Ladies and gentlemen, young men and young women, egacy Forum. Before we start it, I'd like to cover a few things that are coming up that I hope you'd be interested in. One of them, of course, is our twentieth anniversary reunion, which is July 16, 17 and 18, marking 20 years since we opened the library and birthplace in 1990. We have a series of great events, public events, throughout the week and we hope you would go to www.nixonfoundation.org and learn about what is available and how you can participate. I think you'll enjoy every minute of everything we are going to do during that exciting week. Also, I would like to tell you that because of requests from parents and youngsters alike, we are repeating what was a very successful series last summer called "Meet the Presidents", where we have morning programs every week during the summer to educate and give your kids a fun experience hearing from and learning about the presidents of the United States from George Washington to Richard Nixon and we don't do the molic words but we do six of them and including that one on Patnick's Persaily. Now just so there's no misunderstanding, these are not the real presidents. No they are not. However, with Nixon, I mean with President Nixon, it said [xx] his younger brother who is a look alike so it's one at 7 o' clock, we have Dick Morris returning for his eighth blockbuster bestseller. 2010 Take Back America. It will be on our East Room, if you would like to come, if you would go online to .org.
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00:02:36,590 --> 00:02:36,240 Tickets are still available, that's June 1. We decided as part of our 20th anniversary that the most important thing we can do is that President Nixon did that shows there's a lot more than Watergate to his many years as President. And during that time we've schedule and for the next almost two years, monthly programs we called The Next Legacy Form. We started it on January 8th, in our east room and these are jointly sponsored by us as the Richard Nixon Foundation and Richard Nixon presidential library which is a national archives part of this institution and the foundation which is private and supports the work in education then and cultural activities that associate with Richard Nixon's many years in public service. The first one was January 8th on domestic affairs. The second one was February 15th, it was entitled 'The effective use of the president's time. And we brought together the severval staff members who were the immediate moving him both here and throughout the world. And these people who were very young at the time came back for two hours of how it was done, because the Nixon oval office to this day is still considered a model of effective and efficient use of the President's time. The next one was April 22 which was Earth day and that dealt with a focus on the environment and that too was here. That's followed by today, of course, on the Mysteries of Watergate and this will be followed on June 2nd in Washington, at George Washington University where they are jointly hosting with us, a program called Orion and the Origins of Welfare Reform and that's at 1.30 at George Washington University. That will be followed by the Peaceful Desegregation of Southern Schools on September 23rd, here. These are great opportunities to hear and learn about the Nixon legacy. They are usually very well attended and we've been fortunate in having C-Span cover many of them, as they are today. I'd like to welcomeWelcome the AP students from Briar High School. I want to hear from you. The kids form Briar, Would you give me a welcome. As part of the 20th anniversary, we realize that probably the most important thing we could do, would be to recognize that there's a conceptuous shift in public opinion and even among former critics about the president Nixon's record. That they are realizing that indeed there is a lot more than Watergate. That his imaginary have been creative policies are felt throughout our government and throughout the world today. So we have organized this monthly programs and our new President, who I'm going to introduce in a moment, spent years with President Nixon in the White House Later appointed director of the National Park Service. Spent years with President Bush, President Reagan and President Nixon in his later years after leaving the White House and knows as well as anybody I can name, the Nixon Legacy. So we drafted him to come here and be President of the Nixon Foundation. That was done by our chairman, Chris Elfman, who I'd like to acknowledge. Where is Chris? Chris Elfman, who headed the search. So it's my pleasure ladies and gentlemen to introduce the President of the Nixon Foundation, my good friend Ron Walker. Good afternoon everybody and welcome to the President Richard Nixon Presidential Foundation, I see a lot of new faces and I see a lot of old friends. Welcome. Get my glasses out of here. Jeff had an extraordinary career and I am going to share some of it with you with our presenter today. Jeff Sheffered hold degrees from Whittier College and Harvard Law School, of which he attended both on scholarships. Upon graduation, he spent five years with President Nixon's White House staff. First, as a White House Fellow. Secondly, as a member of the domestic council staff which ultimately he became Associate Director of General Government Divisions. Jeff's making his third appearance here at the library, the first being in 2008 when he came to discuss his recently published book on Watergate. The second as Sandyto mention was his moderating the panel in January of this year, Nixon Legacy Series on the founding of the Domestic Council which was modeled after the National Security Council. A very interesting panel, and it was well attended. And I wish those that didn't have a chance to see it, could have. Third is today, to launch his perspective, his Watergate Panel who will address the five Watergate Conspiracies. I should add for the last three decades we just arranged and hosted an annual event in Washington known as the White House policy group. It was the planning staff of both Richard Nixon and the President Ford staff. And it's been a great event for us to get together once a year. And we thank Jeff for that. What you should know for today's presentation is that Jeff was the functionary of Fred Buzhardt, the principal deputy during Watergate defense effort. In that capacity, he transcribed the White house tapes and I think some of us feel that he was really the exploit, the leader. Ran the document room housing all the sensitive files and brief members of the senior staff going on develop. Thus, he not only lived Watergate and its scandal from the inside for almost 40 years, he also spent five years at the National archives researching his 1980 book about the Watergate. It's here in the library. We have it in the book store and definitely will be available afterward if anyone would like to purchase one. With that, please join me with our presenter today, Mr. Jeff Shepherd. Good afternoon and welcome to what I hope would be an interesting presentation. The focus is the Mysteries of Watergate. And we are going to spend almost two hours talking about and reviewing why after 37 years there are still open questions about what happened in the political scandal in our nation's history. Tim Naftali,who is director of the Nixon Library here, has said that conspiracy bust connect the dots that should not as it may, they call our attention to disturbing facts. Inconsistencies in stories we have been told. Now as Ron indicated I am a student of Watergate. I was on the and worked with everybody that was involved. I was on John Ehrlichman's staff, my immediate superior was Bud Krogh,who was the head plumber; Gordon Liddy was on the domestic council with me; Chuck Colson's office was across the hall; John Dean's office was down the hall. My public policy responsibilities on the domestic council centered on the Department of Justice. I knew all of the management, all of the leadership, of the Department of Justice. These were my friends and my colleagues. Then as Watergate grew and the scandal blew up, I became Fred Buzhardt's principal deputy, and I worked on the Watergate defense and did badly as you may recall. I pondered why and how people I knew and worked with could have done the things they were accused of doing. In 2002, I decided to write my version of what I thought had happened. I discovered that national archives, all of the records of the special prosecutor's office, had been maintained. They were government ...employees. Now, they weren't available for public review. You had to file Freedom of Information Act requests to get to them. And you had to ask for most stuff by name. They were classified and housed with the papers on the Kennedy assasination and the Ken Starr papers on the investigation and impeachment of President Clinton. So, it was a kind of like a closed stack system, you could look through the card catalog, but you couldn't wander amongst the files. And I've spent 5 years pursuing and freeing up, with FOIA requests, hundreds of pages of documents that hadn't been public before. And I think a lot of what I found was in my book that I put out in 2008. But, I've continued my research, and some of that we're going to talk about today. So, the structure of today is the first segment reviewing what I call five Watergate conspiracies and then we take some Q&A... okay, on those conspiracies. And then we'll spend the second segment focusing on John Dane, whom I think, holds the key to understanding Watergate. First we are going to start with a review of what happen some people weren't alive when Watergate happened. You only know it from stories of others. Some of the slides, I warn you, are slightly complicated, because it's a complicated story. So I, you apologize in advance as we go through it, I am going