The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down (7 page)

Even Archibald Cox mused about what he might have done under similar circumstances, confiding to the head of the Plumbers task force, “I know I would not have done anything which I knew or felt was questionable, but I wonder how I would have reacted if I had known others were involved in such conduct.”
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WATERGATE’S THREE CRITICAL PERIODS

Keeping these two terms in mind, let us review the key periods of the Watergate scandal. There are but three of them, each lasting only a week or two. A more complete timeline is provided in
Appendix A
for ease of reference. It also is important to remember that everyone admits that there was a cover-up and that it was run on a day-to-day basis by Dean and Magruder. The key question, then and now, is whether these two were operating under the direction and control of the president’s more senior aides (as they later told prosecutors).

1. The Die Is Cast (June 17–July 1, 1972)

In classical Greek tragedy, the hero commits a seemingly insignificant act early in the play, an act that seals his doom. The remainder of the play portrays his struggle against his inevitable and tragic destruction. Until recently, Watergate seemed to be such a tragedy. Here are the key events that occurred in the critical first two weeks.

On Saturday, June 17, 1972, five burglars were caught in the offices of the Democratic National Committee on the seventh floor of the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C. Four of the men were Cuban. The fifth, James McCord, turned out to be a former CIA wireman, then employed as head of security for the Committee to Re-Elect the President. The group was operating under the direction and control of two other CRP officials, Liddy and Hunt. Virtually no one today alleges that anyone at the White House (particularly Nixon, Haldeman, or Ehrlichman) was aware of this break-in in advance.

The president was in Key Biscayne, Florida, on the day of the arrests and did not return to Washington until Monday, the 19th. He met for the first time with Haldeman, his chief of staff, the next day. Haldeman’s notes from that meeting contain the word “Watergate,” but the tape of that conversation turned out to have an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap, which appeared to be a deliberate erasure. Much was made of this gap, and the attempted explanations by White House officials only undermined their credibility. John Dean, however, has recently asserted that whatever was on that tape is “historically insignificant,” mainly because
the substance of their discussion can be reconstructed by their contemporaneous diary entries.

On Friday, June 23, Nixon concurred with Haldeman’s suggestion that they get the CIA to ask the FBI to limit its investigation of funds found on the Watergate burglars. When the recording of this conversation was released in early August 1974 as a result of a Supreme Court decision, it appeared to reveal a clear obstruction of justice and led to Nixon’s resignation three days later. It is easy to see why this tape was called the “smoking gun,” for it seemed to be “proof positive” that Nixon had been in on the Watergate cover-up from the very outset. This interpretation of the conversation between Nixon and Haldeman was openly challenged for the first time in 2014 when John Dean declared that the conversation concerned their effort to prevent disclosure of the names of notable Democratic donors (whose contributions had inadvertently been paid to the Cubans) and had been totally misunderstood from the outset.

John Mitchell announced his resignation as head of Nixon’s reelection campaign on Saturday, July 1, ostensibly to tend to his wife, Martha, whose alcoholic outbursts had become a distraction and an embarrassment to the campaign. At the time, everyone accepted his explanation at face value. We now know that Nixon and his people had been told that responsibility for the Watergate break-in might, if followed carefully, end up at Mitchell’s doorstep (because of his alleged approval of Liddy’s campaign intelligence plan), and he was strongly encouraged to resign. The president took action. He fired his best friend but refused to publicly throw him to the wolves. This apparent act of kindness would cost him his presidency.

Thus the apparent Greek tragedy: Nixon’s concurrence with a recommendation made only six days after a burglary he knew nothing about would come back more than two years later to end his presidency.

2. Collapse of the Cover-Up (March 19–March 28, 1973)

The second set of critical events occurred nine months later, when the cover-up collapsed and Dean switched sides.

The first response of every bureaucracy is to cover-up, to protect itself and its people from outside attack. The guilty declare their innocence, usually twisting the facts of their involvement to minimize their culpability. Their friends and colleagues want to believe them. It’s “us against them.”

This is what happened at the outset of Watergate. The initial reports to the White House were that the Watergate break-in originated at CRP, and the White House goal from the outset was to contain it there. CRP people might ultimately go to jail, but no one on the White House staff was thought to be at risk. Dean, the president’s lawyer, was sent to CRP to help contain the problem and, above all, make sure it stayed at CRP.

Unfortunately, Dean was a bad choice for this assignment, since he had recruited Liddy to develop a campaign intelligence plan and had attended the two critical meetings in Mitchell’s office where Liddy’s plans were detailed. Since Mitchell was still attorney general at the time, these were highly suspect meetings. Following the burglars’ arrests, Dean must have realized that he was at risk of prosecution for the break-in and appears to have cast his lot with others at CRP who were equally at risk.

So there was certainly a cover-up. The essential and lingering question is just who was running it? Was Dean operating under the direction and control of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, as he has maintained, or did they believe he was acting as their lawyer, doing his best to “contain” the problem in a lawful manner? Regardless, the cover-up eventually collapsed (as it should have).

Sentencing for the Watergate burglars was scheduled for Friday, March 23. Howard Hunt, who had pleaded guilty to all six counts at the beginning of the trial, knew that he would immediately be taken into custody to begin serving an exceedingly stiff sentence. On Monday, March 19, wanting to pay his lawyer and to put his financial affairs in order before his incarceration, Hunt requested payment of $135,000 from his former friends at CRP, who had been subsidizing him and the other burglars almost since the time of their arrests. Perhaps understandably, they viewed a request for money over and above his actual legal
expenses as a form of blackmail. Dean informed Haldeman and Ehrlichman of Hunt’s request and asked that LaRue inform Mitchell.

