Hidden History: The Day Nixon Lost His Presidency

"It was his [Nixon's] personality and his mode of operation that did him in." John N. Mitchell, to the author, July 1988.

March 13, 1973 is the day Richard M Nixon made a fateful decision, one that would insure that his Presidency was doomed to self-destruct. With the tape recorder rolling, Nixon would for the next eight days set in motion a series of actions that would cause him to resign the Presidency some seventeen months later.

This article by historian Peter Klingman takes tapes not released until 1996, and not made available even to the prosecutors or the Congress during the entire Watergate investigations and trials,and paints a far different picture of what actually happened. Klingman places those tapes into the setting as we knew it at the time, and places the President in the role of directing the cover up of White House pre- breakin involvement. This is not the role of being led around by the nose by John Dean as we portrayed him in Silent Coup Chapters 16 and 17. Without the benefit of those tapes we got the characterization of the relationship between Dean and Nixon wrong.

Ironically it was John Dean who hid those tapes, when they could have brought down the President more directly than any other tapes.This is true especially of the tape of June 23, 1972, the so called "smoking gun" tape. In that tape Nixon merely handed the gun to Bob Haldeman to execute his order to use the CIA to block the FBI investigation. In these hidden tapes Nixon takes the gun himself on March 13, 1973 and for the next eight days shoots at least one bullet from it each day. The gun was not only smoking, it had his fingerprints, his DNA, and was even gunpowder residue on his hand.

On March 13th Richard Nixon came to a fork in the Watergate road. He could have fired Haldeman, Strachan, and Dean. He could have claimed that he [Nixon] had uncovered the cover up of White House staff pre-breakin involvement, and could have probably saved his Presidency. Instead he just took over command of the cover up of a crime he had nothing to do with and insured his demise.

The tapes also show that Nixon vastly underestimated just how smart and cunning his counsel John Dean really was. As Nixon tried to set Dean up for the fall, Dean in turn used everything at his disposal to turn the tables on Nixon. So was born the "Cancer on the Presidency" strategy. I can assure you from personal experience that one should never take John Dean lightly. He is bright, he is sharp, and the truth is never something that Dean ever lets get in the way of his version of events.

Historians of the future will have much to deal with from what we have learned from these specific tapes and Klingman's article. Why did Dean hide them? Why did Nixon not confront Haldeman? Why did Nixon choose the road he did? It may be that John Mitchell simply got it right. Mitchell who knew Nixon well, never lived to hear these tapes.

LEN COLODNY

What Did The President Know and When Did He Know It?

Redefining Richard Nixon's Guilt and
John Dean's Role in the Watergate Cover-up

by

Peter D. Klingman

Since the Watergate era, no one has been completely certain of Richard Nixon's role in the events. He himself claimed innocence even in the matter of the cover-up of White House involvement. When he resigned rather than face impeachment, the Watergate- related charges were not totally self-evident as true but were open to interpretation. The authors of Silent Coup: The Removal of a President portrayed the President as a passive figure in the whole cover-up sequence, charging John Dean, his White House counsel, with masterminding and manipulating events and personalities. This article reverses that portrayal of both President Nixon and John Dean. There is clear evidence that Richard Nixon perpetrated his own cover-up, at least after March 13, l973, directed John Dean to commit a crime of obstructing justice, and fully participated in the same crime himself.

Thirty years after the break in at the Watergate, the events that engulfed the administration of President Richard Nixon are still neither fully known nor totally understood. The broad outlines are clear. There was a burglary on June 17, l972 that Nixon Press Secretary Ron Ziegler characterized as "third-rate." There was a cover-up. There was an uncovering of the cover-up by the Washington Post's team of reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with aid of "Deep Throat." There was a national drama played out in Washington that did not end until Richard Nixon climbed aboard the White House helicopter, having resigned his office at noon, August 9, 1974.

Early drama surrounding Watergate was publicly staged in the Congress. The summer of l973 witnessed the Senate Select Committee's investigation of the events. As cameras rolled, Americans for the first time were exposed to the inner workings of the Nixon Presidency. United States Senators questioned all the principal officials and many minor ones, trying to piece together the events of Watergate. Immortalizing one question he repeated over and over, Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, the ranking Republican on the committee, kept asking what all Americans wanted to find out: "What did the President know and when did he know it?"

John Dean's testimony before the Senate committee, for the most part, shaped for the public an answer to Howard Baker's question. Dean, the White House counsel, testified before the committee beginning on June 25, l973 with the reading of a 245 page statement implicating the President and his top aides – John Ehrlichman, the President's chief domestic advisor, H. R. Haldeman, Nixon's Chief of Staff, and John Mitchell, the Attorney-General of the United States. And, with corroborating White House tapes available at the time, Dean's version of events withstood the tape test – it was his word against the President's, and he won the battle of credibility. Nixon resigned in disgrace and, despite authoring best sellers in the l980's and early l990's, he never recovered from the enduring legacy of Watergate.

The centerpiece of John Dean's testimony was his recollection of a meeting, March 21, l973 with the President. In that morning meeting, Dean told the President there was a "cancer on the presidency" and that Nixon's denials of White House involvement, repeated in public on many occasions since the break in had occurred, were false. He told the president all his aides were involved. And they discussed payments of "hush money" that E. Howard Hunt, the burglar who had been employed by the White House, had demanded. It is this conversation that became a hallmark of the saga that ended the Nixon Presidency. John Dean successfully proclaimed that he pushed the President to disclose all, and when Nixon did not, John Dean himself decided to talk fully with the Special Prosecutors. Accordingly, March 21, l973 became a benchmark date, seeming to confirm what the president knew and when he first learned it.