to try to remind ourselves of the essence of the scandal and then go into the conspiracies. The word Watergate comes from the name of a hotel office complex that was prominent in Washington DC and uniquely the democratic national committee had rented in space in the Watergate office building on the sixth floor. Similarly, across the street It was then the Howard Johnson hotel, there was a monitoring room setup to monitor what we are supposed to be wire tapes put into. telephones in the Democratic National Committee. The break in that we all remember, is dated June 17th, 37 almost 38 years ago, because that is when the arrests occurred. Now it develop that it was a previous break-in. But they were arrested on June 17th. So we think of that as the beginning of Watergate. It is generally conceded that president Nixon and Bob Halderman and John Ehrlichman didn't have any idea about the break in in advance, that it was a rouge operation. But what got them was the attempt to cover up the crime and the people that were involved and did know about the break-in in advance. And we have come up with one of these phrases that enters our vocabulary that you are not allowed to forget. It's not a crime, It's a cover up. And the other is, the question asked by Senator Howard Baker, the minority member of the Urban committee. And he kept asking during the urban hearings, isn't the real question, what did the President know, and when did he know it? Third, to remind ourselves for purposes of today there are six principle figures we're oing to be talking about. The bottom row are the folks who actually ran the operation. And we start with G. Gordon Liddy. Gordon Liddy engineered, designed, executed the Watergate break in. John Dean, White House Counsel, engineered, orchestrated the cover up. He describes his role as being Chief Desk Officer of the cover up. Jeb Magruder had a role in both. So we have him in between. Real crimes. eal criminals. Should have been punished. But not big fish. The big fish are up here on top. John Mitchell, Attorney General of the United States, the head of the Committee to reelect the President, Bob Haldeman, the President's Chief of Staff, John Ehrlichman formerly Counsel to the President, now Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs. Big fish. If we could get to them, we could get to President Nixon. And the question that remains today is whether the operating people down here, particularly in the cover up, were under the direction and control of the big fish, or whether the big fish became scapegoats in a political attempt or a different conspiracy to destroy the Nixon presidency. The answer in conventional wisdom is very clear: they were all convicted, but that doesn't stop the inquiry and that doesn't stop these books from being written that raise these troublesome questions. So, we are going to spend the rest of the day talking about the troublesome questions and why Watergate remains in the news. It has been 37 years since the break-in but the scandal won't go away. If you Google Watergate you get 4 million hits. Two years ago, 2008, there were five new Watergate books published. One of which was mine. nd the Frost-Nixon movie was released which reminded everybody of the president's interviews with David Frost after he had resigned as president. Last year, there were three major events at least. The New York times had a front page story on the accuracy of the White House tapes. The transcripts - they're very poor quality - so you tend hear what you want to hear. But there are bubbles today, a huge controversy over the accuracy of those transcripts, so this was a front page in February. In July, it became public that there was an effort to reconstruct Bob Hollerman's(sp?) notes from what's known as the eighteen and a half half a minute gap. The Presidential tape recording of that meeting is irretrievably lost. But Bob Hollerman took notes . And this particular theory says, "there is a page missing." Because if you look at the page below it, there is indentations and if you'll electronically review it, maybe you can recreate the supposed second page of notes that's missing and we could learn something. That's an open question that's ongoing. Third thing that happened is in September shortly after Senator Ted Kennedy died. Chris Mathews, who is a rather prominent spokesperson circulated an article on the internet that said it's little known, but Senator Kennedy is the one who orchestrated Nixon's demise. And that of course, it kind of echoed my theory. So I ... the article and I referred to it. But what we are not going to do is that we are not going to try to undermine or disown the actual. We are going to talk about whether they were properly laid at the feet of the senior people. We are going to do that by revealing five Watergate conspiracies. The first one I titled conventional wisdom because they work, a vacant experience to obstruct to justice so that's really the first conspiracy, but that's conventional wisdom. And then we have the blame game. There's a book out who says "No, no, no I was just that really enhanced the scandal to bring down the President. Another book a little bit later said no,no it was the conservative it's in the military that didn't support what was going on and needed the President to come down. There's a rather obscure theory that says that no, it was the take over international finance there has an aspect and then there is what we call the Camelot conspiracy which is the skillful exploitation of this handle to laying the way for Kennedy democrats to take power in the 1976 election, to get back into power. Let 's go through these one at a time. First, conventional wisdom, and we're just reminding you of the dates, the break-in date is June 17th 1972, but there was an earlier break in May 28th. Even today, the reason for the break-ins is hugely controversial among students of Watergate. The CRP officials and the Cubans, five were caught red handed in the building, two more were arrested afterwards. They were indited on September 15th. The feeling was they hadn't gotten everybody, because it didn't go high enough. The convictions occurred on January 30th 1973, and everybody had plead guilty or was convicted of all counts by that time. The Judge, Judge John Sirica, at the conclusion of the trial said we haven't learned the truth. We really need help in further investigation. Amazingly, his request was answered within a week. And the Ervin committee, the Senate Select Committee on 1972 Presidential election was created. It didn't get geared up til the summer, but it's created in February of 1973. And then there are at least four hugely significant dates, which kind of clocked the demise of the Nixon Presidency. The cover up collapsed about two months after the convictions because the sentencing was due two months afterwards. And so, the individuals who had been convicted were looking at substantial prison time. Now, there's a memo written on September 15th by the federal prosecutors that says, you know, we aren't surewe got everybody, but what we are going to do is convict the folks we have and then see if they change their story. So in a very real sense, the career prosecutors caused cover up to collapse. But it is also generally conceded its the letter by James McCord who had It has been cover up and we really don't know the truth. People who had been trouble they saw deals with the prosecutors Watergate really blew up there was turnover and then there was a special prosecutor and the lakes and the Urban Committee effort destroyed the Nixon presidency, he resigned as he should have resigned in all this. He had lost the capacity to govern, very very clear he had been ruined. He might have ...gone, but the party officials came and said if you stay, we're going to get wiped out in November. You may want to fight, but you have to go. For the good of the party, we have to have turnover here. So, the only resignation in the United States history occurs on August 9th. But that didn't finish things, that top row of people were convicted in the cover up trial on January 1st, 1975. So, for those of you who may have lived through it, that will remind you of kind of an 18 month period from the president's reelection until his resignation and the scandal reached maturity. Well, the first book came out in 1984. It was done by Jim Hougan. And it was entitled Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA. And I have Hougan's book right here. It said in essence, it was the CIA that exploited this. And it is extraordinarily well researched, I read it again on the... airplane on the way out. Almost every theory, every conspiracy theory, can be traced back to work. And he was really keen off the loose ends. But, 10 years later Hougan had access to more than they did. And he starts with this very inconvenient fact. There were no taps found on the Democratic National Committee telephones. They were swept the day before the June 17th break-in by the DNC. They were swept by the telephone company, Chesapeake and Pacific Telephone, afterwards. And swept twice by the FBI. There were no wire taps. They found four wire taps in the burglar's brief cases, and for the longest time the prosecution thought the break-in was an attempt to install the wire taps in the first place. And they really thought that the effort was to gather derogatory information on Larry O'Brien who headed the DNC in order to blackmail him. That was the theory of the prosecution, it had nothing to do with the republicans. They really thought it was a rogue event. But then it developed that there had been in this earlier break in and there were transcripts prepared. The other points that Jim Everybody involved in Watergate, the actual operations except Gordon Liddy, who thought he was heading it had CIA connections: Howard Hunt, James McCord, Bernard Barker and the Cubans had all either been