Richard Nixon stood virtually alone on the morning of May 1, 1973. H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, Nixon’s loyal chief of staff, and John Ehrlichman, his chief domestic advisor, had resigned the day before, victims of the growing Watergate scandal. Between the Watergate burglary on June 17, 1972, and April 30, 1973, Nixon’s rigorously crafted White House had fallen apart. Not only did Haldeman and Ehrlichman resign that day, but so did Attorney General Richard Kleindienst; his Justice Department had repeatedly faltered in its attempts to prosecute Watergate cases. Nixon also fired John Dean, the White House counsel whose role in the break-in and subsequent cover-up were becoming appallingly clear to Nixon and his associates. Dean had started cooperating with prosecutors and Senate investigators earlier in April, swearing he would not be made the scapegoat for Watergate.
Haldeman and Ehrlichman had stood behind Nixon for more than a decade. They knew Nixon in defeat during his failed campaigns in 1960 for president and 1962 for governor of California, and they helped his triumphs in 1968 and 1972. In the White House they shaped his policies and enforced his rules. “They were men with long ties and easy access to the President, men of loyalty, men who transmitted Mr. Nixon’s orders to the bureaucracy and to whom, with few exceptions, Mr. Nixon’s Cabinet members were forced to report before winning humble access to the Oval Office,” the New York Times wrote on May 1. “In giving them their release Mr. Nixon has released part of his own political history. What remains is only a shadow of the old superstructure.”1 Nixon had to rebuild that superstructure from the ground up.
Even though Haldeman had left, Nixon still needed his counsel, and he slipped Haldeman into the Oval Office late in the afternoon of May 2 for an unscheduled meeting that was not recorded in his official calendar.
“The thing is, and he may have raised it with you, but [former cabinet official] Bob Finch had an idea, and I wished to hell I thought of it, and I told him that,” Haldeman said. “I stewed over it for two days to find out what’s wrong with it, and I can’t find anything wrong with it and about five hundred thousand things right with it, and that is as you move, at least on a temporary basis, and it could be done temporarily, that you move Al Haig in here in my place.”
“Would he do it?” Nixon asked, sounding somewhat desperate. “God, if only he would do it.”
“On a temporary basis, he doesn’t have any choice,” Haldeman said. “You could simply tell him, direct him. You’re his commander in chief. You could direct him that he is temporarily relieved of his duties as vice chief of staff and is chief of staff of the White House.”
Other presidents, Haldeman continued, had active-duty military aides, such as Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, who was President Dwight Eisenhower’s national security advisor and staff secretary.
“And I’m deeply concerned that you’ve got the problem now,” Haldeman said. “Maybe it’s only a week or two. Or maybe for a few months.” Nixon needed help, Haldeman continued, because so many of his senior aides, such as Treasury Secretary George Shultz, wanted to see him. “There’s all this shit where people are coming up with ideas, and they all want to get to you.”
Nixon needed the help. He faced a summit in June with Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, and the new peace deal in Vietnam was already showing signs of falling apart.
“I think Al knows this place,” Haldeman said. “He has your confidence. You’re able to sit and talk with Al. You need somebody here you can talk some of this stuff through with, and that worries me.”
“I’ve got no one to talk to,” Nixon said forlornly.
Nixon, who rarely let his subordinates know how he felt about them, was moved by Haldeman’s personal sacrifice.
“Let me say I miss your strength,” Nixon said. “You’re always so upbeat. We really miss you around here. . . . I need somebody I can lean on now and then.”
“That’s why we should get Al over here,” Haldeman answered. “He’s someone I think you can do that with.”
Haldeman said he would call Haig.
“It would save us,” Nixon said. “I desperately need someone for the good of the country for temporary additional duty for the next thirty days. We’ll do that.”2
Haldeman reached Haig, who was dining with other generals at the sprawling infantry center at Fort Benning, Georgia. “Al, I’m with the president now, and he has asked me to tell you that he wants you to be his Chief of Staff in the White House.” Haig knew he could not refuse and that “this could mean the end of the life I had chosen for my family and myself,” he wrote later. He asked if Nixon could reconsider.3
Haig knew he could not change Nixon’s mind, because the president had few realistic options. He knew and trusted Haig, whom he often used to manipulate Kissinger, who resented Haig’s access to Nixon and how he ingratiated himself with the president. Now Nixon was just desperate. Haldeman told Haig that a plane would fly him to Washington the next morning.
Before he left, however, Haig called his old boss at the Pentagon, Joseph Califano, who was now the chief lawyer for the Democratic National Committee. Don’t do it, Califano urged. “Don’t you know we have this guy?” Califano said of Nixon. Haig risked becoming collateral damage when the Nixon administration inevitably imploded. Then Haig called Kissinger, who had reservations about his former subordinate becoming his boss. Kissinger questioned Haig’s loyalty, which he told Nixon early the following morning in the Oval Office.4
“Al Haig called me last night about being brought in here for an interim period,” Kissinger told the president. “I’ll go along with any arrangement, but it’s a situation to have both [Secretary of State William] Rogers and Haig to contend with.”
Rogers, Nixon’s friend since the 1940s, had butted heads with Kissinger since Nixon had rearranged the administration to make Kissinger, not Rogers, the focal point of foreign policy. By restructuring the National Security Council, Nixon intended to sideline the national security bureaucracy, regardless of how long Nixon had known and worked with Rogers.
“I’ve got to get somebody for about thirty days until I get somebody to replace him with,” Nixon responded. “I’ve got to have somebody in whom I have total trust, and you’ve got to go along, Henry.”
“I will go along,” Kissinger said.
“I don’t want to bring some total neophyte at the moment,” Nixon said. “So it’s going to be Haig in here for thirty days, maybe two weeks, but I’ve got to have somebody in here right now.”
“For thirty days,” Kissinger responded. “I have high regard for him, and I always thought he’d just be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and that would do.”
Nixon sensed Kissinger’s reluctance and concern that Haig would trample on his turf.
“Henry, I’m having him here for domestic purposes,” Nixon said.
“But he did not support me in the last three months,” Kissinger responded, referring to the end of 1972, when Kissinger had reached a tentative peace deal with North Vietnam, which then fizzled and caused Nixon to resume bombing the North. Nixon then sent Haig to South Vietnam to persuade its president, Nguyen Van Thieu, that he would not get a better deal from Nixon and needed to take the peace offer.
“Well,” Nixon answered, “somebody’s got to handle Shultz and [Federal Reserve Board chairman] Arthur Burns.”
“But I’ve got to have someone who’s loyal,” Kissinger said again.
“He’ll be loyal while he’s here,” Nixon said, adding, “I’m going to handle the war policy myself. I want to get the domestic stuff away from me so I can concentrate on the foreign stuff. That’s going to be you. Don’t you trust Haig?” he asked Kissinger.
“No, I thought he wasn’t loyal to me at the end,” Kissinger responded. “I thought he was responsible for a lot of the news stories that I was disarmed in the [Vietnam] negotiations. If not responsible, he certainly made no effort to undo them. I just didn’t want it to be a circus here when Rogers starts making another run.”5
Kissinger’s initial suspicion of Haig was well founded. While they would partner often in the coming months to cope with Nixon’s growing instability, Haig also destabilized Kissinger by exposing his vulnerabilities, particularly as the FBI wiretapping became better understood. But they also had much in common, such as their policy mentor, longtime army strategist Fritz Kraemer. Kraemer and Kissinger had drifted apart because Kraemer thought Kissinger had sold out his values for power. Meanwhile, Haig would forever remain Kraemer’s acolyte. Haig and Kissinger also bonded over the challenges of working for the difficult and mercurial Nixon. They commiserated about some of Nixon’s more outlandish behavior, often calling him “our drunken friend.” Their relationship, tested during the first term, would be taxed again in new and different ways once Haig returned.
For his part, Haig’s account of the morning’s event in his memoirs is riddled with the exaggerations and falsehoods that dominate his memoirs. Kissinger, Haig wrote, “even threatened to resign if Nixon went through with it. This rings true; Kissinger’s encounters with Haldeman had taught him the power of the White House Chief of Staff, and he knew, like it or not, that he would be taking orders from me.”6 While Kissinger did oppose Haig’s return, there is no sign he threatened to resign. He did, as Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, promise to make it work.
Nixon greeted his new chief of staff briefly in the Oval Office the next day before flying to Key Biscayne, Florida, a refuge he sought more often as the Watergate pressures kept building.
“Well, Al, you always get the tough assignments,” Nixon said as he tried to reassure Haig that he was thinking of the country and Haig’s ambitions. “Can I ask you to in this period of time to be the person who would basically handle my staff work as Bob [Haldeman] does? There are an infinite number of things where folks come rushing to me with a lot of crap that I know should be going through someone else. . . . If you would do it, I’d appreciate it. I don’t know how it could be done. I want you to keep your military rank and everything like that. I know [Gen. Andrew] Goodpaster was over here as a general.”
“He did it, and I think I can do it,” Haig said.
This temporary move would not force Haig to leave the army, Nixon said, but he added: “I don’t want to play games with it, but we may have to decide for these next four years that you may have to be here.”
“I’m here to do what you think is best, sir,” Haig said. “You know that, and I’ll give it everything I have.”
Nixon asked Haig to spend the weekend planning whatever changes he wanted to make at the White House “because we need a strong man, a loyal man, somebody I can talk to and somebody who can talk to others.”
Haig agreed.
“OK,” Nixon answered. “We’re going to win, if you know what I mean.”7
Few presidents had ever confronted a month like May 1973, and by joining Nixon, Haig reentered a world of turmoil for which he was partly responsible. In Los Angeles, the administration’s case against Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg deteriorated each day. The series of FBI wiretaps that Haig and Kissinger oversaw with FBI official William Sullivan were about ready to burst into full view. The White House would become collateral damage in the fight between Sullivan, jilted in his attempts to become the next FBI director, and Mark Felt, his rival at the FBI, who had initially revealed the existence of the wiretaps to Time magazine. Another cover-up—the spy ring inside the National Security Council run by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—also threatened to crumble. Nixon and Kissinger started May 3 by discussing the involvement of Kissinger aide David Young in investigating that case, to which Haig had a deep and possibly career-ending exposure. Vice President Spiro Agnew, a willing antagonist of the press for Nixon, also faced an uncertain future, as a federal grand jury had started investigating him for bribery and tax evasion when Agnew was governor of Maryland. John Dean would soon bedevil Nixon with a series of interviews and claims about secret documents he had spirited from the White House on his departure. Haig and Nixon would spend weeks trying to grasp the severity of Dean’s impending testimony before the Senate committee investigating the Watergate scandal. Those hearings would start May 17 and rivet the nation’s attention, as each witness exacerbated Nixon’s problems. All of these pressure points, as well as many spontaneous crises, would test Nixon and Haig, who very quickly realized the president was guilty and most likely not going to finish his second term in office.
Even before Haig landed in Washington on May 3, a story in the Washington Post by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein caused another crisis for the White House. A “vigilante squad” operating with the approval of then attorney general John Mitchell had conducted wiretaps on two reporters following the leak of the Pentagon Papers, said the story, which was almost entirely wrong.8 It was tipped off by Sullivan, who spun the story to distance himself from the FBI wiretaps on seventeen government officials and journalists. Sullivan and Woodward, according to Woodward’s notes from the interview, now stored at the University of Texas library in Austin, show that the two discussed the wiretaps with an easy familiarity. They met on March 5 near Sullivan’s home in Prince George’s County, Maryland.9 Felt’s favored target for Watergate-related leaks was not Woodward but Sandy Smith of Time.10 The revelations of the wiretaps confirmed the public impression that Nixon had been spying on his opponents all along, but, more importantly, the Post story had immediate repercussions in the Los Angeles courtroom of U.S. District Judge W. Matthew Byrne, who presided over the Ellsberg trial.11 This was the government’s second attempt at prosecuting Ellsberg. Byrne had declared a mistrial in December 1972, which forced the government to try again in January 1973, and federal prosecutors fought not only the defense attorneys but also their own government. Ellsberg’s defense read the Post story into the record, leading Byrne to ask the acting FBI director, William Ruckelshaus, if Ellsberg or fellow researcher and co-defendant Anthony Russo had been caught by the wiretaps.12 Byrne already felt used by the Nixon White House. On April 26 the prosecution suffered an almost fatal blow when it was forced to reveal that the White House Plumbers team had burglarized the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. On May 2 Byrne had acknowledged in court that he had met twice in April with Nixon’s close aide John Ehrlichman to discuss becoming FBI director, a revelation that caused the defense attorneys to ask Byrne to throw out the case or declare a mistrial. Byrne declined, but he refused to give the prosecution the benefit of his growing number of doubts.
In Washington the White House announced formally that Haig had returned as chief of staff. Initial press coverage was muted; few realized the extensive brief Nixon had given Haig. The New York Times, not realizing Kissinger’s doubts, called the two men close allies.13 “I knew that taking this job would mean far more for him than just forfeiting military advancement and perquisites,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. “We were in for a long and bloody struggle, and for Haig it would be like volunteering to return to combat with no guarantee of the outcome and with no medals at the end.”14 Haig knew the dangers of rejoining the White House and feared Nixon was too passive to challenge the newspaper stories and his political adversaries, which, ironically, Haig would urge Nixon not to do repeatedly over the next fifteen months. “But I thought, in one of the least correct judgments of my life, that Nixon’s dread of the personal encounter was not important so long as he had made the right decisions and had somebody by his side who was competent to handle the confrontations,” Haig wrote later. “The force of circumstances had now decreed that that somebody would be me.”15
White House press secretary Ron Ziegler led off his May 4 briefing with the official news of Haig’s appointment. “The President felt the necessity to have someone assume the many responsibilities of Bob Haldeman at this time while the president considers the entire matter of how the White House operates in the future,” Ziegler said.16 Some details of the announcement would soon turn out to be incorrect. Ziegler said Haig would only assume Haldeman’s duties, but Haig quickly consolidated all power in the White House. News accounts also compared Haig’s selection to Dwight Eisenhower’s pick of Maj. Gen. Wilton Persons in 1957 after his chief of staff, Sherman Adams, resigned in disgrace after the exposure of a scandal. Persons, however, had retired from the army by the time he joined Eisenhower. Also, the scope of Haig’s authority remained unclear. “White House officials refused to detail the responsibilities and authority given the general, insisting that ‘those matters will have to be developed,’” the New York Times reported. If it was not apparent to the public at the time, only two White House officials mattered when it came to determining Haig’s role: the president, whose grasp of reality slipped each day, and the general himself. The early accounts showed how little the press understood about Haig. The Times reported on the missions Haig had carried out for Nixon in Vietnam and Cambodia but viewed Haig as a potential troubleshooter in the mold of Ehrlichman. Califano gave Haig his benediction. “He’ll be superb in this job,” Califano said. “He’ll get decisions made, orders implemented and papers flowing into the President’s office. He’ll work 20 hours a day, and he knows how to get along with people.”17
Haig had barely settled into his new office when Judge Byrne demanded that Ruckelshaus and the FBI determine if any of the bureau’s wiretaps had picked up Ellsberg.18 Ruckelshaus then ordered a complete internal investigation of the wiretap program. If thorough, such an investigation could expose Nixon, Haig, and Kissinger in a scheme that, while ostensibly legal when it was started, showed that the administration’s zeal at keeping secrets trampled civil liberties.
With his order, Ruckelshaus stumbled into a years-long war between Felt and Sullivan to succeed Hoover, who had favored each at one time during the last few years of his life. Hoover’s official deputy was also his close companion, Clyde Tolson, whose poor health left him in no position to succeed Hoover. In 1970, when Sullivan was the FBI’s associate director behind Hoover and Tolson, he angered Hoover by telling a group of newspaper executives that the international Communist Party was not a threat to the United States, a statement that contradicted years of Hoover’s messages to Congress. Hoover started to freeze out Sullivan, who responded by leaking negative stories to columnist Jack Anderson and other reporters. Hoover then promoted Felt above Sullivan. By July 1971 Sullivan’s status had deteriorated so badly that he told his friend Robert Mardian, the head of the Internal Security section of the Justice Department, that Hoover would blackmail Nixon with the FBI wiretap files.19 Mardian told his boss, Attorney General John Mitchell, who then told Nixon, who summoned Mardian to California. Within days, a Sullivan subordinate delivered the wiretap logs to Mardian, who then took them to the White House, where Kissinger and Haig inspected them before stashing them in Ehrlichman’s office. Sullivan continued to antagonize Hoover, who finally fired Sullivan while he was on vacation and changed the locks on his office door. Sullivan confronted Felt, and the two almost had a fistfight in FBI headquarters. Hoover ordered Felt to get the wiretap files, which Hoover had considered too sensitive to go in the regular FBI filing system, from Sullivan’s office. When Felt got to the office, however, he realized Sullivan had taken the files.
