The Arrogance of Power (73 page)

Ron Ziegler has insisted he had nothing to do with providing sex for foreign guests. The very suggestion, he said, is “absurd.” John Dean, however, recalled Ziegler going “white as a sheet” when asked if he had “anything to fear from Xaviera Hollander's address book.” He replied, “I'll deny it,” according to Dean, and over the weeks that followed frequently called the counsel's office asking for further developments.
¹⁵

Protocol chief Mosbacher, whose primary responsibility was to look after foreign guests, resigned within days of the Watergate break-in, and has since died. So too has assistant protocol chief Nick Ruwe, the veteran aide Nixon placed in charge of all White House social events. Neither, obviously, could be interviewed for this book, but it seems Ruwe might have been a key source. “What do you do as deputy protocol chief?” Republican lawyer William Bagley once asked him during the presidency. “Well,” he replied, “we have ten
Arabs coming to town, and they've ordered twenty prostitutes—none of them Jewish. . . .”

“Nick Ruwe,” a longtime Nixon aide told the author on condition of anonymity, “was himself the biggest cocksman this town ever saw. He was a bachelor at the time. When our families were out at San Clemente, we'd go over to his place. And before the night was over, he'd have girls in there, and those of us that were frail and sissies would leave, and they'd party.”

Comments by this source and by Nixon's top advance man, Ron Walker, along with other leads, suggest the White House indeed had secrets of a sexual nature to hide in early 1972. These were secrets much more directly damaging than those involving the Xaviera Hollander prostitution outfit in New York.

Walker was aware of the brothel next to the DNC at the time, he said in 1997. “I knew it from the Advance Office. I had colleagues that used call girl rings.” One such colleague, said the aide who requested anonymity, was deputy protocol chief Ruwe, who “was always using those call girls at the place next to the DNC.”

How the whores were employed—whether to provide sex for government guests or for personal pleasure, or both—remains uncertain. Depositions in a recent libel case focused on Heidi Rikan, a flashy German-born blonde, who graduated from striptease dancing at Washington's Blue Mirror Club to a social life that by 1972, when she was thirty-four, included friends ranging from gamblers to White House counsel John Dean and his girlfriend—later wife—Maureen.

Before her death in 1990, Rikan said in a conversation with her maid that she had once been a call girl. Explaining that a call girl was “a lady that meets men, and men pay them”—the maid had grown up in the country and knew nothing of big-city sins—she added, tantalizingly: “I was a call girl at the White House.”
¹⁶

Exactly a week before the Watergate break-in, John Dean again had to follow up on a prostitution story. The June 9 banner headline in the
Washington Evening Star
was:
CAPITOL HILL CALL GIRL RING UNCOVERED
. “The FBI,” its opening paragraph read, “has uncovered a high-priced call girl ring allegedly headed by a Washington attorney and staffed by secretaries and office workers from Capitol Hill and involving at least one White House secretary, sources said.” Among the clients of the call girl operation, the
Star
's sources also claimed, was a “lawyer at the White House.”

The president's aide and personal friend Peter Flanigan, the
Star
reported, had called the U.S. attorney's office to “find out if there was a chance of embarrassment to the Nixon administration.”
¹⁷
The following day, the
Washington Post
reported, courthouse sources said that “the White House had shown a special interest in the case and was exerting pressure on the prosecutors not to comment on it.”

Now that the story was in print, there was an immediate reaction from the Oval Office. “There was a big folderol,” recalled Dean's lawyer colleague Pete
Kinsey. “I remember John having to question each one of us, on the instructions of Haldeman. They were looking for the identity of the ‘White House lawyer,' for damage control.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Rudy found himself in Dean's office within hours, explaining the investigation and showing him materials seized from Phillip Bailley, the man indicted in the call girl case. Dean thumbed through one of Bailley's address books, comparing it with a roster of White House personnel. He had his secretary copy the book and paid particular attention to one photograph of a naked woman.

