One Man Against the World

THE PRESIDENTIAL chalice was poisoned, drop by drop, days after the inaugural ball was over.

The Vietnam Peace Accords were signed in Paris. “After the cease-fire there will be inevitable violations,” Nixon said on January 23, 1973, the day Kissinger initialed the pact. All sides broke the agreement. The war went on.* The armies of Hanoi and Saigon clashed. B-52 bombers pounded North Vietnamese troops in Cambodia and Laos. “Whack the hell out of them,” Nixon commanded.

“We have a stick and a carrot to restrain Hanoi,” the president told South Vietnam’s foreign minister on January 30. The B-52s were a big stick.

That same day, the Watergate jury returned verdicts after deliberating for ninety minutes. Liddy and McCord were convicted on all counts. Hunt and the Cubans had pleaded guilty. All were facing decades behind bars. Judge Sirica held a post-trial hearing February 3. He bluntly stated that justice had yet to be served. He strongly doubted the government’s witnesses, and he openly called on Congress to look into the case.

Nixon was outraged. “Here’s the judge saying I did this,” he railed to Colson in the Oval Office. “His goddamn conduct is shocking.… He’s trying to prod the Senate into conducting a big investigation.”

The Senate heard Sirica loud and clear. On February 7, it voted unanimously to create a select committee to investigate Watergate. Its chairman would be Senator Sam Ervin, a conservative Democrat from North Carolina given to country-boy maxims and constitutional admonitions. Ervin had a Harvard law degree to go with his down-home humor. His mandate was to investigate the Watergate break-in, any cover-ups, and “all other illegal, improper, or unethical conduct occurring during the Presidential campaign of 1972, including political espionage and campaign finance practices.” He would receive half a million dollars to hire investigators—and the power to subpoena anyone save Richard Nixon.

The president flew to San Clemente the next day to spend a long weekend plotting to counter the Senate Watergate Committee. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean joined his strategy sessions. “We should play a hard game,” Nixon said. He had two goals. He would maintain “the outward appearance of cooperation.” But, in the meantime, “our objective internally should be maximum obstruction and containment, so as not to let this thing run away with us.”

Back in Washington, Nixon spent much of the next week giving marching orders to his revamped national security team. The president’s new director of central intelligence, James Schlesinger, was a Nixon man to the core—“I mean one that really had R.N. tattooed on him,” his predecessor, Richard Helms, said—who had been an ax wielder at the Bureau of the Budget. Nixon told him to chop out the dead wood at the CIA, to purge as many people as possible, especially senior officers suspected of liberal sympathies.

Over the course of nineteen weeks, Schlesinger fired five hundred CIA analysts and more than a thousand clandestine service officers. After he received death threats over the dismissals, he hired armed bodyguards. He lasted five months as director of central intelligence.

Nixon, having rid himself of Secretary of Defense Laird, introduced the Joint Chiefs to their new boss at a formal luncheon at the Pentagon. Elliot Richardson was a genial Boston Brahmin with no military expertise beyond leading a platoon at the Normandy invasion under General Eisenhower in June 1944. He had been secretary of health, education, and welfare in the first Nixon administration, in charge of issues that were his cup of tea, not Nixon’s.

Nixon alluded to his preference at a February 15 luncheon with Richardson and the Joint Chiefs, weighing the value of the Department of Defense versus the costs of welfare. “We would like to be able to put the DOD budget into welfare,” the president said, “but if we did, the world would eventually fall under the Communist system.”

At 9:09 a.m. on February 16, L. Patrick Gray, the acting FBI director, entered the Oval Office for the second time in his life. After a nine-month delay, Nixon was submitting Gray for Senate hearings to confirm him as J. Edgar Hoover’s successor, as required by law. The president was taking a huge risk.

Gray was a dutiful dullard deeply entangled in the web of Watergate. He had destroyed evidence on orders from John Dean. He was back-handing his agents’ reporting to Dean—which an FBI internal report later described as “the most serious blunder from an investigative standpoint.”

