Nation: Much Ado About Haldeman

New Watergate tales from Nixon’s top aide provoke heated denials

Suddenly, all the old rancorous controversies of the Watergate era came back to life. High crimes and misdemeanors were charged and denied. Reporters scrambled for inside tips, and there were rumors of stolen documents, violated contracts and million-dollar damages.

At the center of the turmoil was H.R. (“Bob”) Haldeman, once the crewcut, fiercely loyal chief of staff to President Nixon, now serving a minimum one-year term at California’s Lompoc prison farm on a conviction of perjury in the Watergate coverup. Last May Haldeman had fumed as he watched his former chief imply in televised interviews with David Frost that he might have saved his presidency if he had just had the heart to fire earlier his two closest aides, Haldeman and Domestic Adviser John Ehrlichman. Haldeman vowed then and there to turn his pro-Nixon memoirs into a stinging expose of “the truth” about Watergate. As it spilled out last week in an avalanche of leaks, The Ends of Power, roughly written by Freelancer Joseph DiMona, proved far from the definitive answer to Watergate’s many remaining mysteries.

But Haldeman’s account was nonetheless that of a key White House insider. And although he cautiously couched his accusations as beliefs, rather than provable assertions of fact, he charged that Nixon personally launched the Watergate bugging operation that cost him the presidency, that Nixon was part of the cover-up from the very day on which his re-election committee’s burglars were arrested in Democratic national headquarters, that just three days after police had seized his agents Nixon himself erased 18% minutes of a White House tape that showed his complicity in the crime.

Haldeman’s story is badly flawed, frustratingly vague and curiously defensive. Many key sections were promptly denied; others are clearly erroneous. Yet the accusations add a new chapter to the ever unfolding story of the,nation’s worst political scandal in modern times. Only two men are likely to know more about the full Watergate story. One, of course, is Nixon, who last year denied once again in the Frost interviews that he had had any knowledge of how or why the Watergate bugging began or had participated in any criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice. The other man who might know more than Haldeman is Charles Colson, Nixon’s former special counsel and now a “born again” social worker, who is portrayed in Haldeman’s book as the President’s uncontrollable “hit man” and a devious conspirator who pushed the Watergate burglars into their disastrous action.

Haldeman endorses a much-discussed motive for the still mysterious Watergate eavesdropping. Nixon, claims Haldeman, was out “to get” Larry O’Brien, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Long a Nixon antagonist, O’Brien had angered the President by shrewdly exploiting a never proved charge that the Nixon Administration had settled an antitrust suit against ITT favorably to the giant corporation in return for financial help to hold the 1972 Republican National Convention in San Diego. Haldeman contends that Nixon and Colson, who had a personal hatred for O’Brien from old political campaigns in Massachusetts, hoped the Watergate bugs would turn up damaging information about O’Brien’s lucrative ($180,000 a year, according to Haldeman) work as a lobbyist for a company owned by Billionaire Howard Hughes.

But if Haldeman’s explanation of Watergate’s remaining who-and-why mysteries is credible, his book’s most surprising tales concern two sensational foreign policy conflicts that are more difficult to believe. Their authenticity was, in fact, sharply challenged last week by both of Nixon’s Secretaries of State, Henry Kissinger and William Rogers.

The most melodramatic is Haldeman’s account of what he claims “may have been the most dangerous of all the confrontations this nation has ever faced.” According to Haldeman, U.S. intelligence learned in 1969 that the Russians had moved “nuclear-armed divisions” along the Ussuri River within two miles of the Chinese border. Aerial photos showed “hundreds of Soviet nuclear warheads stacked in piles. Eighteen thousand tents for their armored forces erected overnight in nine feet of snow.”

The Russians, claims Haldeman, were considering a “surgical” nuclear strike against the Chinese, designed to knock out new nuclear plants. But U.S. officials feared, among other things, that the Russians had only crude bombs with a radioactive fallout that might kill “every man, woman and child in Japan” and spread death “across Korea and Pacific islands where more than 250,000 American troops were stationed.”

Haldeman reports that “there were several overtures by the Soviets to the U.S. for a joint venture in the surgical strike. Nixon turned the Soviets down, but was then informed, to his horror, that the Soviets intended to go ahead on their own.” Haldeman says U.S. diplomacy cleverly defused the danger. Kissinger first sought to signal the Russians that the U.S. might actually come to China’s aid. He did so, says Haldeman, through Walter J. Stoessel Jr., U.S. Ambassador to Poland, who astonished Chinese diplomats at a party in Warsaw by suggesting that the U.S. wanted to resume the abandoned U.S.Chinese talks on diplomatic relations.