Hoover died on May 2, 1972. Felt considered himself the next FBI director, as did Sullivan, but Nixon instead named as acting director L. Patrick Gray, an assistant attorney general. Six weeks later, the Watergate break-in put Gray in the delicate position of running a bureau that aggressively wanted to pursue the burglary while reporting to a president whose top aides wanted to cover up the White House’s involvement. Felt started leaking to the press damaging stories about Gray and details of the Watergate investigation, which Nixon discovered in September 1972.20 Meanwhile, Sullivan rejoined the government as head of the Justice Department’s new Office of National Narcotics Intelligence. Haig wanted Nixon to put Sullivan back at the FBI. “Al Haig has called me yesterday and said, Jesus, ya know, get Sullivan back in there. Ah, Haig is very high on Sullivan,” Nixon aide Charles Colson, a Haig ally, told the president on February 13.21 Instead, three days later Nixon nominated Gray as the official choice to run the bureau. Nixon distrusted Felt and told Gray he should make Felt take a polygraph test.22 Gray declined, naively trusting his deputy, and Felt repaid that trust by leaking the existence of the wiretaps to Time.23
Haig remained in Washington while Nixon went to Florida. He awoke on the morning of Saturday, May 5, to the news that John Dean had told Newsweek magazine about Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate cover-up.24 Dean cited two critical meetings: a September 15, 1972, gathering with Nixon and Haldeman in which Nixon told Dean that he liked his efforts to “keep the lid on” Watergate and that “Bob told me what a great job you’ve been doing,” and a March 21, 1973, meeting in which Dean claimed to have resisted efforts to get him to resign and told Nixon “the problem is that there is a massive cancer on the presidency and it must be cut out.” Dean’s explanations, Newsweek noted, were self-serving and aimed at getting him off the hook with prosecutors, but most readers, as well as those in the White House, did not realize that. Dean had also exaggerated or lied about some of the conversations—there was, for example, no attempt to get Dean to resign on March 21—but since he had told his side of the story first, he changed the template for the cover-up and the upcoming hearings by the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, which was investigating Watergate. As the first close Nixon aide to break with the president, Dean found the committee willing to listen. Since Nixon and Dean had collaborated in the cover-up, the president justifiably feared Dean’s impending testimony.
Haig left Washington for Key Biscayne on Sunday, May 6, arriving there in time to help Nixon reorganize the White House. Haig also urged Nixon to hire a special attorney to represent him on Watergate-related matters and suggested two high-profile Washington lawyers: Edward Bennett Williams, perhaps the nation’s leading criminal defense attorney, and Joseph Califano, Williams’s law partner and Haig’s friend. Nixon, however, bridled at the mention of the two prominent Democrats. Califano represented the Democratic National Committee in its lawsuit against the Nixon reelection committee after the Watergate break-in. “Al, both these men are Democrats,” Haig wrote that Nixon told him. “You’re right about needing somebody. But I’ve suffered too much from people who have mixed loyalties. We’ve got to have a man who’s with us, a man we can trust.”25
If Haig’s account is accurate, which is never guaranteed with his memoirs, Nixon’s comments are rich in irony. It was Haig who had the divided loyalties, and while he failed to bring Califano into the White House, he would work closely with Califano, a sworn Nixon enemy, for the next fifteen months, usually behind Nixon’s back.
To replace Elliot Richardson, the departing defense secretary whom Nixon had named attorney general, Nixon and Haig turned to James Schlesinger, the professorial director of the CIA, Haig ally, and another disciple of Fritz Kraemer.26 Schlesinger had previously run the Atomic Energy Commission and been the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget before Nixon picked him in late 1972 to lead the CIA, where Schlesinger ruthlessly carried out Nixon’s order to clean house by firing more than one thousand agents and letting much of the top staff resign. Nixon needed more advice than Haig could give alone, so the president turned on May 7 to John Connally, the former Texas governor and longtime associate of President Lyndon Johnson, as a special advisor. Connally flew to Florida to meet with Nixon, who admired Connally’s forceful advice and swagger.
Before Nixon and Haig left Florida, they learned of a new problem rising from the Ellsberg trial in Los Angeles. A report in the May 7 New York Times by reporter Seymour Hersh showed how Gen. Robert Cushman, then the deputy director of the CIA, had agreed in July 1971 that the agency would help the White House Plumbers team as they prepared to break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office.27 By helping the Plumbers, primarily E. Howard Hunt, a longtime CIA operative, the agency violated its charter by operating on U.S. soil. Nixon did not know that FBI agents had interviewed Cushman the previous week. Now the commandant of the Marine Corps, Cushman had been loyal to Nixon for a long time. When Nixon was vice president Cushman had served as his national security advisor; Nixon then placed him at the CIA as deputy director so that Cushman could watch over Richard Helms, the director, whom Nixon had kept from the Johnson administration. Cushman, Hersh’s report said, had admitted that the CIA gave disguises, false documents, and other materials to Hunt before the Plumbers team went to California to burglarize the psychiatrist’s office. If Nixon and the White House had known in advance that the FBI wanted to interview Cushman, they could have claimed executive privilege and blocked it. Now, however, they had lost the chance to do it again, and once Cushman testified, it would become more difficult to block the testimony of other administration officials. Meanwhile, the chairmen of two congressional committees, Representative Lucien Nedzi, a Michigan Democrat, and Senator John McClellan, an Arkansas Democrat, said they would ask Cushman to testify before their panels.
Hersh also detailed how much Dean had taken from the White House when Nixon fired him. Dean first told Nixon in March of the Fielding break-in, and then he told federal prosecutors about it on April 15 as Dean looked for insurance to protect him from being made the scapegoat in the Watergate affair. Judge Byrne learned about Dean’s revelation on April 27.
Nixon had hoped he could persuade William Rogers, the secretary of state, to join the White House. The two men had worked together since the 1940s, when Nixon was a young congressman and Rogers a congressional aide, and they continued while Nixon was vice president for Eisenhower and Rogers was attorney general. While Nixon had sidelined Rogers in foreign policy, he respected Rogers’s political acumen and legal talent. Rogers, however, declined, perhaps realizing the extent of the dangers Nixon faced.28 Those dangers were hard to miss. Everyone in Key Biscayne that weekend knew the scope of Nixon’s peril from both forces beyond his control and events he set in motion. In Washington, Richardson promised the Senate that he would appoint a special prosecutor to handle Watergate cases. That was the price of his confirmation, an issue that Nixon opened by moving Richardson from Defense to Justice. The imminent threat of a special counsel also meant Nixon needed a defense counsel. Nixon had already rejected Haig’s suggestions of Williams and Califano, but Haig had another contender.
When they returned to the White House on May 8, Nixon and Haig had already agreed to make Haig’s stay permanent, and Haig immediately affected the makeup of the government. They agreed on moving Schlesinger from the CIA to the Pentagon, but Haig shot down Schlesinger’s potential replacement, William Casey, a former Office of Strategic Services agent during World War II and the current head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Haig called Casey “a little dotty.”29
“I have a better solution at CIA,” Haig said. “Bill Colby,” the agency’s deputy director of operations. “We’ve got a superb one with him.”
“OK, Colby gets the job,” Nixon said, rubber-stamping Haig’s choice almost without pausing to breathe.
They had a harder time determining a replacement for Ruckelshaus at the FBI, but Haig dispatched two potential candidates in one breath. Of Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, a longtime Hoover deputy, Haig said, “I think DeLoach is a snake.” He was out.
Then Haig killed the dream of his ally, William Sullivan, to lead the bureau. “Sullivan’s not a good front man,” Haig said.
Nixon wanted his former law partner H. Chapman “Chappie” Rose to lead his Watergate defense, but Haig said Rose “just can’t take this on full time.”
Nixon asked if Rose could squeeze in some time periodically, and Haig said yes. Then a pause settled over the Oval Office before Haig broke the silence.
“We could bring someone in from another department, if you want to,” Haig said. “Maybe the Defense Department counsel. He’s a hell of a competent guy. [J. Fred] Buzhardt. He’s a competent guy. He’s kept Mel Laird afloat for the last four years on a number of tricky ones. Very tough ones.”
Nixon murmured his agreement.
“I have great confidence in Buzhardt,” Haig said. “He’s a hardworking guy, and he knows the town. He knows the Hill.”
There was another pause.
“Let’s try that,” Nixon said. “I’d rather have—”
“A known quantity,” Haig said.
“Can you get him?” Nixon asked. “Can you borrow him?”
“He’s first-class,” Haig said.
“You just get a man you can work with,” Nixon said.30
Buzhardt was Haig’s old friend from West Point who had helped him cover up the military spy ring. Haig wrote in his memoirs that he only suggested Buzhardt “without enthusiasm,” but his taped conversations with Nixon show that disclaimer is a lie.31 Haig wrote that Buzhardt was “hardworking, intelligent, rigorously ethical, self-effacing, and discreet,” strong credentials for someone for whom he claimed to lack enthusiasm. Once he proposed Buzhardt to Nixon late in the afternoon of May 8, Haig kept vouching for him, calling him strong, loyal, and skilled in manipulating Congress, where the real battle to save the presidency would be fought.
Buzhardt, just like Haig, had hidden conflicts that compromised his defense of Nixon. First, he would remain the Pentagon’s top lawyer while helping Nixon, and his two clients had interests that often diverged. As Pentagon counsel, Buzhardt would have known about Cushman’s interview with the FBI and had let it go forward. Second, he and Haig had covered up the military spy ring, as well as Melvin Laird’s other intelligence operations that ferreted out White House secrets. That meant Nixon’s new defender was complicit in covering up the spying against the president. Even before he stepped into the White House, Buzhardt had already acted against Nixon’s best interests.
In less than a week, Haig had put his stamp firmly on the White House. He brought in his former aide from Vietnam, Maj. George Joulwan, to start a series of early-morning staff meetings “over which I presided for the purpose of making the president’s wishes on all pertinent issues plainly understood.”32 He had placed Schlesinger at Defense and Colby at CIA, and Buzhardt would lead the Nixon defense. And Haig steadily closed off access to the president.
“I knew that Haig was running the show,” said Len Garment, Nixon’s former law partner and one of his White House counsels. “Haig trusted Buzhardt and not me. My access was that I basically went in and talked to Haig. I was totally blocked. I mean there were times when I couldn’t get in to see” Nixon. And that, Garment said, undermined Nixon. “Obviously these are people who helped undo the vote of the people and who, in my theory, helped to grease the slippery slope.”33
Nixon and Haig walked in the late afternoon from the Oval Office through the underground passageway to the adjacent Old Executive Office Building, the gray Italianate pile of marble that once housed the War Department. Nixon had an office there that provided the extra privacy he could not get in the West Wing. Nixon immediately ordered a Scotch and soda. Haig continued to praise Buzhardt and take some subtle digs at his rivals. Nixon was receptive, but he also wallowed in self-pity, anxiety, and rage at his circumstances. Nixon knew that John Dean knew too much about the Watergate cover-up to be disregarded.
Dean’s betrayal, Nixon said, “isn’t like a little goddamn yeoman [Charles Radford, the man at the center of the military spy ring Haig enabled] that did that horrible thing to Henry. This son of a bitch was counsel.” Nixon’s voice rose almost to a squeal. “This is like [Kissinger aide Helmut] Sonnenfeldt, right, or you? God almighty,” Nixon continued, “I think that has got to have some effect on the country. I don’t know. Or I guess, is the country all crazy? Is it all crazy?”34
Nixon lamented that he had no surrogates to defend him against Dean and the growing number of critics and negative stories. They needed to show that Dean was behind the cover-up, not the president.
Then Nixon shifted from agitation to a more serious tone and made an admission that would alter his future and that of his presidency. “I’ve got to tell you something you’re probably not aware of. There’s only one other person who’s aware of, and that’s Haldeman,” Nixon said. “[President] Johnson did this, and before him, Kennedy apparently did. Every conversation that’s ever been in this office or the Oval Office or Camp David has been recorded.”
Actually, a few more White House aides knew about the taping system. They included Larry Higby, Haldeman’s assistant, and Alexander Butterfield, another Haldeman aide and a longtime friend of Haig from their time working for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Nevertheless, the circle who knew about the taping system was small and tight-lipped.35
“At some point, you may have to tell Henry. Henry’s been here and in Camp David. Every one of my telephone calls, Al, has been recorded,” Nixon continued. “Every one. Johnson set it up. I didn’t know until Haldeman told me. I said, ‘All right, Bob, fine.’ I don’t want them ever transcribed. I don’t believe in this sort of shit. I have ordered that they never be used, unless somebody lies. I want you to know they’re all there. You just tell Henry when he starts going on.
“Don’t say anything you’re not totally sure of,” Nixon said, warming to the occasion. “It will scare the bejesus out of him, because he said some very stupid things at times.”
“That’s right,” Haig said.
“You know,” Nixon answered.
“I guess we all have,” Haig said.
“So have I,” Nixon responded. “That’s right. So have I. Hell, I have a right to say stupid things. He doesn’t have the right to say stupid things and lie about them. Do you get my point?”
Haig agreed.
“It’s all recorded,” Nixon concluded. “I want you to know.”36
Nixon had grown tired of Kissinger’s whining, because the petulant national security advisor had tried to deny how he first demanded and then tracked the FBI wiretaps. He also denied that his former aide David Young was part of the White House Plumbers.
Nixon also knew the tapes could prove Dean was lying. The president’s memory on the details of his meetings with Dean the previous March, just six weeks earlier, were sketchy and self-serving. He remembered that Dean told him about a “cancer on the presidency,” the phrase from the Newsweek interview that had captured the public’s imagination, but the context of that comment was all wrong. Dean made that remark after a week of conspiring with the president to hone the cover-up and bolster their claims that no one in the White House knew about the Watergate break-in in advance. But Dean had already told Nixon on March 13 that Haldeman assistant Gordon Strachan knew about the break-in before it happened, which caused Nixon to speculate that Haldeman must have known, too.37 By March 21, when Dean told Nixon of the cancer, he meant the growing demands of the Watergate burglars to be paid to stay quiet about what they knew.
Nixon knew the tapes could sort out the truth from the lies; now Haig knew it, too.
Nixon’s admission meant Haig could now determine the truth for himself. Haig would say later that he suspected almost immediately after returning as chief of staff that Nixon was guilty.38 The tapes helped prove it.
Haig would also spend the rest of his life lying about when he knew about the tapes, and those lies masked what Haig did to force Nixon from office.
In his memoirs, Inner Circles, Haig explicitly wrote that he learned about the tapes “on Monday, July 16,” when Butterfield told the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, commonly known as the Watergate committee, about the taping system. “This was the first I had heard of the existence of an eavesdropping system that recorded every word uttered in the presence of Nixon, and it came as a total surprise to me.”39
Haig also wrote that he advised Nixon to destroy the tapes once Haig learned they existed in July. However, the recorded conversations between Haig and Nixon from two months earlier reveal no such warning to the president. Nixon wanted to use the tapes, if necessary, to rebut his accusers. Haig, for reasons that would increasingly become apparent, wanted to keep them for his own purposes.
Nixon only wanted the tapes used to prove that “somebody lies.” Haig is that somebody. From the evening of May 8, 1973, until he died in 2010, Haig lied about when he learned about the tapes to cover how he used that knowledge. Haig must have known that from that point late in the afternoon of May 8 every conversation that he had with Nixon would be recorded. Haig knew he had the power to expose Nixon’s guilt, and he worked surreptitiously to do it. He also knew the tapes contained the facts about any of Nixon’s calls or meetings.
After Nixon’s revelation about the tapes, he and Haig circled back to national security, and again Nixon mentioned the military spy ring and Yeoman Charles Radford. Haig said Radford made him uncomfortable, which was another lie, since Haig had requested that Radford travel with him and then wrote Radford’s commander, Rear Adm. Rembrandt Robinson, a letter on March 27, 1971, that said, “Please extend my personal thanks to Yeoman Radford for a job well done.”40
“He had a style about him,” Haig said. “He was obsequious. He moved around in almost an Oriental way. . . . He was always ready to do something.”
“My God,” Nixon blurted. “What he did was unconscionable. We can’t put that out, though. It would destroy the Chiefs.”
“Well,” Haig answered, “it would destroy the chairman. I’m not sure about the Chiefs.”
Nixon said they could not let a flaw in executive privilege expose such information.
“That’s what they call bureaucratic espionage,” Haig said. “They do it all the time. The army against the navy, the navy against the air force. If you ever put that out in Time magazine—”
“Moorer would have to resign,” Nixon responded.
“He’d have to resign,” Haig said of Adm. Thomas Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “He might even be indicted. There would be people saying, ‘Goddamn it, he was involved.’”
“Let me tell you to stand on executive privilege,” Nixon said. “They can impeach the president. Screw them. I’m just not going to let them get into those documents. Now that’s all there is to it. We can’t do that.”
Nixon closed by telling Haig to bring on Buzhardt. “We’ve got the team,” Nixon said. “Get Buzhardt over here.”41
Buzhardt arrived the next day as Nixon continued to obsess over the spy ring and the threat the revelation posed for Moorer. Haig knew Moorer risked the loss of his job and possible indictment because Haig too shared that risk.
