Alexander Haig entered the White House in early May 1973 with a secret to conceal and an agenda to pursue. The secret was his participation in the Moorer-Radford spy ring. The agenda was his Kraemerite opposition to the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policies. Haig’s new position was ideal for achieving these goals, and he furthered them by taking advantage of unexpected opportunities.
In the first months of Haig’s tenure as White House chief of staff, Nixon suffered three crippling blows. Previous histories have credited only the revelation of the White House taping system as crucial to Nixon’s undoing. But two other, earlier events also contributed to his downfall: the decision to drop the use of executive privilege as a shield to prevent disclosures, and the White House’s failure to adequately confront and rebut the testimony of John Dean.
WHEN HAIG TOOK over, Nixon’s political situation was bad but was not considered fatal. Of the seventeen former White House and CRP associates under investigation or indictment, only Dean was pointing a finger at Nixon, and he had not yet testified. Polls continued to show that 48 percent approved of Nixon’s handling of the presidency; and although 50 percent did think he had a hand in the cover-up of Watergate, a far lower percentage wanted him out of office.
Nixon was drinking more than in past years, according to people in the White House at that time; his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, counted his pills to ensure that he took only his allotted doses of Dilantin, an antiepileptic medicine known to interact badly with alcohol and to heighten disorientation, and of tulenol, a sleeping draught. In the evenings the mix of liquor and medicine exacerbated Nixon’s paranoid tendencies and wish for isolation, and diminished his capacity for reasoned thought. Because Nixon now spent two of every three days out of the White House—at Key Biscayne, San Clemente, or Camp David—Haig’s power within the government soon became almost absolute. “Al controlled everything, everybody and everything,” Larry Higby recalled. Colonel Jack Brennan, Nixon’s military aide, remembered Haig saying, “I’m the hero and I’m saving this guy [who] doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.” With Kissinger abroad, trying to settle the war in Cambodia and the future of Berlin, Haig became the de facto national security adviser.
Nixon later wrote that he acquiesced in Haig’s being “a more rigid administrator,” tougher on the Cabinet and other attention-seekers than Haldeman had been:
Haig purposefully set out to structure this kind of White House operation because he felt that during the first term we had made our big mistakes over little things. Watergate was the most obvious case in point: if it had been handled effectively at the outset, it would never have reached this point. Haig was determined not to let this kind of mistake happen again. To prevent it, he drew more and more authority and responsibility to himself.
Haig advised Nixon to hire legal counsel for Watergate. At first he proffered the highly regarded criminal defense attorney Edward Bennett Williams, although Williams was then representing the Washington Post. When Nixon objected, Haig reports in his autobiography, he suggested Califano. When Nixon rejected Califano, Haig “without enthusiasm” nominated his friend J. Fred Buzhardt, who had little criminal trial experience. Buzhardt would retain his post as counsel to DoD while serving as Nixon’s in-house lawyer.
Wearing these two hats entailed an enormous conflict of interest. Although Democratic senators soon demanded that Haig resign from the army to fill the civilian post of White House chief of staff (Haig complied), no one objected to having Buzhardt fill the role of defense attorney for the president of the United States while he was still acting as general counsel to the Department of Defense, and his salary was being paid by Defense. As a government lawyer, not a privately paid defense attorney, Buzhardt was required to turn over to the other side any evidence he found of official wrongdoing. He never did.
Buzhardt later said that he was hired on May 4 and came to the White House the following day to confirm that. Yet White House logs show that the president was in Key Biscayne on May 5, so he could not have met Buzhardt that day; they also show that Buzhardt had his first meeting with Nixon at 5:30 P.M. on May 9. This difference is significant because between May 5 and 9 Nixon’s ability to remain in office was negatively affected by several matters. The first among these was Haig’s learning of the White House taping system. Alexander Butterfield, former Haldeman aide and currently chief of the Federal Aviation Administration, later testified that he told Haig about the system within Haig’s first few days as chief of staff, and that Haig responded, “I know about that.” Steve Bull, a White House aide who was then in charge of the taping system, also recalls filling in Haig during those first days. Kissinger remembered that Haig informed him of the taping system in May 1973. Haig’s knowledge that the tapes existed, and his access to those tapes, would be crucial to the events of that summer.
Another important matter in the May 5–9 period involved the testimony to Congress of General Robert Cushman, the Marine Corps chief and former deputy director of the CIA. In 1971, Cushman had been in charge of the Agency’s efforts to assist E. Howard Hunt, including providing Ellsberg’s psychological profile and materials for the Fielding office break-ins. In late April 1973, when Hunt told the FBI about the Fielding break-in and the CIA’s involvement in it, the road soon led to Cushman. Around May 1 the FBI asked Cushman what he knew, and Cushman admitted to FBI agents that the CIA had helped Hunt. That story broke in the press on May 6.
