100 Minutes
John Dean is seated in a White House waiting room of sorts, having arrived early for his 10:00 am meeting with the President in the Oval Office. Dean was up late the night before, practicing the things he’d tell Nixon, preparing the way he’d prepare to give a closing argument in court.
It’s been a rough couple of days for Dean since the Saturday meeting on St. Patrick’s Day. Dean felt like he needed to be clear with the President just how badly things were going, and how dreadful they might get at that earlier sit-down, but the President had strayed off the subject pretty quickly and the White House counsel felt like he maybe hadn’t fully made clear what he’d meant to say.
Dean had seen the initial list of subpoenas that Sam Dash intended to call for questioning before the Ervin Committee, and it caused him anguish. Many of those who’d be called were “civilians” – low level staffers and office workers – who were fiercely loyal to the President or to their direct reports (Mitchell and Magruder at CREEP, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Stans, Colson, etc. in the White House). Many of them were true believers in Nixon and his agenda, and truly believed – without knowing the full truth – that Watergate was some liberal Democratic dirty trick, perpetrated with the aid of those disloyal intellectuals at the Post and the Times. And so (again without knowing the full story), they were prepared to perjure themselves, to mislead under oath if necessary, not fully grasping that just because the Ervin Committee was headed by a Democrat, an oath to testify under subpoena was covered by laws that applied in all cases, to everyone.
And so Dean knew that nice people, people who didn’t realize the absolute mudhole that the White House was sitting in, were going to expose themselves to criminal indictments out of a misguided sense of loyalty. He’d tried to press the point with the President on March 17th, telling him that the time was coming when Nixon would need to cut some people loose. Haldeman, Dean told him; Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Colson as well.
“And Dean.”
That name had shocked the President, and Dean had hoped it would. Dean calmly explained that even he had criminal exposure – and lots of it – on Watergate. Nixon blew it off, not fully understanding it and the conversation moved on.
And now that conversation needed to drill down completely on what Nixon was facing. And at 10:12 am on March 21st, 100 fascinating minutes in American history begins as Dean sits down across from Nixon at the President’s desk in the Oval Office.
Dean: “The reason I thought we ought to talk this morning is because, in our conversations, I have the impression that you don’t know everything I know, and it makes it very difficult for you to make judgments that only you can make.”
Nixon: “…that we shouldn’t unravel something…”
Dean: “Let me give you my overall, first.”
Nixon: “In other words, your judgment as to where it stands and where we ought to go.”
Dean proceeds:
"I think that there’s no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’ve got. We have a cancer within – close to the presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding. It grows geometrically now, because it compounds itself.
“That’ll be clear as I explain, you know, some of the details of why it is, and it basically is because one, we’re being blackmailed (Chris’s note: by ‘blackmail’, Dean is referring to the increasingly high demands coming from the Watergate 7 who are to be sentenced on Friday the 23rd), and two, people are going to start perjuring themselves very quickly that have not had to perjure themselves to protect other people, and the like. And that is just…and there is no assurance --”
Nixon: “That it won’t bust.”
Dean: “That that won’t bust.”
And so Dean lays out Watergate as he knows it, from an operation to find out what the Democrats might know about Nixon. How putting Liddy in charge of it had yielded this wildly expensive plan to entrap Democrats with hookers and drugs at the Democratic convention, kidnapping them, and all sorts of wild other plans that Liddy dreamed up. Dean thought it was a joke at first, but later Mitchell assured him that Liddy was serious. Both men laughed about it, but then a few months later, Watergate happened – and that was one of the ideas that Liddy had had – to bug Larry O’Brien’s phone at the DNC headquarters.
The conversation goes on, and finally Nixon becomes curious about the “blackmail” demands coming from the Watergate 7. Dean tells him that he thinks McCord still wants some kind of jail time relief. But maybe he’ll accept clemency instead of a pardon. And E. Howard Hunt has demanded almost double the money he’s already received.
Nixon doubles down on the no pardons and no clemency stance he’s made. But the money. That’s interesting.
Nixon: “How much money do you need?”
Dean tells him it might be as much as $1 million total across the next couple of years.
Nixon: “We could get that. On the money, if you need the money you could get that. You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten. It is not easy, but it could be done.”
The two then discuss details of how the money could be gotten, through a Greek-American multi-millionaire named Tom Pappas. The detail of this discussion makes it very clear: Nixon wasn’t just flippantly, sarcastically suggesting payouts. He was working through ways and means the million dollars could be procured without having it land on any investigator’s radar.
Nixon eventually calls Haldeman into the room and the meeting with the three goes on a bit longer with Haldeman and Nixon explaining to Dean that they HAVE to stonewall things on Watergate. Nixon and Haldeman mention that everyone in the White House knows things about Watergate, from secretaries to couriers. If they don’t just stonewall this thing, they’ll all be implicated.
Which is exactly the opposite message that Dean had hoped to convey, but Dean takes it in stride. He wasn’t expecting miracles. But now he’s at least allayed one part of his conscience and laid everything out for Nixon.
Later, Nixon will claim (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary) that this March 21st meeting was the first he’d heard the full scope of the Watergate crisis and the involvement of senior White House aides.
He’ll also claim that when he, the Chief Executive of the United States, suggested buying off witnesses who could implicate everyone, he not seriously suggesting it. But Howard Hunt would claim under oath to the Ervin Committee with the bank receipts to match, that he received $75,000 two days after the Nixon/Dean meeting.
This would be a conversation that would come to greatly haunt Nixon across the next 17 months.