Watergate, page 43
The various threads of Watergate filled entire pages in the newspapers, and the uncertainty and stress of the unfolding investigations were wearing down senior members of the administration. Reporters staked out the homes of Magruder and Dean. Americans who had long overlooked the story were now hungry for details. TIME magazine began running cover stories—its first was on Patrick Gray on March 26, the first of nearly three dozen Watergate covers to unfold over the months and years ahead—and, in an era where an average issue sold 245,000 copies, the Watergate covers began to top 280,000 copies sold, then 300,000. It was a major turnabout; Nixon’s Man of the Year issue in 1972, post-China, post-Moscow, post-victory, had sold below average, just 214,000.I “Only in his disgrace was Richard Nixon a hot commodity,” reflected David Halberstam.
On April 26, Jeb Magruder resigned from government, his ties to Watergate too much of a distraction for his new role in the Commerce Department. The next day, in Los Angeles, the judge presiding over Daniel Ellsberg’s trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers disclosed that Hunt and Liddy had burglarized the psychiatrist’s office, soon to be followed by revelations that Ellsberg had been the target of government eavesdropping. (Later, the judge officially dismissed all charges against Ellsberg saying the “improper” government conduct “offended a sense of justice.”) The irony was obvious: The Nixon White House’s attempt to punish the leaker of the Pentagon Papers backfired and resulted in Ellsberg going free entirely.
During a spring meeting with Attorney General Richard Kleindienst about quotidian budgetary matters, Representative Pete Rodino asked perfunctorily how the attorney general was doing—only to be surprised by a dark response. “Let me tell you something, Pete,” Kleindienst said. “You have no idea what I’m going through, because every Friday when I come home from the office, I tell my wife, ‘Darling, we got through another week without being indicted.’ ”
On the same Thursday that Magruder resigned, the New York Times’ Walter Rugaber scooped further news that acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray III had destroyed the documents given to him by Ehrlichman and Dean, a story publicized by Ervin Committee member Lowell Weicker. Across the administration, everyone was sprinting for the lifeboats, and Gray had confessed his role to Weicker after hearing that Dean was cooperating with prosecutors—a sign, to him, that other high-ranking White House officials would be in trouble too. Gray wanted to make sure he ended up a witness, not a defendant. “I could not accept the fact that we in the FBI—and the American people—had been lied to so blithely,” he recalled later.
As the blockbuster report traveled through the city, the Post tore up and redid its front page. Managing editor Howard Simons looked stricken as he sat in the newsroom, drawing hard on a cigarette. “A director of the FBI destroying evidence? I never thought it could happen,” he said.
Friday morning, Gray called Mark Felt and asked that the bureau’s leadership be assembled. Once in front of his staff, with tears in his eyes, he announced he was resigning, turning to a naval metaphor for explanation: “I was the captain, and I had let my ship run onto the rocks.” The next day, his resignation and departure was just one of five separate stories on the front page of the Saturday New York Times regarding what the paper called “the intensifying Watergate crisis.”II
On Friday, Mark Felt finally achieved his dream of becoming acting FBI director—a role that lasted just two hours and fifty minutes before Nixon named William Ruckelshaus the new interim director.III The Nixon White House had been thinking about someone to nominate in place of Gray throughout the month and, at one point, Ehrlichman tried to recruit Matthew Byrne, the judge overseeing the Ellsberg trial in California—a remarkably odd and improper conversation that, even though it was unsuccessful, would contribute to the aura of misdeeds. Now, they tapped the head of the EPA, Ruckelshaus, who had been working in his garden on a day off when he was summoned by the president and unexpectedly handed the reins to the bureau; Nixon’s new choice had one simple request about Watergate before he agreed: “No matter who is involved there would be no sparing of anyone.”
* * *
With Dean now in the spotlight, the White House returned to its Liddy defense, painting him as a power-hungry lone wolf. Jack Anderson ran a lengthy column that seemed almost certainly sourced from Chuck Colson’s or John Ehrlichman’s office, accusing the president’s counsel of ordering Hunt out of the country after the burglary and saying that the president’s “faith in Dean began to waver” in mid-March. Dean worried more as Anderson quoted Ervin Committee sources saying that investigators believed he had lied in statements to the FBI, raising the potential of perjury charges.
