Nixon weathered May with his presidency intact, but the wounds from the month would be fatal. He just did not know it yet. But Alexander Haig did. Enlisted to save Nixon, Haig only exacerbated the president’s problems. Either alone or with Fred Buzhardt’s help, Haig allowed the damaging testimony by Vernon Walters that exposed the White House’s attempt to use the CIA to block the FBI’s Watergate investigation. He let Robert Cushman, Walters’s predecessor at the CIA, give up records that showed how the CIA helped the Plumbers harass Daniel Ellsberg. Those records broke Nixon’s ability to claim executive privilege with the white paper.
After reshuffling the cabinet in May, Haig consolidated his hold on the White House by bringing in new White House aides: former defense secretary Melvin Laird took the role once filled by John Ehrlichman, and Bryce Harlow, a skilled advisor and Capitol Hill player from the Eisenhower administration and first Nixon term, returned as a bridge between the White House and Congress. Laird, a sixteen-year House veteran, and Harlow knew Congress and Republican Party politics as well as anyone in Washington. They could gauge the shifting moods among the GOP caucus and sense what political capital remained for Nixon, whose landslide reelection the previous November appeared as only a distant memory.
Recruiting Laird reunited Haig and Buzhardt with their fellow conspirator in the military spy ring cover-up. Laird and Haig butted heads multiple times during Nixon’s first term, often over troop levels in Vietnam and the Vietnamization program, which replaced U.S. troops with South Vietnamese soldiers, but they agreed that the military needed to know more about Nixon’s secret maneuvering. Haig maintained one channel with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for which Nixon would have fired him if he knew about it, and Laird knew it. When the spy ring was first uncovered in December 1971, Laird commissioned Buzhardt’s report for the Pentagon to cover up for Haig and himself. Laird eagerly agreed to ship Yeoman Charles Radford, the young aide who stole White House documents for the Chiefs, far from Washington. For his final year as defense secretary, Laird had the best of both worlds. He had eliminated the Chiefs’ liaison office at the National Security Council, which he knew the White House used to bypass him, protected his clients in the uniformed military, and scored a favor from Haig.
Nixon, Haig, Laird, and Harlow met for an hour and thirty-five minutes in the Birch Lodge at Camp David to determine the terms of their joining the White House staff. Harlow had a long and respected pedigree. He had worked on Capitol Hill for two House Democrats and then joined the White House staff of President Dwight Eisenhower, writing speeches and working as his chief lobbyist to Congress. After Eisenhower left office, Harlow became the chief lobbyist for the Procter & Gamble Corporation, the giant consumer products company, and then jumped back to the White House after Nixon’s election in 1968 to run congressional relations again, leaving in 1970. Now Nixon had the difficult task of coaxing Harlow back from Procter & Gamble again to join a White House reeling from scandal. Selling Harlow on returning was more difficult than selling Laird, who was more interested in keeping his own secrets.
Laird’s wife never trusted Nixon, and she feared her husband would sink deeper into an ever-thickening morass, so Laird asked Nixon directly: “Mr. President, did you have anything to do with the break-in or the cover-up?”
“Absolutely not,” Nixon said.1
This account, from Laird’s memoirs, is hard to believe. Laird worked for Nixon for four years as defense secretary. He did some of Nixon’s campaign dirty work in 1968, floating rumors that President Lyndon Johnson had agreed to some kind of nefarious deal with North Vietnam to stop the bombing there. In fact, it was Nixon who was engaged in the campaign trickery, working with a go-between, staunch anticommunist Anna Chennault, to tell the South Vietnamese government not to go to Paris for peace talks with the North Vietnamese before the 1968 election because Nixon would give them a better deal than the desperate Johnson. Nixon would spend his entire presidency covering up the “Chennault affair” with Laird’s help.
