The Arrogance of Power (57 page)

Even some Republican stalwarts had similar thoughts. “I could not detect a touch of humility in his demeanor or in his facial expression,” Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns said of the inauguration. “That troubled me very much. That, combined with his attitude when he took me through the White House and talked about its splendor. . . .” “I don't know what's happened to Dick,” grumbled Tom Dewey, “He just doesn't listen anymore.”

He behaved “like Napoleon,” said the entrepreneur Arnholt Smith, who had known Nixon since childhood. “I mean, he was very imperious, gave you a feeling you were almost traveling with God.” Former Republican party chairman Len Hall thought Nixon became “regal, kinglike. . . . He loved power, power to sit in that Oval Office and just issue orders. . . .”

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Under Nixon, according to an early brief, Nixon cabinet officers were to be considered “Deputy Presidents who run their own departments.” That concept was rapidly forgotten, however. “Nixon never intended the cabinet to be a board of directors,” said Haldeman. “He never took a vote and would have cared less concerning the result; he didn't make any pretext of seeking consensus.”

“I remember one occasion during the energy crisis,” Defense Secretary James Schlesinger recalled. “Nixon said to the cabinet at large, ‘I don't know whether the energy crisis will ever end.' I leaned over to him and remarked that we were in close negotiations with the Saudis about ending the embargo. He turned to me and whispered, ‘I know that, Jim, but I'm not going to say that in front of these clowns.' ”

“We began to get these long soliloquies about how tough it was to be president surrounded by idiots,” said Ehrlichman. “You began to get instructions from him. ‘Get rid of that fellow Allen over at HEW!' ‘Call Finch today and fire him! He is going around saying we favor busing; we don't favor busing. Don't they understand?' More and more, as we proceeded through the first year, he began taking back all those delegations of absolute authority that had been rather frivolously handed out at transition time. . . .

“It got so bad that in about the third year we learned of a rump session of the cabinet. They actually held a meeting over at [Housing and Urban Development Secretary] George Romney's conference room to discuss economic problems, because they couldn't get any discussions at the cabinet table. . . . It was a minirevolt. . . . Nixon was terribly upset that they would call such a meeting behind his back. . . .”

“Nixon never trusted anyone in the Executive Branch,” said CIA Director Richard Helms. “Here he had become president of the United States and therefore the chief of the executive branch, and yet he was constantly telling people that the State Department was just a bunch of pin-striped, cocktail-drinking diplomats, that the agency couldn't come up with a winning action in Vietnam, that the Interior Department was full of ‘pinkos.' It just went on and on.”

Nixon once exploded in rage, a tape of a telephone call reveals, because too few aides called to congratulate him on a nationally televised address about Vietnam. “Screw the Cabinet and the rest!” he told Kissinger. “From now on, they come to me. I'm sick of the whole bunch. The others are a bunch of goddamned cowards. The staff, except for Haldeman and Ehrlichman, screw them. The Cabinet, except for [cabinet secretary] Connally, the hell with them!”

Nixon was the first president in more than a century to have to work with an opposition Congress, and he did not have the patience for the task. “He simply didn't want to spend the kind of time that was required to cultivate these folks,” Ehrlichman said. Congressional liaison Bill Timmons would scrawl, “
ASK FOR HIS VOTE
,” on talking papers when Nixon was about to meet with a member of Congress, but he never did so. “I think he felt it was somehow demeaning for the president to ask a member for his vote,” Timmons said. “It was not in his personality to do it.”

Nixon's ploys to circumvent congressional authority ultimately alienated the nation's elected representatives. He blocked bills, impounded funds when he knew his veto would not work, and eroded the power of the Senate in the field of foreign policy. Kevin Phillips, himself a former Nixon aide, noted that Nixon was moving toward government by an “unprecedented, unreachable elite managerial cadre.” One man in particular, a veteran U.S. senator, was increasingly troubled by the tone of the government. This was Sam Ervin, who was to be Nixon's nemesis during Watergate. “Divine Right,” Ervin would growl then, “perished in America with the Revolution.”

