The Wars of Watergate (36 page)

Four of the men in custody were identified as Cubans, although they gave aliases at first. They had with them when they were arrested $2,400 in cash, including thirteen new hundred-dollar bills. Later that day, FBI agents obtained warrants and searched the suspects’ hotel room. They discovered a sealed envelope with a check written by E. Howard Hunt. Hunt’s name, along with the notations “W.H.” and “W. House,” appeared in the address books of two suspects. Bureau records revealed that Hunt had been the subject of an inquiry a year earlier when he was hired for a White House staff position. Hunt’s file also showed that he had listed Douglas Caddy, a local attorney, as a reference. Caddy was the same lawyer who had appeared at police headquarters, after—it was later discovered—Hunt and the wife of one of the defendants had called him. FBI agents further learned that the Cubans had previously been employed by the CIA.
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Investigators subsequently determined that the June 17 incident was the second illegal entry of the Democratic headquarters. Just after Memorial Day, a group of burglars had installed wiretaps and photographed documents. The purpose of the June 17 break-in, according to later testimony, was to rearrange the taps.

The suspects were arraigned in the afternoon of the seventeenth. Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert appeared for the government and asked the court not to grant bond, as the men had given false names and might flee the country. When asked for occupations, one of the defendants replied, “Anti-Communist.” That day Richard Nixon, on vacation, talked on the phone several times with Haldeman, but mostly he spent time with his friends and saw another movie,
The Notorious Landlady.

In Columbia, South Carolina, retiring presidential aide Harry Dent heard about the arrests on the evening television news. “It’s all over,” he told his wife. Instinctively, Dent figured out that the burglars must have had links to the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP)—and that, he well knew, meant Haldeman and the President. “I had seen enough of the Keystone Kop capers and Mickey Mouse stuff” during the first term, Dent remembered. The break-in, he thought, reflected “the lack of reality and the funny business that was going on in the White House.” But another observer, Leon Jaworski, the President of the American Bar Association, was not “particularly perturbed” when he learned of the Watergate break-in, dismissing the incident as a typical political game.

What the FBI did not immediately learn was that Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, the then-counsel for the re-election committee, with another operative, had observed the whole arrest procedure at the Watergate from a room in a nearby hotel. One of those arrested, however, had a key to that
room, and eventually police searched it and discovered that Hunt had been present.

By late afternoon of June 17, Bureau identification records revealed that the fifth burglar, booked under the alias of Edward Martin, really was James W. McCord, a onetime CIA employee. The FBI soon learned that McCord was chief of security for the President’s campaign committee. They also determined that McCord had rented motel rooms opposite the Watergate and on the same level as the Democratic headquarters. Meanwhile, Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, ordered the Bureau’s Washington field office to ask the CIA whether the suspects were then actively employed by the agency. Petersen also requested that all new information developed by the Bureau be furnished to him for passage to the White House.

Details quickly reached the White House. After breakfast on the morning of the eighteenth, the President and Rebozo flew to Key Biscayne, Florida. Nixon called his wife, his daughters (several times), Haldeman, Charles Colson, Henry Kissinger, and John Connally, then visiting in Australia. The President’s logs did not record any conversations with John Mitchell, the Chairman of CREEP; Mitchell nevertheless announced that day that neither McCord nor the others had in any way operated in behalf of the campaign committee. Mitchell also complained that his office, too, had “security problems.” In Key Biscay ne, Nixon and Rebozo had dinner alone and then watched
When Eight Bells Toll
, a convoluted mystery that plunges the viewer into a maze of subplots. The President ended the day with a call to a professional golfer.
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Alexander Butterfield told FBI agents that Hunt had been a consultant for the White House on “highly sensitive confidential matters” less than a year earlier but had not been used since. But by June 19, agents had learned that Hunt had been a longtime CIA agent and that he had worked for the White House in late March, directly for Charles Colson. That day, the FBI requested permission to interview Colson. On June 23, less than a week after the arrests, FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray ordered the “highest priority investigative attention” for the Watergate case. Meanwhile, the President and Haldeman made a desperate gamble to curtail the Bureau’s investigation and enlisted Gray and the CIA in their effort.

