The Great Shark Hunt, page 48
The New York Times
September 4th, 1974
A prominent San Clemente supporter of Mr. Nixon since he went to Congress in 1946, who asked not to be identified, said he had heard that the Lincoln Club of Orange County, made up largely of wealthy industrialists who contributed millions of dollars to Republican campaign coffers, including Mr. Nixon’s, had invited the former president to become a member of the select and influential group.
“You won’t find Mr. Nixon living the life of a recluse,” the Republican informant said. “Now that he is clear of any criminal prosecution, don’t be surprised if he comes back into California politics. I think he should. I’d like to see him run for Senator John V. Tunney’s seat in 1976.”
The New York Times, September 9th, 1974
We are still too mired in it now to fit all the pieces together and understand what really happened in these last two frenzied years… or to grasp that the Real Meaning of what our new president calls the “national nightmare” and what historians will forever refer to as “Watergate” will probably emerge not so much from the day-to-day events of The Crisis, or even from its traumatic resolution—but more from what the survivors will eventually understand was prevented from happening.
I was out there on the crowded concrete floor of the Miami Beach Convention Center in August of 1972 when that howling mob of Republican delegates confirmed Richard Nixon’s lust for another term in the White House with their constant, thunderous chant of “FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!”
It was bad enough, just listening to that demagogic swill—but I doubt if there were more than a dozen people in Miami that week who really understood what that cheap, demented little fascist punk had in mind for his Four More Years. It involved the systematic destruction of everything this country claims to stand for, except the rights of the rich to put saddles on the backs of the poor and use public funds to build jails for anybody who complained about it.
The tip of the iceberg began emerging about six months after Nixon took his second oath of office, when Senator Sam Ervin took his initially harmless-looking “Watergate Committee” act on national TV. It didn’t catch on, at first; the networks were deluged with letters from angry housewives, cursing Ervin for depriving them of their daily soap operas—but after two or three weeks the Senate Watergate hearings were the hottest thing on television.
Here, by god, was a real soap opera: tragedy, treachery, weird humor and the constant suspense of never knowing who was lying and who was telling the truth.… Which hardly mattered to the vast audience of political innocents who soon found themselves as hooked on the all-day hearings as they’d previously been on the soaps and the quiz shows. Even Hollywood scriptwriters and apolitical actors were fascinated by the dramatic pace and structure of the hearings.
The massive complexities of the evidence, the raw drama of the daily confrontations and the deceptively elfin humor of “Senator Sam” came together in a multileveled plot that offered something to almost everybody—from bleeding hearts and Perry Mason fans to S&M freaks and the millions of closet Hell’s Angels whose sole interest in watching the hearings was the spectacle of seeing once-powerful men brought weeping to their knees.
* * *
Consider John Mitchell, for instance—a millionaire Wall Street lawyer and close friend of the president, an arrogant, triple-chinned Roman who was Nixon’s campaign manager in ’68 and attorney general of the United States for four years until his old buddy put him in charge of the Committee to Re-elect the President in 1972.… Here was a 61-year-old man with more money than he could count and so much power that he saw nothing unusual in treating the FBI, the Secret Service and every federal judge in the country like serfs in his private police force… who could summon limousines, helicopters or even Air Force One to take him anywhere he wanted to go by merely touching a buzzer on his desk.…
And suddenly, at the very pinnacle of his power, he casually puts his initials on a memo proposing one of at least a dozen or so routine election-year bits of “undercover work”—and several months later while having breakfast in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, he gets a phone call from some yo-yo named Liddy, whom he barely knows, saying that four Cubans he’s never even met have just been caught in the act of burglarizing the office of the Democratic National Committee located in an office building about 200 yards across the plaza below his own balcony in the Watergate apartments.…
Which seems like a bad joke, at first, but when he gets back to Washington and drops by the White House to see his old buddy, he senses that something is wrong. Both Haldeman and Ehrlichman are in the Oval Office with Nixon; the president greets him with a nervous smile but the other two say nothing. The air reeks of tension. What the hell is going on here? Mitchell starts to sit down on the couch and call for a drink but Nixon cuts him off: “We’re working on something, John. I’ll call you at home later on, from a pay phone.”
