The Emperor's New Clothes: Exposing the Truth from Watergate to 9/11

Introduction

In the midst of the 9/11 investigation, I opened the New York Times to find that veteran conservative pundit William Safire had again mentioned me in his column. Ben-Veniste, a likely candidate for Attorney General in a future Kerry administration, is too partisan for the job. I shook my head in silent appreciation of the economy of Safire’s effort. In one brief sentence he had implied that I might be seeking high office in a Democratic administration if George W. Bush were defeated in the upcoming 2004 election, while at the same time branding me as too partisan to properly serve in such an important post. Particularly after my questioning of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in April 2004, a chorus of right-wing radio, television, and newspaper commentators attacked me as being politically motivated. Lacking Safire’s finesse, Robert Novak called me an attack dog for the Democrats, while the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and New York Post chimed in with the highly partisan tagline, which they invariably used whenever referring to something I said or did as a member of the 9/11 Commission.

Why the special attention? It had become clear that when facts were brought out inconveniently inconsistent with their political agenda, the knee-jerk reaction of the right-wing media machine was to question the motives of the interlocutor.

On the other hand, hundreds of individuals went out of their way-most of them complete strangers—in letters and e-mails, at airports and restaurants to express their thanks for asking the hard questions, not letting them dodge the facts, and the like. For me, service on the 9/11 Commission was a very simple proposition. I saw my responsibility as finding the answer to one overarching question: How was a group of nineteen fanatics able to defeat the defenses of the world’s most powerful nation and wreak unbelievable death and destruction upon us on a single morning in September 2001? I believed then, as I do now, that our nation is strong enough to deal with the unvarnished facts and, indeed, must know the facts in order to learn the lessons of our mistakes so we can take steps to avoid repetition.

I don’t like being lied to. Never have. Over a long career as a lawyer, I have sometimes had the opportunity to do something about it. Exposing the hypocrisy and mendacity of officials in positions of power has held a special appeal for me. Hans Christian Andersen’s iconic tale of hubris, hypocrisy, and chicanery, The Emperor’s New Clothes, must have made an indelible impression on me as a child.

As a young federal prosecutor in New York City I cut my teeth on organized crime and labor-racketeering cases. Usually, the major villains were honest about their crimes. If caught and convicted, they did their time as the cost of doing business. I soon gravitated to the investigation and prosecution of corrupt officials. In the late 1960s, a crooked lawyer named Nathan Voloshen was found to be operating an influence-peddling ring out of the office of Democratic Speaker of the House John W. McCormack. We soon linked Voloshen to McCormack’s longtime administrative assistant, Martin Sweig, whom the aging Speaker had increasingly relied upon to run his office. Regularly, Voloshen would fly the shuttle from New York to Washington, where he would be installed behind McCormack’s district office desk, with full access to staff, phones, and stationery. His requests for special consideration for his well-heeled clients at various federal agencies were accompanied by calls from Sweig, who could mimic the Speaker’s voice perfectly, expressing the Speaker’s personal support for whatever favor Voloshen sought. My boss, U.S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau, a prominent Democrat himself, was entirely supportive of the investigation. The mantra of the office was simple: Do the right thing. Nothing could provide greater luxury to a young, idealistic lawyer.

What particularly got my attention were the cases in which the Speaker’s office interceded on behalf of young men drafted into military service. McCormack was a voluble and consistent hawk on the Vietnam War. But having the office of the second most powerful elected official in government win discharge and other favorable treatment for the rich and well connected, while tens of thousands of others were being killed and maimed, was a truly reprehensible piece of hypocrisy. I prosecuted Sweig in two separate cases involving young men discharged from the military. Sweig was convicted of bribery and perjury, notwithstanding McCormack’s testimony on his behalf. Voloshen pleaded guilty and died shortly thereafter. While no evidence surfaced implicating Speaker McCormack in the scheme, he recognized it was time to hang up his spikes and decided not to run for reelection.

