The Moorer-Radford espionage story finally became public at just the moment when the nation had focused its attention on Nixon’s guilt or innocence in regard to Watergate. As a result, few people paid much attention to the scandal of the Joint Chiefs’ spying on the White House. But the two matters are inextricably linked. While the public believed that Haig and Buzhardt were dedicated to defending the president in his moment of crisis, they were actually engaged in protecting their own flanks, struggling mightily to deflect the congressional inquiry into Moorer-Radford. If Haig was to retain his position of power, and of influence over the administration’s foreign policy, he and Buzhardt would first have to save themselves.
BY MID-NOVEMBER 1973, Haig and Buzhardt knew that two reporters for rival Chicago papers, James Squires of the Chicago Tribune and Dan Thomasson of the Chicago Sun-Times, working together, had uncovered some aspects of the “military spy ring” puzzle. The reporters’ understanding was hardly complete—they did not yet have Radford’s name—but they were gathering more information each day.
In the two months since Leon Jaworski’s appointment as special prosecutor, Jaworski and Haig had become closer than Jaworski’s subordinates thought was warranted. At one meeting, Haig readily handed Jaworski materials that the White House had previously withheld on national security grounds—materials that would allow the special prosecutor to secure indictments for Ehrlichman and Colson on the Fielding office break-in. In the same meeting, however, Haig refused to turn over to Jaworski materials relating to Moorer-Radford—materials Krogh had requested and the prosecutor wanted to see. Krogh wanted to cite Moorer-Radford as one of the matters he worked on that were covered by national security, a claim that would relieve him of responsibility for actions now alleged to have been criminal. Without seeing the actual materials, however, Jaworski could not agree to Krogh’s request and had to oppose it. The judge soon denied Krogh’s discovery motion, and Krogh was forced to accept a plea deal. As a result, the Moorer-Radford materials stayed in the vaults of the White House.
On December 21, 1973, Jaworski came to Haig’s office to discuss the March 21 “cancer upon the presidency” tape, which Sirica had recently given to him—a tape that Jaworski said was very incriminating of the president. When Haig responded that the White House lawyers had concluded just the opposite, Jaworski said, “I think you should get the finest criminal lawyer you can find—someone not connected with the White House in any way—and let him study the tapes.” Haig now agreed, and hired James St. Clair, a seasoned criminal defense attorney, to start at the White House after the turn of the year.
That timing allowed Buzhardt to be promoted to counsel to the president on January 4, 1974. (He also resigned as DoD counsel on that day, ostensibly because of his new White House duties.) During the next few months, despite Buzhardt’s new title and responsibilities, he attended very few meetings of the president’s legal team. Instead he spent his time defending himself and Haig on Moorer-Radford.
The Chicago reporters’ first articles on the espionage ring, on January 11, 1974, named Moorer but not Radford or Welander. They included Haig’s denial that the affair had occurred, and his threat to bring “lawsuits” against their papers if their allegations against the military could not be proven.
Now Woodward got into the act. Six months earlier, during the height of Haig’s and Buzhardt’s attempt to have Don Stewart prosecuted, Woodward had learned enough about Moorer-Radford to have requested a meeting with his former skipper, Welander. During that meeting, Woodward asked Welander for more information; Welander refused, and Woodward published nothing further about the matter. But the day after the Chicago papers published, Woodward and Bernstein published an article in the Washington Post filling in two facts that the Chicago reporters did not yet have—the names of Radford and Welander. The article contained one clue about who may have divulged those names, a reference to a Pentagon investigation “directed by J. Fred Buzhardt.” The article made no mention of the Ehrlichman-Welander interview or of Young’s probe. Rather, it took the Haig-Buzhardt-Moorer line—that the espionage had done no harm and that the whole thing was Radford’s fault. Nor did the article disclose Woodward’s prior relationship to Welander, an omission that constituted a violation of professional ethics.
Another article that day, in the New York Times, offered a stark contrast to Woodward’s. The article, by reporter Seymour Hersh, highlighted Young’s investigation, reported that the Nixon White House had considered the spy scandal an extremely serious matter, and cited as evidence the fact that the stolen materials had included top-secret memos on Kissinger’s talks with China before the July 1971 announcement.
