“Vietnam had found its successor”
THAT SPRING was a dark season for Richard Nixon. Each week brought deluges of bad news. The downpours turned to floods, and the rising torrents slowly eroded the stone wall surrounding the White House. The wars of Watergate consumed every waking moment.
“Vietnam had found its successor,” Nixon wrote, underscoring every word.
Friday, April 13: John Dean relayed inside information from federal prosecutors to the White House, and his news was dismal, befitting the day. Dean had served as a kind of human switchboard in the cover-up, conferring with every central participant. Now he was using his lawyers to winkle information out of federal investigators, even as he dangled a promise of becoming a witness for the prosecutors.
Howard Hunt was set to appear Monday afternoon before the Watergate grand jury; he had blackmailed the White House by threatening to reveal “seamy stories,” and he knew several. Up next was Jeb Stuart Magruder, whose will to continue committing perjury was weakening. If Magruder testified truthfully, he could incriminate John Mitchell—the “Big Enchilada,” as Ehrlichman called him, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer from 1969 to 1972, and of late the president’s raiser of hush money. And if Mitchell were indicted, “that’s the ball game,” Nixon said.*
Saturday, April 14: Nixon spent seven hours strategizing with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, talking until midnight. They started by speculating about what Hunt might say to the prosecutors. “Question: Is Hunt prepared to talk on other activities he engaged in?” Nixon asked. These included breaking into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, forging diplomatic cables implicating JFK in the assassination of South Vietnam’s president, and being paid for his silence at trial. The demands for money in exchange for silence had not ceased; Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman discussed how to smuggle more than $300,000 in cash out of the White House and into the hands of the convicted burglars. “Hunt’s testimony on hush money,” Nixon said, could lead prosecutors to the president’s doorstep. They wrestled with the implications of Magruder’s testimony. Ehrlichman composed an imaginary magazine story: “The White House’s main effort to cover up finally collapsed last week when the grand jury indicted John Mitchell and Jeb Magruder.… The White House press secretary, Ron Ziegler, said the White House would have no comment.” The president moaned like a wounded man.
Magruder had just pointed a dagger close to the heart of the White House. “I’m going to plead guilty” and testify for the prosecution, he told Haldeman, who taped their telephone conversation. Magruder had implicated John Mitchell that day in an informal conversation with federal investigators. “I am in a terrible position because I committed perjury so many times” in the Watergate case and the cover-up. He couldn’t take it anymore, he said, and he had to seek absolution. Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman had arrived at a moment of truth—or falsehood. The Watergate break-in was one problem. The greater danger was the cover-up and the peril it posed to the president if it began coming apart.
“There were eight or ten people around here who knew about this,” Ehrlichman said. “Bob knew. I knew.”
Then Nixon said—as if unconscious of his rolling tapes—“Well, I knew.” He was acutely aware that he was doomed if Dean testified about the cancer on his presidency and the million-dollar cure.
Haldeman: “If Dean testifies, it’s going to unscramble the whole omelet.”
Ehrlichman: “Dean seems to think that everybody in the place is going to get indicted,” said—referring to himself as well as Mitchell, Haldeman, Colson, and ten more prominent presidential appointees—on charges including “paying the defendants for the purposes of keeping them, quote, on the reservation, unquote.”
Nixon: “They could try to tie you and Bob into a conspiracy to obstruct justice.”
As night fell, Dean returned from the Justice Department to deliver more startling news to the White House: that afternoon, Haldeman and Ehrlichman had become targets of the federal grand jury. Now no one could predict how far up the chain of command the criminal case could climb.
Ehrlichman, who recently had started taping his own telephone conversations, called Mitchell’s successor, Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. He began by saying he had spent the day with the president and had made some phone calls on his behalf.
EHRLICHMAN: The first one I talked to was your predecessor. Then I talked to Magruder.… He has decided to come clean.
KLEINDIENST: No kidding?… Inconsistent with his testimony before the grand jury?
EHRLICHMAN: Dramatically inconsistent.
KLEINDIENST: Holy shit!
EHRLICHMAN: And he implicates everybody in all directions up and down the Committee to Re-Elect.
