Nixon enjoyed a smaller-than-normal bump in support from the State of the Union speech. While many members of Congress supported specific parts of his agenda, mostly because they were important to voters at home, there was little momentum for Nixon’s plan as a whole. Despite his plea that one year of Watergate was enough, Nixon would not receive a reprieve from the crisis consuming his presidency. Throughout February, Alexander Haig focused on maintaining the cover-up of the spy ring while negotiating a series of conferences about the expanding global energy crisis and the peace negotiations in the Middle East. Haig had to manage both a deteriorating Nixon, who maintained delusions that he could remain a vital force in world affairs, and an increasingly antagonistic Kissinger, who believed Nixon was a spent force and a distraction.
Haig continued his secretive negotiations with Leon Jaworski. As the special prosecutor was waiting for official word from the president’s new lawyer, James St. Clair, about whether the White House would release more tapes, Haig called him to the Old Executive Office Building for a meeting. He told Jaworski that the White House had determined it would no longer give any more tapes to Jaworski for “political” reasons.1 No information exists that Nixon knew of Haig’s meeting with Jaworski, and Jaworski said Haig was concerned that Jaworski not tell anyone that they had met or that Haig had reneged on his earlier commitment to supply more documents and tapes. Haig’s concern could have been for show; he already had turned over enough information for Jaworski to conclude that Nixon was guilty.
In the West Wing, Nixon’s top aides still had much to worry about with the evolving spy ring scandal.
“I have to testify on the JCS spying business,” Kissinger told Defense Secretary James Schlesinger during a February 1 meeting. “[Senator Stuart] Symington is pushing. He wants to know why I was uncharacteristically unenergetic about finding out what was taken.”
“Admiral [Rembrandt] Robinson did the same,” Schlesinger said, “but he didn’t take papers. He just briefed on the material. You should testify after March—after the recess. I don’t know what the Laird/Buzhardt angle is, but the Buzhardt report says that it was a two-way spying operation designed to bypass Laird.”2
Such a claim was one of several reasons why Buzhardt’s report, done at Laird’s request, was a cover-up. The spy ring was run by Adm. Thomas Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to find information the White House was hiding from the military. Buzhardt aimed his report at clearing the military and Haig of their guilt. Kissinger corrected Schlesinger. “They passed the JCS documents to us as part of official business,” he said. “The President ordered it, because it was a different relationship than we have. We couldn’t find out what Laird was doing. Were DoD documents taken?”
“I gather so,” Schlesinger said, again showing he was misinformed by Buzhardt.
“It is a morally different position whether the JCS steals from the President or whether the President steals from the JCS,” Kissinger said.
“It may come out that this was a Kissinger-military conspiracy,” Schlesinger said. “Mel [Laird] and Fred [Buzhardt] have the fish to fry in this. Moorer is getting a bum deal.”
Then Kissinger, who had disavowed any knowledge of what his former aide, David Young, had done while a member of the White House Plumbers, acknowledged what those in the administration already knew. He knew exactly what Young had done, and he had a scathing view of his former subordinate.
“I have read the Young report,” Kissinger said. “It is a report of a failure trying to make himself important. It is sick.”
Schlesinger, who consulted Buzhardt and Laird on the details of the spy ring, revealed just how badly the Pentagon needed to cover up for Haig, Moorer, Robinson, and Rear Adm. Robert Welander.
“Mel has a big set of documents which weave a web which he says shows the evolution of the statutory role of the secretary of Defense,” Schlesinger said. “The documents don’t show Moorer set it up but that he was knowledgeable. The report indicates you were getting material to which you were not entitled.
“If it weren’t for the climate, we would just say that Welander was working too hard to please,” Schlesinger concluded.3
As national security advisor to the president, Kissinger was entitled to see any Pentagon documents Nixon wanted him to see. Nixon’s decision to hide information from the Pentagon created problems of trust with the military and helped spawn the leaks that caused Nixon to use the FBI to spy on his own staff. He had the right to do that, whereas claiming that Kissinger somehow benefited from an illegal scheme to steal documents from the Pentagon showed just how desperate the military was to hide its tracks.