Next, Major General George Keegan, Air Force Chief of Intelligence, recalled a trick that had helped warn off the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Using the same ploy, he sent out a deliberately uncoded message, as though by accident, estimating the number of Russian civilians who would die as the result of any Soviet attack on China. The various U.S. tactics had their effect, Haldeman says. U.S. photos soon showed the Soviet nuclear divisions withdrawing from the border.

Haldeman’s other previously unreported story tells of a new Soviet threat in Cuba. He reports that Kissinger rushed into his office in September 1970 with pictures of soccer fields being built at Cienfuegos. “Those soccer fields could mean war, Bob,” an excited Kissinger is supposed to have said. Understandably, Haldeman asked, “Why?” The reply: “Cubans play baseball. Russians play soccer.” The meaning, according to Haldeman, was that eight years after the dangerous Kennedy-Khrushchev showdown over Soviet missiles in Cuba, the Russians were doing it again.

The Soviet aim, according to Haldeman, was to position “mediumrange missiles” within range of U.S. nuclear command bases. DEW-line defenses that guard against Russian attack from the north would be unable to warn of a Soviet strike from the south. It was Kissinger who blocked this threat, contends Haldeman, by calling in Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin and telling him the U.S. knew about the missiles but did not want another missile crisis. If the Russians desisted, nothing would be said publicly and detente could continue. Construction of the base was abandoned by the Russians.

Kissinger agreed last week that the Soviets had considered a nuclear strike at the Chinese but denied that the Russians had asked the U.S. to join in. “Nothing like that happened,” he said. As for Haldeman, “What does he know about it? I have just finished the chapter in my own book on China and have gone over the papers, and that never took place.” Kissinger said that there was some tension over a Russian base in Cuba but it was far less dramatic or ominous than Haldeman’s account portrays—and was nothing like another missile crisis. Haldeman contends that if there had been no Watergate, Nixon would have achieved his goal of “a full generation of peace in the world and prosperity without inflation at home.” There was, says Haldeman, “greatness in him.” But if Haldeman argues that Nixon’s character assets (“intelligence, analytical ability, judgment, shrewdness, courage, decisiveness and strength”) outweighed his flaws, he by no means minimizes those faults. He variously describes Nixon as having a “dirty, mean, base side” and “a terrible temper,” being “coldly calculating, devious, craftily manipulative” and “the weirdest man ever to live in the White House.”

Haldeman portrays himself as continually giving “active encouragement” to the “good” side of Nixon and treating the “bad” side with “benign neglect.” As chief of staff, Haldeman says, he often ignored “petty, vindictive” orders from Nixon (such as one to give mass lie detector tests to employees of the State Department as a means of finding security leaks). Haldeman now regrets that he did not challenge Nixon more “frontally” to check his dark impulses. But he also notes wryly that other Nixon associates who had done so, including HEW Secretary Robert Finch and Communications Director Herbert Klein, quickly lost influence at the White House.

By contrast, Haldeman contends, the crafty Colson became a Nixon intimate by deliberately appealing to Nixon’s vindictive instincts. And that volatile combination of the unchecked worst in both Nixon and Colson, Haldeman suggests, was the cause of Watergate.

According to Haldeman, the trail led this way:

By May of 1972, the Democrats were preparing to nominate George McGovern as their presidential candidate, Nixon led by some 19 points in public opinion polls and had no reason to worry about his reelection. But he was furious at O’Brien for pushing the ITT charges. An angry Nixon told Haldeman on Air Force One: “O’Brien’s not going to get away with it, Bob. We’re going to get proof of his relationship with Hughes—and just what he’s doing for the money.”

How? Writes Haldeman: “I believe it is almost certain that Nixon asked Colson to help him nail O’Brien. Colson naturally turned to Hunt. [E. Howard Hunt, a retired CIA agent used by Colson as an investigator.] And Hunt tried to do it by tapping O’Brien’s telephone at the Watergate.”

But how does Haldeman know that? Says he: “This isn’t mere conjecture on my part. It’s backed up by Nixon’s own words, as revealed over and over again in the tapes. Nixon knew what had happened.” Indeed, various Nixon tapes do show him believing that “Colson must have done it,” “There’s no way he wasn’t involved.” This evidence is neither new nor indisputable. Colson, predictably enough, said last week that “Haldeman’s reconstruction of events may be the biggest hoax since Clifford Irving’s.”

