Watergate, page 4
He always saw his mission as not just serving the country, or just serving the president, but serving the unique combination of man, cause, and moment. He said he doubted he would have ever served another president. “I have been accused of blind loyalty to President Nixon,” Haldeman later wrote. “I plead guilty to the loyalty, but not to the blindness. My loyalty was, and is, based on a clear recognition of both great virtues and great faults in the man I served. On balance, there has never been any question in my mind as to the validity of that loyalty.”
Overall, few staff met with the ongoing approval of Haldeman and the man in the Oval Office; those who did had both indulged the president’s fancies and moved quickly to do so. “Nixon was an aggressive campaigner; his theme was always attack, attack, and attack again,” Haldeman recalled. “He wasn’t averse to using all possible means to try to defeat his opponents.” Haldeman’s assignments emerged from his office with such ferocity that answers seemed overdue even before they arrived on a staffer’s desk; his “tickler” file, with assigned tasks and deadlines tracked religiously down to the hour, never forgot or forgave. “He dealt with most people by memo because memos were quick and impersonal,” aide Jeb Stuart Magruder recalled later. Saying no by memo was as quick as checking the “Disapprove” line, no conversation, gilding, or comforting necessary. Chuck Colson would lament that while he might spend ten or fifteen minutes gabbing with the president—in theory the most tightly scheduled man in the building—he never received such attention from Haldeman. Haldeman’s default message to the White House staff was simple: “There were to be results, not alibis.”
* * *
Haldeman had also brought into Nixon’s orbit a UCLA friend, John Ehrlichman. They had worked in campus politics together, and Ehrlichman had gone on to a career as Seattle’s top zoning lawyer. He had started as Nixon’s White House counsel on the first day of the new administration, a post far removed from the Oval Office, and steadily gained power by delivering the president seemingly helpful, detailed critiques of how others were mishandling issues Nixon was supposed to care about—and then proposing, almost as an afterthought, that he, Ehrlichman, should take over the issue.
One of those issues was domestic policy, a portfolio that had frustrated Nixon since he’d taken office. He had twice tried to establish a powerful domestic policy operation that could rival in authority, scope, and prestige the one assembled by Kissinger in foreign affairs. It was an odd blind spot for the president: Despite understanding innately the nation’s mood and the mechanics of politics, he never seemed to care an iota for domestic policy—he saw geopolitics as the only stage worthy of a president’s focus.IV He had been elected with a campaign trail reprise of “the time has come to get people off the welfare rolls and onto payrolls” but had little sense of how to translate that into policy or what his own New Deal or Great Society could be. Neither, to be fair, did Ehrlichman, who was all but policy agnostic and seemed to care little about societal change. Instead, he won over Nixon with his unquestionable loyalty, executing the president’s explicit orders without trying to clog them up with his own pet causes. That approach, though, led to its own paralysis, since Nixon’s domestic agenda was always better at articulating what he was against rather than what he supported. As Rather and Gates observed, “Domestic policy under Ehrlichman’s reign was essentially negative, both in tone and substance.”
Few outside of the White House campus’s eighteen acres had any understanding of the power wielded by Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Some plugged-in Washingtonians even struggled to keep them straight; which was the Seattle zoning attorney and which the Los Angeles advertising executive? They appeared on the scene almost inseparable from the start and were nearly identical in their résumés: Eagle Scouts, UCLA, Christian Scientists, loyal to Nixon above all others. They differed, really, only in their appearance: Haldeman’s style would have looked stern even on a Marine, whereas Ehrlichman exuded a slightly rumpled appearance even under the most formal circumstances. But their roles individually and as a unit would make themselves apparent when coming to the defense of their commander in chief.