Gray had made few friends at FBI headquarters, where he became known as “Three-day Gray” for the time he spent at his desk each week. He had let the FBI’s number-two man, Mark Felt, control the Watergate investigation. And Felt was the key source of the front-page Watergate stories in the Washington Post. Nixon was one of the few people in America who knew that.* The Post had been the first newspaper to report that Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy oversaw the Watergate break-in, that John Mitchell controlled a slush fund for political espionage, and that “political spying and sabotage” were at the heart of CREEP’s campaign.

Nixon quickly asked Gray how he would handle the Senate’s questions about Watergate. “Would it hurt or help for you to go up there and be mashed about that?” Nixon asked.

“Mr. President, I’m the man that’s in the best position to handle that,” Gray said. “I’ve consistently handled it from the outset.… I think the Administration has done a hell of a fine job in going after this thing.” This was bluster and bombast. “You haven’t been able to do anything—or have you?—up to this point, about the leaks,” Nixon asked. “The whole story, we’ve found, is coming out of the Bureau.… This stuff didn’t leak when Hoover was there. I’ve never known of a leak when Hoover was there. I could talk to him in this office about everything. And the reason is that—it wasn’t because they loved him, but they feared him. And they’ve got to fear the man at the top.… You’ve got to be brutal, tough and respected.… I understand leaking out of the CIA, those goddamned cookie-pushers. But if it leaks out of the Bureau, then the whole damn place ought to be fired.”

Nixon’s fury rose. “You’ve got to do it like they did in the war,” the president said. “In World War Two, the Germans, if they went through these towns and then one of their soldiers, a sniper hit one of them, they’d line up the whole goddamned town and say until you talk you’re all getting shot. I really think that’s what has to be done. I mean, I don’t think you can be Mr. Nice Guy over there.”

“I haven’t been,” Gray protested. “These guys know they can’t lie to me like they used to lie to Hoover.”

Nixon was relentless. “I’ve got to have a relationship here where you go out and do something and deny on a stack of Bibles.”

“I don’t have anybody else,” Nixon said. “I can’t hire some asshole from the outside.” He went on, his rage simmering. “There were times when I felt that the only person in this goddamned government who was standing with me was Edgar Hoover.… He would break his ass if he saw something that was wrong being done, if somebody was pissing on us.… What you’ve got to do is to do like Hoover.”

“It’s going to be a bloody confirmation,” Nixon warned Gray. “You’ve got to be prepared to take the heat and get bloodied up. But if you do go through a bloody one, let’s remember that you’re probably going to be in for just four years. And then they’re gonna throw you out. So let’s get in there and do some good for the country.… This country, this bureaucracy—Pat, you know this—it’s crawling with, Pat, at best, at best, unloyal people and at worst treasonable people.”

“We have got to get them, break them,” Nixon said. “The way to get them is through you. See?”

On February 22, Nixon smuggled Sen. Howard Baker into the presidential hideaway at the Executive Office Building. It was extremely rare for any aspect of the president’s day to go unrecorded in the official White House logs. This was an exception. Senator Baker, a photogenic and politically ambitious Tennessee Republican, would be the ranking minority member of the Watergate Committee. He was eager to please the president. He laid out the committee’s plans, and the next day in the Oval Office Nixon gave Ehrlichman a full account of their conversation.

“I must have scared him to death,” Nixon said. “I put it very hard to Baker.”

Nixon said the senators planned first to take testimony from “a lot of pipsqueak witnesses, little shit-asses, over periods of weeks to build it up, the pressure.” But then, “you got to call Haldeman, you got to call Ehrlichman.” The president laid down the law—or his version of it. He said he would assert “executive privilege” to keep his White House staff from being dragged before the committee.

The Constitution is silent on the question of executive privilege, and the Supreme Court had never confronted it. But two prior presidents had invoked it. One was Dwight Eisenhower; the other, Harry Truman. Twenty-five years before, Truman asserted the privilege to protect government personnel records from congressmen—most notably, Richard Nixon—chasing Communists such as Alger Hiss. This confrontation was at the center of chapter one in Nixon’s 1962 memoir Six Crises. Back then, Nixon had fought against executive privilege. Now he had to fight for it.