The attempts to lure Laird and Harlow to the White House staff came as Democratic senators began to attack Haig’s dual status as chief of staff and four-star army general. Haig’s alleged temporary appointment was a sham; Nixon and Haig had already decided he would stay through the second term. Now Democratic senators Stuart Symington of Missouri and William Proxmire of Wisconsin wanted the Pentagon to say how long Haig would remain on active duty.2 Symington had bedeviled Nixon since almost the moment the president took office, taking issue with the secret use of the CIA in Southeast Asia, criticizing Kissinger’s role leading a secret government inside the White House, and exposing the White House’s attempt to use the CIA to block the FBI’s Watergate investigation. In a four-and-a-half-page letter to Deputy Defense Secretary William Clements, Symington implied that Haig’s appointment violated the law and asked sixteen questions about the appointment and how long it could last before Haig would have to leave the army. Proxmire, one of the Senate’s biggest mavericks, had also called for Haig to resign either the chief of staff job or his army post.
On June 3 Nixon was hit by two bombshell stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post that detailed how John Dean had met with Nixon forty times between January and April to discuss the Watergate cover-up. More dangerously for Nixon, the Times reported that its source “also suggested that Mr. Dean may have tape recorded some of his White House conversations. . . . ‘Everybody taped everybody else then,’ the source said. ‘Dean did it himself.’”3 Both Nixon and Haig knew Nixon held the real tape recordings of those meetings.
Nixon wrote in his memoirs that the Post story filled him with dread as he read about Dean’s claim that they had discussed hush money for the Watergate burglars in March 1973. “I felt discouraged, drained and pressured,” Nixon wrote. “I asked Haig whether I should resign.” Haig said no and urged Nixon to listen to the tapes.4
Nixon spoke with Ron Ziegler, his press secretary, that morning to determine their next moves. They shared a renewed but misplaced sense of optimism, and Nixon displayed a complete ignorance of what was happening with his new chief of staff.
“I didn’t talk to Al very long, because we had other problems, but he seemed to think you made considerable progress on your meetings and plans and so forth,” Nixon told Ziegler, adding that Haig said he thought Laird would join the staff. “Well, Al’s a real operator,” Nixon continued. “You know, when you think of sacrifices, Al’s making the biggest one. He’s going to have to resign from the army.”
“Yes,” Ziegler said, “I talked to him about that last night. He said, ‘Ron, I’ve always done all my life what I thought was the right thing to do. I’m not going to back off from that now.’ I had a nice talk with him last night, and he’s a fine man.”
“By God, there’s so much character in that man, it’s unbelievable,” Nixon said.
Ziegler agreed.
“Unbelievable,” Nixon said. “Well, I called him later last night. Um, I just don’t know many people who would do that.”
“He’s a very selfless man,” Ziegler said.
“He’s a four-star general living in that beautiful free house and all those servants and everything and good God almighty. It’s really something,” Nixon said.
“Well, he’s made it very clear, like a lot of people around here, he’s going to do what he can to help the president,” Ziegler said.5
Later that day, Nixon called Haig and asked what they could do to counter Dean, with whom Nixon had spent hours plotting the Watergate cover-up during March. Haig downplayed the reports, saying that most Americans did not care about Watergate: “They’re not reading it.” Polls, however, showed Nixon’s support dropping quickly, and his credibility was eroding.
Dean’s allegations of a Watergate cover-up were no surprise, Nixon said. “We have not denied I was aware of a cover-up. The point is I was investigating the son of a bitch [Dean] to find out what he’s up to.”6
Nixon’s problem, as the tapes from March showed, is that while Dean had participated in the cover-up, so had Nixon. They had spent most of the eight days between March 13 and 21 determining how to craft a written “Dean report” that would absolve the White House of any involvement in the cover-up. At one point on March 16, Dean assured Nixon on the telephone that “we will win.”7 It was a far cry from Dean’s claim in recent interviews that he came to Nixon, aggrieved about what he had learned about the cover-up, to let the president know about “a cancer on the presidency.” The cancer was not the cover-up itself, in which Nixon and Dean were fully immersed, but the blackmail attempts coming from the Watergate burglars.
Haig said Americans were sick of Watergate and that he disagreed with Buzhardt, Ziegler, and Len Garment, who wanted to take “a big offensive.”
“I’m glad you’re keeping morale,” Nixon said. “I don’t know how you do it.”
If the latest report had come out on May 10, when the White House was absorbing constant body blows of bad news, “it would have knocked us over,” Nixon said.8
Nevertheless, Nixon had to know what he and Dean had discussed. He remembered the multiple meetings with his counsel that started at the end of February, but the specifics remained cloudy. The stories in the Times and Post in which Dean claimed to have met with Nixon up to forty times during that period nettled the president, who knew he had only one way to determine who was telling the truth: the White House taping system.
