Being Nixon: A Man Divided (38 page)

NIXON:
They don’t, huh? That’s fine. Isn’t that just great? I wish to Christ they had to live someplace else. I wish they did.

KISSINGER:
They don’t have the patriotism.
²⁵

Nixon was sinking
in the polls.
²⁶
A majority disapproved of his handling of the war. Nixon could always count on Chuck Colson to cheer him up with an outrageous suggestion, and on March 23, the impish
Colson suggested to Nixon that the White House pay off pollster Lou Harris. “We can buy him,” said Colson, who suggested finding out “how much of a whore Harris is.”

Colson was probably having some fun (there is no evidence of bribes, though Harris did start performing polling services for Nixon).
²⁷
But Colson was perfectly serious about trying to smear Senator Edward Kennedy. In December, Colson had managed to procure some photographs of Kennedy dancing the night away with a woman not his wife in Italy, and the self-described hatchet man had connived to get the photos leaked to the
National Enquirer
through friendly congressmen on the Hill.
²⁸

Haldeman tried, fitfully, to control Colson. “Watch what you tell the president,” he warned Colson on March 26. “Be sure your intelligence is right or that you clearly call it a rumor.”
²⁹
But Nixon wanted to rub old wounds. He was in one of his periodic Kennedy obsessions. Chatting with Haldeman and Kissinger on the morning of April 15, Nixon started in on a familiar refrain that JFK was “cold, impersonal, he treated his staff like dogs,” while “his staff created the impression of warm, sweet, and nice to people.” This led to Nixon berating his staff for failing to create a “mythology” about Nixon’s own courage. “What is the most important single factor that should come across out of the first two years? Guts! Absolutely. Guts! Do you agree, Henry?” “Totally,” Kissinger responded.
³⁰

Nixon was bothered that a poll showed John and Robert Kennedy far ahead of Nixon in the estimation of young people. He was comforted, at least, that Edward Kennedy did not do so well.
³¹
The president was determined that the last Kennedy brother not sneak up on him. On the afternoon of May 18, Nixon met with Colson and Haldeman to work out a plan for round-the-clock coverage on Teddy Kennedy. Nixon was ever hopeful of catching the Massachusetts senator in an indiscretion. Colson had arranged for spies to dog Kennedy wherever he went.

Suddenly, Henry Kissinger burst in the door. “The thing is okay!” exclaimed the national security adviser. Then Kissinger and Nixon
began speaking in a strange double-talk as Haldeman motioned for Colson to leave the room.
³²

Kissinger was bringing, at long last, some much-needed good news. The United States and the Soviet Union were close to a historic deal on the control of nuclear weapons. He was speaking in code in front of Colson because the deal was secret. For months, Kissinger had been working his back channel to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The two had developed an almost playful relationship as they tried to whittle down the arsenal of doomsday weapons. “I am sitting on [my] back patio thinking about our peaceful coexistence,” Kissinger began one phone conversation. “Good for you,” responded the Soviet envoy. “I will be in Moscow thinking in the same way.”
³³

Colson was not the only one left in the dark about the Kissinger-Dobrynin back channel. In Geneva, the State Department had been conducting formal arms control negotiations with the Soviets. The talks had been an essentially meaningless exercise, diplomatic cover for the real bargaining going on behind the scenes between the president’s national security adviser and the Kremlin’s man in Washington. Secretary of State Rogers found out about the deal only when Haldeman, dispatched by Nixon, told him later in the afternoon of May 18. Rogers was furious; he said he felt like he had been made a “laughing stock.” Rogers called the president, spluttering. Hanging up after trying to calm him down, Nixon heaved a deep sigh, looked out the window, and said, “It would be god damn easy to run this office if you didn’t have to deal with people.”
^34
,
*
²

The following day,
May 19, 1971, a warm spring day in Washington, Nixon felt like celebrating the arms control breakthrough. It had
been a trying few weeks. Congress was threatening to try to force disengagement from Vietnam. In late April, returning Vietnam veterans, led by an outspoken navy lieutenant named John Kerry, had tossed their medals over a fence in front of the U.S. Capitol (Kerry kept his).
*
³
In early May, antiwar protesters had tried to shut down bridges and block traffic around the nation’s capital. Under orders from the Justice Department, the police had rounded up several thousand activists and held them at RFK Stadium. Haldeman’s notes show Nixon’s PR calculations in releasing them: “Let ’em out. Better to have trashing, etc. Doesn’t want evening news of 5 M [five thousand] in a cage.”

