Being Nixon: A Man Divided (41 page)

Even before Kissinger returned from Beijing, Nixon was fretting that Kissinger would get all the credit. “When Henry gets back, he’ll be the mystery man of the age,” Nixon told Haldeman.
⁴⁵
Nixon initially tried to forbid Kissinger from briefing newsmen, but that was a futile gesture, so the president essentially tried to climb on board the bandwagon. On July 19, Nixon sent Kissinger a memo that began, “One effective line you could use with your talks with the press is how RN is uniquely prepared for this meeting [with the Chinese leaders].” Nixon ticked off his attributes, including “3. At his best in crisis. Cool. Unflappable,” and “9. A man who is subtle and appears almost gentle. The tougher his position, usually, the lower his voice.” That description would not have fit Nixon as he ranted about Ellsberg and “the Jews,” but it was true enough at other times, and Kissinger dutifully used Nixon’s self-image when he fed Time-Life’s Hugh Sidey, whose column in
Life
clearly reflected Nixon’s talking points.
⁴⁶

More significantly, Nixon’s opening to China succeeded in getting the Kremlin’s attention. In a conversation with Kissinger on June 29, on the eve of Kissinger’s secret trip to China, Nixon crudely but accurately predicted the Russian reaction to such a precipitous thaw in Sino-American relations: “Boy, if they [the Russians] only knew what the hell was coming up, they’d be in here panting for that summit, wouldn’t they? Huh?” “I’m sure,” answered Kissinger.
⁴⁷
Right on cue, on the Monday after Nixon’s breakthrough to Beijing, Ambassador Dobrynin—“at his ingratiating best,” Kissinger recalled—appeared at the White House to ask if the Americans and Soviets could have a summit meeting
before
Nixon went to China. “To have the two communist powers competing for good relations with us could only benefit the cause of peace,” Kissinger wrote. “It was the essence of triangular strategy.”
⁴⁸

On the short
helicopter ride back to San Clemente after dinner at Perino’s, Kissinger, the national security adviser, protested that one of his young aides, David Young, was being reassigned from his staff. Young was to head up a new secret unit, ostensibly set up to plug the sort of leaks that Kissinger had so vociferously complained about when the Pentagon Papers first appeared the day after Tricia’s wedding. Speaking over the noise of the helicopter as it thudded above the lights of Los Angeles, Ehrlichman overruled Kissinger’s objections. Haldeman would later muse that Ehrlichman’s inclusion of a Kissinger man in the secret unit was “a typical stroke of bureaucratic genius. He knew all too well how Henry would happily ignite a fuse, then stand off swearing that he knew nothing about it, or had even been against it.”
⁴⁹

Young was assigned to a new office, Room 16, on the ground floor of the Executive Office Building. The office was equipped with a telephone scrambler and a safe. When he told his mother of the job running the Special Investigative Unit and plugging leaks, she replied that his grandfather would have been proud, because he too had been a plumber. Young, who had a droll sense of humor, hung a sign on the door of Room 16 that read, “Mr. Young: Plumber.” Journalists, later hearing of the sign, began to write about the Plumbers.
⁵⁰

I
t is not illegal, unconstitutional, or unprecedented for a president, stymied by a federal agency, to look for other means to execute the will of the executive. But the high-handed and heedless way the Nixon administration went about staffing and running the Plumbers almost guaranteed illegal and unconstitutional acts, not to mention getting caught.

The chief operatives were E. Howard Hunt—recommended by Colson—and G. Gordon Liddy, a former assistant DA and ex–FBI agent. As a prosecutor, Liddy had once fired a pistol in a courtroom to make a point (using a blank). He loved to tell tall tales about his lethality: to the wife of a young White House staffer sitting next to him, he explained how to kill someone with a pencil to the neck.
¹
Liddy’s first self-assigned task with the Special Investigative Unit (SIU) was to come up with a more evocative name. He chose ODESSA, short for “Our
o
rganization has been
d
irected to
e
liminate
s
ubversion of the
s
ecrets of the
a
dminstration.” The acronym was more commonly associated with an organization of fugitive Nazi war criminals. Tongue in cheek or not, Liddy drew on the Nazis; he once gave a secret showing of Leni Riefenstahl’s film of Hitler’s Nuremberg Youth Rally at the National Archives. (“Great advance!” someone shouted from the back of the darkened room. “So this is what the second term is going to be like,” cracked another.)
Ehrlichman told Liddy to drop the acronym but he did not get rid of Liddy.
^2
,
*
¹

