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Nixon Orders the CIA to Block the FBI — Transcript

by The Political Archives · 2,762 words · 466 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:00June 23rd, 1972, the morning after the
0:03Watergate break-in, Richard Nixon walked
0:06into the Oval Office and sat down with
0:08his chief of staff, HR Halddederman. The
0:11tape was already running. What you're
0:13about to hear is not speculation. It's
0:16not a theory. It's a verbatim exchange
0:18from a declassified White House tape, a
0:21recording Nixon himself didn't know
0:22would survive. A conversation that two
0:24years later became known as the smoking
0:27gun. Nixon's voice on that tape is calm,
0:31almost bored. He isn't ranting. He isn't
0:34panicking. He's planning. He tells
0:36Halddederman to call the CIA to have the
0:39CIA tell the FBI to back off to claim
0:42the Watergate investigation was touching
0:45sensitive intelligence operations.
0:47>> There was a major break in the Watergate
0:49trial today. On this day of sentencing,
0:51one of the defendants, James McCord,
0:53promised to reveal hidden details about
0:56the bugging of the Democratic
0:57headquarters,
0:58>> which it wasn't. He wanted the bureau
1:00strangled before it got started. But
1:03that's only the beginning. Because
1:05somewhere in those early days of the
1:07coverup, a decision was made that went
1:09beyond obstruction. evidence would have
1:12to disappear, not buried in a vault
1:15somewhere, not locked in a government
1:17archive, in a fireplace in Connecticut
1:20by the acting director of the Federal
1:22Bureau of Investigation. The story of
1:25how that happened, who gave the order,
1:27who carried it out, and what it cost is
1:30one of the most documented abuses of
1:33executive power in American history. And
1:36it is still not as well known as it
1:38should be.
1:40This is that story.
1:42>> I made my mistakes, but in all of my
1:45years of public life, I have never
1:48profited, never profited from public
1:51service. I've earned every cent. And in
1:53all of my years of public life, I have
1:56never obstructed justice. And I think
1:59too that I can say that in my years of
2:02public life that I welcome this kind of
2:05examination because people have got to
2:07know whether or not their president is a
2:08crook. Well, I'm not a crook.
2:11>> Part one, context and key players.
2:15To understand what happened in the
2:17winter of 1972,
2:19you have to understand the men who made
2:21it happen, not as historical footnotes,
2:25as people.
2:27El Patrick Gray had spent his career
2:29wanting to matter. He was a Navy
2:31submarine commander, a Yale law
2:34graduate, a loyalist Republican who had
2:37worked for Nixon since 1969.
2:41When J. Edgar Hoover died in May 1972,
2:46after 48 years running the FBI,
2:49Nixon needed a replacement he could
2:51trust. not someone independent, someone
2:54his.
2:56Gray fit the profile. He had no prior
3:00FBI experience, which was exactly the
3:02point. He was appointed acting director
3:05in May 1972.
3:08The Senate confirmation hearings were
3:10scheduled for the following year. And
3:12between those two dates, Watergate
3:15exploded.
3:17John Dean was the White House counsel,
3:2033 years old. precise, meticulous, the
3:25kind of lawyer who wrote everything down
3:27and then wished he hadn't. He was the
3:29coordinator of the cover up in its early
3:32phase.
3:34The man who ran communications between
3:36the White House and the people getting
3:38nervous. When he later testified before
3:41the Senate, he did not protect anyone.
3:44He told them everything.
3:47John Erlickman was Nixon's chief
3:50domestic policy adviser, former Seattle
3:53zoning attorney. He had a gift for
3:55making things happen quietly. He was one
3:58of the men who gave Gray his
4:00instructions
4:01and one of the men who later claimed he
4:03had said nothing of the kind.
4:06HR Halddederman was the chief of staff,
4:09a former advertising executive,
4:12controlled access to Nixon like a gate.
4:16He was on the June 23rd tape, the one
4:19that ended the presidency.
4:22These are the four men at the center of
4:24what happened to those FBI files. Each
4:27of them in their own way was calculating
4:30the same thing, how much they could
4:33admit, how much they could deny, and
4:37whether the story would hold. And then
4:40there was Howard Hunt.
4:43E. Howard Hunt was a former CIA officer
4:47who had been working as a White House
4:49consultant. He was one of the men who
4:51had organized the Watergate break-in.
