At about that same time, Howard Hunt, who was on Colson’s payroll, brought his partner Liddy in to see Colson. Liddy complained that he couldn’t get anyone to approve his espionage plan. Colson immediately picked up his phone and called Jeb Magruder.
“Why don’t you guys get off the stick and get Liddy’s budget approved?” demanded Colson. “We need information, particularly on O’Brien.”
Jeb Magruder was tense as he headed over to the attorney general’s office to see his boss, John Mitchell. They had been meeting regularly, two or three times a week, ever since Magruder had been named deputy director of the Committee for the Re-election of the President a year earlier, and the young man’s open, easy manner had enabled him to develop a close working relationship with his usually reserved boss.
But now in late February, Magruder was troubled. All this pressure from the White House was getting to him. And he didn’t want to go ahead with Liddy’s intelligence operation.
Magruder met with Mitchell, as always, in a small, cluttered room just off the huge, ceremonial attorney general’s office that Mitchell rarely used, and handled some routine campaign business.
Finally, Magruder brought up “Gemstone.”
“Why do we even have to do this?” he asked.
“The president wants it done,” said Mitchell. “We need to get information on O’Brien.”
Magruder already knew that, and not just from Colson or Strachan. He had been in Mitchell’s office a few weeks earlier when Nixon himself called. While he could hear only Mitchell’s side of the conversation, it was clear that the president was pushing his attorney general to nail O’Brien.
Still, Magruder asked why. Why O’Brien? Everybody knew that party headquarters was a useless place to go for inside information on a presidential campaign.
Mitchell, who rarely showed any emotion, remained impassive as he revealed to Magruder the true motive for Watergate. His disclosure, the only one by anybody directly involved, has never before been made public.
There was some concern about a contribution, said the attorney general. The $100,000 that Howard Hughes had given Nixon through Rebozo, the transaction Jack Anderson had already reported. The money had not gone into the campaign, added Mitchell. Rebozo still had it. In fact, some of the money had already been spent.
And Larry O’Brien knew.
Mitchell said he had heard from Hank Greenspun—it wasn’t clear whether he meant directly from Greenspun or through others—that O’Brien knew all about the $100,000 and also knew that it had been passed to Rebozo long after the 1968 campaign.
It was important to find out what else O’Brien knew, and to get solid information on his own Hughes connection—to keep him quiet about Nixon.
A few weeks later, on March 30, at a meeting with Magruder in Key Biscayne, John Mitchell approved Liddy’s espionage plan. And he also approved the first target—Larry O’Brien’s office at the Watergate.
The first break-in was a great success. On Memorial Day weekend a team led by Liddy and Hunt entered Democratic National Committee headquarters, bugged O’Brien’s telephone, photographed papers from his desk, and made a clean getaway.[12]
But the O’Brien bug never worked, and Mitchell ordered Liddy back in. None of the burglars was ever told the true purpose of the break-in—no one ever told them about the Hughes connection—but this time Magruder did tell Liddy to photograph O’Brien’s “shit file” on Nixon, to find out what dirt he had on the president.
They never found out. At 2:30 Saturday morning, June 17, 1972, the police rushed in and broke up the second attempt at a third-rate burglary.
Richard Nixon was with Bebe Rebozo on Robert Abplanalp’s private island in the Bahamas when his burglars were caught at the Watergate, just as he had been three years earlier when he first received word that Howard Hughes had approved the $100,000 payoff that led to the break-in.
He returned to Key Biscayne early the next day, Sunday, June 18, and apparently learned of the big bust from his morning newspaper. He called Haldeman at the nearby Key Biscayne Hotel.
“What’s the crazy item about the DNC, Bob?” asked the president, affecting a lighthearted tone. “Why would anyone break into a National Committee headquarters? Track down Magruder and see what he knows about it.”
The president maintained his bemused air with Haldeman through the long weekend but meanwhile made a frantic series of phone calls to Colson, at one point so agitated he threw an ashtray across the room. On his first day back in Washington, Nixon finally revealed his terror to Haldeman as well.
The tape of their June 20 Oval Office conversation was later erased, creating the famous eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap. But according to Haldeman, it was in this talk—the one some “sinister force” was later so desperate to obliterate—that Nixon himself revealed the Hughes connection to Watergate.
The following account of their meeting is Haldeman’s reconstruction.
“On that DNC break-in, have you heard that anyone in the White House is involved?” Nixon asked his chief of staff.
“No one,” replied Haldeman.
“Well, I’m worried about Colson,” confessed Nixon. “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.”
Nixon feared it was Colson who had triggered the break-in. He had been pushing all his men to get to the bottom of O’Brien’s Hughes connection, and now he seemed not to know which of them had actually sent the burglars into O’Brien’s office at the Watergate. He first thought it was Colson, not Mitchell, apparently because he had conspired most directly with his hatchetman.[13]
“Colson told me he was going to get the information I wanted one way or the other,” said Nixon. “And that was O’Brien’s office they were bugging, wasn’t it? And who’s behind it? Colson’s boy Hunt. Christ.”
Haldeman wasn’t so sure. “Magruder never even mentioned Colson,” he noted.
“He will,” replied Nixon. “Colson called him and got the whole operation started. Right from the goddamn White House. With Hunt and Liddy sitting in his lap.”
The president was scared. “I hate things like this. We’re not in control. Well, we’ll just have to hang tough. In fact, we better go on the attack.”
Epilogue II
The Final Days
Howard Hughes awoke at precisely the same moment that Richard Nixon’s nightmare began.
It was still Friday night, July 16, in Vancouver, Canada, when the Watergate bust went down. At 11:30 the naked billionaire got up out of bed in his new penthouse hideaway at the Bayshore Inn. He made his way from the bed to his Barcalounger, reached for his remote-control instrument, turned on his television, and started to watch a late movie, The Brain That Would Not Die.
He soon switched to a western, Billy the Kid Outlawed, and began picking at a piece of chicken that would take him nearly three hours to get down.
Bored with TV, he called for his Mormons to show him a movie on the screen set up in his bedroom. He watched The Mad Room, followed it with The Silencers, and stayed up all that night, all through the next day, and all through the next night, alternating showings of Shanghai Express and Captain Newman, M.D., before finishing his thirty-four-hour weekend film festival with The World of Suzie Wong and falling asleep at 10:30 Sunday morning.
12
A second phone was also bugged. It belonged to Spencer Oliver, one of O’Brien’s deputies, whose father happened to work for Robert Bennett and was assigned to the Hughes account. A remarkable coincidence, especially given the fact that Hunt also worked for Bennett, but it seems that this phone was picked by pure chance. Transcripts of that wiretap were passed to both Mitchell and Haldeman but revealed only that a secretary in Oliver’s office had an incredibly active sex life.
13
In fact, a Colson aide, Ken Clawson, would later tell Haldeman that Colson had secretly recorded phone calls with Nixon both before and after the break-in, and was using his tapes to blackmail the president. “He’s got Nixon on the floor,” said Clawson. “He’s got on tape just what Nixon said all through the whole Watergate mess.” What makes these still hidden Colson tapes special, of course, is that Nixon did not know he was being recorded.