The Arrogance of Power (64 page)

Even had that order not been rash and ill considered, a bombing operation is not simply a matter of carrying out a sudden command. Targets have to be plotted, diplomatic measures prepared, and many other steps taken. Mercifully, no U.S. aircraft carrier was then within range of the Syrian capital, a factor that proved helpful to Kissinger as he decided how to respond.

Certain the order “would not survive the night,” Kissinger worked out with Defense Secretary Laird a way to avoid outright disobedience while blocking the president's order at the same time. “Laird and I decided to carry out the letter of the order by implementing the first steps and leaving the other measures for the morning.”

The two U.S. aircraft carriers on station in the Mediterranean, the
Saratoga
and
John F. Kennedy,
were instructed to sail toward a potential launch position, but no further orders were given. When Nixon came on the
line with badgering phone calls—he did so “hourly” that night—Kissinger mollified him with reports of the naval movement. Laird, for his part, stalled the president with the excuse that bad weather was hampering operations.

The following morning, when Kissinger informed him of the carriers' progress, Nixon asked innocently, “Did anything else happen?” “When I replied in the negative,” Kissinger recalled, “the President without moving a facial muscle said, ‘Good.' I never heard another word about the bombing of Damascus.”

The weather pretext was needed again a year later, when Palestinian terrorists hijacked several airplanes to the Jordanian desert. “The president wanted to hit an airfield in Jordan,” Laird recalled, “and I said: ‘Just tell 'em [the White House] we had bad weather.' Because we're not going to hit that airfield.”

Ten days later fighting broke out in Jordan between Palestinian forces and King Hussein's army. It was a conflict that threatened to spread, with the possibility of a U.S.-Soviet confrontation. Perhaps with some exaggeration, Nixon was to remember the period as being “like a ghastly game of dominoes, with a nuclear war waiting at the end.”
⁷
In the context of previous episodes, Haldeman's diary entry for the day the war began, September 17, is interesting:

Nixon's “tough guy orders,” Kissinger has said, were less common on foreign affairs issues than in the domestic area. “I was able,” Kissinger commented, “to distinguish between what he intended to be carried out immediately and what he deserved to be given an opportunity to reconsider.”

The notion that cooler heads prevailed is comforting, but begs the question of what might have happened had no cooler heads been available. “It wouldn't have been a good day for something bad to happen, would it?” a source had remarked to the
New Republic
's John Osborne in May 1970, after Nixon's dawn peregrinations to the Lincoln Memorial and the House of Representatives. Less than two weeks later the president, remembered today for opening relations with China, responded impetuously to a call from Mao Zedong for the people of the world to “Unite and Defeat the U.S. Aggressors and All Their Running Dogs.”

Although the chairman's exhortation was clearly just a propaganda blast, Nixon ordered all available naval forces into the Taiwan Strait, without waiting for Kissinger's analysis. His command specified “Stuff that will look belligerent. I want them to know we are not playing this chicken game. . . . I want you to call [Chief of Naval Operations] Moorer that it's an order from the
Commander-in-Chief. . . . There's no recourse. I want them there within 24 hours.”

Kissinger said years afterward this was yet another of “those orders that close associates had come to recognize would better serve the public welfare if not implemented for twenty-four hours.” No action was taken, and Nixon later “thought better” of his plans.

“If the president had his way,” Kissinger growled to aides more than once, “there would be a nuclear war each week!” This may not have been an idle jest. The CIA's top Vietnam specialist, George Carver, reportedly said that in 1969, when the North Koreans shot down a U.S. spy plane, “Nixon became incensed and ordered a tactical nuclear strike. . . . The Joint Chiefs were alerted and asked to recommend targets, but Kissinger got on the phone to them. They agreed not to do anything until Nixon sobered up in the morning.”
⁸

As reported earlier, Kissinger has written of Nixon “suppressing his instinct for a jugular response” after North Korea downed the spy plane but without mentioning drink as a factor in the incident. Kissinger's close associate Lawrence Eagleburger, however, told a friend the following week. “Here's the president,” he said, visibly upset, “ranting and raving, drunk in the middle of a crisis.”

