About ninety million Americans watched some or all of John Dean’s Senate testimony, which riveted the nation and rattled the White House. Still, Dean had not proved that Nixon had obstructed justice by abetting the cover-up or that he knew anything about the Watergate break-in. Each day, more Americans believed Nixon knew more than he admitted, but such feelings could not impeach him or make him quit, regardless of the president’s private musings in the White House.
Nixon spent the first nine days of the month at his home in San Clemente, California, which on July 3 became the focus of more unwanted scrutiny. The Los Angeles Times reported that morning that Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox had started an initial inquiry into the $1.5 million that Nixon had paid for the home and the source of his money.1 Cox and his staff wanted to know if any of that money had come from unions, corporations, or Republican campaign donors. Ever since Elliot Richardson named Cox, Nixon had suspected Cox’s motives, believing the former Harvard Law School dean was out to get him for purely partisan reasons and wanted to remove him with the help of a cadre of dedicated and highly partisan prosecutors. Haig fed Nixon’s paranoia, perhaps because he also suspected Cox wanted to take his investigation toward Haig.
Nixon told Haig to call Richardson back in Washington to share Nixon’s dissatisfaction. At the same time, George Beall’s team of prosecutors had driven from Baltimore to Washington to tell Richardson about the deepening investigation into Vice President Spiro Agnew. Haig had known since May that Agnew was in jeopardy as the grand jury into bribery and kickbacks into Maryland government contracting gained momentum. Agnew himself told Nixon and Haig in June that he feared a possible indictment, and Agnew had confessed his fears for his future to Haig since then. That afternoon, Richardson performed a delicate dance as he sat in his conference room with Beall and his prosecutors and then darted into his private office to talk to Haig, who kept demanding answers after talking to Nixon. Shortly after 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Haig again called Richardson, and Nixon got on the line, telling the attorney general he wanted a clear-cut and immediate public denial from Cox that any investigation into the San Clemente purchase was going on. Cox would give Nixon that denial, but the pressure from the president had so unnerved Richardson that he pondered quitting that day.2
While the countdown to Agnew’s eventual demise continued, the Senate committee closed in on two fronts that threatened Haig and Nixon: the existence of the White House taping system and the internal security plans of the White House, which also included the FBI wiretaps that Haig enabled. On July 5 Larry Higby, a deputy to Bob Haldeman and then Haig, met with committee staffers to describe the workings of the White House staff, particularly as they related to Haldeman. Along with Nixon, Haldeman, and Alexander Butterfield, Higby was one of four people in the White House who knew about the taping system, because he had passed Haldeman’s order to Butterfield to have it installed. Weeks earlier, Higby had asked Haldeman what he should do if the committee asked him about the tapes. Haldeman told Higby to claim executive privilege and say no more. During his July 5 interview, Higby felt the questions were heading to the taping system, but they eventually shifted direction, and he avoided having to say anything. Soon, Higby knew, someone who knew about the tapes would be asked a direct question.3
The next day, Higby told Haig about the meeting and asked what he should do if he was asked about the tapes in another interview. “I told him, ‘Al, they’re eventually going to get to the taping system,’” Higby said. Haig said the committee already knew about recordings made with Nixon’s Dictabelt machine, but Higby said the committee seemed on the verge of discovering the entire taping system, which Higby then described to Haig in greater detail. Haig, Higby said, seemed astonished. “‘I’ll get back to you.’ And I said, ‘Fine. I’ve got to have guidance before I go up there.’” Higby had not been told yet that he would definitely be called to testify, but he believed it likely that he would be called.4
Higby expected Haig to also tell him to claim executive privilege. Instead, Haig told Higby the next day, July 7, to tell the truth, which Higby interpreted as meaning he should tell the committee about the tapes. That surprised Higby, but he thought Haig was just acting on Nixon’s orders.5
Nixon was pushing back against Senator Sam Ervin and his committee. On July 7 he told the senator that he would neither appear before the committee nor give it any documents.6 He did not know that soon enough he would be in a bigger fight over the fate of something far more damaging than any documents. In a misguided attempt to discredit Dean or somehow sabotage the White House’s own case, Buzhardt, with Haig’s approval, was sending documents to the committee’s minority staff that would eventually boomerang back against Nixon.7
Senator Lowell Weicker, the maverick Connecticut Republican on the Watergate committee, was pushing ahead with his investigation into the various intelligence activities within the White House, starting with the Intelligence Evaluation Committee—the residue of the stillborn Huston Plan—and the FBI wiretaps. He or his staff had spoken with William Sullivan, the former FBI associate director, in May and June about the wiretaps and potential abuses of the FBI’s Intelligence Division and the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, which had been under the direction of Robert Mardian, who later became the lawyer for the Nixon reelection committee. After his first attempts at obtaining information from the FBI and Cox’s office were rebuffed as too broad, Weicker kept trying.
He and Sullivan met again on July 9 in Washington.
Weicker said he wanted to narrow the request to “those areas where there might be a request that was not correct.”
Sullivan knew Weicker wanted him to testify before the committee, which he did not want to do. Under oath, unanticipated questions could arise and generate unexpected, embarrassing, or incriminating answers. Angry senators with an ax to grind could take their frustrations out on the witnesses, sparking a confrontation that could alter lives and careers. Although he was at the end of his career, Sullivan still harbored a desire to return to the FBI, which would not be helped by testifying before an open committee.
Sullivan hinted that he could lead Weicker to records that showed requests for illegal surveillance from the White House. Weicker wanted to know more about the FBI wiretaps, so he, Sullivan, and an aide went off to talk alone.
Why did the records of the wiretaps leave the FBI? Weicker asked.
