The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down (4 page)

The Haldeman-Ehrlichman “Berlin Wall” so decried by their many critics was really an accommodation to President Nixon’s approach to governance. A deep thinker who was put off by personal salesmanship, Nixon demanded that ideas, proposals, and issues be presented in written form—not unlike legal opinions—which he would then think through in the privacy of his hideaway in the Old Executive Office Building. Oval Office and Cabinet Room sessions were mainly ceremonial or information-gathering events; the real decisions were made on the basis of written analyses, candidly and thoroughly discussed with only a handful of trusted aides. It was not that Nixon was uninformed of differing points of view, it was that he preferred to receive those views in written form rather than in face-to-face meetings.

Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman were dedicated, talented public officials, who produced outstanding work. Their reputation as thoroughly corrupt evil-doers, unfit for public service, is utterly undeserved.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT

It took Nixon until June 1969 just to get the last of his cabinet secretaries through confirmation—and the sub-cabinet appointments for a department could not even be formally submitted until the secretary had been confirmed. Given these challenges, it is astonishing how much Nixon actually accomplished. But he had thought long and hard about what he wanted to do if he should ever return to power. Far from being content to sit and wait for issues to be presented for decision (to “preside,” in the literal sense), Nixon arose each day filled with ideas and an urgency to get them accomplished. He was, in the truest sense, leading as president, every day and every step of the way.

There were many initiatives and many disappointments, but Nixon’s major accomplishments can be grouped into three categories: foreign affairs, domestic policy, and the institution of the presidency.

No president since Nixon has entered office with a background and expertise in foreign policy comparable to what he brought to the presidency in 1969. With Henry Kissinger as his assistant for foreign affairs, he scored a string of victories in a very difficult era. He saw himself as a peacemaker and spoke of achieving a full generation of peace. He ended the most controversial foreign war in American history. He engineered the opening to China after twenty-five years of isolation, something only a strong anti-communist like Nixon could do. He achieved détente with the Soviet Union and laid the groundwork for the strategic arms limitation treaties. In the challenging arena of the Middle East, Nixon befriended Anwar Sadat and wooed Egypt from the Soviet orbit, making it a strong U.S. ally. He strengthened our ties with other critical allies in the region, including Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and he almost single-handedly saved Israel through his forceful intervention in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. But Nixon’s greatest foreign policy triumph might have been his revitalization of the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger. Together they developed an approach to planning and analysis and trained a cadre of professionals that began America’s golden era of diplomacy. They and their progeny continue to serve and advise Republican leaders to this day.

Nixon was elected to the presidency in a time of domestic turmoil. He ran on a strong law and order platform but exercised a surprising degree of compassion toward his political adversaries. Sir Robert Thompson, the noted counter-insurgency expert, has astutely observed that unless a government can address the legitimate concerns of its citizens, particularly perceived injustices, it can never be successful against an insurgency. Though Nixon receives little credit for it, he addressed an astonishing number of injustices. His agenda had no catchy moniker like the “New Deal” or “Great Society,” but we might fairly call it the “Pursuit of the Just Society.” Here’s why.

The Nixon administration extended a helping hand to a surprisingly large group of oppressed minorities, never expecting and rarely receiving any acknowledgment or gratitude in return. He achieved the peaceful desegregation of Southern schools in the fall of 1971, he continued the integration of Northern unions under the Philadelphia plan, and he brought home rule to the District of Columbia. He restored the right of self-determination to Native Americans, ending the previous policy of assimilation, which paid Indians to give up their treaty rights and relocate to inner cities. He quadrupled the number of women appointed to senior government positions and signed Title IX, which ended funding discrimination in college sports. He established the National Institutes of Mental Health, ended the draft, and gave eighteen-year-olds the vote. He created the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and proposed both the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. He restored respect for law and order in a nation swirling toward anarchy. He initiated a program of block grants to states and localities that not only assured fair allocations of federal funds, but removed the heavy hand of federal bureaucrats in determining how such money was spent. He launched the War on Drugs and broke the inner-city heroin epidemic through a methadone maintenance program that was coupled with stronger law enforcement. It is a record of enviable domestic accomplishments and was achieved by working in partnership with a Congress totally controlled by the opposition party.

Besides these foreign and domestic accomplishments, President Nixon instituted a series of enduring organizational reforms that laid the foundation for the modern presidency. In addition to revitalizing the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger, he established its counterpart, the Domestic Council, under John Ehrlichman and transformed the old Bureau of the Budget into the Office of Management and Budget under George Shultz and Roy Ash. He professionalized the presidential appointment process under Fred Malek, recruiting hundreds of highly qualified persons into the executive branch. Each of these organizational initiatives has withstood the test of time, helping each new president to establish his hold on the levers of power and influence to manage the executive branch.

Richard Nixon compiled an enviable record of presidential accomplishment. As the world burns in the absence of U.S. leadership, partisan gridlock ties up Washington, and the economy languishes, we should pine for a leader with Nixon’s vision, expertise, and ability to work across party lines.

NOW, ABOUT WATERGATE

I began my assessment of Richard Nixon by asserting that, but for Watergate, he would have gone down in history as one of America’s great presidents. But Watergate did happen, and it vastly diminished Americans’ appreciation of all of the good just detailed.