KLEINDIENST: Mitchell?
EHRLICHMAN: Yep, cold turkey.
“John,” the attorney general said, giving truly gratuitous legal advice, “it seems to me that you are going to have to be very careful.”
* * *
The fates, so often cruel to Richard Nixon, now forced the president, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Kleindienst to don formal evening wear and attend the annual cavalcade of self-congratulation called the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The most prominent awards went to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post for their coverage of Watergate, a slap in the president’s face.
Nixon, to his credit, turned the other cheek, making mildly amusing remarks from the dais at the Washington Hilton Hotel. “It is a privilege to be here at the White House Correspondents Dinner. I suppose I should say it is an executive privilege,” he began. The president praised a man with “the most difficult job in this country,” his press secretary, Ron Ziegler. “I must say you have really worked him over,” Nixon said. “This morning he came into the office a little early, and I said, ‘What time is it, Ron?’ He said, ‘Could I put that on background?’”
The after-dinner receptions were still going strong, the liquor still flowing, when, shortly after midnight, Henry Petersen, chief of the criminal division of the Justice Department, telephoned Kleindienst at the hotel in a state of high agitation. He said they had to meet at once.
They gathered at Kleindienst’s home, along with the four top federal prosecutors in the Watergate case, as Petersen laid out a riveting summary of the case before them. John Dean and his lawyer had been talking to the prosecutors about a proffer, a provisional statement offered in hope of immunity from prosecution. Though the government had promised him nothing, Dean had delivered a devastating account of cover-ups and conspiracies conducted by Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and others. Dean had never showed his hole card—what he knew about Nixon’s conduct as coconspirator in chief—but the prosecutors were convinced Dean wasn’t bluffing.
The meeting broke up at 5:00 a.m. “I didn’t sleep but I did weep,” Kleindienst remembered.
* * *
Sunday, April 15: Kleindienst called Nixon unbidden at 8:41 a.m. The president neither liked nor respected his attorney general. He saw Kleindienst as a weakling, incapable of controlling the criminal investigation threatening the White House. Kleindienst was on the verge of resigning, but Nixon was one step ahead; the president had resolved to replace him as soon as possible.
Red-eyed, tear-stained, Kleindienst talked to Nixon for seventy minutes later that morning. The recording of their conversation was cut short at a crucial moment: an entire reel of tape went missing forever from the White House. But Kleindienst vividly remembered one crucial point. He asked Nixon if a special prosecutor should take over the Watergate case. Clearly Kleindienst could not preside in a case against his close friend Mitchell. But few legal precedents guided the special prosecutor question. The Constitution commands the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But in a criminal case where evidence might be locked away within the White House, the powers of a special prosecutor might have to be settled by Congress or the Supreme Court.
Kleindienst returned at 4:00 p.m. with Petersen, who had been cleaning his boat and, as he entered the president’s elegant hideaway at the Executive Office Building, wore sneakers, dirty jeans, and a T-shirt smelling faintly of turpentine. Petersen was a strong-willed man who, like Richard Nixon, had gone to work in Washington in 1947, though Petersen had been an FBI clerk and Nixon a freshman member of Congress. Petersen tried to impress upon Nixon the seriousness of the fact that Haldeman and Ehrlichman faced criminal indictments. He was struck by the calm with which Nixon took the news. If was as if Nixon already knew—and he did.
Petersen argued that Haldeman and Ehrlichman should resign forthwith. Nixon said he would defend them until they were proven guilty.
“What you have said, Mr. President, speaks very well of you as a man,” Petersen replied. “It does not speak well of you as a president.”
The president quickly left the White House. He spent two hours aboard the Sequoia, accompanied by Bebe Rebozo, who said he could raise two or three hundred thousand dollars to help Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Alcohol was involved in their colloquy. When John Dean came to the White House later that evening, at the president’s request, Nixon was still under the influence.