“Mardian said there was a presidential request that the taps be brought in—then the request that the summaries of the taps be collected,” Sullivan said. “[Mardian] wanted them all together in one bundle.”8
Sullivan was maintaining the lie that he had told FBI investigators back in May, that he had nothing to do with Mardian’s request to hand over the tap logs. In fact, it was Sullivan who created Mardian’s request by telling him in July 1971 that he feared that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, fearful that Nixon would try to fire him, would use the existence of the taps to blackmail Nixon into keeping him. Mardian then told Attorney General John Mitchell, who told Nixon, who ordered Mardian to fly to San Clemente and meet with him. Upon his return, Mardian asked Sullivan for the logs.
All of the details of the wiretaps were kept in Sullivan’s office, away from the central files, Sullivan said. Hoover knew the taps were trouble and wanted to keep his distance. “I had seen nothing like it in thirty years at the FBI,” Sullivan said.
On July 12 Sullivan was interviewed by Watergate committee investigator Scott Armstrong, a high school friend of Post reporter Bob Woodward. Once again, Sullivan was asked about the FBI wiretaps, and he repeated the lie that he had nothing to do with Mardian’s request for tap logs. However, Mardian did not know the wiretaps existed until Sullivan told him.9
Haig and Buzhardt’s continued cover-up of Haig’s aid to the military spy ring hit a snag on July 2, when Henry Petersen, chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, told Attorney General Elliot Richardson there was no reason to prosecute Pentagon investigator Donald Stewart for blackmail. “We do not believe that the materials furnished by you and Mr. Garment warrant a criminal investigation of Stewart,” and he added that it “is not at all clear” that Stewart had made a “threat” to disclose classified information, Petersen wrote. Richardson did not care. He wrote a note on Petersen’s memo asking if Stewart could be charged with extortion or blackmail. That note landed on the desk of Carl Belcher, the head of the General Crimes Division at Justice. Stewart remained oblivious to all these machinations; he had not heard back from William Baroody after his June 25 letter, and no one had told him that his pleas had somehow been turned into evidence of alleged blackmail.10
On July 11 Mitchell, Nixon’s former law partner and first attorney general, gave the Senate Watergate committee a glimpse of what he thought was happening inside the White House. When Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii asked Mitchell what the White House would do if the committee subpoenaed the papers that John Dean had stolen from the White House, Mitchell said, “Well, I am afraid you are going to have to ask Mr. Buzhardt that; he seems to be making most of the decisions over there.”11
The following day, July 12, would upend Nixon’s presidency. He awoke around 5:00 a.m., wracked by a sharp pain in his chest. The previous weeks had worn down his health and resistance to infection. At 5:45 a.m. he called Maj. Gen. Walter Tkach, his physician, who led several examinations in which one doctor thought Nixon had an intestinal infection, while another diagnosed pneumonia.12
Nixon pushed ahead much of the day, meeting with doctors in the morning and then with Henry Kissinger and the West German foreign minister. He then spoke with Senator Ervin and said he would not give the committee presidential files. Ervin had written Nixon on July 7 warning about a possible constitutional confrontation. Nixon thought Ervin was grandstanding, mostly because Ervin leaked the letter to the press before he sent it. While he declined to give up the documents, Nixon agreed to meet with Ervin one-on-one later to hash out the details.13
By the end of the day, Nixon was exhausted. Tkach had concluded the president had viral pneumonia. Nixon told Haig he needed to check into the hospital and “sit on my ass for a week.” Although sick, Nixon remained combative. “Okay, fine, they want the papers,” Nixon said about the committee’s request. “They aren’t going to get the papers.”
Haig told Nixon that Richard Moore, a White House aide who had been in the office with Nixon and Dean during some of their March meetings on the cover-up, had been a devastating witness before the Watergate panel.
“He got up there and read a statement that was just—that was the best thing ever,” Haig said. “He just killed Dean. Absolutely crucified him.”14
During his statement, Moore contradicted Dean’s testimony two weeks earlier about what Nixon knew during that week in March. “Indeed, Mr. Dean’s own account that he and I agreed on the importance of persuading the President to make a prompt disclosure of all that the President had just learned is hardly compatible with a belief on Mr. Dean’s part that the President himself had known the critical facts all along,” Moore said at the end of his opening statement. “In one of my talks with the President, the President said he had kept asking himself whether there had been any sign or clue which should have led him to discover the true facts earlier. I told him that I wished that I had been more skeptical and inquisitive so that I could have served the Presidency better.”15
Moore “clobbered” Dean and discredited him, Haig said.16
Dean’s credibility remained a huge obstacle for Nixon’s opponents. In the weeks running up to Dean’s testimony, his leaks to sympathetic reporters created a blizzard of stories that carried Dean’s claims about Nixon and the cover-up. The Newsweek interview in early May that first mentioned the “cancer on the presidency” had focused attention on Dean’s claims of Nixon’s alleged role in the cover-up. Dean repeated that phrase during his widely watched testimony, and most viewers in the Senate or on television believed him over Nixon. But his testimony was not conclusive enough to spur impeachment. Soon Nixon’s enemies would get that chance, courtesy of Haig.
But first, Nixon, Haig, Ron Ziegler, and Tkach needed to explain where Nixon was going and why.
“In any event, if it is just a virus, my inclination is to go,” Nixon said. “I don’t know, thinking of the PR aspects, Ron, people don’t go to a hospital for a virus. They stay at home, don’t they?”
“Yes, they do, sir,” Tkach said. “They go to the hospital for a virus.”
“Really?” Nixon asked.
“Yes, sir,” Tkach replied.
“Particularly a president,” Ziegler said.
“What do you think, Al?” Nixon asked, his dependence on Haig at its highest level.
“Well, I think the description on it—it has to be—there can’t be any question about that in terms of the description,” Haig said. “And that we have to settle before the president goes.”