Mitchell stares at him, then picks up his briefcase and quickly says goodbye. Jesus Christ! What is this? On the way out to the limousine in the White House driveway, he sees Steve Bull’s secretary reading a late edition of The Washington Star-News and idly snatches it out of her hands as he walks by.… Moments later, as the big Cadillac rolls out into traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue, he glances at the front page and is startled by a large photo of his wife; she is packing a suitcase in the bedroom of their Watergate apartment. And next to the photo is a headline saying something like “Martha on the Rampage Again, Denounces ‘Dirty Business’ at White House.”
“Good God!” he mutters. The Secret Service man in the front seat glances back at him for a moment, then looks away. Mitchell scans the story on Martha: She has freaked out again. Where does she keep getting that goddamn speed? he wonders; her eyes in the photo are the size of marbles. According to the story, she called UPI reporter Helen Thomas at four in the morning, cursing incoherently about “Mister President” and saying she has to get out of Washington at once, go back to the apartment in New York for a few days of rest.
Wonderful, Mitchell thinks. The last thing I need right now is to have her screaming around the apartment all night with a head full of booze and speed. Mitchell hates speed. In the good old days, Martha would just drink herself into a stupor and pass out.… But when they moved down to Washington she began gobbling a pill here and there, just to stay awake at parties, and that’s when the trouble started.…
Then his eyes shift up to the lead story and he suddenly feels his balls contract violently, crawling straight up into his belly. “WATERGATE BURGLARY CONNECTED TO WHITE HOUSE,” says the headline, and in the first graph of the story he sees the name of E. Howard Hunt, which he recognizes instantly—and a few graphs lower, goddamnit, is Gordon Liddy’s name.
No need to read any further. Suddenly it all makes sense. He hears himself moan and sees the agent glance back at him again, saying nothing. He pulls the paper up in front of his face, but he is no longer reading. His finely tuned lawyer’s mind is already racing, flashing back over all the connections: phone calls to Hunt, arguments with Liddy, secret meetings in Key Biscayne, Larry O’Brien, Cuban burglars with CIA connections, Howard Hughes.…
He is fucked. It has taken less than 30 seconds for his brain to connect all the details.… And yes, of course, that’s what Nixon was talking about with those bastards, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. They knew. The president knew. Hunt and Liddy knew…. Who else? Dean? Magruder? LaRue? How many others?
The limousine slows down, making the turn off Virginia Avenue and into the Watergate driveway. Instinctively, he glances up at the fifth floor of the office building and sees that all the lights are still on in O’Brien’s office. That was where it had happened, right here in his own goddamn fortress.…
His mind is still racing when the agent opens the door. “Here we are, sir. Your luggage is in the trunk; we’ll bring it right up.”
John Mitchell crawls out of the bright black Cadillac limousine and walks like a zombie through the lobby and into the elevator. Dick will be calling soon, he thinks. We’ll have to act fast on this goddamn thing, isolate those dumb bastards and make sure they stay isolated.
The elevator stops and they walk down the soft, red-carpeted hall to his door. The agent goes in first to check all the rooms. Mitchell glances down the hall and sees another Secret Service man by the door to the fire exit. He smiles hello and the agent nods his head. Jesus Christ! What the hell am I worried about? We’ll have this thing wrapped up and buried by ten o’clock tomorrow morning. They can’t touch me, goddamnit. They wouldn’t dare!
The agent inside the apartment is giving him the all-clear sign. “I put your briefcase on the coffee table, sir, and your luggage is on the way up. We’ll be outside by the elevator if you need anything.”
