Nixon, Ehrlichman & Haldeman on Watergate and John Dean

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One thing I've got to tell you, Mr. President, is we've pretty well negotiated that agreement with the government.

And yesterday, I had a discussion with all the other governors.

And they, I believe, have pretty well listened to that agreement.

So that's not what's going to happen.

So maybe it's pretty well set for the 18th.

It's what it is.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Try to give or take two or three weeks.

Try three days to give or take.

Okay.

Did you...

I told you that it's 30% first.

30% first.

But he wants to do it nicely.

Oh, have you ever been there?

Off the right, yeah.

It's a hole.

Is it worse than the other one?

No, he's a great one.

No, I'm a great guy.

I'm a great guy.

We just had a council here, and they're getting down to the heavy gulping now.

And they feel strongly that we should voluntarily go down for informal conferences if the U.S. attorney wants us.

And so we'll be doing that, I guess.

But you'll make the move yourself.

They have left an arrangement with the U.S. attorney that when and if he wants us, he will phone that, and we will just go down on our own.

Or he would not.

And we will probably not try to accelerate.

Well, we're going to try and get ready first.

Yeah, he said we should not accept it.

That was his first reply.

We'd probably do it in a neutral place rather than at their office.

Bush versus letting weeks go.

Because I suppose in school, people let everybody go.

They have to clean.

Yeah.

Of course, Reeds isn't his gun, Jesus Christ.

I don't know what Reeds is.

He said Reeds is involved in money, too, or something like that.

Oh, really?

I don't know.

God damn it.

What I meant is that in the handling of the money to these people, apparently.

Do you know anything about the Reeds?

I know a little bit about it.

And that's the muskie chauffeur.

Reeds was in that?

Yeah.

And he did, Muskie Schoffer worked for no money.

He worked double oil.

But they did give him some expenses for some things that had to be done.

I don't know what the world's wrong with him.

I don't know.

This seems to me to be overreacting.

If Manolo went over to the Democratic National Committee and said, I'd like to tell you what the president's up to, and they said, fine, tell us.

What's wrong with that?

From their viewpoint, what's wrong with those?

Somebody comes in and volunteers.

They want to take it.

They volunteered.

Jack Anderson, the buddy creator, said, are they volunteering?

Anybody else?

There it is.

That's the human race.

I talked to Peterson about the idea of John speeding up the grand jury.

He says, Christ, I think we'd like to do it much better.

But he says, we've got a hell of a problem because each person talks about somebody else.

Well, I understand, but I think it'd be just a matter of letting him know that you were in a hurry and then periodically keeping the heat on him.

The thing to fear here is that Silver will deliberately try and stretch this thing out, hoping for some kind

That's what he's doing.

Yeah.

So it's Colson.

Yeah.

Was Colson involved in the re-sign?

No.

That was a Magruder operation.

Magruder was the one that was talking about it.

Yeah.

It's separate from...

They say they have Magruder and he's talking and so forth and so forth is cooperating, but they said we still have only an arm joint operation with Deacon.

Dean's just changed attorneys.

Changed attorneys?

Yes, sir.

Why?

Probably because these guys didn't deliver what they said they would.

He's got a guy who's Humphrey's field director in 68.

Jesus Christ.

Wow.

Who?

Wow.

He's his former co-brother-in-law.

Yes.

The sister of Dean's first wife.

I understand.

We know that's where it came from, I think.

Something on that point, Mr. Wilson was just now talking about whether Dean's situation here was difficult or not.

And it's his judgment that we ought not to disturb it.

has the administrative responsibility for the secret service who in the technical security division have the responsibility for all document protection and

President, the helicopter will be in very shortly.

I'm going to get it early.

I just wanted to see Dick Moore.

He's with Mr. Ziegler right now.

Oh, I see him.

Well, I'll let you in on him.

I don't think it's that much of a problem.

We'll leave it up to you guys to set an order.

Thank you.

I wish I'd talked to him last week.

I can't very well now, I don't think.

I think you could now.

And I wish you could pass a message for me, which is this, that...

At least my recollection of La Casa was that you gave us the responsibility, Bob and me, for producing a paper on the whole Watergate episode.