“Yeah, that,” Ziegler said.
“Sounds like a hospital situation,” Haig said.
“It has got to be one that the people are convinced that he ought to go to the hospital,” Nixon said.
“Right, sir,” Tkach said.
“And you have got to say—quite frankly, we have to get the diagnosis before we think of this—even talk,” Ziegler said. “But let’s say it is diagnosed as—hopefully it will be—as a virus. The president does feel bad. He feels weak. He has a high fever. ‘This afternoon the president was diagnosed by his physician to have a high-grade virus, and he’s running a high fever. As a result . . . the president obviously feels tired,’ which he does. ‘The doctors suggest that he check into Bethesda Naval Hospital today.’”
Tired and despondent, Nixon leaned on Haig, who had isolated most of the staff from the president, with the possible exception of Ziegler. “This will really accomplish what the bastards want, Al,” he said. “They’ve killed me. Get rid of the old son of a bitch—people don’t want him anyway. We’ve heard that. The only time the press room will ever be happy is when they write my obituary—only time.”17
At 9:15 p.m. Nixon checked into the hospital, hoping to feel better but still determined to maintain the appearance of a president working hard at his job.18
The next morning, during the hearing, Moore resumed describing what he, Nixon, and Dean did in March to explain away what the White House had known about the Watergate break-in and cover-up. Moore damaged Dean’s credibility, although the committee remained focused on confirming what Dean said he told Nixon about the cover-up. Fred Buzhardt had given the committee the key to unlock that mystery.
Moore’s testimony stretched into the early afternoon of July 13. Fred Thompson, the committee’s minority counsel, had been provided an account of one of Moore’s conversations with Dean and Nixon in March, and Terry Lenzner, a tenacious committee investigator, asked Moore about the apparently verbatim account of the conversation. Was it accurate?
Moore and his attorney, Herbert Miller, were confused. They knew nothing about the document from which Lenzner was reading, nor did they know its origin.
Thompson eventually interrupted to say that Buzhardt had told him the memo’s substance over the telephone. Thompson did not remember the exact date he received the information, he said, but “I took longhand notes. That same day, I dictated from those notes the summary which has been referred to.” He then gave the document to Sam Dash, the committee’s chief counsel, and the staff. “Now, perhaps the preciseness of those conversations and so forth can be disputed to a certain extent, but I believe it has been verified that the substance of what is in that document is accurate. Obviously, there is room for some slip-up in the nature of the way the thing was transmitted. We did not discuss at that time how it would be used or whether or not it would be made part of the record or whether or not it would be the official White House position. And that is the way it transpired and that resulted in the document we are referring to.”
“Mr. Thompson,” Dash said, “I could add this. On the receipt of it, I did make contact with Mr. Garment and Mr. Buzhardt so that if we were going to use it—they saw your reconstruction of the notes. They did come down to my office and read your notes and stated that although it was not a verbatim statement of the telephone call, it was generally accurate.”19
At the same time Moore was being presented with an account of a conversation captured by the White House recording system, the aide responsible for installing that system was meeting for the first time with committee staffers. Alexander Butterfield had been a deputy to Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman in Nixon’s first term and sat just outside the Oval Office. He saw Nixon multiple times a day, and on one day in April 1972, Haldeman asked Butterfield if he could hide $350,000 in cash that was part of a political fund that Haldeman controlled. Butterfield took the money to a friend’s safe-deposit box in a bank in northern Virginia. That money became the focus of some of the early reporting on Watergate by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. After his first term, Nixon appointed Butterfield, a former air force colonel, as director of the Federal Aviation Administration. In April 1973 Butterfield, his conscience troubled, went to federal prosecutors Earl Silbert and Seymour Glanzer to tell them about Haldeman’s odd request about the $350,000 and what Butterfield did with it.20 Butterfield also briefly testified before the grand jury looking into Watergate. Shortly after that, in early May, Butterfield called his friend at the White House, attorney Len Garment, and told him that he had testified before the grand jury. That, Butterfield thought, was that, until he got a call from investigators for the Watergate committee.
Woodward has written extensively about how he urged the Senate committee to interview Butterfield. In All the President’s Men, his 1974 book with Bernstein, Woodward said he first told the committee about Butterfield on May 17, the day after he had a fateful meeting with his secret source, Deep Throat, who Woodward said had told him that Butterfield was in charge of “internal security.”21 FBI files, however, contain no information about Butterfield as the head of internal security and barely any mentions of him at all. In The Last of the President’s Men, his 2015 book about Butterfield, Woodward made the claim again that he urged the committee to interview Butterfield.22
Committee staff members, starting with Dash and including investigators James Hamilton and Scott Armstrong, acknowledged that Woodward recommended an interview of Butterfield but said they were planning to interview him and the other “satellites” around Haldeman.23
Regardless of why Butterfield was there, he was nervous about the interview. He did not know exactly what the investigators wanted, but given the heat Haldeman had taken over the $350,000 and myriad other problems, Butterfield knew he risked trouble. At 2:15 p.m. he met with Armstrong, Gene Boyce, and Don Sanders, an investigator for the Republican committee members, and answered their questions calmly, detailing the inner workings of Nixon’s office—who sat where and who did what. He told them about the $350,000 stuffed into a briefcase and what he told the grand jury. After a couple of hours, Sanders remembered the document Buzhardt had dictated over the telephone to Thompson about Nixon’s contacts with Dean, which was the same document committee members were asking Moore about while the investigators were interviewing Butterfield. The memo surprised Butterfield, because he thought it looked too complete to have come from memory and that Buzhardt may have prepared it by consulting the tapes. He knew Haig knew about the taping system, because he had told him about it weeks earlier. Butterfield volunteered nothing, though, and no one asked him a direct question about the taping system.24
Sanders came back again to the Buzhardt memo, asking whether anyone could have had such a detailed account of the meetings. Butterfield said nothing. Then Sanders mentioned Dean’s testimony in June, when Dean said: “The President almost from the outset began asking me a number of leading questions, which was somewhat unlike his normal conversational relationships I had had with him, which made me think that the conversation was being taped and that a record was being made to protect himself.”25 Sanders asked if Dean had any reason to believe he was being taped. Butterfield, who, like many Americans, had watched the earlier hearings, knew he had information that could determine who was telling the truth and who was not. He decided to come clean. Yes, he told Sanders, Nixon had a series of recording devices in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, the Old Executive Building, and Camp David. His telephone calls were wired, too. If Nixon said anything in the places where he did the majority of his business, it was recorded for posterity.26 Now the committee investigators knew how to find the truth after they were pushed in a certain direction by evidence provided by Buzhardt, the president’s own attorney. Buzhardt’s document attempting to discredit Dean gave Sanders the opening to get Butterfield to make such a remarkable admission. Once the committee and special prosecutor Archibald Cox knew about the tapes, he would want copies of his own. Nixon was doomed from that moment.