In his memoirs, Haig characterized the morning of June 4 as one of desperation for Nixon.
“Al, this Dean testimony is fatal to me,” Haig wrote that the president told him.
“Mr. President,” Haig said he asked Nixon, “I must know in order to serve you. Is Dean telling the truth?”
“No, Al. He’s lying. But the damage is done. The question is, Should I resign, put an end to things, save the country the agony of what’s coming?” Haig wrote.9
Haig’s account is gripping, self-serving, and, based on the tapes and Nixon’s logs, most likely inaccurate. The Monday after the Dean revelations was June 4. The White House tapes indicate Nixon and Haig met that morning for about twenty minutes and discussed possible staff moves as well as the Dean allegations. Haig wrote that he went home after the conversation in which Nixon mentioned resigning, something he had done repeatedly in the previous weeks, and then returned the next day, which would have been June 5, and told Nixon he had the means to determine the truth. “A few days earlier, Nixon had told me in an offhand way that he had the means to tape-record conversations in the Oval Office and over the telephone,” Haig wrote. He also told Nixon he could consult whatever tapes existed to determine if Nixon or Dean was telling the truth.10 As the White House tapes indicate, Nixon told Haig about the taping system in great detail on May 8 and May 11. Once again Haig conflated details about Nixon and the tapes to hide what Haig knew about the tapes and when.
Nixon and aide Steve Bull walked to the room in the Old Executive Office Building that held the tapes. There Nixon quizzed Bull incessantly about the details of the taping system and the tapes themselves. At one point, Nixon asked why a certain conversation he thought had been recorded had not been. Bull told the president he was not sure and that there could have been a mechanical problem with the tape recorder. Nixon also impressed on Bull the need for secrecy about the taping system. “Nobody should know,” Nixon said.11
Nixon played one tape and then called Haig on the phone. They discussed the FBI wiretaps of government officials and journalists, which remained a sore subject for both men. Haig said he was looking into two possible candidates for director of the FBI, the job temporarily held by William Ruckelshaus.
“[Attorney General Elliot] Richardson wants very much to get Ruckelshaus over there as deputy attorney general,” Haig reported. “I don’t think so. He’s not a good team—”
“He’s not our man,” Nixon said of Ruckelshaus, who had already held three key positions in the administration.
“Yeah,” Haig said. “It’s not a good team.”12
The concerns about Archibald Cox, the new Watergate special prosecutor, had increased each day as Cox added lawyers to his team, asked for more documents, and said he would push his investigation into areas perilously close to Haig’s weak points. Richardson had appointed Cox, so that made him immediately suspect, and that suspicion now apparently had started to cling to Ruckelshaus. Haig and Nixon would learn in October just how dangerous a team Richardson and Ruckelshaus would turn out to be.
Haig again told Nixon that Watergate would blow over. “Hell, if this had been three weeks ago you’d be in—our phones would be buzzing every minute.”
Nixon was tapped out by listening to almost nine hours of tapes.
“This is hard work,” he told Haig, who agreed. “But I’ve got to do it. Got to do it. And it’s best for me to do it, too.”
“Only you,” Haig said. “Only you.”
After listening to more tapes, Nixon called Haig to express relief. “The whole damn meetings are a fraud,” Nixon said. “I didn’t realize it, but it was a damn fraud. Yeah. [Nixon’s staff] didn’t find it in the files, but I’ve listened to stuff, and you know, looking back I can see where [Dean] may have been involved. I wasn’t involved.”