In his memoirs, Richard Nixon wrote of his own misunderstandings of that meeting with John Dean:

In retrospect it is clear that on March 21 John Dean was trying to alert me to the fact that what I had assumed for nine months was the major Watergate problem – the question of who had authorized the break-in – had been overtaken by the new and far more serious problem of the cover-up. I left the meeting only troubled by the new dimensions of what he had described rather than galvanized into action by the urgency and peril of our situation. Dean did not tell me the extent of his own active and conscious role in the cover-up, and so I treated much of what he said as conjecture and deduction, instead of as a firsthand report on an explosive situation that was already out of hand. (Memoirs, pp.800-801.)

President Nixon added an additional thought: "Only three weeks later, when I finally saw the whole cover-up mosaic in perspective and realized the position the payments to the defendants played in it, would I understand what Dean had been really trying to tell me . . ." (Memoirs, p. 801).

In l997, Stanley Kutler published his Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes. Kutler argued that John Dean's intention in the March 21 meeting was "to stimulate top-level thinking as to the next White House move. Unbeknownst to Dean, that move developed the new Administration line: on March 21, the President learned of the cover-up, took charge of the investigation, and determined that John Dean had a key role in the planning of the break-in and single-handedly instituted and ran the cover-up on his own writ and authority" (Abuse of Power, p.247). Once again, the March 21, l973 meeting seems to have been the answer Senator Baker was looking for.

But was it really the first time Nixon knew all? The answer is no. The President directed a secret cover-up, shared only with John Dean. Two conspirators – the President and his White House counsel – were locked in a struggle with each other that only one would survive. Like scorpions in a bottle, survival of one could only produce destruction of the other. It is also a story that changes our view of the March 21, l973 "Cancer on the Presidency." Instead of being a centerpiece of Watergate history, it was merely the final culminating act of a struggle between President Nixon and John Dean.

The time frame begins eight days earlier on March 13, l973. This was when Richard Nixon first learned that Gordon Strachan, a subordinate to H. R.Haldeman, White House Chief of Staff, knew about Watergate. Dean told the President that Strachan not only knew but also had had prior knowledge of the break-in. From a White House transcript of their meeting, it is clear that Richard Nixon at that moment of discovery had two choices: disclosure or cover-up. In choosing to cover-up, Mr. Nixon, this story will show, intended to sacrifice John Dean to save his Presidency. He may well have hoped to save H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and possibly John Mitchell as well. But in not disclosing Strachan's role, these "President's men" went to jail, possibly innocent of the charges upon which they were convicted.

John Dean also had much to lose by disclosing the truth. If the President had gone public about Gordon Strachan, Strachan's link to John Dean would also have been disclosed. That link would have highlighted Strachan's transmission of political intelligence to Dean and the fact that both men had prior Watergate break-in knowledge. And, as this story will also show, when John Dean discovered Nixon's intention, he sacrificed the President to save himself. Hence, both these scorpions in the bottle--Nixon and Dean-- became committed to destroying the other.

The March 13th transcript reveals that President Nixon and his White House counsel were discussing the upcoming Senate Watergate hearings that were to begin in May. The two men ran through the potential Administration and Committee to Re-Elect the President (Nixon's campaign office) witnesses. In the course of their conversation, Mr. Nixon comments of the Ervin committee: "They're really, let's face it, after I think, they are really after, uh, Haldeman."

To which John Dean replies: "Haldeman and Mitchell."

It is the next exchange between the two men that turned Richard Nixon's Presidency towards disaster.

Three questions come to mind. First, who was Gordon Strachan and what did he know? Second, why did Richard Nixon bring up his name, considering that, in the normal course of activities in the White House, Gordon Strachan was one of many mid-level assistants? Finally, and far more crucially, why did not Richard Nixon immediately confront H. R. Haldeman to elicit the truth? Why didn't he ever directly ask Haldeman about Strachan? And, once he knew from Dean that Gordon Strachan was involved, why did he not confess to the truth? Why did the President choose to cover-up instead of perhaps saving his Presidency?

There is an equally important fourth question. How did John Dean know about Strachan and why did he allow the President to go before the public over and over in the nine months between the June 1972 break-in and March 13, l973 and proclaim that no one from the White House was involved?

The first question is more easily dealt with than either Nixon's or Dean's failure to tell the truth. John Dean disclosed Strachan's activities to the Senate Watergate committee. Sam Dash, majority counsel to the Ervin committee, asked to Dean to describe Strachan's role, activities, and responsibilities in the White House.

Dean replied:

"Mr. Strachan was placed on Mr. Haldeman's staff to serve as the liaison individual from the White House to the reelection committee, and to deal with other members of the White House staff who were working on problems relating directly to the political cases of the reelection problems. I was aware he was having frequent contact with Mr. Magruder . . . ."

What was the nature of those contacts? Why did Richard Nixon begin a planned cover-up of those activities of Gordon Strachan? In response to a question from Dash on the issue, Dean indicated he had "some knowledge" about Strachan but did not validate Jeb Magruder's testimony. According to Magruder, Strachan had received reports about the break-in and "the fruits of the break-in." What Dean and Mr. Nixon discussed about Gordon Strachan on March 13th, prior to Dean's testimony before the Ervin committee, suggests, but does not prove, something else.

This exchange in their conversation in the March 13, l973 meeting begins to shed light on Nixon's behaviors that followed in the next few days. Somehow, somewhere, Richard Nixon must have received previous information concerning Gordon Strachan and John Dean knew the President knew about Strachan. Could that previous information come from Bob Haldeman, Strachan's boss and the President's chief of staff? As events fell in the next week, this obviously was President Nixon's chief concern.

Certainly, John Dean led the Ervin committee in that direction. Sam Dash asked John Dean the following during his appearance: "Well, if Strachan did in fact receive reports from Magruder in the Liddy operation, do you have an opinion as to whether he would have forwarded those reports to Mr. Haldeman?