After the interview with Butterfield, the three aides dispersed quickly. Armstrong and Boyce raced to Dash. Sanders found Thompson at a local hotel bar having a drink with a reporter. They all wanted Butterfield to testify as soon as possible. Dash talked to Ervin, and they agreed Butterfield had to testify. They prepared a subpoena.27
No one told Nixon.
The president, despite his hospitalization, kept a fairly busy schedule, as he met with Haig in the morning and his physicians, Kissinger, and family members throughout the day. He met with Haig in person twice that Friday, including between 6:00 and 6:19 p.m., after Butterfield had revealed the taping system to investigators.28 Dash said Thompson had called Buzhardt Friday evening, which means Buzhardt told Haig, who said nothing to Nixon, thereby depriving him of the chance to claim executive privilege.29
By Saturday morning, the committee leaders—Ervin and Republican Howard Baker—knew they had to squeeze in Butterfield. But Butterfield was flying that day to New Hampshire to open an airport terminal and was then leaving the following Tuesday for the Soviet Union on FAA business. That left Monday open for Butterfield to appear. Sometime that Saturday morning, a committee aide called Woodward and told him the news. “We interviewed Butterfield,” an unnamed committee aide told Woodward. “He told the whole story.” What story? Woodward asked. “Nixon bugged himself,” the aide said. Woodward quickly called Bernstein, and they suspected a White House trick. They did not report in All the President’s Men that they contacted anyone at the White House about their discovery, but given Woodward’s long connection to Haig, it seems unlikely Woodward did not call him. Their deliberations, however, did not include telling any of their editors, who remained ignorant of this revelation. Woodward called Ben Bradlee, the Post editor, at home at 9:30 p.m. He told Bradlee about Butterfield’s interview, and Bradlee told him it was a “B-plus” story. “See what more you can find out, but I wouldn’t bust one on it,” Bradlee said.30
In All the President’s Men, Woodward left a tantalizing piece of evidence that revealed how he could have known to suggest that the committee interview Butterfield. “All Saturday night, the subject gnawed at Woodward,” he and Bernstein wrote. “Butterfield had said that even Kissinger and Ehrlichman were unaware of the taping system. . . . Kissinger doesn’t know, Woodward reflected, and he thought, Kissinger probably knows almost everything, and he wouldn’t like the idea of secret taping systems plucking his sober words and advice out of the air—whether for posterity or some grand jury.”31 Butterfield mentioned Kissinger neither in his interview with the committee nor in his testimony. Only two people knew how the tapes could embarrass Kissinger: Richard Nixon and Alexander Haig. It was in the context of Nixon’s desire to keep Kissinger from lying about the FBI wiretaps that Nixon told Haig about the taping system on May 8 and May 11.
“I spent hours with him in this office,” Nixon told Haig about Kissinger on May 11. “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.32
Woodward made his first approach to the Watergate committee about Butterfield shortly after Nixon told Haig about the taping system, and they discussed how to use the tapes as leverage over Kissinger. Not even Butterfield knew that. Woodward’s source had to be Haig, who claimed in his memoirs that Woodward recommended the Butterfield interview “on instinct rather than hard information.”33
Butterfield flew to New Hampshire Saturday morning, dedicated an airport facility, and then flew home, the dread of testifying welling up inside him. On the flight home, he wrote down some remarks for his anticipated testimony, notes that ended up in the Watergate committee files. Despite the overwhelming importance of the taping system, Butterfield’s notes do not mention the tapes at all. Instead, he fixated on the $350,000 in cash he hid for Haldeman in April 1972. It was that money that Butterfield had testified about before the grand jury.