The events of May 9 created a ripple effect that would cascade through the rest of Nixon’s presidency. At the FBI, Acting Director William Ruckelshaus’s investigation into the wiretaps on the seventeen government officials and journalists gained pace. Haig’s associate in the wiretaps, William Sullivan, knew the investigation was headed in his direction and told agents he would only answer questions in writing. Agents told Ruckelshaus that the taps had picked up Daniel Ellsberg talking to former NSC aide Morton Halperin, and Ruckelshaus sent a memo to Judge Matthew Byrne, who seemed on the verge of throwing out the government’s case as the evidence of White House misconduct accumulated. Sullivan also took another step to protect himself by talking to John Crewdson, the FBI beat reporter for the New York Times.42 No one knew as much about the taps as Sullivan. If Sullivan told the truth instead of the false lead he provided to the Post’s Bob Woodward, it would rip down the screen hiding the taps from the public.
In Washington, Schlesinger testified before Senator John McClellan’s appropriations subcommittee investigating intelligence abuses and said the CIA was “insufficiently cautious” when it helped the White House Plumbers with psychological studies and materials that were later used in the break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.43 In closed testimony, Schlesinger said Howard Hunt contacted Cushman, the deputy director, and said John Ehrlichman authorized him to get help from the agency. David Young asked the agency for one of its psychological reviews of Ellsberg. The debacle of the Ellsberg trial was killing anything it touched, and it also raised deeper issues about possible agency misconduct. Schlesinger was outraged, William Colby said, and swore that he would tear apart the agency and “fire everyone if necessary” in order to find out if other similar problems existed in the CIA.44 Schlesinger ordered all CIA employees to report examples of potential misconduct to headquarters so he and his top assistants could determine the extent of the agency’s problems. Eventually, Schlesinger’s order would generate a 693-page document that detailed, among other things, the CIA’s secret experiments with psychotropic drugs on unsuspecting subjects and subversion of foreign governments. Howard Osborn, the agency’s director of security, reported back nine days later with eight separate instances in which the CIA violated its charter, including the hiring of Mafioso Johnny Roselli in a convoluted plot to kill Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.45 Schlesinger’s order had another, more immediate effect: it spurred Cushman’s successor as deputy director, Lt. Gen. Vernon Walters, to remember something that would throw the White House into greater turmoil.
As Schlesinger ordered the collection of what would become known as the “Family Jewels,” Colby received a call in his office from Haig, who told him Schlesinger was moving to the Pentagon, “and the president wants you to take over as director of the CIA, Bill.” Colby blurted out his thanks to Haig, who said Nixon wanted to see Colby the following day at the cabinet meeting, “where he intends to make the announcement of Schlesinger’s and your nominations.”46
Another casualty of the Ellsberg trial was Egil Krogh, the former leader of the Plumbers team. He resigned on May 9 as undersecretary of transportation after he acknowledged he had approved the Ellsberg break-in.
Haig and Nixon spoke often that day as Nixon continued to try to explain himself and wriggle free from his obvious guilt in the cover-up. They ended the day with an almost two-hour meeting in the hideaway office.
Haig brought Buzhardt over for the first time, and from the beginning, Nixon’s new counsel and Haig provided Nixon with bad advice. Nixon worried about his exposure to possible criminal charges or impeachment, and Buzhardt said the chances of that were minimal with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. “Most of the evidence is hearsay, somebody down the line,” Buzhardt said. But Nixon had unwittingly given Haig the means to prove obstruction the previous night when he told Haig about the White House taping system, meaning Haig could determine if Nixon had said anything to Haldeman, Ehrlichman, or anyone else that bordered on obstruction of justice.
Nixon empowered Buzhardt with control over Nixon’s personal fate, asking Buzhardt to “be the personal and confidential role that we have to have . . . ,” Nixon said. “I have a very strong feeling about that, not because I am concerned about—I mean, everybody sees [the entire scandal in which he was ensnared] in its entirety—but the problem is, because if you start wading through the notes that Haldeman made or that even Haig has made, let alone Henry Kissinger when I’ve talked to him, it will be an unbelievable mess. I don’t care how carefully they are gone through.”
The president knew that the Senate’s investigation, as well as those of the grand jury looking into more possible Watergate crimes and the incoming special prosecutor, could venture into his personal files and the notes of his associates. Nixon wanted those notes declared off-limits to investigators. As much as possible, he wanted a blanket executive privilege claim that would narrow the scope of the investigation to the Watergate break-in, about which he knew nothing in advance, while avoiding the myriad problems that would emerge if investigators pulled back the curtain to look at other activities.
“That’s the good thing about having Fred working right here,” Nixon told Buzhardt and Haig. “But what I want to do, Fred, is to have executive privilege. I don’t mind giving up conversations with the president if anything involving illegal activity is involved. Do you know what I mean? You can’t—we’re not going to hide a damn thing. But I don’t want anything too formal.”47
Buzhardt suggested they seek help from a senator outside the Watergate committee: John Stennis of Mississippi, a conservative Democrat and chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Stennis had helped Nixon before, primarily by keeping quiet on the secret bombing campaign of Cambodia, which he knew about years before it went public.48
“I talked to Senator Stennis last Thursday morning for two and a half hours,” Buzhardt said, referring to May 3, the day Haig arrived at the White House as chief of staff. “He wanted to talk to me then—let me be very frank—about whether I would be willing to come help you. You don’t have a more dedicated supporter.”
“There is no more dedicated Stennis man than Nixon,” the president said.
The three debated how Stennis could sway his colleagues.
“Now Senator Stennis’s history has been in the Senate,” Buzhardt said. “It depends on which way you look at it. They call him the conscience of the Senate; others call him the undertaker, depending on which way you look at it. But he has handled almost all of their major problems in the Senate. He’s the one voice for their own protection. They’ve never been in a position to question him when it came to what was the right thing to do for the Senate.”
No one, Buzhardt continued, knew more about executive privilege than Stennis. “If Senator Stennis organizes the people in a positive way, to tell Senator [Sam] Ervin there are some very valid arguments for withholding these hearings, that’s why he would be your best bet to pull it off.”
Nixon told Buzhardt to contact Stennis immediately.49
Stennis, however, remained hospitalized for gunshot wounds he suffered during a January mugging attempt outside his home in Washington. Chairing the committee in his absence was Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, a longtime Nixon antagonist suspicious of Nixon’s chronic secrecy. Stennis kept in contact with his colleagues, but he had limited ability to roam the Senate hallways to seek out fellow senators.
Nixon had a small opening for his argument on the hearings, because tensions had emerged between the committee staff, primarily its chief counsel, Samuel Dash, and federal prosecutors, who feared that any immunity deals from the committee would hurt their cases.50
Buzhardt raised another issue: the concern expressed by Richardson, the designated new attorney general, about Buzhardt leaving the Pentagon. “Mr. President, I think you should know I think Elliot has some problem with my going on this job,” Buzhardt said. Richardson’s main concern was that both he and Buzhardt would be leaving the Pentagon at the same time. “We have been very close,” Buzhardt said of Richardson. “He has some problem with the two of us coming from there.”
“I said we thought it was manageable,” Haig said.
“We have the indispensable man here,” Nixon said, referring to Buzhardt.
Nixon said they would find someone to do the legal work in the Pentagon while Buzhardt worked at the White House. “We’re taking a lot of heat, and we’re going to take more.”
Nixon said Haig had told him earlier that he might be a target for impeachment. “I don’t know for what, trying to obstruct justice, I guess,” he said.
“It’s conceivable,” Buzhardt said. He added that Nixon could win a vote in the House on impeachment, which would be a “vote of confidence” in the president. “It’s a hard way to get a vote of confidence, but that may come sometime.”
“It may,” Nixon responded. “But let me say that that would have, in my opinion, quite a traumatic effect on the country.”51
That evening, Nixon met for more than an hour with Haldeman, his former chief of staff. He took a call from Haig at 11:07 p.m. and told Haig that he had told Haldeman that his main contact at the White House would be Buzhardt.
“That is what we had to do,” Haig said.
“We had to do it,” Nixon said. “We’re going to get [White House counsel and Nixon colleague Leonard] Garment the hell out of this thing now. I mean, you know, leave him in a lot of other—you know what I mean.”
“We’ll just keep him out of it,” Haig said.
“But let me say this on the executive privilege thing, though. I just talked to Bob, and Al, we can’t give an inch on written documents, not an inch. So I don’t want Buzhardt or Garment or anybody else to come in to me and say, look, public opinion will be hurt, think we’re covering up. All right. We’ll cover up until hell freezes over.”
Haig said he and Buzhardt discussed that after their earlier talk with Nixon.
“Did he get the point?” Nixon asked.
Haig said yes, adding that Buzhardt should talk directly with Haldeman before talking to Haldeman’s lawyers.
“Oh, yes,” Nixon said. “He should talk to Bob before he talks to any lawyers. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. This fellow is our friend, and he’s my friend and totally trustworthy,” Nixon told Haig. “And if he turns out to be a John Dean, we’ll fry your ass, too.”52
Nixon felt optimistic that he could reverse the events of the last month that had gutted his staff. He scheduled a cabinet meeting to announce his moves—Schlesinger to Defense from the CIA, William Colby from head of operations at the CIA to director, John Connally dipping in from his private law practice to advise the president, and Buzhardt from the Pentagon to run the White House legal work on Watergate. Colby thought his promotion was handled too casually. During the meeting, he watched Nixon lean over and whisper into Haig’s ear, and then Haig wrote a note and handed it to Colby. “Do you have any connection with Watergate that would raise problems?” it said. Colby looked at Haig and shook his head no. “It seemed to me a poor way of conducting a security check,” Colby wrote later, “and if my answer had been different, poor timing, too.”53
While Nixon hoped his changes would signal an administration moving to right itself in the face of mounting scandal, outsiders raised multiple questions. “No one in Washington, or at least very few people, question the integrity and competence of such men as Mr. Richardson and General Haig,” the New York Times reported. “But many doubt that Mr. Nixon has really cleaned house.” The same article also noted the questions about Haig remaining on active duty in the army and Buzhardt’s conflicts of interest. Could Buzhardt “make dispassionate determinations in the Watergate case, with which the Pentagon Papers case is intertwined?”54
Richardson left the cabinet meeting for another session of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on his appointment as attorney general. Already, Richardson had promised the committee that he would appoint a Watergate special prosecutor. On May 10 he promised committee members that he would pursue any Watergate cases aggressively and that he felt “betrayed by the shoddy standards of morals” inside the Nixon administration. This feeling of betrayal, Richardson said, would “at least compensate or neutralize any feeling I might have arising out of my prior associations” with the administration.55 Nixon, Richardson continued, had assured him he would stay out of the Watergate investigations, particularly once Richardson picked a special prosecutor.
That word had apparently not reached the president. He and Haig spoke at length about how they could influence Richardson’s pick. They discussed two Democratic former governors as possibilities, including Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who defeated Nixon in the 1962 California governor’s race. Haig also raised an idea that Buzhardt had shared with him the previous day: What if Richardson named Senator Sam Ervin, the chairman of the Watergate committee, as the special prosecutor? “He can’t do any more damage there than he can anyplace else, and the son of a bitch would be hard-pressed to turn it down,” Haig said.56
In Los Angeles, the prosecutors in the Ellsberg case continued to self-destruct as they released in Judge Matthew Byrne’s courtroom the details of the wiretaps, which had picked up Ellsberg. They also disclosed how the records of the wiretaps and their summaries disappeared from the FBI between July and October 1971. An outraged Byrne ordered both sides to appear the next day to determine if the case should be dismissed because of the revelation of the wiretaps, which, Byrne said, put “a different posture” on the issues in the case. “It appears that Mr. Ellsberg was surveilled during the most crucial period of the indictment.” The court also received a memorandum from Ruckelshaus in which he revealed that the internal FBI investigation showed that Ellsberg was overheard on a tap on the home telephone of Morton Halperin, then a member of the National Security Council.57
The cabinet meeting and staff changes announced on May 10 provided only a brief respite for Nixon, as the following day brought a new series of crises that threatened to unravel Nixon’s multiple cover-ups: the spy ring, FBI wiretaps, and Nixon and Watergate. In Los Angeles, the wiretaps revelation was destroying the Ellsberg case, while in Washington, Kissinger angered Nixon by trying to distance himself from the wiretaps. Kissinger tested Nixon’s patience with yet another period of feeling unwanted and unloved as he tried to prevent the new Vietnamese peace deal from melting down. The House of Representatives had just voted to cut funding for the continued bombing of Cambodia, the government of which was under siege by communist guerrillas. “It’s a bad move,” Nixon said. “It’s a bad break.” Cambodia, the upcoming summit with the Soviet Union, and the continued challenge of Vietnam all required Kissinger’s attention, Nixon said, adding, “It’s my intention to make Henry secretary of state” once William Rogers stepped down. But Kissinger, Nixon continued, had to stop acting like a diva. “I’m not going to have him come in here and say he’s going to leave,” Nixon said. “I’ll handle this thing.”
“I think he’s all right,” Haig said.
“The hell with him being all right,” Nixon said.
Nixon then reiterated what he had told Haig three days earlier.
“Just between us,” Nixon said. “I have a record of everything he has ever said here, at Camp David, the Lincoln Sitting Room, the EOB [Executive Office Building]. Everything. Everything in the national security area has been recorded. We’re not going to fart around.”
The president then lapsed into the routine anti-Semitism that marked so many of his conversations but from which he normally spared Kissinger. “We’re not going to have that Jewish son of a bitch come in here and complain,” Nixon said. “If he walks in here with that kind of crap today, his ass is out!”
Connally, Nixon said, wanted to be secretary of state, and Nixon was inclined to pick him if Kissinger kept complaining. But, he continued, Kissinger is “so intertwined in this nuclear thing” with the Soviet Union.
“I wouldn’t make that decision now,” Haig said. “I want to see how this thing goes.”
Nixon said he would not tolerate Kissinger’s continued complaints, which he blamed on the national security advisor spending too much time with his elitist friends in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood.
“You can’t do that with anybody,” Haig said.
“Because Connally is not a good option,” Nixon said. “But he’s a hell of a lot better than Henry Kissinger coming in here and bitching and bellyaching and whining. I spent hours with him in this office,” Nixon continued. “That’s what will kill him with these goddamn tapes, if I ever put them out, which I trust to God will never have to see the day of light, light of day. If he ever writes a self-serving thing, they’re going to get out. Understand?”
“It can’t be otherwise,” Haig said. “It would be good for him to know this.”
“Huh?” Nixon said.
“This wouldn’t be a bad thing for him to know, maybe in an indirect way,” Haig said.
“No, I think you should be the one to tell him. Say everything the president has discussed in this office, if the EOB office—and, oh, the cabinet room was also wired.”
Everything, Nixon continued, about national security issues was recorded: “We’ve got it all there.” He had the right, Nixon said, to release the tapes if “anybody tried to distort what he said to the president and so forth. . . . We could kill Henry Kissinger on some of this stuff.” Then Nixon made an even more remarkable admission: “It would kill all of us, if that’s what you want.”
Haig only chuckled.
Nixon said his telephone calls were also recorded.
“They should be,” Haig responded. Then he switched tracks and guided Nixon away from telling Kissinger about the massive secret Nixon had just shared. “Well, I recommend, he’s not going to say anything at all about this subject. I just wanted you to know his state of mind. We’ll work it out.”58
Nixon was particularly concerned about Kissinger’s tendency to weave his own truths because of a New York Times article by John Crewdson that fleshed out the story of the wiretaps. Crewdson’s main source was William Sullivan. Crewdson’s report named three journalists who were wiretapped: Times reporters William Beecher and Hedrick Smith and Henry Brandon of the Times of London. The story also implicated Kissinger and, to a lesser extent, Haig for their part in picking the targets of the wiretaps.59 Unlike Time magazine’s report in February, which first mentioned the wiretaps, and the May 3 story in the Washington Post about a bogus vigilante squad of wiretappers, this story had specifics that put the wiretapping squarely in the White House.
Haig and Nixon believed Sullivan could fix the problems posed by the Times story, not realizing that Sullivan had leaked the story in the first place. “I’m not at all worried,” Haig said, noting that each wiretap had been approved by the attorney general. Sullivan could set things straight, he said. “Oh, I think he’ll say that J. Edgar Hoover, there were leaks—looked like they were coming out of the White House staff or someplace in the government and that J. Edgar Hoover authorized those taps. Uh, that the reports of them as they always have been provided to the White House came over memos from J. Edgar Hoover to the president which were delivered initially to, uh, Kissinger. Well, initially he saw them all.”
“But, hell, he was reading everything,” Nixon said of Kissinger.
After a few months, Haig said, the details of the taps started going to John Ehrlichman. The tapping stopped, Haig said, after the Supreme Court “made tapping a questionable activity.”
Haig, freshly reminded again that Nixon was recording this and all his other conversations, did not mention his own involvement in the wiretapping. Instead, he focused on Kissinger, Ehrlichman, and Hoover, who, one year after his death, was an easy scapegoat. Sullivan, Haig said, could help explain the details, even as Sullivan fought his internal battle in the FBI with Mark Felt, his perceived rival to lead the bureau. Nixon suspected Felt.
