Being Nixon: A Man Divided (25 page)

Dutifully, at times a little too enthusiastically, Haldeman took on the role of no-excuses enforcer. “Every president needs a son of a bitch,” Haldeman told one of his minions, Jeb Magruder, “and I’m
Nixon’s. I’m his buffer and his bastard. I get done what he wants done and I take the heat instead of him.”
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Painfully, he had to cut off Rose Woods’s direct access to her beloved boss. So informed, she stormed past Haldeman to tell the president-elect, with a word she seldom, if ever, used before or after, to “go fuck yourself.” Later, when Nixon tried to make conversation with her on the elevator, she refused to talk to him.
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They made up—Woods was no mere “secretary,” in the dated use of the term. She was a member of the family, another strong-willed woman Nixon counted on. But Nixon was erecting walls that kept out people he loved as well as those whom he merely tolerated.

Haldeman, in the view of his friend Ehrlichman, was “joined at the hip”—linked in a “true marriage”—to Nixon. Haldeman had been a true believer in Nixon’s destiny since the 1950s, Ehrlichman told writer Tom Wicker. Like a good wife, Haldeman believed that he could anticipate Nixon’s weaknesses better than anyone, including Pat.
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Still, Haldeman could be irreverent toward Nixon, at least when he was talking to Ehrlichman. (Together they were nicknamed by resentful reporters, as well as a few staffers, “the Berlin Wall” and “the Germans.”)
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Haldeman “called Nixon Rufus, The Leader of the Free World, Milhous, and Thelma’s Husband, depending on the occasion,” wrote Ehrlichman, who could be even more acerbic. Haldeman quotes Ehrlichman referring to Nixon as “the Mad Monk.” There is a tone of gentle amusement, though not condescension, in Haldeman’s contemporaneous diary. Ehrlichman’s memoir, written after he went to prison, dragged down by Watergate, is almost derisive in places. Noting that reporters sometimes confused Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Ehrlichman wrote, “Richard Nixon had the same problem: he was forever calling me Bob. He’d start out to tell me to do something: ‘Ah, Bob—ah—Bob—ah John—’ Haldeman once wrote that Nixon could never remember how many children the Haldemans
had or their names. In my case it was
my
name. Not only was I ‘Bob’ much of the time, but Nixon never mastered the spelling of my last name. Notes to me came addressed to ‘E.’ ”
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Neither man felt personally close to Nixon, notwithstanding the many hours spent in his company. “I’m not Nixon’s friend,” Haldeman explained to his personal aide, Larry Higby. “Nixon treats us like employees.” Haldeman did not seem bitter; he understood Nixon’s quirks. “I’ve met three or four geniuses,” Haldeman told Higby. “All have uneven personalities.”
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Alexander Butterfield would
later become a footnote in history: the Nixon staffer who, at the 1973 Watergate hearings, disclosed the existence of the president’s secret taping system. In the winter of 1969, in the first days of the administration, Butterfield was an outsider, an Air Force colonel who had served as a staff assistant to LBJ. Impressed with his White House experience and military pilot’s checkpoint precision, Haldeman made him responsible, Butterfield recalled, “for the smooth running of the president’s day.”

A forty-two-year-old veteran who had flown ninety-eight missions in Vietnam, Butterfield felt apart from the handsome young aides Nixon liked to hire, “the young guys who liked to say ‘over and out’ on their walkie-talkies,” as Butterfield liked to describe them. On Butterfield’s first day at work, January 25, Haldeman tried to explain his new boss. “This is a strange man,” Haldeman told Butterfield. “He doesn’t like people he doesn’t know.” In his diary, Haldeman described Butterfield’s first encounter with the president: “Rather awkward. Will take time to develop. President awkward with stranger there but tried to cover it up. He’s not very good at that.”
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In a later oral history, Butterfield described his wonder at watching Nixon’s near-mortification as the president greeted his new assistant. Nixon
made some indistinct guttural noises, spun his hands helplessly, and looked down at the carpet. “He never said a word,” recalled Butterfield.

Butterfield came to see Nixon as a solitary but sympathetic figure. According to Butterfield, the president would dine alone “four out of five nights,” usually going to the Residence only when his children were there.
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Manolo would serve Nixon one Scotch; the president, who did not like to be seen looking too informal, would eat in his tie and jacket while Butterfield sat outside. Then, still wearing a necktie, he “might go down [to the White House bowling alley] and bowl a line.” Sometimes he would engage Butterfield in conversation. The president would become engaged, genuinely curious. “What about these young people?” he would ask. “Why are they rioting? What is it that they’re after?” In recalling those late-night conversations in Nixon’s Executive Office Building hideaway, Butterfield mused, “I used to have trouble in there sometimes, but you know, the guy cared. He seemed to be struggling with that.”