“Will you resign?” Butterfield wrote in his notes. “That one question I will answer. There is no reason for me to resign. My record is similar to that of General Haig. Throughout my entire government service I have been as honest and straightforward as he, conducted myself in an equally exemplary manner, and lived day in and day out by a standard of ethics, integrity and personal honor every bit as high. The President knows this. He knows of my military service and record, and of my long and close association with General Haig.”34
Butterfield had multiple telephone messages when he returned home Saturday afternoon. He called Armstrong, who told him to be prepared to testify Monday. That gave him little time to prepare for his Soviet Union trip the next day, Butterfield thought, and he did not want to testify. Desperate to find a way out of this deepening predicament, he called Baker at home. “I said, ‘I need to talk to you,’” Butterfield said in 2008. “I just wanted to talk to someone, you know, on that committee. So he said, ‘OK, come over tomorrow morning,’ meaning Sunday morning at 10:00. So I had my driver take me over there and I met with him. I went through this whole damn story, but all about the tapes and everything, everything. And he said, ‘Well, that’s what I heard last night.’ I mean he had heard it before. And I said, ‘You mean you knew all of this? You let me go on?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ And I said, ‘Well now, I’m concerned about being held up. I can’t be held up in a way. I’m leading this delegation and it’s important. I don’t want to get involved in the Watergate thing. I’m not involved anyway. I’m quite peripheral here.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I don’t think you’ll have to testify.’ And he said, ‘I’ll see to it that—I’ll do what I can.’”35
Baker had no intention of letting Butterfield off the hook, and Dash said Baker told Butterfield to call the White House.36 Butterfield also realized he could not count on Baker alone. He called Len Garment at the White House, was told Garment was out of town, and left a message. Meanwhile, word about the impending Butterfield testimony had reached Haig and Buzhardt. Contrary to Dash’s claim that Thompson spoke to Buzhardt on Friday, Thompson wrote that he talked to Buzhardt at the White House on Sunday and told him Butterfield would testify. Buzhardt pretended to be skeptical. “Well, I think that is significant, if it is true,” Buzhardt told Thompson. “We’ll get on it tomorrow.”37
Steve Bull, one of the few aides who also knew about the taping system, was called Sunday afternoon by Armstrong, who told him to be ready to testify. Bull assumed it was about the taping system and called Buzhardt. “No, they couldn’t know about that,” Buzhardt told Bull.38
When Garment landed at National Airport following a trip to Florida, he had a message waiting for him that told him to go immediately to the White House, where he found Haig and Buzhardt. By 5:00 p.m. the three men knew Butterfield would tell the committee about the tapes.39
Still, no one told Nixon.
That was not for lack of opportunities. Nixon’s calendar shows that the ailing president met or spoke with Haig twice that Sunday between 1:10 p.m. and 2:11 p.m. Haig maintained that he did not know that Butterfield would reveal the tapes until after the fact, a claim that is clearly not true. Haig and Buzhardt could have recommended that Nixon claim executive privilege for Butterfield and stopped his testimony. They did not, so Butterfield’s rushed trip to the committee room continued.40
On Monday morning, Nixon said Haig told him about Butterfield’s interview and impending testimony. “I was shocked by this news,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. “As impossible as it must seem now, I had believed that the existence of the White House taping system would never be revealed. I thought that at least executive privilege would have been raised by any staff member before verifying its existence.”41
Haig maintained he did not tell Nixon about Butterfield’s testimony before it happened, but given Haig’s lies about when he learned about the taping system, Nixon’s version is more convincing. Nixon’s calendar shows that he spoke with Haig three times before Butterfield’s afternoon testimony and four times afterward.42
For his part, Butterfield tried to dodge his date with destiny. Committee aide Jim Hamilton tracked him down in a barbershop and told him that he needed to appear on Capitol Hill or Ervin would order federal marshals to drag him in.43 Butterfield first called Joseph Califano, his and Haig’s former boss at the Pentagon, for help. Califano said he could not help him and told him to call Garment, who told Butterfield he could not represent him because Garment was the president’s lawyer. Butterfield called Califano back; Califano then recommended that Butterfield testify without an attorney in order to make a better impression.44 By 2:00 p.m. he had been ushered into the hearing room and placed at the table facing the seven committee members.
Thompson, leading the questioning, wasted no time. “Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?” he asked.
“I was aware of listening devices; yes, sir,” Butterfield answered.45
Butterfield described where the recorders were, which rooms and telephones were tapped, and other details, but by then most viewers had stopped paying attention. The details meant little once Butterfield revealed that Nixon had recorded himself. There now existed the means to prove who was telling the truth: Nixon, Dean, or any of the other witnesses who told the committee what had happened inside the walls of the Oval Office. Before Butterfield left the hearing room, Buzhardt confirmed the existence of the taping system with a letter, which Ervin read out loud: “Dear Mr. Chairman: This letter is to confirm the fact stated to your Committee today by Mr. Alexander Butterfield that the President’s meetings and conversations in the White House have been recorded since the Spring of 1971. I am advised that this system, which is still in use, is similar to that employed by the last Administration, which discontinued from 1969 until the Spring of 1971. A more detailed statement concerning these procedures will be furnished to the Committee shortly. Sincerely, signed, Fred Buzhardt.”46 For someone just learning about the tapes, that letter came rather quickly, a sign that Butterfield’s appearance was no accident and his testimony no surprise.
In his memoirs Haig assessed the damage that he had brought about: Nixon’s “guilt or innocence had ceased to matter, because no President could survive the verbatim publication of his most intimate conversations, any more than a family could expect its reputation to be the same if everything discussed in the privacy of the home, where special assumptions based on trust and deep acquaintance apply, were to be published in the local newspaper.”47
Before the end of the day on July 16, Nixon had already dictated a letter to Treasury Secretary George Shultz declaring executive privilege for Secret Service agent Al Wong, whose team oversaw the taping system.48 That accomplished little, since Butterfield’s testimony, followed by an almost simultaneous confirmation by Buzhardt, told the committee and special prosecutor everything they needed to know. But it showed what Nixon would have done if he had known that Butterfield was going to testify about the tapes. Haig had told Nixon on May 14 that the committee was interested in talking to Butterfield, but he framed that interest only in the $350,000 that Haldeman had given Butterfield to hide for him in April 1972. If Nixon had known the committee’s interest extended to the taping system, there is no doubt he would have declared executive privilege for Butterfield.