The woman, a young attorney in her twenties, was not exactly a White House lawyer. She did work in the Executive Office Building Annex, however, and was summarily fired.
¹⁸
It is not known if internal inquiries identified others compromised by the probe, but the case clearly had too many links to the Nixon White House for comfort.

Protocol chief Mosbacher's alleged connection to the Xaviera Hollander ring, if revealed, would have triggered disastrous publicity.

Nick Ruwe, said to have “used” the Columbia Plaza women—for whatever purpose—was also very close to the president. He had worked for Nixon since 1960, had been his personal aide in 1962, and was to serve as his senior assistant and traveling companion long after the resignation. Had Ruwe been associated at the time with the Columbia Plaza whores, as a colleague has alleged he was, the scandal would have come embarrassingly close to the president.

In the late summer of 1972, Assistant U.S. Attorney Rudy has recalled, he was ordered to “ice” his investigation into linkage between the Columbia Plaza prostitutes and the Democratic headquarters, to close it down. “The directions that I received,” he said, “were that the DNC should not be pursued, that it was a political time bomb. It was very politically sensitive. . . . It was a time that was very highly politically charged about what Republicans might have done. I worked for a Republican administration, and I was told that was no longer a subject matter to be looked into.”

CREEP's Gordon Liddy, writing of Xaviera Hollander's appointment books, observed that they “were useless to either Democrats or Republicans, because so many prominent members of both parties were represented in them they would cancel each other out in a political ‘balance of terror.' . . .”

_____

However potentially damaging such evidence might be, the final fateful break-in of the Democratic headquarters was not driven solely by the prostitution angle. Had the target been only the desk of one secretary, it would have made no sense to commit eight men with varied criminal specialties to the task. One, at most two, burglars would have sufficed.

There is indeed no need to try to explain Watergate by a single motive. “We were really after anything . . .” Magruder would tell Ehrlichman. That, in the end, was the burglars' brief.

“We were looking for
everything,
” Sturgis emphasized in his detailed account. “Our orders were to sweep the entire file system of the Democrats. Our assignment was to photograph two thousand documents. We had very efficient photo gear, and an efficient system. . . . we had done other assignments, successfully, and as we went along, we improved our techniques.”

It is, however, apparent that two full years after the start of Operation O'Brien, the chairman of the Democratic party remained a primary target. His Washington apartment was also twice burglarized, and documents taken. There were two attempts to break into his home in New York City. He and his wife concluded that their private phones were tapped both in the capital and in New York. Spies, one of them a known member of the Watergate operation, trailed O'Brien around the restaurants of both cities, trying to find out with whom he was dining. Howard Hunt was in Miami before the final Watergate break-in, preparing “an alternate plan” for the bugging of O'Brien's suite at the Democratic convention.

The DNC leader himself concluded that on the evidence, the overall motive had been to get “information that CREEP, President Nixon and his associates, could use against me, in the hope of embarrassing me. . . . The political realities and the facts show conclusively that the objective of Watergate was to secure all possible information that would help destroy the Democratic Party and its chairman. It is as simple as that.”

That and, as Liddy and Sturgis were to say, to discover what the Democrats might have on Nixon and his colleagues. “We knew the Democrats had a shit file of damaging rumors about Republican leaders,” Sturgis said. “We dug for that everywhere.” Nixon had reason to fear what O'Brien knew or might know of an array of guilty secrets: the Castro plots; the Howard Hughes money; the illicit funding by the Greek colonels; the sabotage of the 1968 Vietnam peace initiative. If revealed, any of these issues would have been capable of sinking Nixon in the coming election.
¹⁹

One of the two attorneys most concerned with defending Nixon during Watergate, Leonard Garment, had no doubt who and what was behind the crime. “These people,” he said in the nineties of the CREEP operatives, “had an assignment: What the president wants is information about Larry O'Brien. O'Brien had him spooked for decades. He thought: ‘Why can't you guys get the stuff for me that I know is there?'