At formal White House dinners, Nixon would position himself to talk to “as few people as possible,” with instructions that no conversation was to last more than five minutes. This was to be rigidly enforced; conversations were to be broken off in mid-sentence if necessary. Nixon urged Butterfield to try the same system for the First Lady. “Dick is crazy,” Pat Nixon breezily told Butterfield. “I would never do that.”
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Butterfield had been ordered by Haldeman to act as staff liaison to the First Lady (replacing Chapin, who had been caught up in the inevitable friction between Haldeman and Pat). Butterfield found Mrs. Nixon to be “sweet” and “smart” and “not Plastic Pat,” the misnomer attached to her by journalists who mistook her sad-eyed, frozen candidate’s wife’s smile for emptiness.
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Staffers who spent
time around the Nixons knew that the First Lady was formidable and opinionated as well as loving and warm with her family and her daughters’ friends. But they also saw her ignored or slighted by her husband, not intentionally or cruelly, perhaps, but nonetheless marginalized in the creation of “RN.”

The first year in the White House was hard for the First Lady, Dwight Chapin recalled.
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Ehrlichman described her receding to “near invisibility” at a fancy dinner for Henry and Christina Ford. Nixon, as he often did, rose to the occasion, spilling over with information about his guests’ interests and philanthropies, gleaned from briefing memoranda.
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Julie unhappily observed the diminished role for her mother, “especially since my father tried increasingly to separate his political and personal life,” as she delicately put it.

There was no escaping. The president lives over the store. The First Lady tried to make the most of it, even if her husband was off reading de Gaulle and Churchill in the Lincoln Bedroom. The night she attended one of her first state dinners, Julie came down later from her third-floor bedroom to get a snack from the family kitchen on the second floor. Dimly, down the darkened hallway, she spotted her mother, still dressed in her evening gown.

She was swaying to the faint sound of music coming from the Grand Foyer where some of the guests were still enjoying the dancing. On tiptoes, she moved gracefully across the gleaming parquet floor. I did not intrude but rather turned and went on to the kitchen.
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N
ixon liked order and regimentation, uniforms and uniformity. He suggested that Kissinger dress his national security staffers in blue blazers emblazoned with emblems. (Kissinger put him off.)
¹
And yet, Nixon welcomed
disorder
too. He wanted original thinkers, iconoclasts, visionaries unafraid of seeking to create
new
orders. He loved the word
moxie
, noted speechwriter William Safire, and he admired President Woodrow Wilson, Democratic activist, as a “man of ideas and action.”
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¹
Nixon’s openness to new ideas and willingness to convert them into action constituted one of his great strengths—and also indicated much about his inner courage. At the same time, Nixon knew when to cut his losses or settle for less. His oscillations can seem dizzying—the bold risk-taker one moment, the canny calibrator the next. But he was moved by one overriding concern—to be a doer, an achiever, and not just a talky ideologue or a wishful thinker.

Feeling isolated by the “Beaver Patrol,” as the press referred to Nixon’s young aides, Alex Butterfield was drawn instead to Nixon’s most iconoclastic hire: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, maverick of the West Wing. The former Harvard professor occupied a tiny office in the basement, wore striped shirts when others wore only white ones,
and was the only staffer who took up Nixon’s invitation to use the White House pool. “Come on Alex, let’s have a belt,” Moynihan, his too-long hair still dripping, would say as he handed Butterfield a late afternoon cocktail.
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With Moynihan.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