4:54When the burglars were arrested, Hunt's
4:56name surfaced within hours, and Hunt had
5:00a safe in his White House office.
5:03What was in that safe would change
5:05everything.
5:06Part two, the order. The June 23rd tape.
5:126 days after the Watergate break-in, the
5:14White House taping system captured what
5:16historians would later call the most
5:19damaging 64 words in American political
5:23history. Nixon tells Halddeman to
5:26contact CIA Deputy Director Vernon
5:29Walters. The instruction, as documented
5:32in the declassified transcript, is
5:34direct. Have Walters call FBI acting
5:37director Gray and tell him to, and these
5:41are the words from the tape, stay the
5:43hell out of the Watergate case on the
5:46grounds that it would open up the whole
5:48Bay of Pigs thing. There was no CIA
5:52operation threatened by the Watergate
5:54investigation. Nixon knew that. The CIA
5:58knew that. What Nixon was doing was
6:01using the apparatus of one intelligence
6:03agency to shut down the investigation of
6:06another. He was using the national
6:09security infrastructure of the United
6:11States as a personal coverup tool.
6:15Walters met with Gray on June 23rd. He
6:18passed along the message. Gray, by his
6:21own later account, was suspicious, but
6:24he complied. The investigation slowed.
6:29Think about that for a moment. The
6:31acting director of the FBI, the agency
6:34investigating a crime committed by the
6:36president's own reelection campaign,
6:40receives a call from the CIA deputy
6:42director telling him to back off, and he
6:46does.
6:47The Hunt materials.
6:50The day after the breakin, White House
6:52aid John Dean was directed to go through
6:55Howard Hunt's safe in his executive
6:57office building office. What he found
7:00there was extraordinary.
7:02According to Dean's sworn Senate
7:04testimony, the safe contained classified
7:08State Department cables. cables that
7:10Hunt had apparently altered or
7:12fabricated to implicate President
7:14Kennedy in the 1963 assassination of
7:18South Vietnam's President DM. There were
7:22documents related to the 1971 Pentagon
7:25Papers investigation. There was Hunt's
7:28address book containing names of CIA
7:31contacts. There was a handgun. Dean
7:34testified that he understood immediately
7:37these materials could not go through
7:39normal evidence channels. They could not
7:42be turned over to investigators without
7:44explaining why a White House consultant
7:47had classified fabricated intelligence
7:50documents in a safe two blocks from the
7:53Oval Office. According to Dean's
7:55testimony, he gave the files to Gray in
7:58two meetings in late June 1972.
8:03He told Gray they were politically
8:05sensitive, that they had nothing to do
8:07with Watergate, but should never see the
8:09light of day. Dean testified that he
8:12told Gray the documents were dynamite
8:14that should never be seen. Gray took
8:17them. He put them in a desk drawer in
8:20his Connecticut home. There they stayed
8:23for 6 months.
8:26The pressure on Gray.
8:28Throughout the fall of 1972, Gray was
8:31navigating two worlds simultaneously. In
8:35public, he was running the FBI and
8:38overseeing in theory a Watergate
8:41investigation that his own agency was
8:44conducting. In private, he was receiving
8:47guidance from John Dean and John
8:49Erlickman that he would later describe
8:52as highly suspicious.
8:54Gray testified before the Senate
8:56Judiciary Committee in 1973 that Dean
8:59had sat in on FBI interviews of White
9:02House staff. A significant breach of
9:05standard investigative protocol and one
9:08gray allowed. He testified that he had
9:11shared raw FBI investigative files with
9:14Dean. Another breach. When senators
9:18pressed him on why, Gray struggled to
9:21explain
9:22the answer. Reading between the lines of
9:25his testimony is simple. He didn't know
9:28how to say no to the White House.
9:32Erlickman, for his part, would later
9:34claim he never told Gray to do anything
9:36improper.
9:38Dean's testimony contradicted that. The
9:42Senate committee found Dean's account
9:44more credible.
9:46Gray was caught between his
9:47institutional role and his political
9:50loyalties. He had spent his career
9:53trying to get close to power.
9:56Now the power was asking him to protect
9:58it and he did not have the independence
10:02or perhaps the courage to refuse.
10:06Gray burns the documents.
10:09In late December 1972, El Patrick Gray
10:13drove to his home in Stonington,
10:15Connecticut. According to his own later
10:18account given in federal court
10:19proceedings in 2005,
10:22more than three decades after the fact,
10:25he took the two folders Dean had given
10:27him and put them in the fireplace.