“Clearly he had been drinking, and while not drunk, he seemed exhausted, slurring his words,” Dean wrote, and the way in which Nixon spoke to him—asking leading questions, giving misleading answers—“made me wonder (as I later testified) if he was recording me.” Upon taking his leave, Dean said, “I had to muster considerable fortitude to advise the president of the United States that if he did not handle this problem correctly it could result in his impeachment.”
Ehrlichman, who seems to have taken perverse pleasure in bearing bad news by phone, called Pat Gray at around 11:00 p.m. He said Dean had told federal prosecutors that Gray had taken the bogus cables from Hunt’s safe—and Gray confessed that he had burned them. Gray already had perjured himself before the Judiciary Committee on this very question. Horrified at the disgrace he faced, Gray said, “What the hell am I going to do?” Ten days later, he confessed to lying and resigned as acting FBI director. In time, he considered suicide.
* * *
Monday, April 16: Dean had decided to bear witness against his White House colleagues. He went to see the president at 10:00 a.m. with a draft of a letter of resignation in his pocket. Dean said he would not lie to protect John Mitchell or anyone else conspiring in the cover-up.
Henry Petersen returned that afternoon to confront the president with fresh news from inside the Watergate investigation—all devastating for Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Haldeman had known about the plans to bug the DNC’s headquarters; then he’d kept copies of transcripts from the wiretaps. Ehrlichman had demanded that Dean “deep-six” the documents from Hunt’s safe (the papers Pat Gray had burned) and had then commanded Hunt to leave the country.
Finally, that evening, Nixon and Dean reconstructed from memory Liddy’s original proposal to Mitchell—the buggings, the muggings, the kidnappers, the hookers—and considered whether any hard evidence, not hearsay, could hang the break-in on Mitchell.*
“Everyone’s in the middle of this, John,” Nixon said.
Dean handed the president a revised letter requesting a leave of absence. On that grim note, the two men parted for the last time.
* * *
Tuesday, April 17: Watergate investigators commanded by Mark Felt knocked at the doors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “The FBI has just served a subpoena on our White House police,” Ehrlichman told the president. It sought the names of the people who had been cleared to enter the White House on June 18, 1972.
NIXON: Jesus Christ.
EHRLICHMAN: Now what in the hell?
NIXON: Where were we then?
HALDEMAN: What date?
NIXON: Ah, June 18.
HALDEMAN: June 18.
EHRLICHMAN: The day of the bugging.… I bet it’s the Hunt safe thing.
NIXON: I need somebody around here as counsel.
HALDEMAN: And Attorney General.
NIXON: I need a Director of the FBI.
Shortly before 5:00 p.m., Nixon gave a formal statement on Watergate to the White House press corps. He said that on March 21—immediately after John Dean’s dire warning of a cancer on the presidency, a diagnosis that Nixon did not disclose—he had initiated “intensive new inquiries” into Watergate. “Last Sunday afternoon, the Attorney General, Assistant Attorney General Petersen, and I met at length in the EOB to review the facts which had come to me in my investigation.”
“Real progress has been made in finding the truth,” Nixon declared—a bit of truth, perhaps, but not the whole truth.
At 11:45 p.m., after a state dinner for the prime minister of Italy and a scintillating concert by Frank Sinatra, the president called Henry Kissinger from the White House. Their conversation went on past midnight and into the wee hours of April 18.
Nixon was slightly inebriated and deeply despondent. He spoke of “throwing myself on the sword.” The idea appalled Kissinger. “You have saved this country, Mr. President. The history books will show that, when no one will know what Watergate means.” But Nixon would not be consoled. “It’s a human tragedy,” Kissinger conceded.
Thursday, April 19: Nixon went up to the mountaintop at Camp David. After a brief White House Cabinet meeting the next morning, in which Watergate went unmentioned, he flew down to Key Biscayne, where he remained until April 24. He spent much of his four-day Easter weekend boating with Rebozo. Nixon deleted the names of his visitors from that weekend’s White House logs. But one of them was Horace Chapman Rose, known as Chappie, Ike’s treasury undersecretary and Nixon’s occasional confidant for two decades. Toward the close of a bleak three-hour talk, Chappie Rose quoted William Gladstone, whose first term as British prime minister began in 1868, a century before Nixon was elected president. The aphorism—which may have been apocryphal—was that the first essential for a prime minister was to be a good butcher.