This particular allegation of flirting with nuclear weaponry is not an isolated one. Nixon had been open to the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam as early as 1954 and as president-elect considered striking “a blow that would both end the war and win it.” A Kissinger aide who moved over to the White House, David Young, told a colleague “of the time he was on the phone [listening] when Nixon and Kissinger were talking. Nixon was drunk, and he said, ‘Henry, we've got to nuke them.' ”

_____

Nixon's aggressive posturing was brought to bear as much as if not more to domestic politics. On another cruise down the Potomac on the
Sequoia,
in the spring of 1971, he would again lead his guests to the foredeck to stand at attention as the yacht passed George Washington's tomb. His companions this time were Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Kissinger, and Charles Colson, the lawyer and former marine he had brought to the White House as a political strategist. As the president looked ahead to election to a second term, Colson had risen swiftly from obscure newcomer to trusted intimate.

Nixon drank scotch and soda, then wine over dinner, as the talk turned to his domestic opposition. “Chuck” he told Colson, “your job is to hold off those madmen on the Hill long enough for Henry to finish his work in Paris . . .”—a reference to the Vietnam peace negotiations. “Then we go for the big play—China, Russia.” The “madmen on the Hill” were the senators and representatives who opposed Nixon's war policy and were now talking about domestic repression.

“The President's finger circled his wine-glass slowly,” Colson remembered. Then he said: “One day we will get them—we'll get them on the ground where we want them. And we'll stick our heels in, step on them hard and twist—right, Chuck, right? . . . get them on the floor and step on them, crush them, show no mercy.”

“And so on the
Sequoia
this balmy spring night,” Colson would one day write, “a holy war was declared against the enemy. . . .
They
who differed with
us,
whatever their motives, must be vanquished.”

He hated with a passion, and I don't know if anyone has quite captured it yet.

—Alexander Butterfield, former assistant to the President, 1994

F
or Richard Nixon, enemies were everywhere. Americans who never knew or who have forgotten the details of the Nixon scandals still remember the “enemies list,” which drew outrage across the political spectrum.

William Buckley thought the creation of the list an “act of protofascism . . . ruthless in its dismissal of human rights . . . fascist in its automatic assumption that the state in all matters comes before the rights of individuals . . . fascist in tone, the stealth, the brutality, the self-righteousness.”

James Kilpatrick declared that the list could be understood “only in terms of corruption . . . an abuse of office, an arrogance of power, that goes beyond mere scandal . . . vindictive and vile. . . .” He did insist, though, “There is no proof whatever that Richard Nixon initiated these lists or knew of their existence.”

There is no such proof, if it requires a presidential signature as validation. Yet the sorry history of the lists—for there were several—leads back directly to the Oval Office. It began early in the presidency, when Nixon asked Deputy Counsel Clark Mollenhoff, ironically the ombudsman responsible for dealing with abuses by public officials, to arrange “access to tax returns. . . .” The ostensible reason for the order was to “avoid any Internal Revenue scandals.”

Mollenhoff spoke with top IRS officials, but little came of it. Then he began getting specific requests from Haldeman and others for tax information on
politicians, and Murray Chotiner, now a presidential counsel, began seeking data on particular individuals.

“Chotiner dropped by the office,” Mollenhoff recalled, “with a list of people he said had been making contributions to the Democrats and were believed to be illegally dipping into business expenses to reimburse themselves. . . .” Chotiner said the request had come to him from Haldeman. Leery of “Chotiner's political sophistry and Haldeman's devious
modus operandi,
” Mollenhoff asked Haldeman directly whether this was something the president himself wanted. Whenever he called, Nixon's senior aide replied, “it was always for the president.”

Mollenhoff made contact with the IRS commissioner—the first of three during the Nixon administration, for the president found they bent insufficiently to his will—Randolph Thrower. Interviewed for this book, Thrower recalled having received “two or three” lists of people the White House wanted investigated, each presented as carrying presidential authority. He blocked the requests, however, saying he would act only if shown justification. He asked to see the president, but Haldeman said Nixon “did not like such conferences.” Thrower then offered to resign.

Discussing a successor to Thrower, Nixon made his requirements clear. “I want to be sure he is a ruthless son-of-a-bitch,” he said into the White House microphones, “that he will do what he's told, that every income tax return I want to see I see, that he will go after our enemies and not go after our friends.” He raged about the “stinking little bastards” at the IRS and what they had allegedly done to him during the Kennedy administration. “When the Christ,” he wanted to know, “are they going to go after some Democrats? . . . It's a matter of using the law to its full—to our benefit rather than someone else's.”