Cushman, then in Amsterdam, wanted to address the matter at a press conference, but the Pentagon instructed him to say nothing and to return home to make an affidavit about the CIA’s assistance to Hunt. The reason for Cushman’s abrupt silencing was never given, but Buzhardt, the DoD counsel, likely had a hand in it. This was an early instance of Buzhardt’s conflict of interest: What Cushman could testify to, and the materials he could provide as documentation, concerned matters that were very clearly detrimental to the welfare of Buzhardt’s new client, President Nixon.
Neither Buzhardt nor Haig informed Nixon that Cushman’s testimony could hurt him; nor did they do anything to prevent that testimony. And so, when Cushman testified to three different committees on a single day, May 10, 1973, he established precedent in three ways: by testifying at all, by submitting an affidavit, and by surrendering CIA documents to the legislative branch. Each of these could arguably have been prevented by a presidential claim of executive privilege.
The third matter that arose May 5–9 concerned a series of Cabinet shifts that were announced by the White House on May 10. Though these changes would later be dismissed as a shuffling of deck chairs aboard the Titanic, the shifts actually had a specific and decided effect: They brought into positions of power people who were ideologically aligned with Al Haig. Ever since Nixon announced he was sending Richardson to Justice on April 30, for instance, Beltway oddsmakers considered David Packard, longtime assistant secretary of defense, the favorite for the top job, but on May 10 the new nominee was Jim Schlesinger, a consistent opponent of Kissinger and (like Haig and Kraemer) an open skeptic of the administration’s position on SALT II. William Colby, a long-serving CIA operative and an old acquaintance of Haig’s, was tapped to head the Agency; until Colby’s confirmation, Kraemer’s and Haig’s friend Dick Walters would serve as acting director.
Similarly, Haig influenced a series of White House decisions to bring in from the cold a few former officials and confidants. One was Melvin Laird, who had retired as secretary of defense in January 1973, but now agreed to return as a domestic policy adviser. Laird later said he accepted the offer only after Buzhardt assured him that Nixon was not guilty of the Watergate offenses; he soon learned he wouldn’t be allowed to see Nixon privately and was shut out of most policy decisions. Nixon had also asked repeatedly for the return of John Connally, the former secretary of the treasury, whose advice he considered savvy; Connally got a White House office, but Haig closed him off from Nixon as well, and Connally soon returned to Texas.
Haig also muscled to the sidelines Nixon’s official counsel, Leonard Garment. Garment’s prior legal advice to Nixon had been largely appropriate and sage: In mid-April, for instance, he advised Nixon that because of Dean’s revelations, “you are in possession of knowledge that you cannot be in possession of without acting on”—namely, that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had taken part in the cover-up—and that Nixon must therefore fire them in order to protect the presidency. Though Garment retained his job after Haig and Buzhardt took over, he seldom thereafter saw Nixon in person—because, he said, “Haig trusted Buzhardt and not me.”
Nixon suffered other blows around this time. On May 10, a grand jury indicted two of his former Cabinet members, Mitchell and Stans, and the House voted for the first time to cut off funding for a Southeast Asian war-related activity, the bombing in Cambodia. Now that the POWs had come home, centrist and conservative Democrats who had previously sided with Nixon on the war had no further reason to do so. Their votes made it possible for the House to pass the bill that cut off funding for bombing in Cambodia. Senate Majority Leader Mansfield then announced that he would insert similar bans into every new appropriations bill until Nixon agreed to halt American participation in all Southeast Asian wars; he did so with the support of Stennis, who had previously backed Nixon on almost every vote. Stennis said he changed his vote this time because he was incensed that Haig had promised Lon Nol that there would be renewed bombing, and had done so without consulting Congress.
Finally, it was also on May 10 that Judge Byrne suspended the Ellsberg trial over the revelations of the 1969–71 wiretaps—and the revelation of an improper approach by Ehrlichman, who had asked Byrne if he was interested in becoming the new FBI director. On May 11, Byrne declared a mistrial, freeing Ellsberg and his codefendant. “The totality of the circumstances of this case…offend a sense of justice,” Byrne told the court.
AS JAMES SCHLESINGER headed out the CIA door in May 1973 to become secretary of defense, he issued a far-reaching edict: “Any CIA employee who believes that he has received instructions which in any way appear inconsistent with the CIA legislative charter shall inform the Director of Central Intelligence immediately.” This demand led directly to the release of the most damaging information about Richard Nixon: Haldeman’s June 23, 1972, instruction to the CIA to “block” the FBI’s investigation.
That order surfaced as a result of Schlesinger summoning Dick Walters home from Taiwan to prepare materials on the CIA’s involvement in Watergate, as requested by the Senate Armed Services Committee. Schlesinger was so eager for this information that he sent a helicopter to meet Walters when his plane landed and fly him directly to Langley to get to work. As Schlesinger knew—because Walters had told him so in February—the deputy director had in his safe eight memcons about meetings and phone calls in June-July 1972 covering the effort to have the CIA block the FBI’s investigation of the burglars’ money trail and detailing Dean’s attempts to have the CIA pay bail and stipends for the burglars.
