The Arrogance of Power (55 page)

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover also trekked to the Pierre Hotel to be confirmed in the job he had held for forty-four years and to play on Nixon's fears. During the probe of Republican interference in the Vietnam peace initiative, Hoover claimed to Nixon, President Johnson had ordered the FBI to bug Nixon's campaign plane. There is no evidence that the instruction was carried out, and former Hoover aide Cartha DeLoach has said his boss deliberately embellished the facts. Nixon, however, believed what he was told. He would raise the matter time and again during Watergate, in the hope of demonstrating that the Democrats were as guilty of electronic abuses as his own people.

In similar vein, Hoover admonished Nixon not to make calls through the White House switchboard. “Little men you don't know,” the FBI director warned, “will be listening.” He claimed that presidential communications, which were overseen by the Army Signal Corps, were insecure and said “the President should know that if he talked on those lines he would probably be monitored.”

Since the discovery of a bug in his 1962 campaign headquarters,
*
Nixon had been perennially anxious about electronic surveillance. A veteran wireman had been on duty throughout the campaign, checking for bugs in Nixon's law office in New York, at aides' offices, at the Republican convention, and at every hotel the candidate used around the country.
³

Concern about bugs preoccupied Nixon even when on nonpolitical business—if one can say he was ever so detached. “Let's get off in a corner someplace and make sure we're not bugged,” he had told a Pepsi vice-president on a trip to Cairo a year or so earlier. His friend Pat Hillings recalled Nixon's anxiety after visiting the Johnson White House in 1966. “We got into the White House limo to travel to the airport, and I asked Nixon what had happened upstairs. He said, ‘Shh! Shh!' and pointed to the car roof, indicating it was bugged, so we said nothing until we got into the airport.”

A meeting with Johnson after the election confirmed all such fears. “Johnson was so obsessed with all the recording crap,” Nixon said in 1991. “I will never forget the day he had me to the White House after I won. . . . One of the first things he did was to show me the recording contraptions that Kennedy had installed under the beds. Johnson got down on the floor, lifted the bedspread, and waved his hand under the bed. ‘Dick,' he said, ‘they are voice activated.' Johnson was obsessed with recording everything. He had every room taped.”

The wiring of the White House was not new. It had begun as early as 1940, when Roosevelt had his office space and phone rigged with primitive recording devices. Truman did not use the equipment, but it stayed in place. Eisenhower, indulging a penchant for covert recording that dated to his army days, used a concealed Dictaphone machine to record some meetings.

John F. Kennedy had the Secret Service install multiple microphones in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, and elsewhere, feeding back to recorders in a locked storage room. The phone in the president's bedroom was wired, but the most recent study of the subject makes no reference to the voice-activated mikes “under the beds” that Nixon described.

Kennedy's recording apparatus was dismantled hours after his assassination, but Lyndon Johnson moved in a formidable new system of his own. According to a former director of the White House Military Office, Bill Gulley, Hoover's warning to Nixon about its potential was fundamentally accurate.

“Johnson had an extensive, really extensive taping system,” Gulley said. “He had it installed by the White House Communications Agency, which is under the Military Office. . . . It was a very professional job. . . . The Military Office handled the secret bugging of the Oval Office and Cabinet Room, and installed taps on his telephone and those of his staff members.”

“As any new tenant, I inspected the fittings,” Haldeman would recall of his arrival in his quarters adjoining the Oval Office. “I opened the door of a closet in the wall connecting my office to the President's suite, and found myself staring at a mountain of gleaming electronic components jammed in that closet, obviously for the use of the previous tenant to tape or monitor LBJ's conversations.”

According to Haldeman, Nixon made a snap decision after his meeting with Hoover in November, 1968. “We'll get that goddamn bugging crap out of the White House in a hurry,” he said. So they would. But toward the end of Nixon's first term, as all the world now knows, microphones would again be sown around the presidential quarters—this time with devastating results.