“And don’t you believe Felt leaked this to the Times?” the president said.
“That’s the report Elliot [Richardson] had, and Sullivan told me that that’s what’s going on.”
“Well, he used to leak to Time magazine,” Nixon said. “He’s a bad guy, you see.”
“Very bad,” Haig said. “He’s got to go.”
“He’s got to go,” Nixon said.60
After Haig left the office, Nixon met with Kissinger, who again tried to evade responsibility for the wiretaps. Nixon had anticipated this, which was why he told Haig earlier that all of his conversations had been taped. Now Kissinger was playing into his hands. Instead of hammering Kissinger as he threatened to do with Haig, Nixon tried to console his fretful national security advisor, but he would not let Kissinger escape acknowledging responsibility.
Why did they do the wiretaps? Nixon asked Kissinger.
“To prevent leaks,” Kissinger answered.
“Right, and leaks from where?” Nixon asked.
“Well, from here and elsewhere,” Kissinger said.
“That’s the point,” Nixon said, reminding Kissinger that the leaks were in reaction to the work Nixon and Kissinger had done. “We didn’t have Congress with us. We didn’t have the press with us. We didn’t have the bureaucracy with us. We did it alone, Henry.”61
Haig brought Nixon troubling news just four minutes after Kissinger’s departure. In a reaction to Schlesinger’s order for all agency officials to report any potential violations of CIA policy, Deputy Director Vernon Walters brought to the White House copies of eight memoranda of conversations, known in the trade as memcons, highlighting attempts by White House officials to slow down the FBI investigation of the Watergate break-in.
“Walters was called back by Schlesinger from his trip to the Far East about CIA involvement with the White House, primarily through [fired White House counsel John] Dean,” Haig said. “Walters came in to me and gave me eight memcons of the meeting here with Haldeman and Ehrlichman in July of last year and a series of subsequent meetings with [former acting FBI director L. Patrick] Gray and Dean. I, when I read them, I thought they were quite damaging to us. I said, ‘What are you doing with these, and where are they?’ He said that Schlesinger had ordered him to take them over and deliver a copy to me and a copy to the attorney general,” Haig continued. “So I immediately called Buzhardt in, and we both read it. And we said, ‘These papers can’t go anywhere.’ We sent him back to the agency, told him not to take any telephone calls, return here immediately with every copy. And these are vital national security matters and cannot go anywhere.”
“What did these deal with, Al?” Nixon asked.
“They deal with Dean’s efforts to, to get a CIA cover for the Watergate defendants,” Haig said.
Nixon knew there had to be more. “But were Haldeman and Ehrlichman trying to do it, too?” Nixon asked.
“Haldeman and Ehrlichman’s discussion was in the direction of having Walters go directly to the attorney—or to the director of the FBI,” Haig said.62
Indeed, Haldeman and Ehrlichman did talk with Walters and Richard Helms, the CIA director, on June 23, 1972, just six days after the arrest of the Watergate burglars. Nixon ordered that conversation after Haldeman had told him earlier that morning that Dean had recommended using the CIA to block the FBI investigation because of suspicions the break-in was a CIA operation. Nixon agreed with Haldeman’s suggestion and told him to make it happen, a conversation that was recorded.63
Walters, Haig told the president, objected to the plan and said that Dean, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman were trying to drag the president into the cover-up, not realizing that Nixon had already approved it. Dean then contacted Walters on his own as he tried to get the CIA to provide bail and other financial assistance to the burglars. Walters turned him down flat. “This guy [Dean] did some business for himself,” Nixon said to Haig.
Nixon said he remembered talking to Gray on July 6, 1972, when the FBI director told him that members of the White House staff were trying to cover up their ties to the break-in. “And I said, well, Pat, you have got to go out and get the facts,” Nixon said.
Walters is clean, Haig said, but the memcons were damaging to Haldeman and Ehrlichman.
“I mean, do they mention the president?” Nixon asked.
Only in terms of the conversation between Walters and Gray, Haig said, adding that he told Schlesinger that Buzhardt would talk to him about what to do with Walters. After they consulted with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and their lawyers, Haig said, he and Buzhardt told Walters to go to Henry Petersen, the head of the criminal division of the Justice Department, and say, “The agency has been under attack here. I’ve been called back, and I am prepared to testify. . . . Everything he says is going to help you.”
“Huh?” Nixon said in surprise. Having the deputy director of the CIA tell a congressional committee or a grand jury about a cover-up attempt by the White House hardly seemed helpful.
“Everything he says is going to help the president,” Haig said. “That I’m sure.”
Nixon said he was “a babe in the woods” about the Watergate break-in, which he had always assumed was a CIA operation.
Haig then shifted direction to the collapsing Ellsberg trial, saying Byrne would have to declare a mistrial or throw out the charges, and if he did, the White House should refuse to give him any more information about the wiretaps. Haig said he would tell Ruckelshaus to determine a strategy for handling the wiretap information, which was part of an ongoing investigation. Haig planned to talk to FBI agents about the investigation that afternoon. Nixon and Haig incorrectly suspected that an FBI official had leaked the details of the wiretaps to the New York Times.
“His guy, the same fellow I talked about last night, spilling his guts all over the West Coast, the newspapers . . . ,” Haig said.
“Felt,” Nixon responded, mentioning Mark Felt, who was not responsible for the leak to the Times.
“Including the names of the newspaper people, Joseph Kraft and Henry Brandon, and all those people,” Haig said. “And Ruckelshaus feels that we’ve got to make some kind of a statement on this that’s got to be associated with Watergate, and it’s going to be interpreted.”
“Right,” Nixon said. “And what did he say?”
“He would say that, yes, J. Edgar Hoover, the attorney general, the reason for taps, one led to another,” Haig said.
Ruckelshaus was preparing to put out a statement about the wiretaps, Haig told Nixon, but they needed to be careful. “There have been leaks of this information before the investigation was completed, and among those was this man who’s being discharged,” Haig said.
“Felt,” Nixon responded.
“Fire his ass,” Haig said.
“Blame it on Felt,” Nixon said.
Haig said Ruckelshaus had not told him directly that he wanted to fire Felt, but Haig believed he did.
Nixon said he knew nothing about the attempts to use the CIA to block the FBI investigation, which was a blatant lie. Haig responded by telling the president that Walters’s “testimony is going to help. He’s going to say constant pressure from Dean.”
Nixon asked if there was a chance that Walters’s memcons could get out. “He will testify, and what will he say, though, about his memcons?”
“He’s going to say, ‘Oh, yes, I made notes,’ if they ask him,” Haig responded.64
Haig’s recommendation to allow Walters to testify opened the door to a catastrophe for Nixon. Walters had a reputation for having a photographic memory, and he was on the verge of telling a congressional committee that members of the White House staff, whether directed by the president or not, had tried to obstruct justice. Haig also knew, because Nixon had told him on May 8 and earlier on the morning of May 11, that all of the conversations in his offices and his telephone were recorded. If Nixon had told Haldeman or Ehrlichman to approach Walters about having the CIA block the FBI’s Watergate investigation, it would presumably be on tape, which would implicate Nixon directly in an obstruction of justice. If Haig did not realize that immediately, surely the president’s new Watergate counsel, Buzhardt, would.
Haig had recommended that Nixon not speak directly with Haldeman, but Nixon did not listen. Within an hour, Haldeman was in the Oval Office with the president and Haig discussing Walters’s possible testimony and what happened between them on June 23, 1972. In that meeting, Haldeman inadvertently provided Haig with the lead he needed to prove Nixon had obstructed justice that day.
“I don’t care about the Walters stuff with Dean,” Haldeman said. “I don’t know what Dean’s up to. There was concern about the Bay of Pigs coming out—you told us, you know, get in Helms on this promptly because Helms—I think you had some knowledge that I didn’t know about—that Helms was concerned about some Bay of Pigs stuff at that point in time because Helms blocked at that meeting and said, ‘Well OK, I’m not concerned about the Bay of Pigs, because no matter what comes out’ or something. That’s the part I remember clearly, is Bay of Pigs stuff.”
You told us. By linking Nixon to the conversation before Walters and Helms appeared at the White House to talk about Watergate, Haldeman had tipped off to Haig that Nixon knew in advance about the attempt to block the FBI investigation. That meant he had obstructed justice, and now Haig knew about it, too. Nixon had mentioned the connection of some of the Watergate burglars, four of which were Cubans, to the failed 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, which represented one of the CIA’s biggest failures. As a young army lieutenant colonel, Haig had worked to repatriate some of the captured Cuban fighters back to the United States and into the army. Haig knew plenty about the Bay of Pigs.
Nixon should have heeded Haig’s advice about not meeting with Haldeman, because as the meeting continued, the president kept digging a deeper hole for himself.
“I suggested getting in Walters and Helms,” Nixon said. “I don’t know why I suggested it. You think it is the Bay of Pigs?”
Haldeman said he could not think of another reason and that he and Ehrlichman had done everything legitimately. But, he added, “I worry about the implications in each one, ’cause that’s what they like. They don’t pay any attention to those facts, you know. The implication of there even being such a meeting poses the problem, obviously. But it’s perfectly rationalized, what the hell? It looked like—and the FBI—we were told—I was told by Dean, uh, and I think it was in the papers that the FBI was convinced for months that this was a CIA operation.”
Watergate, Haldeman lamented, was a nothing scandal, although it had claimed his job and Ehrlichman’s and had the White House reeling. “It’s broader because it’s unraveling,” he said. “These are unrelated things, really. Like Krogh’s operation [with the Plumbers], they tied that into Watergate. Doesn’t have a fucking thing to do with Watergate.”
Haig sat silently as he listened to the president and his predecessor as chief of staff discuss the meeting that would eventually force Nixon’s resignation. They obsessed over their concerns about the CIA and why they wanted to use the agency to block the FBI investigation. “I told Bob to meet with Helms and Walters to find out” if the CIA was involved, Nixon said. By the way, Nixon asked, “do you think I would call Helms into something that I wanted to screw up?” Nixon’s antipathy toward the former CIA director was legendary. Then Nixon addressed Haig directly. “Al,” Nixon said, “Walters and Helms were called for the purpose of seeing that the investigation, ah, delved into Watergate but did not get into the covert operations of the CIA.”
Nixon asked Haig if any copies of Walters’s memcons were floating around Washington. No, Haig responded, they were Walters’s personal copies, and he had originally intended to give a copy of them to Attorney General Elliot Richardson. “Thank God, he stopped here first,” Haig said, adding that he told Walters not to give them to Richardson because he had not been confirmed as attorney general yet. Richardson cannot see the memcons, Haig said, “because we’ve got them, and they are under executive privilege, and they’ll stay that way. That’s the only thing we can do. . . . It would be damaging now because of the sequence of time. First, you have a big, high-level meeting with Helms and Walters. And then suddenly these contacts start with Dean, who is really a bad guy.”
Haig said he wanted Walters to testify because it would put the onus for the cover-up on Dean. Nixon and Haldeman were not so sure, because they saw plenty of dangerous implications for the president in the memcons and whatever Walters could say under oath.
“I don’t want Buzhardt to have any implications from just reading that goddamn paper that what this is basically a cover-up on the part of—that first paragraph, where it says the president told Haldeman to get the CIA—what did it say to do?” Nixon said.
Nixon saw the Watergate burglary investigation as an entity of its own and not connected to the multiple other cover-ups he had going at the time of the failed break-in, including the FBI wiretaps, the Pentagon spy ring at the White House, and the secret bombing of Cambodia, to name just three. All involved national security; all involved some degree of secrecy and cover-ups.
“But Buzhardt understands that the purpose of that talk had nothing to do with not pursuing the Watergate burglary,” Nixon said. “It had to do with not getting into the national security aspects.”
Either way, Nixon’s order that Haldeman and Ehrlichman talk with the two CIA officials was tantamount to obstruction of justice, because FBI agents looking into the Watergate burglary would have found evidence of other crimes simply by investigating the burglars and their activities, such as the break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.
Haig said Walters would be a great witness, and so would the former acting FBI director, Patrick Gray. Gray and Walters shared the same views about the impropriety of a cover-up, and Gray told Nixon, who responded that Gray should push forward with the investigation.
“He’s so bright,” Haig said of Walters.
“Well, now, doesn’t that hearten you a little about my role, Al?” Nixon asked. “Would you please mark that for Buzhardt so that he sees that part that I told Gray? Or has he seen it? Or do you think Buzhardt needs to see such things?”
“I am not worried about Buzhardt,” Haig said.
“Well, I don’t care if you’re worried,” Nixon replied. “I want you to believe.”
Haig claimed that he and Buzhardt did believe Nixon’s story, although Nixon appeared skeptical. He and Haldeman seemed both mystified and dispirited by the roiling tsunami of problems from the first term that threatened to wash away the administration. “We didn’t order a cover-up by the CIA, and you know that,” Nixon said to Haldeman after Haig left the room. While Haig provided Nixon with some solace as a sounding board, he could not replace Haldeman, on whom Nixon leaned heavily during this meeting. “They’re trying to get at us with thieves,” Nixon lamented. “What in the name of God have we come to?”65
Nixon needed Walters to know he was not trying to cover up anything. Haig told him the situation “is very damaging to Bob [Haldeman] and John [Ehrlichman]” and that Buzhardt believed the memcons made it appear that Haldeman and Ehrlichman wanted to start a cover-up, most likely with Nixon’s approval.
“Buzhardt must not feel that,” Nixon said. “By golly, it’s not damaging to the president that Bob and John as my agents did something I wanted them to do.”
Nixon wanted Walters to generate “sanitized” versions of his memos that would remove mentions of national security issues, but Haig counseled against that. Nixon almost pleaded with Haig, asking him to believe that Nixon did not want his staff to think he had sought a cover-up, even if he had. “I’m not in this goddamn thing,” he said. “That’s what burns me up.”
Nixon’s new lawyer, Buzhardt, might not understand why Nixon wanted to contain the FBI investigation, Nixon worried. He moaned that he could have “sunk” Kissinger for what he had said or “screwed” Adm. Thomas Moorer for the military spy ring.
“I could have screwed the whole Pentagon about that damn thing, and you know it,” Nixon said. “Why didn’t I do it? Because I thought more of the services. You know that. By golly, that’s the way I deal. I want you to know that. There ain’t going to be any of that. But Buzhardt is not thinking in those terms.”66
While the president and Haig spent most of the day worrying about the ramifications of Walters’s memos, Cushman testified before three congressional committees about how the agency helped the Plumbers.67 He backed up his testimony with affidavits attesting to what the agency had done. That created a precedent that prevented the White House from stopping the release of other documents, such as the Walters memos. Cushman told each committee that Ehrlichman and Hunt both called him to get the CIA’s help. Cushman said the requests did not strike him as particularly strange, that he agreed to help, that he told Helms about the requests he granted after they happened, and that Helms had “assented.” Cushman’s testimony and documents had nothing to do with the Watergate break-in, but they went to the core of Nixon’s ultimate problem: Watergate was just the umbrella term that referred to the myriad other activities Nixon wanted to hide. Any investigator who pulled on the thread that tied together the men involved in the Watergate break-in would unravel the Plumbers and everything they touched, including the Pentagon Papers and the military spy ring.
In Los Angeles, Judge Byrne did what Nixon and Haig had expected and ended the case against Ellsberg and Anthony Russo. But Byrne went beyond declaring a mistrial; he threw out the entire government case and released a written ruling against acts committed in Nixon’s name. “The disclosures made by the government,” Byrne wrote, “demonstrate that governmental agencies have taken an unprecedented series of actions with respect to these defendants.” The White House created a special investigations team, the Plumbers, and “what we know is more than disquieting,” Byrne wrote. The CIA violated its charter by helping the Plumbers, while the administration allowed the FBI to tap the telephones of innocent Americans. “Of greatest significance is the fact that the Government does not know what has happened to the authorizations for the surveillance, nor what has happened to the tapes nor to the logs nor any other records pertaining to the overheard conversations,” Byrne wrote. “I am of the opinion, in the present status of the case, that the only remedy available that would assure due process and a fair administration of justice is that this trial be terminated and the defendants’ motion for dismissal be granted and the jury discharged.” With that, Ellsberg and Russo were free.68
Byrne’s ruling angered Nixon, but at least the end of the prosecution meant that one spigot of bad news for the administration had been turned off. The second Ellsberg trial exposed the Plumbers and cracked the door open to the FBI wiretaps. The case also exposed the lengths to which the president would go to skew justice, particularly Nixon’s attempt to sway Byrne by offering him the job as FBI director. The timing of that revelation coincided with Sullivan’s decision to leak details of the wiretaps to the New York Times.
