Watergate, page 2
Despite the myriad contemporaneous records, many are less than perfect accounts of history. The era’s tell-all memoirs show the haste with which they were rushed into print to capitalize on the nation’s fascination. In a pre-internet era when fact-checking news reports, memoirs, and oral histories was more difficult, period accounts are often littered with obvious errors, from restaurant names to calendars. Woodward and Bernstein’s classic All the President’s Men has an innocent mistake on the very first page, where the two reporters accidentally shrink the Washington Post’s newsroom to just “150 square feet.” Sam Dash, the chief counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee, consistently gets the last name of his House Judiciary Committee colleague wrong, calling Jerry Zeifman, Jerry Zeiffert; and in profiling the security guard who busted the burglars, JET magazine apparently conflates James McCord and George Gordon Liddy, naming the burglar caught “George McCord.” H. R. Haldeman mis-assigns Washington Post star political reporter David Broder to the crosstown rival Star.
More than any little typos or inadvertent mistakes, it’s hard to know whom to trust when you’re telling a story where nearly every major player ended up being charged with lying, perjury, or obstruction of justice. Many of the participants in Watergate’s swirl tend to minimize their own role or culpability in particular events. The memories of Jeb Magruder and G. Gordon Liddy, for instance, often agree generally on events, but differ in obviously self-beneficial ways on the level of criminality or nastiness implied by certain conversations. Alexander Haig’s memoir, which largely covers a period when there were no corresponding tapes of White House meetings, differs significantly from available evidence in key moments. To avoid confusion and for ease of readability, I’ve lightly edited some direct quotes that, because of the vagaries of memory, clearly misremember known dates, names, or events, excising the incorrect information.IV Through cross-referencing accounts, double-checking primary source diaries, schedules, calendars, and underlying documents, I’ve worked to assemble a more true version of the events than any one participant has ever been able to tell before.
The raw Nixon tapes pose a greater challenge. The tapes themselves are a verbal disaster—an almost impenetrable morass of words, overloaded and overstuffed with the filler, interruptions, asides, false starts, confusing antecedents, and digressions that populate colloquial, informal speech. The president loved to talk and talk, what John Ehrlichman would later call “chewing the cud,” rehashing, circling back, and revisiting the same topic time and again. “He would turn the same rock over a dozen times and then leave it and then come back to it two weeks later and turn it over another dozen times,” Ehrlichman explained.V The original recordings were primitive by modern standards, and multiple investigators and scholars have struggled for decades to make sense of their scratchy nuances; famously, in the midst of the House impeachment inquiry, investigators released a transcript that repeatedly quoted Nixon referencing someone named “Earl Nash,” only to determine subsequently that there was no such person and that Nixon instead had kept starting to say “national security” and then stopped short. Conversations and topics often stretch over extended periods of time—encompassing thousands of words, reels of tape, and pages of transcripts—and completely capturing them here would result in a multivolume work that would be of zero reader interest.
Even after a half century of study, there remain fights—sometimes meaningful ones—over the accuracy of the tapes. The National Archives and the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library have declined to author “master” transcripts, so I’ve relied on the expert work of the Watergate investigators and three published volumes of tape transcripts, by Stanley Kutler, Douglas Brinkley, and Luke Nichter, as well as—in very limited instances—my own deciphering of certain passages not included in their works. In some cases, resolving the ambiguity still left in these remarks is critical to understanding their context and interpreting the outlines of the president’s paranoid mind and an unfolding criminal conspiracy. More often than not, though, the unclear remarks are simply confusing. I’ve tried to lightly edit many of the Oval Office conversations for readability and concision where doing so doesn’t falsely change their meaning or context, and left the full verbal soup where it’s important.
This narrative is meant to distill everything we’ve learned in the nearly fifty years since (as well as some new insights gleaned along the way) into a single, readable volume that captures as much of the historical legacy—and utter bizarreness—of the world that we shorthand as “Watergate” as possible. It has taken a half century to be able to write the truest history of Watergate, which—at least until the current times—stands as the strangest chapter of the entire American presidency. It is a story, though, we’re probably not finished with. As White House reporter Helen Thomas wrote, “I don’t think the dust will ever entirely settle on the Watergate scandal.”
I. A brief—and hardly comprehensive—survey would start with the original follow-on, 1976’s Koreagate, about South Korean influence in Congress (a scandal that actually hit some of the same players as Watergate itself), as well as Bill Clinton’s Travel-Gate and Monica-Gate, the New England Patriots’ Deflate-Gate, Ariana Grande’s Donut-Gate, Dan Rather’s own Rather-Gate, and even the false conspiracy theory Pizza-Gate.
II. The second most famous line of Watergate, Deep Throat’s incantation “Follow the money,” actually was never said at all—it was a screenwriter’s flourish in All the President’s Men.
III. Watergate literature is so plentiful that there’s even an entire subgenre that amounts to fan fiction—a half-dozen novelizations of the events, of widely varying quality and accuracy, some written by the key players themselves. That total doesn’t even count the forty or so espionage potboilers written by burglary plotter E. Howard Hunt, some of which he wrote even as he awaited trial.