Seymour Hersh published another story in the New York Times on February 3 that showed how far ahead he was on the story. The spy ring, he wrote, had started working in 1970, a year before previously believed and shortly after Moorer became chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Moorer was frustrated with being excluded from information from the White House. “During the period of Yeoman Radford’s activities, the White House was involved in intensely secret negotiations with China, the Soviet Union and North Vietnam,” Hersh wrote. “Former White House aides have acknowledged that details of those talks were restricted to a very few officials in the White House.” Gen. Earle Wheeler, Moorer’s predecessor as Joint Chiefs chairman, told Hersh that he did not have a similar system when he led the military for six years and that he did not think that Rembrandt Robinson, the first admiral running the ring, “would dream up anything like this” on his own. Hersh leaned heavily on Young’s report, which was more accurate and less tainted by conflicts of interest than the one conducted later by Buzhardt. His story captured almost all the key details, with the exception of the mysterious thinking behind the administration’s refusal to punish anyone involved in the spying or the leaking of secrets to Jack Anderson. Buzhardt, unsurprisingly, called the Young report “ludicrous,” and when confronted with facts that made it clear the White House and the Pentagon were lying about the extent of the spy ring, an unnamed White House official, most likely Haig, said, “I don’t think there’s been any injustice to the facts.”4
Senator Harold Hughes, the liberal Democrat from Iowa who had exposed the secret bombing of Cambodia in July, wanted a deeper investigation. He thought the Cambodia probe, while it had revealed some critical details of the bombing campaign, had fizzled. “No once-over-lightly in executive session with Admiral Moorer or Kissinger is going to suffice,” he said. Yeoman Radford and Young needed to testify, Hughes said, and the committee needed to read Young’s report. “The stakes are very high here,” Hughes said. “This involves the ability of the chief executive and his advisers to be in command of an operation and to keep to themselves whatever information they have.”5 Hughes’s plea to Senator John Stennis made little impact.
Moorer advanced his testimony with a February 5 letter to Stennis in which he reversed course from his earlier statements about the documents he had obtained from the spy ring. Moorer acknowledged he had kept documents that Radford had gathered on his trips to Pakistan and Southeast Asia with Kissinger and Haig in 1971 and that he had been told in December 1971 that Radford “had not only been retaining papers in the course of his clerical duties but, also, had been actively collecting them in a clearly unauthorized manner.” He and Kissinger, Moorer continued, saw each other all the time, so he did not need to have someone spy on Kissinger. Such a claim contradicted the years of complaints by the military about how Kissinger had excluded it from deliberations with the Soviet Union on arms control, a 1970 dispute over Cuba in which Kissinger sought plans from Robinson without Moorer’s input, and the White House’s control over military operations in Cambodia conducted outside of Moorer’s authority. Those were just a few of the times when Moorer learned of White House decisions without being consulted. Moorer also wrote Stennis that he wanted to have Radford court-martialed for taking the documents from the White House but was dissuaded by “civilian leadership,” which ruled that Radford should be transferred immediately. In fact, Nixon wanted to prosecute Moorer, not Radford, and had to be talked out of it by John Mitchell, the attorney general, whom Nixon directed to warn Moorer that he would be on a short leash from then on.6
Moorer’s testimony on February 6 was a master class in dissembling. Moorer claimed he had first learned of the spying on January 5, 1972, when Buzhardt briefed him. That was a lie. Laird told Ehrlichman on December 23, 1971, that he had already talked to Moorer about the spying, and Mitchell had, too. Moorer’s deception continued with his claims of a great relationship with Kissinger. The charges, Moorer told the Armed Services Committee, “sicken me as a man, concern me as a military officer, and deeply disturb me as the nation’s senior uniformed official.” Moorer said he told Welander to give whatever documents were stolen back to the White House, although he actually gave whatever information he did not need back to Haig personally when Haig was Kissinger’s deputy. Nothing he obtained from Welander or his predecessor, Robinson, came as a surprise to him, Moorer testified, because he had already gotten the information from other sources. If the materials were so unimportant, asked Senator Thomas McIntyre of New Hampshire, why were Moorer’s close aides wasting his time by delivering such meaningless information? Moorer switched course, saying that the documents were important but that he had already seen them.7