On May 10, Walters retrieved the memcons from his safe and made an affidavit based on them. Curiously, he then took the affidavit to an outside notary to be certified as authentic. On May 11, at Haig’s request, Walters arrived at the White House, handed Haig copies of the eight memcons, and showed him the notarized affidavit. He told Haig he was to testify on Monday and, according to Walters’ autobiography, brought up the matter of executive privilege, saying that he recognized that Nixon could forbid him to testify on those grounds. In saying this, perhaps Walters felt he was discharging his duty to Nixon as an old friend, even though Nixon had treated him cavalierly in the recent past.
Haig immediately gave the memcon copies to Buzhardt and sent Walters back to the CIA with instructions to sit tight until Haig met with Nixon on the matter at midday. In that meeting, recorded by the White House taping system, Haig rang the alarm bell. He bluntly told Nixon that Walters had a new incoming missile that he and Buzhardt judged as “quite damaging” and briefly laid out the dangerous information about the June 23 meeting—though he stressed, as he said Walters had, Dean’s subsequent role in pushing the CIA to take responsibility for and pay for the burglars.
Haig’s emphasis on Dean’s role, rather than on the explosive revelation that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had told the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation into Watergate, distracted Nixon by feeding into his focus on Dean, his chief accuser. Haig pointed out that Walters said he and the CIA had resisted Dean’s pleas; Nixon was happy to hear it. Haig further reported that Walters had come to the White House because Schlesinger had instructed him to deliver copies of the memcons there and to the attorney general, but “we sent [Walters] back to the agency, told him not to take any telephone calls, [and] return here immediately with every copy [of the memcons]. And these are vital national security matters and cannot go anywhere.” Haig had also warned Schlesinger that the White House was “reviewing the memcons for—for executive privilege due to the whole broad character of it.”
Nixon expressed relief: The news was bad, but he took sustenance from Haig’s assurance that Walters and Schlesinger would protect the president. Even so, later in the conversation with Haig, Nixon was adamant about what should be done: “Walters’ memcons should not get out,” and executive privilege should be invoked to cover the memcons and to prevent Walters from testifying. Just as he wouldn’t allow Haldeman or Ehrlichman to give Congress any papers they had compiled while in the White House—those papers rested in a White House safe—Nixon insisted he wouldn’t allow Walters to give Congress the memcons or to testify.
In the end, of course, none of these decisions in regard to Walters held. The White House did not invoke executive privilege. Dick Walters did testify. And his memcons did “get out,” causing immense damage by revealing Nixon’s attempt, six days after the Watergate burglary, to have the CIA block the FBI.
Nixon’s chief concern on May 11 was with Walters’s documents. He understood that Walters would testify to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Monday, May 14, about CIA involvement in Watergate, but he was too preoccupied with the potentially damaging ramifications of the memcons to recognize the danger of Walters actually testifying. The White House tapes contain no evidence that Haig even mentioned to Nixon that Walters was apparently willing to be barred from testifying. Haig knew that Nixon avoided unpleasant truths, so after giving Nixon the bad news about the memcons he stressed the good: that if Haldeman and Ehrlichman would say that their directive on June 23, 1972, had been made in a legitimate context, Walters’s testimony and memcons would help Nixon rather than harm him.
Nixon grasped at the straw Haig offered. He summoned Haldeman, who arrived in ten minutes. When Haldeman learned of the Walters memcons he recognized that they could mean trouble, even though he was not allowed to view the documents themselves. The former chief of staff was adamant that executive privilege be invoked, to cover not only what the president had said to him (on June 23 and at any other time) but also all documents. His lawyers had told him, and he repeated for Nixon, that “executive privilege is an objective and selective judgment on the part of the President…. And it can be made case-by-case, totally selectively. It can be made paper-by-paper. Obviously you weaken your case every time you let the bar down at all. You make it harder to keep it up for the next one.”
Haldeman recalled that Nixon and he had wanted the CIA to limit, not to block, the FBI, because the FBI was wandering too far off the trail of the burglars and effectively inserting itself into a political matter it had no business investigating. This recollection clashed seriously with the account of the June 23 event in the Walters memcon, but, as Haldeman later emphasized, he did not see the memcon on May 11. Nor did Haig ask Haldeman for further details (from his memory or notes) that might have challenged Walters’s account. Rather, after Haldeman left the Oval Office, Haig returned to tell Nixon that, upon further review of the memcons, Buzhardt now believed they were “very damaging to John and Bob.” Buzhardt, Haig reported, now saw Ehrlichman and Haldeman as “guilty.” This shocked Nixon, who considered Buzhardt a hardheaded analyst. To protect Haldeman and Ehrlichman, the president now suggested that Walters make up “a sanitized version, with all the national security stuff out.” It is unclear whether Nixon expected Walters simply to delete “national security” matters from his memo, or to write a wholly new, shorter, “sanitized” summary of it. In any case, Haig immediately demurred. “I don’t trust Walters to do that,” Haig said; the memcons were “so detailed, so precise” that a cut-down version would be suspect.
