My Kindle Clippings/2014

2014

January

Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 2370-74  | Added on Friday, January 03, 2014, 11:32 AM

In the wake of the Cold War, Cuba became not only one of the last remaining Communist regimes on earth but also one of the few to resist broader economic liberalization. As a result, during a decade where globalization was a buzzword and the spread of global mass commercial culture was celebrated by some intellectuals and denigrated by others, Cuba became a kind of historical artifact, seeming to echo or reinforce idyllic visions of a decommercialized past. Such conceptions fueled not only a significant portion of Cuba’s draw as a tourist destination but also a renewed attraction to Cuban artists and music.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 2374-79  | Added on Friday, January 03, 2014, 11:33 AM

Moreover, beginning in 1987, a crack in the U.S. information embargo opened up when Congress passed what came to be known as the Berman amendment, for Congressman Howard Berman of California. Crafted to protect the First Amendment rights violated by the ban on American travel to Cuba, the new law allowed Americans to import “informational material,” interpreted as not only printed material but also any form of creative expression, including music, visual art, sculpture, etc. These liberalized cultural exchange policies under the Clinton administration, coupled with the growing power of digital technology, increased access to a veritable treasure trove of past and present Cuban art that had by and large not received significant Western attention.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 2452-53  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 10:56 AM

Today, Cuba spends 43% of its national budget on health, education, and social security.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2468-71  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 10:58 AM

The UN has recognized the extremely low infection rate in Cuba and in 2006 hailed the island’s program as “among the most effective in the world.” Notably, in Cuba only 29 children have become infected with HIV in the past 20 years as Cuba has effectively prevented mother-to-child transmission of HIV, mainly due to the government’s universal provision of antiretroviral therapy, which became broadly available in 2001.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2477-80  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 10:59 AM

Those looking for the end of the Cold War to transform Cuba into a western liberal democracy were sorely disappointed. Organized opposition parties and groups remained proscribed, free speech and assembly continued to be repressed, and, although their numbers had vastly diminished, political prisoners still languished in Cuban jails. (By the end of the 1990s, the number of political prisoners hovered in the range of 200 to 300.)
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 148 | Loc. 2491-93  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:02 AM

Yet in light of decades of American attempts to unseat the regime, receiving funds from external sources (or simply the perception of being willing to do so) cast a pall of suspicion over their activities, leading to accusations that they were mere lackeys of foreign interests.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2518-20  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:08 AM

In 2002, Payá presented 11,000 signatures backing the Varela Project to the National Assembly of People’s Power in Cuba, coinciding with former president (and human rights champion) Jimmy Carter’s historic trip to the island.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 2500-2503  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:08 AM

In March of 2003, for example, human rights activists were dealt one of their most significant blows since the end of the Cold War when authorities arrested some 75 independent journalists, prodemocracy organizers, and other dissidents. In what became known as the “black spring,” Cuban officials targeted those individuals allegedly collaborating with or receiving funds from the U.S. government, Cuban American groups, and/or international organizations agitating for more democracy and human rights.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 157 | Loc. 2618-21  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:19 AM

Cuban authorities viewed the controversy over Elián not only as an indicator of all that was sour in U.S. policy toward Cuba but also as an opportunity to goad the Cuban American community into potentially damaging missteps in its quest to keep the embargo in place. Yet Fidel wasn’t the only one who saw Elián’s story and his ultimate fate as a potent symbol.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 2640-44  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:21 AM

With Attorney General Janet Reno’s authorization, federal agents stormed the Little Havana house in a surprise, predawn raid, seized the boy, and quickly ferreted him away to his father. After two months in Washington waiting out a courts appeal process and under 24-hour protection by the ATF, Elián and his father returned to Cuba as national heroes. The entire episode inflicted great damage, first and foremost to the boy and his family, while dealing a withering blow to those in the exile community who attempted to exploit his odyssey.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 161 | Loc. 2692-94  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:27 AM

Yet by and large, in foreign policy, the White House was preoccupied with the consequences of German reunification, the first Gulf War in Iraq, the breakup of the Soviet Union into over a dozen separate countries, and bailing out Moscow. Moreover, the first Bush administration did not put a premium on schadenfreude, at least in public.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 162 | Loc. 2701-4  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:35 AM

Proclaiming that the time had come to “put the hammer down on Fidel Castro,” Clinton endorsed the Cuban Democracy Act, a piece of legislation conceived initially by Mas and sponsored by New Jersey Congressmen Robert Toricelli. Against his better judgment and to no political or electoral benefit of his soon to be one-term presidency, George H.W. Bush endorsed the bill and then signed it into law in October 1992, just before his defeat in the November elections.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 2725-26  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:38 AM

As a result of these complex and politicized regulations, actual sales seldom transpired. Indeed, Cuba would claim that the embargo was directly responsible for the death or illness of patients for whom Cuba was unable to purchase key equipment and medicines.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 2739-41  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:39 AM

Equally significant, the bill retained nearly full executive privilege over the embargo; if he saw fit, the president could still do away with most sanctions with the stroke of a pen.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 167 | Loc. 2774-77  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:45 AM

Yet even more to the point, because the agreements involved government-to-government cooperation, they compromised many exile leaders’ beliefs in a strategy of complete isolation from the Castro government. In their view, the migration agreements conferred sovereign status on a regime considered illegitimate by the exile leadership.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Note on Page 167 | Loc. 2777  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:46 AM

and because the exile community is based in FL... they have disproportionate influence over national politics
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 2786-89  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:48 AM

Upon coming to office, the Clinton administration moved to signal its embrace of democratic movements, parties, and institutions in Latin America, distancing itself from the Cold War preference for stable authoritarian regimes. Yet when the Republicans swept the 1994 midterm elections (only months after the balsero crisis came to an end), none other than Jesse Helms, a hard-core anti-Communist crusader, became chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, signaling that the Cold War was far from over.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2864-67  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:23 AM

the president conceded a degree of executive authority that not even Jesse Helms had expected possible. Helms-Burton codified all existing provisions of the embargo. While the president would retain some authority to tinker with some restrictions on the margins, by and large the executive branch gave up its authority to lift or impose sanctions, turning over to Congress a substantial portion of its power to shape policy toward the island.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2876-77  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:26 AM

If ever Castro needed justification for the government’s siege mentality, or proof that he and the revolution were all that protected Cuban citizens from a return to the injustices of the Batista past, Helms-Burton was it.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 2908-9  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:35 AM

With an eye on the 2000 election, however, the White House ruled out any bolder ventures, lest they damage Al Gore’s chances at the presidency.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2943-47  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:45 AM

The pope’s visit to Cuba in 1998 provided the opportunity for reform-minded CANF members, including Mas Santos, to steer the organization away from his father’s rigid isolationist approach by supporting family ties and dissidents on the island. After Mas Canosa, new Cuban American voices and organizations gained some political space in Miami and in Washington. By slowly adapting to a new reality of family ties and more forcefully promoting the potential of a viable opposition on the ground within Cuba, the CANF was able to retain a shot at relevance under a new generation’s leadership.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2951-52  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:45 AM

The Elián González episode, followed by the contested 2000 election, dashed any expectation that the end of Clinton’s presidency would bring dramatic moves by the White House toward Cuba.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2956-58  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:30 AM

Gore knew he would be hard pressed to sustain Clinton’s impressive gains in Cuban American votes in 1996. And he didn’t: Gore lost Florida to Bush by 537 votes, but he lost Cuban American votes by a much wider margin, winning just under 20% to Bush’s 80%, a more than 15% decline relative to the Democrats’ win in 1996.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2958-60  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:30 AM

Nothing dramatized the political backlash of the Elián affair as much as the spectacle of Cuban Americans participating among the crowd of demonstrators in December 2000 who succeeded in forcing, literally, an end to the Miami-Dade recount, and ultimately to Al Gore’s shot at the presidency.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 180 | Loc. 2981-85  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:36 AM

they were intent on plugging a leaky embargo even though public opinion (whether nationally, in the business community, or among Cuban Americans) was clearly supportive of the Clinton-era openings. Moreover, the president himself (whose brother, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, had developed deep political and business ties with Cuban exile leaders) had campaigned on a promise to bring down Fidel. Nonetheless, prior to September 11, 2001, the new government paid scarce attention to Cuba.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 186 | Loc. 3061-64  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:08 PM

In 1990, following intensive lobbying from the Florida congressional delegation, the first President Bush pardoned long-time anti-Castro terrorist Orlando Bosch, one of the two principal intellectual architects of the 1976 explosion of the Cubana Airline passenger flight that killed all 73 people on board. In 2005, his co-conspirator, Luis Posada Carriles, crossed into Texas from Mexico, and after a period of one month in detention, was released. Both now live in the Miami area.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Bookmark on Page 187 | Loc. 3079  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:10 PM


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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 3078-83  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:10 PM

The Bush administration largely ignored Venezuela’s extradition request, arguing that Caracas failed to present enough evidence. More likely, given the amount of declassified documentation available on the case, Bush officials bowed to pressure from Posada supporters who claim he would be tortured if returned to Chávez’s Venezuela. Yet neither has the United States endeavored to hold Posada accountable for his crimes. Although the Patriot Act permits the United States to indefinitely detain “excludable aliens” who are authors of terrorist attacks, Posada now lives, and is occasionally and publicly celebrated, in Miami, though generally by an aging group of his peers rather than by the majority of Cuban Americans.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 3086-88  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:11 PM

As the United States entered the new millennium, Elián fatigue, embargo fatigue, and widespread annoyance with the domestic politics of the Cuba issue had helped create a bipartisan consensus in favor of dramatic policy change.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 3107-10  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:14 PM

Havana reasoned that allowing the groups to continue to function could also give an in-road to an enemy whose designs may well turn belligerent. Thus, in the eyes of Cuban officials, the national security prerogatives of cracking down on domestic opposition activists were well worth the near-universal international backlash Cuba was likely to (and did) incur. It is no surprise that the “black spring” arrests of 75 dissidents occurred in March 2003, the day before Bush formally declared war on Iraq.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 3133-35  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:16 PM

Yet as allegations of torture surfaced and the legality of the detentions came into question, Guantánamo became, as it did for many of America’s global critics, a symbol of American imperial hubris, one which in the Cuban case also allowed Havana to highlight the island’s own history of grievances over American violations of its sovereignty.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 3205-6  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:35 PM

After the Cold War came to an end, Castro viewed the emerging liberal democratic capitalist order in Latin America as a threat to social justice and a potential recipe for the political marginalization of the left.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3246-48  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:42 PM

Between November 2005 and the end of 2006, Latin Americans went to the national polls in 12 countries. Left and center-left leaders were elected or reelected in 8 of the 12—Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Venezuela, and Uruguay—and came within striking distance of victory in Peru and Mexico.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3249-51  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:43 PM

these impressive electoral outcomes (and close losses) signaled an increasingly empowered electorate’s demands for public policies to address vast inequality, poverty, social exclusion, and rampant crime.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 3265-68  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:46 PM

through well-funded and fiscally competent institutions, a government’s primary role is to deliver the building blocks of opportunity, dignity, and social rights to populations long excluded from the region’s wealth and resources. By the end of his presidency, even George W. Bush indirectly conceded this point by attempting to frame U.S. policy toward the region as helping Latin Americans achieve social justice, appropriating language once the preserve of Cuba and the region’s Left.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 3270-71  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:46 PM

while Cuba’s international message continues to resonate, its domestic model is largely seen as an anachronistic holdover from a prior era.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 3293-97  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:49 PM

When in April 2002 Chávez was briefly ousted in a coup, the White House and the U.S. embassy in Caracas issued statements indicating that they looked forward to working with the new government. The president of the congressionally funded International Republican Institute even praised the coup attempt. Leaders throughout Latin America were justifiably appalled at Washington’s seeming approval of a fundamentally undemocratic act. Indeed, just months earlier in September 2001, Colin Powell had stood with Latin Americans to sign the OAS’s Inter-American Democratic Charter, which explicitly banned coups from the region’s political playbook.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3319  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:51 PM

while interests remain permanent, alliances never are.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3321-24  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:51 PM

With a population of just over 11 million, Cuba’s GDP (roughly $45 billion in 2007) falls closest to neighbors like the Dominican Republic or Ecuador. GDP per capita is comparable to that of Guatemala or Honduras. But unlike any of these countries, Cuba has attempted to shield most of its population from the dynamism and pressures of globalization,
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3330-32  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:53 PM

Although agriculture has been somewhat decentralized and private farmers’ markets are now ubiquitous, Cuba still imports over 80% of the food consumed by Cubans and foreign tourists, with a sizeable percentage from the United States since 2001.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 206 | Loc. 3364-65  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:57 PM

With the prisons at Guantánamo a daily reminder of the human consequences of one country rewriting the international rules of war, Cuba was able to deflect attention from its own prisons and political prisoners onto those jailed by a foreign power on its own territory.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 216 | Loc. 3501-2  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 08:13 PM

Though some in the Bush administration dismissed these changes as simply “cosmetic,” other reforms are far less susceptible to this charge.
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February

Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 566 | Loc. 11753  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:02 AM

antiwar emonstrations
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 565 | Loc. 11726  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:03 AM

hoovers deathand his files
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 564 | Loc. 11710  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:03 AM

espionage and anti narcotics plans
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 563 | Loc. 11693  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:04 AM

helms nixon reationship warms
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 563 | Loc. 11677  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:04 AM

hels pursues spy movies for hunt and cia pr
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 562 | Loc. 11660  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:04 AM

helms and hunt
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 560 | Loc. 11628  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:05 AM

mccord security cia exiles involve.emt bay of pigs
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 559 | Loc. 11613  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:06 AM

fiorini sturgis knew hunt from bay of pigs well before wqatergate
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 560 | Loc. 11619  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:06 AM

sturgis met hunt during cia almeida assassination plot
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 561 | Loc. 11647  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:07 AM

martinez cia reorting on hunt white house connections activities
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 569 | Loc. 11803  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:08 AM

fall and rise o jimmy hoffa book
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 571 | Loc. 11857  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:09 AM

chilean embassy plumbers burglary numero uno
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 573 | Loc. 11898  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:10 AM

mccrd still oyal to cia. said wh was bugging embassy. knewwhen to burgle and whre.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 575 | Loc. 11931  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:11 AM

fiorini and rosselli both say chilean embassy burglary was abt cuban dosier
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 576 | Loc. 11960  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:12 AM

dossier mid 1960-71
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 578 | Loc. 12000-12003  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:14 AM

All Helms would have needed to do initially was to communicate to Nixon that he needed to see him about “the Bay of Pigs thing”—meaning the CIA-Mafia plots—and that would have gotten the President’s immediate attention. That also helps to explain why that term came up on Nixon’s tapes when Hunt’s name surfaced in the Watergate affair, and the term was then thrown back at Helms, to get him to force the FBI to back off on the Watergate investigation.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 579 | Loc. 12007-10  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:14 AM

It’s not hard to imagine Hunt’s reaction when he heard about the Cuban Dossier, since he’d been involved in attempts to kill Fidel from 1960 to 1965. The same is true for his assistant, Bernard Barker—and for Barker’s longtime boss, Santo Trafficante. The godfather would not only have no objection to Barker and Fiorini’s involvement in trying to get a copy of the Dossier, but would probably have encouraged their participation as a way to know what was going on.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 579 | Loc. 12019-22  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:15 AM

Nixon would still privately be insisting that legitimate “national security” concerns were behind the Watergate break-ins and the cover-up. Nixon was specifically talking about the highly incriminating “Smoking Gun” tape, in which the President talked about the Watergate cover-up and the “Bay of Pigs thing,” and the fact that “Hunt, ah, he knows too damn much, and he was involved.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 580 | Loc. 12029-33  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:16 AM

Nixon never explained—to his aides or in public—just what those “national security reasons” were, and how they related to Hunt and the “Bay of Pigs thing.” Ongoing CIA operations are exempt from some disclosure requirements to Congress, an important consideration since both houses were controlled by the Democratic Party. (Ongoing operations only have to be disclosed to four members, two leaders from each party in each house of Congress, and the CIA’s descriptions can be so vague and general as to be virtually meaningless.)
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 580 | Loc. 12035-43  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:17 AM

But there was an important, ongoing CIA operation that could have been endangered if it were listed in the Cuban Dossier, or if it were uncovered because public exposure of the Dossier led to more investigations. That ongoing operation had involved Richard Helms since its inception, and had also involved E. Howard Hunt and Bernard Barker. It was the JFK-Almeida coup plan, or, rather, what was left of the operation, which was the CIA’s ongoing support for Commander Juan Almeida’s wife and at least two children outside of Cuba. Plus the fact that Commander Almeida—in some ways the No. 3 official in Cuba—could still be favorably disposed to helping the United States if anything should happen to Fidel Castro (who had already ruled longer than most Latin American dictators). There was also the fact that Almeida could always be blackmailed into helping the United States (because of his work for JFK), even if he didn’t want to do so willingly. Hunt and Barker had even handled the $50,000 payment to Almeida in 1963, when they had helped arrange for his wife and two children to first leave Cuba under a seemingly innocent pretext.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 12068-70  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:22 AM

The search for the Cuban Dossier explains why the burglars at the Chilean embassy and the Watergate were all former CIA agents, officers, or assets experienced in anti-Castro operations. The only exception was G. Gordon Liddy, who helped Hunt supervise the Watergate break-ins from across the street.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 12077-78  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:24 AM

Memos concerning Rosselli’s 1974 Watergate Committee staff interview about the CIA-Mafia plots were considered so sensitive that they were kept secret for decades, and are published in this book for the first time.57
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 12079-86  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:24 AM

Richard Nixon’s national security rationale/excuse for the Chilean embassy and Watergate break-ins would initially be effective in forcing CIA Director Richard Helms to ask the FBI not to fully investigate the final Watergate break-in. It also kept Nixon’s taped admission about his knowledge of the Chilean Embassy break-in secret until 1999. That was good for Nixon, since in 1976, he provided a written answer to the Senate Church Committee denying any such knowledge, saying that     I do not remember being informed while President, that at any time during my Administration an agency or employee of the United States Government, acting without a warrant, engaged in a surreptitious or otherwise unauthorized entry into the Chilean Embassy in the United States.58
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 584 | Loc. 12112-15  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:27 AM

in May 1972, just prior to the initial unsuccessful Watergate break-in, Hunt and Barker’s team cased and made plans to bug “the offices of McGovern’s two top aides, Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart.” (Five years earlier, Mankiewicz had secretly investigated JFK’s assassination for Robert Kennedy, while Hart would soon be part of the Senate Church Committee that first exposed the CIA-Mafia plots.)
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 584 | Loc. 12115-19  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:28 AM

Mankiewicz’s and Hart’s offices on Memorial Day 1972 and told him that photographing documents would be part of the mission. Lukas also pointed out that Barker and the other Watergate burglars were “mentioned in connection with a May 16 burglary of a prominent Democratic law firm in the Watergate, whose members included . . . Sargent Shriver, [Senator Edward] Kennedy’s brother-in-law.” That burglary was discovered when an early-arriving employee “noticed the entry door was . . . taped so the door would not lock,” similar to what happened on the final two Watergate burglaries.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 585 | Loc. 12123-29  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:28 AM

After the Plumbers failed to obtain a complete copy of the Cuban Dossier at the Chilean embassy, there would be a significant change in mission for the upcoming burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate. No longer would it be primarily a small bugging operation; now, having a larger crew photographing documents would become its primary goal. One can only imagine the reaction of Nixon, or Helms, if they heard that the Cuban Dossier started in 1960 with a CIA plot to kill Fidel involving a “gangster,” or that the Dossier continued until the December 1971 attempt to kill Fidel in Chile. Hunt had told Fiorini the Dossier was approximately one hundred pages long, yet they only had a piece of it, so they had no way of knowing what was on the other pages that could harm the CIA’s reputation or Nixon’s reelection campaign.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 586 | Loc. 12143-46  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:29 AM

Some writers have speculated that Watergate was all about the $100,000 cash contribution from Howard Hughes to Nixon, via Bebe Rebozo, and what DNC Chairman Larry O’Brien might have known about the payment. But there had already been two Jack Anderson articles about the $100,000, and it would have been hard—if not impossible—for Larry O’Brien to use that issue against Nixon without opening himself up to charges about his own lucrative work for Hughes.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 588 | Loc. 12186-90  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:31 AM

The fact that Nixon, Helms, and Hunt were willing to risk several break-ins in the span of just a few weeks shows a level of desperation missing from most Watergate accounts. However, the possibility of the CIA-Mafia plots becoming public during the campaign was simply too great to ignore. Ultimately, in trying to obtain a full copy of the Dossier and learn what the Democrats knew, Nixon would cost himself the Presidency, Helms would end his career, and Hunt would go to prison.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 590 | Loc. 12222-27  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:34 AM

There were several reasons for targeting Spencer Oliver’s Watergate office and phone. Former Associated Press reporter Robert Parry pointed out that Oliver’s father “worked with Robert R. Mullen, whose Washington-based public relations firm [still officially] employed Hunt,” even as most of Hunt’s time was consumed by his work for Nixon. The Mullen firm, and new owner Robert Bennett, worked extensively for Howard Hughes, and “Oliver’s father had represented Hughes.” That meant in addition to the secret Cuban Dossier, Oliver could have information damaging to Nixon that his father could have gotten from Hughes or his representatives.8
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 593 | Loc. 12298-305  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:23 PM

The first break-in wasn’t scheduled until May 26—so why did Hunt have the men fly into Washington on May 22? It’s possible the extra time was needed to get their cover stories straight, and to make sure the men knew what additional information to look for at the Watergate and McGovern headquarters. As Fiorini told St. George, in addition to their main goal of looking for the Cuban Dossier, they were also keeping their eyes open for other material to photograph, some related to the Dossier and some not: “any document with money on it . . . anything that had to do with Howard Hughes . . . damaging rumors about Republican leaders [and] everything that could be leaked to the press with a damaging effect to the McGovern people.” Those items would be icing on the cake, but they weren’t the kinds of things for which Nixon would have risked his Presidency.15
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 594 | Loc. 12315-18  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:24 PM

The “cover” for the burglary was going to be a supposed “board meeting” banquet and film screening for Ameritas, a real estate company affiliated with Barker. The small banquet would be held in the basement of the Watergate Hotel, which had access—via a corridor and a courtyard—to a garage and stairwell in the Watergate office building where the DNC headquarters was located.17
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 595 | Loc. 12340-49  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:27 PM

The next night, the Plumbers tried a different approach: going in through the main Watergate office building entrance, signing the register (using aliases) indicating they were going to the Federal Reserve offices on the eighth floor, then walking down two flights of stairs to the DNC offices. McCord was with Fiorini and the exiles, while Hunt and Liddy waited with Baldwin across the street. Eugenio Martinez thought the plan strained credibility—what were so many men doing going to the Federal Reserve office at midnight, on Saturday, during the Memorial Day weekend? Still, all went according to plan, until Virgilio Gonzalez was unable to open the doors to the DNC offices with the lock-picking tools he had brought.21 Hunt was furious when he learned of the failure, and he demanded that Gonzalez fly back to Miami, get his tools, and return by Sunday night, for a third attempt. Martinez thought that Hunt was being too hard on Gonzalez, but when he complained, Barker relayed a blunt message from Hunt: “You are an operative. Your mission is to do what you are told and not to ask questions.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 596 | Loc. 12359-64  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:28 PM

On Sunday night, May 28, 1972, the burglars tried a different route into the Watergate, and they finally were successful. While Hunt, Liddy, and Baldwin waited in the Howard Johnson’s motel across the street, this time the burglars entered the Watergate office building through the garage, with McCord taping open “the basement stairwell door.” Emery wrote that “once on the sixth floor, Gonzalez . . . used a pressure wrench to twist the lock on the rear door to the DNC and they were in.” As McCord placed the bugs, “Barker and Martinez started photographing documents, while . . . Pico and De Diego served as corridor lookouts.”24
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 597 | Loc. 12382-87  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:30 PM

either McCord’s sense of caution or the former CIA security officer’s possible growing reluctance to be part of such clearly illegal political spying. The break-in at the Chilean embassy was standard CIA fare; in some ways it was a typical CIA security operation to ensure that Agency secrets weren’t in the wrong hands. But the DNC break-in was something else, a grossly illegal political operation with a thin national security cover of protecting CIA secrets and Agency assets like Commander Almeida. After the successful May 28 break-in, Liddy planned for McCord to develop the two rolls of film. But after a week, McCord had made no progress, which could be another sign of his unease about the whole project. Liddy then gave the film to Hunt and asked if Barker could get it developed.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 598 | Loc. 12388-91  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:30 PM

The fact that McCord was supposed to use his contact to develop the Watergate film raises interesting questions. Who developed the film from the Chilean embassy break-in? The CIA? And who was McCord’s contact who was supposed to develop the Watergate film? Someone with Agency contacts? Those questions would only deepen after Barker had the film developed.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 599 | Loc. 12406-13  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:32 PM

While making those plans, and dealing with Artime in Miami on the narcotics operation, Hunt gave the DNC film from the third Watergate burglary attempt to Barker to get developed. Hunt later said that somehow Barker didn’t understand the film was from the Watergate job, so Barker took it to a local camera shop to have the film developed and enlargements made. Why Barker wouldn’t realize—or even assume—the two rolls were from the Watergate mission has never been clear. As Hunt and Barker later told the story, once Barker realized it was the Watergate film, he became frantic. To the Hunt/Barker account, Martinez added a scene where an anxious Barker came to his real estate office, where Martinez just happened to be talking to two other Watergate burglars, Fiorini and De Diego. The three supposedly rushed to Rich’s Camera Shop, where the other two covered “each door to the shop” while Barker tipped the owner “$20 or $30” when the owner said about the photos: “It’s real cloak-and-dagger stuff, isn’t it?”29
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 600 | Loc. 12425-30  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:33 PM

The Watergate burglars could have stolen some documents and photographed them later in the Howard Johnson’s motel room. But few papers—and none of importance—could have been taken, since the DNC staff didn’t realize anything had been taken from the office. Some authors, like Hougan, think that McCord could have switched the film canisters and had the real photos developed by the CIA, while giving Liddy and Hunt innocuous files photographed at the Howard Johnson’s. Given McCord and Hunt’s relationship and mutual CIA background, that seems unlikely. Hougan also thinks it’s possible that Hunt himself switched the film, perhaps sending the real film to Richard Helms in “the packages that Hunt was sending to CIA headquarters.”31
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 600 | Loc. 12431-32  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:33 PM

The bottom line for the whole affair is that the photos Hunt gave to Liddy, which Liddy gave to Nixon’s aides, were not the photos Barker had taken at the DNC offices.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 600 | Loc. 12441-42  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:34 PM

The faked photos, given by Liddy to Nixon’s aides, were destroyed after the Watergate arrests, leaving the camera shop owner’s consistent testimony—about an unusual task and photos that stood out among his usual work—as the only definitive account.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 601 | Loc. 12461-68  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:36 PM

In June 1972, Richard Helms was all too aware of press reports about the drug trafficking activities of so many of his former—and some said current—agents and assets. The negative publicity for the Agency was the opposite of the positive spin Helms had tried to achieve just a month earlier, when pitching the TV show based on Hunt’s spy novels. More drug activities by CIA personnel were going to be exposed in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, a soon-to-be-published book by Alfred McCoy, who had just testified to Congress about the heroin problem. Helms had turned to Nixon to help stop Victor Marchetti’s CIA exposé, but to stop McCoy’s book, Helms unleashed high-ranking CIA official Cord Meyer in June 1972. Meyer tried to prevail upon the head of McCoy’s publisher, Harper & Row, to halt publication of the book because it was “a threat to national security.” Over the protests of McCoy, Harper & Row actually submitted the thoroughly documented book to the CIA for a pre-publication review.35
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 603 | Loc. 12493-502  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:40 PM

Liddy gave Baldwin’s typed summaries to Nixon aide Jeb Magruder, and they eventually covered two hundred calls. Information gets murky after that, in part because of “the federal wiretap statute,” which criminalizes not just listening to a bugged conversation or reading a transcript, but even looking at a summary of the conversation or a memo written about that summary. Because any of those activities is a felony, many Nixon aides, officials, and their assistants have given conflicting accounts about who saw or read the DNC call summaries. Magruder says he passed them on to John Mitchell, and Liddy says he gave some to Mitchell, but Mitchell denies ever seeing them, or knowing about any bugging. Yet Mitchell made what Emery considers a “damning” remark about bugging in general on June 14, when Mitchell was talking to Charles Colson about a Democratic strategy meeting. Mitchell said, “tell me what room they are in and I will tell you everything that is said in that room.” Other Nixon aides who logically should have seen the summaries denied having done so. For example, H.R. Haldeman hedged when he testified to the Senate Watergate Committee that “to the best of my knowledge I did not see any material produced by the bugging,” but when questioned about it in court, “he refused to reply ‘on advice of counsel.’”39
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 606 | Loc. 12542-44  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:47 PM

Nixon seemed to want as much intelligence on his opponents as possible. For example, “the Nixon tapes show that the President urged Colson at this time to get the Secret Service to spy on McGovern. Confidential information was subsequently picked up by an agent on the Senator’s detail and passed to the White House.”43
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 606 | Loc. 12560-65  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:49 PM

Hunt says Liddy told him his superiors “wanted the McGovern office operation completed, too,” either “the same night” or “the night after Watergate.” When Hunt remarked that hitting both the Watergate and McGovern’s office sounded like a lot of work in a short amount of time for his crew, Liddy replied that “The Big Man [Mitchell] says he wants the operation.” Given everything that’s known about the relationship between Nixon and Mitchell, it’s hard to imagine Mitchell would order two risky operations, potentially in one night, without at least the tacit approval of Nixon. Even the usually circumspect Hunt wrote that “Watergate . . . was a political intelligence-gathering operation from start to finish, possibly personally ordered by the president himself.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 608 | Loc. 12590-93  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:51 PM

If Hunt’s accounts about his worries and doubts about the operation are true, why didn’t he just refuse, or quit his White House position, since he was still receiving a full-time salary from the Mullen Company? If the pressure for the final mission was coming from Nixon or Helms—or both—the answer is clear. Hunt couldn’t say no; he only had his salary at the Mullen Company because of Helms, who would have also wanted Hunt to stay in the White House. As with the previous Watergate mission, there is no way Hunt—or Martinez—would have participated if Helms hadn’t wanted him to.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 608 | Loc. 12594-95  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:51 PM

Helms and Nixon stood to lose far more than Hunt if the CIA-Mafia plots were exposed, and Nixon would lose more than Helms. Hence, the operation had to go forward, and quickly, despite the risks and doubts.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 609 | Loc. 12617-19  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:53 PM

Martinez was getting ready to write a letter of resignation when Barker told him about the new Watergate mission, saying they were to leave for Washington on June 16. Even though Martinez said he “had just gotten my divorce that day,” he complied with Barker’s request and went to Washington with the others.2
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 610 | Loc. 12638-45  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:55 PM

The DNC break-in was originally scheduled to begin at 10 pm on Friday night, June 16, to allow enough time for the break-in at McGovern campaign headquarters a few hours after midnight. However, by 11:30 pm, a light was still burning at the sixth-floor offices of the DNC, so the decision was made to wait until after the midnight guard inspection before beginning the break-in attempt. McCord had already taped open a stairwell door in the garage, by using the same ruse as in the previous successful attempt in May: He’d signed in (using an alias) at the main entrance of the Watergate building as if going to the Federal Reserve office on the eighth floor, and, once there, he had walked down the stairwell to the parking garage, where he’d taped the door. In contrast to latter accounts, Jim Hougan’s research showed that McCord didn’t tape the door locks horizontally, so the tape was obvious, but vertically, so it was almost impossible to see.6
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 611 | Loc. 12646-57  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:56 PM

the various accounts by all of the participants in the break-in, and the cover-up, multiply by almost exponential proportions. As Fred Emery points out, many accounts about the various events are often “totally at odds.” Often, a single participant told different stories about a single event at different times, first as part of the cover-up, then a different version to investigators or at hearings, followed by yet another version in later books or articles, and still another version years or decades later in lawsuits or interviews. The reasons participants gave these different versions include avoiding prosecution, diverting blame, or simply presenting themselves in the best possible light. In addition, the burglars were probably given cover stories by Hunt at the very start of the operation, to use in case any problem arose. After the arrests, all of the participants—the burglars and those in the White House—had months to coordinate further cover stories with each other, and to update those stories to match evidence as it emerged.7 Attempts by journalists and historians to reconcile all of those varying stories with the actual evidence and documentation consumed much of the first two decades of Watergate research, and they continue today. However, as Emery pointed out in his 1994 book and BBC documentary series, many of those discrepancies are “impossible to reconcile” and in any event “are not, in the end, very important.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 612 | Loc. 12670-81  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:59 PM

Once the men had climbed the stairs to the sixth floor, locksmith Virgilio Gonzalez had problems opening the locked rear door to the DNC offices. Fiorini decided they should remove the entire door, a drastic step that again shows a sense of urgency or desperation. (Fiorini had not only been told by Hunt about the secret Cuban Dossier, but as a participant in the CIA-Mafia plots, Fiorini might have worried he might be named in the Dossier.) When McCord joined the men at 1:40 AM, he was worried that by removing the door they were making too much noise. But the door was finally dislodged, and they were able to enter the DNC offices.9 In the Watergate building’s garage, guard Frank Wills checked the doors again as ordered by his supervisor and was surprised to find the locks had been re-taped. Realizing it couldn’t be the work of a maintenance man at that hour, he called the Washington, D.C., police at 1:47 AM. A police call went out at 1:52 AM, and a squad car with three plainclothes officers responded. Officer Carl Shoffler, who had almost shoulder-length hair as part of his undercover work, told the dispatcher they were only a block and a half away, and they were soon at the Watergate, talking to Frank Wills. At that moment, the burglars had likely not yet even finished removing the door to the DNC offices.10
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 613 | Loc. 12688-703  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:00 PM

Hunt and Liddy tried to radio a warning to Barker, but there was a problem. Frank Fiorini later told Andrew St. George that Barker’s     job was to keep his ear to that goddamn walkie-talkie, listening to our lookout across from the Watergate in case there was any outside problem . . . But Barker [was] too cheap to install a fresh battery in the thing before an operation; no, he keeps the old battery going week after week by never turning up the volume . . . the night we got arrested, the minute we get safely inside the [Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate,] Macho turns the volume of his walkie-talkie all the way down . . . saving the battery. He also kept us from picking up the first warning calls from the lookout across the street [who] saw the unmarked police car arrive, saw the cops begin turning up the lights on one floor after another . . . we suspected nothing until finally Barker heard the footsteps of the cops pounding outside our door and [he finally] turned up his walkie-talkie. Hunt was stationed in another section of the Watergate complex and his voice came in, squeaky with tension, “Alert! Alert! Do you read me? Clear out immediately” . . . but by then it was too late: the cops were in the corridor. Barker saved his damn walkie-talkie battery and blew our team.* 12 At approximately 2:30 AM on June 17, 1972, Shoffler and the other officers entered the Watergate offices, finding the burglars hiding “behind a desk in the secretarial cubicle adjacent to Larry O’Brien’s office.” McCord radioed to Baldwin, “They got us.”13
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 615 | Loc. 12743-52  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:04 PM