But he could not invoke the privilege in order to keep the silence of people outside presidential command—such as John Mitchell, hunkered down at his New York law firm, trying to raise hush money for the Watergate defendants; Chuck Colson, who had left the White House days before; and Herb Kalmbach, the president’s private attorney, fund-raiser, and financier. Each was in legal peril.

“What are they going to say?” Nixon asked, dreading the answer, though he already knew it in part. “They raised the money?”

“There’s a hell of a lot of money, and it floated around, and there weren’t receipts, and there was funny bookkeeping, and money went to Mexico and back, and there were just a hell of a lot of odds and ends,” Ehrlichman replied.

“I don’t know,” Ehrlichman admitted. “He’s been puffing his pipe and looking at the ceiling and saying, ‘You guys got a problem.’”

After discussing four more present and former White House aides who might have problems testifying truthfully, they turned to Colson.

If the president’s aides defied the Senate Watergate Committee when it subpoenaed witnesses, “in effect we take the Fifth Amendment,” Ehrlichman said. “Is that worse?”

“Yeah, it’s a cover-up,” Nixon said. “The cover-up is worse than whatever comes out. It really is—unless somebody is going to jail.” The president had a prescient vision of what lay ahead: a ceaseless procession of investigations, interrogations, and indictments.

“I’m not going to let anybody go to jail,” he vowed. “That I promise you.”

One week later, on February 27, the president summoned his thirty-three-year-old White House counsel, John Dean, for the first of thirty tape-recorded conversations they would have about Watergate over the next forty-nine days. Though Nixon droned on about the Hiss case and dreamed of a counterattack against Congress, these conversations centered on two conundrums: the cover-up and covering up the cover-up.

Nixon first asked about the sentencing of the seven Watergate defendants. Dean told him that Judge Sirica, “Maximum John,” was delaying judgment day until March, using presentencing interrogations by probation officers to conduct his own inquisition into the case—and trying to coerce confessions. “This judge may go off the deep end in his sentencing,” Dean warned.

Then there would be the Senate Watergate Committee to face in May. The president said he had told Senator Baker to run things just as Nixon had run the Hiss case. “But the committee is after someone in the White House,” Nixon said. “They’d like to get Haldeman, Colson, or Ehrlichman.”

March 1 brought a tremor of fear at the White House. On the first day of his confirmation hearings, Pat Gray testified and, trying to ingratiate himself with the senators on the Judiciary Committee, volunteered to let them see the FBI’s raw and unedited investigative reports on Watergate. Handing over the Watergate files would be giving an enemy a sword. The files showed that key figures in the case had lied to the FBI. And they showed that Dean had sat in on FBI agents’ interviews with every key figure in the case—to the agents’ deep displeasure. If the senators saw that fact, then Dean could be called to testify under oath. Gray had put the White House one subpoena away from a potentially calamitous confrontation.

“For Christ’s sake,” the president said with a groan, “he must be out of his mind.”

The next day, at a White House press conference, a reporter asked if the president would object to Dean’s testifying about Watergate, the FBI, and the White House. “Of course,” said the president. “It is executive privilege.… No President could ever agree to allow the Counsel to the President to go down and testify before a committee.”

On March 7, Gray’s increasingly contentious confirmation hearings landed John Dean on page one of the Washington Post. The president called Dean into the Oval Office at 8:53 a.m. They commiserated. The hearings had “morphed into a mini-Watergate hearing, with the Democrats using selected items plucked from the raw FBI material … to discredit him as a potential FBI director,” Dean later wrote. “Remarkably, Gray just kept digging himself a deeper hole, and by thrusting me into his hearings, he provided the Democrats with sufficient leverage to kill his nomination: They asserted that if I did not appear as a witness, they would not confirm him.” The president had become “totally disenchanted” with Gray. He charged Dean with subtly scuttling the nomination.

Two hours later, Nixon spoke privately in the Oval Office with Thomas Pappas, the oil company executive who had channeled more than half a million dollars to Nixon’s 1968 campaign from the colonels who ran the military junta in Greece. Pappas had been instrumental in the selection of Spiro Agnew as Nixon’s running mate in 1968, and he had personally contributed at least one hundred thousand dollars to Nixon’s 1972 reelection. The week before his meeting with the president, he had met with the campaign’s manager, John Mitchell, in New York and pledged six-figure sums to the Watergate defendants’ hush-money fund.