10:30He burned them along with the Christmas
10:32wrapping paper.
10:34In his memoir, published in 2008, Gray
10:38wrote that he knew the documents were
10:40politically sensitive.
10:42He wrote that he had been told they were
10:44unrelated to Watergate.
10:47He wrote that he had accepted those
10:48representations without verification and
10:52then he burned them. The FBI had been
10:55investigating the Watergate break-in for
10:586 months. The acting director of that
11:01FBI had just incinerated documents that
11:04came from the office of one of the prime
11:06suspects. Gray would later say he didn't
11:09know the full nature of what he
11:10destroyed.
11:12That is technically possible.
11:15What is not possible is that he believed
11:18his actions were normal.
11:21He put those documents in a fireplace in
11:23his home, not in a document shredder at
11:26bureau headquarters, not through any
11:29official records disposal process. in
11:32his home fireplace in December with the
11:35Christmas trash.
11:37Part three. The unraveling. The coverup
11:41began to collapse in the way coverups
11:43always do. Not all at once, but by
11:46accumulation.
11:48Each new revelation pulling on a thread
11:51that shouldn't have been there. In
11:54January 1973, the Watergate burglars
11:57were convicted. One of them, James
12:00McCord, wrote a letter to Judge John
12:03Sera claiming there had been political
12:05pressure to stay silent. That letter
12:08broke the dam. In March 1973, El Patrick
12:12Gray appeared before the Senate
12:14Judiciary Committee for his confirmation
12:17hearings as permanent FBI director.
12:21What followed was a disaster for the
12:23White House. Under questioning from
12:26Senator Robert Bird and others, Gray
12:28admitted he had allowed John Dean to sit
12:31in on FBI witness interviews. He
12:34admitted he had shared FBI files with
12:36Dean. The hearings became a live
12:39demonstration of how thoroughly the
12:41FBI's independence had been compromised.
12:44Gray tried to explain his actions. He
12:46said he had trusted the White House. He
12:49said he had no reason to doubt what Dean
12:51told him. He said he had acted in good
12:54faith. The senators were not persuaded.
12:57The hearings were suspended. Gray's
13:00nomination was effectively dead. On
13:03April 27th, 1973, Gray resigned. That
13:08same day, he told investigators he had
13:10destroyed documents from Howard Hunt's
13:13safe. It was the first time he had
13:15admitted it publicly.
13:17Two months later, John Dean sat down
13:20before the Senate Select Committee on
13:21Presidential Campaign Activities and
13:24delivered his testimony. It lasted for 5
13:27days. Dean named names. He described
13:31conversations.
13:32He laid out the architecture of the
13:34cover up in detail, the meetings with
13:37Nixon, the discussions about executive
13:39clemency for the burglars, the payments
13:42of hush money, and the role of the FBI
13:45director in receiving and destroying
13:47materials from Hunt safe. He said he had
13:50told Gray the documents were political
13:52dynamite and should never see the light
13:54of day. He said Gray understood what
13:58that meant. A month after Dean's
14:01testimony, White House aid Alexander
14:03Butterfield revealed what no one outside
14:06the inner circle had known. The Oval
14:09Office had an automated taping system.
14:12Every conversation recorded, everything.
14:16The battle over those tapes consumed the
14:19next year. Nixon fired the special
14:22prosecutor rather than hand them over.
14:24The Saturday Night Massacre.
14:27Congress issued subpoenas.
14:30Nixon's lawyers fought in court and then
14:33on August 5th, 1974,
14:36the White House released the transcripts
14:38it had been told by the Supreme Court to
14:41release.
14:42One of those transcripts was from June
14:4523rd, 1972.
14:493 days later, Richard Nixon announced
14:51his resignation.
14:53El. Patrick Gray was not done with the
14:56legal system. In 1977, he pleaded guilty
15:01to one count related to the illegal
15:03searches conducted during the Watergate
15:06investigation, not directly to burning
15:08the documents. Though the document
15:11destruction remained part of the
15:12prosecution's evidence, he was sentenced
15:15to time served and a fine. He never went
15:19to prison. In 2005, Fairchack seri
15:24federal charges relating to the document
15:27destruction were revived under a new
15:29legal theory, then dropped when a judge
15:31ruled the statute of limitations had
15:33expired. Gray died in 2005,
15:37shortly before the case was formally
15:39closed. He had lived with what he did
15:42for 33 years. Part four, what it means.