Then Nixon asked Haig about Laird, whom Nixon was excited to have back in the fold because he considered him a savvy political operative and occasional pain in the ass. “Right. Right. Al, you’ve done a great job, believe me,” Nixon said. “Getting Mel to [unclear]. You’ll get a hell of a load off me if you get Mel, Bryce [Harlow]—the three of you will be—you’ll run the shop. You’re the chief of staff.”13
As Nixon spent most of the day listening to tapes, Richardson gave his first news conference as attorney general. Richardson answered questions carefully because he was gradually learning the details of the various cases tied to Watergate and wanted to avoid drawing fire from the White House. Still, Richardson could not ignore the obvious problems with Nixon’s claims about national security, which “even as put forward by the people who were directly involved, is not convincing.” He said Cox had the authority to investigate the Plumbers, a delegation of power that directly threatened Haig, who had asked for the Plumbers to investigate the first reports of leaks to Jack Anderson during the India-Pakistan war. That investigation, in coordination with Pentagon gumshoe Donald Stewart, uncovered the military spy ring. A criminal investigation could uncover Haig and Laird, who continued to hide his multiple operations spying on the White House.14
James McCord’s testimony in May fueled an interest by Senator Lowell Weicker, a Connecticut Republican, in investigating the activities of 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 started talking with William Sullivan to see if the White House had abused the powers of the FBI.15 Sullivan, eager to damage his rivals, was at first willing but then backed away. Sullivan had much to hide.
By June, Nixon and Haig knew they had a problem with Vice President Spiro Agnew that would not go away. In his memoirs, Haig claimed he first heard about Agnew’s legal problems in the second week of June, just a week after Nixon listened to his tapes with Dean. Richardson came to Haig’s office and told him that “Vice President Agnew’s name had come up in an investigation of kickbacks connected to public construction projects in Baltimore.”16
Richardson said the federal prosecutors in Baltimore were taking the case seriously. Once again, Haig’s account covered up what he already knew. Haig said he immediately feared that Congress would impeach Nixon and Agnew, which would make Carl Albert, the Democratic Speaker of the House from Oklahoma, president. “I called Fred Buzhardt and told him what Richardson had just told me and what I feared,” Haig wrote. Haig had to “decouple” the two problems, so he rushed to tell Nixon. “The President received the news with remarkable composure,” Haig wrote, not realizing that Nixon had known about Agnew’s problems since April 10, when the vice president told Bob Haldeman about the investigation. “I did not learn these details until years afterward,” Haig wrote.17 However, the White House tapes show that Nixon told Haig about Agnew on May 17, and an examination of Nixon’s tapes and logs shows that Haig did not go to the Oval Office after talking with Richardson to brief the president about Agnew.18 Instead, Nixon, Agnew, and Haig met on June 14, and Agnew shared his fears about his legal future and begged for a greater role in the administration. They also plotted their plans to defend Agnew and worried about Agnew’s ties with Charles Colson, the former Nixon aide who had become Agnew’s attorney.
“Well, I’d tell him that he’s doing a great job,” Haig told Nixon before Agnew walked into the Oval Office. But when it came to specifics, such as Agnew playing a greater role in economic policy, there just would not be room for him.
Nixon and Agnew traded small talk for a few minutes before Agnew said that one of his former assistants when he was Baltimore County executive in the 1960s, William Fornoff, had just pleaded guilty to bribery. “And now, he is—has made a deal,” Agnew said. “He’s singing about everybody he ever gave anything to and—”
“Oh God,” Nixon said.
“I’m going to be indicted, it looks like,” Agnew said.
“For what?” Nixon asked.
Agnew explained the campaign contributions and the transactional nature of construction projects in Maryland. Nixon interrupted, saying that if grand juries wanted to indict someone in that world, they could indict any governor, such as Nelson Rockefeller in New York.
“Well, there are some income tax things, something of that sort,” Agnew said.
“Oh, boy,” Nixon said.
“It’s just murder,” Agnew continued. “But that’s what’s going on, and I think we ought to brace ourselves, ’cause this is going to get worse.”
“I want your only contact on the matter of this to be with Al, and there’s only one other person you should know about that we are going to bring, and we’re going to announce it today,” Nixon said. “You probably can guess who it is. Bryce [Harlow]. Do you trust him?”
“Absolutely,” Agnew said.
“All right,” Nixon said. “And Bryce, I wanted to give—he makes some real smooth plays. What do you think, Al? You think that’s good?”
“Yes,” Haig said.
Nixon asked Agnew what “the hell we can do.”
“I don’t know,” Agnew said, adding that some of the people implicated in the investigation had asked him to intervene. “What do you want me to do, obstruct justice?” Agnew said he told them. He was afraid he would never be able to wash off the stink of the investigation. Eventually, someone, Agnew continued, would surface and say, “He gave me a kickback of some kind. Came over here and handed me $50,000.”