full time CIA employees or operatives d the point that the CIA was operational on then he goes on to point out the incredible ineptitude of the break in. Everything kept going wrong, the first time they went to break in, the keys didn't work, there were alarms Miami to come back up. They tried to break in on the to get into the DNC. They checked in by going to the 8th floor which was where the federal reserve was. The federal reserve had been burglarized two or three weeks before, so it should have set off the guards to wonder, you know, five people coming in suites at midnight saying they are going to go up to the is somewhat upsetting. Then there are a number of unexplained absences by James Mc Cord,James Mc Cord is the wire He's the one who puts his taps in and he keeps disappearing during the course of the break and they can't account for his time. Now we know if something happened on stage and I was suddenly assassinated, and then we interviewed everybody, the stories wouldn't be consistent. That people see different things, the timing, did Sandy speak first? Did Ron speak first? So, there are going to be inconsistencies but what Jim Hogan develops is a startling number of inconsistencies and unexplained things. And then there's the what is called the secreted key, one of the Cubans had in his pocket and tried to get rid of whenand the desk becomes very significant because the secretary who had that desk may or may not been involved in a constitutional. And there's a law suit that covers this because she felt that was an unfair allegation. But the secreted key is rather key to Watergate conspiracy bust. Finally, that man who was hired to monitor the phone taps, Alfred Baldwin, swears he monitored the first tap on May 26th, which is before the taps were installed. You have trouble. What does Jim Hogan say was going on? He says there was a CIA love nest up the street in Columbia Plaza and the CIA was terrified of exposure because it would show they were operating domestically; they were using mind-altering drugs experimenting on people - foreign diplomats, DNC visitors from out of town who were looking for a good time with these girls and who may feel that they were taken advantage of when they woke up the next day but could hardly go to the police, so the theory is that in order to avoid exposure of CIA operations, they were willing to do anything. But they couldn't stop Gorden Letty, the Republicans, from wanting to break into into the DNC, they were just terrified when they got there what they would find and what it would lead to. So it was an effort to botch the break in, and to lead it to a different location. Now here on the next slide, just we're going to go forward for a second, here up the street is where the Columbia Plaza apartment building was. And this will figure again. But one of the theories that Holgan propounds, is the wire tap was really tapping that phone or a phone down here that was calling into that. We don't know, I'm not a specialist in the CIA. The CIA can't defend itself. It is a magnificent target for conspiracy buffs because it's secretiveare upset with the CIA disclosures in Watergate. The minority report from the urban committee says, "We just could not ever get answers from the CIA." A special prosecutor puts out a record in 1974, of how they conducted their investigation, of how the White House did, of the department of justice did. And They singled out the CIA as being singularly non cooperative. So it is not odd that the CIA figures in this. hether it goes as far as Holgan is an open question, but a continuing controversy. There's also a couple of other tidbits in the book, no conspiracy works without mysterious deaths. Lou Russell and John Leon were just ready to testify when they died under mysterious circumstances. CIA director Richard destroyed all of the CIA mind control documents. So the destruction of those documents certainly cleaned up the file of what may or might have not been going on, but leaves conspiracy busts with lots to play with. And finally, because Hougan's book was written in 1984, and he's speculating on who Deap Throat might have been. He says, "If Deep Throat is a prominent person," I mean he could have been a Secretary, we don't know, but "if it's a prominent person, a prime candidate might be Alexander Haig," who was Bob Halderman's place when he left. We leave you with open questions because that's how conspiracies work. And we will go forward to the next conspiracy theory, which is here, which is "Silent Coup," written predominantly by Len Colodny in 1991 as a follow up book in 2009 entitled "The forty years war: The rise and fall of neocons, from Nixon to Obama." And what Len says, and this is my summary of Len's book, you are encouraged to read the book, is no, he's not the CIA. It's not the CIA. It's the military. The military, particularly the conservatives in the military are terrified of President Nixon's activities with this Harvard professor whom they're not used to. They've gone and re-invigorated the National Security Council and the White House. They're not talking to us. They're not telling us what's going on. They're announcing troop withdrawals without our knowledge and consent. They've done an opening to the Soviet Union, our worst enemy since WWII, and they called [xx]. They are talking to the Communists in China. Kissinger has captured Nixon's mind and he's taking it in a direction that threatens the national security in the United States. So what did the military do? Well, what any military would do under the circumstances. They set up a spy ring and it was called. It was done by the Navy. It was called the Radford Welander Moorer Spy Ring.more was Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff It's rather high up. Admiral Wellender ran the liaison office in the White House that liaised with the National Security Council and transferred information back and forth, prepared briefings. nd Yeoman Bradford was a low-level - almost unfair to call him a male secretary but the military in those day had lots of low-level people doing low level jobs. and less significant people on the staff, and it is alleged over the course of a couple of years he photocopied 5000 pages of sensitive documents. He rifled Kissinger's briefcase, he went on a trip with him because he could carry the luggage, rifled his briefcase, made photocopies; same thing with Al Hague. A hugely embarrassing situation, and they were caught. The other thing that Len develops is Bob Woodward, the cub reporter from the Washington Post who helped do all the stories, was really heavily involved in Naval Intelligence. That he was really a briefing officer for the Joint Chiefs and for the NSC, that it was not just a reporter out of nowhere. And that he may have had access to this spy ring. Now, some of this goes back to Hogan's book, but it's developed in a different direction than Colatney's, because he says Alexander Hag, who toke over as Chief of Staff, and Fred Buzhardt who took over as Watergate Defense Counsel, were involved in treachery and an effort to bring down President Nixon, not to defend him. And that they may have been recipients of some of this spy material. And they, particularly General Hag was opposed to all of These things that was going on because he was a career military officer and he was doing his best to thwart them while he was Henry's deputy on the NFC, but was in a much better position to thwart these initiatives when he was the President's Chief of Staff. And they, and then Len Sites, the inept Watergate defense, there were lots of decisions that in retrospect may or may not have been the brightest way of defending the President, particularly, allowing exposure of the White House taping system. He makes a huge thing that out of the fact the White House knew that Alexander Butterfield was going to testify as to the existence of the system, and these gentlemen allowed that testimony to go forward and they could have ordered him not to testify. They could have stopped that and taken a different path. Not that it would have kept it secret forever but they didn't have to allow this kind of exposure. Then so that's the new theory but in the middle of Len hat's devoted to Jandin. Jandin really appears in the earlier book. But he dominates the second book in that segment and middle segment is entitled "Golden Boy" and that the theory is that was his nickname when he was on the White House staff and it paints the most bizarre theory of John Dean. John Dean is an interesting one aspect is that John Dean's fiancee at the time, Maureen Biner,was somehow involve in this prostitution ring. And John was worried that that would be exposed. So that was the Dean ordered the break in with the intend to preserve Maureen Dean's, Maureen Biner's, he later married her, so it is Marueen Dean, Maureen Biner's reputation and the secreted key is to the desk of Maxi Whales, here her picture, her name, her contact information may or may have not been. But they didn't get that but the nominal purpose was to tap Lorio Brians phone, the real purpose was to look and retrieve possibly embarrassing information in the desk. I used to say that there were no women in the Watergate, you know as all these criminals and cover ups and you go from that to the first two books, which key off of sex and scandal and you really don't know who to believe. The other thing that Len Claudney did, he takes John Dean's testimony and day by day, item by item he says this can be true.when he told President Nixon, "Here's what I think we should do" and John Mitchell agrees, he had he talked to John Mitchell. When the decision was made to raise humanitarian funds for the Watergate burglars it laid at the feet of John Mitchell and yet Calaudney develops the fact that John Mitchell said, "That's the last thing we're gonna do. We're not gonna become involved in that." And just every