In the following days, Don Stewart’s name was mentioned in a news story, though mainly as the man who had tried to “blackmail” the White House the previous summer. Stewart responded with ringing denials of any attempted blackmail and with a statement that he was happy to testify to Congress. In light of all this, Schlesinger started his own inquiry. Fred Buzhardt refused to give Schlesinger the Ehrlichman-Young tape of the Welander “confession,” which was physically in the White House—a tape that implicated Haig. Buzhardt later testified that he did not obey this direct order because technically Schlesinger was no longer his boss. (The expectation that he might eventually have to duck such a request from Schlesinger may have been behind Buzhardt’s decision to resign from the DoD in January, despite having held simultaneous positions at the White House and at DoD for the previous eight months.) After a four-day investigation in which he was unable to obtain these materials, Schlesinger concluded that the espionage episode had been “blown out of proportion,” as the Post contended.
The looming Moorer-Radford scandal threw further gasoline on the flames licking at the administration. The secretary of the SALT delegation, Ray Garthoff, later recalled that his team could only wonder at the implications: “Had Moorer been blackmailed and tamed by the president into agreeing to support SALT in return for being permitted to remain unsullied and kept on in his position? The very fact that the question was being asked reflected the deteriorating confidence in the national leadership.” Garthoff worried about the effect the story could have on negotiations with the USSR.
Senator Stennis, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, met individually on the matter with Moorer, Welander, Haig, Kissinger, and Schlesinger. He chose not to meet with Young, Stewart, or Ehrlichman, the very people Senator Baker had wanted most to testify under oath. Stennis then announced that he would handle the matter in a one-day, closed-door hearing. Fifteen members of his committee objected. When hearings began on February 6, Stennis was in full command of who did and did not testify, and what materials did and did not enter the official record. Almost no mention was made of the Ehrlichman-Welander interview, and scant mention of the Buzhardt-Stewart re-interview of Welander. Laird offered the latter but Stennis turned it down, because (as Laird later recalled) Stennis thought a complete investigation “would serve no useful purpose.” The senator also decided not to require Haig to testify.
During this period, evidence suggests that Woodward was in close contact with Haig, Buzhardt, and Stennis. In a call to Don Stewart, for instance, Woodward mentioned the date of a Radford–Jack Anderson dinner. That surprised Stewart because (he wrote in contemporaneous notes) “this particular date had to come from the file,” meaning the file he had amassed during his investigation, which Buzhardt had taken from him in May 1973. “This and the general questioning Woodward put to me makes me believe that he, too, is being provided info from the White House.”
Radford did testify before the committee, informing them that his superiors had ordered his thievery, and proclaiming that he was willing to be court-martialed so that he could face his accusers in open court. He was whisked off the stand. Moorer and Welander also testified; they contended that the whole affair was the yeoman’s fault.
The Ehrlichman-Welander-Young taped interview, of course, could have countered Moorer’s and Welander’s accounts and supported Radford’s claims. But Stennis told the press he had heard enough and on March 7 called his final witness: J. Fred Buzhardt.
The ubiquitous counsel dismissed the importance of several key elements of the case: of Don Stewart, who had been prevented from testifying; of David Young’s voluminous investigative record, which could not be found; and of Ehrlichman’s interview of Welander, which Stennis refused to allow into the record. Buzhardt said that there was “no material substantive difference” between his re-interview of Welander and the previous one by Ehrlichman. When some senators on the committee asked to see the Young and Ehrlichman materials, Stennis blocked them from doing so.
Buzhardt then proceeded to shred the cloak of national security that Nixon had thrown over Moorer-Radford, and which Buzhardt and Haig had used repeatedly to conceal Haig’s involvement. “I do not believe [my report] contains material which would…endanger the national security if released,” Buzhardt said. If that was so, the recalcitrant senators clamored, then the report should be released. This Buzhardt refused to do, he said, because it contained private correspondence between Laird, other DoD officials, and the White House, as well as the results of polygraph exams that Radford in court might charge were “libelous.” Stennis agreed and told Buzhardt to hold his re-interview. “Take it back,” Stennis said. “I don’t want to see a line of it.”
With that, Stennis closed the hearings. Haig had once again escaped being connected to Moorer-Radford.