“It was Richard Nixon who said: ‘I'm not going to risk this campaign; it was too close last time. There are people who have information I want. . . .' If anybody can believe that it wasn't made clear what this was all about, then they really do believe in Santa Claus.”

Early on Gordon Liddy had characterized his “intelligence” project against the Democrats as “war.” It had been, until then, a secret vendetta, but on Friday, June 16, 1972, it was about to be secret no longer.

Watergate has done for the politician what the Boston Strangler did for the door-to-door salesman.

—Nixon's friend and colleague Robert Finch, addressing the California Republican League, 1973

A
t noon on Friday, June 16, 1972, Nixon sat in the Oval Office waiting to take part in a commemorative ceremony. Though rarely noted in accounts of the day that would lead to his downfall, the occasion evoked all the tensions that had riven the presidency: the Vietnam War, its heroes, its opponents, and those Nixon saw as traitors.

At Arlington Cemetery that morning politicians, generals, and former colleagues had gathered to bury John Paul Vann, the nearest the United States had to a great charismatic leader in Vietnam. A symbol of the struggle for America to prevail in Southeast Asia and the inspiration for Neil Sheehan's
A Bright Shining Lie,
that brilliant study of the conflict, Vann had died in a fiery helicopter crash the previous week. Now, the burial over, his widow and four sons had arrived at the White House. Nixon was about to present them with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the posthumous honor he was awarding Vann.

The atmosphere was shadowed by ambiguity and bitterness. One of the mourners at the funeral had been Vann's friend and Nixon's foe Daniel Ellsberg. Vann had been torn over his friend's exposure of the Pentagon Papers. On one hand, he had given advice to Nixon aides on the best way to prosecute Ellsberg. On the other, he had promised to testify on his behalf at his trial.

Jesse, Vann's twenty-two-year-old son, was a draft resister. At the grave-side in Arlington he had resolved to make a gesture he believed his father
would have understood, “the gift of his own honesty.” He had torn his draft card in two and laid one half of it among the flowers on the coffin. The other piece he planned to give to Nixon instead of shaking hands.

Word of Jesse's intention spread from his family to the White House staff, and an aide scurried to warn Nixon. When the aide reemerged, he told the young man to abandon his plan or see the ceremony canceled. The young man relented, out of deference to his mother, and the family filed into the Oval Office.

Nixon did not impress the Vanns. He irritated them when he announced he could not award the dead man the nation's highest award, the Congressional Medal of Honor, because Vann had no longer been in the army at the time of his death. The excuse was legitimate, but the family thought Nixon's explanation overly complicated and disingenuous. He smiled too much and failed to look them in the eye.

This awkward scene ended Nixon's official schedule for the day. He flew alone to the Bahamas that afternoon, for a weekend in the sun with Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp. There was time to swim and inspect the island turtles before dinner.

As the president headed south, Howard Hunt's Cubans had been on their way north. Once in Washington, they checked into the Watergate Hotel and dined sumptuously on lobster. Then, after a briefing session with Hunt and Liddy, they waited for the all-clear to start their second break-in of the Democratic headquarters. It wasn't until after midnight that the last lone campaign worker was seen to put down the phone, relieve himself in a planter on the terrace, switch out the lights, and leave. Sometime after that the burglars moved in.

Hunt and Liddy remained in the hotel, watching an ancient film on television. Baldwin, in his room with a view from across the street at the Howard Johnson's, had instructions to keep an eye on the Watergate. (The other eye apparently was trained on a movie called
Attack of the Puppet People.
)

The burglars, along with CREEP security director McCord, went about their felonious tasks inside the DNC for about an hour. They searched through files and broke into Lawrence O'Brien's office. “I personally checked O'Brien's desk,” one recalled. “All I could find were bottles of liquor. . . .”

At 2:10
A
.
M
. plainclothes police officers in cruiser 727 received a radio call from their dispatcher. A guard at the Watergate building was reporting a probable break-in in progress, just weeks after a previous burglary. The police responded promptly, and the burglars were caught in the act, arrested, and taken to headquarters.