15:47Here's the question. The historical
15:49record forces you to sit with. Not. Did
15:53Nixon obstruct justice? That was
15:56established at the time and confirmed by
15:58the tapes. Not. Did Gray make bad
16:01decisions? He admitted as much in sworn
16:04testimony and in his own memoir. The
16:08question is this. How did it get this
16:10far? How did a sitting president
16:13instruct his chief of staff to enlist
16:15the CIA in blocking an FBI
16:18investigation?
16:20And have that instruction treated as a
16:22legitimate request?
16:24How did the acting director of the FBI
16:27accept fabricated intelligence documents
16:30from a White House lawyer, put them in a
16:33drawer for 6 months, and then burn them
16:36without triggering a single
16:37institutional alarm? The answer is not
16:41complicated, which is what makes it
16:43disturbing.
16:45Gray was a political appointee who had
16:47no prior FBI experience and owed his
16:50position entirely to Nixon's favor. He
16:54had no institutional base within the
16:56bureau. He had no allies who would
16:59protect him if he pushed back. His
17:02entire identity at that moment was tied
17:05to White House approval.
17:08When Dean and Erlicman told him things
17:10were sensitive and needed to stay quiet,
17:13he didn't ask who authorized that
17:15guidance.
17:17He didn't consult the attorney general.
17:19He didn't call the inspector general. He
17:22accepted the instruction and complied.
17:26That is what institutional capture looks
17:29like from the inside. It doesn't feel
17:32like corruption to the person doing it.
17:34It feels like loyalty. It feels like
17:37discretion. It feels like being part of
17:40a team. And then one day you're burning
17:44documents in your Connecticut fireplace
17:47in December.
17:49And 30 years later, you're writing a
17:51memoir trying to explain why
17:55the postwatergate reforms were real. the
17:58Ethics and Government Act, the Inspector
18:00General Act, the Foreign Intelligence
18:03Surveillance Court, the Special Council
18:06Statute.
18:07Legislators in 1974 and 1978 understood
18:11that Watergate had exposed structural
18:13vulnerabilities
18:15and they tried to address them. But
18:18statutes are not the same as
18:20independence.
18:22The independence of law enforcement from
18:24political pressure is not
18:26self-executing.
18:28It depends on individuals choosing
18:30institutional loyalty over personal
18:33loyalty.
18:34Even when that choice is costly, Gray
18:37chose wrong, not because he was uniquely
18:40corrupt, but because the system placed
18:43him in a position where the wrong choice
18:45looked like the safe one. Whether the
18:48safeguards built after Watergate are
18:50strong enough, whether an acting FBI
18:53director today could be similarly
18:55leveraged by a White House seeking to
18:58obstruct a federal investigation
19:01is a question the documented record of
19:03this episode does not answer. What the
19:06record does tell you is that it happened
19:08once. That the men involved were senior
19:12government officials who swore oaths.
19:15that the institutional protections in
19:17place in 1972 were insufficient to stop
19:21it. That's not history. That's a
19:24warning. El Patrick Gray spent the last
19:28years of his life writing a memoir. He
19:30called it In Nixon's Web. He completed
19:34it just before he died in 2005.
19:36His son Ed finished it and published it
19:39in 2008.
19:41In it, Gray wrote that he had been
19:43deceived by Dean, by Erlickman, by the
19:48White House. That the documents he
19:51burned were described to him as having
19:53no connection to Watergate.
19:56That he had no reason to believe
19:57otherwise.
19:59Maybe that's true. Maybe Gray genuinely
20:02didn't know what he was destroying. But
20:05here is what the record shows. He didn't
20:08ask. He accepted the representations of
20:11men he knew had interests in what
20:13happened to those documents. He burned
20:15them in his home fireplace.
20:19And then he stayed silent for 5 months
20:22before admitting it. The Watergate
20:24coverup required a lot of people to do a
20:27lot of small things wrong. Not one big
20:30dramatic betrayal.
20:32A hundred small compliance decisions.
20:35Each of them individually explainable.
20:38collectively catastrophic.
20:40The sources for this documentary are
20:42listed in the description below,
20:45including the declassified June 23rd
20:47tape transcript, John Dean's Senate
20:50testimony, Gray's own confirmation
20:53hearing record, and his published
20:55memoir. History doesn't require
20:57embellishment. Read it yourself.

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