One of the few staffers to show up for work was John Dean, who had dragged himself reluctantly into the office to finish some long overdue tasks. He was meant to be compiling a much anticipated “Dean report” in advance of the Senate hearings that would clear the president of any involvement in the break-in. He was agonizing over what to say. Nixon was demanding a technical impossibility: a report that had the appearance of “hanging it all out there” but did not create any further trouble. If Dean limited his report to the usual denials of White House involvement, he might be held personally responsible for the falsehoods. If he went into any detail, he would risk opening up dangerous new lines of investigation. It was a lose-lose proposition.
When Nixon learned that Dean was at his desk, he called him in for another long conversation. He was finishing his lunch when Dean entered the Oval Office in his casual weekend clothes. The president startled his young associate by offering him the use of Camp David to write his report. “Anytime you need to get away, remember that my Camp David place is very conducive to that kind of thoughtful work.” He then asked Dean to run through “the vulnerabilities” in the White House defenses on Watergate. The legal counsel began ticking off names. Mitchell, Colson, Magruder of course. Perhaps Haldeman, as someone who had put pressure on Magruder to gather intelligence against the Democrats. He then added his own name.
“And I’d say Dean to a degree.”
“You?” asked Nixon, taken aback. “Why?”
“Well, because I’ve been all over this thing like a blanket,” Dean replied, referring to his coaching of witnesses and handling the burglars’ demands for hush money.
Nixon preferred to focus on the original crime rather than the subsequent obstruction of justice. As far as he was concerned, Dean was innocent because he had no prior knowledge of the “goddamn thing.” The biggest concern was Magruder and whether he would implicate people like Haldeman and Colson.
Dean agreed that Magruder was a potential threat.
“Jeb’s a good man. But if Jeb ever sees himself sinking, he will reach out to grab everybody he can get hold of.”
As Nixon saw it, the danger was that a minor player “starts pissing on Magruder,” who then “starts pissing on who…even Haldeman.”
“We can’t do that,” he said. “What you’ve got to do, to the extent you can, John, is to cut if off at the pass.” The White House would stick to its earlier line that responsibility ended with Liddy and Hunt. It was too late to go down what Nixon called “the hangout road.” Any attempt to find someone else to blame for Watergate would only deepen the crisis.
Dean raised another, even more unsettling, consideration. It turned out that Liddy and Hunt were even bigger “idiots” than previously known. Nine months prior to breaking in to the Watergate, they had used miniature cameras on loan from the CIA to spy on the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in Beverly Hills. They had returned the equipment to the agency along with the film for processing. The CIA had retained copies of the photographs and handed them over to the Justice Department as part of the Watergate investigation. Dean told Nixon that one of the photographs showed “Gordon Liddy standing proud as punch” outside the psychiatrist’s office. The nameplate of the psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, was clearly visible in another photograph. At some point an astute investigator was likely to link Liddy and the White House Plumbers to the still unsolved burglary at Dr. Fielding’s office. Once this happened, the trail would lead to John Ehrlichman, who had supervisory responsibility for the Plumbers. Nixon’s domestic policy adviser had signed off on the “covert operation” against Ellsberg in retaliation for his leaking of the official Vietnam War history to The New York Times. He had been pushing Dean to persuade the CIA to retrieve the compromising materials from the Justice Department. The agency had rejected the request.
What “in the name of God” had caused Ehrlichman to get involved? Nixon demanded.
“This was part of an operation…uh…in connection with the Pentagon Papers,” Dean mumbled. “They wanted to get Ellsberg’s psychiatric records for some reason.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jesus Christ.”
This Watergate stuff was a lot more complicated than Nixon had ever imagined. It was like playing whack-a-mole. If you succeeded in suppressing one scandal, another was sure to raise its head.
After meeting with Dean in the Oval Office, Nixon weaved his way through the cars parked on West Executive Avenue to his hideaway study in the EOB. A more congenial task awaited him. He had an appointment with a man whose sense of history and foreign policy interests matched his own. A journalist turned historian, Theodore H. White had made his name as a Time correspondent in China. He had interviewed all the leading actors in the Chinese revolution, beginning with Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, and Chiang Kai-shek. He knew the top American commanders in Asia, including Douglas MacArthur and Joseph Stilwell. More recently, he had become the foremost chronicler of American elections, with a series of books titled The Making of the President. The first of these books, about the 1960 campaign between Kennedy and Nixon, had earned him a Pulitzer Prize. He was now finishing his fourth campaign book, on the 1972 election. He had mastered the art of turning sin-depth political reporting into thrilling narrative history.