That tape was recorded in May 1971, just weeks before Thrower was replaced and five days after Nixon's conversation with Colson about crushing political enemies. By mid-June Colson aides had prepared a priority list for “activity” and forwarded it to presidential counsel John Dean.

Haldeman and Colson would later claim this document merely contained the names of people who were not to be extended privileges or invited to White House parties. In fact, it was comprised of twenty Democratic politicians and journalists and included annotations like “He should be hit hard,” and—of a black congressman—“Has known weakness for white females.”

The best-known statement of the administration's goals in this area, written by Dean and headed “Dealing with Our Political Enemies,” came two months later. It addressed “the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our administration. Stated a bit more bluntly, how can we use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies?”

Weeks later, the White House tapes show, Nixon himself considered that question in the Oval Office. “John,” he said to Ehrlichman, “we have the
power, but are we using it to investigate contributors . . . are we going after their tax returns?” A new IRS commissioner was now in place, the president said, and he wanted him used.

The new man, Johnnie Walters, would recall being summoned by Dean and handed an envelope containing a long list of enemies. Instead of responding to it, however, he and Treasury Secretary George Shultz agreed to take no action. The commissioner merely locked the list away in his office safe.

“The man I work for,” Dean had said when it was clear that cooperation was not forthcoming, “doesn't like ‘no' for an answer,” and the White House tapes reflect Nixon's eventual rage. “We've got to kick Walters' ass out,” he exploded, “he's finished. . . . Believe me. Out.” Walters left a few months later.

“Shultz,” Nixon blustered, “is to see that any order or list that he gets comes directly . . . be sure it's done. . . . He didn't get Secretary of the Treasury because he's got nice blue eyes.” The last sentence of Nixon's taped comment on Shultz has not been released, but according to John Dean, who was present, he added “candy ass” to the “nice blue eyes.” Shultz, however, survived almost to the end of the presidency.

The Senate Watergate hearings would ultimately identify more than two hundred citizens who had been on the Nixon enemy lists, including thirty-one politicians, fifty-six people from the media, fifty-three from the world of business, fourteen labor leaders, twenty-two academics, and eleven celebrities, along with newspapers and organizations. Among them were the actress Carol Channing of
Hello, Dolly!
fame, Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, Gregory Peck, Steve McQueen, and New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath.

According to Dean, the president would instruct him also to “keep a good list of the press people giving us trouble, because we will make life difficult for them after the [1972] election.” One of the latter was
New York Post
columnist Harriet Van Horne, who had reported Nixon's visits to New York psychotherapist Arnold Hutschnecker.

Although IRS commissioners behaved with integrity, the White House had alternative methods of getting the tax information it wanted. “We have to do it artfully,” Nixon was to say; “there are ways to do it. Goddamn it, sneak in in the middle of the night.” Two lower-ranking officials were also apparently helpful—one of them a close contact of the detective working directly for the Oval Office, John Caulfield.

When the lists were finally exposed, several prominent journalists noted that they had been subjected to unusual IRS attention, among them Mary McGrory, Carl Rowan, Rowland Evans, and Tom Braden.
Newsday
editor Robert Greene, who had headed his paper's series on Bebe Rebozo, was audited after the IRS received an anonymous letter. The letter followed liaison between Nixon's man Caulfield and his contact inside the IRS, and the White House tapes show Nixon was fully aware of the reprisals.

“The guy that's running that Rebozo investigation,” Haldeman told the
president, “the New York IRS office has opened a check on him and they think they may have something. . . .”

At the same time that he targeted his “enemies” Nixon fulminated about perceived attacks on his friends. He had told Haldeman of a complaint he had received from Billy Graham. “The IRS is battering the shit out of him. Some sonofabitch came to him and gave him a three-hour grilling about how much he, you know, how much his contribution is worth. . . . Say now, goddammit, are we going after some of these Democrats or not?”

They were indeed going after the Democrats, on many fronts and on Nixon's personal instructions.

_____

A Haldeman diary entry and a recently released White House tape reveal a significant milestone on the road to Watergate. On May 28, 1971, at the very time the “enemies” operation was under way, Nixon and Haldeman held their morning meeting in the Oval Office.

