Watergate, page 3
The next morning, the photo of the president, arm in arm with his daughter, dominated the front page in the New York Times, filling the top two columns on the left. The Times’ Nan Robertson reported how the president had escorted his twenty-five-year-old “diminutive, ethereal, blond daughter” down the curved staircase of the White House’s South Portico to meet her twenty-four-year-old groom, “tall, fine-boned and handsome” and “the scion of Easterners whose ancestors go back to the leaders of the American Revolution.” (The whole thing, Nixon felt, should have been shown as a prime-time special on the networks. “If it were the Kennedys, it would be rerun every night for three weeks, you know,” he groused to Haldeman.)
Nearby atop the Times were three other columns displaying a story by investigative reporter Neil Sheehan: “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing Involvement,” the first installment of what would come to be known as the “Pentagon Papers,” the leak of a classified yearlong seven-thousand-page study commissioned by Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, that traced how the U.S. had become embroiled in the Vietnam War. The papers documented, richly and at great length, the official lies that had led so many young American men to die in the jungles of southeast Asia.
At first glance, Nixon was not particularly concerned; the backward-looking story about the Kennedy and Johnson years didn’t seem to be his problem. His focus, instead, was on the less charitable coverage of the grand wedding by the Washington Post: “I just don’t like that paper,” he barked to his press secretary, Ron Ziegler. The Post, Nixon decreed, should be banned from covering all future White House social events.
It was an unsurprising response: Nixon felt the press had never been on his side. “Let’s go face the enemy,” he would say en route to the National Press Club. The media had fallen in love with his 1960 opponent, the young and glamorous Jack Kennedy, and sought to write his political obituary so many times that after he’d lost the California gubernatorial race in 1962, he’d promised, “As I leave you I want you to know—just think how much you’re going to be missing: You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”III He and Pat knew they lived under an unforgiving microscope; on election night in 1952, after he was elected vice president alongside Dwight Eisenhower, Pat stayed up late washing all the glasses in their hotel suite so the maids couldn’t publicly lament how much alcohol the party had consumed in celebration. “Was Nixon paranoid? Yes,” his aide Dwight Chapin said later. “But he also had the right to be.” Haldeman separately echoed Chapin’s impression: “He had strong opinions, but opinions were based on reality: That he had a battle to fight with his opponent; with a good segment of the press; with a lot of the Washington and Eastern Establishment.”
Once in office, in an exercise almost akin to self-flagellation, he had pioneered a White House morning news summary, prepared by 7 a.m. each day by a young aide named Pat Buchanan, that became the first thing he read each day. It all but guaranteed he’d be in a grumpy mood by lunch; the news summary would be returned to his aides, its margins filled with scribbled notes, follow-ups, and diatribes. “It was eating at him,” Buchanan observed. One of the news summary team, Mort Allin, said later, “I just don’t understand how the hell he can sit there and take this shit day after day.”
Those morning news summaries caught an institution in transition, as a media that for decades had been little more than stenographers of the powerful tiptoed into something more oppositional, with a sharper edge, amid the broader societal reckoning and questioning in the 1960s of powerful institutions. Washington, which had been a newspaper town since its founding, was gradually giving way to new, even more powerful forms of media. On the nation’s airwaves, television anchors were becoming powerful arbiters of the nation’s attention; in its magazines a “New Journalism” was emerging that prized a subjective voice, personal witnessing, and narrative detail, a style characterized by writers like Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson. The press was becoming not just a scribe and observer of world events, but a participant too.
The Pentagon Papers contained all the right ingredients for an explosion: They played to Nixon’s conspiratorial, paranoid nature, to his antipathy for the press in general and the Washington Post and the New York Times in specific; moreover, they focused on a government cover-up, catnip to reporters, that stemmed from the thing Nixon hated most next to perhaps antiwar protesters—leakers—and focused on the administration’s most volatile personality: Henry Kissinger. It was the beginning of a scandal that would unfurl for most of the next decade, consume Nixon’s presidency, and change American government forever.
