The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down (16 page)

Frampton’s revised report certainly did the trick. The WSPF prosecutors’ certainty of Nixon’s guilt easily carried the day. Don’t take my word for it—you can get it straight from the special prosecutor. In Bob Woodward’s notes from his December 5, 1974, interview of Leon Jaworksi, he asserts again and again that the contribution of the WSPF was determinative in the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment recommendations (see
Appendix B
).

On July 27, the Judiciary Committee voted twenty-seven to eleven to adopt the first article of impeachment, for obstruction of justice, which provided in pertinent part:

          
The means used to implement this course of conduct or plan included one or more of the following: . . .

                
(5) approving, condoning, and acquiescing in, the surreptitious payment of substantial sums of money for the purpose of obtaining the silence or influencing the testimony of witnesses, potential witnesses or individuals who participated in such unlawful entry and other illegal activities.

In essence, the Frampton Supposition provided the substantive underpinning for WSPF prosecutors’ assurances—to the grand jury and to the House Judiciary Committee—that Nixon was personally involved in authorizing the final Hunt payoff. When it came time to prove their thesis in an actual court of law, subject to rules of evidence and the opportunity to confront and cross-examine witnesses, WSPF prosecutors failed miserably and the Frampton Supposition was quietly abandoned. But it was not for lack of trying.

THE COVER-UP TRIAL: CONVICTING NIXON IN ABSENTIA

President Nixon may have been pardoned and thus out of reach of WSPF prosecutors, but the cover-up trial gave them the opportunity to prove their prosecutorial theory. Nixon was not an actual defendant at this trial, but he was certainly being tried in absentia as a principle target of WSPF prosecutors.

Proving the Frampton Supposition was one of the prosecution’s paramount goals at this trial. Nixon, they argued, would have revisited Hunt’s blackmail demands with Haldeman right after Dean left their meeting at 11:55 a.m. on March 21, 1973. The president would have told Haldeman to contact Mitchell in New York to order that Hunt’s demands
be met. For this scenario to work, Fred LaRue would have to have talked with Mitchell in the
afternoon
of March 21 (that is, subsequent to Haldeman’s phone call, which clearly followed Dean’s meeting with Nixon).
¹⁹

To perfect their scenario, the WSPF had to corral its witnesses into telling a consistent story about a matter that had not been so critical when they testified before the Ervin Committee and subsequent grand juries. Ideally, Dean and LaRue would testify that their conversation occurred on March 21, and not before, precluding any alternative interpretations.

But Dean’s recollection up to this point, reflected in WSPF documents, had been that his conversation with LaRue had occurred on March 20. The July 1974 draft of Dean’s anticipated testimony noted with asterisks (*) any significant discrepancies with Dean’s prior testimony or that of other government witnesses:

          
On March 20 or 21, Dean had a conversation with LaRue in which LaRue asked Dean what should be done about Hunt’s demand and Dean said that Dean wanted nothing more to do with money and would not tell LaRue what to do. LaRue replied that LaRue would not pay any money to Hunt without instructions or authorization from someone else; Dean suggested that LaRue contact Mitchell if he wanted authorization.*

                
*Dean believes this conversation was on March 20. If LaRue got authorization from Mitchell on March 21, however, it appears more likely that Dean and LaRue spoke on March 21.

                
LaRue recalls this as a telephone conversation. Dean recalls that LaRue came to Dean’s office.

                
Dean recalls that LaRue was already aware of the threat, presumably through O’Brien. O’Brien denies telling LaRue. LaRue should be questioned about this closely.
²⁰

Note the challenges to the WSPF desired scenario that are reflected in this document: LaRue remembered this as a telephone conversation
of indeterminate date. Dean remembered it as a face-to-face meeting on the evening of March 20. It was troubling—and remains so today—that the government’s two witnesses did not even agree on the date or on the format of this critical conversation.

The specific date was finessed in the finalized WSPF memo, which carefully did not predict Dean’s actual testimony:

          
3/20 or early 3/21/73

          
Dean and LaRue discuss Hunt demand. Dean says “I am not going to have anything to do with it—take it up with Mitchell.” LaRue said o.k. and left.

                
GJ 11/20/73, 87

                
GJ 2/14/74, p. 16

                
House Jud II 249–250
²¹

We have no access to the grand jury testimony that is cited, but we do know that it was John Dean who appeared before the grand jury on November 20, 1973. It is not clear whether the February 14, 1974, appearance was that of Dean or LaRue. Dean’s written statement before the Ervin Committee had finessed the matter entirely. He did not allude to any meeting or conversation with LaRue on either March 20 or 21.
²²

In Ben-Veniste’s opening statement at trial he also finessed the date of the Dean-LaRue communication—placing it on either March 20 or 21—and whether it was a telephone conversation or in-person meeting:

          
Now, either that evening or on the morning of March 21st, before meeting with the President and H. R. Haldeman, Dean informed LaRue of the fact that Hunt was asking for this enormous sum of money.
²³

By the time Dean actually testified at the cover-up trial, however, he must have felt more confident of not being challenged on any inconsistency
with his earlier statements to prosecutors, for he was now more open to the possibility that his conversation with LaRue had occurred on March 21. Here is his exchange with James Neal, who was guiding him through his direct testimony:

                
Q: Mr. Dean, before we go further on this, I want to ask you to back up to just before you had your conversation with the President about what you just testified and ask you if you had occasion to talk with Mr. Fred LaRue?