Nixon fled to Camp David. That Saturday, Haig phoned to tell him that Cushman had testified to three congressional committees and had given them CIA memoranda on Hunt—actions that set precedent for further such cooperation. “We’re just going to have to take the heat, Mr. President,” Haig told Nixon. They must instruct Walters to testify and to turn over his papers. They had no choice.
It was a highly questionable recommendation. As Haldeman had told Nixon, executive privilege could be invoked selectively, on a case-by-case basis. Although any specific invocation of the privilege could be challenged by Congress, they were powerless to gainsay it. Yet Haig now insisted that Nixon must allow Walters to testify and to release the memcons. To ease the pain, Haig told Nixon that the memcons were “very helpful and very clean” because they pinned the blame on Dean for his attempts to make the CIA bear responsibility for the burglars. “Why are [the memcons] helpful?” Nixon asked once more.
“Helpful in the context that here was the real bad guy [Dean] that was putting the wrong kind of twist into it, and the fact that he couldn’t ever—you see, if he had had presidential authority…when he got continually stymied—God, he would have used [that authority] ten times over,” Haig said.
Haig’s “real bad guy” dust blinded Nixon. By seven o’clock Saturday evening, Nixon had accepted that Walters must testify and was reduced to pleading that the deputy director not tell the committee, “Look, they called us in and tried to ask [us] to fix the case and I, we wouldn’t do it.” Haig assured Nixon that Walters was trustworthy and loyal, bolstering his case by pointing out that he and Walters had collaborated on a few secret things and had never told Nixon. As Haig correctly figured, the president was comforted by the idea that his soldiers had been protecting him even behind his back.
The following day, Haig offered Nixon two new reasons to release the memcons. First, like any diary, they were likely to be considered self-serving and thus suspect. Second, he pointed out, “You did furnish Cushman’s memcons to both the committee and the grand jury.”
“You really wonder, though,” Nixon said, “how you can justify giving them Cushman’s and not giving them Walters’.”
To this, Haig said, Buzhardt had an answer: They could be withheld under a “broad statement that they contain national security.”
The national security rationale resonated with Nixon, and he decided to withhold the memcons. But Haig and Buzhardt did not advise Nixon that allowing Walters to testify to the contents of the memcons, and on the basis of a sworn affidavit detailing that content, would let the cat out of the bag, and moot the withholding of the actual papers.
On Monday, May 14, Walters appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. In his testimony, he elevated the alleged crimes committed by Haldeman and Ehrlichman from complicity in a mild cover-up of a failed burglary to a high-level obstruction of justice—directing the CIA to impede the FBI’s investigation of criminal wrongdoing. Although Walters’s appearance was held behind closed doors, the following day Senator Stuart Symington released to the press a long statement detailing what Walters had said. The immediate uproar about an obstruction of justice badly injured Nixon.
But the Walters testimony had another disastrous though previously hidden consequence for Nixon: It pointed Haig and Buzhardt to the White House tapes for June 23, 1972—tapes that would likely confirm Walters’s memories of his meeting with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Helms. In those tapes, far more than in the March 21 “cancer upon the presidency” tape Nixon was worried about, lay critical proof that Nixon had ordered an obstruction of justice—an impeachable offense.
THE PROSPECT OF John Dean poised to testify to the Senate and to the nation, on live television, convinced Nixon that he needed to issue a preemptive statement regarding what Dean could be expected to say. He also needed to provide an explanation for the Huston Plan, a copy of which Dean had managed to take with him, and to explain other matters being bruited about in public, including the Fielding office break-in, the 1969–71 wiretaps, the Plumbers’ other activities, and the Walters memcons. Nixon was also convinced that he needed to issue definitive denials that he had known in advance of the Watergate burglary or ever discussed paying hush money to the burglars.
Between May 15 and May 22, Buzhardt and Haig worked on this all-in-one statement with Ziegler and two speechwriters. They touched base with dozens of other people to compile Nixon’s answers to questions that had been asked before and that they presumed would be asked now.
Haig was distracted from his work that week by his need to defend himself and Kissinger. Learning that Seymour Hersh of the New York Times was about to publish a story attributing the 1969–71 wiretaps to Kissinger’s instigation, Haig tried to dissuade the reporter from publishing on the grounds that both Hersh and Kissinger were Jewish. “Do you honestly believe that Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Germany who lost thirteen members of his family to the Nazis, could engage in such police-state tactics as [to] wiretap his own aides?” Hersh did not yield to the pressure, and the Times printed the story.
Sven Kraemer later commented that in this period Haig repeatedly protected Kissinger for reasons that defied logic and past mutual acrimony. But in protecting Kissinger, Haig was also protecting himself. He did so, in part, by having Nixon take the blame—persuading Nixon to assert in the forthcoming statement that “I authorized the entire program” of wiretapping, for instance, which took the heat off Kissinger and Haig, even though Nixon privately told Ziegler that “Henry ordered the whole goddamn thing.” Kissinger had devoured the wiretap logs, Nixon insisted. “He reveled in it, he groveled in it, he wallowed in it!” he shouted.
