Watergate, page 44
Later that morning, Haldeman himself arrived, walking past O’Reilly into his office, and he began gathering up papers from his desk—when O’Reilly protested, Haldeman shouted back. The scene escalated, with Haldeman promising, “You sonofabitch, I’ll have your job,” and O’Reilly explaining that if the former White House chief of staff tried to leave the office with his briefcase, he’d be arrested. Finally, Leonard Garment arrived with an FBI supervisor to assess the situation. He looked at Haldeman with an air of disappointment. “Bob, it’s been all this time, and you’ve had plenty of time—you should have shredded this shit by now. And if you haven’t done it by now, it’s the FBI’s turn.”
At an afternoon Cabinet meeting that day, Nixon confronted Kleindienst over the FBI’s presence; the attorney general, who had submitted his resignation but planned to stay until Richardson’s confirmation, was flabbergasted. He had had no idea about the FBI operation. The president’s tirade about Kleindienst’s incompetence, malevolence, and disloyalty continued at length until Kleindienst stood and walked out of the White House for the last time. “You’re wrong about me, sir,” he said as he left.
* * *
As chaos engulfed his surrounding offices, White House spokesman Ron Ziegler faced an angry press corps; the resignations and Nixon’s televised address had made very clear that Ziegler had misled, actively lied, or been ignorant of the actual facts time and again since June 17, casting doubt on accurate reporting and scoops by Woodward, Bernstein, and others. Now he apologized: “Where we’re wrong, we’re wrong,” adding, “I would apologize to the Post.”
“Mistakes were made in terms of comments,” he added after a moment, sheepishly and passively.
It was part of a brief victorious moment for the paper. The Pulitzer Prize board had been planning to recognize another newspaper that spring—the Post’s Watergate reporting package hadn’t even been one of the five original finalists for its highest Public Service award—but instead re-voted in the wake of the dramatic McCord letter. It said in its citation, “The Washington Post from the outset refused to dismiss the Watergate incident as a bad political joke, a mere caper.” Beyond just Woodward and Bernstein, the Pulitzer board credited the broader work of editorial board writers Roger Wilkins and Philip L. Geyelin and the biting cartoons by Herblock satirizing the burglary and resulting cover-up.I
After months of tentativeness, the press corps surged into full scandal mode, chasing every morsel and rumor they could. The anonymous—and even less than anonymous—sources of Watergate suddenly broke into public view, using press leaks to compete for deals with prosecutors. Seymour Hersh later recalled that he had written forty-two articles about the scandal for the New York Times, all but two on the front page, between April 19 and July 1, “an unimaginable explosion of news as Nixon was being fed to the wolves by his friends and enemies.” On May 2, he published a three-level banner headline in the New York Times: “Watergate Investigators Link Cover-Up to High White House Aides and Mitchell.” Underneath, a subhead said, “6 May Be Indicted.” On May 3, another three-level headline trumpeted, “Investigators Term G.O.P. Spying A Widespread Attempt to Insure Weak Democratic Nominee in 1972.” A May 5 story linked a senior Nixon attorney to the destruction of campaign data, and on May 6, Hersh wrote a three-column story headlined “C.I.A. Officials Summoned to Explain Agency’s Role in Ellsberg Break-In Plot.” The next day, another three-column headline: “Marine Corps Head Linked to C.I.A.’s Authorization for Ellsberg Burglary.”
Hersh developed a special technique to get past secretaries and ensure his calls got returned, barking, “Tell him I’m writing a story about that son of a bitch he was involved with.” Message recipients would inevitably then answer the phone call to understand which “son of a bitch” was involved, given that in Watergate there were so many possible candidates. For Gordon Strachan, Hersh had a more specific tactic—he’d become convinced the aide played a key role in the whole scandal, and he tried to prey on his conscience, calling his office daily to leave the same message: “Tell Strachan to watch the New York Times tomorrow.”
