Nixon's Secret (93 page)

•     Finally, Dean’s claim that any conflicts between his testimony and that of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell were forever fully and finally resolved when they were convicted on all counts in the Watergate cover-up trial is hardly definitive. A book due out next spring by Regnery History will show how those verdicts were a result of highly improper collusion between judges and prosecutors.

One thing is for sure: Watergate’s saga will continue to unfold.

IV. The “Real” Nixon Defense

What, then, would be the “real” Nixon defense, in light of everything that we know today?

Briefly:

•     Neither Nixon, Haldeman, nor Ehrlichman knew of the break-in in advance (admitted by Dean).

•     But Dean did, since he had not only recruited Liddy for the position, but had attended the two meetings in Mitchell’s attorney general’s office where they were described.

•     Contrary to Dean’s assertions that he told Haldeman after the second of those meetings and told Ehrlichman of his own prior involvement right after his walk in the park with Liddy, Dean said nothing to his White House superiors. They orchestrated Mitchell’s rapid resignation after the break-in arrests; they would have moved Dean out even faster had they realized he also was at risk of prosecution—and they would never have assigned him lead role in protecting White House interests in the aftermath of the break-in arrests.

•     Dean sought that role and, instead of protecting the president’s interests as his counsel, essentially cast his lot with those at CRP who were already effectuating a cover-up.

•     Every day, all over America, lawyers defend clients accused of criminal wrongdoing without they themselves committing criminal acts. It simply never occurred to the president, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman that Dean was not acting in a perfectly legal capacity as their counsel.

•     Of course they complimented Dean’s work, on tape and to his face, but he never revealed the extent of his own criminal acts. He was working hard to contain the problem at CRP; they didn’t inquire further as to specifics.

•     As the go-between conveying information back and forth between people at CRP and the White House, Dean was in an ideal position to protect his own risk of prosecution. The one thing he could not allow was any sort of written report or disclosure of what really had happened, since it would reveal his own criminal acts, beginning with rehearsing Magruder for his perjured grand jury, but also including improperly sharing prosecutorial information with defense counsel and hiding (and then destroying) materials taken from Hunt’s safe.

•     When Dean informed the president of Hunt’s blackmail demands, Nixon’s response, announced later that same day (as well as the following day when Mitchell was present), was to inform his staff that they would have to testify without claim of executive privilege. Dean was to prepare the report that would be the basis for Nixon’s public announcement to this effect.

•     Instead, as the cover-up collapsed (as it should have), Dean was the first to switch sides, as well as his story, accusing his former superior of having condoned the very illegal acts that he had hidden from them. It is no wonder, when he became their principal accuser, that they felt he had been duplicitous and had to be destroyed.

•     The essence of the cover-up story remains the dramatic differences in recollections between Dean on the one side and Haldeman and Ehrlichman on the other. There are no tapes of their many meetings. But one of the reasons the tapes tend to show that Nixon was kept largely in the dark about the true state of affairs may well be because so were Haldeman and Ehrlichman.

•     The cover-up jury obviously believed Dean, but the question remains: did these defendants receive a fair trial—or was there judicial and prosecutorial collusion designed to improperly obtain those verdicts?

V. Remembering the Real John Dean

Dean had already encountered difficulties prior to his Watergate fame. His academic record was undistinguished, and he was fired for “unethical conduct” from his first and only stint in private practice (a boutique communications firm) after only six months.

As sometime happens in politics, he then experienced a meteoric rise in political positions, ending up as counsel to President Nixon in 1970.

It was in that position that he has stood accused of having orchestrated a criminal cover-up of those responsible for authorizing and directing the break-in into offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Office building in June 1972.

When the cover-up collapsed, as it should have, those who were the most intimately involved—and therefore at risk—were the first to run to federal prosecutors to seek immunity for their testimony against their former colleagues. Dean was the clear winner in this race, but held out for full immunity. Prosecutors concluded otherwise and insisted that his own role (as they then perceived it) was such that it required that he be punished too.

In his continuing pursuit of immunity, Dean’s story began to change. Over the course of a dozen contacts with prosecutors by him or his lawyer during April 1973, Dean went from offering evidence about those responsible for the original break-in to asserting that there had been a criminal cover-up and that it had been directed by his White House superiors. The pivot point is well documented in prosecution files, as well as at page 253 in Dean’s own book,
Blind Ambition
. It occurs when Charles Shaffer, his criminal defense lawyer, urges him to boost the cover-up to make himself indispensable, since the prosecutors were inclined to bring criminal charges against him for his own involvement with regard to the break-in itself:

Dean: Goddammit, Charlie. I don’t want to meet with those bastards.

Shaffer: Listen, John, we don’t have any choice. The cat’s out of the bag. We’ve got to pump them full of the cover up now. I’ve got to up the ante with them to have a shot at immunity. That’s your only chance not to be the fall guy.

Dean: I think your strategy of getting immunity is more important than ever now.

But to hear him retell it in his current book, he never wanted immunity; he only wanted to tell the truth. It was just that his lawyer was demanding immunity in exchange for his testimony. How peculiar! The fact remains that when the prosecutors took Dean at his word and scheduled his grand jury appearance for May 5, 1973, without immunity, he stiffed them and took the proposed immunity grant from the Ervin Committee instead.