Kissinger followed Moorer at the witness table, and he did what he was becoming used to doing when it came to testifying about his actions during the Nixon administration: he committed perjury. Yes, he had closed the Chiefs’ liaison office at the NSC after he learned about the spying, but he had only done that in a “fit of pique.” It was also true that he was “enraged” when he listened to the tape of Welander’s interview with Ehrlichman and Young, but he relaxed when he thought about how close his relationship was with Moorer. And yes, again, the papers that Radford stole from Kissinger’s office and briefcase were “extremely sensitive” and not meant to leave the White House, but it was “absurd to argue that there was any subject of any major significance that was kept from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” Why, Kissinger continued, no one in the Chiefs ever explicitly complained during one of the scores of NSC meetings they had participated in with Kissinger.8 The national security advisor turned secretary of state had fought enough bureaucratic wars to know that the Pentagon did not launch frontal assaults on a proposal in an open meeting; military leaders leaked to friendly reporters and members of Congress to get them to do the fighting for them. Perhaps Kissinger would have answered differently if he had known then that Laird had the NSA eavesdrop on Kissinger’s communications overseas; that Laird had the air force inform him of Kissinger’s secret flights to Paris; and that the navy aide assigned to him, Lt. David Halperin, was reporting back to the navy on the secret meetings for which he took notes for Kissinger. But Kissinger knew none of those details, and his priority in this hearing was to make the entire issue go away, courtesy of the friendly Stennis, who stepped outside the hearing room and gave his absolution to both Kissinger and Moorer. He did not see Moorer or Kissinger as being at “the root of any conspiracy,” which was technically true, since Kissinger did not conspire with the military to steal his own documents. Still, Stennis announced, the committee would call Radford and Welander as witnesses in the next two weeks.9 For his part, Moorer said he had recommended that Radford be court-martialed for his alleged theft and leaking of secrets, although there is no proof that he had done anything other than agree to have Radford whisked out of Washington and deposited at a navy base in Oregon, complete with his top secret security clearance.
For all the drama and absurdity of the Senate hearing, it was obscured that day by the House’s 410–4 vote to authorize the House Judiciary Committee to start its impeachment investigation. Public opinion showed that a majority of Americans disapproved of Nixon’s performance as president and suspected his guilt in at least some part of the Watergate affair but were still deeply skeptical of impeachment. No president had ever been removed from office; it remained a step that many Americans feared taking, despite their antipathy toward Nixon.
Radford, who had been kept away from most reporters, weighed in on February 7 with an interview on CBS radio with Mike Wallace, the tenacious interviewer and cohost of TV’s 60 Minutes. Radford said that anything he did was done on the orders of Moorer, Welander, and Robinson. He described what they told him to do and why he did it and said that he looked forward to testifying about it before Stennis’s committee.10
One potential witness for the Armed Services Committee, Pentagon investigator Donald Stewart, still had not heard from Stennis’s staff, despite his obvious interest in testifying. He did, however, receive a call on the evening of February 7 from an aide to another committee, Donald Sanders of the Watergate committee’s minority staff. Stewart wrote. Sanders called him at 9:30 p.m. and said he wanted to talk to Stewart with George Murphy, another Baker aide. The reluctant Stewart had already talked to them twice before and thought they had written his information in extensive memos. In a memo to Martin Hoffmann, Schlesinger’s special assistant, Stewart wrote, “I advised him I did not want to become indiscriminately involved as I didn’t want to prejudice or preempt any testimony I may later have to give before Senator Stennis’ committee should I be called.”11 For someone so normally attuned to the Byzantine ways of Washington bureaucratic politics, Stewart could be amazingly naive. Haig and Buzhardt had so vigorously tried to discredit Stewart with their false claims of blackmail that Stewart had no chance of testifying before Stennis’s committee.
After his testimony before Stennis, Kissinger flew to Panama to sign a treaty turning over control of the Panama Canal to that nation’s government. There he received a telegram from Brent Scowcroft, his deputy, about the latest moves to end the Arab oil embargo, which had so rocked the U.S. economy. In it Scowcroft detailed the wrangling to keep Nixon from making a diplomatic mistake with the Saudi Arabians. The telegram reinforced Kissinger’s growing disdain for Nixon and what Kissinger considered his interference in the whirlwind of global diplomacy. Haig, Scowcroft reported, had just met with Nixon, who told him he wanted to summon the Saudi ambassador into the White House Map Room and hand him a letter that said the United States had kept its commitments, and now the Saudis had to honor theirs by ending the embargo.
