The Wars of Watergate (72 page)

Mitchell subsequently listed the White House horrors for Talmadge: the Ellsberg psychiatrist’s office break-in, the silencing of an ITT lobbyist, the forging of cables regarding the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem, “alleged extracurricular activities in the bugging area,” the planned firebombing of the Brookings Institution, “a lot of miscellaneous matters” relating to Chappaquiddick, “and this, that, and the next thing.” Some of Mitchell’s information, he said, had come from friendly White House staff workers who often enlisted his aid “to pour water on inflammatory requests,” such as those involving political reprisals against Republican congressmen who occasionally strayed from the Administration line.
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More chilling, perhaps, was Mitchell’s explanation of why he never informed Nixon of wrongdoing that had occurred. Talmadge particularly pressed him, reminding Mitchell that he had a special relationship with the President. “[W]hy on Earth didn’t you walk into the President’s office and tell him the truth?” Talmadge asked. The truth was not the issue, Mitchell said; rather, it was important not to involve the President in such things. Knowing Richard Nixon, Mitchell said, led the Attorney General to believe that he would “just lower the boom,” and the result would be to hurt his re-election. Talmadge pressed further: was the President’s re-election more important than his learning about the crimes, perjury, and obstruction of justice that lurked all about him? Mitchell: “Senator, I think you have put it exactly correct. In my mind, the reelection of Richard Nixon, compared with what was available on the other side, was so much more important that I put it in just that context.” He later testified that he was certain that the President did not know about the Watergate cover-up.

Inouye raised the obvious question: why not tell the President after the election? By then, however, Mitchell worried that such matters might be “a detriment” to the second term. He told Baker that none of the crimes and “horrors” could match the importance of re-electing the President. “I still believe,” he said, “that the most important thing to this country was the re-election of Richard Nixon. And I was not about to countenance anything
that would stand in the way of that re-election.” Mitchell, like the President, wanted to relive the 1972 campaign as the most effective way of deflecting the growing charges against the Administration. Despite Nixon’s declining approval ratings, polls still showed that voters overwhelmingly preferred him to George McGovern. But when Ervin told Mitchell he had exalted the President’s political fortunes above Nixon’s responsibility to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, Mitchell displayed a rare glimmer of uncertainty as he acknowledged that that was a “reasonable” interpretation and, on reflection, “it is a very serious one.”
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On Friday, July 13, committee investigators privately interrogated former Haldeman aide Alexander Butterfield in preparation for his public appearance. Butterfield was an important witness in setting the scene for testimony from Haldeman and Ehrlichman. The three men had attended UCLA together in the 1940s. Butterfield’s and Haldeman’s wives were best friends, and the two men were on good terms. Butterfield had served more than twenty years in the Air Force as a fighter pilot and a member of the jet aerobatics team, rising to full colonel. At Haldeman’s invitation, he had joined the White House staff shortly before Nixon’s inauguration in January 1969 and remained until March 14, 1973, when he resigned to become Administrator of the Federal Aviation Agency.

Butterfield’s job was, in his own words, to see to the “smooth running of the President’s day.” He completely controlled the paper flow to the President, logging in memos, weeding out those which “the President did not have to see”—certainly a considerable responsibility. Butterfield and Haldeman shared the task of accompanying the President on domestic trips, mainly to direct the staff. (Haldeman monopolized the foreign excursions, apparently trusting Butterfield to oversee White House operations in his absence.) At 2:00
P.M.
each day, Butterfield and his aides would map the President’s schedule for the next day. Every presidential meeting required a briefing paper that included “talking points” for the President. Whoever prepared the paper generally would attend the meeting and then have responsibility for preparing a summary memorandum afterward, for both immediate and historical reference. Butterfield tracked those reports and ensured that they were completed. He also directed FBI investigations made on behalf of the White House. Although an FBI background check was normal procedure for nominating appointees, Butterfield acknowledged that he filled approximately eight requests for investigations of individuals who were not prospective appointees, including entertainers Frank Sinatra and Helen Hayes, and reporter Daniel Schorr. (Interestingly, Butterfield classified Schorr as a “non-appointee,” indicating that the background check for job purposes was a ruse.)