Hunt and Liddy, who had been sitting out the action in the Watergate Hotel, got away that night, as did Baldwin, the lookout in the Howard Johnson's. So too did Louis Russell, Nixon's former investigator on the House Un-American Activities Committee, who later admitted privately what he denied to the FBI: that he too had been “watching.” Like the others, he managed to skulk off, never to be fully unmasked.
¹

Police Inspector Thomas Herlihy caught the essentials of the story in the six-page report he wrote the following day. Five men had been arrested in the DNC with electronic equipment, Minolta cameras, and dozens of rolls of film. One of them, posing as “Edward Martin,” had been identified as “James McCord, Security Director, Committee to Re-Elect the President.” In the search that followed the arrests, moreover, police had found a check signed by “E. Howard Hunt . . . holder of a White House pass and employed as a Special Consultant to Charles Colson, on the President's staff.” “It is reported,” wrote Inspector Herlihy, “that Hunt was used as a consultant by the White House on highly confidential matters.”

The slow collapse of Richard Nixon's presidency had begun.

_____

When and how the president first learned of the arrests is a matter shrouded in contradiction. He would tell the nation he found out from news reports within hours, on Saturday, June 17. In his memoirs, though, he claimed he did not become aware of them until the next day, Sunday, after flying back to the mainland from the Bahamas. He heard the news, he said, over coffee in the kitchen of his house on Key Biscayne while scanning the
Miami Herald.

Nixon's two companions that weekend later offered their own versions of the discovery, which merely increase suspicion that the truth was concealed. Abplanalp, his host in the Bahamas, supported the Sunday Key Biscayne version, claiming he was with Nixon at Key Biscayne that day when Haldeman phoned with the news. Yet the official record of the president's movements on Sunday, and the helicopter manifests, indicate that Abplanalp did not fly back to the mainland with Nixon and Rebozo.

Rebozo in turn maintained that Nixon got the news on Key Biscayne on Saturday—at a time the president was in fact still in the Bahamas. The detail Rebozo added, moreover, suggests the three friends concocted a story and then muddled it. “I was with him when he got word,” Rebozo said. “We were swimming in front of my house. . . . They came out and told him.” That scenario was totally at odds with both of Nixon's versions.

How did Nixon react? “Hell, I was with him in the room,” Abplanalp asserted, remembering the call from Haldeman. “I heard him say, ‘They did WHAAT?' . . . He was so astonished he was practically shouting. He came off the phone shaking his head.” Rebozo, on the other hand, said Nixon just “sat down and laughed about it. He said two or three times, ‘What in God's name were we doing there?' ”

Haldeman, who spent the entire weekend in Florida, in accommodations not far from the president's, said he heard the news on Saturday. His first reaction, he claimed, was to think: “Good Lord, they've caught Charles Colson.” That fear was assuaged, he said, when he spoke with Nixon on Sunday. The president, Haldeman observed, “wasn't concerned at all by the break-in. In fact, he was amused.”
²

Colson, whom the president called twice on Sunday, painted a different picture. He recalled Nixon's saying he had reacted in a manner unlike the calm described by Rebozo and Haldeman. “He was so furious,” Colson gathered, “that he had thrown an ashtray across the room.”

“I had seen Nixon blow up in towering rages,” Haldeman observed when he learned of this episode, “but never throw anything. Why did he telephone Colson so angrily, yet hide that emotion from me and everyone else?”

All these years later the question hangs there still.

_____

Whether he was “amused” or “furious,” Nixon exercised control over the situation from the start. “Track down Magruder and see what he knows,” he had ordered Haldeman when he called on Sunday. Haldeman did so, and immediately conspired with CREEP's deputy director on how to mislead the press with the first official statement on the break-in. “Idea,” read a line in Haldeman's notes of the conversation, “to get it as confused as possible.”

The cover-up and the destruction of evidence began at once. Gordon Liddy had been at the shredder within hours of the arrests, while others organized little domestic bonfires.

