The Arrogance of Power (56 page)

Billy Graham, a longtime confidant, offered a startling verdict on the cause of Nixon's ultimate downfall. “I think,” he said in 1979, “it was sleeping pills. Sleeping pills and demons. I think there was definitely demon power involved. He took all those sleeping pills, and through history, drugs and demons have gone together. . . . My conclusion is that it was just all those sleeping pills, they just let a demon's power come in and play over him. . . .”

The evangelist's notional demons aside, Nixon's tenure of the White House was to bring times when it was obvious all was not well with the president. Observers who heard the slurring of the voice or saw the disjointed gestures were to wonder about his use of drink or drugs.

On the eve of the 1968 election, another highly sensitive aspect of Nixon's private life had come perilously close to exposure, his use of a new York psychotherapist.

_____

On the morning of October 29, exactly a week before voting day, while President Johnson was grappling with the Republican sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks, the phone rang in the Park Avenue office of Dr. Arnold
Hutschnecker. It was the columnist Drew Pearson calling with a stunning double-barreled question. Was it a fact, Pearson asked, that Hutschnecker had been giving Nixon “psychiatric treatments”? If so, was it true that the doctor was concerned as to whether his patient was “the right man to have his finger on the nuclear trigger”?

Although the columnist was working largely from old information—a private investigator's report prepared in 1960 in the hope of embarrassing Nixon during the contest with Kennedy.
⁴
Hutschnecker, however, did not know what evidence Pearson had. Caught off guard, and with a patient in his office, he confirmed that he had treated Nixon. It was a “delicate matter,” he added, one he was “reluctant to talk about.” Would the columnist please call back in the afternoon?

The telephone hummed in the hours that followed. It was ironically Pearson's colleague Jack Anderson, phoning Nixon headquarters for a comment, who tipped the Republicans to the threat of disastrous publicity. With Nixon and Humphrey running so closely, a story about Nixon's receiving psychotherapy could prove critically damaging.

“We felt we had to be ready to react immediately,” press aide Herb Klein recalled. “We had friends on a few newspapers ready to alert us if they received advance copies of such a column. . . . We wanted to be ready to deny the story in a way that editors would be cautious on the use of the material. . . . One damaging column could have tipped the close election.” As another precaution, Klein put in a check call of his own to the psychotherapist.

At 4:00
P
.
M
., when Pearson called back, Dr. Hutschnecker squelched the story. He had treated Nixon “for a brief period” while he was vice president, he said, “but only for problems involving internal medicine.” Pearson wondered why at a time when Nixon was Washington-based, he would have traveled all the way to a doctor in New York for routine physical problems. Not satisfied with Hutschnecker's account, he continued digging.

Word soon reached Republican Congressman Gerald Ford, the House minority leader, that Hutschnecker was chatting socially about his call from Pearson. The Nixon damage control operation went back into action, and the doctor received separate visits from both Klein and Murray Chotiner.

Voting day came and went without Pearson's running the story. A week later, though, the columnist used the forum of an address to the National Press Club to reveal his unwritten information. He now knew, he said, that Hutschnecker had “confirmed to others that he had treated or advised Mr. Nixon over psychiatric problems. And he had expressed some worry privately that Mr. Nixon had problems—or did have a problem—of not standing up under great pressure.”

When Nixon's press secretary dismissed this allegation as “totally untrue,” Pearson riposted in print. Several of Hutschnecker's patients, he said, had spoken with him about Nixon's visits. One, who agreed to be quoted by name, said it had been “common knowledge” that Nixon received “
psychotherapeutic treatments” during his vice presidency. Dr. Hutschnecker, asserted this witness, had “expressed some concern that such a man should occupy the important post of vice president.”
⁵

Press aide Herb Klein would state in his memoirs that at the time of the early Hutschnecker treatments, the only ones the Nixon side would admit to, the doctor had merely been “studying psychiatry” and that Nixon had seen him primarily because of “severe headaches.” In 1997, interviewed for this book, he was more forthright. Nixon had gone to the doctor, Klein revealed, because “he was feeling depressed.”

During the 1968 flap the journalist Gloria Steinem joined the procession to Dr. Hutschnecker's office and kept him talking for more than three hours. The doctor remained evasive but dropped a number of hints. “He didn't deny and he didn't confirm,” she recalled. “He wasn't forthcoming about Nixon per se, but he energetically put forward his belief that all leaders, including candidates for the presidency, should have some vetting by mental health experts. And when he told me his view about examining would-be presidents, he was responding to questions I had asked about Nixon.”