Relations with the press were similarly contentious. Six years after his “kick around” speech, Nixon's scorn and resentment toward the media were undiluted. A senior aide to Spiro Agnew had tellingly expressed the administration's tone only minutes after the victory announcement. “Why don't we all get a member of the press and beat them up?” he said. “I'm tired of being nice to them.” After the election, in conversation with Theodore White, Nixon dismissed the media as “that fucking bunch of crew cut boy scouts.”

The “boy scouts” failed to please. Four months into the presidency Nixon issued an edict that was patently impractical: There was to be no more White House contact with the
New York Times
—one of whose editorials had annoyed him—the
Washington Post
—had broken news of an upcoming meeting he had hoped to announce himself—or with the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
which had run an inside account of the administration's problems.

A few weeks later, when U.S. astronauts returned from the first moon landing, Nixon told the British prime minister that, should rocks they brought back turn out to be laden with lethal germs, he would dole them out as presents to journalists.

At first it seemed that the new president might be making an effort to improve conditions for the press. On Nixon's personal initiative the old and filthy White House press room was replaced with grander quarters. More than half a million dollars were spent on a briefing room and lounge in the style of an English club, with plush chesterfield sofas and stylish prints on the walls. The room had been moved, however, to a new location—one that prevented reporters from observing the movements of key personalities. “You cannot see who is coming and going to see the President,” Hugh Sidey observed. “The whole purpose is to cut the press off from the flow of visitors to the White House.”

Nixon held no televised press conferences in his first eight months as president and only thirty-one in his first four years. Kennedy had held more than twice as many in less than three years, and Johnson four times as many in his five.

Nixon claimed to be indifferent to what the press said about him. It was he, however, who put Agnew up to making his infamous tirade against television's “small band of network commentators and self-appointed analysts.” The commentators' offense in question was “instant analysis,” deemed impertinent criticism, of a Nixon speech on Vietnam.

Covering the White House by talking to its staff, Sidey decided, was pointless. “It's a non-news operation, a laborious waste of time. . . . This crowd came in like an occupying army. They took over the White House like a stockade. . . . They have no sense that the government doesn't belong to them, that it's something they're holding in trust for the people.”

_____

“Without the Vietnam War,” Haldeman came to think, “there would have been no Watergate. Without a Vietnam War, Richard Nixon might have had the most successful presidency since Harry Truman's. . . . But the Vietnam War destroyed Nixon. . . .”

On his first morning at the White House, while shaving, Nixon remembered a safe Johnson had shown him after the election, a small security box concealed in the bedroom closet. It turned out to contain only a single document, the most recent tally of U.S. dead and wounded in Vietnam. Nixon perused the figures, then returned the folder to the safe “until the war was over.”

His campaign promises of bringing a swift end to the war were now a thing of the past. “Who knows?” Nixon said airily to Theodore White within weeks of the election. “One year, two years, six months? I can't put any time
limit.” “Peace cannot be achieved overnight,” he told the nation in May, 1969, “cannot be settled at a single stroke.”

As indeed it would not be. The North Vietnamese kept up their attacks. The South's President Thieu, believing Nixon to be in his debt for having blocked the Democratic peace initiative on the eve of the election, came away uneasy from their first meeting of the presidency. Asked to agree to the withdrawal of twenty-five thousand American troops, he worried that it might be the start of a full-scale pullout. Nixon insisted that the pullout was only “symbolic,” a “public opinion ploy,” to help him placate domestic opponents of the war. “Strong support,” he promised, “would continue for years.”

Nixon withheld from Thieu the fact that Kissinger was about to open secret talks with the North. Not that it made any difference. Kissinger was to liken dealing with the two Vietnams to being an animal trainer cracking a whip to get two obstinate tigers to sit on stools. “When one is in place, the other jumps off.”