single item he undermines. Now, you come out that strong, particularly attacking a man's wife, as they say, litigation follows. And there was seven years of litigation from John Dean to Len Calaudney and Saint Martin's Press which published the book. It ended with a settlement that's sealed, remains sealed today. So we don't really know what happened, but nothing was ever retracted. The book has never been pulled. I noticed when I came to the bookstore, you could buy the book there in the bookstore today and have a review of their point of view. leave you with open questions, I wasn't going to research those aspects. I'm a domestic affairs guy. Third conspiracy, and we're getting out on the edge here. The Rockefeller Conspiracy is really the trilateral commission. You may have heard of that on the council form foreign relations. We're gonna give up U.S. onspiracy theory that exists anyway, and it keys mainly off David Rockefeller. The application to Watergate picks up his brother Nelson Rockefeller who was Governor of New York, and really wanted to be President. And it says his price for support of Nixon in '68 was that Kissinger had to be appointed to the National Security Council so that Rockefeller really controlled Kissinger. And that the plumber's break in and the Watergate break ins were engineered, not by Nixon people, but by New Yorkers. David Young co-plumber was a Rockefeller protege, and Gordon Liddy was from They weren't Nixon people, these were Rockefeller people trying to create a vacancy in the presidency. And then to show you how far this goes, you remember President Nixon resigned, Jerry Ford became president, and Nelson Rockfiller became Vice President, unelected. Quote, he purchased his selection as Vice President. But then, President Ford had two assassination attempts. So, this theory, there's no book about this theory, but the theory exists that President Ford had to substitute Bob Dole as his Vice Presidential candidate to avoid any additional assassinations. Because if in fact Ford has been assassinated, Rockefeller would have assumed the presidency without ever been elected to anything. Now, dismiss the thing out of hand, if you want. But, one of the intriguing things, once you're informed of this consipiracy, you go back to Hougan's book and it contains references to both Yeoman Radford and a James McCord and both said While I was happy to do what I was instructed to do, the real reason I did it, was out of fear that the And it's truly bizarre. But you think my heavenly days, there may have been people who are motivated by this. Then we get to the last conspiracy theory, I call the Camelot Conspiracy, and it consists of three publications. One's called "Without Honor: The Impeachment of Richard Nixon and the Crimes of Camelot," 1995. My book published in 2008, and the Chris Mathews article that I alluded to earlier. And it makes four quick points. That Kennedy confidants, Senator Ted Kennedy confidants seemed to be behind everything, behind the exploitation of the scandal. A Kennedy confidant is retained as the Urban Committee's Chief Investigator. Carmine Bellino had been working for the Kennedys for 30 years. A Kennedy confidant is retained as John Dean's defense counsel. Charles Schaefer had worked in Robert Kennedy's Department of Justice, was part of a special unit personally hired by Robert Kennedy, and was Robert Kennedy's insertion into the Warren Commission staff. Robert Kennedy was worried organized crime had bumped off his brother and he sent Charles Schaefer down, undisclosed to anybody else, for the sole purpose, joining the staff, not as a lawyer but just as a staffer, to report back to Robert Kennedy on whether any information was developed about organized crime being involved in the Kennedy assassination. You couldn't find a lawyer closer to Kennedy interest than John Dean's. A Kennedy confidant was named special prosecutor, Archibald Cox was the triple crown winner of he Kennedy political dynasty. He had been speech writer and issues coordinator for the 1960 Presidential campaign. He was Solicitor General the second highest ranking official in the Department of Justice when Bobby Kennedy was Attorney General. And he worked very closely with Senator Edward Kennedy in his active opposition to President Nixon's nominees for Supreme Court. So he was actively involved with the Kennedys, almost throughout, and he ends up being Special Prosecutor. And then, according to Jerry Ziefman, who was majority council of the House Judiciary Committee, not an insignificant person. A Kennedy confidant controlled the impeachment process. Burke Marshall, unknown to you, but had been head of a Civil Rights Division when John Diore, who was running the staff, was Deputy. And according to Ziefman, Burke Marshall was Ted Kennedy's choice to become Attorney General. He was orchestrating the impeachment hearings to slow them down. They didn't want to impeach and get rid of Richard Nixon, they wanted him to hang on to make the 1976 election easier for Senator Kennedy. Now That's the Camelot conspiracy but since I made up these slides, and I'm the speaker we get two more slides on this particular conspiracy, because you can buy that book in the book store too. I maintain the special prosecution force, the special prosecutor, was hugely political and did a whole series of improper things. But, the one thing that jumps out, that's a little hard to see the red from the black on the screen, seven of the eight senior members of the prosecution staff had all worked together in Robert Kennedy's Department of Justice. This was a team, top flight lawyers. A team that was the crème de la crème of the opposition. Now when Nixon said on his Watergate speech, you can appoint, if you choose Daley, Richardson is nominated to be attorney general. You can appoint a special supervising prosecutor. He was alluding the Tea Pot Dome scandal when a lawyer was picked to make the tough be indited or not indited? What President Nixon did not envision, which was what happened, a staff of 100 people, 60 of whom ended up being lawyers. Over the course of it's life, a four year life, there were 60 lawyers who came through with nothing better to do than investigate the Nixon Presidency. Now you may work for a company, your company you may think is law abiding. I can tell you it could not withstand that kind of assault from your principle competitors, it just couldn't do it. So what I maintain in my book, is this highly partisan special prosecution staff, operating totally without restraint, the condition was total and absolute independence of the Department of Justice, they reported if to anyone at all, toSenator Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee. And what I maintain they did, was they postponed the indictments of Dean and McGruder John Dean and Jeb Magruder, which the career prosecutors had promised would come within about two months. They postponed them for 10 months. They didn't need to investigate Watergate because that case had been broken, the career prosecutors had broken the cover up. They were ready to indict. But they were replaced by this political group, and they launched brand new investigations designed to destroy the Nixon presidency, to investigate every aspect of the presidency, to cripple Republican fundraising; they sent the FBI or the IRS to interview major Republican contributors and to investigate 1976 opponents. Amazingly, there is literature in the files, that I uncovered from a Freedom of Information Act request, where that lawyers in the special prosecution staff investigated Jerry Ford when he was named Vice President, when he became President and he named Nelson Rockefeller, they launched an investigation immediately of Nelson Rockefeller, when Rockefeller was replaced as the Jerry Ford's candidate, by Bob Dole, sure enough they launchedTo an immediate investigation of Bob Doyle. And finally there are indications in the files, there's not a file, but there's an llusion to the existence of a file, that they investigated Governor Ronald Reagon when he was Governor of California, because he was expected to be, and he indeed was, the Presidential candidate in 1976. Now, these people had nothing to do with Watergate. But the difficulty is, when you have absolute power, you have political corruption. And this group felt, why not, we'll go ask anybody, we'll go see what kind of derogatory wisdom we can develop. So those are conventional wisdom and the four conspiracies. What we're going to do now, because you've been such a good audience, we're actually going to allow questions, and I think they're being submitted in writing and Sandy, are you in a position to read a question or two? Yes, No? Sandy's not here. We'll pick up the questions. I will take them. Thank you. Thank you. Anymore? One more? The first question has to do with Hillary Clinton. I don't know if you're aware, but Hillary was a member of the House Judiciary Impeachment Inquiry staff, she was a recent graduate of Yale Law school Hillary Rodham at the time. And in Jerry Zeifman's book "Without Honor" which dwells on those, the question was, "What is her role?" And Zeifman said she was one of five or six young lawyers under the direction and control of Brooke Marshall, who was guiding and slowing down the impeachment. Now we don't know for sure because the impeachment inquiry files have been sealed for 50 years. We really can't find out. It's intriguing, it's salacious but it's not known. Sandy, maybe you have some other questions from the Internet? I do, sir. On the White House tapes, you said you had transcribed the White House tapes. Wasn't Yes, it was. Rose did the heavy lifting. Rose had to find the tapes on six-hour reels, find the proper conversation and do the first draft, which was recognize who was speaking, try to decipher the exchange in the conversations, and when the conversation ended. That