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My God! The Committee isn’t worth bugging in my opinion. That’s my public line.
—Richard Nixon, in the first-known recorded White House conversation after the Watergate arrests, June 20, 1972
Despite all the official probes, the trials of the miscreants involved, and the massive efforts of scholars and reporters, no one has ever convincingly established the motive for the Watergate break-ins.
Determining precisely why Nixon’s men went into the Watergate, U.S. District Court Chief Judge John Sirica was to assert when the burglars’ trial got under way, was “the basic issue.” “To this day,” Haldeman was still claiming in the late eighties, “I still don’t know why that was done.”
One might have expected the burglars themselves, the men charged with the mission, to have known what their goal was when cameras at the ready, they made their furtive way into the Democratic offices. “We were looking for both general and specific information,” Howard Hunt was to say. “The specific information was the contribution lists. By going through these we hoped to find, and tracing back the names, a source of foreign funding.”
That was their mission, according to Hunt and some of his accomplices. The Democratic candidate-to-be, Senator McGovern, was pressing for a normalization of relations with Castro’s Cuba—anathema to Nixon and his supporters—and CREEP had received intelligence “that the Cuban government was supplying funds to the Democratic Party campaign.”1 It was a strange notion, but would be catastrophically damaging to McGovern if it could be proved.
This explanation has been dismissed as merely a ruse, fed to the burglars to fire up their anti-Castro zeal. But would it not have been pointless to instruct them to seek out something so specific had it not been the real target? There is evidence, moreover, that they searched for precisely that.
“One of the things we were looking for,” Frank Sturgis was to recall, “was a thick secret memorandum from the Castro government, addressed confidentially to the Democrats’ platform committee. We knew that this secret memorandum existed—knew it for a fact—because both the CIA and the FBI had found references to it. . . . But we wanted the entire document . . . it was more than one hundred thirty typed pages, according to our information. . . . We looked high and low . . . and although we found a piece of it one night at another office, we never did find the entire thing.”2
The elusive document, Sturgis explained, not only was valuable as the proof of an alleged Castro deal with the Democrats but was prefaced by “a long, detailed listing of all the covert espionage and sabotage the CIA and the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] and the various joint operations groups have launched against Cuba . . . the complaints were especially bitter about the various attempts made to assassinate the Castro brothers.”3
Therein does lie a compelling motive. As reported earlier, the columnist Jack Anderson had in 1971 published sensational revelations regarding the assassination plots against Castro, stories stating that the murder plans had been initiated during the Eisenhower administration. They had stopped short, though, of exploring Nixon’s hidden role. At the White House meanwhile, as reported earlier, Nixon had repeatedly asked to see the CIA’s files on the “Bay of Pigs.” That was when Ehrlichman had noted, significantly, that the president wanted to know what he might need to “duck” for purposes of self-protection.
At one point it had seemed possible that Robert Maheu, the CIA’s go-between with the mobsters used in the plots, might tell what he knew. John Mitchell, however, had quietly ensured his silence.4 If Maheu had dangerous secrets, though, so did Johnny Rosselli, one of the key gangsters involved in the plots. And Rosselli was talking—to the columnist Jack Anderson.
The Watergate prosecutors were to interrogate Rosselli, and their line of questioning—his attorney Leslie Scherr believed—indicated clearly what they believed to be the motive for the operation. The break-ins occurred “because Nixon or somebody in the Republican Party suspected that the Democrats had information as to Nixon’s involvement with the CIA’s original contact with Rosselli. [The Republicans] felt that a document existed showing Nixon was involved with or knew what was going on with the CIA and the assassination of Castro . . . they wanted to try to get this information that Nixon suspected they were going to try to use against him.”
In his first efforts to prevent a serious investigation of Watergate, in discussions recorded on the White House tapes, the president would allude repeatedly to the Bay of Pigs. His aides, he said, were to have the CIA tell the FBI: “. . . Hunt . . . that will uncover a lot . . . you open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things in it that we just feel that this would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. . . . When you get [the CIA] people in say, ‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that’—without going into the details—‘that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period. . . .’ ”
Later the same day, still discussing how Haldeman could approach the CIA, Nixon would suggest telling the agency: “. . . very bad to have this fellow Hunt, ah, you know . . . he knows too damn much and he was involved, we happen to know that. . . .” As a CIA officer in 1960 Howard Hunt had been one of the very first to suggest the murder plotting against Castro in which Nixon was implicated.5
Senate Watergate Committee counsel Terry Lenzner also thought the Cuban angle was probably the key to Watergate. “The obsession of the administration in keeping tabs on Larry O’Brien in 1971 and 1972,” he theorized in a memo, “was in part motivated by fear that Maheu would impart some of his sensitive information about the plot to O’Brien. Alternatively the objective was to discover if there was any information about the plot that might be damaging to the Democrats.”6
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Lawrence O’Brien knew Howard Hughes aide Maheu because he himself had worked as a consultant to the Hughes organization early in the Nixon presidency. That connection made Nixon vulnerable in yet another way. What might O’Brien have learned from Maheu of the sums that had flowed to Nixon from Hughes since 1968? What of the favors apparently done for Hughes in return for his largess?7
In his memoirs Haldeman reconstructed a conversation with Nixon that, he suggested, had occurred immediately after the Watergate arrests. As he recalled it, Nixon had said: “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? Colson’s boy, Hunt. Christ.”