Just as Nixon feared the arrest of the Watergate burglars would uncover his other secrets, Agnew feared the investigation led by U.S. Attorney George Beall would reveal Agnew’s acceptance of bribes and tax evasion. That could also inflict harm on Beall’s brother, J. Glenn, the Republican senator from Maryland, who had received donations from a secret Nixon fund in 1970 to get elected.
“Glenn Beall’s the only way to influence this,” Agnew said.
“Well, Glenn Beall better take a real deep—we helped him bury that one in ’70,” Nixon said, “with [Chuck] Colson,” Nixon’s hard-nosed political aide whose law firm now represented Agnew.
Agnew said they had to get Glenn Beall to persuade his brother to end his investigation before it reached the vice president. Complicating the issue, Agnew continued, was that some of George Beall’s top prosecutors were Democrats and therefore out to get Agnew.
“See, now, frankly, if all of our enemies were in here investigating us, that’s the—” Nixon said.
“Some of them right here in our own bureaucracy,” Haig added.
Nixon tried to reassure Agnew.
“You forget you mentioned it to us, and let Al and me work on it,” Nixon said.
Agnew, not Haig, raised the issue of double impeachment.
“They’re trying to get both of us at the same time and get Carl Albert to be president,” Agnew said.
“Oh God,” Haig said.
“That’s what it really is,” Agnew said.
Nixon deftly turned the conversation from Agnew’s political problems to the role he could play in the administration. Apart from speaking tours during which he would attack the news media, Agnew’s role in the first term revolved around stoking the conservative base that Nixon might have alienated with his foreign policy moves with China and the Soviet Union. Now with Agnew in political jeopardy and the reelection campaign behind them, Agnew had little to do. Nixon had reduced him to begging.
“Isn’t there some foreign policy assignment that’s important I could do?” Agnew asked.
“Yes,” Nixon said. “Yes, there could be. I don’t want one, though, that looks like it’s froth.”19
Agnew got neither a bigger role in the administration nor assurance that Nixon could make his political problem go away. The vice president of the United States, a man a heartbeat away from the world’s most powerful job, had been reduced to a case that was assigned to two staff aides, Haig and Harlow.
Haig remained silent during most of the meeting because he knew that everything Agnew was telling Nixon was going on tape, including how the vice president wanted the president to use his power to obstruct justice.
On June 18 Nixon welcomed Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to Washington for their second face-to-face summit. Despite the cloud of Watergate, they accomplished much, reaching deals on agricultural sales to continued nuclear arms limits. Nixon relished this part of the job, which played to his strengths and helped him escape his political problems, even if for just a few days.
Nixon took a break from the summitry with Brezhnev for an Oval Office meeting with Haig and Laird. Before Laird arrived, the president and Haig again reviewed Agnew’s growing problems, which he had shared liberally with Haig, who told Nixon that Agnew is “very nervous about this Maryland thing.”
“We need that like a hole in the head,” Nixon said.
Haig said he wanted to reach out to George Beall, but without leaving a trace. He hoped Laird, the White House’s best advocate with Congress, would talk to Beall’s brother and ask him to make sure he had his aggressive assistant U.S. attorneys, many of them Democrats, under control.
“I think you better talk to Mel,” Nixon said.
“I’ll talk to him,” Haig answered.
After some back and forth, Nixon reconsidered. “Is Mel or Harlow the best to do this?”
“Harlow is in St. Croix,” Haig said.
Nixon suggested that congressional relations chief William Timmons should make the contact with Senator Beall instead of Laird. “He’s more discreet,” Nixon said.
Then, as he had throughout the day, Haig gave Nixon more false hope about Dean’s impending testimony, saying that the revelations that Dean had used campaign money to help pay for his wedding in the fall of 1972 would destroy Dean’s credibility. “It just finishes Dean as a threat,” Haig said in another classic misreading of the situation.20
Nixon and Brezhnev ended their summit with meetings in San Clemente, where Nixon remained after Brezhnev departed. It was there that Nixon and Haig monitored the much-anticipated appearance of Dean before the Watergate committee.
