to the EOB, and I was standing there. He walked by, and looked right at me, and I said, ‘Good evening, Mr. President.' If looks could kill, I'd have been dead. There was such arrogance on his face, such disdain. And the next morning a memo arrived for all Secret Service personnel, saying, ‘You will no longer address the president by anything like “Good morning” or “Good evening.” Keep contact to a minimum.' ”

Whatever his emotional state or his other preoccupations, Nixon had his hand firmly on the helm of the election campaign. Nothing was to stand in the way of an overwhelming victory, and not even the Watergate arrests had given him pause so far as that goal was concerned.

Although it is hard to conceive of now, for months Watergate made barely a mark on the public consciousness. Gallup estimated as late as the fall that only half the electorate had heard of the break-in. Two young
Washington Post
reporters named Woodward and Bernstein, however, were already boring toward the truth. So too were the
Los Angeles Times'
Jack Nelson and the
New York Times
's Seymour Hersh—never to get sufficient recognition for their Watergate work. Most of the media, however, long remained supine.

“In terms of the reaction of people,” Nixon had said within days of the arrests, “I think the country doesn't give much of a shit . . . most people around the country think that this is routine, that everybody's trying to bug everybody else . . . it is not going to get people that excited . . . because they don't give a shit about repression and bugging and all the rest.”