All the President's Men

From the beginning the Plumbers’ operation has been about using duplicitous means to gain advantages on domestic rivals for the benefit of the President. As the walls close in, however, the Plumbers turn on each other. John Dean releases a defiant letter in response to the accusations of Magruder and McCord. In it, Dean refuses to become a scapegoat for the entire operation. Magruder’s partisans hit back, challenging Dean’s credibility. Dean’s people say that Magruder is trying to divert blame from himself. The true villain, though, they claim, is H. R. Haldeman who, despite having resigned from the White House, is still fighting to insulate himself and the President from blame. Haldeman’s plan, Dean’s partisan claims, is to paint Dean as the sole architect of the scheme (182).

Suddenly Woodward and Bernstein become desirable friends to have. Administration officials and lawyers who have long snubbed the reports now hope to use them to pass the blame of Watergate via the front page of the Washington Post. Dean is prepared to testify in the Senate that he followed Haldeman’s orders as much as others followed his. Next John Mitchell weighs in. His proxies tell the New York Times that Mitchell indeed had dealings with the Plumbers before he resigned as attorney general. While attorney general he also had conversations about bugging Democrats. However, Mitchell is adamant that he “cut off” all such discussions every time. Wiretapping is, after all, illegal, and Mitchell says he only authorized legal operations (184). Other reporting confirms that Haldeman hired Donald Segretti.

White House lawyer Chuck Colson claims, by proxy, to Woodward that he warned Nixon in December that members of the White House staff had been involved in both the bugging and the cover up, but nothing was done with that information. A few days later, Bernstein calls back Dean’s partisan. He asked for more details on why Dean decided to go public with his information. Dean, the partisan claims, met with the president on March 21. At the meeting Dean laid out the entire conspiracy and the entire plan. Dean also said that for legal and ethical reasons it was vital that he, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Mitchell tell prosecutors everything. Anything else would damage the Office of the President and hurt Nixon politically. The President acted shocked, thanked Dean for the important revelation, and then sent him to Camp David to rest. When Dean returned, Haldeman and Ehrlichman had convinced the President that they could save themselves by sacrificing Dean, so Dean broke rank (187).

The multitudinous finger pointing seems to tie the story back into knots. Was Dean a rogue operative acting on his own or foot soldier sacrificed to save Haldeman and Ehrlichman? Deep Throat conveniently cuts through the tangled mess that the Plumbers’ infighting caused. Rumors abound in Washington that Patrick Gray is going to withdraw his name from consideration as the FBI director. Gray, Deep Throat explains, destroyed several files taken from Howard Hunt’s safe, including fabricated top-secret diplomatic cables implicating John Kennedy in the 1963 assassination of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem and another file filled with salacious rumors concerning Senator Ted Kennedy. More interestingly, Gray was given the files by Dean and Ehrlichman. Dean ordered Gray to destroy the documents because they were “political dynamite” that “could do more damage than the Watergate break-in itself” (188). These are serious accusations, but even more serious is the power dynamic implied by the demand. Gray is one of the most powerful officials in the United States; someone of his position would never take orders from a freelancing junior lawyer acting beyond all White House policy. Gray obeyed Dean and Ehrlichman because they were well-known lieutenants of the President; they spoke with the voice of the president.

Gray’s revelations hit the White House like a bomb. Within days the White House staff and many senior members of the administration are either fired or shuffled into new positions. On April 30 President Nixon gives a televised address in which he takes responsibility, although indirectly and shallowly, for the crimes and coverup. He suggests that he was deceived by members of his administration, painting himself a victim as much as the American people. He ends by saying “there can be no whitewash at the White House […] two wrongs don’t make a right […] I love America […] God bless America and God bless each and every one of you” (191). Just hours later Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler publicly apologizes to the Washington Post for his earlier criticism.