In his interviews for this book the doctor said Nixon gave him to understand that should he be elected president, he would appoint Hutschnecker his personal physician. That was not to be, however, because Haldeman and Ehrlichman, whom the doctor categorized as “goons” or “gangsters,” insisted that using the doctor would be “the kiss of death . . . would destroy the presidency.”

Keeping his distance from Hutschnecker did keep the threat of the “shrink” connection at bay. Other Damoclean swords, weapons of his own making, however, were already pointed at Nixon's head.

_____

Bryce Harlow, who had been associated with Nixon for many years, knew some of the man's dangerous secrets. As early as the Pierre Hotel transition period he warned younger aides of the perils ahead, predicting that the new administration “would attract scandal like a dog would attract fleas.”

Four of these potential scandals were especially worrisome: the original assassination plots against Fidel Castro, the cash connection with Howard Hughes, the massive recent campaign contribution from the dictatorship in Greece, and the recent offense that was still being actively hushed up, the sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks.

While there were various ways these secrets might surface, one man especially, a man on the wrong side of the political spectrum, knew too much. This was Lawrence O'Brien, fifty-one, leading light of the Democratic party's Irish Mafia and master political strategist. A veteran of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, it was O'Brien—he had taken over in late summer after the murder of Bobby Kennedy—whose expertise had brought Hubert Humphrey from almost certain defeat to almost defeating Nixon.

Within hours of the younger Kennedy's death, issuing orders from his penthouse suite in Las Vegas, Howard Hughes had come up with a characteristically perverse scheme. As the latest ploy in his effort to turn the nation's top politicians into his personal puppets, he set out to hire “Kennedy's entire organization.” That being an unrealistic goal even for Hughes, he reached out for O'Brien.

Several weeks later, after negotiations with Hughes's aide Robert Maheu, O'Brien accepted a post as the tycoon's Washington consultant, for an annual fee of $180,000. The previous year, hints that there had been assassination plots against Castro appearing in the press for the first time had been characterized as ethically inadmissible, “a political H-bomb.” The initial report had pointed the finger only at the Kennedy brothers. Yet Maheu, now in close touch with O'Brien, well knew that the first anti-Castro conspiracy, involving the Mafia, had started in 1960, when Nixon was White House point man on Cuba. How much did O'Brien learn about Nixon's role in the assassination plots? How much, once his Hughes consultancy got under way, was he going to learn about Hughes' money flowing to Nixon?

Lawrence O'Brien also knew about the Greek dictators' contributions to the Nixon campaign, a subject on which he had been briefed by exile activist Elias Demetracopoulos. It was O'Brien who had issued the press statement four days before the election, challenging Nixon to explain his relationship with Tom Pappas, the go-between with the Greek regime.

If Nixon also feared that O'Brien had knowledge of the Republican interference in the Vietnam peace process, he feared correctly. Records show that, logically enough, Hubert Humphrey had informed his campaign manager of the gist of what he had learned from President Johnson.

There was something else. The night before the voters went to the polls, when the result hung in the balance and there was little more he could do to advance his cause, Nixon—and a large proportion of the voters—had watched on television a Democratic party commercial that Theodore White called Humphrey's “high moment of identification.” There was Senator Edward Kennedy, the last remaining brother, walking the sands of Hyannis Port. In earnest conversation with him, as the wind off the Atlantic blew their coats up in swallowtails, had been that repository of secrets so dangerous to Richard Nixon, Lawrence O'Brien.

Nixon fretted about O'Brien and about the potential threat from the last of the Kennedys. In the White House, ever insecure and determined to win a second term with a truly convincing victory, he would plot against them both. It would be the plotting against O'Brien, later elevated to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, that was to result in Nixon's destruction and disgrace.

_____

At a bone-chilling noontime on January 20, 1969, as dignitaries shivered under their temporary canopy, Richard Nixon stepped out of a limousine in front of the great dome of the Capitol.

He tripped as he took his place on the dais for his inauguration so that, as the ambassador from Ecuador noted, the last word he uttered before the ceremony was “Oops!” Pat, in rosy red outfit and fur hat, held out two family Bibles dating back to the nineteenth century. Her husband placed his left hand upon them as Earl Warren, the chief justice who loathed him, administered the presidential oath.

Nixon was now the thirty-seventh president of the United States. Billy Graham intoned a prayer, and the new leader of more than two hundred million people launched into his seventeen-minute inaugural address. He spoke rapidly but evenly of winding up the war in Vietnam, ending the cold war with the Soviet Union, and bringing the divided nation together.