Monday morning, June 19, Ron Ziegler met reporters and refused to comment on what he dubbed a “third-rate burglary attempt.” He warned that “certain elements” would try “to stretch this beyond what it is.” Ziegler, of course, was his master’s voice. Nixon’s own reaction to the break-in and arrests was, as he later described it, “cynical,… a cynicism born of experience.” Vote fraud and various dirty tricks were familiar stuff; “I could not muster much moral outrage over a political bugging,” he wrote.

Some Republicans were concerned about the incident. Representative William
J. Keating, the ranking minority member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, indignantly wrote to FBI Acting Director Gray that “the specter of spying on political parties or candidates or office holders for political reasons should not be tolerated.” Keating urged Gray to conduct a “thorough investigation” to restore public confidence in the political system.
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Ziegler’s response to reporters’ questions about the break-in underlined the growing publicity about the affair. The generic term “Watergate” eventually became synonymous with media leaks. From the outset, local Washington reporting, especially in the
Post
, closely tracked the FBI’s work, relying primarily on raw Bureau reports. The media also reported repeated charges by Democratic National Committee Chairman Lawrence O’Brien that the White House and CREEP had been directly involved in the burglary. By the twentieth, Colson’s and Hunt’s names, as well as McCord’s employment at the re-election committee, had become public knowledge. O’Brien called a press conference and announced that the Democrats had filed a $1 million damage suit against CREEP. Citing the involvement of Colson, O’Brien charged that the case had developed “a clear line to the White House.”

Colson visited the President on June 20 and complained that newspapers had tainted him with guilt by association because of his links to Hunt—a man Colson later characterized along with Liddy as “good healthy right-wing exuberants.” But Colson directed most of the conversation to assuring the President that matters seemed under control and typically suggested that the White House begin its own political offensive. Early in the exchange, Nixon, referring to “this thing here,” remarked: “I, uh, I’ve got to, well, it’s a dangerous job.” Colson picked up the thread and commented that Haldeman was pulling “it all” together. “I think we’ve done the right things to date,” he added. At one point, the President said that the break-in didn’t sound like a very skillful job. “If we didn’t know better, [we] would have thought it was deliberately b[o]tched.” Apparently, Nixon had learned—and was satisfied—that those arrested simply had blundered, but their ineptness cued both men to imagine new conspiracies against the President. Colson and Nixon exchanged views on political espionage, and both agreed that the Democrats undoubtedly had someone spying on the President’s re-election committee. Nixon remembered the theft and publication of the Pentagon Papers; he wanted an article commissioned and a speech given that would remind the country of those events. The President and Colson also discussed an advertisement that had appeared in the
New York Times
calling for the impeachment of the President. Colson thought it possible to trace another anti-Nixon ad to Senator George McGovern, which then would make “eavesdropping at the Watergate Hotel look like child’s play.” Meanwhile, Colson assured Nixon that “we won’t let this one bug us.” For himself, the President concluded that “I [will] just stonewall it.”
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Nixon met reporters on June 22, telling them that the “White House has had no involvement whatever in this particular incident.” On June 25, Lawrence O’Brien challenged the President and called for the appointment of a “special prosecutor of unimpeachable integrity and national reputation.” He claimed that abundant evidence now existed linking the White House to the Watergate burglary. Six days later, John Mitchell announced his resignation as the President’s campaign manager, claiming that he wanted to spend more time with his family. Before he left, however, Mitchell dismissed Gordon Liddy when he learned that the CREEP aide had refused to cooperate with the FBI. Within several weeks, the FBI found that Liddy had been employed by the White House and the Treasury Department for several years. Eventually, the Bureau also discovered that Liddy had worked for John Ehrlichman on “law enforcement matters.” In fact, Liddy had been in the Special Investigations Unit, better known as the Plumbers. His colleagues had included Howard Hunt and several of the Watergate burglars. The Watergate break-in was part of a seamless web.