The president prepared his knives.
Wednesday, April 25: Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman had a harsh three-hour talk in the Executive Office Building. Ehrlichman had just learned about the White House tapes. “If matters are not handled adroitly, you could get a resolution of impeachment,” Ehrlichman said, “on the ground that you committed a crime.” He argued that the president should listen to the tapes and assess the threat they represented. Nixon handed this immense task to Haldeman.
Thursday, April 26: Mark Felt was certain he would be chosen to lead the FBI after Gray’s fall: a grave miscalculation. He served as acting director for three hours. Instead, Nixon named William D. Ruckelshaus, the administrator of the new Environmental Protection Agency, as the acting director of the Bureau.* The mild-mannered Ruckelshaus was thunderstruck at Nixon’s ferocity that day. “I had never seen the President so agitated,” he remembered. “I was worried about his stability.… He was extremely bitter.”
Nixon feared the legal perils he faced. “I don’t think it should ever get out that we taped this office,” he told Haldeman, who spent five hours that day trying to transcribe the “cancer on the presidency” conversation at Nixon’s request, looking for exculpatory evidence. The president worried that “this blackmail stuff” could surface. They recalled raising the matter of hush money—“the Pappas thing”—on that March 21 tape. But Haldeman told the president that the snippet with the strongest shock was when Dean warned Nixon that “people may go to jail.… And that really jarred you.”
* * *
Friday, April 27: Nixon fled Washington for Camp David, where he stayed for the final days of his cruel April.
Camp David is a lovely compound of wood-and-stone lodges on the Catoctin Mountain of Maryland, sixty-two miles north by northwest of the White House, deep in a forest divided by a narrow road. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had it built by government-paid laborers for the Works Progress Administration, an exemplar of the New Deal programs Nixon hated. FDR called it Shangri-La. President Eisenhower renovated it and renamed it after his grandson, David, who married Richard Nixon’s daughter Julie in December 1968. Its buildings, transport links, armed security, and encrypted communications were maintained by the navy and the CIA.
In late April, the fields below Camp David fill with apple and cherry blossoms, the rising road glistens with burgeoning aspens and birches, the campgrounds bloom with daffodils and tulips. Nixon hadn’t come to smell the flowers. He had come to fire Haldeman and Ehrlichman. For good measure, he decided to dismiss his attorney general, accept John Dean’s resignation, and create a new palace guard.
Saturday, April 28: The president called his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, at 8:21 a.m. “That’s quite a collection of headlines this morning, isn’t it?” Nixon said.
The front page of the New York Times was covered with four big stories above the fold. One said Pat Gray had resigned as acting FBI director. “Haldeman and Ehrlichman Reported Fighting Ouster,” read another. A third said: “Dean Is Reported Asking Immunity” from federal prosecution. But the double-decker headline atop page one was the shocker: “A JUSTICE DEPT. MEMO SAYS LIDDY AND HUNT RAIDED OFFICE OF ELLSBERG’S PSYCHIATRIST.”
Watergate prosecutors had uncovered the raid. As Nixon now knew, Ehrlichman had signed off on the break-in. The law required the prosecutors to disclose the crime to the trial judge in the Pentagon Papers case. A dismissal of the charges on grounds of government misconduct looked inevitable.
“What the hell. We’ve just begun to fight, haven’t we?” Nixon said to Ziegler. “After all, a hell of a lot of other crap is going to hit.”
“That’s right,” Ziegler said.
“This is a time for strong men, Ron,” the president reassured his spokesman. “Our day is going to come.”
Nixon called Haldeman twenty minutes later. The president wanted Bill Rogers as his consigliere in his hour of calamity. What did Haldeman think of that? “There is a crisis here of enormous proportions,” the ever loyal Haldeman told the president. “The way for him to finish his service to the nation is by moving and cleaning this up.” Twenty minutes after that, Nixon called Rogers.