Liddy had been recruited by Egil “Bud” Krogh from the Treasury Department, which was only too happy to lose the wild-swinging former G-man from its narcotics enforcement bureau. Krogh missed subtle hints from Liddy’s former employers (“Gordon is a very
aggressive
investigator”), who, in time-honored bureaucratic fashion, blandly endorsed Liddy’s transfer.

Ehrlichman had tapped Krogh, along with David Young from Kissinger’s staff, to run the SIU. Krogh was not Ehrlichman’s first choice; several aides, including speechwriter Pat Buchanan, had wisely declined the job. An Eagle Scout and a Christian Scientist like Ehrlichman, Krogh saw his co-religionist as a kind of father figure. He was nicknamed by his White House pals “Evil Krogh” because he so plainly was not.
⁴

Krogh was a lawyer, not yet thirty, who knew nothing about plugging leaks or—the SIU’s more nefarious job—stealing secrets that could be leaked. “Howard Hunt was presented to me as a crackerjack CIA operative who knew his way around. I didn’t know he was a clown. I didn’t even know he was writing spy novels. They told me he could practice some good spycraft,” Krogh recalled to the author many years later. “What did I know?” Krogh did have an inkling that Liddy might be trouble when the mustachio’d, ramrod-erect ex-G-man brandished a large combat knife he carried on “ops.” “It is hard to understand why we were so blind to the risks,” he recalled, “but I was living in a cocoon of high-pressure expectation.”
⁵

On Saturday, July 24, at around 10
A.M
., Krogh was summoned by Ehrlichman to see President Nixon. A
New York Times
story had revealed some secrets about the American negotiating position in the SALT talks.

Krogh’s last visit to the Oval Office had been to introduce Elvis Presley. Whenever he met the president, Krogh felt a “chill and tightening
in my gut,” he recalled. The Oval Office felt “cold and austere,” despite a bright and suitably Californian blue-and-gold color scheme installed by the First Lady. “The president was pacing behind his desk, and his mood was obvious: he was extremely upset and very angry,” Krogh wrote in a memoir. “His face was darkly flushed.” When he was anxious or agitated, Nixon’s dark eyes would dart about, then bore in. Krogh shifted uncomfortably under the presidential gaze.

The president said that he was not going to stand for it anymore. He slammed his hand into his palm to make his point. “This crap is never ending. I studied these cases long enough, and it’s always the son of a bitch that leaks….”

“Ellsberg,” Krogh piped up. “Ellsberg!”

“Sure,” the president responded.

The leaks were jeopardizing national security. “Now goddamn it, we’re not going to allow that. We’re not going to allow it.” He dismissed Krogh with a wave and a cursory “Good luck.”

As they were leaving, Ehrlichman emphasized that the president had invested the work of the SIU with “the highest degree of national security.” Krogh later recalled, “I did not dare ask, what does that mean?”
⁶

On August 10,
Nixon took an evening cruise on the
Sequoia
with Billy Graham. “The P went into considerable detail on his leadership decadence theory at dinner,” Haldeman recorded. The problem, said the president, was not the “hippies or youth,” but rather “our leadership class”—the ministers (“except for the Billy-Graham type fundamentalists”), the teachers, the business leaders, the politicians—who had “become soft.”
⁷

Nixon believed that he had found an exception in the former governor of Texas, John Connally. With his wavy silver hair and chiseled chin, Connally exuded self-assurance. “The boss has fallen in love again,” joked Bill Safire and his pals in the White House speechwriting shop when Connally began showing up in the Oval Office in the
fall of 1970. Kissinger scoffed that Nixon was fulfilling his Walter Mitty fantasy through Connally—“Big Jawn,” as the tall Texan was known, was the handsome, athletic Man of the West Nixon could never be.
⁸
It would be more generous and accurate to say that Connally “bucked up” Nixon, to use a favorite Nixonism. The former naval officer, who had been decorated for bravery in World War II, had a curious tie to the Kennedys: Seated in front of President Kennedy in the Dallas motorcade on November 22, 1963, he had been wounded by one of the bullets that killed JFK. Connally was deft at boosting the president, urging him to project more confidence, to be manly, upbeat, optimistic—all things Nixon wished to be and, in truth, often was, when he was not brooding. Connally was replacing the weary John Mitchell as the president’s one true peer, the adviser he could look up to.