By the time Byrne threw out the Pentagon Papers case, the internal FBI investigation into the wiretaps was nearing an end. Former attorney general John Mitchell told investigators he had discussed “these wiretaps with either Colonel Haig or Dr. Kissinger at the White House and they (Mitchell, Haig and/or Kissinger) agreed that these wiretaps could become ‘explosive’ and that this whole operation was a ‘dangerous game we were playing.’” Mitchell said Felt leaked the information about the taps in February to Time magazine and that he believed Sullivan was leaking, too.69 Robert Mardian, the former assistant attorney general and a Sullivan ally, told investigators that Sullivan told him in July 1971 that he feared J. Edgar Hoover would use the wiretaps to blackmail Nixon to not fire him. Mardian then went to Mitchell, who told Nixon, who summoned Mardian to California and ordered him to get the wiretap records. Mardian complied, and he told agents that the wiretap logs were delivered to him. Then, Mardian said, he took the materials to the White House and delivered them in person to Kissinger and Haig. “In Kissinger and Haig’s presence,” the FBI report of Mardian’s interview said, “White House correspondence [was] checked against chronological check list which listed all material sent to the White House by date.”70 Sullivan agreed only to give written answers to twenty-five questions from the investigators. He provided a series of minimalist answers in a memorandum directed to Ruckelshaus that never mentioned Haig at all.71 Finally, as the growing crisis over Walters’s memos swirled around him and Nixon, Haig talked to investigators on the night of May 11. He, too, lied. “General Haig said it was absolutely untrue that logs and other FBI records regarding the wiretaps were ever turned over to Kissinger or himself,” the FBI report of his interview said. He minimized his involvement in the taps, saying mainly that they had been valuable in tracking leakers and had led to the departures of two NSC officials, Daniel Davidson and Morton Halperin. Haig said he was merely Kissinger’s messenger, and, like Sullivan, he blamed the taps on Hoover. While Hoover had suspected some of the targets as serial leakers, primarily Halperin, he had also resisted putting on the taps unless Mitchell approved them in writing. The true impetus for the spying on members of his own staff and the reporters to whom they allegedly told secrets came from Kissinger, with Haig’s considerable assistance.72
Haig spoke to Sullivan constantly during the course of the FBI investigation. Nixon wanted Sullivan to minimize the seriousness of the wiretaps and to claim that previous administrations, primarily those of Democrats John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, tapped people, too. Haig and Sullivan had a shared interest in keeping their part in the taps secret and also distrusted Felt, whom Sullivan gladly blamed for leaking information to the New York Times.
Nixon escaped the White House on the afternoon of May 11, driving to the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland, with his good friend Cuban-born millionaire Charles “Bebe” Rebozo. His visits to Nixon often included swimming, drinking, and watching movies in the Camp David theater. But Nixon stayed in contact with Haig throughout the afternoon and into the early evening. Haig called at 6:35 p.m. to tell Nixon what he had learned from Ruckelshaus. The good news, Haig said, was that the newsmen bugged by the FBI were bugged not because they were journalists but because they had received leaked information from someone inside the government. Kissinger should take the heat for the wiretaps, since he wanted them so badly, Nixon said.
That’s not what Kissinger says, Haig told the president.
“Bullshit,” Nixon responded. “He knew all about it. For Chrissakes, he’s who was in my office pounding on the desk.”
Haig told Nixon that Mitchell had tried to evade his role in the wiretaps. Mitchell told the FBI that he did not know who approved the taps, although Mitchell had signed the request for each one.
“Bullshit,” Nixon said again.
Sullivan, Haig said, had insisted to FBI investigators that Mitchell had signed all of the requests to the FBI.
“It’s another nail in John Mitchell’s coffin,” Nixon said.73
They talked for the last time that day shortly after 7:00 p.m., when Haig said he had learned what really happened with the tap logs. Sullivan had believed that Hoover would try to blackmail the president with the details of the taps. “There’s an awful lot of juicy stuff in here,” Haig said. “It’s all wrapped up in this terrible gut fight to run the FBI.” Felt, Haig said, “will be a victim in this thing.”
Nixon agreed but said firing Felt alone would enable Felt to “go out and babble” about what he knew about the wiretaps. “Sullivan is against Felt, you know,” Nixon said.
“Very much,” Haig answered.
“Sullivan’s our man,” Nixon said.74
By the end of May 11, the embattled president had reinforced Haig’s knowledge of the secret White House tapes, revealed the meeting in which he told Haldeman to use the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation, and pleaded with Haig to believe him that he had not obstructed justice. For the chief of staff who already believed the president was guilty of crimes that would prematurely end his presidency, it was an arrow pointing to where Haig could find the evidence to prove Nixon’s guilt. Haig’s challenge was to expose that guilt without exposing his own culpability.
Haig spent Saturday, May 12, trying to learn the final details of Ruckelshaus’s report on the FBI wiretaps and coordinate his story with Sullivan, so they would not also be targeted. Sullivan could hide behind Hoover, while Haig could use Kissinger as a foil.
Haig’s talks with Nixon this weekend had the dual purpose of persuading the president that Vernon Walters should testify about what he was told at the White House the previous June and turning Nixon against Kissinger on the wiretaps. Haig and Buzhardt had already concluded that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were guilty of obstructing justice by meeting with Walters and Helms.
Cushman’s testimony hurt the White House’s ability to limit the disclosure of Walters’s memos, because Cushman had also given the committees his own memos. Since Haig and Buzhardt had not stopped Cushman they could not stop the committees from getting Walters’s documents, too. “So we’re just going to have to take the heat, Mr. President,” Haig said.
It was going to get hot, Nixon said, and what Haig told him next reinforced that impression. Haldeman, Haig quoted from one of Walters’s memos, “said that the whole affair was getting embarrassing and that the president wished—it was the president’s wish that Walters call on Acting FBI Director Gray and suggest to him that since the five suspects had been arrested, that this should be sufficient, that it was not advantageous to have the inquiry pushed, especially in Mexico.” Early reports in the Watergate investigation had traced money that went to the Watergate burglars to a Mexican bank account, which sparked speculation that CIA operations there may have been exposed.
“Yeah, that’s bad,” Nixon said.
For some reason, Haig thought the details of the Walters memos would not become public. Instead, he said they could limit Walters’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee by having Walters build a wall around Haldeman and Ehrlichman. They also needed to contact Helms, now the U.S. ambassador to Iran, and get him to echo what they expected Walters to say.
The memo, Haig said, looks bad for everyone, but “we can survive it in very good shape.”
“We can survive,” Nixon repeated. “It will be very embarrassing, because it’ll indicate that we tried to cover up with the CIA.”
“That’s all right,” Haig answered.75
It was most definitely not all right but obstruction of justice, and Haig knew there were tapes that would prove it.
Back in Washington, Ruckelshaus’s report occupied most of Haig’s time. Ruckelshaus and an FBI agent came to get the tap logs from a safe in Ehrlichman’s White House office, and Ruckelshaus and Haig discussed the report. Buzhardt also helped Ruckelshaus write the statement. Haig also dealt with a growing number of questions from New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh, whom Sullivan had given information that implicated Nixon directly in authorizing the taps and indicated that Kissinger had helped him. “Sullivan made available to me copies of the White House wiretap authorizations, which directly linked Kissinger to the requests for wiretaps on his own staff aides,” Hersh wrote in his 1983 book, The Price of Power.76 Hersh would not back off his story, but Haig tried hard to make Hersh do so. Hersh did not realize, however, that Haig and Sullivan were talking multiple times a day about the wiretaps, the investigation into them, and how to avoid the focus falling on them.
In California the Los Angeles Times broke a story that Sunday that would set up drama for the first hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee, which would start on May 17. James McCord, one of the Watergate burglars, said that John Caulfield, a former New York City police detective who went to work for the White House, had told him that Nixon would give him clemency if McCord remained silent. This offer was allegedly passed to Caulfield through John Dean. The Los Angeles Times’ scoop was picked up by papers around the country and provided another piece in the portrait of a Nixon White House actively trying to cover its tracks in Watergate.77
For someone who needed to relax at Camp David, Nixon spent much of his time over the weekend on the telephone with Haig, Ziegler, or Kissinger. On that Sunday morning, Nixon sought more reassurance from Haig about their plans for Walters’s impending testimony, and Haig revealed they might fail in their attempts to keep Walters’s written memos private because they had already allowed Cushman’s memos about the agency’s help for the Plumbers to be turned over to Congress.
“Why did he [Cushman] do that?” Nixon asked Haig.
“Well, I don’t know,” Haig said. “Now he’s on notice now, and he’s not going to do pull anything like that again.”
“How can you justify giving them Cushman’s and not giving them Walters’s?” he asked Haig. “How do you do that, Al? What’s Buzhardt say?”
“Because what Walters discussed was not just a little bit of equipment for somebody but national security matters,” Haig responded.78
Such a tissue-thin response would not stop a Senate committee determined to get Walters’s memos. Walters’s testimony, which Haig repeatedly assured Nixon would help him, loomed as a disaster for the president.
Haig talked with Nixon one final time that night between 10:00 and 10:30 and inconceivably told Nixon that “I think there’s a good chance [Walters’s memcons] will never come up. I don’t think the question will ever come up.”
Haig also vouched again for Sullivan, who had denied to the FBI that he had taken the wiretap logs to stop Hoover’s blackmail of Nixon. “The guy who has proved to be the true, accurate voice in this thing is Sullivan,” he said. “He’s just one good solid loyal American who has good law enforcement credentials.”79
On the night of May 13, the day before he was scheduled to release his report on the FBI wiretaps, Ruckelshaus received a bizarre call from a man who identified himself as John Crewdson, the New York Times reporter who had broken the detailed story on the wiretaps on May 11. His main source for that story was Sullivan. The caller who claimed to be Crewdson did something that Crewdson or any serious reporter would never do: provide the identity of a confidential source. That source, “Crewdson” said, was Felt. At the end of every phone call, “Crewdson” told Ruckelshaus, Felt would tell him, “‘Remember, I’m a candidate for FBI director.’”
“Why tell me this?” Ruckelshaus asked the caller.
“There’s something wrong with the country right now,” the caller said. “I don’t know what it is, but I thought you should know what Mark Felt is doing.”80
Ruckelshaus hung up, called FBI official Bucky Walters, and told him what had just happened.
“Cut his nuts off,” Walters told Ruckelshaus about Felt.81
The caller could only have been Sullivan, who, as leader of the FBI’s secretive Counterintelligence Program, specialized in destabilizing rivals and unsuspecting victims with false leaks and threatening calls and letters. Haig told Sullivan that both he and Nixon knew Felt was leaking to Time magazine. Sullivan also knew the pair also believed Felt had tipped off Crewdson, and he knew that Ruckelshaus also suspected Felt and wanted a reason to fire him.
Nixon returned to the White House in the morning of May 14, a day that would turn into one of the busiest and most eventful of his presidency. By day’s end, Nixon had given Haig more authority, while the chief of staff learned about a threat to the cover-up of the military spy ring, the details of Ruckelshaus’s FBI investigation, the documents Dean had stolen from the White House, and the extent to which Walters endangered Nixon with his revelations about the attempted Watergate cover-up with the CIA.
The day started with an article in the Washington Post by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that claimed that Gray had known of allegations of interference in the Watergate investigation but did nothing because he did not want to be seen as looking for Nixon’s advice. “Top FBI officials warned former acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray III several weeks after the Watergate break-in that there appeared to be a cover-up going on and urged him to immediately alert President Nixon, according to two reliable sources,” the story began. “But Gray declined to go to the President, he told the officials, because he felt it would appear as if he were seeking guidance from Mr. Nixon, the sources said. Gray’s exact reasons are unclear. He could not be reached for comment yesterday.” Like their May 3 story, which started the internal FBI investigation into the wiretaps, this one was mostly incorrect and seemed aimed at discrediting Gray, who had told Nixon on July 6, 1972, that some of his staff were interfering in the Watergate investigation. That was slightly more than two weeks after the June 17 break-in, not the “several weeks” cited by Woodward and Bernstein. They also had details of Ruckelshaus’s investigation, which was scheduled to be announced that day. The story said that seventeen government officials and journalists had been tapped and that the wiretap files had been given to Mardian at Justice by Sullivan before Hoover fired him. The story did not mention Haig or Kissinger. It cited anonymous sources, including one from the Justice Department, possibly Sullivan, and another anonymous source. If one was Felt, whom Woodward claimed to be his secret source known as Deep Throat, there are no notes of that fact kept with the rest of Woodward’s Deep Throat notes at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The section about the wiretaps, which contained advance details of the Ruckelshaus report, was tacked on at the end of the story almost as an afterthought. Unlike the section about Gray, it was accurate and indicated that someone with knowledge of the report, most likely Haig, had told the reporters.82
That morning, almost as an aside, Nixon gave Haig more power, anointing him with the ability to assume many of the president’s responsibilities, including attending many of the meetings usually reserved for the president.
“There are many things you do better than I do or just as well,” Nixon said in another sign of Nixon detaching himself from the daily tasks of the presidency and putting Haig in Nixon’s place.
Then Haig transitioned the conversation to another White House aide who was in the Senate committee’s crosshairs: Alexander Butterfield, Haig’s old colleague from the Pentagon.
“I got a report from the Hill that they’re going to have Butterfield into this thing,” Haig said. “I don’t know what. It had something to do with campaign funding.”
“Butterfield?” Nixon said.
“Yes,” Haig continued. “He had funds for campaign polling. As best as I can tell, he used [the money] only once. He had nothing to do with campaign funding. So I think he’s clean as a whistle, but they think they have something on the committee on this.”
“Good God, that sort of thing right now shouldn’t concern us a bit,” Nixon said. “What the hell, you can’t find everyone who had something to do with the campaign. Can you?”
“No, sir, you can’t,” Haig said.
“Well, we went as far as we’re going to go with [former aide Egil] Krogh,” Nixon said. Krogh had to leave the Transportation Department after he was revealed as a member of the White House Plumbers. “Now with Butterfield, if he did something that was illegitimate. Yes, he had some funding. If it had to be reported and it was some kind of technical violation, then that was that. He’s not going to be fired for that now.”83
Unlike Walters, whom Nixon knew had damaging information about an alleged cover-up, Butterfield raised no alarms. Haig’s mention of the committee’s interest in Butterfield served to get Nixon to allow Butterfield to testify, which would turn out to be a fatal error, because Butterfield had helped install the secret White House taping system. Butterfield, Haig, and Bob Woodward have acknowledged that it was Woodward who recommended that the Senate committee interview Butterfield. Haig’s comments to Nixon about Butterfield show that Haig knew about Butterfield’s knowledge of the White House tapes, which he passed on to Woodward, who then told the Senate committee to interview Butterfield.
After receiving the call from Sullivan masquerading as John Crewdson, Ruckelshaus confronted Felt on Monday morning, just hours before he was to release the wiretapping report.
Felt denied he was leaking.
“You can’t deny it,” Ruckelshaus said. “I just heard it from the guy you talked to.”
Felt said nothing.
“I’m so mad at you I don’t know what to do,” Ruckelshaus told Felt. “I’m going to sleep on it and decide in the morning.”84
Felt returned the next day and gave his resignation to Ruckelshaus, who would have fired Felt if he had not resigned.
In an early afternoon news conference, Ruckelshaus said the FBI had wiretapped thirteen government officials and four journalists between May 1969 and February 1971, and the taps were ordered “in an effort to pinpoint responsibility for leaks of highly sensitive and classified information, which, in the opinion of those charged with conducting our foreign policy, were compromising the nation’s effectiveness in negotiations and other dealings with foreign powers.” That was the closest the report came to mentioning Nixon, Kissinger, or Haig by name. Also left unsaid was who had ordered the reports or who picked the targets. When Kissinger was asked for comment after the Ruckelshaus news conference, he again lied, saying that his talks with Hoover “concerned the safeguarding of classified information and not the initiation of any particular form of investigation.” Kissinger lied another time when he said he knew nothing about the Plumbers, although his former aide David Young was a Plumber who had investigated the military spy ring. Ruckelshaus said Sullivan had kept the tap logs at the FBI but gave them to Mardian in July 1971 because he believed Hoover would use them to blackmail Nixon. “Mr. Sullivan does not affirm Mr. Mardian’s claim,” Ruckelshaus said, although Sullivan had told Haig repeatedly that was why he took the logs from the FBI. “That would account to some extent as to why these files were moved to the White House,” Ruckelshaus said about Hoover’s rumored blackmail. “It certainly is a logical reason.”85
As Haig tried to manage the Ruckelshaus report and the impending Walters testimony, he and Buzhardt faced a threat that appeared from seemingly nowhere. Donald Stewart, the former FBI agent who was now the Pentagon’s chief investigator, called the White House looking for Young, his former associate from the investigation into the leaks about Nixon’s behind-the-scenes actions to tilt U.S. policy in favor of Pakistan in the war between India and Pakistan, an investigation that revealed the military spy ring (see chapter 1). Young had left the White House amid the fallout from the discovery of the Plumbers, so Stewart was directed to lawyer Richard Tufaro, a young member of White House counsel Len Garment’s staff. Stewart vented his numerous frustrations, primarily that he was unhappy at the Pentagon. He correctly believed Buzhardt had sabotaged his investigation of the spy ring, and he wanted a more challenging job. Tufaro, who knew nothing about Stewart or the spy ring, was alarmed, particularly after Stewart hinted that his secret work could become public. Stewart’s complaints about Buzhardt also struck a chord with Tufaro, who distrusted Buzhardt, as did Garment. Tufaro had warned Garment about Buzhardt handling the Watergate defense because he remained the Pentagon’s general counsel and had numerous conflicts of interest. Shortly after he spoke to Stewart, Tufaro sent Garment a memo that said, “Stewart clearly is in a position to damage the Administration because of his direct involvement in White House investigations of national security leaks.” Garment told Buzhardt about the call, and Buzhardt responded by reassigning Stewart to desk duty and seizing his files at the Pentagon.86 Stewart’s call let Haig and Buzhardt know that the spy ring, the subject of numerous diatribes by Nixon over the last two and a half years, had not gone away and remained a threat.