Across the Potomac River, as the drama unfolded in the Senate hearing room with Butterfield, an aggrieved Donald Stewart wrote another memo to his superior at the Pentagon, Martin Hoffmann, complaining about the political pressures that had killed his investigation into the military spy ring. Stewart had no idea that the object of his dissatisfaction, Buzhardt, had been trying to get him prosecuted by the Justice Department for blackmail and extortion, but career prosecutors there had rebuffed the attempt as misguided and unsupported by the evidence.49 Stewart seethed at his post in the Pentagon; Buzhardt, with the help of then defense secretary Melvin Laird and Haig, shot down Stewart’s initial investigation into the spy ring. Stewart suspected there was more to it and that Buzhardt was covering up for his superiors.
The morning headlines on July 17 blared out the news about Butterfield’s revelation the previous afternoon. “Nixon Wired His Phone, Offices to Record All Conversations; Senators Will Seek the Tapes” was the headline on the front page of the New York Times.50 Other major papers did the same. The Watergate committee was not done. Called to the committee on July 17, Wong presented Ervin with the letter claiming executive privilege, and he was excused from the hearing.51 The day was all about damage control for the White House. Haig, Buzhardt, and Garment drove to Bethesda to meet with Nixon in the hospital. They were divided about what to do with the tapes. Buzhardt advised Nixon to destroy them before the committee or Archibald Cox issued subpoenas for them. After the subpoenas, he argued, it would be too late. Destroying the tapes then would mean obstruction of justice, a criminal and possibly impeachable offense. Garment said Nixon had to preserve the tapes.52 In another conversation, so did Bob Haldeman, calling them essential to Nixon’s defense. Haig tried to split the difference, saying that destroying the tapes would be considered a sign of guilt but that preserving them meant that Nixon’s opponents would eventually get them and use them against him. The president remained undecided but hoped, as he had told Haig two months earlier, that the tapes would catch his accusers, such as John Dean, in lies of their own.
Haig did not advocate destroying the tapes outright. Instead, he hoped others would do the job for him. When Haig brought Vice President Spiro Agnew to visit Nixon, Agnew urged Nixon to burn the tapes in a bonfire on the White House lawn.53 Nixon told Agnew he did not know what the tapes had recorded and had forgotten that the tapes were running most of the time, but he was not going to destroy them.54
Haig started July 18 by ordering the removal of the taping system. He placed the tapes themselves under the control of Maj. Gen. John Bennett, his deputy. “I did not discuss these actions with the President beforehand,” Haig wrote later, “and he never questioned them afterward.”55 Haig also wrote that he met with Nixon at 8:00 that morning, a meeting that never happened, according to Nixon’s own calendars.56 In one of the meetings they did have that day, Nixon reportedly told Haig that Butterfield may have done them a favor by disclosing the tapes, because Nixon believed the tapes would exonerate him.
“He had a way of gazing away into the middle distance as if distracted by a thought when hearing advice he did not want to hear,” Haig wrote. “That happened now. He lowered his voice. ‘Al, we know that Dean lied and the tapes proved that. We don’t know what other lies may be told by people who are trying to save themselves. Who knows what Ehrlichman might say, or even Bob Haldeman. The tapes are my best insurance against perjury. I can’t destroy them.’”57
By allowing Butterfield to testify, Haig set off a legal battle that would last until the end of Nixon’s presidency. The disclosure of the existence of the tapes undoubtedly hastened that end, and the battle started July 18 with a letter from Cox seeking the tapes of eight White House conversations.58 Cox’s formal request put the tapes firmly in the category of potential evidence collected in an ongoing criminal investigation, so destroying them would mean the potential obstruction of justice charges. Charles Alan Wright, a University of Texas law professor advising Nixon, wrote back for Nixon, saying the White House would not comply because only the president could decide if the tapes were in the public interest.59 On July 19 Nixon wrote in his diary that he should have destroyed the tapes after April 30, when Haldeman and Ehrlichman quit and Nixon fired Dean.60 That day, Ron Ziegler told the press that Nixon would not turn over the tapes.
As the tapes battle heated up, a cryptic paragraph appeared in a July 20 story in the New York Times. “Sources on Capitol Hill said that Melvin R. Laird, one of Mr. Nixon’s counselors, had informed Republican Congressional leaders that he believes pertinent sections of the tapes should be released and that he was arguing that position within the Administration,” the story said. “But, by Mr. Laird’s own admission, the President has not been willing to take his advice on Watergate matters.”61
As Laird admitted years later, he knew by this time that the tapes proved Nixon’s guilt. If he was arguing for their release, even if in limited form, he knew what that disclosure would do to the president.
On July 21 Nixon wrote another note: “If I had discussed illegal action, I would not have taped. If I had discussed illegal action and had taped I would have destroyed the tapes once the investigation began.”62 Nixon’s challenge, for which he did not realize he could not rely on Haig and Buzhardt for help, was how he could use the tapes to his advantage without losing control of them to the committee or to Cox. On July 23 Cox officially subpoenaed the eight tapes, declaring in a news conference that they were essential to determining the guilt or innocence of those under investigation.63 Haig called Attorney General Elliot Richardson to complain that Cox was out of control. Not only was he asking for tapes, but he threatened to push the investigation beyond Watergate, particularly to issues tied to Haig. Richardson would later tell the House Judiciary Committee that Haig said the “boss” was very “uptight” about Cox’s questions. “If we have to have a confrontation, we will have it,” Haig said, adding that Nixon wanted “a tight line drawn with no further mistakes.” “If Cox does not agree, we will get rid of Cox,” Haig said.64
Nixon responded on July 25 to Cox’s subpoena in a letter to District Judge John J. Sirica, in whose court the Watergate investigation had been since the break-in thirteen months earlier. “I have concluded, however, that it would be inconsistent with the public interest and with the Constitutional position of the Presidency to make available recordings of meetings and telephone conversations in which I was a participant and I must respectfully decline to do so,” Nixon wrote in the letter, which was read in court on July 26.65 That, Sirica said, amounted to a dare. “In short, the president asserted that he would turn over to the grand jury only what he wanted to turn over and that the courts had no power to compel him to turn over anything else,” the judge wrote later.66 Sirica turned the issue over to the grand jury investigating Watergate, and the grand jury voted to seek the tapes. Sirica signed a show cause order that day, directing Nixon’s team to appear in court on August 7 to show why the tapes should not be introduced as evidence before the grand jury. The tapes, Sirica said, would help determine if Dean or Nixon was telling the truth.