Given my role in investigating the office of a powerful Democrat, it was mildly surprising that Richard Nixon’s political spin machine branded me (along with Archibald Cox and the rest of the Watergate special prosecutor’s staff) as a political partisan out to get Nixon. As the thirty-year-old chief of the task force investigating and prosecuting the criminal obstruction of justice conspiracy that involved the president of the United States, I had a front-row seat for the most extraordinary political scandal of our times. In the end, it was Nixon’s own hubris and hypocrisy—expressed in a smorgasbord of criminal and constitutional violations—that brought him down. Had he accepted responsibility early on for his underlings’ criminality instead of launching a massive cover-up, Nixon’s presidency might well have survived. In the end, Nixon’s outright lies to the American people about his role in the conspiracy to obstruct justice—proved irrefutably by his own secretly tape-recorded conversations—made for a choice between certain impeachment or resignation.

The FBI’s Abscam investigation exposed greed and stupidity by an alarming number of sitting members of Congress. But by the same token, the methods relied upon by the FBI and the Carter Justice Department to lure elected officials into a honey trap were dangerous and ill advised. Inadequate standards and the absence of prudent safeguards allowed a convicted swindler to skew the investigation far a field from what was being reported to officials in Washington in a process that more closely resembled Candid Camera than due process of law. In defending a Philadelphia lawyer who found himself cast in the role of a central middleman between the FBI’s agent provocateur and members of Congress—despite the fact that he didn’t know a single congressman before the bizarre undercover operation began—I was determined to show the machinations and misconduct that accompanied this unprecedented honesty test, where criminality was manufactured in the absence of provable real-life criminal activity.

As chief counsel to the Democratic minority during the Senate Whitewater Committee’s investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in an ever-expanding litany of alleged improprieties, I faced a Republican chairman determined to use the committee to take down the president of the United States. Inconveniently for Senator Alfonse D’Amato and his most partisan colleagues on the committee, evidence to support the hyperventilated charges was woefully lacking. It was one thing to find a ready megaphone in an uncritical news/entertainment establishment to amplify the pseudoscandals churned out by the right-wing anti-Clinton apparatus, but quite another thing to prove them in the bright light of open hearings where witnesses could be cross-examined. Allegations about the Clintons’ improprieties regarding a failed investment in a land development deal called Whitewater, and a baker’s dozen of other charges, proved to be unsupportable. In the end, with no credible claims of Whitewater impropriety remaining, it was left for Bill Clinton to hand his enemies the Monica Lewinsky affair that nearly ended his presidency.

An independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the 9/11 attacks was created over President George W. Bush’s early opposition. As one of the ten commissioners, I was committed to avoiding the mistakes of the Warren Commission’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination and determined to make the facts revealed by our investigation available to the public. The commission surprised skeptics with a collegial approach to our task in which partisan impulses were more often than not put aside. Despite individual differences in emphasis, we were able to agree to a unanimous report that was enthusiastically received by the American public. But fulfilling our mandate to investigate and report the facts was often at odds with the Bush administration’s penchant for secrecy and its unwillingness to admit mistakes. On occasion, it would take a blowtorch and pliers to extract critical evidence from the White House. Political embarrassment rather than legitimate concern over national security motivated the effort to keep secret the August 6, 2001, presidential briefing, Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S. The public testimony of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in which the classified title of this document was revealed became the commission’s most dramatic moment. Administration statements professing that no one could have anticipated commercial planes being used as weapons and claims that Saddam Hussein had aided and abetted the 9/11 attack were shown to be disingenuous, at best. Our opportunity—after a long battle—to question George W. Bush provided a revealing window into how the president operated, what he knew, and what he didn’t know.

The revelations that have emerged detailing deception, misdirection, disingenuousness, propaganda, and outright mendacity in selling the Iraq war to the American people only emphasize my belief that our democracy is dependent on hearing the truth from our elected leaders. Nothing less is acceptable. Policies built on a foundation of lies will in the end crumble. And where untruthfulness has fouled the halls of our American institutions, I believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant. As patriots who believe in our system of government, we should all be partisans … for the truth.

IN THIS BOOK I provide highlights and personal impressions of five important matters—one from each decade from the 1960s to 2000—in which I played a role. As each could be (and one already has been) a book in its own right, I have extracted those elements that were the most memorable and interesting to me.