Both Bibles had been opened to Isaiah 2:4, the passage about beating swords into plowshares. The keystone sentence in Nixon's speech was a Quaker sentiment from his own pen that was destined to be chiseled into his tombstone: “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.” On the drive to the White House afterward he could see antiwar protesters lobbing sticks, stones, and beer cans and hoisting a huge placard reading
BILLIONAIRES PROFIT OFF G
.
I
.
BLOOD
!

That night at the inaugural balls, throngs of Republicans from across America—huge contingents of them from Nixon's native California and much-favored Florida—crowded so close that few could dance. Bebe Rebozo was there of course, as was the Saudi entrepreneur Adnan Khashoggi, whose beauteous wife missed what Nixon was saying because a man behind kept pinching her.

Also present was Anna Chennault, the intermediary in the operation designed to sabotage the Vietnam peace talks. Patricia Hitt, whom Chennault had named as a possible go-between in her contacts with Nixon, hosted a party of her own. As assistant secretary at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, she now held the highest government position of any woman in the new administration.

Noting that one of the featured bands was Guy Lombardo's, Nixon recalled having danced to Lombardo's music with Pat the night World War II ended. Around 2:00
A
.
M
., when the Nixons got back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they walked from room to room turning on all the lights.

“He seemed exultant,” Henry Kissinger would say of the inauguration, “as if he could hardly wait for the ceremony to be over so that he could begin to implement the dream of a lifetime.” Nixon's friend Bryce Harlow, however, had doubts. “When Dick was finally elected President,” he said, “he attained eighty percent of all his goals in life. He has no idea of what he will do after he is sworn in.”

On his first working day in office Nixon invited a thousand campaign workers to the White House. He told them: “This is your house, too. We'll get up early and work late so this will always be a happy house. And your home will always be a happy home. . . .”

It had begun.

The office neither elevates or degrades a man. What it does is to provide a stage upon which all his personality traits are magnified and accentuated.

—George Reedy, President Johnson's press secretary

“D
on't you dare call me Dick. I am the president of the United States. When you speak to me you call me Mr. President.” So commanded Nixon, early in the presidency, at a meeting with Florida banker Hoke Maroon, a man he had known for years. “He was as obsessed with the office as any president has ever been,” his old friend Bob Finch ruefully recalled. “He gloried in it, night and day.”

The outward signs were quickly obvious. Before the Nixons moved into the White House, the message they had conveyed to the public was that it did not need refurbishing. That opinion soon changed, however, and a massive remodeling program, costing millions, was begun.

Military planes were dispatched to Italy to bring back green watered silk for just one medium-size room. An ornate four-poster bed for Nixon cost six thousand dollars, its draperies ten thousand. The next presidential couple to occupy the White House, the Fords, thought it unbelievable, “something Marie Antoinette would have slept in,” and promptly had it removed.

Whereas Lyndon Johnson had maintained three Boeing passenger jets, Nixon had three Boeings, eleven Lockheed Jetstars, and sixteen helicopters at his exclusive disposal. The existing Air Force One was refurbished at a cost of $800,000, with the emphasis on the First Family's accommodation. Later,
when a new plane was delivered—with a layout the Nixons did not like—another $750,000 went toward the alterations.

The fleet was not used solely for government business. Nixon's extended family, including in-laws, availed themselves of the planes. When a troubled official reported that senior aides were taking Air Force One on transcontinental flights to and from vacations, Nixon signed off on them. An Air Force Jetstar was once used to ferry a package from Florida to Camp David for senior aides, at a cost of five thousand dollars in fuel alone. Its contents: ten pounds of crabs from Joe's Stone Crabs in Miami Beach.

The White House and the Camp David retreat were not sufficient for Nixon. He bought houses on Key Biscayne—the complex to be known as the Florida White House—and at San Clemente, the fourteen-room house and estate in California styled the Western White House. Nixon himself purchased the properties, with a massive financial assist from Rebozo and aerosol tycoon Abplanalp. The government, however, was to spend more than ten million dollars—more than forty-four million dollars at today's values—to install special features not only at Nixon's out-of-town homes but also at houses he frequented, like Abplanalp's in the Bahamas.