After having had the story all but to themselves for so long, Hersh and Woodward “became particularly fascinated with each other” that spring, recalled one of Woodward’s editors, Len Downie. The competitors met with Bernstein for dinner at a Chinese restaurant, where they roasted the Washington establishment. Hersh and Woodward began playing tennis together at the Arlington YMCA from ten to midnight on Thursdays, followed by pizza nearby and war stories from the Watergate beat, the fun color tidbits that didn’t make the papers—like how Charles Colson regularly tried to leak Hersh other non-Watergate stories to distract him from the scandal.II
In fact, as the scandal cracked open—the McCord letter, the Gray hearing, and the Dean testimony, all rapidly intensifying toward the summer Senate hearings—the power dynamics and relationships all over the capital had begun to change. “This was a turning point in the relationship between the White House and the press,” wrote journalism historian Alicia Shepard. “Never again would White House reporters be so trusting or respectful of a press secretary pushing the administration’s agenda.” All the reporters who had contributed materially to advancing the scandal over its first year, from TIME’s Sandy Smith to the Times’ Walter Rugaber to the Los Angeles Times duo to Woodward, Bernstein, and Hersh were White House outsiders, people who had little reason to trust the Nixon denials and little reason to brush up against Henry Kissinger at fancy parties. Now they held the keys to the kingdom.
It was a shift lost on neither Woodward nor Bernstein. “There has been an obscene affection in Washington for the official version of a story,” Woodward said. “Big-name reporters were merely stenographers. Watergate has proved that that is not enough.”
* * *
On May 3, at the Washington Press Club’s annual roast charity dinner, Howard Baker took on the role of the Republican toastmaster, standing in front of a room containing nearly every major player on both sides of the Watergate investigation. “It’s a little hard to just come off the campaign trail with echoes of ‘four more years’ ringing in your ears and get used to the new popular chant: ‘not less than two, nor more than ten years’ [in prison],” he deadpanned. The crowd roared. Later, as Fred Thompson navigated through the packed ballroom, he passed Ron Ziegler and his wife seated at one of the dinner’s round tables and introduced himself. Ziegler lit into him about Baker’s softball jokes. Finally, Thompson extricated himself: “All right, Ron,” he said. “I’ll deliver the message.”
The next day, on May 4, Haldeman and Ehrlichman appeared before the Senate staff; Dash had steeled himself for a hostile encounter, knowing the men’s reputation, but was surprised to find the two aides warm and respectful. Jim Hamilton whispered at one point, “I like these fellows. Maybe they won’t tell us everything they know, but they’re certainly not the ogres they’ve been made out to be.”
Both claimed to have nothing useful to share and maintained “to have never been around when any Watergate event occurred or was discussed,” Dash recalled. Haldeman claimed that after the burglary, he hadn’t even spoken to anyone about it in passing. Matter-of-factly, they laid all the blame on Dean. The conversations, Dash found, provided valuable insights into the reelection campaign’s culture and work, despite the men’s avoidance of any major details. At one point, the committee counsel asked Ehrlichman to explain an unfamiliar phrase: What did the former advisor mean when he said that Mitchell had “stonewalled” him?
“Stonewall? That’s easy. He just denied knowing anything. It was like talking to a stone wall,” Ehrlichman replied.
After the witnesses left, Dash and Hamilton agreed: They had been repeatedly, albeit very politely, lied to. There was no way to square the Washington reputation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman—men who supposedly commanded absolute power in the White House, spoke for the president in all manner of settings, and were charged by Nixon with navigating the hardest political questions—with these allegedly disconnected foot soldiers consumed by the nation’s other business. Dash cracked a smile, deploying the word they’d learned that day: “Jim, I have the feeling that we have been stonewalled.”
That same day, Senator Weicker unexpectedly showed up in Dash’s office to report that he’d spent the previous evening talking to Dean. “He’s told me a fantastic story,” Weicker said, handing over three pages of typewritten notes that outlined for the first time the extreme nature of Liddy’s plans for his original GEMSTONE intelligence operation—kidnappings, prostitutes, and recording devices galore. When Ervin and Dash reviewed Weicker’s memo later, the committee chair instantly understood its importance. “Just think Sam, this is only a small part of it,” he said to Dash. “Our hearings are going to stun the American people.”