With Hoover no longer running the FBI, cooperation had started to resume between the Agency and the Bureau, which might help to explain the missing evidence.19 For example, Hougan points out that on June 17, 1972, “[James] McCord would be arrested and booked under a Hunt alias, ‘Edward Martin,’ producing a phony ID on which the birth date was identical with Howard Hunt’s own.” What’s also interesting is “that the identification papers in McCord’s possession at the time of his arrest . . . disappeared from police and prosecution files. The false ID was issued by the CIA to Howard Hunt, and vanished immediately after McCord’s fingerprinting by Washington police.”20 The disappearance of the CIA-supplied McCord/Hunt ID was no accident. Hougan found that “a file on Hunt’s activities” using the Edward Martin alias and “maintained ‘outside the normal CIA filing system,’ was [later] requested from the CIA by the [Senate Watergate] committee.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 619 | Loc. 12815-26  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:10 PM

There, Woodward happened to encounter one of the two attorneys that E. Howard Hunt had arranged for his crew. When Judge James A. Belson asked the defendants “what they did for a living,” one said they are “‘anti-Communists’ . . . and the others nodded in agreement.” James McCord was the first to be questioned by the Judge, who asked for his occupation. McCord replied, “Security consultant.” Woodward wrote that “in a low voice, McCord said that the was recently retired from government service . . . sending a strong message that he wanted this to be between the judge and him.” However, since “it was an open courtroom,” Woodward said that he “moved to the front row and leaned as far into the conversation as possible without joining in.”28 Woodward wrote that the Judge asked, “Where in government?”     McCord’s “barely audible” reply was “CIA.”         The judge flinched.         Holy shit, I said half aloud. It was like a 10,000-volt jolt of electricity. I was amazed.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 620 | Loc. 12835-44  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:11 PM

Bob Woodward then called “the White House—and asked for Howard Hunt. There was no answer but the operator said helpfully he might be in the office of Charles Colson, Nixon’s special counsel. Colson’s secretary said Hunt was not there but might be at a public relations firm where he worked as a writer.”     I called the firm, reached Hunt, and asked why his name was in the address books of two of the Watergate burglars.         “Good God!” Hunt shouted, [then] said he had no comment and slammed down the phone.30 The next call Woodward made was to “the president of the public relations firm, Robert F. Bennett.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 620 | Loc. 12845-46  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:12 PM

“‘I guess it’s no secret that Howard was with the CIA,’ Bennett said blandly.”31
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 620 | Loc. 12849-52  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:13 PM

Woodward went to work on his next story, which would reveal Hunt’s CIA past and his connection to the Watergate break-in. But after that article, despite the dramatic revelations of the Agency connections of McCord and Hunt, the CIA side of Watergate would soon fade into the background of Woodward’s Watergate reporting, and his subsequent books.32
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 621 | Loc. 12865-72  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:14 PM

It wasn’t just the Post—and the Star and also Newsweek—that Bennett was feeding stories and information to in order to protect his CIA proprietary firm. In the first CIA memo quoted above, from three weeks after the Watergate arrests, his case officer said that “Mr. Bennett related that he has now established a ‘back door entry’ to the Edward Bennett Williams law firm which is representing the Democratic Party . . . to kill off any revelation by Ed Williams of Agency association with the Mullen firm.” At that time, Edward Bennett Williams was working with his partner Joseph Califano on the DNC’s lawsuit against CREEP for the break-in.35 Robert Bennett was probably just one of many CIA assets that Richard Helms had the Agency use to move the news media away from a focus on the CIA.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 622 | Loc. 12891-93  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:16 PM

Later that day, still on June 17, Liddy used “his White House pass” to get into “the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing.” There, Liddy “placed a scrambler call through the White House switchboard to [Jeb] Magruder,” who was in California.38
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 624 | Loc. 12923-28  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:19 PM

John Dean and a colleague, wearing surgical gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, picked over the contents of [Hunt’s] White House safe . . . papers they found . . . would eventually be burned by Nixon’s compliant acting FBI Director, Pat Gray.” John Mitchell told Jeb Magruder “maybe you ought to have a little fire at your home,” and Magruder complied. Even Mitchell destroyed “his campaign correspondence with Nixon and Haldeman,” which could have included information on a wide range of illegal matters. After Haldeman told his aide to “make sure our files are clean,” more files were shredded. It’s impossible to know what paper trails, or evidence of other crimes, literally went up in smoke or through the shredder.42
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 625 | Loc. 12956-59  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:21 PM

Monday, June 19, 1972, was the first in a series of increasingly important days in the Watergate cover-up. That morning, Nixon’s Press Secretary, Ron Ziegler, proclaimed that the Watergate break-in was nothing more than “a third rate burglary,” a term some still use today. Ziegler also cautioned the press, saying that “certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is,” and much of the press corps took his caution seriously.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 626 | Loc. 12977-82  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:23 PM

“bugging of U.S. citizens in internal security cases must be first authorized by a court-ordered warrant.” Basically, Nixon and Mitchell had argued that if the President wanted someone bugged, the President had the “inherent power” to do so, which the Supreme Court rejected. Hence any contact with the bugging results was now even more clearly a felony, which helps to explain why so many White House aides and officials who probably saw bugging transcripts later denied doing so. The Supreme Court’s ruling also meant that any “national security” justification Nixon felt he could use to ultimately cover his political bugging was no longer valid, a concept that Nixon would still be struggling to accept until his resignation.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 628 | Loc. 13015-21  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:26 PM

In Watergate lore, however, June 20, 1972, is mainly remembered as the date of the infamous “eighteen-and-a-half-minute” gap in one of Richard Nixon’s White House tapes, which later investigations proved was a deliberate erasure. Many authors have speculated as to why that portion of that particular tape, a conversation between Nixon and H.R. Haldeman, was erased when other very incriminating tapes were not, such as the June 23, 1972, “Smoking Gun” tape, whose release forced Nixon’s resignation. A close look at all of Nixon’s activities that day, and what he would have been talking about to aides, helps to show why that tape was probably erased—and why it isn’t the only record of Nixon’s talks that day that is missing.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 629 | Loc. 13037-42  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:28 PM

Nixon may have decided to tell John Ehrlichman a little about the CIA-Mafia plots, because after his time alone, Nixon met with him. Nixon later wrote that Watergate wasn’t talked about at the meeting, but Ehrlichman says it was briefly discussed, along with wiretapping. As Summers points out, “no tape of that meeting has ever been produced. The tape of the President’s next meeting that morning, with Haldeman,” contains the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap. Prosecution and White House experts “would later conclude that the tape’s long stretch of buzzing, clicks, and pops reflected a series of overlapping erasures. Someone had manually set the machine to erase at least five times, suggesting that tape was intentionally wiped.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 630 | Loc. 13053-59  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:29 PM

In a matter that has never been explained, Dan Moldea found that just “fifty-three minutes” after the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap, “Nixon placed a long-distance call to . . . an associate of Anthony Provenzano . . . that lasted only one minute.” Provenzano had been part of both Nixon-Mafia-Hoffa bribes, for Jimmy Hoffa’s December 1971 release and also in September 1960 (at the same time the CIA-Mafia plots with Johnny Rosselli were beginning).56 Nixon and Haldeman had another conversation four hours after the one with the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap, which Nixon started by asking, “Have you gotten any further on that Mitchell operation?” That remark demonstrates that Nixon felt John Mitchell was really running, at a high level, the Plumbers operation.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 631 | Loc. 13068-78  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:31 PM

That evening, “Nixon spoke on the telephone with John Mitchell,” the first officially documented “contact between the two since the Watergate arrests.” Nixon said they discussed Watergate, and Mitchell essentially apologized, saying that he was “terribly chagrined that the activities of anybody attached to his committee should have been handled in such a manner and that he only regretted that he had not policed all of the people more effectively.” However, no recording was made of the call, supposedly “because the call had been placed on a line from the president’s private quarters, one that was not hooked into the recording system”—at least, that was what Nixon later told one of his attorneys. Eventually, it was discovered “that Nixon had made a note of the [unrecorded Mitchell] conversation on the Dictabelt machine on which he recorded his daily diary.” Even in Nixon’s own summary of his conversation with Mitchell, “there is a forty-two-second break in the dictation,” and the Watergate Special Prosecution Force stated that Nixon’s “Dictabelt appears to have been tampered with” at the time of the break. The tampering was likely because Mitchell’s apology—or Nixon’s comment about it on the Dictabelt—might have included a reference to the fact Nixon had ordered a reluctant Mitchell to approve the whole political espionage plan in the first place.58
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 632 | Loc. 13092-97  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:32 PM

Nixon’s evening call to Haldeman then veered into “the Bay of Pigs thing” again, in a way that left Haldeman perplexed. The President ordered Haldeman to “tell Ehrlichman this whole group of Cubans is tied to the Bay of Pigs.” A confused Haldeman asked, “The Bay of Pigs? What does that have to do with this?” Nixon simply said, “Ehrlichman will know what I mean.” This might help to explain Nixon’s unrecorded call to Ehrlichman earlier that day. Recall that Ehrlichman had taken the lead in trying to get Helms to give Nixon the Bay of Pigs material starting in 1969, soon after Nixon’s Assistant Attorney General had checked out the Justice Department’s file on the CIA-Mafia plots involving Johnny Rosselli.61
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 633 | Loc. 13112-19  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:59 PM

A review of all of Nixon’s known comments and meetings yields clues about what might have been talked about during the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on June 20. The press’s naming of Hunt, particularly his leading role in the Bay of Pigs operation, seems to have been a concern for Nixon that day. In addition, two of the unrecorded calls from that day involved Mitchell, who knew about the CIA-Mafia plots, and Ehrlichman, who apparently knew more about the Bay of Pigs matter—a euphemism for the CIA-Mafia plots—than Haldeman. The call to the Provenzano associate less than an hour after the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap also raises the possibility that the gap concerned one or both of the Nixon-Mafia-Hoffa bribes, which were known by John Mitchell. So, it appears likely that the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap—like other conversations that day—involved some discussion about Hunt and something about the Bay of Pigs (which to Nixon meant the CIA-Mafia plots); it could have also included a reference or allusion to one or both of the Nixon-Mafia-Hoffa bribes.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 636 | Loc. 13177-87  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:05 PM

On June 23, 1972, in three meetings, Richard Nixon and H.R. Haldeman discussed the Watergate cover-up extensively on what has come to be known as the “Smoking Gun” tape. Nixon was very receptive to using the CIA to block the FBI investigation because he knew secrets about the CIA, Hunt, and Richard Helms that his aides like Haldeman and Dean didn’t know or only suspected. In a way, we’re lucky that the “Smoking Gun” tape exists at all, and that it involved a conversation with Haldeman—as opposed to the more-informed Mitchell, who already knew about the CIA-Mafia plots. Nixon, not wanting to spread the knowledge of those plots further than it already had been disseminated, kept having to repeatedly imply things about Helms, Hunt, and the plots to Haldeman, leaving a revealing audio trail. Dean and Gray’s suggestion was to use the protection of a possible Mexican CIA operation as the excuse to have the CIA limit the FBI investigation, but Nixon quickly went in a very different and telling direction. Nixon’s comments on the tape about the CIA weren’t fully appreciated when it was finally made public on August 5, 1974, because just the fact that it showed Nixon was actively involved in the cover-up forced the President to resign three days later, on August 8. In addition, the CIA-Mafia plots wouldn’t become widely known and documented until the year after the tape’s release, and the CIA would continue to withhold important information about the plots for decades after that.70
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 637 | Loc. 13194-211  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:07 PM

    PRESIDENT NIXON: All right, fine . . . you call him in, I mean you just—well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things.     PRESIDENT NIXON: Of course, this Hunt will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab, there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.     PRESIDENT NIXON: When you get these people [Helms and Walters] say: “Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing and the President just feels that . . . The President’s belief is that this is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. And, because these people are plugging for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the good of the country, don’t go any further into this case,” period . . .     PRESIDENT NIXON: Hunt . . . knows too damn much and he was involved, we have to know that. And that it gets out . . . this is all involved in the Cuban thing, that it’s a fiasco, and it’s going to make the FB—ah CIA—look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and its likely to blow the whole, uh, Bay of Pigs thing, which we think would be very unfortunate for the CIA and for the country at this time, and for American foreign policy and he’s [Helms] just gotta tell ’em “lay off.”     PRESIDENT NIXON: I would just say, “Look it’s because of the Hunt involvement.”72 Clearly, Nixon has his own agenda here, one to pressure Helms by using Hunt’s involvement in “the whole, uh, Bay of Pigs thing.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 638 | Loc. 13211-13  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:07 PM

Of course, Hunt’s leading role in the actual Bay of Pigs invasion and even his cover identity as “Eduardo” had already been announced in The New York Times three days earlier, so that wasn’t a secret any more. What was left to “blow” about “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” that involved Helms (and Nixon) except the CIA-Mafia plots?
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 639 | Loc. 13226-31  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:09 PM

Nixon apparently wanted Helms to help him solve two problems. First, to use the CIA to limit the FBI’s investigation. The second problem was that Nixon no longer had a way to find out more about—or stop the leak of—the Cuban Dossier and anything it might say about Nixon’s role in the CIA-Mafia plots. That could still be devastating if it came out before the election, especially if it caused journalists and investigators to look for other ties between Nixon and the mob. Nixon seemed to want Helms to take responsibility for the Cuban Dossier matter as well, and appears to be trying to convey that through Haldeman.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 640 | Loc. 13237-41  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:10 PM

As for Nixon’s comment that “we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things,” Nixon later said he was referring to his help for Helms regarding suppressing parts of Victor Marchetti’s book. But Nixon didn’t say “one thing” on the tape, he said “one hell of a lot of things,” which led investigators to wonder what else Nixon could have been referring to. Helms’s Chilean and domestic spying operations had all been done for Nixon, so those hardly seem like instances in which Nixon “protected” Helms. Congressional investigator Michael Ewing looked at the matter in a report for the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 642 | Loc. 13283-88  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:14 PM

Helms went along with Nixon’s request, writing a memo to Walters saying that the CIA was requesting the FBI to “confine themselves to the personalities already arrested . . . and that they desist from expanding the investigation into other areas which may well, eventually, run afoul of our operations.” In later years, Richard Helms would make a point of telling journalists that he had never succumbed to pressure to get the FBI to back off from its Watergate investigation, something repeated by many journalists and several historians. But the record clearly shows Helms did call off the FBI, at least for a time.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 645 | Loc. 13343-48  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:34 PM

In a June 30, 1972, meeting, the President told Haldeman “About this fellow [Hunt]—I mean, after all, the gun [found in Hunt’s White House office safe] and the wiretapping doesn’t bother me a bit with this fellow. He’s in the Cuban thing, the whole Cuban business.” In transcripts of Nixon’s taped conversations days after the Plumbers’ arrests, when Colson told Nixon on July 1, 1972, that Hunt had “certainly done a lot of hot stuff . . . Oh, Jesus. He pulled a lot of very fancy stuff in the sixties,” that was followed by a notice from the National Archives: “[Withdrawn item. National security.]” After the censored portion, Nixon then said, “If anything ever happens to him, be sure that he blows the whistle, [on] the whole Bay of Pigs.”4
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 645 | Loc. 13349-54  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:35 PM

In addition to the hush money flowing to Hunt and the others from Kalmbach and White House operatives, there was also another channel of money. Nixon had wanted Bebe Rebozo to set up a fund for “the boys,” but it had to be done in a deniable way that could not be traced to the President. That task fell to Manuel Artime, an office tenant in Rebozo’s mob-built shopping center. Lukas wrote that Artime “formed an informal committee to aide the Miami defendants.” He pointed out since Artime was “a leader of the Cuban exile community and the godfather of Hunt’s youngest son, he was an ideal man to assume the role” of a hush money paymaster without arousing suspicion.5
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 646 | Loc. 13359-63  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:36 PM

Artime’s assistant at the time, Milian Rodriguez, said that the amounts Artime distributed to Barker and the others were much larger than most investigators realized. As documented by PBS, Milian Rodriguez later used the skills he first learned with Artime by handling the Watergate hush money to become one of Miami’s largest drug traffickers. Artime would have to testify to the Watergate grand jury, but he would never be charged for his Watergate involvement or for his drug trafficking (documented in earlier chapters).6
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 646 | Loc. 13364-67  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:36 PM

It was initially difficult to get the Watergate defendants’ attorneys to take the envelopes stuffed with cash. Finally, after two weeks, Hunt’s second attorney—William Bittman—“accepted a bizarre delivery of $25,000 in an envelope left on a ledge in the downstairs lobby of” his law firm. Bittman had been a Mafia prosecutor for Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department before leaving in 1967 to enter private practice.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 646 | Loc. 13367-68  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:36 PM

Liddy had no qualms about accepting the hush money, and a money drop for him was arranged “at National Airport, where the cash was in a luggage locker.”7
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 646 | Loc. 13369-71  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:36 PM

Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, gave the White House money courier “a five-month ‘budget’ for all seven men involved [that] totaled $450,000,” while Hunt sent Colson a personal note saying that “re-electing the President” was of “overwhelming importance [and] you may be confident that I will do all that is required of me toward that end.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 650 | Loc. 13446-49  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:43 PM

British researcher John Simkin compiled a list of the mistakes committed by each of those involved with the burglaries, which showed that while McCord committed seven critical errors, so had G. Gordon Liddy, who had no connection to the CIA. Simkin listed Barker as committing six critical errors, along with eight by Hunt. Fiorini himself committed several key errors, including the final taping of the garage stairwell door and insisting the burglary go forward even if it required the time-consuming step of removing the rear door to the DNC offices.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 652 | Loc. 13483-84  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:45 PM

In that same conservation with Dean, Nixon revealed his own thinking that played a role in the Watergate scandal, when he said that “Espionage and sabotage is illegal only if against the government.”19
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 655 | Loc. 13548-50  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:49 PM

However, Walter Sheridan didn’t release or leak any of the Hoffa information during the campaign, and it’s not known why. In addition, Walter Sheridan was spectacularly unsuccessful in bringing media attention to the Watergate story.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 655 | Loc. 13554-55  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:50 PM

Regardless of the reason, a huge opportunity was lost for Watergate and the Nixon-Mafia-Hoffa relationship to become issues in the final months of the 1972 campaign.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 663 | Loc. 13709-10  | Added on Tuesday, February 04, 2014, 04:40 PM

Now that Nixon had won reelection and faced no more campaigns, his fears about whatever Helms could release about his past were greatly diminished.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 664 | Loc. 13729-31  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:13 AM

his firing of CIA Director Richard Helms meant that the dark undercurrent of crime and corruption just below the surface of Nixon’s carefully crafted public image would soon start to become exposed.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 664 | Loc. 13733-38  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:14 AM

His approval rating in a Gallup poll was 68 percent, and three days after he took his second oath of office, his peace deal for Vietnam became final. The settlement was reached after a massive bombing campaign of North Vietnam that Nixon had begun in December, along with intense pressure from Nixon on President Thieu, still the U.S.-backed dictator of South Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson had died the day before the peace deal took effect, and Nixon could claim public credit for ending what he liked to depict as Johnson’s war. Henry Kissinger was awarded a joint Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts (with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho), an honor Nixon might have shared had he not withdrawn his name from consideration.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 665 | Loc. 13743-44  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:14 AM

Alexander Haig returned to the Pentagon, as the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff, where he was said to have been “catapulted by Nixon over the heads of two hundred senior officers.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 665 | Loc. 13745-47  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:15 AM

As a result of all those shifts, John Dean became a “central figure” in Nixon’s second-term White House. After only having three meetings with Nixon in the first eight months of 1972, Dean would soon have “31 meetings and telephone calls with Nixon” in less than a one-month span, starting in late February.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 666 | Loc. 13767-72  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:17 AM

In a bizarre scenario that brought together Watergate and Nixon’s Hoffa bribes, “on February 10-11, 1973 . . . two meetings were held simultaneously on the grounds” of the La Costa Country Club in Southern California: one for Nixon’s aides plotting their Watergate cover-up strategy and the other between Teamsters President Frank Fitzsimmons and several Mafia leaders. One of the owners of the 5,600-acre posh La Costa resort was mobster Moe Dalitz, who had sold Howard Hughes his first Las Vegas casino in the deal brokered by Johnny Rosselli (see Chapter 19).
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 667 | Loc. 13782-87  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:20 AM

Moldea interviewed “two former Nixon aides” who “confirm[ed] that the La Costa meetings were regarded as ‘very strange’ even by other members of the Nixon staff.” One aide explained that “the meetings were going on in a setting which obviously had the Secret Service, FBI, and Justice people climbing the wall . . . I say it was no secret. What I still don’t know is if it was no accident.” Another aide said that “Word came down from Haldeman to the Secret Service to make sure the agents for that trip kept their mouths shut—about the appearance of impropriety of these [meetings] being held in the midst of Fitzsimmons’s Apalachin affair”—a reference to the historic mob conference described in Chapter 4.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 667 | Loc. 13800-13803  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:21 AM

However, the Fitzsimmons-Mafia meeting, followed by the Nixon-Fitzsimmons Air Force One meeting and Nixon’s Attorney General ending the surveillance on the company involved in the new multimillion-dollar fraud scheme, raises the possibility that Nixon’s January 1973 $500,000 payment was also part of a new deal between Nixon, Fitzsimmons, and the Mafia.9
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 668 | Loc. 13806-14  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:23 AM

Frank Fitzsimmons then pressured the Teamsters’ current attorney—Edward Bennett Williams, Califano’s partner—to drop the DNC lawsuit against CREEP. When Williams refused, Fitzsimmons “fired Williams and gave the $100,000-a-year business to Colson” and his law partner.10 Was Nixon being arrogant in continuing his illegal dealings with Fitzsimmons and the Mafia in his new term, since he would not have to face another election? Was the relatively young President simply interested in accumulating as much money as possible, looking ahead to his post-Presidency years? According to the Time article, Nixon might have just been being practical. It pointed out the “crucial timing” that just three days before Colson received the $500,000 authorized by Fitzsimmons, Dorfman, and Provenzano, there had been a meeting between [E. Howard] Hunt’s lawyer and Colson” regarding “demands for payoffs by [the] Watergate” figure.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 668 | Loc. 13817-22  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:24 AM

Though Helms had been of little help to Hunt since the burglaries, the possibility of help had remained as long as Helms was Director, plus Hunt knew enough about Helms that he could always force the issue, if need be. Now, that possibility no longer existed. Hunt had been trying to exert pressure on the White House and Charles Colson since November, in an attempt to have them live up to their promises of hush money, expense money, and lawyers’ fees for himself and the other defendants. His wife, Dorothy Hunt, played a major role in helping to solicit and distribute funds, often giving money to Manuel Artime so he could disburse it to the Cuban exile defendants and Frank Fiorini.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 669 | Loc. 13822-26  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:25 AM

On December 8, 1972, Dorothy Hunt had flown to Chicago, carrying $10,000 in cash in $100 bills, the same type of money she’d been distributing to the other defendants “for more than four months.” On its approach to “Chicago’s Midway Airport through drizzle and fog . . . the plane suddenly nose-dived into a neighborhood . . . a mile and a half short of [the] runway . . . Forty-three of the fifty-five people on board were killed, including Mrs. Hunt.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 669 | Loc. 13836-40  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:26 AM

Some have thought it suspicious that Egil Krogh moved to the Department of Transportation as an Undersecretary a month after the crash. The same might apply to Alexander Butterfield’s appointment in March 1973 to become Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, where The New York Times reported that Butterfield “read all the accident reports himself.” However, Nixon probably just wanted his people in place so he could know immediately if information about his hush money surfaced in the FAA’s crash investigation.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 670 | Loc. 13856-59  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:28 AM

According to Dean, “on January 5 Colson met with him and Ehrlichman . . . and reported that the had indeed given Bittman a ‘general assurance’ that Hunt would get clemency” from Nixon. The next day, according to the FBI, Colson got the Mafia-Teamsters bribe of $500,000 for Nixon.16 The
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 670 | Loc. 13862-68  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:28 AM

It’s interesting that Hunt received special treatment from Nixon over the other defendants, with the President saying in a conversation with Colson on January 8, 1973, that when it came to clemency, “I would have difficulty with some of the others.” Nixon agreed with Colson’s line of reasoning that the others “can’t hurt us [but] Hunt and Liddy [had] direct meetings, discussions [that] are very incriminating to us.”17 Colson was wrong when he said the other Watergate defendants “can’t hurt us,” because the firing of CIA Director Richard Helms had apparently been the last straw for Agency veteran James McCord. Unlike Hunt, McCord was strongly resisting the White House pressure to plead guilty to avoid a trial.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 672 | Loc. 13889-92  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:31 AM

Along with Liddy, McCord stood trial in front of Judge John Sirica—a conservative Republican judge known for his harsh sentences—who seemed determined to get to the bottom of the Watergate morass. “At a pretrial hearing [Judge Sirica] put the prosecutors on notice that they had to get to the bottom of who had hired the men to go into the Watergate. ‘The jury is going to want to know: . . . What did these men go into that headquarters for?’”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 673 | Loc. 13906-10  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:32 AM

Helms didn’t destroy the only copy of the IG Report because it had left out so much crucial information, and all of its supporting files had already been destroyed in 1967. When coupled with that earlier file destruction, Helms’s 1973 housecleaning put some details about the CIA-Mafia plots permanently beyond the reach of easily documented history. However, some top secret operations that involved Helms—like AMWORLD—were so large that many related files probably still exist.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 673 | Loc. 13917-20  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:33 AM

It was perhaps poetic justice for Richard Helms that on February 7, 1973—five days after he finished destroying files and had stepped down as CIA Director—Helms found himself testifying to Congress when the subject of Chile came up. Helms lied when asked if the CIA had provided help to those who opposed Allende in Chile. Helms had lied to Congress before, about Chile and other matters, but it would be that particular false statement that would eventually bring him a criminal conviction.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 673 | Loc. 13923-24  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:33 AM

Helms’s testimony about Barker’s mob ties would not be released for more than a year, after All the President’s Men had been completed, which kept Barker’s criminal connections from becoming part of the conventional story of Watergate.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 674 | Loc. 13945-47  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:35 AM

as the scandal unfolded, only one largely ignored article mentioned an important part of Hunt’s back-ground that Helms had withheld from investigators: Hunt’s work on the plots to assassinate Fidel Castro in the mid-1960s. Tad Szulc’s February 1973 Esquire magazine article—on the stands in January, before Helms began his housecleaning—briefly described those operations.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 675 | Loc. 13959-64  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 11:43 AM

In the interview, Haynes told Sprague that “A meeting was held on Nov. 22, 1963 in Wash[ington] D.C. to discuss plans for Cuban operation . . . it was the most important meeting they had . . . at [the] meeting were [CIA Executive Director Lyman] Kirkpatrick, Helms, Hunt, and Williams. Word of [JFK’s] assassination came in [during the] meeting.” Haynes knew something had been about to happen with Cuba, but he hadn’t been told about Almeida or the coup plan. If any of Haynes’s information involving Hunt and Helms had become widely known at that time, it would have radically changed the Watergate investigations. Instead, when some of the interview was finally published in a small newsletter in 1975—after Watergate had faded from the headlines—it passed without notice.30
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 676 | Loc. 13975-79  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 11:44 AM

In the ten years since JFK’s murder, Williams had learned about Barker’s ties to godfather Santo Trafficante and had come to believe that Barker had sold out the coup plan to Trafficante, and that both men had played a role in JFK’s assassination. Now, Williams saw that Barker was involved with Hunt, James McCord, and other notable Cuban exiles in Watergate. Williams also heard in Miami’s Cuban exile community about the efforts of his former friend and rival, Manuel Artime, to provide financial assistance to the burglars. Hunt, McCord, Barker, Artime, and Watergate—it seemed beyond coincidence.
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- Highlight on Page 678 | Loc. 14010-15  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 11:47 AM

In addition to Joseph Califano’s DNC lawsuit against CREEP being overseen by Judge Richey, Califano also had to represent The Washington Post when Nixon had CREEP try to subpoena Woodward, Bernstein, Post editor Howard Simons, and Post owner Katherine Graham. CREEP also demanded all of “their notes, internal memoranda, and phone logs,” since “CREEP wanted to uncover the identity of the reporters’ anonymous source or sources.” Nixon and Haldeman already knew that Mark Felt was providing information to the Post, but they couldn’t be sure of how much or if other officials might be doing the same.38
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 679 | Loc. 14042-53  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 11:50 AM

McCord might have felt free to act because of Richard Helms’s firing from the CIA. Helms was preparing to assume his post as Ambassador to Iran, and an outsider, loyal to Nixon, now ran McCord’s beloved Agency. There were still many CIA secrets McCord would protect, but McCord viewed Watergate as a Nixon White House operation, “not a CIA operation.” As McCord would later testify, he “believed that President Nixon gave the final approval, and set the Watergate operation in motion.”42 It’s not known what other Nixon crimes McCord may have become aware of or suspected, or heard about from Hunt. McCord wrote in his book that Hunt had “information which would impeach the President.” In his Watergate book, McCord did go out of his way to decry “the volume of heroin illegally entering the U.S.,” but there is no indication if he ever learned about or suspected the Trafficante-linked money that Al Haig’s Army investigation would uncover the following year. McCord saw himself as different from his fellow ex-CIA officer Hunt, and certainly from Fiorini and Barker, and seems to have resented having to work with—and being lumped in with—the latter. In his letter to Sirica, McCord was careful to stress that “my motivations were different than those of the others involved, but were not limited to . . . those offered in my defense during the trial.” In his book, McCord doesn’t make clear exactly what those motivations were, or why he got involved in a seemingly purely political operation.43
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- Highlight on Page 681 | Loc. 14070-75  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 11:52 AM