On July 22 Parade magazine, a Sunday newspaper supplement, published a story by columnist Jack Anderson in which he bragged about his recent stories exposing wrongdoing by the Nixon administration. Included was a brief mention of the Pentagon’s efforts to find officials who had leaked information to Anderson in December 1971 that eventually uncovered the network that was feeding White House secrets to Adm. Thomas Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The failed leak hunt, Anderson wrote, involved hauling suspects to room 3E933 of the Pentagon for interrogations. “They concluded mistakenly that the source was located on Henry Kissinger’s staff,” Anderson wrote of the investigators. “Innocent staff members were yanked from behind their desks and dragged to polygraph machines, although it was the White House, not my sources, doing the lying about Pakistan. Eventually an entire section of Kissinger’s staff was scattered around the world, and Adm. Robert Welander who headed it was exiled to the Atlantic fleet.”67 Most readers did not notice the reference, but Donald Stewart did. The Pentagon investigator had conducted some of his interviews into the military spy ring in room 3E933, and, already seething about his inability to get a new job, Stewart was outraged at Anderson’s casual reference to where Stewart did his work. Stewart considered Anderson a traitor for his columns that exposed military secrets, and he also blamed Buzhardt for scuttling his investigation. Stewart did not know that Buzhardt was trying to get the Justice Department to prosecute Stewart for extortion and blackmail.
Coincidentally, Donald Sanders of Howard Baker’s Watergate committee staff also read Anderson’s article. A former colleague of Stewart at the FBI, he recognized the room number where Stewart had grilled suspects at the Pentagon. He told two of his colleagues on the Republican committee staff, Fred Thompson and Howard Liebengood, and then called Stewart at the Pentagon on July 24. Within hours, Stewart was on Capitol Hill talking with Sanders and Liebengood. Baker, their boss, had long suspected that the growing Watergate scandal was about more than a simple office burglary. The May 22 white paper had hinted darkly at national security secrets so damaging that no one could mention them without causing great harm. Baker wanted to know more. Stewart did not disappoint.
Stewart told them that the Indian-Pakistan affair about which Anderson wrote had far greater dimensions than anyone imagined and that his investigation was killed for political reasons. Stewart said rear admirals Rembrandt Robinson and Robert Welander had used the NSC liaison office to squirrel away White House secrets, such as planned troop levels for the Vietnam War, and sent the information back to the Pentagon. They felt compelled to spy on the White House because of Nixon’s secrecy. They used Yeoman Charles Radford, who was detailed to the National Security Council, to steal documents for Robinson, Welander, and eventually Moorer. Stewart told the investigators that he had forced Radford to confess to supplying documents to his bosses, but Radford denied leaking secret documents to Jack Anderson.68
But Stewart only knew part of the story. Buzhardt had called Stewart back from a Florida vacation at Buzhardt’s request in early January 1972 to interrogate Welander, not knowing that John Ehrlichman and White House Plumber David Young had already questioned him and that Welander had implicated Haig in helping the spy ring. Soon after Stewart’s interview of Welander, Buzhardt provided a report to then defense secretary Laird that presented Haig, Moorer, and the military brass as victims of Radford’s perfidy. Stewart knew nothing of that report or the investigation conducted at the White House by Young, which included the first interview of Welander. The investigation into the leaks to Anderson and the spy ring had mysteriously stopped. Stewart, who saw the entire affair as an assault on the president, had always suspected that Buzhardt killed the investigation to cover up an embarrassing political scandal.69
At the White House, Haig and Buzhardt remained focused on the wiretaps and the potential exposure of the spy ring. On July 23 Haig called Richardson to complain about a questionnaire that Cox’s office sent to all government employees with a potential connection to wiretapping. Haig warned Richardson that Nixon wanted “a tight line drawn with no further mistakes.”70 Buzhardt also realized that Ehrlichman was scheduled to testify that week. Ehrlichman had overall authority over the White House special investigations unit, the Plumbers, which had investigated the spy ring and the Pentagon Papers leak. Some of the men who broke into the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist who treated Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, were later caught trying to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex. Part of Ehrlichman’s developing legal defense involved using his duties overseeing the Plumbers to explain that he was acting on Nixon’s orders. He particularly emphasized that role in relation to the spy ring, which Buzhardt and Haig could not afford to have Ehrlichman use in his defense. On July 23 Buzhardt wrote a letter to John Wilson, Ehrlichman’s attorney, claiming executive privilege over any mention of the spy ring. “As you know the President said in his Statement on May 22, 1973: ‘Executive privilege will not be invoked as to any testimony concerning possible criminal conduct or discussions of possible criminal conduct in matters presently under investigation, including the Watergate affair and the alleged coverup,’” Buzhardt wrote. “This is the total extent to which the President waived executive privilege. The 1971 investigation about which you inquired was in no way related to the Watergate affair, the alleged coverup, or to any Presidential election. This matter does involve most sensitive national security matters, the public disclosure of which would cause damage to the national security. Accordingly, if your clients, Mr. John F. Ehrlichman or Mr. Haldeman, are interrogated about this particular investigation, the President has requested that you inform the committee that your clients have been instructed by the President to decline to give testimony concerning this particular investigation, and that the President, in so instructing your clients, is doing so pursuant to the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers.”71 That meant Ehrlichman could not explain why he did what he did. It also stopped a line of questioning that would expose the roles of Haig, Buzhardt, and Laird in stealing White House secrets and then covering it up.