I. “To be with Bebe Rebozo is to be with a genial, discreet sponge,” Ehrlichman later wrote. “Bebe makes no requests or demands.”
II. In the closing days of the 1960 presidential election, Nixon believed it important to meet his promise to campaign in all fifty states and, rather than fight in person in the close battleground states and high-population areas, led a swing through some of the nation’s most politically irrelevant states, like Alaska and South Dakota. His commitment to fulfill that pledge might well have cost him the election.
III. Days later, ABC News had run a special documentary actually entitled, The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon, that had even featured an interview with Alger Hiss, the former Russian spy whom Nixon had made famous through his crusade on the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948.
PART I The Kindling
1971
Chapter 1 All the President’s Men
As the thirty-seventh occupant of his office, Richard Nixon had settled into the White House under a new reality: Washington, D.C., had changed dramatically since World War II, as what had once been a relatively sleepy southern town conducting part-time business had morphed into the all-consuming locus of federal power, directing the world’s largest economy and driving foreign affairs the world over. With that shift—and the massive and ever-swelling bureaucracy that came with it—the presidency had changed too; what for much of America’s first two centuries had been the office tasked with executing policy and spending money decided and set by Congress had seen that power dynamic reverse and instead now piloted the national agenda itself. It was a job now far too big for one man, even as the White House absorbed, stole, and agglomerated still more power and personnel. To Nixon, figuring out how to staff the oversized presidency—whom to trust, how to inspire them and manage them—consumed far too much energy. “It would be god damn easy to run this office if you didn’t have to deal with people,” he lamented.
He also knew he had big shoes to fill and equally big problems to address. His predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had built one of the most ambitious domestic agendas of all time, overseeing the implementation of sweeping civil rights legislation and the Great Society, but Vietnam had so quickly and thoroughly crushed his presidency and broken his soul that he chose not to even run for reelection. The promise of prosperity for white Americans at home—of suburban houses, two-car garages, and new shiny appliances like televisions—seemed to retreat among growing economic unease in the U.S. and military pessimism abroad. “The confidence of the early sixties, the belief in an inevitable destiny, the redress of old injustice and the attainment of new heights, was being displaced by insecurity; apprehension about the future; fragmenting, often angry, sometimes violent division,” wrote historian Richard Goodwin.
In fact, Nixon’s rise had been enabled by that very sense that the country was losing its way. The campaign year began with the seizing of the USS Pueblo by North Korea, the disastrous Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and Johnson’s resulting announcement that he wouldn’t seek or accept another term as president, a political earthquake overshadowed just days later by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis. On the campaign trail that night in Indiana, Bobby Kennedy calmed a volatile crowd, but violent riots broke out in a hundred American cities elsewhere. The National Guard and the U.S. Army patrolled the streets of Washington, D.C., to bring the looting and arson under control, and the scars and hulks from those fires would persist in the capital until the 2000s. Then, a little more than two months after that night, Kennedy himself was assassinated after winning the California presidential primary. That summer, as the Democrats gathered in Chicago to nominate LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, Mayor Richard Daley’s police rampaged through the streets, beating antiwar protesters on live TV in what a later investigation would famously dub a “police riot.”
As the upheaval rippled through politics, voters—or at least many southern voters—turned against the liberal dreams of the New Deal and the Great Society. The peace, love, and understanding of the “Age of Aquarius” that had begun to characterize sixties culture turned into something darker and more selfish by the end of the decade. Lyndon Johnson’s dreams of a “war on poverty” became instead Nixon’s “welfare mess”; the celebration of Brown v. Board of Education became northern fights over “school busing”; white fears of drugs, Black militants, and the New Left became enshrined in calls for “law and order.” An economy that had soared since the generation educated under the GI Bill, bringing millions of white families into suburban, middle-class, Cleaver family bliss, sputtered with unemployment and inflation. America had dominated the postwar world stage for two decades, but now the great democratic superpower reckoned with its own internal dissension and weakness alone.