However, Nixon’s main focus the following day was on E. Howard Hunt, and making sure Hunt had enough hush money to remain silent even after he was sentenced. On March 21, 1973, Nixon talked with John Dean about the matter, in the famous conversation that began with Dean telling Nixon, “We have a cancer—within—close to the Presidency, that’s growing.” As mentioned earlier, this is the conversation where Nixon told Dean that “Your major guy to keep under control is Hunt. Because he knows . . . about a lot of other things.” The two discussed the fact that some of the money had gone through “the cover of a Cuban Committee,” the one Nixon had planned to use Rebozo for but that had actually been implemented by Cuban exile Manuel Artime.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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Dean told Nixon that keeping Hunt and the others quiet will “cost money. It’s dangerous. Nobody, nothing—people around here are not pros at this sort of thing. This is the sort of thing Mafia people can do: washing money, getting clean money, and things like that . . . we just don’t know about those things . . . we are not criminals.” The irony of the last statement is lost on Nixon and Dean, who then told the President, “these people are gong to cost, huh, a million dollars over the next, uh, two years.”47 After a pause, President Nixon told Dean: We could get that . . . if you need the money . . . you could get the money . . . What I mean is, you could, you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I, I know where it could be gotten . . . I mean it’s not easy, but it could be done.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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McCord’s revelations invigorated the recently created Senate Watergate Committee investigation and gave the Committee its first star witness. Suddenly, the entire American press corps was putting the Watergate story on its front pages, and the drumbeat of pressure on Nixon would continue to mount over the coming months. Now that McCord had made it clear that higher-ups were involved, some of Nixon’s aides began reassessing their own positions. On April 12, 1972, there was another breakthrough when former Nixon aide Jeb Magruder confessed to U.S. Attorneys that he had committed perjury in his earlier testimony. Just four days prior to that, John Dean had begun talking to Watergate prosecutors. The day after Dean met with the prosecutors, Nixon told Haldeman they ought to get rid of the White House tapes, but nothing was done and Nixon continued his recording. However, Nixon greatly increased his use of the tapes to try to spin or simply lie about past events to new and old aides.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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To divert blame and responsibility from himself, Nixon had to use the strategy of essentially blaming Watergate on his staff, implying they might not have supervised their underlings properly. To make that approach work, he would have to take dramatic action by shaking up his staff and top officials. After much soul-searching and emotion, Nixon told H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman they would have to go. On April 30, 1973, in a dramatic speech, Nixon announced their resignations, while calling them “two of the finest public servants it has been my privilege to know.” That same day, Nixon also announced the resignations of John Dean and Attorney General Kleindienst. L. Patrick Gray had resigned three days earlier, so William Ruckelshaus left the Environmental Protection Agency (the creation of which was one of Nixon’s most notable domestic achievements) to become the new FBI Director.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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Haig would play a crucial role in essentially running the country in Nixon’s last months in office, before helping to engineer the President’s resignation.1
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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Hunt was still torn between wanting a reduced sentence from Sirica and wanting his promised clemency from President Nixon, so in his testimony he only implicated Nixon aides, not the President.3
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The same day as McCord’s explosive testimony, Archibald Cox was chosen by acting Attorney General Eliot Richardson to be the Watergate Special Prosecutor; both Cox and Richardson were sworn in the following week. Cox had been the Solicitor General during John F. Kennedy’s administration, and the tapes show that Nixon soon regarded Cox as “an adversary,” and the President had no intention of cooperating with Cox’s investigation.4
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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Bernard Barker testified to Ervin’s Watergate Committee on May 24, 1973, but he was not asked anything about his Mafia ties. The Senate and House Watergate Committees only had access to some FBI information, not the Bureau’s full file, so the subject of his organized crime ties wasn’t raised to Barker, and the same was true when the Committee questioned Frank Fiorini. That meant that organized crime was completely missing from the public Watergate hearings, which was ironic, since the chief investigator for Ervin’s Watergate Committee was Carmine Bellino, who had worked on organized crime cases for Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department. Before that, Bellino had been an investigator for the Senate crime hearings in the late 1950s that had propelled John F. Kennedy to prominence (Senator Sam Ervin had been on that committee with JFK). In the mid-1950s, Bellino had also been partners for a time with Robert Maheu, which would put him in an unusual and potentially awkward position the following year, once Maheu—and the CIA-Mafia plots with Rosselli—became a quiet subject of investigation by the Watergate Committee.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The day before Butterfield’s testimony, Thompson admitted in his own autobiographical Watergate book that “‘Even though I had no authority to act for the committee, I decided to call Fred Buzhardt at home’ to tell him that the committee had learned about the taping system. ‘I wanted to be sure that the White House was fully aware of what was to be disclosed so that it could take appropriate action.’” In contrast to that questionable act, Thompson would later take the lead in investigating the CIA’s withholding of important information from the Committee, which raised important unanswered questions about the CIA,
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The battle for the tapes that pitted the Senate Watergate Committee and Special Prosecutor Cox against the White House intensified, and would last for another year. In response, Nixon tried to counterattack in various ways. Haldeman, still apparently hoping for clemency from Nixon in the future, was still not being honest in his testimony and claimed “that the tapes he had listened to proved that Nixon was telling the truth” about his lack of involvement in Watergate and the cover-up.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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In a matter that didn’t involve Watergate, Nixon had been told six months earlier that Agnew was under investigation by the Justice Department. In August, “The Wall Street Journal [had] reported that Agnew was suspected of extortion, bribery, and tax evasion [involving] kickbacks paid by contractors architects and engineers” to Baltimore and Maryland officials. As noted earlier, when Nixon had chosen the racially divisive Agnew as his running mate, he knew “that his running mate was corrupt,” so the news of Agnew’s crimes should have been no surprise. On October 9, 1973, Vice President Agnew told Nixon that he was resigning, after striking a “deal with the Justice Department [to plead] nolo contendere to one count of having knowingly failed to report income for tax purposes.” Agnew would get “three years probation and a $10,000 fine [and] no further prosecution.”21 On October 12, 1973, Nixon chose House Minority Leader Gerald Ford as his new Vice President.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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To Nixon’s way of thinking, Agnew’s resignation somehow gave him an excuse to fire Special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox, so the President said, “Now that we’ve taken care of Agnew, we can get rid of Cox.” The Special Prosecutor had been pressing for the tapes for several months, and he was reported to be investigating Nixon’s financial affairs with Bebe Rebozo, so Nixon felt he had to be removed.22 On Saturday, October 20, 1973, a critical part of the Watergate saga began. Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Special Prosecutor Cox. However, Richardson resigned rather than obey Nixon’s orders. Richardson’s deputy, former FBI Director William Ruckelshaus, also resigned. That left “Solicitor General Robert Bork . . . temporarily promoted to acting Attorney General, [to] obediently [send] the letter of dismissal” to Cox. The dramatic resignations and the firing of Cox became known as “the Saturday Night Massacre.”23
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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However, because Jaworski emerged with more power than Cox, his appointment marked another milestone. Nixon had lost control of the Watergate investigation, which was now centered on the tapes. If he lost control of the tapes, Nixon knew his Presidency was over. That process began three days after the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon agreed to comply with an appeals court ruling to turn over seven tapes that had been subpoenaed by Sirica’s court, for the grand jury.26
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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There are several reasons why the Nixon-Rebozo financial entanglements didn’t become a huge scandal in the following months. An investigative report in Rolling Stone reported that “Bebe Rebozo escaped indictment in Watergate despite strong circumstantial evidence of tax evasion and bribe taking. One reason, according to CIA sources, is that CIA officials sanctioned his plea of ‘national security’ when the Special Prosecutor’s office began investigating Rebozo’s” business affairs. (Rebozo’s only real “national security” activity had been money laundering for the Bay of Pigs.) In addition, Rebozo sued The Washington Post for “ten million dollars in damages” for its stock story, and he then dragged the case out for a decade, until a settlement was reached (in which the Post paid Rebozo no damages). Rebozo’s suit eventually had a chilling effect on other news outlets, so his financial crimes and Mafia ties were soon rarely mentioned in the press. In short, Rebozo and Nixon had enough money to make reporting the Nixon-Rebozo story very expensive for media outlets—at a time when there was plenty of other Watergate news to cover.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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A new Watergate scandal erupted on December 7, 1973, when the public learned about the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on Nixon’s June 20, 1972, tape. Though Nixon had turned over the seven subpoenaed tapes, only three had been sent to the grand jury, since he was claiming executive privilege on four, which remained with Sirica. Nixon knew that other tapes would be subpoenaed, so he was having them transcribed for his own use and reference. As part of that process, Nixon’s lawyers had first learned about the mysterious gap on November 14, and they waited a week before telling Judge Sirica.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The Committee investigators concluded their memo by saying that “the obsession of the Administration . . . on Larry O’Brien in 1971 and 1972 . . . was in part motivated by a fear that Maheu would impart some of this sensitive information about the plot to O’Brien . . . and these concerns could have been a possible motivation for the break-in to the office of the DNC and Larry O’Brien . . . especially since their directions were to photograph any documents relating to Cuban contributions or Cuban involvement in the 1972 Democratic campaign.” Clearly, the investigators were getting very close to uncovering the Plumbers’ goal of the Cuban Dossier, which could easily fall into the category of “Cuban involvement in the 1972 Democratic campaign.” They end the memo by saying “it is for these reasons that we wish to question John Rosselli about the nature and scope of his activities with Robert Maheu in the early 1960s.”38
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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As a result, the fact that Rosselli had been interviewed by Watergate investigators at all—let alone the fact that he was viewed as key to the Watergate burglar’s motivation—remained largely unknown. Woodward and Bernstein had finished the manuscript for All the President’s Men the previous month, so it contained nothing about Rosselli or the Mafia.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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By the spring of 1974, the battle over Watergate had become a battle for the tapes that would decide Nixon’s fate, since impeachment was now a very real possibility. Earlier in the year, Special Prosecutor Jaworski had “requested twenty-two more tapes,” but Nixon had turned him down. (Unknown to Nixon, on February 25, after the President had refused to talk to the Watergate grand jury, it had named Nixon as an “unindicted co-conspirator,” though that wouldn’t become public for almost four months.) Jaworski soon subpoenaed “sixty-four more tapes,” and he included in his request the June 23, 1972, “Smoking Gun” tape. Naturally, Nixon didn’t comply.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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To deal with legal, Congressional, press, and public pressure, Nixon decided to release edited transcripts of forty-six of his White House tapes. The effort became an intense, mad dash by Nixon and his aides to release enough to make it look like a good faith effort, without revealing anything criminal. Worried about the outcome, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler “assigned his two personal assistants—Diane Sawyer and Frank Gannon, to review the editing and report back to him.” Diane Sawyer was “dismayed at the sloppy presentation [where] lines spoken by the President were mistakenly divided and attributed in part to Ehrlichman.” Much worse was the fact that “certain passages referred back to matters that had been excised [and] could not fail to convey the impression that the really damaging parts had been eliminated.” Sawyer and Gannon “pleaded for more time” to prepare things more properly.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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When Nixon revealed the tape transcripts to the nation in a televised address on April 29, 1974, they were in neat, uniform, nicely bound volumes that belied the problems within. Criminal references had been removed, and some tapes—like the June 23 “Smoking Gun” tape—were withheld entirely. So the tape battles continued, and pressure continued to mount on Nixon to release more.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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As the House Judiciary Committee began to consider impeachment more seriously, it hired additional staff. One of those added was twenty-six-year-old Hillary Rodham, thanks to a recommendation by one of her professors, Burke Marshall, who had served in Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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she was responsible for drawing up highly restrictive rules of procedure that were to govern the impeachment process.” In addition, she helped “to oversee the preparation of a confidential history of Presidential abuse of power.” The thinking was “that Nixon would mount a defense to the effect that actions in the Watergate affair were not inconsistent with those of many previous administrations.”
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April - May 2014

The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1873-74  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:32 AM

A decade earlier, Nixon had acknowledged the difficulty, even the impossibility, of certain administrative functions. For those, he said, “you need a son-of-a-bitch in it.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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Alexander Butterfield, a Haldeman aide who monitored the paper and staff flow to the President and set his schedule each day, saw the President as much, if not more, than Haldeman did. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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The Haldeman directives, whether written memos or shouted instructions to awed subordinates, are legendary for their authoritativeness. Even when the staff characterized them as “Mickey Mouse” orders—such as harassing a senator who had said something critical about the President the day before—they knew, as Dent remembered, that the instructions really came from the President. The authority was Nixon’s, that “one well, one spring,” as Dent said. Butterfield vividly recalled how Haldeman regularly emerged from the Oval Office with his yellow legal pad, reading directives to others or going to his “dictating machine [to] spit out instructions to the staff members.” Presidential commands, both important and trivial, were often formulated as the President sat alone at night in his Executive Office Building hideaway or in the Lincoln Room in the White House residential quarters. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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Haldeman was only “an implementer,” who did “nothing without the knowledge of the President”; “he was not a decision maker,” Butterfield later told House and Senate investigators. “Haldeman’s preoccupation [was] … to see that things went in accordance with the President’s likes and dislikes.” To that, Haldeman was “dedicated … in a very selfless way.” Inadvertently, Butterfield confirmed the danger that Reedy had sighted four years earlier. The President’s staff, Butterfield thought, sometimes mirrored his personality too readily, and even accentuated his weaknesses rather than compensating for them. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1939-41  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:42 AM

Harry Dent, on the other hand, remembered that he and others would simply ignore some of the more outrageous or silly orders. Stephen Bull, who also worked in the Oval Office and later assumed many of Butterfield’s duties, thought that Haldeman occasionally ignored Nixon’s instructions or allowed others to ignore them. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1951-52  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:43 AM

“Most of us operated in watertight compartments, unaware of what Nixon was ordering our colleagues to do,” Ehrlichman wrote. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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Compartmentalization ensured fragmentation of power, precisely what Nixon desired. (Of course, the technique was not new; Franklin D. Roosevelt was a past master at such administrative dealings.) 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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“Things didn’t happen around that White House willy-nilly,” Dent insisted. “The man on top was on top.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1971-73  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:46 AM

Kissinger claimed that he could recognize an “impulsive instruction,” and thought it wise to have the “reflective Nixon” go over it before taking any action. 20 The observation is instructive for its insight into personality; more important, it demonstrates a president in command—with whatever personality was momentarily dominant in his psyche. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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“I’ve always thought this country could run itself domestically without a President,” Nixon said in 1967. “All you need is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home. You need a President for foreign policy; no Secretary of State is really important; the President makes foreign policy.” This oft-repeated remark implied that Nixon really had little interest in domestic affairs and was prepared to allow a “competent Cabinet” to run its own course. Nothing was further from the truth. In his eyes, the Cabinet was only an extension of Richard Nixon and the Oval Office; he well realized how domestic affairs intersected with political and public-relations considerations which in turn vitally affected his public standing. As a result, Nixon intimately involved himself in overseeing Cabinet activities, once again using his trusted staff to determine and protect his interests. His interests, as usual, were political and personal rather than those of substantive policies. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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Henry Kissinger, who worked within both the White House and the Cabinet, saw the President’s relations with his Cabinet as psychologically complex. He thought “students of psychology” could explain why every President since Kennedy trusted his immediate aides more than his Cabinet. 24 The answer, of course, lies in presidential perceptions of political and personal needs, the need to enhance his image and power, as well as to protect his public standing. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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By mid-1971, with little more than a year remaining before the next presidential election, the public-relations groups seemed concerned that the nation did not view the President as “being personally involved in domestic issues.” One staffer thought it important that the President, not Attorney General Mitchell, speak out on drugs; that President Nixon, not the Environmental Protection Agency’s William Ruckelshaus, talk about pollution; and again, that President Nixon, not Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz, discuss the economy. Ehrlichman and Haldeman agreed that the President must be more involved—or, at least, more visible—in domestic matters. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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Now, ten months into his presidency, Nixon wanted someone to develop his philosophy. Safire’s observation was revealing, however inadvertent: “Strange, fitting a philosophy to the set of deeds, but sometimes that is what has to be done.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 2098-2100  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 02:02 AM

Connally stirred his audience most when he urged that someone do something about the President’s awkward thrusting up of his arms and giving the V-for-Victory signal with his fingers. The other presidential aides thought Connally was the only one who could tell Nixon to stop the gesture. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 94 | Loc. 2125-30  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 02:06 AM

John F. Kennedy’s aide and biographer, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., recalled many instances of his and Kennedy’s frustration in getting the bureaucracy to respond to policy directives. Schlesinger claimed that he spent three years unsuccessfully trying to persuade the State Department to stop using outmoded references to the “Sino-Soviet Bloc.” More generally, he observed that “the President used to divert himself with the dream of establishing a secret office of thirty people or so to run foreign policy while maintaining the State Department as a facade in which people might contentedly carry papers from bureau to bureau.” (Ironically, that was precisely the system that Nixon and Kissinger installed.) 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 2162-66  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 02:11 AM

As a practical matter, however, bureaucrats under Nixon did what they always did, even when not ideologically hostile to the Chief Executive: they fought for position and a share of power and often settled on the basis of mutually satisfactory group bargains. 38 That was not the game favored by the President and his men. And as the White House staff grew, that bureaucratic structure, with its own subunits, confronted the myriad of established bureaucracies scattered throughout the government, giving a new dimension to jurisdictional warfare. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 99 | Loc. 2225-31  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 02:17 AM

Much of the difficulty probably was due to Hoover’s declining energies; he preferred to consolidate his empire and not open it to further assaults. Hoover no longer could be counted on to meet CIA or White House demands for actions that, if carried out and subsequently revealed, might have irreparably harmed his beloved Bureau. Consequently, he refused requests for mail openings, break-ins, wiretaps, and campus infiltrations. Hoover’s finely attuned political antennae remained intact; indeed, they operated far better than those of the White House. Given the heightened judicial and public consciousness of the importance of maintaining rigorous constitutional standards, Hoover recognized that the operations favored by the White House threatened problems for the President—and not least of all, for “his” Bureau and for himself. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 100 | Loc. 2255-59  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 02:21 AM

Hoover was more direct: he warned Mitchell that he would insist on the President’s signature for any activity that might be illegal. Mitchell saw the danger and informed the President. Two weeks after his initial approval, Nixon ordered the plan scuttled. And in the meantime, Hoover remained free to conduct the “dirty war” against subversion, in a fashion not too different from that proposed by Huston, but on J. Edgar Hoover’s terms. Hoover’s victory only heightened the White House antagonism toward him. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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Nixon returned from the funeral, announced that the new FBI building would be named in Hoover’s honor, and ordered the Acting Director, L. Patrick Gray, to bring Hoover’s files to the White House. It developed that they were gone; supposedly, Hoover’s secretary got there first. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 98 | Loc. 2217-20  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 10:48 AM

LBJ told Nixon that he must depend on “Edgar” to “maintain security.” Put your “complete trust” in him, Johnson advised. Nixon needed little prompting, for he had forged a close bond with Hoover since his service on the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940s. Hoover had kept up the contact, providing Nixon with information throughout the latter’s “wilderness years.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 97 | Loc. 2192-96  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 10:48 AM

Huston pushed hard for an interagency working group, “chaired by the White House,” to coordinate intelligence in the internal-security area. Huston told Egil Krogh, another young lawyer concerned with law-and-order issues, that the “President’s interest” in discrediting Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, and other activist groups simply was not being served by the Department of Justice—which meant the FBI. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 98 | Loc. 2203-7  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 10:50 AM

On June 5, 1970, Nixon met with the directors of various intelligence agencies: the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. He criticized their overlapping activities and jurisdictions, and he demanded that they reorganize to provide him with one informed body of opinion on domestic political intelligence. He named Hoover as Chairman of the group—first among equals, so to speak—and installed Tom Huston as “staff director.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 102 | Loc. 2294-96  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 10:50 AM

As 1970 drew to a close, Richard Nixon, as was his custom, prepared a list of goals for the future and made random notes that left tracings of his moods. His writing offered an idealized version of himself and his Administration, a view he ardently sought to impose on the nation, his entourage, and history. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 103 | Loc. 2324-28  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 10:53 AM

Less than three months into the first term, John Ehrlichman had hired John Caulfield, a former New York City policeman, to establish a White House “investigations unit.” Caulfield had been a Nixon bodyguard in 1968, and Haldeman assigned him to Ehrlichman after the election. Caulfield’s ostensible job was to serve as liaison with the Secret Service and local police units, but he eagerly plunged into the task of investigating Senator Edward Kennedy and the Chappaquiddick accident of 1969, in which Kennedy drove a car into the water, drowning a female companion. 
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Nixon later candidly acknowledged his own involvement in such harassment. He “hit the ceiling,” he recalled, when he learned that the IRS had audited John Wayne and Billy Graham. He told his aides: “Get the word out, down to the IRS, that I want them to conduct field audits of those who are our opponents, if they’re going to do in our friends.” He immediately suggested Democratic National Chairman Larry O’Brien as a target. 
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- Highlight on Page 106 | Loc. 2379-80  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:26 PM

The White House strongly believed that IRS commissioners could not be trusted to carry out its will and assigned John Caulfield to work with Vernon Acree, the IRS Assistant Commissioner for Inspection, to stimulate activity. 
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- Highlight on Page 106 | Loc. 2394-98  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:28 PM

The Service had been too “unresponsive and insensitive” to the White House. Commissioner Walters, Caulfield noted, appeared “oversensitive” in his concern that IRS actions might be labeled political. That had to change, Dean said. Specifically, Dean told Haldeman that Walters “must be made to know that discreet political actions and investigations on behalf of the administration are a firm requirement and responsibility on his part. We should have direct access to Walters for action in the sensitive areas and should not have to clear them with Treasury.” Finally, the inevitable rationale: the Democrats “used [IRS] most effectively. We have been unable.” 
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- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 2406-12  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:30 PM

President Nixon and his men also considered direct action, less subtle and including physical force, against “enemies.” During antiwar demonstrations in Washington in May 1971, Haldeman told the President that Charles Colson would use his connections with the Teamsters’ Union and hire some “thugs” to attack the protesters. Haldeman’s enthusiasm was unmistakable: “Murderers. Guys that really, you know, that’s what they really do. Like … the regular strikebusters-type and all that … and then they’re gonna beat the [obscenity] out of some of these people. And, uh, and hope they really hurt ’em.” Nixon enthusiastically chimed in: those “guys” would “go in and knock their [the demonstrators’] heads off.” His contempt was obvious: “These people try something, bust ’em,” he added. 
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- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 2415-17  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:30 PM

“Aren’t the Chicago Seven all Jews?” the President asked. (They were not.) The two men had a wide-ranging discussion of political “dirty tricks” that various aides had organized. 
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- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 2419-22  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:31 PM

Senator Muskie, then considered to be Nixon’s most likely opponent in 1972. Nixon and Haldeman were particularly pleased and amused by Colson’s attempts to disrupt Muskie’s campaign. Haldeman, with obvious relish, reported that Colson had “got a lot done that he hasn’t been caught at.” Nixon and Haldeman laughed throughout the exchange. But in that compartmentalized White House world, Haldeman was equally glad to report that “we got some stuff that he [Colson] doesn’t know anything about, too.” 
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- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 2432-36  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:33 PM

Charles Colson reported the President as saying: “I don’t give a damn how it is done, do whatever has to be done to stop these leaks and prevent further unauthorized disclosures; I don’t want to be told why it can’t be done. This government cannot survive, it cannot function, if anyone can run out and leak whatever documents he wants to…. I want to know who is behind this and I want the most complete investigation that can be conducted…. I don’t want excuses. I want results. 1 want it done, whatever the cost.” 
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- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 2436-37  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:33 PM

Haldeman assigned Caulfield to find the source of leaks to columnist Jack Anderson. 
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- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 2444-47  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:35 PM

In and out of office, Richard Nixon consistently was preoccupied with his place in history. To him, the control of information and documents was then—and continued to be—essential for ensuring a satisfactory standing at the bar of history. Perhaps nothing illustrated this better than the 1971 episode involving the White House’s response to the publication of the Pentagon Papers. 
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- Highlight on Page 109 | Loc. 2447-53  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:35 PM

On Sunday morning, June 13, 1971, the New York Times carried a frontpage photograph of the President and his daughter Tricia, standing together in the Rose Garden following her wedding ceremony. The other side of the page carried the first installment of the “Pentagon Papers,” a 7,000-page document commissioned by Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary under Kennedy and Johnson. The study traced the origins of the American involvement in Vietnam and offered significant insight into decision-making processes in the foreign-policy and military establishments. Nothing better revealed how secrecy had served the cause of deception than the revelations in these papers. Melvin Laird, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, told the President that 98 percent of the Pentagon Papers could be declassified. But Nixon responded that “the era of negotiations can’t succeed w/o secrecy.” 
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- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 2470-72  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:37 PM

Two weeks after publication of the papers, he acknowledged his complicity in their release. That admission put the issue of the war—its necessity, its wisdom, as well as its morality—squarely at the center of public attention. 
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- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 2475-76  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:37 PM

Nixon told Ehrlichman at one point that he would go “an extra mile to defend the security system to reassure China and friendly governments.” 
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- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 2476-77  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:37 PM

Both Nixon and Kissinger realized the personal danger if any president lost control over classified documents and allowed them to be used to smear his predecessors. 
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- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 2494-96  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:39 PM

Eventually, the Administration brought criminal charges against Ellsberg (against Griswold’s recommendation), but the proceeding ended in a mistrial—ironically, because of the Administration’s own illegal behavior. 
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- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 2497-99  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:39 PM

One of the more bizarre by-products of the Pentagon Papers affair was a plan either to raid or to firebomb the Brookings Institution and to pilfer papers there belonging to Leslie Gelb and Morton Halperin, former National Security Council aides. These papers allegedly represented a Pentagon Papers analogue for the Nixon years. 
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- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 2511-13  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:41 PM

Thus, the Pentagon Papers incident intensified the adversarial relationship between the Administration and the media, a relationship that was to deteriorate still more sharply. These developments, together with a failure of the courts to provide the desired protection and relief demanded by the Administration, led directly to one of the most fateful decisions of the Nixon presidency: the creation of the Plumbers. 
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- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 2528-33  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:42 PM

And thus the President of the United States called into being the Plumbers, a group specifically created to do what J. Edgar Hoover would not do without the validation of Nixon himself. According to Harry Dent, Lyndon Johnson told Nixon to rely on Hoover to cope with enemies within; but Hoover had failed his longtime friend Nixon. Five men connected to this group would go to jail for a specific crime committed in fulfillment of the President’s wishes. One of them, Egil Krogh, later recalled being told by Ehrlichman (another of those convicted) that the President suggested he read the Hiss chapter in Nixon’s book Six Crises. Dutifully carrying out the assignment, Krogh concluded that the President wanted him to proceed “with a zeal comparable to that he [Nixon] exercised … in investigating Alger Hiss.” 
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- Highlight on Page 113 | Loc. 2545-49  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:44 PM

Krogh, a lawyer and an Ehrlichman protégé” from Seattle (he viewed Ehrlichman as a “father-figure”), had served in the White House in a variety of posts, chiefly centering on the Administration’s antidrug measures and on District of Columbia affairs. Young had served with Kissinger as a Rockefeller retainer, and the two worked together on the National Security Council before Ehrlichman peremptorily recruited Krogh for his own needs. 
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- Highlight on Page 113 | Loc. 2554-55  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:44 PM

(The group’s quaint name was coined when one member, David Young, told his mother-in-law that he was plugging leaks of sensitive information. She thought it was nice to have a plumber in the family.) 
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- Highlight on Page 113 | Loc. 2557-60  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:45 PM

Ehrlichman also told Krogh that the Administration would not use the CIA, because its jurisdiction was legally limited to operations abroad, and this was a domestic matter. (A somewhat exceptional adherence to scruples given the President’s entanglement of the CIA with the Huston Plan and the collection of domestic intelligence. In fact, the CIA did get involved in the Plumbers’ operations, by aiding its notorious alumnus Howard Hunt.) 
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- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 2578-81  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:21 PM

When Nixon and Ehrlichman had their last official meeting on May 2, 1973, the President asked if he, Ehrlichman, had known about the Fielding break-in earlier. Ehrlichman noted that he silently nodded, and Nixon replied: “If so, it made no impression.” Colson indirectly supported Ehrlichman’s claim that Nixon knew. Colson assumed, he testified, “that John Ehrlichman wouldn’t take something like that upon his own shoulders.” 
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- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 2609-12  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:25 PM

When Attorney General Richardson reviewed the Fielding operation in May 1973, he immediately recognized that it would be impossible to make any public distinction between it and the Watergate break-in. Both events, he realized, involved Hunt and Liddy, both were illegal, and both could be traced to the White House. He favored prompt disclosure if “the trail” led no further than Krogh and Young. Richardson had good reason for making that qualification. 
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- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 2627-31  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:28 PM

The White House ordered the FBI to tap Radford’s telephone, hoping to uncover his ties to Anderson. Instead, the wiretap disclosed that Radford had been pilfering documents from Kissinger and the NSC files and turning them over to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Radford eventually confessed that he had stolen perhaps a thousand documents from NSC files and bum bags and then delivered them to Welander, who served as middleman for Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Radford steadfastly denied he had leaked to Anderson. 
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- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 2633-35  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:28 PM

He saw Radford’s revelations as “an extremely serious matter.” The Seven Days in May scenario of a military coup crossed his mind. “It was a question whether there was an actual move by the military into the deliberations of the duly-elected and appointed civilians to carry out foreign policy.” 
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- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 2647-49  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:30 PM

To be sure, someone—the President? Ehrlichman?—had ordered a Department of Defense investigation of Radford and one within the White House carried out by the Plumbers. Those reports remain buried. 
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- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 2649-54  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:31 PM

The only public discussion of the Radford affair came in a desultory Senate Armed Services inquiry in 1974, artfully managed by Senator John Stennis (D–MS) to produce the least possible information. None of the principal investigators testified. Senator Stuart Symington (D–MO) wanted Ehrlichman called as a witness, but Stennis dodged on this. Defense Department Counsel J. Fred Buzhardt filed a report on the affair, but none of it was discussed. The hearing, in sum, dealt with few substantive issues, although several interesting tidbits filtered out. For example, Admiral Welander testified that Haig had arranged his meeting with David Young, indicating Haig had knowledge of the Plumbers. (Curiously, according to Ehrlichman, Young thought Haig was behind the whole spying effort.) 
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- Highlight on Page 120 | Loc. 2719-21  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:37 PM

Unhappily for Nixon, after admitting he approved the tap on Morton Halperin, a Kissinger aide, he became the first president ordered to pay damages—a $5 award, meant to be symbolic—to a private citizen for acts committed by the Chief Executive while in office. 
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- Highlight on Page 122 | Loc. 2756-65  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:40 PM

Some twenty months later, in the summer of 1972, the pending case had moved to the Supreme Court. Ervin put in an appearance to argue against the government’s policy, describing the Army’s action as a “cancer on the body politic.” Chief Justice Burger led a five-man majority which specifically followed Rehnquist’s formulation that the mere existence of governmental surveillance activities was not a violation of First Amendment rights. Rehnquist, now an Associate Justice, refused to disqualify himself in the case, claiming—in the face of his public testimony—that he had no personal knowledge of the case itself. He also insisted that he had never acted in an advisory role for the government in the case. Rehnquist’s vote, of course, was crucial; a tie vote would have sustained the lower-court ruling against the government. Fourteen years later, in 1986, Rehnquist faced the issue again during hearings on his nomination to be Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He reiterated that he had “no recollection” of participating in the formulation of Army surveillance or intelligence policies. But earlier testimony from the Army’s General Counsel clearly contradicted Rehnquist. 
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- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 2791-92  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:44 PM

The case now took on the paradoxical title United States v. United States Court for the Eastern District of Michigan , but is more simply known as the Keith Case. 
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- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 2797-2801  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:45 PM

In the Keith Case, the government strikingly ignored the Steel Seizure Case of 1952, though this was the leading case on inherent presidential powers. There, the Supreme Court had rejected President Truman’s claims of inherent powers to nationalize the steel mills because of the Korean War emergency. The Court of Appeals in the Keith Case thought it odd that the President of the United States should claim the sovereign powers of George III, whose authorization of indiscriminate searches and seizures had been a vital issue in the Revolutionary Era. 
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- Highlight on Page 126 | Loc. 2822-25  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:49 PM

Richard Nixon’s assuming office marked the first time since Zachary Taylor’s election in 1848 that a first-term president failed to meet a Congress controlled by his own party. The Democratic majority, however, represented only part of the problem. Nixon confronted a Congress sympathetic to ideological and institutional forces increasingly resistant to presidential wishes. 
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- Highlight on Page 127 | Loc. 2837-39  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:50 PM

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Hundred Days” in 1933 is often cited as a standard for demonstrating modern-day presidential leadership, but a close examination of the legislative process in this case reveals, as in so many others, that partnership between President and Congress which must prevail in American political life. 
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- Highlight on Page 127 | Loc. 2839-41  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:50 PM

John F. Kennedy remarked after two years in office that “Congress looks more powerful sitting here than it did when I was there in the Congress.” Nixon apparently never shared that insight. 
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- Highlight on Page 127 | Loc. 2844-47  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:51 PM

Richard Nixon’s experience in both the legislative and executive branches for fifteen years must have made him mindful of political reality. Nevertheless, he directed his staff toward a policy that alternated contempt for Congress with a belief that, through the borrowed techniques of advertising and public relations, the White House could sell its program directly to the public and so make Congress irrelevant. 
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- Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 2865-68  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:52 PM

In foreign-policy matters, Eisenhower respectfully regarded Congress’s role, whether consultative or formal. He carefully touched congressional bases during the tense moments surrounding the French collapse in Vietnam in 1954, the Formosan Straits crisis in 1955, the Suez invasion in 1956, and the civil war in Lebanon in 1957. Nixon, on the other hand, discussed his Cambodian invasion plans with Congress in 1970 only after the decision had been reached. 
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- Highlight on Page 129 | Loc. 2879-83  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:54 PM

Special combinations of man and times—a Franklin D. Roosevelt or a Dwight D. Eisenhower—followed the unpopular tenures of Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman. The nation waited in 1969 to see what it had chosen. It soon became clear that the election had not stilled any of the nation’s civil strife; most significantly, Nixon’s installation as President only widened the chasm and conflict between the executive branch and Congress. Moreover, that conflict had taken on a new character in recent years. 
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- Highlight on Page 129 | Loc. 2896-97  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:55 PM

A distinguished political scientist, James MacGregor Burns, summarized the deadlock-of-democracy notion in a book by that title in 1963. 
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- Highlight on Page 130 | Loc. 2905-7  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:55 PM

believed that we had allowed the Madisonian system of checks and balances to thwart and fragment “leadership instead of allowing it free play within the boundaries of the democratic process.” The result was a political system divided along both partisan and institutional lines—and, all too often, a paralysis of governmental will and power. 
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- Highlight on Page 131 | Loc. 2931-36  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 04:51 PM

The Nixon speech sounded as if it had been crafted by speechwriter Theodore Sorensen in the Kennedy style. Nixon spoke of presidential involvement in the “intellectual ferment” of the time. He recognized that “the lamps of enlightenment are lit by the spark of controversy.” The President, Nixon noted, was both “a user of thought” and a “catalyst of thought.” He talked of attracting “the ablest men” to his Cabinet, and he promised “a reorganized” executive and “a stronger White House than any yet put together.” Finally, there was a Kennedyesque call for elevation of the crusade: “Our cause today is not a nation, but a planet—for never have the fates of all the people of the earth been so bound up together.” 
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- Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 2965-67  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 04:54 PM

That faith rested on Theodore Roosevelt’s concept of a president free to do anything except what was expressly prohibited in the Constitution. Now Nixon was telling the people the same thing. In Alexander Bickel’s well-chosen metaphor, Richard Nixon caught the liberals bathing, and walked off with their clothes. 
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- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 2985-92  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 04:56 PM

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson matter-of-factly reported to Congress that he had not spent a $50,000 appropriation for Mississippi River gunboats because “the favorable and peaceful turn of affairs … rendered an immediate execution of the law unnecessary.” 11 Thus began the history of presidential impoundment of duly authorized funds. Impoundment had always posed practical constitutional problems, but these seemed of minor consequence until the Nixon Administration (with an important precedent from the Johnson years) transformed an occasional practice into a special test of wills with Congress. For Nixon, the exercise of impoundment also became part of his constitutional responsibility. In a January 31, 1973 press conference, he announced “the Constitutional right for the President of the United States to impound funds[,] and that is not to spend money, when the spending of money would mean … increasing prices or increasing taxes for all the people, that right is absolutely clear.” 
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- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 3028-33  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 05:00 PM

Congressional inertia on impoundment amounted to benign acquiescence, which in turn emboldened the Administration to expand impoundment actions. Cost-cutting activities most often involved programs that the White House wanted eliminated and replaced with state initiatives financed by revenue-sharing measures. Altogether, Nixon impounded more than $18 billion in his first term. 15 Unlike the impoundments of his predecessors, none of his involved defense expenditures; the impounded funds consistently affected pet pork-barrel projects and traditional liberal causes. Impoundment became an instrument serving preferred presidential policies, policies that aided fiscal restraint and at the same time frustrated congressional wishes. 
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- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 3067-68  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 05:03 PM

the fact that impoundment had risen to the respectability of being considered grounds for impeachment measured the furies Richard Nixon aroused in Congress. 
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- Highlight on Page 138 | Loc. 3089-91  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 05:05 PM

“We’re going to reorganize the government come hell or high water,” he told Nelson Rockefeller in 1971. But Leonard Garment recognized the dangers of making a “lunge at the private parts … of all the different establishments in Washington.” 
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- Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 3113-16  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 05:07 PM

The President subsequently named John Ehrlichman to head the Domestic Council, and the aide soon confirmed the fears of both Cabinet and congressional critics. Ehrlichman seemed less interested in broad policy formulation than in making the council into an operational agency. By all accounts (except Ehrlichman’s, of course), the Cabinet became increasingly isolated, even irrelevant, as contacts increased between the White House and middle-level bureaucrats. 
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- Highlight on Page 143 | Loc. 3209-14  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 11:47 PM

Court-watchers knew, however, that Warren Burger stood out as the exception who proved the rule. Burger, a former Assistant Attorney General, had been appointed to the Circuit Court by Eisenhower in the late 1950s. He consistently took issue with his liberal colleagues, often sarcastically berating what he considered their activism, elitism, and excessive concern with the rights of defendants at the expense of social order. In 1967, U.S. News & World Report published excerpts from some of Burger’s dissents and speeches, emphasizing his law-and-order themes. The article caught the attention of then-candidate Richard Nixon, and he used some of the ideas in his presidential campaign. Impressed with Burger’s “moderate conservatism,” Nixon nominated Burger as Chief Justice on May 21, 1969. 
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- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 3229-33  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 11:50 PM

Black’s definition in its own way departed from the original understanding of the term. In the early nineteenth century, strict construction was advocated by those who opposed what they regarded as the overly broad interpretations of the Constitution by Chief Justice John Marshall. But at that time, Marshall was regarded as the consummate conservative. His opponents, particularly Thomas Jefferson (who on occasion found it convenient to discard his own notions of strict construction), were the liberals of their day. 
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- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 3237-40  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 11:51 PM

Perhaps nothing with the exception of the ever-growing interinstitutional conflicts of the Vietnam war so poisoned the relations between Nixon and Congress as the Senate’s rejection of his successive nominations of Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Cars-well to the Court. A failure to confirm a presidential nomination is rare enough, but for it to happen with two successive nominees was truly extraordinary. 
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- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 3248-49  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 11:52 PM