CHAPTER ONE

Watergate

Iwatched John Dean drone through his fantastic testimony about the Watergate cover-up on television in the living room of my Manhattan apartment. Dean’s monotone belied the explosive content of his allegations, detailing a ten-month cover-up orchestrated by the most powerful men in government, including President Richard M. Nixon himself. How could anyone believe that Nixon, wizard of the dark arts, had entrusted this young, blond, bespectacled twerp with the authority to run an insanely stupid and dangerous obstruction of justice right out of the White House counsel’s office? My instincts as a prosecutor with all of five years of experience, albeit in the most highly regarded U.S. attorney’s office in the nation, told me that Dean was exaggerating the role of higher-ups in an effort to escape punishment for his own misdeeds. Indeed, the Senate Watergate Committee, led by Sam Ervin of North Carolina, had already granted Dean immunity as a condition of his willingness to testify. I had seen many targets of criminal investigations try to plea-bargain their way out of serious prison time by turning state’s evidence against their former friends and accomplices. The criminal justice system is dependent on this process. One of the most difficult tests of a prosecutor’s judgment and integrity is the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff in such situations—to make a determination about the credibility of accusations from the mouths of people under tremendous pressure to save themselves by implicating others.

I shook my head in disbelief. Despite the details, Dean’s story just didn’t add up. One hell of a fight would be shaping up in Washington.

My thoughts about the implications of Dean’s testimony were interrupted by a telephone call that would change my life. Jim Vorenberg, a Harvard law professor and friend of the newly appointed Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, called to ask if I would be interested in interviewing for a job on Cox’s staff. Vorenberg told me that Cox would be interviewing federal prosecutors who could jump in to conduct grand jury investigations and then try cases in the event indictments were returned. I was high on Vorenberg’s list of possible candidates. Time was of the essence for assembling a staff. I told Vorenberg I would be on a plane to Washington the next day. If offered the job, I suspected I would be moving to Washington and would play a role in unwinding the greatest political scandal in American history.

Watergate had entered my life at a crossroads in my fledgling career. I had become restless at the U.S. attorney’s office, even after my promotion to head the special prosecutions/anti-corruption unit. My relationship with the woman I was living with wasn’t working out, and I was thinking seriously about leaving New York. A few months earlier, I had given a lot of thought to accepting an offer by the Department of Justice to head the Organized Crime Strike Force for Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. I would be based in San Francisco and would also have jurisdiction over Hawaii. But there was one major hitch—there was hardly any organized crime there. The Mafia in California was, at best, a joke. Would I be willing to accept a professional diet of chasing small-time gamblers in return for the benefits of the natural beauty and relaxed lifestyle that came with the territory? I agonized over my decision for weeks before turning down the offer.

The next morning, I stepped off the Eastern Airlines Shuttle, oblivious to Washington’s famous humidity. Watergate promised to be the most compelling drama to be played out on America’s stage. It seemed as though providence had guided my hand in turning down the strike force job when Watergate was just around the corner.

I met Jim Vorenberg in the special prosecutor’s suite of offices—two floors at 1425 K Street N.W. in the heart of Washington’s business corridor. I liked Jim immediately and found his lack of pretension and ready sense of humor a welcome change from the stereotypical law professor. Jim had done some background research on me and said that my experience in prosecuting corrupt public officials made me an attractive candidate for a senior position, despite my youth. If Archie—as everyone on staff called the reserved Yankee law professor—agreed, Vorenberg would recommend me to lead one of the task forces that had been created to address the broad categories of investigation that lay ahead. Vorenberg ticked off campaign finance, dirty tricks, the plumbers, and ITT as possibilities. The only task force leader’s position that was taken was the one dealing with the Watergate cover-up. James Neal, an experienced former prosecutor who had established a highly successful criminal defense practice in Nashville, had already been selected for that position and had been on the job for a month. Cox and Neal had known each other from the Kennedy administration, for which Cox had been solicitor general and Neal had prosecuted Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s number-one target—Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa. At forty-five, Vorenberg was a couple of years older than Neal. In the Kennedy administration, he had served under Bobby Kennedy as chief of a newly created Office of Criminal Justice. Immediately after Cox was sworn in, Cox and Vorenberg’s first call was to Neal to see if their former colleague would join them in Washington.