The third German in Nixon’s troika was Henry Kissinger, who became a rare public figure beyond the Nixon White House. Washington was used to presidential aides serving as ephemeral celebrities during their tenure—advisors in recent administrations like Harry Hopkins, Sherman Adams, Ted Sorensen, and Kenny O’Donnell had paraded through the city—but Nixon’s men kept to themselves. Kissinger embraced the fame of his role, loving the Georgetown dinner parties and charity gala dinners, becoming “a figure of real distinction and glamour,” Rather and Gates noted. In conversations around town within those more liberal social circles, conversations where it was hard to discern truth from performative outrage, Kissinger regularly decried Nixon as a “madman” and noted how he had little patience for his White House colleagues—he complained at one point in 1970 to the British ambassador: “I have never met such a gang of self-seeking bastards in my life. I used to find the Kennedy group unattractively narcissistic, but they were idealists. These people are real heels.” He told his journalist friend Marvin Kalb, “I can’t explain how difficult it is to work around here. I am surrounded by maniacs in a madhouse.”
Nixon, for his part, distrusted Kissinger’s sincerity in all matters—rightly, in many instances—and felt, again often rightly, that Kissinger talked down to him. Nixon called him “Jew boy” both behind his back and to his face. Despite such disdain and distrust, their shared ambition and insecurities melded together into one of the most fascinating (and powerful and, depending on one’s definition, successful) president-advisor relations in all of U.S. history. “Kissinger and Nixon both had degrees of paranoia,” future secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger said. “It led them to worry about each other, but it also led them to make common cause on perceived mutual enemies.”
Coming into Richard Nixon’s presidency, he and Henry Kissinger both believed that ending the Vietnam War would cement their legacies as great men. Nixon had brought Kissinger into his White House as part of a broader effort to reshape and remake the apparatus of American foreign policy. “I’ve always thought that this country could run itself domestically without a president. All you need is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home,” he said in 1967. “You need a president for foreign policy.”
Nixon had combined the presidential national security advisor and the White House’s internal National Security Council into a single entity under Kissinger—to guide foreign policy directly from the president’s desk. Kissinger enlisted a generation of up-and-coming aides, like army colonel Al Haig and a fellow Harvard faculty member turned Pentagon advisor, Morton Halperin, to assemble the bureaucracy necessary to feed Nixon’s agenda.
The National Security Council, established as part of the post–World War II reorganization in 1947, had until then existed as a cautious, consensus-focused planning mechanism that had little to offer presidents during a crisis and little connection to a president’s own foreign policy objectives.V Nixon knew, though, that he wanted nothing to do with the State Department—purposefully choosing an uninspiring secretary of state in William P. Rogers—and even less to do with the effete Ivy Leaguers of the CIA. Under Kissinger’s leadership, Nixon wanted the NSC transformed into the main instrument of American power and vision.
Kissinger aggressively vacuumed up the administration’s foreign policy, running roughshod over the beleaguered and disrespected Rogers and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, making it clear he and the president stood alone atop the hill. “[Nixon and Kissinger] both had a penchant for secrecy, a distaste for sharing credit with others, and a romantic view of themselves as loners,” Kissinger’s biographer Walter Isaacson wrote. Roger Morris says that “the brutal truth was that, at heart, neither man had a steadfast faith in the democratic process, least of all as applied to the conduct of foreign policy.” The pace was grueling—one-third of the twenty-eight staff members Kissinger hired didn’t last the first nine months of the administration—but “a listing of the Kissinger staff read like a Who’s Who of some of the brightest, most innovative geopolitical thinkers in the country,” according to journalists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. (Many, as Kissinger would later regret, were Democrats—veterans of JFK’s or LBJ’s administrations, men in Nixon’s eyes who could never be trusted.)
* * *
Despite the hard work and smart minds, peace in Vietnam proved elusive. Early in his presidency, Nixon tried a strategy to raise the war’s stakes and force the North Vietnamese back to the bargaining table, ordering the air force’s massive, lumbering B-52 bombers—the brontosauruses of the sky—to begin secretly targeting North Vietnamese and Viet Cong supply chains and bases in Cambodia. He had lied about the move to the American people, the U.S. soldiers on the ground in Vietnam, and even to the planes’ own crews—only the pilots and navigators understood the secret that they were dropping bombs on another country. It was an escalation he hoped would send a signal to the North Vietnamese without provoking further ire from U.S. antiwar protesters. Word of the bombing, though, leaked, and New York Times reporter William Beecher wrote about the raids on May 9, 1969.