An ebullient man with wire-rimmed glasses, Teddy White tended to glamorize his subjects in bursts of purple prose that sometimes verged on hero worship. He had a particularly soft spot for Jack Kennedy. After JFK was assassinated, he wrote an article for Life magazine comparing his doomed presidency to Camelot, the mythical English court of King Arthur. The suggestion for the Camelot analogy had come from Kennedy’s widow, Jackie, mesmerized by the Alan Lerner lyric, “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.” White was happy to build upon the imagery. For Jackie, he wrote later, the Kennedy era represented “a magical moment in American history when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when artists, writers, and poets met at the White House, and the barbarians beyond the walls held back.” It was the kind of over-the-top eulogy of the slain president that made Nixon want to vomit.
He was obsessed with Jack Kennedy. He had recently read, and heavily annotated, an extract from a new book by a British reporter, Henry Fairlie, critical of the Camelot mythmaking. One of the passages that caught his attention examined Kennedy’s techniques for wooing the media elite. A New York Times columnist, Arthur Krock, described a skillful policy of news management based on the “social flattery of Washington reporters and commentators” by the president and his senior aides. Nixon underlined the quotation, along with Fairlie’s observation that the admission of American political journalists to the Kennedy court undermined their credibility as neutral observers. “Z[iegler] note!” Nixon instructed his press chief. He was convinced that many of his problems came down to poor image building and a hostile press. It was all terribly unfair.
Nixon knew that he would not be able to seduce White the way Kennedy had seduced such supposedly objective reporters as Joseph Alsop and Ben Bradlee. But he could tap into his romantic view of American history and deference toward the presidency as an institution. At the very least, they would have a stimulating conversation about the state of the world. As an old Asia hand, White had welcomed Nixon’s opening to China. He had a feeling for the shifting sands of big-time politics and the awkward compromises that statesmen were obliged to make to achieve their goals. This was an opportunity for Nixon to impress an influential commentator with his intellectual sophistication and grasp of international affairs.
Nixon steered White toward the settee opposite the presidential desk as Manolo served refreshments. He put his feet up on the coffee table as he talked about his favorite presidents, notably Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. White had never “spoken to a President who gave the impression of being more completely self-possessed or in command of his job.” Nixon’s mind moved easily from one topic to another, from the desegregation of schools to rising gasoline prices to his visits to Moscow and Beijing. “Mostly he talked the shop talk of power—power as Mao Tse-tung sees it, power as the Pentagon sees it, power as the President must use it,” White later recalled. “The President, he felt, must single out a few problems of the thousands and thousands of immensely complicated affairs that clamor for his attention, and must concentrate on those. He must wall himself off from detail.”
If Nixon was tormented by Watergate, he gave no sign of it. Whenever White made a move to leave, the president waved him back to the settee. He seemed at peace with himself. It was this “quality of serenity” that struck White most forcefully later, after he had an opportunity to read the jarring transcript of Nixon’s conversation with Dean earlier in the day. “He had swept the morning dialogue with Dean from his mind: he was out there, far, far out there in history, talking as a President should. His serenity could not have been feigned.” White did his best to put Nixon in a good mood, avoiding Watergate entirely. As he wrote later, the scandal “did not, at that moment, seem relevant.”
At the end of their two-hour conversation, the reporter-historian reached one of the sweeping conclusions that were a hallmark of his literary style. Nixon’s election landslide of November 1972 represented a fundamental break with the era of the welfare state built by FDR and LBJ. Americans had voted for Nixon because they wanted to place restraints on “the power and reach of the Federal state into daily life.” Loved or hated, Nixon personified a popularly supported change in the nation’s direction. “My judgment,” White informed readers of The Making of the President, 1972, “would have cast Richard Nixon as one of the major Presidents of the twentieth century, in a rank just after Franklin Roosevelt, on a level with Truman, Wilson, Eisenhower, Kennedy. Thus the view from Olympus, on March 17, 1973, as Nixon described his use of a President’s power.”
By White’s own account, it would take just a few days for him to be “brought down from Olympus” and for his upbeat assessment of the Nixon presidency to shatter into tiny pieces.