Title Card: Secrets Unraveled

NARRATOR: One month before the Watergate burglars went on trial, a 737 crashed in Chicago. Among the dead was Dorothy Hunt, wife of Watergate burglar Howard Hunt. Her purse, found in the wreckage, contained $10,000 in cash. Later, it would be revealed that Mrs. Hunt had acted as a courier, delivering money drawn from secret White House funds, hush money used to buy the burglars' silence. From the moment they were caught, the burglars lied to conceal their ties to the White House. Questioned by the FBI, G. Gordon Liddy, who'd planned the burglary, and James McCord, former CIA agent, who'd helped to carry it out, insisted they had acted on their own. So did the president's men.

Nixon's campaign manager and former attorney general, John Mitchell, who had approved the break-in, denied responsibility. The president's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, authorized hush money payments totaling more than $350,000. The president's domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman, lied to the FBI and grand jury investigating the break-in. The president's counsel, John Dean, withheld evidence, coached witnesses and monitored the FBI investigation. The cover-up was holding, but by early '73, it was consuming the time and attention of Nixon's closest aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman.

By February, John Dean had assumed more responsibility for managing the cover-up. He began to meet frequently with the president.

JOHN DEAN III, Counsel to the President: When I first started dealing with the president, my first concern was whether I should even be dealing with him on this because I felt that not only had I been compromised, I thought Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, all of us had because by now, I didn't have to be a criminal lawyer. I knew we were in the midst of something bad. I mean, this is a cover-up. There is no doubt in my mind.

NARRATOR: Nixon noted in his diary, "I'm glad that I'm talking to Dean now, rather than going through Haldeman or Ehrlichman. I think I've made a mistake in going through others when there is a man with the capability of Dean I can talk to directly." Both Nixon and Dean sensed growing danger from Capitol Hill. The Senate, under Democratic leadership, was forming a special Watergate Committee to investigate the break-in and the conduct of Nixon's re-election campaign.

But the most immediate threat came from Watergate burglar Howard Hunt. Despairing over the death of his wife, concerned over the fate of his children, he now demanded $120,000 or he would reveal, he said, the "seamy things" he had done for the Nixon White House.

Mr. DEAN: This is the first time one of these threats had ever been brought directly to me and I didn't like being in that role 'cause I had never -- I knew about the money out there, but I'd never been a conveyer of messages back and forth. And now, suddenly, I'm just right in the middle of another ugly side of this.

NARRATOR: Hunt's demand was a turning point for John Dean. The White House could no longer control the cover-up. On March 21, a worried Dean tried to persuade Nixon to end the conspiracy. He described the cover-up as a "cancer" on the presidency and warned that Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Dean himself had broken the law.

Mr. DEAN: And he just ... the president started knocking down every one of these horribles I kept raising. Finally, I got around to saying, "Well, you know, these guys want a lot more money to remain quiet. And there's just, you know, no telling how much they want." And he said, "Well, how much could they want?" And I pulled out of thin air what I thought was a pretty astronomical number and I said, "Well, it could cost a million dollars." And he looked at me and he said, "John, I know where we can get a million dollars."

NARRATOR: Nixon approved more hush money. He let the cover-up continue. Two days later, the cover-up blew wide open.

ROGER MUDD, Newscaster: [March 23, 1973] Good evening. There was a major break in the Watergate trial today. On this day of sentencing, one of the defendants, James McCord, promised to reveal hidden details about the bugging of the Democratic headquarters.

NARRATOR: In a letter to the judge presiding at the trial, James McCord admitted that the Watergate burglars had not acted on their own. His testimony implicated the White House and galvanized the national press. Even before McCord's letter, Nixon had ordered John Dean to write a report that would exonerate the White House of wrongdoing.

Mr. EHRLICHMAN: The president asked him to reduce his understanding of the whole problem to writing. He asked him to do that four or five times and nothing happened. And finally, the president sent John Dean to Camp David in the middle of March, to sit down, do nothing but write a report for the president on what this Watergate business was all about, who was involved, who was at fault, all of that. While Dean was up there, he had an epiphany, which was that he was in deep trouble, or so he says.

