Nixon's Secret (67 page)

Nick Ruwe talked about the high-end call-girl operation over drinks at the Pisces Club in Georgetown, a private watering hole opened by Frank Sinatra intimate, restaurateur, and Spiro Agnew aide, Peter Malatesta. “We sent all the diplomats and visiting foreign dignitaries there,” Ruwe said as he dragged deeply on an unfiltered Camel. “We knew the agency boys were filming them.” The unmarried Ruwe was known for his hard drinking and easy access to female companionship when he was not serving as a traveling aide or advance man for Richard Nixon. “Nick Ruwe was himself the biggest cocksman this town ever saw,” said a longtime Nixon aide. “Honey Trap,” he said, referring to the Columbia Plaza brothel. When California Republican William Bagley asked him what the chief of protocol did, Ruwe said, “We have ten Arabs coming to town, and they’ve ordered twenty prostitutes—none of them Jewish.”
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Ruwe eventually married First Lady Bette Ford’s social secretary and bought a palatial home in the pricey Kalorama section of Washington, DC.

Another regular was Texas/New York socialite millionaire Emil “Bus” Mosbacher. Mosbacher’s deputy was his running buddy, Nick Ruwe. Both socially prominent Ruwe and Mosbacher bonded in 1961 when Nixon dispatched Ruwe to Texas to work on the successful election of Professor John Tower, a Republican, to the seat vacated by Lyndon Johnson’s elevation to the vice presidency. Tower was the first elected from Texas since the Reconstruction era.

Mosbacher frequented the high-end call girl ring that operated out of the Columbia Plaza Apartments. According to an FBI document I obtained, Mosbacher was also a regular at the New York whorehouse of Xaviera Hollander, known as the so-called Happy Hooker. When Hollander was busted, New York tabloids reported that among her customers were movie stars, athletes, titans of industry, and a White House lawyer. These reports rang alarm bells in the White House, and John Dean was assigned to find out who was in Hollander’s little black book and whether “the Nixon administration had any vulnerability,” as presidential aide Peter Flanigan asked the FBI. Dean sent New York gumshoe Tony Ulaseicz to try to secure the client list and any political dirt on Democrats or Republicans it might contain. Interestingly Mosbacher, a dashing two-time America’s Cup winning yachtman, would resign the very prestigious position of US State Department Director of Protocol only two weeks after the Watergate break-in.

“Sometime after Nixon’s resignation, in a report suppressed officially but leaked to the press, the House Intelligence Committee revealed that the CIA had provided foreign heads of state with ‘female companion,’” wrote Anthony Summers. “Several leaders including King Hussein of Jordan had so benefited.”
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During a meeting on June 3, 1991, Bailley told Liddy that tasteful photographs of the Columbia Plaza call girls were kept in Well’s desk. According to Bailley, various personnel were involved and were rewarded for wrangling appointments and new clients.

“Some members of the DNC were using the call girl ring as an asset to entertain visiting firemen,” Liddy said to a student audience at James Madison University. “And to that end they had a manila envelope that you could open or close by wrapping a string around a wafer. And in that envelope were twelve photographs of an assortment of these girls and then one group photograph of them. And what you see is what you get.” It was kept, he said, in that desk of Ida Maxine Wells. “Thus, the camera [and] all the rest of it. And what they were doing is as these people would be looking at the brochure, if you want to call it that, and making the telephone call to arrange the assignation that was being wiretapped, recorded and photographed.”
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Bailley’s exciting and lucrative referral service did not last long.

On June 9, 1972, the
Washington Star
ran a story headlined “Capitol Hill Call-Girl Ring.” The article was salacious:

The FBI here has uncovered a high-priced call girl ring allegedly headed by a Washington attorney and staffed by secretaries and office workers from Capitol Hill and involving at least one White House secretary, sources said today.