The growing media attention only worsened Nixon’s paranoia. On April 25, John Ehrlichman broached the I-word to the president. “I think it’s entirely conceivable that if Dean is totally out of control and if matters are not handled adroitly that you could get a resolution of impeachment,” the aide warned. “My own analysis is that what he has falls far short of any commission of a crime by you… so far as I know.”
Over the next seventy-two hours, Nixon became totally consumed managing the changing situation—there was Dean, Pat Gray, the hush money for the burglars, the Ellsberg trial. He might even need to ask for the resignations of his own two top aides; each problem seemed intractable and each outcome unacceptable. Meeting with Haldeman, Nixon said, “You, Ehrlichman, and I have got to put the wagons up around the President on this particular conversation [the March 21 “cancer on the presidency” talk with Dean]. I just wonder if the son of a bitch had a recorder on him? I didn’t notice any but I wasn’t looking.”
Haldeman listened to the tape of the March 21 conversation himself, trying to find the words that would clear the president. Nixon laid out his strategy: We need, he said, to keep “one jump ahead of the fucking sheriff.” Defiantly, he said he welcomed the fight ahead.
“Now if he’s going to have this pissing contest… all right, bring it out and fight it out and it’ll be a bloody goddam thing, you know in a strange kind of way that’s life, isn’t it?” Nixon said. “[It’ll] be rough as a cob and we’ll survive.… Despite all the polls and all the rest I think there’s still a hell of a lot of people out there… you know, they, they want to believe, that’s the point, isn’t it?”
Day after day, he stewed. He asked his aides, incredulously, “Do you think the people of the United States are gonna impeach a President because of John Dean?” At another one, still incredulous, he said, “My god—what the hell have we done to be impeached?”
He felt as if he alone were holding the free world together—and safe—and yet still all his ravenous domestic enemies could do was attack him. “The press has got to realize, that whatever they think of me, I’m the only one at the present time in this whole wide blinking world that can do a goddamn thing—you know—keep it from blowing up,” Nixon complained. “Look, if we went in with sackcloth and ashes and fired the whole White House staff… that isn’t going to satisfy these goddamn cannibals. They’d still be after us. Who are they after? Hell, they’re not after Haldeman or Ehrlichman or Dean; they’re after me, the President. They hate my guts.”
By that weekend, it was time for action. At Camp David, Nixon hosted a seemingly endless stream of staff and strategy sessions. On Sunday morning, he called Haldeman back in D.C. and said he needed to see his top aides immediately and have them resign.
Haldeman, in turn, called Ehrlichman. “Voice of doom,” he explained. “We go to Camp David today.” The men met at the Pentagon helipad shortly and flew north. Ehrlichman was furious—“Goddamnit—he’s not going to tie us in one bag with Dean,” he fumed. They each met in Aspen Lodge with the president to hear their fate; one of the key breaking points between Haldeman and Nixon would come later, when the chief of staff realized Nixon had used the same maudlin speech and lines on both men separately: “Last night before I went to bed, I knelt down and this time prayed that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning. I just couldn’t face going on.”
In an attempt to soften the blow, he offered large figures of financial support he could provide to help the aides and their families, offering $200,000 at one point and $300,000 at another. (Bebe Rebozo had also volunteered that he and Abplanalp could raise money for the men.) Both turned him down. Ehrlichman, now even more bitter, replied, “Just explain all this to my kids, will you? Tell them why you had to do this.”
The meetings shook Nixon. Asking his chief of staff and top aide to resign was “the toughest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said. “I had done what I felt was necessary, but not what I believed was right.” It was a rare moment when Nixon’s hidden anguish broke through to the surface, Julie Nixon later said, and Kleindienst too recalled the president looking absolutely grief-stricken as the attorney general walked in to discuss his own departure. As Kleindienst left, after tendering his resignation, Elliot Richardson walked in.