Mr. DEAN: Well, it was clear ... it was much clearer after the fact, but I suspected at the time I was being set up. And the whole plan was to give the president this report so he could say, "This is all I've ever known and my counsel lied to me, clearly." And I just wasn't going to be a part of that.

NARRATOR: The cover-up was disintegrating and Dean feared that he might become Nixon's scapegoat. In early April, he telephoned Haldeman to say that he was talking with the prosecutors. Haldeman cautioned him, "I think you ought to think about it because once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in." "If Dean is totally out of control," Ehrlichman told Nixon, "you could get an article of impeachment." Haldeman later remembered that Nixon looked stunned. In private, the president continued to search for a scapegoat and struggled to salvage the cover-up. In public, he acted as if he were upholding the law.

Pres. NIXON: I can report today that there have been major developments in the case, concerning which it would be improper to be more specific now, except to say that real progress has been made in finding the truth. I condemn any attempts to cover up in this case, no matter who is involved. Thank you.

NARRATOR: Events were spinning out of Nixon's control. John Dean, bargaining for immunity with Watergate prosecutor Earl Silbert, made a stunning revelation.

EARL SILBERT, Assistant U.S. Attorney: Dean's lawyer said, "Dean has one more thing to tell you that you might want to know about." And Dean, at that point, said -- we're standing in the hallway and Dean is in the office ... he said, in substance, that Liddy and Hunt were involved in a break-in into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Dan Ellsberg's psychiatrist. That was ... I know my jaw must have fallen down to the floor. That was a bombshell of information.

NARRATOR: For two years, the burglary of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office had remained one of the most closely-guarded secrets of the Nixon White House. Now, Dean's revelation suggested that the Watergate break-in was not an isolated event. It was part of a web of illegal activities ordered by the president's men.

Vacationing in Key Biscayne, Nixon knew Dean had talked to the prosecutors, but he still hoped to appeal to Dean's loyalty not to reveal any more. On Easter Sunday, Nixon called Dean.

Mr. DEAN: And he said he'd been out with the family to Easter Sunday or what-have-you and he said, "I want you to know, John, you're still my counsel." And I thought to myself,"B.S.," you know. "I'm about as close to being his counsel now as the man in the moon." And it was just... he just was keeping little feelers out there and -- but I made it pretty clear to all the -- all the word I was putting back to everybody, I wasn't making any deals, I wasn't interested in any deals.

Mr. EHRLICHMAN: I think Nixon hoped that he could make a bargain with Dean and say, in effect, "You have to protect your president." But the much stronger voice that Dean was hearing was the prosecutor, saying, "Boy, I'm going to nail you to the wall unless you give me all the dirt."

NARRATOR: As Dean and other aides scrambled for immunity, rumors swirled about the White House, coming ever closer to the Oval Office. In April, accusations against Haldeman and Ehrlichman dominated the headlines. The two men had protected the president, guarded his privacy, shared his ambitions. But now, Nixon would sacrifice his closest aides. The last Sunday in April, he summoned them to Camp David.

Mr. EHRLICHMAN: The first thing he said to me was, "When I went to sleep last night, I prayed that I would not wake up this morning." And he began to really cry. He began to really cry and I didn't know what to do 'cause I had just never seen him out of control this way. He finally said, basically -- the words have gone, I've forgotten ... I went back and made very careful notes so that somewhere I have notes of this conversation, but the gist of it was that the accusations were so serious that he couldn't keep us on. He thought maybe we could stay on, Bob and I, as -- on a leave of absence or some such form. But he saw that he had to cut it off, that he was going to fire Dean at the same time, he was going to fire the attorney general at the same time.

At some point, he asked me if there was anything that he could do for me. I said, "Yeah, I'd like you to explain this all to my kids, because I'm having trouble explaining to them why you would do this." And he didn't respond to that. So we ended up in a hug. We hugged each other and I could see that he had said everything that he could and that was the end of it.