The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down (5 page)

The public was assured that justice had prevailed in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell had been tried and convicted by a jury of their peers, and that their convictions had been duly reviewed and upheld on appeal. After a full and fair process, each was sentenced to a prison term of two and half to eight years.

And there things have stood for the past four decades.

Documents recently uncovered, however, show that these men—regardless of their conviction in the court of public opinion—did not receive anything close to the fair trial guaranteed by our Constitution. Without a fair trial, of course, a jury could not have rendered a valid verdict.

The internal records generated by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force are still being released by the National Archives, but only in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act. Recently released records provide many of the missing pieces to the Watergate puzzle, pieces that have never before been available to researchers or to the general public.

Those documents and other disclosures that form the heart of this book reveal how, at a time of intense and highly politicized partisan combat, the constitutional rights of criminal defendants were intentionally trampled. They show that the judges and prosecutors involved in the Watergate trials met and reached agreements designed to assure convictions. These people cheated justice and then they lied to the appellate courts about having done so.

When judges conspire with prosecutors, any pretense of a fair trial is lost. There were at least a dozen secret meetings between Watergate judges and prosecutors or other interested parties, summarized in the chart on pp. 6–7.

Prominent and distinguished public officials, all members of the bar, violated their oaths of office in order to obtain convictions they believed were richly deserved. It is a sordid tale of meetings, memos, and collusion. These men undermined our Constitution’s guarantees of due process and the even-handed application of justice.

The consequences of these prosecutorial and judicial misdeeds have extended far beyond injustices to individuals. These convictions were the capstone of the Watergate scandal. President Ford’s pardon may have allowed Nixon himself to escape criminal prosecution, but the conviction of his senior aides on all counts was intended to extinguish any doubt that they and the president they served were as guilty and as evil as the public had been led to believe.

If the validity of those convictions is undermined, then the lid is removed from the Watergate scandal and all sorts of issues resurface: Do we really know who authorized and directed the original break-ins? Are we certain of who actually was running the subsequent cover-up? Is it possible that President Nixon was unfairly run out of town by an overly aggressive and highly partisan team of prosecutors, who were secretly sharing their mistaken conclusions with the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry?

Had due process prevailed, the Watergate prosecutions would have been handled far differently:

          
•
    
The trials would have been held outside of the District of Columbia, most likely in Baltimore or Richmond, and far away from the taint and bias of Judge Sirica and a Washington jury.

          
•
    
The cases would have been presented by career federal prosecutors, bound by rules and procedures applicable to all federal criminal prosecutions.

          
•
    
Prior inconsistent statements by John Dean and Jeb Magruder would have been shared with defense counsel, as required by law, allowing their credibility as the government’s principal accusatory witnesses to be aggressively challenged.

          
•
    
Appeals from any convictions would have been heard by three-judge panels of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, a dramatically more conservative appellate court than the D.C. Circuit.

The issues I raise in this book could well have led an unbiased jury to acquit one or more of the principal defendants. Such an acquittal would have raised questions about the forces that culminated in President Nixon’s resignation. We might today have a far different view of the Watergate scandal and of Richard Nixon and his three top aides, Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman.

CHAPTER 2

UNDERSTANDING WATERGATE

T
o understand Watergate, it is important to know the key figures and the basic chronology of the scandal.

KEY WATERGATE FIGURES

WHITE HOUSE STAFF

Before April 30, 1974
:

H. R. “Bob” Haldeman
(1926–1993), Chief of Staff. Convicted on all counts in the cover-up trial.

John Ehrlichman
(1925–1999), Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs. Convicted on all counts in the cover-up trial.

Charles “Chuck” Colson
(1931–2012), Special Counsel to the President. Prominent political operative; indicted in the cover-up case, but
pleaded guilty in the Plumbers case instead. Became a government witness in the cover-up trial.

John Dean
(1938– ), Counsel to the President. Coordinator of the cover-up, who switched sides to become the government’s principal witness in the cover-up trial.

Gordon Strachan
(pronounced “strawn”) (1943– ), Haldeman’s liaison to the Committee to Re-Elect the President. A young lawyer from Nixon’s law firm, he was indicted in the cover-up case but never brought to trial because of a grant of immunity from the Ervin Committee.

After April 30, 1974
:

Alexander Haig
(1924–2010), Chief of Staff. Career military officer, former National Security Council deputy director under Kissinger and later secretary of state under President Reagan.

Fred Buzhardt
(1924–1978), Special Counsel to the President. Lead Watergate defense counsel. Former legislative aide to Senator Strom Thurmond and general counsel for the Defense Department.

Charles Alan Wright
(1927–2000), outside counsel retained to defend the president in the White House tape litigation. Distinguished law professor at the University of Texas and the leading authority on federal procedure.