As the pressure intensified against Fortas, Attorney General Mitchell visited Chief Justice Warren and briefed him on the department’s evidence; shortly afterward, Fortas submitted his resignation. 
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a Life magazine article charged that Fortas had accepted improper fees and had intervened with a federal regulatory agency in behalf of a former client whose foundation he served as a paid consultant. And Department of Justice investigators reportedly turned up more incriminating evidence. 
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- Highlight on Page 145 | Loc. 3264-66  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 11:54 PM

The President’s selection of Burger had obvious political motivations. His next choices for the Court offered payment on his obligation to key Southern supporters, particularly Senator J. Strom Thurmond, to appoint a man from the South—presumably a judge who would be less amenable to pressures to uphold desegregation measures. 
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- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 3289-90  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 11:57 PM

For the first time since 1930, the Senate had turned down a presidential nomination to the Supreme Court. The Haynsworth defeat demonstrated the fragility of Richard Nixon’s congressional support only one year after his election. 
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- Highlight on Page 151 | Loc. 3392-97  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 12:06 AM

Ehrlichman had his protégé Egil Krogh devise procedures to tighten the White House grip and influence on Court nominations, primarily at the expense of the Justice Department. Krogh told Ehrlichman that the President could not again “play catch up ball with a nomination.” Conceding initial selection and checkout procedures to Justice and the FBI, Krogh suggested that a White House unit be established to oversee the proceedings—with John Ehrlichman at the helm. Krogh devised roles for the President’s key men in securing future nominations: Clark MacGregor and William Timmons to handle Congress, William Safire to deal with the press, Charles Colson to brief various interest groups, and John Dean to coordinate the 
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- Highlight on Page 151 | Loc. 3391-99  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 12:07 AM

By late 1971, with two new nominations to submit and an election only a year away, the Administration could no longer afford mistakes. Ehrlichman had his protégé Egil Krogh devise procedures to tighten the White House grip and influence on Court nominations, primarily at the expense of the Justice Department. Krogh told Ehrlichman that the President could not again “play catch up ball with a nomination.” Conceding initial selection and checkout procedures to Justice and the FBI, Krogh suggested that a White House unit be established to oversee the proceedings—with John Ehrlichman at the helm. Krogh devised roles for the President’s key men in securing future nominations: Clark MacGregor and William Timmons to handle Congress, William Safire to deal with the press, Charles Colson to brief various interest groups, and John Dean to coordinate the others. Krogh urged that David Young, his fellow Plumber—whom Krogh called “the one independent mind, very facile and penetrating”—should be heavily involved. Krogh also did not trust the FBI. 
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The White House knew that numerous members of the Court were in precarious health. Shortly after his sharp attack on the Nixon Administration for its attempts to censor the press in the Pentagon Papers case, Justice Hugo Black became gravely ill. He submitted his resignation in September 1971. A week later, Justice Harlan, nearly blind and debilitated by bone cancer, also resigned. It was a golden opportunity for the President, but he came perilously close to opting for mediocrity and confronting the Senate once more. 
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Those names might have provided some short-range political mileage for Nixon, but their obscurity belittled the Court’s significance as an institution, and their mediocrity only signaled the President’s willingness to devalue the Court’s role in the governmental apparatus. 
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Congress’s customary behavior had permitted an extravagant growth of executive war powers. Perhaps Congress had been overwhelmed by a “cult of executive expertise”; perhaps there was a residue of guilt left over from the Senate’s 1919 rejection of the League of Nations and American international responsibilities; or perhaps, as a Senate committee suggested in 1969, Congress found itself “unprepared” to assert its constitutional role as the United States suddenly found itself in a new and dangerous world after 1945. 50 In any event, for better than a generation, presidents generally dealt with tame, pliant congresses in foreign-policy matters. The frustrating obstacles Congress regularly had imposed on presidential domestic policies simply were absent in foreign affairs. With cause, Richard Nixon thought he had a “free hand” in the international arena. 
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In a rare moment, however, detachment prevailed as Kissinger clearly stated the ironic, tragic nature of the conflict between the President and Congress over foreign policy. The Vietnam debate, Kissinger later wrote, “represented a flight into nostalgia,” a notion that America had somehow lost its way and desperately needed to recover its moral purity. Kissinger dismissed the confusion and debate over the war as an expression of self-indulgence that “opened the floodgates of chaos and exacerbated … internal divisions.” 
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Nixon sensed the new mood. Just a few weeks earlier, he attacked critics of American foreign policy as “neo-isolationists.” Yet several months later he effectively neutralized his critics with his response to the massive protests in October 1969. In a national television address, he appealed to the “Silent Majority,” confidently asserting that they outnumbered the protesters and supported his goal of “peace with honor.” North Vietnam, he insisted, could not defeat or humiliate the United States; “only Americans can do that.” 
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congressional restlessness gave rise to a gesture of rebellion. As part of a defense-authorization bill, Congress called on the President to terminate military operations in Indochina and provide for withdrawal within nine months, subject to the release of prisoners of war. In a bold fashion of his own, Nixon said he would ignore the proviso, since it did “not reflect my judgment about the way in which the war should be brought to a conclusion,” adding that he considered the statement “without binding force or effect.” The next year a federal court repudiated the President: “No executive statement denying efficacy to the legislation could have either validity or effect,” the court’s decision said, and the court characterized Nixon’s statement as “very unfortunate.” 
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- Highlight on Page 159 | Loc. 3587-94  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 12:28 AM

Modern presidential-congressional relations have a checkered history. Some observers have been critical of an altogether too compliant Congress. Carl Vinson, who first arrived as a Georgia Congressman in 1914, sadly lamented in 1973 that Congress was a “somewhat querulous but essentially kindly uncle who complains while furiously puffing on his pipe but who, finally, as everyone expects, gives in and hands over the allowance, grants the permission, or raises his hand in blessing, and then returns to his rocking chair for another year of somnolence broken only by an occasional glance down the avenue and a muttered doubt as to whether he had done the right thing.” Indeed, even Richard Nixon could be a beneficiary of that kindly old uncle. Congress passed the Economic Stabilization Act in 1970, which gave the President sweeping authority to regulate wages and prices—a domestic equivalent to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, as one writer remarked. 
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- Highlight on Page 161 | Loc. 3631-35  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 09:00 AM

The Nixon Administration mounted an unprecedented, transparent assault on the media and individual reporters; yet that Administration, like others, went to extraordinary lengths to cultivate the press. And for good reason: the media had become an essential component in the task of governance in late-twentieth-century America. Mastery of it, or at least maintaining its goodwill, became a recognized, desirable prize as presidents sought to reach and shape public opinion and to build constituencies for their programs and future campaigns. 
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- Highlight on Page 162 | Loc. 3648-51  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 09:01 AM

Nixon and Haldeman installed Ronald Ziegler as Press Secretary. This was apparently a conscious move to diminish, certainly to subordinate, the position. Ziegler had been a Disneyland guide and a Haldeman aide in an advertising agency. Not to name a working reporter for the post marked a dramatic departure for a new Administration, although LBJ had done the same late in his presidency. 
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- Highlight on Page 167 | Loc. 3750-57  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 09:13 AM

Emphasizing the “enormous responsibilities” of the presidency, Nixon insisted that the Chief Executive “must not be constantly preening in front of a mirror, wondering whether or not he is getting across as this kind of individual or that.” He had no truck with the public-relations types “constantly riding me, or they used to in the campaign, and they do now. ‘You have got to do this, that, and the other thing to change your image.’ I am not going to change my image, I am just going to do a good job for this country.” The facts were otherwise. Nixon was constantly concerned and preoccupied with image; and it was the President himself, not “spinmakers” and public-relations men, who set the agenda for this concern. Just prior to his Today appearance, Nixon told Haldeman that it was time to use a “full-time PR man to really convey the true image of a President to the nation.” 
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The presidential press conference has come to be the most visible point of public contact between presidents and the media. It is often said that this is the closest American approximation to the British parliamentary practice of periodically questioning government ministers. The comparison pales. The British system is institutionalized and works on a regular basis, operating between assumed equals in status, if not quite in power. All questioners are members of Parliament, standing in deference to their monarch but not to the Prime Minister. The questioners stand forth openly as political opponents, with the opportunity to coordinate and focus a series of questions designed to secure political advantage for themselves. Above all, parliamentary examination is a vital component of ministerial accountability. Presidential press conferences simply have lacked those qualities of tradition and institutionalization. 
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Roosevelt, like Wilson, believed that if he made page one, the editorial pages were of minor consequence. FDR’s first press conferences in 1933 (fashioned after those he had held as Governor of New York) marked a new stage in presidential relations with the press, one in which the President personally assumed control to manage the news flow. FDR largely succeeded, through a combination of charm, guile, cajolery, and flattery. He was, a recent biographer noted, “a picture of ease and confidence.” Without television to convey a visual image of himself, the President nevertheless portrayed himself to the press—and hence to the public—as “unprecedentedly frank, open, cordial, personal.” 
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Eisenhower held 193 press conferences in his eight years in office, far more than any other president, before or since. Sophisticated audiences often responded contemptuously to the President’s jumbled syntax, his rambling, “often inappropriate or impossibly confusing answers,” and his confessions of “I don’t know.” But his style was effective, and the press conferences contributed to Eisenhower’s continuing extraordinary popularity. Eisenhower cultivated good relations with reporters, regularly inviting them to cook-outs during his vacations, playing golf with them, and treating them as “quasi members of his staff.” Occasionally, he might betray some anger or annoyance at a particular incident involving the press, but he never permitted or fostered open antagonism.’ 
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Press conferences are not as spontaneous as they seem. The live televised proceedings dictate careful preparation on the part of the President, including briefings and even rehearsals. Good staff work usually ensures that there are no surprises. The likely questions are obvious and generally are confined to issues of the moment. 
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Given their numbers and differences, reporters at press conferences have no opportunity for coherent questioning. Thus control of the event usually belongs to the President. His problem is to guard against the infrequent slip of the tongue, the inadvertent remark. Nevertheless, control can on occasion slip from his hands: witness Nixon’s experience on June 1, 1971. A reporter raised a question regarding alleged civil liberties violations surrounding the mass police arrests of the May Day antiwar demonstrators that year. (Charges already had been dropped against more than two thousand arrested individuals.) Nixon’s reply focused on the danger of the demonstrations to the government, ignoring the civil liberties question. What followed was unusual, as one reporter after another rose to bore in on the same issue, pressing hard on the question of improper police tactics. Nixon evaded them, finally finding a “safe” reporter who invariably strayed from the pack to ask irrelevant, obscure questions. She did not disappoint him in this case, dropping the dangerous line of questioning to inquire about a surplus of telephone poles in Vietnam. The President, visibly relieved as the press conference quickly returned to its familiar anarchy, nevertheless realized the danger. He did not hold another televised press conference for nearly thirteen months. 
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- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 3953-56  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 09:34 AM

The President’s anger focused in a particularly vicious manner in November that year, when Haldeman, at Nixon’s direction, called J. Edgar Hoover and asked for “a rundown on the homosexuals known and suspected” in the Washington press corps. Hoover confirmed he had the material and noted that he would not need to make any specific investigation. The Director sent the files to the White House. 
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- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 3966-69  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 09:36 AM

Haldeman had his man. It was a perfect match: Magruder was pliant, reliable, and obedient. In time, Haldeman dispatched Magruder to Herb Klein as the “Deputy” in the White House Office of Communications, and fatefully, in 1972 he became Mitchell’s “Deputy” at the Committee to Re-elect the President. Klein was my “nominal boss,” but Haldeman was his “real boss,” Magruder acknowledged. 
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The Agnew speech in Des Moines had been nurtured in the darker moments of the Goldwater candidacy in 1964. The Vice President offered the nation, particularly its heartland, a conspiracy theory that blamed the anti-Nixon bias of the media on an Eastern liberal establishment. “A small group of men, numbering perhaps no more than a dozen anchormen, commentators, and executive producers, settle upon twenty minutes or so of film and commentary that’s to reach the public… . [They] live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C., or New York City… . They draw their political and social views from … one another, thereby providing artificial reinforcement to their shared viewpoints.” It was time, he said, to question the power of this “small and un-elected elite.” Given the government’s role in regulating the broadcast networks, Agnew’s threat was only thinly veiled: “the people,” Agnew warned, “are entitled to a full accounting of [the networks’] stewardship.” Agnew had struck the sensitive nerves of the media and liberal intellectuals, but he also won the hearts and minds of those who already believed the notions he espoused. They responded with passionate support for the Vice President. Antisemitic letters constituted II percent of one network’s mail, while tirades against blacks made up another 10 percent. In an ABC poll, 51 percent of the respondents agreed with Agnew. 
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When he returned, he planned to do a documentary on his visit, but Richard Salant, head of CBS News, “cross-examined” him at length over his inability to get more information on the POWs and his failure to report more unfavorably on the North. Instead of doing a documentary, Hart appeared on only a few late-night spot reports. He believed that he had lost the confidence of his bosses. He later realized that he had covered the story as a journalist, not as an “American journalist.” One of his colleagues emphasized how important it was to preface or conclude his reports with reminders that “these people were Communists.” 
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- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 4151-58  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 07:26 PM

Several hours later, in the early morning of the seventeenth, police arrested five men in the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington. A security guard discovered an apparent burglary in progress and notified the local police. When captured, the suspects had several cans of Mace, carried lock-picking devices, and wore surgical gloves. One had a portable radio receiver. The police also found camera equipment and telephone-bugging devices. Because of the possibility that the federal Interception of Communications statute had been violated, the D.C. police called in the FBI. Preliminary investigations on the scene led Bureau agents to believe that the burglars were in the process of installing the listening devices in the Democratic offices. Shortly after the arrest, an attorney showed up at police headquarters, stating that he represented the men in custody. The suspects, however, had refused to make any telephone calls, and the lawyer would not tell agents how he had learned of their arrest. 
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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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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. 
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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. 
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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.” 
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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 Ehriichman 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. 
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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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Late in October, after CBS had devoted extensive attention to Watergate, the President complained at length to Haldeman. He ordered Kissinger to do nothing with the network for a week. Ziegler was not to talk to CBS reporters or to the Post. Colson upbraided CBS’s top executives and succeeded in having the network reduce a promised follow-up program. 
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Nixon recalled in his memoirs that he had “insisted to Haldeman and others … that in this campaign we were finally in a position to have someone doing to the opposition what they had done to us. They knew that this time I wanted the leading Democrats annoyed, harassed, and embarrassed—as I had been in the past.” The rationale always centered on retaliation: “I told my staff that we should come up with the kind of imaginative dirty tricks that our Democratic opponents used against us and others so effectively in previous campaigns.” He acknowledged that he ordered “a tail on a front-running Democrat” (without saying for what purpose) and directed that federal agencies’ files be checked for suspicious or illegal behavior by Democrats. 
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- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 4428-31  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 01:46 PM

John Mitchell reportedly listened to the proposal of Gemstone, puffed on his pipe, and told Liddy that it was “not quite what I had in mind” and that he was to devise more “realistic” and less expensive plans. The entry and bugging of the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee was the more realistic plan concocted by CREEP’S “security” forces. 
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Mitchell later ruefully reflected that he should have thrown Gordon Liddy and his entire plan out the window. As Attorney General—which he was until March 1972—Mitchell might have done better to arrest Gordon Liddy for his proposed conspiracy. 
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- Highlight on Page 200 | Loc. 4442-47  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 01:47 PM

At the time, the certainties of the Watergate break-in were three: the burglars were real; they had entered the office complex; they had bugging devices with them. The five perpetrators eventually were convicted for breaking and entering and for violating laws prohibiting unauthorized wiretaps. Hunt and Liddy were also found guilty. As the prosecutors developed their case, they discovered, as did subsequent investigations, that the seven men had important links to CREEP and the White House; in particular, all had received money from questionable campaign contributions. But what was the purpose of the break-in? Clearly, the operation was political. But what had been its end? For what specific gain had the break-in been planned? 
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- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 4459-67  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 01:49 PM

Arthur Kinoy, the lawyer who successfully challenged the Administration’s broad claims for inherent presidential powers to wiretap without warrants, offered a second hypothesis to account for the break-in. Earlier in the spring, Kinoy had represented federal judge Damon Keith, who had ordered the Administration to disclose wiretaps in a case involving alleged White Panther members. Throughout the proceedings, the Justice Department attorneys had pressed luxuriant claims of inherent executive powers to wiretap. If the Supreme Court had accepted the government’s position, the Administration would have had a perfect cover for wiretaps and “black” operations already underway or planned. The Watergate break-in occurred, Kinoy suggested, because the Administration was privy to the Court’s adverse decision and someone ordered that the phone taps be removed before the Court gave its ruling, scheduled for announcement the Monday after the break-in. Why were so many men caught at Democratic headquarters if their mission was only to repair one faulty tap? Kinoy theorized that the burglars were removing equipment. 
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- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 4475-76  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 01:50 PM

Haldeman also endorsed Senator Howard Baker’s 1973 comment: “Nixon and Helms have so much on each other, neither of them can breathe.” 
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- Highlight on Page 202 | Loc. 4483-87  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 05:29 PM

Haldeman later argued that the CIA and the Democratic National Committee knew about the first Watergate break-in and that, singly or together, they sabotaged the second. He claimed that the Cubans, Hunt, and McCord remained on the CIA payroll. The CIA’s animosity toward the Administration, its fear that after his re-election Nixon would move decisively to bridle its power, and its determination to protect an old ally, industrialist and financial manipulator Howard Hughes, Haldeman argued, explained the failure of the break-in. 
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- Highlight on Page 202 | Loc. 4494-98  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 05:30 PM

Jim Hougan’s book, Secret Agenda, fleshes out Haldeman’s claims for a pervasive CIA role in Watergate. Hougan has established the most thorough reconstruction of the crime. As evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the events of May-June 1972, Hougan traced the Agency’s dealings back to Howard Hunt’s roles in the Pentagon Papers case and the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Throughout this period, Hougan argues, Hunt was a CIA operative and regularly reported on Administration doings, particularly the sexual peccadillos of various politicians. 
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- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 4507-11  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 05:31 PM

Questions regarding the CIA appear in various segments of the Watergate story. The Agency’s role, however, seems destined to remain shadowy. Such CIA principals as Helms, Deputy Director Vernon Walters, and future Director William Colby have adamantly denied any CIA role in initiating any Watergate events or in implicating the White House. But Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert charged, and Colby admitted, that the CIA had withheld cooperation with the investigation. What eventually emerged from the inquiries into Watergate—wholly apart from the events of the break-in and subsequent cover-up—was the CIA’s changed relationship to other power centers in the government. 
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- Highlight on Page 204 | Loc. 4532-36  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 05:36 PM

Dean turned the O’Brien matter over to John Caulfield, Ehrlichman’s in-house private detective. Caulfield found little on O’Brien, but he kept running into more details of the Hughes-Nixon connection and warned Dean that it might be dangerous. Nevertheless, the IRS began a tax audit of Robert Maheu, Hughes’s ousted chief aide. Maheu retaliated with a leak to columnist Jack Anderson about a reported $100,000 Hughes payment to Nixon through Bebe Rebozo. Las Vegas journalist Hank Greenspun told Herb Klein that he had information the money had been used to furnish the President’s San Clemente estate. 
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- Highlight on Page 205 | Loc. 4554-59  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 05:38 PM

The so-called “Greek Connection” provides yet another theory for the Watergate break-in. Once again, there is a link to Lawrence O’Brien, and the motive may, like the O’Brien-Hughes theory, lie in G. Gordon Liddy’s contention that the Watergate break-in “was to find out what O’Brien had of a derogatory nature about us, not for us to get something on him or the Democrats. “ James McCord also testified that the purpose of the June 17 break-in was “to do photocopy work of documents” as well as to install new listening devices. The story has its origins in a September 1968 campaign speech delivered by vice-presidential candidate Spiro Agnew. 
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- Highlight on Page 205 | Loc. 4563-69  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 05:39 PM

What had happened? According to Demetracopoulos, the Greek KYP—the intelligence service which had been founded by the CIA and subsequently subsidized by the Agency—had transferred three cash payments totalling $549,000 to the Nixon campaign fund. The conduit was Thomas Pappas, a prominent Greek-American businessman with close links to the CIA, the Colonels, and the Nixon campaign. (Agnew insisted that he “had absolutely no knowledge” of such money.) The charges that KYP money had come into the presidential campaign, with CIA knowledge, were circulated in the United States and in Greece. CIA Director Richard Helms commented with studied ambiguity: “Even if somebody suggests they would like to do it, I would insist that they don’t tell me about it because that is dynamite.” 
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- Highlight on Page 208 | Loc. 4686-87  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 08:50 PM

James McCord, Watergate burglar, former CIA agent, and Chief of Security for CREEP, testifying before the Senate Select Committee.( 
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- Highlight on Page 212 | Loc. 4761-66  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 08:55 PM

Nixon met with Haldeman in the late afternoon of September 15. Watergate was very much on their minds, as was the young lawyer in charge of damage control. Haldeman congratulated himself on having designated John Wesley Dean III for that task. While Dean would not “gain any ground for us,” Haldeman told the President, he would make “sure that you don’t fall through the holes.” Haldeman knew the way to Richard Nixon’s heart. Dean, he noted, was “moving ruthlessly on the investigation of McGovern people, Kennedy stuff, and all that too.” Altogether, Haldeman reported, Dean had turned out to be tougher than he had anticipated. 
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- Highlight on Page 212 | Loc. 4766-74  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 08:56 PM

Such a performance apparently merited a presidential audience. It was close to 5:30 P.M. when the President summoned the White House Counsel. Nixon greeted Dean rather casually. “Hi, how are you?” “Yes sir,” Dean responded. The President wasted no time in coming to the point: “Well, you had quite a day today, didn’t you? You got, uh, Watergate, uh, on the way, huh?” 1 September 15 was an important day for the President’s growing involvement in the cover-up of any White House connection to the break-in. For John Dean, especially, it was a red-letter day, for now he was about to receive official recognition, even blessing, for his direction of the cover-up campaign. He had worked hard for three months to keep the President from falling through the holes. Dean thought he was on his way to the top. From another perspective, at another time, he saw his life that day as “touching bottom.” 
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Dean’s modest experience typified the Nixon White House; the essential qualifications for important positions consisted of loyalty and subordination. 
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After he had applied unsuccessfully for a clerkship with District Judge John Sirica, Dean had worked in staff positions in Congress and the Justice Department. Richard Kleindienst, his immediate superior, learned to dislike Dean, yet acknowledged that he had performed with “great distinction.” Kleindienst also claimed that he had warned Dean against moving to the White House, telling him that he would only be “a runner for Ehrlichman”; being “counsel to the President,” he said, was only an illusion. But John Dean—the WASP Sammy Glick—was an adaptable young man: he would move from being John Mitchell’s “boy” to become Haldeman’s, not Ehrlichman’s. 
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Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, well acquainted with ambitious young lawyers from his days as Dean of the Harvard Law School, considered John Dean a “nice young man” but nevertheless “was astounded” when he heard of his appointment as White House Counsel. Griswold believed Dean unqualified by either ability or experience. The position, Griswold said, “required a more mature person, with the fiber and strength to stand up to the President and to other people in the White House, and to do it gracefully so that you avoid head-on collisions.” Neither Nixon nor Haldeman included those qualities in their job description, however. 
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The new Counsel shrewdly sensed that handling what seemed to be the dull, routine matter of interest conflicts offered a key to advancement. He realized that by knowing a man’s financial situation he could gain his confidence. And winning confidence, Dean knew, would bring more “business”—contacts and chores that would make Dean more visible and ever more valued. 
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Dean’s desire for visibility reaped big dividends following the Watergate break-in. The White House Counsel had just returned from a trip to the Orient, but at Ehrlichman’s instructions he lost no time in talking to a variety of Administration principals regarding their knowledge of the burglary. Dean interviewed Colson, Magruder, Mitchell, Kleindienst, Liddy, and Gordon Strachan, a Haldeman aide. From Strachan, Dean learned that Haldeman had received logs from the wiretaps of the Democratic National Committee. If Haldeman were implicated, Dean realized, the President could not be far behind. 
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Dean’s role in Watergate began, in his words, as that of a fact-finder. From there, he worked his way up to idea man, and “finally to desk officer.” He met with involved officials, advised them, and made recommendations as to the disposition of evidence. He shuttled between the warring camps in the White House and the Committee to Re-elect the President. John Dean did not initiate the Watergate cover-up, but in time he came to be the orchestrator of the various disparate parties to the cover-up. 
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The first step in the cover-up belonged to Mitchell and was taken several hours after the news of the burglars’ arrest broke, when he denied any involvement by CREEP officials. On June 19 Colson urged that Howard Hunt’s White House safe be confiscated. Mitchell suggested to Magruder that he “have a little fire” at his house with the Gemstone files. The next day, Haldeman ordered Gordon Strachan to “make sure our files are clean.” Strachan promptly shredded numerous documents. Later that afternoon, Dean and his Associate Counsel, Fred Fielding, sifted the contents of Hunt’s safe, finding evidence of more “dirty tricks,” including an attempt to fabricate a direct link between President Kennedy and the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem. The safe also contained memos between Colson and Hunt regarding the Plumbers. Dean informed Ehrlichman about the materials, and Ehrlichman told him to “deep six” them. Dean instead gave them to FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray. 
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Haldeman later expressed surprise when he discovered on June 23 that Dean was the “‘project manager’ on the Watergate problem.” He thought Ehrlichman was in charge, but “my crafty friend,” as Haldeman characterized Ehrlichman, had managed to fade out of the picture for the current business. Ehrlichman hastily informed other relevant parties, such as Gray, that Dean had White House responsibility for an “inquiry” into the break-in. Ehrlichman scrambled for distance. 
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Petersen liked Dean and even confided in him, quite unsuspecting of Dean’s role. Petersen later bitterly recalled that Dean had become the “linch pin” (a term Dean himself used) of the conspiracy, acting through Haldeman and Ehrlichman. He grudgingly recognized that Dean was a splendid choice to direct the cover-up. Because Dean had worked in Congress on the committee to reform the criminal laws, and because he had been in the Justice Department, Petersen said, “we trusted him. We thought he was one of us. He had a degree of rapport with us that an ordinary counsel who just came in out of the political hinterlands never would have had with the Justice Department.” 
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Helms remembered that he immediately thought Haldeman’s concerns amounted to “baloney,” but he did not know “what the baloney was.” Gray himself testified that Helms told him on July 22, and again on July 27, that the CIA had no concern about the FBI investigation of the burglars’ money. Helms claimed to be mystified about a current White House notion that an FBI investigation would uncover the Agency’s “money-laundering” operation in Mexico; “we never used the term,” he insisted. The CIA, Helms revealed, had no need to operate in such a fashion: “We could get money any place in the world. We ran a whole arbitrage operation. We didn’t need to launder money—ever.” 
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- Highlight on Page 220 | Loc. 4942-46  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 09:09 PM

A couple of weeks later, on July 6, the President telephoned Gray from San Clemente. Gray told Nixon that he and Walters believed that “people on your staff are trying to mortally wound you by using the CIA and the FBI and by confusing the question of CIA interest in, or not in, people the FBI wishes to interview.” The President, Gray reported, paused slightly, and then urged Gray to continue his “aggressive and thorough investigation.” After the call, Nixon advised Ehrlichman not to “raise hell” with Gray or Walters, adding that the White House could take the heat. 
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“I was being set up by the President of the United States to take a fall.” Thus Richard Helms made his assessment of the President’s political tactics as the summer of 1972 wore on. But Helms was determined not to be the “goat” of the affair. Helms knew that Walters had been a longtime Nixon loyalist and that the President could have his way with him. Helms believed that Nixon intended to “embroil the Agency … and use the Agency as the cover for the cover-up.” Although he later resisted further demands from the White House, however, Helms at first cooperated in allowing the Agency to be used accordingly. His resistance eventually cost him his standing with the President, and his cooperation exposed his treasured organization to unprecedented public scrutiny. The Watergate affair was a disaster for Richard Helms and the CIA. 
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He pointed to the FBI’s investigation, one by the House Banking and Currency Committee, and John Dean’s “complete investigation” as ample evidence that “we are doing everything we can to take this incident and to investigate it and not to cover it up.” Dean’s investigation had satisfied him, Nixon insisted. “I can say categorically that his investigation indicated that no one in the White House staff, no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.” Charitably, the President said that “overzealous” people often do wrong things in campaigns. But his charity had limits. “What really hurts” in dealing with wrongdoing, he remarked, “is if you try to cover it up.” 
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Richard Nixon claimed that his diary entry for September 15 only briefly alluded to the grand-jury indictment of the Watergate burglars. “We hope,” he wrote at the time, “to be able to ride the issue through in a successful way from now on.” For Nixon, this meant that the incident was of only minor concern to him and that the trial of the burglars would end the matter. 
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Dean left the Oval Office shortly after the remarks about the newspapers. He had his orders; he did not talk to the President again until February 28, 1973. The mood then would not be so confident. 
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Patman, by now, was playing for the historical record. On October 31 he released the House Banking and Currency Committee’s staff report linking CREEP officials to the burglars and charging that the White House had authorized the most effective “curtain of secrecy ever erected.” Ford remained faithful to the Administration, demanding dismissal of the staff members. He derided the report and the Chairman for “last-minute smear tactics.” 42 Just as predictably, the report had no influence on the electorate. 
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Patman’s inquiry accomplished nothing in the immediate sense, but its encounters with CREEP and the White House had some important consequences. Patman’s pressure required that the cover-up be intensified and expanded, thus widening chances for error and eventual exposure. Meanwhile, Patman had perceived the cover-up. He was a formidable enemy, with a long memory and a penchant for settling scores. Several months later, he ordered his staff to share its materials and findings with Senator Sam Ervin and the newly created Senate Select Committee, named to probe 1972 campaign financing. Patman himself wrote to Ervin, urging that Dean be questioned closely on his interference with the House Banking and Currency Committee. 
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Richard Nixon and his campaign managers pursued Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 prescription of isolating the opposition and persuading the nation that it had no real alternative to “four more years” of the incumbent. 
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The President consistently talked about the opportunity to forge a broad mandate. The campaign of 1972 was to be very different from the calculated divisiveness of 1968. Now, the President assiduously courted Democrats, labor, blacks, Jews, and the young, while expecting (quite correctly) that his 1968 constituency would remain with him if only because it had nowhere else to go. 
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John Dean still had his tasks, busily trying to keep the ball of yarn tightly wrapped. His “firm” was esteemed in inner circles—and was ever more indispensable. “John Dean is handling the entire Watergate matter now,” Haldeman told Colson in March 1973, “and any questions or input you have should be directed to him and to no one else.” For the President, John Dean was “a superb young man.” Later, others would, with anger and bitterness, argue that Dean had “organized and directed” the resistance to the Patman hearings, miraculously absolving anyone else of responsibility and culpability—the incontrovertible evidence of the Oval Office tapes notwithstanding. 
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In March 1973, Colson told the President that Dean had “done a spectacular job. I don’t think anybody could do as good a job as John has done.” From the other side of the fence, Dean also received lavish praise when FBI investigators later acknowledged “that the President’s most senior associates at the White House conspired for nine months to obstruct our investigation.” 55 The President’s Counsel had not yet fallen from grace. On September 15, 1972, John Dean had promised the President fifty-four days; he had delivered more. 
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Meanwhile, the President’s familiar enemies-Congress, the government bureaucracy, and the media—began to look beyond the White House version of Watergate as a “third-rate burglary.” New wars seemed in the offing. For good reason, a channel of apprehension paralleled the confident course of the Nixon White House after the November election. 
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The Gray nomination went to the Senate on February 17. It was the President’s most fateful and disastrous decision in this crucial period, for Gray’s confirmation hearings offered the Democratic Congress an immediate opportunity to raise questions about Watergate. 
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But the writer offered several items for consideration, including a reminder that the defendants had been involved in “highly illegal conspiracies … at the behest of senior White House officials.” The warning was blunt: the Administration had been “deficient” in living up to its commitments for financial support and pardons. “To end further misunderstandings,” the defendants set 5:00 P.M. on November 27 as a deadline for the White House to meet financial requirements and offer “credible assurances” that other commitments would be honored. “Loyalty,” they said, “has always been a two-way street.” Liddy, meanwhile, told Dean that he needed money for his lawyer. 
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Given the times, suspicions were aroused, and some linked the crash to the Watergate case. Dorothy Hunt had traveled with an unusual amount of money. Talk circulated that allegedly she had the same CIA links as her husband, and there was shadowy talk of “hush money.” In any event, the final report of the National Transportation Safety Board on August 29, 1973, found no evidence of “sabotage or foul play” in connection with the accident. Meanwhile, the White House was aware of Mrs. Hunt’s importance in the cover-up. Three months after her death, Dean told the President that she “was the savviest woman in the world. She had the whole picture together,” he said. 19 
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- Highlight on Page 251 | Loc. 5639-47  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:12 AM

Nixon knew that his aides had paid money to Hunt and the defendants, but he only worried about finding new donors for “hush money.” “Goddamn hush money,” the President complained, “uh, how are we going to [unintelligible] how do we get this stuff….” In a February 14 conversation with Colson, he talked about maintaining the cover-up: “The cover-up is the main ingredient,” he told Colson. “That’s where we gotta cut our losses; my losses are to be cut. The President’s losses gotta be cut on the cover-up deal.” The day before, Nixon bluntly told Colson that the cover-up must be maintained: “When I’m speaking about Watergate,” the President said, “that’s the whole point of the election. This tremendous investigation rests, unless one of the seven begins to talk. That’s the problem.” But the President had confidence in his old friend John Mitchell, as he was pleased that Mitchell had “stonewalled it up to this point.” Colson and Mitchell were adversaries, but Colson admiringly told the President in response: “John has one of those marvelous, ah, memories.” 
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He told Colson he knew it was “tough” for him, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and the rest. But, he promised, “[W]e’re just not gonna let it get us down. This is a battle, it’s a fight, it’s war and we just fight with a little, uh, you know, uh remember, uh, we’ll cut them down one of these days.” In March, both John Dean and Charles Colson advised the President to retain Colson as a consultant without pay in order to maintain a curtain of executive privilege around him. 
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On January 6, Senator Mike Mansfield had called for a full investigation of Watergate, by a select committee armed with proper funds, staff, and subpoena powers. The time had come, Mansfield said, “to proceed to an inquiry into these matters in a dispassionate fashion.” The Senator thought that his North Carolina colleague, Sam Ervin, was the man to head such an investigation. 
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- Highlight on Page 252 | Loc. 5664-67  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:15 AM

