Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (65 page)

Q: What instructions were the men who were to photograph documents given?

A: They were to photograph everything that was available with particular reference to any papers with financial figures and computations on them, anything that looked like contributors. In fact, a second camera had been procured for that purpose, together with a large quantity of film.

Q: Did you know what Mr. McCord was supposed to be doing on the second entry?

A: He was supposed to be either replacing or repairing an electronic device that for some reason was not functioning properly.

Martinez, who also testified in a deposition in my wife’s and my own defamation lawsuit, has consistently said that they were looking for financial information regarding contributions from Fidel Castro. Martinez added that, at that time, it seemed a credible story. Asked to be more specific, Martinez explained, “I want to say the document that might represent that there [was] money coming in or money going out, some accounting thing, anything related with money coming from Cuba…anything that we could find out about that, that is what we were told.”

Alfred Baldwin was the man assigned to listen to the conversations at the bugged DNC offices. He was hired at the time of the first break-in by Liddy’s “wireman,” James McCord. Al Baldwin moved into the Howard Johnson Hotel, and took a room facing Virginia Avenue, thus facing those of the Watergate offices of the DNC that were directly across the street and also faced Virginia Avenue. Baldwin, also a former FBI agent, cooperated with the prosecutors after the arrests of Liddy’s men during the second entry, and was never prosecuted. Baldwin testified against Liddy and McCord at their trial, and fleetingly during the Senate Watergate hearings, but he was never closely questioned about what exactly happened, until a deposition in our lawsuit.

When we questioned Baldwin he confirmed (under oath) Liddy’s men never entered O’Brien’s office during the first break-in. Baldwin described Liddy’s operation as a joke, comic, a “Katzenjammer Kids” operation—it was “just totally unorganized.” During the first entry into the DNC, the burglars never got anywhere near O’Brien’s office, for good reason—they did not have a clue where it was located. As a result, no bug was ever placed in O’Brien’s office, and no photographs were taken in or near his office. O’Brien’s office was located in a separate suite of offices within the DNC complex and behind a locked glass door that was never opened during the first break-in. It was McCord’s job to place the bug in O’Brien’s office, but Baldwin testified during his deposition that it was not until shortly before the second entry, on June 12, 1972, that McCord instructed him to visit the DNC to find the location of O’Brien’s office. Baldwin did this by pretending to be the nephew of a former DNC chairman (a person Baldwin actually knew). Knowing that O’Brien was out of town, he asked O’Brien’s secretary to show him the chairman’s office, which was located in the back of the building, where the listening post at the Howard Johnson Hotel would not have been able to pick up the signal from a bug. Baldwin drew a crude floor plan so that McCord would know where to go when they entered the second time.

As late as 1980, when he was writing
Will
, Liddy believed his men had entered O’Brien’s office during their first entry because one of the burglars (Bernard Barker) had reported, as Liddy wrote, that “Barker had two rolls of 36-exposure 35-mm film he’d expended on material from O’Brien’s desk, along with Polaroid shots of the desk and office before anything was touched so that it could all be returned to proper order before leaving.” In fact, these pictures could not have been of materials on O’Brien’s desk. Liddy added, when recounting these events in
Will
that the next morning he “reported to Magruder the successful entry into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate. For proof, I showed him Polaroid photographs of the interior of Larry O’Brien’s office.” In fact, the suite of offices that McCord bugged (and the office Barker had no doubt photographed) belonged to the Chairman of the Democratic State Governors, and included the office of the Director of the Office for the State Chairman, R. Spencer Oliver, and the office of his secretary, Ida M. Wells. McCord placed a bug in the telephone system of this suite of offices, which faced the Howard Johnson Hotel across the street, and said that he planted a room bug, as well, that never worked. Since the Democratic State Governors office was frequently empty, and Spencer Oliver was often traveling, the conversations that Baldwin overheard using the bug were largely of the secretaries who made use of this phone system in these empty offices. (They liked this phone system because it did not go through the DNC’s switchboard operator.) Baldwin estimated that he may have heard as few as “60” and possibly as many as “100” or more different people use the phone that McCord had bugged, and none of them was Larry O’Brien or any member of his personal staff.

While Liddy apparently did not know his team had never made it to O’Brien’s office, he did know that the bug McCord had installed was not picking up anything regarding O’Brien. He wrote in
Will
that by June 9, 1972, Magruder had looked at the summaries of the conversations that Baldwin was overhearing—no electronic recordings were made because McCord could not figure out how to connect his taping machine to the radio receiver intercepting the calls, so Baldwin made notes and Liddy had his secretary retyped them—Magruder found the material “hardly worth the effort, risk, and expense.”

After further conversations with Magruder, Liddy set up a second entry into the DNC to repair the defective bug and to take more photographs of financial material in the DNC files. It would be done the same night that they planned to break into and bug Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern’s headquarters on Capitol Hill. In discussing the second DNC break-in, Liddy wrote, “Magruder didn’t tell me what he either expected, or was afraid, we’d find in O’Brien’s files,” only that he wanted his men “to photograph everything in his desk and in those files.” (While Liddy did not recall what Magruder wanted when writing
Will
, as noted earlier, Hunt recalled clearly, and Hunt had received this information from Liddy to impart to the Cuban-Americans. This, however, is typical of Liddy’s selective or poor memory in reconstructing these events so long after they occurred.)