I told Vorenberg that titles were not important to me; the only part of the investigation that truly appealed to me was the cover-up. I would gladly pick up and move to Washington for the opportunity to be Jim Neal’s number two on the cover-up investigation—if Cox and Neal were to offer me that position. Jim sat back in his chair and thought for a moment. Let’s see how it goes with Archie. Then you can meet with Neal and see whether the two of you could work together.

Archibald Cox had a reputation as a stern and forbidding legal scholar, self-righteous and unyielding. His roots and background were about as different from mine as anything I could imagine. My interview lasted fifteen minutes. Professor Cox’s appearance—t all, ramrod straight, with close-cropped steel-gray hair and clear blue eyes—did nothing to suggest the slightest connection between us. The starkness of his office, freshly painted white and unadorned with anything on the walls to personalize it, was of a piece with his unfashionable gray suit and drab narrow necktie. By contrast, I wore my hair in the longish contemporary style of the early 1970s, particularly unflattering in my case, given its tendency to frizz up at the slightest mention of humidity. Summer in the reclaimed swamp that is our nation’s capital is synonymous with humidity. I was wearing a wide paisley tie—equally contemporary and an equally unfortunate fashion statement, given the benefit of hindsight. Photographs of me from this period evoke spontaneous gales of derisive laughter from my daughters. If my appearance was disconcerting to Cox, he gave no indication of it. He was all about substance, a trait I could be thankful for as I look back on our first encounter.

Archie spoke slowly, carefully choosing his words, as they flowed into full sentences, the sentences into perfect paragraphs. He gestured for emphasis with the stub of a missing finger, the casualty I surmised of a long-ago accident chopping wood, one of his favorite activities for exercise and relaxation (with the added Yankee virtue of usefulness). After going over some of the cases I had prosecuted, Archie quizzed me on my reaction to a series of hypothetical situations involving bribery or conflict of interest, referring to himself as the perpetrator. What would I do as the prosecutor in each of the hypotheticals? What process would I use in reaching my decision? As our brief meeting ended, Cox gave me no indication of whether I had passed or failed.

After ducking his head in for a brief chat with Archie, Vorenberg cheerfully led me down the hallway to meet with Jim Neal. Apparently, I had survived Cox’s scrutiny. As different as Archie Cox was from me in one direction, Jim Neal was in the other. A dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, Neal had gone to the University of Wyoming on a football scholarship before attending law school at Vanderbilt. Barrel-chested and bandy-legged, Neal’s booming Nashville twang could be heard throughout the office as he greeted me. Neal’s ruggedly handsome face broke into a big smile as he removed a large unlit cigar from his teeth and shook my hand. Introductions over, Vorenberg excused himself and left us to feel each other out.

Neal and I hit it off from the start. He was an accomplished trial lawyer, the real McCoy. While he had won a conviction against Jimmy Hoffa, I had prosecuted Hoffa’s de facto successor as head of the free-spending Teamsters pension fund, Allen Dorfman. We compared notes on our experience with the cast of characters surrounding Hoffa and soon were regaling each other with anecdotes that had us laughing until tears were rolling down my cheeks. We discussed the Watergate cover-up allegations and the best way to proceed with an investigation. John Dean of course would be central to our focus. Neal knew Dean’s canny lawyer, Charles Shaffer, as a former colleague in the Kennedy Justice Department. He believed Charlie to be both highly skilled and completely trustworthy, an assessment that proved entirely accurate. Jim confided that his obligations to clients and his partner would require his return to his two-man law practice in Nashville in the near term. He would turn over the day-to-day running of the cover-up investigation to his next in command with the hope that he would be able to return to participate in any major Watergate trial. If that happened, he would share the trial responsibilities with me. Our conversation had morphed from the theoretical to the practical. This was an offer I couldn’t refuse. We sealed our understanding with a handshake. How soon can you get down here? Neal asked, lighting his cigar. I thought I could convince my boss, the U.S. attorney, to allow me a week to transition and reassign ongoing matters to my deputy, a very capable and ambitious young lawyer named Rudolph Giuliani.