Having decided that it was long past time to inform Nixon of the specifics of the Watergate problem, including Hunt’s new monetary demand, Dean met with the president at ten o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, March 21. He began by telling Nixon that there was a “cancer on the presidency,” which was spreading, and he told him about Hunt’s “blackmail” demand. Dean managed to omit the details of his own criminal acts, but it was not Nixon’s finest moment, either. The president clearly played with the idea of meeting Hunt’s demands, if only to buy time to get out ahead of Hunt’s threatened disclosures. Haldeman joined the meeting toward the end, and all agreed that they needed to bring Mitchell down from New York to decide how to respond.

At about five o’clock that afternoon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean again met with the president. They knew that Mitchell was to join them the next day, but they were still worried about Hunt’s demands. Nixon seemed to suggest that the only way out would be for staff members to appear before the Ervin Committee, in private session, in exchange for forgoing any claim of executive privilege. Later that night, at about ten o’clock, seventy-five thousand dollars was delivered to Hunt’s lawyer.

The next day, Thursday, March 22, this same group met again, joined by John Mitchell. This seems to have been the first time that the president had met in person with Mitchell since his resignation from CRP some nine months earlier. The distance Nixon maintained from his old friend probably indicates how radioactive Mitchell was thought to be. The conclusion of the meeting was that Dean would go to Camp David and write a report about what he had learned in his investigation on behalf of the president. On the basis of that report, the president, in turn, would send his staff to testify before the Ervin Committee. The unspoken assumption was that any such appearance by Mitchell would require him either to commit perjury or to take responsibility for authorizing the Watergate break-in. At the meeting’s conclusion, Nixon lingered alone with Mitchell and, according to the House Judiciary Committee’s
transcription of the tape recording, instructed him to “stonewall,” invoke the Fifth Amendment, cover up, or do anything else necessary to save the plan. I maintain, however, that this is a mis-transcription of this key recording.
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At the sentencing of the Watergate burglars on Friday, March 23, Judge Sirica shocked the courtroom by dramatically reading a letter from James McCord alleging a cover-up and then proceeded to hand down surprisingly harsh sentences—up to thirty-five years—to each of the defendants, with the provision that the sentences might be reduced in exchange for cooperation with prosecutors and the Ervin Committee.

That weekend, Dean dutifully journeyed to Camp David to draft the promised report, but he found himself unable to produce it, perhaps because anything he wrote, if remotely true, would have been self-incriminating. On Wednesday, March 28, Dean retained criminal defense counsel Charles Shaffer, a Democrat who had served in Robert Kennedy’s Department of Justice. It turned out to be a most astute choice. A brilliant and resourceful lawyer, Shaffer’s adroit initiatives and defense tactics got Dean off almost scot-free.

3. Nixon’s Fall (July 24–August 9, 1974)

The third and final stage of the Watergate scandal began on Wednesday, July 24, 1974, with an eight-to-zero decision of the Supreme Court in
United States v. Nixon
, ordering the president to turn over some sixty-four subpoenaed tape recordings to Judge Sirica for review for relevancy to the Watergate prosecutions. The “smoking gun” tape would not become public for two more weeks, but the fuse had been lit.

The Supreme Court decision was followed almost immediately by extensive and dramatic debate on the House Judiciary Committee over articles of impeachment against the president. On Monday, July 29, the committee recommended adoption of three articles of impeachment for (1) obstructing the investigation of the Watergate burglary inquiry, (2) misusing law enforcement and intelligence agencies for political purposes, and (3) refusing to comply with the Judiciary Committee’s subpoenas for White House tapes.

Late on the afternoon of Monday, August 5, the White House released the transcript of the meeting on June 23, 1972—the “smoking gun”—in which Nixon agreed with a recommendation to get the CIA to ask the FBI to limit its Watergate investigation. This was seen as a clear instance of obstruction of justice and was thought to show that the president had been in on the cover-up from its very outset.

His remaining political support having evaporated, Nixon announced to the nation on the evening of Thursday, August 8, that he would resign the presidency at noon the next day. After a farewell to his staff in the East Room on Friday morning, a helicopter lifted President and Mrs. Nixon from the White House lawn for the journey home to San Clemente, and Gerald Ford took the oath of office as the thirty-eighth president.

It is important to appreciate that the Watergate scandal was a
political
battle. It was waged mainly in the public media and in televised congressional hearings. But the Watergate Special Prosecution Force led the attack on the Nixon White House with grand jury and court proceedings conducted under the federal criminal code. They provided the substantive back-up for what was being debated. But they also became politicized themselves and cut too many corners in their efforts to oust Nixon and secure convictions of his senior aides. The result was the criminalization of politics. That is the
real
Watergate scandal.

CHAPTER 3

WHAT WENT WRONG

T
he
Washington Post
’s Carl Bernstein delivered the most famous assessment of the Watergate scandal: “What happened is that the system worked, the American system worked.” But Bernstein was badly mistaken. Virtually nothing worked as intended.

A “NEWTONIAN” SCANDAL

Newton’s third law of motion—for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction—applies to Watergate. The unacceptable actions of the Nixon campaign and White House provoked equally unacceptable reactions by Nixon’s many political opponents, though the nature and extent of those reactions have remained undisclosed these many years. The responses of Congress, the courts, and the press were marred by excesses at every stage, some of which have come to light only recently.