Nixon said to Rogers that “John and Bob are going to make their move … and then I’m going to move on Dean” and dismiss Kleindienst. On Monday he would address the nation on Watergate—“not for the purpose of saying everything that happened, but because I just want the country to know that I’m in charge, that we’re getting to the bottom of it.” He wanted Rogers to guide his hand and steel his nerves.
“What time would you like me up there, Mr. President?” Rogers asked.
“Frankly, the sooner the better,” Nixon said. “I want to get it done, get it done, done.”
Rogers was remarkable for making the trip at all. Nixon, after scorning and humiliating his secretary of state for four years, now craved his counsel—exactly as he had in 1952, when Rogers saved Nixon’s reputation. That episode formed chapter two of Six Crises.
Rogers, later Eisenhower’s attorney general, had taken charge when Nixon’s vice presidential nomination was threatened by allegations of a political slush fund. Rogers audited the fund and found it clean, and he helped Nixon fight serious-minded newspaper editorials calling for him to withdraw his nomination. When General Eisenhower himself considered dumping Nixon, Rogers stood steadfast in support. Nixon gave Rogers a draft of a speech he had written in his defense, and Rogers gave him the courage to go on national television and read it.
Vowing that he had never made personal use of political funds, listing his meager assets, including his wife Pat’s “respectable Republican cloth coat,” Nixon then admitted in all candor to accepting one campaign gift—just one. A man had heard on the radio that little Julie and Tricia Nixon would love to have a puppy. A black-and-white spotted cocker spaniel arrived in a crate from Texas. The girls loved the dog and named it Checkers. “And I just want to say this right now,” Nixon declared, “regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.” The Checkers speech was among the greatest moments in the early days of television.
Rogers had helped to salvage Nixon’s reputation; the president returned the debt of gratitude by treating him like a pariah for four years. And yet Rogers returned to do one last favor for Richard Nixon before accepting, after a decent interval, his dismissal as secretary of state.
Now, on that Saturday afternoon in April, after the morning fog had burned off, Nixon and Rogers spent five hours walking the grounds of Camp David and talking about the president’s political future. Nixon thought out loud about another reshuffling of his Cabinet and his staff; this quickly became a grim game of musical chairs, for he would need a new secretary of state, a new secretary of defense, a new attorney general, new FBI and CIA directors, and a new White House chief of staff—all in a matter of weeks.
Rogers returned the president’s attention to the immediate crisis. He strongly agreed that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had to resign, but he balked when Nixon asked him to deliver the blow. The president pleaded for one more favor: to help him draft the speech he planned to deliver on Monday. The secretary of state felt he could not refuse this last request. The words would be far more painful to write than the Checkers speech. But both talks had the same purpose: saving Richard Nixon from himself.
* * *
Sunday, April 29, was execution day. A few weeks before, for reasons only he knew, Nixon had removed the tape recording system from his study at Camp David’s Aspen Lodge, the room where he carried out his sentences against Haldeman and Ehrlichman. But their memories of that afternoon are all of a piece.
Ehrlichman wrote: “He looked small and drawn. It was impossible for me to remain composed as he told me he hoped and prayed he might die during the night. ‘It is like cutting off my arm,’ he began, and he could not continue. He began crying uncontrollably.… The Camp was in full spring bloom out there, I noticed. All the bulbs were up and out.”
Haldeman recorded: “The P was in terrible shape. Shook hands with me, which is the first time he’s ever done that.… We were looking at the tulips from the Aspen porch, talking about the beauty and all, and as we started back in, he said, well, I have to enjoy it, because I may not be alive much longer.… Then he went through his whole pitch about how he’s really the guilty one. He said he’s thought it all through, and that he was the one who started Colson on his projects, he was the one who told Dean to cover up, he was the one who made Mitchell Attorney General, and later his campaign manager, and so on. And … that he too probably will have to resign.”
Nixon—as he would do again on a far more fateful day—invoked the sainted memory of his pious mother. “I followed my mother’s custom of getting down on my knees every night and praying silently,” he said to Haldeman. “When I went to bed last night I had hoped, and almost prayed, that I wouldn’t wake up this morning.”
