Senator Howard Baker asked, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” According to Dean, a lot from the start. Excerpted from “The Nixon Defense,” August 12, 2014.
JOHN DEAN; Author, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It
In conversation with ROY EISENHARDT; Lecturer, UC Berkeley School of Law

ROY EISENHARDT: The first half of the title of the book is interesting – The Nixon Defense. Can you go into some length in defining what that was?

JOHN DEAN: The title came from when I immediately realized that Nixon was on the defensive as soon as the arrest [at the Watergate] occurred. He pretended to be very unconcerned about it, but initially when he learned of it, he was down in Florida. The break-in and arrest occurred on June 17, late in the night. There was a report the next morning – it was carried on the wires – that mentioned Cuban Americans from Miami. So the Miami papers covered it. Nixon had been in the Bahamas, visiting a friend, and had come back to his compound in Key Biscayne on Sunday. He walked into the kitchen – really to get a cup of coffee – and saw a Miami paper, and below the fold he found a very small article about this whole thing. It indicated that these Cuban Americans who had been arrested wearing business suits, had surgical gloves on and pockets stuffed with cash. He thought the whole thing was a prank, so he didn’t even read the whole article.

Later that day, he went over to his friend, Bebe Rebozo’s, house, which was also part of the compound. Bebe was well aware of people in the Cuban community. He knew several of these key players, if not their names. He knew that the men had been arrested. One, by the name of Barker, was a real estate broker in Miami. One of his key salespeople was somebody by the name of Eugenio Martinez – also connected with the CIA, so Nixon learns from Bebe.

He was over at Bebe’s house for 15 minutes, then turned around and came back to his house to use secure telephones. [He] called [Special Counsel to the President] Charles Colson and wanted to know about it. Colson would later testify about this. Only Chuck Colson could testify in a way where he was testifying about his own testimony and it was hearsay.

Let me explain: Colson claimed he couldn’t remember what the president had told him, but one of his staff, whom he had told what the president had told him – [Colson] testified and said that [his testimony] was what he was told later that he had said to [a staffer] after he [Colson] had talked to the president – which, of course, made it hearsay.

What this aide had [told Colson that] Colson had told him the weekend right after the call was that the president was so angry on learning that [Watergate burglar and ex-CIA agent James] McCord, who was the security chief at the re-election committee, was involved in this, that he threw an ashtray across the room. Colson [had told the aide that Nixon had] seemed very furious in this conversation.

Later, Nixon walked out on all that. He wanted to have it as something he was really unconcerned about. But he was obviously very concerned from the outset. So, as I say, the title comes from [the way] he set up one defense after another defense after another defense, until he got to what I describe in part four as the Nixon defense. At that point, he went public with his defense. [His defenses] were all public, but he went public in a definitive speech on the subject. Then on May 22, he issued a written version, a rather complete written version of his defense, and it proved deadly. That final defense was that he’d known nothing about Watergate until I had told him on March 21, when I told him there was a cancer on the presidency, that there was a cover-up that could be interpreted as something illegal. Well, there are endless, endless examples of Nixon having full knowledge of [the whole thing.]

What I didn’t know when I went in to tell him [about the cover-up] is how much he did know. I can tell you today, he knew a lot more than he was letting on to me, as anyone who reads this narrative will discover. 

EISENHARDT: There are several questions that ask about the aphorism that has come out of Watergate. That is, “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.”

?DEAN: Nixon had a very interesting view of what a cover-up was. He constantly warned his staff that we couldn’t cover this up, but what was he talking about? This comes out when you start piecing things together. I don’t do a lot of thinking for the reader; I lay out the facts. But I can tell you some of it will be very conspicuous to you as you read, and I will correct some misfacts so people don’t get confused. But [Nixon’s] view of what a cover-up was, came from his time in Congress when he was pursuing the Truman administration, and he had evidence [that]people in the Truman administration were both getting kickbacks and not paying taxes on them. They were as guilty as sin as far as he was concerned. Not a single one of them was prosecuted. That, to him, was a cover-up. It was not a cover-up to him if the men who were actually caught red-handed in the Watergate [were charged] along with those who had been the immediate organizers of the break in, [Howard] Hunt and Gordon Liddy. So long as they were being charged, he didn’t see that as a cover-up.

If you stopped it there and didn’t go up to who had approved it, like Jeb Magruder, the deputy director [of the Committee to Re-Elect the President], or John Mitchell, [Nixon’s] former attorney general and director of his campaign, [Nixon] didn’t think that was a cover-up. So you have to put this in perspective, and you will as you see how this unfolds. He was very concerned; if everybody had walked scot-free, that would be a cover-up. Stopping it and not letting it get out of hand, not so much a cover-up.

?EISENHARDT: Going back to your March 21st conversation: Before that, how actively had you been involved in discussions either with the president or with Ehrlichman or Haldeman and when did you first start to sense that the line was being crossed?