The subject that day, Haldeman noted discreetly, was “the general political situation.” The politics in fact were highly personal, for the president had been brooding on the ways John and Robert Kennedy had once supposedly committed abuses against him by bugging (likely true) and by probes of his tax affairs. Now, annoyed by carping at his daughter Julie's being awarded a new teaching job, he fretted that the “attack” might have a “partisan source.”
¹
He wanted it “tracked down.”

“That led him to thinking,” Haldeman wrote in his diary, “that we should put permanent tails on Teddy and Muskie and Hubert on all the personal stuff, to cover the kinds of things they hit us on in '62: personal finances, family, and so forth.”

It is almost comically ironic that a perceived slight against the president's daughter may have been the wellspring for Watergate, yet in a sense it was that, the start of a fatal slide. “. . . I want more use of wiretapping,” Nixon said in hushed tones, perhaps briefly remembering the hidden microphones. Then: “Are we dealing adequately with their candidates, tailing them and so forth?”

Surveillance was sporadic, Haldeman replied, and Nixon cut in, “Well, it should not be on and off. I mean, that's something we can afford. . . . Maybe we can get a scandal on any, any one of the leading Democrats.”

As his chief of staff warmed to the idea, Nixon wavered. “I don't know,” he said, “maybe it's the wrong thing to do. But I have a feeling if you're gonna start, you got to start now.”

The president wanted the surveillance pursued energetically—with one condition. “Can't do that out of the White House,” he cautioned. The covert activities should go forward, but they must not be traceable to him.

The burglaries of the Democratic party headquarters were a year away, and the election that would win Nixon a second term just a few months more.

_____

Nixon wanted “permanent tails” placed on “Teddy”—Edward Kennedy—“Muskie”—Senator Edmund Muskie, the likely Democratic front-runner—and “Hubert”—Humphrey, the former vice president Nixon had narrowly defeated in 1968.

Muskie and Kennedy were on the Enemies List along with George McGovern, who would in fact emerge as the Democrats' candidate for 1972. However real the threat posed by the last Kennedy brother, Nixon still obsessed about the Kennedy legacy.

“Nixon was ill at ease,” Kissinger recalled of a 1969 visit to Berlin, “worried that the turnout would be compared unfavorably with that for Kennedy in 1963. Only after he was assured repeatedly that no unfavorable comparisons could possibly be drawn did he relax.”

Although Edward Kennedy had recently been elected assistant Senate majority leader, his presidential hopes had been severely compromised in the summer of 1969 by the tragedy—and international sensation—of Chappaquiddick.

Nixon “called me over to tell family about Teddy Kennedy's escapade,” Haldeman recorded in his diary, “. . . late last night in Martha's Vineyard, drove his car off a bridge into a pond, left girl in it to drown. . . . Lots of peculiar possibilities . . . . [President] wants to be sure he doesn't get away with it . . .
very
interested . . . feels it marks the end of Teddy.”

If Nixon was confident that Chappaquiddick spelled an end to Kennedy's career, his actions belied it. At the president's behest, Ehrlichman sent one of his permanent undercover men—retained on a twenty-two-thousand-a-year salary paid by Nixon's personal attorney—to the scene of the drowning within hours.
²
He stayed there for days, posing as a
Philadelphia Enquirer
journalist and reporting back several times daily to the White House.

A week later Nixon was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, welcoming the Apollo astronauts back from the first moon landing. The mission was the fulfillment of a dream first articulated by President Kennedy, and the president now called it “the greatest day since the Creation.” His mind, though, was still on the car wreck in a Massachusetts pond.

Nixon reached Ehrlichman by radiotelephone, aboard a train, for an update on Chappaquiddick. Later, when Kennedy presented his version of the accident in a nationwide broadcast, an aide in Washington held a phone to the radio so that Haldeman could listen in Guam. “P still very interested,” Haldeman noted, “has a lot of theories.”

Nixon would claim in his memoirs that he felt “deeply sorry” for Kennedy over Chappaquiddick. Two weeks afterward, following a meeting at the White House, he took him aside to say he “understood how tough it was. . . .” The record contains nothing to indicate he was genuinely sorry, however, and a former aide thought he was actually “overjoyed” at Kennedy's plight.
³

The desire to produce dirt on Kennedy consumed Nixon. The detective sent to Chappaquiddick obtained phone records and later a restricted transcript of the inquest for the woman who drowned, Mary Jo Kopechne. The phone at Kopechne's Washington home, which she had shared with friends, was reportedly tapped as well.