The Great Shark Hunt Part 19

K: Yeah. Well, and when we talked you knew what I was about to do, you know, to go out and get the dough for this purpose; it was humanitarian.

E: It was a defense fund.

K:. . . to support the family. Now the thing that was disquieting and this thing with O'Brien was that he said that there is a ma.s.sive campaign evidently under way to indict all the lawyers including you and me, and I was a little shocked and I guess what I need to get from you, John, is a.s.surance that this is not true.

E: Well, I don't know of any attempt to target you at all. My hunch is that they're trying to get at me, they're trying to corroborate. See what they said to Dean is that he gets no consideration from them unless they can corroborate Haldeman and my liability.

K: G.o.d, if I can just make it plain that it was humanitarian and nothing else.

E: Yeah, and the point that I undoubtedly never expressed to you that I continually operated on the basis of Dean's representation to me.

K: Yep. It was not improper.

E: Right.

K: And there was nothing illegal about it E: See, he's the house lawyer.

K: Yep, exactly and I just couldn't believe that you and Bob and the President, just too good friends to ever put me in the position I would be putting my family on the line.

K: And it's just unbelievable, unthinkable. Now shall I just -- I'll just if I'm asked by Silver I'll just lay it out just exactly that way.

E: Yeah, I wouldn't haul the President into it if you can help it.

K: Oh, no, I will not.

E: But I think the point that which I will make in the future if I'm given the chance that you were not under our control in any sort of a slavery sense but that we had agreed that you would not be at the beck and call of the committee.

K: And, of course, too, that I acted only on orders and, you know, on direction and if this is something that you felt sufficiently important and that you were a.s.sured it was altogether proper, then I would take it on because I always do it and always have. And you and Bob and the President know that.

E: Yeah, well, as far as propriety is concerned I think we both were relying entirely on Dean.

K: Yep.

E: I made no independent judgment.

K: Yep. Yep.

E: And I'm sure Bob didn't either.

K: Nope and I'm just, I just have the feeling, John, that I don't know if this is a weak reed, is it?

E: Who, Dean?

K: No, I mean are they still going to say well Herb you should have known.

E: I don't know how you could have. You didn't make any inquiries.

K: Never. And the only inquiries I made, John, was to you after I talked to John Dean.

E: And you found that I didn't know just a whole h.e.l.luva lot.

K: You said this is something I have to do and. . .

E: Yeah, and the reason that I said that, as you know, was not from any personal inquiry but was on the basis of what had been represented to me.

K: Yeah, and then on -- to provide the defense fund and to take care of the families of these fellas who were then. . .

E: Indigent.

K: Not then been found guilty or not guilty.

E: And the point being here without attempting to induce them to do a d.a.m.n thing.

K: Absolutely not and that was never, that was exactly right.

E: OK.

K: Now, can I get in to see you tomorrow before I go in there at two?

E: If you want to. They'll ask you.

K: Will they?

E: Yep.

K: Well, maybe I shouldn't.

E: They'll ask you to whom you've spoken about your testimony and I would appreciate it if you would say you've talked to me in California because at that time I was investigating this thing for the President.

K: And not now?

E: Well, I wouldn't ask you to lie.

K: No, I know.

E: But the point is. . .

K: But the testimony was in California.

E: The point is. Well, no, your recollection of facts and so forth.

K: Yes, I agree.

E: See, I don't think we were ever seen together out there but at some point I'm going to have to say that I talked to O'Brien and Dean and Magruder and Mitch.e.l.l and you and a whole lot of people about this case.

K: Yeah.

E: And so it would be consistent.

K: Do you feel, John, that calling it straight shot here, do you feel a.s.sured as you did when we were out there that there's no culpability here?

E: Yes.

K: And nothing to worry about?

E: And Herb, from everything I hear they're not after you.

K: Yes, sir.

E: From everything I hear.

K: Barbara, you know.

E: They're out to get me and they're out to get Bob.

K: My G.o.d. All right, well, John, it'll be absolutely clear that there was nothing looking towards any cover-up or anything. It was strictly for the humanitarian and I just want. . . when I talked to you I just wanted you to advise me that it was all right on that basis.

E: On that basis.

K: To go forward.

E: That it was necessary. . .

K: And that'll be precisely the way it is.

E: Yeah, OK. Thanks, Herb. Bye.

5:00 PM Monday, July 30th Hearing Room Old Senate Office Building * Haldeman opening statement -- Terrible heat from TV lights turned back towards press and gallery. Barking (sounds of dog kennel) in press room as Haldeman comes on. Not on Nat TV, but audible in hallway.