was good special prosecutor, Fred Buzhardt's feeling was that we had to know precisely what was on those quality so there's lots of unintelligibles. We needed to spend a lot more time seeing if we could decipher the unintelligible. So, what I spent hundreds of hours doing was polishing Rosewood's transcripts and trying to get those last few words so we would really know what the tape said. It's an interesting exercise, because listening to the tapes is far different from reading that transcript. It's almost a difference between learning a language as growing up as a native, and learning it in college. You can't pick up the subtleties or the innuendo unless you are really concentrating on the wording. And you can't pick up the intonation, and I would tell you based on review of hundreds of tapes, hundreds of hours that they're not conspirators, they're not sitting there saying, you know, "What do you think about this? How do you think that's going to play?"they really don't what's going on. There's no conduct there that would suggest that this was a group that knew. And it's an intriguing, if painful, exercise to spend that much time listening. I have disagreements with lots of the transcripts and I have disagreements with the meaning and import of all of the major conversations. The smoking guns or stunwell quote, he cancer on the presidency speech. It is almost like I come from a different place because I have studied those things so intently. Next Sandy? This is on the Ervin Committee. Most Americans remember Watergate from watching the Ervin Committee hearings. Yet you don't talk much about their role. Well, we only have two hours to cover a life time of review. I have a chapter in my book on the Ervin Committee. It is how most Americans remember Watergate It is political theater at its finest. The President Weicker joined the committee for the express purpose of sinking President Nixon. Senator Baker that it was in his interest not to fight the majority in public. He fought in private, but he would lose on every vote, so in public, he would participate in what was going on. Two key votes that set up the Irvin Committee. One was to vote that they would not review house or senate elections in 1972. So senators and congressmen and all the shenanigans in their elections weren't subject to disclosure. econd side was wiretapping in 1968, 1964 and 1960 but those were off the table. So you had from the outset A political witch hunt. What's so intriguing is when the White House gathered to figure out how to respond, how to combat, that was considered to be another overt act in the continuing cover up, because they were trying to resist the inquiry of the Urban Committee. I have in between if I could. Someone has asked how reliable is the author of Silent Coup? He is extraordinarily thorough, he too has spent his entire life dwelling on Watergate. I didn't do an independent investigation of what he has to say. I don't necessarily agree, I disagree. But General Hague and Fred Desart were trying to bring the presidency down, but he does identify and isolate very disturbing facts about the military, and it's true, there was a spy ring, and about John . So you don't have to buy you could buy 80% of what Len Calaudney writes and you'd be very troubled about Watergate. Now remember what Hogan says: "The titles mean something". Hogan says that there was a different agenda, which was the CIA protecting itself. Len says, "No it was far worst than that, there was a takeover. The military caused a change in the presidency." Now, I don't go that far, but it doesn't make me right and Len wrong, I mean there's lots in Len's books that I buy into a hundred percent. Now this question has to do with President Nixon himself. You really haven't talked much about the role of President Nixon. Wasn't he involved in the cover up? Yes . President Nixon was involved in political maneuvering to save his presidency. There's no question about that. He has every right to do that. Every right to protect himself politically. If you look at the interviews with David Frost and I don't mean the which is substantial fantasy, but the actual televised Frost interviews, and they're for sale in the book store, Nixon is making the point that he had no criminal intent. He doesn't use the word scienter, but that's evil intent. But what he was doing, was trying to protect his administration. And that was recharacterized, and he was acting through his senior people too, and that was recharacterized as continuing the cover up. I mean, he had people doing the investigation. Let me put it this way, if Richard Nixon were really running the cover up, you would not have these obscure, ambiguous phrases in the tapes that people are trying to make into something that they aren't. It would be chapter and verse, because the cover up was so extensive. There are, I mean, something like So, I listened to all these tapes, I worried about this for a long time. I don't think he knew what was going on. His lawyer, John Dean, was dirty, was involved, intimately involved in the cover up. At what point does a CEO or a family decide their lawyer is corrupt and has led them astray. By the time you figure it out, you've been involved. And if the lawyer suddenly claims, "Oh, were all in it together. They knew what I was doing." How do you defend yourself? That's the dilemma of those senior people, as well as president Nixon. One more? One more, this question has to do with Deep Throat. How does the exposure of FBI director Mark Felt as Deep Throat affect these conspiracy theories. Well, I will tell you one thing, the naming of Mark Felt, Deputy Director of the FBI, as Deep Throat, ruined 30 years of cocktail conversation in Washington. And the speculation as to, you know, whether it was John Rose or Ken Khachigian or Diane Sawyer, Alexander Haig. Who sold out the President? And then it turns out that the claim of a senile old man, that he was Deep Throat, is hurriedly confirmed by Bob Woodward as, "Yes that's what it was. I really had this source in the FBI." That hasn't stopped the speculation, let me assure you. All the effort that went on before of how tall was he, did he have flower pots, what was going on? Has switched to who was the source of Deep Throat, or more likely wasn't Deep Throat really a composite, and didn't Woodward have other sources? Now I've believed, ever since I left the White House staff, that Mark Felt was a source for Bob Woodward, Fred Bizarre believed that. Because stuff was leaking that was part of the investigation, and I believe from having been on the staff for five years, the White House did not know what's going on. So it would be very hard to orchestrate the continuing cover up after John Dean left because you didn't know what had been done. I do think one thing though, and maybe there's a book in this. The one institution that hasn't figured in the conspiracy work, is the FBI. And you can picture how the book would go. J. Edgar Hoover stayed too long. The FBI was engaged in the nefarious acts that they shouldn't have been engaged in. Both of which were true. The death of Hoover and the appointment of an outsider, Pat Grey, to run the FBI, threatened the exposure of all these nefarious acts within the FBI, and therefore, it's goal, the career goal of the people in the FBI, was to protect themselves, even if that meant the Nixon administration was brought down It wouldn't surprise me if sometime in the future we don't see that. The military makes a great object of a conspiracy, the CIA does, but so would the FBI. With that, what we're gonna do, if you'll forgive me, we're going to stop the questions, and I'm going to go on to the second segment which is the focus on John Dean. And you can see it's slightly out of focus because we're so good with these slides. We're gonna spend some time on the one individual who I think is the key to really understanding Watergate. There have been lots of books written, these aren't the only books. There are lots of books that have been written on Watergate by insiders. But John Dean's role, for the most part, plays a major segment in all of those books. And it doesn't play a major segment in his own book. You don't really learn much about John Dean, or what I discovered, what I causedthe national archives to disclose about John Dean from his own book. So you're fighting, you're constantly fighting for information about John Dean. Here's a wonderful comment in a recent book by Conrad Black. This is an 1,100 page biography of Richard Nixon. I commend it you. I must say I found it mesmerizing, it goes through his whole life. But on page 846, he focuses on the beginning of Watergate, and he says Gordon Liddy, an idiosyncratic figure, but in his own way of man of integrity, vehemently insisted that Watergate was Dean's idea. The truth of the matter will probably never be known. Dean is the most slippery of all the main players. And he's captured the problem of dealing with John Dean in Watergate, in spite of 37 years and all these investigations, we really don't know there's another quote from the middle book here, which is really a book about John Mitchell, called "The Strong Man", came out in '08 and it's by James Rosen, who is a commentator on Fox News. And he says, "The admitted ring leader in this multifarious undertaking," he's talking about the cover up, "was John Dean, the ambitious young White House council who scrambled to find ways to raise the hush money that kept the cover up together, kept close tabs on the FBI investigation and civil litigation that threatened to unravel it, and coached MaGruder in his perjury." And that's kind of a capsulization of what John Dean was doing during the cover up. So, what we're going to do, is we're going to talk about concerns about John Dean. And we're going to go through the conventional wisdom, talk about his legal career, talk about how his story