The Arrogance of Power (66 page)

This was the first installment of a series of reports that
Times
managing editor Abe Rosenthal was to characterize as “the biggest damn story in the world.” For the past three months, at one point holed up in a Manhattan hotel suite, his reporters had pored over a seven-thousand-page, forty-seven-volume study dryly titled “United States–Vietnamese Relations, 1945–1967,” what the world rapidly came to know as the Pentagon Papers.

Prepared in the final months of President Johnson's administration, the papers were an official history—complete with copies of original documents—of how the United States had become enmired in Vietnam and of the often less than noble or intelligent thinking that had kept it there.

Publishing the papers neither endangered the lives of U.S. fighting men nor
caused any specific damage to national security. The history covered no events later than 1968, and according to Defense Secretary Laird, 98 percent of the material could have been declassified. The very fact that the material
was
classified, however, triggered a reaction in high places that had unimaginable consequences.

By the time of the collapse of the presidency three years later it would become clear that Nixon lied and that many of the men around him lied, sometimes to save their leader, sometimes themselves. Of those convicted of crimes after Watergate, five, including four of the President's closest aides—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Chapin—would be sentenced for perjury.

To recreate accurately, then, the aftermath of the publication of the Pentagon Papers involves picking a way through a landscape strewn with falsehoods and half-truths. Sometimes the White House tapes and the documented record signpost the truth, yet even they can be misleading. The president's tapes are but a partial record, and some of what Nixon said into the White House microphones may have been spoken deliberately to deceive. A false paper trail may have also been created, and many documents are known to have been destroyed.
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The available record suggests that Nixon's initial reaction to the Pentagon Papers' publication was fairly cool, for he perceived their potential for damaging the reputation of his predecessors Johnson and Kennedy. Nevertheless, although no one yet knew who was responsible for the leak, the president urged his staff to “get the story out” on Leslie Gelb, the man who had directed the study. Gelb was now working at the Brookings Institution, a liberal Washington think tank closely associated with the Democrats.

Most of Nixon's immediate ire, though, was directed at the
New York Times
for its “clear disloyalty” in publishing the material. No facilities, he ordered, were ever again to be granted to the nation's newspaper of record. “No contact and no interviews,” the president ordered, “never in the office, never on the pool, never on the plane.” Any White House staffer who spoke with the
Times
was to be fired. “He wants to be sure,” Haldeman noted, “that we do everything that we can to destroy the
Times
.” Nothing in his presidency would give him more pleasure, Nixon stormed.

Nixon's initial anger turned to unbridled rage, sparked and fueled by Henry Kissinger. The security adviser had called the president from out of town on the day the first installment of the papers appeared, fulminating about the damage to the conduct of foreign policy. Those with whom he was involved in delicate diplomacy—the Chinese, the Soviets, the North Vietnamese—might, Kissinger said, conclude that the United States was “too unsteady, too harassed, and too insecure to be a useful partner.”

Expressed calmly later in Kissinger's memoirs, the concern seems reasonable, but at the time the adviser was enraged. “These leaks,” Colson quoted him as shouting, “are slowly and systematically destroying us.” Kissinger
pounded his hand palm down on the antique Chippendale table, rattling the coffee cups. To Colson he seemed to be “going through the ceiling . . . almost irrational.”

The culprit behind the leaks turned out to be forty-year-old Daniel Ellsberg, a Rand Corporation consultant who had used his privileged access to copy the papers. Once an ardent supporter of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, Ellsberg was now convinced the conflict was futile. He dismissed Nixon's Vietnamization policy as a “bloody, hopeless, uncompelled and surely immoral prolongation” of the war, “mass murder.” Ellsberg hoped that “by revealing over twenty years of secret plans for escalation, lies to the public, plans to violate treaties, and plans to basically enlarge the war . . . the public would draw from that that the current President might be doing the same . . . it would be just as serious if it became known that he was lying as it would have been for Johnson. So he had to try to shut me up.”

While Nixon did try but failed to stop further publication of the papers by taking the
New York Times
to court, his pursuit of Daniel Ellsberg became a vendetta. Kissinger, who knew Ellsberg, fed the president's spleen with a torrent of allegations. Ellsberg may have been “the brightest student I ever had,” he told Nixon, but he was “a little unbalanced.” He supposedly “had weird sexual habits, used drugs” and, in Vietnam, had “enjoyed helicopter flights in which he would take potshots at the Vietnamese below.” Ellsberg had married a millionaire's daughter and—Kissinger threw in for good measure—had sex with her in front of their children.

The accusations were over the top, but they reached their mark.
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A man with an Ivy League background who had married into money, indulged in far-out sex, and took drugs was a ready-made Nixon target. In the days that followed, the president would remind his staff frequently of his glory days pursuing another Harvard man, Alger Hiss. Kissinger also touched another nerve certain to prompt a reaction from Nixon. If the president failed to respond, the adviser dared suggest, it would show he was “a weakling.”