In their private March 13 meeting with Nixon, however, Dean explained that Strachan would do something different than report all he knew to Haldeman. In reply to the President's assertion that Haldeman "probably knew," (quoted above), the following exchange took place:

The President then wanted to understand why Strachan might stonewall the Ervin committee. Dean supplied the following answer:

One uncontested and clear fact is that Gordon Liddy had prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in. There is, however, clear disagreement between Dean's committee testimony in l973, his March 13th conversation with President Nixon, and that of Gordon Liddy. Liddy's testimony under oath concerning Gordon Strachan in a previously unseen videotaped deposition in Dean v. Colodny in l996 indicates he told John Dean fully and completely on June 19, l972 that Gordon Strachan knew about Watergate (Eye of the Storm).

Strachan would later testify that John Dean received intelligence reports from him. That fact was Dean's primary fear. Strachan was his direct link to guilt in Watergate. Hence, both Nixon, wanting to spare Haldeman, and Dean, wanting to save himself, had good reasons to cover up the actual role of Gordon Strachan.

The Liddy deposition establishes a baseline role for John Dean in the Watergate cover-up. He, the White House Counsel, at a minimum knew from June 19, l972 that Gordon Strachan had had prior knowledge of the break-in. In his own deposition in the same Dean v. Colodny case, also not previously seen, John Dean himself confessed he had "deliberately withheld" that information from his superiors in the White House including his client, the President of the United States (Eye of the Storm – Dean statement).

Whatever else he knew, and whatever else he did, has remained a source of contention, especially between John Dean and the authors of Silent Coup: The Removal of A President, Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin. In this, their New York Times best selling book published in l991, the authors summarized their view of John Dean in the following paragraph:

What Dean did not tell his own counsel, nor the prosecutors, nor the Senate, nor the House Judiciary Committee, nor his fellow co-conspirators when they sat down in jail together, nor the public in his book, nor the avid listeners at the hundreds of forums to which Dean has lectured in the years since Watergate, was that he threw over Richard Nixon to prevent his own deep criminality from becoming known (Silent Coup, p.272).

But what of Richard Nixon? If Silent Coup asserts that John Dean was the mastermind of the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon continued to assert to the public that it was only after March 21 and the now famous "Cancer on the Presidency" disclosures by Dean of White House that he knew White House staff had been involved – including Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman. It is that version of Watergate history that is still most accepted today.

The problem is that Richard Nixon clearly knew, at a minimum, that instrumental White House involvement (Gordon Strachan) had been ongoing in the Watergate affair eight days earlier than March 21, l973. The previously reported March 13th meeting between Mr. Nixon and Mr. Dean leaves no doubt of that. The knowledge of that conversation changes three important base issues of our understanding of Watergate:

1. When Republican Senator Howard Baker continuously asked in the Senate Watergate hearings "What did the President know and when did he know it?" the answer is, at a minimum, March 13th, not March 21st and the "Cancer on the Presidency" revelations by John Dean. Further, the implication of the Nixon-Dean conversation of March 13th, cited above, discussing Strachan's upcoming hearing testimony is that Mr. Nixon, from another source and earlier than March 13th, knew about Gordon Strachan's activities;

2. The March 13th conversation removes any logical surface reason for Dean's revelations in the "Cancer on the Presidency" that all of the President's top staff had been involved; and

3. It changes the characterization of Richard Nixon in Silent Coup as a target of Dean's manipulation to a willing participant directing a hidden two-man cover-up or, if you will, a cover-up within a cover-up, unknown to any except Richard Nixon and John Dean.

This two-man hidden cover-up begins on March 14, l973, the day after the Strachan conversation occurs between the President and his counsel. The first question is why? Why would the President not just go public on March 13 or March 14? Why, at a minimum, did he not at least immediately confront H. R. Haldeman, Strachan's boss, with what he knew?

Stanley Kutler provides at least a partial explanation. Kutler published part of the dialogue of a March 14 meeting between Mr. Nixon and Mr. Dean (at which Richard Moore and Ron Ziegler were present occasionally). The President offers his most revealing comment in the course of that meeting, observing that higher-ups had to be involved:

"Who, I don't know, and I would prefer not to know because I don't want to get my friends involved. But I know very well it had to be a higher –up. That's our real problem, and everybody knows it. They wouldn't have done it because Magruder told them to, or Hugh Sloan told them, and we've got to recognize that. So there is our real problem with Watergate, as I see it, my problem." (Abuse of Power, p. 229).

In the actual White House recording of that conversation, indeed, in his very next sentence uttered to John Dean, Richard Nixon begins directing the hidden cover-up. Keeping in mind they discussed Strachan only the day before, nonetheless, the President says to his counsel: "But I'm taking your word that your investigation showed no one in the White House was involved. Right?" John Dean replies: "Right."

From that moment, March 14th , perhaps to save his friends or perhaps to save himself, the President began directing John Dean to continue covering up the White House involvement of Gordon Strachan. Both men knew Strachan was involved from the beginning; they did not want to inform the others present at that meeting; and they would continue covering that fact over the next several days without involving anyone else.

In his own memoirs, Richard Nixon described his reaction on March 13 to the revelation, after nine months of denial, that Gordon Strachan had been involved. "I was stunned." (Memoirs, p. 781) And, after mulling over Dean's parsing out Strachan's role on a legal technicality, the President finally asks the question that had he asked and answered affirmatively earlier, he may well have saved his Presidency: "Is it too late to, frankly, go the hang-out road (full disclosure)? He answered it himself, not needing John Dean's agreement. "Yes, it is," Nixon said (Memoirs, p.783). Even then, at that point, March 14, l973, had President Nixon decided on full disclosure, he might have saved his Presidency. He was, in his own view, following his first instinct, not "to accuse nor criticize, but to consolidate" (Memoirs, p. 782).