A 22-count indictment returned today by a special federal grand jury names Phillip M. Bailley, 30, as head of the operation. Sources close to the investigation said that among the clients of the call girl operation were a number of local attorneys holding high positions in the Washington legal community and one lawyer at the White House.
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There is little doubt John Dean saw this article and panicked. Dean called John Rudy, the prosecutor in the Bailley case, within an hour of the paper hitting the newsstands. “He told me he was the President’s counsel, and that he wanted me to come over to the White House,” Rudy recalled. “He wanted me to bring ‘all’ the evidence but, mostly, what I brought were Bailley’s address books. Dean said he wanted to check the names of the people involved, to see if any of them worked for the President.”
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Benton Becker, an attorney and aide of President Ford, who, along with Alexander Haig negotiated the Nixon pardon, remembered the story Rudy, and Rudy’s boss Don Smith, told him of their trip to Dean’s office. When Rudy and Smith arrived with the two address books, Dean had his secretary Xerox copies of both. When she returned, Dean went through the copies meticulously, circling specific names with a pen. Becker said that one name in particular piqued Rudy’s interest.

“He [Rudy] had close contact with that book not only on that occasion but subsequently throughout the Bailey prosecution that he recollected and remembered that a notation in Phil Bailley’s book was the notation ‘Mo Biner.’”
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Eight days after Rudy was summoned to Dean’s office, Magruder summoned Dean to his office. As detailed prior, an impatient Magruder ordered Liddy and the burglars back into the DNC. Liddy was correct in his revelation that “[t]he purpose of the second Watergate break-in was to find out what O’Brien had of derogatory nature about us, not for us to get something on him or the Democrats.”
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Ida “Maxie” Wells was a liaison between the pols working at the DNC and prostitutes working at the Columbia Plaza apartments. The three plainclothes officers caught Eugenio Martinez with the key to her desk in his possession, which he tried mightily to hide until he was restrained. One of the burglars had also placed a camera on her desk, which was there when the Schoffler and the other cops arrived.
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Schoffler said that Wells was shocked to learn there was a camera on her desk and exclaimed, “My God, they haven’t gone in there.”
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One question that needs to be raised . . . If the pamphlet was indeed in Well’s desk, was Mo “Clout” Biner featured amongst the pictures?
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Shortly after the break-ins, in late June 1972, Dean and Biner went through a “break-up” and Biner moved back to her home state of California for the summer. This is, not coincidentally, at a time when subpoenas were being issued in the call-girl case.
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In the fall of ‘72, Biner moved back to DC and Dean insisted on marrying her despite working amidst the busy reelection campaign. When Haldeman was sent a memo from Dean on October 5, his one-word response was: “Reconsider.”
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Dean could not wait and married Biner on October 13. The rush to elope was calculated; if Mo was Dean’s wife, it would be tougher for her to testify against him if the Watergate investigation went to trial.
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* * *

Dean has been zealous in his attempt to control
his
history of Watergate. Aided by his move to the left, which provides him shelter from the conservative mainstream media, he strives to put the black hat on Richard Nixon and John Mitchell. He strains to mislead and deflect attention away from his own actions in planning, pushing, and then covering up the break-in, before cutting a lenient deal with prosecutors. Dean is certainly entitled to make his case, but he is not entitled to control evidence that proves he may be guilty of an enormous fraud.

Aiding in this fraud is liberal college professor and “Nixon hater” Professor Stanley Kutler. Kutler has altered transcripts of Nixon White House tapes to make Dean come off more favorably in more that one instance. Anyone who reads the March 13 transcript in his book
Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes
and then listens to the actual tape online will hear that “Professor Kutler” is perpetuating a fraud. Today, Kutler admits to being a “close friend” of Dean’s.

“I am responsible for whatever was transcribed,” said Kutler, “Did I make any mistakes? Of course. Did I ever make a deliberate mistake, did I ever deliberately transform a negative into a positive? Please, I’m a trained historian. I don’t work that way.”
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Ah, but he does work exactly that way.