I circled back to Jim Vorenberg with news of my agreement with Neal. We stopped for a perfunctory good-bye handshake with Archie, and I was on my way back to New York. As sophisticated and worldly as I supposed myself to be, I began to realize that New Yorkers could be just as parochial and limited as anyone from Hicktown, USA. I was in for a real educational experience.

A week later, July 4, 1973, I moved into the Hilton Hotel at 16th and K, which was to be my home for two months until I could find an apartment. I immediately dove into the mountain of memos and transcripts that were required for me to get up to speed. On my first day on the job, I glanced into the office of another of my new colleagues, a Harvard law professor who was in earnest conversation with Tony Ulasewicz, the Runyonesque former New York City cop-cum-private investigator, who had been enlisted by Nixon’s personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, to secretly deliver cash to the five Watergate burglars and their supervisors, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. To my astonishment, the professor was discussing giving Ulasewicz informal immunity in return for his version of events. In what was a total departure from cordial manners, I asked the professor if he might step into the hallway for a moment, introduced myself, and told him not to interview any other cover-up witnesses, much less make any promises to them in connection with their cooperation. The contingent of law professors was soon relieved of any responsibility for gathering facts and making deals that could bind the Watergate special prosecutor in any later proceeding.

The Watergate Task Force, as the group assigned to investigate the cover-up/obstruction of justice case was known, grew to seven in number. Jill Wine, a Chicago native who had been a year behind me at Columbia Law, had already distinguished herself as a tough Department of Justice lawyer specializing in labor racketeering—the first woman organized crime prosecutor in the department’s history. George Frampton and Gerry Goldman had been top students at Harvard Law and each had been rewarded with a prestigious clerkship with a Supreme Court justice. Peter Rient, who had overlapped with me in the U.S. attorney’s office, became the law man on our team, assigned legal research and brief-writing responsibilities. Larry Iason and Judy Denny, both promising young legal scholars, rounded out our team—average age, thirty-one, even with old man Neal at the helm.

The months from July to October were grueling fourteen-hour daily marathons, as we began to assimilate the prior investigative work of the original prosecutors from the DC U.S. attorney’s office and the Senate Watergate investigators (two of whom, Terry Lenzner and David Dorsen, had also been colleagues of mine in the Southern District of New York) and build upon that foundation. Our priorities were set by Archie Cox. Even though John Dean had been granted immunity by the Senate Watergate Committee in return for his extensive testimony, Cox was determined not to let Dean off the hook. We would make every effort to find a way to prosecute the young White House lawyer for his central role in the cover-up, even though following the Senate’s lead would have given us cover and greatly expedited our effort to investigate the involvement of the most senior White House officials.

The revelation by Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield of a surreptitious White House taping system crashed upon Watergate’s shores. Cox publicly pledged to seek access to the tapes for evidence they might yield about the alleged cover-up. The stakes regarding Dean’s cooperation as a witness for the prosecution grew dramatically.

Archie came under tremendous pressure from the White House to back off and agree to a compromise that would deny us a firsthand review of the taped conversations among Nixon and his top lieutenants, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, and Chuck Colson, that we had identified, using a combination of White House logs and insider testimony. Yet Archie remained firm about Dean. If everything else goes down the drain, the one thing I can cling to is Dean’s venality, he explained.

Nixon, of course, pegged Cox as a part of the Eastern elite establishment, a Kennedy man at that, who was out to get Nixon. The reality was much different. Cox was bent on providing a scrupulously fair investigation that would withstand scrutiny by any objective observer. On several occasions when we updated Archie on the progress of our investigation, our boss questioned us closely on the appropriateness of various investigative tradecraft. It was not enough to point out this is what prosecutors do. But is it fair? was the bottom-line question to which Archie always returned. So to some extent we were obliged to reinvent the wheel and think through issues I had never questioned. I developed a tremendous admiration for Archibald Cox and what he stood for. Nixon, on the other hand, was playing by a different set of rules.