But what did consolidate mean for Richard Nixon? What would that decision eventually produce? First, if President Nixon was, as he claimed, truly stunned by the Strachan situation on the 13th, the exchange in which John Dean and he discuss Strachan's stonewalling, described above, makes no sense. Richard Nixon knew, as the March 13th tape indicates, that Strachan had already been stonewalling in interviews prior to testifying. Second, listening to the tape of March 13th reveals no tonal changes, no emotional outbursts, and no reactions that could be even remotely described as "stunned." Third, the President's behaviors, based on his decision to "consolidate, " were not of someone stunned. It was, however, the action of someone angry and perhaps afraid.

On March 15, President Nixon held a press conference. Bombarded by questions about Watergate and John Dean, he reached two more conclusions that were a part of his decision to "consolidate" and to cover-up Strachan. First, Mr. Nixon conceded to himself that John Dean's strategy of denying White House involvement on a legal nicety that claimed while Strachan knew, he was not a participant, was indefensible. At the press conference he claimed both executive privilege and lawyer-client confidentiality to protect his White House counsel. But, his second decision would be far more fateful: he determined to sacrifice John Dean and force John Dean into participating in his own demise. Why? In his memoirs, the President described his new awareness of Watergate: as with Vietnam, he concluded, Watergate was just not going to go away. He resolved to "press Dean more firmly than ever" for a written statement that no one from the White House had been involved, this despite their discussion only two days before about Gordon Strachan. President Nixon's decision to press Dean would cost him his Presidency. In like turn, John Dean would decide to sacrifice the President to save himself, and the Cancer on the Presidency meeting would become his vehicle instead of the written statement or "Dean report" that Nixon wanted to deny White House involvement. Such is sometimes the fate of co-conspirators.

To sacrifice his White House Counsel and save his Presidency, Richard Nixon needed John Dean to commit an obstruction of justice by lying. In an evening March 16th phone conversation previously unheard in its entirety, having been incorrectly edited and misdated by Stanley Kutler, clearly Nixon's intent is to force John Dean to state in writing that which the President had been saying: no one from the White House had been involved. Their conversation also reveals Dean's planned lead-in to the famed March 21st meeting as well as Nixon's plans to sabotage Dean:

This portion was recorded on March 16, 1973 between 8:14 and 8:23 p.m.

President Nixon is neither passive nor ignorant in this telephone conversation with John Dean. The first part of their conversation reveals that the Senate Committee hearings posed no threat of disclosure to either Mr. Nixon or Dean. But keeping in mind they had discussed Strachan on the 13th, the deadline set by the President for Dean to finish this false statement that no one from the White House had been involved was obviously timed for the aftermath of the Sirica sentencing of the Watergate burglars. As the President indicates, he wanted to be able say he was presented a document proclaiming White House innocence. And, as John Dean indicates, his report was to show that not a "scintilla of evidence" was found to indicate otherwise. What happened to Gordon Strachan? The President and his lawyer were covering him up.

Yet also in this conversation, there is the exchange between the two men about what would become John Dean's "Cancer on the Presidency" meeting less than a week later. Although the focus in this article is on the actions of President Nixon, not John Dean, this conversation is the critical piece to understanding what happened on March 21st. Dean volunteers to brief President Nixon in far greater detail but not in writing, and Nixon agreed.

Over the next few days, having enlisted Dick Moore to assist Dean as the writer, the President and his White House counsel continued to work on their cover up of Strachan. In a private meeting on March 20, with John Ehrlichman reviewing his options, the President considers meeting with the Republican leadership and confessing almost all, but not all, the facts: "I would hold one of those leadership meetings and say: Now look, you've all been wondering about Watergate and here are the facts, period, and give them the statements . . . . You can say Haldeman was not; Ehrlichman was not involved. You know what I mean. I'm afraid in the case of Chapin you've got to say what the facts are" (Kutler, p.243).

But Strachan? "Strachan, I would try to ignore that as much as possible," said the President, remaining true to the cover up (Ibid).

At the end of their meeting, the President and Ehrlichman engage in a review of John Dean. It is clear from the conversation that Ehrlichman knows that Mr. Nixon and John Dean have been regularly together, but it is equally clear that he does not know why:

What makes this conversation with Ehrlichman significant is that Richard Nixon had already reviewed and participated in the rewrite of the general statement he wanted from John Dean. That meeting had occurred earlier that same afternoon. Although listening to the tape is difficult because of multiple voices talking at once, clearly, Richard Nixon is not only directing Dean to obstruct justice, he is a full participant in committing the crime:

This is conversation 884-17. Portion of a conversation between the President, John W. Dean, III, and Richard A. Moore. This portion was recorded on March 20, 1973 at an unknown time between 1:42 and 2:31 p.m. in the President's Oval Office.

The President, John Dean and Richard Moore are reviewing John Dean's general statement. President Nixon wants to know if they are ready for him to edit the statement.

Two things are now very clear: Richard Nixon is an active co-conspirator quite removed from the passive characterization of him by the authors of Silent Coup. He is more than just comfortable with his plan to have on record John Dean's denial of White House involvement. This taped conversation is, still to this day, the only White House tape that ties Richard Nixon directly to a crime of obstructing justice. There can be no other interpretation for his actions in producing a false statement about White House involvement in Watergate.

Equally clear is that the course of meetings and conversations between President Nixon and John Dean between March 13th and this meeting on the afternoon of the 20th raises serious questions about the intent of Dean's famed "Cancer on the Presidency" encounter the following morning.