"Nor did I ever suggest. . . [The Super Eagle Scout wounded tone of voice-- ] I had full confidence in Dean as did the President at that time. . ."

Haldeman's 1951 burr-cut seems as out of place -- even weird -- in this room as a bearded Senator would have seemed in 1951. Or a n.i.g.g.e.r in Beta Theta Phi fraternity in the late 1940s.

Haldeman's head on camera looks like he got bashed on the head with a rake.

Total tedium sets in as Haldeman statement drones on. . . his story is totally different than Dean's on crucial points. . . definite perjury here. . . which one lying?

"If the recent speech [August 15th] does not produce the results the President wants, he will then do what he has already come to doing. He will use all the awe-inspiring resources of his office to 'come out swinging with both fists.' Divisive will be a mild way of describing the predictable results."

-- Joe Alsop, Was.h.i.+ngton Post, Was.h.i.+ngton Post, 8/17/73 8/17/73 "The clear warning: Mr. Nixon will not do any more to clear himself of the taints of Watergate because he cannot: If the Democrats do not allow him to get back on the job of President, but continue what one high presidential aide called the 'vendetta' against him, his next move will be full retaliation."

-- Evans & Novak, Was.h.i.+ngton Past, Was.h.i.+ngton Past, 8/17/73 8/17/73 "'When I am attacked,' Richard Nixon once remarked to this writer, 'it is my instinct to strike back.' The President is now clearly in a mood to obey his instinct. . . So on Wednesday, July 18th, at a White House meeting, it was agreed unanimously that the tapes should not be released. This decision, to use the sports cliches to which the President is addicted, meant an entirely new ball game, requiring a new game plan. The new game plan calls for a strategy of striking back, in accord with the presidential instincts, rather than a policy of attempted accommodation. . ."

-- Stewart Alsop, Newsweek, Newsweek, 8/6/73 8/6/73 Cazart! It is hard to miss the message in those three shots. . . even out here in Woody Creek, at a distance of 2000 miles from the source, a joint-statement, as it were, from Evans & Novak and both Alsop brothers. .h.i.ts the nerves like a blast of summer lightning across the mountains. Especially when you read them all in the same afternoon, while sifting through the mail-heap that piled up in my box, for three weeks, while I was wasting all that time back in Was.h.i.+ngton, once again, trying to get a grip on the thing.

Crouse had warned me, by phone, about the hazards of coming east. "I know you won't believe this," he said, "so you might as well just get on a plane and find out for yourself -- but the weird truth is that Was.h.i.+ngton is the only place in the country where the Watergate story seems dull. dull. I can sit up here in Boston and get totally locked into it, on the tube, but when I go down there to that G.o.dd.a.m.n Hearing Room I get so bored and depressed I can't think." I can sit up here in Boston and get totally locked into it, on the tube, but when I go down there to that G.o.dd.a.m.n Hearing Room I get so bored and depressed I can't think."

Now, after almost a month in that treacherous swamp of a town, I understand what Crouse was trying to tell me. After a day or so in the hearing room, hunkered down at a press table in the sweaty glare of those blinding TV lights, I discovered a TV set in the bar of the Capitol Hill Hotel just across the street from the Old Senate Office Building, about a three-minute sprint from the Hearing Room itself. . . so I could watch the action on TV, sipping a Carlsberg until something looked about to happen, then dash across the street and up the stairs to the Hearing Room to see whatever it was that seemed interesting.

After three or four days of this scam, however, I realized that there was really no point in going to the Hearing Room at all. Every time I came speeding down the hall and across the crowded floor of the high-domed, white-marble rotunda where a cordon of cops kept hundreds of waiting spectators penned up behind velvet ropes, I felt guilty. . . Here was some ill-dressed geek with a bottle of Carlsberg in his hand, waving a press pa.s.s and running right through a whole army of cops, then through the tall oak doors and into a front row seat just behind the witness chair -- while this mob of poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who'd been waiting since early morning, in some cases, for a seat to open up in the SRO gallery.

After a few more days of this madness, I closed up the National Affairs Desk and went back home to brood.

PART III.

To the Mattresses. . . Nixon Faces History, and to h.e.l.l with The Was.h.i.+ngton Post. . . The Hazy Emergence of a New and Cheaper Strategy. . . John Wilson Draws 'The Line'. . . Strange Troika & a Balance of Terror. . . McGovern Was Right "When democracy granted democratic methods to us in times of opposition, this was bound to happen in a democratic system. However, we National Socialists never a.s.serted that we represented a democratic point of view, but we have declared openly that we used the democratic methods only in order to gain power and that, after a.s.suming the power, we would deny to our adversaries without any consideration the means which were granted to us in times of our opposition."