John Dean found himself between a rock and a hard place. The White House mounted a furious attack on Dean, focusing on his alleged motive of trying to besmirch others in an attempt to save himself from a jail term. Yet Cox rejected anything less than a plea to a felony count of obstruction of justice, which carried a maximum five-year penalty. Charlie Shaffer felt he was holding good cards and refused to budge: We needed Dean; moreover, everything he had testified to before the Senate was protected by the use immunity the Senate had conferred upon his client. Eventually we would have to back down and give immunity to Dean also.

But what if we could find an area of possible prosecution that had not been the subject of Dean’s extensive Senate testimony? Combing carefully through the record, the team found just such an omission. It involved Dean’s attempt to induce James McCord, one of the Watergate burglars, to plead guilty rather than go to trial by making him a veiled offer of presidential clemency if he did so. We knew about this episode through witnesses who had testified before Dean’s Senate appearance. We drafted an indictment outlining such a charge to show Dean that Archie meant what he said. Neal told Shaffer that we had Dean boxed. It was time for his client to plead guilty and throw in with the good guys.

Meanwhile, the drama over the White House tapes had moved from hot to white hot. Cox’s appointment as Watergate special prosecutor had been the result of Nixon’s attempt to shore up his administration’s eroding credibility by appointing Elliot Richardson, his Boston Brahmin secretary of defense, to be attorney general. Coinciding with his announcement of the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, his two closest aides tarnished by Watergate revelations and dumped overboard by the chief, the Richardson appointment was the type of bold move Nixon reveled in. Richardson’s spotless reputation for integrity would surely head off the growing political sentiment for an independent inquiry into Watergate. But the Democrat-controlled Senate wanted more—a guaranty that Richardson would appoint an independent special prosecutor who would investigate allegations of a Watergate cover-up and other abuses of executive power free from White House control. It was more than a suggestion. The Senate Judiciary Committee made it clear that Richardson’s confirmation as attorney general would depend on his selection of a special prosecutor with guarantees of independence. Richardson signaled his acceptance of such a condition and his willingness to name an individual who would pass muster. Richardson picked his former Harvard Law professor, Archibald Cox, who appeared with the nominee before the Judiciary Committee and testified to Richardson’s promise of independence, further guaranteed in a written charter. Cox could be removed only for extraordinary improprieties. Richardson was confirmed two days later.

By mid-October, the behind-the-scenes maneuvering shadowing our attempt to have the courts enforce our subpoena for Nixon’s tape recordings of seven specified conversations had reached its zenith. On October 12, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the decision of District Court Chief Judge John Sirica ordering Nixon to turn the tapes over to the grand jury. The appellate court gave the president one week to comply.

During one of our task force meetings with Archie, I suggested that it might be a good idea to ask Judge Sirica for an order sequestering the tapes while the president appealed Sirica’s ruling. Archie brushed aside my suggestion. The president of the United States is not going to tamper with evidence under subpoena. To seek such an order would look like overreaching. While he was mistaken on the first count, Archie was right about the second. And he was under enough pressure to back off his demand to get the tapes that he didn’t need to open a second front by suggesting that Nixon couldn’t be trusted to safeguard the tapes in his custody during the legal battle.

Meanwhile, Nixon had cooked up a fiendishly disingenuous compromise to avoid turning over the original tapes to us. Styled the Stennis compromise, Nixon proposed that he would submit summaries of the subpoenaed conversations to Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, who would verify that the summaries accurately portrayed what was on tape. Cox would then give up any attempt to get the actual recordings.

There were two reasons why the proposal was a nonstarter. Summaries, or even verbatim transcripts, would be inadmissible as evidence in any case we might wish to bring. If that were not enough, there was good reason to suspect that Stennis would be suboptimal as an authenticator. Although a Democrat, the ultraconservative Stennis saw eye to eye with Nixon on the conduct of the Vietnam War and supported strong measures to curb dissent. Moreover, there were serious questions about whether the seventy-two-year-old senator had the endurance or hearing acuity to verify what was on the tapes with any degree of reliability. Beyond age alone, Stennis was recovering from gunshot wounds to his head from a recent mugging in his Capitol Hill neighborhood. To top it off, Nixon’s new White House counsel, Fred Buzhardt, formerly counsel to the Defense Department, had worked closely in the past with Stennis, who as the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee had earned the nickname the Undertaker for the Pentagon secrets that stayed buried under his leadership. Buzhardt would be helping Stennis with the verification process. Archie didn’t need to get into the second reason for concern—a political trap were he to question the senior Democrat’s bona fides. The inadmissibility of summaries as evidence would suffice as a cogent reason not to accept Nixon’s offer.