Nixon faced another threat, this time from Dean, who had appeared in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge John J. Sirica, who oversaw the Watergate criminal cases. When Nixon fired Dean on April 30, Dean took several secret documents, which he placed in a safe deposit box in a northern Virginia bank. Nixon wanted the documents back because he was worried about the embarrassing secrets they contained. Sirica, however, ruled that the documents be copied and given to the Senate committees investigating Watergate-related activities and to the Justice Department. If Nixon wanted to see what Dean had taken, he could get them from Justice.87
Walters’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee closed out the day. Contrary to Haig’s assurances to Nixon, Walters was a disaster for the White House. Although Walters had testified in a closed hearing, the committee’s acting chairman, Stuart Symington, told reporters afterward that Walters said Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean had tried to involve the CIA in the Watergate case. The CIA, Symington said, had no connection to the Watergate break-in. “Ehrlichman and Haldeman—particularly Haldeman—were up to their ears in this, along with Dean, in trying to involve the CIA in this whole Watergate mess,” Symington said.88
The news set off sirens at the White House.
“We got a problem with the testimony that Walters gave,” Haig told the president late that evening during a meeting with press secretary Ron Ziegler and Larry Higby, Haldeman’s former deputy, in the Oval Office.
“How come?” Nixon asked.
Walters, Haig said, “twisted it in a way that was bad for Bob and John.”
Nixon was crestfallen. He had counted on Walters, who had served Nixon when he was vice president and had carried out secret missions with China and North Vietnam, to protect him before the Senate. “So, what do you think that Walters did?” he asked Haig. “Walters deliberately put Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s tit in the wringer on this. That makes me sick.”
Nixon worked late into the night with Haig, Ziegler, and Higby, trying to come up with a plan on how to survive the Walters revelations. “This is difficult shit,” Nixon said.
Haig urged Nixon to rely more on Buzhardt, although his poor advice had already led to Cushman turning over his documents to the Senate, thereby creating a dangerous precedent, and to Walters’s disastrous testimony, which would only turn out to be more damaging.
“Buzhardt’s in charge,” Nixon said, “and at the end of the day he can tell you, well, we had this and this pack of shit today and this pack of shit tomorrow.”
“That’s the best way,” Haig said.89
Haig’s and Buzhardt’s insistence that Walters testify about his White House meetings in the days following the Watergate break-in had turned out exactly as Nixon had feared. While Dean was exposed as a prime character in the attempted cover-up of the White House’s connections to the Watergate break-in, so were Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Nixon’s closest aides. And if Haldeman and Ehrlichman had tried to cover up, what did Nixon know about the break-in? The two could not have acted alone, and if they had acted on Nixon’s instructions, it meant the president had obstructed justice, an impeachable offense.
Symington, who was not content with the comments he made after Walters’s testimony, released more details in a news conference on May 15. Accompanying him was his Republican colleague from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, a hard-core Nixon loyalist and ardent conservative. Yet the two men found common cause on the implications of what Walters told the committee. “It is very clear to me that there was an attempt to unload major responsibility for the Watergate bugging and cover-up on CIA,” Symington said. Dean, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman, he added, “were doing everything in the world to obstruct justice.”90 Symington, who had previously irritated Nixon by criticizing Kissinger’s growing secret powers as national security advisor, again had proved to be one of Nixon’s most effective interlocutors. Now he, as much as the leadership of the new Watergate committee, was exposing more of the White House’s dirty laundry as the public began to turn away from the president.
Symington used his influence again after the news conference by sending his top staff, along with Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, to meet with Pentagon and intelligence community officials to discuss the documents that Sirica had taken from Dean. They focused on an internal security plan known by the name of its author, Tom Charles Huston. A passionate conservative, Huston was twenty-nine years old in 1970 when Nixon entrusted him with creating a plan to fight against student protesters and other suspected security threats. His main ally was Sullivan, whom Hoover delegated to handle the details. Restrictions that Hoover placed on illegal break-ins by FBI agents, the so-called black-bag jobs, would have been lifted by the new plan, as would some of the limits on electronic eavesdropping. The plan never went into effect, because Hoover persuaded Attorney General John Mitchell, whom Nixon had excluded from the planning, to get Nixon to kill it. The plan’s existence had grave implications for Nixon. Not only had the president condoned the creation of a special investigations team, the Plumbers, that burglarized the offices of its targets, but Nixon had also approved spying on members of his own administration and journalists. The Huston Plan was one more indication that Nixon would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.
Symington did not believe claims that exposing the Huston Plan would hurt national security. Nixon had played the national security card too often, he said, and since the plan never took effect, he risked little by exposing it. Symington asked the FBI officials to “be prepared to justify in a paragraph-by-paragraph basis just what must be protected in the national interest.” Despite this threat to the president, Buzhardt and Haig did not tell him about it until a day later.91
With the day’s mail, Haig received a mysterious letter from a doctor in Philadelphia who claimed that his office had been burglarized the previous year and that files on his patient, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, were taken. Eagleton had been the vice presidential nominee for the Democrats briefly in 1972 before he had to leave the ticket because of reports that he had undergone electroshock treatments years earlier. The Eagleton affair damaged whatever chance the campaign of Democratic nominee George McGovern had of beating Nixon. This letter was a secret to Haig and Buzhardt, but it would not remain one much longer.92
Haig also fought a losing battle with Seymour Hersh, who was finishing a story that would place Nixon at the center of the FBI’s wiretaps. Hersh, as he would write ten years later, had received copies of the letters approving the wiretaps from Sullivan. Those letters implicated Nixon. Haig, who was trying to limit his exposure as well as Kissinger’s, told Hersh, “Do you believe Kissinger, whose family members died in the Holocaust, would have approved such Nazi tactics?”93 Hersh was not deterred.
Sullivan remained Nixon’s hope to shift attention from his administration’s wiretaps to those of his two predecessors, Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy. Haig, who talked to Sullivan several times a day, told Nixon that Sullivan would defend Nixon publicly, which never happened. Instead, the May 16 New York Times featured Hersh’s story, which said that Nixon “personally authorized” the wiretaps on journalists and government officials. For all of Haig’s protestations with Hersh, the article did not expose him or Kissinger as much as it could have. Perhaps Sullivan, Hersh’s source, steered Hersh away from Haig, although Haig’s involvement was evident. Some of the quotes from Hersh’s anonymous sources read much like Haig’s comments to Nixon as they worked to minimize the damage from the wiretap revelations. “Hell, yes, I was aware that it was going on,” one source, most likely Haig, told Hersh. “To have done less would have been the highest order of irresponsibility.”94
The news from Symington’s press conference the previous day was bannered across the front page of the morning’s Washington Post: “CIA Resisted Lengthy Cover-Up Attempt by White House, Hill Account Reveals.” Only someone totally ignorant of the growing Watergate controversy could have missed the story and its implications. “The Central Intelligence Agency resisted an extraordinary series of pressures by top White House aides to assist in a cover-up of the Watergate scandal over an eight-month period beginning in June 1972, Sen. Stuart Symington (D-Mo.) revealed yesterday,” the story said. Nixon’s closest aides tried to enlist the CIA to help them stop an FBI investigation into the Watergate break-in. Most people thought it unlikely that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean acted on their own initiative. If they had acted at the president’s request, which is what Walters said he believed, then Nixon had obstructed justice.95 That could eventually mean impeachment or possible criminal charges from the special prosecutor whom Attorney General Elliot Richardson was expected to appoint at any time.
Symington and the Senate Armed Services Committee met again with defense and intelligence officials about the Dean documents. The most sensitive was a forty-three-page “special report” that detailed the Huston Plan.96 After Nixon rescinded his approval of the plan, a demoralized Huston lashed out, asking Haldeman who was in charge—Nixon or Hoover? Sullivan then asked each agency—the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency—to return the copies of the plan it possessed. Still, some elements of the plan were implemented, including the formation of the Intelligence Evaluation Committee, led by Dean, which was intended to coordinate all intelligence issues within the White House. Thus Dean had access to the Huston Plan, whether it formally went into effect or not, and this plan was now in the hands of the president’s enemies.
Buzhardt had learned of these developments from his associates at the Pentagon and told Nixon on the afternoon of May 16.
“Don’t it seem like we always have problems?” Nixon asked Buzhardt in the Oval Office.
“It has nothing to do with Watergate,” Buzhardt said. “Let’s start with that. Nothing to do with Watergate unless somebody draws an inference of connection. What it is basically, Mr. President, is your interagency intelligence group plan.”
Some of the language in the copy of the Huston Plan kept by Dean was “quite inflammatory,” Buzhardt said.
“Everything he [Huston] wrote was inflammatory,” Nixon said.
“So, it’s very unfortunate,” Buzhardt said. “I think it presents a serious problem.”97
As they had just days earlier with the FBI wiretaps, Haig and Nixon turned again to Sullivan, this time to confirm that the Huston Plan never took effect. Nixon hoped to mitigate the damage caused by the plan’s exposure by proving it never went past the planning stages.
Buzhardt proposed an idea, which Haig quickly adopted, that Nixon confront the issue head-on. Over the next six days, this idea would grow and again put Nixon in the position of trying to explain himself to an increasingly skeptical public.
“I think, frankly, that this will be used by the [Senate Watergate] committee really to supersede the whole Watergate thing,” Buzhardt said.
“Yeah,” Nixon responded.
“It puts a new light on the fight,” Buzhardt said.
“Yeah,” Nixon said again.
“I would suggest it be handled in a much different fashion,” Buzhardt said. “I think you can’t let this dribble out.”
Nixon agreed, and Buzhardt continued. “It’s my own belief that you have to make your case for doing it. Think of the environment that it was done in. You have to lay it on the record, and there are a number of ways you could do it with something approaching a state paper, perhaps with a summary by you, say that with the leadership or otherwise. I think you should be accompanied at this point by a relaxation to the maximum extent of executive privilege, because you can’t have the plan and then have anything that appears to cover up. I think we should work up into the maximum extent possible, the best darn approach.”
“Yes, sir,” Nixon said. “I hear you.”
Buzhardt presented Nixon with a very stark view of the future. The president had little chance of preventing Walters’s memoranda from becoming public. Nixon could not stop a court order. He had to strike back while making his best case, regardless of the potential dangers, which included impeachment.
Confronting the issue directly, Buzhardt said, could “precipitate action by the House [meaning impeachment]. If so, you should make your case in the strongest possible terms. Give everybody the ammunition you can to help you, and then let’s go fight it. Just take them on and fight this thing head-on. Actually, it gives us a better case, because the issue can now turn on the threat to national security during this period. The document is a good one. It lays out the threat very well.”98
Buzhardt was making a remarkable request of Nixon, whose entire administration had been built on secrecy, to admit to parts of the Watergate cover-up and to the creation of a secret security plan that resembled that of a police state.
By the end of the night, the eve of the start of the Senate Watergate hearings, an embittered, disillusioned Nixon felt surrounded by his enemies.
“We have to realize they’re not after Bob or John or Henry or Haig or Ziegler,” Nixon told Haig and Buzhardt. “They’re after the president. Shit. That’s what it’s all about. You know that. They want to destroy us.”
Buzhardt had at least some good news. He had confirmed through Sullivan that the Huston Plan never went into action.
“It was within two days of it being issued, to the best of their recollection,” Buzhardt said.
“Jesus Christ,” Nixon said, laughing.
“Sullivan thinks he has notes that will give us the precise times. But the whole thing was suspended immediately.”
Nixon felt a brief flurry of encouragement. “Let’s get it nailed down,” he said. “Let’s knock the shit out of this one. Knock the ball right out of the park.”99
At the FBI, Mark Felt’s resignation meant he would leave the bureau in June. His resignation would take on more significance after June 2005, when Felt, unable to speak for himself because of severe dementia, claimed through his children and family lawyer, John O’Connor, to have been Deep Throat, Bob Woodward’s secret source. In the book All the President’s Men, with Carl Bernstein, Woodward wrote that he and Deep Throat had a dramatic meeting on the night of May 16 in an underground parking garage at the Marriott Hotel near the Key Bridge, which connects Arlington County, Virginia, to the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington DC. Woodward described an agitated Deep Throat telling him about the damaging revelations from inside the White House. After the meeting, Woodward rushed home and called Bernstein, who joined him at his apartment. An alarmed Woodward turned on his stereo to a Rachmaninoff piano concerto and cranked up the volume in case government spies were listening. “Deep Throat says that electronic surveillance is going on and we had better watch it,” Woodward typed on a piece of paper. Bernstein wrote on a piece of paper, “Who is doing it?” “C-I-A,” Woodward mouthed.
“Bernstein was disbelieving,” the two wrote in the book. He should have been, because much of what Woodward would type, and which both reporters would give to Post editors the next day, was either untrue, old news, information that Felt would not have known, or piped directly to Woodward from Haig. No evidence exists that the CIA spied on reporters or anyone connected with Watergate, and there is no proof that the dramatic garage meeting ever happened. Woodward was the only person who claimed to have been there; there were no third-party witnesses; Deep Throat purportedly told Woodward information that Felt never had and/or that was not included in FBI files.
Much of what Woodward allegedly learned that night could have come only from Haig, if the meeting happened the way Woodward claimed it did. According to Woodward, the source told him that Republican senator Howard Baker was secretly working for the White House, which was not true, and that many of the Watergate-related activities were aimed at making money, also not true. Woodward also claimed that Deep Throat told him that John Caulfield, a Nixon aide, had told Watergate burglar James McCord that he would receive presidential clemency if he remained quiet, a fact the Los Angeles Times had published three days earlier and that had been picked up in the Washington Post. As proof of the White House’s machinations, the source told Woodward that CIA official Vernon Walters said the White House wanted to use the CIA to block the FBI’s Watergate investigation, a claim that was no great revelation, because it had been bannered across the front page of that day’s Post.
The new information was that the White House was deeply concerned about the documents Dean had taken from the White House. Those details were part of the multiple discussions that Haig, Nixon, and Buzhardt had had during the previous days. Deep Throat also reportedly said there were talks about domestic intelligence, a direct reference to the Huston Plan, which was also the focus of the worried conversations in the Oval Office, conversations Felt could not have known about. Instead, such details were what Haig and Sullivan had discussed all week.
Finally, Woodward wrote that there was an “unreal atmosphere” in the White House, “realizing it is curtains on one hand and on the other trying to laugh it off and go on with business. President has had fits of ‘dangerous’ depression.”100 Once again, only Haig, not Felt, would have been privy to such information. By May 16 he had spent almost two weeks as Nixon’s latest confidant, listening calmly as the president expressed doubts about his ability to stay in office and openly mentioning the possibility of resignation. Haig’s firsthand witnessing of Nixon’s depression, most of it captured by the White House taping system, is the most logical source of this admission to Woodward.
Since the publication of All the President’s Men in 1974, Woodward and Bernstein have insisted on the unerring accuracy of Deep Throat’s information and his reticence about being exposed as a source. The details Deep Throat allegedly provided in the parking garage on May 16 belie Woodward and Bernstein’s reputation for accuracy. Some of what Deep Throat told Woodward was incorrect, such as Howard Baker’s blind allegiance to Nixon and that White House officials were trying to make money off Watergate. Some information would turn out to be accurate, such as Nixon’s dangerous depression. Other bits of information were things that a casual reader of the Post would know, such as Walters’s testimony about White House cover-up attempts.
Nevertheless, Woodward and Bernstein took this pastiche of factoids to the Georgetown home of Post editor Ben Bradlee in the middle of the night and breathlessly told him that they were all in danger. In reality, there were no threats to anyone, as the taped meetings of Nixon and his staff would prove. These tapes show a desperate president, his administration beset by mounting threats from inside and out, trying to regain his footing. Nixon lashed out often, but his threats meant little. No one, especially Woodward’s source, who spent half his days in the Oval Office, had anything to fear other than the discovery of earlier scandals.
The contents of Woodward’s late-night parking garage rendezvous reveal the source of the information to be a combination of people, particularly Haig and Buzhardt, and not Felt. Given his distaste for Felt and alliance with Sullivan, it is highly unlikely that Haig would have used Felt as his conduit to pass information to Woodward. In fact, the events of this week show that Haig was far more likely to use Woodward as a messenger to others. After all, Woodward told his Post colleague Len Downie that Haig spoke with Woodward often and promptly and personally returned his calls to the White House.101 Also, why would Felt have contacted Woodward for a secret garage meeting the night after his FBI career was terminated to pass along a hash of gossip and old news when Felt preferred to give such information to Sandy Smith at Time magazine? He would not.