Papers McCord kept at the office were removed by his secretary for burning, while others were destroyed by his wife in the living room fireplace. Howard Hunt also burned documents at home. John Dean and a colleague, wearing surgical gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, picked over the contents of his White House safe. Potentially incriminating papers they found, including material on Ellsberg and Edward Kennedy, would eventually be burned by Nixon's compliant acting FBI director, Pat Gray.

“Maybe you ought to have a little fire at your home,” Magruder was to quote John Mitchell as suggesting, and his GEMSTONE material duly went up in flames. Mitchell himself would destroy his campaign correspondence with Nixon and Haldeman.

Having flown back to Washington with Nixon, Haldeman called a Tuesday morning meeting with Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Richard Kleindienst (Mitchell's successor as attorney general), and John Dean. They discussed how to handle Watergate, and afterward Haldeman saw his aide Gordon Strachan. When the aide, “scared to death,” showed his boss the compromising political action memorandum of early April memorializing approval of Liddy's plan, Haldeman ordered: “Make sure our files are clean.”
*
Strachan headed for the shredder.
³

While his closest colleagues debated damage control that morning, Nixon sat alone for more than hour, neither making nor receiving calls. Then he met with Ehrlichman. Watergate was discussed, although no tape of the
conversation has ever been produced. The tape of the president's next meeting that morning, with Haldeman, became known around the world not for what it contained but for what was obliterated.

Visitors to the National Archives today may don a pair of headphones and listen solemnly to what remains of the part of that morning's conversation that, according to Haldeman's skeletal notes, dealt with Watergate. They will hear no words, however, but only more than a quarter of an hour of audio buzz. This is the infamous eighteen-and-one-half minute gap.

“It looks a very serious thing, Your Honor,” Nixon's principal Watergate lawyer would admit to Judge Sirica during the legal fight for the tapes. “. . . It doesn't appear from what we know at this point that it could have been accidental.” The president had assigned his secretary Rose Woods to transcribe the tape in late September 1973 and it was she who was ultimately blamed for its destruction. There ensued the ludicrous reenaction scene for prosecutors in which—equipped with tape recorder, earphones, and foot pedal—Woods tried to convince the court she could have erased part of the recording by accident, while distracted by the telephone.

Experts, approved by the White House as well as the prosecutors, would later conclude that the tape's long stretch of buzzing, clicks, and pops reflected a series of overlapping erasures. Someone had manually set the machine to erase at least five times, suggesting the tape was intentionally wiped.
⁴
Who was that someone? Woods herself insisted that, at worst, she was responsible for the loss of only five minutes of dialogue.

When Woods had rushed into the Oval Office to explain that she had erased a portion of the June 20 recording, she testified the president had merely said casually, “Don't worry about it.” At some point in the court furor, it seems, she began to feel she was being made the scapegoat. On the phone to an old friend, former press secretary James Bassett, that most loyal of Nixon retainers, declared she was “being framed.”

Nixon did personally review critical tapes during the Watergate crisis, and Woods said in testimony that at Camp David he had “pushed the buttons on her recorder back and forth.” Was he, then, responsible for having created the eighteen-and-one-half-minute gap? Several people believed so.

“Most likely it was the president,” the prosecuting attorney who interrogated Woods in court, Jill Wine-Banks, said in 1999. Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski offered a less qualified judgment. “Only the President,” he noted, “had access to both the tape and the machine [at the likely time of the erasure] . . . what was on the tape, and what portion might be incriminating. . . .”
⁵

Having struggled to recall precisely what was said during the erased phase of the conversation, Haldeman later suggested Nixon had worried aloud about what might come out about Charles Colson. “I know one thing,” Haldeman's reconstruction had Nixon asserting, “we can't stand an FBI interrogation of Colson. . . . Colson can talk about the President, if he cracks.”

As for his other conversations with Haldeman and Colson that first
Tuesday, Nixon was to refuse to release the relevant tapes. If we examine the two that have since become available, it is obvious why.