-- Josef Goebbels What will Nixon do now? That is the question that has every Wizard in Was.h.i.+ngton hanging by his or her fingernails -- from the bar of the National Press Club to the redwood sauna in the Senate Gymnasium to the hundreds of high-powered c.o.c.ktail parties in suburbs like Bethesda, MacLean, Arlington, Cabin John and especially in the leafy white ghetto of the District's Northwest quadrant. You can wander into Nathan's tavern at the corner of M Street & Wisconsin in Georgetown and get an argument about "Nixon's strategy" without even mentioning the subject. All you have to do is stand at the bar, order a Ba.s.s Ale, and look interested: The ha.s.sle will take care of itself; the very air in Was.h.i.+ngton is electric with the vast implications of "Watergate."

Thousands of big-money jobs depend on what Nixon does next; on what Archibald c.o.x has in mind; on whether "Uncle Sam's" TV hearings will resume full-bore after Labor Day, or be either telescoped or terminated like Nixon says they should be.

The smart money says the "Watergate Hearings," as such, are effectively over -- not only because Nixon is preparing to mount a popular crusade against them, but because every elected politician in Was.h.i.+ngton is afraid of what the Ervin committee has already scheduled for the "third phase" of the hearings.

Phase Two, as originally planned, would focus on "dirty tricks" -- a colorful, shocking and essentially minor area of inquiry, but one with plenty of action and a guaranteed audience appeal. A long and serious look at the "dirty tricks" aspect of national campaigning would be a death-blow to the daily soap-opera syndrome that apparently grips most of the nation's housewives. The cast of characters, and the twisted tales they could tell, would shame every soap-opera scriptwriter in America.

Phase Three/Campaign Financing is the one both the White House and the Senate would prefer to avoid -- and, given this mutual distaste for exposing the public to the realities of Campaign Financing, this is the phase of the Watergate Hearings most likely to be cut from the schedule. "Jesus Christ," said one Ervin committee investigator, "we'll have Fortune's 500 in that chair, and every one of those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds will take at least one Congressman or Senator down with him."

At the end of Phase One -- the facts & realities of the Watergate affair itself -- the seven Senators on the Ervin committee took an informal vote among themselves, before adjourning to a birthday party for Senator Herman Talmadge, and the tally was 4-3 against against resuming the hearings in their current format. Talmadge cast the deciding vote, joining the three Republicans -- Gurney, Baker and Weicker -- in voting to wrap the hearings up as soon as possible. Their reasons were the same ones Nixon gave in his long-awaited TV speech on August 15th, when he said the time had come to end this Daily b.u.mmer and get back to "The business of the people." resuming the hearings in their current format. Talmadge cast the deciding vote, joining the three Republicans -- Gurney, Baker and Weicker -- in voting to wrap the hearings up as soon as possible. Their reasons were the same ones Nixon gave in his long-awaited TV speech on August 15th, when he said the time had come to end this Daily b.u.mmer and get back to "The business of the people."

Watching Nixon's speech in hazy color on the Owl Farm tube with New York Mayor John Lindsay, Wisconsin Congressman Les Aspin and former Bobby Kennedy speechwriter Adam Wolinsky, I half expected to hear that fine old Calvin Coolidge quote: "The business of America is business."

And it only occurred to me later that Nixon wouldn't have dared to use that one, because no president since Hubert Hoover has been forced to explain away the kind of root-structural damage to the national economy that Nixon is trying to explain today. And Hoover at least had the excuse that he "inherited his problems" from somebody else -- which Nixon can't claim, because he is now in his fifth fifth year as president, and when he goes on TV to explain himself he is facing an audience of 50 to 60 million who can't afford steaks or even hamburger in the supermarkets, who can't buy gasoline for their cars, who are paying 15 and 20% interest rates for bank loans, and who are being told now that there may not be enough fuel oil to heat their homes through the coming winter. year as president, and when he goes on TV to explain himself he is facing an audience of 50 to 60 million who can't afford steaks or even hamburger in the supermarkets, who can't buy gasoline for their cars, who are paying 15 and 20% interest rates for bank loans, and who are being told now that there may not be enough fuel oil to heat their homes through the coming winter.

This is not the ideal audience for a second-term president, fresh from a landslide victory, to confront with 29 minutes of lame gibberish about mean nit-pickers in Congress, the good ole American way, and Let's Get on with Business.