* * *
His fall from insider to pariah complete, Dean began to more fully open up to his lawyer about two elements of the case he’d been reluctant to address while still working for Nixon: the specious “national security” argument for the administration’s schemes—including the forty-three-page Huston Plan that Dean still had a copy of—as well as the president’s own involvement in the cover-up. After Dean related the March 21 “cancer on the presidency” meeting to his counsel, Charlie Shaffer simply said, “That’s the damndest conversation I’ve ever heard.”
Over the days ahead, as Dean hid out at a Maryland beach house away from the eyes and cameras of the Washington press corps, Shaffer negotiated carefully between Silbert and Dash—playing the prosecutors against the Senate investigation. There was no shortage of investigators and lawyers interested in speaking with Dean; the growing number of other lawsuits and investigations spawned by Watergate, including Common Cause’s effort to force the disclosure of the Nixon campaign donors and a House investigation of ITT, all also wanted time. As part of the negotiations, Dean took the most sensitive—and potentially explosive—documents and placed them in a safe-deposit box, since he was no longer supposed to be in possession of classified or presidential materials; Shaffer then delivered the key to Judge Sirica. Sirica, in turn, passed them to the prosecutors and the Senate committee.
Dash knew that Dean would be a critical witness for Ervin’s committee, but the White House aide insisted on being granted immunity if he was going to speak publicly. “I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to sit down and be the only one to go and take the whole rap for this thing,” Dean told Dash in their first meeting.
In conversations with Dean at Shaffer’s townhouse, Dash finally grasped how much worse the situation was than he’d realized. “The burglary at the Watergate was just the last of a series of similar acts over a period of years sponsored by the White House. It was really not unusual, in light of what had been going on,” Dean had explained to him. “A way of life had developed in the White House which made a burglary or an illegal wiretap acceptable and almost normal behavior.”
He talked and talked, his dry monotone and command of the details instantly adding credibility as he spoke; they talked night after night, as Dash wrote furiously on a yellow pad, interrupting regularly to ask clarifying questions. The longer the conversation went, the more Dean’s memory blossomed, as questions jogged his thoughts. Dash continued to be impressed; the story got stronger and more detailed, which Dash knew was the sign of a reliable witness. Dash reported to Ervin that Dean appeared worthy of immunity. “I couldn’t break his story,” Dash explained, “and he provides enough supporting details that naturally fit together to persuade me he’s telling the truth.”
As his mid-May deadline to start the public hearings drew near, Dash still hadn’t settled on how to structure them. All around him, Washington eagerly awaited news of his strategy—the TV networks had not originally planned to carry the hearings live, but the ouster of the president’s inner circle had instantly transformed their interest. Now it seemed to Dash that he not only had to convince a Senate committee, but the American people watching at home too. He saw the hearings as a critical moment for the country and an important civics lesson in accountability.
Whereas most had suggested that he should start out with the big-name witnesses—like Mitchell or Haldeman—Dash settled on the reverse. After all, there was a story to build. “It was my plan to start out with little-known witnesses, who would provide the details necessary for the public to understand the background roles and activities of the major witnesses,” Dash explained.
Thompson was taken aback when he saw his counterpart’s proposed witness list; it stretched across dozens of names. “You want to produce 40 witnesses in the Watergate break-in phase alone?” he asked with incredulity. “Why, Sam, that would keep us in public hearings until September, and we wouldn’t have touched the dirty tricks phase or the campaign financing phase.” He and Baker offered an alternative: limited, short hearings—a few days on each phase of the investigation, wrapping up around the end of June—and then the summer to write the final report. The GOP proposal was rejected in an early May hearing. The die was cast; the public hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee would be meaty, substantive, and carefully crafted by the expert staff.
Dash was ready to fight.
