Watergate, page 26
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After the Oval Office conversation with Nixon and Haldeman, Ehrlichman summoned Helms and his deputy, Vernon Walters, to the White House. Walters, a talented army linguist who had served as a presidential translator and worked with Nixon during his vice presidency, was new to the job and the agency—just six weeks into being the number two at Langley.VII The men arrived at 1 p.m. and were ushered into Ehrlichman’s office.
Walters recalled the conversation with Nixon’s team in a memo written five days later: “Haldeman said that the ‘bugging’ affair at the Democratic National Committee Hqs at the Watergate Apartments had made a lot of noise and the Democrats were trying to maximize. The FBI had been called in and was investigating the matter. The investigation was leading to a lot of important people and this could get worse. He asked what the connection with the Agency was and the Director repeated that there was none. Haldeman said that the whole affair was getting embarrassing and it was the President’s wish that Walters call on Acting FBI Director Patrick Gray and suggest to him that since the five suspects had been arrested that this should be sufficient and that it was not advantageous to have the enquiry pushed especially in Mexico, etc.” Helms got tense and reacted with opprobrium to the suggestion; he explained he’d already talked to Gray and assured the FBI that the CIA wasn’t involved. (“There was turmoil in the room,” Haldeman would recall in his memoirs.) Haldeman repeated his request, telling Walters to go see Gray. “I’m just following my instructions, Dick,” the chief of staff said. “This is what the president told me to relay to you.”
Walters finally agreed. “I had been in Washington for six weeks at this point and it simply did not occur to me that the chief of staff to the president might be asking me to do something illegal or wrong,” he wrote later. “I genuinely believed that Haldeman had some information that I did not have.” That afternoon, Walters met with Gray and encouraged the FBI to drop the Mexico element of its probe. Gray, with some hesitation, agreed.
Back at CIA headquarters, Walters began to ask around if there was some covert operation in Mexico he wasn’t aware of. There wasn’t. As further pressure came from the White House, he realized the agency was being used for political purposes and began to document his conversations and the executive branch’s abuse of power. In an agency that all too frequently found it easy to lose files it found historically or politically inconvenient, Walters created a lethal paper trail of his own. Memo by memo, conversation by conversation, they went into Walters’s personal safe.
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John Dean also had his own plans for Pat Gray, relying on the procedural knowledge of FBI investigations that Liddy had given him. He met the acting director near Gray’s residence in Southwest D.C. and they walked to a bench overlooking the Potomac. During the meeting, he demanded that the FBI furnish him with its raw interview reports, known as “302s” in bureau parlance.VIII
Gray initially tried to refuse, explaining that the raw files were incredibly closely held and never given to anyone outside the bureau, but eventually succumbed to his discomfort and had Dean promise he was asking on behalf of the president. (As Gray justified it to himself, the president was the head of the executive branch and so could see any document created within it.) Dean enthusiastically confirmed, and soon after, Gray delivered the files personally—a total of eighty-three investigative reports through October, about half of all the FBI’s investigative materials in the case. “I was totally aware of what the bureau was doing at all times,” Dean said later.
Dean also used Gray to hide some of the existing conspiracy material. After the contents of Hunt’s safe had been delivered to the White House counsel’s office a few days after the burglary—workers wheeled in several dollies’ worth of material—Dean had sorted it all in the presence of Fred Fielding.IX As Dean and Fielding cataloged, they realized much of the haul was troublesome, just as Hunt had promised. “Holy shit,” Dean had said to Fielding as they looked over everything from a briefcase of McCord’s electronics to Hunt’s work forging State Department cables to implicate the Kennedy administration in the assassination of South Vietnam’s president.
They sorted the documents into three piles. Dean surreptitiously kept the seemingly most incriminating documents for himself: In his own safe, tucked underneath Richard Nixon’s estate plan, he placed two “operational” Hermès notebooks Hunt had kept throughout the work of the Plumbers and GEMSTONE that recorded meetings, conversations, plans, and details.