changed. When there was a transition from the career federal prosecutors to the special prosecutor, the lead career prosecutor wrote a memo on the status of their investigation. And what he says in that memo, is John Dean's testimony, his story of what happened, escalated. I think he says, in other words, John Dean's story escalates over time. And that thought, that his story changed, is very troublesome. And we'll get into that into that in some detail, and then we'll talk about what I characterize as John Dean's disappearing prison sentence. So, let's go to conventional wisdom. Here you have a guy who most people think was a young, inexperienced lawyer caught up in something beyond his control, fell in with the wrong people, and made a clean breast of it by going to the government and confessing. But look what the prosecutors say about John Dean, and I'm going to read it to you, I want to introduce it for a second. This is a book in 1977, by two, Richard Ben-Veniste and George Frampton, who're on the Watergate Task Force, these are the prosecutors and they're talking about, they call it Stonewall: The real story of the Watergate prosecution. They're talking about the cover up trial, and how it worked. And they're talking about Archibald Cox, who was the first special prosecutor, this Kennedy democrat. I read, "Archie Cox was particularly firm in his personal determination that Dean be prosecuted no matter what. Dean became an idée fixe," that's french for obsession, "for Cox. With all the uncertainties of Watergate that swirled around him, Cox saw Dean's guilt as the one enduring constant. During a particularly difficult period, Archie remarked to us, 'If everything else goes down the drain, the one thing I can cling to is Dean's venality'." Now, if that's the first special prosecutor, and that's his view of John Dean, the central figure. Why did he believe that, and what happened? That's what we're going to spend the rest of the segment on. Okay. Dean's central role in Watergate. Dean is there at the beginning and at the end. First, he triggered events that led to the Watergate break in. Dean is tasked by Bob Haldeman to assemble, in Dean's words, a perfectly legitimate campaign intelligence plan. He recruits Gordon Liddy, he recommends Gordon Liddy to John Mitchell and Jeb Magruder. He discusses with Gordon Liddy what the White House wants in the way of campaign intelligence. He promises Gordon, at least a half-million, maybe more, to do his plan. So John Dean is present at the creation. He is the instigator of Gordon Liddy putting the plan together, but then, and because of that he was at risk, John Dean hides his own risk of prosecution from his White House superiors - from President Nixon, Bob Haldeman and John Erlichman. John Dean was present at two critical meetings in the Attorney General's office. when Gordon Liddy presented his plan. And his plan was over the top. It has been summarized as a proposal for mugging, bugging, kidnapping, and prostitution. OK, first meeting is January 28 1972, it's rejected, they think maybe it costs too much. It costs a million dollars. He comes back on February 4th. Now this is in the office of the Attorney General of the United States. there are only four people in the meeting: John Mitchel, Jed McGruger, Gordon Liddy and John Dean. It almost becomes comical when you really get down to the weeds about why they were there. Gordon Liddy shows up at CREEP saying, "I've been promised aillion dollars for an intelligence plan." And Jeb McGruder, who is acting chief of staff says, "I don't have the authority to commit a million dollars. The only man that does that is John Mitchell. He is still over there as Attorney General. We got to go over there and get his permission for the million dollars." And you could say, "why did you do this?" But they go. over and it's rejected. They go back with a half a million dollar plan on February 4th. Plan is not approved. But later there is this break in. Well if you were John Dean, you're in real trouble! You hired him, you discussed the plans with him, you were present at these two plans. So John Dean is worried from the moment the burglars are arrested, that he is at risk. Now, I tell you on faith that if he had told his superiors this he would have been fired [xx], he would have been removed. He was a threat, because there wasn't anybody that they were worried about on the White House staff and John Dean himself had told them that no one on the White House staff knew of the break in, in advance. So they built their entire defense over the idea that the problem was at CREEP, if we could just keep it over CREEP it may be bad but it's not going to infect the White House itself. But the guy they picked to run it was dirty. And he orchestrated the cover up as though he were an employee of CREEP. He acted by his own admission As Chief Desk Officer throughout the cover up. He was the Chief Operating Officer of the cover up. He knew what was going on, and in general he suborned perjury, that's encouraging the perjury of someone else - Jeb McGruder - going before the grand jury. He improperly leaked government information on the investigation to the Defense Council. He destroyed evidence. There's really critical evidence from Howard Hunt that Howard said would enable him to justify what he was doing, that Dean admitted later that he had destroyed. And he took money. There was lots of money floating around. Dean borrowed about $4000 without asking anybody - it happened to be in his own safe - to pay for his honeymoon. And then he didn't go on the honeymoon, it didn't last. But he never put the money back, he put a note in his own safe saying, "By the way, I owe you some money." And so he's heavily involved in the cover up, and he's at real risk. Then when the cover up collapsed - and the cover up should have collapsed, don't misunderstand coverup should have collapsed. It should have never occurred. John Dean switched sides and his story. He was the first official in to see the prosecutors to exchange testimony for immunity. And in the course of his time, in talking with the prosecutors, his story changes. And because of that, he served the least time of any central figure because he was the only roadway to get to Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and the President. So they needed him, and they protected him, because he was the way to get to the big fish. We're going to spend a lot of time on these last two items. But first, I want to talk a little bit about Dean's legal career. It 's five different organizations. It spans eight years. It ends badly. He is terminated, he pleads to a felony, he's disbarred. That's the end of his legal career. But there was a meteoric rise from graduating fromGeorgetown Law School in 1965, working for a private law firm for six months. Then housed the judiciary committee, then the Brown Commission on the reform of federal criminal laws. Then the Department of Justice and then council to the President. I mean absolutely meteoric rise, particularly for someone who was not involved in any operational way in Nixon's campaign, and the man almost comes out of nowhere. And there's lots of speculation about that how that occurred, but it kind of centers on the thought that the effort was to downgrade the Office of Council. He told his probation officer in the pre-sentence report that there were really only two functions that he performed when he first got there. The reaction to clemency petitions from the Department of Justice, please pardon this guy. And the review of FBI investigations to clear people, presidential appointees, for appointments for the Federal Government. That's all the Council's Office was doing after John Ehrlichman. and left. John took all the fun, all the heavy involvement and all the staff with him to be assistant to the president for domestic affairs. The other thing that's odd about this, is John Dean's first job, his only job, in private practice lasted only six months. And he was fired. He was fired for unethical conduct. And we show you here, again freed from, at my instance, from a document. You can't read this, but I can. This is a civil service questionnaire that was submitted to the lead partner of the law firm and it says, "Has the individual ever been discharged under adverse circumstances?" And the answer is "Yes." And the question is "Why?" And the answer is, "Unethical conduct." "Did the employee know that that was why he was discharged?" "Yes." And here is says, see answer to 5b, "While employed by this firm, applicant undertook work, unbeknownst to us at the time, in direct conflict with the interest of the firm and a client thereof. Now, what I understand happened, and I didn't do an investigation, this is an understanding on my part, this is an FCC firm, a small boutique firm. It does broadcast license applications before the Federal Communications Commission. And in those days, if you got a broadcast license, you got lots of money, because its a monopoly of one aspect of the airwaves. They were doing a license application for a client in St. Louis. John, right out of law school, learned how to do it, concluded it could be very lucrative, and on his own participated with a group of people to file a competing application in St. Louis that also included his mother-in-law. The firm found out, you can see how the firm would take it badly, and he was fired. This form is not put in when he was firedbeing fired is bad enough, he went to House Judiciary. But this form is put in in September of 1967, a year and half later. Because this form is being circulated in connection with his recent employment by the Brown Commission. They're doing a review of him. And of course something like this would render you unemployable. So, pressure was brought on the lead partner to please back off a little bit, because you've ruined the guy, you've not just fired him, but you've