Stanley Kutler in his Abuse of Power has offered his view that Dean's intent was to stimulate " top level thinking as to the next White House move." But given that Kutler failed to recognize the pattern of the President's role over that week, and that he misedited a crucial conversation, that explanation truly makes no sense. What does make sense is that President Nixon's effort to cause Dean to obstruct justice by lying about White House involvement in this report created urgency for the White House counsel, the President's co-conspirator, to retaliate. The March 21st meeting was Dean's retaliation. The President may have believed he could order Dean to obstruct justice; however, all Dean could do as a subordinate was manipulate the President's fears about his staff.

Dean returned to the President's comment on March 14th that a higher-up had to be involved. As Mr. Nixon stated: "That's my problem." Dean, in employing the image of a "Cancer on the Presidency," presented Richard Nixon with not one but all his top staff as guilty members of a conspiracy. And, because of escalating blackmail demands from Howard Hunt, about to be sentenced to jail, the manipulation effort by Dean worked. The "Dean report" disappeared and the Cancer on the Presidency went into history as a principal cause of the demise of Richard Nixon. What did the President know and when did he know it? There is still much to be uncovered, but it is clear that Richard Nixon knew more and knew it earlier than March 21, l973.

A professional note on Stanley Kutler – From my earliest days in graduate school, my professors taught me that history is what the historians say it is. And, until the final release of all the Nixon White House tapes occurs, no historian can be assured that any view of this period will remain intact. But every historian is supposed to do their best to recount the historical facts accurately, interpret them fairly, and explain them clearly. Sadly, Stanley Kutler, acknowledged as one of America's premier historians, failed and failed miserably to do just that in his treatment of this week, March 13th to the Cancer on the Presidency meeting on March 21, l973. This inner conspiracy involving Nixon and Dean could not have been told until l996. That is when the tapes of conversations and meetings between John Dean and Richard Nixon from March 14th through 20th were released in the settlement of Stanley Kutler's lawsuit against the Nixon Estate and the National Archives. Dean himself had suggested the March 13th and the March 21st tapes to the Special Prosecutors. They were among an original 49 tapes subpoenaed from the White House. Dean did not include the 14th to the 20th conversations in his tape list for the Watergate investigators; they would have fixed his guilt in Watergate.

However, Stanley Kutler deliberately chose to withhold republishing the March 13th tape (although he republished the March 21st Cancer on the Presidency tape) to avoid providing a context, framework, and perspective that would contradict the original story Dean told the Senate Watergate Committee as well as his own views previously published in Wars on Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon.

To make matters much worse, Kutler also deliberately cut and pasted two tapes of March 16th. One is a morning meeting between Nixon and Dean and the other is an evening telephone conversation. What Kutler did is take a portion of the evening telephone conversation and add it to the morning Oval Office meeting. By doing this, Kutler preserves the traditional view of the Cancer on the Presidency meeting. He cut off a crucial exchange of dialogue between the President and his counsel. The conversation that Kutler hid from view is John Dean telling Richard Nixon that his own investigation had led him to the conclusion that there was "not a scintilla of evidence" that the White House had been involved. This exchange occurred three days after the two men discussed Gordon Strachan and White House involvement in great detail. This conversation that Kutler hid from history also would have confirmed John Dean's and Richard Nixon's guilt in lying and covering up. And, as bad as this is, in the small piece of the evening conversation Kutler did publish, albeit in the wrong place, Nixon's desire to have Dean produce a general statement about White House also allowed Kutler to hide entirely from view the March 20th meeting that proves the President was a very active co-conspirator in obstructing justice. It also hid from history John Dean's response.

If the only deficit was an innocent misplacing of the evening telephone conversation quoted above into an Oval Office meeting, then I would be very unfair in this critique. However, these are indeed far more serious mistakes that Stanley Kutler made. And those mistakes matter – because his work has been and to this day still is the premier source material on the White House tapes for researchers, scholars, and students.

The first and most important deficit is that Stanley Kutler ignored entirely the meetings of March 13th and March 20th. Knowing those tapes existed and not publishing is a serious professional lapse. This sequence of tape proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that before March 21st President Nixon knew very well about Gordon Strachan and so did John Dean. So is deliberately misediting the March 16th tapes. The phone conversation is not only misplaced, but also is edited in a way that totally hides from public viewing both Richard Nixon's role and John Dean as his co-conspirator in the planning and producing of the hidden cover-up they conducted. Had Kutler included all that he possessed, his view of John Dean as a frustrated "good guy" in all this leading up to and including March 21st would never had stood scrutiny. Our general understanding of those events would now be markedly different. Stanley Kutler needs to explain how he allowed this egregious set of errors to occur. If, as he wrote, the tapes reveal much of Richard Nixon, then these issues make a similar statement about Stanley Kutler's professionalism. How sad.

Why the Nixon Tapes Pose Problems for Scholars,
John Dean, and the President

by

Joan Hoff

Richard Nixon's ultimate legacy will not rest entirely upon the secret, but legal, tapes he made from February 1971 to July 1973. These tapes, however, combined with the 40 million pages of documents which constitute his presidential papers will make Nixon's administration the best documented in U.S. history. Of the original 4,000 hours of tapes, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) first released 63 hours in 1991 of the designated Abuse of Government Power tapes (AOGP); then additional 201 hours in 1996; and finally, a few more hours of the last of the AOGP tapes in 1999, leaving approximately 3,700 unreleased. Since then, it has released another 1,700 in three different tape segments. The latest and largest segment consisting of a little over 400 hours on 171 cassettes was released in February 2002. This leaves two more segments or approximately 2,000 hours still unopened.