Nixon did brief Thieu on Vietnamization, the push to make South Vietnam capable of surviving on its own. The French colonialists had used the same term, and critics claimed that the policy was a fallback: using Vietnamese to fight Vietnamese. Others argued that it was a maneuver not to accelerate peace but to buy time to keep the war going. Meanwhile, behind the meetings and the public rhetoric, another clandestine scenario was developing.

Within two months of becoming president, Nixon approved a massive B- 52 bombing strike, code-named Breakfast, on an area around and beyond Vietnam's border with Cambodia. Breakfast was to be followed by Lunch, Dessert, Snack, Supper, and Dinner, an extended series of strikes over a period of fourteen months, under the umbrella designation Menu. Menu's purpose was to pulverize enemy concentrations and arms dumps near the frontier, in areas from which Communist forces had previously launched attacks with impunity.

Intrinsic to Menu, though, was a problem. Cambodia was a neutral country, and the bombing campaign marked a significant expansion of the war. On Nixon's personal instructions, therefore, it was carried out under conditions of extraordinary secrecy. A few press leaks aside, the truth about Menu would not emerge for nearly five years. When it did, at the height of Watergate, outraged critics would accuse the president of having exceeded his constitutional powers.

One congressman, Robert Drinan, was to characterize the bombing as “presidential conduct more shocking and more unbelievable than the conduct of any president in any war in all of American history.” Nixon would retort that the strikes had had the effect of saving the lives of U.S. soldiers and hastening the peace settlement. Twelve members of the House Judiciary Committee, on the other hand, would deem them a “deception of Congress and the American public,” serious enough to add to the articles of impeachment.

While that proposal was ultimately voted down, the fact remained that
Nixon had publicly lied. In a solemn speech during the election campaign he had spoken of the people's “right to know,” of a president's duty to “lay out all the facts.” “Only through an open, candid dialogue with the people,” he had declared, “can a President maintain his trust and leadership.”

During the period of the bombing he had reassured the nation that he was presenting the facts on the war “with complete honesty.” In another speech, referring directly to the Cambodian border area, he said the United States had never “moved against these sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation.” This assertion was made after some three thousand B-52 sorties had been flown and a hundred thousand tons of high explosives had been dropped.

Nixon's mood, as much as tactical planning, was a factor in the bombing. He ordered the attacks initially while aboard Air Force One, en route to Europe. He then twice rescinded the order, on Kissinger's advice, before finally giving the go-ahead. He ordered a second phase of the bombing, in Kissinger's view, “because of an event far away . . . in North Korea. . . . Nixon looked for some other place to demonstrate his mettle. There was nothing he feared more than to appear weak. . . .”

The faraway event in question was the shooting down of a U.S. spy plane by a North Korean jet fighter, on April 14, 1969. All thirty-one American crewmen on board were killed. According to a Haldeman diary entry, Nixon at first wanted a “strong reaction.” When aides advised prudence, he held back, “suppressing his instinct for a jugular response,” as Kissinger put it. A few days later, however, he ordered the Lunch bombing of the Cambodian border.

Nixon's private language about Vietnam remained bellicose. Behind their back, he reportedly referred to anyone he thought dovish as “sweet-ass.” He used extreme verbal threats to illustrate how he would make North Vietnam submit. “I'll turn Right so goddamn hard it'll make your head spin,” he told Kissinger in a recorded phone call. “We'll bomb the bastards off the Earth.”

Nixon professed shock when, in late 1969, the horrific story of the worst atrocity in modern U.S. military history broke in the press. The previous year, it emerged, troops of the Eleventh Light Infantry Brigade of the Americal Division had slaughtered at least 350 unarmed Vietnamese civilians. American soldiers and junior officers had shot and bayoneted old men, women, and children, even babies. Some of the women had been beaten and raped before being killed. All dwellings had been burned to the ground, the carcasses of the villagers' cattle tossed into wells to poison the water.
⁴
The massacre, in and around the village of My Lai, had been carried out without provocation. There had been much enemy activity in the area, but the brigade had met no hostile fire that day.