For the White House, the first day of the Senate Watergate hearings started with a Woodward and Bernstein story bannered across the front of the May 17 Washington Post: “Vast GOP Undercover Operation Originated in 1969.”102 It was, as Ron Ziegler noted to Nixon that morning, a set-up story that established a range of White House–related espionage and dirty tricks activity since Nixon took office in 1969.103 Just like the duo’s May 3 story on the alleged “vigilante squads” of former CIA and FBI agents spying for the White House, this article contained several questionable assertions and also conflated the White House Plumbers with other activities. It also bore the unmistakable fingerprints of Alexander Haig.
The story reported that Ehrlichman had the confidential health records of Senator Thomas Eagleton. Haig and Buzhardt told Nixon on May 17 that Haig had received a letter from a doctor two days earlier in which he stated that his office was burglarized and Eagleton’s records were stolen.104 This revelation then materialized in the Post. The story also mentioned that the White House “has promulgated ‘national security’ guidelines for use in the Watergate investigation that are designed at least in part to prevent testimony about the undercover operations by those with knowledge of them.” Haig, Buzhardt, and Nixon had developed these guidelines to prevent Walters’s testimony, the release of Walters’s memcons, and any testimony about the military spy ring. Again, that information showed up in the Post, courtesy of Haig.
Woodward’s work as Haig’s messenger continued in May. In All the President’s Men, he and Bernstein wrote that Woodward went to Capitol Hill around the time the Senate hearings started on May 17 to tell his friend Scott Armstrong, now a member of the Watergate committee staff, how he and his colleagues needed to interview Alexander Butterfield, Haig’s old friend from the Pentagon and the aide who helped install Nixon’s taping system.105 Nixon had told Haig about the tapes on May 8 and again on May 11, emphasizing each time how the tapes would prove who was telling the truth and who was not.
Butterfield’s potential testimony, which would reveal the taping system, aligned with another critical piece of information Haig learned on May 17. He and Nixon left the White House for Nixon’s hideaway office in room 180 of the Old Executive Office Building. The president had taken to disappearing from the West Wing more frequently, and shortly after 4:00 p.m., Nixon told Haig about something that would soon create a situation in which both the president and vice president faced crises that would force them from office. A federal grand jury in Baltimore was investigating bribery and tax evasion allegations about the Baltimore County executive, Dale Anderson, who had succeeded Vice President Spiro Agnew in the job after Agnew became governor of Maryland. The investigation did not stop with Anderson. Soon witnesses told investigators they had bribed Agnew, too, including giving him envelopes of cash in his vice presidential office. Agnew learned the initial details in April and told Haldeman on April 10. Since then, Nixon had shared the details he knew about the investigation with a few others, in particular, Ehrlichman, William Rogers (Nixon’s secretary of state but also a former attorney general), and Henry Kissinger.
Agnew, Nixon told Haig, wanted Haldeman “to call Glenn Beall’s brother and have him cool the grand jury investigation here because it might embarrass him, Agnew,” Nixon told Haig. Glenn Beall was the Republican senator from Maryland, and his brother, George, was the U.S. attorney handling the Baltimore grand jury. “If I had done that when I was vice president, Ike would have fired my ass,” Nixon continued. “Agnew can’t play this holier-than-thou attitude.
“Just say you wanted him to know the president is trying like hell to keep this from getting out,” Nixon said of Agnew’s request. “You can’t tell what will come out.”106
Nixon wanted Haig to call Agnew and work out the details.
So by May 17, as Haig realized the extent of Nixon’s problems, he had already learned from the president himself that Agnew was taking bribes and desperately wanted Nixon to make Agnew’s problems disappear. There are multiple signs that Haig knew at least a month earlier, shortly after Agnew told Haldeman about the grand jury investigation. Agnew, Haldeman wrote, “called me over and said he had a real problem, because Jerome Wolff, who used to work for him back in Maryland, was about to be called by the United States Attorney who was busting open campaign contribution cases and kickbacks to contractors.” Agnew “feels it would sound bad.” The vice president wanted Haldeman to reach out to Senator Beall “to straighten it out.” When Haldeman refused, Agnew said he would probably contact Charles Colson, one of Nixon’s most ruthless aides, who had just left the White House and started a new law firm.107
Haldeman and Ehrlichman told Nixon about Agnew’s request on the morning of April 14 while they were surveying the deteriorating political landscape. They discussed whether former attorney general John Mitchell, who was Nixon’s 1972 campaign manager, had ordered the Watergate break-in. Then Ehrlichman dumped another problem on Nixon’s lap.
Agnew and his associates met often in the Maryland governor’s office to discuss potential contracts and who was giving them campaign contributions, Ehrlichman said. Wolff participated in those meetings “and wrote those comments down,” Ehrlichman told Nixon. When Wolff fell under the scrutiny of the Baltimore grand jury, he ran with the notes to his lawyer, who then went to George White, Agnew’s longtime associate and attorney. Agnew realized that he, too, would soon be under scrutiny. He called Haldeman.
“Thank God I was never elected governor,” Nixon said before ruminating on the corruption cases that had ensnared multiple governors around the country, such as Otto Kerner of Illinois, who was being tried in 1973 on federal corruption charges.
What does Agnew want us to do? Nixon asked.
Haldeman speculated that the White House’s support of Senator J. Glenn Beall’s 1970 campaign with $200,000 passed through a special political fund would make him tell George Beall to back off. “We can’t quash the case,” Nixon said. They should ask Colson to contact [Agnew attorney George] White to see what they could do. “I can’t imagine Glenn Beall’s brother hitting the vice president,” Nixon said. Still, he continued, “[Agnew’s] just got to ride that through.”108
At 11:31 a.m. Haldeman and Ehrlichman walked out of the office, and Haig and Henry Kissinger walked in. There is no indication that Haldeman and Ehrlichman told the other two about Agnew. However, between April 14 and May 17, Nixon discussed Agnew’s fate with multiple aides, including Kissinger. “Agnew’s got a problem, as I told you, on this,” Nixon told Kissinger and Rogers on May 11. “The poor son of a bitch has a grand jury working on him.”109 Any of them could have told Haig, who could have learned about it from Colson, with whom Haig had a long and close relationship. When Haldeman and Ehrlichman resigned on April 30, Colson, along with Haldeman, pushed the hardest for Haig to become the new White House chief of staff.110
None of this proves that Colson told Haig of Agnew’s legal problems in mid-April 1973 or that Haig told Woodward, who then told his fellow reporter Richard Cohen. But the evidence is more plausible than what Cohen and Woodward have written. In his 1974 book about the Agnew case, A Heartbeat Away, Cohen wrote that Woodward told him in April 1973 that Deep Throat told him that “FBI files contained apparently unverified allegations that Agnew had accepted a bribe while vice president.” The grand jury, Cohen wrote, “was heading Agnew’s way and the Vice President was in fact its target. This seemingly preposterous information was received in April, nearly a month before the prosecutors acknowledged getting the first veiled hint that Agnew had taken kickbacks and nearly two months before they learned anything specific.”111 However, publicly available FBI files on Agnew reveal nothing about the bribery investigation from before August 1973, when the news about Agnew’s problems exploded in public view.112 It was only then that the FBI was asked for help providing polygraphs. Agnew’s problems came from an IRS investigation. By August, Mark Felt no longer worked at the FBI. Again, Haig knew more about Agnew’s problems than most people, and he had been supplying Woodward with information.
Meanwhile, the first Senate Watergate Committee hearing on May 17 was a low-key affair that opened with its chairman, Democratic senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, spelling out his expectations. “If the many allegations made to this date are true,” Ervin said, “the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate were in effect breaking into the home of every citizen of the United States.”113 At age seventy-six, Ervin seemed like an artifact of a bygone political era, like a character in an Allen Drury novel. Nixon and his aides thought Ervin would not wear well with the television audience. They wildly underestimated the folksy country lawyer, whose demeanor belied his Harvard Law School education.
“He’s our biggest asset, Ervin,” Buzhardt told Nixon, because Ervin ran terrible hearings and did not let his professional counsel ask questions.114
Buzhardt was wrong on both counts. Chief committee counsel Sam Dash, a former district attorney, would conduct large chunks of the questioning, and Ervin would turn into a folk hero for how he managed the hearings, which drew huge television audiences. Ervin and Dash’s strategy called for building up their witnesses to a crescendo throughout the summer, each one adding to the testimony of the previous witnesses. Just a week into his job as Nixon’s Watergate counsel, Buzhardt had already made some significant errors in judgment. His miscalculation about Ervin was just another day at the office.
As they analyzed the hearings and tried to determine how much of the Huston Plan would leak out, Nixon lapsed into a digression about one of his favorite examples of betrayal, the military spy ring and the theft of thousands of documents from the White House by Yeoman Charles Radford. Nixon considered the spy ring a national security breach of a greater magnitude than the Huston Plan or the Plumbers, and it was so secret that he would not include it in any white paper that Buzhardt was writing.
“I’m sure you’re aware of the India-Pakistan story,” Nixon said.
“I wrote the report on that, Mr. President,” Buzhardt said of the report he wrote that covered up Haig’s sharing with the Joint Chiefs information that Nixon had wanted to keep secret.
“About the yeoman?” Nixon asked.
“Yes, sir, the yeoman, the admiral, the [taking of Kissinger’s files from his briefcase],” Buzhardt said. “Mr. President, not too many people know about that, and I’m very afraid it’s going to come out.”
“If it comes out, you know who it’s going to hurt,” Nixon said.
“It’s going to kill the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Thomas Moorer]. I’m aware of it,” Buzhardt answered.
Nixon fulminated about Radford, that “goddamn yeoman. . . . He knew too much,” adding that they had to let him go.
“We had circumstantial evidence,” Buzhardt said. “That’s all we had. . . . People were concerned, and they started the investigation with the wrong people over there [at the Pentagon].”
“Oh,” Nixon said, surprised.
“As soon as [Defense Secretary] Mel [Laird] found out about it, he told me to take it away from them, because he was afraid of it leaking, and then said, ‘Give me a full report’ so he’d know what happened,” Buzhardt said.
“Is that so?” Nixon said. “Mel knows?”
Nixon had spent the first four years of his presidency specifically bypassing Laird, the defense secretary, as he put together much of Nixon’s national security policy. He always underestimated Laird’s ability to learn about and conceal information Nixon wanted to hide from him.
“Mel knows the whole story, absolutely,” Buzhardt said. “Top to bottom.”
Nixon called the spy ring a major national security threat, but prosecuting those involved “would have accomplished nothing, except it would have embarrassed Moorer, the military-industrial complex, and maybe would have embarrassed Jack Anderson,” the columnist whose stories with leaks from the NSC led to the uncovering of the spy ring.
“I’m not even sure it would have embarrassed Jack Anderson,” Buzhardt said.115
Meanwhile, in the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing room, Vernon Walters was testifying again about the attempted White House cover-up of the Watergate investigation. The testimony that Haig and Buzhardt had assured Nixon would actually hurt Dean continued to damage the president’s claims that he had nothing to do with any cover-up. Walters said that L. Patrick Gray had told Walters he had recommended that those involved in the Watergate cover-up needed to be fired and that Gray was willing to resign if that did not happen. Walters’s latest claims were contained in a series of affidavits he had given to the committee and its acting chairman, Stuart Symington, while Walters testified in a closed session with Richard Helms, the former CIA director who was now the ambassador to Iran. After the hearing, Symington said that Walters and Helms told the committee that they did not know if Nixon knew about the attempts to block the FBI investigation, “but it’s hard for me to visualize that the President knew nothing about this.”
Walters put the blame on Bob Haldeman for raising the possibility of blocking the FBI investigation. “As I recall it, Mr. Haldeman said that the Watergate incident was causing trouble and was being exploited by the opposition.”116
This testimony, along with a story that revealed new details about the FBI wiretaps in that morning’s New York Times, gave more momentum to Haig and Buzhardt’s call for the white paper. The Times’ latest story by Hersh implicated Kissinger directly in the selection of targets for the wiretaps started in May 1969, saying that he “personally provided the Federal Bureau of Investigation with the names of a number of his aides on the National Security Council whom he wanted wiretapped.” Hersh’s source was impeccable: Sullivan, whose claims were damning. The wiretaps proved nothing, he told Hersh, except that some NSC officials were not personally loyal to Kissinger: “There wasn’t one member of the [National Security Council] staff who was disloyal to the country. But they were disloyal to Kissinger, and they were giving him real problems.” Some of the liberals Kissinger had hired, Sullivan said, “began to disagree with him and they weren’t with him. Actually, they were disloyal—not to the country, but to him. Henry didn’t mind disagreement in the family, but what he didn’t like was these fellows arguing and losing and then going outside to leak things.”117
Haig had two goals on May 18: talking with Agnew about his future and learning exactly what Dean had taken from the White House and whether he, Nixon, and Buzhardt could keep it secret. They could not. Stuart Symington already had the documents, and he had no desire to maintain secrecy; Symington had already rushed to spill the details of Walters’s secret testimony about the White House cover-up attempts. Haig knew the damage done to the president this week had been severe. Nixon knew it, too. He had spent much of the two previous days alternating between raging about the enemies who were treating him unfairly and contemplating resignation.
“Shit,” Nixon said. “If I were to resign, I would admit the whole goddamn thing. If I resign because they’ve made my job too hard, everybody will say the son of a bitch is guilty. I’m not going to do that, damnit.”
“That would be impossible,” Haig said.
“I’ve got to fight it out,” Nixon said.
“Of course you’re going to fight it out,” Haig replied.118
Around this time there occurred another fateful meeting. Rear Adm. Robert Welander met for lunch with his former subordinate on the USS Fox and at the Pentagon, Lt. Bob Woodward, who told him that the story of the military spy ring might soon become public. What could Welander say about it? “[Woodward] said the issue was going to come up again and everything else and did I have anything further to say,” Welander said. No, Welander said. He had been sworn to secrecy when he had been forced from the Joint Chiefs’ liaison office and sent to a destroyer command in the Atlantic. Now, back at the Pentagon, he wanted to avoid the problems that forced him into exile.119
Woodward’s meeting with Welander came just days after Pentagon investigator Donald Stewart had called the White House and mentioned his dissatisfaction at the Pentagon and his suspicions that Buzhardt had killed Stewart’s investigation for political reasons. The options for Woodward’s sources were limited: either Haig, Buzhardt, Len Garment, or Richard Tufaro, the White House lawyer who first spoke to Stewart. However, only Haig had a relationship with Woodward.
But Woodward did nothing with this great scoop; instead, he sat on it for months. Welander said Woodward that did not tell him his source, but when it was suggested to him in a 1987 interview that Woodward was not honest, Welander said, “I’m glad other people think so, too.”120 Publishing such a bombshell during the tumultuous days of May would have exploded the White House. The military leadership would have been implicated in the theft and leaking of White House secrets, which could have jeopardized Nixon’s upcoming summit with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. And if those involved were honest about their actions, then Haig’s role in the spy ring would have been revealed, a betrayal that would have forced him out of the White House, ended his career, and perhaps led to prison. Woodward put keeping Haig’s secret ahead of informing his readers.
After two weeks of deliberations, tentative feelers to potential candidates and rejections, attorney general designate Elliot Richardson selected a special prosecutor for Watergate. It was Archibald Cox, a solicitor general for John Kennedy, a Harvard Law School dean, and a venerable Yankee Democrat. Cox had been Richardson’s mentor at Harvard, and the two shared an easy familiarity. Of all the possible choices, Haig and Nixon thought they could work with Cox.
“I see he got a humdinger,” Haig said to Nixon about Richardson’s choice.
“Who’d he get?” Nixon asked.
“A fellow named Cox that used to be solicitor general for Kennedy,” Haig said.
He is well respected, Nixon said. “I don’t think he’s too bad. Did he take him?”
Not yet, Haig said, but the word is out, and it will be difficult for Cox to decline or for the Senate not to confirm Richardson.
“Cox is not a mean man,” Nixon said. “He’s partisan, but not that mean.”
“That’s right,” Haig said. “That’s the description I got. He’s not a zealot.”121
In less than two weeks, Nixon, Haig, and the small defense team would reverse gear and zealously attack Cox as a vicious partisan out to get Nixon. Their initial optimism faded as they realized Cox and his prosecutors had a wide mission and were taking every opportunity to dig into areas the president and his chief of staff preferred to avoid.
Although Nixon had agreed to release the white paper detailing the national security issues that led him to create the White House Plumbers, wiretap his staff and journalists, and try to block parts of the Watergate investigation, he still could not make a clean breast of everything. He complained about the treatment he was receiving from the press and his political enemies. Haldeman, who still talked with the president frequently, advised against giving up too much.
“My resigning didn’t clear my name,” Haldeman told Nixon on the afternoon of May 18. “My resigning proved to everybody in the world except the few people that believe in me that I’m guilty.”