We got them out there to aid in developing that document.

We came back to you afterward and said we can't.

My very vivid recollection is that Dean was the major impediment

to getting that done because of his blocking lines of possible development.

That the money business was nothing new.

Dean continually, through this period of time, was coming to us on an episodic basis and saying, geez, Mitchell needs money, and what are we going to do?

And invariably and inevitably, with the exception of the one little bit of the Herb Kambach episode, who was in John,

God only knows what he's going to do.

And my remark about Nelson Rockefeller is typical.

You know, tell Mitchell to go borrow it from his friend Nelson Rockefeller.

Okay.

I think the other... All right, I'll call it now.

Because our sense of this throughout was Dean saying to us, nobody in the White House is involved.

And our sense of it being, well, look, if Mitchell needs money for whatever reason, that's Mitchell's problem.

I had no interest, for instance, in instructing justice.

I had no exposure myself.

I was satisfied from Dean that none of my colleagues in the White House had exposure.

And if Jeff McGruder was a horse's ass and got himself into this...

I suppose you would say, morally, that a member of the White House said about McGruder that he found somebody else in the traffic justice system.

Absolutely.

No question about it.

I had no evidence of that.

I did not.

I had no evidence that anybody, until I got into this thing on the 30th of March, I had no evidence that any lawyer had induced any defendant to say anything but what's true.

I still don't know that.

I don't understand the purposes.

I understand.

Well, in all candor, I knew that Mitchell was trying to raise money for these people.

And I knew that Lulu was, and I knew that Christine told me so.

But I don't have any personal knowledge, either from Dean or anybody else, of any corruption in that process.

Now, I can raise an inference.

Bob and I shared a suspicion that Mitchell was at the bottom of all of this.

There's no two ways about that.

And we've shared that suspicion for many months.

But Dean very effectively

kept between me and any intimate knowledge of that whole business.

One other situation, the other situation you can think about is the perennial one that we have here.

Where we stand, you know, on what they call an operation circuit.

Your lawyers and our lawyers.

If you accept eventually, then I will do one.

Exactly.

That's why you've got to get in through all your songs.

There's a third level to this that's developing now in the press, particularly in the New York Times this morning.

And that is, even if there is no complicity, the White House staff

has to bear responsibility to the president for having permitted this thing to have occurred generally, just as a matter of stewardship.

And that their managerial capacity is seriously questioned, put in question by this whole chain of events.

Assuming that... Well, I think it's going to be a dull eight going through this thing.

You're going to hear it.

And...

I think it's something you ought to give some thought to as to whether we can or not.

I don't know.

I just noticed it this morning for the first time.

It's a very dangerous one if you start into that, because then you're saying that we have to accept responsibility for the commission of the Watergate and for anything else that may ever develop that the campaign did.

Well, I don't know.

We have clear and specific responsibility in certain areas.

and signed off on it.

They couldn't publish a position paper or have a document on issues until John had signed off on it.

But I had no authority over the budget.

I had no authority over the people organization or personnel hiring or firing.

over political strategy, policy, telephone operation, telemedicine, is there anything else?

You've got to take one step at a time.

The first step is to do exactly what you're doing.

That's right.

The second step, then, is to talk about this area about what you're depending on your lawyers to do to make sure that you're potentially working on balance.

That's right.

And the third area is your...

Why not now?

I mean, if it's a clear, better, even change, it's going to move in certain directions.

I think it's well to not take it.

Absolutely.

Sure.

Absolutely.

Well, and that's going to be an evaluation we ought to make every day.

That's right.

Every day.

Every day will be different.

And you don't still know about the most out-of-hand cases?

No.

Still don't.

Well, I think that's such a silly thing to say.

I'm a lawyer, too.

I didn't ask you.

I don't think I asked you.

Well, it's very helpful to our guys.

Some of these things are, and to the extent that you can, that's helpful, but I don't understand.

All right.

Oh, I just called him today.

Thank you.

Nixon, Ehrlichman & Haldeman on Watergate and John Dean

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Nixon Library Finding Aid

Also recorded on April 20, 1973

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