Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [227]
A confident Dean concluded that the memo, so compromising to the government, would soon be exposed as a fake. He was wrong. Far from demolishing the document, the Bureau report concluded it was probably genuine. When Dean called Edgar’s office to bring pressure, Edgar exploded. ‘Call Dean right back,’ an aide remembers him saying. ‘Tell him I said for him to go jump in the lake!… This request is completely improper.’
Improper it was, but the President himself tried to intervene – by penning a personal note to Edgar. Still the Director refused to budge. Nixon, Colson told colleagues, was angrier than he had ever seen him. There was renewed talk of firing the Director, or at least of shifting him to a grand-sounding new post that carried no power.
At the height of the row, the President was embarrassed by a damning expose in Life magazine. It spelled out, in detail, how the White House had intervened to help the banker Arnholt Smith, one of Nixon’s best friends, and a bookmaker called John Alessio, another Nixon backer, to shake off corruption and tax charges. Edgar, Life reported, had used his personal influence to help defeat the White House moves and to see that Alessio faced trial. It was this, McCord believed from his White House contacts, that had really set Nixon at Edgar’s throat. And now it was all coming out.
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‘Nixon was determined to get rid of Hoover at the earliest opportunity after the 1972 election, and he wanted to supply no hostages that might impede the process.’
Henry Kissinger, former National Security Adviser
In late March 1972, Gordon Liddy sat closeted with the President’s adviser Charles Colson. When they finished talking, Colson picked up the phone. ‘Gordon Liddy,’ he told CREEP organizer Jeb Magruder, ‘can’t get a decision out of you people on an intelligence program. I don’t want to get into a debate of the merits … Let’s get on with it.’
The program at issue was the project code-named ‘Gemstone’ and it was about to be approved. This was Liddy’s brainchild, his response to a high-level White House request. Two months earlier, in the office of the Attorney General of the United States, he had explained his concept to John Mitchell, John Dean and Magruder.
Gemstone, Liddy suggested, should include electronic surveillance of the Democratic National Convention, including a chase plane to intercept radio-telephone communications; break-ins to obtain and photograph documents; kidnapping teams to capture radical leaders and smuggle them, drugged, to a safe house in Mexico; mugging squads to beat up demonstrators; prostitutes to lure Democratic politicians to a specially rigged yacht, there to be filmed having sex; and sabotage of the airconditioning in the Convention hall. It was all to cost around $1 million.
Liddy’s superiors did not fire him out of hand for proposing such a scheme. They merely sent him back to the drawing board, with orders to ‘tone the plan down a little.’ The next version of Gemstone, which concentrated on surveillance, wiretapping and surreptitious photography, was better received. Several targets were discussed, one of them the office of the Democratic National Committee. Though there would be no go-ahead until April, the die had been cast for the break-ins at the Watergate.
In the weeks that followed, Liddy and Howard Hunt ran around the country pursuing harebrained schemes. They flew to Los Angeles with orders to snatch damaging documents that would ‘blow [Democratic hopeful Senator] Muskie out of the water.’ The plan aborted. Sporting a red wig, Hunt rushed to Colorado to persuade ITT lobbyist Dita Beard to deny authorship of the memo that, according to columnist Jack Anderson, proved Republican corruption. Then, around March 24, Hunt and Liddy had lunch at the Hay Adams Hotel, just across the street