In speaking with the press after his Senate testimony, Buzhardt dropped another bomb. During the Pentagon Papers mess, he revealed, Defense had at his urging recommended against prosecuting Daniel Ellsberg, not because national security would be compromised in a trial but rather because the case was “too complex” to be adequately prosecuted and won. He added that there had been no real “national security” issues in either the Ellsberg case or in certain unspecified others.
Later in the spring of 1974, as he prepared for his trial, John Ehrlichman petitioned the court for the right to review evidence held in the White House that might exonerate or exculpate him. He specifically asked for the Welander interview tape and other notes that he believed would show the “national security” reasons behind the Plumbers’ activities, the Fielding office break-in, and Moorer-Radford. Back in October 1973, when Krogh had asked for these materials, Buzhardt and Haig had successfully argued that they were covered by national security and could not be provided. But after Buzhardt said that none of these matters touched on national security, Ehrlichman demanded the materials. Buzhardt then switched rationales once more, claiming that the materials would be withheld on grounds of executive privilege. Ehrlichman moved to have the case dismissed because he was being denied access to materials that he needed to prepare a proper defense.
Judge Gerhard Gesell agreed, threatening to dismiss the case unless the White House complied. Ehrlichman had also subpoenaed Haig and Buzhardt as custodians of those materials. The two submitted affidavits denying that they had “custody or control of any document or object” subpoenaed, even though the materials, as they and Ehrlichman knew, were inside the White House. Gesell ordered the White House to provide Ehrlichman and his attorneys access to the materials.
As Ehrlichman later recalled, he went to the White House to review his files but was directed to remain outside Buzhardt’s office, where he could hear Buzhardt reviewing (at high volume) Ehrlichman’s interview with Welander—the very object of the subpoena, something Buzhardt had sworn in an affidavit that he didn’t have. Ehrlichman considered this a deliberate slap in the face. Buzhardt also defied the judge’s orders by refusing to grant Ehrlichman or his attorneys access to that subpoenaed tape and to the Young investigative files. Gesell threatened again to dismiss the case, and Ehrlichman’s attorneys submitted an even more specific request for his notes of his December 21, 1971, discussion with Nixon about Moorer-Radford, a conversation in which, the lawyers said, Nixon had said that “any testimony” on the Plumbers’ activities was “affected by national security and these activities were not to be disclosed.” In response, Buzhardt—as he shortly told the court—reviewed Ehrlichman’s files and submitted an affidavit saying that there was nothing in them “which bears on the issue of guilt or innocence” of Ehrlichman—in other words, attesting that Nixon had not thrown the blanket of national security over various Plumbers’ activities. This ensured that Ehrlichman would not be able to use national security as a defense in his trial.
Shortly thereafter, Gesell allowed Ehrlichman’s trial to go forward. Without the tape he had requested, Ehrlichman was unable to defend his claim that his actions were taken at the request of the president for reasons of national security, and he was convicted.
IN ANOTHER CURIOUS incident whose only purpose seems to have been Haig self-protection, at some point in early 1974 a memo in the White House files was altered.
The original memo, from Butterfield to Magruder, bore the date of January 8, 1970. Its genesis was the tap on Morton Halperin, which had turned up the news that an unknown individual who had met with Kissinger on a specific day in December was going to feed information to Clark Clifford for an anti-administration article. If Magruder wanted to identify the person, Butterfield told him, “You should go—first of all—to Al Haig” for information and also because “Al Haig can get you squared away” on ways to deal with Clifford.
This memo, and Magruder’s response, might have pointed investigators to proof of Haig’s involvement in the 1969–71 wiretaps. But in early 1974 the 1970 Butterfield memo was taken out of the files and a poor fake inserted—we know it was a fake because a copy of the true memo was eventually found, allowing comparison of the two versions. The date of the fake memo had been altered to January 8, 1969—that is, before the administration had begun. The more significant change was the deletion of most mentions of Haig’s name. Also absent from the fake memo was an introductory phrase by Butterfield, “in response to your query” the deletion made the fake memo seem like just a crazy idea of Butterfield’s. In the spring of 1974, Haig gave the faked memo to the special prosecutor’s office, along with many other requested documents.
HAVING DECIMATED THE ranks of Nixon defenders and having protected his own flanks, Haig could now fully devote himself to the task of forcing Nixon out of office.