Haldeman put up with Moynihan’s unbuttoned habits—like drinking Heinekens in the morning—because he knew that the president was taken with his new domestic affairs adviser.
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“He’s in love again,” Nixon staffers would say, by now accustomed to Nixon’s crushes on dynamic men who could shake up the status quo.
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A Kennedy liberal, Moynihan was a prize defector. His own family and friends were shocked. “How could you even meet with him!” exclaimed his wife, Liz, when Moynihan told her he had just taken a job working for Nixon. She and the kids stayed in Cambridge. “We didn’t trust them, we didn’t know them. We didn’t want to be hostages,” she later recalled.
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Judged by later eras, when presidents tend to appoint faceless loyalists as domestic policy advisers, Moynihan was an astonishing choice—a freewheeling former Kennedy adviser welcomed into Nixon’s inner council. Nixon was pleased to have not one but two Harvard professors as his top advisers. (The other one was less thrilled. “Moynihan will only go off and write a nasty book about you,” Kissinger advised Nixon.)
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Irish Catholic, son of a bar owner in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, Moynihan was, like Kissinger and Nixon, largely self-made.
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As an assistant secretary of labor in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he had warned the limousine liberals against putting down poor whites and poked holes in liberal cant.
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Moynihan’s honest writings about the breakdown of the “Negro” family had made him an apostate, looking for a new home. “Pat was in a pretty bleak place in 1968,” recalled a young aide, Chris DeMuth.
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Moynihan’s ability to flatter rivaled Kissinger’s. During the transition, at his first meeting with Moynihan arranged by house liberal Leonard Garment, Nixon said he was thinking of creating an Urban Affairs Council, as an equivalent to the National Security Council, to
try to save America’s rotting, racially torn inner cities. “Capital idea!” Moynihan exclaimed.
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Nixon asked Moynihan if he would like to head it. Moynihan “said ‘yes’ on the spot. Very uncharacteristic,” recalled his wife, Liz. Like Nixon, Moynihan matched his periodic gloom with determined optimism. On inauguration night, Nixon had ordered the lights turned on in every room in the White House to cheer up the place (and its new occupants).
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Only five days before, Moynihan had sent a memo to the president-elect suggesting that he reverse a money-saving order by LBJ to douse the exterior lighting around the White House. While other public buildings were “brilliantly lit at night, the White House appears to be in permanent mourning,” Moynihan had written. Nixon agreed; soon the White House glowed from within and without.
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Moynihan and Nixon bonded over the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli. Nixon had read and underlined a biography of the nineteenth-century iconoclast, an ethnic Jew who had stepped over and outmaneuvered the toffs to become prime minister.
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Disraeli had been a great conservative reformer, able to achieve more than the liberals because of his drive and intelligence—in part because no one expected him to.

Nixon, who once pooh-poohed running the welfare state as “building outhouses in Peoria,” would spend only about 20 percent of his time on domestic affairs. To presidential chronicler Teddy White, he had said, “I’ve always thought the country could run itself domestically without a president. You need a president for foreign policy.”
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But Nixon liked bold gambits, and Moynihan offered him a dramatic way to reform the welfare state and trump the liberal bureaucrats who ran it.
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Drawing from free market economist Milton Friedman, Moynihan proposed cutting out the bureaucrats and social
workers altogether and giving money directly to the poor in the form of a negative income tax. The welfare rolls would expand at first, but there would be more incentives to preserve families and find work. Nixon was sold. In a speech on welfare reform delivered in December 1969, Nixon declared that he wanted to free the poor from “the soul-stifling, patronizing attitude that follows the dole”—his own words, written in the pre-dawn hours when he rejected a speechwriter’s draft. Nixon knew something about the struggles of the poor to preserve their dignity.
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Decades would pass before welfare reform would become law in 1996 (in altered form, with Moynihan, by then a senator, ironically voting in opposition). But Nixon began the march, and his administration was an active player in other traditionally liberal realms like health care, consumer and job safety, and the environment.
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Nixon came to power in an era—following FDR’s New Deal, World War II and the Cold War, and LBJ’s Great Society—when the public assumed that their representatives went to Washington to govern, not just posture for the next election and cash in on K Street. While Nixon is universally, and not wrongly, regarded as a cynic, his approach to governance was essentially positive. He believed that he could get things done—and that it was his
duty
to try. “He was an activist,” recalled Bill Timmons, his congressional liaison. “He wanted to do a lot of things no one had ever tried.”
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His faith—optimistic, unabashedly patriotic—seems almost quaint, if not naïve, judged by cable-TV era standards of negativism and passive-aggressiveness. It is striking, from the perspective of a later, less confident age, to see how incredibly
busy
the Nixon administration was. Nixon was often thwarted, and he lashed out in frustration or turned to connivance, and he was at times motivated more by political expedience than principle. But he embraced the mid-twentieth-century ethos that government existed to solve problems, and he kept at them until he was swallowed by Watergate. Although Nixon was in some ways a conservative who wanted to cut back on
Big Government, he was an activist constantly looking for ways to have an impact. “Decentralization is not an excuse for inaction but a key to action,” he scrawled on a memo from Moynihan.
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Nixon liked big bets, but he also liked to hedge. As a “counterweight” to the liberal Moynihan, Nixon created an amorphous but potentially powerful job as White House “Counsellor” for Arthur Burns, a conservative economist. Ponderous and long-winded, Burns wanted to slow down the quick-witted Moynihan by maneuvering him into writing up a formal position paper that could be picked apart by critics like Burns. At the first meeting of the President’s Urban Affairs Council on January 23, Moynihan cheekily responded to this clever but unsubtle bureaucratic ploy. “I would be glad to undertake such a task,” Moynihan said, “on the condition that—and I realize that one does not ordinarily impose conditions on the President of the United States—on the condition that no one take it seriously.” The room roared with laughter. President Nixon “first blinked,” reported the note taker, Ray Price, “and then joined in the laughter.”
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Later debates by
historians over whether Nixon was really a liberal or a conservative are largely beside the point. He was at heart a pragmatist in a deep American tradition. True to his puritanical heritage, he was a fatalist who knew that he faced harsh, unknown challenges in an untamed world and that outcomes could not be predicted confidently. He would make grand pronouncements from time to time, and he loved the idea of the “big play” that would surprise his enemies. But by and large, he favored modest steps, or at least slowly cementing his bold ones. “I wanted to be an activist president in domestic policy,” he wrote in his memoirs, “but I wanted to be certain that the things we did had a chance of working.”
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Like the eighteenth-century British statesman Edmund Burke whose writing he studied, Nixon viewed the world as it is, not as one might wish it to be. He was very open to new ideas and thought deeply about them, but he oddly discouraged open debate in his own
councils. As vice president, he had been invited to join the vigorous back-and-forth President Eisenhower encouraged in his cabinet and National Security Council. Eisenhower eagerly jumped into the discussion, sometimes switching sides to provoke more debate. Nixon learned much from observing Ike, but this was an example he did not follow, perhaps because he was incapable of such confident face-to-face leadership. His essential shyness, shaped by his mother’s Quaker reticence and his father’s bullying, made Nixon avoid loud, open clashes of ideas. He relied on Kissinger—with the attendant subterfuge and gamesmanship—instead of formally engaging the National Security Council. Stimulated by Moynihan, he did chair most meetings of the Urban Affairs Council in his first year. But he came to regard cabinet meetings as troublesome and largely a waste of time; increasingly, he repaired to his hideaway to read and think.