Richardson, the fifty-two-year-old defense secretary, had held thirteen different government jobs in Massachusetts and Washington, climbing steadily as he sought to reach his ultimate goal: governor of Massachusetts. An archetypal Boston Brahmin, he was descended from the original Puritans, a Harvard Lampoon editor in college who had joined the army as a combat medic in World War II and landed on Utah Beach on D-Day. After the war, Richardson had been president of the Harvard Law Review in law school and clerked with liberal legend Felix Frankfurter before becoming a prosecutor himself.IV Relentless and polished, Richardson loved Beethoven sonatas and doodled his way through meetings—always paying careful attention—and then crumpled up his paper to shoot baskets into the trash can. “It had come to be the cliché about Richardson that he resembled the stiff, square-cut comic-strip character Clark Kent,” the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew observed. About the wildest thing anyone ever accused Richardson of, Drew said, was that he was an “uninhibited dancer.”
Before arriving at Camp David, Richardson had already been told by Secretary of State William Rogers that Nixon intended to make him attorney general, Richardson’s third cabinet job of 1973, since he’d spent two-and-a-half years as secretary of health, education, and welfare before moving to the Pentagon on January 30.V Richardson tried to beg off and talk Rogers out of the switch, but he was told it was too late: There wasn’t time to locate another acceptable appointee.
That Sunday, amid a beautiful crisp spring sky, tucked a world away from Washington in the Catoctin Mountains, the two men talked Watergate. Richardson, Nixon said, was to pursue the investigation wherever it led, “even to the presidency,” and he understood that a special prosecutor might need to be appointed. The choice was Richardson’s, Nixon said, but he offered some suggestions: retired judge Joseph Edward Lumbard, establishment lawyer John McCloy, and a young Richardson lieutenant, Wilmot Hastings. Finally, as the meeting wrapped up, Nixon leaned forward, all but pleading with his cabinet secretary. “I had no knowledge of any of this,” he said. “You must believe that, or you can’t take this job.”
And then he said something, a warning, that Richardson would find himself returning to again and again in the months ahead: “Be extremely careful of national security interests, otherwise I don’t give a goddamn,” he said. “Above all, protect the presidency—not the president.”
In that moment, Richardson saw a president, raised in genteel but pinching poverty, still striving unnecessarily to prove himself to contemporaries who had always looked down on him. “I wish somehow deep down inside yourself you could come to believe you have really won,” Richardson told him. “The American people are rooting for you to succeed.”
Nixon, Richardson recalled later, said nothing.
* * *
On Monday, April 30, John Dean was in New York, being grilled by a grand jury investigating John Mitchell and Maurice Stans for their role in the brewing scandal over controversial investor Robert Vesco’s contributions to the Nixon campaign. James Polk, a reporter for the Washington Star-News, had reported early in 1973 about how Vesco had funneled money into the reelection effort through Mitchell and Stans and all but explicitly asked for the Nixon aides to make some of his legal troubles go away; Vesco’s associate had delivered the unreported $200,000, saying, “Sure hope that we might get some proper help somewhere along the line, if possible.” (The revelations would ultimately earn Polk a 1974 Pulitzer Prize.) It was there, in New York, where Dean received a midday telephone call from his secretary at the White House, who informed him that he’d been fired by the president.
News of the shake-up trickled through the capital. At the Post, Howard Simons interrupted Ben Bradlee in a meeting: Ehrlichman and Haldeman were resigning, along with Kleindienst; Dean was fired. Bradlee had his feet on the desk and had been tossing a plastic basketball at a hoop on the other side of his office. “How do you like them apples?” the editor yelled with surprise. His boys had been right. “The white hats win!”
“Don’t gloat,” Simons replied.
That night, President Nixon addressed the nation on television from the Oval Office, saying, “I want to talk to you tonight from my heart on a subject of deep concern to every American.” The address mixed bluster, performative outrage, and righteous indignation about the assaults by his own staff on the “integrity of the White House itself.” Recent weeks, he explained, had made clear that the longstanding denials by key aides of their own role in the break-in were wrong. He had held faith in people undeserving of it. Worried that he wasn’t getting the truth, Nixon explained he had ordered a renewed investigation and fresh answers—and what he had learned from that investigation proved deeply troubling and led him to the unfortunate conclusion to clean house, ousting Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean.