A helicopter pad at Key Biscayne cost $418,000, and communications equipment there $307,000. “The bottom line for military expenditures at Key Biscayne came close to two million dollars,” recalled Military Office head Bill Gulley. “Then we did it all again at San Clemente.” Camp David was also revamped. A swimming pool next to the presidential “cabin” was built at an expense of $500,000, because the chosen site stood atop an underground nuclear shelter.

Nixon had nine offices for his personal use: the Oval Office, a hideaway in the Executive Office Building, a room in his private quarters, two at Camp David, one at the Key Biscayne house, another at Abplanalp's Caribbean home, and two at San Clemente. All required sophisticated communications systems, installed at public expense. A former Budget Bureau official would calculate that, by four years into the presidency, Nixon's household expenses had added up to a hundred million dollars.

Nixon spent more than one in three nights away from the White House in the first eighteen months of his term. While the days of absence included foreign trips, there were also forty-two trips to Camp David, fourteen to Key Biscayne, and nine to San Clemente. The California stays tended to last two or three weeks.

Before assuming office, Nixon had repeatedly pressed Ehrlichman to “capitalize upon the work habits of the President-elect—long hours of work, delayed dinners, eighteen-hour days, late reading, no naps. . . .” That was not the routine Nixon's assistant Alexander Butterfield observed, however. He was struck by the fact that his boss “had so much leisure time. There were many days with no appointments at all. Every now and then he would work like a Trojan. . . . But generally he allowed plenty of time to sit and kick things around. . . . And every afternoon Nixon took a nap. . . .”

For the women in the family, pride in Republican cloth coats was a sentiment long since abandoned. Pat Nixon arrived at the White House with a new Persian lamb coat to supplement her mink, and both daughters had acquired expensive coats of real fur. Julie had married President Eisenhower's grandson David a month before the inauguration, a ceremony at which she bent custom a little by kissing her father first rather than her new husband.

The junior Nixons had long since assigned each other joke initials, parodies of what the trio viewed as their hilarious billing in the press. Julie, who was to graduate from Smith College, was N.C.P.D.—for “No Cream Puff Deb.” David was T.C.C. for “Teen Carbon Copy”—of his famous grandfather. Tricia was F.P., for “Fairy Princess.”

In the White House, Tricia soon acquired the reputation of being a spoiled princess. Then twenty-three, she spent entire days shut up in her Louis XV bedroom, surrounded by a collection of Dresden and Meissen figurines. Her favorite featured two little girls on a seesaw with a spotted dog, a gift from her father that he called “Tricia and Julie with Checkers.”

Tricia did not endear herself to Nixon's staff. Ehrlichman thought her a “tough and troubled cookie.” She once reported an Air Force One steward for allegedly staring at her legs. An usher who had been told to bring pillows to the garden for Tricia and a friend was then expected to lift the friend's outstretched legs to create a hassock. Secret Service agents, who dubbed Tricia Goody Two-shoes, objected to being instructed to water her plants while she was away on a trip. They carried out the mission, one agent claimed, by urinating on them.

When Britain's Prince Charles came visiting, Nixon tried to pair Tricia off with him, to no avail. Tricia was to marry Edward Cox, an Ivy League law student descended from one of the framers of the Declaration of Independence. Their wedding in the Rose Garden, in the third year of the presidency, would be staged as a television spectacular reportedly seen by sixty million viewers. CBS's Dan Rather thought it “the closest thing Americans have, or want, to a royal occasion.”
¹

Early in his travels as president, Nixon was greeted in Brussels by royal guards in operatically grand uniforms. In India he was escorted by outriders in British Empire–vintage scarlet coats. One of these trips reportedly inspired the outfitting of the White House police in similarly outlandish uniforms. The new outfits, high-necked white tunics with gold epaulets, first appeared on public view a year after the inauguration. They were topped by tall military caps with blue and gold visors, reportedly paid for by Nixon himself.

After early critics noted how plump the uniforms made their wearers look, the policemen were ordered to diet. Then, following a national chorus of ridicule, the regalia was withdrawn altogether. The tunics were eventually sold off to high school bands in Iowa, and the caps reappeared at an Alice Cooper rock concert.

“The President,” Haldeman said by way of explaining the uniforms, had “wanted something more formal.” Peter Flanigan, Nixon's political adviser,
thought the livery an attempt to emulate the “grandeur” his boss admired in Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle himself fell from power, then died soon after Nixon took office. By that time Nixon had established his own self-important style.