Further revelations deepen the knowledge surrounding the Plumbers. On May 14 the FBI announces that it found 17 wiretap records that were placed between 1969 and 1971. The logs indicate that 13 administration officials and three reporters had their phones tapped. They were also authorized by members of the FBI and, when national security was cited as a reason for expedience and secrecy, the staff of National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger (192). In a follow-up interview, Kissinger admits that he “almost never” approved the Plumbers’ wire-tap requests, but “almost never” is synonymous with “sometimes.” When Woodward explains that to Kissinger, the Kissinger works his way up the Washington Post chain of command, complaining profusely that Woodward was unfair in his interview. After consultation with Murrey Marder, the Post’s diplomatic reporter, it becomes clear that Kissinger is used to deciding after the fact what reporters are and are not allowed to quote him on. He will not receive such leniency in this story.

On May 16 Deep Throat contacts Woodward. When they meet, he speaks in rapid-fire sentences and hushed tones. He says that despite Nixon’s early public contrition, the President is prepared to counterattack the Post and to target Woodward and Bernstein personally to stop their stories. While this claim was never proven, it serves to scare Woodward and Bernstein into maintaining the upmost secrecy in every aspect of their life. Deep Throat further reveals that every man involved in the Watergate plot is now receiving serious threats from government officials. McCord told the Senate behind closed doors that one had told him that his “life is no good in this country if you don’t cooperate” (196). Worse yet, Hunt and the burglars blackmailed the President into paying them off in exchange for cooperation. A total of $1 million was promised to the seven men on trial if they kept their secrets. In a state of near panic, Woodward reveals Deep Throat’s warning to Bernstein. He refuses to speak in his apartment for fear of surveillance; instead they talk through a typewriter set on the kitchen table. In the days after the surveillance scare, the reporters return to Plumber gossip.

That gossip is swept aside on July 13 by the last bombshell of the Watergate case. Following up with a lead provided by Woodward, a staffer for the Senate Select Committee contacts Alexander Butterfield, a low-level aide for the President who assists other White House personnel in some of the less sensitive aspects of their work. The reporters pursued Butterfield earlier in the investigation, but he was conveniently always too busy to sit down for an interview. He is not too busy now to sit down with the Senate. Butterfield has little to tell, but he does share one unexpected detail. As the aide explains, “Nixon had bugged himself” (203). According to Butterfield, a recording device exists inside the Oval Office and other locations within the White House and has been in almost continuous use since 1971. The recording device is the President’s greatest secret. He has used it virtually every time he is in the Oval Office; every conversation big and small the President has is carefully organized and stored in a closet next to the desk of the President’s secretary. When Butterfield repeats his claim on live television in front of the Senate, Nixon’s presidency dies.

The revelation of the recording system changes everything. The President’s claim that the tapes are privileged and therefore cannot be subpoenaed is unsuccessfully challenged in the Supreme Court. When the tapes are finally turned over, several are missing, and others have mysterious gaps in the recordings. The most infamous is an 18 1/2-minute gap. Nixon’s secretary admits to having accidentally rerecorded a section of the tape when producing transcripts for the Senate Committee. However, she says she had caught her mistake and had only damaged approximately five minutes of the record. Nixon blames the remaining 13 minutes on her error as well. No evidence can be produced to explain the gap, though H. R. Haldeman’s notes from the meeting suggest that it was the first time the two discussed the Watergate break-in. The tape was made three days after the botched burglary.

The Nixon tapes—as they came to be known—are a shock to the public, and they completely undermine the President’s claim to innocence. The “smoking gun” tape obtained in August 1974 is irrefutable. In a tape recorded on June 23, 1972, six days after the break-in, H. R. Haldeman updates the President as to the state of the Watergate investigation. Nixon seems exasperated, but he also seems to possess a working knowledge of the details of the scheme. He knows the key players and expresses relief when he hears that Chuck Colson was not arrested with the rest of the burglars. Nixon and Haldeman agree to direct the director of the CIA to intervene to thwart the FBI’s investigation, suspecting that Gray and Felt already suspected the break-in was a botched CIA operation. When this tape comes out, Nixon is reduced to two stark choices. He can drag the matter out in front of the House and Senate in a bruising public impeachment trial. Even if the Senate acquits him, however, the evidence is so damaging that Nixon’s presidency will enter a long lame duck period until the 1976 election for his replacement. Or Nixon can resign, ending the national fixation on Watergate. Nixon chooses the latter and on August 9, 1974, resigns his office. He reasoned correctly: Within days the Post has concluded its Watergate reporting, and the story begins to slip into history.