The Nixon Defense by John W. Dean

Author:John W. Dean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-07-14T04:00:00+00:00

April 15, 1973, the White House

Because the president had stayed up late talking with Bebe, he slept in on Sunday morning. When Kleindienst tried to phone him at 8:41 A.M., Steve Bull took the call and the attorney general’s message that he needed to speak with the president. Bull relayed this information to Ehrlichman, who said he should go ahead and pass it on to the president, which he did while Nixon was having breakfast in at 9:45 A.M. The Washington Post had a glaring front-page headline—“NEW MAJORITY” GROWING DISILLUSIONED WITH NIXON—above a highly negative story by seasoned political reporters Haynes Johnson and Jules Witcover.23 At 10:13 A.M. the president called Kleindienst from a residence telephone not connected to the recording system. Kleindienst requested an urgent meeting without either Haldeman or Ehrlichman present, and the president told him to come to the church service at the White House at eleven o’clock that morning, and they could then meet in his EOB office, after the services and reception.

At 10:35 A.M. the president asked Ehrlichman to join him in the Oval Office, where they spoke for forty-five minutes, putting Ehrlichman’s in-progress meeting with Strachan on hold. Nixon informed Ehrlichman about the call from the attorney general and asked, “Kleindienst said he had been up most of the night with Titus. Who is Titus?” Ehrlichman told him Titus was the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. The president assumed they wanted to discuss “this special prosecutor thing” and asked what line he should take. Ehrlichman did not have a firm position, but the president did: The “problem with the special prosecutor, as I see it, it just puts another loose cannon right there rolling around the deck. Tear the hell out of the place. I think we’ve had enough of the damn thing myself, now I’ll have to hard-line it. Dick [Kleindienst] has not been, let’s face it, very helpful throughout this thing.”

Nixon said he had been “cogitating last night” about the situation and thought the main problem was “on the obstruction of justice thing.” They discussed who knew about that who might be a problem and came up with the names of the attorneys: Rothblatt and Bittman. “Bittman was an instigator of the whole thing,” Ehrlichman explained. “He was concerned about his fees. So he was one of the active promoters of that, as near as I can tell.” The president asked him to spell it out on “the obstruction thing”: “What was involved? I mean just from our side, from our guys?”

Ehrlichman had come up on the learning curve regarding obstruction, so he gave a perfectly legal explanation of the motives: “Well, you had defendants who were concerned about their families, and that’s understandable. You had lawyers who were concerned about their fees, and that’s less understandable. You have, well, I mean in terms of the end result, you had a campaign organization that was concerned about the success of its campaign and didn’t want these fellows to say anything in public that would disrupt the campaign.

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