There was only one break in the silence from San Clemente, where Nixon was besieged by requests for a response. Said Colonel Jack Brennan, Nixon’s longtime aide: “Former President Nixon’s memoirs will be published in May.” One thing seems certain: Nixon’s recollections of the Watergate origins are not likely to coincide with Haldeman’s.

Haldeman tries to minimize his own role in the Nixon committee’s intelligence-gathering plans. He contends that he did want the committee’s deputy director, Jeb Stuart Magruder, to develop an intelligence capability but only to make “simple recordings of public speeches” by Democratic candidates so that inconsistencies could be attacked. He admits prodding Magruder to get going on it and says that Nixon, in turn, had been nudging him.

Contrary to evidence introduced at Haldeman’s 1974 trial, he still denies that he ever saw any of the “Gemstone” reports showing what the one working bug on a phone inside the Democratic Committee headquarters was picking up. He also denies ever telling his aide, Gordon Strachan, to destroy any such documents—contrary to Strachan’s testimony.

In giving his version of how the Watergate operation began, Haldeman endorses the familiar—but never convincingly documented—theories that the Democrats knew about the plans for the bugging in advance and let it happen to entrap the Republicans. Says Larry O’Brien: “That’s baloney. That’s a real crock.” Haldeman further suggests that the CIA knew all along about the plans and may even have sabotaged them to discourage Nixon from developing any unofficial intelligence capability or seeking political control over the CIA. Former CIA Director Richard Helms said last week that his Senate Watergate testimony still stands. “The agency had nothing to do with the Watergate break-in.”

Haldeman is more credible when he abandons such unverifiable theorizing and focuses on the specific new evidence he can bring to the scandal. He does so in supporting his belief that Nixon was part of the cover-up “from day one”—even though no one in the-White House viewed it as a crime at first. The cover-up was not a “conspiracy” in the legal sense, Haldeman contends: It was “organic,” growing “one step at a time” to limit political damage to the President.

Haldeman claims that on June 20, three days after the arrests, he received a Nixon phone call that has remained “unknown to anyone but the President and me to this day.” Already Nixon was thinking about raising money for the jailed burglars. “Those people who got caught are going to need money. I’ve been thinking about how to do it,” Nixon told Haldeman. “I’m going to have Bebe [Nixon’s friend, Bebe Rebozo] start a fund for them in Miami. Call it an anti-Castro fund.”

Haldeman also for the first time fills in that celebrated 18½ minute gap from the tape of a conversation he held that same June 20 with Nixon at the White House. In what looks like his lawyers’ protective way of camouflaging what, in fact, Haldeman knew—possibly to preclude further legal charges against him—he writes, “I’ve reconstructed the way the conversation might have gone.” And, if Haldeman is accurate, it becomes clear why the tape was erased. The key Nixon passages:

“I know one thing. I can’t stand an FBI interrogation of Colson … Colson can talk about the President, if he cracks. You know I was on Colson’s tail for months to nail Larry O’Brien on the Hughes deal. Colson told me he was going to get the information I wanted one way or the other. And that was O’Brien’s office they were bugging, wasn’t it? And who’s behind it? Colson’s boy Hunt. Christ. Colson called [Magruder] and got the whole operation started. Right from the goddam White House … I just hope the FBI doesn’t check the office log and put it together with that Hunt and Liddy meeting in Colson’s office.”

If the quotes are accurate, Nixon is not only divulging his own culpability in initiating the bugging but is also expressing a clear intent to keep the FBI from learning about it. Thus the seeds of an obstruction of justice have been planted even before the celebrated June 23 “smoking gun” conversation, which ultimately triggered Nixon’s resignation from office.

Once again, Haldeman claims no direct knowledge of who erased that 18/^ minutes from the tape, but he nonetheless accuses Nixon. “My own perception had always been that Nixon simply began to erase all of the Watergate material from the tapes when he started to worry that they may be exposed,” Haldeman says. This was the first taped post-burglary conversation. Haldeman believes Nixon set out to censor it, but since he “was the least dexterous man I have ever known,” he discovered that “it would take him ten years” to wipe out all the incriminating words. Indeed, court-appointed tape experts detected at least five, and probably nine, starts and stops in the erasure. Haldeman claims he later was “confused” when Nixon referred to the gap as “Rose’s 18 minutes”—but that could easily have been the President’s way of shifting blame in Haldeman’s mind to Rose Mary Woods, who claimed to have accidentally erased at most five minutes of this tape.