There are official government transcripts for only the first 63 hours of the AOGP tapes. All of the other AOGP and the rest of the tape segments must be transcribed by the individual researcher. Because historian Stanley Kutler brought suit for the release of the AOGP tapes, he (and his team of transcribers) was given first access on November 18, 1996 when 201 hours of additional AOGP tapes were released. This placed upon him the heavy burden of making sure that the words of the participants were as accurately conveyed as possible. Yet for over a year, half of the listening stations at the National Archives were semi-permanently staked out by teams of researchers paid by individual historians such as Kutler and news services. This gave Kutler an advantage over other researchers and special responsibility as a historian to inform the public in the most honest and unbiased fashion. Recent revelations of plagiarism committed by major historians, has made honesty a major criterion for judging all historical works. This burden of accuracy and objectivity falls on any transcript project, such as the Miller Center Presidential Records Project at the University of Virginia whose intent it is to publish presidential transcripts for profit. The same burden rests upon the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace Foundation and the Nixon Era Center when they post on the Internet certain tape transcripts. This scholarly burden has not always been met and that is why there should be complete transcriptions without ellipses so that future researchers can interpret their meaning confident that nothing of importance has been left out. Such complete transcripts would not be commercially profitable, but unless such an authoritative and comprehensive transcription project is undertaken using digitally enhanced and the rigid standards originally set by NARA, there will be endless haggling over the meaning of segments of the Nixon tapes and commercial publication of incomplete transcripts.

To date, no such impartial academic endeavor has been or is being made. For example, although the Miller Center Presidential Records Project at the University of Virginia is now transcribing Nixon tapes using essentially the same standards which were criticized in 1997 when Miller Center director Philip D. Zelikow and Ernest R. May published partially inaccurate and incomplete transcripts in The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis. Likewise, in 1997 Stanley Kutler published, Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes, based on transcripts of 201 hours of tapes, the accuracy of certain words, dates, passages and editing was challenged immediately. Yet, for three years, this hastily produced book remained the only authoritative transcription of these tapes simply because until the end of 1999 NARA did not permit the copying of individual tapes by researchers. Less significantly because fewer hours of taping were involved, on February 25, 1999, when NARA released the last of the abuse of power tapes, the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace Foundation simultaneously posted on the web transcripts of 124 tape-recorded conversations from the Nixon White House. Unfortunately, the Nixon Library chose to scatter partisan comments throughout its 1999 transcript what it euphemistically called "historical commentary." These transcripts, like those in the Kutler book, may or may not be entirely accurate—reinforcing the idea that an independent, scholarly transcripts of all the remaining Nixon tapes should be funded by Congress or some public interest group before more suspect transcripts are published for political and/or commercial purposes. The quality of these tapes, except for telephone calls, remain so poor that the serious scholars are having them digitally enhanced to try to decipher accurately what is being said, but Kutler, the Miller Center and the Nixon Library did not employ this methodological tool. This is time consuming but well worth the effort because the bulk of these conversations contain invaluable information on important domestic issues such as school desegregation, court appointments, welfare reform, Native American issues, pecking order among cabinet members, and a wide assortment of economic matters. To date, the press has also not taken the time to analyze the weighty content of the Nixon tapes, concentrating instead on sensational tidbits from them. This is particularly unfortunate with respect to the abuse of power tapes because so many questions about Watergate remain unanswered. John Dean and, as it turns out Nixon, probably have more to lose from authoritative and complete transcripts if suspicious gaps in the current tapes of his and the president's conversations. Moreover, the questionable editing by Kutler in his Abuse of Power of several crucial Dean conversations need to be corrected by both digitally enhancing them and then interpreting them using traditional documents from the papers of Nixon and his closest aides.

For thirty years John Dean has been at the center of the Watergate saga involving the White House tapes; namely, his conversations with Nixon when he was White House counselor, ostensibly investigating the break-in and cover-up for the president. Over the years he has promoted the standard interpretation of the Watergate break-ins on May 28 and June 17 as examples of attempts at political espionage on the part of the Nixon administration. This puts him in agreement with Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and historian Stanley Kutler. Moreover, Dean's simpatico, particularly with Woodward, have given them, as consultants, a virtual monopoly over media representations of Watergate since the 1970s, including the 1994 ABC/BBC documentary, and all of the 1999 discussions on network or cable TV of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Nixon's resignation and the thirtieth anniversary of the break-ins in June 2002.. The domination of the Dean/Woodward/Kutler interpretation has been particularly evident in "Nightline" coverage of the Nixon tapes by Ted Koppel and will be evident this August on the thirtieth anniversary of Nixon's resignation.

Dean has also given credence to the Woodward and Bernstein Deep Throat fiction (In all likelihood, Deep Throat is a literary device invented to cover-up the fact that they obtained information from several informants.) After first fingering Earl J. Silbert, a U.S. assistant attorney investing Watergate, in a 1975 statement about Watergate, Dean then said in a 1982 book that it was Alexander Haig, deputy to Kissinger and later chief of staff after Haldeman resigned. Now in an electronic book posted on Salon.com in June 2002, Dean says he has found still other and, heretofore unidentified Deep Throat candidates. Among the latest Dean Deep Throat suspects was Nixon speech writer Pat Buchanan. But since Deep Throat helped bring the Nixon administration down, why would his staunchest conservative supporter of Nixon (then and now) leak damaging information?

Even more important than Dean's self-serving pursuit of Deep Throat to cover-up his true role in the Watergate fiasco, have been his attempts to censor Len Colodny's and Robert Gettlin's controversial 1991 book, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President, by filing a multi-million dollar libel suit. Yet the media have not paid much attention to the conversations between Dean and Nixon in the Abuse of Government Power (AOGP) tape segments or to this law suit over a book, which not only contained the most thorough account of the little-known spying conducted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff against the White House in 1971-72, but also implied that John Dean had master-minded the Watergate break-ins because he wanted to find out if his future wife's name might be on call-girl list maintained inside Democratic National Committee headquarters. (This theory, by the way, has recently received judicial credibility when a defamation suit against G. Gordon Liddy was decided in his favor on July 3, 2002).