_____

“As 1968 came to a close, I was a happy man,” Nixon was to write in his memoirs. “In Key Biscayne a wreath hung on the front door and a beautifully trimmed Christmas tree stood in the living room. . . . Those were days rich with happiness and full of anticipation and hope.”

Nixon had achieved his goal, was about to take possession of the prize that only thirty-six men had won before. Yet he did not seem to be a man at ease with his destiny. At the Hotel Pierre, Kissinger had thought Nixon's greeting “a show of jauntiness that failed to hide an extraordinary nervousness. . . . His manner was almost diffident; his movements were slightly vague, and unrelated to what he was saying, as if two different impulses were behind speech and gesture. . . . While he talked, he sipped, one after another, cups of coffee that were brought in without his asking for them.”

The previous months had been hellishly tough, as is any campaign for an American presidential candidate, but Nixon's condition worried close aides. “I would call for him at his hotel in a small Midwestern city in the morning,” Haldeman remembered, “and find he was missing. Some time in the early dawn he had gotten out of bed and slipped away, with a nervous Secret Service man tailing him. We'd search all over town until we found the candidate looking haggard and wan in a flea-bitten coffeeshop.”

Nixon suffered from chronic insomnia. “A month before the election,” Len Garment recalled, “I would get a call, three or four times a week, somewhere between midnight and three
A
.
M
. I was at home, in New York. The phone would ring, and my wife and I would look at that phone. Usually it would be John Ehrlichman, and he'd say: ‘The Old Man wants to talk to you.' It was always the same thing. He would start off with ‘How are things back there? How's it going with John Mitchell?' But manic, manic, and depressive. . . . He'd go from all the assertive, confident things to ‘Are we gonna be all right?' ”

Once reassured, Nixon would seem to drift off, murmuring memories of the forties and fifties. “He would become blurred and slightly incoherent, then more so, like talking to somebody who was very drunk. I'd be getting worried about what was happening, and then it would just end, click.”

Years later Ehrlichman told Garment how it had been at his end of the line. “He would talk to political people,” Ehrlichman remembered. “Then, for the last call, he would say, ‘Get me Len.' By that time we would have given him his Seconal and a good stiff single-malt scotch. And he'd get on the phone with you until the phone dropped from his fingers and he fell asleep. Then I'd pick the phone up very quietly, and hang up.”

“I was the disembodied presence,” Garment recalled, “to whom Nixon could unload his daily deposit of anxieties until he was finally carried away by alcohol, sedation, and exhaustion into the Land of Nod . . . cries and whispers . . . I worried over these calls.”

Nixon's public stance at the start of the race was that he seldom drank anything. “When I'm campaigning, I live like a Spartan,” he declared even as he was nursing a whiskey. Once again where the subject of Nixon and drink was concerned, the issue was one of propaganda versus reality.

Nixon told Theodore White that he realized that once in office he “couldn't take a drink again, couldn't party it up. You can't drink and think clearly . . . two drinks and your mind isn't quite sharp, and you may not be able to think clearly when that phone rings at night . . . you've got to be ready. . . . No more drinking, no more late hours. . . . I felt I knew what Jefferson meant when he said the presidency was a ‘splendid misery.' ”

Returned to spontaneously, twice in the course of a single interview, these were the words of a man who recognized that he had a weakness. Meanwhile, what of Ehrlichman's reference to Seconal? What of Nixon's use of prescription drugs?

By his own account, Nixon first used sleeping pills in the late forties. His fellow Republican in the 1962 California race, George Christopher, thought he used “some pills to ease his mind a bit. Dispassionate pills to cool down. He was under great, great pressure.” “There may have been some medication to reduce stress,” Nixon's brother Edward agreed in 2000, “but he was not one who wanted to do anything like that habitually. . . .”

