“Forget about the easel. If this gets out of hand, they’re going to impeach the president.”
Reisner said he did not want to hurt anyone but was obliged to tell the truth. For a respite from his legal woes and the reporters camped out on his front lawn, Jeb took his wife to Bermuda, where they competed in a mixed doubles tournament. Back in Washington, he went over his version of events with a new defense attorney, Jim Sharp, who refused to believe it. Like Dean, Magruder began to drink heavily, taking tranquilizers to get some rest. Finally, he could bear it no longer. On April 10, he told Sharp “the truth about Watergate.” The lawyer urged him to strike the best deal he could with the prosecutors. Jeb agreed. He felt an immediate sense of relief, as if he was “sane again” after months of madness.
The prosecutors took a tough line. They told Magruder’s lawyers that he was negotiating from “a position of weakness”: Everyone else was talking. They refused to grant him immunity from prosecution but were willing to consider a plea bargain. Jeb risked being charged with multiple prison terms of up to five years each. He thought about the pain this would inflict on Gail and the children, “whose interests I’d ignored for so long while I was worried about Mitchell and Nixon.” For the first time in his life, he considered suicide.
On Friday, April 13, as the plea bargain talks dragged on, Magruder received a call from the White House. It was Larry Higby, known to his colleagues as Haldeman’s Haldeman. Higby fulfilled the role of SOB for Haldeman that Haldeman performed for Nixon. He did not let on that he was taping the call in the hope of gathering evidence to exonerate his boss. Dispensing with his usual sunny greeting, he passed on a story that “really bugs the shit out of me.” Ehrlichman was claiming that Magruder was attempting to shift the blame for Watergate onto the White House. Supposedly, Magruder had told reporters that Haldeman had ordered the break-in.
“Bullshit,” Magruder said, almost incoherent with anger. “Jesus Christ! I mean it just makes me sick, Larry.”
Higby caught Magruder at the peak of his despair. Magruder had lied to juries and investigators so many times that he faced cumulative prison sentences of more than a hundred years on perjury alone. It was impossible for him to “stonewall it” any longer.
“I’m probably going to jail, Larry, goddamn it,” he moaned. “Our lives are ruined right now anyway. You know, most of ours. Mine is certainly. And so will many others before this is over.”
Higby delicately raised the Haldeman question. Magruder said he had discussed the intelligence operation against the Democrats with a Haldeman aide, Gordon Strachan, but had never discussed the matter with Haldeman himself. The prosecutors were not interested in small fry like Strachan, Magruder went on. They were after the “big fish.”
“Did Gordon ever relay to you any instructions from Haldeman?” Higby wanted to know.
“Nope.”
What about the president?
“Shit no. Nothing at all.”
Pressed further by Higby, Magruder said he had forwarded transcripts of the bugged conversations to the White House, but it was unlikely that Strachan had done anything with them because they were “all junk.” The operation had been “a waste of time.”
Higby became much more friendly now that he had Magruder on tape denying Haldeman’s involvement in the bugging conspiracy. Dropping his earlier charge of betrayal, he called him Jebber and promised to visit him in prison. Magruder traced his problems back to the letter that McCord had written to Judge Sirica three weeks previously, which had given the prosecutors the upper hand. By breaking so dramatically with the other defendants, McCord had undermined the bargaining position of everyone else.
“I don’t have any chips,” Magruder complained. “They don’t need us anymore. Hell, they’ve got everybody down there.”
That evening, Jeb and Gail attended a fancy Washington dinner party. He checked with his lawyers throughout the evening on the progress of the plea bargain negotiations. Eventually, Sharp called to say that the prosecutors were offering a one-count felony indictment on a conspiracy charge. With parole, he would likely serve no more than twenty months in prison. In return, Magruder had to promise to be completely “truthful, candid, and cooperative, and testify as a prosecution witness before the grand jury and at trial.” He accepted the deal immediately and returned to the party.