On June 25 Dean, remade from a blond playboy into a mild-mannered young lawyer, sat before the Senate Watergate Committee to give the testimony that Nixon had feared because he knew just how much Dean knew about the cover-up. Some of the earlier leaks had helped force Nixon to release the May 22 white paper in which the president acknowledged trying to hide White House connections to Watergate. Earlier in June, leaks about Dean’s impending testimony forced Nixon to spend an entire day listening to tapes of his meetings with Dean. Nixon felt the tapes showed he was telling the truth, but he still worried about his exposure to impeachment.
Dean started slowly by reading a lengthy prepared statement that consumed the first day of testimony. He recounted incident by incident from the moment he arrived at the White House, and with each step, there seemed to be plenty of blame to go around. Dean tried to downplay some of his claims, saying he was naming fellow Nixon aides only because he had to. “Some of these people I will be referring to are friends, some are men I greatly admire and respect, and particularly with reference to the President of the United States,” he said. “I would like to say this. It is my honest belief that while the President was involved that he did not realize or appreciate at any time the implications of his involvement, and I think that when the facts come out that the President is forgiven.”21
Dean’s first day of testimony touched on the decisions made by John Mitchell, the former attorney general who ran Nixon’s reelection campaign, and their desire for political intelligence for the 1972 race. Dean also distanced himself from the Huston Plan, the aborted attempt to unshackle the domestic intelligence apparatus. “I was instructed by Haldeman to see what I could do to get the plan implemented,” Dean said of a 1970 order from Nixon’s chief of staff. “I thought the plan was totally uncalled for and unjustified.” Instead, Dean said, he agreed to work on an intelligence evaluation committee that would coordinate information gathered across the intelligence community. After that, the administration, he said, could remove the restraints on some intelligence-gathering practices that were called for in the Huston Plan.22 However, Dean was a far more active participant in the intelligence world than he portrayed during the Watergate hearings. CIA records show that Dean was one of two main recipients, along with Henry Kissinger, at the White House of intelligence collected by the agency’s controversial CHAOS program, which monitored antiwar and student groups.23
Dean also told of the White House’s deliberations after the Watergate break-in and how the White House wanted to help shape the Republican staff of the Senate Watergate committee, right down to selecting the general counsel. Although Dean was an avid consumer of political intelligence developed by the reelection campaign and the in-house White House investigators, he professed shock at some of the plans developed by G. Gordon Liddy, the campaign’s counsel. “I did not fully understand everything Mr. Liddy was recommending at the time because some of the concepts were mind-boggling and the charters were in code names,” Dean said.24
After the Watergate burglars were arrested and tied back to the Nixon campaign and the White House, Dean said he followed orders to facilitate the cover-up and did not start anything on his own initiative. John Ehrlichman, he said, told Dean to go to Vernon Walters, the number 2 official at the CIA, to get the agency’s help in paying off the burglars. “I also recall Ehrlichman saying something to the effect that General Walters seems to have forgotten how he got where he is today,” Dean said.25
As for his most telling moment in the cover-up, Dean said he told Nixon on March 21 that “there was a cancer growing on the Presidency and that if the cancer was not removed that the President himself would be killed by it. I also told him that it was important that this cancer be removed immediately because it was growing more deadly every day. I then gave him what I told him would be a broad overview of the situation and I would come back and fill in the details and answer any questions he might have about the matter.”26 In Dean’s retelling, he felt the pangs of conscience about the growing nature of the Watergate cover-up and felt compelled to tell Nixon. Dean used the phrase “cancer on the presidency,” the same phrase that appeared in his early May interview with Newsweek magazine and that grabbed the most attention in May. The context in the actual conversation, which would not be seen for months, was different. Nixon and Dean met with Haldeman, not alone, and Dean’s warning to Nixon was not one of aggrieved conscience but one of concern that the cover-up would not hold.
“In other words, you, [what is] your judgment as to where it stands and where we go now[?]” Nixon asked Dean on March 21.
