The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down by Geoff Shepard Page A

and to put his financial affairs in order before his incarceration, Hunt requested payment of $135,000 from his former friends at CRP, who had been subsidizing him and the other burglars almost since the time of their arrests. Perhaps understandably, they viewed a request for money over and above his actual legalexpenses as a form of blackmail. Dean informed Haldeman and Ehrlichman of Hunt’s request and asked that LaRue inform Mitchell.
    Having decided that it was long past time to inform Nixon of the specifics of the Watergate problem, including Hunt’s new monetary demand, Dean met with the president at ten o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, March 21. He began by telling Nixon that there was a “cancer on the presidency,” which was spreading, and he told him about Hunt’s “blackmail” demand. Dean managed to omit the details of his own criminal acts, but it was not Nixon’s finest moment, either. The president clearly played with the idea of meeting Hunt’s demands, if only to buy time to get out ahead of Hunt’s threatened disclosures. Haldeman joined the meeting toward the end, and all agreed that they needed to bring Mitchell down from New York to decide how to respond.
    At about five o’clock that afternoon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean again met with the president. They knew that Mitchell was to join them the next day, but they were still worried about Hunt’s demands. Nixon seemed to suggest that the only way out would be for staff members to appear before the Ervin Committee, in private session, in exchange for forgoing any claim of executive privilege. Later that night, at about ten o’clock, seventy-five thousand dollars was delivered to Hunt’s lawyer.
    The next day, Thursday, March 22, this same group met again, joined by John Mitchell. This seems to have been the first time that the president had met in person with Mitchell since his resignation from CRP some nine months earlier. The distance Nixon maintained from his old friend probably indicates how radioactive Mitchell was thought to be. The conclusion of the meeting was that Dean would go to Camp David and write a report about what he had learned in his investigation on behalf of the president. On the basis of that report, the president, in turn, would send his staff to testify before the Ervin Committee. The unspoken assumption was that any such appearance by Mitchell would require him either to commit perjury or to take responsibility for authorizing the Watergate break-in. At the meeting’s conclusion, Nixon lingered alone with Mitchell and, according to the House Judiciary Committee’stranscription of the tape recording, instructed him to “stonewall,” invoke the Fifth Amendment, cover up, or do anything else necessary to save the plan. I maintain, however, that this is a mis-transcription of this key recording. 11
    At the sentencing of the Watergate burglars on Friday, March 23, Judge Sirica shocked the courtroom by dramatically reading a letter from James McCord alleging a cover-up and then proceeded to hand down surprisingly harsh sentences—up to thirty-five years—to each of the defendants, with the provision that the sentences might be reduced in exchange for cooperation with prosecutors and the Ervin Committee.
    That weekend, Dean dutifully journeyed to Camp David to draft the promised report, but he found himself unable to produce it, perhaps because anything he wrote, if remotely true, would have been self-incriminating. On Wednesday, March 28, Dean retained criminal defense counsel Charles Shaffer, a Democrat who had served in Robert Kennedy’s Department of Justice. It turned out to be a most astute choice. A brilliant and resourceful lawyer, Shaffer’s adroit initiatives and defense tactics got Dean off almost scot-free.
    3. Nixon’s Fall (July 24–August 9, 1974)
    The third and final stage of the Watergate scandal began on Wednesday, July 24, 1974, with an eight-to-zero decision of the Supreme Court in United