While they handed over all the innocent contents to the FBI and Lano’s team directly, Dean decided to pass other sensitive files directly to Gray. By turning over the most explosive documents to Gray directly, Dean and Ehrlichman figured that if they were ever asked under oath, they could truthfully say they “turned over everything to the FBI.” During a meeting in Ehrlichman’s office, Dean made clear to the FBI leader that this special sensitive set of files shouldn’t be turned over to investigating agents. “I distinctly recall Mr. Dean saying that these files were ‘political dynamite,’ and ‘clearly should not see the light of day,’ ” Gray testified later. After receiving the files from Hunt’s safe, Gray took them home and hid them under a pile of shirts in his closet.X
I. A main controversy of the race hung on a Celler speech opposing the Equal Rights Amendment, where the veteran congressman said, “There is as much difference between a man and a woman as between lightning and a lightning rod—and between a chestnut horse and a horse chestnut.”
II. James McCord’s wife burned a selection of his papers, as well as a bag of typewriter ribbons from CREEP’s headquarters, later in the week too, some in the presence of a former McCord CIA colleague, Lee Pennington, Jr. When this news came out, the head of security, Howard Osborn, was forced into retirement.
III. On Thursday, Hunt flew to Florida, but according to his account, Barker’s house was surrounded by reporters and he couldn’t reach Barker’s wife by phone, and so he abandoned the trip to return to California.
IV. His precise theory, that Nixon’s longtime dark-arts maestro Murray Chotiner was behind the operation, actually proved false; in fact, as Metro editor Harry Rosenfeld later said, “His was the one name that never appeared in Watergate.”
V. As Lano recalled the early theories, “[Head of the FBI Washington Field Office] Bob Kunkel asked me candidly who I thought was behind the burglary. I must admit that at that point I believed that it was a botched CIA operation.”
VI. Whether Nixon and Haldeman ever really thought of this conversation again over the next year is unknown—nor is it clear in the moment whether either man registered the depth of the corruption of their scheme. John Ehrlichman, who didn’t know about the conversation, would later come to believe that at least Nixon did and that it ate away at him over the months ahead, becoming to the president the beating, pulsing telltale heart of Edgar Allan Poe.
VII. Walters and Nixon had developed a special bond during a 1958 trip to Venezuela, where a crowd had attacked Nixon’s motorcade in Caracas. The crowd tried to overturn the vice presidential limo and shattered its windows in what at the time was called the “most violent attack ever perpetrated on a high American official while on foreign soil.” Secret Service agents had been prepared to open fire on the crowd, but Nixon told them not to shoot unless he ordered. Walters, then a lieutenant colonel, was with Nixon in the armored passenger compartment, which the crowd almost managed to breach, and ended up with a “mouthful of glass particles, and calmly picked them out, spitting blood,” according to a Los Angeles Times account of the attack.
VIII. Unbeknownst to Gray, Dean had already asked for such documents from Petersen and Kleindienst and been rebuffed—he was told it was wildly inappropriate for the president’s counsel to be seeing raw FBI interview reports.
IX. Most ominously, the safe contained a small pistol—which made headlines and worried Dean, but which Hunt would explain later he’d brought into the office amid a rash of street crime earlier that year.
X. While Dean took advantage of Gray’s naïveté, Gray seemed to understand he was doing something wrong in handing over the interview reports to the White House; he never told his assistants he was doing so and pulled them covertly from a complete copy of the Watergate case files he insisted on keeping in his office in order to stay up to date.