“I think, I think that, uh, there’s no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’re, we’ve got. We have a cancer—within, close to the presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding, it grows geometrically now because it compounds itself. Uh, that’ll be clear as I explain, you know, some of the details, uh, of why it is, and it basically is because first, we’re being blackmailed, second, uh, people are going to start perjuring themselves very quickly that have not had to perjure themselves to protect other people and the like.”27
Such differences were why Nixon felt reassured when he listened to the Dean tapes on June 4. Nixon knew Dean wanted to save himself at Nixon’s expense and believed the tapes would prove Nixon was telling the truth. “I did not watch the hearings, but the reports I read filled me with frustration and anger,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. “Dean, I felt, was re-creating history in the image of his own defense.”28
About five weeks after his first outreach to the White House, which led Fred Buzhardt to get him prosecuted for extortion, Pentagon investigator Donald Stewart contacted the White House again on June 25. This time, he wrote a letter to William Baroody, a member of the White House staff and close aide to Laird. Stewart sought Baroody’s “guidance and assistance” in getting out of the Pentagon and another job somewhere else. He would not reveal anything that had a national security interest, Stewart wrote, although he felt no limits on talking about the Ellsberg and Jack Anderson cases because he did not believe Buzhardt’s “interest in the Ellsberg or Anderson case was for security interest but rather totally for political considerations. . . . I knew professionally he [Buzhardt] was running the [Ellsberg] case for politics and not security.” As for the Anderson-Radford case, the details spoke for themselves, since everyone involved was still working and not being punished. “As you can see, the foregoing is enough to upset an honest investigator and I just want to get the hell out of DoD.”29
Just as he had with his telephone call in May to Richard Tufaro, Stewart had miscalculated. Baroody was no ordinary White House staffer but a longtime aide and friend of Laird, having joined the Wisconsin Republican’s staff on the House Appropriations Committee in 1961 and then followed Laird to the Pentagon in 1969. Baroody was more than an aide; he was a Laird loyalist and the most likely person in the White House to sound the alarm on the threat Stewart caused.
Dean’s testimony stretched into a second day, and he finally concluded reading his statement. Weicker, who had started pulling a thread of investigation that led to the police state tactics used by the White House, focused on those topics when he questioned Dean. If allowed to go unchecked, Weicker could have stumbled on details of the FBI wiretaps and other programs that would have implicated Haig.
Weicker voiced an even greater threat to Haig, although no one other than Haig and perhaps Sullivan realized it at the time.
“Mr. Chairman. I think one point that I would like to make clear here is that I have had a rather lengthy discussion with Mr. Sullivan on the subject matter which is being discussed here now,” Weicker said. “I know that it would not be fair for me to state what the substance of that conversation was, I would much prefer to have it with Mr. Sullivan and I would hope when we are through with this particular witness we will give Mr. Sullivan the opportunity to explain his particular role in this matter.”30
Before the final day of testimony, Haig, Buzhardt, and Garment made a half-hearted attempt to reel in Dean and challenge some of the inconsistencies in his testimony. In what was called the “Golden Boy” memo, they collected a series of details in which Dean presented false or misleading information to the committee.
The White House gave the information not to Howard Baker, the committee’s top Republican, or his staff but to Senator Daniel K. Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii and a World War II hero. Inouye read the details of the memo to Dean on June 27, and Dean danced around the discrepancies between his earlier interviews and his testimony. While Dean was shaken by some of the questions, they had little impact, and many of the memo’s details focused just as much on the alleged illegal activities of John Mitchell, Nixon’s former attorney general and campaign manager. Under questioning by Senator Edward Gurney, a Florida Republican and Nixon’s biggest defender on the committee, Dean said the idea to have the CIA block the FBI’s Watergate investigation was Mitchell’s idea.
“Mitchell brought it up to you and then you brought it up to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, is that right?” Gurney asked.
