Washington was the hottest place in the country in the summer of 1974—if you were President Nixon or anybody connected to Watergate. The Supreme Court ordered the White House to produce and hand over to prosecutors all secret tapes that had been recorded. On July 27, the House Judiciary Committee adopted the first article of impeachment, charging Nixon with obstruction of justice regarding the investigation of the Watergate entry.
On August 8, Richard Nixon became the first U.S president to resign, announcing his intentions by a televised address to the nation. On or just after the day on which Nixon resigned the presidency, my lawyer, Bill Snyder, was in the courtroom of Judge Gerhard Gesell, a federal judge in D.C., representing me in one of the nasty spawn of litigations brought on by Watergate. Federal marshals brought in Gordon Liddy and sat him down right next to Bill.
At the time, Liddy had not yet published his book, Will, and was reveling in being the only stand-up, strong, silent-type guy. Consequently, Bill asked him, “Well, Mr. Liddy, are you going to continue to remain silent now that your leader has resigned?” Liddy replied that the soldier owed his allegiance to the prince, no matter whom the prince may be. Poor man’s Machiavelli.
A day or so later, Liddy was hauled before the Nedzi Committee—the House Armed Services Committee. When asked if he would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, Liddy replied, “No!” He was subsequently cited for contempt of Congress and returned for sentencing to Judge Sirica, who angrily added an additional eighteen months to his sentence.
A month later, on September 8, President Gerald Ford announced a “full, free, and absolute” pardon of the former president for “all offenses against the United States” committed between January 20, 1969, and August 9, 1974. Nixon, the man who was conspirator in chief, would somehow rise like a phoenix from the ashes of his ignominy and become an elder statesman whose funeral would draw every living American president, including President Clinton. No other Watergate figure would fare quite as well.
The presidential pardon did not cover other conspirators named in the indictment, so the trial of John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Kenneth Parkinson, and Robert Mardian proceeded at the end of September 1974. One important prosecution witness would be John Dean, who was serving one to four years in prison. I would be considered another blockbuster witness, technically brought to the stand by Judge Sirica in a controversial move so that prosecutors would have more leeway to question me.
This unconventional move had been orchestrated by Ben-Veniste to help conceal from the defendants’ lawyers that I was now cooperating fully with prosecutors. Up until very recently, I had steadfastly maintained my earlier fallacious testimony concerning my superiors, which had angered prosecutors so much that Ben-Veniste had uttered his disturbing Leavenworth threat. Even my own lawyer, Bill Snyder, had threatened to part ways if I continued prevaricating.
We were of two minds. He thought my best hope of having Sirica cut my draconian thirty-five-year sentence was to fully cooperate with the government. I, however, had no trust in Sirica by this time and thought that if I admitted to perjury, the angered judge would use it as a weapon to uphold the entire provisional sentence hovering above my head like the sword of Damacles. Even Snyder, however, did not know that I was lying—he could only suspect it.
Kevan produced the envelope of papers I had given her to destroy shortly after her mother’s death. Our relationship had not been warm since the Watergate revelations, as she blamed me for involving Dorothy (and her, by proxy) in such a high-stakes game. One night, after discussing with Snyder how they could get me to recant my testimony, she had given him the long-secreted envelope that had weighed so heavily on her mind. Then the two confronted me like family members going through an intervention one evening when I had been allowed by marshals to prepare for court at Snyder’s Baltimore home.
My reaction was just as violent as that of an alcoholic in denial. I cursed them and called them betrayers—but eventually conceded defeat. Snyder turned the papers over to overjoyed prosecutors with great fanfare about my “conversion.” The effect was almost magical, flipping the stormy climate of animosity into balmy geniality. Now they had weapons they would need in the oncoming trial, including the amounts and dates of monies received and disbursed by my wife to my coconspirators. Still, they wished to conceal my sudden born-again transformation as long as possible, so they had Sirica call me as a special witness.
During opening statements, each of the defendants’ lawyers tried to paint his client in the best possible light. Parkinson’s attorney said he was simply in awe of John Mitchell, just “like a ballplayer who wants to meet Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron.” So it was easy to see how the poor gullible Parkinson believed Mitchell when his boss told him that CREEP had nothing to do with the break-in. Haldeman and Ehrlichman also both pointed at John Mitchell as the man in charge of the cover-up and any payment scheme that might have existed. Everybody was pointing fingers at everyone else.