The statement Haig and Buzhardt were preparing became even more important on the morning of May 16, when the Washington Post printed a lengthy Bernstein and Woodward story about various “Watergate” activities—including the 1969–71 wiretaps—under a banner headline running across the entire front page: “Vast GOP Undercover Operation Origins.” From the early morning of that day, Nixon met for hours with Buzhardt, Haig, and Ziegler on how to respond—before deciding, ultimately, to do so only in the May 22 statement.
On that evening of May 16, according to All the President’s Men, the source Woodward called Deep Throat told him about the statement preparation meetings and the vulnerabilities the writers had discussed with Nixon, most of them pertaining to the March 21 Dean meeting: the raising of executive clemency, Dean’s dealings with Liddy, and Hunt’s attempts to obtain hush money. The next day, Woodward contacted his lifelong friend Scott Armstrong, one of the Senate Watergate Committee’s investigators (hired on his recommendation), and urged the committee to call Alexander Butterfield as a witness.
By May 1973 Butterfield had become the FAA administrator. Before that he had been a White House assistant to Haldeman, unknown to the public. The committee had little ostensible reason to call him. We believe that Woodward urged them to do so because he knew that Butterfield could reveal the White House taping system. The fact that the committee initially ignored Woodward’s pleas suggests that the senators and investigators had no idea what Butterfield’s testimony might disclose.
On May 22, the White House issued Nixon’s four-thousand-word statement. “Already, on the basis of second- and third-hand hearsay testimony by persons either convicted or themselves under investigation in the case, I have found myself accused of involvement in activities I never heard of until I read about them in news accounts,” it began. The statement covered a wide array of subjects, from alleged payoffs to the Watergate burglars to wiretapping, the Huston Plan, and the Plumbers. Most of the paragraphs dealt with matters that Nixon said involved “national security.” On the wiretapping of reporters and others, Nixon stated, “a special program of wiretaps was initiated in mid-1969 and terminated in February 1971…. I authorized this entire program.” Nixon also asserted that these wiretaps “were legal at the time.” He admitted that many details of the Huston Plan that had been aired in public were true, saying, “The options initially approved had included authorization for surreptitious entry—breaking and entering, in effect—on specified categories of targets in specified situations related to national security.” He revealed that he had authorized the Plumbers the week after the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and that their “principal purpose was to stop security leaks and to investigate other sensitive security matters.”
Many of the statement’s assertions painted Nixon into corners. One, noted above, was his claim of sole responsibility for the 1969–71 wiretaps. A second concerned the subject of the Walters 1972 memcons. In the statement, Nixon lumped the Walters matter together with quite different subjects: Because of “the scale of national priorities with which I had to deal,” Nixon said, he had to ensure “that neither the covert operations of the CIA nor the operations of the [Plumbers] should be compromised. It was certainly not my intent, nor my wish, that the investigation of Watergate be impeded in any way.” That assertion raised more questions than it answered. A third corner: “Executive privilege will not be invoked as to any testimony concerning possible criminal conduct in the matters presently under investigation, including the Watergate affair and the alleged cover-up.” This unequivocal stance precluded Nixon from later arguing against the release of the White House tapes, or against insiders divulging knowledge of the tapes.
Even as the press and the public were parsing this May 22 statement, the next day Buzhardt issued new restrictions on Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s access to their papers that were still in White House hands. Until then, the two former aides had been permitted to take notes as they reviewed papers and to make occasional copies; henceforth they were forbidden to make any copies or even to take notes while in the room with their papers. This would hamper their ability to defend themselves in court.
In the wake of the May 22 statement, Nixon faced a hailstorm of criticism. At one o’clock on the morning of May 25, Nixon phoned Haig to ask, “Wouldn’t it be better to just check out?” Nixon probably meant he should just resign. When Haig demurred, Nixon said, “No, no, seriously; because, you see, I’m not at my best. I’ve got to be at my best and that means fighting this damned battle, fighting it all out.” But soon the president thrust the thought aside in preparation for two climactic events: Leonid Brezhnev’s impending visit, and John Dean’s expected Senate testimony.
When the May 22 statement failed to alleviate the pressure on Nixon, Buzhardt and Haig prodded Nixon to listen to the tapes so that he could respond even more directly and in detail to Dean. This request took on special urgency after a lengthy Bernstein and Woodward article on June 3, 1973, recounting in great detail what John Dean was prepared to testify to: some thirty-five meetings with the president.