False Protests of Ignorance, With Occasional Slips, At the White House

Protests of ignorance about why anyone would break into the DNC offices were rampant after Liddy’s men were arrested. Neither Nixon nor Haldeman wanted to recall the actions they had earlier demanded be taken to look for financial dirt on the Democrats, nor did they want to recall putting pressure on everyone to find such intelligence. Notwithstanding these protests of ignorance, however, both Nixon and Haldeman slipped from time to time and revealed their knowledge when discussing what, in fact, had happened. Unfortunately, there is no single collection of all the transcribed Nixon taped conversations, and most of the conversations have not been transcribed. One day, it will be possible to do a digital search, which will help locate the hidden nuggets. Still, proceeding the old-fashioned way—by reading—I have found conversations that show that Nixon and Haldeman, in fact, knew exactly what had occurred at the DNC and why it had happened. Below are a few examples, and I do not doubt that, one day, more will be found:

On June 20, 1972, just three days after the arrests at the Watergate, and on his first day back in his office, Nixon had the following exchange with Haldeman. (The emphases are mine):

NIXON: My God, the [Democratic National] committee isn’t worth bugging in my opinion.
That’s my public line
.

HALDEMAN:
Except for this financial thing
. They thought they had something going on that.

NIXON: Yes, I suppose.

Nixon and Haldeman discussed the fact that they were looking for financial information in the DNC during a conversation on January 3, 1973 (again, emphases are my own):

NIXON: I can see Mitchell, but I can’t see Colson getting into the Democratic office.

HALDEMAN
:
The stupidity.

NIXON: What the Christ was he looking for?

HALDEMAN
:
They were looking for stuff on two things. One,
on financial
.

NIXON: Yes.

HALDEMAN
:
And
the other on stuff that they thought they had on what they were going to do at Miami to screw us up, because apparently—a Democratic plot
. And they thought they had it uncovered. Colson was salivating with glee at the thought of what he might be able to do with it. And they were very reluctant, the investigator types were reluctant, to go in there. They were put under tremendous pressure that they had to get that stuff. None of this—I don’t know any of this firsthand. I can’t prove any of it, and I don’t want to know it. As I pointed out, if I ever get called in I’ll be ignorant, which I am.

Among the references that I have found (so far) regarding the President’s interest in the financial activities of the Democrats, is a conversation I had with him on February 28, 1973. In the middle of this conversation, and literally out of nowhere, Nixon asked me a question: “What in the name of God ever became of our investigation of their [referring to the Democrats] financial activities? Jesus Christ, they borrowed—they cancelled debts, they borrowed money. What the hell is that?” At the time, I was not certain what the President was taking about, because I had been only incidentally involved in the earlier full-court press to dig up financial dirt on the Democrats, so I stammered and mentioned the fact that his opponent Senator George McGovern’s finances were in “bad shape,” and then proceeded to another topic. Reading the transcript of this conversation years later, I realized that Nixon was testing me to see how much I did or did not know about these earlier efforts, and when he realized I did not know anything, he, too, moved on. The subject would come up again.

On March 13, 1973, in a conversation with me, the following exchange occurred (again, emphases are my own):

DEAN: A lot of people around here had knowledge that something was going on over there. They didn’t have any knowledge of the details of the specifics of, of the whole thing.

NIXON: You know, that must, must be an indication, though, of the fact that, that they had God damn poor pickings. Because naturally anybody, either Chuck or Bob, uh, was always reporting to me about what was going on. If they ever got any information they would certainly have told me that we got some information, but they never had a God damn [laughs] thing to report. What was the matter? Did they never get anything out of the damn thing?

DEAN: No. I don’t think they ever got anything.

NIXON: It was a dry hole, huh?

DEAN: That’s right.

NIXON: Jesus Christ.

DEAN: Well, they were just really getting started.

NIXON: Yeah. Yeah. But, uh, Bob one time said something about the fact we got some information about this or that or the other, but, I,
I think it was about the Convention, what they were planning
, I said [unintelligible].

Today, I have no doubt that Nixon understood that his request for dirt about the financial activities of the Democrats was the catalyst that resulted in Mitchell’s approving Liddy’s operation that resulted in his men getting arrested in the Democratic headquarters. This was not information that Nixon was about to admit to anyone, other than through his oblique admissions to Haldeman. This, of course, raised the following question: If Nixon’s involvement in the ruinous Watergate operation was so tangential, and if no one at the White House was involved directly in the conspiracy to burglarize and bug the DNC, then why did the cover-up occur, when the cover-up appears to have made it so much worse for everyone?

Reasons for the Watergate Cover-up: More Stupidity,
Including My Own

Bud Krogh’s explanation as to why the cover-up occurred—that the Ellsberg-related burglary was at the core of the cover-up—is correct, at least as far as the White House was concerned. This fact was well understood by all who were involved in the cover-up, although it has been left to only Bud and myself to acknowledge it, since Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell went to their graves either pretending they did not understand why the cover-up occurred or denied that anything untoward had, in fact, happened.

Initially, and during the first few days after learning of the arrest of Liddy’s team at the DNC, there was considerable confusion at the White House about what, in fact, had truly occurred. Certainly, no meeting was held where everyone sat down and planned a cover-up. No information was more incomprehensible and difficult to understand than the fact that not only had Liddy used James McCord—head of security at the Committee to Reelect the President, who was then in jail—but Liddy had also used the same men he had employed to burglarize Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. As for Liddy’s contingency plans in the event that his men got caught and were arrested, he had absolutely none, so he laid it off on the reelection committee and the White House to take care of such problems as providing support money and attorneys’ fees for those who had been arrested—a sure and short route to obstruction of justice. In fact, a panicked Liddy had tracked down Attorney General Kleindienst at his golf club, confessed that his men had been arrested at the DNC, and requested that Kleindienst get them out of jail—as if he could, in fact, actually do that without obstructing justice, not to mention the attorney general of the United States had no jurisdiction over the District of Columbia jails.