ruined the guy. So, there was a second letter. And the second letter goes in about a month and a half later. And the operational language down here is, upon further consideration, my description may have overstated. A more apt characterization of Mr. Dean's departure would be to describe it as having resulted from a basic disagreement over law firm policies regarding the nature and scope of an associates activities. So, he's backing it off. I would suggest out of grace but you can read the letter as well as I. But he does one veryinteresting thing: he does not withdraw his previous filing. He says, "Please include this letter with what I had submitted before." So John Dean's career began badly, had a meteoric rise, and ended badly. We go to the next segment, which is called "Getting the Story Straight." This is complicated. It's gonna be on the exam. You wanna pay very close attention to this part. And it's about five slides. And I apologize, but I think this is hugely newsworthy. It's public for the first time today because of research I did, because of Freedom of Information Act request that I made. John Dean's communications with career federal prosecutors spanned twelve meetings over the month of April. The first meeting is April 2nd, 1973. The coverup has collapsed. His lawyer goes in to bargainfor immunity. We can give you Mitchell, we can give you Magruder. It ends, May 3rd, 1973. It's the last meeting. And pretty much, if it's in Shaffer's office, Shaffer is Dean's lawyer, Dean is there, it's late at night, the meetings go on for four to five hours. And there's two or three of the career federal prosecutors taking notes on their interviews of John Dean. And what we're going to see is over the course, and this is the first the last meeting because after this, he refuses to go in front of the Grand Jury. He's supposed to go on in front of the Grand Jury on May 5th. Without immunity, they insisted no immunity. And he says, no, I'm not going to do it. I am going to make my deal with Ervin Committee. So, there's just 12 meetings or phone calls and there are notes taken by the two or three career prosecutors who were there. The notes of course, are what never became public and I got disclosed. And the notes are dynamite, and I'm quoting from, I'm sorry. I misstated. The prosecutors took the notes, the career prosecutors, then they're relieved because the special prosecutors come on the scene and he's picking up where they left off. And these interviews occurred in September and October of 1973 and they're interviewing the career prosecutors about their meetings with John Dean. So you've got the judgment of six months on top, and they're saying, "Well, what happened at the first meeting? What happened in the second meeting?" And somebody's in the meeting, a member of the Watergate Task Force and the Special Prosecution who's taking notes as to what's said. They're interviewing Doug Campbell and Seymour Glanzer, two of the three career federal prosecutors. And the first entry that's relevant to us is April 6th. The meeting of April 6th with John Dean and this is John Dean's lawyer. Nothing about Haldeman or the President. Schaffer talked only of Mitchell and Magruder. As I alluded to at the beginning, I can deliver Mitchell, I can deliver Magruder. The 8th, two days later, no info from Dean; Re: Erlichman, and Haldeman. Now this is a meeting in Schaffer's office with Dean. But Dean has not talked about of Erlichman or Haldeman either. The 9th, the next day another meeting in Schaffer's office. Dean didn't mention the cover up until later. So you begin to get the drift, I'm going to help you to get the drift. He comes in to bargain for immunity. The lawyer says, "I'd like to help you, but you got to help him. Give him immunity. He would really tell you everything but you've got to give him immunity." But he's not talking about Erlichman or Haldeman or President Nixon. And then, it turns out, he's not talking about a cover up. He's talking about crimes committed by other people, but he's not coming in saying, "and we obstructed justice." That doesn't come up. Here on the 9th, continued, and that's the phrase in the notes. Dean never said the money was for Hunt's silence. He's describing the payments, what we all call hush money. He is describing the payments but he is not saying it was buying silence. Now, you need to know another fact. Four hundred thousand dollars changed hands. It was very significant and it was secretly left at mailboxes and everything else for the defendants. The burglary defendants. But it was conceded at trial, the coverup trial, that every payment was in response to a submission for reimbursement of legal expenses or humanitarian aid. And the defense said, we were merely taking care of our own. We were not buying their silence. And of course John Dean said, well that's what you say now, but we were buying their silence. That's what else would youWe also need to know, in every major political scandal, the individual is left abandoned. And in every scandal I know of, their legal fees are covered. You can't let them stay out there bare. Who knows what they might say? So that's usually taken cared of. It's not characterized later as an obstruction of justice. It's just taken care of. It happens in the corporate world. Same thing. If you've got someone who's accused, you enable them to mount their own defense. But what is odd here is by April 9, this is six meetings, he's not saying the money was for silence. But the real killer is here at the bottom. I hope you didn't read ahead because this is significant. We're into May. This is the last meeting. It's two days but it's summarized in the notes as one. Situations in a state of flux because the Irvin committee and the new prosecutor are coming. Dean becomes antagonistic to E and H that is Erlichman and Haldeman. Whereas, before he had given the impression that Haldeman was clean and was restrained as to Erlichman's involvement. Now, if your lead witness in a trial is dirty criminally himself, and for a full month has met with prosecutors, and notsaid "boo" about his superiors, you could conclude his story was evolving. Ross Silver's words was "escalating." That information, under law and Supreme Court decision, must be disclosed to the defense because it is possibly exculpatory. You know, the Department of Justice isn't in the business of just winning cases. They're in the business of prosecuting under rule of law. And there's a Jenck's Act and a Brady decision that says exculpatory information must be disclosed. This is exculpatory information. This could be used to impeach John Dean on the stand as a witness: "Were you lying then or are you lying now? How come a full month passed?" But it was never disclosed. Okay? It gets a little better. Two more slides on this. These are the hand-written notes. They were then typed up. Now watch what happens when it's typed up. This is paragraph twelve and this is a quote from the typed version. "By the end of April he'd become much more antagonistic toward Haldeman, Ehrlichman in his discussions with the prosecutors, issuing his scapegoat. He said, 'I won't be the scapegoat in public.' Before that, the impression he gave of Haldeman was of a great devoted public servant, clean and hard-working. He had been restrained in his praise of Ehrlichman." Now, that's turning this inside out, okay? Go back just for a second too. This is clearly labeled May second and third, but when you go forward, it's not. It's just...it's kind of loose. It's kind of toward the end of April. So you have lost the date, you have changed Holden from being clean to being clean cut and Ehrlichman's involvement from being restrained to being restrained in his praise. This is the sort of thing that we call This is the sort of thing that gets lawyers disbarred. This is a dramatic change in what was really said. This memo That too, was not turned over to the defense. I mean, even so, this is still not bad. nd Holden, okay? And then later in this same memo the same thing happens to president Nixon, paragraph fifteen on May 3rd. At least we have the date. Dean began focusing on presidential involvement and these are the special prosecutors own words, "Thus dramatically changing his previous stands." That would have made a difference in the trial. That would have made a huge difference. You could have used that to impeach the primary witness but this was kept hidden. So I leave on this segment where they start. Dean's story evolved, escalated, changed, from ... I can tell you who did the break in and why to, we were all in it together. He had his story straight in front of tIn the front of the urban [xx]. This should have been disclosed at trial. You could have raise the question. Just tap in the kid Steven trial. Same thing Steven trial was.