Haldeman already had told the president that Pappas was contributing heavily to “the continuing financial activity in order to keep those people on base … and he’s able to deal in cash.” In exchange, all Pappas wanted was an assurance that his close friend Henry Tasca would be reappointed as the American ambassador to Greece. “Good. I understand. No problem,” Nixon had replied.

Pappas entered the Oval Office at 10:54 a.m. Nixon gave his word on the ambassadorship and thanked Pappas profusely. “I am aware of what you’re doing to help out,” he said. “I won’t say anything further, but it’s very seldom that you find a friend like that.”*

One week before, Pat Gray had turned over the FBI’s Watergate files—twenty-six thick books, along with summaries and analyses—to the Senate Judiciary Committee. On March 14 the president ordered Dean to call the FBI to see if this procedure had any precedent. He said he wanted an answer in three minutes, and if he did not get it, “I’ll fire the whole goddamn Bureau.”

As Nixon knew perfectly well, J. Edgar Hoover had fed the House Un-American Activities Committee, where Nixon served, reams of raw FBI reports on suspected Communists and Communist sympathizers from 1948 onward. But that was different, Nixon said. Hoover had done it under the table; it was a secret transaction; it never leaked.

Dean reminded Nixon of this history after conferring with the Bureau. (It took longer than three minutes; no one was fired. That was simply the way Nixon barked commands.)

On March 14 the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to summon John Dean. The president had precluded that; at his March 2 press conference, he’d proclaimed that the White House counsel could not be compelled to testify before Congress. Nixon, Dean, and the president’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler—whose prior job before joining the Nixon team in 1962 was as a Jungle Cruise skipper at Disneyland—huddled to prepare for a news conference Nixon had set for the next day, March 15. They knew that any answers they provided on Watergate would only provoke more questions.

The president, providing guidance, said, “Give them a lot of gobble-de-gook, that’s all. Then let them squeal.”

Ziegler, checking his notes, said: “We’ve made it very clear that no one in the White House directed espionage and sabotage.”

Nixon made his position perfectly clear. “Espionage and sabotage is not illegal, do you understand? That’s the point I’m making. Espionage and sabotage is illegal only if it’s against the government.”

The president acquitted himself masterfully at the March 15 press conference, where seven of the thirteen questions dealt with Gray, Dean, the forthcoming Watergate Committee hearings. He parried every one. Why had he banned Dean from testifying at Gray’s confirmation? Nixon stood upon the Constitution to justify the obstruction of justice.

Mr. Dean is Counsel to the White House. He is also one who was counsel to a number of people on the White House Staff. He has, in effect, what I would call a double privilege, the lawyer-client relationship, as well as the Presidential privilege.… I consider it my constitutional responsibility to defend the principle of separation of powers.

I am very proud of the fact that in this Administration we have been more forthcoming in terms of the relationship between the executive, the White House, and the Congress, than any administration in my memory. We have not drawn a curtain down.… All we have said is that it must be under certain circumstances, certain guidelines, that do not infringe upon or impair the separation of powers that are so essential to the survival of our system.

In that connection, I might say that I had mentioned previously that I was once on the other side of the fence, but what I am doing here in this case is cooperating with the Congress in a way that I asked the then President, Mr. Truman, to cooperate with a committee of the Congress 25 years ago and in which he refused. I don’t say that critically of him now. He had his reasons. I have mine.

And he flatly proclaimed, “Members of the White House staff will not appear before a committee of Congress in any formal session” at any time. That assertion of executive privilege seemed to slam the door on the Senate Watergate Committee once and for all.

But after the barrage of questions, Nixon asked Haldeman and Ehrlichman if Dean should write a Watergate report to feed the hunger of the press corps and Congress. They concluded that it would be impossible—and potentially suicidal. Dean himself told the president on the morning of March 16: “There are some questions you can’t answer.”