On June 4, 1973, Nixon spent all of his office hours listening to the tapes. During the morning he took extensive notes as he listened; then, near lunchtime, according to an account in Woodward and Bernstein’s The Final Days, he called in Buzhardt to review the notes with him. Then, alone again, he plunged back into the tapes. Late that day, Nixon recounted to Buzhardt his own versions of what had been said on twenty tapes. According to Woodward and Bernstein, as the president spoke Buzhardt began taking notes. These included Nixon saying that Dean had told him about Strachan on March 13, and quoting the March 16 line “not a scintilla of evidence.” Buzhardt’s notes did not become extensive until Nixon began to read from his own notes about the March 21 recording, at which point Buzhardt, in the recounting of the scene by Woodward and Bernstein, felt “waves of uneasiness [and] saw the intrinsic contradictions…. The more Nixon read, the more Buzhardt realized that John Dean had a case.”
No competent defense attorney would have accepted at face value his client’s account of such key pieces of potential evidence. Any such attorney would have insisted on listening to every Nixon-Dean tape himself, since that was where evidence impugning the accuracy and self-serving nature of Dean’s expected Senate testimony could likely be found. But Buzhardt did not do that. Nor did he suggest destroying the tapes, which had not yet been requested as evidence and were the president’s property and thus within his legal right to destroy—even though such an action would have protected Buzhardt’s client from later being hoist on their petard.
Late in the day on June 4, Nixon phoned Haldeman to say that he had listened to the tapes and that “the only thing he [Dean] has in there, which he did hit about the seventeenth, or maybe the fourteenth, was that Strachan might be involved in terms of getting material”—that is, that Strachan might have received the fruits of the burglaries or wiretaps. “That was a ‘might,’” Haldeman echoed, “and there’s still doubt about that.”
This Nixon-Haldeman conversation is revelatory about the president’s unwillingness to understand his own predicament. He has listened to a tape of Dean admitting Strachan’s involvement, among other matters, and has misperceived it rather completely. He has also listened to other tapes that contain material quite detrimental to him, and missed their importance and potential impact, should they ever be released. And now he was attempting to embed these misperceptions in the mind of his former chief confidant.
On June 6 and 11, Buzhardt met with the Senate committee minority counsel, Fred Thompson, to prep him to question Dean before the committee. An affidavit written by Thompson suggests that some details of Buzhardt’s account differed from what Nixon had told him. For instance, the reference to Strachan definitely having early knowledge of the break-in was altered. Buzhardt apparently used the phrase “could be” to characterize that knowledge. Buzhardt also made no mention of the “not a scintilla of evidence” claim.
Before Dean could appear, however, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield agreed to postpone his testimony for eight days, so that the president could meet Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev without the distraction of ongoing Senate hearings.
SIX MONTHS EARLIER, Nixon had set high goals for this summit. But between the efforts of Scoop Jackson and his handpicked U.S. contingent of SALT negotiators to slow the progress of détente, and the far-reaching agreement Brezhnev had recently signed with West Germany, the results of the summit were destined to be limited. The heads of state signed minor pacts—on air transport, agriculture, and joint scientific study of the oceans—but the agreement-to-agree to SALT gave the Russians another year to finish testing their MIRVs before they had to sign a limiting pledge. Brezhnev visited the Senate but ran up against obdurate opposition from Jackson, who succeeded in quashing the trade deal Brezhnev wanted and in holding Russia’s MFN status hostage to better conditions for Jewish and other ethnic emigration and to better “human rights” treatment.
For these sorts of roadblocks, Kissinger blamed Jackson’s adviser Richard Perle. Kissinger later credited Perle with “one of ablest geopolitical minds I have ever encountered,” and with being “the chief designer of Jackson’s confrontation with Nixon.”
Far too intelligent not to have realized that some of the charges he was making were more cynical than substantive, Perle [aimed] to stymie the administration’s arms control policies by submerging them in technical controversies, to block trade with the Soviet Union by making it dependent on changes in Soviet emigration policies, and to isolate the administration by accusing it of indifference to human rights…. Jackson and his neoconservative supporters spawned the myth that Nixon was sacrificing American military security on the altar of arms control theory.
The day after Brezhnev left the United States, John Dean began his Senate testimony. For six hours he read from a prepared statement, and what he had to say, then and during the four days of questioning that followed, electrified the senators and a public that was riveted by the nationally televised coverage. Buzhardt had been alerted to what Dean would say by Thompson, who briefed him on Dean’s testimony in camera of June 16, but Buzhardt failed to gave Thompson the ammunition he needed to skewer Dean’s public testimony. This allowed Dean to conceal that he had known that some White House staffers had advance knowledge of the Watergate break-in for nine months before he told Nixon about it in March 1973. Had the senators and the public understood this fact, it would have seriously diminished Dean’s credibility.
The White House got a second chance at Dean, via a memo Buzhardt provided to the Senate committee that supposedly took into account what Dean had already testified to and tried to impugn it. Signed by Buzhardt, but prepared largely by Garment, it became known as the “Golden Boy memo” because it presented the fair-haired Dean, whom the White House had viewed as a young man of great promise, as involved in planning the break-in and even masterminding the cover-up.