In a remarkable twist of the facts, Nixon blamed himself for the atmosphere of the 1972 campaign as he’d been distracted by pursuing world peace around the globe. “I decided, as the 1972 campaign approached, that the Presidency should come first and politics second. To the maximum extent possible, therefore, I sought to delegate campaign operations, to remove the day-to-day campaign decisions from the President’s office and from the White House,” he said.
Change now, though, was necessary. From this point forward, Nixon pledged, he would focus again on restoring the integrity of the presidency. “Some people, quite properly appalled at the abuses that occurred, will say that Watergate demonstrates the bankruptcy of the American political system,” he said. “I believe precisely the opposite is true. Watergate represented a series of illegal acts and bad judgments by a number of individuals. It was the system that has brought the facts to light and that will bring those guilty to justice—a system that in this case has included a determined grand jury, honest prosecutors, a courageous judge, John Sirica, and a vigorous free press. It is essential now that we place our faith in that system—and especially in the judicial system.”
With the housecleaning complete, it was time for a fresh start. “I must now turn my full attention—and I shall do so—once again to the larger duties of this office,” he concluded. “I owe it to this great office that I hold, and I owe it to you—to my country.”
About an hour later, he spoke to Haldeman. “It’s a tough thing, Bob—for you, for John, the rest, but God damn it, I never want to discuss this son of a bitch Watergate thing again. Never, never, never, never,” he said. “You’re a strong man, God damn it and I love you and I love John.… Keep the faith, keep the faith. You’ve got to win this son of a bitch.”
I. One of TIME’s senior editors, Jason McManus, sensed where the story was going mid-April, cabling his colleagues: “If Mitchell really planned Watergate from the outset, if Mitchell and Dean bribed those caught into silence, if Kalmbach was in on the espionage, is it really credible that Nixon was not involved?”
II. Gray never really recovered from the humiliation of his FBI exit; he left it to his sons to pack up and clean out his office. Unfortunately for him, though, he had years of further FBI scandal ahead to weather.
III. Felt, in his brief tenure, managed to put a single stamp on the bureau: He did away with the practice of “accountability logs,” paper records of who saw certain sensitive documents, logs that often ended up far eclipsing in length the underlying document.
IV. Frankfurter thought so much of Richardson that he had recommended his former clerk to become president of Harvard at thirty-three.
V. Richardson, who would go on to be Ford’s secretary of commerce, and George Shultz are the only two Americans to hold four different cabinet posts.
Chapter 30 The End of Mark Felt
For Richard Nixon, the year had begun with such promise—even peace in Vietnam!—but on the morning of May 1, at 8 a.m., he arrived in the Oval Office as isolated and alone as he had ever been. There was no pop-in from Haldeman, no brief chat with Ehrlichman, no phone call from Mitchell. Even for a man who preferred solitude, it was lonely. Outside, the spotlight on Watergate burned brighter than ever and now centered on the White House itself.
In the wake of Ehrlichman and Haldeman’s resignations, FBI agents had moved to secure their offices. Under orders from their new boss, William Ruckelshaus, a half-dozen agents from the Washington Field Office at the Old Post Office Building were dispatched to the White House, where they briefly argued with the Secret Service about whether they could bring their guns into the executive mansion. The agents, armed, took up posts in the narrow West Wing hallways with orders to stop anyone from removing anything from either office; other agents secured Dean’s office in the Executive Office Building. Ruckelshaus and Richardson had agreed that they wanted to avoid the chaos and trouble that had come from Hunt’s safe the previous year following the burglary—better to seal the offices immediately.
Soon after they arrived, Nixon passed through the hallway. When he realized what was happening, he grew furious. How could such good men like Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman be disrespected like this and treated like common criminals? Special Agent Bill O’Reilly watched, astounded, as Nixon seized the agent outside Ehrlichman’s office and shoved him down into a nearby chair, saying, “It’s bad enough I have to see you fuckers—I don’t want you in my way.” The president stormed off, only to return, chastened, about a half hour later to apologize, explaining how much stress he was under.