Chapter 16 “Keep My Mouth Shut”
In California, Martha Mitchell’s mental condition deteriorated fast. She had been relegated far from Washington as a brewing scandal engulfed her husband and the campaign, and she was in pain, tending to her bandaged hand by smoking heavily and drinking glass after glass of Dewar’s. By the moment, she became angrier and angrier—at CREEP, at Nixon, at John, all of them. They’d abused her and kept her in the dark about the activities at the committee, even as she had served as its most popular public face. “I would have understood it,” she said later. “Even if I hadn’t been a member of the committee, John owed me some explanation of what was going on.” And yet she couldn’t reach him; everyone at CREEP seemed to be dodging her calls as the week continued.
The night of Thursday, June 22, Fred LaRue answered when she dialed her own apartment at the Watergate. Furious, she relayed a message for John: She was never coming back to Washington, unless her husband quit politics that moment. She told LaRue her next call would be UPI reporter Helen Thomas, a threat she followed through on. “I’ve given John an ultimatum. I’m going to leave him unless he gets out of the campaign,” she ranted to Thomas. “I’m sick and tired of politics. Politics is a dirty business.”
No sooner had the words been spoken than Thomas heard Martha shout, “You get away—just get away!” before the phone line went dead. Thomas tried to call back, repeatedly, and finally tried the hotel switchboard operator, who told her Mrs. Mitchell was “indisposed.” Panicked and confused, Thomas called John Mitchell at the Watergate, who brushed it off. “That little sweetheart,” he said. “I love her so much. She gets a little upset about politics.” The United Press article chronicling the late-night call ran in papers coast-to-coast the next day; the San Francisco Chronicle titled it, simply, “What Martha Said She Told John,” no last names needed.
Though John had assured Thomas that Martha was fine, she was anything but. By her account, Steve King had charged into the room, pushed her over, and torn the phone off the wall. (Someone—perhaps Fred LaRue—had called King and told him to keep her from making calls.) Martha rushed to her daughter’s room to reach another phone, but King followed, again pushed her away, and disconnected that phone as well. Then he pushed her back into her own bedroom and shut her inside. When Martha went out onto the balcony to escape, King reappeared; they struggled as he hauled her back in and kicked her.I
At some point the next morning, she made it downstairs, but King again caught her as she tried to exit the villa’s glass patio door; they struggled again, and Martha’s left hand was cut seriously. A doctor and nurse arrived to give her stitches, only to be surprised that there were also a half-dozen men, apparently security, all over the villa too. (Martha would later claim that there were both Secret Service and FBI agents watching her, and one of the mysterious men introduced himself to the doctor as part of the team who “guard the president.”)
Frantic and fearful, Martha resisted treatment. The security men held her down as the doctor administered a sedative. “They pulled down my pants, and shot me in the behind,” she recalled later, incredulously. She tried repeatedly to escape, and each time was blocked by King or others. Finally, she was carried back up to her room. Through it all, the Mitchells’ eleven-year-old daughter, Marty, wandered through the villa, confused and worried.
When word of the grave situation reached her husband, John enlisted Herbert Kalmbach, who lived nearby, to help: “If you’ve ever done anything for me, Herb, do this for me now.” Kalmbach sought medical advice, and that night, his secretaries monitored the villa and again prevented Martha from placing telephone calls.
Finally, John dispatched two friends from out east to retrieve his wife, and the following day, they and Martha headed for New York—she held fast on her refusal to return to Washington. By the next night, she was ensconced in Suite 543 of the Westchester Country Club, where she finally got ahold of Helen Thomas on Sunday night. “If you could see me, you wouldn’t believe it,” she told the reporter. “I’m black and blue. I’m a political prisoner.” She was done with politics, done with Washington. “I love my husband very much, but I’m not going to stand for all those dirty things that go on.”
The resulting article set off a fresh media firestorm. Reporters flocked to Westchester, and the Daily News’s Marcia Kramer scored an interview, spending hours listening as Martha recounted the harrowing preceding days while pacing the room in a rumpled suit and wild hair, smoking and crying. As an experienced crime reporter, Kramer was used to disheveled witnesses and alarming scenes, but even she was taken aback by Martha’s bruises and appearance. The next day’s Daily News screamed: “ ‘I’M A PRISONER OF GOP’: MARTHA.”