“Thanks,” Mitchell says. “I’ll be fine.” The agent leaves, closing the door softly behind him. John Mitchell walks over to the TV console and flips on the evening news, then pours himself a tall glass of scotch on the rocks and stretches out on the sofa, watching the tube, and waits for Nixon to call—from a pay phone. He knows what that means and it has nothing to do with dimes.
* * *
That was John Mitchell’s last peaceful night in Washington. We will probably never know exactly what he and Nixon talked about on the telephone, because he was careful to make the call from one of the White House phones that was not wired into the tape-recording system.… Mitchell had not been told, officially, about the president’s new tape toy; the only people who knew about it, officially, were Nixon, Haldeman, Larry Higby, Steve Bull, Alex Butterfield and the three Secret Service agents responsible for keeping it in order.… But unofficially almost everybody with personal access to the Oval Office had either been told on the sly or knew Richard Nixon well enough so they didn’t need to be told.… In any case, there is enough testimony in the files of the Senate Watergate committee to suggest that most of them had their own recording systems and taped most of what they said to each other, anyway.
Neither John Ehrlichman nor Charles Colson, for instance, were “officially” aware of the stunningly sophisticated network of hidden bugs that the Technical Security Division of the Secret Service had constructed for President Nixon. According to Alex Butterfield’s testimony in closed hearings before the House Judiciary Committee, Nixon told Chief SS agent Wong to have his electronics experts wire every room, desk, lamp, phone and mantelpiece inside the White House grounds where The President was likely ever to utter a word of more than one syllable on any subject.
I’ve been using tape recorders in all kinds of journalistic situations for almost ten years, all kinds of equipment, ranging from ten-inch studio reels to raisin-sized mini-bugs—but I have never even seen anything like the system Wong’s Secret Service experts rigged up for Nixon in the White House. In addition to dozens of wireless, voice-activated mikes about the size of a pencil eraser that he had built into the woodwork, there were also custom-built sensors, delay mechanisms and “standby” switches wired into telephones that either Bull or Butterfield could activate.
In the Cabinet Room, for instance, Nixon had microphones built into the bases of the wall lamps that he could turn on or off with harmless-looking buzzers labeled “Haldeman” and “Butterfield” on the rug underneath the cabinet table in front of his chair. The tapes and recording equipment were installed in a locked closet in the basement of the West Wing, but Nixon could start the reels rolling by simply pressing on the floor buzzer marked “Butterfield” with the toe of his shoe—and to stop the reels, putting the machinery back on standby, he could step on the “Haldeman” button.…
Any serious description of Nixon’s awesome tape-recording system would take thousands of words and boggle the minds of most laymen, but even this quick capsule is enough to suggest two fairly obvious but rarely mentioned conclusions: Anybody with this kind of a tape system, installed and maintained 24 hours a day by Secret Service electronics experts, is going to consistently produce extremely high quality voice reproductions. And since the White House personnel office can hire the best transcribing typists available, and provide them with the best tape-transcribing machinery on the market, there is only one conceivable reason for those thousands of maddening, strategically spotted “unintelligibles” in the Nixon version of the White House Tapes. Any Kelly Girl agency in the country would have given Nixon his money back if their secretaries had done that kind of damage to his transcripts. Sloppiness of that magnitude can only be deliberate, and Nixon is known to have personally edited most of those tape transcripts before they were typed for the printer.… Which doesn’t mean much, now that Nixon’s version of the transcripts is no longer potential evidence but sloppy artifacts that are no longer even interesting to read except as an almost criminally inept contrast to the vastly more detailed and coherent transcripts that House Judiciary Committee transcribers produced from the same tapes. The only people with any reason to worry about either the implications of those butchered transcripts or the ham-fisted criminal who did the final editing job are the editors at whichever publishing house decides to pay Richard Nixon $2 million for his presidential memoirs, which will be heavily dependent on that vast haul of Oval Office tapes that Gerald Ford has just decreed are the personal property of Richard Nixon. He will have the final edit on those transcripts, too—just before he sends the final draft of his memoirs to the printer. The finished book will probably sell for $15; and a lot of people will be stupid enough to buy it.