Nixon’s people had in fact been on O’Brien’s tail for far longer than six months. Two years before Watergate a Haldeman memo had referred to “Operation O’Brien,” designed to “keep the heat on the DNC and O’Brien.” Murray Chotiner reported that he was making checks on O’Brien in nine states, checks too sensitive, he told Haldeman, to put in writing.
In January 1971, with little to show for such efforts, Nixon himself had dictated this memo aboard Air Force One:
MEMORANDUM FOR H. R. HALDEMAN
FROM THE PRESIDENT:
It would seem that the time is approaching when Larry O’Brien is held accountable for his retainer with Hughes. Bebe has some information on this although it is, of course, not solid but there is no question that one of Hughes’ people did have O’Brien on a very heavy retainer for “services rendered” in the past. Perhaps Colson could make a check on this.
It was soon afterward, following some initial investigation, that an underling reported that “forced embarrassment of O’Brien” might well backfire and “shake loose some Republican skeletons.”8
One of those skeletons had already rattled—namely, the Castro plot scenario as published by Jack Anderson. The columnist would soon bring forth another, publishing the first story on the Hughes handout that was later to lead to a huge investigation. A hundred thousa
nd dollars, according to the Anderson reports, had been “siphoned off” from the Silver Slipper casino in Las Vegas and passed to Bebe Rebozo.
Nevertheless, Nixon never let up in the targeting of O’Brien. “I said: ‘Get the word out down to the IRS that I want them to conduct field audits,’ ” he admitted long afterward, “and I suggested that one they ought to look into was O’Brien. . . .” O’Brien later recalled having been “attacked by the IRS . . . subjected to a series of audits in 1971 and 1972 . . . and concluded I was stuck in the computer. I was to learn otherwise. . . . What the President had engaged in was to misuse the power of the Internal Revenue Service.”
No irregularities of any significance emerged from the IRS investigation of O’Brien. Meanwhile, a familiar distressing message went back to the White House. A probe of the Hughes operations, an IRS official reported, had turned up instead “possible wrongdoing by Mr. Rebozo and Mr. Nixon, the President’s brother or brothers. . . .”
The months before the Watergate break-in brought new trouble due to the Hughes connection and covert attempts to counter it. “Attorney General called today about the Howard Hughes problem,” Haldeman noted in his diary in January 1972. The “problem” had been the publication of one of several books dealing with the Nixon-Hughes relationship, all of them embarrassing.
The infamous Clifford Irving “as told to” portrait of Hughes was ultimately exposed as a fake and canceled, but only after having generated headlines on the Nixon side of the story that came perilously close to the truth. The work of another author on Hughes, Benjamin Schemmer, never got beyond the manuscript stage for very different reasons.
First, someone broke into Schemmer’s office and stole tape recordings of key interviews. Then his publisher, Grosset and Dunlap, canceled the book as it was going to press, a decision Grosset’s attorney attributed to “White House pressure.” A Hughes executive told Schemmer: “Attorney General Mitchell has seen and read your book. The problem is at the White House.”
In May, Mitchell and Ehrlichman received a long memo about yet another book, this one just published, titled The Nixon-Hughes Loan. It had been sent to them by Gordon Liddy, just two weeks before Liddy’s team broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee for the first time.
In 1987 Liddy’s former boss at CREEP stated publicly that it was indeed the Hughes connection that was the motive for Watergate. “It was a planned burglary,” Jeb Magruder told a Hofstra University conference. “As far as I know the primary purpose of the break-in was to deal with information . . . about Howard Hughes and Larry O’Brien, and what that meant as far as the cash that had supposedly been given to Bebe Rebozo and spent later by the President possibly.”9
That claim corresponds to what we now know Magruder said in private as Watergate began to drag Nixon down. Quoting Magruder, Haldeman scrawled this note: “Plan hatched here—Hunt, Liddy & Cols[on]. Cols[on] called Jeb twice—to get on this thing. Specifically L. O’Brien info re. Fla [Florida] dlgs [dealings].” “[Florida] dealings” is understandable here only if it refers to the cash that Rebozo, in Key Biscayne, had received from a Hughes emissary. Liddy, citing Magruder’s orders for the second—fatal—break-in, later claimed the objective was “to find out what O’Brien had of a derogatory nature about us, not for us to get something on him or the Democrats.”
It seems they did find something of relevance during the break-in at the Watergate. In a 1973 conversation with Nixon on the White House tapes, Colson responded to a suggestion by the president that “we didn’t get a goddamn thing” from the operation. “Well, apparently we did, of course,” said the aide, “mainly Hughes. . . .”
Was the Hughes information, then, the reason for the operation that was to destroy Nixon? More likely, taking all the evidence together, CREEP’s motivations were multiple and catholic. The raids were both offensive and defensive and targeted a number of political vulnerabilities. That general concept brings us to the wild card in the pack of possible motives: sexual scandal.