Minutes later, Nixon and Haldeman spoke alone in the Oval Office. Any report Dean could write would have to reveal criminal conduct. “Then you get into a real mess,” Haldeman said. “I just wonder if it isn’t a losing game.”

That afternoon, Ehrlichman laid out his own Watergate report for the president. His synopsis was startlingly detailed. Liddy and Hunt, spurred by Colson, demanded and received from CREEP at least one hundred thousand dollars for the Watergate break-in. “Liddy, being kind of a nut, sat down with Hunt and said, ‘Okay, how are we going to pull this off?’ And Hunt said, ‘Listen, I know five Cubans who will come up here for that kind of dough and they’ll crack the United States Treasury.’ So they had to call McCord for equipment,” because the CREEP security director had eavesdropping expertise from his career at the CIA. “McCord says, ‘What the hell are you guys up to?’ And they told him.”

How could Dean put this on paper? It would unravel threads that ran right to the White House. “We can’t do it,” Ehrlichman said succinctly. In the evening, Nixon telephoned Dean. The president still wanted a report—even if it only added another layer to the cover-up. “I realize the problems of being too specific,” Nixon said. “Just put it in general terms, you see? I don’t know. Do you think that’s possible?”

“It’s going to be tough but I think … it’s a good exercise, and a drill that is absolutely essential,” Dean said. The White House counsel also had a news flash for the president: “Maximum John” Sirica would impose sentences on the Watergate defendants in one week.

In an Oval Office conversation with Dean on March 17, Nixon elaborated on what the report should say. “I think what you’ve got to do, John, is to cut it off at the pass,” the president said. “Liddy and his bunch just did this as part of their job.”

On Monday, March 19, Howard Hunt’s lawyer delivered a blackmail message to Dean, face-to-face in the White House. If Hunt didn’t get $122,000 in cash within forty-eight hours, he would have some startlingly seamy things to say at his sentencing. Dean called John Mitchell in New York and asked, referring to Tom Pappas, “Is the Greek bearing gifts?”

On that same day, James McCord signed, sealed, and delivered a letter to Judge Sirica. McCord had not demanded hush money. His silence had not been bought. And he had heard scuttlebutt from his fellow defendants and some of their lawyers that infuriated him. The word was that the White House wanted to lay Watergate at the feet of the CIA, where he and five of his codefendants had served. McCord was intensely loyal to the CIA and Richard Helms. The idea that the Agency could take the fall for the crime and the cover-up compelled him to compose his letter. It would be read by the judge from the bench at the sentencing, four days later.

McCord wrote, “[I]n the interests of restoring faith in the criminal justice system, which faith has been severely damaged in this case, I will state the following:”

1. There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent.

2. Perjury occurred during the trial in matters highly material to the very structure, orientation, and impact of the government’s case, and to the motivation and intent of the defendants.

3. Others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified during the trial, when they could have been by those testifying.…

Following sentence, I would appreciate the opportunity to talk with you privately in chambers.

The facade of the cover-up was about to crack. Judge Sirica, upon reading the letter in his chambers, turned to his law clerk and triumphantly said, “This is going to break this case wide open.” Nixon’s attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, wrote in his memoirs: “Future historians, in a more detached environment, might well conclude that the McCord letter was not only the turning point in Watergate but perhaps a turning point in modern civilization.”

Tuesday, March 20, 1973, was the last day of Richard Nixon’s presidency unscathed by Watergate. The president was still the most powerful man on earth and the leader of the free world. He hammered home that message in a speech he made that morning in the Cabinet Room of the White House to two dozen Republican leaders in Congress and the chairman of the Republican National Committee, George H. W. Bush. Fortunately for future historians, the Cabinet Room was wired.

“The only threat to the world’s freedom and the world’s peace is the Soviet Union today and the People’s Republic of China twenty years from now,” the president proclaimed. “The United States, therefore, has to use this last ultimate moment. It is the last moment because whenever we fall behind we’ll have no chips at all.”

“There is a chance for peace,” he said. “It’s never going to be because … Zhou En-Lai and Nixon shook hands and got to know each other; Brezhnev and Nixon hit it off because they both came from poor families; all that gobble-de-gook you read in the columns. That’s all crap. It happens only because the President of the United States … is strong enough and respected enough to be paid attention to. We are the force for peace in the world.”

