The Arrogance of Power (17 page)

Sexuality aside, the degree of intimacy between the two men was really remarkable. Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson's confidant, knew Rebozo and his friends. Intending no sexual innuendo, he described Nixon and Rebozo as having been “close like lovers.”

To Herb Klein, who knew them for many years, the relationship was like “a boyhood bond.” The talk in the Nixon White House was that after Nixon's
most ignominious defeat, in the California gubernatorial election of 1962, he and Rebozo “held hands and pledged eternal friendship no matter what happened.” Once, at a Washington dinner party, a woman journalist who sat near them bent below table level to retrieve a dropped fork and was astounded to see that Nixon and Rebozo were clasping hands, an intimacy rare indeed in males in the Western world.

To many observers, however, the relationship seemed, as John Ehrlichman put it, “unilateral.” The comedian Jack Paar, who often saw them together, thought of Rebozo as Nixon's devoted Tonto or Sancho Panza. The woman Rebozo eventually married, Jane Lucke, said—not entirely in jest—“Bebe's favorites are RN, his cat—and then me.” Jake Jernigan, another intimate, thought: “He loved Nixon more than he loved anybody. He worshiped Nixon. Nixon was his God . . . his Little Jesus.” William Safire added context to this interpretation. “Bebe worshiped Nixon,” he said, “and hated Nixon's enemies.”

Others, including Pat Nixon, took a more caustic view of Rebozo's idolatry. “Bebe's like a sponge,” she said in a rare blunt comment. “He soaks up whatever Dick says. . . . Dick loves that.” Charles Colson dismissed Rebozo as just “the dog you talk to when you feel like talking.”

As late as 1970, flying home aboard Air Force One after a visit to Ireland, Nixon was in conversation with his cousin, the writer Jessamyn West. He peered out the window, brooding. Then, she recalled, “In a calm voice, stating a fact, not complaining or asking for pity, he said, ‘I haven't a friend in the world.' ” West asked: “Not Rebozo?” Rebozo, Nixon replied, was just “a golfing partner.”
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“Anyone who has known me,” Rebozo said during Watergate, “knows that I am not a mystery man. I'm just a private person. . . . My relationship with politicians has been truly a social one. . . . I do not offer advice to the President on any political matter.” In fact, whatever the truth about Rebozo's relationship with other politicians—he also cultivated numerous U.S. senators, including the future presidents Kennedy and Johnson—he took a highly political role in Nixon's career.

The precise detail of Rebozo's involvement can never be established, but we have glimpses of his activities. In 1960 political foes made efforts, unsuccessful at the time, to destroy John F. Kennedy's wholesome family man image, and Rebozo fed sexual dirt on him to the Nixon campaign. This included sending Nixon documents suggesting that his opponent was concealing an earlier marriage to a Palm Beach divorcée. Kennedy, Nixon recalled, “was so careless . . . just like Clinton.”

“In the background, straddling a chair behind Nixon,” an aide recalled of a 1968 strategy meeting on Long Island, “sat a swarthy, smiling man who was not introduced . . . Charles Rebozo.” The previous Christmas Nixon had
flown alone to Florida to decide whether to run for the presidency. He made his decision in the company of two men, the evangelist Billy Graham and Rebozo.

Richard Danner, one of those who initially brought Nixon and Rebozo together, gave a sworn deposition during the Watergate investigation. A hundred and fifty pages long, it was devoted in large part to Rebozo's wheeling and dealing and describes a politically savvy fund-raiser who operated—not least with respect to contributions from the billionaire Howard Hughes—with Nixon's knowledge and authority.

Nixon's two most senior aides remembered Rebozo's pervasive influence. “Bebe was unselfish but not entirely selfless,” said John Ehrlichman. “. . . I began by thinking of him as a potted palm, standing in the corner. He was a great deal more than that—he had political influence.” “Nixon once sent Bebe Rebozo to lecture me,” Bob Haldeman recalled. “Over coffee . . . Bebe got down to business. The President felt I would do better in my job if I were more circuitous, more diplomatic, less straight-ahead . . . a whole string of Dale Carnegie homilies.”