Nixon was defensive once more about the press, complaining that L. Patrick Gray was often described as his “political crony.” They had never met in a social situation, Nixon insisted. But the talk of Gray made the President nostalgic for J. Edgar Hoover. “[H]e’d have scared them to death. He’s got [sic] files on everybody, God damn it,” meaning, it seems, that Hoover would have called off the dogs for Nixon. 
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He emphasized that Dean must get through to Kleindienst—he was the “man who can make the difference,” Nixon said; moreover, Kleindienst “owes Mitchell” for his position. Finally, Nixon again raised the Hiss case and applied it in an odd, almost perverse way. He told Dean that Whittaker Chambers, Hiss’s accuser, suffered greatly because he was an informer. Chambers, he thought, was one of the great men and writers of his time. Still, “they finished him…. [T]he informer is not wanted in our society. Either way, that’s the one thing people do sort of line up against.” 21 Was that pointed advice for John Dean? 
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The trial of Hunt, Liddy, and the Watergate burglars began on January 10 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. 
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That same day, Hunt offered to plead guilty to three charges, but Sirica promptly refused the offer, citing the strength of the government’s case. The public, he admonished, must have “not only the substance of justice but also the appearance of justice.” On January 11 Hunt pled guilty to all six counts. Patriotism was his last refuge. He had acted, he insisted, “in the best interest of my country”; he added that he had no knowledge of “higher-ups” in the conspiracy. Sirica released Hunt on $100,000 bail. 
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The four Cuban burglars similarly pled guilty on January 15 to all counts in the indictment. Responding to questions from Sirica regarding their actions, the burglars insisted that they had acted on behalf of Cuban liberation, and because they believed McGovern’s election would lead to Communism in the United States. 
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Patman’s earlier attempts to unravel the Watergate puzzle failed because of White House pressure, the distractions of the political campaign, and, not least, because his investigation was perceived as a partisan attempt to embarrass the President. 
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But the White House was not oblivious. The creation of the Senate Select Committee meant that the maintenance of the cover-up would have to be expanded. The new dimensions, however, only increased the likelihood of exposure. Administration resources proved to be limited, vulnerable, and ultimately, incompetent. 
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- Highlight on Page 257 | Loc. 5785-86  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:27 AM

The President realized the danger. On February 11, he told Haldeman that they must discredit the hearings, reiterating the now-familiar theme that this was a commonplace “political crime.” 
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- Highlight on Page 260 | Loc. 5848-55  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:33 AM

He said nothing about the obvious risk for a Republican judge perceived as favoring a Republican president. Yet Sirica had been Nixon’s kind of judge. And until 1973, Richard Nixon had been John Sirica’s kind of president. Sirica had scheduled sentencing of the Watergate burglars for March 23. Three days earlier, James McCord delivered a letter to the judge’s chambers that led directly to the unraveling of the conspiracy. Recognizing the possibility of a stiff sentence, and “in the interest of restoring faith in the criminal justice system, … [and to] be of help to you in meting out justice in this case,” McCord told Sirica that pressure had been applied to have the defendants maintain silence; that perjury had occurred in the trial; that Watergate was not a CIA operation, but it involved other governmental officials; and that McCord wanted an opportunity to discuss the case at greater length with Sirica. The judge exuberantly told his clerk: “This is going to break this case wide open.” 
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- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5858-60  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:33 AM

He wrote to his friend White House aide John Caulfield at the end of December, warning that “if Helms goes, and the Watergate operation is laid at [the] CIA’s feet where it does not belong, every tree in the forest will fall. It will be a scorched desert,” McCord warned. 
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- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5861-65  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:33 AM

Richard Nixon knew in advance about McCord’s letter to Sirica. The day it was delivered, the President told Haldeman that Dean and others were concerned about the convicted burglars’ sentences and what Sirica might do. He knew that McCord did not want to go to jail and apparently had decided to talk. Haldeman realized the implications: McCord, he said, “would have a lot on Mitchell.” The President replied as if he were unaware of the connection between the two. John Dean knew the implications: “The dam was cracking,” he later said. 
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- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5865-72  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:34 AM

At the same moment, the hearings on L. Patrick Gray’s nomination as Director of the FBI verged on disaster, with Gray about to admit that he had cooperated with Dean in seeking to limit the investigation of the break-in. The nomination also brought a confrontation with the Senate over executive privilege. The day after McCord sent his letter to Sirica, Dean told the President that there was “a cancer on the presidency.” Still, the “containment” effort persisted. Howard Hunt received a $75,000 payment from a White House emissary. Kleindienst, probably acting on White House orders, publicly minimized McCord’s charges and privately wrote to Sirica, chiding him for not sending McCord’s letter through Department of Justice channels. But Assistant Attorney General Petersen knew, as well as the prosecutors did, that Kleindienst’s complaint was beside the point: the case, to use a favorite Oval Office expression, was about to blow. 
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- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5872-73  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:34 AM

The President and Haldeman in their March 20 meeting did not see any particular problems for themselves or any other key White House figures, however. 
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- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5874-77  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:34 AM

Eight days later, Ehrlichman telephoned Kleindienst, conveying word that no White House people had prior knowledge of the break-in. Nixon wanted Kleindienst to keep him informed on developments in the case, particularly any information that involved White House officials. But he was concerned about Mitchell and the people at CREEP, Ehrlichman reported. “So am I,” Kleindienst added. 
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- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5878-79  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:34 AM

After reading the McCord letter in court on March 23, Judge Sirica turned to the sentencing of the other defendants. 
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- Highlight on Page 262 | Loc. 5896-99  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:36 AM

Sirica’s threat of maximum sentences skirted dangerously close to the precipice of forcing self-incrimination. The judicial precedents were mixed. An appellate court had vacated sentences in a drug-trafficking case because they trenched upon the defendant’s right to avoid self-incrimination. “Mercy seasons justice,” the court said, “but the quality of mercy is strained when its price is abandonment of the classic freedom against self-incrimination.” 
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- Highlight on Page 262 | Loc. 5899-5904  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:36 AM

Two years later, a Second Circuit Court ruling sustained broad discretion for the sentencing judge, including his right to consider matters inadmissible at trial. More to the point of Sirica’s example, the court ruled that when a judge left open the possibility of sentence reduction if the defendant subsequently cooperated, any judicial reference to the defendant’s silence was not a punishment for exercising self-incrimination. Ironically, the losing attorney in that case was Samuel Dash, the designated Majority Counsel for the newly created Senate Select Committee. Dash had recommended the precedent to Sirica, hoping that it might persuade the defendants to cooperate. 
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The President and his closest White House aides had determined by then that John Mitchell must be a sacrificial lamb if the strategy of containing the revelations was to work. Such passiveness occasionally gave way to exhortation. “Stonewall it,” “plead the Fifth Amendment,” “cover up”—anything to “save the plan,” he said defiantly. But in the next breath, he talked about his preference for “the other way”—in which his good friend John Mitchell would take the blame. 
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But at bottom, the President recognized the peril. He instructed Haldeman to keep Dean working on the case. From the moment Senator Mansfield proposed a congressional investigation, Nixon was concerned. Dean, he said, should “try to turn it off.” 
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- Highlight on Page 265 | Loc. 5958-63  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 01:56 PM

The optimistic, even cocky, Dean of September 1972 had vanished; for him, the outlook was terribly grim. “We have a cancer within, close to the Presidency, that is growing,” Dean reported. “It is growing daily. It’s compounded, growing geometrically now, because it compounds itself.” Dean thereupon launched into a long narrative of the origins of Watergate and the subsequent White House responses. But radical surgery lay in the distance. For now, the President and his aides launched a new cover-up, one to mask their earlier effort and also to find appropriate people “to take the heat.” 1 Dean’s pronouncement of March 21 was no surprise to Richard Nixon; he already had prepared for that new stage. 
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The Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings began shortly after the President announced Gray’s nomination as FBI Director on February 17. By the end of the month, Gray had acknowledged his direct contacts with the White House during the Watergate investigation, and his ambitions lay shattered. 
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Gray’s positive achievements were quickly disregarded once the Judiciary Committee hearings disclosed that he had regularly submitted FBI investigative reports to Dean. He contended that Hoover had made a practice of providing reports of ongoing investigations; further, he thought that he was merely supplementing Dean’s own investigation. In a conciliatory move, Gray offered to make the Watergate files available to the senators—an offer later vetoed by the White House. But more was to come. The committee learned that Dean took a week to turn over the contents of Howard Hunt’s White House safe to the FBI (Gray thought nothing was “irregular” about this: “the President’s got a rather substantial interest as to what might be in those papers,” he said on March 6). The Judiciary Committee also secured affidavits from CREEP employees who had cooperated with the investigation, stating that their superiors knew almost immediately about their statements to the FBI. By March 13 the committee had heard enough and voted unanimously to invite Dean to testify. The Democrats indicated that Gray’s nomination might be held hostage pending Dean’s appearance. The next day, however, Dean declined to appear, although he agreed to accept written interrogatories. 
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- Highlight on Page 268 | Loc. 6012-16  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 02:01 PM

The President invoked executive privilege and adamantly opposed any public testimony by his aides. Speaking at his March 2 press conference, Nixon insisted that “no President” could ever allow his Counsel to testify before a congressional committee. Ten days later, he found an enlarged sanctuary in the separation-of-powers doctrine. He transformed separation and independence into unbridled autonomy, maintaining that the manner of exercising assigned executive powers is not subject to questioning by other branches. The fig leaf of executive privilege carried with it high moral purpose. 
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- Highlight on Page 268 | Loc. 6021-22  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 02:01 PM

But in his memoirs, the President recalled that at that press conference, he suddenly realized: “Vietnam had found its successor.” 
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- Highlight on Page 268 | Loc. 6024-28  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 02:02 PM

But he told John Ehrlichman in a taped March telephone conversation that “John Wesley”—Gray appropriated an almost reverential name for Dean—must “stand awful tight in the saddle and be very careful about what he says.” Dean must say that he delivered everything developed by the White House investigation of the break-in to the FBI, Gray warned. All this he put on a note of knowing conspiracy: “I’m being pushed awfully hard in certain areas,” he reminded Ehrlichman, “and I’m not giving an inch and you know those areas.” 
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- Highlight on Page 269 | Loc. 6037-43  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 02:04 PM

The devious Ehrlichman quickly called Dean, and the two snickered about Gray’s alleged toughness. His testimony, Dean said, “makes me gag.” Ehrlichman wondered if Gray had called to “cover his tracks.” He contemptuously dismissed Gray. Ehrlichman wanted Gray to just hang there; “let him twist slowly[,] slowly in the wind.” Dean responded that those were exactly the sentiments of “the boss.” The President, he claimed, had questioned Gray’s ability to lead the Bureau, given the way he had conducted himself before the committee. The President himself decided that Gray was useless and expendable. Nixon told Dean on March 13 that Gray “should not be head of the FBI”; because of the hearings, Nixon added, “he will not be a good Director, as far as we are concerned.” 
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- Highlight on Page 270 | Loc. 6053-55  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 02:05 PM

On March 22, Byrd challenged Gray: was his first duty to the FBI or to the President?—a “tough question,” as Gray characterized it. But he could not “evade” the fact that he took orders from the President. 
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- Highlight on Page 270 | Loc. 6055-60  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 02:06 PM

Gray even admitted he would continue to give Dean FBI reports if the President requested them. Byrd then elicited Gray’s frank charge that Dean had lied when he had told FBI agents that he did not know whether Hunt had an office in the White House. Gray had broken contact with Dean by then, sensing that Dean had pushed beyond the bounds of propriety—and foolishly believing that the White House Counsel was an independent authority. Byrd’s questions were devastating. They involved Gray’s political speeches; his political uses of the FBI; his relations with the President, Dean, and other White House staff members; his conduct of the Watergate investigation; and his personal handling of evidence from Howard Hunt’s safe. 
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- Highlight on Page 272 | Loc. 6104-9  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 02:09 PM

No one better understood the shifting sands of public opinion than John Dean. He had determined that it was time for a direct, thorough discussion with the President of the United States. The President and his men had to confront their past—and their future. Meanwhile the President had created a new layer to the cover-up. On March 12 he issued a blunt statement asserting the nature and broadening the power of executive privilege. Cloaking himself in precedents dating back to George Washington, Nixon argued that executive privilege was sanctioned by the Constitution’s separation-of-powers doctrine and was necessary to protect internal communications of the executive branch regarding vital national concerns. 
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- Highlight on Page 272 | Loc. 6109-10  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:26 PM

He insisted that revelations of such communications threatened the candor of discussion and decision making. 
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- Highlight on Page 273 | Loc. 6123-27  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:28 PM

The Ervin Committee dominated the President’s thoughts at the March 13 meeting. He asked Dean to summarize the potentially damaging witnesses. Dean thought that particularly vulnerable were Hugh Sloan, the CREEP treasurer, who had passed money to Liddy, and Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s lawyer, who had provided hush money to the burglars. Nixon protested that Kalmbach, as his lawyer, merely handled some San Clemente property matters and his income tax—“he isn’t a lawyer in the sense that most people have a lawyer.” 
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- Highlight on Page 274 | Loc. 6147-50  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:31 PM

Again, Nixon acknowledged the vulnerability of Mitchell and Haldeman. But he always focused on the roles of others in planning or having knowledge of the break-in. On the surface, Nixon did not recognize that the deep involvement of the White House in the cover-up immediately following the break-in was the real problem. Or did he? Did he not realize that the task now was to cover up the cover-up—to “save the plan,” as he often said? If that was to happen, sacrificial lambs would have to be prepared. 
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- Highlight on Page 274 | Loc. 6151-57  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:33 PM

Dean told the President about Ehrlich-man’s role in the break-in of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The President appeared stunned, even mystified, claiming that it was the first he had heard of the matter. “What in the world, what in the name of God was Ehrlichman having something [unintelligible] in the Ellsberg?” Nixon asked. Whatever the answer, the “hang-out road” now had to be even further circumscribed. Another key aide was vulnerable; another “horror” might be revealed. Furthermore, Dean told the President, the CIA had developed pictures Hunt had taken of Liddy in the doctor’s office. Was the CIA, not exactly a reliable Nixon friend, wholly knowledgeable about that break-in? Perhaps not, but the Agency knew that Hunt had some illegal involvement. Here the President lost some of his aplomb, some of his sense of command. 
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- Highlight on Page 275 | Loc. 6166-73  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:34 PM

Dean’s recitation began with Haldeman’s instruction that he establish “a perfectly legitimate campaign intelligence operation” at CREEP. John Caulfield first developed a plan, but Mitchell and Ehrlichman agreed with Dean that it was not suitable. Dean then suggested that they commission Gordon Liddy for the task. Liddy proposed several hare-brained and expensive schemes, which again were rejected, but he then enlisted Hunt as an ally. The two visited Colson who, in turn, pressed Magruder for action. Mean-while Haldeman, through his aide, Gordon Strachan, similarly pressured Magruder for campaign intelligence. Magruder responded by turning to Mitchell and urging the campaign to authorize Liddy’s plan to wiretap the Democratic National Committee. Mitchell agreed, and the fruits of the taps went to Strachan, who gave them to Haldeman. Dean informed the President that Magruder ordered Liddy to make a second foray into the Watergate offices—and added that “no one over here knew that. I know, uh, as God is my maker, I had no knowledge that they were going to do this.” 
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- Highlight on Page 276 | Loc. 6197-6200  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:38 PM

Money, however, seemed to be no problem. How much do you need, he asked Dean? A million dollars over the next two years, the Counsel replied. “We could get that,” the President said. “[I]f you need the money, I mean, uh, you could get the money… . [Y]ou could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I, I know where it could be gotten…. I mean it’s not easy, but it could be done.” 
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- Highlight on Page 277 | Loc. 6217-24  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:40 PM

What was to be done? the President pleaded. Complete disclosure? “Isn’t that the best plan?” Nixon asked. It was Dean’s turn to dodge, for “complete disclosure” threatened him because of his role in the obstruction of justice. Dean wanted the President to ask for another grand jury, order the prosecutors to immunize witnesses, and sacrifice a few individuals. The lawyer-President seemed to have difficulty comprehending the point: “I don’t see it. I can’t see it,” he said. He thought Dean simply had served as a proper President’s Counsel; in any event, he seemed to think the matter could be handled easily enough. Suddenly, the President sounded satisfied with his prospects. “Sometimes it’s well to give them … something, and then they don’t want the bigger fish then.” And just as quickly, he realized that blackmail money still would have to be paid—“it would seem to me that would be worthwhile,” Nixon said. 
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- Highlight on Page 277 | Loc. 6231-32  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:42 PM

It was time, the President and Dean decided, for all of the key principals to meet to discuss future strategy—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Dean, and the President. 
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- Highlight on Page 279 | Loc. 6260-65  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:46 PM

But Ehrlichman knew that the immediate problem involved Hunt. He favored continuing the pattern of containment and blackmail and ultimately giving Hunt a pardon. Nixon tentatively agreed, yet wondered whether Hunt might get clemency from the court if he talked. Dean warned the President that that was a real possibility; he outlined exactly the scenario that James McCord, not Howard Hunt, had initiated the day before. Dean then contemptuously sneered at those (Colson, Kalmbach, Chapin) who had hired criminal lawyers “to protect their own behinds … ; self-protection is setting in.” Ten days later, Dean himself called a prominent criminal lawyer, disingenuously telling Haldeman that he needed someone to “figure out what everybody else’s criminal liabilities are.” 
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- Highlight on Page 279 | Loc. 6267-68  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:47 PM

Ehrlichman’s plan had the virtue of most heavily implicating Dean; the President and his favored men apparently did not realize at that point that Dean would not let himself go down alone. 
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- Highlight on Page 279 | Loc. 6271-73  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:47 PM

Dean’s theory steered the discussion into the question of just who would go to jail. Awareness of possible criminal liability jolted the conversation back to the easiest course of all: continuing the cover-up. All agreed that Hunt must be paid, and the President offered to make a public statement promising cooperation with the Ervin Committee and an internal investigation to quiet growing 
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- Highlight on Page 279 | Loc. 6271-76  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:49 PM

Dean’s theory steered the discussion into the question of just who would go to jail. Awareness of possible criminal liability jolted the conversation back to the easiest course of all: continuing the cover-up. All agreed that Hunt must be paid, and the President offered to make a public statement promising cooperation with the Ervin Committee and an internal investigation to quiet growing concern. Dean warned, however, that these were merely stopgap arrangements, again stressing that the story would eventually become public knowledge. That route, Haldeman exclaimed, held out “a certainty, almost, of Magruder going to jail, Chapin going to jail, you going to jail … [and] probably me going to jail.” Soothingly, the President responded: “I question the last two.” 
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- Highlight on Page 280 | Loc. 6281-84  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:50 PM

Dean sensed at this point that Haldeman and Ehrlichman ultimately might isolate him. After the meeting broke up, Dean told Richard Moore (who had urged him to speak to the President) that “all of a sudden my two friends, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, don’t know anything about all of this.” Dean also informed his associate Fred Fielding that he saw problems because others refused to admit their complicity. 
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- Highlight on Page 281 | Loc. 6308-12  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:53 PM

Nixon relayed Dean’s concerns about the future, a cue for Nixon to praise Dean’s “superb job here keeping all the fires out” and for Colson to laud his “spectacular job—I don’t think anybody could do as good a job as John has done.” Colson realized that Dean could be charged with obstruction of justice, but he planted an idea Nixon later adopted, that Dean had the double protection of executive privilege and lawyer-client privilege. 
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- Highlight on Page 282 | Loc. 6347-51  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:57 PM

The March 21 discussions were an overture to the series of meetings that began the next day and continued into April. Much of that time was spent maneuvering John Mitchell and his CREEP aides into position to take responsibility for Watergate, leaving the White House entourage relatively immune. But that scenario had been devised before the President heard Dean’s “cancer” exposé on the twenty-first. The evening before, Nixon and Haldeman met for more than an hour. They knew that McCord had offered to talk; accordingly, they mapped their own strategy. 
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- Highlight on Page 283 | Loc. 6359-64  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:27 AM

Both Nixon and Haldeman believed that Ehrlichman posed a problem, however, not for what he knew about Watergate, but for the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Haldeman suggested that key aides should prepare statements for publication in the Washington Star, but Nixon objected—“open[s] too many doors.” He would issue a statement, perhaps a general one, expressing confidence in his staff and basing it on “the Dean report”—a nonexistent document to be conjured up when convenient. But both men were sensitive to the danger of saying that any truth was “the whole truth.” “Never, never, never,” the President emphasized. 
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- Highlight on Page 283 | Loc. 6370-73  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:28 AM

The President quickly covered for Colson, asserting his conviction that Colson had no prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in. Nixon and Haldeman both believed that Mitchell had an interest in maintaining the cover-up because of his own complicity in—or at least awareness of—the plan. “No question about that,” Haldeman emphasized. The stage was set for Mitchell to play his part. 
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- Highlight on Page 283 | Loc. 6374-78  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:28 AM

Nixon and Haldeman resumed their conversation for nearly ninety minutes on the morning of March 22. First, Haldeman briefed the President on his use of $350,000 in campaign contributions to pay the defendants. Haldeman had directed Dean to channel the money to Strachan, who in turn gave it to Mitchell’s aide and friend at CREEP, Fred LaRue. The money had been collected since 1968 and had initially been set aside by Haldeman for taking polls and surveys. Nixon argued that none of this constituted an obstruction of justice (as Dean had contended it did) and that the funds were not covered by the recent campaign-financing laws. 
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- Highlight on Page 284 | Loc. 6379-83  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:29 AM

The President insisted that he would not be blackmailed: it was “right” to pay. “God damn it, the people are in jail, it’s only right for people to raise the money for them. I got to let them do that and that’s all there is to it. I think we ought to… . [W]e’re taking care of these people in jail. My God, they did this for—we’re sorry for them. We do it out of compassion… . What else should we do?” More a plea than a question, it seemed. But the bottom line was that the President agreed to blackmail payments. 
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- Highlight on Page 284 | Loc. 6394-97  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:30 AM

Mitchell’s “awfully close to you,” Haldeman said, as if to prod the President, but getting only a grunting “Yeah.” In the terms of an old political saw, Haldeman was a man who “seen his opportunities and took ’em.” Mitchell no longer was as close to the President as Ehrlichman, himself, and, now, Dean had become. Proximity was power and influence. 
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- Highlight on Page 285 | Loc. 6403-9  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:31 AM

At 2:00 P.M. on March 22, the President assembled Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean and asked, “[W]hat, uh, words of wisdom do we have from this august body on this point?” Rather sarcastically, Ehrlichman remarked that “our brother Mitchell” had brought some wisdom on the matter of executive privilege. Mitchell seemed to sense his vulnerability and cautioned his erstwhile law partner that the more he waived executive privilege, the less it was worth. He urged tough negotiations with Senator Ervin, through Howard Baker, and he recommended organizing “a damn good PR team” in order to avoid “a political roadshow.” Given his vulnerabilities, Ehrlichman heartily endorsed Mitchell’s advice. Haldeman worried that any testimony might indicate that “the President was involved”—certainly an uncomfortable possibility for him, as well. 
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- Highlight on Page 285 | Loc. 6418-20  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:32 AM

Who would testify before the Ervin Committee? Haldeman knew the committee wanted “big fish,” meaning that he and Ehrlichman could not avoid an appearance. He seemed confident they could handle things. Clearly, everyone appeared anxious to keep Dean away from the committee: his vulnerability was the vulnerability of all. There was talk of the lawyer-client relationship to give him further protection. 
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- Highlight on Page 287 | Loc. 6451-53  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:35 AM

Thus Richard Nixon interpreting history and applying its lessons: “I don’t give a shit what happens,” he defiantly told his men. “I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it’ll save the plan. That’s the whole point.” 
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- Highlight on Page 289 | Loc. 6510-12  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:41 AM

If Goldwater believed that the President and his men had lied, then indeed the President was in trouble. But Nixon preferred his own options: stonewalling, modified limited hang outs, sacrificial lambs. He remained confident that he could get his house in order as April approached. But truly, for him it became the “crudest month.” 
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- Highlight on Page 291 | Loc. 6543-46  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:44 AM

Two days later Magruder and his lawyer began extended discussions with Silbert leading to a confession and a plea bargain. The deal was struck on April 14, but a day earlier, Haldeman delegated his top aide, Larry Higby—popularly known as “Haldeman’s Haldeman”—to sound out Magruder. Magruder told Higby that the U.S. Attorney’s office would get all the facts, but Haldeman, he assured Higby, would have “no problem.” Mitchell, Dean, and Liddy had problems, but not Haldeman, Magruder insisted. 
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- Highlight on Page 292 | Loc. 6569-74  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 11:26 AM

The talks of April 14 began with a morning meeting of more than two and one-half hours between the President, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman. The tape recordings of the conversations at times appear disjointed. The transcripts have been cannibalized for a juicy tidbit here, a titillating curse there. Interpreting the transcripts as showing hesitation or uncertainty in the Oval Office would be an error, however. The transcripts reflect a consistent line of discussion. Certainly, participants occasionally sounded unsure of matters, but that only mirrored the compartmentalization that Nixon generally had imposed on his dealings with aides. The President himself always seemed to know the correct answers, and throughout he established and maintained the drift and tone of the conversations. In his most perilous moments, Richard Nixon remained the man on top. 
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- Highlight on Page 294 | Loc. 6614-15  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 11:30 AM

Perhaps Richard Nixon saw Agnew as a pawn; neither then nor later did he understand that Agnew represented a built-in insurance policy against impeachment proceedings directed at himself. 
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- Highlight on Page 295 | Loc. 6625-30  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 11:32 AM

Ehrlichman had his own agenda. Mitchell, of course, was his primary target, but Ehrlichman thought that Dean, too, should be given an opportunity to serve the President in like fashion. He reminded Nixon of Dean’s knowledge of the hush money, as well as several other links to the cover-up. Ehrlichman did not want Dean fired; if he remained as the President’s Counsel, Ehrlichman believed that Silbert and the grand jury would be more respectful. The President then spoke carefully about Dean’s role. He “only tried to do what he could to pick up the Goddamn pieces and … everybody else around here knew it had to be done… . Uh, let’s face it. I’m not blaming anybody else … That was his job.” 
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- Highlight on Page 297 | Loc. 6681-82  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 09:11 PM

Shortly after 5:00 P.M. on that April 14, Ehrlichman returned to the Oval Office to report on his meeting with Magruder and his lawyers. It was as expected: Magruder would implicate Mitchell, along with Dean. 
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- Highlight on Page 297 | Loc. 6682-84  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 09:11 PM

He had given the prosecutors details of the extent to which Dean’s coaching had led to his earlier perjured testimony. Nixon realized that Dean might be an enemy within, now that he found himself threatened. 
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- Highlight on Page 297 | Loc. 6687-94  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 09:12 PM

At the end of the conversation the President cursed the growing official and public preoccupation with the Watergate story. “[D]ragging the God damn … thing out and dragging it out and being—and having it be the only issue in town,” he complained to Ehrlichman. Get the “son of a bitch done,” he said. Indict Mitchell and the rest; there would be a horrible two-week scandal, but he was sure they could survive. He thought the story might appear worse than Teapot Dome, but he saw a difference: no venality, no thievery, no favors. Still, he realized the seriousness of the picture if Mitchell were indicted. And then there was what he described as the vulnerability of others—he must have realized that these others included him—regarding the charges of obstruction of justice. On this front, he exhorted Haldeman and Ehrlichman to fight. After all, he said, “we were simply trying to help these defendants.” 
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- Highlight on Page 299 | Loc. 6714-18  | Added on Monday, April 07, 2014, 10:38 AM

Whatever empathy or relief the President expressed toward Magruder in his diary entry was forgotten as he told Haldeman that he just could not depend on Magruder. He seemed particularly anxious to establish the line that money payments to the defendants had not been intended to obstruct justice. He reassured himself that it would be the word of felons such as McCord and Hunt against the word of those who raised the money. But he worried that someone might have “some piece of paper that somebody signed or some God damned thing… .”—as if in fear that written or taped evidence would undermine the White House in some way. 
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- Highlight on Page 302 | Loc. 6798-6800  | Added on Monday, April 07, 2014, 10:48 AM

Furthermore, for the first time Ehrlichman informed Nixon that he had urged Dean to reveal everything in the summer of 1972, but that Dean had refused, ostensibly because doing so would hurt the campaign. Dean in fact, Ehrlichman argued, had been protecting Mitchell. 22 
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- Highlight on Page 302 | Loc. 6789-93  | Added on Monday, April 07, 2014, 10:48 AM

John Dean still had some White House cards to play. He called Haldeman on April 15 to relay some messages to Nixon. Dean wanted the President to understand that he remained loyal; “if it’s not clear now, … it will become clear,” Dean said. He refused to meet Ehrlichman, but he would meet the President at any time. Finally, he urged Nixon to counsel with Petersen, “who I assure you does not want the Presidency hurt.” Although Nixon seemed unsure about Dean, Haldeman and most emphatically Ehrlichman had turned rather sharply on him. 
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- Highlight on Page 303 | Loc. 6809-11  | Added on Monday, April 07, 2014, 10:50 AM

Within a half-hour, Dean met the President. He remembered later that Nixon asked him “leading questions which made me think the conversation was being taped.” Specifically, he recalled Nixon’s remark that his March 21 statement about raising a million dollars to sustain the cover-up had been merely a joke. 
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- Highlight on Page 303 | Loc. 6816-23  | Added on Monday, April 07, 2014, 10:51 AM

Two hours later—near midnight—the President phoned Petersen again. The relationship seemed to be becoming intimate. Nixon anxiously tried to give Petersen the impression that he was deeply involved in the case and interested only in pursuing the truth. “The main thing, Henry, we must not have any question, now, on this, you know I am in charge of this thing. You are and I am. Above everything else and I am following every inch of the way and I don’t want any question … of the fact that I am … way ahead of the thing. You know,” he emphasized, “I want to stay one step ahead of the curve.” Petersen then revealed which principals would be questioned in the next several days. When the President slyly, almost parenthetically, asked about Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Petersen indicated that they might have to resign. He promised to give the President “all the facts with respect to them into a pattern.” Unwittingly, but understandably, Petersen had informed the wrong man of his plans. 
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- Highlight on Page 304 | Loc. 6838-40  | Added on Monday, April 07, 2014, 10:54 AM

John Dean clearly emerged as the principal “enemy.” Dean “stonewalled,” he “shot down” White House attempts to make a clean breast of things in 1972, and “he dug in his heels.” Haldeman and Ehrlichman desperately made the case against John Dean. 
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- Highlight on Page 304 | Loc. 6844-48  | Added on Monday, April 07, 2014, 10:54 AM