Buzhardt’s move, done with Haig’s approval, frustrated Baker. He had avidly prepared for Ehrlichman’s scheduled testimony on July 26. Not only did Baker want to provide Nixon with a possible explanation for what he had done before, during, and after Watergate, but Baker also wanted to know more about the apparent threats to national security. Ehrlichman took his seat at the witness table facing the committee’s seven senators, and Baker jumped into the details of Nixon’s May 22 white paper and any other situations about which Ehrlichman was familiar. “What I do want to know is the breadth and range of your information as to that event or other security problems that may have had some bearing on the contentions of the President in his May 22 statement,” Baker said.
Ehrlichman mentioned the 1971 friendship treaty between India and the Soviet Union and a CIA document that had appeared in the New York Times.
“What other examples?” Baker wanted to know.
“That is as far as I can go because that is all in the public domain and I am under an express injunction from Mr. Buzhardt that executive privilege has been invoked as to the other matters,” Ehrlichman responded, raising the Buzhardt letter for the first time.
Baker kept pressing and got Ehrlichman to acknowledge the issue concerned the December 1971 war between India and Pakistan. Like a good lawyer, Baker knew the answers to the questions he was asking, and Ehrlichman most likely realized it, too. But Buzhardt’s letter prevented Ehrlichman from answering without violating the claim of executive privilege.
“This is a terribly important matter because on the one hand, you have an allegation by the President that national security matters accounted for part of his conduct subsequent to Watergate,” Baker said. “On the other hand, we have examples of wiretapping, of the Ellsberg break-in and other things, and very frankly, I am not sure you have entirely convinced all of the committee that these are matters of extraordinary national importance that they fit the description that the President makes in his statement of May 22.”72
Nixon’s May 22 white paper, which Haig and Buzhardt had forced on him, was coming back to haunt him. In it Nixon had claimed he could not release some information because it was too secret and exposing it would endanger national security. And there were deep secrets of tremendous gravity. The military spy ring exposed a huge rift between the president and the military, and it also involved top military leaders leaking vital secrets to derail a presidential order—the movement of an aircraft carrier task force to the Bay of Bengal. But while the white paper contained Nixon’s confession of some parts of the cover-up, it also contained tantalizing hints of other matters, such as the spy ring, the details of which Baker wanted Ehrlichman to confirm.
“I want to put a specific question to you,” Baker said. “Whether or not any of these functions had to do with anything related to, say, the Indo-Pakistani war.”
Ehrlichman evaded, but only because Buzhardt’s letter prevented him from doing so.
“What I am asking you is, is it that important or am I playing games?” Baker asked.
“In my opinion it is that important, Senator,” Ehrlichman answered.73
Ehrlichman had stonewalled the committee enough on the issue that Baker let it drop. His time had expired, and none of the other senators followed suit. But Baker had pried enough information from the reluctant Ehrlichman to pique the curiosity of those in the room, particularly two reporters, Jim Squires of the Chicago Tribune and Dan Thomasson of the Scripps-Howard newspapers. They wanted to know more about the Plumbers investigation, which had surfaced in the dialogue between Baker and John Wilson, Ehrlichman’s attorney. Their editors allowed them to work together to see what new details they could find in what they started off knowing was an investigation tied to the India-Pakistan war, ensuring that this would not be the last the White House would hear of it. What neither Squires nor Thomasson knew was that Bob Woodward of the Washington Post already knew about the military spy ring and was sitting on the story.
The following day, Ervin and Baker met secretly with Buzhardt and Garment from the White House to discuss Ehrlichman’s testimony and whether the committee would investigate the India-Pakistan crisis and the military spy ring. Buzhardt and Garment argued that the issue was not germane to Watergate and too potentially explosive to be disclosed. Ervin reluctantly agreed, but Baker said little, because he wanted to investigate more on his own. The White House men also smeared Stewart by claiming he had tried to blackmail the president, although they knew the Justice Department had already rejected that claim as groundless. The senators’ decision gave Buzhardt and Haig a brief reprieve; they did not know then that Squires and Thomasson were pursuing the story.74
Baker took one more shot. Stewart had told Sanders and Liebengood that he had worked with White House aide David Young on the spy ring investigation. Shortly after the meeting with Buzhardt and Garment, Baker met with Young, who declined to say anything. “This is the one thing that the president told me not to discuss at all, and I won’t,” Young said in the off-the-record meeting.75 At this point, any investigation by a member of the Senate Watergate committee into the spy ring came to an end. Haig and Buzhardt had dodged a bullet, although just for a few months.
While Buzhardt and Garment were fighting off the potential Senate investigation into the spy ring, the federal prosecutors from Baltimore handling the investigation into Spiro Agnew returned to Washington for another briefing with Richardson. The case against Agnew continued to get stronger, U.S. Attorney George Beall told Richardson, and the probability that Agnew would be charged was close to 100 percent. Richardson then told Haig he needed to see Nixon. Haig told him that Agnew had already talked to him and Nixon and claimed his complete innocence. But Haig already knew the depth of Agnew’s trouble. He told Richardson they would arrange a time for him to meet with Nixon soon, and Richardson left for Cape Cod for the weekend.76
Haig had maneuvered Butterfield to reveal the taping system, which sealed Nixon’s fate. With Buzhardt’s help, he had planted the idea with the committee that Nixon may have taped himself, which led to Butterfield being asked about the taping system, which he confirmed. Again, with Buzhardt’s help, Haig blocked Ehrlichman from talking about the spy ring, which continued Haig’s cover-up. By the end of July, Haig’s position was secure, while Nixon’s unraveled with each moment.