IV. D.C. prosecutor Earl Silbert, for example, spoke in one oral history of the known events of Saturday, April 15, 1973, when that particular Saturday was actually the 14th, and in written testimony to Congress he said an event happened on Friday, July 29, 1972, when the Friday was actually the 28th. Indeed, nearly every Watergate memoir is littered with mixed-up dates. Senator Ervin’s own written account of his meeting with Richard Nixon amid the week of the Saturday Night Massacre accidentally dates the event to October 1975, fourteen months into Gerald Ford’s presidency. Egil Krogh, in his memoir, correctly lists a meeting in one paragraph as happening July 17, while in the paragraph before he misstated it as July 16. Howard Hunt incorrectly dates an early meeting of the Plumbers to Saturday, July 10, that was actually held two weeks later, on Saturday, July 24. The memoir of CIA deputy director Vernon Walters misquotes his own memos, placing a key meeting on June 22 rather than June 23.
V. Even his own staff came to realize that their role in most of their conversations with Nixon was simply to absorb him and let him process out loud. Their presence was almost extraneous. “Probably you’d grunt at the right times,” Ehrlichman said. “Our minds were probably drifting off to other things.” Kissinger too came to see as central to his role the strange experience of soaking up the president’s “nervous tension. One would sit for hours listening to Nixon’s musings, throwing an occasional log on the fire, praying for some crisis to bring relief, alert to the opportunity to pass the torch to some unwary aide who wandered in more or less by accident,” he recalled.
Prologue The Pentagon Papers
Even though it would continue for another 1,153 days, Saturday, June 13, 1971, was arguably the last happy and good day of Richard Nixon’s presidency. There were still happy days ahead (many spent enjoying milkshakes or Ballantine’s Scotches on the back deck of the presidential yacht Sequoia) and good days to come (a historic opening to China and the largest presidential landslide election in U.S. history), but perhaps never again would there be a day both happy and good, at least for the moody, brooding, conspiratorial, thin-skinned, self-destructive occupant of the Oval Office.
On that spring Saturday—even as unbeknownst to him the New York Times finalized a scoop for the next day that would begin to upend all that was happy and good about his presidency—Richard Nixon’s daughter was getting married. The fact that their granddaughter was getting married at the White House would have astounded his parents, Hannah Milhous Nixon and Francis A. Nixon.
The doctor who had delivered Richard Milhous Nixon a year before the start of World War I had traveled by horse and buggy to the Irish Quaker family’s house in Yorba Linda, California, on what then represented the outskirts of the continental United States. The town was so new to the map that he was the first baby born there. There had been no government social safety net, the New Deal and the Great Society still years away, and Jim Crow laws and segregation reigned almost unquestioned across the South. Now, as commander in chief, Francis and Hannah’s son traveled the world in a heavily modified Boeing 707 jet, presided over a life-ending arsenal of thermonuclear missiles, and had watched from the Oval Office in 1969 as his nation became the first to walk on the moon.
Today, he would escort his daughter down the aisle at the most famous address in the world.
* * *
Yet, for a man who had seemed to have much to celebrate—after the conclusion of his navy service in World War II, he had risen in just six years from a newly elected congressman to the U.S. Senate to the vice presidency, served eight years alongside Dwight Eisenhower in a time of great prosperity and peace, and then returned to a triumphal victory for the nation’s highest office in 1968 himself—happiness had often escaped him.
Elective office had been on Nixon’s radar from the start; in eighth grade, he’d listed his life goals and included “I would like to study law and enter politics for an occupation so that I might be of some good to the people.” In his presidential inaugural address, he would phrase the drive thusly: “Until he has been part of a cause larger than himself, no man is truly whole.” Aide Pat Buchanan said it simply: “He wanted to be a great man.”
However, years later, in his memoirs, he would look back and recall just how much stress and grief his entire political career had wrought. He recalled fondly the night his first congressional campaign ended in California, way back in 1946, circulating among rowdy victory parties. He was not even thirty-four years old. “Pat and I were happier,” he wrote, “than we were ever to be again in my political career.”
Nixon often struggled to connect with others. A man who spent most of thirty years at the peak of American power when American power was at its peak, he seemed to have only two meaningful, deep personal friendships—both men with strange names, and both of whom could not have existed further from high-society circles: Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, a Florida laundromat magnate, banker, and real estate speculator, and Robert Abplanalp, a man who had made his fortune inventing the mass-produced, cheap, and reliable aerosol valve that transformed consumer goods and enabled everything from spray paint to canned whipped cream. He struggled to make small talk. The first time Rebozo invited Nixon sport fishing, Nixon showed up with a briefcase of work to do on the boat and barely spoke; Abplanalp, meanwhile, provided the president the use of his private 125-acre island in the Bahamas where Nixon could exist in total solitude.I He never learned to spell his top aide John Ehrlichman’s name, preferring to instead address notes to him with a simple “E,” and continued to misspell it years after the presidency. Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman—his closest professional associate—would remark years later, “To this day, he doesn’t know how many children I have.” And aides would mock the president behind his back for the awkward way he would shove White House trinkets—golf balls, pens, or cuff links—at Oval Office guests without looking at them, his arm shooting out from his back as he rummaged through drawers, unsure and uncomfortable greeting people visiting him, the occupant of the most famous office in the world.