Four days after the inauguration the president dictated the following memo to Pat, referring to himself in the third person, rather as the queen of England affects the royal “we” on formal occasions,

Nixon sought to preserve everything that related to his tenure, however trivial. “He saves everything,” Rose Woods would one day tell investigators, “place cards, menus. Even one Halloween we were at Camp David and he and Mrs. Nixon invited me to dinner and a steward put a colored mask on each of the three plates—I know Mrs. Nixon put hers in the wastebasket, and I did mine. But his came down to be filed. . . .”

“Things got more and more regal,” recalled Traphes Bryant, the presidential kennel keeper. “Nixon decreed that even workers like me had to get all prettied up for official functions. The White House had suits tailored for any electrician or carpenter who might be around during a party or official function. Several times I had to go to a Georgetown haberdasher to be measured for my black suit, which was almost like a tuxedo. . . .”

“Problems with signals,” Haldeman noted in his diary after a morning meeting with Nixon. “Dinner last night. . . served just champagne when should have had cocktails, 12 in black tie.”
White
tie and tails, long out of fashion, were at first de rigueur at Nixon White House occasions.
²
At dinners the small round tables favored by the Kennedys and the Johnsons were replaced by long banquet-style tables with seating that indicated to all present just who was and was not “above the salt.” For cabinet meetings Nixon replaced Johnson's reclining chair with a high-backed chair, higher—for that was the point—than those his colleagues used.

The pomp and circumstance of a typical Nixon airport arrival gave
Life
's Hugh Sidey pause: “Acres of automobiles parked on the landing field. Men, women, and children in luxurious coats and sweaters . . . wives of the
dignitaries elegant in furs, jewels sparkling in the sun. Agnew . . . flawlessly tailored, combed, manicured, polished. There was about him the smell of power, position and possessions. . . . There were ruffles and flourishes from the army's special heraldic trumpets, followed by ‘Hail to the Chief.' A journalist next to me turned away. ‘My God,' he muttered, as Nixon appeared at the airplane door, ‘it's like the arrival of the King.' ”

The Nixons seemed almost oddly attracted to royals, even exiled ones. “White tie, decorations to be worn” invitations were sent out for a dinner for the duke and duchess of Windsor, who had hosted Nixon while he was out of office. When the duke sent apologies—he did not have his decorations with him—bemedaled guests were asked to shed their badges and ribbons at the door.

On a flight to Europe with the First Family the writer Jessamyn West, Nixon's cousin, recalled a telling interview with Pat. “I wanted to hear about her early struggles,” West remembered. “She replied: ‘How can you present me as being other than perfect?' She was giving me statistics about how many crowned heads they had served in the White House. . . .”

Investigations would eventually reveal that Pat and her daughters accepted lavish gifts of jewelry from Middle Eastern royalty. Saudi Arabia's King Faisal gave Pat a shoulder-length pair of earrings set with marquise diamonds and cabochon rubies, as well as, reportedly, a strand of pearls, worth as much as a hundred thousand dollars at seventies values.

From Saudi Deputy Prime Minister Prince Fahd, Faisal's half brother, Pat received a matching diamond and emerald ensemble—necklace, bracelet, ring, and brooch—worth $52,400. Defense Minister Prince Sultan, another half brother, presented a diamond bracelet to Pat and brooches—in diamonds, rubies, and sapphires—to Julie and Tricia.

Upon her marriage, according to her cousin Donald, Tricia was given a diamond and emerald brooch by the shah of Iran. The emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, sent a silver vase. Donald told the author he thought such gifts were “the way various people Uncle Dick had helped throughout the world thanked him. . . .”
³

The official roster of Britain's nobility,
Burke's Peerage,
pronounced Nixon one of thirteen U.S. presidents able to claim royal ancestry. The grocer's son from Whittier was supposedly a direct descendant of King Edward III (d. 1377) and thus distantly related to Queen Elizabeth II and Sir Winston Churchill. While thousands of people can claim similar bloodlines, one should perhaps not assume this was totally irrelevant to Nixon.

“I often felt that inwardly the president secretly wanted to be considered an English lord,” said his close associate Herb Klein, “someone who, like Jack Kennedy, would be praised for upgrading the social dignity of the White House. . . . he longed for this elite social distinction.”

Nixon himself denied such notions. “The Imperial President,” he wrote, “was a straw man created by defensive congressmen and by disillusioned
liberals. . . .” One such critic was future Speaker Tip O'Neill. “After he became President,” O'Neill recalled, “Nixon seemed to change. He no longer played cards with our group, and I doubt he played with anybody. Unlike Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, Nixon didn't pal around much with his old friends . . . he became aloof and imperial.”