In Dean's suit, his lawyers attempted to prevent anyone from quoting or relying on the sex theory behind the break-ins contained Silent Coup and thereby violated the First Amendment rights of all authors who have cited their work. Ironically, journalists and historians, who condemn Nixon, have ignored Dean's attempt to silence authors who disagree with this former White House aide's various contradictory versions of his role in Watergate and the virtual monopoly he and Woodward have exercised over media representations of Watergate as a consultant since the late 1970s, including the 1994 ABC/BBC documentary. Dean's attorney threatened to sue Basic Books after it published in 1994 my book, Nixon Reconsidered, simply because I quoted from the Colodny and Gettlin work. Basic refused to issue the subsequent 1995 paperback edition, until I complied with the advice of the publisher's attorneys to make less direct use of this book. Dean's attorney even tried to prevent me from teaching a class on Watergate at Ohio University using the public legal documents from Dean's suit against Colodny and Gettlin. Why is John Dean immune from media commitment to the First Amendment and off-limits when it comes to serious investigative reporting?

Logically, in terms of the public's right to know, Dean's litigation against these authors should have triggered journalistic interest in the AOGP segments should dealing with his conversations with Nixon listed in the Tape Log Survey. In particular, they have double checked Kutler's published transcripts against the originals. Additionally, reporters should have been concerned with those conversations Haldeman and others have said they had with Dean, but which do not appear in the official NARA survey. "Missing" from the latest tapes release are conversations for the time that Dean spent at Camp David from March 23-28, 1973, during which he was supposedly writing a report about Watergate. Both Haldeman and Ehrlichman reported having telephone conversations with Dean while he was at Camp David, yet some conversations with Dean were not recorded during that crucial period and before Dean was dismissed from "investigating" Watergate at the end of the March after having produced no written report.

Perhaps the most glaring "missing" conversation took place on the evening of April 15, 1973. Nixon was "obviously quite disturbed" by this conversation, according to the Haldeman CD-ROM Diary, because it appears that Dean indicated to Nixon he had decided to cut a deal with the Ervin Committee, rather than testify before a federal grand jury, as Ehrlichman and others had been recommending. It is also likely at this time that Dean told the president he would resign only if Nixon two closest aides Haldeman and Ehrlichman also did so that he (Dean) would not look as though he was being singled out. If this is correct, Dean came close to blackmailing Nixon by indicating that Haldeman and Ehrlichman (and possibly the president) were guilty of obstructing justice in this particularly critical, but missing, conversation.

Moreover, Haldeman and Nixon both make reference to reviewing other conversations in 1973 which were not among the segments released in either1991, 1996 or 1999. I have for sometime suspected (without proof except for his detailed Congressional testimony) that Dean reviewed some of these tapes during his stay at Camp David in March and decided to later indicate to prosecutors only those which showed him in a most favorable light. What happened to the others would have been by now a matter for serious investigation had not so many journalists, scholars, and prosecutors benefitted from blindly relying on Dean rather than questioning his self-interested motives.

Another curious anomaly that has emerged from the AOGP segments concerns one recording for March 29, 1973, between Ehrlichman and Dean in which the former is strongly urging the latter to testify before the grand jury because "one can't expect probity, fairness and guarantees of rights before a committee of the Senate the does the kind of things [including asking for raw FBI files] this committee has done in the last couple of days." This tape could have helped in Ehrlichman's defense at his subsequent trial. In it Ehrlichman says that his "safe refuge is at the grand jury," where he is willing to volunteer information to "cleanse" his name. Dean, however, is heard on this tape as saying he was not willing to voluntarily appear before the grand jury because "there's always the chance I won't be called."

Before Ehrlichman died on February 15, 1999, during the height of the Clinton impeachment proceedings, he had contended in a documentary made a year earlier that had he known this conversation existed on tape he would have made use of it at his trial. But it was not on the list of events and tapes Dean prepared for the Special Prosecutor — list which consisted of a bare bones outline which cast him in the most positive light. Even more curious is that there is no cross reference to this recording in the logs for Executive Office Building or Oval office tape segments. Since Ehrlichman specifically says on this tape that he stepped out of a meeting with the president, it was first thought that Dean may have privately recorded this conversation, but the National Archives maintains that no private Dean dictabelts were found in his papers and so cannot explain why no cross reference to it exists unless it was taped in the Lincoln Sitting Room. Kutler's editorial comment for this tape does not explain its strange provenance and then misleadingly describes the importance of this tape as being the fact that both Ehrlichman and Dean agree John Mitchell should "step forward and assume full responsibility," when, in fact, he clearly shows Ehrlichman, and not Dean, being willing to step forward and testify before the grand jury.

In several other instances, Kutler goes out of way to manipulate either his comments or the conversations themselves to show that Nixon knew in advance about both the break-ins of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and of the Watergate complex. These attempts were so transparent, however, that they were immediately exposed by reviewers of his 1997 book and Kutler changed his editorial comment about the Ellsberg break-in for the paperback edition, but without correcting the transcript itself. In another conversation on September 15, 1972, Kutler's transcript leaves out the end of that conversation where Dean is about to say that one of the lawyers for a Watergate defendant was beginning to get "into the sex life of some of the members of the DNC (National Democratic Committee). This, in fact, is part of the Colodny and Gettlin thesis which in turn suggests that Dean's wife-to-be was a friend of one of women involved in providing sexual services for Democratic officials visiting Washington, D.C. Why leave out such a titillating remark, except to keep Dean from looking as positive as possible and to keep readers in the dark about his law suit against Colodny and Gettlin over just this issue of sex as the motivation for the Watergate break-ins?