Haldeman and Ehrlichman passed Dean on their way out of the Oval Office, “laughing like college pranksters,” Dean recalled, until they saw him. Dean realized they did not look like men who had been told to resign. When he sat down, the President immediately confronted him with the alternative letters that Ehrlichman, apparently, had prepared. Dean balked, insisting that Haldeman and Ehrlichman, too, must resign. The President then baldly lied, claiming that he had similar letters from them. Dean warned Nixon against believing that the aides had no problem. “I’m telling you, they do,” he declared. Nixon then seemed to agree. 
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The President’s treatment included fatherly advice on truth-telling. “John, I want you to tell the truth,” the President said. “I have told everybody around here, said, ‘God damn it, tell the truth.’ ’Cause all they do [when they lie], John, is compound it.” The experienced Nixon offered his advice, resurrecting Alger Hiss’s perjury. “[D]on’t ever lie with these bastards,” Nixon emphasized. He reminded Dean that right clearly could be distinguished from wrong, but when Dean agreed, the President added: “perhaps there are gray areas.” 
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as Petersen later explained, “The Son of God could not have turned off that investigation in April 1973.” 
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John Dean was history for the President, who now focused his energies on Petersen. Perhaps Nixon remembered Dean’s March 21 characterization of Petersen as a “soldier,” one who “believes in this Administration.” Nixon called Petersen at nine that evening, again urging him to share information. He wanted grand-jury information, promising not to pass it on to anyone else—“because I know the rules of the Grand Jury.” 
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For the last two weeks in April, Haldeman and Ehrlichman underestimated the President’s resolve. They joined him in finger-pointing sessions to lay the blame at the feet of others (Magruder, Mitchell, Dean, Gray), conjuring up explanations, skewing memories—all designed to rationalize their behavior and impugn that of others. The idea of “getting out in front of the story” disappeared in a wash of recriminations and excuses. 
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When Petersen recommended that Haldeman and Ehrlichman resign, the President listened. He knew his aides had to go. Undoubtedly he was loath to dismiss them, but Richard Nixon’s antennae of self-interest left him no choice. He realized this by April 16: for the rest of the month, however, he played out the string, hoping that his advisers would leave quietly and of their own accord. 
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On April 17 he acknowledged that “major developments” had resulted from “intensive new inquiries” he had made into the affair. His Secret Service agent remembered that the President sobbed after his statement. Later that afternoon 
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On April 17, with one unforgettable word, Ziegler declared all his previous remarks on Watergate “inoperative.” 33 That dramatic concession clashed with Nixon’s reluctance to act decisively in his own house. 
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Ron Ziegler knew that he would face hostile questions, but he agreed to state simply that this now was the “operative” statement. “Don’t [expletive deleted] on Dean,” the President cautioned Ziegler, apparently still hoping to cut a deal in that quarter. 
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Ehrlichman warned that if he had to take leave, “I gotta start answering questions.” Whether he was presenting a fact or a threat was not clear. “Let me ask you this, to be quite candid,” the President responded. “Is there any way you can use cash?” Haldeman reacted with a blend of fury and sarcasm. They were being “drummed” out of office for their “supposed role” in payments to the defendants, and now the President offered them cash. “That compounds the problem,” he told Nixon. “That really does.” 
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Ehrlichman contributed his part: “The American people—you gotta go on the assumption that the American people want to believe in their President.” Cover-up still was the order of the day, but now John Dean would be the scapegoat. 43 Haldeman listened to the March 21 tape that afternoon and then gave an interpretation that would remain at the foundation of the President’s defense. Nixon and Dean had discussed the White House’s role in the break-in and the defendant’s demands for money. Now, Haldeman proposed the following version: Nixon had asked leading questions; he was trying to “bust the case,” and he did not know “whether to believe this guy [Dean] at this point.” 
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The President had also then realized that Hunt was blackmailing him on the Plumbers, but he no longer would support payments because he knew he could defend the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist on national-security grounds. Haldeman was not sure that this interpretation of the March 21 record could be sustained—particularly if Dean had a different version of the conversation. “I just wonder if the son-of-a-bitch had a recorder on him,” Nixon remarked. 
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Now, the President said, Ehrlichman had to take a leave of absence. Bad news exploded like Chinese firecrackers. Two minutes after Kleindienst called about the Plumbers, Nixon learned that the New York Times was about to reveal Pat Gray’s destruction of the evidence from Hunt’s safe linking Colson to the Plumbers—evidence Ehrlichman had suggested that Gray “deep six.” 
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“I mean, we don’t have any investigators, that’s our problem, see,” he said. This, as Haldeman later noted, from the man who created the Plumbers. 
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Not all the bad news reached the White House. The prosecutors had learned from Anthony Ulasewicz, a former New York policeman, that he had been a courier for Herbert Kalmbach and had delivered cash payments to several of the Watergate defendants, including $154,000 to Howard Hunt. 46 With Ulasewicz offering corroborating testimony, John Dean’s credibility increased significantly. So, too, did his vulnerability—as did that of his various superiors at the White House. 
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On April 27 Nixon spoke to Assistant Attorney General Petersen again. Published reports indicated that Dean had implicated the President. 
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Pat Gray’s withdrawal of his nomination as FBI Director, on April 5, allowed him to stay in place pending the appointment of a successor. But the end for Gray came suddenly on April 27—probably before either he or the President intended, particularly in the light of Nixon’s crisis involving the futures of his closest White House aides. The New York Times revealed that Ehrlichman and Dean had given Gray, then Acting FBI Director, the contents of Howard Hunt’s office safe at a White House meeting on June 28, 1972. Dean reportedly said that the contents “should never see the light of day.” Gray accepted the material after Dean assured him that it had nothing to do with the Watergate incident. 
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The Plumbers and the Gray revelations proved too much for Attorney General Kleindienst. On Friday, April 27, as Gray stepped down, Kleindienst decided to submit his resignation the following Monday. But Richard Nixon had other plans. On Sunday he summoned Haldeman and Ehrlichman to Camp David to demand their resignations. 
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Nixon called Kissinger that evening, “nearly incoherent with grief,” and told him that he needed him more than ever, to “help me protect the national security matters now that Ehrlichman is leaving.” Kissinger spitefully, but correctly, regarded the remark as both “a plea and a form of blackmail.” 
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Nixon later realized that he had amputated both arms. Perhaps he could survive, he recalled, but the day left him “so anguished and saddened that from that day on the presidency lost all joy for me.” He noted that he had written his last full diary entry on April 14. “Events became so cheerless that I no longer had the time or the desire to dictate daily reflections.” But an anonymous aide fit the event into a familiar Nixon pattern: “For Nixon,” he claimed, “the shortest distance between two points is over four corpses.” 
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Pat Buchanan pleaded with Nixon not to appease his opponents. This was not the time, Buchanan warned, “to surrender all claim to the positions we have held in the past”; instead it was a time for a “low profile and quiet rearmament in this worthwhile struggle.” He urged Nixon to take the offensive and not passively “suffer the death of a thousand cuts.” Nixon responded that it would be useful to unleash Spiro Agnew or John Connally to say that the President had been right in his handling of the Watergate affair. 
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he had been jumped over 240 senior officers. In January 1973, Nixon nominated Haig to be the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff to replace Palmer, although Haig’s selection went against the recommendations of both outgoing Chief of Staff William Westmoreland and his successor, Creighton Abrams. After Haig moved to the Pentagon, the President provided him with a secure phone link to the White House, and Haig remained “deeply involved” in Administration affairs. Haig’s connection only fueled resentment in the Pentagon. 6 Until the Watergate crisis, Haig was a shadowy figure, yet one Nixon trusted in a special way. In the wake of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s spying on Kissinger and the National Security Council in 1971, the President directed that nothing be done to harm Haig. Haig was then Kissinger’s deputy, although many suspected that he kept both White House and Pentagon officials apprised of Kissinger’s activities. 
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When, as Secretary of State in 1981, Haig appeared at the White House following the attempted assassination of President Reagan and proclaimed, “I am in charge here,” many observers found him displaying a familiar pattern of behavior—characterized by Bull as a “very serious personality disorder.” Haldeman, Bull recalled, never had to remind others of his authority, and Haig often expressed insecurity about himself vis-à-vis Haldeman. 
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Haig had a way of making himself indispensable, like Thomas Cromwell, who in a famous play described his role for Henry VIII: “I do things.” 
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The President, Richardson claimed uneasily, had promised him that he would be a “counterweight” to Kissinger in mapping the Administration’s geopolitical strategy. 
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Richardson sensed that Nixon must curb his well-known proclivity for nursing grievances; above all, he believed, the President must realize that he had “arrived,” that he had stature in the eyes of the people. “[Y]ou have won—not only won, but been reelected by a tremendous margin. You are the President of all the people of the United States. There is no ‘they’ out there—nobody trying to destroy you.” But he remembered that the President sat mute, offering no expression of either agreement or disagreement. 11 Richardson’s truth, as he saw it, simply did not fit Richard Nixon’s perception of reality or his favorite guise of outsider. 
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More than half the lawyers who served in the Special Prosecutor’s office had graduated from the Harvard Law School. Cox’s sweeping authority alarmed the Administration even more than his personnel. 
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Richardson and Cox agreed on a charter, and on May 31, the Attorney General directed Cox to investigate all “possible offenses” of the Administration—not just those relating to the Watergate break-in, but including all other “allegations involving the President, members of the White House staff or presidential appointees.” Nixon was “shocked and angry.” Richardson assured Haig that the language referred only to the Watergate break-in and cover-up, but the President knew better. His doubts, resentments, and fears only magnified. His staff and supporters mirrored his mood. Within a few months, White House lawyers and the President’s supporters were contemptuously referring to the Special Prosecutor’s office as “Coxsuckers,” or as “Cox’s Army,” one with “sharp ideological axes to grind.” The Special Prosecutor’s office appeared to them as nothing less than the vanguard for Senator Kennedy’s march to the White House. 
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Perhaps Cox was the wrong man for the job. What he represented, and how he proceeded, undoubtedly exacerbated the situation. Henry Petersen, who naturally resented the transfer of the case from his own jurisdiction, thought Cox “ultra-liberal” and believed the post should have gone to “a less partisan man.” The job required a man “with more detachment”; Cox’s rectitude, Petersen thought, was “second only to God.” Less than three months after Cox’s appointment, Petersen bitterly described his resentment to the Senate Select Committee. “Damn it,” he exploded, “I think it is a reflection on me and the Department of Justice. We could have broken that case wide open, and we would have done it in the most difficult circumstances… . That case was snatched out from under us when we had it 90 percent completed.” By that time, Petersen realized how the President of the United States and his Counsel, John Dean, had so badly misled him. It was a frustrating conclusion to a worthy career. 
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The perception that the Justice Department’s investigation was compromised was not without reason, but both Cox and Ervin knew better. The U.S. Attorney’s office had in fact discovered the cover-up conspiracy and had broken the case by the time Cox took control, and before Senator Ervin’s committee provided a public venting of what the prosecutors had learned. 
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The Senator, furthermore, failed to acknowledge John Dean’s success in keeping the prosecutors at bay. 
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Time flew like an arrow for Silbert and his colleagues. The Senate hearings opened on May 17, and Richardson appointed Cox the next day. The U.S. Attorneys’ days in the case were numbered. 
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Cox eased the transition in order not to lose the momentum of the case. The federal prosecutors briefed their successors at great length as to the evidence and prosecutorial theories they had developed. James Neal, who had gained the conviction of Jimmy Hoffa, was brought to Washington by Cox in late May, to prepare for prosecutions. Neal graciously complimented the prosecutors for their efforts. Silbert was ambivalent. The appointment of the Special Prosecutor deprived him and his associates of a proper share of public credit; still, he had grown weary of the unfair criticism and of maintaining proper procedures and fairness in the face of media pressures. Ultimately, he acknowledged that “the special prosecutor may be considered necessary for the appearance of justice.” 
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The federal prosecutors’ report to Cox was a turning point for the President’s fortunes. For the first time a duly constituted authority had officially raised the possibility of Nixon’s own involvement in aspects of the criminal conspiracy. Ironically, the May 22 press conference statement of the President had raised the prosecutors’ suspicions. (“I neither authorized nor encouraged subordinates to engage in illegal or improper campaign tactics.”) 
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As the case passed to the Special Prosecutor, the U.S. Attorney’s office provided Cox with their materials. Silbert and his colleagues would not reap the harvest of a year’s intimate contact with the Watergate case and the growing ramifications of it; that glory would belong to others. On June 29 they wrote to Cox, renewing a request to withdraw from the case. They used the occasion to state the record of their long, arduous work. By mid-April their office had uncovered “the existence of a massive conspiracy to obstruct justice, the participants therein, and their motives.” 
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Cox perceived that his task force had a substantial rival in the Senate Select Committee. The committee had been at its work for more than three months when Cox appeared on the scene. The day before Richardson announced Cox’s appointment, the committee launched its public hearings. Cox quickly came to the same conclusion that Earl Silbert had reached: the committee’s public hearings could well interfere with future prosecutions. 
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When Dean and Baker later clashed over this meeting in an executive session of the committee, Dean admitted that Baker had urged the President to waive executive privilege. But he insisted that Nixon believed he had Baker’s commitment to aid the White House. Colson told the President on March 21 that Baker was eager to cooperate and that the Senator had signalled the President to ignore his public statements, as they were for “political” consumption. Baker met Kleindienst for secret consultations, and a Baker aide informed Colson that Baker hoped to “control” Ervin. 
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Baker and Ehrlichman held lengthy discussions regarding television coverage of the hearings. They talked several times in late March and early April, and on several occasions. Baker spoke to the President. 
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At a crucial May 8 executive session of the committee, Baker argued that the burglars (excepting McCord) and the arresting police officers should appear first, followed by Mitchell, Colson, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman. Dean would be last, thus enabling the others to avoid responding to his accusations. Baker also wanted senators to question witnesses before the committee counsels had their turn. Ervin would have none of it: “Well, my daddy used to say that if you hire a lawyer, you should either take his advice or fire him. Since we’re not planning to fire Sam Dash, I suggest we take his advice.” 
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Throughout March and April Weicker became a familiar television figure, particularly for his spirited defense of Pat Gray and then for his equally spirited assault on the White House for its manipulation of Gray. But for many, much of that anger appeared contrived to boost the political stock of a first-term Senator who had captured only 38 percent of the vote in a threeway race. 
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Yet those statements were devastating, particularly Baker’s relentless—but largely misunderstood—line: “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” 
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He projected extremely well on television, combining a boyish smile with the appearance of a diffident, nonpartisan pursuit of the truth. In the end, Baker served himself well: a Republican, he nonetheless emerged from a Democratic-dominated show with his reputation substantially enhanced. He subsequently parlayed that performance into the position of Senate Republican leader and gained national visibility as a presidential contender. 
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Sam Ervin had been a prime force in establishing the committee, and he easily dominated it. His Democratic colleagues gave him free rein. He hired Dash, a man with a considerable background in criminal law as a prosecutor and professor, who in turn assembled a formidable staff of lawyers and investigators. Dash, at forty-eight, was eighteen years older than Fred Thompson, his Republican counterpart. His experience in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office and as a trial attorney in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, and his prominence in academic circles, dwarfed Thompson’s brief tenure as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Tennessee with a few years in private practice. Ervin, Dash, and the majority staff simply overwhelmed the lesser—and divided—Republican forces. 
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By the beginning of the second week, the networks reached an unprecedented agreement among themselves to rotate live coverage, ostensibly to satisfy “viewer discontent.” The real discontent was in the boardrooms, since each hour of pre-empted programming lost the networks an estimated $120,000 in advertising revenues. 
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“It now appears,” he added, that some persons had “gone beyond” his directives and used national security as an excuse “to cover up any involvement they or certain others might have had in Watergate.” 
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A month earlier, on April 17, when the President publicly acknowledged his recognition of “serious charges” about the Watergate case, he had insisted emphatically that he “reserved” executive privilege and that it might be asserted regarding any questions raised during the hearings. 45 The President’s reversal on May 22 dramatically underscored his eroding position; nothing declined more sharply than his ability to challenge Congress. 
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Now, in May, such confidence, such arrogance was on the wane. Nixon’s reversal on executive privilege signaled the retreat. The steady stream of his men before the Senate Select Committee left the doctrine in shambles, at least as far as Congress was concerned. The courts, indeed, provided one final forum for invoking the privilege, but that was for another day. 
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His “friend” corroborated much of McCord’s story. Caulfield acknowledged that he had lengthy discussions with Dean regarding McCord’s silence and executive clemency. 
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The testimony of McCord and Caulfield revealed that Nixon would have vigorous support within the committee. When McCord offered the first intimation of White House involvement, Baker quickly interrupted to establish that McCord’s belief was based on hearsay evidence that he had picked up from Gordon Liddy. Gurney similarly broke in to note that Caulfield was not working in the White House when he allegedly delivered the messages to McCord. 
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Quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ruckelshaus concluded that “this time ‘like all times is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.’” 
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Sloan discussed the matter with the campaign finance chairman, Maurice Stans, who told him: “I do not want to know and you do not want to know” why Liddy needed money. 
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Magruder had a grant of immunity from Judge Sirica. When he testified, what had been rumor for weeks was publicly stated before the committee by a key principal, as Magruder implicated Mitchell, Dean, LaRue, and Strachan in the planning and cover-up of the Watergate break-in. 
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His mind was not a tape recorder, as he told Gumey and Inouye, but he had an uncanny ability to recall whole passages of conversation, recollections eventually substantiated by tape recordings of Oval Office talks. 
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The rest of Dean’s testimony described the cover-up and his role in it. He revealed with uncanny accuracy the crucial September 15, 1972 meeting with Nixon and Haldeman. Dean had left that meeting, he remembered, with “the impression that the President was well aware of what had been going on regarding the success of keeping the White House out of the Watergate scandal.” 
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John Dean was different. He had challenged the integrity and image of the Administration; more important, he had portrayed the Nixon White House as deeply entwined in illegal activities and the obstruction of justice. Dean’s exposing the falsity of Nixon’s sponsorship of any serious attempt to investigate Watergate was reminiscent of the remark of a critic of Freudian psycho-analysis who called it “the disease that presumes itself the cure.” 
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Higby contended that people had talked to Dean believing that they were covered by lawyer-client confidentiality; now, Higby said, Dean used that information for his own advantage and to damage others. No one, however, understood the implications of Dean’s testimony better than the President. During Dean’s testimony, he listened to relevant tape recordings of his meetings with his former Counsel. 
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Throughout, Dean maintained his composure, his appearance of restraint, and above all, his consistency. 
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Earlier, in executive session, Ervin spoke to the President on the telephone and described the substance of the letter. Throughout the call, Ervin insisted that “we are not out to get anybody.” The Senator assured the President that he would be delighted to say that there was “nothing in the world to connect you with the Watergate in any way.” Nixon told Ervin that he was ill with viral pneumonia and would be hospitalized. He added that he would meet the Chairman at some future date to discuss the impasse. 
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- Highlight on Page 364 | Loc. 8140-44  | Added on Sunday, April 13, 2014, 05:09 PM

The printed record inadequately conveys Mitchell’s behavior. His recalcitrance, his foggy, vague answers, his angry interruptions, and his snide, sarcastic remarks directed at the committee and at some of his own associates need to be seen and heard to be fully appreciated. His long pauses, his silent rejection of questions, and his facial expressions amply reflected his absolute contempt for the proceedings and his total loyalty to the President. That loyalty is the more remarkable in view of what Mitchell and the President both knew: Mitchell acted as he did despite Nixon’s eagerness to make him a scapegoat just two months earlier. 
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- Highlight on Page 365 | Loc. 8174-78  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 01:11 PM

As Dash led Mitchell through his knowledge of the Huston Plan and the Plumbers’ operations, Mitchell referred to these activities as the “White House horrors.” His remarks at this point effectively diminished the singularity and importance of the Watergate break-in and provided a window on the entire pattern of wrongdoing and abuse of power in the Administration. He bluntly stated that the cover-up really was designed to conceal the “horrors” rather than any aspects of the Watergate break-in. Watergate, in short, “did not have the great significance that the White House horror stories … had,” Mitchell concluded. 
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- Highlight on Page 370 | Loc. 8285-87  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 01:21 PM

With obvious pain and emotion, Ervin described it as “the greatest tragedy” in American history—one even more profound than the Civil War, which at least had the redeeming qualities of sacrifice and heroism. “I see no redeeming features in Watergate,” he concluded. 
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- Highlight on Page 371 | Loc. 8309-14  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 01:25 PM

Damon Runyon might have written the script for Ulasewicz’s testimony. The former New York policeman’s comic descriptions of driving on the Washington Beltway, carrying a money changer for telephone calls, putting keys and envelopes in phone booths, lurking around corners, behaving in an exaggeratedly surreptitious manner, and delivering cryptic messages would have been the stuff of Broadway comedy except for the serious implications of his efforts. “Who thought you up?” Baker asked, much to the amusement of the audience. But Inouye soberly demanded to know whether Ulasewicz actually believed that he had delivered money for the legal defense of the Watergate conspirators. “Not likely,” Ulasewicz admitted. 
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- Highlight on Page 372 | Loc. 8324-26  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 01:26 PM

all of which, he noted, provoked disappointment and disillusionment in younger people and affected their attitude toward public service. What advice could Strachan give them? “Stay away,” he retorted, probably not offering quite the penitent statement Montoya desired. 
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- Highlight on Page 373 | Loc. 8345  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 01:28 PM

When Ervin quoted a Biblical parable, Ehrlichman snapped back: “I read the Bible, I don’t quote it.” 
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- Highlight on Page 378 | Loc. 8463-66  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 06:23 PM

Ehrlichman had managed to skirt discussion of the White House tapes. For Haldeman, who acknowledged that he had supervised the installation of the recording devices, that was not so easy. Furthermore, he infuriated the senators when they learned that he had had access to the tapes and had taken them to his house as part of his preparation for his testimony. Ervin sarcastically noted as a “strange thing” that Haldeman could listen to the tapes but the committee could not. 
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- Highlight on Page 378 | Loc. 8470-72  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 06:24 PM

The tapes were a trap for Haldeman. His answers to Baker regarding the March 21 meeting with Dean and the President concerning the unraveling cover-up formed the basis for a subsequent perjury indictment, as the tapes demonstrated a quite different story from the one Haldeman had rendered. The former Chief of Staff, however, confidently believed that the contents of the tapes would never become public knowledge. 
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- Highlight on Page 381 | Loc. 8531  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 06:43 PM

The summer of 1973 marked a sharp shift in Nixon’s fortunes. More verifiable proof than polls demonstrated his declining powers. 
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- Highlight on Page 381 | Loc. 8539-42  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 06:44 PM

his giving in on the Cambodian bombing halt amounted to the “largest and most gratuitous concession” in the history of American foreign policy. 55 The President’s declining authority in foreign affairs, coupled with the growing disenchantment of his conservative supporters, ominously exhibited the reality of his deteriorating position. 
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- Highlight on Page 398 | Loc. 8905-8  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 09:43 PM

The decision to move for a criminal indictment of Agnew might have been a lost opportunity for Nixon. Impeachment might have become dangerously popular, to be sure; but it also would have consumed enormous time and energy, perhaps enough so that following an Agnew impeachment, Congress and the nation might have had neither the inclination nor the will to move against the President. For five years, the President had treated Agnew as a pawn. But when the Vice President resigned, Richard Nixon lost his queen. 
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- Highlight on Page 406 | Loc. 9083-88  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 10:00 PM

Instead of simply removing Archibald Cox’s probing lance, they raised a “firestorm” of protest that permanently scarred Nixon’s credibility with the public, and, most damaging, with congressional Republicans and Southern Democrats. The news and televised images of FBI agents, following a White House directive, sealing the Special Prosecutor’s office and barring access by Cox’s staff, shocked and frightened the nation. The ominous action raised talk of a coup and prompted comparisons to the Reichstag fire that prepared Germany for the rise of Hitler. Leon Jaworski, viewing events from Texas, thought the FBI’s actions resembled those of the Gestapo. 
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- Highlight on Page 406 | Loc. 9088-90  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 10:00 PM

A decade and a half later, the reverberations from those events still influenced the American political landscape, including the confirmation hearings of a Supreme Court nominee. The “Saturday Night Massacre”—a name appropriate to the bloody political hemorrhaging—of October 20, 1973, was one more irretrievable blunder by the President. 
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- Highlight on Page 407 | Loc. 9091-97  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 10:01 PM

Several incidents are indisputable: Elliot Richardson refused to fire Archibald Cox and resigned; when his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, similarly refused Haig’s command (“this is an order from your Commander-in-Chief”), Ruckelshaus resigned—although that evening the White House insisted he had been fired. Haig told Ruckelshaus that Cox had embarrassed the President during the Middle East crisis, and he insisted it was necessary for the Administration to close ranks. Ruckelshaus suggested that the President should postpone firing Cox if he had such a problem. The Justice Department’s third-in-command, Solicitor General Robert H. Bork, then agreed to carry out the President’s order, to a significant extent because of the urging of Richardson. Why Bork acted as he did, exactly how he acted, and what were the consequences of his acts, became matters of some dispute. 
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- Highlight on Page 408 | Loc. 9132-37  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 10:07 PM

In his October 26 press conference, Nixon denounced the media in words reminiscent of his famous “last press conference” in 1962. The reporting, he said, had been the most “outrageous, vicious, [and] distorted” he had witnessed in twenty-seven years of public life. Although the nation had been “pounded night after night with … frantic, hysterical reporting,” he assured reporters and his audience that they had not affected him or his job performance. Asked if he felt any stress because of the pressure of both domestic and foreign crises, the President smiled wanly and said, “The tougher it gets, the cooler I get.” 
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- Highlight on Page 409 | Loc. 9138-39  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 10:07 PM

The reply was vintage Nixon: “Don’t get the impression that you arouse my anger… . You see,” he said with a nervous grin, “one can only be angry with those he respects.” 
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- Highlight on Page 413 | Loc. 9250-54  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 12:15 AM

The events of the last days of October numbed and galvanized. Bork’s predecessor as Solicitor General, Erwin Griswold, was shocked. Cox, Richardson, and Ruckelshaus had been his students—and all were “honorable men.” Griswold had “lost faith” in the President by April; October’s events only confirmed his misgivings. For recently appointed FBI Director Clarence Kelley, the “Saturday Night Massacre” was a turning point. He no longer thought the Administration could be saved. 
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- Highlight on Page 414 | Loc. 9264-65  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 12:16 AM

Whether the nation would support or reject him now was the question on the table. The fractures, the divisions would have to cease; in one way or another, Richard Nixon would have to “bring us together.” 
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- Highlight on Page 421 | Loc. 9413-16  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 12:35 AM

Even Ford acknowledged that whatever momentary goodwill Nixon had fostered by nominating him had been neutralized by the Saturday Night Massacre. Two months after Ford’s confirmation, a Democrat captured his House seat, the first Democrat since 1910 to represent Michigan’s Fifth District. Watergate was the issue, and the result was interpreted as a referendum on the President himself. 
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- Highlight on Page 421 | Loc. 9418-22  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 12:36 AM

The vice presidency plagued Richard Nixon in a curious way. His own tenure in that office had catapulted him to fame, but it was an unhappy, frustrating experience, tethered as he was to a President who in truth neither liked nor trusted him. Henry Cabot Lodge, Nixon’s 1960 running mate, preferred afternoon naps to campaign appearances. The candidate who shared the ticket with him in 1968 and 1972 resigned in disgrace. Finally, his last Vice President hovered over the White House in 1974, a conspicuous alternative to the agony of the President and the nation. 
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- Highlight on Page 422 | Loc. 9423-29  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 12:36 AM

the Justice Department had been useless to him in his Watergate battles. In practice, the department consciously severed itself from the President and his problems. Before the creation of the Special Prosecutor, the department had been an antagonist, despite the President’s concerted efforts to co-opt its leaders and thwart their investigation. The events of October, beginning with the Agnew negotiations and the dealings with Cox, further demonstrated that the department remained an independent power center. Among the many paradoxes of Watergate was that the President of the United States—the “Most Powerful Leader of the Free World”—could muster only the most meager resources against an array of legal talent commanding the full range of public agencies. 
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- Highlight on Page 423 | Loc. 9458-61  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 12:40 AM

Garment also understood his limitations as a criminal lawyer. He feared Nixon’s lawyers would be the “patsy” for the President. By November, he had come to realize that he should have removed himself from the case earlier, but he could not stay away from it—he operated with a kind of obsessiveness; protecting the President in the Watergate affair was “like feeling a sore tooth.” Yet he worried that he might find himself in trouble, for he was learning too much and might have to disclose what he knew. 
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- Highlight on Page 425 | Loc. 9498-9500  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 12:44 AM

Oliver Wendell Holmes’s dictum that a man should share the passion and action of his time “at a peril of being judged not to have lived,” summed up Wright’s feelings. 
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- Highlight on Page 426 | Loc. 9516-21  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 01:30 PM

Apparently, the first choice of Bork and the White House was Leon Jaworski, a Houston lawyer and a confidant of Lyndon Johnson. Elliot Richardson had approached Jaworski about the position in the spring, but he had declined because of inadequate assurances of independence. On November 1 the President announced that Senator William Saxbe (R–OH) would be the new Attorney General, a move denounced by conservatives as “appeasement.” Bork followed Nixon’s announcement to report the Jaworski selection—apparently a matter on which Nixon could not bring himself to speak. Bork said that Jaworski would have no restraints on his freedom to pursue presidential documents, marking a clear retreat from the position Nixon had laid down in his October 26 statement. 
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- Highlight on Page 431 | Loc. 9630-33  | Added on Saturday, April 19, 2014, 09:47 AM

The panel examining the erased June 20 tape reported to Sirica on January 15, 1974. It unanimously found that at least five, and possibly as many as nine, “separate and contiguous” erasures had been made by hand operated controls. When one of the Watergate prosecutors asked if the erasures had been accidental, an expert testified that “it would have to be an accident that was repeated at least five times.” 
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- Highlight on Page 431 | Loc. 9635-37  | Added on Saturday, April 19, 2014, 09:48 AM

The President’s new lawyer, James St. Clair, told one of the experts that he would have to talk to “his own experts”—apparently forgetting that the panel had been selected with White House cooperation. 
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- Highlight on Page 432 | Loc. 9707-9  | Added on Saturday, April 19, 2014, 09:56 AM

Questions regarding the President’s taxes dovetailed with discussions of government expenditures for his houses in San Clemente, California, and Key Biscayne, Florida. The General Services Administration had spent more than $1.2 million on house and ground “improvements” at the two estates. 
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- Highlight on Page 432 | Loc. 9712-13  | Added on Saturday, April 19, 2014, 09:56 AM

Modern presidents are away from the White House a good deal of the time, and Nixon may have established the most extraordinary record of all. Between 1969 and 1972, he spent 195 days in California and 157 in Florida—nearly one-fourth of his first term. 
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- Highlight on Page 434 | Loc. 9722-26  | Added on Saturday, April 19, 2014, 09:57 AM

Several weeks earlier, speaking to newspaper editors at Disney World in Florida, the President admitted that he had made some mistakes but insisted that he had never profited from his years of public service. “I have never obstructed justice,” he claimed. He welcomed a public scrutiny of his records, because “people have got to know whether their President is a crook.” With no hesitation, he quickly and forcefully responded: “Well, I am not a crook. I earned everything I got.” These words would haunt him the rest of his days. 
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- Highlight on Page 434 | Loc. 9742-50  | Added on Saturday, April 19, 2014, 10:49 AM

Several days prior to the Cox dismissal, the Special Prosecutor’s office had begun to move against corporations that had made illegal campaign contributions and engaged in other illegal activities on behalf of the President. Much of this material had been developed in the later stages of the Senate Select Committee’s investigation. On October 17, 1973, American Airlines pled guilty to a violation of the U.S. code on campaign contributions and was fined $5,000. The same day, the 3M Corporation similarly was fined $3,000, and a corporate officer was fined an additional $500. Before the year was out, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, Braniff Airways, Gulf Oil, Ashland Petroleum, Phillips Petroleum, and the Carnation Company submitted guilty pleas, as did a number of their officials, and all were duly fined. During the next year, another ten companies followed the same pattern. The most prominent was the American Ship Building Company, which was fined $20,000 in August 1974; its chairman, George M. Steinbrenner, received a $15,000 fine, the highest for any corporate official. Steinbrenner originally had been charged with five counts of illegal campaign contributions and four counts of obstruction of justice. 
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- Highlight on Page 435 | Loc. 9754-57  | Added on Saturday, April 19, 2014, 10:51 AM

In addition to his fines, Steinbrenner was suspended for two years from his presidency of the New York Yankees by baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Around the same time, a baseball player convicted of manslaughter received no penalty from the Commissioner; that activity, Kuhn noted, had happened in the off-season. 33 Apparently, Steinbrenner had written his checks between April and October. 
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- Highlight on Page 445 | Loc. 9969-71  | Added on Sunday, April 20, 2014, 08:30 PM

On January 30, the same day that President Nixon declared that “one year of Watergate is enough,” the grand jury requested an opportunity to meet with him. 
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- Highlight on Page 447 | Loc. 10029-34  | Added on Sunday, April 20, 2014, 08:38 PM

After several delays, including revelations of the missing tapes and the 18½-minute gap, Buzhardt delivered seven tapes to Judge Sirica on November 26, one month after the President’s lawyer had agreed to comply with the subpoena. The Special Prosecutor’s office was pleased with this progress, and after Sirica listened to the tapes in camera, the prosecutors received them on December 21. Before releasing the material to the Special Prosecutor, the judge withheld some tapes, thus sustaining some of the President’s claims of executive privilege. Jaworski and his staff immediately realized that the tapes had strengthened their evidence against the President’s men; what was more, they believed they now had a case against Nixon—and it was in the tapes. 
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- Highlight on Page 448 | Loc. 10043-50  | Added on Sunday, April 20, 2014, 08:40 PM

Jaworski and Haig met in the White House on December 21. Haig told the Special Prosecutor that the March 21 tape of Nixon’s conversation with Dean was “terrible beyond description.” Jaworski concurred, adding that he found it “unbelievable.” But Haig insisted that “the White House lawyers” believed no criminality attached to the President’s behavior. Jaworski disagreed and suggested that the White House hire a good criminal lawyer. Shortly afterward, Haig called Jaworski at his Houston home, again reporting that Buzhardt found no criminality involved because there was no overt act following the meeting of March 21. Haig and Buzhardt may have invented their own version of criminal law; nevertheless Jaworski again warned the Chief of Staff to get a criminal lawyer. Jaworski, no stranger to criminal wrongdoing, was appalled at the stupidity of maintaining the taping system when such “an evil approach and wrongful conduct by the President” had been taking place. “I would have turned off the system,” Jaworski thought. 
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- Highlight on Page 451 | Loc. 10120-23  | Added on Monday, April 21, 2014, 08:13 PM

What seems clear is that during the last ten days of March and the first ten days of April, the President and his advisers made a decision to release new tape transcripts. The Judiciary Committee may have spurred that decision when it voted 33–3 on April 11 to subpoena the requested material. 
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- Highlight on Page 452 | Loc. 10130-31  | Added on Monday, April 21, 2014, 08:14 PM

Richard Nixon knew that his fate rested on the tapes. 
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- Highlight on Page 452 | Loc. 10124-28  | Added on Monday, April 21, 2014, 08:17 PM

Five days later, Jaworski appeared before Sirica, seeking an order to deliver sixty-four more taped conversations, and the judge issued a subpoena on April 18. St. Clair again requested more time: White House secretaries were frantically transcribing tapes. The task was a tedious one: transcription, then a check by Buzhardt and St. Clair, and then one by Ziegler’s aide, Diane Sawyer, who would look for “non-substantive problems,” such as might be posed by the presence of obscenities. Finally, the President himself examined the transcripts. 
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- Highlight on Page 452 | Loc. 10134-40  | Added on Monday, April 21, 2014, 08:18 PM

As always, legal problems became political ones and thus required a special public-relations twist to ensure favorable understanding. Nixon spoke on national television on April 29 to announce his decision to release the tape transcripts. He appeared with a stack of blue notebooks allegedly containing tape transcripts but in fact amounting only to a stage prop, part of the carefully contrived scenery for presidential appearances which also included, from time to time, family pictures and Lincoln busts, all designed to foster a favorable illusion on behalf of the President. Nixon’s elaborate speech seemed tailored to establish his interpretation of the tapes and to anticipate any negative reactions. What eventually appeared was a 1,200-page book, liberally spaced, of fragmented conversations which at times seemed incomprehensible or nonsensical when read in abstracted form. 
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- Highlight on Page 457 | Loc. 10251-52  | Added on Monday, April 21, 2014, 10:05 PM

As Nixon’s Watergate troubles deepened, conservatives began boldly to express their contempt. 
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- Highlight on Page 457 | Loc. 10260-66  | Added on Monday, April 21, 2014, 10:08 PM

Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who resigned from the Joint Chiefs of Staff because of his dissatisfaction with the Administration, thought that Kissinger, true to the “dynamics of history,” believed that the Soviet Union eventually would surpass the United States and that it was best for the U.S. government now to arrange the best deal it could. Zumwalt specifically referred to the “deliberate, systematic, and unfortunately, extremely successful efforts” of Nixon and Kissinger to conceal their “real policies about the most critical matters of national security.” Others heaped scorn on Kissinger’s grasp of the issues. “The master delusion of our time,” columnist M. Stanton Evans wrote in March 1972, “is the idea that Henry Kissinger actually knows what he’s doing.” 
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- Highlight on Page 458 | Loc. 10275-79  | Added on Monday, April 21, 2014, 10:10 PM

As late as May 1974, William Buckley believed that Nixon should destroy tapes to protect his office. Even if the nation concluded that such action proved guilt, and even if it resulted in impeachment, Buckley thought, it would save the presidency. Besides, with no tapes, the charges would remain inconclusive.” 27 (The President’s moral critics apparently claimed no monopoly on morality.) Still, by May 1974, a good part of the conservative establishment had abandoned the President. 
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- Highlight on Page 463 | Loc. 10391-92  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 12:53 AM

That same evening, February 25, Nixon held his first televised press conference in four months. 
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- Highlight on Page 463 | Loc. 10400-10402  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 12:54 AM

The “presidency” must not be “hostage” to the momentary “popularity” of any incumbent. The work must be continued, he concluded, “and I’m going to stay here till I get it done.” 
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- Highlight on Page 464 | Loc. 10411-12  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 12:55 AM

Haig later claimed that Nixon told him the next day that he was too busy trying to run the country and would not listen to any more tapes. But Nixon later admitted that he had heard the June 23 tape. 
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- Highlight on Page 465 | Loc. 10423-26  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 12:56 AM

The jurors had also returned indictments against a former Attorney General and the President’s three closest aides, as well as others. The indictments came down on March 1. The counts ranged from conspiracy and obstruction of justice to perjury and false declarations to the FBI. The jury listed forty-five overt acts of conspiracy to cover up the true nature of the involvement of the Administration and the re-election committee with the break-in. 
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- Highlight on Page 465 | Loc. 10426-27  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 12:57 AM

The defendants—Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Robert Mardian, Kenneth Parkinson, and Gordon Strachan—pled not guilty before Judge Sirica on Saturday morning, March 9. 
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- Highlight on Page 465 | Loc. 10431-34  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 12:58 AM

Jaworski saw Mitchell as a “broken-down old man” and the once-ruthless Colson as “a frightened man”; while Haldeman and Ehrlichman “tried to maintain their bravado.” When Jaworski entered the court, Mitchell rose and greeted him. “You must be very busy these days,” Mitchell said. “Yes,” Jaworski responded, “more so than I wish.” 
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- Highlight on Page 466 | Loc. 10454-57  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 01:01 AM