* * *

On the morning of March 21, John Dean reported to the Oval Office to present a full picture of the legal problems confronting the president. Their conversation remains the most remarkable tape Richard Nixon ever recorded.

“I have the impression that you don’t know everything I know—and it makes it very difficult for you to make judgments that only you can make,” Dean began. “I think that there’s no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’ve got.”

“We have a cancer within, close to the presidency,” Dean said. “It’s growing daily. It’s compounding. It grows geometrically now.”

“One, we’re being blackmailed; two, people are going to start perjuring themselves very quickly that have not had to perjure themselves to protect other people.… And there is no assurance—”

“That it won’t bust,” Nixon said.

Dean began to lay out facts, many of which Nixon knew very well: “Where did it start? It started with an instruction to me from Bob Haldeman to see if we couldn’t set up a perfectly legitimate campaign intelligence operation over at the Re-Election Committee.” Dean continued: “I came up with Gordon Liddy.… I was aware of the fact that he had done some extremely sensitive things for the White House … going out into Ellsberg’s doctor’s office.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Nixon, who had learned about that break-in from Ehrlichman.

“Took Liddy over to meet Mitchell,” Dean said. “Liddy laid out a million-dollar plan that was the most incredible thing I have ever laid my eyes on: all in codes, and involved black bag operations, kidnapping, providing prostitutes to weaken the opposition, bugging, mugging teams.” The review of the break-in, arrests, trial, and imminent sentencing of the Watergate burglars was Dean’s throat-clearing cough before the cancer diagnosis.

The burglars had demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars in blackmail to keep silent. Mitchell had raised hush money as recently as the week before from the gift-bearing Greek. Haldeman had handed over $328,000 in CREEP funds for payoffs. Ehrlichman and Dean were entirely enmeshed in the crimes and the cover-up. It all constituted a conspiracy to obstruct justice, Dean told the president. “Bob is involved in that. John is involved in that. I am involved in that. Mitchell is involved in that.”

Dean turned to “the continued blackmail” by the Watergate defendants. “It’ll go on when these people are in prison, and it will compound the obstruction of justice situation. It’ll cost money. It’s dangerous,” he said. “People around here are not pros at this sort of thing. This is the sort of thing Mafia people can do: washing money, getting clean money, things like that.… We are not criminals and not used to dealing in that business.”

“That’s right,” said the president. Then he asked, “How much money do you need?”

Dean took a guess.

“These people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years.” Silence filled the Oval Office for a few seconds.

“We could get that,” Nixon said. “You could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.… You don’t need a million right away, but you need a million. Is that right?”*

“That’s right,” Dean said. They agreed that the immediate problem was Howard Hunt, who could sink Ehrlichman, Colson, and Dean with a single deposition. “Don’t you have to handle Hunt’s financial situation … damn soon?” Nixon said. “Either that or let it all blow right now.”

“If this thing ever blows and we’re in a cover-up situation, I think it’d be extremely damaging to you,” Dean said. “What happens if it starts breaking, and they do find a criminal case against a Haldeman, a Dean, a Mitchell, an Ehrlichman?”

Nixon returned the conversation to the blackmail. “Let me put it frankly: I wonder if that doesn’t have to be continued?” Dean kept silent, overawed at engaging in a criminal conspiracy with the president.

“Let us suppose that you get the million bucks and you get the proper way to handle it,” Nixon said. “That would be worthwhile.” Otherwise, “the thing blows and they indict Bob and the rest.”

The president continued: “Jesus, you’d never recover from that, John.”

“That’s right,” Dean said.

“It’s better to fight it out instead,” Nixon concluded.

The fight resumed the next morning. The Watergate files Pat Gray had handed to the Senate held a deadly accusation. FBI agent Angelo Lano had concluded that Dean had lied to him by concealing the existence of Howard Hunt’s White House safe. Sen. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat, asked Gray on March 22 if Dean had deceived the FBI.