Nixon liked to say that every president’s cabinet should include a potential president, but his did not. (Disliking fractious cabinet meetings, Nixon was having fewer and fewer of them.) Nixon saw Connally as his heir apparent. By the winter of 1971, the president was actively wooing Connally and his wife Nellie, inviting them to a Camp David screening of his favorite movie,
Around the World in 80 Days
. (“The P,” wrote Haldeman, “was hysterical through it; as each scene was coming up, he’d say, ‘You’re going to love this part,’ or ‘the scenery is just great, now watch closely.’ ”)
⁹
Connally, for his part, praised Nixon as the only president who understood “the uses of power.”

In the spring, Nixon was soon talking about dumping Vice President Agnew and swapping him out for Connally.
¹⁰
Nixon and Connally began discussing “five-year plans” and “twenty-five-year plans,” until Mitchell quietly persuaded Nixon that Connally, a turncoat Democrat, would arouse too much opposition in Congress.
¹¹
Still, Nixon wanted to find some way to put “Big Jawn” in charge, to rally the flagging troops the way he had inspired the chief executive. Nixon had already found him a prominent place in the cabinet as secretary of the Treasury. On June 28, Nixon summoned his economic
advisers and told them that, from now on, Connally would be the administration’s spokesman on economic policy. “Nixon was in a harsh mood,” John Ehrlichman recalled. “That same day Daniel Ellsberg had admitted his theft and dissemination of the Pentagon Papers, and Kissinger was riding Nixon hard, urging revenge on Ellsberg.” In the future, Nixon informed his economic advisers, when Connally “announced that some policy line would be taken, everyone was to hew to that line,” wrote Ehrlichman. “Or else,” Nixon said brusquely, “you can quit.” Nixon abruptly walked out of the meeting.
¹²

Connally had little economic training but joked, “I can add.” He was a nationalist who had once said, “My view is that the foreigners are out to screw us, and therefore it’s our job to screw them first.”
¹³
Connally’s ignorance of economic matters matched Nixon’s own; although Nixon was a substantive, unusually well-read political leader, his economic expertise was surprisingly shallow.

In early August, Connally faced his first test, a true international crisis. Under the international monetary system adopted after World War II, other countries could convert the dollars they accumulated into gold at a fixed price—$35 an ounce. But because the United States did not own nearly enough gold to pay off all the dollars, the system counted on other nations to treat the dollar as “good as gold.” In May, Belgium, Netherlands, and France had traded $400 million for gold. Now Britain, in the throes of its own postwar economic decline, was insisting that its $3 billion in dollar reserves likewise be reimbursed in gold.
¹⁴

Nixon was faced with a dilemma. If America kept the “gold window” open, more countries might overwhelm the Treasury with demands for gold, starting, as it were, a run on the global bank. On the other hand, if the United States “closed the gold window” and let the dollar float against all other national currencies, the dollar would weaken. The effect would likely be inflationary; imports would become much more expensive.

Rarely in doubt if not deeply informed, Connally proposed “a
bold stroke,” as Nixon called it. The United States would close the gold window, to prevent a run, but at the same time freeze wages and prices, to lasso inflation. Such an approach was sure to stun the American political scene and much of the rest of the world. Wage and price controls were favored by
liberal Democrats
, after all. Nixon had stated publicly that he would never impose such government fetters on economic freedom. Yet, as Connally well knew, Nixon loved to confound the enemy. Stealing the Democrats’ clothes was Nixon’s old Tom Sawyer trick—he had pulled it on Senator Ed Muskie by pushing for environmental laws. “Nixon imposes wage and price controls” would be a move along the lines of “Nixon goes to China”: going for it all, the surprise “big play.”
¹⁵