Although relatively unknown outside Administration circles, and of a modest, accommodating demeanor, Butterfield nevertheless could act with an authoritative confidence. After the President and Ehrlichman had met with key Administration officials on tax policy in September 1972, Butterfield’s aide asked Ehrlichman’s assistant for a memorandum of the meeting for the White House records. The Ehrlichman man replied that Ehrlichman had said that there should be no report, because of the “sensitive nature” of the session. Butterfield personally replied: “Nothing is too sensitive—
really
! No one sees these except Dave Hoopes [his aide] & me … & neither of us
has
to read anything. We have K[issinger]’s memos on Mao, Chou, Brezhnev, etc.… —Haldeman’s, Connally[’s] meetings. Surely you can comply with this request. Just put memo in sealed envelope & mark it P[resident] & E[hrlichman] eyes only—if you want. But some written record is mandatory.”
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Butterfield’s decision to leave the White House apparently was his own. He told Senate investigators that the position no longer challenged him. Nixon initially asked Butterfield whether he wanted to join the State Department. The FAA was a second suggestion. Shortly after he left in March, Butterfield visited U.S. Attorneys Silbert and Glanzer to describe his tenuous connection to Haldeman’s $350,000 fund for “political polling.”

Three Senate committee staffers interviewed Butterfield on that Friday afternoon in July. He cooperated mechanically, aptly reflecting his White House functions. But except for Haldeman, the investigators would speak to no one with as intimate a knowledge of the President’s day-to-day conduct. Since Dean’s rather offhand remark that he thought his Oval Office conversations had been taped, the Ervin Committee’s staff had routinely asked witnesses if they had any knowledge of such action. When asked whether he was aware of any taping, Butterfield forthrightly responded: “There is tape in the Oval Office. This tape is maintained by the Secret Service, and only three (3) Secret Service men knew about it initially … now four (4) know about it. The system was installed about 2 1/2 years ago, I think—about at the 18-month point of Mr. Nixon’s 1st term.… [T]he President is very history-oriented and history-conscious about the role he is going to play, and is not at all subtle about it, or about admitting it.”

Butterfield told the committee staff that Nixon had directed him to have the Secret Service install and operate a voice-activated taping system. Besides the Secret Service operatives, only three other White House aides knew about it. Even the Director of the Secret Service Presidential Protective Division was unaware of its existence. Dean, he was certain, also did not know of it. The system had been installed in the Oval Office, the President’s Executive Office Building retreat, the Cabinet Room, several private White House rooms, and the President’s cabin at Camp David. “
Everything
was taped … as long as the President was in attendance. There was not so
much as a hint that something should
not be taped.
” Butterfield did not believe any transcripts existed, nor had Nixon (in Butterfield’s tenure) requested any tapes for review. Butterfield believed that the President had no intention of depositing the tapes in the National Archives at the conclusion of his presidency.

The original report of the investigators noted that Butterfield had stated that he thought his revelation was “something you ought to know about in your investigation.” But when Butterfield read the report, he protested, concerned as he was that some might think he had been “eager” to reveal the existence of the recording system. He had told the committee staff that he had not informed the U.S. Attorneys of the system because “they did not ask anything even closely related to this.” He corrected the report to read that he knew that the President would not want the information known, but since he had been asked, he had “no choice but to answer. And, of course, there is only one kind of truth.” He noted on the transcript that he had not said anything about the committee’s “need” to know. “That,” he said, “sounds as though I was
eager
, & I was not.”
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Butterfield had assumed that the committee already had asked Haldeman and Higby about the tapes, and believed he was only corroborating what they had said. But apparently someone in high quarters had given Butterfield comfort after he had made the revelation, since in his public testimony he remarked that the tapes provided “the substance” for the President’s future defense. For his part, Butterfield hoped that he had not “given away something” that Nixon had planned to use in support of his position.