In fact, as it became clear during research for this book, Nixon consumed large quantities of one particular drug over a long period, apparently without a prescription or proper medical supervision. The drug was Dilantin, the brand name of an anti-epileptic medication known to pharmacologists as Phenytoin, and the circumstances in which Nixon came to start taking it were alarmingly casual. He heard about the drug, probably soon after being elected president, while dining at Key Biscayne with Bebe Rebozo and the millionaire founder of the Dreyfus Fund, Jack Dreyfus, Jr.

Dreyfus, who had contributed to the Nixon campaigns in both 1960 and 1968, had no medical qualifications. Having credited Dilantin with relieving him of chronic depression almost overnight, he had become the leading advocate of it as a panacea for all manner of ailments. He poured millions of dollars into promoting the drug, which he considered a “gift from God” with properties that could bring almost miraculous relief from disorders ranging from heart problems and asthma to leprosy and arthritis—beliefs he still held at age eighty-six in the year 2000.

At their 1968 meeting in Key Biscayne, as Dreyfus told the author, “Nixon said, ‘Why don't you give me some Dilantin?' So I thought, ‘What the heck, he's [going to be] president of the United States. I can't get in trouble. . . .' So I went out to the car and got a bottle of a thousand and gave it to him. A few days later he called me and said, ‘Is it all right if I take two a day?' I said, ‘Yes, I think so.' Later on when I went to see him at the White House, he asked me if he could have some more. I gave him another large bottle. . . .”

Asked what Nixon wanted the Dilantin for, Dreyfus was vague. Nixon, he said, had “a lot of things . . . worries.” At one point, when Dreyfus suggested that the president should perhaps get the medication from a doctor, Nixon said, ‘To heck with the doctor.' ” The president likely had little to worry about on that front. John Ehrlichman remembered the White House physician, Dr. Walter Tkach, as a compliant doctor who would do exactly as a patient asked. “You'd go to him and say, ‘I'm going to Turkey tomorrow and I need inoculations.' And he'd say, ‘Here, give me your book,' and he'd stamp all the inoculations and say, ‘There! That ought to immunize you. . . .' ”

Dr. Tkach, moreover, had used Dilantin himself and enthused over it. When asked later by Dreyfus if his eminent patient was still taking the drug, Tkach merely said airily: “I don't know, but the amount of pills in the bottle in his bathroom is reducing in size, so I suppose he is.”

Neither Nixon's cavalier use of Dilantin, nor Tkach's style of doctoring, is reassuring to those who like to assume the president makes prudent use of
medication under the direction of the most meticulous of physicians. Dilantin is, moreover—to the frustration of Dreyfus and like-minded converts—a medication approved by the Food and Drug Administration only as an anticonvulsant to counter epileptic seizures. While it is also effective in pain relief and may be prescribed at a qualified doctor's discretion, it can have serious side effects.

Dreyfus has conceded that should dosages not be well calculated and observed, the user can become what he termed “a little disjointed-feeling . . . dizzy . . . [with] a drunkish feeling.” The
Physicians' Desk Reference,
used by doctors nationwide, lists numerous known adverse reactions to Dilantin. They include “slurred speech, decreased coordination, and mental confusion, dizziness, insomnia, transient nervousness. . . .” Dr. Lawrence McDonald, a Washington physician consulted by the author, was alarmed at the notion of anyone's—especially a person in a position of high responsibility—using Dilantin in uncontrolled doses or combined with other medications or alcohol.

“If such a user of the drug were the president of the United States,” Dr. McDonald said, “I would be very nervous. Mental confusion is not something you want in a leader. Dilantin certainly could impair someone of that caliber from making correct and timely and appropriate judgments. It's a potential time bomb, waiting to happen.”

Nixon did use alcohol and did use sleeping pills. His longtime speechwriter Ray Price recalled how even a single drink could make him appear drunk “if he had a sleeping pill.” As if the drinking, the sleeping pills, and the Dilantin were not troubling enough, Rabbi Baruch Korff—a Nixon apologist late in the presidency—said he learned that “at times he resorted to amphetamines.” Amphetamines, of course, are stimulants, the opposite of the relaxing medications mentioned by other associates.