But the members of the House Judiciary Committee, particularly the seasoned veterans, preferred the old political maxim festina lente—“make haste slowly.” They realized they had neither the time nor the moral authority to create Cox’s “substantive law of impeachment.” Practical imperatives of political action, and not the intellectual symmetry of theory and precedent, dictated the course of the committee’s progress. 
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- Highlight on Page 469 | Loc. 10519-23  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 01:08 AM

Jaworski was in a combative mood. Saxbe and Bork wrote to him on June 5, assuring him that their guarantees of independence remained intact but that they thought St. Clair had reason to pursue the question of Jaworski’s jurisdiction. They urged him and St. Clair to work out an agreement for handling the jurisdictional problem. Jaworski responded with lengthy quotations from the Special Prosecutor’s charter which defined his authority. Compromise? “A highly significant principle is involved, as I see it, one that involves not only the integrity of others but mine as well—and accordingly, there is no room for compromise.” 
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- Highlight on Page 469 | Loc. 10532-36  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 01:09 AM

The dispute perhaps raised Jaworski’s ire more than any single event in his tenure. Clearly, he viewed St. Clair’s words and actions as those of St. Clair’s master, and therefore as especially sinister in their implications. By raising the jurisdictional issue, St. Clair invited judicial intervention against the Special Prosecutor. After all, the Supreme Court had neither a vested interest in the Special Prosecutor nor had it made a commitment guaranteeing his independence. If the Court ruled that the Special Prosecutor had no jurisdiction, then to whom would he appeal for the preservation of his existence? 
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- Highlight on Page 472 | Loc. 10587-89  | Added on Friday, May 23, 2014, 11:10 PM

Given the Framers’ recent experience with George III, however, neither they nor their constituents conceded “all sail and no anchor” to the office or the man. James Madison pointedly reminded Americans in Federalist48 of the dangers to liberty “from the overgrown and all-grasping prerogative of an hereditary magistrate.” 
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- Highlight on Page 473 | Loc. 10591-93  | Added on Friday, May 23, 2014, 11:11 PM

But the provision for impeachment perhaps best reinforced accountability, as it implicitly rejected the traditional English doctrine that “the king could do no wrong.” 
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- Highlight on Page 473 | Loc. 10607-10  | Added on Friday, May 23, 2014, 11:14 PM

Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution provided that the President and all civil officers might be removed following impeachment and conviction for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” The House had the sole power of impeachment; the Senate had the sole power to try the impeached; and the Chief Justice presided over the Senate in the event of a presidential impeachment trial. 
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- Highlight on Page 473 | Loc. 10610-13  | Added on Friday, May 23, 2014, 11:14 PM

The constitutional reference to “high crimes and misdemeanors” is not language historically vague in source or meaning. Its origins can be traced to an impeachment proceeding in England in 1386 and amounted to a catalogue of political crime. The language has been best described as “words of art confined to impeachments, without roots in the ordinary criminal law.” 
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James Iredell (a future Supreme Court Justice) thought that impeachment “must be for an error of the heart, and not of the head.” Iredell’s dictum became, in time, the standard for requiring evil motives as a basic criterion for impeachment. 
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The historical evidence, however, is impressive in showing that neither English practice nor the framers of the American Constitution required an indictable crime as a basis for impeachment. 
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The first impeachment resolution was introduced in the Congress by Representative Robert Drinan (D–MA) on July 31, 1973, not coincidentally, it seemed, just after Alexander Butterfield revealed the presidential taping system. Perhaps the suspicions regarding the President might be confirmed after all. 
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following the Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973, four impeachment bills appeared in the House hopper, including one from California Republican Paul McCloskey. The new resolutions repeated Drinan’s charges but added others denouncing the President for breaking his trust with Congress when he dismissed Archibald Cox. 
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Throughout April, the committee had bristled at the White House’s delay in releasing more tapes. After extensive wrangling, it approved a bipartisan compromise subpoena on April 11. Two weeks later, St. Clair requested and received an additional five days to comply, a deadline he met when the President released the tape transcripts on April 30. The next day, Doar informed the committee that his staff had reason to believe the edited transcripts they had received (the tapes and Dictabelts had not yet arrived) had numerous inaccuracies and omissions that could be rectified with better listening equipment. Clearly, at this point, the majority considered the President in contempt of the subpoena. Rodino, in a rare display of combativeness, contended that the House, and not the President, must determine the relevance of evidence. 
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Vice President Ford later claimed he told Nixon in May that he could no longer support the stonewalling and that the House had a right to the information. “We’re handling it this way because we think we’re right,” the President told Ford. 29 Publicly, the Vice President maintained his steadfast support of Nixon. 
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Meanwhile, numerous members had become restless with Doar’s presentation of the evidence. The information books covered a variety of subjects, with the cover-up being the largest and most important, yet they seemed aimless. The materials were presented chronologically; thus, if numerous calls or conversations occurred in a three-day period, they were set down chronologically. But they related to multiple subjects, and the chronology had to be keyed to the different subjects. Doar’s presentation did not attempt to do that. About July 1, several members turned to Richard Cates and other staff members for succinct summaries of the evidence and some clues as to the reasonable conclusions that could be drawn from it. Cates notified the entire committee of his intention to analyze the material. 
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Essentially, Cates disentangled the material from its rigid chronological setting to offer a coherent theory of presidential involvement in the cover-up. 
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St. Clair requested that the House committee hearings be open and televised, claiming that the selective leaks of evidence unfairly damaged the President. But Republican staff members sensed a shrewder reason. St. Clair himself had seen how passively the members listened to Doar, their boredom apparent to all. A television spectacle could either discredit the committee or make the members more active, questioning Doar incessantly and dragging the process on indefinitely. The White House now understood that time was on its side and could create a backlash in its favor, as the nation might grow bored with the inquiry. 
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Reluctantly, committee Republicans opposed St. Clair’s move. With elections only months away, they had no interest in prolonging the work. 
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Finally, on June 21, Doar concluded his presentation of the evidence, six weeks and eighteen closed sessions after he had started. 
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The President’s popularity continued to plunge. In June and early July, Nixon journeyed to the Mideast, traveling where no American President had before, and then to the Soviet Union for another summit. The televised images of the President riding by train through Egypt, cheered by enthusiastic crowds; continuing on to the long-forbidden and malevolent Syria, leader of the socalled radical bloc of Arab states; receiving a warm, emotional reception in Israel; and finally basking in the glow of an apparently enhanced détente with the Soviets, contrasted jarringly with the steady revelations regarding his behavior at home. 
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Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, however, dramatically sought to mark Watergate’s corrosive effects on foreign policy when he threatened to resign because of a New York Times editorial charging that he had lied to congressional investigators about his role in authorizing wiretaps of his aides. In a stopover in Salzburg, Austria, on June 11, Kissinger said he would not have his “public honor” discussed. With his credibility in question, he found it impossible to conduct foreign policy. 
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At the end of June, Nixon flew to Moscow to meet with Leonid Brezhnev. Criticism from conservatives in both parties mounted, fearful as they were that the President would fail to bargain effectively because of his political weakness, even desperation. 
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Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger insulted the President at a National Security Council meeting, when he proposed a SALT agreement that assured overwhelming American nuclear superiority. 
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By the time Nixon returned from the Soviet Union on July 4, he realized that he had serious problems in the House of Representatives. 
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Certainly, his well-honed political instincts told him that “on some subsurface level, the political tide was flowing fast, and flowing against me.” 
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Alexander Butterfield appeared to discuss the President’s work habits. He portrayed Nixon as the man in charge; Haldeman and other aides did nothing without the President’s knowledge, and Haldeman himself was nothing more than “an implementer.” St. Clair tried to discredit Butterfield, but the testimony fit the image the President himself had fashioned in his various image-building efforts. Nixon’s lawyers had more success in insulating the President when Fred LaRue testified that John Mitchell knew money had been paid to the burglary defendants. 
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Cohen’s time for questioning then expired, and no one else pursued the question of why LaRue met with the shadowy Pappas—“the Greek bearing gifts,” as Dean and Mitchell had described him. 
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Once again, John Dean provided the most interest and generated the most heat. For more than a year Nixon’s defenders had argued that Dean was a loose cannon, that he had instigated and carried out the cover-up on his own, to protect himself and a few others—but not the President. Charles Colson later testified that Dean ran the cover-up, even exerting pressure on Colson to cooperate in the effort. Dean admitted to St. Clair that Nixon did not specifically instruct him in the cover-up, but the former aide insisted that his conversations with Haldeman and Ehrlichman demonstrated both “concern and instructions” regarding the cover-up; “it was not quite willy-nilly, as you have tried to portray,” Dean retorted to a hostile questioner. 
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Petersen’s most devastating remarks centered on his trust in the President and his willingness to share privileged information with him. The tapes, of course, revealed that Nixon had improperly provided his aides with Petersen’s reports; the President’s own words, together with Petersen’s testimony, offered a substantial case for obstruction of justice. 
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Colson revived the finger-pointing that had characterized Oval Office discussions in early 1973. He claimed he told the President to urge Mitchell—“the guy who was responsible”—to come forward “and take the consequences.” At that point—mid-February 1973—Colson said, Nixon responded angrily, insisting that “I am not about to take an innocent person [Mitchell] and make him a scapegoat.” Colson also raised what came to be another favorite White House explanation of events: the CIA had played a decisive role in the events of Watergate. 
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The President, furthermore, could not “crack down” on the military, “because of what they knew and what they had taken”—a dark hint, never really pursued by the committee. It was not Colson’s last attempt to till revisionist soil. 
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St. Clair stressed that transcribing the tapes had become “quite an art.” He also gave the impression that the White House had been overly severe in its rendition, as he noted that the committee’s transcripts “are more favorable to the President than our own.” But the committee found significant discrepancies in the Administration’s transcripts; the White House versions had not in fact been less favorable. For example, the committee found a clear indication in the March 13, 1973 tape that Nixon had rejected the “hang-out road”—that is, a full revelation of the truth—in a conversation with Dean. Again, in his March 22, 1973 talk with Mitchell, the President repudiated Eisenhower’s scrupulous standards for the conduct of subordinates; more important, in this exchange, he told Mitchell to “stonewall” and to take the Fifth Amendment. 
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On July 12, a day after the House committee made its evidence public, Ford stated that the “new evidence as well as the old evidence” exonerated Nixon. Ford may have been obtuse, as some critics charged, but he apparently had no knowledge of the extent to which the White House had played with the evidence. 
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Whatever shackles had been imposed on St. Clair during the lengthy proceedings before the House Judiciary Committee, they dissolved on July 18 as he presented his closing defense of the President. He spoke for nearly one and a half hours, finally gaining an opportunity to display his reputed skills. St. Clair sensed the decisiveness and the solemnity of the occasion. His argument was impressive: organized, articulate, unyielding in behalf of his client, totally skeptical of the adversarial positions—and selective. 
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St. Clair had quickly negated any pluses he had earned. 
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He thought the record already offered ample support for the President, but at this point he again produced a hitherto undisclosed portion of a tape transcript, this time from March 22, 1973, when Nixon told Haldeman: “I don’t mean to be blackmailed by Hunt. That goes too far.” That was the “evidence,” St. Clair announced, that was the “fact” that the President did not deliberately plot to obstruct justice. 
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St. Clair had argued that being president justified some of Nixon’s actions; Doar turned that proposition inside out. In the ordinary course of affairs, concealing one’s mistake might be understandable, but “this was not done by a private citizen.” The President of the United States, Doar contended, had used the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, and his aides to obstruct justice. “It required perjury, destruction of evidence, obstruction of justice, all crimes. But, most important,” Doar concluded, “it required deliberate, contrived, continued, and continuing deception of the American people.” That evidence, Doar assured his listeners, would “help and reason with you” to reach a verdict. 
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On July 23, the day after Garrison’s summation, Hogan became the first Republican to announce that he would vote for impeachment. 
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The committee scheduled the opening of its debate for the next evening, July 24. The nationally televised spectacle was about to begin; first, however, a truly dramatic development unfolded behind the scenes. Despite the procedural fuss, the Democrats were about to gain their crucial bipartisan coalition, and the President was about to lose preciously needed political and moral support. The months of the staff’s labors, as well as some careful cultivation by committee members, finally secured the most desired prize of all: votes for impeachment by Republicans and Southern Democrats who also happened to constitute a rainbow of ideological commitments. 
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The coalition emerged rather haphazardly, and only after each of the men had come to a decision on his own. 
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But the younger Fish had supported the President on less than half the congressional roll calls prior to 1974. In 1968, he narrowly won election because the state Conservative Party had fielded a candidate who took away much of the traditional Republican vote. The candidate, Gordon Liddy, agreed not to campaign too hard, and in 1969 Fish helped him secure a position in the Treasury Department. 
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For Railsback, committee Counsel Richard Cates’s July 20 briefing had been decisive, while he thought St. Clair had failed to make a case for the President. On July 21, Railsback concluded that Nixon’s lies constituted a serious obstruction of justice, that he was directly involved in the cover-up, and that he had abused power. 
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Thornton believed that Nixon had damaged “the system” with his abuses of power. He saw the White House itself—apart from the executive agencies—as a virtual fourth branch of government, checked by no one. The President’s lack of cooperation with the impeachment inquiry buttressed Thornton’s conviction that the arrogant pattern of abuse was endemic. “Ford brought his life to the Judiciary Committee,” he said, “whereas Nixon brought his lawyers.” 
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As Robert Frost had said of love, the reason to impeach was indefinable but unmistakable, and he would know it when he saw it. 
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Before July 22, Fish remembered, the time was “a very lonely thing”; he did not discuss evidence with Republican colleagues, only political implications. Unlike Cohen, Fish had no desire to operate on his own: “I was perfectly willing to confess that I did want company.” 
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On July 22, all the coalition’s members had their first look at Doar’s draft articles of impeachment. They later agreed that the “ambiguous and vague and arbitrary” language galvanized them into action. That evening, Flowers told Railsback to “get your guys together and I’ll get mine and let’s sit down and visit about this.” Flowers then spoke to Mann and Thornton, who agreed to meet with the others. The next morning the seven gathered in Railsback’s office. Fish was surprised to find the Southern Democrats. At the outset, Railsback asked whether they could find an alternative route to impeachment, such as censure of the President. Flowers pointed out that the committee had responsibility only for deciding the issue of impeachment. They were in the “driver’s seat,” Flowers remembers; the “thing” was “in their hands,” and they realized their power. What was “fragile” was not the coalition members’ attachment to one another; rather, it was their link to the nominal liberal majority, who now found themselves “at the mercy of seven swing votes.” 
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the President shifted to a more existential posture: “I intend to live the next week without dying the death of a thousand cuts…. Cowards die a thousand deaths, brave men die only once.” It was, he wrote in his diary, his “Seventh Crisis in spades”; he could only “hope for the best and plan for the worst.” Publicly, Nixon was defiant. He assured supporters on July 18 that he would leave office “in 1977 when I shall have finished my term of office to which I was elected.” 
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On July 12 a California jury found John Ehrlichman guilty of perjury and of conspiring to violate Daniel Ellsberg’s civil rights. At the end of the month, the court imposed a twenty-month-to-five-year sentence. 
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Shocked, he learned that Fred Buzhardt had signed an affidavit stating that the White House documents contained nothing material to Ehrlichman’s defense. Ehrlichman believed then and in later years that he had been betrayed and went to jail for a crime the President had authorized. 
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Old California friends entertained the President in Bel Air on July 21. It was a pleasant evening, but Nixon later remembered that it was the last time he felt any real hope. 
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Two days later, he called Governor George Wallace from San Clemente, desperately seeking to enlist Wallace’s help in dissuading Walter Flowers from voting for impeachment. But Wallace told Nixon that it would be improper. The conversation lasted only six minutes. When it ended, the President turned to Haig and said: “Well, Al, there goes the presidency.” 
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The Watergate spotlight briefly moved from the House Judiciary Committee to the Supreme Court on July 8 as Leon Jaworski and James St. Clair presented their arguments to the Justices. 
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- Highlight on Page 506 | Loc. 11336-37  | Added on Sunday, May 25, 2014, 11:31 PM

Except in periods of emotional assault upon the institution from those momentarily aggrieved by a decision, the Court’s prestige consistently has remained high among the American people. 
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“We are a lost people when the supreme tribunal of the law has lost our respect,” ran a typical comment that urged Americans to maintain faith in the efficacy of the Court, despite its momentary lapse. 
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Truman’s claim of “inherent powers” to justify his seizure of steel mills to prevent a strike that he believed would impair the Korean War effort. When the steel companies sued to regain control of their property, six of the nine Justices ruled that in the absence of congressional authorization, the President had no such power. In a concurring opinion, Justice Robert H. Jackson eloquently underlined the rule of law: “With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and the law be made by parliamentary deliberations.” 
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Burger, however, assigned the opinion to himself. He was in a bind as he confronted a case affecting the future political well-being of the man who appointed him. White House gossip in 1973 and 1974 reported that he “had assured the President that the tapes would not be taken away.” Burger’s closeness to Nixon and the Administration was well known—a situation riddled with irony since the Senate had rejected Lyndon Johnson’s nomination of Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice, in part because of charges of cronyism. 
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The Chief Justice at one point had suggested that the federal rule allowing courts to subpoena evidence considered potentially relevant and admissible, must be applied more strictly for issuing a subpoena against the President. Douglas would have none of it: “My difficulty is that when the President is discussing crimes to be committed and/or crimes already committed with and/or by him or by his orders, he stands no higher than the Mafia with respect to those confidences.” 
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In the end, Brennan and the others certainly had the input they had wanted all along; meanwhile, Burger alone had his name on an opinion that united the Court: the President must surrender the tapes. The Court met for its final conference on July 23, and the Chief Justice issued a press release noting that it would convene the next morning. 
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The next morning Alexander Haig called the President to report that he had the complete text of the Supreme Court’s decision. “Unanimous?” the President asked. “Unanimous. There’s no air in it at all.” “None at all?” the President persisted. “It’s as tight as a drum,” said Haig. 
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Richard Nixon’s fatalistic sense came closer to understanding the truth. He knew he could not defy the Court; perhaps he could still devise a plan for deleting some material. But the June 23, 1972, tape “worried” him ceaselessly; it could not be “excerpted properly,” he confided to his diary. While St. Clair made the President’s case to the Judiciary Committee on July 18, Nixon admitted that his greatest concern was “the Supreme Court thing.” On July 23 he talked to Haig and Ziegler about resigning. That night, Nixon stayed up late, reviewing a speech draft on economic matters. At midnight, he wrote: “Lowest point in the presidency, and Supreme Court still to come.” 
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That morning, on July 24, St. Clair had been advised by his White House aides that the Court’s decision was imminent. Fifteen minutes later, the wire services carried the news, but Haig did not inform the President for another forty-five minutes. At noon, Ron Ziegler told reporters that St. Clair would make a statement later in the day. The President’s lawyer appeared before the press at 4:00 P.M., approximately eight hours after the Supreme Court’s decision. 
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in 1952 Truman promptly dispatched a letter to his Secretary of Commerce ordering him to return the confiscated steel mills to the owners. The President complied less than thirty minutes after the Justices finished reading their opinions in the Steel Seizure Case. 
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St. Clair always thought that even now the President “didn’t have to turn over the tapes, maybe. I don’t know.” That “maybe” was predicated on St. Clair’s belief that the presidency and the judiciary were two equal and separate branches, a belief traceable to Jefferson and to Andrew Jackson’s notion of concurrent powers, under which some actions of the judiciary were not necessarily binding on the executive. 
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The nation barely had time to absorb the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision, for that same evening, July 24, the House Judiciary Committee reassembled to continue its impeachment inquiry. Now its debates would be aired on prime-time television. Nixon had fought throughout his presidency to control the media, to use it to his advantage. Whether in unveiling his Cabinet or in announcing his China visit or his selection of Gerald Ford, he had tried to persuade the nation that he was the right man doing the right thing. It was fitting, then, that following his repudiation by the Supreme Court, his “enemies” mounted their own television spectacular, as choreographed in its production and as emotional in its impact as anything that Richard Nixon might have imagined doing. 
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The narrow question centered on whether the President had told the truth when he said he had been deceived by subordinates, and whether or not he himself had participated in a design systematically to cover up the role of his agents and associates in an illegal political-intelligence operation, together with related activities—whether he, in short, had engaged in a course of conduct that had impeded his faithful execution of the laws and had done this for his own political interest and protection. 
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Finally, Hutchinson took note of the day’s events in the Supreme Court and suggested that the Chairman consider postponement until the President yielded additional evidence. Rodino ignored him and instead turned to the committee’s senior Democrat, Harold D. Donohue, who introduced a resolution and two articles of charges against Nixon. For the first time in more than a century, Congress confronted the President of the United States with the very real possibility of impeachment. 
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- Highlight on Page 518 | Loc. 11604-7  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 12:02 AM

Responding to the members’ wishes for something concrete to debate, John Doar hastily assembled his draft articles and presented them on July 19. Several members of the coalition, including Caldwell Butler, met with Richard Cates on Saturday morning, July 20, and again had been impressed with Cates’s tight summary of the evidence and its inexorable conclusion. No such precision appeared in the Doar drafts, which struck the coalition members as vague, rambling, and altogether “a sloppy piece of work.” 
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Dissatisfaction with the drafts galvanized the coalition into collective action, and led to their July 23 meeting in Railsback’s office. 
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- Highlight on Page 519 | Loc. 11621-22  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 12:03 AM

That same evening, Tom Mooney, a Judiciary Committee staffer with close links to Railsback, armed with copies of the Doar, Mann, and Thornton drafts, also began to compose articles on his own. 
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- Highlight on Page 519 | Loc. 11622-26  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 12:04 AM

When the coalition reconvened at 8:00 A.M. on July 23, Mooney offered a draft article focusing on the President’s obstruction of justice. Working through the afternoon, periodically meeting with Mann and other members, Mooney assembled four other drafts before producing one for circulation. Five of the members met the next morning and developed two more drafts. They realized that their articles had to be drawn with the severity of any indictment, charging Nixon only with what could be proven. 
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- Highlight on Page 520 | Loc. 11640-41  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 12:05 AM

The coalition had the Mann and Thornton drafts of the charges in Article II on July 23. 
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- Highlight on Page 520 | Loc. 11647-48  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 12:06 AM

Each member of the full committee had fifteen minutes during the opening debate for his remarks. The proceedings carried through the afternoon and the evening of the second day, July 25. 
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- Highlight on Page 521 | Loc. 11673-74  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 12:08 AM

“I think,” Cohen concluded, “that no man should be able to bind up our destiny, our perpetuation, our success, with the chains of his personal destiny.” 
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- Highlight on Page 522 | Loc. 11684-88  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 11:36 AM

Butler’s dismay with Nixon and his annoyance at the narrow partisanship of the President’s defenders on the committee finally burst forth in a wave of passion and anger that belied his usual calm. Although Butler had to confront a skeptical district, he seemed to focus his public remarks on his fellow House committee Republicans. Watergate, he reminded them, “is our shame,” a scandal for a party that had campaigned so often against corruption and misconduct. “We cannot indulge ourselves in the luxury of patronizing or excusing the misconduct of our own people.” 
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- Highlight on Page 522 | Loc. 11691-93  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 11:48 AM

The evidence was “clear, direct, and convincing”—St. Clair’s words—that Richard Nixon had abused power and that he had engaged in a “pattern of misrepresentation and half-truths” to explain his conduct in the Watergate affair, a policy “cynically based on the premise that the truth itself is negotiable.” 
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- Highlight on Page 522 | Loc. 11694-96  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 11:49 AM

The combination of Mann and Butler left no doubt as to the outcome. Together, they offered a bipartisan conservative condemnation of the President. Together, they combined the sadness and fury that must have flowed through all but the most committed Nixon-haters and loyalists alike. 
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- Highlight on Page 522 | Loc. 11698-701  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:15 PM

When debate opened at noon on July 26, McClory moved to postpone consideration of the impeachment articles for ten days, if the President assured the committee within twenty-four hours that he would provide the House with the tapes which the Supreme Court had ordered him to submit to Judge Sirica. McClory had no expectation that Nixon would make the materials available. Apparently, he simply wanted to demonstrate that the committee had treated the President fairly and with proper deference. 
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- Highlight on Page 523 | Loc. 11702-5  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:16 PM

Brooks, Railsback, and Sandman, representing the three major factions in the committee, rejected the gesture as meaningless and opposed it. McClory’s motion failed, 27–11. By now the President commanded virtually no trust. A Gallup poll released that same day revealed that his disapproval rating had risen to 63 percent, while his support had fallen to 24 percent. 
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- Highlight on Page 523 | Loc. 11722-24  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:18 PM

By late afternoon the Democrats had recovered somewhat and had begun to reply effectively to Wiggins and Sandman. Rodino read a staff member’s hurried note citing previous impeachment proceedings in which a body of evidence was provided apart from the articles themselves. 
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- Highlight on Page 524 | Loc. 11730-33  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:20 PM

The counterassault by Wiggins and Sandman blistered the pro-impeachment forces. The Republican loyalists had little hope of moving those Democrats who had been firmly convinced by the evidence to vote against the President. Their target was the tenuous, uneasy bloc of approximately six Republicans and three Southern Democrats. Their shock tactics momentarily stunned the coalition and severely tested its mettle. 
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- Highlight on Page 524 | Loc. 11738-40  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:20 PM

That night, Democrats Mann and Flowers, and Republicans Cohen, Rails-back, Butler, and Hogan met for dinner and a post-mortem at the Capitol Hill Club. Some blamed Doar and poor staff communication for their own weak reply to Wiggins and Sandman. Flowers complained that the Democratic majority had not made the case. Cohen disagreed. “The members had got stung and they didn’t really know what to do,” he later recalled. 
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- Highlight on Page 524 | Loc. 11743-49  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:21 PM

Butler and Mooney remembered the “state of panic” and chaos that pervaded the group that evening. Flowers said that Sandman was the biggest hero in his Alabama district. The “specificators” had “licked us,” he complained. Meanwhile, ever politic, he suggested that the group maintain its image of neutrality. But the time for neutrality had passed. The coalition only bent; it did not break. The members had decided, and they were committed. Cohen deplored the label “fragile coalition.” He had reached the point where it didn’t really matter to him whether others “stayed in or stayed out,” as he had made his resolve. And so had his colleagues. The bloc remained intact, and despite Flowers, a number of them eagerly responded to the challenge of the President’s defenders. 
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- Highlight on Page 525 | Loc. 11759-63  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:23 PM

Sandman sometimes appeared a man who could not put the trees together to form a forest, but by Saturday afternoon, July 26, he knew the count. He saw no need to “bore the American public with a rehashing” of material and acknowledged that the votes were there to pass the article. Wiggins, too, sensed the futility of the situation. The glue holding together the coalition—in Wiggins’s opinion, self-interest and an erroneous understanding of constitutional responsibility—proved strong enough. 
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- Highlight on Page 525 | Loc. 11769-70  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:23 PM

Flowers then briefly yielded to allow Fish to speak to his “friends and supporters” in New York who supported Nixon. “There was no smoking gun,” Fish noted. “The whole room was filled with smoke.” 
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- Highlight on Page 525 | Loc. 11771-77  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:24 PM

Suddenly, dramatically, Rodino asked for a vote on the Sarbanes substitute Article I that the coalition had prepared. Choruses of “ayes” and “noes” responded. But Rodino called the roll, and thirty-eight members recorded their vote. The afternoon pattern held firm, and by a 27–11 vote, the committee adopted one article of impeachment against Richard Nixon. Six Republicans—Butler, Cohen, Fish, Froehlich, Hogan, and Railsback—joined the twenty-one Democrats. 23 The bipartisan vote, transcending ideological alliances as it did, belied charges that the committee’s proceedings were a partisan vendetta. Richard Nixon had brought the committee together, as he was to bring the nation together—though clearly not the way he had intended in 1968. It was fourteen years to the day since he had first been nominated for the presidency. 
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- Highlight on Page 527 | Loc. 11780-84  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:25 PM

Richard Nixon received the news of his own “Saturday Night Massacre” in his San Clemente beach trailer; it was, he said, “exactly” what he had “feared.” He realized a sense of historical shame—the “first President in 106 years to be recommended for impeachment.” Not the kind of first on which he usually prided himself. Compounding his anguish, the June 23 tape, in which he had discussed using the CIA to cover up the Watergate break-in, was, he knew, “like slow-fused dynamite,” waiting to explode. 
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- Highlight on Page 527 | Loc. 11787-92  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:26 PM

Returning to Washington on July 29, Nixon found the White House “cloaked in gloom,” the staff’s confidence “shattered.” St. Clair had returned from a long weekend at Cape Cod and learned the contents of the June 23 tape. According to Nixon, his “breezy optimism” had evaporated. Now, St. Clair expressed concern for his own liability as a party to obstruction of justice. 1 The House Judiciary Committee resumed deliberations on July 29. In three sessions that day, and three the following day, the members considered four more articles of impeachment. 
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- Highlight on Page 528 | Loc. 11793-94  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:26 PM

Many of the issues raised during the debate over Article I remained apparent when the members discussed the abuses of power charged in Article II. 
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- Highlight on Page 529 | Loc. 11816-19  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:31 PM

The Republican loyalists proposed various motions to strike Hungate’s substitute article, but this time their opponents were better prepared. For example, when Wiley Mayne insisted that the Plumbers had a national-security purpose, Hamilton Fish had Albert Jenner read the relevant evidence pointing to the conclusion that the Plumbers’ goal was to cultivate public relations, not to protect national security. 
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- Highlight on Page 529 | Loc. 11823-24  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:31 PM

The voting lines held. McClory crossed over to the majority, and the committee approved Article II, 28–10. 
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- Highlight on Page 529 | Loc. 11833-34  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:32 PM

McClory picked up only one Republican vote (Hogan’s) and lost two southerners; nevertheless, the article passed, 21–17. 
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- Highlight on Page 530 | Loc. 11841-44  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:34 PM

First, John Conyers introduced an article condemning the President for his taking “unilateral” military actions against Cambodia without informing Congress and for insisting that he had not done so. Edward Mezvinsky then submitted a fifth article, charging the President with willfully evading income taxes and with receiving compensation in the form of excessive government expenditures for his estates. Both articles failed, 26–12. 
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- Highlight on Page 531 | Loc. 11872-78  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:40 PM

On July 30, as the committee debate ended, the Nielsen Company informed White House aides that the debate had an estimated audience of 35–40 million—extraordinarily high numbers. A few days later, Nielsen reported that the average household watched 1.9 days of a possible four of the debates, for an average of 3 hours and 43 minutes. The viewing audience translated into double the American population of 1868, the year the House impeached Andrew Johnson. Only 10 percent of U.S. adults heard none of the House committee proceedings on television or radio. A Louis Harris poll taken on August 2, a week after the first vote, showed public opinion favoring impeachment 66–27 percent. Pro-impeachment sentiment had risen 13 percent in one week. 
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- Highlight on Page 532 | Loc. 11884-90  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:41 PM

After the final committee vote, the President spent a restless night. Early the next morning, he wrote out his options: resign immediately; resign if the full House voted impeachment; or fight through the Senate trial. Nixon’s “natural instinct” prevailed over any reasoned approach to the options, for at the end of his notes, he wrote: “End career as a fighter.” The only other real alternative was to set a precedent for resignation—and that was “far worse,” he thought. But hours later, according to Nixon, Haig read the June 23, 1972, tape transcript “for the first time” and agreed with Buzhardt and St. Clair: “I just don’t see how we can survive this one,” Haig told the President. The next day, August 1, Nixon told Haig that he intended to resign. 
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- Highlight on Page 533 | Loc. 11925-27  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:45 PM

Nixon’s traditional support eroded. On July 29 Howard Phillips called for the President’s removal, either by resignation or impeachment. He announced the creation of “CREEP 2”—Conservatives for the Removal of the President. 
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- Highlight on Page 533 | Loc. 11927-30  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:46 PM

Just after the impeachment vote, Federal Judge Gerhard Gesell sentenced John Ehrlichman to a twenty-month-to-five-year jail term for his role in the Fielding break-in, and two days later, John Dean received a one-to-four-year sentence for obstructing justice. The emergence of new enemies and painful reminders of “White House horrors” only reinforced the image of a totally discredited Administration. 
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- Highlight on Page 534 | Loc. 11931-33  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:46 PM

Ford’s enduring faith must have shattered on August I when Haig told him that the situation had so deteriorated that “the ball game” might be over, and Ford should start “thinking about a change” in his life. 
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- Highlight on Page 534 | Loc. 11936-43  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:47 PM

Anger was a mild word to describe the feelings of presidential supporters four days later when the President released the June 23, 1972 tape transcript, destined to be known as the “smoking gun.” At the President’s first meeting that day, more than two years earlier, Haldeman told the President that “we’re back in the problem area,” because Pat Gray did not have the FBI under control. The FBI’s investigation had led into some “productive areas,” where “we don’t want it to go,” he said. Haldeman had talked to Mitchell and Dean, who agreed on the need to maintain a cover-up of the Administration’s role in the Watergate break-in. Mitchell’s recommendation that Deputy CIA Director Vernon Walters call Gray and tell him to “stay the hell out of this” was the fateful instruction. Didn’t Gray want to stay out of it? the President asked. Yes, Haldeman responded, but he needed a reason, and the CIA could provide him with one. Haldeman thought the story might be plausible, because the FBI investigation allegedly had been tracing money to some CIA connections. 
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- Highlight on Page 534 | Loc. 11947-51  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:48 PM

The conversation shifted to various legislative and policy matters. But abruptly, Nixon returned to the Watergate problem. Call in the CIA people, he said, and tell them that further inquiry might lead to “the whole Bay of Pigs thing”; “don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is a comedy of errors,” Nixon said. The CIA should call in the FBI and say, ‘Don’t go further into this case[,] period’ !” 
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- Highlight on Page 535 | Loc. 11954-56  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:48 PM

When the two men resumed their conversation later that afternoon, the President urged caution lest the CIA and FBI leaders have “any ideas we’re doing it because our concern is political.” Instead, he underlined an anxiety that any revelations might “blow the whole, uh, Bay of Pigs thing.” 
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- Highlight on Page 535 | Loc. 11960-62  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:49 PM

The June 23 tape offered a definitive answer to Howard Baker’s question, put just over a year earlier: the President knew. He knew that he had instigated a cover-up and thus had participated in an obstruction of justice almost from the outset of events. 
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- Highlight on Page 536 | Loc. 11993-96  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:01 PM

But after they learned of the June 23 tape, Republicans, like cuckolded mates, refused to accept Nixon’s expressions of regret for withholding the information. Some wanted him simply to resign; others wished to vent their fury on him. As the news spread through Washington, House Republicans reacted with dismay, sorrow, or anger; whether by impeachment or by resignation, they concluded, the President had to go. 
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- Highlight on Page 537 | Loc. 12008-13  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:05 PM