Indeed. That's the first thing Richard Nixon and I have ever agreed on, politically -- and what we are dealing with now is no longer hard ideology, but a matter of simple competence. What we are looking at on all our TV sets is a man who finally, after 24 years of frenzied effort, became the President of the United States with a personal salary of $200,000 a year and an unlimited expense account including a fleet of private helicopters, jetliners, armored cars, personal mansions and estates on both coasts and control over a budget beyond the wildest dreams of King Midas. . . and all the dumb b.a.s.t.a.r.d can show us, after five years of total freedom to do anything he wants with all this power, is a shattered national economy, disastrous defeat in a war he could have ended four years ago on far better terms than he finally came around to, and a hand-picked personal staff put together through five years of screening, whose collective criminal record will blow the minds of high-school American History students for the next 100 years. Nixon's hand-picked Vice President is about to be indicted for Extortion and Bribery; his former campaign manager and his former Secretary of Commerce & personal fund-raiser have already been indicted for Perjury, two of his ranking campaign managers have already pleaded guilty to Obstruction of Justice, the White House counsel is headed for prison on more felony counts than I have room to list here, and before the trials are finished. . .

Sen. Talmadge: "Now, if the President could authorize a covert break-in and you do not know exactly where that power would be limited, you do not think it could include murder, do you?" John Ehrlichman: "I do not know where the line is, Senator."

With the first phase of the Watergate hearings more or less ended, one of the few things now unmistakably clear, as it were, is that n.o.body in Nixon's White House was willing to "draw the line" anywhere short of re-electing the President in 1972. Even John Mitch.e.l.l -- whose reputation as a super-shrewd lawyer ran afoul of the Peter Principle just as soon as he became Nixon's first Attorney General -- lost his temper in an exchange with Sen. Talmadge at the Watergate hearings and said, with the whole world watching, that he considered the re-election of Richard Nixon in '72 "so important" that it out-weighed all other considerations.

It was a cla.s.sic affirmation of the "attorney-client relations.h.i.+p" -- or at least a warped mixture of that and the relations.h.i.+p between an ad agency executive and a client with a product to sell -- but when Mitch.e.l.l uttered those lines in the hearing room, losing control of himself just long enough to fatally confuse "executive loyalty" with "executive privilege," it's fair to a.s.sume that he knew he was already doomed. . . He had already been indicted for perjury in the Vesco case, he was facing almost certain indictment by Archibald c.o.x, and previous testimony by John Dean had made it perfectly clear that Nixon was prepared to throw John Mitch.e.l.l to the wolves, to save his own a.s.s.

This ominous truth was quickly reinforced by the testimony of John Ehrlichman and Harry "Bob" Haldeman, whose back-to-back testimony told most of the other witnesses (and potential defendants) all they needed to know. By the time Haldeman had finished testifying -- under the direction of the same criminal lawyer who had earlier represented Ehrlichman -- it was clear that somebody in the White House had finally seen fit to "draw the line."

It was not quite the same line Mitch.e.l.l and Ehrlichman had refused to acknowledge on TV, but in the final a.n.a.lysis it will be far more critical to the fate of Richard Nixon's presidency. . . and, given Mitch.e.l.l's long personal relations.h.i.+p with Nixon, it is hard to believe he didn't understand his role in the "new strategy" well before he drove down from New York to Was.h.i.+ngton, by chauffeured limousine, for his gig in the witness chair.

The signs were all there. For one, it had been Haldeman and Ehrlichman -- with Nixon's tacit approval -- who had eased Mitch.e.l.l out of his "Number One" role at the White House. John Mitch.e.l.l, a millionaire Wall Street lawyer until he got into politics, was more responsible than any other single person for the long comeback that landed Nixon in the White House in 1968. It was Mitch.e.l.l who rescued Nixon from oblivion in the mid-Sixties when Nixon moved east to become a Wall Street lawyer himself -- after losing the presidency to John Kennedy in 1960 and then the Governors.h.i.+p of California to Pat Brown in '62, a humiliating defeat that ended with his "You won't have d.i.c.k Nixon to kick around anymore" outburst at the traditional loser's press conference.

The re-election of Mr. Nixon, followed so quickly by the Watergate revelations, has compelled the country to re-examine the reality of our electoral process. . .

"The unraveling of the whole White House tangle of involvement has come about largely by a series of fortuitous events, many of them unlikely in a different political context. Without these events, the cover-up might have continued indefinitely, even if a Democratic administration vigorously pursued the truth. . .

"In the wake of Watergate may come more honest and thorough campaign reform than in the aftermath of a successful presidential campaign which stood for such reform. I suspect that after viewing the abuses of the past, voters in the future will insist on full and open debate between the candidates and on frequent, no-holds-barred press conferences for all candidates, and especially the President.