Monday, April 30: Nixon awoke alone, ate breakfast alone, and apart from a brief talk with his tireless secretary, Rose Mary Woods, and a long session with his talented speechwriter Ray Price, he spent the day alone, working on his address to the nation on Watergate. The speech, as Nixon wrote years later, was the start of “an increasingly desperate search for ways to limit the damage to my friends, to my administration, and to myself.”
He took his helicopter back to the White House, went to his barber, and walked into the Oval Office at 8:58 p.m., two minutes before he went on the air.
Richard Nixon, one of the most talented and tenacious presidents of the twentieth century, had the rare gift of blarney, a cajoling tongue capable of telling falsehoods with unblushing effrontery. He got off some good lines in his speech that night, such as “There can be no whitewash at the White House.” But he also told seventeen palpable lies about Watergate—concerning his role in the case, his fictitious in-house investigation of the crimes, and his commitment to uncovering the full story. He wrapped up his speech and then got rip-roaring drunk, as evidenced by his increasingly incoherent telephone calls, between 10:00 p.m. and midnight, to Haldeman, Rogers, Colson, the Reverend Billy Graham, and his new nominee for attorney general, Elliot Richardson. “Goddamn it,” he told Haldeman, “I’m never going to discuss the son-of-a-bitching Watergate thing again—never, never, never, never.” He had the gall to say to Rogers, whose forced resignation as secretary of state was imminent, “You’re the Cabinet now, boy,” and then laughed. “No bullshit.”
Rogers advised him: “Get some sleep now.”
* * *
While Nixon was anguishing in the White House, the peace accords Kissinger had struck were failing in Vietnam. “Still no cease-fire and no visible movement toward a political settlement” after ninety days, Ambassador Bunker reported from Saigon.
An especially harsh series of B-52 attacks struck Cambodia that spring. These bombings, like so many before, were covert and counterproductive. They killed civilians and they drove the surviving Communist troops eastward, closer to Saigon.
These secret bombings were uncovered by an intrepid twenty-eight-year-old freelance reporter named Sylvana Foa and two Senate staff investigators, Dick Moose and Jim Lowenstein. Moose and Lowenstein were in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, checking out a tip that the American embassy was coordinating the B-52 raids with the Pentagon. They had no proof until Foa struck up a conversation with Lowenstein.
“Listen,” she said. “Do you want to hear something interesting?” She turned on her five-dollar pocket radio and tuned it to an open frequency. “There were American pilots talking to an American air controller,” Lowenstein recalled. The embassy was vectoring the bombers to their targets, a blatant violation of the peace accords. On April 27 the staffers reported their findings to Sen. Stuart Symington, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“Symington went to the Secretary of Defense and didn’t get any place; went to the Secretary of State and didn’t get any place,” Lowenstein said. “And, as I recall, he finally went to the President and said, ‘This is what these guys say. This is what the law says. This is what this Committee is considering in terms of legislation.’”
Congress started drafting legislation to cut off funding for the war—regardless of the president’s powers as commander in chief—by requiring congressional approval for any combat-related spending in Indochina. In the words of William Stearman, the NSC’s senior Hanoi analyst, “The Presidency had been so weakened by Watergate that the American public, and certainly the Congress, would not continue our support for the Vietnamese forces much longer.”
* * *
The mercurial Al Haig, promoted from colonel to four-star general by Nixon, was the new Haldeman and Ehrlichman—the president’s chief of staff and palace guard. He was the only man Nixon could depend upon in his time of crisis. The Senate Watergate Hearings were set to begin in seventeen days—and the president had no counsel, no one in official command at the FBI or the Justice Department, and only Haig to trust.
Then another general—Vernon Walters, the president’s handpicked deputy director of central intelligence, a man of impeccable discretion who had worked with Nixon since 1958—delivered a set of documents to Haig. Copies would soon be in the hands of senators and Watergate investigators.
These scrupulously maintained memoranda of conversations, memcons for short, detailed the meetings among Walters, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman during the days immediately after the Watergate break-in. They described the orders from the White House to use the CIA to turn off the FBI’s investigation with a spurious assertion of national security.