What was unknown publicly was how strongly Elliot Richardson pushed Archie to agree to the Stennis compromise. Archie tried to reason with his former student, to no avail. Then a new demand was added: Not only would he have to content himself with summaries, Cox would have to promise not to seek judicial enforcement of any additional subpoenas for White House tapes. How could a prosecutor voluntarily abandon a demand for specific evidence that two courts had ordered be turned over, not to mention forswear seeking what promised to be the most reliable evidence of what was said behind closed doors between and among those being investigated?

Richardson’s strong desire to continue on as attorney general provided Nixon and Haig with the leverage to put crushing pressure on him to get Cox to agree to their terms. Richardson knew that unless Cox either acceded or resigned under pressure to do so, he would be forced into the position of firing the man he had promised would not be discharged except for extraordinary improprieties or tendering his own resignation.

As October 19, 1973, the date the Court of Appeals had set for Nixon to turn over the subpoenaed tapes, approached, the efforts to persuade Dean to plead guilty accelerated. The draft indictment had convinced Dean of the seriousness of our intention that he would not get off scot-free. Shaffer told us his client was ready to plead guilty. Led by Jim Neal, we engaged in a marathon session with Dean and Shaffer that went on into the early morning hours of Thursday, October 18. We insisted on a provision in the plea agreement that would leave Dean vulnerable to an additional prosecution for perjury if the tapes proved him to be a liar. Dean readily consented.

It was agreed that Dean would enter his plea on Friday, the same day as the deadline for Nixon to comply with the order to turn over the tapes. Dean’s guilty plea was a dramatic step forward in the effort to build a case against the higher-ups Dean claimed had ordered the cover-up. I had worked intensely with Jim Neal for more than four months since our first meeting. With Dean’s plea of guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice, Jim would return to his law practice in Nashville. Friday would be his last day.

We returned to the office from Judge Sirica’s courtroom to say our good-byes to Jim. Despite the important milestone of securing John Dean’s guilty plea, the mood in the office was somber. Nixon had handed off negotiations from Attorney General Richardson to Charles Alan Wright, a prominent constitutional law professor from Texas. No longer was there any pretense of give-and-take. Wright’s message was take it or leave it. Unless Cox accepted the Stennis compromise, the president would follow the course of action in the best interests of the country. What the hell did that mean? Cox wrote back that he could not accept a proposal totally at odds with his guarantee of independence. Wright responded that further communications would be futile: The president would do what he had to do. The constitutional law professor pen pals ceased postal artillery between K Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. The clock ticked down as the time for filing court papers expired. Archie looked totally forlorn. His belief that at the end of the day, the president of the United States would act honorably and in conformity with the pledges so publicly made to him was eroding by the minute. At 6:30, Elliot Richardson called to read Cox a letter from Nixon to Richardson, in which the president had instructed his attorney general to tell Cox to make no further attempts to compel production of presidential tapes, notes, or other memoranda.

At 9 P.M., the White House went public. Nixon would not pursue an appeal to the Supreme Court. Nor would he turn over the subpoenaed tapes. Rather, he had made a very generous and reasonable offer to Cox in order to avoid the continued strain the Watergate investigation had imposed on the American people. In order to avoid a constitutional confrontation, Nixon offered a summary of the tapes, which would be verified by Senator John Stennis, a distinguished and respected American patriot. In return, Cox had been ordered not to subpoena any more tapes. Breathtaking in the president’s disregard for the rulings of the two courts and the attorney general’s earlier assurances of Cox’s independence, the White House sprang a final surprise. Senators Sam Ervin and Howard Baker, the leaders of the Senate Watergate Committee, had endorsed the Stennis compromise as a resolution of the committee’s parallel demand for the tapes. This was a shocking stab in the back. Judge Sirica had ruled against the Senate, distinguishing between a grand jury’s preeminent right to gather evidence in a criminal investigation and Congress’s desire to compel a co-equal branch of government to disgorge its confidential communications. The Watergate Committee, which had moved the investigation along so importantly, was selling us out and giving Nixon cover for flouting the legal process. I was stunned and disillusioned; I could hardly imagine Archie Cox’s distress.