“I told Al that this was a bad idea, that, as he had seen from the traffic that I had shown him, the Saudis were coming along and that a move by the President himself could hardly be helpful,” Scowcroft wrote. Haig told Scowcroft it was either do that or deal with John Connally, his rival for Nixon’s attention and the former treasury secretary, who had met with Nixon for more than an hour that day.
“He thought this almost harmless by comparison,” Scowcroft continued. “Al has asked that we prepare some talking points for the President to use in meeting with the Saudi Ambassador,” Scowcroft wrote, and “I can probably stall until late afternoon, but Al says the President is quite determined to move today.”12 Nixon did meet with the Saudi ambassador that day, accompanied by Scowcroft, for almost an hour.13
In that meeting, the details of which Scowcroft reported back to Kissinger, Nixon made a stunning announcement: “I am the first President since Eisenhower who has no commitment to the Jewish community, and I will not be swayed.” He criticized Kissinger’s remarks the previous day that the continuation of the embargo by the Saudis while the United States was trying to broker a Middle East peace agreement constituted a form of “blackmail” to get the United States to force Israel into making concessions against its interests. Nixon vowed that he would remain in office for another three years and that his successor, whoever that was, would be controlled by “groups” tightly aligned with Israel.14 It is hard to imagine that Kissinger would have allowed such a meeting to take place or those comments to be made if he had been in Washington.
The next day, February 8, Hersh acted on a hunch and flew to Denver’s Stapleton airport, where he met a surprised Charles Radford, who was changing planes as he flew east from Oregon to Washington. There, Radford reinforced what he had told Mike Wallace a day earlier. “The yeoman acknowledged that he had pilfered hundreds of documents [that] were funneled to the office of Adm. Thomas H. Moorer,” Hersh wrote.15
At 1:10 that afternoon, Stewart received a call in his office from Bob Woodward, who fired a series of questions about the hearings at him. “After five to ten minutes of sparring, the only thing of interest that developed was did I know that Radford and [Jack] Anderson had dinner together on December 12, 1971,” Stewart wrote in a memo to Hoffmann. “This surprised me because this particular date had to come from the file. I commented I had no particular knowledge of this. This and the general questioning Woodward put to me makes me believe that he, too, is being provided info from the White House.” Stewart was right. Woodward was getting his information directly from Haig and Buzhardt, who were trying to discredit Radford and Stewart, the two most damaging witnesses in the spy ring investigation. About two hours later, Woodward called back and asked Stewart: If Buzhardt said what he knew about the spy ring, would Admiral Moorer get court-martialed? Stewart said he didn’t know what Buzhardt knew and hung up.16
Now in Washington, Radford met with Stennis for more than two hours on February 9. Radford was also presented with a subpoena to testify before the committee. “He was cooperative fully and I have no complaints about him,” Stennis told reporters after the meeting. Radford said nothing. Stennis had asked him not to give any more interviews. “I’m sure we fully understood each other,” Stennis said. “All of Radford’s constitutional rights have been preserved.”17
Stewart, who desperately wanted to testify before Stennis, instead heard on February 11 from Hoffmann that it was the Senate Watergate committee that would subpoena him to testify. Hoffmann told Stewart he would notify the Armed Services Committee of the Watergate committee’s interest in him. Hoffmann said the subpoena for Stewart would be for the following day, but then later in the day the interview was moved to February 19 “because Senator Ervin desired to personally conduct the interview with me,” Stewart wrote in a memo. “Mr. Hoffmann had advised also that he had communicated the fact I was subpoenaed to the Stennis Armed Services Committee and they apparently were concerned.”18
Nixon hosted a huge dinner at the White House on February 11 for the attendees of the Washington Energy Conference, designed to find more sources of energy amid the global crisis and the Arab oil embargo. Haig and Kissinger fretted about Nixon saying something stupid and wrecking the progress they had made.
“How is it going?” Haig asked Kissinger in a 3:40 p.m. call.
“So far so good. It is going to come out alright. Nevertheless, the situation, and we should not kid ourselves is exactly as I described it and I hope he does not dribble over them too much tonight,” Kissinger said.
“I don’t think he will,” Haig said. “I told him he can’t.” Haig had already outlined Nixon’s dinner remarks. “He is not going to speak formally tonight. He will just draw from the remarks that were given to him and keep it informal.”