In the March 13, 1973, conversation
not included
in
Abuse of Power
, Dean told Nixon that White House aide Gordon Strachan had knowledge of the Watergate break-ins before the burglaries. When compared to Dean’s testimony, where Dean professed no prior knowledge in the White House, it is another clear case of perjury.
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It is important to recognize that Dean’s admission that a White House staffer knew about the break-in and received transcripts of the wire-tap prior to Dean’s so-called “cancer on the presidency” conversation with Nixon on March 21, 1973, contradicts his claim that he did not know of White House involvement until then. Frederick J. Graboske, who, as the supervising archivist in charge of processing the Nixon tapes at the National Archives, worked with Kutler, said that what the “historian” did was “deliberate.” “In the history profession, you never change the original evidence; Dr. Kutler has changed the original evidence,” said Graboske. “I’m sorry that it has come to this.”
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The
New York Times
reported Kutler’s treachery in a piece by Patricia Cohen. Historian Joan Hoff was also critical of Kutler’s actions. “What this dispute over the Nixon tapes really demonstrates is the need for an authoritative set of transcriptions which the government should have undertaken years ago,” Hoff wrote. “By authoritative I mean transcriptions that include every word, pause, grunt, stutter, expletives, and uhs, etc. to prevent more misuse and/or distortion of the Nixon tapes.”
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This is not the only instance of “historian” Kutler altering evidence to depict Nixon negatively. Former Nixon Chief of Staff Reverend John Taylor, an exacting man and a friend of mine, called Kutler’s work “sleight of hand” in a damning analysis:

In the wake of Sunday’s
New York Times
article, critics and defenders of historian Stanley Kutler have focused on his transcripts of Watergate conversations from March 1973. His 1997 book, Abuse of Power, also included an apparent attempt to edit a transcript to make it appear that by June 1972, the month of the Watergate break-in, President Nixon had become aware of the White House Plumbers’ September 1971 break-in at the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding.

Mr. Nixon always maintained that he didn’t learn about the Ellsberg caper until the spring of 1973. If he’d known about it during the first days and weeks of the Watergate coverup, it would put his statements and actions in a much darker light.

Nixon critics have been understandably eager to find evidence that he knew in advance about either break-in as well as that he was mindful of the Plumbers’ illegal activity as the Watergate coverup got underway in June 1972. Rick Perlstein joined the counterfeit smoking gun club with 2008’s Nixonland when he misconstrued the meaning of a secondary source to make the President look guilty of foreknowledge of an illegal burglary.

Kutler’s sleight of hand occurs in his transcript of a July 19, 1972 conversation between the President and political aide Chuck Colson. In an editor’s setup, Kutler wrote:

Colson is full of praise for his friend [E. Howard Hunt, arrested at the Watergate], knowing that he had broken into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. “They weren’t stealing anything,’ Colson rationalized. ‘They had broken and entered with an intent not to steal, [only] with an intent to obtain information.”

Having gotten the reader thinking about the Ellsberg break-in, Kutler alters the rest of the conversation to remove any explicit reference to its real subject, the June 1972 break-in. His transcript begins with the President and Colson discussing Hunt’s background and effort to compile a reliable psychological profile of Ellsberg. They ponder whether this entirely legal work might be drawn into the Watergate investigation. According to Kutler, the conversation proceeds as follows:

President Nixon:
You’ve got to say that’s irrelevant in a criminal case.

Colson:
It clearly will be irrelevant in the civil case, because it had nothing to do with the invasion of privacy. I’m not sure in a criminal case whether it is a sign that will be relevant or not. Of course, before a grand jury there’s no relevance . . .

They weren’t stealing anything. Really, they trespassed. They had broken and entered with an intent not to steal, with an intent to obtain information.

The conversation has just jumped from Ellsberg to the Watergate break-in. Bet you didn’t notice. Kutler has invited those who question his transcripts to go to the National Archives and listen themselves. Back in 1998, we did. Here’s what the tape really says. Pay special attention to what Colson and the President say after Kutler’s ellipses:

President Nixon:
You’ve got to say that it’s irrelevant in a criminal [unintelligible].

Colson:
Clearly—the civil case has to do with the invasion of privacy, for information. I’m not sure in the criminal case whether these assignments [for the Plumbers] will be criminal [Kutler has “relevant”; tape is unclear] or not. Of course, before a grand jury, those would be irrelevant. I wouldn’t worry about it.