                
A: Yes sir; I did.

                
Q: About Mr. Hunt’s demands?

                
A: Yes sir; I did.

                
Q: Tell us when this was?

                
A: Mr. Neal, that was either on the evening of the 20th there was possibly a telephone call on the evening of the 20th but my best recollection is there was a very brief meeting with Mr. LaRue and myself on the morning of the 21st.

                
Q: Was that before your meeting with the President?

                
A: Yes sir.

While Dean had now done his part and altered his recollection (in conflict with his earlier testimony), LaRue’s testimony about the timing of his conversations with Dean and Mitchell remained problematic. Here is LaRue’s exchange with Ben-Veniste, who was guiding him through his direct testimony:

                
Q: Now, did there come a time on or about the 21st of March, Mr. LaRue, when you learned of additional requests for money from the defendants?

                
A: Yes.

                
Q: And what were the circumstances of that?

                
A: This was a conversation—this was a phone call I had from Mr. Dean.

                
Q: Can you fix the time?

                
A: The best of my recollection, the phone call was that morning.

                
Q: What did Mr. Dean say to you?

                
A: Mr. Dean said that he had a request for funds for Mr. Hunt. The amount was approximately $130,000, broken down, as I recall, to $60,000 for his living expenses for a year, approximately $75,000 for legal fees.

                
Q: Sixty and 75 is different than 130.

                
A: It would be 135. Mr. Dean told me that—or I asked Mr. Dean if he thought I should pay this money. At that time I had that much cash on hand.

                
Mr. Dean informed me that he was not any longer in the money business, that he was very apprehensive about this operation, he was withdrawing from it and would no longer be involved with anything having to do with money and Watergate affairs.

                
I told Mr. Dean that I would not undertake to make any payments unless I had some authorization from someone.

                
He said: Why don’t you call Mr. Mitchell.

                
Q: Did you call Mr. Mitchell?

                
A: Yes, I did.

                
Q: Can you fix the time of day?

                
A: Again, the best of my recollection, it would be the morning of the 21st.

                
Q: Do you know whether you actually spoke with Mr. Mitchell on the morning of the 21st?

                
A: I know I placed the call, whether I talked to him at the time I placed the call or he called me back, I don’t know.

                
Q: Can you say with any certainty whether it was the morning or afternoon that you spoke with Mr. Mitchell?

                
A: I cannot say with any degree of certainty, no.
²⁴

This was not the answer that Ben-Veniste wanted. The LaRue-Mitchell conversation had to have occurred
after
the conclusion of Dean’s
March 21st meeting with the president—which had ended at 11:55 a.m.—for the prosecutors’ scenario involving Nixon to be feasible. That is why LaRue’s recollection of a morning call was so devastating—and why Ben-Veniste introduced the idea that maybe the call had not gone through.

Ben-Veniste had pushed LaRue as hard as he dared, even to the point of asking leading questions on direct examination in a desperate attempt to align LaRue’s testimony with the revised testimony of John Dean, but LaRue’s responses had hardly been helpful.

While the defendants themselves did not appear to appreciate the critical importance of these exchanges with respect to President Nixon, they did get LaRue to reconfirm his testimony on cross-examination by John Wilson, Haldeman’s defense counsel:

                
Q: Going to the March 21st meeting, you said your best recollection was that you called Mr. Mitchell in the morning?

                
A: That is correct.

                
Q: And you testified that you told Mr. Mitchell that they needed $75,000 is that correct?

                
A: Yes.

                
Q: And you fixed the figure of $75,000?

                
A: That is correct.

                
Q: And I take it, according to your testimony, that he then asked you what it was for; is that right?

                
A: That is correct.

                
Q: And what did you tell him?

                
A: I told him it was for legal fees.
²⁵

But it really was much worse. When LaRue was asked why he had asked Mitchell only for authority to pay the seventy-five thousand dollars of legal expenses (instead of Hunt’s total demand of $135,000), LaRue responded that they had never paid the full amount requested by any defendant and had always cut it back by some amount. He volunteered that it had been his decision alone to pay only the legal fees portion of
Hunt’s demands. This unexpected response totally undermined the Frampton Supposition. It is obvious that if the president had ordered the payment based on Dean’s representations that morning, the full $135,000 would have been paid.

Dean had changed his testimony to support the WSPF hypothesis and testified that his communication with LaRue—he still maintained that it had been a brief meeting—had occurred on the morning of March 21. LaRue had been brow-beaten into placing the conversation on March 21, but he still maintained that it had taken place over the telephone, and he was clear in his recollection that the conversation had occurred in the morning.

Without LaRue’s testimony that his conversation with Mitchell had not occurred in the afternoon of March 21 (preferably with Mitchell calling him, rather than the reverse, to relay the instructions that Mitchell had allegedly received from Haldeman following the Nixon-Dean meeting of late that morning), and that it was his own idea to cut the payment to seventy-five thousand dollars, the WSPF prosecutors’ theory of Nixon’s direct involvement in that final payment collapsed. The Frampton Supposition was never advanced again—not in the closing arguments in the cover-up trial and not in the statement of facts or argument in WSPF briefs on subsequent appeals to the D.C. Circuit.