Recently released White House tapes reveal that Rebozo suggested a person who would commit to a huge campaign contribution—“a quarter of a million at least,” Nixon thought—in return for an ambassadorship. Nixon used Rebozo as go-between with a caller who had offered to provide “the goods” on 1972 presidential contender Edmund Muskie. Rebozo was also asked to make a secret approach to the George Wallace camp.

Nixon listened to Rebozo's thoughts on Vietnam War policy and on at least one telephone call, transcribed by secretaries, used Rebozo to pass on his views to Henry Kissinger. The president himself sounded drunk at the time. Rebozo had long involved himself in Caribbean politics—he was linked to at least two of the Cubans who took part in the Watergate burglary
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—a connection that troubled the secretary of state. Rebozo “hated Castro with a fierce Latin passion,” Kissinger wrote, and Nixon's friendship with him “guaranteed that he would constantly be exposed to arguments to take a hard line; he would never want to appear weak before his old friend.” Rebozo's presence at Nixon's side, Kissinger observed, “did not usually make for the calmest reflection.”

In the White House, Haldeman noticed, Nixon was “always edgy” when Rebozo's name was mentioned. Well he might be edgy, for Rebozo was much more than a golfing partner, much more than a social friend. He was dangerous to know, in part because of the way he helped enrich Nixon, in part because of his links to dubious characters—including members of organized crime.

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“While I have never had the urge to accumulate wealth,” Nixon wrote in old age, “I have great respect for those who do, because I can see the worthwhile things many rich people do with their money. . . . I never wanted more wealth than I needed to provide a comfortable life for myself and my family.”

Rebozo, for his part, described his friend as “a man to whom money means nothing” and adding that he thought Nixon had never signed a check himself. James Bassett said Nixon “had a disregard for money but liked to live well. . . . He had no real consciousness of where it came from . . . that didn't concern him. Nixon was naive to the nth degree about money.” Bassett noted, though, that Rebozo was “a damn shrewd operator . . . [and that] as Bebe's fortunes enhanced, so did his need for government considerations.” Another colleague noted that Nixon relied on friends for advice on investments. Only two such advisers were cited, one of them Rebozo.
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In the fifties, when he was vice president, the Nixon the world saw was a man who went to Florida merely in search of relaxation. He and Rebozo dined at Don Julio's in Miami or had a beer or two out of personal tankards engraved with their names at the English Pub. Behind the scenes, though, as Rebozo began to expand his interests, he reportedly cut Nixon in on some of the deals.

According to a law enforcement source and an FBI informant, the two men jointly invested in interests in pre-Castro Cuba. According to Rebozo's banker colleague Hoke Maroon, they also shared in the ownership of a Coral Gables motel, with Rebozo fronting for Nixon on the ownership documents. Maroon told a hilarious tale of the night the pair stood in the parking lot counting cars, because Rebozo suspected the manager of lying about how much business he was doing.

When press stories like this appeared during the presidency, stories for which Maroon seemed the most likely source, Nixon's office ordered two undercover men—future Watergate burglars Howard Hunt and Bernard Barker—to look for derogatory information on Maroon. They found instead that the banker was regarded by the financial community as a man of “unimpeachable integrity,” while Rebozo was “not well thought of.” This was not the report the White House wanted.

In 1958, during a scandal about high-level Republican corruption,
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Rebozo told the Florida papers how “selfless” Nixon was, that he always insisted on paying his own bills. “They'll never get anything on that boy,” he asserted. “In my view,” said George Smathers, “Nixon never made a dishonest dollar in his life.”

In 1960, after losing to Kennedy and going into political limbo, Nixon reckoned his personal worth at a mere $50,000, made up mostly of his house and his federal pension plan. A year or two later, as a prosperous lawyer, he told a friend with delight that he had enough to donate $11,000 to charity in one twelve-month period. Eight years later, when he was elected president, property and investments—plus his salary as an attorney and his income as an author—had left him by his accounting worth $307,141—about $1.5 million at today's values.