While John Dean was supposedly the star witness at this trial, I was brought in to testify on October 29 and would create the biggest splash. By this time, the jury had listened to so many hours of scratchy White House tapes that certain members were often falling asleep. Despite all of this very graphic testimony, including the treasury of my papers, there was no smoking gun to which prosecutors could point to say that any of the principals had absolutely full knowledge of the break-ins and that the total of $429,000 that we had received for lawyers and living expenses had been in return for our silence.
Ben-Veniste questioned me several times on the whereabouts of the missing memo that I had “laid on Parkinson.” I had given it to Bittman, who said he had read it to Parkinson over the telephone and put it in a folder that had later been destroyed. Now Bittman suddenly came up with a copy of the confidential memo, which he gave to prosecutors to keep from being indicted. Ben-Veniste had kept it from defense attorneys for over a month, allowing them to question and harangue various defendants, believing that it did not exist or possibly had never existed. Now I dutifully testified that the copy was a true and correct photocopy of the original, and Ben-Veniste read it to the jury very dramatically. It had a chilling effect on the defendants and their lawyer.
The one-and-a-half-page memo had been typed in a crisp, businesslike font on my IBM Selectric typewriter. I started by noting that the Watergate operation had been planned against my better judgment.
The seven Watergate defendants, and others not yet indicted, bugged D.N.C. offices initially against their better judgment, knowing that Larry O’Brien was seldom there and that many items of interest were being moved to Florida. Furthermore, the defendants pressed an alternate plan to bug O’Brien’s Fontainebleau convention suite, before occupancy, a low-risk, high-gain operation, which was rejected.
The seven defendants again protested further bugging of D.N.C. headquarters on June 16–17, the intercepted conversations by then having shown clearly that O’Brien was not using his office.
Again, objections were overridden and the attempt was loyally made even though money for outside guards was struck from the operational budget by Jeb Magruder. In fact, the entire history of Gemstone was characterized by diminishing funding coupled with increasing demands by those who conceived and sponsored the acitivity.
If initial orders to bug D.N.C. headquarters were ill advised, the defendants’ sponsors compounded the fiasco by the following acts:
1. Indecisiveness at the moment of crisis.
2. Failure to quash the investigation while that option was still open.
3. Allowing Hunt’s safe to be opened and selected contents handed to the F.B.I.
4. Permitting an F.B.I. investigation whose unprecedented scope and vigor caused humiliation to families, friends, and the defendants themselves.
5. Granting immunity to Baldwin.
6. Permitting defendants to fall into the hands of a paranoid judge and three self-admitted liberal Democrat prosecutors.
7. Failure to provide promised funds on a timely and adequate basis; continued postponements and consequent avoidance of commitments.
8. An apparent wash-hands attitude now that the election had been won, heightening the sense of unease among all the defendants who have grown increasingly to feel that they are being offered up as scapegoats ultimately to be abandoned.
1. Once the criminal trial ends, the D.N.C. civil suit resumes. In his deposition John Mitchell may well have perjured himself.
2. Pending are three investigations by Congressional committees. The Democratic Congress is not going to simply let the Watergate affair die away.
3. The media are offering huge sums for defendants’ stories, for example an offer to one defendant for his “autobiography” now stands at $745,000.
4. The Watergate bugging is only one of a number of highly illegal conspiracies engaged in by one or more of the defendants at the behest of senior White House officials. These as yet undisclosed crimes can be proved.
5. Immunity from prosecution and/or judicial clemency for cooperating defendants is a standing offer.
6. Congressional elections will take place in less than two years.
Defendants’ Position
The defendants have followed all instructions meticulously, keeping their part of the bargain by maintaining silence. They have not, until now, attempted to contact persons still in positions of responsibility in an effort to obtain relief and reassurance, believing preelection security to be a primary consideration.
The Administration, however, remains deficient in living up to its commitments. These commitments were and are:
1. Financial support.
2. Legal defense fees.
3. Pardons.
4. Rehabilitation.
Having recovered from post-election euphoria, the Administration should now attach high priority to keeping its commitments and taking affirmative action in behalf of the defendants.
To end further misunderstandings, the seven defendants have set Nov. 27 at 5:00 p.m. as the date by which all past and current financial requirements are to be paid, and credible assurances given of continued resolve to honor all commitments. Half measures will be unacceptable.
Accordingly, the defendants are meeting on Nov. 2 5 to determine our joint and automatic response to evidence of continued indifference on the part of those in whose behalf we suffered the loss of our employment, our futures, and our reputations as honorable men.