Colson had been playing to Nixon’s dark side. He had advocated hiring some goons to wade into the protesters and tear down their Vietcong flags. “Go ahead and have a fight,” Colson urged, according to Haldeman’s meeting notes. “Get it thru on TV—dramatize. Also get a fight re tearing down U.S. flag. Be sure cops don’t stop our people.”
³⁷

But Colson also made Nixon lighten up. He had sent a crate of oranges to the imprisoned protesters, with a label that read, “Best of luck, Senator Edmund Muskie.” Then he tipped off the press. Nixon and Haldeman hooted with laughter when White House counsel John Dean told them of Colson’s prank.
³⁸

On the evening of May 19, the president asked Colson to join him, Kissinger, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman for an evening cruise on the
Sequoia
. Colson recalled the way Nixon stopped to salute the flag on the yacht’s stern, and then again when the
Sequoia
paused at Mt. Vernon for the lowering of colors in honor of George Washington (required of naval vessels). Watching Nixon stand rigidly at attention, Colson observed, “it wasn’t a politician’s showmanship.”
³⁹
Over
a dinner of steaks and fresh corn in the yacht’s mahogany-paneled dining room, Nixon held forth on his dream of détente through great power diplomacy. With his giant chessboard vision of the globe, Nixon had been sidling up to China in part to throw a scare into Russia. The strategy was working. Moscow was closely watching as Beijing signaled its new openness to Washington. Nixon was convinced that the Russians had agreed to defrost relations with the United States—to sign a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty—as a counterweight to an emerging Sino-American rapprochement. “Let me tell you something: without China, they never would have agreed to the SALT,” Nixon had told Kissinger.
⁴⁰

Eyeing Colson, who was ignorant of the secret diplomacy, Kissinger uncomfortably warned Nixon not to say too much about his plans for China. “Relax, relax,” Nixon said. He saw a chance to poke at a soft spot in Kissinger’s Germanic countenance. “If those liberals on your staff, Henry, don’t stop giving everything to the
New York Times
, I won’t be going anywhere.” Then Nixon jabbed a little harder. “The leaks, the leaks; that’s what we’ve got to stop at any cost. Do you hear me, Henry?”

Kissinger, “who often did not know when he was being kidded,” Colson recalled, “launched into an impassioned defense of his own office.” The leaks were all coming from “disloyal bureaucrats” at the State Department, he protested. (Across the table, Haldeman “smiled,” wrote Colson. “He and I knew, as did Nixon, that Henry himself was often the major source of leaks.”)

Nixon by now was off on his favorite subject, his enemies, both on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. “Chuck, your job is to hold off those madmen on the Hill long enough for Henry to finish his work in Paris [his secret talks with the North Vietnamese]. Then we go for the big play, China, Russia.”

Nixon began complaining about a freshman senator, Harold Hughes of Iowa, who, in a Law Day speech two weeks earlier, had accused the Nixon administration of “repression, wiretapping, bugging…surveillance…and
attempts by government to intimidate the communications media.” Colson dismissed “Hughes’s accusations as the paranoid prattlings of an ambitious politician,” Colson recalled in
Born Again
, his memoir. Then, as Colson told the story: “The President’s finger circled the top of his wineglass slowly. ‘One day we will get them—we’ll get them on the ground where we want them. And then we’ll stick our heels in, step on them hard and twist—right, Chuck, right?’ ”

Nixon’s eyes darted to Kissinger. “Henry knows what I mean—just like you do it in negotiations, Henry—get them on the floor and step on them, crush them, show no mercy.”