May 11 became judgment day at the White House. First Haig read the memcons. They were devastating. One passage said: “It was the President’s wish that Walters call on Acting FBI Director Gray and … suggest that the investigation not be pushed further.”
Haig immediately called Nixon at Camp David. “It will be very embarrassing,” Nixon said. “It’ll indicate that we tried to cover up with the CIA.” In a second telephone call, the president put it more bluntly: “If you read the cold print it looks terrible.… I just don’t want him to go in and say look, they called us in and tried to fix the case and we wouldn’t do it.” Nixon wrote in his memoirs: “One of the things that made the memcons so troublesome was that Walters was one of my old friends; he would not have contrived them to hurt me. In addition, his photographic memory was renowned, and he was universally respected as a scrupulous and honest man.”
That same morning, page-one stories described the White House wiretaps Nixon and Kissinger had placed on presidential aides and prominent reporters starting in 1969. Kissinger, who was expecting to be appointed secretary of state, brazenly denied that he had chosen the wiretap targets among his NSC staff and national security reporters; he implied he was only following orders. Nixon shouted: “Henry ordered the whole goddamn thing.… He read every one of those taps … he reveled in it, he groveled it, he wallowed in it.”
That same day’s newspapers reported that the federal judge presiding over the espionage trial of Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case had dismissed the charges on grounds of government misconduct. Belatedly, the Justice Department, as required under law, had disclosed the misconduct—a warrantless White House wiretap recording Ellsberg, and the Plumbers’ break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office.
The Pentagon Papers case was a total loss for the president: Ellsberg went free and the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize. Nixon was embittered.
“Doesn’t the President of the United States have the responsibility to conduct an investigation with regard to leaks in the goddamn place?” Nixon argued to Haig on May 11, regarding the wiretaps. “I got to go to the court to ask them? Screw the court.” The court begged to differ.*
John Mitchell publicly denied signing the wiretap authorizations. Nixon had a one-word response to that: “Bullshit.” He was right about that. But that same afternoon, FBI agents had wrung a modicum of truth from Mitchell.
He confessed that the taps were part of “a dangerous game we were playing.” He also told them where transcripts of the wiretaps might be found: in the White House safe of John Ehrlichman. The acting FBI director William Ruckelshaus recalled: “An FBI agent, sent by me to the White House to guard those records and others in Ehrlichman’s office, was badly shaken when the President of the United States seized his lapels and asked him what he was doing there.” He was upholding the law of the land—and helping to make a case against the president of the United States.
Nixon saw no alternative but to fight to keep these documents secret. “Good god, if we were going to stonewall executive privilege and a lot of other things we can sure as hell stonewall this,” he told Haig on May 12.
How they were going to stonewall the Huston Plan was another question. Nixon had endorsed every kind of government spying on Americans—opening their mail, bugging their phones, breaking into their homes and offices—until J. Edgar Hoover himself killed the program. John Dean had placed a copy of the incendiary plan in a safe-deposit box and given the key to Judge Sirica. He intended to turn the copy over to the Senate Watergate Committee.
Nixon’s constant refrain had been contempt for court rulings on wiretapping, break-ins, any aspect of “the national security thing.” Nixon insisted: “I’m going to defend the bugging. I’m going to defend the Plumbers [and] fight right through to the finish on the son of a bitch.” But when he thought about people actually reading the patently illegal Huston Plan, he changed his tune. “The bad thing is that the president approved burglaries,” Nixon said on May 17; he could be perceived as “a repressive fascist.”
The tension at the White House was unbearable. With the Watergate hearings days away, Nixon screamed at his underlings as he schemed to save his presidency. Ziegler cautioned him to stay calm: “If we allow ourselves to be consumed by this—”
“—We’ll destroy ourselves,” the president said.
Rose Mary Woods tried to console him. She said that Dr. Hutschnecker, Nixon’s psychoanalyst, had just called her: “He’s thinking of you all the time and if there’s anything on God’s earth that he can do.…”
“They may kill me in the press, but they will never kill me in my mind,” Nixon said. “I’m going to fight these bastards to the end.”