The President desperately tried to insert exculpatory material into his August 5 statement on his release of the tape. At the last moment, he drafted a notation that he had told Pat Gray to press forward two weeks after the June 23 conversation, once he had determined that there was no national-security matter at stake. But the statement would have to wait for his memoirs. Haig told him that St. Clair and the lawyers would leave unless the prepared statement remained intact. “The hell with it,” Nixon said. “Let them put out anything they want. My decision has already been made.” 
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- Highlight on Page 539 | Loc. 12050-53  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:12 PM

The President, with some urging from Burch, called in the Republican leaders on August 7. Goldwater’s presence was a measure of his untitled stature within the Republican Party and the nation. Burch knew his friend would be blunt and honest. Given the Senator’s significant national constituency, and the growing respect of old adversaries, Burch also realized that Nixon could not lightly reject any counsel Goldwater gave him. 
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- Highlight on Page 539 | Loc. 12056-61  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:13 PM

Accompanied by Hugh Scott and John Rhodes, Goldwater met the President. According to several accounts, including his own, he never directly told Nixon to resign, indicating instead that he had no significant support in Congress. He informed Nixon that he had at most ten supporters in the Senate, six of whom really were undecided, including himself. Goldwater left the meeting with no doubt as to the outcome: the President “would resign.” When the three met reporters late in the afternoon of August 7, Goldwater told them that no decision had been made and that they had visited the President to describe the situation in Congress. 
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- Highlight on Page 539 | Loc. 12063-66  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:14 PM

Nixon remembered Goldwater’s telling him that he leaned toward voting for Article II. He also recalled saying to Scott as they ended their discussion: “Now that old Harry Truman is gone, I won’t have anybody to pal around with.” Truman had had monumental contempt for Nixon, and the President knew it. Nixon’s remarks to Scott displayed his typical awkwardness and perhaps offered some indication of a momentary flight from reality. 
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- Highlight on Page 540 | Loc. 12092-95  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:17 PM

Meanwhile, Ford delivered Agnew-style speeches—written in the White House—assailing the President’s critics and blithely assuring his audience of Nixon’s innocence. “Throughout my political life, I always believed what I was told,” Ford later wrote. And he believed that Nixon had told him the truth. When he saw the experts’ report on the 18½-minute tape gap, he began to suspect he was being used, yet he dutifully continued to defend the President for months to come. 
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- Highlight on Page 541 | Loc. 12115-21  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:22 PM

He reminded his lieutenants that the presidency had experienced enormous trauma in the past decade, with the assassination of Kennedy and with Johnson “literally hounded from office.” The institution, he said, must not sustain another “hammer blow” without a defense. Consequently, he would not resign, and would let the constitutional process run. This, he insisted, would be in the “best interests of the Nation”; he would not “desert the principles which give our government legitimacy.” To do otherwise, he continued, “would be a regrettable departure from American historical principles.” He offered nothing in the way of personal defense aside from past diplomatic triumphs; instead, he wrapped himself in the mantle of the presidency—claiming 
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- Highlight on Page 542 | Loc. 12122-25  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:22 PM

With that, Nixon turned to a discussion of economic problems, projecting policies for six months in the future. Attorney General William Saxbe was dumbfounded by Nixon’s bravado. “Mr. President, don’t you think we should be talking about next week, not next year?” he asked. According to Saxbe, Nixon looked around the table, no one said a word, and with that he picked up his papers and left the room. 
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- Highlight on Page 541 | Loc. 12112-13  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:23 PM

President Nixon appeared for his last Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, August 6. 
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- Highlight on Page 542 | Loc. 12133-34  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:24 PM

Resignation offered only short-term benefits, Butler thought; more important, he did not want to establish a precedent “for harassment out of office, 
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- Highlight on Page 544 | Loc. 12164-68  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:27 PM

Preventing the “death of a thousand cuts” seemed to be the rallying cry for the President’s men. Haig complained, however, that to some White House aides the slogan meant that Nixon should resign rather than suffer such a painful ordeal—the “pussy fire group,” he contemptuously called them, comparing them to Vietnamese who would not stand and fight. Some in the White House felt besieged: “It was us against the world.” Every day, it seemed, brought what Stephen Bull called the “Oh, Shit Syndrome,” meaning another revelation, another disclosure, another indictment. 
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- Highlight on Page 544 | Loc. 12170-72  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:27 PM

Still, Bull knew that the White House atmosphere was different; “things just were not happening,” he recalled, and the blank pages of the presidential logs offer mute testimony to that fact. 
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- Highlight on Page 545 | Loc. 12190-93  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:30 PM

According to McClory, Rodino promised to end the impeachment inquiry as well if Nixon stepped down. Speaker Carl Albert concurred, although he added that he had no influence over the Special Prosecutor’s course of action. The news from McClory undoubtedly had some appeal. If Nixon learned of that development, then he would have done so just prior to his meeting with Goldwater, Rhodes, and Scott. That conversation, taken together with the news from Rodino, might well have been influential. 
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- Highlight on Page 545 | Loc. 12196-99  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:31 PM

That evening Nixon began to work in earnest on his resignation speech and arranged to meet Vice President Ford the next day to discuss a transition. In that meeting, the President recommended that Ford retain Haig; the rest of the meeting was awkward, as both men seemed to understand, yet were unable to express, what was required of each. 
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- Highlight on Page 545 | Loc. 12199-205  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:33 PM

The following night, Nixon saw more than forty longtime, steadfast supporters. “I just hope I haven’t let you down,” he told them. But he said later that he knew he had—as he had “let down the country … our system of government and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government…. I … let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life.” Earlier, he met with congressional leaders from both parties. He told them what he would say to the nation that evening: he had “lost his base” in Congress, and he believed the outcome of the impeachment process to be inevitable. Speaker Albert best remembered that Nixon never discussed the question of whether he had done wrong. Perhaps that was asking too much. Instead, the President broke down in tears. 
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- Highlight on Page 545 | Loc. 12206-12  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:34 PM

Nixon’s last full day in office proceeded routinely. He vetoed annual appropriations bills for the Agriculture Department and the Environmental Protection Agency on the grounds that they were inflationary. On a lesser, but far more symbolic note, he nominated a judge to fill a federal court seat in Wisconsin which had been vacant for three years. Nixon had sought unsuccessfully to appoint an old friend, Republican Representative Glenn Davis, but the American Bar Association, as well as state groups, had mounted an intense campaign in opposition. The new appointment on August 8 painfully measured the President’s decline and powerlessness. Later that day, Nixon addressed his simple letter of resignation to the keeper of the seals, the Secretary of State: “I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States.” 
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- Highlight on Page 546 | Loc. 12226-31  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:35 PM

General Brown sent a message on August 8 to various American military commanders in the United States and abroad, advising increased vigilance. Yet he also urged them not to be overly ambitious in implementing the order. The next day, two other messages went to the same commanders over Schlesinger’s name. The first conveyed remarks of President Ford: “I know that I can count on the unswerving loyalty and dedication to duty that have always characterized the men and women of the Department of Defense. The country joins me in appreciation for your steadfast service.” The other communique, signed by Schlesinger, stated: “Mr. Ford will have, consistent with our best traditions, the fullest support, dedication, and loyalty of all members of the Department of Defense.” 
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- Highlight on Page 547 | Loc. 12251-53  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:37 PM

The President spent the afternoon of August 8 correcting and memorizing his resignation speech, to be broadcast that evening. “One thing, Ron, old boy,” he feebly joked to Ziegler, “we won’t have to have any more press conferences, and we won’t even have to tell them that[,] either!” Of course, he had said a similar thing a dozen years earlier in California. 
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- Highlight on Page 548 | Loc. 12253-56  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:37 PM

He also said that he looked forward to writing, noting that it might be done in prison. “Some of the best writing in history has been done in prison. Think of Lenin and Gandhi,” he said. At 9:00 P.M. the thirty-seventh President addressed the nation from the White House for the thirty-seventh time. 
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- Highlight on Page 548 | Loc. 12261-62  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:38 PM

With a hint of defiance, he asserted that he had never been a quitter. To resign was “abhorrent to every instinct” within him. But he would put “the interests of America first.” 
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- Highlight on Page 548 | Loc. 12266-68  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:38 PM

“I regret deeply any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision. I would say only that if some of my judgments were wrong—and some were wrong—they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interest of the Nation.” It was Richard Nixon’s only moment that approximated contrition. 
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- Highlight on Page 548 | Loc. 12274-75  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:40 PM

“few things in his presidency became him as much as his manner of leaving.” 
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- Highlight on Page 549 | Loc. 12278-79  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:40 PM

Six years earlier, to the day, Nixon had delivered perhaps the best speech of his career as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination. 
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- Highlight on Page 549 | Loc. 12279-81  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:41 PM

He had told the nation that he would restore respect for the law. “Time is running out,” he said at that time, “for the merchants of crime and corruption in American society.” 
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- Highlight on Page 550 | Loc. 12308-10  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:44 PM

His “old man” was “a great man because he did his job,” and every job counted to the hilt, regardless of what happened. His mother, too, was remembered. No books would be written about her, “but she was a saint,” he said, as tears welled up in his eyes. 
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- Highlight on Page 550 | Loc. 12315-18  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:45 PM

Nixon quoted a delicate, moving passage from Roosevelt’s autobiography that described her death and his enduring love for her. With her death, Roosevelt wrote, “the light went out from my life forever.” How strange that Nixon should have identified with Teddy Roosevelt’s lament for his inexplicable loss. For after all, Richard Nixon’s cause for grief was all too explainable. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 553 | Loc. 12324-28  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 10:56 AM

On Sunday morning, September 8, President Gerald R. Ford attended St. John’s Church, across from Lafayette Park. Afterward, he invited a pool of reporters and photographers into the Oval Office, where he read a brief statement and then signed a proclamation granting Richard Nixon a “full, free, and absolute pardon” for any crimes “which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed” during his presidency. The time had come, the President said, to end this “American tragedy” and restore “tranquility.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 554 | Loc. 12343-45  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 10:58 AM

Alexander Hamilton in Federalist74 warmly endorsed its discretionary aspect. There would be, he said, “seasons of insurrection or rebellion,” or “critical moments, when a well-timed offer of pardon … may restore the tranquility of the commonwealth; and which, if suffered to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterwards to recall.” 
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- Highlight on Page 554 | Loc. 12347-48  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 10:58 AM

“Our long national nightmare of Watergate” was over, he said as he took his oath of office. 
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- Highlight on Page 555 | Loc. 12361-63  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 11:00 AM

It is clear, however, that Ford believed the nightmare still haunted the nation, and that he had an antidote. The new President’s cure had substantial merit; unfortunately, he fumbled its application, with costly short-run effects for him and for the nation. 
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- Highlight on Page 555 | Loc. 12366-69  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 11:01 AM

So much of the affair of the past two years had been extraordinary; its denouement was no exception. We have differing versions of when a pardon for Richard Nixon first received serious consideration. Seymour Hersh’s 1983 article on the subject in the Atlantic contended that Nixon selected Ford as his Vice President in October 1973 because “he thought that he could rely on Ford to pardon him.” 
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- Highlight on Page 555 | Loc. 12369-70  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 11:02 AM

Ford himself testified that on August 1, 1974, Haig told him that a pardon for Nixon, if he resigned, should be a possibility. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 555 | Loc. 12378-79  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 11:03 AM

Buzhardt later insisted that he never proposed any discussion of a Ford pardon of Nixon, yet he drafted a pardon proclamation in Gerald Ford’s name, dated August 6, 1974, three days before Nixon’s eventual resignation. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 556 | Loc. 12390-91  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 01:44 PM

Less than a week after Nixon returned to San Clemente, John Ehrlichman’s lawyers subpoenaed the former President as a witness in the forthcoming trial of Nixon’s former aides. 
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- Highlight on Page 556 | Loc. 12396-99  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 01:46 PM

Near the end of the month, Nixon received a subpoena to give a deposition for a pending civil trial related to Watergate. From his San Clemente exile, the law’s long arm seemed menacing to Richard Nixon. “Do you think the people want to pick the carcass?” he said in a telephone call to a Republican congressman on August 26, adding that “We’ve got problems with that fellow …”—meaning Jaworski. 
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- Highlight on Page 557 | Loc. 12424-27  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 01:48 PM

On August 20, Ford nominated Nelson A. Rockefeller, Nixon’s old rival, for the vice-presidency. Reporters questioned the former New York governor regarding Nixon’s future. He already had been “hung,” Rockefeller said, and added that he need not “be drawn and quartered.” He proposed that Nixon be given “immunity from prosecution.” 
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- Highlight on Page 557 | Loc. 12427-28  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 01:48 PM

That same day, by a 412–3 vote, the House of Representatives accepted the Judiciary Committee’s report on its impeachment inquiry. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 558 | Loc. 12434-35  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 01:50 PM

But public sentiment was skeptical: a Gallup poll, conducted between August 16 and 19, showed that 56 percent of the respondents favored a criminal trial for the ex-president. 
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- Highlight on Page 559 | Loc. 12454-57  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 01:52 PM

Conveniently—perhaps too conveniently—the first question raised at Ford’s press conference that day, August 28, was whether he agreed with Rockefeller on immunity for Nixon and whether he would use his pardon authority. Ford thought that Rockefeller’s statement “coincided” with the “general view” of the American people. A bit elliptically, he added that “in this situation I am the final authority,” and then pointedly declared that a pardon was a “proper option.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 559 | Loc. 12466-69  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 01:55 PM

But he insisted that the nation’s health most concerned him, and he quoted one of his military aides: “We’re all Watergate junkies. Some of us are mainlining, some are sniffing, some are lacing it with something else, but all of us are addicted. This will go on and on unless someone steps in and says that we, as a nation, must go cold turkey. Otherwise, we’ll die of an overdose.” 
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- Highlight on Page 560 | Loc. 12477-80  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:10 PM

On September 4, Jaworski told Buchen that Nixon could not be tried for at least nine months to two years. He added that the forthcoming trial of Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman would generate unfavorable, prejudicial publicity, precluding any fair trial for Nixon. Jaworski also had no intention of including Nixon as a co-defendant, believing that the former President’s condemnation in the impeachment process might well prejudice the cases of the other defendants. 
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- Highlight on Page 560 | Loc. 12492-93  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:11 PM

Ford had made his decision firm by September 4, perhaps sooner. But for the next few days, he carried out a bargaining charade with his predecessor. 
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- Highlight on Page 562 | Loc. 12535-40  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:20 PM

After all the hard bargaining, bargaining in which Nixon did not deal personally with Ford’s emissary, Benton Becker had a brief audience with Nixon. He claimed that he told Nixon the White House would stand by prevailing legal doctrine that acceptance of a pardon acknowledged guilt. Nixon seemed uninterested. Becker remembered the conversation as unfocused and depressing. He found Nixon to be “an absolute candidate for suicide; the most depressed human being I have ever met, and I didn’t think it was an act.” Becker duly conveyed that impression to President Ford. Whatever Nixon’s mood when he met with Becker, less than three weeks later he signed a contract for a two-million-dollar advance for his forthcoming memoirs. 
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- Highlight on Page 563 | Loc. 12554-63  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:25 PM

Becker brought back an agreement on the Nixon records subsequently known as the Nixon-Sampson Agreement, named after the Administrator of the General Services Administration, and announced the same day as the pardon. The agreement required the former President to deposit his papers in the National Archives, yet gave him “all legal and equitable title” to those materials, as well as the right to control access and to withdraw any of them after three years. Nixon was also assured that his tape recordings would be destroyed upon his death or in 1984, whichever came first. Buchen later defended the agreement because he considered the recordings as “so offensive and contrary” to personal privacy. For his part, Becker claimed that Ford was not going to be a party to the “final cover-up” of Watergate by giving Nixon possession of his papers—a statement that somehow ignored the fact that giving him unequivocal control over their use was a complete victory for Nixon. Within weeks, Congress abrogated the Nixon-Sampson Agreement when it passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974, giving the National Archives custody of the Nixon records and the authority to determine their use. 
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- Highlight on Page 564 | Loc. 12581-82  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:27 PM

The White House received nearly 270,000 written communications following the pardon, almost 200,000 of which opposed Ford’s act. 
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- Highlight on Page 566 | Loc. 12617-19  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:30 PM

Charles Colson later claimed Nixon had promised him that he would not leave office “without wiping the slate clear” for everyone, and that there had been a deal for Ford to pardon all Administration defendants until the subsequent storm over the Nixon pardon. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 566 | Loc. 12620-23  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:31 PM

Nixon telephoned Ford about a week after the pardon, apologizing for the political embarrassment he had caused and expressing his gratitude. It was small comfort for Ford, however. The image of goodwill and honesty he had so assiduously fostered now dissipated. The President’s Gallup poll approval rating plunged in a month from 71 percent to 49 percent, and would eventually drop even more. Within two days, the White House reported that mail and telegrams ran five to one against Ford, an extraordinary admission. 
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- Highlight on Page 566 | Loc. 12627-31  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:33 PM

In a completely cynical vein, William Buckley’s National Review stated that conservatives were happy with the pardon, for, at last, it had exposed Ford to liberal criticism. The President, the magazine remarked, had “burned his bridges to the great organs of liberal opinion,” preparing the way for “the real battle” in American politics. Charles Colson, now a “born-again” Christian, delivered his own innuendoes, and denied the President any comfort in his struggle with conservatives, when he reiterated that Nixon never would have resigned unless he had reason to believe Ford would pardon him. 
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- Highlight on Page 567 | Loc. 12652-58  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:38 PM

What went wrong was that Ford failed to prepare the country for what he must have known he would do, certainly as early as the end of August. He apparently consulted with no political leaders; furthermore, his lack of desire—or his inability—to get that measure of contrition from Richard Nixon that the national mood may well have demanded was a serious miscalculation. In deciding to pardon Nixon, Ford relied on only a few advisers. Given his congressional experience, Ford must certainly have understood the virtue and indispensability of consultation. Yet he made no effort to touch the necessary political bases in this momentous case. Ford made a brave decision; he need not have made one amid such “splendid isolation.” 
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- Highlight on Page 568 | Loc. 12659-61  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:39 PM

Imagine if Ford had asked former congressional colleagues from across the political spectrum—Mansfield, Scott, Goldwater, Albert, Rhodes, and O’Neill—to stand with him as he delivered his announcement. 
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- Highlight on Page 569 | Loc. 12695-97  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:47 PM

On September 16 Congresswoman Bella Abzug (D–NY) introduced a resolution requesting that the President respond to ten questions relating to the pardon. A week earlier, she had written to Jaworski, contending that the pardon was unconstitutional and that he should proceed with an indictment. No reply was sent. 
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- Highlight on Page 570 | Loc. 12702-3  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:47 PM

The White House reply came on September 30 with dramatic suddenness: the President himself would appear to answer questions. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 570 | Loc. 12705-8  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:48 PM

October 17, Elizabeth Holtzman carried the burden of the questioning, mainly repeating the questions that Abzug and Conyers had stipulated in their resolutions. But she launched them in rapid-fire succession, hardly allowing Ford time to answer. Finally, he interrupted: ‘[T]here was no deal, period, under no circumstances.” 
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- Highlight on Page 573 | Loc. 12771-73  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:22 PM

The framers of the Constitution debated granting pardon only after conviction. They decided otherwise, in the belief that a pardon might be used as a means of obtaining cooperation from an accused individual. But Richard Nixon provided nothing toward resolving Watergate.35 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 575 | Loc. 12798-800  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:27 PM

In 1986, Richard Nixon, serenely confident that he had been “rehabilitated,” suddenly found Watergate alive and well, hauntingly compared to the Iran-Contra affair that erupted that fall. Watergate proved to be more than the “dim and distant curiosity” that one historian described. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 575 | Loc. 12805-12  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:29 PM

Donald Segretti pleaded guilty on October 1, 1973, to three counts of distributing illegal campaign literature and eventually served four months. Dwight Chapin was indicted on November 29, 1973, on four counts of perjury relating to his ties to Segretti. After a five-day trial, he was convicted on two counts on April 5, 1974, and sentenced to ten to thirty months in prison. John Dean pleaded guilty on October 19, 1973, to one count of obstructing justice, but the court delayed his sentence until August 2, 1974, to ensure his continuing cooperation. Judge John Sirica ordered a jail term of one to four years, but Dean served only four months, as Sirica ordered him released following the conviction of Nixon’s closest associates. Dean spent the entire time at Fort Holabird in Maryland, conveniently available foralmost daily questioning in preparation for the Mitchell-Haldeman-Ehrlichman trials, in which he appeared as the principal witness for the prosecution. 
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- Highlight on Page 575 | Loc. 12812-15  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:29 PM

Jeb Magruder offered a guilty plea in August 1973 and received a penal term of one to four years. He, too, appeared as a witness against his former associates and had his sentence reduced. Herbert Kalmbach pleaded guilty in February 1974 to several campaign violations, and in return for his testimony, all other charges were dropped. 
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- Highlight on Page 576 | Loc. 12818-20  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:30 PM

Charles Colson pleaded guilty to a charge of obstructing justice by scheming to defame and destroy the reputation of Daniel Ellsberg and thereby influence Ellsberg’s trial. Other charges for his role in obstructing justice in the Watergate burglary were dropped, and on June 3, 1974, Judge Gerhard Gesell sentenced Colson to one to three years. 
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- Highlight on Page 576 | Loc. 12823-25  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:31 PM

Ehrlichman was sentenced to concurrent prison terms of twenty months to five years. Liddy received a jail sentence to run simultaneously with the one he was then serving in connection with the Watergate burglary. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 576 | Loc. 12825-27  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:31 PM

The trial of Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson for various charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury began on October 1, 1974. After three months, the jury returned guilty verdicts against all but Parkinson. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 576 | Loc. 12828-30  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:32 PM

On February 21, 1975, Richard Nixon’s closest advisers—Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman—received sentences of 2½-8 years for their crimes. For many, the verdict represented a conviction of the former president in absentia. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 577 | Loc. 12851-54  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:35 PM

As President Ford continued the same policies, conservatives refused to submit to party loyalty and offer affection for an incumbent they had once admired. In May 1975 Ronald Reagan condemned Ford for a projected $51-million budget deficit. Conservative Digest reported a poll in June 1975 claiming that 71 percent of its readers thought Ford was doing a “poor” job, and 91 percent opposed his nomination for the 1976 election. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 578 | Loc. 12866-69  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:39 PM

Richard Nixon’s Republican opponents finally enjoyed a measure of revenge. Fifteen years after he left the presidency, Nixon found himself out of the mainstream of his own party. Periodically, he invoked conservative slogans and labels, but he remained a distrusted and embarrassing figure. The former President had the unique distinction of not appearing at the four presidential nominating conventions of his party that followed his leaving the White House. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 579 | Loc. 12890-91  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:42 PM

Three consecutive presidential defeats left the Democrats floundering in search of their identity as a party. Perhaps that identity might have been found nearly two decades earlier, had Watergate not diverted the party from the quest. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 580 | Loc. 12923-28  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:08 PM

The 1974 law regulated both contributions and expenditures. But in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the Supreme Court held that expenditure limits violated the First Amendment, except for those imposed on grants of public funds. The Court ruled nine years later that PAC expenditures, if made independently of the candidate, could not be constitutionally limited. The net effect of the judicial decisions was to stimulate the flow of special-interest money. Increased use of the media, involving legions of “creative and support” staff, as well as expanded roles for pollsters and political consultants, made campaigning more expensive, which made the demands for increased campaign funds circular and even more extravagant. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 581 | Loc. 12933  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:09 PM

Sociologist Robert Nisbet observed that “unethical” might well be the most difficult word to define in the American language. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 12951-56  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:12 PM

1978 law first required the Attorney General to investigate such allegations and then to report to a three-judge panel within ninety days on whether the charges were unfounded or whether the judges should appoint a special prosecutor. The judges defined the prosecutor’s jurisdiction. Once selected, the prosecutor had authority to perform the investigative and prosecutorial functions of Justice Department officials. Finally, the prosecutor could not be removed, except by impeachment or conviction of a crime, or by the Attorney General in the event of extraordinary impropriety or physical incapacity. The Attorney General must justify such action to the Senate Judiciary Committee; moveover, the prosecutor might appeal to the courts for review. The Ethics Act institutionalized the memory of the Saturday Night Massacre. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 583 | Loc. 12976-79  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:16 PM

Two years of wrangling produced a series of amendments to the Ethics Act in 1983. The changes renamed the Special Prosecutor an “Independent Counsel” (a less “inflammatory” title, one Senator suggested), gave the Attorney General more discretion in the decision to name a counsel, reduced the list of officials who might be investigated, provided for reimbursement of attorney’s fees for the subject of an investigation if no indictment were brought, and allowed the Attorney General to remove the counsel for “good cause.” 
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- Bookmark on Page 584 | Loc. 13003  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:20 PM


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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 584 | Loc. 13003-6  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:20 PM

Independent Counsel Whitney North Seymour complained that the Ethics in Government Act had too many loopholes and exemptions. Whatever its inadequacies, the law nevertheless remained imperative, he said, because there was “too much loose money and too little concern in Washington about ethics in government.” Seymour struck particularly at the Reagan Administration’s failure to instill an ethical sense throughout the government. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 585 | Loc. 13020-26  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:33 PM

The Supreme Court put its imprimatur on the independent-counsel statute in a surprisingly firm and broad decision. Reversing the appellate court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist led the Court in rebuffing the Administration. The Justices found no violation of separation-of-powers doctrine. The Court held that the Ethics Act in no way inhibited the President from performing his constitutionally assigned duties. Further, unlike the lower court, Rehnquist rejected any notion that the law constituted “Congressional usurpation” of executive functions. In a lone dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia bitingly referred to “our former constitutional system,” as he lamented the Court’s refusal to uphold what he believed to be a proper and absolute scheme of separation of powers. 
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- Highlight on Page 587 | Loc. 13076-79  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:43 PM

Helms dismissed Nixon’s lament as hypocritical and misguided, for he had “no doubt that the whole Watergate business fueled” the CIA’s difficulty with Congress. Nixon’s attempt to entangle the CIA in Watergate, Helms contended, had been “the battering ram” for the subsequent congressional inquiry. 
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- Highlight on Page 588 | Loc. 13094-101  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:49 PM

Executive orders are subject to new executive orders, however; relations between the CIA and the Attorney General are subject to the compatibility of their interests; and congressional oversight is dependent, first, on what information the CIA or the President chooses to provide, and second, on the extent of Congress’s own vigilance and interest. President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333 of December 4, 1981, substantially weakened Carter’s 1978 directives and restored a large measure of discretion to CIA activities. (That order also upset the Levi guidelines on the FBI and, in general, “unleashed” the intelligence agencies, as the President noted.) The Iran-Contra affair in 1986–87 demonstrated that the CIA and the Administration had acted without congressional consultation and hence lacked that degree of consent that might have provided some cover of legitimacy to what clearly was a dubious enterprise. The result was predictable; renewed demands to force full CIA disclosure of its activities were followed by expressions of concern that the CIA not be inhibited or compromised in its activities. 
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- Highlight on Page 588 | Loc. 13108-12  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:51 PM

The charges leveled against President Nixon’s misuse of executive agencies touched developing concerns for the right of privacy. Interest in the problem erupted in the 1960s, partly in response to a concern over the government’s increasing surveillance of the civil rights movement and of opponents of the Vietnam war, and partly in recognition that sophisticated new technology-including computers and the establishment of centralized computer data banks—threatened freedom of private activities and information. 
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- Highlight on Page 589 | Loc. 13122-26  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:53 PM

The result was the Privacy Act of 1974, passed four months after Nixon resigned. The new law permitted individuals to see information in their federal agency files and to correct or amend the information. Agencies were prohibited from making files available to other agencies without permission. They also could not maintain records describing a person’s exercise of First Amendment rights unless the action fell within the scope of official law-enforcement activities—a loophole that specifically exempted the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, and other agencies from the law. 
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- Highlight on Page 589 | Loc. 13127-30  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:54 PM

Nowhere was the privacy issue more sensitive than with regard to tax information. Revelations that Nixon and his advisers had used IRS data sensationalized the White House’s war against its “enemies.” John Caulfield’s testimony to the Ervin Committee in 1973, and Nixon’s well-known searches for a politically pliable IRS Commissioner, made prophets of the Nixon Administration’s critics. 
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- Highlight on Page 590 | Loc. 13135-39  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:55 PM

Congress apparently was not content to leave compliance entirely to presidential and IRS discretion. As part of the Tax Reform Act of 1976, it provided that presidential requests for information must specify the reason for any request and that the President must submit a quarterly report to the Joint Congressional Committee on Taxation, describing the returns requested and the reasons for seeking them. Two years later, Congress passed the Financial Privacy Act of 1978, a law designed to bar government agencies from gaining bank records without knowledge of the person under investigation, except in rare circumstances. 
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- Highlight on Page 591 | Loc. 13161-63  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:59 PM

That enterprise, combined with the Watergate environment, fostered substantial additions to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) of 1966, the landmark law that provided an opportunity to scrutinize behind-the-scenes activity in the executive branch (if not the legislative). 
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- Highlight on Page 591 | Loc. 13169-72  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:01 PM

When the Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that the original law did not give courts the right to review bureaucratic decisions, the Watergate context inspired a congressional movement to revise the law. The House passed new provisions in March 1974, followed by Senate action in May. A conference version finally emerged in November. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 592 | Loc. 13194-96  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:05 PM

The PRMPA specifically addressed itself to the problem of Watergate. It noted that the Archives regulations should recognize “the need to provide the public with the full truth, at the earliest reasonable date, of the abuses of governmental power popularly identified under the generic term ‘Watergate.’” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 593 | Loc. 13200-13203  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:05 PM

Furthermore, the Justices noted that “the expectation of the confidentiality of executive communications … has always been limited and subject to erosion” after a president left office. Nixon must yield, the Court concluded, to the legitimate and desirable congressional purpose of “preserving the materials and maintaining access to them for lawful governmental and historical purposes.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 593 | Loc. 13203-4  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:06 PM

In a concurring opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that Nixon’s behavior properly placed him in a different class from all other presidents; that behavior, he said, justified the 1974 law that “implicitly condemns [Nixon] as an unreliable custodian of his papers.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 593 | Loc. 13210-13  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:06 PM

Following the mandate of the 1974 law regarding Watergate, the National Archives processed more than two million Watergate documents. By 1986, the Archives had, pursuant to the PRMPA, promulgated five sets of regulations governing the use of the documents, each challenged by Nixon or his aides, or by Congress, or by the courts. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 593 | Loc. 13220-22  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:08 PM

Just prior to leaving office, however, Reagan revealed his self-concern by issuing an executive order that ignored Silberman’s ruling and passed executive privilege on to former presidents. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 594 | Loc. 13222-26  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:08 PM

Despite the controversy over executive privilege, the National Archives opened the Nixon Papers in 1987, first with assorted materials pertaining to policy matters, and then with successive releases of the Watergate “Special Files.” The 1974 law had provided that the Archives do so “at the earliest reasonable date.” By 1978, the archivists had complied with that dictate, but Nixon’s resistance prevented public access to these files for nearly a decade. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 594 | Loc. 13229-31  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:09 PM

Richard Nixon always realized the stakes, knowing that the documentary and audiotaped record would shape history’s final judgments of him and his presidency. Perhaps, too, he knew the Orwellian dictum: “To control the present is to control the past. To control the past is to control the future.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 594 | Loc. 13240-45  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:11 PM

The Budget and Impoundment Act of 1974 represented an attempt of Congress to assert its rightful powers, and at the same time to respond to perceived excesses of the Nixon Administration. The law reflected in equal measures the Democrats’ concern that Nixon had excessively impounded appropriated funds, especially as an instrument of his own policy preferences, and the concerns of Republicans to reform the budget process in order to get spending under control, and so lessen the need for impoundment. The act established budget committees in both houses, a Congressional Budget Office with experts to analyze the budget, and authority to enact a budget resolution to guide, yet not bind, the appropriations process. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 596 | Loc. 13278-82  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:16 PM

“We won the war in Vietnam, but lost the peace. All that we had achieved in twelve years of fighting was thrown away in a spasm of congressional irresponsibility,” the former President wrote, as he linked Watergate and the collapse of South Vietnam. “As a matter of fact, the Congress lost it,” he said in a television interview, implying that Congress proved to be irresponsible in using the power newly gained at executive expense. On occasion, too, Nixon turned the argument around, blaming his preoccupation with the war for the negligence that allowed Watergate to happen. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 596 | Loc. 13283-88  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:17 PM

For Henry Kissinger, the historical stakes were equally great, for as a result of Watergate, he said, “I, a foreign-born American, wound up in the extraordinary position of holding together our foreign policy and reassuring our public.” Even some Kissinger critics acknowledged that he was “nearly the sole figure who legitimized or redeemed the government.” But Kissinger offered his own maze of contradictions, as he admitted that Nixon resented his Nobel Prize and the adulation of the media for his role in the peace process. “Had Watergate not soon overwhelmed [Nixon], I doubt whether I could have maintained my position in his Administration,” Kissinger wrote, taking a position opposite to his usual disdain toward Watergate. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 597 | Loc. 13304-6  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:20 PM

The Nixon-Kissinger search for a scapegoat in the loss of Vietnam had a sinister resemblance to the Nazi revisionism that blamed Germany’s defeat in 1918 on a “stab in the back” delivered by domestic subversives. 

July

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Building Wireless Sensor Networks: with ZigBee, XBee, Arduino, and Processing (Robert Faludi)
- Bookmark Loc. 1658  | Added on Tuesday, July 22, 2014, 12:04 AM


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Building Wireless Sensor Networks: with ZigBee, XBee, Arduino, and Processing (Robert Faludi)
- Highlight Loc. 1960-63  | Added on Wednesday, July 23, 2014, 10:45 AM

ATIC Configures the digital I/O pins to monitor for changes in state, using a binary value to set for each pin. The pin(s) would also need to be configured as digital inputs. When change-detection is enabled, a sample is sent immediately any time a pin shifts from low to high or vice versa. This is useful if you are monitoring a switch, and care about triggering a transmission only when a button is pressed or released. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 315-17  | Added on Thursday, July 31, 2014, 10:04 AM

“ There is quite a deal of hysteria in the country about German spies. If you will kindly box up and send me from one to a dozen I will pay you very handsomely for your trouble. We are looking for them constantly, but it is a little difficult to shoot them until they have been found.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 376-80  | Added on Thursday, July 31, 2014, 10:10 AM

As the Senate’s alarm at the Red threat increased, the fighting spirit mustered for the world war festered. Nine million American workers in war industries were being demobilized. They found new jobs scarce. The cost of living had nearly doubled since the start of the war. As four million American soldiers started coming home, four million American workers went out on strike. The United States never had seen such confrontations between workers and bosses. The forces of law and order felt the Reds were behind it all.