The second and more meaningful aspect vis-á-vis Nixon’s tape system has to do with the way he used it. Most tape freaks see their toys as a means to bug other people, but Nixon had the SS technicians install almost every concealed bug in his system with a keen eye for its proximity to Richard Nixon.
According to Butterfield, Nixon was so obsessed with recording every move and moment of his presidency for the history books that he often seemed to be thinking of nothing else. When he walked from the White House to his office in the EOB, for instance, he would carry a small tape recorder in front of his mouth and maintain a steady conversation with it as he moved in his stiff-legged way across the lawn.… And although we will never hear those tapes, the mere fact that he was constantly making them, for reasons of his own, confirms Alex Butterfield’s observation that Richard Nixon was so bewitched with the fact that he really was The President that his only sense of himself in that job came from the moments he could somehow record and squirrel away in some safe place, for tomorrow night or the ages.
There is a bleeding kind of irony in this unnatural obsession of Nixon’s with his place in history when you realize what must have happened to his mind when he finally realized, probably sometime in those last few days of his doomed presidency, just exactly what kind of place in history was even then being carved out for him.
In the way it is usually offered, the sleazy little argument that “Nixon has been punished enough” is an ignorant, hack politician cliche.… But that image of him walking awkward and alone across the White House lawn at night, oblivious to everything in front or on either side of him except that little black and silver tape recorder that he is holding up to his lips, talking softly and constantly to “history,” with the brittle intensity of a madman: When you think on that image for a while, remember that the name Nixon will seem to give off a strange odor every time it is mentioned for the next 300 years, and in every history book written from now on, “Nixon” will be synonymous with shame, corruption and failure.
No other president in American history has been driven out of the White House in a cloud of disgrace. No other president has been forced to preside over the degrading collapse of his own administration or been forced to stand aside and watch helplessly—and also guiltily—while some of his close friends and ranking assistants are led off to jail. And finally, no president of the United States has ever been so vulnerable to criminal prosecution, so menaced by the threat of indictment and trial, crouched in the dock of a federal courtroom and so obviously headed for prison that only the sudden grant of presidential pardon from the man he appointed to succeed him could prevent his final humiliation.
These are the stinking realities that will determine Richard Nixon’s place in American history.… And in this ugly context, the argument that “Richard Nixon has been punished enough” takes on a different meaning. He will spend many nights by himself in his study out there in San Clemente, listening over and over to those tapes he made for the ages and half-remembering the feel of thick grass on the Rose Garden lawn adding a strange new spring to his walk, even making him talk a bit louder as he makes his own knotty, plastic kind of love to his sweet little Japanese bride, telling it over and over again that he really is The President, The Most Powerful Man in the World—and goddamnit, you better never forget that!
* * *
Richard Nixon is free now. He bargained wisely and well. His arrangement with Ford has worked nicely, despite that week or so of bad feeling when he had to get a little rough with Gerry about the pardon, threatening to call in the L.A. Times man and play that quick little tape of their conversation in the Oval Office—the one where he offered to make Gerry the vice-president, in exchange for a presidential pardon whenever he asked for it—and he had known, by then, that he would probably need it a lot sooner than Gerry realized. Once their arrangement was made (and taped), Nixon just rode for as long as he could, then got off in time to sign up for his lifetime dole as a former president.
He will rest for a while now, then come back to haunt us again. His mushwit son-in-law, David Eisenhower, is urging him to run for the U.S. Senate from California in 1976, and Richard Nixon is shameless enough to do it. Or if not in the Senate, he will turn up somewhere else. The only thing we can be absolutely sure of, at this point in time, is that we are going to have Richard Milhous Nixon to kick around for at least a little while longer.