John Dean, for one, was ecstatic over the revelation of the White House tapes. Alexander Butterfield, on the other hand, seemed distinctly unhappy with himself for having revealed them. Nixon later described himself as “shocked.” He thought that “any staff member” would have raised executive privilege rather than reveal the system’s existence.
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In those suspicious times, Butterfield aroused the darkest of suspicions. Minority Counsel Fred Thompson thought that Nixon, that shrewdest and most nimble of politicians, had deliberately instructed Butterfield to describe the taping system because, Thompson believed, it would allow the President to provide irrefutable evidence of Dean’s culpability. Some suspected Butterfield of being a CIA agent, a charge Richard Helms later denounced as “ridiculous.” “I didn’t need Butterfield to spy for me,” Helms remarked. Butterfield’s motive was beside the point, however. His testimony changed the course of the hearings and redirected the conflict between Congress and Nixon. The tapes constituted the President’s deepest secret. Less than three months earlier, Nixon had underlined their importance when he warned Haldeman that the tapes had to remain secret. “Have we got people that are trustworthy on that?” the President asked. “I guess we have,” he said, providing his own response.
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Most important, the President’s ability to defend himself and to be defended had shifted dramatically with the introduction of the White House tapes. Despite appearances, Howard Baker had been Nixon’s most effective supporter on the Senate Select Committee. While Edward Gurney was a caricature of the Nixon loyalist, Baker
appeared
to be disinterested. His question regarding the President’s knowledge, carefully repeated as it was, served to protect Richard Nixon. Who among those witnesses knew what the President knew, or when he knew it? Not many, and those who did seemed unlikely to answer. But the discovery of the tapes undid Baker’s careful handiwork. The tapes made irrelevant his question to John Dean, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Through the tapes, Richard Nixon himself could answer Baker, and in indelible words.

The President moved hastily to thwart the committee’s attempts to gain access to the tapes. On July 16, he directed that no Secret Service agents give testimony regarding their protective or other White House duties. A week later, an obviously bitter Richard Nixon dispatched two letters to Senator Ervin which were read that day in the Senate Caucus Room. The first said that Nixon knew of no useful purpose for holding a meeting between the two. The second curtly rejected any access to the tapes. The “special nature of tape recordings of private conversations” was such, the President said, as to make the principle of confidentiality even greater for tapes than for documents. The tapes, he insisted, were “entirely consistent with what I know to be the truth and what I have stated to be the truth.” Listening to them could only be confusing, for they were subject to interpretation against a wide range of other conversations and documents.

The sharp rejection distressed Ervin. He replied, expressing his love for the nation, his veneration of the presidential office, and his wishes for President Nixon’s success—“because he is the only President this country has at this time.” But the widening scope of Watergate had alarmed him. With obvious pain and emotion, Ervin described it as “the greatest tragedy” in American history—one even more profound than the Civil War, which at least had the redeeming qualities of sacrifice and heroism. “I see no redeeming features in Watergate,” he concluded. Baker seconded Ervin’s comments, apparently having decided that the President now had to do more than “stonewall.” With that, the committee unanimously voted on July 23 to issue a
subpoena duces tecum
requiring the President to deliver the tapes to the committee.

Three days later, Nixon rejected the subpoena. Baker moved that the committee take the matter to the courts. There was no precedent, but the issue was joined, as Ervin noted, “whether the President is immune from all of
the duties and responsibilities in matters of this kind which devolve upon all the other mortals who dwell in this land.” The entire Senate voted to subpoena Nixon the following November. Lowell Weicker then suggested that the committee meet with the President to discuss the impasse, but Nixon again refused either to honor the subpoena or to talk to the senators. By December, Ervin was in despair. The President had convinced him “of his unrelenting purpose to hide … the truth respecting Watergate.”
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