“The same as John [Ehrlichman],” Nixon said.
“And your resigning will prove it conclusively,” Haldeman said. “It will prove that you’re guilty, and that I’m guilty, and that everybody else here is guilty.”
So, Nixon said, I need to fight.
“Because you aren’t guilty,” Haldeman said.
“I know I’m not,” Nixon answered.
Haldeman’s resignation, he told the president, “doesn’t shake the world; your resigning does.”122
As he fought, Nixon refused to reveal the military spy ring, because he could not let the world know how his cult of secrecy sowed the distrust that military leaders had toward him.
Nixon fretted as Haig and Buzhardt drafted the white paper. They also consulted the White House tapes so they could buttress their claims with enough facts to be convincing. As he worked closely with Haig, Garment said that it was obvious Haig was consulting something: “It was Buzhardt, myself, I think [speechwriter] Ray [Price] was involved and [Patrick] Buchanan and pieces would be—and Haig, and pieces would be drafted and taken into Nixon in the old Executive Office Building office for him to pass on it. From time to time Haig came back with detail that did not seem to be top of the head memory.”123 Nixon’s schedule and the tapes show just how much he leaned on Haig and Buzhardt: Nixon spoke with Haig three times on May 20 as Nixon tried to relax at Camp David and then another thirteen times, including a trip together on the presidential yacht, Sequoia, on May 21, the day before the paper’s release.124
Haig cared less about Watergate and more about the so-called national security events that led up to it, because “we’ve got to build a climate, the situation, what we were faced with,” Haig told the president.125
Nixon’s mood reflected the stress he endured each day. Not only were the Watergate hearings churning out a daily dose of bad press as witnesses recounted attempts to cover up the Watergate break-in or to spy on rival politicians, but leaks about non-Watergate missteps came at a rapid clip. Nixon also had to contend with the strains of running the government. His war policies faced growing congressional opposition; both houses of Congress were cutting money for the wars in Southeast Asia and trying to limit his war-fighting powers. A national energy crisis loomed on the horizon as gasoline prices had started to rise, which also threatened to spark another surge in inflation. His Republican allies feared the drag Nixon posed for their electoral futures and sought reassurance. These pressures would have taxed the most resilient politician, let alone one immersed in an existential crisis that would end in disgrace and exile.
Haig tried to calm Nixon even as he coaxed the president into authorizing a document that would implicate him in covering up the White House’s connections to the Watergate break-in, approving the Huston Plan, and wiretapping his own staff and reporters. No one would accept Nixon’s claims of national security reasons to justify himself. Haig, with Buzhardt’s canny assistance, was maneuvering the president into signing his own death warrant.
The testimony of Watergate burglar James McCord on May 21 fueled the interest of Senator Lowell Weicker, the tall and voluble Connecticut Republican, to investigate the FBI’s Internal Security Division, which had aided McCord and the Nixon campaign in identifying possible threats to the 1972 Republican National Convention. Weicker suspected more, however, such as a White House–directed crackdown on civil liberties and peaceful protests. He sought out Sullivan, hoping he would reveal what his division had done. Sullivan started as a willing participant, eager to cast his rivals in a negative light, but he soon proved skittish and evasive as the questioning turned toward him. Sullivan had much to hide, as his division handled some of the most politically sensitive and explosive issues of the previous twenty years, including an extensive infiltration of the U.S. Communist Party called Solo. Through Solo, the code name for the Chicago-based brothers Morris and Jack Childs, the FBI learned that Stanley Levison, an influential aide to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., had ties to the Communist Party. Sullivan himself wrote King a threatening anonymous letter in 1964 in which he promised to ruin his life. Sullivan badly wanted to keep such actions secret. He could not afford an investigation that pried them into the open and also exposed Haig.
Before Nixon could release his white paper, Tom Huston appeared late on the afternoon of Monday, May 21, before the Senate Armed Services Committee and Stuart Symington. Huston had left the White House in disgust in the summer of 1971, angered by the president’s failure to implement the plan that bore Huston’s name. What Nixon attempted to explain away as the result of cataclysmic domestic security threats seemed more sinister under the lights of the Armed Services Committee hearing room. Huston’s plan, much of which still remains secret almost fifty years later, was breathtaking in scope. It would have allowed the FBI to resume surreptitious break-ins of the homes and businesses of suspects without a warrant. The National Security Agency was granted more power to eavesdrop on the calls of people in the United States, a violation of its charter. The CIA had already violated its charter with Operation Chaos, a campaign to target student antiwar protesters, and would have been granted similar powers with the Huston Plan. Nixon feared its implications, whether it took effect or not, because while he wanted the power, he did not want the American people to know about it. When they did, the immediate reaction justified Nixon’s fears. “There didn’t seem to be any limitation to the amount of burglary,” Symington said after the hearing. “This is the most fantastic document I’ve ever read.”126 Senators already distrusted Nixon’s national security arguments; Henry Jackson of Washington had called Nixon on those arguments a week earlier as intelligence officials tried to keep the plan secret. Now Symington had released many of the plan’s details, and while Huston’s work came two years before the failed Watergate break-in, his plan and Nixon’s desire for it easily fell under the banner of the Watergate scandal.
It was the fourth time in a week that Symington had exposed a key White House secret to the public. His hearing on May 14 led Vernon Walters to acknowledge the meetings at the White House in which Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman had tried, on Nixon’s orders, to get the CIA to block the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Symington then conducted a news conference the following day to amplify what Walters had testified to in a closed hearing. On May 17 his panel questioned Walters again, who provided even more details about the White House’s attempted obstruction. And now he had Huston before his panel explaining the intent of his plan.
As the Pentagon’s chief lawyer, Buzhardt could have stopped the release of the documents to Symington. “These documents were turned over to the committee by the Defense Department without consultation with the FBI or to our knowledge National Security Agency or CIA,” an FBI memo shows.127 Buzhardt knew which documents Dean had removed from the White House two days before Buzhardt told Nixon about their contents. During the same conversation he and Haig pushed Nixon to reveal his support of the Huston Plan and the reasons why he supported covering up the White House involvement in Watergate.
The document that press secretary Ron Ziegler and Garment released on the afternoon of May 22 was presented as Nixon’s final version of the truth. It had three main goals: “To set forth the facts about my own relationship to the Watergate matter,” to deal with some of the topics that “are currently being discussed in Senate testimony and elsewhere,” and “to draw the distinctions between national security operations and the Watergate case.” In this remarkable document, Nixon acknowledged using his Watergate cover-up to protect his earlier cover-ups, and while he hoped national security considerations would explain away most of his actions, Nixon had opened himself to more questions about whether he obstructed justice. Nixon admitted that his first-term policy successes—opening relations with China, creating détente with the Soviet Union, and ending the Vietnam War—depended on obsessive secrecy and that “leaks of secret information about any one could endanger all.”
On the question of the FBI wiretaps, Nixon took full responsibility, although he privately blamed Henry Kissinger for pleading for them in order to stop leaks. “I authorized this program,” the white paper stated. “Each individual task was undertaken in accordance with procedures legal at the time and in accord with long-standing precedent.” Nixon’s anodyne acceptance of responsibility for the wiretaps raised more questions and obscured what had actually happened. Kissinger, as Nixon and Haig knew, provided much of the impetus for the early taps, and he and Haig actively selected the targets. Haig particularly wanted to tap the phones of Col. Robert Pursley, the military aide to Defense Secretary Melvin Laird. Nixon also knew the White House used the national security wiretaps for political purposes, such as when the White House was lobbying Congress to approve a planned antiballistic missile system.
As for the Huston Plan, details of which started to spill forth in that morning’s Washington Post after Symington’s hearing with Huston, Nixon emphasized that it had not taken effect. “It was this unused plan and related documents that John Dean removed from the White House and placed in a safe deposit box,” Nixon wrote in the white paper. While the plan never officially got started, it spawned another unit, the Intelligence Evaluation Committee, which was meant to coordinate intelligence on radical groups generated by all agencies. Dean was the point man for that committee, hence his possession of the documents. Also, Nixon wanted the Huston Plan to work. He backed down only because he feared antagonizing J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, who, while a diminished force in the administration, remained powerful enough for Nixon to fear crossing him.
Nixon’s incomplete explanation of the creation of the Plumbers ignored the goriest details. “This was a small group at the White House whose principal purpose was to stop security leaks and to investigate other sensitive security matters,” Nixon said. Nixon created the unit not because he wanted a complete investigation of Daniel Ellsberg and the leaking of the Pentagon Papers but because he wanted to destroy Ellsberg and hide whatever documents existed about Nixon’s use of an intermediary in late October 1968 to persuade the South Vietnamese government to skip a meeting at the Paris Peace Talks to end the Vietnam War. Nixon told the truth about having no knowledge of the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, but he created and fostered the culture that led to it, which he acknowledged. “However, because of the emphasis I put on the crucial importance of protecting the national security, I can understand how highly motivated individuals could have felt justified in engaging in specific activities that I would have disapproved had they been brought to my attention,” he wrote. Some things, Nixon said, remained too sensitive to reveal. These vital national security issues, he insisted, would have to remain secret.128
Perhaps the greatest single issue Nixon was hiding—the existence of the military spy ring—was not mentioned at all in the white paper. That would remain a secret.
If Nixon hoped the white paper would quell the demand for more information from him and other officials, public reaction quickly stripped away those illusions. Garment and Ziegler were immediately beset by questions from the White House press corps about specific details in the white paper and whether Nixon would conduct another news conference.
“President Nixon’s lengthy statement on the Watergate scandals reveals more of the truth than he or any of his senior associates had previously been willing to put on the record,” the New York Times editorialized. “The involvement of the President and his White House aides in the tangled events that led to these assorted crimes and conspiracies and the subsequent attempt to cover them up is much more extensive than had previously been acknowledged. Although the President’s latest statement discloses more of the truth, only the statements of other principals can show whether the whole truth has yet been revealed,” the Times concluded. “Mr. Nixon has reiterated several specific denials about the extent of his knowledge of and therefore his culpability for various misdeeds. Those denials have to stand the test of time. Meanwhile, it is abundantly clear that an inflated and erroneous conception of ‘national security’ led to criminal behavior which has brought the office of the President into grave disrepute.”129
Haig and Buzhardt not only talked Nixon into releasing the white paper, which, despite its numerous falsehoods, also admitted to covering up the Watergate break-in, wiretapping his staff and reporters, and creating the Plumbers, but also persuaded him to renounce claiming executive privilege to limit the testimony of his current and former staff. That meant leads generated by his admissions in the white paper could be followed by Senate and special prosecutor investigators with few limits. Haig and Buzhardt persuaded Nixon to admit potential crimes and then to limit his tools for defending himself. As Nixon himself wrote, “Thus I set more traps that would be sprung by the tapes months later.”130
Nixon and Haig tried to absorb the fallout. Nixon told Haig that he had to weaken the first draft of the white Paper he received: “I ordered that they use any means necessary, including illegal means, to accomplish this goal. The president of the United States can never admit that.”
Haig also shared a piece of good news. He had talked to William Ruckelshaus at the FBI, who told Haig that Felt, whom they suspected of leaking details of the FBI wiretaps, had been fired.
“He [Ruckelshaus] is fine,” Haig said. “He’s giving this guy notice.”
“Felt?” Nixon asked.
“Yeah, he’ll be leaving in two weeks,” Haig said. “He’s fired.”
“Why?” Nixon asked.
“Because he just—he didn’t tell him why,” Haig said.
“Is that right?” Nixon said.
“He did the right thing,” Haig said. “This son of a bitch. He’s the source of an awful lot of the heat that developed two weeks ago.”
Now Felt was gone, and the president and Haig enjoyed his demise, not realizing that their supposed ally, Sullivan, was the person causing their problems.131
The Senate confirmed Elliot Richardson as attorney general on May 24 by a vote of 82–3. He immediately appointed Cox as the special counsel for Watergate and what would become a growing portfolio of other potential cases. Nixon and Haig almost immediately started to view Cox as an enemy. After hosting a grand dinner at the White House for the recently freed prisoners of war from North Vietnam, Nixon retired to the White House and called Haig. Tired, his voice slurred, Nixon at turns celebrated the dinner and lamented his future prospects.
“Coming right down to it, Al, when you look at it, you know, all this crap we’re taking, and the Congress being Democratic and the Republicans being weak and all the rest, wouldn’t it really be better for the country, you know, to just check out?” Nixon asked.
Haig just laughed.
“No, no, seriously, I mean that, because I—you see, I’m not at my best,” Nixon said. “I’ve got to be at my best, and that means fighting this damn battle, fighting it all out. And I can’t fight the damn battle, you know, with people running in with their little tidbits and their rumors and all that crap, and did the president, you know, make a deal, you know, to pay off this one and that and the other thing. Huh?”
Haig tried to reassure Nixon, telling him the POW dinner was a huge success and that the white paper had helped the stock market to rise the previous day. The Watergate committee hearings, Haig continued, were not going well and “proved that these bastards don’t even know what they’re talking about.” He praised Nixon’s speech and said the White House had turned a corner.
Nixon still feared Richardson, whom he would watch being sworn in the next afternoon.
“See, Richardson’s in the spot where, as you know, he’s going to have to prove that he’s the white knight and all that bull, and so he’s going to try to—he and Archie Cox will try to try the president, you know, well, and all that crap. How do you handle that?”
“I don’t think those people are going to—well, Richardson, what does he gain by that?” Haig answered. “He’s going to have to keep that guy under control, that Cox. But Cox, he’s not much.”
“You don’t think so?” Nixon asked.
“No. No. I’ve checked on him,” Haig said. “He’s not an effective guy. In fact, I’m not sure those things will ever even come to trial. . . . He’ll have these cases, these portfolios, so screwed up nobody’ll be able to be brought to court.”
Haig had to buck up Nixon’s emotions at this moment, but he also displayed a seriously flawed view of Cox’s effectiveness. Within days, the White House would be complaining about the ruthless Cox and how he was pushing beyond what they considered his charter. Nixon sensed the sharks circling his life raft, but Haig acted as if the fins poking above the waves were from dolphins. “Hell, they’ve dug up all they can dig,” he said, but Nixon knew better.
“No, they’ve got more,” he said, adding that John Dean would try to save himself with his upcoming testimony.
Again Haig dispensed more bad advice.
“Well, I think he said most of what he had to say,” Haig said. “I really do believe that, sir. And it doesn’t make any difference what they have. The power of the office is in there. The power of your accomplishments in the past and ahead are going to swamp any of these other difficulties.”132
Nixon attended Richardson’s swearing in at the White House the following afternoon after he and Richardson met for about twenty minutes in the Oval Office. Richardson praised Nixon for saying he would not use executive privilege to prevent his staff members from testifying. Nixon cautioned him, however, that he would still use executive privilege to protect presidential documents. The two reminisced about how Nixon campaigned for Richardson when he was a candidate in Massachusetts in the 1960s, when Nixon was just a former vice president working for a New York law firm. Their attention turned to the Plumbers, who, both men recognized, made some incredibly stupid decisions as they tried to stop leaks from the White House. “They did lead us to controlling a lot of leaks,” Nixon said. If they did not, then the SALT arms talks would not have worked or the opening to China. “I didn’t inform Mel Laird,” the defense secretary, Nixon said, which Nixon did not realize was why Laird was spying on the White House. “The Russians would have been up the wall. . . . It’s become a heroic act to destroy a policy you’re against.”133
With that, Nixon ushered Richardson into the White House for his swearing in. Cox had taken his oath a few hours earlier in a ceremony surrounded by members of the Kennedy family, including Nixon nemesis Edward Kennedy, the senator from Massachusetts and brother of the slain president. The twin oaths put the problems for Nixon in a different realm. He now had a dedicated prosecutor with free rein to look into all aspects of the Watergate case and any other potential wrongdoing that caught his eye or the eyes of his aggressive staff. Investigators who had felt frustrated by what they had considered White House interference in their investigation had a new outlet, and they intended to take advantage of it. Richardson’s challenge was that after being appointed to his third cabinet post by the president, some people considered him a Nixon stooge. Richardson demonstrated his independence by giving Cox the leeway to explore whatever leads he wanted. Nixon and Haig now worried they faced a runaway prosecutor.
Nixon’s Watergate problems were spilling into other parts of his presidency. On May 31 the Senate voted 63–19 to cut off funding pay for the bombing of rebels in Cambodia on behalf of the besieged government. It was the exposure of Nixon’s secret bombing campaign in Cambodia in May 1969 that led him, Kissinger, and Haig to seek wiretaps on government officials they suspected of leaking. Now a war-weary Congress wanted to end the bombing ordered by an administration whose credibility diminished every day.
Few presidents had weathered a month as calamitous as May 1973 was for Nixon. He started the month alone and without his top two aides, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, on whom he had relied constantly. In Alexander Haig, Nixon thought, he had found someone to replace Haldeman as his sounding board and enforcer. By month’s end, Haig was firmly in control and ready to add some allies to the White House staff to further lock in his influence.