Gray replied, “I would have to conclude that that probably is correct, yes, sir.” Lying to the FBI meant slammer time.

The president’s men convened in the Oval Office. “Gray is dead on the floor,” Ehrlichman told the president. “He accused your counsel of being a liar,” Haldeman said sardonically. “He may be dead,” Dean said with false bravado, “’cause I may shoot him.” The last laughs on the White House tapes echoed and faded.

Later that day, Nixon had a heart-to-heart with John Mitchell, who had flown down from New York to consult and comfort the president. But Nixon could not be consoled. He had concluded that obstruction of justice was the only recourse. “I don’t give a shit what happens,” he said. “I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else.… We’re going to protect our people, if we can.”

* * *

The president and Haldeman fled Washington for the Florida White House on the day of the Watergate sentencing, Friday, March 23. They spent more than five hours that afternoon mulling over the case while they awaited word from Judge Sirica’s courtroom.

The judge read McCord’s letter from the bench. “The courtroom exploded,” recalled Sam Dash, a law professor preparing to serve as chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee. “It was a stunning development.… It looked as if Watergate was about to break wide open.”

Sirica gaveled the court into silence. Then he brought down the hammer on the other defendants: up to twenty years for Liddy, thirty-five for Hunt, and forty for the Cubans. He said the sentences would be reduced if the men cooperated by coming clean with the Senate committee.*

Nixon and Haldeman spent four days in Key Biscayne consumed by the case. Dean holed up in Camp David laboring on a written Watergate report for the president. Haldeman called him there on March 24. Dean said, “The problem is we’ve been bailing out everybody else and it’s gotten out of hand and compounded the problem. Now we have to protect ourselves.” They spoke again the next day. “He’s back to his cancer theory, that we’ve got to cut the thing out,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. But where to make the first cut? He and Dean talked a third time on Monday, March 26.

“He feels that Mitchell has a problem and Mitchell may not realize it,” Haldeman wrote. “Then he went into a great deal of detail on what he sees as the really serious problems now. The main one is the blackmail situation. He says he was aware that Mitchell and others were being blackmailed by those involved in the Watergate thing.”

The two tried to tally how much already had been paid to the Watergate defendants and their lawyers through funds controlled by Mitchell, Haldeman, Kalmbach, and CREEP. It came to more than five hundred thousand dollars. “Dean feels he’s not in a position to fully evaluate the blackmail situation,” Haldeman wrote, “but it’s clear that all concerned felt there were dire threats to the White House, and when you’re being blackmailed you imagine the worst.”

Haldeman spent six hours with the president that day, going in circles on the Watergate case, shrouded in misery as the sun shone on the Florida seashore: “It’s a beautiful day at Key Biscayne, which I spent inside, locked in the P’s villa. We’ll leave late tonight to go back to Washington.”

The president faced the prospect of the Senate Watergate Committee hearings in seven weeks. On March 27 he mused, “A committee of Congress is a double weapon. It destroys a man’s reputation in public. And if it turns its files over to the Department of Justice for prosecution, they will prosecute the poor bastards.… I did it to Hiss.”

Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean now began to contemplate hiring criminal lawyers. All realized that “it isn’t going to get any better on Watergate,” as Nixon told Haldeman in the Oval Office on March 30. “It’s going to get worse.… It’s going to go on and on and on and on.”

Nixon decided to retreat to San Clemente for a week. Before he returned to Washington, on Sunday, April 8, John Dean held an informal off-the-record meeting with federal prosecutors. He had told Haldeman of his plans. Haldeman responded with a memorable admonition: “Just remember that once the toothpaste is out of the tube it’s going to be very tough to get back in.” By now, Dean wrote, he was halfway out: “One foot in the White House and one foot outside it.”

On April 9, Nixon and Haldeman had a hushed and haunting conversation about “recording what is going on in this room,” as the president put it. “I feel uneasy about that.” The tapes could be of great value to Nixon. He could keep them for a presidential memoir that could make millions. They would protect him against the inevitability that Kissinger would write his own version of history.

But if anyone else ever heard the tapes they could pose a great danger.

“I think we should destroy them,” Nixon said.