American Experience

John Ehrlichman on the cover-up

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I'm not sure what took place between, let's say the 6th of July, my last conversation with the President on this subject. And a day in mid February of 1972, which was the next time that I really talked to him about it. But my understanding is that during that period of time, John Dean kind of ran this whole problem single-handedly. He was the fellow in the White House who was picked out to monitor and presumably did so. Long about the middle of February, after the '72 election, the middle of February of '73, Richard Nixon and the rest of us came down from Camp David. We all went to San Clemente for a week or so. And Nixon said," What are these fellows in the Senate doing? What's this hearing they're talking about on Watergate? What's going on?" And those of us who were with him said, well we really don't know. This fellow Dean has been looking after all this. And Nixon said, "Get him out here, let's find out what's going on ." So we had a meeting in San Clemente, with John Dean and a fellow named Richard Moore to find out what had been going on during these ensuing months. And the story he told us was a bad story. There had been money passed to the burglars to keep them under control. There had been a certain amount of pressure brought on them and their lawyers to testify certain ways. There were grand jury proceedings. The Democrats in the Senate were running away with this thing and about to have a big public hearing. And we were very, very much behind the power curve at that point, had badly underestimated the implications of this thing.

At that point the President's options were pretty narrow. And I felt strongly, one of his options was to step out as the hugely re-elected President for this country and say, I've got the back end of this ballgame now and I've checked around and some really bad stuff has happened, and I'm sorry. But I'm going to correct it right now. Bingo. His response to that was, I think Bob Haldeman ought to do that. And Haldeman sat down and wrote out a long statement in which he tried to act out that role. And it didn't wash. He didn't have enough personal knowledge for one thing. And it didn't sit well having him do this and we talked about it. And said no. And I came back to it, I said, Mr. President, I think this is something you've got to do. He was really turned off by that. I didn't know that he had been involved in this June 23rd meeting. I thought he was clean as a hound's tooth at that point and that it was possible for him to separate himself from what other people had done. He knew in his heart of hearts that he couldn't do that I guess. And he was reticent to do it. More than reticent, he just wouldn't do it. So then the options get even narrower. And he sent me to negotiate with Sam Ervin and Howard Baker, the senators who are going to run this senatorial committee. And the first thing that he wanted proposed was it not be televised. The second thing he wanted proposed was that no members of the White House staff would be witnesses. And the senators obviously were encouraged by what they knew up to that point and they were adamant. They wouldn't give them those things.

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