On August 13, all of Nixon’s top economic advisers went to Camp David to be given their marching orders.
¹⁶
They were not allowed to make phone calls. There was but one dissenter to shutting the gold window: Arthur Burns, the supposedly independent chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Burns and Nixon had an on-again, off-again relationship. At the start of his administration, Nixon had brought the brainy but long-winded Burns into the White House as a top domestic policy adviser, then shunted him aside for the more spritely Moynihan, then kicked both men upstairs when he tired of their battling. At the Federal Reserve, Burns was sure to annoy Nixon some more. Nixon had long been wary of the Fed, which he blamed (among others) for costing him the 1960 election by refusing to ease the money supply and prolonging the “Republican Recession.” In the balance between creating jobs and holding down inflation, Nixon wanted to “err on the side of inflation.” Burns did not share this view and, from time to time, publicly indicated as much. In his memoirs, Nixon wrote that he respected Burns for not always telling him what he wanted to hear, but in the summer of 1971, in his state of Ellsberg-induced agitation, the president wanted to put the Fed chairman in his place. Nixon cut off Burns’s access to the Oval Office. “Just tell Arthur to report to Connally,”
Nixon instructed Ehrlichman. “The president won’t see him.”
¹⁷

More callously, Nixon instructed Colson to plant a leak that Burns had lobbied for a nearly 50 percent salary hike for himself while calling for a wage freeze for everyone else. Burns, a devoted public servant, was humiliated by the fabrication, which appeared in
The Wall Street Journal
.
¹⁸
Nixon then personally, and shamelessly, knocked down the story as “unfair” and, at a press conference, praised Burns as a valuable public servant. “This he did to pacify rumors that we floated at his instruction, which were designed to stir up Burns a little bit,” wrote Haldeman in his diary, explaining Nixon’s not-so-subtle gambit to intimidate Burns. “It was a masterful stroke both ways and should have the result of getting Burns back in the fold, but on a basis where he won’t bang us around so much from now on.”
^19
,
*
²

At Camp David, Burns tried to make the case against leaving the gold standard, but he was rolled by Connally. Others, like OMB Director George Shultz, who had privately told a friend that wage and price controls would be a “disaster,” played “good soldier,” as Safire described it, and protested not at all. Mostly free marketers, they knew the risk of such a heavy government hand, but no one raised any serious objection.
²¹
“Connolly took complete command,” Haldeman noted. The code of silence stilled otherwise strong voices. Paul Volcker,
*
³
Connally’s deputy at Treasury, warned against leaks because “fortunes could be made with this information.” Haldeman eased the tension by leaning forward and asking, with mock seriousness, “Exactly how?”

At about 9
P.M
., Haldeman found Nixon in Aspen Lodge, sitting in his study with the lights out and a fire burning, even though it was a hot August night outside. “He was in one of his sort of mystic moods,” Haldeman wrote. Nixon told Haldeman and another visitor, White House budget aide Caspar Weinberger, that he was sitting where Franklin Roosevelt had made all his “big cognitions,” as he put it.

At such moments, Nixon was boosted, not weighed down, by his historic duties. When Nixon became wound up on a big subject, like leadership or America’s role in the world, he would grow highly animated. He would gesture broadly with his hands and smile widely—not just his student-body-president grin, but a toothy, crinkly beam of pleasure. His arms would wave, slightly out of sync with his words. Or, pondering the immensity of a challenge, he would frown darkly, a grimly purposeful St. George facing the dragon. Occasionally, as he warmed to the task, he would wipe the sweat from his upper lip with a finger or handkerchief. He might catch himself and stiffen his pose to convey wise-man gravitas, but then his enthusiasm would bubble back up. To the end of his life, serious philosophical debates about the future of America were rejuvenating to Nixon. Holding forth on, say, America’s duty to save the world from global communism, he could seem as gawky as a teenager at his first dance, peppy as a cheerleader, and disarmingly patriotic. There was no doubt that he was sincere. The cynical Nixon vanished, replaced by the boyish dreamer.