However, the most egregious manipulation of crucial conversations in Abuse of Power occurred when Kutler severely edited and then cut and pasted two truncated conversations together between Nixon and Dean, which took place on in the morning and evening of March 16, 1973, in such an arbitrary manner that it confirms his lack of objectivity where the president's former counsel is concerned. Kutler has denied reversing the order of these tapes, but the extensive sections he leaves out of both transcripts all show the president and Dean deeply involved in concocting a cover-up story in which Dean would say in the morning that he would conclude that "there was not a scintilla of evidence in the investigation that led anywhere near the White House." Both discussions relate to the report that Dean is supposed to be writing, with the evening one concluding when Dean reassures the president that "We will win." Kutler not only reverses the order of these two March 16 tapes, but leaves out both of these incriminating quotations by Dean.

This was three days after Dean had already told Nixon on March 13 that White House aide to Haldeman, Gordon Strachan had prior knowledge of Watergate break-ins (a tape that Kutler entirely leaves out) and five days before he told the president there was a "cancer—within—close to the Presidency, that's growing." In the interim one of the Watergate burglars, E. Howard Hunt, had asked for more money to keep silent. So by March 21 when Dean uttered his famous phrase about a cancer on the presidency to Nixon, they both knew that the White House was involved and Hunt's additional request simply convinced Dean that the jig was up. But before he reaches this conclusion on the 21st , he has told Nixon on the 16th (in a segment that Kutler leaves out) that he is frustrated with his inability to infiltrate the Senate Watergate Committee. "That's the only way we can handle them is to know what they're doing."

In uttering these words Dean and Nixon both know that such activity constitutes an obstruction of justice and the report they are contriving will be part of that obstruction. On March 20, Dean and Nixon and presidential aide Richard Moore actually work together on a cover-up statement (with Moore heard clearly typing it up in the background) and yet this conversation is entirely left out of the Kutler book. As a friend of Dean's and foe of Nixon, Kutler could have used the March 13, 16, and 20, 1973, tapes to show how deeply the president was involved in the cover-up once he hears about Strachan, but do so would also demonstrate Dean's deep involvement. And so, at least two key tapes are entirely missing from Abuse of Power, and two other conversations are redacted in such a way as to ensure that Dean remains the reluctant witness hero the Watergate Senate hearings.

In a word, when placed in proper context with previous and subsequent tapes, Dean's cancer on the presidency remark looks like it was carefully calculated for his own future defense. Instead of being an altruistic whistle blower, he may have made it as a potential blackmailer of the president reminiscent of his April 15 "missing" conversation. One would not know any of this from the Kutler book.

The Dean libel suit against Colodny and Gettlin was settled out of court and so these, and other tapes containing circumstantial information about Dean's involvement in the break-ins and cover-up were not subjected to public scrutiny as they should have been back in 1973-74 by prosecutors and by reporters since the 1996 release. Belatedly, the National Archives, admitted that certain tapes (most notably one for the evening of April 15, 1973) were not recorded because the Secret Service neglected to change the tape on the system recording conversations taking place in the Oval Office. However, all telephone conversations with the president before and after Dean's visits were recorded for that evening and are now released. Moreover, the Archives did not reveal until 1998 that seven of the reel-to-reel tapes in the collection (not all necessarily AOGP segments) are completely blank. Four are from Camp David and are the most likely to have included conversations with Dean about Watergate while he was "preparing" his report; and three are from the Oval Office. Another little known fact about the Nixon White House tapes is none of those scheduled for release include some 950 hours of dictabelt recordings which remain locked away from research, and the NARA Nixon Materials Project has no plans for processing these dictabelts in the near future because no one has sued for their release and because many can be found as typed memoranda in the papers of individual White House staffers.

Thus, it remains unclear whether the public's right to know will prevail over the past quarter century of secrecy enshrouding these "missing" or stored recordings--especially the heretofore ignored conversations in which John Dean participated. Not surprisingly, Dean emerged as the hero of liberal Democrats the during the Nixon impeachment investigation and as a defender of President Clinton during his impeachment troubles, hoping no doubt for what he has long sought: a presidential pardon for his Watergate misdeeds.

The futile search for Deep Throat has allowed mainstream interpretations dictated by Dean, Woodward, Bernstein, and Kutler to dominate press coverage of Watergate since 1975. Woodward, in particular, doesn't want his connection with Haig and the JCS spy ring exposed and more than Haig does. James Rosen's article in the April 2002 issue of The Atlantic Monthly detailed the spy ring operation run by the Joints Chief of Staff against the Nixon White House because the military disagreed with the president's foreign policy in Vietnam, China, and the USSR. Likewise, Dean wants his deep involvement in the cover-up unmasked. Thus, Deep Throat was (and remains) a perfect diversion from finding out the truth about Watergate and who has been covering up ever since Nixon's and Dean's initial and subsequent cover-ups. Only an authoritative, comprehensive, and noncommercial transcriptions of all the Nixon tapes will end the devious Deep Throat strangle-hold about who covered up what about Watergate and underscore the historical fact that the domestic and foreign successes Richard Nixon transcend the sensational and often deceptive attention paid to his administration because of Watergate.

JOAN HOFF, was formerly the Executive Secretary of the Organization of American Historians co-editor of the Journal of Women's History, President and CEO of the Center for the Study of the President, editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly; and Director of the Contemporary History Institute at Ohio University. Currently she is Distinguished Research Professor of History at Montana State University and author of Nixon Reconsidered (Basic, 1994).