James St. Clair
(1920–2001), Special Counsel to the President. Outside counsel retained for Watergate defense. Top litigator at the Boston firm of Hale and Dorr.

COMMITTEE TO RE-ELECT THE PRESIDENT (CRP)

Coming from the Department of Justice
(
DOJ
):

John Mitchell
(1913–1988), Director. Nixon’s first attorney general. Convicted on all counts in the cover-up trial.

Robert Mardian
(1923–2006), Special Counsel. Former assistant attorney general. Helped CRP respond to the civil suit brought by the Democratic National Committee. His conviction in the cover-up case was reversed and remanded on appeal but never re-tried.

Fred LaRue
(1928–2004), Special Assistant. Former Mitchell aide at DOJ. Pleaded guilty to a single count of obstruction of justice and became a government witness in the cover-up trial.

Coming from the White House
:

Jeb Magruder
(1934–2014), Chief of Staff. Former White House deputy director of communications. Liddy’s supervisor at CRP and active in the cover-up. Pleaded guilty to a single count of obstruction of justice and became a government witness in the cover-up trial.

Gordon Liddy
(1930– ), Counsel to the Finance Committee. A former FBI agent, he orchestrated break-ins at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist on behalf of the White House Plumbers unit, as well as DNC offices in the Watergate office building. Convicted in the break-in trial and served the longest prison term of any defendant (over five years).

Coming from the Central Intelligence Agency
:

Howard Hunt
(1919–2007), Consultant. Partner in crime with Gordon Liddy on both break-ins. Pleaded guilty to all six counts in the break-in trial and granted immunity from further prosecution. Became a government witness in the cover-up trial.

James McCord
(1924– ), Outside consultant retained to oversee CRP security. The wiretap expert on the Watergate break-ins, he was one of the five burglars arrested on June 17, 1972. Convicted in the break-in trial. His letter to Judge Sirica is credited with triggering the cover-up’s collapse.

FEDERAL PROSECUTORS

Career prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office
:

Earl Silbert
(1936– ), Principal Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Became U.S. attorney in 1974.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys
Seymour Glanzer
and
Donald Campbell

Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF)
:

Special Prosecutors:

Archibald Cox
(1912–2004). First Watergate Special Prosecutor, May 19–October 20, 1973. Harvard law professor and confidant of the Kennedy family.

Leon Jaworski
(1905–1982). Second Watergate Special Prosecutor, November 1, 1973–October 25, 1974. Managing partner of Fulbright & Jaworski in Houston.

Staff Prosecutors:

Henry Ruth
(1932–2012), Deputy (and third Watergate Special Prosecutor, October 25, 1974–October 6, 1975); Philip Lacovara, Counsel; Peter Kreindler, Executive Assistant.

Watergate Task Force:

James Neal
(1929–2010), Lead Counsel; Richard Ben-Veniste, Deputy; Other Counsel: George Frampton, Peter Rient, Judith Denny.

FEDERAL JUDGES

John Sirica
(1904–1992), Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. A biased and publicity-seeking judge who appointed himself to preside over both the break-in and cover-up trials.

Gerhard Gesell
(1910–1993). Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Presided over other Watergate trials, including the Plumbers case.

David Bazelon
(1909–1993), Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which heard all appeals from the Watergate trials. Deeply biased, he stacked the appeals court panels to assure that Judge Sirica was not reversed.

CRIMINAL DEFENSE COUNSEL

Charles Shaffer
(1932–2015), counsel for John Dean. A former DOJ prosecutor and a brilliant and resourceful lawyer who obtained far more lenient treatment for Dean than he deserved.

William Bittman
(1931–2001), counsel for Howard Hunt. A former DOJ prosecutor who was heavily involved in the cover-up payoffs. It is all but impossible to explain why he was not indicted in the cover-up case, as was recommended by the entire Watergate Task Force.

THE FALSE HEROES OF WATERGATE

The focus of this book is not the three famous defendants convicted in the cover-up trial—John Mitchell, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman—but five other men—two judges, two special prosecutors, and
the government’s principal accusatory witness—whose collusion in undermining the rule of law in the Watergate prosecution has only recently come to light. Though these men have been lionized by the press, no one who dispassionately examines their misdeeds can regard any of them as a “hero” of Watergate.

Before his role in the Watergate prosecution propelled him to national fame and
Time
magazine’s selection as its Man of the Year for 1973, John Sirica
¹
had had what is charitably characterized as an undistinguished legal career. He never attended college and twice dropped out of law school before finally graduating in 1925. He admitted in his memoir that he seldom understood the legal concepts being taught. Small of stature but arrogant and stubborn to a fault, he had moved to Miami after graduation to pursue his boxing career and was as surprised as anyone when notified that he had passed the bar exam.