In fact, Archie was busily at work, scratching out on a yellow legal pad an outline of his reasons for rejecting Nixon’s offer. He intended to explain his position directly to the American people in a press conference the next day. Meanwhile, at the White House, General Alexander Haig, who had replaced H. R. Haldeman as Nixon’s chief of staff, was war-gaming the possible outcomes. The smart money was on Richardson staying on message; the hope was that Cox would resign.

Saturday morning was my first day as leader of the Watergate cover-up team. As events unfolded at warp speed, it could easily have been my last. The entire staff assembled in our office library at 11 A.M. so that Archie could explain what was going on. The mood in the room reflected both anger and despair. We were being outflanked by Nixon and abandoned by our natural allies, the Senate Watergate Committee leaders. Archie had traded his signature bow tie for a standard maroon striped four-in-hand. With a blue button-down oxford shirt and a gray tweed suit, he still appeared far more professor than Washington lawyer. His unkempt, bushy eyebrows with wiry hairs going every which way contrasted with his salt-and-pepper buzz cut. He gave a brief summary of the past week’s events and told us he would try to explain at the press conference why he could not accept the president’s demands. For the first time I saw Archie’s natural reserve break down as he told us how proud he was of his staff and how much he appreciated the hard work we had put in since he was appointed. It was possible the president would fire him; if that happened, he hoped we would stay on as long as possible, for our effort was important to the country.

The possibility that Nixon would lash out and fire Cox for disobedience had been the subject of discussion among us for weeks. In fact, we had assembled copies of important memos summarizing evidence and transcripts of key testimony, which George Frampton had then squirreled away in his grandmother’s attic in Virginia. But such precautions seemed a stretch. After all, we were lawyers, working as part of the Department of Justice, not rebel bomb throwers. What could the president do?

At 12:30, we walked to the main hall of the National Press Club, a few blocks south down 14th Street from our office, to take seats for the one o’clock press conference. The room was rapidly filling and seats were becoming scarce. The television networks were covering it live. Could the Harvard law professor and former solicitor general, so comfortable with abstract legal principles, hold the attention of a lay audience, much less battle the entire White House spin apparatus?

Archie spoke in the slow, measured cadence that I had grown to know so well in our staff meetings. He started off by referring to the morning’s news reports.

I read a headline in one of the newspapers this morning that said, ‘Cox Defiant,’ he began. But I don’t feel defiant. He didn’t want a fight, least of all with the president. He did not want to provoke a constitutional confrontation, nor was he out to get the president. Indeed, he was brought up to have the highest regard for the presidency. He worried about the possibility that he had grown too big for my britches. He wanted to assure the public that his was not some manifestation of his own vanity but an expression of the principle of law to which he was dedicated. In the vernacular of The Godfather, which was still some years off, Cox made clear this was not personal; it was a matter of business. He looked the American public in the eye and told them how he had decided that following a path that would lead to evidence admissible in a court of law was the only responsible course of action he could follow. The message came through clearly that Cox took his responsibility seriously. By his words and demeanor, Archie communicated that there was not a whit of vanity about him. The rejection of the president’s offer did not imply any doubt about Senator Stennis’s integrity, Archie continued, but rather a commitment to adhere to established principles rather than some one-off recipe for avoiding confrontation. He detailed the communications with Nixon’s representatives over the past weeks and ended with an apology for being professorially long-winded. As he opened the floor to questions from the press, I reflected that Archie had humanized himself not only as a man of integrity and dedication to principle, but also as a man who could be introspective and worried about taking himself too seriously. It was a bravura performance of courage and principle. How could America not get