Forty years ago, on Aug. 8, 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned from office following the Watergate scandal.
Despite four decades of literature from historians, journalists, academics and politicians, questions remain. Who ordered the break-in at the DNC headquarters on June 17, 1972? What was erased from the infamous 18 ½ minute gap? How much did Nixon know about the cover-up?
John W. Dean, a member of Nixon’s White House counsel who would spend four months in jail for his involvement in the cover-up, aims to finally answer these questions in his latest book, “The Nixon Defense.”
Dean transcribed more than 1,000 of Nixon’s White House recordings, 600 of which were previously untouched, and reviewed 150,000 pages of Watergate-related documents to reconstruct the events that led to Nixon’s resignation. From the first reports of the break-in to July 18, 1973, when Nixon shut the recorder off, this day-by-day account comes directly from the conversations of those involved.
The gap:
On the afternoon of June 20, 1972, an infamous gap appears in Nixon’s recordings. Dean believes it’s a conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, but he says it’s not as mysterious — or important — as people think.
It’s three days after the DNC break-in, and Nixon spends the day talking with Haldeman and John Mitchell, the director of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) and a close friend of Nixon.
“I gave Mitchell a call,” Nixon tells Haldeman in one evening conversation. “Cheered him up a little bit. I told him not to worry that we might be able to control this Watergate thing.”
“At that point it’s very much cover-up talk,” says Dean in an interview with The Post.
So what was said during the 18½-minute gap?
“It wasn’t Haldeman or Erchlichman sitting there saying, ‘Oh boy, did we mess up that job where we tried to break into Watergate,’” Dean says. “Which is the kind of thing people were fantasizing they might have been talking about.”
Drawing context clues derived from conversations in the following days, Dean concludes the gap “contained some general comment that revealed [Nixon’s] involvement in the cover-up.”
Dean doesn’t believe the 18 ¹/₂ minute gap contains any piece of information that isn’t repeated in another conversation.
“There’s other talk that week that would have been equally as damaging,” Dean explains. “It’s just those tapes weren’t subpoenaed.”
Who ordered the break in:
No one. Not directly anyway.
“I think there’s no question that [G. Gordon Liddy] had the impression that he was to go into the DNC,” Dean explains. Nixon had created an atmosphere where a high priority was placed on intelligence-gathering operations, largely in the hopes to “nail O’Brian.” (Larry O’Brian was a political strategist at the DNC and one of Nixon’s biggest political nemeses.)
When Mitchell wasn’t satisfied with the first operation, Liddy returned to the DNC headquarters.
Jeb Stuart Magruder, deputy director for CREEP, held to the same story, “literally from day one, that Liddy went back, on his own initiative, the second time because he had been chewed out by Mitchell,” Dean explains. “It’s really not an order, it’s really a dissatisfaction, by Mitchell.”
What Nixon knew:
He didn’t know about the break-in ahead of time, Dean says, but he was involved in the cover-up early on.
“He’s involved within hours,” says Dean. “By June 23rd [six days after the break-in], he’s plotting with Haldeman how to use the CIA to block the FBI.”
Dean explains, however, that “no one was considering the criminal implications of our actions, only the political consequences of inaction.”
The botched burglary took place just five months before the 1972 presidential election. “It couldn’t have been a worse timed event,” Dean says.
Nixon believed that as long as someone could be held accountable, it couldn’t be considered a cover-up. “To Nixon, a cover-up would have involved letting the men arrested in the DNC’s Watergate office walk free.”
This idea stemmed from Nixon’s experience in Congress during the Truman administration, after he tried to prosecute Truman officials whom he had evidence of being involved in kickback schemes and tax evasions. They all walked. “That, to him, was a definition of a cover-up.”
“Offenses such as conspiracy and obstruction of justice are not bright-line crimes that are immediately and easily discernable to those not experienced in criminal law.” Dean says not hiring a criminal lawyer proved to be “a fatal error.”
Regardless, by early July, Nixon knew what was taking place. On July 19, 1972, Haldeman reports to Nixon that the “Magruder plan was proceeding.” Magruder would lie in court.
“Perjury’s different,” says Dean. “People know when they’re lying and when they’re encouraging others to lie.”
“That’s one of the ones that surprised me, when Nixon really gives approval to this whole plan for Magruder to lie to protect himself and Mitchell, to keep the cover-up in place.”
Watergate was a perfect storm of deeply unfortunate and poorly handled events, further mishandled “because there was a re-election campaign going on.”
“We had become something of a criminal cabal,” Dean writes, “weighing the risks of further criminal action to prevent the worst while hoping something might unexpectedly occur that would resolve the problem.”