?DEAN: Good questions. I was asked to meet with Liddy a couple times. First, when I was involved with getting Liddy to become general counsel of the Committee [to Re-Elect the President], I was totally unaware of his past. I had been specifically excluded from the so-called plumbers operation, which did the [Daniel] Ellsberg break-in, because I had gotten wind of another break-in, that’s on tape, in ’71 when the Pentagon Papers leaked.

One afternoon in July, a fellow by the name of Jack Caulfield came in my office. Jack was a former New York City detective who had been temporarily assigned to my officeashewasonhiswaytoworkinthe Treasury department; but he had worked for Ehrlichman when he was counsel.

New York City detectives don’t get rattled by many things; they’ve seen just about everything you can think of, but he was wideeyed and said to me, “John, I just came from Colson’s office and he wants me to firebomb the Brookings Institute,” a think tank in Washington.

I said, “What?!”

He said, “He wants me to firebomb the Brookings Institute. When the fire department responds, he wants me to send a team in to crack the safe to get a copy of what the president believes is either [some] study or something to do with the Pentagon Papers.”

I said, “Jack, do nothing, please. Just don’t do anything.” And I said, “Let me see what I can do.”

I jumped on the next flight to San Clemente – because the president and his staff were out there – and went immediately to Ehrlichman to tell him what had happened. The last thing I remember before leaving my office, [is] I had the DC [legal] code there, and I [checked it], rather quickly, and discovered that if anybody died in an arson situation at that time in the District of Columbia, it was a capital crime. So I tell Ehrlichman about this crazy scheme and the [danger of ] somebody out of the White House committing a potential capital offense. He picked up the telephone and called Colson and said, “Chuck, young counsel Dean is out here. Doesn’t think this is such a good idea on the Brookings. Cancel it.”

That’s it. He literally turned to me and said, “Anything else, counselor?” But I learned a few days later, when [presidential advisor] Bud Krogh returned from Washington, that he was being tasked to set up an investigation unit known as The [White House] plumbers.

I didn’t learn about all these activities until after Liddy confessed and after they had the debacle at the DNC. The Brookings Institute break-in was a debacle, too. There was nothing there. They messed up the office and made what could have been direct links back to the White House, [despite] Liddy later promising Krogh and others for whom he had done this that he would never do anything that would link to the White House. He decided at the last minute to provide protection for his Cuban Americans who’d gone into the psychiatrist’s office. They’d broken a window to get in and Liddy was there and said that he was prepared to kill anybody in the Beverly Hills police department who gave them any trouble.

I don’t think anybody was thinking in terms of the criminal law when we should’ve been. I had the passing thought that we didn’t know about it. My antennae should’ve been quivering from the outset, but they were not. I was more worried about the politics of it and what this could do, and actually just trying to find out what had happened. It took us a good bit of time to ferret out what all was involved. In fact, there was some real evidence that the CIA actually was involved in this thing. Now, I’m clear that they weren’t at all, other than having worked with the plumbers unit and then [with White House plumber E. Howard] Hunt and Liddy having used material that they got from the CIA later in their Watergate operation.

But Chuck Colson came to me after the election and said, “I just talked to Howard Hunt” – whom he had brought into the White House – and he said, “I’ve got a tape of the conversation with Hunt.” Almost everybody in the White House taped. I didn’t tape, but almost everybody else did. He was very proud of this tape, because he said, “Hunt really exonerates me as to having anything to do with the Watergate break-in.”

But [the recorded] conversation wasn’t about the break-in other than Ehrlichman and Colson trying to get this information out of him. It was Hunt trying to get money and making it very clear that this was a quid pro quo. If he wasn’t paid and the rest of them weren’t paid soon, the whole thing was going to fall apart.

When I heard that conversation, I first of all took the recording for Haldeman and Ehrlichman to hear. They said, “Take it to Mitchell and see what he says.” I took it to Mitchell and he said, “I’ll take care of it.” It was taken care of.

I came back and started looking in the law books. So I started looking around to see what we might be doing. I pieced it together that we were involved in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. I took that to Ehrlichman, and he debated it with me. You’ll find conversations in this book where I start walking around with copies of the statutes in my pocket to try to convince Ehrlichman, principally, any time I can that what we were doing was crazy.

Some of this got reported to the president. When Ehrlichman did it, I happened to be there and he was much more inclined to say there might be a problem in front of the president than he was with me. Another thing I took in at one point was a list of all the people I thought might be indicted, both for the break-in and the [related] activities. I noted that it was going to be a conspiracy to obstruct justice, and I cited the sections of the code. Haldeman told the president [about the list], and recited pretty accurately what was in this document [and said], “This shows you how distorted Dean’s thinking has become.”

It happened to be highly prescient. Everybody I named on there got indicted for the offenses that I had laid out.