As for the smoking-gun tape from three days later, Haldeman adds some spectacular—but unverified—ramifications to the White House efforts to persuade top CIA officials to intercede with the FBI in order to impede the FBI’s investigation of the money found on the arrested Watergate burglars. That tape, in which Nixon instructed Haldeman to ask the CIA to do this, put the lie to Nixon’s repeated claim that he had not tried to block the criminal investigation into Watergate and had wanted only to protect any CIA secrets involving national security. It showed his real fear was that the money would be traced to his re-election committee, and protecting his own political standing was his real aim.

Haldeman says he was puzzled in that conversation when Nixon told him what to tell the CIA: “Look, the problem is that this will open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing again.” When Haldeman did ask CIA Director Richard Helms that day to intercede with the FBI, he reports he at first got nowhere. Helms insisted that no CIA operation would be compromised if the FBI traced the money through a Mexican bank. But then Haldeman did as he was told by Nixon, warning that “the Bay of Pigs may be blown.”

According to Haldeman, the reaction was galvanic. “Turmoil in the room, Helms gripping the arms of his chair, leaning forward and shouting, ‘The Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with this. I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs.’ ” Recalls Haldeman: “I was absolutely shocked by Helms’ violent reaction. Again I wondered, what was such dynamite in the Bay of Pigs story?” In fact, the CIA officials then did ask Acting FBI Director Pat Gray to slow the money tracing—and he did for a week or so.

What did it all mean? As Haldeman later pieced it together, he says, the “Bay of Pigs” was a coded reference to the CIA’s then-secret attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. The CIA had withheld this information from the Warren Commission, even though it could have had a bearing on any conspiracy theory that Castro might have plotted Kennedy’s death. The book’s implication is that Nixon knew this secret and held it over Helms. Haldeman also suggests that Helms had something on Nixon. In the vaguest of hints, he implies that as Vice President under Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon may have been a chief instigator of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion plans, later carried out by Kennedy. The invasion plans were, in fact, created by clandestine services officials in the CIA and, although Nixon as Vice President probably was aware of them, he certainly had not been their author

There are many lesser, but intriguing, stories in the book. Haldeman claims the White House taping system was originated so that Nixon could have a check on anyone who might later misrepresent what was said in the Oval Office—and one of his main concerns was Kissinger. Nixon, Haldeman writes, “knew that Henry’s view on a particular subject was sometimes subject to change without notice.” Nixon did not destroy his tapes because at first he felt he would never have to give them up and later he thought they could be used to discredit John Dean. Haldeman flatly denies Nixon’s Frost-show claim that he once told Haldeman to get rid of the tapes.

Like other veterans of Watergate, Haldeman has a theory on the identity of the celebrated “Deep Throat” source of Washington Post Watergate Reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. His “candidate,” as he puts it, is Fred Fielding, Dean’s White House deputy. As aide to Nixon’s nemesis, Fielding has been on most such speculative source lists, but he said again last week that Haldeman’s charge was “sheer fantasy.” Fielding has shown TIME passports and photographs indicating that he was in Bolivia in late January 1973, when All the President’s Men describes one specific undercover meeting with Deep Throat.

Haldeman, who is expected to be released from Lompoc prison as early as this summer, is currently insulated from the storm his book is stirring. It certainly is not, as he concedes, the full story of Watergate, and is far from the final one. Despite the claim that his aim was finally to “tell the truth” about the scandal, his book is too self-protective for that.

Haldeman does admit some wrongs. The coverup, he concludes, was “morally and legally the wrong thing to do—so it should have failed.” But then he suggests that the problem actually was tactical—”Too many people knew too much”—and that the one man who knew the most (Richard Nixon) had not told his aides enough.

“A plan can be developed to handle almost any problem,” Haldeman states, and if Nixon had only provided “a key part of the puzzle … most of us would have been willing to sacrifice ourselves, if necessary, to save the presidency that we believed in.” The coverup, in short, was not such an evil to Bob Haldeman that he would refuse to try it again if he thought he could make it work. Says he: “There is absolutely no doubt in my mind today that if I were back at the starting point, faced with the decision of whether to join up, even knowing what the ultimate outcome would be, I would unhesitatingly do it.”