Kissinger smiled and nodded. Colson said, “You’re right, sir, we’ll get them.” Haldeman said nothing. Ehrlichman looked up at the ceiling.
⁴¹

Nixon continued to
be an exuberant sports fan. On the White House tapes, he can be heard yelling at his TV while watching football games.
*
⁴
In March, Nixon had waxed on to Haldeman about the spectacle of the Ali-Frazier boxing match, “how the chemistry and drama [had] really lifted public spirits,” wrote Haldeman. “The P feels that people need to be caught in a great event and taken out of their humdrum existence.” That same day, March 17, Nixon had publicly announced his daughter Tricia’s wedding engagement to Edward Cox, the Princeton- and Harvard Law–educated young man who had been courting her on and off for several years. Noting the positive press about the impending White House nuptials, Haldeman
wrote that it “may be one of the event-type things that the P’s talking about, if we can take advantage of it properly.”
⁴³

The wedding was scheduled for June 12. Over four hundred people were invited—but no members of the House or Senate. Nixon had grown tired of meeting with small groups of congressmen, who seemed to complain and misinterpret his words. In January, he had told Haldeman that if he had to meet with congressmen, they should be assembled in congregations of fifty or more—“no cozy groups that just lead to gripes and leaks,” Haldeman wrote.
⁴⁴

The president also banned
The Washington Post
from covering the event. Haldeman, as it happened, had just sat with the
Post
’s owner, Katharine Graham, at a Sunday Night Supper at Joe Alsop’s. Mrs. Graham was a close friend of Kissinger but had never tried to meet Haldeman. “He made my blood run cold,” she wrote in her memoirs. Attempting his own local brand of Nixon-goes-to-China diplomacy, Haldeman had invited the
Post
’s proprietor to call him if she ever had any problems. She promptly phoned Haldeman to protest her newspaper’s thwarted access to the wedding. In his memoir, Haldeman recalled that he ignored the president’s ban and allowed the
Post
to attend after all. Mrs. Graham’s recollection was that her paper was shut out but that the
Post
reporter, Judith Martin, wrote the story from the notes of sympathetic reporters from other papers. (Graham allowed that she would not want Martin to cover the wedding of her own daughter; Martin had already compared Tricia to a vanilla ice cream cone.)
⁴⁵

The day of the wedding was cloudy and drizzly. Pat Nixon, supported by Julie and the staff, wanted to play it safe and bring the ceremony indoors. Tricia, who possessed her father’s steely will, was determined to be married in the Rose Garden. Nixon, who had avoided the festivities the night before by going for a cruise on the
Sequoia
, had taken refuge in his Executive Office Building hideaway.
⁴⁶
But he was on Tricia’s side. He called the Air Force and learned that there would be a slight break in the weather around 4:30. The seats
in the Rose Garden were hastily wiped dry and the ceremony went on. The drops began falling again just as Tricia said, “I do.”

Nixon had never danced at the White House. “I won’t dance!” he announced during his presidential campaign. “When you’re running for sheriff, you dance.”
⁴⁷
But he made an exception for his daughter’s wedding. He gave the bride a whirl to “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” then took a spin with Pat, who was a graceful dancer.
⁴⁸
Nixon’s joy and pride were palpable. The PR pay-off was obvious. Americans all over the country were stopping to watch the historic White House wedding, only the fifth of the twentieth century. Nixon’s staffers, accustomed to the president’s apparent aloofness from his family, were struck by the warmth and emotion of the moment. Longtime aides who flew with the Nixons had observed that Nixon typically sat apart from Pat and the girls and that they affixed their campaign smiles and linked arms only to greet the airport crowd.
⁴⁹
But now Nixon lovingly embraced his wife and daughters. He let down his guard and allowed his emotions to show.

“P asked me for a rundown on how it all had gone,” Haldeman dictated to his diary that night. “I gave him a very enthusiastic report. The P was in great spirits.” Haldeman persuaded the president to watch a TV replay of him walking his daughter down the aisle. “Well, at least I’m standing pretty straight,” Nixon said. “Obviously, the ladies in the family had been nagging him about standing up straight,” Haldeman wrote. “All in all, the whole thing was a sensational day.”
⁵⁰

In the Rose Garden.

Library of Congress/Wikimedia

*
⁴
Nixon claimed never to watch TV, but as a regular consumer of televised baseball and football games, he sometimes dipped into pop culture, if inadvertently. Public tastes and mores were moving away from Nixon’s values, which remained firmly rooted in small-town, prewar rural America. On May 13, Safire wrote in his diary this “aside” from Haldeman: “The President turned on the ballgame Tuesday night, and when it was rained out, he watched a show called ‘All in the Family.’ It really bugged him. He remembers all the dialogue and he acts it out when he tells about it. It had to do with a fag who was portrayed sympathetically. The President feels that the decline of civilizations has always been marked by an acceptance of homosexuality and a general decline of moral values.”
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