On the night
of February 6, his seventeenth day in office, Nixon took out a yellow pad and made a list. It’s an expression of the way he saw himself, or wished to see himself, and how, in any case, he wanted to be seen by others:

Compassionate

Bold

New

Courageous

Strong—in charge President

The list went on: “Open Channels for Dissent”…“Trustworthy”…“Openminded”…“On the ball”…“Honest”…“Zest for job (not lonely—awesome)”…“Mrs. R.N.—glamour, dignity”…“Not concerned by Press, T.V., or personal style.”
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This last item was so far from reality that it almost calls into question what he really believed about all the others. On February 2, just four days earlier, Haldeman’s diary had recorded Nixon badgering his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, to do a better job of persuading reporters
that Nixon worked night and day, taking only five minutes for lunch.
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Nixon made his list of resolutions while preparing for an interview the next day with Hugh Sidey of
Time
magazine, whose column, “The Presidency,” was highly influential, particularly among middle Americans. Nixon could not stop worrying about his media image. He was at once determined to win over the press and sure that he would fail.

Nixon warily regarded Sidey as a pal of JFK and LBJ. In truth, the genial Sidey was prepared to like any president who gave him access, and he wrote a flattering column about Nixon.
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Indeed, Nixon enjoyed a honeymoon with the press in his first few weeks in office. Even Herblock grudgingly agreed to give Nixon a shave and dispense with the dark jowls.
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On February 17, James Keogh, a former
Time
editor who ran Nixon’s speechwriting shop, wrote a memo, “Media treatment of the President is uniformly excellent….The usual media characterizations are ‘efficient,’ ‘cool,’ ‘confident,’ ‘orderly.’ ”
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Nixon had enjoyed success going over the heads of the press, via television, to the people. Not a few reporters resented his ability to circumvent them. He had moments of clarity about press relations, like the time he wrote Haldeman, “The greatest mistake we can make is to try to do what [President] Johnson did—to slobber over them with the hope that you can ‘win’ them. It can’t be done.”
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But then he would fool himself into thinking that he could somehow manipulate reporters into doing his bidding. He was encouraged in this wishful thinking by Haldeman, who came from an advertising background and believed, perhaps too well, in “media campaigns.” It was Haldeman who invented the term
news cycle
.
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The press was highly skeptical of the White House spin machine. “We thought these PR techniques were bizarre in their lack of subtlety,” recalled
Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee (who, during the Kennedy administration, had dined privately with the president and their wives). “It was like they were running some sort of sleazy hotel in the Caribbean. ‘Give ’em a free trip, and fill ’em up with booze if they’re for us. Buy ’em off if they’re neutral. Knee ’em in the groin if
they step out of line.”
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Nixon would let himself get wound up by the “daily press summary,” initiated by conservative speechwriter Pat Buchanan, who enjoyed pointing out the latest outrages of the liberal press. Goaded by the fiery Buchanan (who delegated much of the job to his assistant Mort Allin), Nixon would scribble commands in the margin, usually of the “off with their heads!” variety.
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Nixon would routinely cut off all White House contact with reporters from papers like
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
—“cut him,” “freeze him,” “dump him”—and then just as routinely forget about it.
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Larry Higby, Haldeman’s assistant, recalled his boss emerging from the Oval Office with long “to do” lists from the president. Haldeman would wisely draw a line through most of Nixon’s impetuous orders—meaning, ignore them—but not always.
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