Kissinger flew into a rage as he read the newspapers that morning with other White House staff, in his customary sun-drenched, poolside perch in Key Biscayne, Florida, where they waited while President Nixon lounged on his friend Bebe Rebozo’s houseboat Coco-Lobo. All through that first spring of the administration, Nixon felt his position negotiating a peace was constantly being compromised by press leaks—according to a careful tally during his first five months, they had already faced twenty-one serious leaks—and here was one of the most secret moves of the nascent administration splashed all over the front page. Nixon, when he saw the story, raged too: “What is this cock-sucking story? Find out who leaked it, and fire him,” he told Kissinger.
Kissinger called J. Edgar Hoover. As the longtime FBI director wrote to his deputies after, recounting the conversation, “Dr. Kissinger said they wondered whether I could make a major effort to find out where that came from. I said I would.” Hoover added that the national security advisor wanted the FBI “to put whatever resources I need to find who did this” and then “they will destroy whoever did this if we can find him, no matter where he is.”
By day’s end, Hoover had moved forward with a series of wiretaps to bust the leaker. (Kissinger had already settled on a likely culprit: his NSC aide Morton Halperin, a Johnson administration holdover and assumed liberal.)VI Starting with the four most likely suspects, the target group swelled eventually to eighteen administration staff, including seven on the National Security Council and three at the White House—names personally delivered to the FBI’s assistant director, William Sullivan, by Kissinger’s deputy Al Haig.VII Haig said he was operating on “the highest authority” and asked that the operation be conducted in total secrecy, with no written record of the wiretaps, but Sullivan explained that it could never be kept entirely secret inside the bureau since each wiretap would require the work of at least eight agents, technicians, and typists. Later, paperwork appeared with John Mitchell’s signature at the bottom of the forms authorizing the wiretaps on presidential staff. (Mitchell always denied signing such authorizations.)
Haldeman was baffled by the theatrics of the whole wiretapping endeavor. “The FBI would place the summaries in envelopes for delivery,” he recalled. “Every now and then on my way into my office or in a hotel corridor on a trip, a man would suddenly jump out of a dark doorway, thrust an envelope in my hand, then disappear into the night.” For his part, Haig visited the FBI’s Sullivan to read over some of the wiretap summaries personally, and Sullivan sent some thirty-seven regular updates to Kissinger’s office from May 1969 to May 1970. Even more, fifty-two, went to Haldeman. The documents and wiretap transcripts inside were all but useless. “A dry hole. Just globs and globs of crap,” Nixon himself would conclude.
Frustrated by the lack of progress, Nixon himself ordered the list expanded further: The FBI had, for some reason, told the White House that syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft’s phone was “untappable,” so Nixon had Ehrlichman do it himself. Ehrlichman outsourced the project to a former NYPD detective, Jack Caulfield, who had joined the White House team to help out on various investigative tasks, and Caulfield then also enlisted a former FBI agent named John “Jack” Ragan. Ragan had been one of the bureau’s top wiretap experts, targeting Soviet spies at its UN mission in New York, and had worked with Caulfield to secure the ’68 campaign’s hotel rooms from electronic surveillance. Now he was working security for the Republican National Committee and began a much more homegrown covert operation: He and another man surreptitiously tapped one of the phones in Kraft’s home by climbing a ladder alongside the building, only to discover that Kraft was in Paris, attending the peace talks. Finally, the frustrated order came down for the FBI’s Sullivan to travel to France and have authorities wiretap Kraft there. As weeks passed, journalists were added to the FBI target list too—the New York Times correspondents Hedrick Smith and Tad Szulc, as well as CBS reporter Marvin Kalb. Week by week, month by month, the wiretaps continued—never quite delivering the intelligence the White House hoped for.