The foregoing should not be misinterpreted as a threat. It is among other things a reminder that loyalty has always been a two-way street.
Looking back, my lawyer comments, “To a prosecutor, this was gold—a clear road map of the cover-up, of quid pro quo. ‘We continue to keep silent; you pay the money you owe.’” Snyder also remembers that he was watching Sirica when Ben-Veniste read the section about the paranoid judge but that the man in question sat stonefaced, giving no indication of his thoughts.
The memo had two immediate effects. First, it added immense credibility to my current testimony, as I had previously testified in front of the Senate subcommittee saying the opposite to what the memo contained, and I was now “coming clean.” Second, it pointed directly to higher-ups, specifically naming Jeb Magruder and John Mitchell. Attorneys for Mitchell and Parkinson thought that the letter, which had been withheld from them, was so damaging to their clients that they filed for a mistrial.
Parkinson’s lawyer, Jacob Stein, argued, “I am now stuck with a cross-examination that is harmful to my client. I have now a cover-up within a cover-up. I’m caught between the blades of scissors in a play within a play.”
I could have told them how far that would go in front of the paranoid, railroading judge in charge of the case.
On January 1, 1975, after sixty-four days of trial, the jury deliberated for fifteen hours and five minutes, delivering a guilty verdict on all counts of the cover-up to Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mardian—four men who had once been some of the most powerful officials in the land. Parkinson’s argument that he had been misled by his superiors was apparently believable, as he was acquitted.
John Mitchell served nineteen months at the minimum-security institution at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama before being released early because of bad health. He was a man who was accustomed to having his orders obeyed without question and did not take no for an answer. His subsequent courses of action after our arrests showed that he had little sensitivity for those whom he ordered around.
He did, however, make an apologetic statement to Judge Sirica: “My reflections since the trial upon my acts and deeds and the events in which I participated, my reflections have led me to considerable remorse and regret that they occurred, and, of course, that they resulted in such distress to my family and friends and associates and all other people who were affected by them....” He promised never to perform such deeds in the future.
After being released from prison, Mitchell settled with his companion, Mary Gore Dean, in Georgetown, where he attempted unsuccessfully to write a memoir. It’s too bad that he never finished, because as the “Big Man,” he must have had some very juicy tidbits to reveal. The failure to deliver prompted Simon & Schuster to sue him to recover the large advance they had tendered, making him the only conspirator to never publish a book about Watergate. He took his last breath on November 9, 1988, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
H. R. Haldeman was sentenced to eighteen months in Lompoc Federal Prison in California. In 1978, he published The Ends of Power, taking responsibility for creating the atmosphere that allowed an operation like Watergate to flourish. The book also engendered more conspiracy theories, as it alleged a CIA plot to cover up facts surrounding the Kennedy assassination, which Oliver Stone used in his movie Nixon, speculating that the missing eighteen-and-a-half minutes of Nixonian tape concerned the cover-up. Haldeman became a successful entrepreneur before dying of abdominal cancer in California on November 12, 1993.
Haldeman also prepared a statement to the judge. To his credit, he spent most of his time repeating that he would like to contribute to society in the future and apologizing: “I do totally accept responsibility for my actions and I recognize my responsibility to atone for those actions. I have in a religious sense as well as in a legal sense a very strong feeling of repentance.”
Robert Mardian was convicted on the basis of Magruder’s testimony and sentenced to ten months to three years in prison, before his conviction was reversed on appeal on grounds that his lawyer had fallen ill two weeks into the trial. Before Mark Felt’s “Deep Throat” revelation, many people believed the Watergate leaker to be Mardian, who would have been a perfect person, as he was Liddy’s “action officer.”
Ehrlichman had the most to lose, as he had already been convicted in the plumbers trial and could receive twenty years. In the end, the mean and vindictive counsel to the president was sentenced to twenty months to five years in prison. He ended up serving eighteen months in a minimum-security Arizona prison camp.
After his release from prison in 1977, he issued a statement to Judge Sirica rationalizing his actions, saying, “I now realize that I had an exaggerated sense of my obligation to do as I was bidden, without exercising independent judgment in the way I might have if it had been an attorney-client relationship. And I hope that people who are in the White House now and in the coming years will have a different sense of that relationship. It’s almost a metaphysical kind of relationship. It’s very hard to define, but see you’re asked to do all kinds of thing—out of your loyalty to the institution, out of your loyality to the man, as your essential relationship—you’re kind of an extension of his arm.” He finished with perhaps his least self-serving and truest words: “I went and lied; and I’m paying the price for that lack of willpower. I, in effect, abdicated my moral judgments and turned them over to somebody else. And if I had any advice for my kids, it would be to never ever defer your moral judgments to anybody—your parents, your wife, anybody. That’s something that’s very personal. And it’s what a man has to hang onto.”