The Arab oil embargo, Kissinger said, was about to be lifted not because of the letter Nixon gave the Saudi ambassador but “as a result of our threat of stopping all diplomatic efforts. . . . It proves that the only thing these guys understand is toughness,” Kissinger said. “When we were sucking around them, they kicked us in the teeth.”
Haig agreed.
“You will tell this to our leader,” Kissinger said.
“Yes, I will be seeing him in a few minutes,” Haig answered.
“Tell him to stay steady,” Kissinger admonished. “Be conciliatory but not groveling but not to believe the bullshit about the great cooperation they are extending.”19
Kissinger maintained his dismissive attitude of Nixon. On February 14, as Nixon was in Washington preparing to travel to Florida, Kissinger expressed to Haig his frustration and contempt for having to deal with a president he felt was barely functional. Kissinger wanted to bring the foreign ministers from Egypt and Saudi Arabia to Florida to meet with Nixon so they could finalize the deal. “I’ll stay here and wait for them and, what’s the president’s schedule?” Kissinger asked.
“He’s going to leave here Monday,” Haig said.
“I mean, he isn’t going over to Walker’s Key?” Kissinger said, referring to the island in the Bahamas where Nixon’s friend Robert Abplanalp had a home where Nixon often went to get drunk.20
Stewart went to Capitol Hill on February 19 to meet with Ervin and members of the Senate Watergate committee staff, but when he arrived, he found Senator Howard Baker instead, along with Sam Dash, the chief majority counsel, and investigators George Murphy and Don Sanders. Now Stewart could tell Baker directly about what he had discovered. Over the next two hours, Stewart told about how he was brought into the investigation, who his collaborators were, and what they had found. Radford, Stewart said, had been Anderson’s source all along, “and this was a good vehicle for him to use as a cover, ostensibly to be getting this stuff for Welander, but at the same time peeling off what he wanted for Anderson.” Stewart deeply believed this, despite Anderson’s claims that he never received anything from Radford. Stewart also realized that neither Baker nor his staff knew much about the details of the spy ring and had not seen any of the critical documents generated by Stewart’s investigation. Stewart told Baker about the report he had given to Fred Buzhardt in early 1972, and Baker asked if he could get a copy. Stewart said Buzhardt had taken the document when he ordered Stewart’s files seized in May. Baker was puzzled by the continued national security claims surrounding the spy ring and the pressure on him and Ervin not to investigate.
“As a taxpayer, if I found out that the military was spying on a president of the United States, it would worry the hell out of me,” Stewart responded.
“Me, too,” Baker said.21
Radford received his chance to testify before Stennis’s committee on February 20, two weeks after Moorer and Kissinger did their part to cover up what they both knew—that Moorer had commissioned a spy ring to gather intelligence from the White House. Stennis did his best to minimize Radford’s importance and to challenge his credibility, while other members of the committee tried their best to pierce what they knew was an attempt to hide what had really happened. Stuart Symington said the administration’s claims of national security had fallen flat when he managed to see the documents John Dean had taken with him from the White House after Nixon fired him in April 1973. Those, Symington said, did not warrant the national security claims aimed at hiding them.22
Despite having the military’s top officer and the secretary of state aligned against him, Radford more than held his own. Robinson, his first boss at the liaison office, had high standards and drove him hard, Radford said, but he wanted to make Robinson happy. “He further stated that he worked directly for the chairman and that it was his responsibility to keep the chairman informed and that I was to help him do that,” Radford said. That meant staying on the lookout for anything that would help the Pentagon better understand the decisions made in the White House. Robinson also wanted to keep his activity secret, Radford said. “One on occasion I did tell Captain Shephard that the admiral was in the west wing to see General Haig. . . . He explained that I was to act in a low key manner so as not to raise questions or cause excitement in those with whom he worked.”23
What Radford described, although he lacked the understanding of the entire scope of the enterprise, was a military intelligence-gathering operation that touched all aspects of the White House and National Security Council. Under questioning, Radford mentioned Robinson’s many visitors at his office in the Old Executive Office Building: NSC members Helmut Sonnenfeldt, one of the officials wiretapped by the FBI in 1969; Kissinger deputy John Negroponte; Sven Kraemer, the son of Haig’s mentor, Fritz Kraemer; Russell Ash, an NSC official and close ally of William Sullivan, Haig’s friend at the FBI; and Navy Lt. David Halperin, an acolyte of Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, the chief of naval operations, and an aide to Kissinger.24 They all passed information through Robinson to Moorer. Zumwalt called Halperin his best source at the NSC. Moorer told the panel two weeks earlier that he knew much of the information he received from Radford, but he did not say how he knew it. He knew not because Kissinger had told him but because Moorer had a deeper, more sophisticated operation funneling White House secrets to him than he revealed.
