Free The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It by John W. Dean

an obvious [reply], in my opinion. I think I should state there’s no White House involvement.” But he wanted to be sure that that was not too broad a statement, since it had not been suggested by whoever had prepared the briefing material. 6
    “I don’t know what, it may be that their concern is that there is some White House involvement?” the president asked.
    “No,” Haldeman answered quickly. “The only question is whether that technically puts you in a—”
    “—a position of commenting on it?” the president interrupted.
    “Well, no, in a sense that, on a direct basis of White House involvement, I think you’re absolutely clean,” Haldeman replied hesitantly. Only days earlier, on June 20, he had reminded the president that a number of members of the staff—including the president and himself—were aware of the reelection committee’s intelligence operation: “We all knew that there were some,” he had said, a sentence the president had completed with “intelligence things.” Haldeman now rephrased the statement more prudently: “Some activities, and we were getting reports, or some input here and there.” When Haldeman responded to Nixon’s question on June 20, his choice of the words “on a direct basis” regarding the White House was a careful qualification of the potential involvement of the staff, including that of Colson and myself, but particularly his own.
    “Hunt’s the only line to the White House,” Haldeman continued, but heraised the concern that both Gordon Liddy and Jeb Magruder had once been members of the White House staff.
    “But they aren’t White House now,” Nixon pointed out.
    The president now took a call from Ziegler, * and after he hung up summarized for Haldeman the Watergate strategy they had agreed on.
    “Well, I think I’ll just say Mr. Ziegler’s covered that, because he said he was asked about Hunt, and he said he left the White House three months ago. He said he was asked about Colson the first day, he checked with Colson, he was not involved. I’ll say Mr. Ziegler has covered that. It keeps me from getting into it, and then they bring up another story, the president says White House was not involved.”
    Haldeman did have some good news to report: “We’re in pretty good shape. Today’s news is all good. In the first place, we got Judge Richey for the civil case. The civil case is kind of worrisome. The Democrats outsmarted themselves. They made a fatal legal error. They filed the suit on behalf of all Democrats, thereby disqualifying any Democratic judge from hearing it. And according to [former attorney general and current secretary of state] Bill Rogers, [Richey’s] programmable, and knows exactly what’s going on. Richey’s played it just beautifully.” Haldeman described how the Democrats had planned to “move immediately on depositions,” but Richey would “entertain all sorts of delaying motions.”
    “He also knows he has a possibility of moving up in the world,” the president added, and then turned to the fact that security at the Republican National Committee and the CRP had been beefed up, and warned that they needed to be careful, because papers had been stolen from the White House. * Discussing security and leaks brought the president back to reporters who published stolen classified government documents. That morning’s
Post
editorial gloated over the fact that nothing had gone amiss, no national security calamity had occurred, when the classified Pentagon Papers had been published. Nixon instructed Haldeman to have a story written by at least one columnist critical of Pulitzers being awarded for such reporting. “We’ll getthat,” Haldeman assured him. “We’ve got another thing going that’s taken hold a little bit, which is, we’ve started moving on the Hill, letting things come out from there, which is that this whole Watergate thing is a Jack Anderson thing.” Haldeman reported about how members of Congress