That meeting with Kissinger, with Haldeman and Ehrlichman sitting in, raised more than the spector of Ellsberg. Nixon had long since ordered aides to bring him the file on the 1968 “bombing halt episode,” President Johnson's election eve effort to get peace talks started by calling off bomb strikes against North Vietnam. If the files revealed that the cessation of bombing had been merely a vote-getting ploy at election time, as the Nixon side had always maintained, they might be used against the Democrats.

“You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff,” Haldeman suggested, “and it might be worth doing.” Nixon of course had another reason for wanting to obtain the file. As reported earlier, he had actively worked to sabotage the 1968 peace talks, and the records in question might actually prove more damaging to
him
than to President Johnson.

When Haldeman explained that the material had likely been lodged at the
Brookings Institution, Nixon seized on the possibility of getting hold of it. “I wanted it . . . right now,” he would recall in the memoirs, “even if it meant having to get it back surreptitiously.”

A tape released in 1996 reveals that Nixon ordered a break-in of Brookings. He reminded Haldeman of the 1970 domestic intelligence plan that had featured burglary as a component—a plan he had approved and later aborted—and then said: “Implement it. . . . I want it implemented. . . . Goddammit it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get them.”

The notion that this was merely an impetuous command, one he did not expect to be carried out, is belied by the evidence.
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Less than two weeks later, on June 30, the tapes show, Nixon again insisted on action at Brookings.

The next morning, meeting with Haldeman and Kissinger, the president again raised the subject of Brookings.

And two hours later:

Then, to Ehrlichman:

The following day, more:

They did try to do it, more than once, and over a period of months. One of the detectives used for earlier undercover jobs, including the pursuit of Edward Kennedy, recalled being assigned by Charles Colson to raid the Brookings Institute. Colson, he testified, suggested a way to go about it: Nixon operatives would set fire to the Brookings building, and the file would be grabbed during the ensuing commotion.

This witness, former policeman John Caulfield, thought the scheme “asinine” and asked White House counsel John Dean to intervene. Dean did so, he would testify, by flying to San Clemente to see Ehrlichman. The president's aide, apparently unsurprised by the report of the fire-bombing plan, merely looked over his half-glasses and said, “Well, maybe we should call it off.” Then he called Colson to say, “Chuck, that Brookings thing. We don't want it anymore. . . .”

By that time, Dean was to tell investigators, Colson's men had already “cased the joint.” A veteran guard at Brookings, interviewed years later, did recall an evening visit by two suspicious strangers. When he blocked their way, they made their excuses and left.

According to another of the detectives on contract to the White House, a second reconnaissance was carried out later. Other operatives were at work by that time, devising a variant on the original scheme. Brookings was still to be set on fire, but the first fire engine to arrive would be a phony, an old, used model purchased expressly for the operation. Its “crew” would “hit the vault, and then get themselves out in the confusion of other fire apparatus arriving.”

The dangerous caper was scrapped, said the former operative who described it, only because the fire engine was “excessively expensive.”
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While Colson later tried to deny his alleged role, Ehrlichman acknowledged having called it off. He said too that Nixon knew about the fire-bombing plan in advance. If true, that is surely the most astonishing feature of the whole mad episode.

That Nixon was in earnest about the Brookings plot is evident, and not only because the tapes reveal his insisting it be carried out. They have also preserved the conspiratorial moment when—just for a moment—he evidently remembered the hidden microphones. On June 30, as he urged Haldeman to see the plan through, Nixon paused to warn: “Don't discuss it here. . . .”

To break into Brookings, Haldeman had pointed out, they would need “somebody to do it.” The president had someone in mind. “You talk to Hunt,” he said. Hunt. E. Howard Hunt, the man who exactly a year later would lead the Watergate break-in.

As reported earlier, Hunt had first met Nixon some twenty years earlier as a young CIA officer.
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It was then that, already an admirer, he had gone up to Nixon's table in a Washington restaurant to congratulate him on his pursuit of Alger Hiss. Out to dinner with Pat, the young politician had asked Hunt and his wife to join them at their table.

Six years on, when Hunt was serving in Uruguay and Nixon stopped there en route to Caracas, they talked again. Later still, when both men were embroiled in early efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro, Nixon's military aide Robert Cushman told Hunt to call on the vice president for help if necessary.

That was the extent of the relationship prior to the Nixon presidency, Hunt said in a 1997 interview. Nixon mentioned nothing of the earlier meetings in his memoirs—and one passage could be taken to mean that he had not heard Hunt's name until as late as 1972.
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“You know,” he was to tell Ehrlichman on the White House tapes, as his presidency began to implode, “Colson never told me about Hunt, that he knew Hunt, until after the Watergate thing.”