* * *
With the top ranks of his White House decimated, Nixon needed new leadership—and fast. He and Haldeman knew only one man seemingly capable of stepping into a White House under fire: Kissinger’s former aide, General Alexander Haig, Jr. At the moment, he seemed destined to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Instead, he was relocated to the White House as Nixon’s new chief of staff.
Haig had been a below-average student at West Point and an average army officer, but he possessed an above-average political acumen. His time on Kissinger’s staff in the early years of the Nixon administration had accelerated his rank from colonel to four-star general in just four years, skipping over 240 more senior officers. The promotion pace surely stunned even Haig himself, but it mirrored the wishes of his commander in chief: Nixon wrote the army in 1970 that Haig was “a phenomenal individual with outstanding judgment and leadership ability.” A year later, in 1971, Kissinger similarly endorsed Haig in an evaluation as “the most outstanding flag officer in the Armed Forces.”
On May 2, the forty-seven-year-old received the call; by May 4, he was fully ensconced in a White House confident that the worst of Watergate was now behind it.III As would become clear with time, Haig, as a career military man, neither understood America nor Washington. He believed that he could stay above the fray, and that his boss was innocent. (“The original crime was stupid, and the idea that it was possible to cover it up was more so,” Haig recalled thinking. “I thought that Nixon was just too smart to be involved.”) He didn’t realize the position defending the president would put him in, but Nixon did. The president knew in his heart there would be no escape for Haig. “We were in for a long and bloody struggle, and for Haig it would be like volunteering to return to combat with no guarantee of the outcome and with no medals at the end,” he reflected later in his memoirs.
As his first order of business, Haig rapidly reorganized the White House structure. “The changes were fundamentally that Al controlled everything—everybody and everything,” Larry Higby explained later. “Al was trying to manage the whole thing personally.” It was a change Nixon’s circles would come to resent; even though Haldeman had been a powerful chief of staff, his actions and behavior were always seen as being in service of the president himself, while Haig seemed to set himself up as a separate, independent power center, akin to a “first minister”—over the course of the next year, as Nixon retreated deeper mentally and physically while Watergate consumed his presidency, some would joke that Haig became the nation’s “37 ½th president.”IV
His next step involved strategy. In one of their first conversations, Nixon debriefed Haig on the political landscape they faced and how he felt Dean’s goal was to force a resignation. “My God,” Haig replied. “It’s unthinkable. It’s unthinkable.”
“Only one person [is] trying to do that—you realize that—that’s Dean, and goddamn him,” Nixon continued. “One disloyal President’s counsel—a lawyer, of all people!—not just a Henry Kissinger walking out, you know, as a disgruntled person, people will understand it. But the President’s lawyer? Jesus Christ.”
“Well, he’s a sniveling coward,” Haig said.
“I think we can destroy him—we must destroy him.”
“Have to.”
“We never can allow this to happen—even if I was guilty as hell, but I’m not [unintelligible]. I was dragged into this, son of a bitch, because of stupid people—well-intentioned stupid people,” Nixon said.
“That’s something entirely different,” Haig agreed. “Here we’ve got a vicious little coward who’s trying to protect his ass at any cost.”
“And therefore he’s got to be destroyed,” Nixon said.
Within a week, Haig had recruited J. Fred Buzhardt as the White House’s legal counsel on Watergate matters. (“He’s a hell of a competent guy,” Haig promised Nixon during an Oval Office chat. “He’s a hardworking guy and he knows the town. He knows the Hill.”) Buzhardt, known behind his back as “Buzzard,” was a South Carolinian who had once worked on Senator Strom Thurmond’s staff as a military advisor, where he’d helped argue against Hawaii’s admission to statehood on racial grounds. Later, he had served in the Nixon administration as the general counsel at the Pentagon, where he’d worked the Pentagon Papers case and argued against prosecuting Ellsberg. When he joined Nixon’s team, the Charlotte Observer quoted one of his former Thurmond colleagues: “He’s the kind of guy who could steal your underwear without ever disturbing your pants.”V