Richard Nixon took charge at a White House meeting with Mitchell and Haldeman on June 30. The President clearly wanted Mitchell’s resignation. The conversation centered on the fear of “a potential problem”—Haldeman’s oblique way of describing the possibility that Watergate might be linked to the White House. “The longer you wait the more risk each hour brings,” he said. Nixon readily agreed. “Well, I’d cut the loss fast. I’d cut it fast. If we’re going to do it I’d cut it fast.” In short, Mitchell’s departure could reduce the danger to the President. There was a cover for Mitchell, however. His resignation would be explained “in human terms”—family concerns, in other words—and woe to any reporter who questioned the President further on the subject. They would appear insensitive, Nixon said, and “look like a selfish son-of-a-bitch, which I thoroughly intended them to look like.” For nearly a year, Nixon had regularly told staff people that the drinking and emotional instability of Martha Mitchell, the Attorney General’s wife, had been responsible for her husband’s bad judgments. Ten days before the resignation, Nixon claimed that he had called Mitchell to “cheer him up a bit.” According to the President, his campaign manager was chagrined over the recent course of events and regretted that he had not policed his organization more effectively. The conversation established the foundation for a strategy that Nixon and his top aides pursued for nearly a year: John Mitchell would take the fall.
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In May 1974, with his grip on the presidency slipping, Nixon told a friendly reporter that “history will have to record whether I made the right decision in terms of the allocation of my time; my major error was not doing what many persons have appropriately criticized me for doing in previous campaigns—that
was always running my own campaign.” He indicated that if he had done so, he would have stopped the planned break-in.

Richard Nixon had a special knack for regretting or repudiating the opposite of what was true in order to obscure reality. So it was with the direction of the 1972 campaign. Nixon himself—not John Mitchell, not Clark MacGregor (the ostensible campaign chairman), and not the hierarchy at the Committee for the Re-election of the President—was the campaign manager in 1972. And as in most other matters, Haldeman was the loyal, efficient instrument of his wishes. Alexander Butterfield testified that for two years the President and his aides had directed the committee’s operations. The leading figures in CREEP—Jeb Magruder, Hugh Sloan, Maurice Stans, Frederick Malek, MacGregor, and Mitchell—Butterfield acknowledged, were “trusted” White House aides. “There is no question about that liaison,” he said.
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The creation of the re-election committee reflected Nixon’s determination to present a public image of nonpartisanship. The model for a separate campaign group may have had its origins in the 1952 Citizens for Eisenhower, an organization that consciously sought to convey the idea that General Eisenhower was above traditional political strivings. Nixon also sought, in establishing the committee to re-elect, to bypass the Republican National Committee so as to keep control of the campaign in his own hands. But, as always, image was basic: Nixon’s committee enabled the President to avoid the aura of partisanship and professional politics.

Nixon repeatedly stressed to his aides that the 1972 campaign really was about patriotism, morality, and religion, and not material concerns such as taxes and prices. The “movement,” that is, the antiwar, civil rights, and environmental crusades, he confidently asserted, was finished, or, as he put it on another occasion, “The Liberal Establishment Media May Have Had It.” In any event, “Square America” was back. Nixon would forge a “New American Majority” for an across-the-board appeal against “permissiveness” and “elitism.” Confronted with a suggestion that the Administration consider adopting Truman’s policy of pardoning draft evaders during the Korean War, Nixon scrawled on the memo, “never.” He wanted campaign surrogates to hold McGovern’s “feet to the fire” whenever the Democratic candidate appealed for quotas, affirmative action, or other measures for special-interest groups. Nixon must have known he was on the right track when he learned on July 19 that George Meany and the AFL-CIO would not endorse McGovern.
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Haldeman’s action memos for the campaign derived from notes taken at his daily meetings with the President or from presidential memoranda. The White House directed the campaign, not CREEP headquarters at 1701 Pennsylvania
Avenue, and not Republican National Committee Chairman George Bush. Those organizations simply executed White House directives. Around September 1971, Haldeman summarized his presidential meeting notes on political activities: “Mitchell will deal only with Haldeman in the future. Haldeman will operate only as a conduit and not as a manager. This is a role that he will have to perform for the time being.” The note was written as the President settled on John Mitchell as his purported campaign director. When Mitchell formally took the post in February 1972, Nixon, in a handwritten note, told him he was one of those “rare men,” one of the “very few indispensable men,” and the “man to run the campaign of 1972.” Finally: “I can’t pay you what you are worth. But if just plain ‘thank you’ will do—you have that a thousand fold (and Martha too!)[.]”