He clearly could have been speaking for all of us. Afterward, Ehrlichman settled for a while in New Mexico, where he wrote two novels and two nonfiction accounts of his time with Richard Nixon. Ehrlichman died of diabetes complications in Atlanta, Georgia, on Feburary 14, 1999.
All in all, nineteen administration officials would be convicted, with Liddy doing the most time, a total of four years, before President Carter ordered his release. Despite the Democratic president’s mercy, Liddy gave thanks by parleying his notoriety into a “successful,” ultraconservative radio talk show.
In his book, Blind Ambition, John Dean recounts a conversation with Chuck Colson, who said: “I tell you, John, ... I turned into something of a CIA freak on Watergate for a while, you know, and I still think there’s something there. I haven’t figured out how it all adds up, but I know one thing: the people with CIA connections sure did better than the rest of us. Paul O’Brien’s an old CIA man, and he walked. David Young was Kissinger’s CIA liaison, and he ran off to England when he got immunity. Bennett worked for the CIA, and he ran back to Hughes. And Dick Helms skated through the whole thing somehow. Maybe those guys just knew how to play the game better than we did.” Dean did pretty well, though. After he testifed, Sirica sentenced him to time served, which totaled four months.
Despite Colson’s observations, my CIA connection was not much help to me. I ended up serving thirty-three months in prison. It wasn’t pleasant, but there was one good aspect: it was in prison at Eglin Air Force Base that I met my wife, Laura.
Eglin is another one of those country club prisons that sounds better than it is. While it was superior to D.C. Jail, you never forgot that you were in prison. Yes, it is for nonviolent, short-term prisoners, and you can play tennis, but it’s still not a place you want to go back to once you’ve been released.
I didn’t have a wife to visit me, so one of the other prisoners, a man by the name of Hughes, who is now deceased, told me that he wanted me to meet a young divorcée from his old town in Georgia. I told him that I preferred not to meet anybody, because usually when I did, they gave me a stack of Bibles. I had so many of them that I had become a major source of Bibles for the prison converts. The givers were all quite well intentioned, but I was comfortable with my own level of interest in religion.
Then I received a nice letter from a woman who said she had seen me interviewed by Tom Snyder on the Tomorrow Show, and would like to meet me.
I wrote back a terse reply:
Dear Miss Martin:
Thank you for your letter and your interest in visiting me, but I am not interested in meeting strangers. Every time I am on network television, I get hundreds of marriage proposals. Again, I am not interested in meeting someone who saw me on television.
Sincerely, Howard Hunt
She was amused by the letter and kept it on her dining room table for several days before writing back:
Dear Mr. Hunt,
I am not the least bit interested in proposing marriage to you. You are five years younger than my father! I merely have admired you from afar and thought you might enjoy a picnic lunch from this teacher who, believe me, has NO designs on you. Perish the thought. I am not offended, since we do not know one another; in fact, I had to grin when I read your letter.
You are a WONDERFUL patriot who has done so much good for this country, and how ironic that your country sent you to prison over so small a thing. If Nixon (whom I thought was an excellent president) had taken responsibility for the whole affair, he likely would have enjoyed a very successful second term. How tragic that you and your children suffered so terribly in the loss of your wife/their mother in that plane crash.
Good-bye, Mr. Hunt. Stay well.
Sincerely,
Laura Martin
By chance, Laura was, in fact, the woman whom Hughes wanted me to meet. “She’s a former Miss Georgia,” he prompted enticingly.
So I agreed to the meeting the following Sunday; on Sundays families usually came to visit in a large hall with minimal guards.
“The lady I mentioned to you is right over there,” Hughes said, gesturing toward a very charming young lady.
To make a long story short, it turned out to be Laura. She visited me on weekends and would bring me fried chicken and things like that. When I got out of prison, I continued seeing her for six to eight months while I got my life straightened out, because there were still many loose ends to tie up. Once I was clear, I asked Laura to marry me.
The wedding was planned for Thanksgiving 1977 but had to be postponed because my great old friend Mañuel Artime was dying from recently diagnosed pancreatic cancer.
Mañuel liked Laura instantly and told me, “Don’t let this one get away, hermano.”