As Time magazine reported, however, the questions “failed to rattle the accuser. Contradicting point after point in quick response, Dean easily handled the attack.” Dean could deflect the Golden Boy memo because it failed to make use of the information in Buzhardt’s possession. The questioners made no reference to whether Dean had told Nixon about Strachan on March 13; nor did they demand that Dean respond to the Walters memcons. Portions of the memcons had been leaked to the New York Times, which printed excerpts, but Buzhardt had the complete documents, and their details could have provided serious ammunition for a sharp questioning of Dean’s motives and actions. Without that ammunition, the committee could not effectively counter Dean’s denial that he had suggested using the CIA to block the FBI, or refute his characterization of the June 23–28 Walters contacts, which he said had been at Walters’s instigation, not his.
As Dean neared the end of his testimony, Buzhardt stopped Laird in the halls of the White House to say that he had previously “misled” his former boss. “I was wrong,” Buzhardt now said, as Laird later recalled it. “The President did have knowledge, and I’ve just got to level with you.”
Later, Buzhardt would contend that Nixon never let anyone listen to the tapes, and that he, Buzhardt, had chosen not to listen to them on principle, because as an officer of the court he would then have had to disclose information of the sort that he referred to as “a smoking pistol.” But over the summer of 1973, when Nixon was in California and wanted to hear one particular tape, a courier to take it to him could not be arranged, so Nixon asked Buzhardt to listen and tell him what it said.
After Dean’s testimony, polls continued to show that it was still only his word against the president’s, and that if Dean’s allegations could not be proved by anything other than his say-so, most people still gave Nixon the benefit of the doubt. Nine months earlier, Nixon had been reelected by the largest electoral landslide in American history; few people had an appetite for overturning that mandate.
Then, suddenly, it became possible to prove or disprove Dean’s allegations. On July 5, Senate Watergate Committee staff spoke with Larry Higby, formerly Haldeman’s closest assistant, who had continued on in the White House after Haig had replaced Haldeman. Higby had known about the taping system since its inception. He was one of those who informed Haig about it early in Haig’s tenure as chief of staff.
Haldeman had told Higby that if the Senate committee staff brought up the taping system, he must claim executive privilege. But on July 5, Higby finessed the staffers’ questions and escaped without mentioning the taping system or needing to claim executive privilege. Higby later recalled that the staffers had not shown him the affidavit Thompson had prepared based on his talks with Buzhardt.
On July 6, Higby told Haig about the committee’s questions and speculated that the committee would eventually unearth the taping system. Haig acted surprised to learn that such a taping system existed, and told Higby, “I’ll get back to you.” Haig’s surprise was feigned. Several accounts, including Higby’s own, confirm that Haig had learned of the taping system early. The absolute latest he could have known about it was June 4, the day Nixon spent listening to tapes.
On July 7, Haig told Higby that if he were asked about the taping system, he should “tell the truth”—a directive that shocked Higby, who had expected Haig, like Haldeman, to tell him not to say anything because the taping system was covered by executive privilege.
As it happened, Higby was not summoned to testify. Instead, Woodward brought to the committee’s attention, for a second time, the name of Alexander Butterfield. On Friday, July 13—a day Nixon spent at Bethesda Naval Hospital with viral pneumonia—investigators Scott Armstrong and Don Sanders interrogated Butterfield.
While Nixon, despite his illness, was conducting business in his hospital room—he saw Haig and Ziegler, and had substantive phone conversations with Kissinger and treasury secretary Shultz—the two Senate committee staffers questioned Butterfield. They had in hand the month-old Thompson affidavit, with its very detailed recounting of some Nixon-Dean conversations, which had ostensibly been given to Thompson to impugn Dean. But Armstrong, Woodward’s friend, used it on July 13 for precisely the opposite purpose: After having Butterfield read the memo, he had Sanders ask how the president could have had such a detailed recollection of events. Since the question did not specifically mention a taping system, Butterfield ducked it. Later, after several hours of grilling on other subjects, Sanders asked a more direct query: Would Dean have had reason to believe that a particular conversation with Nixon was taped? Is it possible that “conversations in the President’s office are recorded”? Butterfield immediately confirmed the existence of the taping system.
On a flight to New Hampshire for an FAA event the next day, Saturday, Butterfield compiled thirty-one handwritten pages of notes on what he would say if he had to testify. But he later asserted that he did not phone the White House to advise that he might be called, or to seek guidance on whether his testimony might be blocked by executive privilege.
Sam Ervin and Howard Baker, the committee’s leaders, planned to call Butterfield to testify on Monday; fearing a leak, they did not alert the other committee members. Yet somehow Haig learned on Saturday that the taping system might be revealed, and on Sunday Thompson phoned Buzhardt to alert him that the committee was aware that “every conversation in the White House is on tape,” and to instruct him to ready those tapes to be turned over. Scott Armstrong later recalled his outrage that Thompson had tipped off Buzhardt: “When the prosecutor discovers the smoking gun, he’s going to be shocked to find that the deputy prosecutor [has] called the defendant and said, ‘You’d better get rid of that gun.’”