Meanwhile, down in Florida, Rebozo had become seriously rich. In 1964 he had started his own financial institution, the Key Biscayne Bank. Nixon, as former vice president, wielded a golden shovel at the groundbreaking (for the
bank's parking lot) and held Savings Account No. 1. The bank became a Nixon shrine, with photographs of him on its walls and a bust of him sitting benignly on the teller counter. It was a small bank, housed in a nondescript brick and glass building, and well-off locals tended to pad in on bare feet, while the staff doled out popcorn and lollipops to children.

Sometimes Rebozo himself—chairman, president, and principal stockholder—could be seen working in his office at the end of the lobby. On the outer wall of the office, facing the public, hung a red, white, and blue plaque representing the American flag, with the inscription “This is our flag, be proud of it.” He drove to work in a large green Lincoln Continental—license plate “Miami 1”—bearing a bumper sticker that read: “The only issue is America.”

In spite of the folksy welcome it offered, Key Biscayne Bank was not a place for the man in the street to go to obtain a loan. A survey later showed that it was last but one of the 687 banks in Florida in the number of loans it issued. Rebozo's bank was primarily a place that held money or assisted in the movement of money.

By the time the bank opened, Rebozo's specialty had long since become real estate speculation, with a particular interest in the islets and cays dotting the ocean off Miami and in the Caribbean archipelago. “Bebe loved property,” said Smathers. “He never saw an island he didn't fall in love with.” One that especially took his fancy was Fisher's Island, some two hundred acres of speculative investment off Miami Beach. Nixon started buying shares in Fisher's in 1962 at a dollar each, and by the time he became president he owned 185,891 of them.

“After the 1968 election,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “I decided to sell all my stocks. . . . I thought it would be worth going the extra measure to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.” Rebozo proposed that Nixon be bought out at three dollars per share and was furious when Hoke Maroon, the largest single shareholder in the venture, initially offered only the dollar Nixon had originally paid. Nixon settled for two dollars a share, which at the time made him the only shareholder to double his investment.

By his own later account, the president put most of the money from the sale of his stocks into buying “two houses in Florida and a house in California.” These were the palatial residences that became famous as the southern and western White Houses, the presidential compound in Rebozo country, Key Biscayne, and San Clemente in Southern California.

Rebozo organized the purchase of the Key Biscayne complex and was a silent partner in the investment company that purchased San Clemente. The twenty-eight-acre estate had been much too costly for Nixon to finance alone, so Rebozo and a second friend, aerosol tycoon Robert Abplanalp, looked after the matter. A complex series of sales, mortgages, and resales left Nixon technically owning the luxury villa, its outbuildings, and some six acres, though he had the use of the entire property. Rebozo also bought a house in an exclusive Washington suburb, again involving labyrinthine financial arrangements, for
the use of Nixon's daughter Julie and her husband. The couple would not reveal the rent they paid, beyond describing it as “reasonable.”

Early in Nixon's first term, John Ehrlichman recalled, Rebozo expressed concern that the president's personal finances were not being well managed. Close aides objected to Rebozo's overseeing them completely, but he was soon in control of all Nixon's money. “If there's something I think he should have,” Rebozo told probers later, “I might just go ahead and do it without even him knowing about it. He just doesn't concern himself with financial problems; never has.”

Ehrlichman also noted that Nixon repeatedly asked him to “help Bebe with his personal problems”: assistance at the Department of the Interior over a real estate problem here, a little help for his relatives there. Should anyone complain about favoritism, Nixon blandly directed, aides should point out that “Bebe is different: he handles the President's personal affairs.”

For a while, even when the presidency became suspect under the impact of Watergate, the president's friend seemed unassailable. Then, when an unrelated IRS investigation led to the discovery of a hundred-thousand-dollar cache, held in hundred-dollar bills in a safe-deposit box at Rebozo's bank, the carefully cultivated image of the innocuous, apolitical friend was shattered. Every aspect of Rebozo's affairs was relentlessly scrutinized, with the focus on misappropriation of campaign contributions, acceptance of money in exchange for favors by the Justice Department, distribution of Watergate hush money, and alleged diversion of campaign funds to Nixon's brothers and personal secretary.
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