The operation, as unsuccessful as it was, had laid the groundwork for the response to the Pentagon Papers, seeding the administration’s taste for spying on its enemies—real or imagined. Now, just months after the end of those Kissinger wiretaps—begun too as a reaction to the damaging leaks about Vietnam—the Pentagon Papers represented another major leak about the war and one that Kissinger feared for entirely different reasons.
I. Victor Gold, Spiro Agnew’s press secretary, stole from the musical Man of La Mancha to label them the “Knights of the Woeful Countenance.”
II. The idea and role of a “White House chief of staff”—an evolution of what previous generations had called a private secretary—had only emerged in the years after World War II. As a response to the growing demands of the presidency and the complexity of operating the White House staff, postwar presidents had taken to appointing one staffer in a post that was known by various titles, including “assistant to the president,” before public nomenclature settled on “chief of staff.”
III. Haldeman’s brutal efficiency wowed and worried even the boss: Nixon once dispatched his friend Bebe Rebozo to lecture Haldeman on being more diplomatic. The lesson didn’t take.
IV. First, he turned to Arthur Burns, a ponderous longtime advisor who struggled to translate his unceasing graduate school seminar–style lectures—heard, willingly or not, by the president, cabinet, and officials beyond—into action. The next candidate was Pat Moynihan, who led the president right to the edge of a radical and ahead-of-its-time plan for “income maintenance,” what later generations would know as universal basic income, to guarantee Americans enough money to live their lives. The most radical piece of social legislation since the New Deal actually appeared headed for reality—the House passed Nixon’s welfare reform in April 1970—until Moynihan, a rare liberal in a circle that distrusted such men instinctually, was sunk by leaks of controversial memos proposing, among other things, the “benign neglect” of race relations. Ultimately, both Burns and Moynihan were escorted out in the way that Haldeman liked to banish people: with a promotion to a seemingly big role that only with time proved meaningless and irrelevant.
V. When JFK faced the Cuban Missile Crisis, he created something called the “ExComm,” an executive committee of both National Security Council members and other advisors he thought would be valuable, to help lead the crisis planning and response efforts.
VI. One of the oddities of this entire episode was that Halperin hadn’t worked on the Cambodia raids; he told Kissinger after he didn’t even know if Beecher’s story in the New York Times was accurate.
VII. The total number of so-called “Kissinger wiretaps” is usually listed as seventeen, because the FBI, which struggled to re-create who had been tapped and when, had initially failed to include NSC staffer Richard Sneider on the list. “Simply… no one remembered it,” Mark Felt wrote later.
Chapter 2 “Ellsberg? I’ve Never Heard of Him”
Of the two and a half million words spread across the forty-three volumes of the Pentagon Papers, not a single one of them was “Nixon.” The study, the brainchild of Robert McNamara, had been commissioned in 1967 as a postmortem of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ push into Southeast Asia, designed to cut through a decade of government obfuscation and bureaucratic back-patting. When the Times published its findings, the gaping chasm between the government’s rosy public statements—lies, really—and its dark internal assessments shocked the nation. The detailed indictment of the nation’s military strategy, such as it was, astounded readers with the government’s mendacity and cynicism, as the country had flushed a generation of blood and countless treasure into the jungles, rice paddies, and river deltas of Vietnam. “You know, they could hang people for what’s in there,” McNamara had said to a friend once. Giants of American politics and policy who had advocated for the war were all equally exposed and damaged—all, that is, except for the current occupant of the White House, who had instead spent the decade in political exile in New York.
His absence from the main story is why, presumably, the historical study caused Nixon little concern that Sunday as he read it among the wedding coverage. When Kissinger’s aide Alexander Haig asked Nixon mid-day if he’d seen “this goddamn New York Times expose of the most highly classified documents of the war,” Nixon admitted he hadn’t even read the article.