Unfortunately, he died before Laura could get to know him, but she fell in love with his wife, Adelaida, and their children.
On our honeymoon, Laura had to laugh when I told her that the only reason I agreed to meet her was because Hughes had told me she was a former Miss Georgia.
“I’ve never been in a beauty pageant in my life!” she told me.
At first, we moved to Guadalajara, Mexico. Laura was (and still is) a Spanish teacher, so she was excited by the idea. Accordingly, we bought a trailer and loaded it with essential items, and headed south across the border, where countless expatriates have gone to get away from their reputations.
I knew a couple of CIA people who had resettled in Guadalajara, and I had gone down there before to check it out with them. So when Laura and I got to Guadalajara, we had a circle of ready-made friends, which expanded rapidly in the American colony. We enjoyed a very good life and sent the two children we had together to a reputable American school. All in all, it was a good move, and I was able to write a couple of books there. But after five years, it became as expensive to live in Mexico as in the United States, so we moved to the other major city in the United States where you can usually leave the past behind—Miami.
I realized that not only had I successfully left my past behind but had acquired a different identity altogether. One day in a supermarket, a middle-aged lady rushed up to shake my hand. “Oh, it’s so nice to see you here.... We were wondering for a long time what happened to you, Mr. Liddy!” she said.
I don’t like to be misidentified with him. We’re totally different, to say the least. But there you go.
As of this writing Laura and I have been married for twenty-eight years, and our children, Austin and Hollis, are twenty-seven and twenty-one, respectively. Sometimes it amazes me that these two fine human beings would never have arrived on this earth except for the terrible trials of Watergate. I now have six children, some of whom have their own children, so I’ve made my mark on the eastern part of the United States.
I suppose the genesis of Watergate is to be found in the Vietnam War. The Nixon White House was deeply disturbed and baffled by mass antiwar demonstrations, spreading campus unrest and destruction, the Kent State killings, and publication of the Pentagon Papers. Their cumulative effect produced in the White House a bunker mentality—Us against Them—prompting the nefarious actions detailed in this book.
Nixon’s impeachment turned on the crucial question of whether he thought that he was paying blackmail for my and the others’ silence. So for the rest of my life, I will probably be known as the man who tried to blackmail the White House, even though all I was trying to do was collect on promised debts.
Still, it’s clear that at least from the time of Alger Hiss, Nixon was accustomed to spinning his own paranoid reality and had been somewhat successful in foisting it upon a willing public—to which I belonged. And so it was that a bodyguard of otherwise honorable men began shielding private Nixonian truth with public lies. That was the beginning of the cover-up and the fall of Richard Nixon.
I was one of those liars, and the subterfuge cost me everything I held dear, except my life. I lied to protect the presidency—until it became clear that the president was frantically trying to preserve himself, not his high office. In the end, my involvement in Watergate cost me the disruption of my family; legal fees of nearly $800,000; the fall of the Cubans who trusted me; publishers’ resistance to my books after a long, successful writing career; the permanent labels of “Water-gater” and “burglar”; and thirty-three months in prison. Collaterally, my name, published photographs, and CIA background attracted the unwelcome attention of assassination buffs who fantasized that a Watergate conspirator could have conspired to murder John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
This for a man who had only contempt for me and those he sacrificed to lighten his sinking boat—intimate friends, longtime supporters, and advisers—until all were gone and he sank alone, rejected and unregretful. In the spring of 1974, I read transcripts of Nixon’s Oval Office tapes and realized that the president whom I had so long admired and for whom I had sacrificed so much was indifferent to our fate. For me that was a turning point, and I resolved to testify truthfully, and did so from then on.
Still, here’s one example of the surreal atmosphere that suffused the White House—and how much Nixon was living in his own reality: at the time he was fighting impeachment, Nixon’s attorney telephoned, asking if I would come to the White House to help prepare the president’s defense. The invitation was so incredible that it took me a few moments to comprehend what was being asked. Finally, I managed to decline civilly, though outrage and profanity were on the tip of my tongue.
Nixon’s legacy of misfeasance is found in diminished respect for the presidency and suspicion of government itself: an imprint as enduring as it is unforgivable.
Classical Greek dramatists focused on hubris, the tragic flaw in a man’s character that inevitably brings him from high to low estate. Nixon’s flaws were paranoia, vanity, pride, and obsession with self-preservation at the expense of the public’s governance.
As Richard Nixon lay on his deathbed, I uncharitably recalled Shelley’s words on George III: “an old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king.”