Befitting the political moment they inherited, the Nixon crew exuded a certain disdain and dourness. “The enemy was liberalism in both senses, political and moral,” journalists Dan Rather and Gary Paul Gates observed. “They looked upon Washington as a hostile and alien city in part because, in their judgment, it reflected the moral permissiveness that had been allowed to flourish during the Kennedy-Johnson years; and beyond that because it was situated in the hated East, the region that, again in their view, was the haven for all the forces that were tearing down America: hippies on drugs, pushy Blacks, left-wing radicals as well as the Establishment groups that encouraged them, like the Kennedys and the national media.”
Despite a job larger and more powerful than ever and despite the uphill struggle he’d face with Congress—he was the first president since 1849 to arrive in the White House with control of neither congressional body—Nixon had settled into the habit of an inner circle encompassing only the smallest number of staff and a minimalist approach to governing. On one visit to the Oval Office to meet with his successor, Lyndon Johnson couldn’t believe how neat and functionally lacking Nixon’s desk was; he had always prided himself on a massive desktop telephone apparatus that allowed him to instantly connect with people at all levels of the government and was confounded to see Nixon’s tiny telephone with just three direct-connect buttons: “Just one dinky little phone to keep in touch with his people,” he related in wonder to guests at dinner afterward. “That’s all—just three buttons and they all go to Germans!”
Nixon had always planned for a lean staff to assist him at the White House, while in his mind most of the serious work and decision-making took place out in the cabinet departments. Inside the White House, he had planned to have five senior staff of equal rank and importance. Those hopes lasted only a few months, and as the administration advanced, he centralized ever more power and decision-making inside an ever-smaller White House team, neutralizing one cabinet post after another. Efficiency was the key to all the Oval Office operations—all the better to maximize Nixon’s solitude and thinking time, a goal so all-encompassing that Nixon stopped signing his middle initial on official documents: Dropping the “M” saved a full second, and given the volume of required presidential signatures over a full term, Nixon declared, “That’s a real time-saver!”
The three Germans LBJ referred to were chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman, and, of course, Henry Kissinger. Reporters who covered the administration came to know the triumvirate by a variety of ethnic-slanted monikers: the German Shepherds, the Berlin Wall, the Fourth Reich, the Teutonic Trio, and All the King’s Krauts.I “Never before had so much authority with so little accountability been delegated to so few,” Rather and Gates observed.
As the White House team assembled, it looked less like the flower-child hippies of American culture and more like the offices of J. Walter Thompson, the advertising powerhouse that had employed Nixon’s chief of staff and which the revolution of the sixties had largely passed by. Short hair and crisp suits prevailed; the clones of brush-cut H. R. “Bob” Haldeman multiplied, including Appointments Secretary Dwight Chapin, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, and Haldeman’s chief aide, Larry Higby, who would become known as “Haldeman’s Haldeman,” the latter of which so defined the eager and officious staffer archetype that other White House aides-de-camp were simply known as “Higbys.” By the end, even Higby had an assistant, known, of course, as “Higby’s Higby.”
Haldeman had long idolized Nixon, arranging to meet the rising politician in Nixon’s D.C. office in 1951, just three years after he graduated from UCLA. “What appealed to me first about Nixon was that he was a fighter,” Haldeman later recalled. “Nixon refused to be cowed.” He had watched with enthusiasm as Nixon built a national profile amid the Red Scare; whereas many Americans—and history—would remember the Communist witch hunts as a dark chapter of politics, it long stood as Nixon’s proudest episode. In his first campaign for Congress in 1946, he’d accused the incumbent, New Dealer Democrat Jerry Voorhis, of “vot[ing] straight down the line of the SOCIALIZATION OF OUR COUNTRY” and called for the Republican Party to “take a stand for freedom.”
