(5 of 13)
If the grand jury is right, Nixon has repeatedly lied about never having acquiesced in any cash payments by his associates to any of the original Watergate defendants. Nixon issued a long Watergate paper last May 22, claiming that "I did not know, until the time of my own investigation, of any efforts to provide the Watergate defendants with funds" and "I took no part in, nor was I aware of, any efforts that might have been made to cover up Watergate." Asked during an Aug. 22 press conference about Haldeman's version before the Senate committee of the $1 million discussion, Nixon replied: "His statement is accurate." Nixon said he had. in fact, told Dean: "John, it is wrong. It won't work."
Woven through the grand jury's various allegations against the newly indicted men was evidence that a large payment was, in fact, made to Hunt a few hours after this crucial conversation of Dean, Haldeman and Nixon. It would have been foolhardy, indeed, for Nixon's aides to carry out such payoffs if the President had flatly banned them as wrong. According to the indictment, after the end of this White House meeting, Haldeman called John Mitchell. Mitchell minutes later "had a telephone conversation with Fred C. LaRue [a Mitchell deputy], during which Mitchell authorized LaRue to make a payment of $75,000 to and for the benefit of E. Howard Hunt Jr." LaRue, who has pleaded guilty to conspiring to obstruct justice, according to the indictment gave the $75,000 to Hunt's attorney, William O. Bittman, that very evening, March 21. Next day, contends the indictment, Mitchell told Ehrlichman that Hunt "was not a problem any longer."
The charges against Haldeman raise an obvious question: Why would he risk perjury by testifying publicly that the tape contained those five words of Nixon's if, indeed, it did not? One answer may lie in the fact that Haldeman was testifying only a couple of weeks after the existence of the secret Nixon taping system had been revealed to the Ervin committee. Nixon later fought vainly on two court levels to withhold his tapes from Archibald Cox, then the Watergate special prosecutor. He yielded seven of them, including the one of the March 21 meeting, only after the public uproar that followed his firing of Cox, who was seeking the tapes and other White House evidence. At the time he was before the Ervin committee, Haldeman may have felt certain that the tapes would never have to be given to the prosecutors or the committee.
Throughout, the 50-page indictment handed up by the grand jury carefully refrains from citing any acts of the President. It sometimes even fails to note that a meeting singled out as an overt conspiratorial act was attended by Nixon and was held in his office, although his presence there is public knowledge. This is presumably part of the strategy of keeping the grand jury's report on Nixon thoroughly separate from the indictments, on the theory that Nixon's guilt or innocence ought constitutionally to be only the province of the House impeachment committee headed by New Jersey Democratic