Throughout his presidency, he went to ever-greater lengths in search of solitude; he retreated from the Oval Office to work from a hideaway in the Executive Office Building and fled Washington for ever-longer stretches, to his western getaway in San Clemente, California, or his southern getaway in Key Biscayne, Florida. By his second term, he would retreat to Camp David for weeks on end. “Richard Nixon went up the walls of life with his claws,” his longtime friend White House aide Bryce Harlow would say years later. “I suspect that my gifted friend somewhere in his youth, maybe when he was very young or in his teens, got badly hurt by someone he cared for very deeply or totally trusted—a parent, a dear friend, a lover, a confidante. Somewhere I figure someone hurt him badly.” His comfort was assured through a strict adherence to routine. He ate the same lunch almost every day: a ring of canned pineapple, cottage cheese, crackers, and a glass of milk. (The cottage cheese was flown in weekly from his favorite dairy back home, Knudsen’s.) He liked bowling alone and walking on the beach alone. Nixon drank too much and couldn’t hold his alcohol—particularly when he was exhausted, even just a drink or two could make him loopy—and fought his depression by self-medicating with Dilantin and sleeping pills.
And yet, as his biographer Jay Farrell would write, “there existed, within the angry man, a resolute optimist.” He devoured movies at nights and weekends as president—more than five hundred of them—watching religiously at Camp David, the White House theater, and on vacation, and his family remembers how enthusiastically he plowed ever onward. “No matter how terrible the first reel is, he always thinks it will get better,” his daughter Julie said later. “Daddy would stick with it. ‘Wait,’ he’d say, ‘wait—it’ll get better.’ ”
He could, in moments, radiate a warmth and exuberance for life that surprised; he loved the beauty of the White House gardens and in the evenings would bound off the elevator into the family residence to report that the crocuses had bloomed or another flower had arrived in season. While running for vice president in 1952, he’d once traded places with a lanky reporter and allowed the journalist to wave at adoring crowds alongside Pat as Nixon, watching from the press bus, laughed and laughed. During his 1968 campaign, he’d stumbled upon a young aide in the hallway, whisking a woman back to his room, and cracked, “Mike, we don’t have to get those votes one at a time, you know,” and one day, while talking to aide Chuck Colson in the Oval Office, Nixon saw his national security advisor Henry Kissinger approach out of the corner of his eye and quickly deadpanned, “I don’t know, Chuck, about that idea you had about dropping a nuclear weapon on Hanoi. I’m not sure the time is quite ready, but if we try to do it, let’s not tell Henry.”
Nixon, confoundingly, considered himself a man of his word.II At the end of 1970, he sat down and sketched his goals and the qualities he hoped to project, a list that began with “compassionate, humane, fatherly, warmth, confidence in future, optimistic, upbeat” and continued, line after line, through more than fifty such traits, including “moral leader, nation’s conscience.” And as mercurial as he was, Nixon hated arguing, confrontation, or firing people, and possessed an odd reservoir of tenderness, even gentleness, for those who served him. “Some of his most devious methods were mechanisms to avoid hurting people face-to-face,” Kissinger later recalled.
It was that mixing of idealistic light and morose dark that had propelled him and allowed him to bounce back from professional humiliation, time after time, manipulating and Machiavellian-ing his way through Washington—building himself up on the back of McCarthyism in the 1950s and Vietnam in the 1960s, remaining personally ever hopeful even as he roared about how much the nation needed him precisely because it had so much to fear.
“His rise to the presidency was an amazing triumph of will and intelligence,” biographer Richard Reeves concluded. “He was too suspicious, his judgments were too harsh, too negative. He clung to the word and the idea of being ‘tough.’ He thought that was what had brought him to the edge of greatness. But that was what betrayed him. He could not open himself to other men and he could not open himself to greatness.”
Or, as his aide Bryce Harlow said, simply, “He liked rolling in the dust.”
* * *
The wedding was spectacular, attended by four hundred guests, including Billy Graham, Ralph Nader, Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Art Linkletter, and even FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Chief Justice Warren Burger (not a single member of Congress, however, was to be found). Martha Mitchell, the flamboyant and fiery wife of Nixon’s attorney general, arrived under a yellow organza parasol and wide-brim hat, wearing a pale-apricot couture dress and high-heel slingbacks—the same outfit she’d worn earlier in the year to meet Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. The eighty-seven-year-old Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who herself had been married at the White House in 1906, fumbled through her purse for her invitation when asked for it by the guards at the gate. The male attendants wore ascots, the women mint-green organdy dresses. Three different champagnes—all American, of course—flowed through the night, and the newlyweds cut into a 355-pound, seven-tier wedding cake. Tricia called Edward “my first and last love.” The music-loving president, worried earlier in the day about his first dance, nailed the tradition, then proceeded to dance on with his other daughter, his wife, and even Lynda Bird Johnson, the daughter of the man who had preceded him in the White House. “It was a day that all of us will always remember because all of us were beautifully and simply, happy,” he said later in his memoirs.