Radford inadvertently let on that someone had already tipped the Pentagon off to Kissinger’s secret China mission. Radford told the committee what Welander had asked him to look for when Radford accompanied Kissinger on the July 1971 trip from which he split off to go to China. “I was approached about going on a trip with Henry Kissinger in July 1971, and I agreed to go,” Radford testified. “Admiral Welander told me that he would be interested in anything that ‘I could get my hands on.’ I remember something specifically, something about diplomatic dealings with China and that anything I could gather in this area would be of particular interest to him. He cautioned me to be careful and don’t get caught. He said, ‘Don’t take any chances.’”25
Radford did not know why Welander had asked him to find out about the China talks. But we know why now. David Halperin had taken the notes in the secret May 7, 1971, meeting between Kissinger and Joseph Farland, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, in which Kissinger told him about the secret trip to Peking. Halperin then told Zumwalt, who acknowledged that in a 1991 oral history that was kept secret for twenty years.26 Haig, who was working with the military spy ring, asked Welander if Radford could accompany Kissinger on that trip, and Welander agreed. It was through this secret network that the top leaders of the military learned that Nixon, whose career had been built on stoking the fears of a communist China, was talking secretly with the leaders of a country that so many in the Pentagon considered an imminent threat to the United States.
Welander testified the following day before a skeptical committee. Despite the allegations from his superiors, who had somehow not seen fit to prosecute Radford, the committee members had a favorable impression of the young, tall, and almost impossibly thin yeoman. Although Stennis seemed eager to wrap up the hearings and dispense with the whole matter once and for all, enough of the other members smelled something rotten in the claims by Moorer, Kissinger, and now Welander. The rear admiral who had been shunted off to a destroyer command after Kissinger closed the liaison office blamed the entire spying affair on Radford, saying that he immediately concluded that Radford had leaked secrets to Jack Anderson after seeing in Anderson’s columns details of the memos Radford had typed. Welander said that he had taken his concerns to Haig in the NSC and that Haig then tapped John Ehrlichman and the Plumbers to investigate.27
Welander’s testimony was so at odds with Radford’s that Senator Hughes concluded: “His and Admiral Welander’s testimony have direct discrepancies in almost every account and they are both under oath. . . . In my opinion, one or other of you have perjured yourself before this committee, because you are testifying to two different things, or there is a third party involved that neither of you are aware of.”28
Senators Thomas McIntyre of New Hampshire, Sam Nunn of Georgia, and Hughes had a difficult time following Welander, who claimed that no one had told Radford to take documents while he was traveling with either Haig or Kissinger and that the documents could have been obtained in other ways. Yet, Welander said, he still gave the documents to his superior, Moorer. Welander also acknowledged that the documents that Radford typed and delivered to Haig at the NSC had multiple copies and that it was possible that one of those copies could have been leaked to Anderson.
Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, one of the most promilitary members of the committee, also picked up on one of the inconsistencies in Welander’s testimony. “You mentioned you were not aware of Dr. Kissinger’s original trip or exploratory trip to Peking?” Byrd asked.
“No, sir,” Welander answered.
But Moorer testified that he had been told about it, Byrd said.
“He could well have been, sir,” Welander answered, at a loss to explain the obvious discrepancy between what he, Moorer, and Radford testified to.29
Hughes pressed Welander on the security in Haig’s office and the possibility that the memos could have come from there.
“The possibility remains that the question of security in General Haig’s office is a question that we have not resolved yet,” Hughes said.
“Yes, sir,” Welander answered.
Welander also acknowledged that Radford brought documents from one trip that had details of the situation in Vietnam that were different from those Welander and Moorer had seen.
Nunn also wanted Welander to explain why Radford had come to Welander’s office and asked him if he wanted to see a certain document if he had the ability to get the document through normal channels.
“Senator, I do not know,” Welander said.