There is a reason that Archibald Cox, the original Special Prosecutor, had no respect for Dean. As portrayed by Richard Ben-Veniste and George Frampton at page 107 of their book,
Stonewall, The Real Story of the Watergate Prosecution
:

Archie Cox was particularly firm in his personal determination that Dean be prosecuted no matter what. Dean became an idée fixe for Cox. True, as a witness Dean would cement otherwise weak cases against Haldeman and Ehrlichman. But Cox preferred, if forced to choose, to take the relatively sure shot at Dean rather than the long shot against Dean’s superiors. When the Saturday Night Massacre loomed close, it might have been propitious for Cox to make a deal with Dean and secure Dean’s testimony against President Nixon as another weapon to hold the President off. Even then, Cox’s determination did not waiver. With all the uncertainties of Watergate that swirled around him—the weakness of evidence against Nixon’s top aides without Dean’s testimony, the possibility of Presidential culpability, the problems of obtaining White House evidence and of dealing with “national security”—Cox saw Dean’s guilt as the one enduring constant. During a particularly difficult period Archie remarked to us, “If everything else goes down the drain the one thing I can cling to is Dean’s venality.”

VI. An Alternative Take

Alternatively, one could have a more nuanced view. Dean’s book is going to be a fact of life and is not going to go away. Perhaps, like Peter Morgan’s
Frost/Nixon
(which was equally erroneous in many respects), many will feel that Nixon comes across as a rather sympathetic figure. After all, Dean asserts:

•     Nixon and his White House staff knew nothing in advance (albeit Dean skillfully excludes his own knowledge).

•     Haldeman did not get any of the fruits of the one working wiretap.

•     Neither Mitchell nor Magruder explicitly directed Liddy’s second break-in.

•     Magruder’s assertion that Mitchell approved Liddy’s campaign intelligence plan on March 30, 1972, surfaces very late in the game.

•     Ehrlichman really did advocate full disclosure from the outset.

•     The 18 ½-minute gap is “historically insignificant,” and the smoking gun instruction was to protect the identities of Democrat donors and had nothing to do with Watergate.

•     Nixon really didn’t appreciate the extent of the cover-up until Dean laid it out for him on March 21, 1973.

Maybe we just say that it is nice to have all of the above confirmed by Dean himself—and point out that:

•     His resignation was the result of a mistaken interpretation of the smoking gun.

•     His alleged abuses of power seem trivial in light of Obama’s.

•     His accomplishments, both foreign and domestic, can stack up against any president.

•     As the world burns, it might be beneficial to have Nixon’s expertise in foreign affairs.

•     Then quote Ben Bradlee’s unpublished comment of May 16, 1990:

I mean the crime itself was really not a great deal. Had it not been for the Nixon resignation, it would really be a blip in history. The Iran Contra hearing was a much more significant violation of the democratic ethic than anything in Watergate. Watergate was really dirty tricks and arrogance and people thinking they were all-powerful and could ride roughshod over civil liberties, but it wasn’t dealing in foreign arms and buying foreign nations and shit like that.
4

NOTES

1
.     All page references are to the advance uncorrected proof copy of Dean’s book.

2
.     Dean’s explanation is still incomplete. The effort was to prevent FBI interviews of apparent campaign contributions by Ken Dahlberg and Manuel Ogarrio, who were really acting as conduits for contributions from prominent Democrats, including Dwayne Andreas and a group of Texas oil and gas producers.

3
.     In fact, there is considerable legal conflict over the role of intent in crimes such as conspiracy and obstruction, particularly the difference between general and specific intent. This was the point that Nixon was attempting to make in his 1977 interviews with David Frost (the actual interviews, not the later play by Peter Morgan or its subsequent movie version).

4
.     Jeff Himmelman.
Yours in Truth, a Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee
, p. 212.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Gary.
Richard Nixon: The Man Behind the Mask.
Boston: Western Islands, 1971.

Ambrose, Stephen E.
Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913
–1962. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

Ambrose, Stephen E.
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Ambrose, Stephen E.
Nixon: Ruin and Recovery 1973–1990
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991.

Anson, Robert Sam.
Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Baker, Russ.
Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years.
New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009.

Bass, Jack, and Marilyn W. Thompson.
Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond.
New York: Public Affairs, 2005.

Bell, Jack.
Mr. Conservative: Barry Goldwater.
New York: Doubleday, 1962.

Black, Conrad.
A Life in Full: Richard M. Nixon.
New York: Public Affairs, 2007.

Brodie, Fawn E.
Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.

Brownell, Herbert, with John P. Burke.
Advising Ike: The Memoirs of Attorney General Herbert Brownell.
Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1993.

Bryant, Nick.
The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black
Equality.
New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Butz, March.
Yorba Linda: Its History.
California: Taylor Publishing Company, 1970.

Cannon, Lou.
Reagan.
Toronto: General Publishing, 1982.

Cannon, Lou.
Ronnie & Jesse:
A Political Odyssey.
New York: Doubleday, 1969.

Caulfield, John.
Caulfield, Shield #911-NYPD.
Indiana: iUniverse, Inc. and The Shield #911-NYPD Foundation, 2008.

Chester, Lewis, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page.
An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968.
New York: Viking Press, 1969.

Cohodas, Nadine.
Strom Thurmond & the Politics of Southern Change.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973.

Colodny, Len, and Robert Gettlin.
Silent Coup: The Removal of a President.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

Costello, William.
The Facts About Nixon: An Unauthorized Biography.
New York: Viking Press, 1960.

Crowley, Monica.
Nixon Off The Record: His Candid Commentary on People and Politics.
New York: Random House, 1996.

Daller, Robert.
Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power
New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

De Toledano, Ralph.
Nixon.
New York: Henry Holt, 1956.

Dean, John.
Blind Ambition: The White House Years.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.

Dean, John W.
The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment that Redefined the Supreme Court.
New York: The Free Press, 2001.