“That is correct, yes,” Dean said.31
It was not correct. Mitchell’s logs would later show that he never spoke to Dean during the time in which Dean said they had the conversation that led to the fateful “smoking gun” conversation between Nixon and Haldeman on June 23, 1972.32
But, as Nixon soon realized, the facts did not matter. “I worried about the wrong problem,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. “I went off on a tangent, concentrating all our attention and resources on trying to refute Dean by pointing out his exaggerations, distortions, discrepancies. But even as we geared up to do this, the real issue had already changed. It no longer made any difference that not all of Dean’s testimony was accurate. It only mattered if any of his testimony was accurate. And Dean’s account of the crucial March 21 meeting was more accurate than my own had been. I did not see it then, but in the end it would make less difference that I was not as involved as Dean had alleged than that I was not as uninvolved as I had claimed.”33
While Haig and Buzhardt had struck out in challenging Dean’s testimony, on June 28 they focused on attacking Stewart. Buzhardt and Garment thought Stewart was trying to blackmail the White House into giving him another job, even making him FBI director. Garment said he was swayed by Haig and Buzhardt, who told Garment something along the lines of Stewart being a “troublemaker and we should do something.”34 Buzhardt, Garment said, “believed it would be calamitous for the country to have [the spy ring] come out. Haig also felt this way. . . . I accepted that the disclosure of Moorer-Radford would be hurtful.” Buzhardt called Elliot Richardson on June 28 to talk about prosecuting Stewart, and Garment sent Richardson an “eyes only” letter the next day. He included the memo Tufaro wrote in May and Stewart’s letter from a few days earlier to Baroody. “Stewart,” Garment wrote, “is using the threat of disclosure” to leverage a high-level job. Richardson, Garment concluded, needed to investigate the issue to determine if Stewart should be prosecuted.35
Buzhardt had other business in the last week of June. He went to Laird’s home one evening near the end of the month to visit his old friend and boss at the Pentagon, and they went into Laird’s basement.
“I’ve misled you, Mel,” Laird said that Buzhardt told him. “The president was involved in the cover-up.”
“How do you know?” Laird asked.
“I’ve listened to some of the tapes,” Buzhardt said, “and he was in the cover-up right up to his eyeballs from the beginning.”36
That was a stunning disclosure from the president’s own attorney, one that violated attorney-client privilege and showed that the bond between Buzhardt and Laird outweighed that between Buzhardt and the president. It also indicated that Buzhardt knew about the June 23, 1972, taped conversation between Nixon and Bob Haldeman. Only Haig, who knew about the taping system and had listened to Haldeman and Nixon discuss the June 23 meeting, could have guided Buzhardt to that tape.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this, because I am counsel for President Nixon,” Laird said Buzhardt told him. “I was your counsel for four years over in Defense, and I’ve always tried to protect you. I’ve gone over all the tapes, and he’s guilty.”
Buzhardt’s admission meant that he, too, was obstructing justice, because he had evidence of Nixon’s guilt, as did Haig. What Laird did next would further unravel Nixon’s defense. “I felt that I had to tell Bryce [Harlow],” Laird said.
So by the end of June, four of Nixon’s main defenders, all of whom joined the White House after May 3, knew he was guilty. Haig, Buzhardt, Laird, and Harlow had to argue Nixon’s innocence before Republican members of Congress and the media. They would all claim ignorance about the truth as they served their own interests and while ostensibly claiming to protect the president.
Laird said he confronted Nixon the next day as they walked back to the Oval Office after an early evening meeting in Nixon’s hideaway office in the Executive Office Building.
“That’s when I confronted Nixon,” said Laird. “I can remember it as if it were yesterday. I told him that I had been advised that he had not leveled with me on his involvement in the Watergate cover-up, and it was hard for me to stay and work there. I said at the time, ‘I would have come here probably anyway, if you’d have told me the truth. I was here to help because my friends on the Hill wanted me to be here to help. But having not been told the truth, it’s very hard to help somebody. I just can’t stay.’”
“Well, I hope you don’t leave,” Nixon said.37
Such a dramatic conversation would have alerted Nixon of the depth of his political problems. But if it happened, it was not in the last week of June or the first week of July. Nixon was in San Clemente from June 23 until July 9. His schedule for June indicates no meetings with Laird at the Old Executive Office Building, and no recordings exist of any such meetings.38 Instead, it is more likely that Buzhardt knew about Nixon’s guilt far earlier than he told Laird, his old friend, and that Laird took the job anyway because he had priorities that went beyond Nixon. Laird knew from the four years of the first term that Nixon routinely excluded him from information and that the uniformed military distrusted the president. Laird could cover up the multiple ways that he and the military spied on Nixon better from inside the White House than from anywhere else.