Woodward also learned of the taping system on Saturday, in a call from the committee staff (though he has denied that it came from Armstrong). Woodward then informed Bernstein that a taping system existed, but at first the duo did not write about it. Concerned “about a White House set-up,” as they put it in All the President’s Men, they “decided not to pursue the story for the moment.” When they informed Ben Bradlee of the impending testimony about the taping system, he rated the story a “B+” and decided not to print it.
On Monday, when the taping system was revealed, the news was labeled “the story of the century,” so the Post’s stated rationale for not publishing it Sunday or Monday—that it wasn’t a good enough story—is hard to believe. But not printing it did serve to keep the impending revelation secret, thus avoiding the possibility that Nixon might try to stop Butterfield or anyone else who knew of the system from testifying. Later Buzhardt and Haig asserted that they hadn’t told Nixon that the taping system was about to be revealed because he was too ill to be disturbed. But Nixon had been well enough to see visitors, conduct official business, and talk on the phone with Haig several times on Sunday. Moreover, a cardinal rule in politics is to never let bad news surprise the boss, and the revelation of the taping system was bad news indeed.
When Butterfield returned to Washington on Sunday, the committee told him to be ready to testify the following day. Howard Baker suggested that Butterfield call the White House. In a later interview, Butterfield said that he didn’t phone Haig, his close friend; instead he left a message for Garment, who knew very little of the matter. After checking with Haig, Garment returned Butterfield’s call. In that conversation, both Butterfield and Garment later separately recalled, Garment gave Butterfield no instructions forbidding him to testify or if forced to testify, to refuse to answer questions about the taping system by saying that the subject was covered by executive privilege. And even after the Butterfield-Garment calls, no one in the White House told Nixon that the taping system was about to be revealed.
What would the president have done if he had been alerted of Butterfield’s impending testimony before the fact? He would almost certainly have moved to block the testimony on the grounds of executive privilege. As Nixon later wrote, he was shocked when he learned—too late to prevent it—of Butterfield’s testimony: “I thought that at least executive privilege would have been raised by any staff member before verifying [the taping system’s] existence.” Once the taping system did surface, after all, Nixon ordered Shultz to shield it on exactly those grounds. Shultz soon issued a letter saying that no Secret Service agent could testify about things learned in the course of his duties at the White House.
Shultz’s shielding letter arrived at the committee as Ervin and Baker were preparing to question a Secret Service agent, who thereafter refused to testify. But the moment that Butterfield completed his testimony, another letter to Ervin arrived—from Buzhardt, confirming that a presidential taping system had been active since 1971.
Nixon could still have destroyed the tapes, claiming that considerations of executive privilege, national security, and privacy demanded such an action. Joe Califano, for one, later asserted that Nixon would have been able to weather the storm such a bonfire would have caused. After the tapes were revealed in public, however, Garment opined that they were now sought-after evidence in criminal trials and Senate hearings and therefore it would be criminal to destroy them.
According to Haig’s autobiography, Buzhardt was concerned that the tapes likely contained material—“offhand remarks”—that would be “misunderstood and misconstrued, and…very damaging if exposed in raw form to the world.” This was reason enough for the tapes to be destroyed, he argued. But Nixon later recalled Haig warning that destroying them would “forever seal an impression of guilt in the public mind.” Nixon agreed with him, and the tapes were spared. Haig would still later call the failure to destroy the tapes Nixon’s “big mistake,” but according to Nixon’s memory, Haig himself was among those who argued for preserving them. (Nixon himself soon regretted the decision: On July 19 he wrote on his bedside pad, “Should have destroyed the tapes after April 30, 1973.”)
Nixon’s approval ratings plummeted after the taping system was revealed. The press and the public clamored for Nixon to release the tapes of conversations between himself and Dean. The special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, and the Senate Watergate Committee both called for the release of those tapes. If the White House refused to release them, Sam Ervin told reporters, “I would inform the President that the committee was going to hold him guilty,” presumably of withholding evidence of criminal conduct.
Most people did not yet think the president guilty of a crime; they continued to believe, as Time put it, that the tapes when released would be subject to “semantic shadings, conversational contexts, and inconclusive interpretations of what the participants in presidential dialogues really meant.” But most people now believed that Nixon no longer had a valid legal justification to hold back the tapes.
IN 1971, HAIG, pursuing Kraemerite goals in an attempt to block Nixon’s foreign policy advances, had undermined the president by taking part in the Moorer-Radford espionage ring. Haig had been relatively junior then. In the early summer of 1973, as White House chief of staff, Haig once again stepped in at a critical moment in the Nixon administration and altered the course of events—this time far more seriously, and with disastrous results for the president. As the fall of 1973 approached, it seemed as though only one question remained for Haig: Would his goals be better served if the weakened president remained in office or if he were forced out?