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From the start of the Nixon presidency, as one of the White House operatives was to testify, “background checks” were conducted on individuals’ personal lives, to find out if they were heavy drinkers, what sort of sex lives they had. The same tactics were a factor in Watergate. The man who monitored the functioning DNC bug, Alfred Baldwin, told prosecutors that his orders were to monitor “all telephone calls . . . including personal calls.” Special attention, he said recently, was to be given to those of a “sexual” nature.
Precisely what Baldwin actually overheard in this regard cannot be established, in part because of court restrictions imposed to protect those whose privacy the bugging had invaded.10 Soon after the Watergate arrests, though, Baldwin would confirm that some of the conversations he eavesdropped on concerned “personal matters.” “With several secretaries and others using the phone, apparently in the belief it was one of the more private lines,” he said in an interview, “some conversations were explicitly intimate.”
The prosecutor in the Watergate break-in case, Earl Silbert, concluded on the basis of Baldwin’s description while under interrogation that the conversations had been “extremely personal, intimate, and potentially embarrassing.” Who made the calls? “I don’t know if you had one very active secretary or you had ten,” Baldwin said recently. “I don’t know if you had one very active male or if you had ten . . . there were a lot of calls of a sexual nature.”
The phone on which the conversations took place was in the office of thirty-five-year-old Democratic official Spencer Oliver. CREEP’s Jeb Magruder, who saw Baldwin’s logs, brought up Oliver’s name when John Ehrlichman questioned him during the Watergate crisis. Ehrlichman’s handwritten notes of the meeting include the name “Oliver” followed closely by “sex.”
“What they were getting,” Ehrlichman told Nixon the same afternoon, “was mostly this fellow Oliver phoning his girlfriends all over the country lining up assignations.”11 Oliver, today a top official with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, was a prime mover in ensuring that the content of the bugs was not revealed in court.
The woman at the DNC who in recent years has drawn the most attention is Maxie Wells, at the time Oliver’s twenty-three-year-old secretary. By her account, she was “completely naïve and innocent,” a music major from a small town in Mississippi. Months after Watergate, when she had left the DNC and the Democrats brought a civil suit against the burglars for invasion of privacy, she would write to a girlfriend:
I’ve developed a crisis. . . . I’m flying up tomorrow to talk to Spencer and the DNC lawyers. . . . It appears that the Republicans are going to try to discredit Demo. witnesses on moral grounds . . . I am really upset and nervous. . . . I may have to bare (or bear) all in court . . . better get rid of this, I shouldn’t write, but must confide in someone. . . . If you talk to God in the next few days remind him about your friend who needs help keeping her nose clean.
Love, Max
Testifying in 1997, in a more recent lawsuit, Wells said that while working at the DNC, she thought her life “pretty wild by the standards of where I grew up. Living in a house with five men, dating several different people, working for a man who was rumored to have numerous affairs, and gossiping on the phone about it with my friend.”
Wells said she was “kind of appalled by a lot of the romantic and sexual behavior I saw going on at the DNC. . . . People were just sleeping with each other kind of indiscriminately, I thought, not real relationships, but one-night stands and things like that. That was pretty wild stuff to me.” So she gossiped, she said, especially on the internal phone with her friend Marty Sampson, who worked in an office a few floors below. “I bet,” she said, “we gossiped about every single person we knew at the DNC . . . it was kind of crude sometimes. . . . Marty and I gossiped about adultery.”
Her own chatter aside, Wells said, other secretaries took advantage of the fact that the phone in question was in a ro
om that was often unoccupied to “[talk] to their sweeties on the phone.”
Was that all that took place, then, on the infamous bugged phone at the Democratic headquarters? Conversation about personal relationships and secretaries’ gossip? Some suspect not, noting that when arrested, one of the Watergate burglars would have with him a key to a drawer in Maxie Wells’ desk. Reasonably enough, such researchers have concluded that her desk was a specific target for the burglars.12
Phillip Bailley, a former Washington lawyer convicted in 1972 of pimping, has claimed that a secretary at the DNC was used as a go-between with prostitutes based at the Columbia Plaza, the huge apartment complex nearby. This secretary, he said, would provide would-be customers with photographs of available whores. Then, unknown to Oliver, a phone in his office was used to set up specific assignations.13
As reported earlier, one element of Gordon Liddy’s “intelligence” plan had envisaged the employment of prostitutes. Everyone privy to the plan admitted later that he hoped to put into action, as John Mitchell put it, “the call girl bit,” the houseboat at the Democratic convention, wired for sound, to which classy-looking women would lure leading Democrats and try to get information out of them.
A madam he had located in Baltimore, Liddy told colleagues, promised “girls who can be trained and programmed,” and there was later discussion—after the houseboat plan had been shelved—of using prostitutes in Washington. Howard Hunt later told one of his accomplices that he feared “accusations about prostitutes” would come out at his trial.
While one aide has said that Nixon’s top men were too straitlaced ever to have approved such antics, another—one of Ehrlichman’s assistants—stated in an interview that Nixon and Haldeman both had “perverted interests in their surveillance activities.”