In Congress, then, he had a career-making moment targeting Alger Hiss, a State Department official accused of spying for the Soviets—hammering Hiss while railing about the hidden influence of Communism in the U.S. government and helping to launch the era of McCarthyism before even Joe McCarthy rallied to the cause. (“How he loved that case!” Haldeman recalled. “He was able, somehow, to compare every tough situation we ever encountered, even Watergate, to his handling of the Hiss case.”) Nixon then used the same Hiss and Voorhis playbook to accuse his opponent in the 1950 California Senate race, Helen Gahagan Douglas, of being a “Pink Lady” and “insufficiently concerned about the Soviet menace.” One biographer later called it the “most notorious, controversial campaign in American political history” (even Nixon would later express regret, saying in 1957, “I’m sorry about that episode”), but it paid off and by 1952, Dwight Eisenhower had added “the party’s poster boy for anticommunism” to his ticket. As dirty and unforgivable as his strategy had been—the Communist threat in the U.S. was never as real or as grand as alarmists like Nixon, Joseph McCarthy, and J. Edgar Hoover feared—it’s hard to imagine any other path that could have led him in just six years from being an obscure freshman congressman to vice president of the United States.
A Californian like Nixon, Haldeman had proudly supported him in that ’52 vice presidential campaign—and even stood outside the television studio as Nixon delivered his famous “Checkers” speech when a financial scandal looked like it might sink his bid—but Haldeman’s offer to volunteer for the campaign was never accepted. Instead, he signed on four years later as an advanceman on the ’56 reelection effort and eventually became Nixon’s head of advance for the unsuccessful presidential bid in 1960 against John F. Kennedy.
Haldeman stayed loyal through Nixon’s wilderness years as he rose in his own advertising career at J. Walter Thompson, working for Disneyland, 7UP, Aerowax, and more, polishing his own selling and messaging skills that he would later deploy on Nixon’s behalf. He discovered he had a knack for figuring out what would sell, what wouldn’t, and how to convince people they absolutely needed things they hadn’t even considered—one of his greatest product launches was of snail-killing pellets named “Snarol,” positioning the common gastropod as a scourge of modern California life.
Aboard the ’68 campaign, Haldeman led the way with a new tactic, using television, rather than an endless series of stump speeches, as the centerpiece of a national campaign. The new approach was not just technologically savvy, and tactically and strategically revolutionary, but it helped preserve Nixon’s privacy and solitude, lessening the demand on his energy to be always on, always backslapping and glad-handing.
By election night, Nixon had proved Haldeman right: Despite being rewritten off by the political establishment following the ’60 loss and even after effectively writing himself off following his ’62 loss of the California gubernatorial race, Nixon had battled back to become the thirty-seventh President of the United States—the first losing presidential candidate of the twentieth century to later win.
Once in the White House, Haldeman quickly emerged as first among equals. The chief of staff, one of just a handful of aides with nearly unfettered access to the boss, was rarely more than a few feet away from the president during the workday—his office just one hundred gold-carpeted feet away from the Oval—and he saw every piece of paper before it reached the president’s desk.II Whereas Nixon often demurred from direct confrontation, Haldeman was the man who said no, dispatching unwanted proposals, out-of-favor staff, and unnecessary commitments with an executioner’s cold-eyed precision. In profiling him, TIME magazine wrote, “Spiky and glaring, he… personifies the Nixon Administration: the Prussian guard who keeps Mr. Nixon’s door, the ‘zero-defects’ man who bosses the White House staff, the all-knowing assistant president of legendary arrogance, efficiency and power,” while Newsweek was even crisper: “Harry Robbins Haldeman is, as he once put it, Richard Nixon’s son-of-a-bitch.”III
Haldeman’s most important role was simply listening and absorbing the hopes, fears, obsessions, insecurities, victories, and losses of Richard Nixon. As Nixon’s mind churned, he listened for hours, translating the president’s thoughts—both good and bad—into page after page of notes and diaries on yellow legal pads. Nixon’s desire to interact with as few people as possible was a uniquely odd trait in a politician, and it’s part of what gave Haldeman such historically unparalleled power. As gatekeeper, he decided which of the president’s many orders, interests, and instincts were then translated into action by the White House and government beyond.