John Mitchell’s team denied everything. “It’s all news to me,” he said. “Everyone knows that Mrs. Mitchell has her private personal problems,” an aide added. The Washington Post didn’t mention the story at all. The relative shrug with which Washington greeted the wife of the attorney general–turned–presidential campaign chair declaring herself a prisoner and saying that she was tired of all the “dirty things that go on” is a testament to how thoroughly the city had already written her off. She wasn’t a power player; she was entertainment.
* * *
While the newspapers were fixated on Martha’s drama, that same weekend the twenty-six FBI agents working on the Watergate case were summoned to Gray’s office at the Justice Department for an unusual 11 a.m. meeting on Saturday, June 24. They thought it might be an attaboy—perhaps an award and bonus for the hard, fast work on the case so far. Instead, Gray berated them angrily for a leak to TIME magazine. Sandy Smith, one of the nation’s top crime reporters, had been doggedly pursuing the burglary over the preceding week and called Gray Friday night to inquire whether the FBI director was trying to prematurely shut down the Watergate case. Gray’s fury rose steadily as he listened to Smith, who seemed to have well-sourced details about the case’s early days and Gray’s discouraging of the Mexican money trail investigation. The acting director, taking notes on the conversation as it progressed, had scribbled in capital letters the words he feared most: SOMEONE IN THE FBI IS TALKING ABOUT THE DETAILS OF THE INVESTIGATION.
Now he wanted answers—and a scalp. “I want that agent, or those agents, to step forward. I want their credentials, their weapons, on the table,” he spat. No one moved. “What we need in the FBI are dedicated professionals, not a bunch of little old ladies in tennis shoes,” the acting director continued, calling the team a bunch of “yellow-bellied singing canaries.” The agents were humiliated; even when the head of the Washington Field Office, Robert Kunkel, tried to interject, the director shut him up fast. “We were just frozen,” recalled Agent Magallanes.
The meeting backfired spectacularly. What might have worked for Gray in his military career aboard a submarine failed with his new bureau agents, who saw before them not a tough commander but a figurehead questioning their integrity. The meeting, which agents would later jokingly call the “Saturday Morning Massacre,” would be Gray’s only encounter with the Watergate squad—and it didn’t even reach its intended target. Decades after the fact, it would become clear that the actual FBI leaker to Smith was almost certainly Mark Felt, who wasn’t even present for Gray’s dressing-down. The leak to Smith was, according to the cowriter of Felt’s memoir, intended as a “warning to Gray that if he allowed a Watergate whitewash, his career would be in public tatters.”
In any case, the investigation continued, and Angelo Lano finally sent a memo to Gray and headquarters outlining the main roadblocks: Lano argued agents needed to move quicker to interview key sources like the lookout, Al Baldwin, Hunt’s White House colleagues David Young and Young’s secretary Kathleen Chenow, and even Mitchell himself. The memo sat, unread, for three days while Gray traveled to field offices around the country.II When he finally read it, the acting director was apoplectic; he summoned Felt, Kunkel, and Lano to FBI headquarters, along with the head of the bureau’s criminal division, Assistant Director Charles Bates. Lano defended the memo. “The facts set forth were true,” he recalled. “After I insisted that investigators were accustomed to conducting a complete and thorough inquiry, Gray backed off, indicating that he would urge Dean to move up the interviews.”
In hindsight, Felt was clearly the source of Gray’s woes. In theory, he could have pushed the FBI investigation forward as Gray’s proxy while he was out of town, but he had held the big decisions to hurt the acting director on all sides, undermining him to the bureau’s investigators, underscoring his absences, and pushing ultimate responsibility for the investigation onto his shoulders. It left the acting director in the untenable position of either angering his agents by turning down the requests or angering the administration he desperately wanted to please by approving them—altogether, quite a bureaucratic sleight-of-hand.