Throughout his testimony, Welander stuck to his claim that Radford acted on his own, that he had stolen documents without any authorization from his superiors, and that whatever Radford did steal was something Welander and Moorer could have obtained on their own. And through all of that, no one told Radford to stop.”
“And again,” Welander said, “I guess I should have told him not to.”30
That Welander did not give that order and that the stolen documents kept moving from the White House to the Pentagon diminished the importance of his testimony. It did not matter, however, as Stennis remained determined to make the entire issue go away.
Radford stepped back into the witness chair after Welander testified. He remained unshakeable, despite some attempts to move him off details of his earlier testimony. Strom Thurmond, the conservative Republican from South Carolina, asked if Radford considered it “a coincidence that you had dinner with Jack Anderson the day before these leaks appeared in his column?”
“Yes sir, I do; most definitely I do,” Radford said.31
Stennis had no further witnesses, although the panel had heard repeatedly about the roles Stewart and Young had played in the investigation in late 1971 and early 1972. Stennis’s aides knew about Stewart’s interview with Baker on February 19, and they knew that Stewart wanted to talk to the Armed Services Committee. Young, too, was available. He had been granted immunity in the case of the Plumbers’ break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, so Young remained untainted by that. He, too, was ignored.
Three days after Welander and Radford testified, on February 24 Seymour Hersh had another story in the New York Times that answered one of the most pressing questions about the entire spy ring affair. Why did Nixon not push to prosecute Radford and his bosses in the Pentagon for stealing documents? Nixon called off the potential prosecutions because he did not want to expose the stealing to the public, especially in the middle of secret negotiations with North Vietnam to end the Vietnam War and with the Soviet Union on nuclear weapons. Hersh cited Young’s investigation, which concluded that Moorer and Welander knew about the spying. He also noted Nixon’s total silence about the spy revelations since they broke six weeks earlier. Hughes, perplexed by what Kissinger, Moorer, and Welander told the Armed Services Committee, told Hersh there was no reason why Radford or the others could not have been court-martialed. “If it was stopped the way Admiral Moorer says it did, I don’t know why and how,” Hughes wrote.32
On February 25 the legal fight against Nixon took several troubling turns for the president. Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal attorney and chief fund-raiser, pleaded guilty to charges that he helped run an illegal fund-raising operation in the 1970 campaign and promised a better assignment for an ambassador in exchange for money. Kalmbach, Leon Jaworski told the court, had agreed to cooperate in future cases. “What added fuel to the fire from [Nixon’s] standpoint was that we had gotten Herb Kalmbach to capitulate, his own counsel,” Jaworski said. “And Kalmbach not only had to talk freely with us, but he gave us more and more information, because this is a part of the plea bargaining: all right, you plead guilty to a felony; you have to tell us everything that you know, now. All right, now they hear about Kalmbach folding; and this created real consternation at the White House. Then they begin an attack on my plea bargaining and try to get [Attorney General William] Saxbe to interfere.”33 Kalmbach’s plea, Jaworski said later, shut off the flow of future documents from the White House. Already “jittery,” Nixon stopped allowing Haig to give Jaworski more information, a decision that made sense from Nixon’s view but that limited Haig’s ability to assist the prosecutor in establishing a case against the president.
Haig appeared before the grand jury the same day. Although prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste pushed him hard on multiple fronts, Haig said he “had no knowledge of any thought or action on Nixon’s part that could possibly provide grounds for criminal charges.”34 That, of course, was a lie. Haig knew that Nixon had obstructed justice, and he had known it since the previous May, when Nixon and Bob Haldeman sat in the Oval Office and recounted how Nixon told Haldeman to block the FBI investigation into Watergate.
Nixon reinforced his administration’s new attitude in a news conference that evening in which he said there needed to be a criminal offense in order for the House to impeach him, which he predicted the House would not do. He vowed not to resign, and in what had to be alarming news for his fellow Republicans, he said he would not leave office even if it looked as if Republicans would suffer grievous losses that November at the polls. Nixon said he would cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation, but he couched that cooperation in such circumscribed language that it could hardly be considered cooperation at all. Any cooperation, he said, would be “in any way consistent with my constitutional responsibility to defend the office of the Presidency against any action which would weaken the office and the ability of future Presidents to carry out the great responsibilities that the President will have.”35