I know, I was there—on the White House staff from Watergate’s beginning to its dramatic conclusion. I knew and worked with virtually everyone involved—in the scandal and in Nixon’s defense. It was like watching a slow-motion train wreck, with the crew and passengers alike caught in the crushing of the cars.

PART I

A BASIC WATERGATE BACKGROUND

CHAPTER 1

IDENTIFYING THE REAL WRONGDOING

OPENING SALVO

Even serious students of Watergate are not aware that the “smoking gun” tape that drove Nixon from office has been misinterpreted and had nothing to do with the crimes of Watergate. Most people don’t realize that John Dean, who was sentenced to a prison term of one to four years for his role in the Watergate scandal, never spent a day behind bars, or that the prosecutors’ contention that Nixon himself had authorized the final “hush money” payment (the core of their case against him at the time) proved to be totally erroneous.

Something that Carl Sagan wrote about the popular understanding of science applies equally as well the public’s understanding of Watergate:

          
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the
truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
¹

In politics, as in war, truth is usually the first casualty. It certainly was in the Watergate scandal. This book is my attempt to set the record straight. I intend to expose some of the charlatans who bamboozled the American people, and you’ll be surprised to find out who they were.

Historians may eventually conclude that Nixon was done in by his political enemies, but they’ll continue to insist that, as Nixon put it himself, he “gave them the sword.” Surprisingly, that’s not what happened. Oh, Nixon had political enemies, boatloads of them. But politicians will always act like politicians. They have danced on their opponents’ graves since time immemorial. But his many political enemies are not the ones who did Nixon in.

No, Nixon was done in by officers of the court, the very people sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution—federal judges and federal prosecutors, who met in secret and reached back-room deals on how best to take him down and secure convictions of his senior aides. That is the
real
Watergate scandal, a story told for the first time in this book.

I have recently uncovered documents at the National Archives that make it clear that as the Watergate scandal unfolded, federal judges hearing the Watergate cases held secret meetings with persons whose interests were adverse to President Nixon’s and his top aides’. The most outrageous of these confidential gatherings were the
ex parte
meetings between judges and Watergate prosecutors. I have been able to document ten of them, but it’s likely there were many more. As Leon Jaworski, the second Watergate special prosecutor, later confided to the reporter Bob Woodward, “there were a lot of one-on-one conversations that nobody knows about except [me] and the other party.”

Secret meetings, secret documents, secret collusion between judges and prosecutors, culminating in the reversal of the will of the people
expressed in President Nixon’s re-election—that’s the part of the Watergate scandal that has remained hidden until now. The subversion of the right to due process guaranteed by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution was part of a conscious plan to engineer the downfall of the president and the conviction of his senior aides. The principles that were violated are basic. You don’t need a law degree to understand and appreciate them, and they go to the very heart of our constitutional form of governance.

In his landslide re-election, Nixon received every vote in the Electoral College except those of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. The effort to un-elect him was led, fittingly enough, by people from those two political jurisdictions.

I will elaborate on these charges in the chapters that follow, and I have reproduced in full the most damning documentation in the appendices. But before proceeding to the details of the judicially assisted coup that brought down Nixon, it is important to explain the context in which it occurred.

PUTTING WATERGATE INTO CONTEXT

In 1808, Pierre Paul Prud’hon painted the allegorical
Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime
for the criminal tribunal hall in the Palace of Justice in Paris.
²
The painting, which now hangs in the Louvre, captures the universal aspiration that criminals be brought to account, in this world or the next. As Prud’hon himself described it,

          
Divine Justice is forever pursuing crime; and crime never gets away. Wrapped in the veil of night, in a remote and wild place, voracious Crime has killed a victim, taken his gold and is turning to see whether any remains of life might give him away. Fool! He does not see that Nemesis, that terrible agent of Justice, like a vulture descending upon his prey, is pursuing him, will catch him and hand him over to his unbending companion.

Americans share these deep-seated feelings about justice. They are expressed less colorfully but majestically in the words carved into the west pediment of the Supreme Court building in our nation’s capital:
EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW
. Though this phrase appears in none of our founding documents—it was suggested in 1935 by the building’s architect, Cass Gilbert—it nonetheless reflects our nation’s faith in the pursuit of justice under the rule of law.
³

A corollary of this maxim—“No man is above the law”—became a leitmotif of the Watergate scandal. And the “man” in question was the president of the United States, since he and senior members of his staff stood accused of having covered up the identities of those responsible for planning and authorizing the break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building on June 17, 1972.

The ensuing investigations and disclosures culminated in Nixon’s resignation and the conviction and incarceration of over twenty of his former associates.
⁴
The most notable of those associates were John Mitchell, Bob Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman, who were found guilty in the Watergate cover-up trial, which ended on January 1, 1975, some two and a half years after the break-in.

While justice, symbolized by the fearsome companion of Vengeance in Prud’hon’s painting, means the pursuit and punishment of wrongdoers, Americans also believe that it entails the right to a fair trial. Lady Justice, therefore, is more commonly depicted as blindfolded, to represent impartiality, and serenely holding a set of balancing scales in one hand and a double-edged sword in the other. Indeed, virtually all Americans would agree that the more heinous the crime or notorious the accused, the more essential it is that the trial is fair.