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01:29:33,770 --> 01:29:33,450 . The The FBI agent told the judge, "Case was thrown out." There is a strong reaction to this sort of thing. We go back to the last segment. Dean's disappearing presence, this is another aspect of the exam. Five or six slides and we are done. We are going to start with the show you what will happen with John Dean. First, on October 19, he pledged guilty to a single felony. That's October 1973.And sentence was postponed until the conclusion of the cover up trial. That is standard procedure with government witnesses. Plead guilty to a count, your sentence is postponed until after the trial at which your testimony is relevant. That's perfectly standard practice, but then something happened in April of 1974. That's the trial of John Mitchell and Maurice Stans. He was Chief Financial Officer for the committee to reelect. They were acquitted, in what's called the Vesco trial in New York, and you don't really need to know that was an allegation that for mere two hundred thousand dollars of campaign donation Robert Vesco's troubles with the SCC were supposed to disappear. They took it to a jury in New York and the jury acquitted them, said, "No, no, that's not what happened." John Dean was the principal witness and in interviewing the jury on the way out. The jury said he wasn't credible. Dean wasn't credible. So great worries begin in Washington about Dean's credibility with perhapsGood reason. What happened next is best described by Judge John Sirica, the presiding judge, at both the Watergate break-in trial and the coverup trial. And I read, "When Dean was on the stand and on the New York case the against Mitchell and Stans in order to get a lighter sentence from the court in Washington, that's from me. It was a legitimate way for those attorneys to try to discredit Dean given the fact had not yet been sentenced by me. But I didn't want the defense to use the same tactic in the coverup case. Dean had already made his plea bargain with prosecutors. As long as he appeared to testify fully and truthfully, I knew what he said on the witness stand wasn't going to make any difference in the sentence I handed down. So, to prevent the suggestion that he was testifying in the hope that I would reduce his sentence. I decided to give Dean that sentence well before the trial. This is a change in standard procedure."This is an effort to have you testify from jail, and indeed what Judge Sirica did on August 2nd 1974, he sends John to a prison term of one to four years. Now he's only plead to a single felony; the most he can get is five years, and he's given one to four, and his confinement begins on September 3rd, which is the opening day of the coverup trial, so he can go say, "I have been punished. I am testifying from jail and look what they did to me." These are the only people who haven't been punished. Let's see from Dean's own book how he describes the surprise of a one to four year sentence. "I was absorbing Judge Sirica's words. He threw the book at me. The most he could have given me was five years and he gave me four. Why did he do that?" "I don't understand", Charlie Shaffer said, over and over, "This is my fault, John. I should never have allowed you to plead to Sirica. I'm sorry, I didn't know, I don't understand." Charlie was as shaken by the sentence as if it were his. How can he do that? I asked. I figured I get like some thing like Krogh. But Krogh was the head plumber. Six to 18 months, maybe a year at the most. He hit me harder than the gruder. Even Corson didn't get the sentence I got. It can't be and then he the describes the reaction of his wife Moreen. "How could he do that?" Moreen shrieked hysterically. She was sobbing out of control. So you have this dramatic and unexpected sentencing of the principle accusatory witness to one to four years. What affect did it have? Well, he testified from October 16th to 23rd at the trial and how did that go and we get that again from the book by the prosecutors. More balancing aside the real politic of the situation was that Dean would not be an effective witness if he had gets a free ride. His credibility would be substantially diminished if the prosecutors completely forgave his own deep involvement. The evident of effective Dean's prison sentence later on the jurors at the Watergate coverup trial confirmed our tactical judgment. As a man, who has already been serving a long jail term for doing what he testified he had been instructed to do by Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Dean made a measurably greater impression than if he had never been charged or punished for his acts. So, this tough sentence really worked. It really increased his credibility and persuaded the jury. So we know John Dean was sentenceThree or four more slides. This is an official document pulled from a special prosecution force and it is from Jim Neal, the lead prosecutor for Watergate to James Warrenburg, who was number two in this special prosecutor's office. Dean was scheduled to surrender at Lompoc, which is near LA. It is the federal minimum security prison near Los Angeles. Please arrangethe bureau of prisons to have him retained at Fort Holabird until further notice. The reason is so I can work with him in preparation for his trial. It's important to know the retention of Dean at Fort Holabird is for the convenience of the government and not as a favor to John Dean. Fort Holabird is a witness holding facility, and at the time there were 21 people at the holding facility. And it's really designed as a safe house for mafia witnesses who were about to testify against the mafia and it would be helpful if they lived. So there...it's confinement. There's no question about that. It's on a military base to protect you. But it's not prison in any normal sense of the term, not how we understand prison, not Lompoc. Well, if that's how he spent his nights, how did John Dean spend his days? What a strange question! But we go back to John Dean's own book. And this is wonderful. But you have get his isn't appropriate. Hank Ruth, Joe Keys replacement as special prosecutor was frowning. If the press got hold of this, they go crazy. He threw down the John Dean's office name plate down on my desk and waited for an answer. Well, Hank I sputtered. I didn't know whether this will take his remarks seriously. I didn't put it on the door. One of the Secretaries did it as a joke. They think I am almost one of the guys. I know he said fairly but we can't afford this kind of stuff. I am already catching a lot of flock about the office you got. Okay, I understand. I knew there were some of resentment that I fetch so well on office shuffle at the special prosecutor's case three head quarters. When the Watergate travel team had moved to the court house I had been assigned Neil's hold office this is the head of the Watergate Task Force. On the ninth floor, a corner location with lots of windows. So John Dean sentenced one to four years in prison. He was spending his nights at Fort Holabird and his days in a special prosecutor's office, not with the trial team down at the court house, but on K street, in a corner office. What, we asked, was he doing during that time? Here's what he was doing, and this is an excerpt from Dean's financial statement given in connection with his sentencing. I signed a contract with the Bantam Book Publishing Company to write two non Watergate books about government. It's my hope to write whenever I'm not being called upon by the government to testify. And hopefully complete the first manuscript by March of next year. So you're left with the idea that this principle accuser, heavily involved in Watergate, sentenced to one to four years, spending his nights at Fort Holabird, his days at the special prosecutor's office, writing his book. Not the image conveyed to the American public, not the image conveyed to the jury. then what conviction. But then the other shoe dropped, this is what's so troubling. On January 8, one week later, Judge Surecca reduced Dean's sentence to time served. Setting him free after four months of technical confinement. Let's go back to Surecca's book for a moment down here at the bottom. I knew as long as what he said on the stand was not going to make any difference in a sense I handed down. o to prevent this suggestion he was testifying and hope I would reduce his sentence, I decided to give him that sentence well before the trial. When he threw the book at him 1 to 4 years, there were other books that said, you know, this is really to improve his credibility but nobody thought Judge Sirica would write in his own book with the implication that he did it to increase his credibility before the jury. And then when the jury convicted, set him free. That is astonishing. People less generous than I could say that's a fraud on the jury. That's an intentional fraud on the jury. I wouldn't go that far. But you can see what we have here on the last slide. We have a situation where the principal accuser, the one who is involved throughout. The one who changed his story is hidden from the defense and his prison sentence is trumped up and then taken away. And you ask yourself did they get a fair trial? They may have done what they were accused of doing. The cover up went on for so long and there were so many meetings. They could have crossed the line. They were trying to protect themselves politically. Maybe they did. But even criminals, even Republicans get a fair trial. And you could conclude from this, perhaps, they did not. So we end, the alluring, the enduring allure of Watergate. This is a botched quote from Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill said on the radio in 1939. It's a paraphrased quote. He said on the radio, "Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But perhaps there's a key. The key is an appeal to Russia's national interests." He was talking about getting Russia to come into WWII. But it's most appropriate for Watergate. Watergate is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. I think there's a key. I think the key is John Dean. The question is, which version do you believe? Now what's so amazing after 37 years, the Watergate scandal is a story for which the last chapters are still being written. I thank you for your attention, I hope you enjoyed your afternoon. thank you, Jeff Shepherd. Those of us who spent years working and being around Richard Nixon really have o it's... And about Richard Nixon's knowledge and role in it. So it's refreshing indeed to hear another point of view particularly so factually based as Jeff Shepherd presented as only a Harvard that Harvard lawyer, now be available in our gift shop to sign copies of Inside The Real Watergate Conspiracy. And if you will join us in the gift shop the books are available as will be our speaker in just moments. Thank you for coming. Please watch our website again, Nixonfoundation.org, and hear more about exciting and interesting
